Finding our right relationship with rest

The conditioning of the open Heart Center goes the deepest of all the open centers.  I continually see how true this is for myself.  How deep is the pressure of the outer world to always have to be somebody.

I was discussing the Heart Center in one of my recent classes and the importance of the heart’s need to rest. Defined or open, we have to find the right relationship to rest. Most of us don't know how to rest. We don't recognize the value of rest. Until it's too late, at least. Or when life finds a way to make us rest. Everyone, in some way in their design, needs to find the right relationship to rest.

The ego also needs to rest. It's a lot of work pumping up your tribe in one way or another. Sitting here in the mountains, by myself, I remember the value of rest. There is no one to smile to. There is no one to explain to. There is no role I have to play. I can let it all rest. There is no Penta. There is no other. The hanging gates are just...hanging out...nothing to connect to. I can just be myself and that is so restful.

Our conditioning jacks us up to suddenly be someone to whoever shows up. We put so much stress on our face, our facial muscles, to adapt to all the faces we and roles we need to be for others. The conditioning starts very early.  

I have a practice called the no-smile technique. It just involves being aware of how we automatically smile when we see people. It's an interesting practice to bring awareness to a certain level of conditioning. I invite you to try it out.  You don’t have to make it super weird or anything, just be aware as you see people throughout the day, how you enter into the connection.  Don’t automatically smile.  Once our facial muscles are engaged, it triggers a whole chain reaction of behaviors, conditioned responses, and adds to the projection field.  This practice positions you to stay more in touch with your Inner Authority.

Do you recognize your relationship to the importance of rest in your life and how to access it?

The Consequences of Intimacy

As a 59 Personality Sun, I’ve spent my life exploring and experimenting with intimacy in many forms.  Whether personally or professionally, people have always felt safe to open up to me and I’ve taken that role to heart and I’ve enjoyed exploring how deep we can meet each other, sometimes pushing the edges (I am a third line too). 

In-to-me-see.  

In the Human Design world, it’s entertaining to see how people often seem to equate intimacy with sex and they get excited at the prospects of the 59, or the 59-6, since it is really the channel that does potentially bring an element of sex and the possibility for reproduction.

In my exploration, I’ve come to realize, the potential of holistic intimacy is in its early stages. Everyone gets very excited about the possibilities of sex and intimacy, but have you ever wondered why so often it gets weird afterwards? The genetic imperative to bond and mate affects us so deeply, alters our chemistry, that in some ways we are really throwing ourselves head on, or genitals first, into a possible emotional mess.

The mechanics of the 59-6 Channel of Mating can inform us about a few things. With the 59 coming from the Sacral Center, there’s no awareness here!  It’s the blind genetic imperative to mate and make more. The chemistry is the ability to break down all barriers to achieve intimacy and union, but there’s no awareness here, so we’re not necessarily equipped to deal with the consequences.

The Solar Plexus Center is a young awareness center. We are in the conception stages of understanding emotional awareness.  As long as we are riding a wave, any experience of intimacy will continue to evolve even after the moment. 

Mechanically speaking, the Channel of Mating, is not directly connected to the Throat.  It’s only voice is the Sacral motor which is either turned on and humming or turned off, potentially marked with other Sacral sounds.  The chemistry of intimacy has no direct connection to the throat, to communicate awareness. If we had a direct channel from the 59 to the throat, we could communicate our imperative for intimacy in a way that would require accountability or some sort of explanation, but our intimacy is filtered through our moods and emotional waves and other ingredients in the chemistry soup towards the throat depending on its pathway. 

The chemistry of each circuit group has its limitations with intimacy.  The individual wants to bond.  Once the bonding has occurred, they eventually want to be left alone again.  “Give me sex then leave me alone,” doesn’t always go over very well or taken as a compliment by the other.    

The tribal being does their mating dance and once the pressure is relieved to have their needs met, then it becomes all about the duties involved to keep up what’s been established materially.  Then we spend a lifetime talking about the next meal we’re going to have together. 

The collective has endless creative fantasies but then gets bored or creates another crisis when their expectations can never be fulfilled.  It was never really about the other anyway.  It was always about the experience. 

All of this is perfectly natural, except for the other side of intimacy always catches us off guard after union is achieved and we aren’t always equipped to deal with the consequences.  It can play out a million ways, but points to the essential need for authenticity, clear boundaries, and good communication skills. 

Following our Strategy and Authority will help us to enter into intimate bonds and connections correctly.  Recognizing our open center behaviors where we let the conditioning from others take over gives us the opportunity for awareness expressed as healthy boundaries.  Making efforts to communicate with honesty, integrity, and accountability can help us reduce resistance in the “consequences of intimacy”.  

This is more than about sex.  There are many ways to experience intimacy in a safe, creative, constructive, professional, or playful way.  And yet, since it is coming from the Sacral Center, it may always have a tinge of sexuality to it, but that is just a flavoring of intimacy, not an obligation or invitation.  Nevertheless, the conditioning and structures of the world as it is today doesn’t know how to differentiate or understand these mechanics. 

For myself, that process has led to a shrugging of my shoulders at times when I sense my words or actions will be misinterpreted.  I’m sure we all can relate in some ways.  So many lost opportunities for depth and experience in a world that is not equipped to manage the consequences or mature enough in our accountability.  So many relationships fallen apart or that never should have been entered into in the first place.  So many words left unspoken or too many words spilled. 

I look forward to seeing what there is to see as we begin to develop Spirit awareness and hope I get to experience some of this in the days ahead.  Maybe the possibility to break down barriers and achieve union, and wake up as ourselves and it will all be okay, or not. 

Homogenized Spirituality and the Open Head Center

The one-way-fits-all approach to anything is a homogenized approach. We don’t have to look very far to see the seven-centered homogenized thinking in the world all around us. Everyone loves to tell other people what to do, what to think, how to feel, how to be. Seven-centered thinking relies on an antagonistic view. It has been an important aspect of developing self-reflected consciousness to differentiate “us versus them”. So while we know it served a purpose for a long time, we have still been raised/conditioned in this mentality, and it’s easy to miss our own natural defaults to homogenized thinking. It gives us a common ground to bond.

Some of the most humbling realizations are when we see where and how homogenized thinking is still operating inside of ourselves. In some ways, our openness is naturally open to a homogenized approach, which is usually a 7-centered strategic approach, which again was developed to stay safe, to survive, and to master this world, so it served a purpose at one point and for a very long time.

Let’s take our spiritual paths for example because there is so much homogenized spirituality out there. I was talking with a student recently about the Bodhisattva vow. This comes from the Buddhist tradition, where one commits him or herself to remain in in a cycle of embodiment until all beings are free from suffering. How enticing this is to the being that wants to dedicate their life to help others. Nevertheless, this is a great example of a homogenized approach, where there is one right way, no matter your design. We could even call this homogenized nobility: “I will stay and put my full evolution on hold while humans are still suffering, because if they are suffering, technically I am suffering too.” In our seven-centered evolution, these strategic, structured paths could truly help one evolve and be of service. As nine centered beings, we have to find our own way, our own unique differentiated way and purpose.

Two thirds of the world (approximately) have open Heart centers, so it’s clear how we are trying to prove our worth to ourselves and others by making these types of vows, which is unhealthy for an open Heart/Ego. But I mainly see homogenized spirituality as a phenomenon of the open Head Center, of which is approximately 70% of humanity. I have had to ask myself (with a wide open Head Center), am I trying to solve everyone else’s problems? Am I trying to think about things that don’t really matter to my purpose? Am I always under pressure, worrying about solving the world’s problems? And ultimately, am I doing for others what I really just want for myself?

These can be important questions to reflect on for people who identify as healer, mystical, world service archetypes, especially if you have an open Head center. It’s more than just the worrying or chronic thinking of the open Head Center. We build our lives, careers, and identities around solving other people’s problems. The worry can be so elusive because the pressure of thinking is always there that we don’t even recognize the worry as a pressure. It takes over the mind’s need to be in control. “I’ll feel in control with my worry and we’ll make it noble by doing something spiritual.” Is your well-intentioned desire to help others a choiceless way of dealing with the pressure?

What if your purpose was very specific and had nothing to do with the way you “thought” your spiritual life of service was supposed to look? What if being a healing presence had nothing to do with the healing arts? What if those things were potentially a distraction to your true purpose?

Living out your true purpose is how to become a true healer, because it will set you on the right trajectory, to meet the right people, and to play the correct role, the correct outer authority for others. It doesn’t matter what your Incarnation Cross is, everyone can be a healer or healing presence for those in your life and the world, just by you aligning with your true nature.

A Fond Farewell to the Seven Centered Way

As we come to know ourselves as nine-centered beings, it is going to be a natural part of our mutative process to recognize where and how we are still conditioned and surrounded by the seven-centered paradigms, which is essentially all about the mind and our mental development of the last 90,000 years.  It doesn’t take much to look around and see how the mind distorts, confuses, and projects its madness into our world. 

Recalling my own personal journey, I remember it was around sixteen years old, I began to really question the meaning of life and began my quest to go beyond the superficial nature of the world I knew.  While I encountered many things, some helpful, some not, in the new age self-help world (as many of us know), I was always looking for what seemed beyond the conceptual realm and something concrete I could trust.  Learning about the path of “ascension” captured me and seemed like the ultimate way. I followed the threads of truth I could find, particularly with the record in many traditions of beings doing this advanced yoga of being able to turn the body into light.  Right before our eyes in the West was the example of Jesus doing this.  Looking towards the East, we have a rich history of the Siddhas (yogis with spiritual powers) of South India and the other master yogis and saints from the Himalayas performing indescribable, super-human, miracles, even until very recent times.  Several other cultures and spiritual traditions have the same thread, rooted in ancient wisdom which could unlock the fullest potential…of the seven-centered being.  And they all seemed to have a similar message, that we all inherently have the same power and potential. 

That became my path for many years.  I became deeply absorbed in my “ascension path” and taking it to the extremes that I saw as the only ways to transcend.  I did all the things a good seven centered yogi should do.  I renounced my family.  I renounced “the world”.  I became a celibate monk.  I stopped relying on any substances outside myself.  I broke all the bonds.  And in that fire, many things did burn to ashes.  Many worldly desires faded which gave me a helpful view on my own conditioning, but I also sensed that I was losing the gift of my uniqueness.  At some point, I heard that something had shifted somewhere, somehow on a spiritual level and that we didn’t need to go through the whole renunciate path or even go through the physical ascension process to receive the highest initiations necessary for our soul growth.  While it makes sense that we don’t have to renounce the world to become masterful or embodied, the deeper explanation was never fully made available or transparent as to why the physical ascension was no longer necessary.  And then along came all the red flags which also made me question the solidity of this path.  The founders of many of the theosophical and ascension material had been caught as charlatans, having made up or plagiarized their experiences with the “masters of wisdom”, the ascended beings who had been communicating with them.  Many times my faith just stood on my personal experiences and studies of the Siddhas and saints of India, modern and ancient since all the modern day examples I could find had some kind of distortion.

Well, along comes Human Design to give the missing piece and logical explanation of why we do not have to get out of our bodies and renounce the world to achieve “the ultimate”.  The name of the game is no longer mental dominion over the outer world – neither as controlling beings, nor as master yogis or disciples of mystery schools.  As nine-centered beings, we have our own Authority to help us align to the core of our most authentic self.  With the Science of Differentiation (HD), we have a map to understand our uniqueness in the context of the totality and embrace it, rather than homogenize it.  Even in our spiritual practices, if we are applying seven-centered practices, it will most likely end in some resistance.  This is what we see: people swinging to one end of the pendulum, only to bounce back in the opposite direction; doing all the mental practices to fill ourselves up with “love and light” only to meet our frustration, bitterness, anger and disappointment as the mentally initiated energy crashes.  In our history as humans, we can also see our tendency to be a little superstitious, to rely on something outside to determine our fate, for better or worse: A guru will save me and deliver me; that such and such a belief, practice, dogma, prayer, deity, etc will save me and everyone else has to think and behave the same way if they also want to be saved.  We even fall trap to projecting this on to Human Design, which is why Ra always made it a point to explain that it is not a belief system.  Until you really live your design, it is easy to project our old human paradigms onto everything. The knowledge of Human Design alone cannot get you out of your mind.  You can have access to all the knowledge, but it is just a worthless pile of gold if you do not learn to embody and live your true nature.  We didn’t know and we did our best and that is ultimately what I wanted to recognize here.  As much as the nine-centered being can operate on a spectrum, as seven-centered beings, we did too and there was some pretty magical stuff that we accomplished as humans during this time.  We can have an appreciation for the spectrum of life, in all its fractal phases and forms.  So that is why we can now bid the old way a fond farewell.  As we enter a new evolution ahead into the development of Spirit Awareness, we will see a whole new spectrum emerging.  We now have the tools to help us navigate through with awareness, balance, and a path to self-love.     

The Gift of Today

In my design, I have Sacral Authority and am also Splenic in my definition.  I am a Manifesting Generator (Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix) with the Channel of Charisma (34-20), which, we say, is a design where thoughts must become deeds or mechanically speaking, where we must manifest our vital energy in the moment according to whatever we respond or, in the not-self, react to.  So much of my design mechanics are about being in the moment.  Maybe you have a similar design with Sacral and/or Splenic definition.  The deeper I go into my experiment, I feel “planning impaired”.  The Sacral motor can only respond in the moment.  And the Splenic awareness can only make itself known when something in the moment is requiring us to pay attention.

I have an open Heart/Ego Center.  The Heart Center is a motor which, on the other hand, is more about having the energy to commit to something over time, or not.  This takes will power and why it requires that there has to be something “in it” for the defined Ego to make that commitment.  If there is nothing “in it” for the defined Ego, there is no key to turn on the will power motor.  With an open Heart/Ego Center, our not self mind can convince us that we need to commit to something.  Commitment is saying, I will do this for sometime between now and forever.  I assume I will have the energy so I will put pressure on myself to make this work for a mentally derived period of time.  The not-self need to prove something starts from this internal place of overcompensation.   After a lifetime of having pushed myself in that way, it feels so good to take the pressure off and align with the present moment where I can feel my Inner Authority and have “nothing to prove”. 

When I was in my twenties, I committed to a few years of celibacy.  I was part of a spiritual community and the guru would send us to very traditional and strict ashrams in India where we would be trained in certain yogic and Vedic disciplines.  So while celibacy was a natural choice and part of the group mindset I was surrounded with, this was shocking to some people making such a big decision like this, at a time when it is normal to be very sexually active.  But my few years of commitment was something that was chosen over and over again each day, until the day that I didn’t choose that anymore.  When people would ask if I’m going to be celibate forever or want to know for how long, I would just respond, “I am celibate today”.  Wow, what an amazing pressure to take off ourselves, to feel like somehow we should know how much energy we will have for something, for how long, and that we will always choose that decision. 

Maybe it’s a diet.  Maybe it’s a workout routine.  Maybe it’s a career path.  If you are an in-the-moment person, designed to live in the now, why not give yourself the gift of today?  Tomorrow other decisions will be made.  We don’t know what is coming or what life will bring.  We don’t know what our body chemistry will respond to or how the transits will affect us. 

Of course the mind wants to kick in:  “Well, if it’s just for today, what does that mean about tomorrow?  Who am I if I can’t be identified with this or that?  If you can only say you love me today, what does that mean about tomorrow?  If I can’t rely on a long term commitment, what is all this energy I’m expending and will it all go to waste?  What if I disappoint others because I couldn’t live up to what they saw in me?”  Well, that’s the story of the mind and the not-self and what keeps us locked into pathways that can take us down some long and windy roads that take us further and further away from our true nature. 

Planning still has to happen in this current matrix we are in.  The past and future are both parts of us.  But to take the pressure off ourselves, and the pressure that the mind puts on us to have it all figured out, to be strong, to be accomplished, or whatnot, to take those pressures off and come back to making decisions correctly as we are designed.  Giving myself the gift of today helps me to align with my authentic nature and everything else works from that place. 

The Waiting Room - My Story of Getting Hit By Lightning and Having A Near Death Experience

If I had to find a beginning of this story, I would say it started one day in February of 2000 while I was travellng through Central America.  I was 22 years old, in San Marcos, Guatemala, sitting over a small, rocky cliff overlooking Lake Atitlan.  I got the message: “It’s time to turn around.  This is as far as you go for now.  Head back to Colorado where it will make more sense to buy a round trip ticket to Peru”. 

I began retracing my steps from my last six months of travel where I had been celebrating the new millennium as a free man, mostly living on the beach and in the jungle for the last several months doing the backpacker thing and checking out the Mayan Temples and Ruins. I was happy to be out of the States for the whole Y2K madness and figured if everything malfunctioned and collapsed, which was the prediction, that I would be safe in the jungle and beaches of Mexico where probably not much would change anyway. 

I started heading back up through Mexico and revisiting some of my favorite spots that I’d been backpacking through.  Palenque having been probably my favorite magical spot where the magic of the ruins, the jungle, the ancestors, the locals, and the mushrooms enchanted me.  It was in Palenque on the way back to the States, I had an unexpected and brief romantic encounter with a French Canadian woman.  After a few playful days together, she begged me to come with her back to the apartment she was renting back on the beach in San Augustinillo on the Oaxaca coast where we could spend some time and get to know each other.  I had this feeling I was on a mission and so with some will power and a dash of stupidity, I refused the offer.  In some strange way, I feel this was a very interesting fork in the road in my life.  I only spent a few days with this woman, but given the occurrences that played out after my choice to stay on track on my journey, I sometimes can’t help but wonder how my life would have played out differently had I chosen this enticing invitation and missed the dramatic events that followed.

Finally, I arrived back in Boulder, Colorado on a Friday afternoon in March.  Within hours of rolling into town, I was invited to my first ayahuasca ceremony weekend.  This was ironic, given that it was Peru which was my ultimate destination and I was still technically en route there, on my “mission”.  But going in the opposite direction, I still was greeted by Mother Ayahuasca, which is what was calling me to Peru.  I was an instant yes to the invitation and within a few hours, I was at the mansion of the host with several of my closest friends at the time.  It was a hard, but powerful weekend that changed my life forever.  There are parts of that ceremony weekend that I will always remember and it was there that I also met Marcio who played a significant role in my medicine journey.  That weekend was a true initiation into a lineage that would become a pillar of my core spiritual life.

After that ceremony weekend, I was looking for a place to ground out for a few weeks.  I was given an invitation to become the caretaker of a local Ashram in exchange for rent.  It would come with the opportunity to take Ayurvedic classes, be part of a community, and learn how to run the weekly pujas.  It was a no-brainer offer that I couldn’t refuse.  South America would have to wait.

It was a good 8 months that I lived there, at Alandi Ashram.  It was a nice time living in Boulder then.  Alandi was, and continues to be a wonderful hub of Vedic wisdom and devotional community.  I learned a lot from Alakananda and Sadananda, the founders of the Ashram, about different spiritual and religious practices and got to taste them all in communal settings with other elders in the global community who were connected to them. 

Towards the fall of that same year, I got the travel bug again.  This time, my vision had changed.  Living at the ashram had sparked my interest in the Far East and I had planned an epic “renounce the world” voyage that would take me through Asia, the Middle East and Europe.  I was ready to go where life would take me and I knew, from meeting several other globetrotters, that you can always find a way to make things work and that world traveling is a whole lifestyle and subculture.  I had my one-way ticket to Thailand.  Set to leave November 26th, 2000.

In the meantime, I had a few months to spare, to make some money, and enjoy community life.  One day, a woman in a big funky painted van showed up at the ashram.  Her name was Pana Columbus.  She had been travelling around the Southwest, doing a one-woman production that she had created, which she called “The Initiation”.  It was the story of a woman who falls in love with the Star Sirius, which is symbolic of Christ Consciousness.  One day, she falls asleep and has a dream, where she goes through a series of initiations where she becomes one with the Star and becomes illuminated.  The woman wakes up and becomes the embodiment of this illumination.  This was all very symbolic of events to come. 

Pana was looking for a place in Boulder for her next performance and was hoping to stay with us for a few days while she was looking.  We all connected with her and appreciated her journey.  In fact, there was something about Pana that deeply touched me.  In telling her story of how she became essentially a travelling bard, she would keep talking about her commitment to live a 100% authentic life.  It was the first time I’d heard someone talk this way about being 100% authentic, no compromise.  And that as hard as it can be, it is the only way to live and worth every step of your commitment to get there. Her inspiration gave me something very important to contemplate, and which eventually became a pillar of my life, as well. 

Interestingly, Pana had been told two years before, that she would meet someone with my name, or a name that sounded a lot like the name I had been using at the time, Asira Nova.  She had been in Egypt in the White Desert living with a Bedouin tribe there.  One day there, she was bit by a scorpion.  During her healing process, that is when she met an elder who had many things to tell her, but that she would meet me was one of those things.

Also during those late summer months, I began recording an album.  After making several mediocre sounding productions on my 8-track, I decided to pay someone for the first time to help me record Adamic Resurrection, an album of Hebrew mantras and music for a spiritual, and maybe literal, resurrection.  I had been deep into the Keys of Enoch at this time in my life and was intrigued by the power of sacred languages, of which that book explains the power of sacred language that had angelic or cosmic roots in the cultures where they were derived.  I recorded that 5 song EP with a man named Jimmy Dunn at his home studio.  He is a great human being who also coincidentally survived a Near Death Experience.  We wrapped up the final touches on October 2nd, 2000.

It was a beautiful Fall in Colorado that year.  On October 3rd, the day after I finished my resurrection album, we planned an ashram community outing to Rocky Mountain National Park to see the changing leaves.  It was a brisk day, but clear blue skies that morning.  Pana, Alakananda, Sadananda, Seva (another ashramite), and myself loaded into Pana’s funky van and got into the park around 11.  We drove slowly, stopping at a few scenic areas, with the intention of eventually finding a nice trail to take a hike. 

On Trail Ridge Road at 12,000 feet, we pulled over at a large scenic overlook.  We got out of the car at the parking lot and took a short walk to see the epic spread of golden Aspens in the valley below.  It was there, the weather started to turn and the clouds rolled in.  A few minutes later, we saw a lightning strike in the distance.  It began to precipitate and then turn quickly turned into hail.  Pana and I were together and the others were slightly up the hill behind us at a different part of the extended overlook.  We started to walk at a fast pace together back to the car. 

Then the two of us, Pana and I, were struck by lightning.

I don’t remember any of the actual strike.  I’ve done different types of somatic therapy after that, but never was able to access that moment.  I think it was too intense and big for my nervous system to integrate.  What I do remember though, is opening my eyes and seeing people I was pretty sure I recognized huddling over me, with the rain and hail wetting my face.  They were chanting an ancient healing mantra.  But nothing made sense.  Something had happened.  It may have happened to me, but I wasn’t sure.  It probably did happen to me because I wasn’t sure.  But I still wasn’t sure.  Nothing made sense.  Nothing was firing correctly or completely in my nervous system.  I was completely fried and my circuitry was malfunctioning.

Apparently, I was told later, someone who was there saw the lightning, like a whip, come up through the ground and hit me and Pana. Pana had received the full strike and had burns starting from her hair, wrapped around her breast and body, down her left leg and out her foot, leaving an exit wound, a literal hole in her foot.  Just like lightning wraps around a tree, apparently it can spiral around us too.  Pana fell on top of me and I hit my head on the concrete.  With blood running down the side of my head, I sat up and tried to call for help.  I have never been able to consciously access this memory, but this is what the others there saw and later shared with me.  I remember someone helping us get out of the rain and let us sit in the back of their car until the ambulance came.  But I don’t remember any more about that.  That is when I left my body.

And then I found myself in a place.  It was an Ocean of Love.  I was floating there.  Everything was perfect.  There was a field of unified consciousness.  Everything in the ocean of soft violet and green colors was alive.  Everything was intelligent and interconnected.  I was floating in that Ocean of Love and Oneness for what felt like a few minutes, when two presences appeared before me.  They were orbs of light.  I didn’t have to say anything.  They knew everything I was feeling in that field of Oneness.  They told me it wasn’t my time to go and I had to return to me body.  I responded saying it’s so nice here and I didn’t want to go back and asked if I could stay.  They then told me again it wasn’t my time and I had work to do.  Then I had the feeling they turned me around and kicked me out of the door.  I started to feel myself descending through the realms.  This most expansive feeling of being free in Creation started to fade as I felt myself being compressed back into my limited human form and specific imprint.  I was holding on to the feeling of divine love and total freedom.  I woke up laughing. 

And then I realized I was in a hospital bed.  Several hours had passed.  I had got a CT scan to make sure I didn’t have an internal bleed.  I knew it was the right place to be, but I was immediately wondering how much this was going to cost me.  Thrown out of heaven back into the blinding complexity of the material world.  I was sent home that same day. I had just pierced the veil of reality, got a good report from the hospital, and was supposed to just carry on my way.  The next few weeks were just like one big WTF.  It was all too surreal to think about what happened and that it happened to me. 

Nevertheless, before I go on with some of the after events, it’s important to explain more of what I actually felt and received in that place.  I’ve come to call the place I went the “waiting room” because, I think I just needed a place to rest while my body did a deep reset and recalibration.  My heart never stopped or anything like that, but what I felt and received when those beings communicated with me was that only Life knows when it is our time to go.  Outer circumstances matter very little, at least the way our minds understand it.  When it is our time, it will happen.  Maybe it sounds simple, but it is an important simple understanding that there is a whole set of laws and way of life that we don’t fully understand from our limited perspective. 

Another gift I received was this direct experience of how everything is alive.  What seems like air or space in front of us, is filled with the prana and essence of creation.  We all live and breathe in the unified field of all Life.

But the best gift I received, was feeling the absolute Love of Creation.  I can say that I know that Life is Love.  We have a Loving God.  It’s hard to put these things into words in a profound way because it is the most simple truth.  God is Love.  Love is the glue that holds everything together. 

It is in that same moment of integrating this into my soul, that it became instantly obvious to me, that this world we live in is a place where we come to learn and grow.  This isn’t meant to be a heavenly realm that we live in.  It is a place where our souls have specific lessons we have to learn and integrate.  Those lessons may not even be what we think our life is all about, like our careers or major goals in life.  But whatever our lessons are, we will be here until we embrace them and meet the challenges and potential growth that they all come with.  Many people give up.  Many people lose their sight, becoming complacent and homogenized.  Many people just want to leave this plane in one way or another.   But we are here to embody.  We are here to forget about heaven, in a way, because heaven will always be there.  And when I say heaven, I mean the higher realms that are all part of the One, which we all traverse through.  It will always be there.  That is why it doesn’t make sense to try to escape.  It is a world of duality and separation that serves its purpose.  Maybe at some points in time, future or past, this may be more of a heavenly or enlightened realm, but for now, it is what it is.  And we must be here fully in the body to progress on our soul journey.  The ultimate point of all these lessons is to one day come to know ourselves as Love.  It is Love that is guiding this whole operation behind the scenes. 

It is hard to explain the weight I felt this experience put on me.  Some days it really felt like a heavy load and like some kind of curse.  To see through the illusion, and then be so deep in it, is disorienting.  It definitely made me question the meaning of everything.  And to have been told that I “had work to do” felt like an assignment.  But with no direction or handbook.  I feel like the words “why me” would just replay in my head. 

And then the headaches started.  It was about 5 weeks after the lightning.  Daily chronic headaches that would get stronger each day.  I would turn my head and it would throb.  I knew I had to get checked out by a chiropractor or doctor.  I would take a high dose of ibuprofen before going to work at the wellness center where I was doing massage.  It was about 10 days before I had my one-way ticket to Thailand and I was on my last shift at work, doing my last massage of the day, when I started seeing colors.  I couldn’t talk.  Something wasn’t right in my nervous system.  Somehow, and how stupid is this, I kept doing the massage.  I finished about 5 minutes later and went out to the lobby and told the receptionist “something isn’t right”.  Coincidentally, at that exact moment, a friend of mine stopped in to the wellness center to check it out, having never been in before.  He didn’t know I worked there.  The receptionist said “You” to him, “take this man to the emergency room now!”  I said “Hey, Dave”. 

Dave stuck with me that night, taking me to the emergency room and waiting for the test results from the CT Scan.  The doctor came back to tell me the results and words all kind of blended into one:  “Major internal bleed. Need to operate immediately.  No room in this hospital.  Need to move to next nearest hospital in Longmont.   Scheduled for 2 hours out.  It should have been done a week ago.”  Something like that. 

Basically the pain I’d been feeling was my brain being pushed against my skull to the point of almost giving myself brain damage.  I had a slow internal bleed which was not detected in the initial CT scan.  So here I was, hit by lightning and about it to get it through my thick skull.  Could the wack over the head, literally, be more obvious?  What was the wake up call?  What am I supposed to learn?  Getting hit by lightning and getting it through my thick skull seemed like two pretty strong metaphors for waking up. 

This episode left me with some typical head injury symptoms.  It took me at least two years to feel somewhat recovered from the head surgery.  I had a few seizures after that.  The whole right side of my body went numb a few times.  For years after that, any kind of extreme stress would make my body go partially numb.  I would trip over my words a lot and honestly, my thought process has never really been the same since.  I checked myself into the emergency room a few times over the next two years because I was convinced I was having internal bleeding again, of which every time it turned out to be what they call “skeleton” pains, certain psychosomatic pains that reoccur with no physiological correlation.   

For a solid year after the lightning, every time I did a massage for someone, I would get a shock when I would initially touch them.  This doesn’t make any sense really, but it happened and eventually stopped. 

I cancelled my plane ticket.  I was in bed for three weeks at my brother’s house, high and happy on Vicodin and felt like some kind of crazy karma had been released. 

This gave me time to contemplate the message.  It was time for me to stop this incessant traveling and face my fear of being “in the world”.  I felt like such an alien in this world and was more interested in the transcendent, that as much as I loved it, I knew it was out of balance.  I knew I had to face my fear of being “normal” and responsible.  Of course, I’ve come to find so many other gifts from this experience, but at the time, this lesson to be learned felt like the beginning of my mission.  So, I eventually got an apartment, a job, and jumped into my growing edge at the time.  Those first two years after the lightning were hard in many ways, but then again, my life has never been short of mystical and magical moments.

Pana was in bed for several weeks, but eventually made a relatively speedy recovery.  I think she was teaching a movement class in three months.  She had some nerve damage, of which eventually healed.  Pana has shared a lot of her own story in her own books.  You can read about some of the amazing things she has continued to do and link to her books: https://panacolumbus.com. 

I forget how it all evolved, but a group of our friends, along with Pana, decided to enact The Initiation all together, playing all the roles that Pana had initially played in her one-woman act.  We had a few sold out performances in our friend Ty’s earthship up in Nederland, outside of Boulder.  It was a great experience to host a production with all my closest friends. 

I now have a deep respect for the power of lightning.  I used to romanticize the idea of being hit by lightning and was somewhat of a lightning chaser when I was a little younger.  It wasn’t so much lightning, but electricity which fascinated me and which I had some odd encounters with growing up. 

One time, when I was 17 years old, I was at home alone at our house in Maine, the state where I grew up.  I had been actively interested and studying shamanism for about a year.  I was listening to some shamanic drumming by Michael Harner, a leading expert on shamanism.  The drumming put me into an altered state.  I don’t remember exactly what drove me in that moment, but I felt this primal instinct and I decided to take off all my clothes and go out in the yard.  I began doing some kind of tranced out dance where I felt like I was invoking some powerful energy.  All of a sudden, this ball of electricity came zipping around above me.  It was only a few inches, but it was like a crackling sparkler and clearly was intelligent as it was flying at high speed about 15 feet above my head, around me.  It zipped back and forth a few times above me in the yard and then disappeared.  I don’t know what it was, but seemed like an electric fairy being.

Later that same year, I went to Sedona with my family and was able to bring a friend with me.   Rufus and I already had some crazy, unexplainable magical experiences together.  My family started going to Sedona, which is known for its energy vortices when I was 15, initially to celebrate my father’s 50th birthday.  I took Rufus to a secret spot I had previously explored and wanted to share with him.  We took a great hike through an unmarked trail that ended with an amazing overlook.  As we were walking back, shooting the shit, all of a sudden, this electric orb flies over our heads, about 20 feet up, in the same direction we are walking until we can no longer see where it went, fading out into skyline not too far ahead.  It was the same crackling, sparkler-like electricity like the one I had seen before, except more like the size of a soccer ball.  Rufus fell to his knees and exclaimed, “They are real!”  I was filled with curiosity and exhilaration.  What in the world was that, why was it going in our direction, where did it disappear to, and what did it mean that this happened to us?  I’ve since done some research to see if I could find any kind of explanation about these electrical phenomena, but nothing has really satisfied my experience and understanding of these electrical forces. 

The last pre-lightning, electrical initiation is more mundane, but shocking nonetheless.  I was 20 years old and was traveling through New Zealand, doing work trades on farms through WWOOF – Willing Workers on Organic Farms.  I WWOOFed my way through New Zealand, which remains one of my favorite places I’ve traveled.  I was staying on a family farm and wanted to go on a hike into a local park.  The family gave me directions to go through some pastures and some other farms to get to the entrance of the park.  At one point, I came to a large gate, not knowing it was entirely an electric gate, connected to a smaller electric fence.  I went for a running leap, to get over the gate and grabbed one of the beams with both hands.  It threw me about 8 feet and I blacked out for a moment.   I was okay, but in quite a state of shock.  That must have been my training for getting thrown by the power of the electricity.  

In conclusion, the lightning and near death experience has continued to unfold.  It now feels that rather than an experience, it was a seed that was planted inside of me.  Watering that seed has been driven by that voice that told me I had work to do.  If I had work to do, then I had better pay attention.  Follow the signs.  Do the work.  Keep that peaceful place in my heart.  One day, I know I will return to that place, as we all must.  The fear of death is gone.  I am more excited to experience the next phase of Life and to reunite with the great mystery.  But I am also not afraid to live.  I have no intention of rushing things.  It all goes by in the wink of an eye.  So, celebrate life.  Celebrate love.  Pay attention and do your work. 

Start With the Small Stuff

As Generators, we are here to be satisfied.  We are here to learn what it means to enter into things correctly so we can use our life force energy towards things that make us feel good and naturally regenerate. 

But we’ve lost touch with what makes us happy.  Sometimes those things feel like distant echoes from the past.  Sometimes those things were never found, which feels like an added anchor to our sometimes melancholic states.

And layer upon layer of conditioning.  From relationships, family, society.  So how do you put fuel into your spaceship?

Sometimes, coming into the experiment can feel daunting.  How do you get out of certain situations you’ve found yourself in?  How do you know what an authentic sacral response feels like?  What does it really mean to live a life of satisfaction?  Is this waiting thing for real?

As part of your experiment, getting in touch with the sacral response can be with little things.  Start with the small stuff.  Start a project you can finish in a few hours or the same day.  Do something you never let yourself do.  Go sit at the bar and have a beer.  Pay the five bucks to download that movie.  Get extra blue cheese.  Stop at the bookstore on the way home.  Who knows, whatever it is.  We’ve conditioned ourselves to suffer.  We’ve conditioned ourselves to be so used to the state of stress that we think it’s normal.  Experiment with your satisfaction. 

It’s not that it’s about a temporary state of happiness.  It’s about being yourself and finding yourself again.  Especially when you’ve forced yourself to be comfortable in someone else’s box.  Experimenting is how you find what is true for you. 

Life won’t change in one day.  It changes one decision at a time.  When we make so many decisions that are more in alignment with our authentic nature, something changes inside of us, maybe some kind of quantum cellular regeneration.  All I really know is that this is the process, step by step, of creating the life you love.  One choice at a time.  One question and response at a time.  Less suffering and frustration.  And more happiness and satisfaction.

And if you’re not a Generator, it’s still the same.  It’s still one decision at a time.  It’s still one more choice to wait and take the pressure off yourself and your genetics. 

So, start with the small stuff.  Take the pressure off.  This is a path of self love.

This and That, Embracing the Duality

Human Design shows us that everything in existence is part of a duality.  There is always the “this” and the “that”.  Human Design explains that we live in a Bi-Verse.  We see it in the bodygraph itself – the Personality and Design activations.  They are both two different calculations, but co-existing inside our forms.  This is where we sometimes encounter dilemmas in our experience, where one part of us has the imperative for one experience, in seeming contrast to another aspect of our being.  I call this the “grass is greener” syndrome.   I used to notice this especially when I was alone and wanted to be around other people, but when I was with others, I wanted to be alone again. My single definition would crave that singularity to recharge, but then my gate of intimacy (59th gate) was urging to bond.  Like anything in Design, awareness is key is this is where the heart of the paradox is found.

Recently, I’ve been observing our tendencies to become very polarized and attach to one end of the spectrum.  Our minds have a tendency to want to label things with a stamp of morality.  The good and bad, the black and white. We want to make conclusions about others. That is what the mind does best.

What struck me recently was when I was reviewing some of the Role Gates.  For example, the 6th Gate is a Role Gate, which we all have and which determines aspects of how we bond with others.  It comes out of the Solar Plexus which operates on an emotional wave, so any gate coming out of the Solar Plexus is naturally already going from high to low, from hope to despair, etc.   

A 6th line being, for example, will go on a wave between Sympathy to Apathy.  It made so much sense to me why sometimes my 6th line friends seem so caring, but then so aloof and distant.  Looking back, I recognized my mind’s tendency to want to affix a moral stamp on them, depending on which side of the wave they had recently been on and my whole mental view wanting to change to adapt and fix a label.  “Oh they are so kind and really do mean well and have such a big heart”, to “They don’t really care, it’s all a show, definitely not authentic, just a mask”.  But we all have these waves and polarities, all of us.  I’m a third line personality and that resonates to the themes of allegiance/rejection.  Being honest with myself and how this genetic bonding strategy expresses, I can see that wave in myself.  I bond and form allies, and then I close up and reject and move on to find a fresh start, to put it in simple terms.  So anyway, these dualities live within us, as ways that our genes operate and express through our personalities.  We can’t control it.

 So I have been watching the tendency to attach to one end of the polarity and form conclusive statements.  When I watch it, it dissolves and I wait.  I wait for life to keep changing and expressing itself differently and embrace it all as part of the duality. 

I’ve been afraid of the word and idea of “Duality” because in the new age mindset and conditioning, it is the duality of the human experience that keeps us separate from the whole.  But coming to embrace the Duality as something that comes out of the One, out of the whole spectrum and holistic perspective of life, gives me a renewed and relaxed understanding that allows me to be with awareness and helps me to practice waiting.  And in the waiting, that is where the magic happens.  Life keeps unfolding and renewing itself.   And that is where the awareness, that I AM, reveals itself.  This is where, as the passenger, I can truly enjoy the ride.

Generators Need To Be Asked

I’ve been doing readings as a certified analyst for several years now.  Many times I will check in or hear from my clients a few months after their initial Foundation Reading.  One thing I hear from some Generators is that they are still feeling frustrated about many things.  There is still a stuck energy with work, with relationships, with how to move forward in life.  So where is the resistance happening in their experiment? After some inquiry, I am seeing a few of the missing links. 

Generators need to be asked.  You cannot ask yourself questions with your own mind.  There are no shortcuts to bypassing the mind.  The Sacral Center operates through response, not through initiating!  You cannot go on quietly trying to push forward, making daily decisions that you have not run past your Sacral Center.  So what steps can you take today to make these changes and start living out your Strategy?

 1)   Have allies.  Generators need their people around them who understand the experiment and the value of being asked.  An ally is probably not someone enmeshed in the outcome of your answer, but someone who can be neutral and non-moralistic towards whatever comes out of your mouth.  Really, they do not even need to know about Human Design, but if they can recognize the value of being an ally who evokes a correct decision making process, then they can be correct for you.

2)   Teach the people in your life to honor you as a Generator and ask you questions or give you options.  It sounds so simple, right?  It could be something like, “Hey (friend or loved one), I realize that I really get in touch with my truth when I can hear my response from being asked a question.  Can you ask me more questions?  Can you rephrase that as a question so I can hear what comes out?”  Something, anything like that, but it has to start with you being asked.  The age of being told what to do is over. The next time someone tells you what to do or demands an answer out of the blue, that is another opportunity to educate them that you need to be respected as a Generator, in your own words, of course.

3)   Respond to your responses.  When we are asked, we have a chance to hear our Sacral Response, but not all responses work that way. Sometimes it is not always 100% clear what is an authentic Sacral Response and what is a response from the mind.  Sometimes in life, we do just have to take a step in some direction.  What if you think it was an authentic response, but as you take action, you meet resistance and things feel off or do not flow?  Respond to your response! Change your course and take it as a learning experience to get to know and recognize the subtleties of the Response mechanism.  It is an experiment after all.  I love the idea of “responding to my responses” because it doesn’t leave me frozen in my tracks, but creates some movement and awareness to check out what happens and how I enter into any situation.  Since “response” is happening all the time and we aren’t always asked, this is a more subtle recognition where we can develop awareness.