Great Balls of Fire - #10

Format: A couple evenings of playing around and a general plugged-in-ness for a few days.
Goal: Play around. See what happens.
Goal met? But of course.
Terms you should know:
Energy work: Using the mind and body to manipulate psychic energy. (A bit of googling should give you a better idea of this.)

So here's what happened:

This... this is spiffy.

This past week I went out of town for a wedding. The friend I was staying with and I ended up doing some energy work (same friend who worked with me in this experiment) and in addition to doing things like manifesting green lights, creating thoughtforms who made it snow, and following good vibes to dress shops, we played around with sending and receiving energy in our hands. Freaked me out a few times, to the point of my jumping back and shaking my hand around while shrieking "Oh, weird, weird, this is creepy!" Fun times.

Basically, this was the deal: We grounded and then filled our hands with balls of energy. We then melded them together (alternately, one of us would fill our hands and the other person would just try to sense that energy) and then took turns sending and receiving first colors and images. It didn't take long until I would fill my hands with yellow and then shift to dark purple, and she would say, "Yellow. No, wait, it changed. It's darker. Like... purple." We had a success rate far higher than could be explained by coincidence. Didn't figure out the numbers but we were at 90% accuracy, easy -- at least when I was the sender and she was the receiver.

Turns out I'm good at sending energy and she's good at receiving it, but not the other way around. When we switched to images it was better -- she would send an image of a piano and I would say, "Smooth. Really glossy, kind of dark" -- but still nothing like when I'd been sending and she receiving.

I found it interesting that she would be prone to receiving, as her energy is very strong and overwhelming if you're not used to it (what I would consider more aggressive/sending), and I would be good at sending, since my energy is usually calmer and more contained (passive/receiving). But it also makes sense, as she's much more open to taking in energy from outside sources and I spend most of my time trying to guard against taking in other people's unwanted energy. (Perhaps this stems from our mothers? Her mom's a calm listener, so my friend has had to learn to receive subtle signals, and my mom is sort of "BBWWAAAA!!!!!" most of the time, so I've had to learn to shut that out so as not to get flooded.)

What I learned:
This stuff is cool. I already knew that, but it's also much more powerful and obvious than I'd expected. And maybe it's all just a placebo and we're really tuning into impossibly small nonverbal cues... Whatever. I don't actually care. It works, is the bottom line, and it's fascinating.

I also learned that I have very different experiences with energy work, meditation, manifesting, etc., when I'm alone than when I'm with someone. It's not that either is better or worse, but there were some things (manifesting green lights and snow) that were easier with her help, and others (meditating, being centered) that were harder with someone else around. I'll be paying more attention to that in the future, because I suspect it's important in ways that I'm just touching on right now.

Try this:
Find someone who wants to play around with this kind of stuff with you. You've got to be able to trust them and be open with them -- just admitting that you believe in "energy" and all that New Age mumbo jumbo is enough to weird some people out, and trying to work with a die-hard skeptic is probably going to mess with your results. Get someone who's into this stuff, or at least very open towards it. Then go crazy. See what you can feel. Talk through it and follow intuition. The more you play with and practice this stuff the clearer your results get, so have fun. I strongly recommend grounding first, though -- failure to ground before you start working with this stuff can leave you grumpy (me), dizzy (my friend), light-headed, stressed, etc., so make sure you're coming from a centered place.

Coming Soon...
Spirit guides, perchance? Or tuning into elements? Or being direct with people, especially of the stranger variety? Been playing with all of these lately, so you tell me.

Images by Sea Frost, jam343, and Pink Sherbet Photography.

Affirmations

Affirmations are funny. I didn't believe in them for the longest time, because really, chanting, "I love and accept all parts of myself" has never done much for me, and saying, "I am a successful violinist!" will not make it true if I don't actually know how to play the violin.

Much more helpful are the affirmations I've come to embrace lately. They're not mantras or prepackaged chants -- they're just thoughts that I have, that I believe, and that I repeat while I'm driving or otherwise mentally bored to cement them in.

A few recent favorites:

• My heroes will soon become my contemporaries.
• Ideas are in the air. The genius is in the wall.
• I accept change with a calm, positive attitude.
• My thoughts determine this experience.
• Things will be all right; everything aligns with its best possibility.
• I handle every situation competently.

These beat "I'll never lose this weight," "I can't deal with this right now," and "This sucks" as affirmations hands down. I've had those kinds of thoughts wearing tracks in my brain, too, and all things considered, I much prefer these new ones, whether they're true or not. (And they are true -- the sheer fact that I believe them makes them so. Which is true because I believe it. Which is true because... Yeah, this could go on for a while.)

What are the affirmations you keep repeating to yourself? When you talk about money, what phrases do you always use? What labels do you stick on yourself and repeat whenever the subject of love or career comes up? If they feel great, awesome. If not, start changing them today. Overwhelm yourself with a positive emotion or logic your way into believing a better thought, whatever works for you. Use words that feel good. Your thoughts are your mental landscape and decor -- make your brain a nice place to live in and the results will start to show up in the outside world. It's pretty trippy. :)

Book Recommendation! Creating Money: Keys to Abundance

I have been in an unusually good mood today. And I attribute it to the fact that I read snippets of this book:







Creating Money: Keys to Abundance







over a couple different 15 minute periods today, while waiting to clock in at my first job, waiting for my brother to get out of work and while walking to my second job.

In short, it's attitude crack, at least for me. I've read a lot of different books on positive thinking, Law of Attraction, magnetizing, conscious creation, etc. etc. This one is my favorite so far. It's positive, upbeat, readable, practical, and there's just something about it that keeps me up and running.

It claims to be channeled; however, if that sort of thing bugs you, just ignore it. The advice is valid either way, and it's a really easy read. Love it. Love it love it love it.

I definitely recommend reading it one short section at a time -- I've found it's valuable to spread it out over my day. Somehow having time to think about the concepts one chunk at a time really maximizes its value.

Just so ya'll know. Check it out on Amazon using the links above or at your local library; I think you'll enjoy it.

Sensing Chakras/Auras - #9

A few weeks ago, I went down with my friend Bekah to visit our friend Erin in Utah. Erin and I have been discussing chakras and energy fields for some time, and so we decided to see if we could do a bit of sensing.

Dang cool.

I wasn't intending to do it for this blog, but it fits great, so I'm sticking it in the usual format.


Format: One evening of playing around

Goal: Try to sense other people's chakras (I can already sense my own reasonably well)


Goal met? Yes yes and yes!


Terms you should know:

Chakra: Energy center in the body. Literally means "wheel" or "turning." More information can be found at Wikipedia or by doing a Google search.

Aura: Field of psychic energy surrounding the physical body. More info at Wikipedia.


So here’s what happened:

It all started when Erin started talking about problems she'd been having with her solar plexus chakra (which is located two or three finger widths above the bellybutton). We'd been texting about it for a couple of days and she'd ask if I'd feel around and see if I could do anything about it. I had her sit down and began feeling the air around her. 

I was half-expecting to not find anything -- I had no idea what I was doing, after all, and chakras haven't been scientifically proven or anything. It took about thirty seconds, though, before I started feeling stuff clearly. It felt like tingling or pressure in the air surrounding her, and after a while I started getting impressions of colors and textures. Her solar plexus felt kind of brownish and thick, and so I used some techniques I'd read about in a Chios Energy Healing manual to clear it out. I held one hand out to channel clean energy and then worked on scooping the dark color out of the chakra. I don't know how else to explain it... it's all very intuitive and you have to turn your brain off and just go with the flow. I could feel energy passing clearly through my arms and to the hand that was working on her, and after a while it felt like I could stop.

Then we took turns lying on the ground and feeling one another's chakras. While we were working on Bekah we did a few experiments to see if we were making this up or what. I would hold my hands over a  chakra (which had gotten very clear at this point) and would ask Erin, "All right, what do you feel here?" And then she would say, "It's huge!" or "It feels like the energy has diffused all over this area," or "Bekah... your chakra is caffeinated." Her comments, with maybe two exceptions, matched my impressions.

We also experimented with auras. We closed our eyes and started with our hands several feet above Bekah's body. We brought our hands down, left hands to mark where we felt the aura, and then opened our eyes. We discovered two interesting things:

1. Our impressions were consistent. When we opened our eyes, our hands were always within inches of one another. 

2. There are multiple aura levels. I'd never heard this before, but it was very clear that we all had at least three. When I got home I looked this up, and it turns out that yes, auras do have layers. Seven of them. We felt them at different spots on each of us, but it was always one in the outer few levels, one in the middle levels, and one really close to the body.

Then they worked on me, which was also weird. I could feel a lot of what they were doing. At one point, Erin was making a sweeping motion over my solar plexus and sacral chakras to sweep energy down and hopefully remove a block I had there. I couldn't see what Bekah was doing as my head was resting facing Erin. Erin asked if I felt anything, and I said, "No... Well, it feels like my heart area's being pulled like taffy." There was a moment of silence, and then, from the other side, Bekah said, "I've been pulling it."

Weird, eh?

We also discovered that my chakras were low-lying in the body (which I haven't been able to find information on -- has anyone heard of this before?), and that I as the person being worked on could feel when they felt my auras. I'd close my eyes and say "There" as Erin and Bekah felt for levels in my auras. When I opened my eyes they said that I'd registered "there" at within inches of the point they'd stopped their hands. We also discovered that I'm very sensitive to the auras closest to my body -- even with my eyes closed I felt ticklish and pulled back into the carpet when they got near my closest aura -- and that I use them as a shield. Erin had to tell me to let her in, and I had to focus on softening and letting people get close before she could actually sense anything. Don't know if that's normal but it's consistent with what I know about myself.

Double weird.


What I learned:

I don't even know, honestly. I'm at such a beginning point with all of this, but it's fascinating. I was surprised by how clearly I could feel it all. I was particularly sensitive to whatever Bekah was doing -- I'm not sure if we're more psychically compatible or if we were more in tune because we'd been roommates for the past several months. It was very, very cool. I'd like to have a session with someone who really knows what they're doing; perhaps my friend Kendra, who's a massage therapist and has done some effective energy work on me before. I'll keep you posted.

So is it real? Or is it just our minds playing games? No clue. Sure is fun, though.


Try this:
1. Check out the Chios manuals/course. I found them really helpful.

2. Also check out this and this by Erin Pavlina (not the Erin I was doing this experiment with). Normally I'm hesitant about psychic claims and the like, but Erin's blog is pretty no-nonsense and approachable, and it's a good place to start.

3. Start playing around. Get into a meditative, open state -- whatever helps inspiration and spiritual impressions come through most clearly for you -- and have at it. I'll be more helpful as I figure out more...


Next Experiment: Inspiration. Online dating. Manifesting relationships. Manifesting, period. Don't know yet. Any suggestions?

Images by YOUscription, Spirit-Fire, makelessnoise, and mangpages.

Inspired to Gratitude

People are so nice.

Steve Pavlina (yes, I've already linked to his site about 45 times) has been blogging lately about subjective reality and following intuition and I liked a fair bit of it and decided to follow my intuition more often. It's turning out splendidly so far.

Today I had a warm fuzzy pleasant result. I posted a note on Facebook and tagged a bunch of people, thanking them for their creative contributions to my life. I've felt compelled for a few days to casually thank all those folks I admire/stalk who do exciting artistic things and whose work I follow like I'm some kind of groupie, which may not be far from the truth. (I have some pretty amazing, creative friends and acquaintances. Which is happy-making.) So I did that, and I felt good about it -- seriously, artists/actors/singers/writers/etc-ers do so much for not much appreciation, and appreciation is a lifeblood of creativity -- and in, like, an hour, I got so much love and affection and gratitude back... Which hadn't been my intent but was lovely.

Follow your inspiration... It lives to make everyone happy.

Images by Ian Sane™ and psd.

Side Note

I think I want to be in a relationship. ("Which is weird... for me...") Just throwing that out there.

Magnetic

I've gotten very into Law of Attraction lately. It became a big thing a few years ago, when everyone was reading The Secret, but then it kinda died down and everyone stopped talking about it.

I mostly suspect this is because the book The Secret doesn't make any sense and has very little to do with magnetizing, manifestation or just about anybody's reality. The real stuff is much more interesting and has been floating around for a while. Not sure what it is, really, or why it works --- the amazing power of the subconscious mind? --- but I don't particularly care. It does work, and that's the important thing to me.

In the past few weeks, amazing stuff has started happening. I've manifested:

pluots (which are mostly like a plum)
a netbook (four days earlier than planned)
a job I quite like
chocolate Zingers
fantastic books/articles on manifesting and related topics
shoes (big deal: I do not shoe shop if I can help it)
emotional support
a storm
various amounts of money
a house
a convenient schedule

There's something to magnetizing. And I have no idea how to explain it. It's entirely emotional and largely kinesthetic, at least for me. But you know it when you tune into it. It's like you scan different emotional ranges and ways of dealing with the world until the static and crappy stations snap into a crystal-clear broadcast of exactly the station you wanted to hear, and they're in the middle of announcing that you won their sweepstakes. It's absolutely spiffy.

I've experienced magnetic/emotional highs before, but they're usually short and followed by crashes into depression and cynicism. This time, however, it's stuck around for weeks, with one small crash followed by some huge highs. I attribute the longevity and clarity of this time to some energy work a couple of my dearest (and talented) friends did on me, and to my conscious choice to stay on the high and make it my plateau.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what the commonalities are. Detachment has something to do with it. So does affection. So does meditation. So does emotional awareness (whole new world, that). So does positive thinking, and so does conscious thought before sleep. It's some sort of alchemical blend of all of the above, and it's absolutely amazing.

Aaaaaaand.... that's all, folks. Not sure what more to say about all this... I don't particularly understand it but I'm constantly grateful and amazed. It's a wonderful world. More later. And stay tuned... I've got stuff to say about chakras, which are fun.