My chaotic journey

In February of this year, I participated in the “ShamanicDe-armoring” ceremony which was created and presented by the Deer Tribe out of Mesa, Arizona. It really rocked my world and in some very powerful ways. At the end of that experience, we were given some summary sheets that showed us the energetic condition we were in when we arrived and how we looked upon completion. These sheets were a summary of what the people running the ceremony saw in our energy field. It was about 8 pages of information and I remember thinking “Wow, I wish I could read all that information, it would sure help me in my own practice to know all of this about the men I work with.” In October I went to Mesa for a two week training session where I learned to do that very thing. Oh my, what an experience that was!

THE DEER TRIBE

A couple of years ago as part of the energy class that I’m in, our reading assignment for the month was “Song of the Deer”. It was written by the leader of the Deer Tribe, Thunder Strikes. I remember reading the book and thinking “this just all makes so much sense” and it felt like it was in total alignment with my belief system but just far more detailed. Thunder Strikes was one of the guest speakers at the ASEP conference that I attended acouple years ago. I remembered being awed by all that he had to say and thinking I’d love to get to learn more from him. It seems that little by little I was being drawn to his teachings.

The Deer Tribe teaches that our physical body is just one tiny component of our energy field. At this point most people have heard of “the aura”, the energetic rings surrounding our physical body. The Deer Tribe teaches that the energetic rings of the aura form the outer shell of the Luminous Egg Cocoon (LEC). In addition to the 5 layers of auric rings there are a whole host of other energetic components along with the body which compromise the LEC in total. Learning to read all of these components is what the class I attended was all about.

OWNING OUR TRUTH

We all have psychic gifts and abilities which are available to us. Most of us have chosen to block that information out at a very early age because we were taught that we were either making it up or worse yet evil for being able to see the unseen. When we make the choice to shut it out, opening it back up can be challenging and scary. As part of that willingness to engage the psychic realm again we not only have to contend with a flood of new information but we also have to process all of our accumulated emotional baggage around why we chose to block it out all of these years and the consequences of that decision in our lives.

The men I work with are all in varying stages of self-acceptance and each is dealing with their own sexual and spiritual wounds in their own way. A major factor for any of us on that journey is denial. Rather than fully claiming our power and acknowledging our part in creating all of the experiences that we’ve had, we create false personalities composed of what we think others can love and accept. That becomes the false egoic self that we form our identity around. It is what the Deer Tribe calls the “pretender voice”. We put all of the parts that we believe are unlovable, by others or ourselves, into what is called “the shadow self”. The shadow self is basically all the parts of ourselves that we deny, reject or repress. Neither of these, the pretender voice and the shadow self, is the full measure of who we really are but we delude ourselves into believing that our pretender voice is who we are and our shadow self is who we are not.

For most of us, our pretender voice has become the only voice that we associate with internally because we believe it is “me”. In my work, when I speak with my clients they respond from the projected self and that makes my work challenging because to truly help them I have to be able to see under that projection and into what is really true for them. The only way so far for me to access that information has been to gain it psychically and slowly over a series of sessions until I can get a good handle on what’s going on for them. In my work I’ve been slowly learning to not only notice these psychic abilities within myself but I’ve actually come to rely on them. My own journey into trusting that information is unfolding along with me as I work with my clients.

SEEING INTO THE UNSEEN

Now I wish I could say that I went to the training and they showed me a magic button that I could press on a body where suddenly I could see all of these energetic indicators, auric rings and moving lights. If only it were that easy, but it was not. Not only did we have to learn what all is in there, where it is and what it does but we also had to learn to see, intuit or feel it based upon our particular primary psychic energy gifts. To say that this was a challenge for me would be a gross understatement. The analogy that I gave Thunder Strikes for how I felt was: it’s like you’ve put me in a dark room and filled it with some wild animals that I’ve never seen before and you tell me to find one. When I manage to feel around and finally get my hands on one, the question you ask is “what did it eat for dinner last week?” It’s all so foreign that when I finally get a glimmer of understanding of what I’m looking for then the problem becomes determining what that means.

While I felt like I was truly taking a shot in the dark for most of the two weeks that I was there, it really pushed me hard and made me look at my own pretender voice and how much I identify with it. “I can’t do this”, “I don’t know how”, “I’m not as good as everyone else” and “I keep getting it wrong”. I wanted to get it so badly that all I could focus on was the problems I had and that led to a couple of emotional meltdowns. Those meltdowns of course opened a pathway to healing the issue for me and it mostly came back to issues of self-worth or self-pity.

THE OUTSIDER

To hopefully help you see how these issues might be manifesting in your life and blocking you from achieving your goals, I’d like to share how they showed up for me in the class. This class is primarily offered to those on the Deer Tribe path but those outside the path can attend as well. I was the only one of the 12 students that was not an apprentice on the path. Being on the “Deer Tribe path” simply means that you study the teachings of their spiritual lineage. Once I discovered that this was the case, I immediately felt myself at a disadvantage because the extent of my exposure to their teachings came during Shamanic De-armoring, from reading “Song of the Deer” and some teachings that I’ve received in the energy class that I’m in.

I noticed myself not wanting to continually have to say “what does that mean?” when ThunderStrikes was teaching and would use a term or concept that was new to me but was familiar to the rest of the class. I didn’t want to appear to be “the dumb one” or to be the one that holds up the learning progress of the class by asking too many questions. To that end, during the first 3 or 4 days of the class unless it seemed really important, I would rarely ask for clarification or definition of terms and I would just try and go with the flow and ask for clarification from the other students after class. My sense of low self-worth was preventing me from getting the teachings that I deserved whether it slowed anyone else down or not. Not having the depth of knowledge that the other on the path had and therefore unable to fully grasp the teachings being presented was just another way for me to stay in victim mode. Being in victim mode is one way that we all manifest self-pity.

OLD PATTERNS

In general, we all seek attention (energy) through the actions that we generate. This is a pattern that we learn as infants. If I cry, pout, misbehave, act out, go silent or become a pleaser, I get attention. Even if it is negative attention, it is still attention. Feeling sorry for myself or getting you to feel sorry for me is one way that I can get attention.  This is why so many people are all too willing to share all that is wrong in their lives so that they can gain sympathy (attention).  Of course the older and wiser we become, the more crafty our attention seeking devices become…even to the point where we don’t consciously notice them ourselves until a situation brings them to light. This is one of the things that the training experience did for me.

Once it was pointed out to me that this was the energetic behind my behaviors, I knew it had to change and from that point on I got clarification on anything which I didn’t understand. In fact one of the most powerful teachings that we received in the class came from me saying “I don’t understand what that means”. ThunderStrikes then took the time to explain what he meant in depth and even one of the teachers of the class said “I’ve never understood this like I understand it now.” The class consciousness benefited in that instance from me being willing to transcend my issues of self-worth and self-pity. That is also the way it works for the human collective consciousness. The entire collective benefits from the healing and growth of the individuals.

MULTI-DIMENSIONAL SENSES

Our physical bodies reside here in the 3^rd Dimension. In this realm we use sight, sound, taste, touch and smell to navigate our world and identify its components. Since the LEC is non-physical it cannot be read by our five senses but rather it must be read, or as the Deer Tribe calls it “gleaned”, by our energetic (or psychic) senses. The journey into trusting these senses is more complicated because these gifts are not honored in this world (and especially this country) the way they should be and so this is mostly uncharted territory. Fortunately that is shifting and more and more of us are waking up to these gifts and owning them and the data they bring us.

As we began the training, I’ll admit that my skepticism was running high the first few days. I really began doubting that all we were being told was what was going on inside the LEC and that the techniques we were being shown would help me read it. Each evening we would all gather in the training room and the rest of us would glean one of students from our class. Around the third or fourth evening is when I was able to pull back from the “doing” and realize that if we were all independently reading one person and coming up with the same answers, it couldn’t be just “lucky guesses”. That was one of many “AH HA” moments for me. Once I let that awareness sink in, I began to feel more confident about my own ability to read and trust the information I was getting back.

Once I began trusting the information I was getting then I had to look at what that information, which was in my LEC too, really meant to me and said about me. It basically came down to “it’s there, it describes you and you can read it too.” Through my actions and experiences I ran full speed into my own doubts and fears and dispelled them.  When presented with the conflict between validated experiential data and my own personal denial drama, I realized that my old story was false. If I dropped my own pitiful story of “I can’t” that would mean that I would have to start seeing myself differently. My pretender voice could not stand on its own against my current reality. Needless to say, an emotional meltdown followed this realization and I had to change.

THE CYCLE OF CHAOS

At the most basic level, change is what I sought from my experience with the Deer Tribe. Anytime that we choose to consciously engage an experience that it outside of our normal routine, we disrupt our patterned behavior. Breaking a pattern is intentionally introducing chaos into our lives. Since everything in a state of chaos seeks order and everything ordered ultimately breaks down into chaos, change is the catalyst (that which brings the energy of movement to that cycle). Anytime a structured system breaks down, when it reorganizes it does so at a higher level of consciousness. This is true for internal energetic systems and it is also true for external systems that we see in life. So what this teaches us is that in order to grow and consciously evolve we have to disrupt our patterned behaviors, ride out the chaos and allow our awareness to increase in the process. Resisting the chaos or going into victim mode because of it, holds us in the chaotic state and slows our growth. The main difference between conscious and unconscious evolution is therefore awareness.

As you may have noticed, I went to the class in October and it is currently mid-December. I sought change and I got it. Yes, I learned some amazing things in the training class and got some powerful teachings from ThunderStrikes in the process but I also have been through some serious chaos. The time between the class and the completion of this posting is due to me trying to get a handle on all the change which has occurred since the training. That however will be food for a future posting.

INVITE THE CHOAS IN

For now, I invite you to examine the places in your life where you see stagnation, fear, or resistance. Start with a simple issue and see if you can consciously introduce a small measure of chaos (change) and watch this process manifest for you to observe for yourself. A controlled experiment like that will allow you to then trust the process and utilize it in bigger and more important areas of your life. That experiment will benefit you far more than just reading my words describing it. Experience is the most powerful teacher we have. Just remember that when the chaos of change begins, even if it is just a tiny disruption, that this is what you consciously sought, so don’t resist it. Welcome the change, flow with it and you’ll see it settle faster and you’ll learn more from it.

Where are the places in your life where you cling the hardest to your pain, your drama or your fears?