I’m sorry the posts have been so sporadic but I’m returning to posting on a weekly basis. Many fascinating (to me and I hope to you) topics have been emerging that I will explore, along with issues and themes readers might bring up. So come back soon!
Bob and I have been in Europe for 2 weeks now, teaching with Ray McCall in Leipzig. Module One and Two are just completed, and Module 3 begins tomorrow. At the first training we had Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, England, Denmark, Italy and Germany: International SourcePoint. This is appropriate as the language of pattern and the dance of energy transcend nation and language. We all understand Order, Balance, Harmony and Flow. Our bodies know that language!
I’ve written before that health is about communication, and I truly felt all last week the truth that the language we speak is only one form of communication. We are always receiving messages, sending messages. I cannot put into words in any language the delight it is to be in a space with people for days where the communication is just the simple language of Order, Balance, Harmony and Flow. There’s a field created, drawn forth, entered into, that is so supportive, nourishing and transformative. Thanks to all the wonderful participants and Bob and Ray as the primary teachers, and to Kathrin Grobelnik for the use of her beautiful studio and her efficient organization. I’m looking forward to more participation in workshops in the future. I love being in that field. One of the participants quoted a Rumi poem I love that goes something like “Beyond the idea of right and wrong, there is a field…meet me there.” That’s where I’ve been, in that field.
Fritjof Capra says “One lesson that nature teaches is that everything in the world is connected to other things.” In The Web of Life, referring to the immune system, he states“The entire system looks much more like a network, more like people talking to each other, than soldiers out looking for an enemy.” Hurray. If we begin to shift our perception that what goes on inside our bodies is constant battle, perhaps that shift will eventually be mirrored in the outside world.
At a practical level, methods such as non-violent communication work with assisting this shift in the outside world. Last week I said I would talk more about down to earth ways in which communication=health. In an interview with Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication, he says that it evolved from his attempt to get conscious of what he calls Beloved Divine Energy and how to connect with it. He continues, “To me, the violence in the world comes about when we get alienated or disconnected from this Energy. How do we get connected when we are educated to be disconnected?” He talks about being in a roomful of Bosnians and Serbs: “I remember sitting there in the middle of all this rage and pain and thinking, “Divine Energy, if you can heal all this stuff why are you taking so long, why are you putting these people through this?” And the Energy spoke to me, and it said, “You just do what you can to connect. Bring your energy in. Connect and help the other people connect and let me take care of the rest.”
At so many different we levels we find the theme of connection: connection to ourselves, to each other, and to the cosmos. Connection is communication, and connection at all those levels nourishes and sustains our health. The connection to the Blueprint in SourcePoint facilitates that connection to the cosmos, which in turn strengthens our connection to ourselves, and gives us a different foundation for our connection to others.
I’d like to share an experience I’ve had in healing through communicating with myself. Three years ago I began to experience severe, incapacitating episodes of vertigo, the kind where the room is spinning and rising and falling, every body system is in alarm and literally you can’t move anywhere. I sometimes ended up crawling from place to place, but mostly when it happened I just was immobilized and working with it to let it be, to subside and pass. I was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease, and I’m not going to tell the whole story here, but it was a major teacher at many different levels. With lots of work and help and healing I’ve been pretty stable for almost a year now. I had a stable year after the initial occurrence, and then a major recurrence, so I’m not getting attached. I know the things I need to do to give myself the greatest opportunities of continued stability, and I do them, and one important ongoing activity is communicating with my body/mind/brain/nervous system.
Meniere’s is theoretically “caused” by excess fluid in the inner (not middle) ear that leaks out and disrupts the body’s balance. Toward the beginning I was being tested for all kinds of balance/vertigo possibilities. The audiologist explained to me that my inner ear was sending a danger signal to my brain, and my brain was reacting with all kinds of alarm messages back to my body. I decided I needed to let my brain know I wasn’t really in danger, that it was just a little extra fluid sloshing around! How to do this? I tried to talk to my brain without any noticeable effect. Then I happened upon a method in Donna Eden’s book “Energy Medicine” that she calls “temporal tapping.” For more details, see this book, p. 333. It involves using the three middle fingers of each hand to tap a message to the brain, behind each ear, along the side of the head from front to back. Negatively worded messages are tapped on the left side, positively worded messages on the right.
So I tried it. When I would begin to feel what I called “blips” in my perception that I knew were the forerunners of vertigo, I would tap the left side of my head repeating to myself, “There is no danger.” Then on the right side I would tap “I am safe.” Almost immediately I would feel a settling, and over time indeed the vertigo episodes became less frequent. I was doing a lot of other things too, including lots of SourcePoint, so who knows, but I believe this was very helpful. I was changing the message. I was communicating something to my body that it experienced as reassuring. And, I was responding to my condition by connecting and communicating with myself, and acknowledging what was going on inside me.
If you have a story about how communication with yourself, others, or the cosmos has lead to healing, I’d love it if you would post a comment and share it here.
Here’s another fundamental principle of SourcePoint Therapy: good health=good communication. In SourcePoint we are opening up our communication with that larger field of information in which we dwell. We are opening ourselves to the information of order, balance, harmony and flow inherent in our bodies, our earth and our universe.
We live in a universe that is constantly communicating with itself. Physicists describe an interactive and entangled universe. Quantum entanglement means that particles of energy/matter, separated by vast distances, can interact with each other instantaneously, in a communication that is non-local and not limited by the speed of light.
To quote the Buddha once again, “In this fathom-high body is the entire universe, and its arising, and its ceasing.” Take a look at the video below. Within this body, inside the brain, there are billions of neurons in constant communication with each other, creating billions of neural pathways. When I see these energy connections in videos such as this one, I think, ah, there’s the Mandala Realm again, a web of energy and light, point and lines. As above, so below. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm. This self is a network of energy patterns forming and re-forming, dancing in endless beauty and creativity. The neurons in my brain have billions of “welcome receptors” and when those receptors receive a message, they can create instantly up to 50,000 connections with other neurons, passing the message along. My self is constantly communicating with itself, and I can easily imagine that network of pathways extending itself beyond the physical body into my immediate energy field, out into the farther reaches of the galaxy. Then I can begin to understand that the self that is communicating with itself extends far beyond the boundaries of this physical body.
If I reflect on this communication that is going on in my brain every single moment, and I see that process as a mirror of the communication that is always happening in that larger information field, then I get another insight into what is happening when we hold the points. It’s hard to put into words, and I’m going on imagination here. I’m imagining holding that Source Point off to the right of the body. My mind, through my hand, is transmitting the message to that point that we want to connect with information of health in the universal information field, so the point is perhaps like a synapse, and the message travels along a network of points, and each point sends the message to the next point, until it reaches its destination, in a moment of split-second-beyond-time non-travel, and then the information travels back as instantaneously along whatever network is set up for it. I’m imagining the universe as a vast brain, I guess, or even more accurately, a vast body. And in that vast body communication is always happening as that universe-body seeks to maintain the balance, order, harmony and flow of all its parts. Rupert Sheldrake speaks of “nested hierarchical fields,” field within field within field, body within body within body. Ervin Laszlo says, “The physical world is a reflection of energy vibrations from more subtle worlds that, in turn, are reflections of still more subtle energy fields.” As the ancient seers in India knew, the nadis, or energy channels, both permeate and surround the body (see image above).
So, it is not just that we live in a great flow of communication and information; each one of us is a flow of communication and information. In our personal lives many of us have discovered that an open flow of communication is important for the health of our relationships and our communities. It’s equally important for the health of our physical bodies. Next week I’ll look at some “down to earth” implications of this. This week, join me in traveling to the furthest reaches of your imagination, letting yourself journey through the cosmos and deep into yourself”¦with the growing understanding these are not two.
Once again, I’m convinced the imagination is a powerful means of exploring and understanding this wondrous self, world and universe. If I could, I’d eliminate the dismissive phrase, “Oh, it’s just your imagination” from everyone’s vocabulary.
