Inner Surfing

Why I love Rafa Nadal... and Olympic waves

2008-09-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

Starting with Olympic wave news: The latest New Scientist (my favorite magazine other than People ;-) ) reports that the swimming records broken in Beijing Olympics may be due not so much to US supremacy as to wave patterns! The Beijing pool was 3 meters deep whereas the Athens pool was 2 meters. Apparently, a deeper pool allows the swimmer to put forth wave patterns with her strokes, but “get out of town” before they come back from the depths to hit her and slow her progress. In shallower pools, such as the one used in Athens, the swimmer’s own “back-wave” slows her down.

So how can we swim in a deeper pool, so that we can achieve “escape velocity,” and shift from the experience of moving forward, only to hit our own counter-intentions or resistances or karma and move backwards again, in what sometimes can seem like a never-ending loop? In motherwave days, I coined the phrase “get out of the loop and onto a wave.” How can we do that? I am asking this question, right now, for real.

The answer communicates itself in waves, as is often the case in my experience of inner guidance. Before I translate the wave-answer into words, I want to give a cliché-alert, and repeat a quotation from Wendell-Homes that I believe I used before in this blog: “Words are the outer skin of a living experience.” So what I’m about to say may miss its mark in your present, wavy experience because you already “know” this clever answer. Anyway, here goes:

How we can swim in a bigger pool, so that we live free from an endless karmic loop, is to move from a pool into the ocean. Yeah, yeah, very clever Katie, you are thinking. Who HASN’T heard the teaching stories about the well and the ocean? But bear with me: I’m talking about a real ocean in which we are swimming without realizing it, right now. Literally. The ocean is not only larger than a pool, but it is also living water. A pool is completely stagnant, until someone gets into it and creates waves, whereas the ocean constantly runs waves of every kind, from the moon, sun, tides, whales, ships, currents, winds…

The ocean is alive and constantly reinventing itself, which is why coastlines are always changing, which can be a drag if you have oceanfront property. And yes, this is a metaphor: The pool in which I used to spend my time as a child was like one of those 2-meter pools they used in Athens. It was, relatively, an Olympic-sized pool because my parents were clever academics and also socially conscious to a fault. So I was deeply conditioned by the belief and nervous systems of my parents and the British culture in which I was raised. Swimming in that shallow-yet-Olympic pool, I would continually meet myself coming back, and life felt so constricting.

At the age of 18, I had a few spontaneous spiritual or rather “oceanic” experiences that put me on a search, that led me to live in… a deeper pool! The 3-meter Olympic pool of Beijing, in which new records could be set. Now I was in the alternate reality pool; the groovy, hip, New Age, spiritually correct, pool. Hell, I spoke at the International Conference for Science and Consciousness. That’s a pretty deep pool, but so what? It's a pool.

So what is the ocean? I’m dipping my toes in and it’s nothing like the 2 or 3-meter pools. All I can really say about it is that I can’t go there until it’s the only thing I want. All my previous visits, and my ability to be “salty” from dipping in this ocean of love were just like church on Sunday, sin on Monday. Now, as many of life’s illusions have burst like blood blisters, I have been turned back into the contemplation of my real relationship with the Infinite. And I find that my fear of diving all the way in, and my attachment to the fake medals of those Olympic pools, are creating a lot of noise––some very choppy waves at the shore of that sea. Everything is pulling me through that edge. Everything else is resisting. I am doing my best, one day at a time, to cultivate a life of true surrender.

There is not much more I can say about this right now, so let’s move on to Nadal and those buns of steel!

Why I love Nadal?

Well… what’s not to love? That butt, those biceps. But I swear, that’s not really what I love (even though I have been accused by friends of blindly following beefy biceps into banal bardos!).

In case you’re too spiritual to know, Rafael Nadal is the new World #1 tennis player, having finally beaten longtime #1 Roger Federer at Wimbledon, in what is now widely called The Greatest Tennis Match Of All Time. Barb and Lawrence and I watched TGTMOAT for about 8 hours one Sunday, and it was almost TOO exciting, especially for me because I was rooting for Nadal and he almost didn't win…

Anyway, why do I love Nadal so much? Well, he is an interesting archetype. While he is playing, he is so focused that it’s scary to watch (see pic on left). His face scrunches down in a look of absolute intensity, and nothing can distract him. He shows no signs of a shift in focus when he is losing, when someone in the audience makes a joke, or when the other player throws a fit. It’s as though he is not a human with a personal self. In fact, TV commentator Mary Carillo says of him, “It’s amazing that off-court, he is completely sweet and humble, yet on the court he is a savage beast.” In Paris, where he keeps winning the French Open year after year, they call him the “bete sauvage,” which actually means “wild beast.”

And that’s the thing. These public personas, like Jennifer Aniston and Sarah Palin and Rafael Nadal are archetypes for our age. We no longer have a real King and Queen or the Greek gods on whom to project all our issues and inner selves, so we use celebrities (I wouldn’t even call Palin a politician!). I allow myself free rein to read People magazine (or worse), because (1) I can, and (2) I recognize that parts of me are getting mirrored and acted out by all their shenanigans, and I can access stuff inside myself that needs acknowledgement and release, by noticing my reaction to the celebrity soap opera. I was SO worried, for example, that Jennifer Aniston would get dumped by the serial ladykiller John Mayer, and I was bummed when I was right.

Back to Nadal. Bottom line (pun intended): he represents my inner body that is trying to get out. I am tired and done with using my physical body, which is, after all, an animal, as an interpreter, side-stepper, symbolic map and general mouthpiece for my unresolved deep, dark painbody issues. Enough already. I already said that, a few years ago, in my lightwave body awakening, as chronicled earlier in this blog. The process continues. Inside me, or perhaps a few vibrational inches to the left of me, lives another body. It is youthful, healthy, whole, energetic, and free. It is governed by that part of God which is instinctual and connected to the universe. It knows what to eat, when and how to sleep, play… all of it. I call it my soulbody, and have taught trainings about it, yet I find myself still IN a training.

If you don't quite get what I mean by all this, I'll try to clarify. I'm NOT talking about resisting the natural process of birth, death, and all that. But I've come to see that it isn't always a "natural" process. Much of the time what has been happening in my body has been the playing out of other stuff that doesn't necessarily have to happen through a body. I don't mind dying, but I don't want it to be an expression of my resistance to something I was afraid to feel. Unless that happens, and that would be okay too.

But let's say that the physical body is an expression of a virtual body: Which virtual body do I want to express in physical form? My wounded painbody, or my soulbody?

This is where Rafa is one of my teachers. He somehow seems to have come into this life with a body that easily channels the natural ferocity of wild physical power. He may have mental and emotional stuff that isn’t totally free––his awkwardness in interviews seems to suggest that, along with his racquet bag, he carts around a painbody like the rest of us. Yet his painbody doesn’t use his physical body to distract him from his fear/sadness/anger by illness, addictions or violence, or to express all those feelings by vulnerability, hpersensitivity or, again, illness.

His physical body is almost always in the zone. It doesn’t get zapped by his emotions, except positively, in the exultant leaps and fist pumps that explode through him when he scores a winner. Like some kind of archetypal “body-whisperer” he has somehow cultivated his natural physical wildness into an ever-more-effective expression of skill and power.

And then, off the court, he is impossible to dislike, (see pic on right) even by his tennis rivals who love to mock and imitate his habit of pulling wedgies out of his famous butt before every point. Yet they can’t find anything bad to say about him, because he is so humble that even after winning Wimbledon he said in the interview that Federer was still the best. And he wasn’t kidding. He seems to need no personal ego to excel excellently, and that is the point.

I have experienced great ambition in my life. I seem to have been born with an enormous, unstoppable desire to express something big. And I also have yer typical painbody, full of the usual suspects of not good enough, too much, unlovable, and so on. Sometimes these two––self-expression and compensation for pain––get entangled, so that a passion to express becomes a passion to achieve. In that unholy marriage, I spent many years surfing a wave back-and-forth between agony and ecstasy, while I taught motherwave trainings.

Now the urge to achieve is relaxing into a willingness to express. Recently I’ve been living a quiet life doing various writing projects for myself and others, seeing clients, and also cultivating my soulbody every day. I swim––or should I say I “bob”––every day in a pool, wearing my float belt, and allowing my wavy body to do its spontaneous, spiral water dance. Then, three days a week, come rain or shine or backache or exhaustion, I go to the gym and do an hour of weight-training with Adam, my excellent trainer. I’m experimenting with allowing God-through-my-bod to lift the weights, since they are impossibly, ridiculously heavy for my frame, which feels more like a bird than a Neanderthal.

That’s it for now. Vamos Rafa!

Beloved

2008-09-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

Is he (the one on the right) really that into you?

How about the one on the left?

Welcome to my Inner Surfing Blog (or welcome back!).

I just got a strong impulse to start writing here at least once a week, so if it's helpful to you, please check back in––I won't go away again for 14 or 9 months without blogging, honestly! I seem to be receiving a lot of inspiration every day, and because I'm still on my mysterious hiatus from my former identity as a teacher, I generally share it all with a few close beloveds. But why not you too, if you want?

Talking of Christ (weren't we?) I was looking online for a good headshot of Jesus because I was feeling the urge for a bit more male representation in my house of goddess-images. I found an endless supply of hysterical Jesus pix! They all looked like egoic, seductive hippies to me (how about that one on the right!?) None of them seemed to represent that personal-yet-impersonal, expanded, I am consciousness-love that I was looking for, except perhaps the one on the left.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news: This morning in my mailbox I found the following quote from author Guy Finley:

The Right Way to Help Those
Who Do Us Wrong

Real compassion lies in our ability to remember that any angry, resentful person is usually just someone who can no longer bear the weary weight of his or her own carefully concealed despair.

I went to the pool for my daily soulwaving session and, as usual, along came Mario the maintenance guy for a chat. I've known him now for a couple of years. When he first started working at this apartment complex, he looked very down and depressed. He wouldn't look you in the eyes and I felt a frisson of discomfort whenever he would drag his cleaning cart through the pool building. Then one morning, I engaged him in conversation. Like most Latin people, he was taken aback by my fluent Spanish, but perhaps more so by the fact that I was friendly. The not-so-subtle class system in which Latin-looking people are ignored as our servants is very pervasive.

Someone must have said something good to Mario in our first conversation, because the next time I saw him, he was smiling and walking differently. He told me that what I had told him had caused him to turn his life around and he now saw that it was all about "thinking positively" (did I really say that––that is SO 20th Century!), and that his depression had completely gone away. I remember joking to my friends that he was my shortest and most successful client experience ever!

Back to today: Mario was looking very agitated when he walked in. He told me a story of how the maintenance boss had asked him to make a list of needed cleaning supplies, then torn up his list. Or something like that. He was feeling that all his sincere, hard work was completely unvalued. And he said, "They are always saying bad things about me, even though I try to be friendly, and just keep my head down and do my work well."

I tried to say a few wise things, like: "Good thing you're working for God and not for them," and he liked the ideas, but really just wanted to be heard. I felt a bit irritated because I wanted to "get on " with my meditation and exercise, but then I let go and realized that this was what life was bringing me. "This man is your Beloved right now."

Listening to more of the story I felt some outrage on Mario's behalf. I could identify with the painbody piece he was experiencing. Part of me wanted to go and tell his boss off, but of course this would have made things worse. Finally Mario left, and in the next unfolding scene, his boss walked into the pool to check on something. He talked to me in a very friendly way. I noticed the feeling of wanting to challenge him on his racism, his "bossism," his insensitivity, his unconsciousness of Mario's pain. But of course, as the quotation above reminds me, he has his own pain.

Ouch, ouch, ouch!

And then again, oh well!

Then another scene: Mario comes back into the pool, sits down at the edge and says, "Can I tell you something? I always thought I had bad karma until I began talking to you. Now I have good karma." Wow! Little Katie likes that!

Now, such comments are not uncommon in the kind of work I do, as you probably know if you have ever offered yourself in service to life, or humanity, or God, which I am calling today the "Beloved." People project the Beloved onto you, which feels wonderful, unless/until they project on you their issues with the Beloved (i.e. with their parents), which feels horrible. If my whole brilliant career has taught me anything, it is to expand towards greater detachment from this human drama of projection, which plays out on every level of human relationship. This has been the hardest learning of my life. It's hard not to take someone-seeming-to-adore-you personally; even harder not to personalize someone seeming to hate you.

I came back into my home and found a "Help!" call from a beloved former student who had been traumatized by a death. I called her and was able to listen and love and empathize and by the end of the call she was laying out plans for the next wave of my work, which was fun to listen to.

There is a plan for this next wave. It's in my computer and in my extended brain-field, and I receive constant downloads that refine and complexify the information and deepen my union with the place from which it emanates. I take dictation, and I also receive the Love that wants to express itself through me. The piece I haven't received yet is how this might play out in the world. I have no desire or guidance to make anything happen. Been there, done that. So I'm still leaving that part to God.

LOVE YOURSELF AND WATCH

2008-01-12T19:44:00.000-08:00

Love yourself and watch -
Today, tomorrow, always.
First establish yourself in the way,
Then teach,
And so defeat sorrow.
To straighten the crooked
You must first do a harder thing -
Straighten yourself.
You are your only master.
Who else?

Hi! Yes, I know, you've been following my blog avidly, and have checked every day for 14 months and I haven't blogged. Sorry about that!

Do you know who said the above quotation? I'll give the answer at the end of this post. You may be surprised, as I was, and say, "But I didn't think that teacher spoke of loving oneself!"

Of course, "to love myself" can mean different things according to who or what I think "myself"...er... am! I used to believe that loving myself meant following all impulses, creating so-called realities to satisfy what I thought were my desires. I was widely recognized as a "great manifester."

"Hmm! And how did that work for you, Katie?"

"Not great, actually!"

It's one of those chaos theory /butterfly effect things, like the principle of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where getting the premise just slightly - ah - wrong can set off an unwanted hurricane in the climate of your own experience. The premise: that you are who you think you are. That the bundle of impressions that you identify with as it bumbles along through time and space is you! Like Morgana, the whinier of my two cats, this alleged self constantly demands junk food and then pukes it up on the Turkish rug.

I know, I know, I sound like some Eastern person giving "satsang" (spiritual discourse) but I'm really talking directly from my now experience here. I will try to do better and communicate more directly: What do I mean by "junk food" for the self?
Well, as far as the cats' diet goes, a cat-loving neighbor is trying to convince me that I should convert them to raw meat. I tried once before, but apparently not in the right way - it takes more than slapping a new plate of sushi down and saying, "You're gonna like it, because it's good for ya!"

They are CATS, and (like your Soul) not easily manipulated. I would have to gradually wean them from dry kibble which they are addicted to day-in-day-out, via healthy wet food from cans, into which I would start sneaking bits of the raw meat. Eventually, but possibly after some digestive problems (ahem - this was why I balked last time - those problems went on my rug from both ends!), the cat becomes a mini-lion, raw meat convert, starts singing Rasta songs and giving true feline transmissions of its real nature. And perhaps won't die of horrible junk food diseases.

It sounds like a lot of trouble, especially since I am away a lot, (and it will soon be more of the time), leaving them in kind hands - but could I teach all this to my cat-sitters? Merlin and Morgana are so attached to their kibble even though it contains veggies and grain which, my friend pointed out, you just don't see lions in the wild eating.

So, bringing this metaphor home: I don't know if I will do this with the cats, because they resist change.

But as for me, I am taking great care with what I put in my consciousness. Raw truth, no more opinions. If you have hung around me, especially when I am (a) sick and (b) in full throttle of creative writing, you know that I am always surrounded by books. Some people even think I read/have too many! I don't know why! Just because they have their own room? What's your problem?

Yet out of thousand of books I have read, only a few seem to be sacred transmissions of raw truth. Every other book in my vast library is basically kibble––a bit of truth cooked up with the carbs of someone's opinions. Some of them seem more "received" than others. Of course some are mysteries or books about science, but I am talking about spiritual/psychological/personal growth books... Most of these feel as though they were written by someone stuck in their mind trying to mentally resolve some issues and convince the reader that he has got it right.

One night a year or so ago, I was in a very deep place after my dad died. The whole situation around his death was a bit challenging, because no one in our family except me felt that he was going anywhere new or that the transition was anything more than an ending. At the same time, I was the only one who cried, because it was important to keep a "stiff, upper lip," and––amazingly––I have since received flak for weeping at his death-bed!

When I came home and wanted some real inspiration, and faced my hundreds of metaphysical books, only 2 or 3 seemed relevant to my journey. ET (Eckhart Tolle) is always right there (right here and now present, that is). Byron Katie tells unusual strong truths towards awakening. But it was my old Joel Goldsmith books from The Infinite Way that suddenly galvanized my attention! I picked up "The THunder of Silence," and read till dawn.

Joel, who died in 1964 before I even became a hippy, really had it going on. He was a true mystic, living and speaking from oneness.

So in addition to watching NBA basketball as I lie here with flu, I am also reading about 20 books from Joel, and falling asleep to his talks.

Obviously I am getting something out of this.

What he says is that there is only one power. No second power can oppose me, because God is in everything. I don't need to pray to heal any "illness," get rid of any "world problems," or resolve any "scarcity," because such things would then be secondary powers that I am asking the One Power to oppose.

And a big piece is that you manifest what you are really supposed to manifest by merging your consciousness in Christ or God consciousness, not by focusing on things you want. Again, that was what got me into trouble, because I was susceptible to appearances––the partner, home, career, etc.––but they were manifestations of my false self, and proved to be... FALSE! Of course, all worldly things must pass, etc. etc., but I now know that there is a RIGHT unfoldment of my destiny that probably includes all these things if they are soul desires. But they unfold in Divine Right Timing rather than my ego's timing.

It's already happening for me. Since I have consciously directed my consciousness towards the direct experience of union with the Divine (and yes, soulwavers/motherwavers, I am using almost exactly the same portals I taught you––that hasn't changed much!), I have been experiencing an unfolding of divine manifestation that feels like being loved and adored by Life. In fact, although I am abundantly taken care of in miraculous ways, I am feeling the Divine Love through everything that happens–– well, almost! I don't like it so much when the Warriors lose their games ;-)

Joel Goldsmith was teaching Christians back then, and uses a lot of good Bible lines, and his favorite is one that has been my favorite since I went to a Christian High School:

Seek Ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all else shall be added unto you.

In other words, stop worrying about "your" life, "your" career, "your" finances, "your" health, "your" love-life, and turn your attention again and again into direct connection to source, and Source will take care of the rest.

It works!

It's a path of taking risks and not believing in worldly laws. Check out any book by Joel - if it's your time you will be transformed as I have.

And the answer to the question at the top of this blog is: Buddha - not a new age seminar leader teaching narcissistic self-love, (like I used to be!), but Gautama himself, in the Dhammapada. Apparently many monks seem to skip the line "Love Thyself," preferring to focus on the next line in which you are to WATCH yourself.

But I say, let's love ourselves AND watch everything from that place. And let's place our attention on our divine source, directly, because then we get the real jackpot, rather than trying to use "source" to get other stuff.

I'm finding that seeking divine connection before anything else doesn't leave much time for anything else, as it seems to handle things, or I get very strong inspiration to do something––but not from a place of fear or struggle or trying to control reality. Right now my inner connection is bringing lots of new guidance and creative projects into birth. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm in a hiatus––almost completely disappeared from the planet, in fact, although don't worry, I am being loved up every day, by truly adored and adoring beloved friends––and now I need this less than ever!

My guidance tells me I will be emerging into more public offerings before very long. Of course, what I am working on is not just for me! But my work will be coming forth in a new and––by the looks of it––much more universal way. I remember when I was first getting the Motherwave transmission in 1994, and I was being shown all the people it would affect. Well, what I am seeing now as this new upgrade (Soulwave 2.0) comes through is much bigger, yet much less stressful for me personally.

I am very excited.

xxx

Freedom... really?

2006-11-19T01:27:00.000-08:00

The new SOULBODY training at Mount Shasta was beyond amazing. We'll be putting some reports from students on the website soon and we're assembling a new video. These pics show a waterfall where we did some magic, plus Tai giving me a healing transmission, and a group of people laughing. Why are they laughing? Because David is filming them with his back to the waterfall, and his pants have fallen down, yet he is coolly continuing to pan the scene with a smooth move!

But/and I don't want to talk about Soulbody right here, right now, although it has changed my life. I want to say a bit about freedom.

There are a lot of different strands of information coming to me simultaneously right now. One is about the Soulbody work, and is all about healing the body. Incredibly important for me after 30 years of chronic illness. And I'm getting stuff about the next training in 2 weeks at Harbin (Soulwave Two) which is about guidance and the Meltdown. Yet this is a personal blog, and my personal guidance is all about FREEDOM, right now.

In recent months I've felt my whole motivation for doing things change - in fact it has seemed at times to have disappeared, although I still show up for what I've committed to, and all that. But I've been asked (on the inside) to consider this question:

What would life REALLY be like if I were just living it for and with my real essence (which I generally call God, having been raised atheist, and not having the usual problems with that word). What if I REALLY didn't care what people thought of me, not out of some rebellious or cantankerous or hurt or vengeful inner emotionality, but because I am waking up to the more evolved truth: IT'S NOT PERSONAL!

This non-personal nature of everyone's projections on me (positive and negative) has become clearer and clearer to me on my journey of the past 3 years. In case you don't know, in this period, I have been recovering from the loss of pretty much everything that made up my "life." The experience was so total that I couldn't just put a life back together. The only thing that seemed to be bringing me back to life was a more radical spiritual path than I had ever taken, even when I was a monk in my 20s. At that time, all I wanted was to be free - free to serve my then-guru and travel the world doing what he wanted. I travelled for about 12 years, around Spain and South America and later North America, where I landed. There I married my first nice husband. We travelled all over Europe and North America, setting festivals up for our teacher. We had money after my then father-in-law's death and one year we crossed the Atlantic 36 times - or was it 13?

After I left the guru (and the husband - still a friend), I felt a deep need to settle down and nest. I nested for 17 years with my next two husbands, travelling very little, which was strange for me. But I wanted security and stability so badly after all that bird-like, saddhu-like existence. At least I thought I did. When my security and stability rugs were pulled in 2004, I at first experienced desperate grief and a feeling of having no structure, no center, which was very difficult. I deliberately DIDN'T do the things which traditionally would have built up a structure again. Like getting involved with another man and nesting with him, or promoting my seminar business so I would be busy and prominent again.

My whole paradigm of reality has shifted so profoundly. I've been taken almost forcibly through gates that I would never have had the courage or focus to pass through in this life without such devastating losses and betrayals as I experienced.

A very big fixation for me was what people thought of me. As though it somehow meant something about me. Now I'm coming to just feel that I AM ME, right on track on my guided path, and the path is so hot, so inspiring, so exiciting, that I hardly care what people think any more. At this stage Sarah and Ivy and I have no extra energy to promote the work beyond the very simple e-mails we send to our limited list. People come through miracles, through word of inspired mouths, and by methods that have to be divinely guided.

But although I feel so much new inspiration and am excited to bring it through, I'm not sure how much will even come through the normal seminars of Soulwave Institute. My sense is that new resources are on their way that will pick the whole thing up and land it in a slightly different context or even location. I'm not attached to teaching in Marin (although I love where I live). I trust that I will be called forth when the time is right. The work is SO potent and effective. I have no doubt of its efficacy and value. But I feel helpless to figure out how to expand the message and work to more people without pushing and efforting. Do I even want to be a big business owner ? Should I just finish writing my big book? The proposal is almost written. But I seem to be in no hurry.

Because the main motivation I'm feeling is to be free, almost as though I could gather up my stuff and hit the road, if an inspiring enough opportunity were to call me. And I can feel such opportunities kinda circling my auric airport.The bank has taken back my former house, which is a step towards freedom, after 3 years of complicated hassle.

This is all to say that I am in a mode of packing up my life, going through closets, to make myself as portable as possible while still having this flat as a home base and Soulwave Institute office.

In the last 3 years I have developed the best relationships of my life. Many, if not most, of my former friends turned out to be NOT in with me for the duration of my long and arduous haul into the underworld, hanging on the meathook, losing more than just the outer layers, emerging somewhat resurrected after a long hook-hang. Some old, but mostly extraordinary new souls have turned up to love me. As I love to say, my love life is better than ever in my life, and I don't have a partner. But about 20 intimate beloveds who come to commune with me in my mosh pit.

But these relationships feel very free to me, much as I love them and will keep them in some form. I have this strange sense as though I'm about to be called onto a Freedom Boat that is leaving the dock and I will have to jump. This is strange to write about, because it's invisible, and it's just a metaphor, but what I am trying to describe feels very real to me. Moving through loneliness to oneness, or perhaps onliness.

It's as though I can smell the air of another dimension of awareness. The biggest, meanest guards at the gate of this dimension are my beliefs such as the one that it matters what other people think. And it doesn't. Everyone will think what they want. In the past I have striven to be helpful, brilliant, profound, door-opening, loving, kind, loyal, generous, friendly, whatever, hoping that this would be enough to be liked... but no! It's often enough to be disliked (or envied). I'm still working kindly, but more detachedly. Don't NEED anyone to get it or like me. Of course people are mostly getting the work better than ever because I'm less attached, but being detached is not a trick. My main motivation really is to get free of all these identity traps about trying to control what people think of me, and to go to the place they've been keeping me from.

As far as I can tell, that place is where oneness reigns, where even the leaves understand you and are your friends. You're home. Home free. I never used the word "freedom" much during my whole motherwave career, but it's a main theme of soulwave.

BLOGGIN' ON: CHAI-CAFFEINE-DEATH-LIFE'S WORK

2006-09-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to my blog, to me and to you!

Haven't blogged for 7 months. Suddenly got the urge again.

Last night I was schmoozing with my brilliant and true friend Lion. We saw "The Illusionist" which you must see. Don't ask why, just see it! Later, in a typical Marin evening, we sat in my Mosh Pit and he channeled some helpful messages from my (recently-deceased) father and we chatted about surrender and my recent dramatic healing after 30 years of illness.

Those two subjects (surrender and my healing) are intimately entwined, by the way. I don't even know where to start to explain and communicate what has happened to me in recent months. I wish I'd been blogging, because it's been a wondrous journey. The short version is that I am no longer a chronically ill person.

As for the long version - I don't know what to do, how to communicate it. I'm planning a new training called Soulbody, probably this November (see soulwave website), to transmit what I realized, and what healed me. And there is a book about it all which is called something like Soulbody, A Radical Healing Journey. Chunks of it come through at my usual 4 am download hour.

INFO BACKLOG ANXIETY SYNDROME (IBAS)
Yet I sometimes get anxious, because I seem to be wired to make discoveries and pass them on. I could even make up a story that I HAVE to do this, for some karmic reason. It has seemed to work quite well up to now: my greatest sufferings have become my greatest breakthroughs which have become doorways for others to break through with less suffering, via seminars and now, again, private work.

The only problem is that right now I'm way behind in communicating what I am discovering. Although they continue to flourish, I'm not promoting seminars very actively these days. I have the belief that I need to communicate the information through books. Yet, as I may have mentioned somewhere, I have 13 books outlined on my computer, one of which I am quite far along with, and which is, appropriately, the introductory one. Inconveniently, the information that wants to come through is, perhaps, from book 8 or 9. I don't know quite what to do about this. In some ways I could truly say this Info-Backlog-Anxiety-Syndrome is my only "problem." And I'm sure, like all my other so-called problems, offering it up to the Divine will bring the answer in good time, whether it's someone to organize my writing or I'll just let it go and someone else will bring that stuff through, or something I can't imagine right now. I realize I'm not indispensable, but I do feel like a steward to some precious jewels that have been given to me to pass on...

CAFFEINE
Anyway, coming to right here, right now... I am zinging with inspiration and I want to talk about caffeine:

The short version is that in my 30-some years of being hugely health-challenged, plus the previous 7 years of being a health-nazi (my first spiritual trip was macrobiotics; I opened a store and restaurant before I was 18), I have eschewed caffeine. I have also lovingly (I think) harrassed others, in true health evangelist mode, about their caffeine use. I apologize! How wrong could I have been? For one thing, try googling caffeine: good or bad?. But there's more to this story for me.

For the past 3-4 years, I've been seeing a brilliant naturopath who prefers to remain nameless (Talking of life's work, which we will be, he charges cost on supplements and only does what he does because he is driven to do research to undo the ridiculous breakdown of our physical bodies). He unravels deep patterns of illness way below the symptomatic level. Recently he discovered that a major factor, one you cannot get around, in true healing, is what he calls "prenatal dependence."

ADDICTED IN THE WOMB
What's prenatal dependence? Most of us are addicted to some substance or other that our mother ingested when we were in her womb. (By the way, don't use this to guilt-trip your mother, or yourself if you are a mother!). Could be caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes - who knew back then?. In testing me he found (accurately) that my mom's drug of choice was caffeine (after all she was English - you can stand a spoon up in that tea).

To my amazement, he prescribed green tea capsules to counteract this. I was horrified, shocked, disapproving, furious, suspicious... you get the idea. He insisted that my organs had been developed in collusion with caffeine, and the reason they just can't seem to kickstart themselves despite decades of "healing my adrenals" ad nauseam, is that they need caffeine.

"So," I said, crankily, "You're saying that I should just go to Starbucks like everyone else?"

"No," he said. "Drinking caffeinated beverages can just continue the problem. They kickstart your nervous system in a shocking way, which further breaks it down. But if you take capsules the caffeine enters the bloodstream in a slow, time-released fashion which actually supports the organs."

To be accurate, his take is the you also have to heal the basic pattern with homeopathy and other methods. This abbreviated explanation doesn't really do justice to what my anon doc has discovered. Should we then smoke, booze, for health, you might ask? Yet I am amazed at what this has done for me, and it may help you - at least in the critical, guilt-alleviation department. When I started on the green T caps, I had already found my life energy again (yes, I will tell how in good time). But with the addition of this slow-release caffeine, everything started working better. I am now a gym rat with muscles and all, and I have normal days, like everyone else who, I now realize, is addicted to caffeine and has never bothered resisting it. Will they face the consequences later in life, or is this idea just another paranoid alternate health meme that is really an expression of our deep distrust of life?

I have sheepishly admitted my new relationship with caffeine to various friends who are yoga teachers, Buddhist meditators, "just-meet-it" Advaitans, and so on, and they all say, "Oh, I've never stopped drinking my coffee/tea/whatever." Where was I? Why didn't I notice? I feel like one of those soldiers after World War 2 who got stuck in the forest and thought there was still a war on years later. But I've noticed myself feeling the need to say to my friends:

'No, No, You need to take it through caps or it just makes things worse." But look! I am satisfying that proselytizing save-the-world need by this blog!

By the way, since I'm sure you are wondering, coffee enemas also satisfy the slow release requirement. I have a point here. I am fulfilling the title of this blog and you will see how caffeine, chai, life's work come in for a landing together:

HEAVY METAL DHARMA
So I am taking a spiritual retreat day, and I was settling down to read the latest issue of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Truly a cut above any other spiritual publication I know of. The latest issue has all kinds of goodies, including a great story about Tibetan Tantric language, one about a woman who has been dumped and follows Ammaji around India, one about how to respond to people who attack you. And, most amazing of all, there is a story about a heavy metal rockstar called Rivers Cuomo from the band Weezer (no, I hadn't heard of them either, but one of their singles was the most-downloaded song on i-Tunes last year!), who is a true, real Buddhist, following the dharma. He talks about how boring it is to be a rockstar, and... well, you should read it here. The Readers Digest version is that he is really, really doing what he's doing as his true life's work, not from ego. And he talks about following the Zen precept of telling the truth, even to the press, rather than putting a spin on things to make him look good. I think that was what inspired me to return to this blog.

CHAIBABA CHAI
I went to the kitchen very inspired about Cuomo and started heating up some Chaibaba Chai decaf. I am truly addicted to the taste of this stuff. I buy it in multiple bottles and my errands tend to center around the various places in Marin that serve it. But it does contain some sugar, albeit the organic kind. I wish they had a sugar-free variety. Then I would really have no problems. On a whim I called the number on the bottle and had an amazing, half-hour conversation with the Baba himself, Richard, who lives and works in Sebastopol and whom some of you know. I told him how much I love his product. He said that he is thinking of making a sugar-free version, but hasn't had time, as he is the boss and also all the employees of his company. He started explaining about the subtle blending of flavors, and how this chai recipe has been around since before time, and how he has a natural talent for cooking, and "knows" in advance how flavors will blend.

I found this fascinating and asked him more. He said (and I wrote this down as he said it):

"Of course, growing up in this society, I want to make a lot of money. But my business has been nothing but a loss - a tax credit. "

"Yeah, I know exactly what you mean," I said (and I do!).

"In fact, the only thing I get out of it is when people like you call me up and tell me that you really like it. This gives me a whole different angle on the meaning of satisfaction, knowing that I'm able to offer this to people, because I really do believe that people deserve to get good chai." chai link

I pointed out to him that although both he and I have made zero profit from our businesses in recent years, we are both somehow alive and well, living in the Western world of luxury. We giggled together about this miracle.

DEATH AND ATHEISM
Oh yes, and death: My dad died recently, aged 89. This has been a very big experience for me. And my mum is having extreme memory problems at the age of 87. I have been to England 5 times since last August, and I came back from my latest trip 4 days ago. I have tried to communicate to mum and my grieving stepmother my conviction that death is not the end of anything. They are, like many English people, deeply faithful atheists. This is a completely true perspective from where they are sitting, just as mine is from where I am sitting. I am just so grateful for mine. I am so grateful for everything: for Cuomo the heavy metal dharma dude, Richard the Chai Baba, my parents, the Love that is breathing through me right now...

and you

xxx

Remembering...

2006-02-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

from a poem by Neil Rogen:

"In the beginning you knew,

Then you pretended to forget

Then you pretended to forget you forgot

Then you forgot you pretended

Remember?"

Yesterday I went with darling Sarah (Soulwave Institute supreme chief) to Harbin Hot Springs, to check out the facility we are going to use for our weeklong Meltdown training that starts in a week. The Harbin folk are SO loving and supportive to us these days! We went in the silky warm pool in this pic, then into the very hot, then run into the very-cold, bow to Quan Yin, back into the very-hot, then back, back, back... I had never done this so many times and felt an exhilarating energy. But, driving home, I was so "relaxed" that I had to stop at a Starbucks...

The Soulwave Two training facility is a beautiful place in the woods, which is where I taught the first Meltdown training, about 11 years ago. As I stood in the room looking out at the mountainside and actual SNOW, I remembered the experience of that first training. In fact, standing in a particular corner of the room regressed me directly into the feeling I had when I first sat down with those 15 or so intrepid wavers:

"Hmmm! I don't really know how this is going to come out. I've felt the presence of the meltdown information landing (mixed metaphor alert!) on my informational landing strip like a ball of twine that wants to be unravelled; but I haven't fully unravelled it. These transmissions seem to come through best in the presence of committed beloveds who desire the information. Help! Use me, Goddess! Here goes..."

It worked and the Meltdown technique was birthed, and has since been refined over 11 years. In the past year or so, as motherwave has morphed into soulwave, the Meltdown has been reborn in a simpler and more memorable format.

Why didn't I think of that before? Ah, the endless evolution of consciousness! We never step in the same river twice, said the Greek geek, Heraclitus.

'DEM BALLS"
And talking of those balls of information, as you may remember me saying if you've taken Wave Two, those informational balls of twine were dubbed "rotes" by Robert Monroe, author of Journeys Out Of The Body and other great books. If you haven't read Monroe, you might want to check out his stuff. He was a businessman who spontaneously started leaving his body decades ago, before such things were widely discussed. His out-of-body journeys were so lucid that he could actually watch the neighbors'... (ahem...) private lives. He thought he was crazy (don't we all think we're crazy when we're close to a pioneering breakthrough!) until he started meeting likeminded crazies.

I met Monroe before he died for the last time when I went for several weeks to the Monroe Institute in the 80s. He had established a center in Virgina where you could put on headphones in dark womb-like cubicles and try journeying. I didn't journey. Typically, for me, I ended up thinking, "It must be great for all the others." But in another training I took, I did come across Mother Mary, chatting away to me, tossing me rotes...

Ah yes, rotes!...

Monroe writes about travelling into other dimensions every single night, and meeting various entities with names like Q176 (being an Alpha Male-type Dude, he probably couldn't have handled meeting anyone with a name like Saint Germain or Antara!). They would tell him the secrets of life, telepathically. Sometimes they would tell him so much at once that he would have to save it for later deciphering, and this is what he described thus: "The entity tossed me a ROTE."

INFO DOWNLOAD-OVERLOAD
Many of us receive "rotes" from our higher selves every day. I know I do! Since my initial motherwave awakening in 1994, I have felt a veritable information download-overload. I sometimes cannot adequately file the number of revelations that appear to my consciousness. I have felt great stress at times from feeling like a steward to some fields of information that feel important and precious. At other times, like when I am teaching, I feel gratitude and bliss about this open access. There is a great line in the Upanishads that I just read this morning, in Stephen Mitchell's book, The Enlightened Mind:

"When you see that God acts through you in every moment, in every movement of mind or body, you attain true freedom."

Aha!

The biggest mystery to me has been how to write my book. I started writing about the motherwave soon after meeting it. My book expanded to a 1000-page ramble that tried to cover everything. Then I decided to cut it down to just the information in Wave One, thinking that I would write a book for each Wave of the work (seven Waves!). However, the book about Wave One, by the time I wrote it (and I did!) ran to nearly 600 pages. So I decided to make that into a trilogy. I had nearly completed the first part of that trilogy in 2003, cleverly weaving the story of discovering my ideal relationship into each chapter, in order to illustrate the principles. Then, -- POOF! -- my ideal relationship melted itself down, and not just my love-life went back to the drawing board.

Everything I formerly understood about everything changed radically, as I went through my soul-striptease experiment. As I have been gradually re-dressing myself in more soul-colored garments, most of the basic motherwave technology has reappeared as soulwave. I've found that yer basic wave-tech still works best for me, after taking another extended tour of all the healing approaches out there.

So my new book is about the basics, and it is shorter, sweeter, has an incredibly catchy title and a basic How-To message. I even have interest from a couple of hot publishing sources (btw I have a total of 11 books outlined in my computer today, and as information comes in, I try to drop it into the appropriate outline).

But my current inner guidance has been to continue my journey into myself, and the edges I am exploring are not quite the same as the introductory book's message. I haven't felt much energy in recent weeks to write - even to write the book proposal. I've learned not to push myself. I'm not being lazy. When the timing is right I write day and night and it pours out at an astonishing rate, in whole paragraphs.

I'm still attending my weekly writing group. Some members understand and trust my process, others think I just need to "get down to it." This endless debate between surrender and control is, as you know if you've been a student, a major interest of mine. In the Quadrant Leap process, we learn to journey or "wave" back and forth between these two points on life's spectrum, in the flow of life. That is how this feels. I'm definitely in the Surrender mode most of the time, and every now and then I feel a strong inner wave of energy to Manifest something, and I do. Then I rest back in the arms of the Beloved again. Seems to be working, and it definitely beats the old "pushing" style that I favored most of my life.

Some concerned friends are wondering whether "the book" will ever happen without someone sitting on me. If someone shows up to sit on me, that might be fun! Sarah has proposed that I offer a series of private talks in my home that would be recorded and transcribed, to at least kick-start the book. That sounds like fun. That was how I produced the Body In Love tape series.

A book advance would get me in manifestation mode, too. Yet I'm not pursuing one, at least today.

Bottom line: I feel as though I belong to the Beloved.

I have felt inklings of this my whole adult life, since one of my earliest awakening experiences at the age of about 17. I was walking along a road in the Dutch countryside, a barefoot hippie (no drugs though!) on some kind of journey of discovery. Suddenly I was filled with an absolutely overwhelming Presence of Love. I was an atheist at the time, raised by atheists, 100% whole-grain atheist. The Love guided me into awareness of my breath, and I found myself pulled into this awareness like a vortex of bliss and coming-homeness. "You are loved. You are mine always," the Presence seemed to be telling me, through the wavy language of breath. I went on a train to Amsterdam and met a woman in the street who seemed to be in a similar state. She gave me the address of my then-future guru's ashram. The rest is spiritual hypestory until I emerged 12 years later.

Despite many exciting experiences I didn't really feel that full Presence again until around 1994 when I met the motherwave.

And now, more than 30 years later the endless expanding spiral of the Divine through my inner breath is still where I feel the Real Love. In the last year this feeling of Oneness with Whom-I-Really-Love, and Who-Really-Loves-Me, has become the foreground of my experience more and more --now much-- of the time. Hallelujah!

Since there is now the wondrous phenomenon of Olympic Short Track Skating ("Go Apolo!") on TV, I'll end this entry with the Rumi poem I'm always quoting:

I belong to the Beloved,
have seen the two worlds as one...
Outer, Inner, Only Breath....

-Rumi

Love to Y'All...

A Curriculum of Love

2006-02-03T16:21:00.000-08:00

Hi! I've blogged twice in recent days. Below this entry is the tale of my recent adventures at Jack Canfield's Transformational Leadership Council in Mexico.

I love these pics of new grads of the Soulwave One: Initiation training from last weekend. The experience they shared at the end was a deepening of love as a palpable reality, and the practical experience that it is safe to completely surrender on the wave of the soul, and everything will be handled, all will manifest. Read what some of them said here: http://www.soulwave.org/testimonials.html

Also in the pic are various old grads from motherwave/soulwave who were there assisting. At the beginning of the training we went round and people said how long they had been in the work. I was amazed to hear "11 years," "8 years," "5 years, and it's changed my life." Someone asked Jeff Wessman in what way it has changed his life. "Just look at me," he said.

As for me, I'm feeling good. Having all kinds of adventures with the high integrity, loving people in my life, including some wonderful new ones.

ADVENTURES IN COMPASSION
One of the things I'm learning ever-more-deeply is how one's values - what might be called ethical/moral development - are an essential factor on the path of awakening. The Dalai Lama expresses this simply: "Kindness is my religion."

I went recently to see Satyong Mipham, son of the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, (one of the most controversial and brilliant Tibetan Buddhist teachers to [literally] "hit" the West). The whole point of his talk was that we need to develop compassionate mind, for real, okay? for real. He said that he was brought up in full-time spiritual practice, and one of his great Tibetan teachers, somebody, somebody Rinpoche, was also one of the Dalai Lama's teachers. Satyong and his buds would ask, Can you initiate us into the secret enlightenment teachings? "Yes I can," responded the teacher, "But it will do you absolutely no good if you haven't developed a completely compassionate mind."

Satyong kept on saying it, repeating himself over and over, then apologizing, then repeating it some more. The friend I went with was snoring gently, but I was saying (inside, as it was a serious Buddhist talk, not a Southern church), "Yes, preach it! Preach it, preacher! I'm with you!"

Compassionate mind resolves everything. It doesn't mean no boundaries. This morning as I woke up, a girlfriend who had stayed the night was dangling my cat's toy in my face. As I batted at it with my paws, a voice said, "Buddha would have loved boundaries." I had left a Pema Chodron talk playing on my i-pod, and that was my awakening line.

Jeff ("Just look at me!") and I had a long conversation yesterday. He was talking about some awakenings he has had through Vipassana, and reflecting on how they interconnect with his soulwave experience of many years. As we chatted I came to realize that I am clearly in a curriculum of love. A loving higher power––whether I think of it as a personal God who carries me through the valley of the shadow of death, which I often do, or as an impersonal void or higher level of organization of consciousness, as in chaos theory––is taking me through Its own training. Since I design trainings to expand consciousness as my life's work, I can only marvel at the one I am in.

CLEANING OUT THE SHADOWY CORNERS
A curriculum of love means that I have to get honest with myself about the corners of my soul with their piles of shadow material - the stuff I don't want to feel that lurks within me. The thing is that if I don't own it and feel it - and melt it down - I will project it outwards. My shadow stuff is my business, your shadow stuff is yours (unless you hire someone compassionately ruthless like me to scour out the corners faster - I go to someone ruthless to help me with this!).

My commitment to not project my own fear/anger/judgment/pain outward is my way of living in love. It's very challenging. I recently had an interaction with a new friend that stimulated all kinds of old material. It would have been easy to dismiss this person - I could easily get my close friends to collude with me if I did. But I knew it was about me, even though it really, really, really seemed to be about them. So I melted down my intense feelings (the Meltdown is a technique you can learn in Soulwave Two and yes, I really do use it all the time).

The air cleared within, and I was soon able to share what had happened. Our friendship (just good friends!) deepened. By doing this, I lost a certain advantage, in terms of the power game of relationships. Owning stuff isn't the prettiest path, and it won't necessarily get you "the prize" within the general system of human interactions, so many of which are based on mechanics of power struggle, projection, love addiction, and so on. If I feel bad about myself at deep levels, then being right, putting you down, judging you, making you wrong, can give me a temporary sense of being okay. As well as using these dubious feel-good techniques, I have been at the receiving end of these kinds of dynamics a lot. For one thing, being projected on is par for the course when you are a seminar leader.

WHICH EGGS DO YOU WANT?
There is a great line at the end of Annie Hall. Woody is saying something like this about his repetitive romantic escapades:

"Relationships are like chickens. Not real. My brother-in-law thought he was a chicken. We never told him it wasn't true, because we needed the eggs."

So which eggs, which "prize" do I want? Do I want to play the fear-based game and get the unreal eggs? Or will I trust in the value of the real eggs, God's eggs, you might say? Slower, quieter, deeper flavor... Sometimes in my life the underlying fear has been so great that even though some part of me knew I was doing this, I wanted the false eggs anyway. I was a bit like that corporate logger guy that we all love to hate and judge, who cuts down the rainforest for a short-term profit, not considering that he is living in the same planet that he is destroying for short-term gain.

My challenging passage over the last two years has really woken me up to the fact that I am on an eternal soul journey. Everything I do has karmic consequences, and the karmic consequences I receive now were created at some point by me. I'm truly committed to living as a conduit of love. Love doesn't always look the way someone else might think it looks, as we all know. Sometimes someone wants us to be a certain way, and it is not in accordance with our highest loving guidance. But there are ways of expressing our boundaries that are loving, and ways that are a dump.

BOUNDARIES OR VIOLENCE?
A bit more about this distinction: in her book "The Hero Within," Carol Anne Pearson explains the Hero's Journey (which Joseph Campbell has described in rather masculine terms as a lone, heroic quest) from a more female, relational perspective. It's a fantastic book which I used to give to everyone a decade or so ago. She describes various stages of a person's life, and one is Martyr, which is followed by Warrior. Many people who are into personal growth, both men and women, are in the middle of a transition from Martyr to Warrior. All of a sudden a person "receives" the realization that she has been exploited, is being used, or is not being recognized as deserving her own choices, power, or freedom. It is clearly someone else's fault and they are going to pay!

Watch out! This is the stage, the author says (I'm giving a vague remembered version here), where a person can become a worse perpetrator than the perp she is protesting against (like the patriarchal system, or her father, or whoever). From one day to the next, her friends and family, or even the mailman, are subjected to her new practice of "boundaries," or "personal power." Ahem! That ain't personal power, ma'am, it's violence! Your empowerment is none of their business. Be careful how you go through this doorway, or you won't really get through, and you can accumulate some quite instant karma. It can be quite hairy to be on the receiving end of someone in this phase, as they use you to work out their new "assertion" muscles. True assertion is loving, kind and peaceful, and always makes everyone around feel better.

The Warrior in Pearson's book evolves into the Magician, who can see and integrate all points of view and levels of self. Who works through love. Who changes everything through changing herself.

We are all in a curriculum of Love. A Course in Miracles says the curriculum is not optional, just when you take it is.

THE GOLDEN RULE
Talking of the curriculum of love, I have a new poster on my bathroom door which has the Golden Rule, as stated in every single religion. It's incredible! Every single spiritual path says the same thing. Many say it is the basis of everything else. For example, from Sikhism, "I am a stranger to no one, and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a friend to all." From the Bible, we all know this one: "In everything do unto others as you would have them do to you, for this is the law..." Matthew, 7:12.

And check out these accounts from people who died and came back, from my favorite book about Near Death Experiences, "Lessons From The Light," by Kenneth Ring:

"All of a sudden... my life passed before me... What occurred was every emotion I have felt in my life... And my eyes were showing me the basis of how that emotion had affected my life. What my life had done so far to affect other people's lives, using the feeling of pure love that was surounding me as the point of comparison. And I had done a terrible job. God, I mean it!... Looking at yourself from the point of how much love you have spread to other people is devastatin'."

"(During her life review), I remember one particular incident... when, as a child, I yanked my little sister's Easter basket away from her, because there was a toy in it that I wanted. Yet in the review, I felt her feelings of disappointment and loss and rejection. What we do to other people when we act unlovingly!... Everything you have done is there in the review for you to evaluate, and when I was there in that review there was no covering up. I was the very people that I hurt, and I was the very people I helped to feel good..."

I belong to the Beloved,
have seen the two worlds as one...
Outer, Inner, Only Breath....

-Rumi

Katie gets some TLC (Transformational Leadership Council)

2006-01-31T20:58:00.000-08:00

My trip to the TLC (Transformational Leadership Council), a motley group of seminar leaders and various other transformative types, was magical from the beginning. I have had many psychic, astrological and other woo woo readings saying that now is the time, Kate, opportunities are going to come to you now, in all areas––like love and work... Well, love is certainly showing up everyday in its myriad forms. This opportunity was about both love and work.

The way I got to this members-only council of 49 folks meeting in Cabo San Lucas was beyond magical. I was lying in my Mosh Pit (a furry power spot in front of my fireplace) one afternoon. A client had just cancelled, and I had decided to do some spiritual sadhana, so I was relaxing with the Victoria's Secret catalog. Someone I didn't know came to the door and knocked. Long story short, she turned out to be the adorable Marci Shimoff, editor of the Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul books. Not knowing why she was there, I offered her some homemade chicken soup, which made her laugh hysterically.
"You don't know who I am, do you?" she said.
"Well, no..." I answered, wondering if she might be my fairy godmother. Turned out that she had previously interviewed me for her new book on Happiness, which will consist of stories of people who found happiness through––ahem––unconventional pathways (like being picked to the soul-bones on a meathook). The result of our meeting was that she invited me to the Cabo conference and got me in as a presenter, which was a big deal. Thanks Marci.

The moral of this and most stories in my life these days is that I am manifesting through surrender. The Victoria's Secret catalog may be an esoteric key, also.

At the 5-day Cabo Conference I gave my Zero Point Field slideshow and experiential presentation on soulwave and dynamic intelligence. The wave got itself across and has set new waves and adventures in motion: Many people have been contacting me, wanting to continue the work after just a few minutes' taste of the wave. Jack Canfield, the organizer and founder of TLC, really seemed to "get" the significance of soulwave. The folks at Centerpointe (Bill Harris' Holosynch tape business) are inviting us up to Portland to give a training in March (see schedule on www.soulwave.org).

The white-haired dude on the whale-watching boat with me, Steve and Alice (who are Taoist geniuses) is Jack Canfield. He created the Chicken Soup for the Soul series (against all odds) and a recent book, The Success Principles. I found him to be quite angelic - nothing like the alpha male one would expect from a success guru. He carries a strong, fatherly authority like a powerful man, yet he is virtually ego-less in his openness to people and new ideas (mine about the wave, for example, which he mentioned in his talk which came after mine). He radiates a humility and kindness that make him adored by everyone, although he barely seems to notice it. We sat on the plane together and discussed our strange former lives and soulwave and books.

The guy with the gourd is Fred Johnson from Florida, a new friend. He is a scorchin' drummer/musician, and also a mind-bending improviser. He sang a song at the beginning and end of each session which somehow summed up what we had just done or were about to do - kind of like the Wayne Brady of the consciousness set. (Don't know Wayne? Watch Whose Line Is It Anyway!). Fred was also really down with soulwave, and he and I are looking for some fun projects to collaborate on. Keep an eye out for him in a training sometime soon!

The goddesses in the water are me and my roommates and buds practicing our synchronized swimming moves, but apart from this very early morning exercise, which really did begin in orange light like the dawn pic at the top, we were in sessions all day and evening. Very intense, very profound. Lots of wonderful people who have become new friends and potential colleagues.

I loved it because I got to hang out with people who have been doing the kind of thing I've been doing for decades. It's like a sort of training leaders' guild. I had all kinds of conversations I have been wanting to have forever, but I only know a few people who successfully do what I do. I came away more determined than ever to keep surrendering to the miraculous unfoldment of my life's work as it is being pulled forth from the strange attractor in my future...

In other words, I was NOT inspired to come home and push! Nonetheless, abundant opportunities have emerged from this fabulous experience. A win/win. Thank you, Life.

Meanwhile life has moved on, and we will soon post pics of the very blissful new Soulwave One grads from last weekend. Our man Dave filmed the whole thing, and we are hoping to get a DVD and CDs out of it.

Most are going on to Soulwave Two at Harbin next month, February 24-March 3. I'll be there. Will you? Be there or be linear! (We're doing a one day make-up for people who want to do the Meltdown at Harbin but couldn't make the last Soulwave One.
Check with Sarah at 415-847-3529 right away to be included).

More soon. New stuff at www.soulwave.org (see testimonials).

Mother is Everywhere

2006-01-08T23:49:00.000-08:00

There is a story, which may be apocryphal (a myth), that when they uncover the black box after planes crash, the last thing the pilots often say before dying is "MOMMY!"

My lovely cat, Morgana, is walking all over the keys here as I type (trying to get into a "catroom?"), but she can't see this picture of feline motherhood. Funny!

Being "under the weather" recently has brought up feelings of wanting to be held like this kitten (if you know me you know that such feelings aren't exactly deeply buried inside me). Fortunately I've had lovely people to cuddle me. But there is this feeling of being truly held that I've been looking for my whole life. The other night I was lying in front of my fire, feeling the lack of this feeling. Then I realized I was in the middle of it! I was being held right then and there! I don't mean a mental realization. It was an actual wave or more like an ocean that I suddenly accessed. It was there all along. Duh!

I know this sounds like what I've been saying for years, like most of my current realizations. I even have an article about this love that surrounds us on my website ("What's Love Got To Do With It?"). But I just got it much more deeply.

Sometimes I realize something is true, but continue to live mostly in the old conditioned reality. Can you relate? Then as I begin to shift my center of gravity into the unconditioned reality, I am amazed. I run around or call around or e-mail around - or if there's a teaching gig happening, I preach away to the students - about this amazement that something I always "knew" to be true is now clearly, actually, really true.

I have just calculated that I can realize something is true and only be at a 4.65% realization thereof. And then there is the exciting journey in which the other 95.35% seeps into me, or I into it.

Right now my experience of being ill (sorry, but there's no spiritually correct other way to say it when it's just pneumonia and antibiotics, but I basically feel it's a healing purge) is quite different from previous such experiences. The presence of The Presence is so much more tangible. I have called it motherwave and now, more often, soulwave, in my work. These words refer to a manner in which it can be reliably accessed, but there are really no words for it.

Life is my Mother. She is everywhere, nourishing and nurturing me. In fact, I had a dream that I drove past a church with this sign:

Bye for now. I'll write again when I return from Mexico, bathed in the vibes of 49 transformational leaders,

Oh yes, and if you live around Sebastopol in Northern Cal., I'm doing my intro slideshow and experiential talk on Soulwave Zero and the Zero Point Field on Tuesday (1/10). See website for details; perhaps I'll see you there?

love Katie

Mother is Everywhere

Meditation/Schmeditation

2006-01-02T00:41:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year

I spent New Year’s Eve in extraordinary company, having a 6-hour conversation with a small group of completely divine, awake souls, only 2 of whom I had known before. Today, New Year’s Day, I’m collapsed with apparent pneumonia taking antibiotics, lightwave body and all! Been basically down-and-out and coughing since I came back a month ago from my two recent sudden trips to England to be with my aging parents.

This is giving me lots of time to meditate. But, what do I mean by “meditate”? In my twenties, as you may know, I was a sort of monk. I lived under monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for six years. Then I married someone within the spiritual group and we continued the spiritual lifestyle (minus poverty and chastity) for another six years, more or less in full-time service except that I got ill in the later years (which was probably related to the spiritual override of this lifestyle).

Part of our spiritual orders were to meditate twice, morning and evening, for at least an hour. I did it, although I would often fall asleep trying. For twelve years, I did it. And also, our teacher had certain “commandments” which we had to follow, and one of them was: “Constantly meditate and remember Holy Name.” Remember Holy Name meant to follow the inner breath. I did that, too. Day in, day out, as I traveled the world (he sent me to Spain and South America and eventually here, to the US of A) I would continually return my attention to the inner flow of my breath.

On one level, this practice caused me to pass through doorway after doorway, entering the realms of purer and purer awareness to which the breath is the doorway. The fact that the breath is a doorway to the Divine is not new news to most of you, I bet. It is taught in every spiritual path, in some form or another. If it is news to you, that’s great: this doorway is right inside you! The breath is a phenomenon that spans the spectrum from the physical dimension all the way to pure spirit (as you may know, spiritus is latin for breath). Thus breath is a doorway, an escape hatch. Try it right now. In my book (it’s coming, it’s coming) I delve into all this in detail.

But the thing is, all this practice of hours of sitting meditation and returning to the breath throughout the day left me in very bad shape, as I have often expressed. I spoke about it in the interview on the website, for example. Briefly, it caused me to do the famed “spiritual bypass,” overriding my physical and emotional bodies which eventually fought back, making me emotionally crazy and physically ill, demanding that I integrate them.

Since then, only an integrated spiritual path has made any sense to me. When I see people in the honeymoon of getting into meditation, believing the spiritual authorities that say it will take you all the way, all glamorized by the initial sense of trance-like tranquility that meditation can bring, thinking that it’s just a few years before they hit enlightenment, I sometimes want to scream: “I’ve been that way. Don’t go too far up without going all the way down as well, or you may get very disillusioned, shocked and disappointed later on.”

Now in Soulwave (formerly Motherwave) there is a lot of practice done with the breath. Wave Zero, in particular, the practice I teach that you can do all day, at any time, includes what I now call the “Inner Aha,” which is to flow your attention on the wave of the breath. But there is what I consider a critical difference in this practice: it's not about stilling all movement but getting back in synchrony with the wave, the dynamic movement of life's river through your body, and thoughts, and emotional body. Wave Zero is designed to be a practice that you literally cannot use to go out of integration, either into too much spiritual consciousness without physical/emotional integration, or too far into your mind, or too far into your body/emotions without access to the spacious ground of being.

As I said, I’m an integration nut. The dangers of non-integration are very real to me. I’ve been with teachers who brilliantly deconstruct one’s beliefs so you realize they just ain’t true, but have you sitting on hard chairs for a week, your body and nervous system getting more and more rigid. I’ve also had teachers who will have you moving and vibrating and undulating your body for a week, but who consider working with beliefs to be “just in the head.” In the last 2 years, going through a big passage myself, I’ve surrendered, at least temporarily, to many teachings, sometimes just looking for a sanctuary where there is some soulful energy. And after all of it I’m emerging very grateful to everyone who has loved and supported and taught me, and also more convinced than ever of the essential nature of integrating all parts of myself in any meditation practice I do or teach.

So, to get back to meditation, it took me 12 years to wake up to the fact that I HATED the sitting meditation. It was not a doorway to bliss for me. It was somewhat tranquilizing – a buffer of time and space between me and the world, or the busy life. I remember wondering during those years how people could possibly get up and go right into life before meditating, getting caught up in and identified with whatever illusory wave of thought or activity first crashed on the beach of their consciousness, whether it was other people or a phone call. But other than this buffering effect, my meditation was mostly a struggle with my mind. I lived all over the world in about 12 countries and 30 different ashrams during my journey with that group (this all ended more than 20 years ago btw), and I only met very few people who were actually, really, genuinely, getting off on that sitting meditation. Certain personality/nervous system structures may be designed for it. But less in the West than the East, due to our extreme bonding disorders from childhood.

When I emerged, all messed up, I started getting into other practices that were more lively, that involved breathing in a less rigid, suppressive way, and actual movement, and actual allowance of feelings and – God preserve us – the dreaded mind! For all those years I had bought the story that the mind was my enemy, and suddenly I discovered that this was nonsense. The only reason my mind was so tortured was that the energy in my body, including all the build-up and backlog from my wounded childhood, was completely stagnating, or rather smouldering like a volcano. Because I was so – what I would now call, in soulwave terms - “DRY,” with a static, frozen nervous system, mind, emotions, body, etc., that the only place all that energy could go was into my mind. As I have often said in class, it was as though the stuck energy was jacking up into my mind through the only open valve of my straight spine, and thus the more I meditated, the more crazy I became. I thought the pressure I felt just meant I should meditate more, and the more I meditated, the worse things got...

After I left the group and the practices, I started to experience incredible releases by involving more of myself in the process of meditation. Eventually, after years and years, I came back to seated meditation but in a completely different way, a “WET” way, through the doorway of the wave, so that although I might have looked as though I was just sitting still, meditating, I was actually riding, surfing the soulwave. The difference, although not externally apparent, is about as different as sitting with earphones on, listening to a regular, digital beat, versus listening directly to some incredible sounds of nature or spontaneous jazz. This is just an analogy; it’s not just about listening, but about what I am ACCESSING. Now I am accessing the moving experience of the soulwave. It’s something real, not a brand name. I could call it stillness or silence or the field or ground of being, and it is those things, yet those names can all invoke a sense of frozenness.

Since we are in bodies, which vibrate and pulse in many dimensions with the rhythm of life, I have found that the doorway to my source is to travel with and THROUGH these pulses, waves, rhythms, not to suppress or go beyond them. For some people, transcendence may be the next step. Maybe you are feeling such desperate chaos that you just want to check out, like putting a relaxing hypnosis tape on the headphones. Okay. But that is just relaxing hypnosis, not accessing your source. You may just need a trance, like a valium, to get by for a while. And maybe you need to do that for years before you will even consider "trance-ending" –– feeling what lies within you, the accumulated individual you-ness that must be fully felt in order to be dissolved and truly transcended.

There is a phrase in Spiral Dynamics (a system that describes how we evolve through levels of memes/beliefs) that sums up this integrative process: "transcend and include." Transcending without including is just jumping-over, and in my experience, you will have to go back.

So, if traditional, sitting, “top-down” meditation really turns you on, more power to you. I know many of you, and I believe you. But I also know many of you who are very relieved when I say, “Do you really find this kind of meditation boring?” The amount of disowned attention and energy that floods back into the room when students are given permission to admit this is enough to enlighten the White House! There is an unconscious, absurd spiritual belief that we should do stuff we can’t stand in order to evolve spiritually. There may be moments when this is true – a clue may be that you really don’t have a choice. But can that really be the chosen path? Because to really get back to your self, as in Self, wouldn’t you have to fall in love with It? When there are so many other objects and energies hooking your attention, your love, how are you ever going to merge with source if it’s a struggle?

For some people – maybe the majority - a more dynamic “bottom-up” form of meditation is essential, in order not to end up frustrated, feeling like a failure, feeling increased pressure or even craziness. Yet if you just jog or do some form of exercise, you may get high yet still miss the subtlety of the doorway to an awakened consciousness that includes everything. Top-down isn’t the whole story. Bottom-up isn’t the whole story.

A lot of my life purpose seems to involve the integration of the both/and/and of all this, finding multidimensional pathways that actually work. Then traveling on those pathways myself. And then, whatever else happens. (Like having a life, and perhaps teaching, if students show up).

To sum up this blog, here are my thoughts on meditation, and on spiritual practice in general:

--If you secretly hate and avoid meditation, but feel bad because you think you “should” be doing it, you are probably not doing an integrated practice that is self-evidently moving you forward.

--For many of us, the meditation process has to be more dynamic than just sitting “watching our thoughts.” Yet that witness consciousness is part of it.

--It should be integrative – meaning that it includes body, mind, emotions, breath, spirit. Otherwise whatever part you don’t include will drag you back down to integrate it.

--It should be a mystical experience that is so enjoyable that it pulls you in. Further, deeper, more and more love. Forever.

I want to add that I think the doorway to this kind of meditation is subtle and narrow. Certain teachers can probably take you through. although that hasn't happened for me. I think Wave Zero, understood deeply, can take you through. It’s taking me through.

AND THERE'S ONE MORE THING:
I've been unexpectedly and auspiciously invited to speak at and participate in the Transformational Leadership Council, a group of - yes! - transformational leaders, coordinated by Jack Canfield and Lynne Twist and others, who are holding a conference in Cabo San Lucas to support each other on the path. It's invitation-only, and there are many hot members. It's next week, and I'll be returning from that to teach Soulwave One the last weekend of January.

I am very excited. This opportunity has emerged from pure surrender and soul destiny. I've done nothing to make it happen except be on my path, mostly on a deep invisible retreat. I will report back here with the news, inner or outer. Like, what will I talk about for my designated spot? Don't know which title they picked, or when I am on. Exciting. I love it. I always used to say that the sign that you are a motherwave trainer is that you can teach the training now (whenever that now happens to be)

Back to sleeping meditation for me. Come surf the wave at www.soulwave.org

Love to all. Happy New Year.

Tadyatha -- Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha.
[Gone, gone, gone to the other shore; safely passed to that other shore.]

Check this out for New Year Giggles: http://www.icq.com/img/friendship/static/card_16961_rs.swf

An Awfully Big Adventure…

2005-12-16T01:59:00.000-08:00

Peter Pan said, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

This pic is of my dear dad, who is on life's home stretch. Physicist, published novelist, violinist, museum director, jazz pianist... He is the small one in the middle. Until I visited him a couple of weeks ago, I never saw this photo, taken long, long ago (see how young Charles looks, pre-Diana!) nor my dad's "C.B.E." medal, (which means "Commander of the British Empire" and is one beneath a "Sir"). My family is so egalitarian that meeting the royal family was almost an embarrassing, anti-status event. However, I am now an American and am happy to exploit this status: time for some respect, guys, I'm the daughter of a Commander!!

I have to say I’m not too bothered about dying. My exploration of life, loss and NDEs, especially in the past two years (check out link at end of this blog), has reassured me of what I already knew ––there is no death. And in many ways the fun may begin when we drop the body, although I’m convinced the real fun begins when we drop the so-called self while staying in the body!

And my inner Wendy, with her Peter Pan sidekick, has been melting more and more into my Elder, whether they like it or not.

What I have to say now is this:
“To die into life will be an awfully big adventure.”

When my life and illusions fell apart last year, I remember saying to a few close friends “I’m done.” I felt––and still feel––like the Buddha, suddenly seeing the dreaded signs of aging, sickness and death, and realizing that human life is only for one thing: to wake up. I’ve had it with the illusion – the round of pain and pleasure, the tendency to place my trust and love in that which isn’t real or enduring. Buddhists call the human experience “samsara,” and they basically say you can’t fix it; you can just wake up from it. This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it and have a fulfilling, abundant life. It just means that fulfillment and abundance can’t be based on thinking that the outer world is going to bring us what we crave…

Oh Gawd, I can hardly believe or BEAR that I am saying these words, so corny, so spiritually hackneyed do they sound! Same old words I heard when I first entered my spiritual path and became a monk at age 18. After decades of practice and service and life, my great realization is coming out in these same words? Yet some of the way I feel things isn’t quite so typical; like my experience of accessing the divine oneness through inner oceanic waviness, and my certainty that awakening has to be a literally “moving” experience on all levels (and as you know if you’ve been my student, this doesn’t necessarily mean physical exercise, except in the most subtle ways).

Anyway, I feel as though last year I was asked by life to die into life, to keep living with gratitude and enthusiasm and most importantly, to stay awake and aware, within the experience of great pain. For more than a year I found that I couldn’t numb my pain out; I don’t do drugs or alcohol; I could barely watch TV, despite quite a healthy previous basketball-watching habit. The only books I could read were about Reality with a capital R, despite my previous book-a-day practice which had meandered between crap and inspirational or scientific stuff. I could barely watch a movie (I just wanted to fall asleep watching videos of Eckhart Tolle). I was committed to not getting into another relationship to numb my pain. Anything that presented life in its illusory form just stuck in my craw like hard peanut butter. I felt allergic to anything except raw truth, and raw truth hurt.

So melting down this pain hasn’t been easy – it goes way beyond the ending of a marriage, family, home and dreams. A whole large lump of “me”––well, actually, what seems to be me but is actually fixated-self material––has had to be melted with it. I was just listening to Pema Chodron saying that while at a small retreat someone was apparently projecting hatred towards her, and she found this so painful that she ended up staying up all night, sitting in the pain she was feeling, leaving the story aside. By morning she felt a release, and realized that her whole ego structure had been designed to not feel this exact pain!

I can absolutely relate to this. Can you? I ask myself (and you can ask yourself along with me if you like): What is it that I am most afraid of feeling? And how am I structuring my presentation of self, and indeed my life, not to feel it? If intimacy brings it up, how am I designing––and rationalizing––my lifestyle to keep intimacy at bay? If it is criticism that wounds me at the core, how am I desperately trying to placate others, to dowse the fireball of projection that every unhealed one of us is always throwing at everyone else? If abandonment wigs me out, how am I trying to insure against it? If I am afraid of being nobody, how am I constantly trying to be somebody? If I don’t have a life, how am I trying to live through others, as savior or martyr? If being fully seen makes me fear that I won’t measure up, how do I make sure I hide, or fail in advance to avoid disappointment?… and on and on.

And did I answer these questions about myself, or about someone else I am trying to judge or fix?

At this moment in time, I find myself coming to the end of a long dark night in which I found myself sitting (rolling around “waving” and breathing on a furry rug, actually) in feelings I never wanted to feel, that I thought I had felt and completed. Until something else started to happen. Just as Pema Chodron felt something different in the morning, I find myself coming towards the dawn after my dark night and it’s pretty exciting.

I just went to England and spent time with my 88-year-old dad, who is very ill, and my mom (they have been divorced for 30+ years). Came back and found that the jetlag hit me very hard (I went over there on the nearly 12-hours-each-way plane journey twice in a few weeks). I also had taken, as an experiment, a cortisone shot for a shoulder that has hurt for 10 years despite doing everything naturally right for it. And this combination of insults to my body has put me in a physical funk. The cortisone also activated my emotional body; I got really cranky for a few days; found myself arguing with my bank manager one day. That evening a friend said, “Oh, you had a cortisone shot––have you had any arguments yet?” “Aha!” The next day as I prepared to go into battle with a shop assistant, I woke up: “Oops, I’m on steroids, sorry!” I told the woman, who thought this was funny and took care of me. I could have said I had PMS; but could I just say, “Oops, I’m on insane neurotransmitters, sorry!” or “Oops, I’m believing myself to be a separate self, sorry!”?

While teaching the last Soulwave One just before getting on the plane, I was in full-blown cortisone mode, and Sarah was giving me “Down, girl!” signals from the back of the room every now and then, as I got a bit “ramped up.”The students didn’t seem to notice and all had breakthroughs regardless.

Then, after a couple of days of cranky, I turned weepy, which coincided with seeing my mom. She didn’t seem to notice much difference. Then with jetlag and the inner chemicals, I couldn’t sleep, blah blah.

Before all this, as I reported in my last blog entry, I had been enjoying a movement into a more consistent awake space than ever before in my life. A space of full “nothingness.” So delicious. And now it’s as though I unconsciously had to “test” this awakening by bringing in various physical difficulties––historically my biggest challenge. The breathing witness fights back: “Aha!” I tell myself (if thought is inevitable, I may as well upgrade it): “There they are again, those painful feelings and thoughts trying to re-enter my consciousness or even become my identity. But they’re just the feeling/thought language of a particular neurotransmitter cocktail that my physical stress has restimulated. In other words, all that “stuff” is just chemicals. Who I think I am is a chemical soup. I am not that. I am the creator of that! I AM!”

But, as the What The Bleep movie rightly, and in my opinion most significantly pointed out, I am addicted to those chemicals, which I have come to think of as my “self.” Am I willing to go through the pain of withdrawal in order to be free from that artifact of self? Yup! Especially since I know how to surf a wave through that pain, which accelerates my journey and ensures I won’t get stuck.

So there was this familiar addictive “self” with a few new twists, trotting through my consciousness. Even today (12/7/05), which was not a good day physically, I woke up crying. A friend called while I was crying and said, “What’s up?” I said, “It’s just some detoxing I’m doing, and the brain chemicals are restimulating certain feelings and thoughts, but I don’t want to talk about any content because I could easily make a nightmarish story out of any aspect of my life. Even the cats seem to be looking at me funny but it’s probably just my weird altered consciousness!” I knew this was true because just a couple of weeks ago my same life circumstances of deep uncertainty had invoked deep gratitude, trust and joy. She didn’t quite get my point and persisted, asking about a particular situation, and I found myself telling her the story.

Sometimes you have to tell the story, and I don’t subscribe to the “no story” theory. As usual the absolute truth in this regard is “both/and.” In fact there is evidence from some grief studies that shows that you MUST tell certain traumatic stories a certain number of times, and that all your immune markers will get better as you tell them, until a critical point where retelling the story makes those markers go down. How can you know which trajectory you are on? Tuning into the bod, breathing and getting wet makes it pretty clear. You can’t tell for another person (they call this “taking someone else’s inventory”). You can tell for yourself whether saying it fixates you or unfixates you.

I was definitely on a “no story” turn of life’s river, as I had already sensed. As soon as I told my friend about the situation, I felt silly, because now the chemicals were really pumping. “Yes, “ I began to believe, “this is why I feel lousy; it’s this situation to do with (not) selling my house.”

But no it isn’t. It actually never is the situation, even when expressing yourself with someone loving to hold space really helps. I spent a few hours re-releasing that particular story and just being with (in a wavy and therefore effective way) the here-now experience of the strange “state” occupying my body. “Don’t believe a word it says,” I kept reminding myself, “And let the feeling move through my body on a wave.”

Well, it worked, as this motherwave/soulwave stuff amazingly does, every time, and I feel as though I have almost reset myself to where I was before the “setback.” In 12-step programs they say that setbacks are part of the path, and in Soulwave trainings I say that we learn in spiraling waves, and should expect some “ecstasy backlash” after major moves forward. Well, I’ve had mine, and I’m ready to continue my adventures.

For the last 2 years I’ve been in an exploration of a very deep surrender. Even when I was a monk in my 20s, I never surrendered this deeply. I am amazed at how brilliantly life has been unfolding my soul’s destiny pathway as I stop trying to control-create what I want or make it happen. It’s not that I don’t have intentions or desires or preferences, and I certainly make those clear to “Life.” But I have been exploring the––for me––radical experiment of being okay with what is, knowing that it is all dynamically unfolding towards my highest good. The difference from my old way of thinking is that what I now consider my highest good is spectacularly higher. I have been shown what is actually available.

Recently many exciting opportunities have come towards me re my book and career expansion. (They’re not coming through strife and struggle and PR, I can tell you that! In fact one major doorway-opener recently walked through my front door unexpectedly while I was relaxing into a feeling of spaciousness while reading the Victoria’s Secret catalog!). I’m going to be taking some journeys. The next phase of my life is starting to move in. They say that “when one door closes, another opens, but man these corridors suck.”

I feel as though I am getting to the end of the corridor, and some doors are opening. Inner doors are definitely opening; and of course they go together with outer doors. I don’t have to find them. They are finding me. This seems to be the way it works. I can’t fake it. I can’t try to go through an inner doorway so that the outer world will conform to my demands for control. But since I actually am finally going through those doorways I never thought I would choose, those full-surrender doorways that my feisty soul resisted for ages, it seems as though the heavens are getting ready to open up and rain down on me.

I’ll let you know what happens.

Check out this amazingly inspiring NDE story:
Journey Through the Light and Back by Mellen-Thomas Benedict

SHIFTING...

2005-11-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

(This is a pic of Kali (goddess of transformation through death) at my altar fireplace. She has been busy...

Continuing to try to "splutter my living experience into words:"

Things have recently and rather dramatically gotten a lot quieter in my reality. And I have been quite busy with clients and work.

I just reread my previous post, and I was talking about the sense of my center of gravity shifting from its former residence within my (wounded) emotional body much of the time, towards my soul.

This shift has continued. I would have to say that there has been a leap, perhaps in the last two-three weeks. I feel I am on a journey that is accelerating into warp speed. I did once travel on the Concorde in the 80s, racing across the Atlantic to see my former spiritual teacher (he didn't show up). There was a definite moment when the plane shifted through the sound barrier. Bumpier for a while and then quieter. Much faster, but quieter.

I'm feeling like that. I feel as though I have awoken from a dream - the dream of my former self. Now, if you have been my student over the past 12 years, you have certainly heard me speak and teach about this kind of thing before. The whole Meltdown training was (and is) about how to practically dissolve the "alleged self" and wake up in the Field Within Which Everything Arises (again, insert your fave word for God here). And I was teaching from experience. But it was as though I was in a long dream from which I would occasionally awaken. Looking around at the awake "real" world, I would enthusiastically devise wake-up devices and teach them to people, who would then have awakening experiences.

But I wasn't established in a reality of being awake. And I'm not fully established in it now, but I am experiencing long periods of awakeness. I am a little leery of saying this in "public" here, but it is my true experience and I offer it in service to all of our awakening process.

What do I mean by awake? Well, the central experience of reality for me has shifted from the world seen through Katie's eyes (and feelings, and beliefs, etc.) to a world of which I am simply a loving, breathing, living part. My ego still runs, but it doesn't carry me off so far so fast. Beliefs and feelings move through, but they seem funny to me. And yes, I know I said that when I had my first "motherwave" awakening in 1994 - "everything seems funnier to me." Well, it's just more so now, in fact the feeling of the "cosmic, compassionate giggle" has gone way over the 50% line of my experience.

I (like you probably) have known for a long time that I am "not my thoughts, not my feelings, not my body, not my sense of self." And if I'm not that, then the world I'm seeing can't be what I'm seeing it as, either.

So suddenly - or at least fairly rapidly and increasingly - it has become the primary reality of my experience that the slightly--or very--anxious dream I used to relate to as reality (despite "knowing better" spiritually and philosophically) is actually not reality, and that something else is. And, sorry to be corny, but the something that IS reality seems indescribable and unnameable and untalk-aboutable. But I will say that it is a loving presence. And within it, everything in outer reality seems to operate differently. It is as though different laws apply. Everything feels magical, but not in the way of the old new age magical thinking where you want to control things because you are afraid of them not going your way. It's magical because I feel surrendered to the way things go or don't go, more than ever in my life. And everything seems to be going "my" way--whoever that way may belong to!

And please note, this shift is caused by no new boyfriend, no great career or financial breakthrough, plus my cat just magically swallowed a reel of thread and needed a $1000 operation, and my dad is suddenly very sick at 88 and I am racing across that pond again next week, second time in 6 weeks, 24 hours in planes, to see him.

And I feel okay about everything. Everything is a divine flow of grace, bringing greater and greater love, abundance, beauty and opportunity for service. I don't hope this, I know it with "inspired certainty."

I'm teaching the second Soulwave One: Initiation training this weekend before I travel, and I'm really looking forward to how it is going to come through, since I feel so very very ... different.

Watch this space. I will write again when I return from visiting dad. Sending love to all.

p.s. By the way, check out this fabulous flash animation (keep going, it gets good) if you want to take a 15-minute journey into yet another parallel reality! I promise you that you won't experience anything remotely like this in a soulwave radical hypnogression!

Physical body as an interference pattern of waves

2005-10-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

If you're following this blog, sorry for the delay. I jumped across the pond to London to surprise my mom on her 86th birthday. She was surprised, and said "Katie! You'll give me a heart attack!" Here's a pic of us sitting outside our favorite health food restaurant.

I have good news: my body––along with my experience of self / reality / life––is changing radically. I may have already said many times that I'm in the "birth canal" of a major transformation, but now I would have to say that I'm "crowning." Some of what now seems to be here in my experience is quite unimaginable.

On the level of the body, or Lightwave Body: after many decades of chronic health problems, I seem to be healthier and stronger than I can remember being! Since the early 80s, when I contracted some kind of mystery illness, later given names like CFS and Fibromyalgia, I've been on a journey to unravel my health problems. As some of you who know me well well know, I've done, taken, tried everything, from spending months in Brazil with a psychic surgeon, to all manner of odd health machines and healers and alternate and allopathic approaches.

For the last few years I've been working almost exclusively with a brilliant maverick doctor who doesn't want new patients so I won't say his name. But basically he is helping unravel what I call the complex "wave interference pattern" of my body's challenges. There are waves that come in from all directions and dimensions to create what we call a human being. For example, my physical body is an interference pattern of waves or coding that might include:

––my karma (as in my possible need to experience things I've resisted in the past)
––my genetic imprint (influential––though less so than commonly believed)
––my beliefs, conscious and unconscious
––when I was born (galactic influences are waves of information that "printed out" as I incarnated)
––where I was born (ditto)
––my soul's "scars" or samskaras, in Sanskrit––meaning experiences I carry from past lives (you don't have to believe this)
––the physical environment of my mother's womb
––the physical environment I was born into––for example, was there radiation, toxic chemicals?
––the emotional environment of my mother's womb and the home and family I was born into
––various traumatic experiences in this life
––the general cultural/historical era I was born into (my health and body would have been very different centuries ago)
––prevailing micro-organisms, viruses, bacteria, parasites and other noxious waves intersecting with my physical body at certain key moments when it was vulnerable...
––plus what one might call a "future coding" or a higher level field that is pulling me forth, aka my soul's destiny for this body.

In the course of my earnest quest to alleviate my suffering and get some energy so I can get on with my multiplex life purpose, I have worked on most of the above. And I'm sure that everything that I've done is part of the new level I am now emerging into.

(Before I go on, I want to say that of all the health remedies I have tried, on a purely physical and chemical level, the hands-down winner in terms of making an actual change in my body has been the discovery of bio-identical hormones. I will get further into this on a separate page at some point, but if you're a woman with health problems, read Natural Hormone Balance by Uzzi Reiss or Suzanne Somers' book The Sexy Years!).

However, what has worked more than anything else has been to include the body in a particular transformation I am currently experiencing. As you may have gleaned, either from reading this website or taking my trainings, my work involves incarnating the soul further into the body. However, the soul can only get in so far, if something or someone else is living there. Who was living in my body? Well, along with the powerful, irrationally exuberant self and the wise teacher self and the curious English self and so on, there was, of course, what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body. A complex miasm or––again––wave interference pattern that has created an actual mass like an identity or presence that inhabits, or even at times possesses my physical vehicle.

just grabbed Eckhart's new book: A New Earth, yesterday, and read the chapter on the pain-body. If you're a soulwave / motherwave grad, what he describes is equivalent to the Tyrannical Inner Child/Parent energies (from Soulwave Three: Planetary Leadership training) or a FAM or Fixated Attention Mass (from Soulwave Two: Meltdown). Tolle brilliantly likens the pain-body to a cat's ever-alert attention. He says that when a cat is sleeping, it still twitches and its ears prick up, etc. when something moves in the house. Although it is asleep, some alert attentive body is always there, ready to spring into action. He describes the mass of unresolved pain we carry from the past as being similar - ready to spring into dramatic projection and reaction at a moment's notice. Life is a continual series of painful triggers if we carry a big pain-body. How is yours?

Soulwave trainings are specifically designed to transform and transmute the pain-body back into available, creative, pleasurable energy and attention. This is not just a matter of being here now (because I'll only have to be "there" later!). There is a skillful means, (which in my book I have called the "Power of How"), whereby this old pain can be transmuted, and that is the technology of soulwavework. It involves, as you probably know, a multidimensional approach, melting the inner fixation at all levels––INCLUDING THE PHYSICAL LEVEL––into waves that you can ride back into the ocean of life. It's very practical and it works, unlike simply sitting in the mental balcony "observing" your pain (which eventually just makes it angrier and more alienated), or jumping in to totally identify with the pain (which just prolongs it). End of skillful means rant––for now!

Having said all that, I am pondering how it is that I am feeling so different now? Obviously I have done years, no, decades!, no, lifetimes! of integrative work on myself, with very skillful means, at least recently. But what seems to be making the difference in the new emergence into a Lightwave Body that I am experiencing?

Well, first I think it builds on having done a lot of work to melt the patterns of painful fixation in the physical, mental, emotional and astral bodies. And then, on top of that, I've just experienced this new initiation into my soul. How to speak of this? The words are so common, so cheap. A word like soul can mean anything from a music style to a type of food to a catch-word in many popular spiritual books...

Oliver Wendell-Holmes said that words are the "outer skin of a living reality," so I will try to describe the living reality that I am referring to here, when I say soul: My soul is not a thing, or a person. It is personal, but it isn't a smaller, more see-through version of Katie. It is a wave of information that has been traveling through the galaxies perhaps since the Big Bang, and may always exist. Its purpose is NOT to merge back into nothingness or pure consciousness. My purpose, as a human being, is to merge back into my soul, which is a kind of moving way-station between the personal embodied ego and the impersonal "Zero Point Field in which everything arises" or "God" (or insert your favorite name).

"My soul is a moving way-station? Now I'm really confused." Well, sorry! I'm not weaving a theory here, but trying to splutter a living experience into words. My soul is the center of me. And it's a moving center. I'm not supposed to just disappear into the Void. I––my soul––am an evolving consciousness. And my soul-journey is certainly transcendent, but it's about transcending and embracing/including everything.

I wasn't really centered in my soul before, although I spent a lot of time there. But my center of gravity was closer to the wounding of my emotional body, as discussed above. And here's the scoop, regarding the Lightwave body:

I had contracted with my body to show me where I was off the pure, 100% soul-centered consciousness by even a millimeter!

This was one of those soul-level pre-birth contracts that you probably know about. So all my illness, while certainly "caused" at certain levels of reality by the many factors mentioned above, was also inevitable, as long as the body was being used as an indicator, or exaggerator, or amplifier, like a loud warning signal forcing me to fully experience any place that I am remotely off–-remotely sad from old sadness, mad from old madness, scared from old fear, etc. This contract made me hyper-sensitive.

The short version of what has happened recently is that on Glastonbury Tor (England) on the Full Moon in July, I changed this contract. I tell the story of this on the upcoming DVD/movie about the Lightwave Body training. As I descended the Tor, I started to receive a huge download, both in cognizant knowing and in waves of light moving through my body, showing me that they ARE my body. I surfed them as I know how to surf inner waves, thank God. Otherwise I might be fractured, having one of those horrible "kundalini experiences" or "spiritual emergencies" (that are really emergences) that happen when too much cosmic energy surges through a dry body.

Since then the experience has been coming in small waves. Teaching from the experience in Hawaii made a very powerful initiation for all of us.

More will be revealed. I feel as though I'm still in the middle of my birth.

Watch this space if you like.

Back from Hawaii

2005-08-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Back from Hawaii, integrating - in other words, watching a new integral whole emerge from the combination of the new territory experienced and the old territory that was "my life so far." We were on the Big Island, the land of new territory, where the Volcano goddess Pele constantly creates fresh young land, spewing forth molten lava which pours into the ocean, cools off and within a few years, becomes the womb of lush rainforests.

We experienced a similar kind of change within our bodies, I think, and I'm sensing the lush rainforest effect won't take years.

The title of the training, Lightwave Body In Love, set a high matrix of possibility. Possibility is a wave, fact is a particle, and the journey into our lightwave bodies required us to surf a wave of possibility where few have gone before us.

Here is what J.G. Bennett (a great British philosopher) says about these two worlds of particles and waves in Making a Soul:

"There are two worlds. One is the world of facts where there are no possibilities and the other the world of possibilities where there are no facts.

It is very hard to grasp that possibilities exist independently of facts and can even have power over facts.

The pattern of possibilities is as substantial as the body, but it is made of potential energy instead of energy in visible form.

Between these two worlds [possibility and fact] there is a border, a frontier, and across this frontier there can be an exchange, and it is across this frontier also that "yes" and "no" can really mean something."

Our group of 13 lightwavers were really saying a huge "YES" across this potent frontier of possibility, which I have dubbed the "New Edge," (for the edge, in chaos theory, is where everything new happens).

I'm so happy. I feel as though I am in a new world with my new-and-getting-newer body! Our invocation of our lightwave bodies worked! -- to a degree and depth that I literally could not have imagined. We will soon upload some direct recordings of people's reactions as things were changing, and you can read some testimonials here.

Why I couldn't have imagined what came through was that although my prior download, preparing me to lead the training, was powerful, it was just the menu, not the meal. There was a potent magic in the combination of this wave of new experiential information wanting to come forth, the exact group of 13 brilliant souls who were hungry for it (some jumping in on the very last day!), plus Hawaii, sun, rain, full moon over frothy white waves and many different warm watery experiences, with turtles and a human pod of beloved fellow-travelers.

The dolphins didn't show up at the beach this time, and we decided not to drive for 6 hours in a minivan to pursue them and force the experience. Instead we became a fluid, wavy pod ourselves and barely felt that ole "dolphin abandonment syndrome" which is probably an echo of feeling abandoned by our source.

Will post more as it integrates. Watch for a visual guided tour of lightwave very soon. Check out what others have said in the meantime here.

Since everything is none other than just the way it is,

one may as well simply burst out laughing.

--Long Chen Pa

love Katie

Back from England

2005-08-05T00:00:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting in Peet's Coffee slurping a foamy decaf chai soy latte, a week or so before the first Lightwave Body In Love training (starts August 14 on Hawaii Big Island - you may still be able to leap in). It has just struck me that this article about the Lightwave Body information I am receiving is going to have to become a BLOG. Because although I have a few snippets coming through, I know from experience that I won't really know what it's all about until I am actually teaching the training.

I like blogs. They strike me as being very dynamically intelligent, in the way they flow like a river rather than trying to freeze life like a pond that can stagnate. Dynamic Intelligence was, in fact, the title of a book I was writing and had almost completed, in 2003. It was a description of the scientific and practical principles of Motherwavework, relating each chapter to the story of my ideal marriage. I remember thinking it would be funny--and safe--to put a disclaimer in the front of the book saying that "By the time you are reading this, I will have moved forward, and am not necessarily married to any of these ideas."

Ha ha! What I didn't expect was The Big Splat that bulldozed my life quite unexpectedly around Xmas/New Year 2004, when all aspects of my reality (marriage, home, work, community) were suddenly... well... gone! Shift happened! The Shift Hit The Fan (and other bumper stickers). One of the chapters in the aforementioned Dynamic Intelligence book was titled "Shifting The Way Shift Happens." You may remember that I sent it out to motherwave graduates as an article. In this chapter, I argued passionately and wittily that the belief that change and transformation have to happen through struggle, pain, destruction and suffering is just that--a belief! I said that I was aware that I was also a participant in this belief, having been deeply conditioned by eons of living in cultures where it is believed, and thus experienced, then believed even deeper, and thus experienced even more concretely. But, I declared, I was experimenting with the idea that growth can happen through love, pleasure, safety and EASE . I said that I didn't want to buy the concept of human life with all its cruelty and suffering as nothing more than a series of lessons in a school. Could the headmaster (God) really be this mean ?... I asked, crankily.

Well, take this: Splat! As I entered a phase of undisguisable suffering, grief, pain and undeniable growth, I mused at length about this question. Why, when I had sincerely proposed and volunteered for this experiment of growth-through-ease , was I now growing through the deepest losses of my life, in other words, growth-through-suffering ? Should I have put a disclaimer on the article? (But I didn't care what anyone thought any more). Was I wrong in challenging this well-honed "truth"--this veritable sacrosanct "What Is?" (We all know we must love and accept What Is).

Or: Was I still in the experiment? Could this incredibly hard AFGO (stands for Another F--g Growth Opportunity) be leading me to a deeper, more nuanced and complex answer to my question about how to transform through ease?

Well, in a word, Yes! In my inner blog, it seems as though, after about 18 months of melting and reforming, melting and reforming, something completely different is approaching my experience. I have often wondered, as yet another aftershock wave moves through, if there is really light at the end of this tunnel-period of my life.

Last Full Moon, I slowly ascended the spiral path up Glastonbury Tor. If you don't know about this magical place, said by some to be the planet's heart chakra, google it!

I had been guided to do a very specific process at this place and time, to do with bringing in my light body--something you've never heard me talk about, because I have been so concerned with honoring our own fleshy matter as it is . Yes, and... I was now receiving 4 am blogs from my guidance about the light body.

I did my ritual on top of the Tor, surrounded by wild English pagans smoking, drinking, twirling fire sticks... The orange moon rose over the rolling English hills...

As I slowly redescended, the real download began. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Yes, light waves! And here they are now: waves of palpable light, moving through my body, all in a field of infinite love. A light wave body.

You may be trying to imagine this as you read, visualizing or "feelitizing" waves of light moving through your body, transforming it to a higher, freer, more exuberant frequency. Yes and no! Instead of imagining yourself as the body through which the lightwaves are flowing to purify you, imagine yourself as the lightwaves...! (More to come!)

So in answer to my own question about shifting the way shift happens, and why my desires to grow in ease were not quite working, I realized that I had been on the right track, but I had things backwards. Good intentions are all very well, but being 2 degrees off course can cause a plane to miss the runway and crash. I'm not aiming for perfection, but I have found that the portal to the radical, real transformation that I now want more than anything else is tiny!

Here was my mistake: the pleasure, ease, ecstasy and co. that I had been claiming are a side-effect of something else, and cannot be pursued directly. This something else is the light body, or lightwave body , as I am calling it. And the lightwave body is a side effect of something else...

I'm off to the Big Island of Hawaii next week to explore all this with a dedicated group of pioneer explorers. We will be doing the Portals and Wormhole techniques I invented years ago for the Ecstasy Training, but with a new twist...

We will keep you posted. If you want to follow my lightwave body adventures, bookmark this page and we can journey together.

Love, Katie Darling

P.S.

Guess where Wendy and I are in this picture:

The farmer was so annoyed at the arrival overnight of this crop circle in his field that he drove his tractor through it.

The interesting thing (well - the whole thing is interesting: we went to 5 - count 'em FIVE - crop circles!) is that when we were in the crop circle we couldn't see its pattern at all. There was a guy above us in an ultra-light filming, and he could see it, but we couldn't until we went on the web next day. Is this a metaphor for life, or what? (www.cropcircleconnector.com)

The answer is... right here: