From an early age I was convinced that there was something I could do to relieve the situation – infact, that’s not quite right.  I actually genuinely believed I could fix the situation.  I could get mum and dad to like each other and then we’d all be happy.  It never happened…

I’ve agonised over feelings of guilt for feeling selfish that I can’t do anything to help them and for always thinking about my own needs in front of theirs… The fact is I now realise that they’re trapped in their situation.  They couldn’t separate from each other because they can’t afford it and they can’t stay together because they hate each other.  It’s incredibly sad but I think this will eventually kill them somehow.  And there is nothing I can do about it.

Ocean-loads of compassion would be good for the both of them, but the fact is, I have a life of my own to live and I cannot provide them with this.  I have been buckling under the weight of their negativity from when I was born and have been shaped and moulded by it and have forgotten to have fun with my life in the process.  I’ve spent years and thousands of pounds trying to “heal” myself with tai chi, yoga, ayahuasca, etc, and they are all effective to a point but no amount of this healing that I provide myself with will heal the negativity of two people who passionately hate each other.  The only option I have is as follows – (and I hope this information helps someone else also) -

When I went to the mens workshop last week, there was one point where I was a bit upset and felt disconnected from everyone.  I was crouching with my back against the wall and everyone else was as far away from me as they could get – at the other side of the room, standing near the wall.  The teach had a quick check in with me and I told him how I was feeling… he told me that it was ok and that it wasn’t me.  Of course I was pissed off at the time – if these feelings weren’t me, then what am I?  Who am I really?  He obviously wouldn’t have had an answer to this, but he was right when he said those feelings didn’t belong to me.  They’ve been placed there by year upon year of conditioning.  The only answer if anyone who is reading this is in a similar situation is to realise that those feelings are not coming from within you – they are coming from someone else.  They are not your feelings.  You have to find out who you are by yourself, listen to and be completely honest with yourself about how you feel.  Do your current friends see you for who you really are?  Do they?  If so, great you’ll continue to hang around with them.  If not, then you’ll know it.  You’ll just feel as though maybe they take advantage of you the same way as your parents did.  You know they’re not worth it.

So as a 29 year old man who’s been dealing with this problem for 29 years now, here’s the best advice I can give you, having just came off the phone to my mother who’s told me my parents have been arguing again in front of my niece who isn’t even 2 years old yet – such is the extent of their selfishness.

My advice is first of all to realise that those feelings you are feeling are not coming from you, they are coming from other people and therefore do not belong to you.  However if you’ve been dealing with this for a number of years, you may find that you’ve absorbed these feelings because you wanted to feel loved by your parents and so you sucked them all into yourself.  After a number of years, these types of emotions will drain your energy, so you absolutely have to start looking after yourself, physically and energetically.

I’m now in what I consider a privileged position in that I live alone, I’m financially independent, I have a LOT of experience with yoga, tai chi, meditation and now Taoist sexual energy practices (my latest thing!) and these will all help to shore up your reserves of chi and bolster your immune system.  You must develop a passion for this type of exercise if you don’t already have it.  And I do recommend these types of exercise over things like weight lifting.  Running might be ok, but the only way to develop your chi is to work entirely with the weight of your own body and your own awareness.  Once your body is primed up, you can then begin to mediate and this will further refine your energy.

I should say it’s not entirely necessary to do things in the order I’m giving here, but it does make things much easier and the energy between you and others will be a lot more harmonious, so I do recommend it.

Once you have physically and energetically strengthened yourself over a period of disciplined practice, you can then face the world from a state of empowerment.  I highly recommend dancing, spending time meeting new people, trying new things, travelling and maintaining an attitude of fresh, open positivity with others as they are not your parents!  Basically my advice stops there as I haven’t done a great deal more than this with my own life, but I do feel the need to dance and spend time in deep communion with others.  I have met people who I’ve felt real love for and I’m eternally grateful for those connections.  There really is a lot of beauty in the world.

Perhaps in the future, once you’ve gained some real freedom in your life, you can use this to develop a better relationship with your parents as individuals but not as a partnership, if they hate each other as my parents do.  This is the ultimate aim – to be able to view their relationship from a place of compassionate detachment and hold a place of love for them while they continue to argue and bicker and make life hell for each other.  Remaining focused on the compassion will assuage the guilt you may feel, but this is an advanced practice only to be undertaken when all previous steps have been mastered.  If you can’t be compassionate – don’t try – for your own sake.  Don’t expose yourself to any more negativity they might want to play out.  You have to be energetically rock solid in order to transmit real compassion.  Even Buddhists have trouble with this, so I am serious when I say be careful.  But it is the highest lesson of all this – how to remain in the situation without actually being affected by it.  And also being able to live a happy, fulfilled life when you’re not in it.

I find myself wishing I could come from a place of compassion myself, such is the guilt you tend to feel in these situations.  Right now, my own heart needs opening and my own life needs to be enjoyed while I’m still young, healthy and virile!  I quite fancy dancing actually…

I sincerely hope someone got some benefit from this.  Comments, etc most welcome.

Love,

Ryan.

It got me thinking about some things… How much do we value being alive really?  In the UK I almost seem to get the impression that people don’t really value life as much as they probably should… which is a strange thing to say, I mean most people have been affected by death in some way, so you’d think this would impact our culture and our attitudes towards life, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  Not in my opinion anyway.  I feel that if we became more familiar with what death entails, then maybe it’d help us deal with life a lot better.

I’ve been thinking recently that it seems a bit odd that I haven’t really had to deal with the problem of people close to me dying.  I mean, my grandparents on my dad’s side have died, aswell as on my mother’s side, but it was all hush-hush and no-one talked about their feelings on the subject.  When my dad’s parents died, he told me it had happened and that was it.  No more was said on the subject.  When my mum’s parents died I didn’t even find out till recently when doing some genealogy research and apparently one died about 10 years ago and the other about 7 years ago.  I wasn’t close to them, but it would’ve been good to have known what was going on at that time at least so I could’ve shown some compassion but how could I deal with it if I wasn’t going to be told about it?  She should’ve told me at the time.

Interestingly I had a curious energetic sensation while in a half asleep/half awake/half sore back state early this morning.  I had a feeling that my brother was with me (he’s alive btw!) and we felt energetically close together.  It was an extremely deep feeling.  We don’t get together that much these days and we have our own lives and live them in our own ways, so to feel this last night confirmed that we’re still close energetically and I realise I do love my brother.  There was a real precious feeling about it.

Leaves me with a great deal of questions in my head which isn’t unusual for me these days… Should I move to another country or stay near my family?  Maybe it’s just my own limitations that make me feel trapped as i often do?  Who knows.

Take care,

Loveyogi.

I have to be completely honest and say that I’m feeling very complex and complicated at the moment.  I have a back condition where I have chronic inflammation in my spine which I’ve been hell-bent on healing for a while now.  And I probably will be for a number of years.  So, knowing that mainstream medicine won’t “cure” me as they are unable to and also knowing that it really is possible for anything to be healed, I went straight to core shamanism to learn the healing methods shamans practice to create healing in their clients.  I’ve had mixed results from the shamanism, but have collected a surprising number of nuggets of wisdom of what really can heal my back problems – outwith the shamanic context.  So healing is possible.  So why is it that we can’t get healing from these New Age workshop-type scenarios?  Why is it that people do not heal?

Caroline Myss wrote a book on the subject but I haven’t read it yet.  I’m sure it’s quite enlightening considering our current evolution with regards to healing, but here’s what I think.  What heals is personal power.  If an individual has a certain amount of personal power, they can use that to heal themselves.  A practitioner/therapist/healer can examine with the client where they are losing power in their lives (such as in unfulfilling jobs or dead relationships, etc) and together they can work to restore the client’s personal power.  It takes a highly evolved practitioner to be able to affect this type of change in a client and you don’t see many of them.  Anyway, restoring this lost power is what heals.

Here’s a personal example.  My back has chronic inflammation which affects how mobile my spine is.  A friend of mine came up to see his family where I stay and while he was here we went out on the town on saturday night.  We had a good night and met up again the day after.  On the monday I had an appointment with my rheumatologist (one of my regular 6 monthly appointment to see how I’m doing).  So he asks me to bend forward and then bend backwards as far as I can and he measures the range of movement in my back.  Turns out after having the night out I managed to gain an extra 15 degrees of movement in my back!  My rheumatologist was pretty stunned.  Apparently in the previous appointment I only had 50 degrees of movement but now I had 65.   So what happened?

I very rarely go out on the town as I’m just not good in these situations.  I curl up in fear of other people getting drunk and feel fear at the sheer danger of the situation.  It’s not a healthy state of being but I guess that’s what’s happening on a fundamental level.  So after facing that fear (with the help of my friend) and spending a good number of hours out in the sun, retaining my sexual energy (as I usually do in these situations) I manifested an extra 15 degrees of movement in my back.  All because I took the power back and took personal responsibility.  I will not get these types of results from a healing workshop.

What I’m trying to say here in a very roundabout way is this.  I’ve been involved in going to New Age healing workshops of one kind or another for a number of years now.  They are cults.  Ever since I went to my first one about 7 years ago, I have only lost friends and have made very few since then.  I could rationalise it and say that I had evolved beyond them and didn’t need them anymore… but if this was the case, then why is it that I haven’t made any good quality long-term close friendships since then?  Of the same kind I had with these people I’ve become estranged from?  The only people I am friends with now are people who can remotely see the part of me which just wants to see the truth and cut through all the bullshit and find out what it’s really all about.

I have become involved in the cult which is the new age phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century.  This phenomenon is a result of us lifting the lid on our deep-seated desire to know the truth about why we’re here, what the purpose of life is, etc.  It touches on the finest, most fundamental aspects of our being and has the potential to drive us to absolute despair if we let it.  It’s a big old trap that only we, ourselves can drag ourselves out from.  And this is why I’m writing this convoluted post right now.

Problem is it’s like as a species we’ve only just been born into the magical realms on a massive scale so these struggles to manifest power and gain clarity and insight on how it all works were bound to have kicked off at one point or another.  And here I am embodying that particular archetype now.  Like learning any other art, there’s a yin and a yang aspect to how it plays out.  Sometimes you’re going at it too hard and nothing seems to happen, other times it’s effortless.

Well, I want out of it.  I don’t need to do it anymore and I want out of it.  This Derren Brown show came at an interesting time because I just confirmed to go onto another shamanic workshop in a few weeks time and obviously I now have real reservations about it, but I’m one for sticking to my word.  If I said I’ll go, then I’ll go.  I then have one more later in the year but after that I need to call it a day at that.

Funny here I am being ambivalent and trying to convince myself that it’s ok and I’ll just get on with it… I’m suckered in good and proper.  It’s no wonder I haven’t even been able to produce a good blog post in quite a while.  I need to repeat this as a mantra – I do not need new age healing workshops to become healed…  My power is already within…

Really, the less you become attached to any institution, individual, new age organisation, healing method, structure of ANY kind… the more you manifest real freedom which you CAN use to heal yourself and maybe even make a few friends and get some sex aswell without having any hang-ups about it.

As I’ve been writing this I feel a good warmth in my solar plexus.  Never a bad thing.

More soon perhaps… I’ll certainly feel the need to dance with this energetic feeling for a while until it’s released from my system and transmuted into REAL freedom.

Comments welcome,

cheers,

Loveyogi.

For anyone who isn’t aware, alcohol is completely useless when it comes to trying to manifest genuine consciousness expansion in your life.  It’s no surprise that about 90% of the people I know who aim to live consciously just don’t drink alcohol.  As a result, they don’t go out to pubs a lot either and I think that’s a real shame because the sexy Friday and Saturday energy in places like Glasgow city centre cannot be beaten.  It’s necessary for humans to disconnect from hum-drumness and simply “go out” with the intention of having no intention and letting go and letting God (if God’s the right word).  It can be exceedingly enlightening.

So I haven’t been out for a while, but when my Bristolian mate comes up to Glasgow every now and then, we’ll head out somewhere.  We started off the night doing a past life regression as part of my shamanic course…  Not the most ordinary way of starting a night out, but I needed to do it as part of my coursework.  It actually put me in a good frame of mind for starting the night.  I had expressed my innate need to feel detached compassion for someone else and he accepted it fully.  Good stuff.  But slowly the energy shifted and moved.

I saw a girl eye me up and I felt a serious tightness in my solar plexus as I was walking up the road…  That didn’t feel nice.  I didn’t panic, I knew it would relax in it’s own time and sure enough it did.

We went into a decent rock pub and another girl is giving me the eye.  She’s beautiful, long dark hair, pale skin, pink top.  Very nice.  So she gives me a good long look, goes to the toilet and vacates the premises with her friend.   Was she inviting me to follow?  I didn’t even think of that at the time…  Only thing I know is the tightness in my stomach from the previous girl was healed and replaced with a humility from being “rejected”.  Or at least it felt that way.  So I was brought down to Earth again.  This was ok.  Conscious energy was still moving.

Problem is it didn’t move from there all night.  My mate didn’t seem to notice this, so he can certainly take me back to my emotional self, but he can’t take me beyond this extreme sadness I very often feel.  Conscious energy has to keep moving for my vibration to stay high and physical and emotional healing to take place in my bodymind.  At that point, it would’ve been the perfect time to open up to another person, another girl, take the initiative.  That’s where the energy was pointing as I had lost my magnetism at that point.  The only way to bring it back was to take the initiative and lead it forward.  But this is like the frontier of my healing, staying present on that frontier is like walking on a tightrope.  Very very difficult to stay there, although, I guess it’s really just perseverance and in time, it’ll click into place and healing will occur when the time is right.  I will not allow myself to become panicky or disempowered about this.  You have to push your depression down when you are not in a position to do anything about it.  No need to bring it up and “process” it.  Better to feel a slight sadness at being rejected while in a pub and then just move on gracefully instead of letting it sit and sit and sit as I have over the past months and years…  That’s how you end up with a chronic inflammatory disease like ankylosing spondylitis.  That’s what happened to me anyway.  Best way to move those things up and out is to keep the energy/consciousness moving and dance it out of your system.

When people talk about the “quickening” in terms of spirituality, they’re literally talking about your rate of vibration.  How quickly you travel from one high (like when the girl was eyeing me) to the low (the sadness) and BACK again.  It’s literally a wave oscillation as seen on an oscilloscope but existing in 5D reality within your body mind as conscious energy.  Learn to harness that and you become more and more clear and at one with the ebb and flow of the universe.   You end up in the right place at the right time without having to do ANYTHING about it.  You end up being a LUCKY person.  It’s not luck, it’s just being in tune and in the flow.   In my honest, educated and informed opinion, this is how to completely heal a chronic autoimmune disease such as ankylosing spondylitis.

So I stopped at the sadness.  This energy needs careful examination and compassion.  I feel I could do with a good cry just now, but I’ve pushed it all down and can’t express it at this moment.  Maybe when I’m asleep.  Maybe.  If not, I’ll be waking up with a stiff back.

I may start a new blog with this type of material in it or I may not.  I just haven’t posted in such a while as my empowerment gauge has been showing “empty” for a good while now, but it’s almost full at the moment.  I’m hoping I can send plenty of love and compassion to my sad self and gently reintegrate this unacknowledged part of myself and recapitulate the lost energy it uses up.  I intend for this to happen.

More soon,

Love and love, etc

Ryan.

I decided to do a shamanic journey to investigate the heaviness and weakness that I feel in my heart.  I had an idea where it’d lead… but the results were enlightening.  If not unsurprising.

I started off in a place which was a split land of darkness and redness and seriously low density stuff in one place and a pristine, cold magical landscape on the other.  They were sandwiched together.  The pristine magical landscape is where I want to be, but it was cold and frigid.  It wasn’t quite right.

There was a crystal castle there which I walked into.  An old, diseased, decrepit man sat there – he was some kind of wise visionary-hermit guy and he gave me a big ball of light to put in my solar plexus, which I physically did.  It didn’t do much though and I asked him why.  He complained that I never visited him and had basically neglected him.  He said, maybe heading down a particular door would help…

So I walked through the door and saw another magical landscape, but this time more colourful and a bit warmer.  There were stairs leading down but when I walked down the stairs, they kept going and going… and never stopped.

I jumped off the stairs into a field of mushrooms that kept going for infinity.  I became smaller and smaller and the more smaller I became, the more mushrooms I saw – it was basically an infinite mushroom fractal field I was seeing.   I complained to my ally that this wasn’t getting me anywhere and he made it clear that this field represented the thought loops I’ve been constantly getting myself into.  OK then…

From there I saw myself with my Team Leader at work.  I was saying to him how I couldn’t work there any longer and trying to have a chat with him…

It was an absolute nightmare of a shamanic journey, enlightening I guess but a nightmare.  My mind is nothing more than a constant series of endless loops which use up all of my existing power and I need to reclaim it.  But I realise it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life and I’m absolutely shitting myself.

I left the journey feeling a real need for support and help in this… I’m seeing a psychologist soon who I hope will listen to what I’m saying and take it on board.  I cannot continue living like this.

So I’m calling out to the universe for as much support and energy and light, etc as I can get in order to make this transition as smooth as possible.  I want to get out of there but I don’t want to become disconnected from the source of abundance.  I want to live abundantly from my heart.

So, I now welcome whatever support the universe moves in my direction.  Aho – so be it.

Many blessings,

Loveyogi.

I’m fascinated with exploring the kinds of relationships that have turned up at these events.  You get 13 random folk with an interested in shamanism  in a room for 4 weeks out of the year, get them to do massive amounts of intense journeying, rituals, healing and all sorts and see what comes up.

I’ve noticed I’ve had a connection with one particular girl there – not a sexual one, just a heart connection, like we’re heading in the same direction, on the same page kinda thing.  So, I’ve known her for just over a year now.  We were studying what’s known as “soul remembrance” which is when we look at the essence of someone and find out what they’re really like under any conditioning and preconceived ideas about someone.  So I was with this girl and I saw her in a real divine feminine, teacher/mother type of role with loads of children around her, adoring her.  It was a beautiful thing to see and so I blew these images into her, with the hope of fortifying these aspects of her.  With practice I’m sure I’d improve at it.  I’m seeing her again in a few weeks.

I struggled the whole week keeping my masculine energy at a decent level though.  Not actually because I was in a room full of women but just because I need to work more on the warrior aspects of myself outside of the course.  I consciously avoid situations that make me fearful or anxious and it makes me ridiculously sensitive.  I spent a lot of time on the course feeling as though my heart was very very raw.  It was open, but raw, as I say – very vulnerable.  This may have explained the seemingly one-sided sexual connection I felt with another girl there.  She was lovely, very much my type, (just a pity she lives a few hundred miles away) but looking back on it, it was kinda one-sided.  And who would blame her or any girl for allowing it to be that way… any other girl who received the amount of attention I gave her would’ve accepted it all the same.  Then again, there’s probably nothing quite as motivating as a beautiful girl who’s interested in you to get you off your warrior-ass and start embracing your fears!  I’d easily face my fears for her…

But I know I have to do it for myself first.  There’s a year’s wait until the reunion next year during which time I have plenty of time to work on these aspects of myself in one way or another.  Question is what conscious action will I be taking to make this happen…?

I often think I could do with a mentor of some kind to help me out with this… someone along the lines of Satyen Raja who seems quite genuine and trustworthy.  It feels somehow difficult to gather my energy and face my fears, although I’ve been doing more of that in recent times, focusing on the right things, reading the right material, etc…  But yet I’m still not certain I’m facing my fears.

During the soul remembrance exercise, the girl I was working with saw me on top of a mountain, dancing around a fire, completely connected to spirit – whooping and running around wildly.  Sounds like me at my deepest level underneath this fear… Hmm.

I’m gonna have to do some serious journeying on this in the near future.  I want to become crystal clear on my intentions around resolving issues of fear so that my mind and body can become more freer.  I’m thinking it’s got something to do with having ankylosing spondylitis aswell.  I think there’s something in the idea that a perpetually rigid mindset (like a rabbit in front of the headlights) is exactly on a par with the nature of stiffness that appears in the lower backs of people with AS.  If you’re afraid of something and don’t want to face it, then you’re not relaxed – you never are.  How can you be if you’re feeling afraid all the time?  You might have the illusion that you’re relaxed, but it’s more a kind of numbness that real relaxation.  It’s an attempt to relax and let go, but part of you still holds on and never trusts the Earth.  Next thing you know an autoimmune disease appears.

Yet another one of my grand theories, maybe, but somehow the idea that the cause for inflammatory arthritis is too many tomatoes, leaky gut syndrome, too much starch, not enough antioxidants or whatever is just nonsense to me.  Sure, eating less refined sugar (for example) does help, but it’s a bit ridiculous to think that I’m not energetically strong enough to eat a fucking pudding because it might make my back sore.  I find that ridiculous, myself.  How sensitive do you need to be to avoid a wee bit of simple carbohydrate?

So, I’m thinking fear’s a big part of it.

Anyway, maybe meditation’ll help with the clarity side of it… I’ll maybe give it a go.

Think that’s all for now – comments welcome.

Ryan.

See, I had this feeling on the last shamanic gathering we had recently.  There came on point while we were all working together, my awareness had separated from the group energy and I suddenly started hearing the words, “CULT CULT CULT CULT CULT” like a big alarm bell right next to me.  There may aswell have been someone actually sitting next to me, saying this out loud, and perhaps there was a spirit there doing exactly that.  In shamanism we routinely converse with “the spirits” so it seems highly likely that I’d opened up to a helping spirit who was helping me in a very very direct way.  It was very clear and intense, I could feel the information in my energy field as an energetic vibration aswell as in audio… It was multi-layered and clear and deliberate. I’ve only ever had this type of communication twice in the past.

Once was not long after I started practicing Tai Chi.  I received the message that I needed to keep practicing and it was essential that I kept doing it.  Which I did – I practiced every day and I loved it.  The other time was about a month or 2 after taking aya in Brazil, I received the message to quit my job very distinctly.  It was like I couldn’t think any other thought – this information permeated my entire frontal lobe!  But I didn’t follow this advice, as to follow it, I’d have to place great faith in the universe to support me and I just didn’t feel ready at the time – I was too afraid.  Maybe I would’ve been ok, this intelligence seems to know what it’s doing, but I gave in to fear.  Simple as.

So, the third time would’ve been at the last gathering.  Out of curiosity and balance, I did a google search last night on “Stuart Wilde cult” just to see what came up.  I’ve been reading his material for a while now and I’m pretty heavily influenced by his teachings, especially regarding developing grace and going “sideways” as he calls it. (Basically opening your heart to everyone).  So I searched for Stuart Wilde cult and I found the following forum – http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message475830/pg2

It’s a 7 page thread of people talking about their experiences of Stuart’s darker side and strangely I wasn’t surprised by any of it.  I’ve seen teachers fall from grace on more than one occasion and I guess this prepared me for Stuart Wilde’s darker reputation.

Most horrifying of all was an aya ceremony he did with Heart of the initiate in Brazil (who I have been with) where on the third and final ceremony, they get robbed by “banditos” (including one guy with a machine gun).  Imagine how horrifying that would be?  Youre right in the thick of an ayahuasca trip and some guy turns up with a machine gun trying to rob you!!  What the fuck?!  I’ve no idea how anyone could recover from something as shocking as that.  Personally, I’d be far too vulnerable to do anything.  I’d fucking crumble completely.  Luckily one guy knew some advances EFT and started practicing it on the people there and helping people (what a legend btw) but Stuart Wilde apparently “avoided” it and wanted nothing to do with it.

So, I had this swirling around my head late last night into this morning and coupled with watching Al Murray’s “Pub Landlord” on TV last night, I was feeling quite down to earth and sensible about things and pretty secure about my place in the world.  So it was not long after this I had the insight…

The New Age community claims that they work for the empowerment of individuals, yet consistently acts against their commitment for the sake of making a profit.  They take advantage of people in a vulnerable position and take their money in the full knowledge that they may not actually need the product/experience they’re offering and may actually be causing harm in the process.  Market forces and all you know?

What they do to some vulnerable people is give them as much leeway as possible when it comes to choosing whether or not they choose to use their product/service so they can say no but inevitable the poor new-ager gets suckered in against their own will and is led astray once again.  I’ve seen in time and time again in various places.

I did a vision quest a few years back and met a woman in her late thirties I think, who claimed, defensively, only to do things “like this” once a year.  I thought that was pretty excessive.  And here’s why.

At the very heart of a lot of these new age “experiences” is “insight”.  They’re selling experiences which grant you insight that comes from within yourself.  So you go on a vision quest and gain insight from nature.  Or you do some shamanic stuff and talk to the spirits, or you go on a meditation retreat and gain insight that way.  But I think insight and communication with the unseen realm constituted a large chunk of what they’re offering.  But here’s the issue I have…

When you need insight, you do whatever it is you need to do… you go for a walk in nature… you sit for a while… you talk to a certain person.  And you gain insight.  You gain inspiration.  Aha!  Now you know what it is you want to do with your life.  Now you have the info you need in order to move on.  So… what are you waiting for?!  Move on!

But that’s where everyone (including myself, sadly) get royally stuck.  See, I think they develop an addiction to this insight and the addiction actually gets fed by these new age product/service providers and their need to make a living actually gets in the way of whether or not the produce/service is actually right for them at that moment in their evolution.  The problem is the poor new-ager is afraid of moving out into the world and acting on that insight – giving it room to breathe and manifesting the next phase of their life and so they keep going back to their books, crystals, feathers, workshops, etc and keep burying themselves ever deeper into their own fearful hole.  Some of these people are so unfortunate, it’s really a very sad thing to see.  Really is.

I felt such immense clarity and like a weight had been lifted from me today as I realised that I didn’t have to be connected to all that stuff anymore.  I’ve done enough yoga and tai chi (it was necessary for me to develop my energetic structure as I’d never done this as a teenager) and now could fully begin to take flight and do whatever I fancy with my life.  My only regret is not doing it sooner.  I should’ve not gotten addicted to doing tai chi and yoga in place of living a full life and trying to build my ivory tower (as Stuie Wilde would say) and just allowed myself to go sideways and embrace everyone.  I always wondered why it was that I still found it hard to attract people even when I was feeling energetic after a good yoga session – and that was the reason.  I only did yoga for myself – it was purely selfish.  I need to practice the yoga of how to regain the feeling of oneness with my fellow humans.  It’s amazing how isolated you can become.  But you’re never disconnected – you just end up becoming more difficult to work with.

So.  All this insight I received last night left me with the question… What am I going to do about our last and final gathering?  I’d still have to go in the knowledge that it’s not really what I need.  I do feel as though I have the healer archetype within me, but there’s an infinite number of ways to heal others and don’t have to involve a load of unnecessary paraphernalia like crystals, feathers and noise making instruments.  But you really have to start from a place of authenticity.  What’s the real reason you’re doing a course in healing?  Trying to make yourself all important?  Eh?!  It’ll never work.  You can’t manifest the learning if you have the wrong motives.  I guess that’s what my motives were – to seem important first and foremost.  But my power animals have told me time and time again – focus on yourself first, the time for you to heal other deliberately will come, but not yet.

So that is what I intend to do.

Comments more than welcome.

Ta,

Loveyogi.

I’m in a tight situation at the moment.  Within the last few months, I’ve became an uncle to a lovely niece.  She’s totally adorable and I’m not just saying that.  I mean, she actually is.  There’s no issue with her whatsoever.  The issue… is with how am I to relate to her?

I’ll explain.  Me and my brother (her father) have a very tenuous relationship.  It’s been like that for a long while now.  When we were younger (maybe up until the age of about 17ish) we always spoke to each other in made-up voices and used weird facial expressions all the time.  We practically lived in our own world – probably to avoid the pain of living with parents who were constantly at each other’s throats and obviously hated each other the whole time.  So, acting like this actually felt really good at the time – it was a great way to maintain our sanity when people around us were obviously going mad themselves.  So it served a purpose.  Thing is, we got to the age of about 15ish and I really started to wonder when we were going to stop acting like that.  We eventually did stop connecting in that way and it was a couple of fallouts that were the catalyst for it.  They were minor things really.

Once time, my bro called me a fool for installing the SETI software on my computer as I wasn’t getting paid for it.  I took this really personally as he was being incredibly selfish thinking you should only do things like that for money whereas I was happy to be helping out in a big global science project and the energy I was getting was the fulfillment of helping out in this way.  He obviously didn’t see that.  So we fell out.

A day or two past and we still weren’t speaking.  I started thinking, “so… when are we going to be friends again??”  I didn’t know, but I decided that it shouldn’t be me who makes amends with him as it’s ALWAYS me who does that.  I decided to sit back and let him do the work this time.

Thing is, it never happened.  We didn’t speak for about a year and a half all because he called me a fool.  I learned a lot from that event…

To cut a long story short, we were on holiday and that’s when we started speaking again.  Problem was Ritchie started up the faces and voices again and after a few weeks of coercion from him, so did I.  It was like a weird addiction of some kind.  I didn’t really need it but I did it because it’s what he wanted.  Some time later, we fell out again for another year and the voices didn’t start up again after that.  He tried speaking to me in his normal voice…

It’s only now I’m writing this that I realise things have probably been hard for him.  I had a moment of insight a few days ago that it’s probably because he was born with forceps that he feels so scared that he found it hard to use his real voice.  Because he’s always been like that – literally for as long as I can remember.

I think I need to sit down with him and have a frank discussion about our relationship.  It would be nice to have a brother.  But he seems to have gotten himself into this “holier-than-thou” mindset right now where he just thinks that I’m the one that’s fucked up and I’m being lazy because I apparently don’t want a relationship with his daughter and it’s all MY fault… He couldn’t be more wrong.

How can I possibly have a relationship with his daughter if I don’t even have any relationship with him?  I don’t feel like I can.  His missus deliberately planked their daughter onto my lap yesterday telling me that I “didn’t have a choice” in the matter.  You should’ve seen the look on her wee face…  Just a completely innocent bundle of joy being used as a pawn in a manipulative game by a bunch of adults.  It’s not her fault…  This isn’t the only thing that happened, but it’s all so subtle that it’s hard to put into words exactly what mind games are going on.

So I’m sitting there with my niece on my lap and I start smelling something… A minute later, she’s stretching about the place so she doesn’t have to sit on her backside… She obviously needs changing.

I told her mum that she needed to be changed and she says, “What makes you say that?” as though I’m lying my ass off and just trying to get rid of her.  I could smell piss – I didn’t want her sitting in her own piss, simple as that.  So she changes her in front of us and sure enough, she obviously needed changing…  Enough said.

Bottom line is I came away from that day feeling as though I’d been cursed somehow.  I came away feeling like some deliberate emotional manipulation had went on and I was given no chance to deal with any of it.  They just didn’t give me a say in the matter – I had zero opportunity to figure out how to act in that situation.  So I defaulted to just avoiding the situation out of fear – like my mum and dad do – and spent more time focusing on the TV than who I was with.  Something I absolutely abhor.  Nothing worse that avoiding the present moment.

Sigh… Bottom line is I need to reach out to my bro.  It seems like he must harbour some resentments towards me for whatever reasons… Truth is I really don’t know what’s going on in his head right now.  No idea whatsoever.  I actually feel as though I don’t know who he is – genuinely.  I don’t know who my brother is!  All I’ve known is all the voices and faces and now he’s formed his own tribe where he gets a lot of his personal power.  Well it looks like he might be after some tribal warfare.  Best thing I can do it reach out to him and get us both together in a non-threatening public place just the two of us.  We both need to spend time together just with each other.  No-one else.

I hope if I do invite him that he’ll take me up on the offer and get off his high horse for a minute and come down to my level.

If we do do it, here’s how I think it’ll go.  He’ll start arguing with me, asking me why I’m making no effort with my niece.  It won’t take long to break those barriers down – it’s obvious why I can’t connect with her – I have few friends of my own and zero relationship with her dad.

Providing we get past that point, we might reconnect again.  If we do, he’s start up the voices and the faces again at which point I’ll have to tell him that I can’t possibly act like that.  He’s going to have to let them go.  In return I’ll have to somehow pass onto him the centredness I’ve gained over the years from my yoga and tai chi practice and pass it onto him via the usual healing transference you get when you spent time with people you genuinely love.  THEN we’ll be cooking.  Then we can have a relationship.

The big bugger about all this stuff is that I’m heading away at the start of this week for another week of shamanising and I don’t really want to have this on my mind when I go.  Only option I have is to message him before I leave asking if he wants to meet some time after I get back.  I hope he’s ok with that idea.  I’m genuinely scared though.  After the whole best man debacle (I pulled out from being his best man at his wedding specifically because I didn’t think we were close enough) I think he’s just going to tell me where to go.  I suggested after the best man thing that we should probably get to know each other better and spoke to him on the phone about it a few days after… He seemed to be fuming with rage he was struggling to contain and I have absolutely no idea why.  He wouldn’t even say.  He said he wasn’t going to reply to that message and would tell me why at some point but never did.

I’m fucking shitting myself.  If I do this I’m going to be opening up a big can of worms… But I guess that’s what’ll need to happen if I’d like a relationship with my niece.  Or at least a relationship with HIM?  It needs to happen before we can move forward.  But we’d need to meet just the two of us – no other influences.  I’ll ask him if he wants to do it, no strings attached, no-one else there, he has the choice of if he wants to do it or not.  No pressure.  But it is necessary.

Sigh… Yep – shitting myself.

I had a very interesting insight while doing yoga this morning that led to visions of a world overflowing with love and creativity.  There’s this erroneous belief flying around (probably emanating from one religion or another) that you can not fully satisfy the ego.  But I say you CAN.

The way you fully satisfy someone’s ego is to love them.  It’s all just about being acknowledged.  No-one wants to be fired up onto a pedestal as some kind of “holier-than-thou” guru, because imagine the amount of energy it’d take to keep this pretense going!  It’s nonsense!  No, I say all everyone wants is to be acknowledged.  I read something in a book about a week ago that when a man does things around the house for his wife (fixing the car, putting up a shelf, mowing the lawn or whatever) what he’s looking for is just acknowledgement – nothing more.  That would be satisfying enough for him.  It’s us all taking each other for granted which got the world into the state it’s in…  We all just want to be acknowledged for what we do to make the world go round.   I think one of the worst things anyone can do is take other people for granted.

So, I had this vision of being inside a massive, round fractal dome kind of thing with an opposite emanation coming from the bottom of it.  Like a bulge coming into the dome.  This is the ego.  What we need to do is to shower love onto the ego, allow our egos to relax FULLY so that they let go of any need for attaching onto the love that is coming to them.  This is the mechanism which will allow us to be in full service to other human beings without bringing any of our own baggage into the situation – because there just won’t be any.  If we all keep focusing on this, keeping our egos relaxed, keep being creative and making new situations for ourselves that allow us to have these experiences that we all need, soon, we’ll have the world that we’re all after.  For now though, it’s our karma to process all the heavy duty constricting energy present in the world at the moment and so we better get to work!  It’s what we’re here for really.

The idea is that when we do satisfy our egos with what they really need (love as opposed to new gadgets, too much food, exercise or whatever) then we’ll be in a position to start generating so much love ourselves that the earth will start to become a paradise again and we’ll be back in that sacred energy that has been there the whole time but we just haven’t been tuned in enough to realise it.

Just thought I’d mention it.

Love,

Ryan.

The idea is that the new age movement is where people are being opened up to these kinds of forces.  So when you get your reiki attunements, what’s really going on is you’re receiving an energetic configuration which makes you more receptive to demonic forces.  And by the sounds of it, if I’m really honest with myself, it did genuinely sound like she was channeling something not entirely benign and with some kind of negative intent.  She said that Jesus saved her and managed to get her to stop doing what she was doing and she instead now focuses all her intention on God and gives all glory to God where it “belongs” as she says.  And I guess I’d agree with that.

Interesting thing about this video (I’ll see if I can find it in a sec) is that on the one hand it seemed to cast a massive light on my own shamanic practice (which has it’s basis in concepts not far off what she’s describing – communicating with spirit allies, etc) and actually made me feel lighter and genuinely freer but on the other hand it raised a whole other raft of questions which I don’t feel completely able to answer.  I’ll elaborate.

What this woman (who I have a lot of respect for) said was that we are not supposed to worship spirits – we are supposed to worship God.  People who are getting themselves into reiki and communicating with “angels” and the like really don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.  I completely resonated with this concern she has.  How do I know that when I’m undertaking a shamanic journey that I’m actually communicating with the spirit of a wolf or a panther or a hawk or whatever?  How do I actually know this?  The only way I could know is if I’ve been in close, regular contact with one of these animals and have a real heart-connection with them.  If I love the animals and they love me, I see no reason why I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them.  But I’d have to be entirely discerning and build a rock solid foundation of willpower which would protect me from the influence of any darker intentions that may be going around…  This is where modern new age reiki/shamanism/whatever falls flat on it’s face in quite a pitiful way.

Problem with our planet (in case anyone hasn’t noticed) is that we’re constantly subject to the incessant egoistic, selfish intentions of everyone around us…  I don’t want to get negative here and turn this into an apocalyptic “end-of-the-world” blog like some of my other posts, but I’m just saying that this makes us a vast amount of the energy imprint surrounding our planet or the “Sphere” as Stuart wilde (and other visionaries) have been known to call it.  People, managers, the media, governments, transnational corporations and all these agents are constantly trying to manipulate us at every turn.  And this erodes the will power of everyone who’s subject to all these influences.  It erodes it so badly that there’s usually very  little left.  And the net result of that is a lot of people in varying degrees of susceptibility to external influences.  On the bright side, it seems that we all try to protect ourselves from these influences as much as we can, but it’s never possible to protect ourselves from it all and so most of us do the best we can and become numb to the rest.  Anyway, the overall result is a population with very little ability to exercise discernment over the information which comes into their minds via their senses.

This is the very reason why it’s difficult to be a shaman in this day and age.  If like me you live in a city and are surrounded by all these influences, you better make sure you practice some pratyahara (look it up – it’s a useful yogic technique) in order to give your senses a rest and help you to restore your sense of willpower.  THEN you can start questioning whatever messages you’re getting from any entities you may be in contact with and you can really start to test them.

Back to the woman in the interview.  What she said was that we’re not supposed to worship spirits – we’re supposed to worship God.  God put a veil between us and the spirit world in order to protect us from these negative influences and as long as we focus on god entirely, we’ll be ok.

Well, I think this is bullshit.  If we basically relinquish our discernment to this concept of “God”, then there’s absolutely no difference between the mechanism by which people become influenced by negative forces and the mechanism by which people become influenced by God.  The mechanism’s the same because it involves being completely passive and throwing your masculine, pioneering aspect to the side and letting God do all the work.

I don’t think the universe operates this way.  We HAVE to actually take part in the universe in order to become more luminescent  and more awake and if we just sit back and let God do all the work – God won’t end up doing anything!  God IS love IS consciousness and if we’re to become one with God, then we actually have to take part in existence.  And the way to do this is through a relentlessly discerning attitude which sadly, the new age community has been lacking the whole time it’s been in existence.

So, rather than just refusing to step beyond the veil to the world of spirit (and there is a veil btw), what I say is we develop a rock solid foundation, get ourselves connected to the ground – take your shoes and socks off, feel your feet in the Earth and use whatever techniques are familiar to you to start exploring the world of spirit and go into the spirit world with the intent of shining our light of solid discernment onto every energetic vibration you come across in order to figure out what it’s real intention is, where it came from and what it’s purpose really is.  You could do this via a shamanic journey.

Which all raises the question – how do you know what has a benign intent and what doesn’t?  What do you judge this against?  You need to be rooted the ground, but you also need an open heart.  Love=consciousness=God, therefore if you feel a loving presence, you can be certain that you’re dealing with a benign entity/thoughtform/influence.  Again, the problem is genuine love is in starkly short supply in our world, so you may need to look hard to find it.

The woman in this interview also said that these demons can and do actually perform healings.  This seems to be in order to get you on board as one of their servants.  You just have to exercise the same discernment as before and test the being out to see if they’re demonic or not.

I hope this has been clear and more or less linear… I had such an urge to write this blog but they’re not often linear and readable enough because I don’t write as often as I used to.  Keeping a focused intent is difficult!

Anyway, here’s my vision for a shaman who genuinely works for the good of the community.  A shaman’s task is to communicate with the spirits of nature for the benefit of the community they’re a part of.  A shaman will consult with the mountains and rivers and plants that exist nearby to see if they can come to some kind of mutually supportive relationship.  I don’t really see anything wrong with this.  Plants CAN and do have consciousness and you can communicate with them.  What’s left me a bit spooked at the moment is the question of whether it’s the right thing to do?  I think it’s ultra important to be brutally and relentlessly discerning and honest with ourselves about the information we’re receiving from these other spirits.  I think God would appreciate this.  I see it in my mind’s eye as a shaman piercing the veil of ordinary consciousness and travelling into Non-Ordinary-Reality with a sacred geometrical figure around him to protect him from anything negative, zooming around from place to place, journeying with a completely benign intent.  There’s nothing wrong with being open to these worlds as this woman suggests there is, but what’s missing is the ability to be discerning about what information you’re getting which is one major way our societies fail us.

Phew!  So, listening to this video actually opened up a massive can of worms for me but also helped me to construct my belief system in a much more coherent way.  If I want to practice shamanism, I’m going to have to get into my local environment a lot more often.  As it happens I’m also intending a fast at some point in the near future (maybe this weekend) and am going to totally clean my flat from top to bottom so as to resemble the natural world as much as possible.  Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

I think if people really knew what shamanism involved, they’d absolutely shit themselves.  You’re really ripping your mind open, feeling like you’re punching against a brick wall at one minute and then when you do get through, you find you’re suddenly open to all kinds of intent which you never bargained on and suddenly that’s the next challenge you have to deal with.  So, you might close down to protect yourself from it and find yourself at square one again, trying to figure out how to pierce through the veil again with a new intent to be more discerning about who you listen to and who you don’t.

In my opinion, genuine shamanism’s a beautiful thing and I’d love to be able to practice it in a real way in my own local landscape (Scotland) and somehow bring that energy into the cities and work some magic there.  The question is, who are you serving?  Why are you practicing whatever you practice?  What’s your own intention?  If you contact angels, what do you think the intent of these angels are?  Have you asked them?  Do you think they’d get a bit pissed if you did ask them?

Be discerning.  Don’t be afraid to ask awkward questions and keep your heart open and your feet on the ground.  Don’t let anyone tell you you’re an awkward fucker for asking awkward questions – if their intent’s genuine, they’ll be glad you asked because you’re only trying to shine some light on the situation and they’ll be glad you’re their to offer more light.  If their intent’s negative, they’ll get angry and might try and get you to keep your mouth shut.  There’s your exit signal.  I say God wants you to be strong and discerning.  God wants you to become a master of reality.  God wants you to learn and grow and expand.  Just be discerning.

Big Love,

Ryan.