The Power That Transforms Lives

The Power That Transforms Lives

I write this feature because I have something to share. It is something which brought me from emotional and physical ill health to – not super health – but to feeling adequate and functioning. It has done the same for many other people also. It is not an easy thing or a quick way, and few will no doubt be unable to apply it. But for those who can, I want to explain it. But let me start at the beginning of my story because I am 83 now so might only have a few years left living in this body. Also strangely there is no financial cost to it because it is all a part of your own nature.

Eighty five years ago I didn’t exist. Eighty three years ago, my world was that of the womb, and from sperm and ovum, my body weight increased as much as twenty seven million times as I grew within my mother’s womb. Eighty two years ago, I was born prematurely, four pounds in weight, given up for dead, but resuscitated by my grandmother. Eighty years ago, after numerous illnesses I was placed in a convalescent hospital by my mother. Seventy seven years ago, I went into hospital and had my tonsils removed.

Seventy two years ago, I began to masturbate in earnest and went through a difficult puberty. Sixty three years ago, I went out with my first girlfriend. Sixty six years ago, I got married. In my early thirties, I started to feel physically and psychologically ill felt very depressed and considered suicide. In my mid thirties, I began to believe there must be something a human being could do which would heal him. Then I began to realise there was a natural underlying activity in each human being, which if we could release it, would bring mental and physical healing. But how could we release it? I read all I could on the subject, and began to daily practice a method of opening consciousness to what I believed was a transforming principle within me.

Four years later the illness reached its height and I withdrew from most activities. I felt continually dizzy, and physically exhausted at the slightest effort. My chest and back hurt almost continuously and in the background of my feelings I hoped for death to release me from the burden of myself.

Then, while with friends at my home, exploring group interactions, I began to tremble. We had started by thinking about a seed, and wondering what we had in common with it. As we talked, the trembling increased, but I relaxed it away thinking it was nervousness or my body was cold.

During the following week I experienced a tremendous tension in the back of my neck. As I lay in bed dropping off to sleep, the tension was so intense my head gradually pulled back painfully and I had to consciously relax it to ease the discomfort. Later while getting into bed from going to the toilet I heard a disembodied voice say, “You asked how God touches the human soul. Now watch closely.” I had never experienced anything like that before so was incredibly curious.

The group of us met again a week later to explore mentally and physically what could bring about change in my human experience. Once again my body began to tremble. This week I had purposely put on a jersey. I was not cold. Was I nervous? This too seemed to be no explanation. I was with friends I had known and felt easy with for some time. But my study of the healing processes in the body and mind, had introduced me to the fact that there was something in us which could spontaneously produce body movements and emotion in the process of healing.

My friends were discussing some point together, unaware of what I was experiencing. We were sitting on the floor. I lay back and gave way to the trembling. It immediately became much more forceful as if my body were very cold. The tension in my neck increased and my head and instead of relaxing it I allowed it to pull my head back and back; my mouth opened and stayed as if it were clamped wide. I could have stopped this at any moment simply by tensing and holding off the movements or consciously relaxing. Instead I chose to let it happen, and they arose quite spontaneously, giving me the feeling of standing back and watching something develop. With the same powerful spontaneity, the movements now led to the vocalisation of sounds. Whimpers and cries arose, then real shouts of child pain as I screamed for my mother.

I was aware of the sudden silence on the part of my friends. They told me afterwards they thought I was going mad or having a fit. At the time, I did not want to interrupt what was happening to me, it was too incredible. I knew they had read along the same lines as I, and I hoped this would enable them to cope with the situation. They stayed, without interfering. I could not have hoped for better companions.

The noise of screaming for my mother increased, and my body felt as if it were held down, yet was flailing and struggling, head still back, mouth open wide. I realised I was living through the time I had my tonsils out. I was reliving it, yet although my body was in violent movement, head full of pain, and screams of fear roaring out of me, ‘I’ seemed to be standing back inside myself quietly watching it all.

In a few words it is difficult to explain what damage I could see had been done to me by that small medical operation. An event in one’s life is not separate; it is bound and conditioned by countless factors. In my case, the prior experience of being put in a convalescent hospital at three, had so devastated me and caused terror of being deserted and unwanted by my parents, that the mere fact of once more being left in a hospital by them was an agony in itself. Add to this a light anaesthetic and a barbarous operation on a frightened child, and fear and loneliness are planted in ones being for perhaps the rest of life, crippling relations with others and with self. My head, held against the softness of a nurse’s body, promised the protection of womanhood and mother, yet at the same time an attack of horror was made on my throat. How could a woman’s body ever again provide joy and harbour for my own, with such an association of physical pain, wounded sexuality, and a desertion by parents?

For twenty nine years following that operation I had suffered frequent bouts of loneliness and feelings of being unloved and unwanted. Often I had walked the streets of London looking for someone, anyone, to fill the ache of being alone. Yet no companion could take the ache away, for it was buried deep in the pain of my own child self.

In the presence of those two friends, that ache was taken from me. I had been touched by the power which transforms a human life. The pain and aloneness of a six year old boy had been healed.

I have described the events dramatically. That is because it was dramatic. It began unexpectedly; it exploded out, and was followed immediately by two other past events. being relived. One, the being given an anal anaesthetic forcibly and during violent protest on my part prior to another minor operation; and the reliving of what appeared to be a sexual attack on me. There can be few things as dramatic as the eruption and reliving of childhood agonising trauma by an adult, because most adults are really trying to suppress such feelings because they avoid any pain prefering to smoke, drink, go to the pub to get away. It lasted four hours with only a short pause between the emergence of the three events. I lost four pounds in weight that day.

Such is one of the ways the power of transformation can show itself in one’s life. But if we believe this is the only way it shows itself in a life, we will miss most of the important facts. The countdown given of my life was not only to give a quick background to the emergence of my illness and the healing of part of it. It is in itself a demonstration of the power of transformation which is always at work. Every single one of us who survived even to birth has such a countdown. Even the failure to survive birth is itself an example of something so amazing, so fundamental, so enormous, people fail to see it. Perhaps we fail to see it because it is the most primal thing in human animal, plant and even mineral existence.

It is so important I am not going to hurry its explanation. Instead, I will explain two things which helped me to see it. One was very simple and all of us have seen it at some time. Often I had watched films of plant growth from seed to flowering where the whole process is speeded up. In a few minutes we see the whole cycle of the plant unfold before us. If we are sensitive to what we see, we cannot help but have a deep impression of a tremendous power expressing there before us. Tremendous energy, coupled with something which directs and unifies that energy into becoming an actual and unique plant is at work.

To put it in a few words: Something expresses itself purposefully! What is that something? What is behind all that explosion of emergence, growth, struggle for survival, feeding from earth and sun, flowering, seeding and withering?

That was the experience and those the questions which first gave me a tentative glimpse of the most fundamental function of all living experience. The second thing occurred when I was thirty one. A friend was undergoing analysis with a psychiatrist who was licensed to use LSD. As I was trying to be of help in my friend’s healing, it was suggested by him and the psychiatrist that I might gain insight by sharing an LSD session with him. In my studies of the transforming influence in human experience, I had read a fair amount regarding LSD, and agreed to the experiment. The event pertaining to what I am describing was that during the LSD session I began to experience a rapid regression through the whole course of my life. I felt myself rapidly go back through memory after memory, getting younger and younger until at last I was curled up and felt myself to be in a womb-like condition. I understood it was not a reliving of a past event, not an experience of being in my mother’s womb, but the return to the most basic level of human consciousness. Just as the mother’s womb, and the experience of our infant body in it, is our primal or fundamental physical experience of self, so this condition I was experiencing was the primal state of consciousness. It was a state of open, non-striving, pleasurable yet personal awareness.

Now I realised, while in this womb of consciousness, that I felt the process was trying to push me even further back and if I let it carry me further back, a stage would be arrived at where ‘I’, my sense of being an individual, would cease to exist. The power of the drug only made one more aware of the possibilities of the use of my conscious will. But here I was, faced by the original question – to be or not to be – and I had a choice.

Years of working with dreams, practising relaxation and meditation techniques aided me to make the decision. Whatever lay beyond my personal existence, I had no need to fear it. In sleep we drop into it every night. Conception and birth bring us on a journey not only from primal physical and personal awareness in the womb, but conception itself is a journey from what lies behind and always underlies personal existence, and which we face again in death. It emerges because the conscious mind takes on a listening and non–interfering attitude. Just as happens when we enter the dream process, and while active in sleep we experience spontaneous speech, movements and drama, so, by taking on a passive receptive attitude of body and mind, this process is allowed while awake and produces similar actions. It is a form of waking lucid dreaming. It is by no means something only known in present times. If you consider the function of the dream process in the light of what has just been described, what was the Pentecostal experience if not a breakthrough of unconscious material into awareness? It was a breakthrough occurring because the group took on a surrendered and receptive attitude to what they called the Holy Spirit. See Waking Lucid Dreaming

It was life itself that I had surrendered to, I need not fear it. To do so would be to fear myself. I surrendered myself to the current carrying me back. I dropped into what lay beyond myself.

It was like dropping into space, without stars or planets – like nothingness. Yet this was what underlay everything. This nothing, this absence of all movement, form and desire, was yet the drive and desire behind my own existence. As I surrendered and dropped into the nothingness, I was caught, held, and then, from the void itself came the energy and purposeful drive of my existence. Completely surrendered to the nothing, the energy of life erupted in me and I began to grow like a seed, not only a plant seed, but a human seed. As I unfolded in body and consciousness from the primal condition, the qualities of humanness, latent in the void, opened and developed in me. Telescoped into a short period of time I experienced the whole miracle of growth from the fundamental state of void, through conception, birth, babyhood, youth, puberty, to the threshold of manhood. With awe I realised that all the time, in every second of our life, in every department and function of our being, this tremendous directing and regulating power of life was always at work. Not only was it the power to grow, but also the wisdom and restraint which gave boundaries to growth, and thus gave distinct shape, functions, individuality, and not just a formless mass of expanding cells. As with a plant, something expresses itself purposefully, and takes us as a human being, through a whole dynamic cycle of expansion, growth, maturing, decay and death.

In fact each of us is immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood, and there are more stages of growth beyond adulthood. And as we passed through these changes we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. And this is a force of growth and change.

As I went through the experience I had a tremendous sense of watching life at work in me, of being in direct contact with that which caused and manifested as my existence. I was experiencing the source of my being, and a communication between cause and caused took place. I understood that most people become dangerously out of contact with what is really their own fundamental nature and source. The very root energies of their body and consciousness are blocked or denied. Because real human existence brings choice, decision and the use of will, we can decide, and often do so unconsciously, whether or not to co-operate and go along with our own being whether or not to acknowledge and integrate ourselves with what lies beyond personal consciousness, beyond personal existence in our being. Present education, intellectual cynicism, childhood fears, and a ridiculous view of human personality as existing today has in some way cut off and separates us from the rest of life’s processes, has put a wall not between man and God, or man and Nature, but man and his own being.

It was communicated to me that if I came each and every day to this point of opening and surrendering my conscious self to that part of my being lying in the void, this miracle of life’s action on and in me could continue its work less hampered by my blocks, fears, intellectual doubts, education and will.

We do not need LSD to give us a deep experience of the forces of life emerging from our own source. Each one of us has already had many profound and moving experiences of the source of our existence. All we need to do is to sit quietly sometime and recall or look at the countdown of our own lifetime. If we telescope our own lifetime into an hour or so of consideration, we too will see the tremendous and amazing power at work in us. It has brought us through the many miracles of profound physical changes in the womb. From birth it led not only through the hazards of infancy, and childhood growth of body, but also it was the power behind the gradual yet dynamic changes in consciousness. It transformed the delicate processes in our body and soul at puberty, and whole new worlds of experience, creativity, sexuality and relationships were ours. To just exist, in sickness or health, is an expression of this greatest mystery, the process of Life. If, as suggested, we telescope our life, we would see this mystery at work as a tremendous power, a power which has transformed our body and consciousness so many times, it would be unbelievable if we ourselves were not the ones who had experienced it all.

Yet perhaps, in our sickness, in our love, in our creativity, or in our search for life’s meaning, we forget this most fundamental principle of our own existence. Or even if we remember, maybe we believe the release of it into our conscious experience is in some way connected with or belongs to some particular religious group or guru; or to a clever form of psychotherapy; or to the power of some great teacher or healer; or to the influence of a drug or medicine; or to a special form of inner discipline. But no, this power which transforms a life, as you can see by looking upon your own growth from conception onwards, is already in us. It is a principle of nature. It belongs to no one and everyone. Perhaps you doubt that people can remember their birth – see Remembering My Birth

At this point, while it may be agreed that there is obviously something inherent in each of us which lies behind our own physical and psychological growth, there may be some argument as to whether this is the same process which led to my experience of being healed of the shock caused by my tonsil operation. Countless people all over the world, in every period of time, and in every culture and race, have found something which has healed them of serious mental or physical sickness. Or else their contact with this aspect of their wider experience has transformed them as a person1 or delivered to them an important inspiration, or given life meaning, or brought peace. People have found this thing in numberless ways, and sometimes these ways of making contact have become a religion, or a cult, or a ‘new’ method of healing often because people see it as a way to make money or to gain greater recognition.

Sometimes it is explained that the transformation is due to the natural physical processes within. Sometimes it is said to be due to spirits, gods, supernatural forces, or God. Each new group has a different name or a different explanation, and often charge money and build a business with it. But putting all these names and explanations and ways of achieving it to one side, the basic fact remains that it is possible for a man, woman or child, to contact something which transforms them. See Opening to Life

Obviously our very growth from infancy to maturity through to old age is a continual process of transformation. But is there not in some people’s lives a growth, a change, a degree of joy in life, or a creativity which has come upon them through some transforming influence altering them? We can explain its cause how we wish, but can we deny it? The change in Saul on the road to Damascus, transforming him to Paul, is paralleled throughout history, before, within and outside Christianity.

Looking through the annals of religion, hypnotism, shamanism, psychotherapy, drug use and the many other ways of seeking transformation, another fundamental can be seen. It is that the person who achieves a lasting transformation is usually ripe in a special sense, and makes contact with the transforming influence by letting go of themselves, or surrendering self through shock, injury, drug, long practised discipline, or special technique such as breath control, opening themselves, or another person or group’s influence. Ripeness and surrender are two important issues if we are to understand what the power of transformation is, and how we may use it constructively in our life. In the LSD experience mentioned, the surrender of self to a spontaneous activity arising from other than conscious volition can be seen as a crucial factor if the experience was to develop. See Keyboard Condition

As Carl Jung said,”Do nothing but let things happen.”

This is so important I will enlarge upon it. My readiness to surrender, as already mentioned, was the result of many years work with dreams, self analysis and wide reading. My ability to do so was due to even more years of practising relaxation techniques. There was both a degree of ripeness and surrender. On the other hand, another aspect of the dual session struck me so deeply I have never forgotten the lesson. My friend was, in that session, experiencing about his two hundredth LSD session with professional guidance. Despite this, he could still not experience the area of contact with himself I found in that one session. The long remembered lesson was that it was not the drug which led to the experience of oneself in depth, but the qualities one brought to it. The drug might release a process, like the beginning of regression, or the facing death of self, but unless we brought with us the qualities of self trust, perseverance, and surrender, the life process could not lead us anywhere.  See Opening to Life

This so impressed me that the three years between the drug experience and the spontaneous drug free healing of the tonsil operation time was spent in learning to relate more patiently and trustingly to my own deep self. I saw that if one brought these qualities of self trust, daily opening to the hidden centre of self, and patience to life in oneself, the release the drug produced would occur spontaneously. In fact, the drug only stood in the place of these qualities.

One took such a drug because one did not have those qualities. And as I saw my friend helpless and hopeless in his two hundredth session, I knew that the drug was no substitute for them. While we are still controlled by fear, mistrust, impatience in regard to our own life process, no drug can help us. With those fears gone, we do not need the drug. Those fears act like a great thick wall between the forces of transformation within us, and our consciousness self. My years of deepening this trust in the transforming energies, thinned this wall, enabling the process to break through into consciousness.

I didn’t start this direction in my life in my thirties for at fifteen I has read about the full breath and tried to use it.  So, I walked from St Pancras Church along the Euston Road to Marylebone High Street, about a mile, twice a day, using a deep breathing exercise. The aim was to breathe in and out as fully as possible, lifting the shoulders to gain the maximum in-breath, then almost fold over with collapsed chest to get the full out breath. I was oblivious to the strange looks from passing pedestrians and motorists as my shoulders regularly rose and fell while I strode purposefully along. But that first week I gained an inch on my chest. Okay, it was painful to grow that much in a week, and then again the next week. But gradually the growth slowed when I had gained four inches on my chest.

That experience led me to start experimenting with what amount to mental exercises, to see if the mind could be changed as radically as the body. What I uncovered in that direction was even more far reaching than what had happened to my body. I didn’t just find change, I uncovered unsuspected depths and heights. I found facets of myself previously unknown. It this led me to start experimenting with what amount to mental exercises, to see if the mind could be changed as radically as the body. What I uncovered in that direction was even more far reaching than what had happened to my body. It opened a whole world of experience for me. I also discovered an approach to Life that has lasted and has grown through my whole life.

So in my mid twenties, still trying to understanding what religion was about a turning point occurred

I think a turning point occurred when I was working as a photographer in London at about the age of 25, and was all alone in a darkroom. I had been puzzling about the meaning of the Virgin Mary, and suddenly felt that it represented the ‘virgin mind’. In other words a state of mind that did not hold fast to its convictions or beliefs, but instead was virginal and ready to conceive of the new. In the case of Mary she is shown as a young girl, newly aware of her sexual self, not offering herself to a man, but giving herself without preconceptions and with all her heart and body to the invisible that gives life. But the virgin arose in many cultures – for Melchizedek was born of a virgin, Sofonim (or Sopanima). According to tradition, Zoroaster’s mother, Dughdova, was a virgin when she conceived Zoroaster by a shaft of light. Attis was born to the virgin Nana on December 25  –  Heracles was born on December 25 to a virgin. Romulus was born to Rea Sivia, a mortal Vestal virgin. Also Mithras/Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. He was born of a Virgin. It is such a huge mystery it occurred everywhere.

Having realised that – the plates I was developing were now in the fixer and I had time just to be – I wondered what would happen if I myself tried to be just like Mary, offering my being wholeheartedly and virginally to the unseen creator. Immediately I had images of a young woman I knew, like a vision, and as if a new slide had been put in a projector, then an image of a baby with a crown on its head followed. This was so extraordinary I didn’t know what to make of it. But it seemed to be telling me that the daughter of a friend of mine was pregnant and she would give birth to a boy who was a ‘special child’ – more aware than usual.

About a fortnight later I had to phone the mother of the girl, and after we had finished our business together I asked her if her daughter was pregnant. She immediately laughed and I asked her why she laughed. She said she didn’t know if her daughter was pregnant, but her daughter was at the doctor’s at that moment to find out. The daughter was pregnant and later gave birth to a son. To me this was a demonstration of one power of the virgin mind.

This is a process that arises from the unconscious that most people do not know how to allow or work with, though Jung has described it well enough, and ancient cultures knew and used it. It is the action of the unconscious process breaking through into waking consciousness.

It emerges because the conscious mind takes on a listening and non–interfering attitude. Just as the dream process, while active in sleep, produces spontaneous speech, movements and drama, so, by taking on a passive receptive attitude of body and mind, this process is allowed while awake, and produces similar actions. It is a form of waking lucid dreaming. It is by no means something only known in present times. If you consider the function of the dream process in the light of what has just been described, what was the Pentecostal experience if not a breakthrough of unconscious material into awareness? It was a breakthrough occurring because the group took on a surrendered and receptive attitude to what they called the Holy Spirit. See Meetings with the Christ

We can allow life to unfold us by recognising that our conscious identity has the tendency to believe it knows what it needs, what is true, and what is false. If that were true there wold not be the enormous amount of depressed, mentally ill, suicidal and people on antidepressants. However, life on this planet has been around for millions of years and has a lot of unconscious information about how we are formed and what we are capable of.

Life expresses as movement, feelings, sexual drive, awareness, along with the other fundamentals such as absorption and excretion, self regulation (homeostasis), breathing, attempts to communicate and ability to respond. The baby in the womb makes spontaneous movements, which express its own core activity.  Life in the form of animals, without any self awareness, expresses in these ways. Recognising this shows us that it doesn’t take conscious will and self awareness to exist and live within the environment. In fact a fundamental of self regulation or LifeStream is that to remain healthy physically and psychologically we need to let go of our conscious personality regularly and allow Life to move us in its own spontaneous way. When we sleep our conscious needs and desires are surrendered. But Life still maintains all our systems without our conscious help. In fact while we sleep our conscious self is largely or totally unconscious, and while we dream our voluntary muscles are paralysed – therefore another will or motivating force moves our body. So we have a Conscious Will, and what I will call a Life Will. The first one we have experience of as we can move our arm or speak in everyday activities; but the second will takes over when we sleep.

At that time it creates dreams during which we move and even speak spontaneously without conscious volition. It is this deep core of self we need to open to often, allowing our infinite potential to express.

Why Do We Need to Allow Life more Fully into our Lives?

Many of us do not know how to empty the trash/garbage we store within us just below our awareness. The effects of this are feelings of anxiety, unrest, depression and feeling lost. See Pandora’s Box

An example of this is seen in this woman’s description:

Rita, a nurse who had been hospitalised with psychiatric problems, describes what happened to her when she let go of her ’self control’ in what at the time we called self-regulation, (SR), but now name LifeStream.

“In most every part of me I have felt energy stirring or moving since I started SR. I look different now. When I look in the mirror I see I am a different shape. I am much stronger than I was. I think this is because I am not wasting energy now. I am also less afraid of my feelings. I was a very passionate person and would get into arguments about everything. Now I can be more detached. I never thought I would be like that. Somehow ones energy gets re-organised in self regulation. You get rid of the stuff which is potentially destructive, and you are left with what is really a force for growth.

The process of SR seems so sensible to me. Having had a fairly good medical training the idea of homeostasis and energy being blocked, even though it may not be charted in Gray’s Anatomy, is very straightforward. It seems no more puzzling, although it’s mystical. The process is trying to do its work, whether we open to it or not in our body. It is quicker and easier if you give it the right conditions. Most of the time, almost deliberately we give it adverse conditions. All we need to do is take the concrete off so it can grow. This force seems to be there all the time.

When I started SR I wasn’t prepared for the violence of the feelings or the strength, immediacy and freshness of them, and the fact it was real.

Our society deals so much in second-hand experience. The immediacy of it really took my breath away. I am beginning to allow myself now a glimpse of what we often put down as so much religiosity.

I am allowing myself now, having had almost an overdose of grieving and anguish, to open up to the other extreme which I have never experienced very much, which is the sheer joy of living. The other day I found myself walking into the sea and shouting, ‘Hey sea, I love you’ and it really came up from my boots. We get stuck in the bad stuff and don’t let ourselves feel the good.

A couple of months back I went through, with M. the event of my son’s birth. It was thought he might not live and I had been super controlled from the nurses point of view. I hadn’t given way to anguish at the thought this child might not live. But when he was born healthy, what I wanted to do, much more than that, was to shriek with joy, and I hadn’t allowed that. We think so often, being a puritan society, it’s only the pain we have got to face, but it seems we have got to open those channels of joy too. It’s too easy to become hooked on the masochistic element. When I began to let myself experience joy in SR I even began to think I was no longer doing real self regulation because it was so pleasurable.”

What follows is a way to do this.

How do you open the door to your own real self?

Much of the time we edit or control what we allow ourselves to think or feel. Dropping this form of judgment, if only for short periods while you open to the mystery you are, is important. At first it may cause some concern because you are unblocking part of the flow, and it may start pushing out some of the attitudes, past experiences and habits that have been blocking your greater flow. Usually those things would have been cleansed in the normal LifeStream, but unconscious tensions and resistances prevent the healing. This is why we have to consciously take in hand the work of dropping our self-control for periods of time.

One way of describing it is to say that you become the dance partner who is led. You dance with life every day anyway, but usually you want to make the decisions about what steps to take, what way to twirl, when to finish. Opening the door to the streaming life means that you open your body, your mind and your feelings to being guided by your partner, who has led the dance from the very beginning – Life.

Let’s imagine it. Here I am as the dance instructor, and you are standing with your partner, Life. So, is your body ready to move? Are your feelings and thoughts ready to enter fully into the dance? Are there points of view that you are keeping hold of and will not surrender to the dance? Can you move and be uplifted and thrown down? Are you ready to dance the drama of love, the darkness of pain, the sunlight of discovery? The dance is always creative. So can you let go of what you already know, what you have already done, and the moves already made, and let Life move you wonderfully into the unknown?

It may take an age for anything to show

Can you do that? Can you stand and drop your control and allow what arises spontaneously to flow through you? If you need help, see Arm Circling

What this means is that for a given length of time, about 30 to 60 minutes once a week, you allow your body, feelings, voice, sexuality and mind be moved spontaneously, as happens in dreams. The arm circling exercise helps to learn this. But for a full description of how this process is always active in you but seldom allowed conscious expression, see Life’s Little Secrets.

It may take time for anything to happen. Here is a womans experience of that.

This may be linked with me because it happened when I had given up.  I stopped expecting anything to happen.  After three months of, to me, nothing happening, but my lying there for ninety minutes listening to other people making a noise.  But in the way a lot happened because my feelings and thoughts had changed considerably in those three months.  I had gone through fear, contempt, attempting to cut it down to size, saying it wasn’t a valid experience for people.  I was very much the outsider for a long time.  Then, when I had given up any hope something happening, it happened to me.

Animals, being the unselfconscious manifestation of how life expresses, when they are ill are spontaneously moved to seek or do things to help the healing process. Animals seek to survive, and learn in the process. Often they are informed by what we call intuition and instinct. But we have those possibilities also, but often muffle them by our conscious desires and thoughts. So open your mind and imagination to the mystery at your core. Let it unfold its wisdom to you intuitively or in images. Intuition – Using It

Opening to the LifeStream in this way starts the process during which you remember your origins. It is a time of letting the power that gives you Life flow more fully into awareness. It is a time you allow your potential and creativity to unfold. It is a time of cleansing and healing, equally as important as your daily wash. It is also a time when you open to allowing your hidden needs to be known and dealt with. In opening to the mystery you also become more conscious of being an integral part of the society and world you live in. You begin to feel your connection with the life of this planet and the universe that is the constant stage upon which you live your life.

It is helpful to remember, especially if what occurs for you in a session is a deeply felt experience, that it only occurs because you make an agreement with yourself to allow it. Therefore, although it is spontaneous and  unexpected, it is still an expression of your own will to allow. To stop the process you simply reverse your decision, thinking to yourself something like – During this session it was appropriate to allow myself freedom of movement fantasy and sound, but now I will again assume my usual social behaviour. This is my choice.

Come to the mystery at least several times each week — or daily if you can. Lots of people believe they do this in their prayers or meditation. But in most cases what is happening is that they still hold on to the almost unconscious attitude that this means being still, not making a noise, controlling their thoughts and emotions, blocking their sexual feelings and bodily movements. So their meditations are actually a form of interfering with the real flow. See: Mind and Movement