Finding Balance
Explorations of Balancing the Internal and External Worlds
Hey beautiful friends,
At the end of every year, I enjoy writing up a summary of my life for the year, which includes many of the rich, sometimes profound realizations I experienced during the year. This last year was particularly fertile in wild and expansive realizations. For any with the time and interest, I thought I would share a key section of my yearly summary on realizations I had as a result of my amazing monthly Bikram yoga practice. Take care, and have a most beautiful, meaningful, and love-filled new year ahead. And thank you so much for being a part of my life.
With abundant love, joy, and gratitude,
Fred
January 6, 2012
Bikram Realizations
The intense 90-minute Bikram yoga sessions in 105-degree heat that I do once a month continue to be one of my greatest sources of inspiration. Almost every month I get powerful realizations. I go into each session with a clear intention of what I want to explore. Pushing myself and the blood flowing out of my head after particularly intense bending stretches seems to open up channels that aren't normally open. The realizations often continue to flow while I lay resting on my mat after the session and even on the bicycle ride home and afterwards. I love these monthly sessions and am so grateful to the creator of Bikram for this wonderful form of yoga and meditation.
Below are realizations I wrote down from three of the most profound sessions this year. As this section is fairly lengthy, I've highlighted some of the key sections.
June 14: Great Bikram session today. I really pushed myself. Between poses, I could often feel the energy vibrating in my body in a most delicious way. The more I pushed into discomfort in each pose, the more delicious the healing energy felt in my body between poses. I saw this as a metaphor for life. When we are willing to push past our own comfort zones, it is much easier to grow to new levels of wisdom and understanding. And I was able to let go of another layer of urgency in my life and surrender to the joy of just being in love with the universe, with All That Is. Great stuff!!!
September 8: Each of us is always at the center of our own consciousness. This consciousness experiences life both externally and internally at the same time, though one or the other tends to be more dominant in each moment.
The external world we experience largely through our five senses, while the internal world consists of all the conscious and unconscious processes that take place within us. When we are interacting with others or with our environment, like talking with a friend or watching a movie, we tend to be much more externally focused. The internal world is most commonly accessed through stillness, sleep, and meditation.
Many people tend to value one of these more than the other in their lives, sometimes even neglecting or even holding judgment about the other. Yet I see both the external and the internal as vitally important parts of life. The external, physical world allows us to engage fully in the journey of life on this planet, while the internal world is the place where what happens to us is processed, either consciously, unconsciously or both. Our inner world strongly shapes our interpretation of everything that happens externally. In the external world, we get to experiment and explore who we are based on beliefs held within our inner world.
I want to focus more on consciously welcoming greater awareness of both the internal and the external aspects of life, and particularly on being aware of the balance between them. What excites me is the possibility of being ever more aware of both the external and internal focus not only in myself, but even in others as I interact with them. I love having internal conversations with the internal awareness of whoever I'm interacting with, even as we may be having an externally focused conversation. I do this by silently communicating my deeper or more subtle thoughts and feelings in what feels like soul to soul communication.
When I am conscious of both the internal and external worlds of both myself and whoever I'm interacting with, it feels like a deeper harmony is created. The symbol of the infinity sign comes to mind as a cycling of inner and outer awareness between myself and whoever I'm interacting with. I love to invite others to have more awareness of the inner processes as we interact, too. It's a way of fostering both greater transparency and intimacy.
Many people consciously hide their inner processes from others in an attempt to create desired external perceptions of themselves in others. They thus create one or more personas which actually mask their inner essence and internal processes. This can be quite effective in achieving certain goals, yet it also takes a certain amount of energy to maintain. And those who are sensitive to both the external and internal can sense that something is not in harmony.
One of the reasons I feel so free and experience so much joy in my life is that I feel like I no longer have any masks or personas to maintain. I have reached a place where I totally enjoy just being who I am and sharing all parts of myself freely with any who are open to this. Life is so much easier and more fun this way! I attribute this to having done quite a bit of integration of my inner and outer worlds, yet I know there is always more to learn in this fascinating process.
I also realized today how I have tended to trust the divine realms much more than people as I've moved through life. I want to open more to the wisdom that I know all people around me have. The divine realms represent the light, while the Earth and its people for me represent the shadow. And I'm understanding more all the time how the shadow is just as important as the light. Like the inner and outer worlds, both are very important to experiencing life in its fullness. I want to find ever more ways to balance and integrate these two in my life. I know that every person I meet has something to teach me if I am open to it.
October 4: The below realizations from today's Bikram session came out of my explorations into the Hidden Hand material. I sent them to my private "In the Know" email list and got some great comments in response. In this session, I entered a most amazing, divine realm. I had recently been feeling a lot of big energy shifts both in myself and in the world. As I realized ever more deeply how I/we co-created all of this, I wanted to take personal responsibility to new levels. I saw that I/we are co-creating something different now, something more infused with love and support from divine realms which exist both inside and outside of ourselves.
What a powerful and unexpectedly profound experience!!! As I had been working on crafting summaries of the intriguing Hidden Hand material, I went into this Bikram yoga session with the intention of opening to wisdom and guidance from group souls like that of the Hidden Hand, Ra (Law of One), Michael (Messages from Michael), the WingMakers, and any other groups souls available. I particularly opened to guidance with creating the summaries of the Hidden Hand material, which I will soon be sending out to the nearly 12,000 subscribers on our two email lists.
As I got towards the end of this 90-minutes of challenging yoga postures and intense heat, I felt several times a rich connection and energetic exchange with these loving and supportive group entities. Yet the most amazing experience occurred after the session while I was lying on my mat in quiet stillness with my eyes closed.
While breathing deeply in a state of surrender during this post-workout relaxation, I suddenly felt an invitation to move beyond these wise group souls to connect directly with a level of divinity even greater. As I opened to the invitation, I felt my consciousness expand into another dimension. My awareness felt like it moved quickly along an energetic line through a surrounding darkness, like following a beam of light through a dark tunnel. And then quite unexpectedly, I touched another realm.
This realm I contacted is a completely different dimension – more like another universe, or the other side of the veil – far beyond time and space as we know it. I had previously been there in a few most profound sacred medicine journeys, but this was the first time I encountered this realm without any medicine assist.
With my body lying still on my yoga mat, yet having left behind awareness of this body, I touched and briefly merged with the edge of this dimension. I immediately felt the unbelievably profound love with which this realm pulses. In this other universe far outside of the normal dimensions of time and space in which we live here on Earth, all beings are fully conscious of their interconnections with each other as they flow in a radiant cosmic swirl of consciousness exploring itself.
Though in linear time it was only a brief moment of connection, I immediately saw for the first time that this amazing place or space of being is, in fact, what might be called the positive pole of existence. The conceptions of some of our most pioneering scientists on Earth hint at this place in their explorations into the worlds of antimatter, with the assumption that this place is somehow negatively charged.
I saw, however, that it is our universe of time, space, and dense matter which is the negative pole of existence. Matter is of a heavy density which from the expansive and all-loving perspective of this other realm would clearly be described as negative. The substance of the other realm (which scientists allude to as antimatter) is actually undeniably positive.
The only "matter" which exists in this indescribable realm is in such an expanded state that it is almost the opposite of matter on Earth. All substance there is clearly seen and experienced as being composed of love and light, where here matter is seen more as something dense and solid, something to be used and manipulated. It was very clear to me that the world in which we live is the dense negative pole or shadow universe, and that this other realm I touched briefly, sometimes referred to as the other side of the veil, is the expansive positive pole of existence.
In my very brief visit, I only touched and merged with the edges of this place, yet I could feel what so many who have had near-death visions describe as a place filled with amazing love and vibrance. I could even feel a kind of collective consciousness of the place which some might refer to as God or the being of light there at the end of the tunnel. What an amazing, loving presence!!! As a result of this brief, yet timeless journey, I feel I now have a new map of existence based on the split between these two entirely different ways in which consciousness can experience itself.
Looking at the roots of it all, I suspect that at the beginning of time or at some point beyond time, primal divine consciousness densified itself to the point of creating the perception of physical matter. Parts of divine consciousness were thus fragmented and separated into this new dimension or density in a way that blocked these fragments from having knowledge of their deeper interconnectedness with all beings and All That Is. This was done in order to eventually create new ways for the divine and for all of us fragments of the divine to experience ourselves.
This new density could be described as a parallel universe where space and matter were created in a way that allowed fragments of divine consciousness to inhabit the matter, thus allowing our fragmented consciousness to have the unique experience of life in this densified universe in sequential time. These divine fragments (including all of us here on Earth) thus agreed to be anchored to physical bodies in order to experience the fullness of life in a three-dimensional universe. Not only that, they/we agreed to forget their/our origins in order to have full freedom to explore a completely new and different way of being.
In conceptualizing these two differing realms, I am reminded of a figure eight or infinity symbol where one side is positively charged and the other is negative. The positive side is largely pure consciousness exploring itself in worlds of love and light beyond time and space. The negative side is consciousness densified into space and matter to explore the mystery of separateness and physicality in a three-dimensional world with incremental time. These two realms can also be referred to as the two sides of the veil.
To travel between these two sides of the veil or two sides of the figure-eight infinity symbol, one must go through the mysterious zero point at the center, as I somehow did briefly today after the yoga session. And just to be clear, this negative and positive are not at all associated with judgments of good and bad. Both poles are equally divine. They simply offer differing ways of experiencing life and existence.
I very much saw that this other universal space of consciousness is not better or worse than the one we here normally live in. Of course, many of those from this negative side who have experienced the positive feel like they would give up the challenges of this negative side of existence in an instant to bask in the flowing light and glory of the positive pole. But when I considered this myself today, it was very clear that is not what is meant to be for me and for most of us here. We are sacred pioneers of the divine who have both chosen and were sent here to explore entirely new ways of being, however full of challenges they may be.
If everything is positive love and light all the time, the ways consciousness can explore itself are limited. By creating the negative, unconscious pole, the collective consciousness of All That Is has greatly expanded its ability to experience itself in the infinitude of existence.
So I suspect this negative universe or pole of existence may have been created as a kind of divine experiment with the purpose of bringing a much fuller, richer experience of life for all of us with the intention of eventually inviting a fertile and harmonious balance for the whole of collective consciousness. And we here are the pioneers who on some deep level volunteered to go unconscious and experience many levels of separation in order to explore deep into this physical realm and to eventually help to bring divine consciousness back fully into the experiment.
Yet it seems that the negative side of existence ended up sometimes bringing us divine fragments who volunteered here to places of intense pain and suffering that the collective consciousness never even imagined existed. As the positive side now begins to focus its awareness back to the shadow experiment we co-created, there is a growing desire from beings on both sides of the veil to somehow transcend the pain and suffering here to find a new balance. It is time now to harmonize and reunite aspects of the positive and negative poles, so that all consciousness can explore ever greater harmonies and mysteries without having to further spiral into pain and suffering. Wild stuff!!!
On my bicycle ride home from this most beautiful, most intense Bikram session, I found myself thinking about how many people in their limited human consciousness don't feel that they are worthy of entering or even looking at this other amazing dimension of existence I had just visited. They don't even feel capable of connecting directly with highly expanded group souls, like those with whom I've been exploring recently and connected with so beautifully today. Yet I have no doubt that these beings and the divine life force of this other dimension are available to all and happy to work with any who open to them.
I am one of a relatively small percentage living in this negative pole of existence who carries some conscious memory of the other pole, and who is here to invite any who are open and interested to explore together the infinite possibilities available to all souls or fragments of the divine everywhere. I want to invite all of my friends to open to the joys of exploring both sides of the veil.
From as early as I can remember in this lifetime, I had conscious awareness of the interconnectedness of all beings, and in particular, of the heart/love energy which connects us all. I now understand that the challenging part of me that wanted to be a savior simply wanted everyone to know how beautiful and loving we all are in our core. Yet it has been a long journey to learn how to share this in an empowering way with others. Only as I have opened consciously to ever deeper levels of energetic connection both within me and with all around me am I gradually coming to better understand how I can assist those interested to experience this amazing level of expanded love and consciousness that is available to all.
I am excited now to put out the Hidden Hand material with some minimal commentary to help people understand that the viewpoint presented is yet one more fascinating perspective in the greater scheme of things. And though it has helped tremendously to expand my understanding, not everything about this material resonates with me. Hidden Hand's belief that the Earth will split into three differing dimensions to me is but a metaphor for what is already happening in our world.
Those like me who have found their way to live life here largely from a place of love and interconnectedness are already living in a kind of heaven on Earth. In contrast, those who see and experience largely negativity both in themselves and out in the world continue to create more of the same by allowing their deep negative beliefs to play out for them on this planet. They are living in a kind of self-created hell. So there is no need to split the Earth into separate planets. Each of us now live on the same physical planet, yet our experiences of life and reality here can be incredibly different. It's like we live in the same physical reality, but emotionally and spiritually we live in different worlds.
So I suspect the differing densities and positive and negative poles Hidden Hand talks about already exist here and now in this world in which we live. Parts of the Hidden Hand's Luciferian group soul seem to believe that there will actually be a critical moment (the harvest) in which there is a physical split between these densities and poles, and that parallel Earths will be created. Yet I see this as a desire for salvation/damnation at some point in the future which would only create further separation in this dimension. And I suspect this may even be a consciously designed concept by Lucifer to challenge people here and help them to see who they are not. Wild stuff!
What I know is that we are each somehow co-creating the reality in which we live in an ever evolving dance, as our deepest, sometimes unconscious beliefs are reflected and manifested out in our world. The more we choose to become conscious of our deep unconscious beliefs, the more choice we have in how we create our experience of the world, and the easier it is to transform both our lives and our world.
The Hidden Hand's group soul Lucifer seems to even have some souls believing consciously that they need to choose intense negativity in order to advance spiritually as a soul. I highly doubt this is true, yet believe that key people here may be convinced of this. They believe that to progress to the next level they have to embody the negative option by being "bad." What a strange and funny game! I don't fully understand the logic of it, but I do sense a legitimate reason behind it all. In the greater scheme of things, I have no doubt that everything is in divine order.
With my deep, unwavering commitment to what's best for all beings, I choose not to take sides on the service to self versus service to others polarity. I live in service to all, which includes both self and others. I clearly am aligned with helping myself and all around me who are open and interested to choose ever more love, connection, and life-affirming beliefs. And I am getting better all the time at not having judgment of those who are consciously or unconsciously choosing to explore separation and the negative. It's all a part of the grand cosmic dance. Thank you, Hidden Hand, for helping me to better understand this.
I want to invite all in this world who are interested to connect directly with their higher selves, with supportive spirits and group souls from other dimensions, and even with the amazing love energies of the positive realm I visited today. We all have choice in every moment as to how and where we focus our consciousness. I want to be an invitation for ever greater conscious awareness of all parts of ourselves and of our interconnectedness with all around us, including the many divine beings and expanded realms invisible to our eyes. Thank you so much, Bikram yoga, for this incredibly rich experience. Life rocks!!!