Re-conceiving Ourselves for Dec 2012

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Brad Silberberg

This Tuesday (March 20, 2012) is the Spring Equinox, but it is more than just the day of nearly equal darkness and light that marks the beginning of spring.  Some would have this day declared the beginning of the New Year, as Nature reawakens from her winter slumber and life returns to the landscape.  I’ve always felt that way myself, and wondered why we proclaim dark, dreary January 1st as the beginning of anything at all when it seemed so out of sync with the natural world.  There, things were still coming to an end, not beginning anew.

The passing of winter into spring is when a new cycle begins on the Native American Medicine Wheel.  With the spring season represented by the energies of the eastern quadrant comes the promise of new birth, renewal, initiation, the rising sun, the coming of Light, and the enlightenment that comes from our spirit.  It follows winter, located in the north, which teaches us about introspection, old age, death, and the end of the cycle of life.  With the spring Nature renews itself, and we are reborn into the next cycle.  It is a time to plant new seeds for what we want to see grow and mature not only in our own lives but in the lives of “our people”.  Hopefully, with wisdom gained from reviewing the lessons of the previous year we move to a higher level instead of just repeating what has just come to pass.

As we approach whatever cosmic shift and changes that are coming for humanity with the planetary alignment and end of the Mayan calendar great cycle in December 2012, some people have suggested an additional significance to this year’s Vernal Equinox since it proceeds this momentous event by exactly nine months.  In human terms, this is the length of time it takes a baby to develop in its mother’s womb and points to a chance for us to “re-conceive” ourselves in preparation for what’s coming.  It is a historic opportunity to set an intent for the rest of 2012 and for what lies beyond.

We invite all of our Mesa “tribe” and especially those who have not yet availed themselves of what this place of community, enlightenment, and personal reinvention has to offer to join us for our Spring Equinox Medicine Wheel ceremony this Tuesday evening at sunset.  As we stand together in that vortex of energy, time, and Spirit, we have the opportunity to pool our Light and intent not only for a glorious year to come, but for a smooth and prosperous transition into the next phase of Creation for ourselves, our families, and All Our Relations (Mitakuye Oyasin).  Hope you’ll join us.

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Stuck in a Rut, or Hiding From Life?

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Brad Silberberg

I woke up this morning feeling a bit tired and unsettled, an all too familiar state of late.  I had been having trying dreams again that reflected some conflict and imbalance on deep inner levels, but their origins were not readily apparent to my mind.  I knew I’d have to consciously look for them while my inner self(s) might dodge and weave to obscure what they didn’t want to come to light.  I pictured it like some spy movie, the hero trying to follow his quarry through twisting back alleys of some old European city as they split up to slip away into the shadows.

I used some Kinesiology (muscle testing) to get past my surface thinking and down into the deeper levels of my psyche.  I spoke mostly to my “You” part (as in “You know what I’m talking about…”) and found that part’s answers to indicate that it was in pretty good shape.  Hmm.  Then why the unsettled feeling, I wondered?  I could feel the compression, so where was it and what was it about?  I continued to check in.

Mentally, I knew that things were going really well for us and that my wife Kate, myself, and our center were headed for a bright future despite the sometimes desperate look of the world around us.  Emotionally, I felt flat, bored, and stuck in a rut.  I muscle tested about being in a rut and got results indicating an admission that I was (no surprise there) but that my inner self(s) had no interest in coming up out of it.  I recognized the safety of ruts derived of their familiarity; well worn paths through life that an old blacksmith friend of mine used to quaintly describe as: “just a grave with the ends kicked out.”

When I told Kate what I was getting about being in a rut, she agreed.  We had fallen into little ruts here and there that we knew might not be serving us well, but felt less than enough impetus to steer back out of.  She talked about the beautiful tipi our beloved Mesa had been gifted and how that would bring new energy and direction into our life.  I agreed with her, mainly because I could feel it already building.  When she began talking about her impatience to get started painting the canvas cover and the need to prepare the many 27 foot long poles (my job) I could feel a part of me cringe.  I wanted to be excited about the whole thing, but it was obvious that I was conflicted about it.  I recognized that it wasn’t just about the tipi, but that the thought of it was bringing something more to the surface.

As Kate and I talked about my hesitancy to begin the work, I muscle tested with myself about my resistance.  Then something pulled at my attention.  I hadn’t checked in lately with “brad” (small ‘b’).  “He” was the part of me having trouble with the way things were going and wanted to keep traveling the rut because it allowed avoidance of something.  As I thought about “brad” and his rut, I didn’t see it like wagon track grooves from some old western.  It appeared in my mind’s eye as far deeper than that—more like an entrenchment from some WWI saga.  It was way over my head and some part of me paced back and forth in it without ever being seen.  My rut didn’t go anywhere and was big enough to hide in.

We may like to envision ourselves as monolithic in nature, but inside we are very complex, multileveled, and often fragmented assemblages of energy, thought, emotion, and ?? (mystery).  Life’s traumas have often caused us to arrange self-defined “parts” of ourselves to deal with specific aspects of our experience, be it past, present, or future.  In extreme cases they show up as multiple and very distinct “split personalities”, but for most of us they find ways to work as a loose-knit unit.  Mine seemed a bit like a platoon from some combat movie I’d seen with a cast of characters that weaved in and out.  There was “the brave one”, “the coward”, “the brain”, “the lover”, etc, all trying to get the mission done and just stay alive.  Some of these characters are actually one in the same (“You”, “brad”, and “I”), but act out different roles in different situations.  We are very complicated.

What I was getting was a glimmer of the part(s) that constituted “brad” experiencing anxiety about something that inaction could avoid, and the puzzle began to become clearer.  Emotional “brad” was hiding, a theme we had partially dealt with before, and wanted to stay right where he was, hidden from view in his deep rut.  I knew that a Guided Head Movement healing could unlock whatever made “brad” want to stay hidden.  It was just a question of what prompt or suggestion he needed to hear during the head movements to help him unlock the door.  “brad” wanted to hide from pretty much everyone, but there was one person who could likely draw him out.

The obvious was for Kate to ask “brad” to come out, specifically for her.  I knew that part of myself had been looking for my spiritual twin since before we ever met, but hard to describe things made “him” (me) keep his distance, something people do in various ways in relationships to feel safe.  We may call it personal “space” but it’s much more than physical.

As close as we had become in many ways I still obscured part of myself from Kate, something we both could feel and knew needed to be resolved to further our joint spiritual mission.  We had been sensing into it and had recently discussed the issue.  When I told Kate with sadness about “brad’s” hiding she moved to hug me, and I could feel a push-pull that my desire for togetherness overruled.  As we embraced, I had to admit to myself that I could not be totally present with the feeling of her drawing me in at that moment—or maybe at all.  We settled on “I want ‘brad’ to stop hiding from me” as the request she would make as she guided my head through the no/yes movements of our healing technique.

As Kate made the request and started rolling my head for “NO!” I felt a kind of numbness.  Then I saw the reason for the hiding with a memory of trying to hide from my enraged father.  There was no place to go in a physical sense, so “I” took the beating and put my emotional part somewhere for safekeeping, stashing my inner child under the floorboards like I’d seen people do in stories about the Holocaust.  Tears came out and so did my inner “brad”.  I felt a weird and indescribable compressed “something” down in the left side of my solar plexus open back up like a relaxing fist.  I was letting go of the shame and despair I felt over my beloved father’s rejection of me, something I never wanted anyone else to see.

As I later sat writing this, Kate came into our home office to tell me she was leaving on an errand.  When I turned from the computer, she hugged me and my head came to rest against her heart.  As I listened to its beating, I found myself wanting to melt into it and have it wrap around me.  In a warm little wave I allowed it to do so and sensed how much I had yearned for that feeling when I was a child.  All I had wanted back then was to have someone envelop me safely in their heart, but the grief I felt when my parents closed their fragile hearts to my young self necessitated sending that part of me into exile to keep my delicate sanity in an untenable situation.  That part was never shown it was safe to come back out.

When you drive by the big flat hill we call The Mesa on PA route 18, you can clearly see the big white building that houses our spiritual and creative center, but there’s nothing all that distinctive that jumps out at you to draw you there.  The signage space provided us by our landlord is minimal and easy to miss and even those who are looking for us sometimes pass the turn.  All that will change when our tipi goes up this spring.  It (and we) will be unmistakable and highly visible from the highway.  We know it will turn heads as people pass, becoming a landmark too big to hide.  “brad” had been uneasy about this and the exposure it will bring.  Luckily, the spiritual necessity of it precipitated a needed change because I was somehow ready enough to face it instead of continuing to hide.

We have heard from many people lately who have felt like they are riding some kind of weird roller coaster.  One moment they are full of energy, the next they feel drained.  They get up one morning feeling joyful, but by mid-afternoon they feel depressed.  They see motivation evaporate into lethargy in the blink of an eye, and self assurance melt into fear and doubt without warning.

We remind all of our Mesa “tribe” that the energies of Creation are oscillating at vastly sped up rates compared to only a few years ago—and are still picking up speed.  If you graphed it, a vibration that used to look like slow, gentle ripples now appears as closely packed tsunamis.  This is something that we are all experiencing with or without awareness, but doesn’t get any “Severe Weather Center 17!” kind of media attention because it can’t yet be mechanically measured like the solar storms it’s causing.  The Plan is to nudge and increasingly shove us into change; to give up what we’re clinging to and move into a new way of being for our own good and the survival of our planet.  We won’t be able to hide from it much longer.  Ollie, Ollie, oxen free!

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Stories We Tell Ourselves

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Brad Silberberg

I always tell people that I learn from all of our students and from our clients in the Mesa Healing Center.  I really feel blessed that because of these relationships I have accessed understandings that I may not otherwise have been exposed to in the full expanse of my life.
 
Just the other day I was given a such a gift in a session with one of my clients, a woman who has come to me consistently for a couple of years.  She is someone who through her own diligence and desire to create a different experience of herself has undergone an amazing transformation.  This was clearly evident just from looking at her face in our most recent session and comparing it to my memory of her from even just six weeks before.  She looked more relaxed and confident, less like a frightened child and more like a capable adult.  Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed the change.  My client said that a friend had asked her if she’d had a facelift.  Her face no longer etched in fear and doubt, she looked years younger and less childlike at the same time.
 
When she came to see me the that day I could tell that she felt down, but it was more of a dip in the road compared to the depths she had sometimes sunk to in the past.  Hers was a heroic story as far as I was concerned.  She had taken a chance and trusted me and my “woo-woo” techniques when they were totally out of her realm of belief or experience, at first because she was desperate, and with time because she knew they actually worked.  I marveled at her progress, and felt compassion for her plight in feeling unable to figure herself out on her own, a source of shame, sorrow, and resignation felt by many.
 
I have always seen my role as a healer being primarily that of teacher, helping my client-students to learn to heal themselves.  One way I do that is by telling instructive stories; ones I have heard from those who have taught me, tales from my own life experiences, and (anonymously) those of other students and clients I have worked with.  In our latest session, as I groped to find a handle on what I was sensing from my client as she looked for words to describe her most recent malaise, I found myself talking with her once again about stories.
 
As I listened intently to her on this particular day, what came suddenly clear to me was that her own stories were what were confining her, constraining her way of dealing with the world around her and the process of life.  What made things so hard for her was the difficulty she had in finding real world evidence to back up her bad emotional experience of herself.  It just wasn’t there.
 
I told her about the concept of how we “story” ourselves and how those stories then shape our way of being.  I shared with her briefly what we’ve learned about this concept from our friend, Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and his approach to healing through story, what he calls “Narrative Medicine”.  “You know… some of the stories you tell yourself may not be true…” I found myself saying to my client.  I could feel some part of myself that had been listening in on the conversation gasp.
 
On many occasions while working to help this particular person resolve issues, I have found myself stopping and thinking, “Brad…  Listen to yourself.  You might need to look into that about you, too.”  I would often tell my client when it happened and muscle test myself in front of her so that she could see I shared her humanness.  I smiled at my client and announced that I was about to muscle test myself on that very statement as an illustration of the issue.  “I want you to know, the stories you tell yourself may not be true,” I said out loud to myself and pulled on the circle made by my tightly pinched together left thumb and ring finger.  It gave way easily, indicating denial of that possibility.  My stories couldn’t be mistaken.  I laughed out loud, sharing the folly of it with my client.  “See,” I said, “I’ve got it, too!”
 
We used exactly the same healing prompt for a Guided Head Movement healing for my client after confirming that she also indicated denial that her personal stories could be faulty.  It took two iterations of the no/yes head movement process for her inner paradigm to unlock and shift without emotion or fanfare.  She knew something had changed for her, but could not yet describe it.  I could empathically sense that a deep change had been set in motion for her that would play out over days or weeks.  I’d have to wait and see.  Meanwhile, I planned my own healing for my inner storyteller, hardly able to contain my glee at this insight.
 
It wasn’t until the next day at our regular morning “meeting” in the living room that I told Kate about my denial about my own inner fairytales.  We found that while we both intellectually understood that our subconscious minds were prone to making things up when they lacked any information or didn’t understand to keep from going insane with fear and confusion, those parts of ourselves couldn’t face the fact that they were fabricating accounts.  We both muscle tested “NO” to the prospect that our personal stories might be erroneous, our inner selves adamant in their rejection of a simple possibility.
 
For research purposes, we asked me a few muscle testing questions to establish a baseline of obviously false tales I told myself, like what stories I was telling myself about my ability to make money (I couldn’t make any), how I looked (ugly), or whether or not I could succeed (nope).  These answers were opposite to when we just asked outright (without the story angle) if I could make money, etc, showing how Kinesiology depends completely on which questions are asked and how.  It was laughable, pathetic, and the title of my inner operating manual: “Bad Stories About Brad.”
 
We saw minute differences in the way the two of us dealt with the issue of inner fairytales, and our Guides suggested that we use slightly different spin on our healing prompts.  Mine would be “I want you to know…, the stories you tell yourself may not be true.”  Kate’s would be “I want you to know…, some of the stories you tell yourself aren’t true.”  We set to work with Guided Head Movement, me getting on the floor for the first healing.  Kate said the prompt and moved my head no/yes a couple of times.  Then I saw an incident from thirty-four years ago.
 
I had been working in downtown DC and taken a walk on my lunch break.  An angry man walked swiftly past between me and the store fronts I was idly looking into, loudly berating me for walking “in the middle of the sidewalk, like you own the place”.  Silently and unconsciously, I just shook my head, scoffing at his anger and possible inebriation.  After he was several feet past me and still moving fast, I felt an overwhelming and irresistible compulsion to say something back, knowing full well that I might be dealing with a powder keg but telling myself he was out of earshot.
 
Under my breath, I softly hissed a drawn-out, “sh-t”.  He heard my whispered comment, stopped in his tracks, and started ranting at me, arms over his head.  I remember telling myself to just keep walking and ignore him.  (Insert Brad’s mom’s voice here: “Just ignore him and he’ll leave you alone, Honey!”)  When I got next to him, he wheeled and punched me so hard just above my left ear that my whole body vibrated.  I managed to continue on to my destination a couple of doors down where I sat down, stunned, unable to fathom what had just happened to me.  I had told myself he wouldn’t really hurt me, and (after the fact) that he really hadn’t, but he did.  I noted in that recollection that it reminded me of my dad…
 
Even though I felt activated by the head movements, I could tell that whatever kept the storytelling issue locked down was not budging.  On the third side to side head rocking I felt a queer sensation that I described as being cut down the middle from head to toe, “like a knife cutting a birthday cake.”  I could tell that something else was involved.
 
As usual, when a prompt and head movements don’t bring a fairly rapid shift, something else deeper presents itself.  Once again I heard something from my inner “parking garage” level, something about whether my stories could be “fixed” rather than simply changed.  We asked my Guides and got that what was needed was a new prompt for this deeper level.  We circled down to the next floor of the garage with “I want you to know…, your broken stories can be fixed.”  Kate said the words to me and barely moved my head when I exploded into tears and wailing, hands covering my face.  I was feeling compressed anguish gushing from my inner underground like a broken water main.
 
I was feeling old pain I had suppressed and pushed down from being 7 or so years old and watching my family begin to come apart.  I intuitively saw the possibility coming fully 5 or 6 years before it actually ruptured.  Heaped on top of that were subsequent tragedies of teenage rejection, the loss of my first wife to illness, a general lack of success in business, and other disappointments.  I was in total despair within that walled-off part of me because I couldn’t change my epic saga, silently retelling the broken stories about my life to myself every day.  I couldn’t change what actually happened to me back then, but I knew I could change what I told myself about it all.  I could fix the broken stories of loss, low self-worth, and bad luck—whatever that meant inside of me, and “re-story” myself.
 
The muscle test about fixing my stories shifted as well as the baseline questions about the stories I was telling myself.  The negative answers all had vanished.  Kate’s healing was not emotional, but she also realized that she had been telling herself sad stories about her life, from the puppy she didn’t get, to her parents’ early deaths.  Afterwards she reported feeling a lot lighter, clearer, and less weighed down.
 
When we were done and had discussed the magnitude of what we had experienced, we got up to go about our day.  Kate stopped me and gave me a big hug, telling me that things would be OK.  In her arms I once again felt a flood of emotion and burst into tears.  “I don’t want our story to break,” I found myself saying in the high, pinched voice of a distraught child, remembering the loss of my first wife.  “I don’t want the Mesa’s story to break, either” I sobbed.  I recognized through my tears that I was habitually telling myself broken stories about the future—not just imagining defeat, but writing the script for it.  Now maybe I could craft a new ending, a “happily ever after” for us and the Mesa.  Kate reassured me that our story would not be broken and I felt better.
 
Our Western popular culture is not devoid of the art of storytelling.  These days it takes the form of bullet-laden movies, romance novels dripping with sex, rewritten history, and sensationalized news reporting.  Sadly, these stories seem to have little to do with us and our “mundane” lives, but can encourage us to write demeaning internal tomes about ourselves not measuring up to superheroes, fashion models, lucky lottery winners, or gazillionaire politicians.  What is missing is the intentional shaping of personal narrative about individual worth that is intrinsic to indigenous and tribal cultures.  In those societies, children are largely taught how to be adults through stories, rituals, and ceremonies (acted out stories) and are encouraged to tell their own stories so that those who guide them can assess and steer what they are telling themselves.  Our children are often being told that their story is irrelevant, silly, or unfounded; sustaining dismissal without explanation.  (“There’s no one in your bedroom!  Now, go back to sleep!”)  It is often implied that their feelings and what they’re telling themselves doesn’t matter, and that only their parents’, teachers’, or some religious book’s story does.
 
We create our own personal reality, largely through the stories we tell ourselves.  Many are based on critical anecdotes and short tales we were told about ourselves by the adults in our lives, or overheard in whispers.  We have incorporated them (in-corpore: to bring into the body) in our personal explanations of ourselves to ourselves.  Others are our own immature, irrational, and negative imaginings, slanted that way by steeping in a society based on conflict, separation, and scarcity.
 
These stories can be about the past, present, or future, and have little to do with the more objective reality of the world around us.  We can be using our personal stories to sooth, reassure and strengthen ourselves, or just to warn us away from more trouble.  They can uplift us, but often tear us down more than any outside detractor.  This is not a logical process—and we can’t make it such.  All we can do is become more aware of what we tell ourselves and do a better job of helping ourselves and our children rewrite our personal stories.  We’re here to help you review and mend your tattered texts, and put band-aids on your broken stories.

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Faith Makes Sense (It’s “sensical”)

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Brad Silberberg

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a pretty logical kind of guy.  Much of the time this serves me very well, but at times it can be a great hindrance.  I began to recognize that aspect of my logical self a long time ago, but recently understood it in a new way.  My desire for logic was sometimes causing self-doubt and something else that tormented me; second guessing.
 
This came to the fore once again over the last couple of days as Kate and I went tipi shopping.  Back in November a very generous donor had graciously gifted us the money to purchase one for The Mesa, but it was the end of January and we still hadn’t bought it yet.  We knew that we wouldn’t put it up on the runway before winter turned to spring, but also that it would soon be tipi makers’ busy season.  If we waited too long we could end up sitting on a waiting list instead of in a tipi.  Why didn’t we act?
 
On several occasions we had looked at various tipi manufacturers’ websites, and felt overwhelmed by all of the choices.  Mentioning in the “News from The Mesa” section of our emails that we were shopping for one brought a recommendation from Mesa friends Larry and Neta in Israel who had just recently received shipment of the tenth tipi they have purchased for their own spiritual center or to help others.  We valued our friends’ advice, which basically reinforced our own leanings.
 
Tuesday, we called and spoke with a representative at Nomadics Tipis who graciously answered all of our questions and promised to call us back with a quote for what we wanted.  The money was in the bank and we had secured permission from our landlord to put a tipi on the runway.  All we needed to do was to check on our charge card balance to make sure we didn’t bump into our credit limit.  Still, we could feel some part of us begin to second guess, me more so than my wife.  Were we making the right choice?
 
Kate’s Aries (“Do it now!”) nature was ready to jump in and order it on the spot when Nicole called back with a quote that included shipping of the 27 foot long poles, but I was more hesitant.  I knew it was prudent to check on our finances, but I was feeling something else; that one foot on the gas, one foot on the brakes kind of hesitancy that sometimes stopped me from doing things in life that I knew were right until I checked and triple checked.  I told myself I was being cautious.  Besides, I reminded myself, we had to rush off to meet a healing client up at The Mesa and stop at the bank on the way, so there wouldn’t be time to do the transaction right then.  That served to justify something I was feeling inside me that I did not fully understand—not until the next day.
 
I had crazy dreams that night about being detained in a foreign country and trying to bargain or deceive my way out.  My efforts were unsuccessful but I wasn’t imprisoned, just not allowed to leave some kind of government agency.  I stayed willingly, not attempting to force my way out and risk reprisal.  Later scenes were of me and Kate in a car, trying to decide what town in that foreign land to drive to now that we were free to travel.  We had to choose which way to turn and debated going left or right.  On top of things, the car was nearly out of gas.  I turned off the engine.
 
As I woke up and began my morning check-in with myself, and then with Kate, the issue of second guessing came to the fore.  I often watched myself doing it with certain things in life but not with others, and categorized it as some kind of protective behavior.  I wanted to understand what was driving it so I could move past second guessing to a new level of trusting myself, my intuition, and my heart.  I started asking myself and my Guides questions along with some Kinesiology (muscle testing) and what emerged didn’t seem like that big a deal at first glance.
 
I asked if second guessing myself was about fear and got NO’s all around.  Stating the obvious, I asked if there was some kind of payoff for me and got a YES.  If I’m not doing it out of fear, then what’s driving it?, I wondered.  Then another word came into my awareness; faith.  I knew I had trouble with faith, not as a concept, but as a felt sense.  I easily believed in the unseen world that I had been touched by many times in my life without any outside “proof” other than my own senses.  What I had trouble with was the sense of comfort, certainty, and assurance that I figured would go along with a feeling of faith in what I believed.
 
Just a couple of days before, I had spoken with an insistent telemarketer who had called The Mesa, wanting to sell us health insurance.  I laughed out loud when she stated her case, telling her that we are holistic healing practitioners and don’t foresee a need to go to doctors.  “OK,” she said, “but what if you have an accident or a heart attack?  We can set you up with catastrophic insurance.”  I told her that I didn’t need to have an accident because I was facing the things inside of myself that would cause me to manifest one.  “But what if you were in an accident?” she continued, “You wouldn’t want to end up in the hospital with a $50,000 medical bill, would you?”  I told her that I wasn’t going to end up in the hospital.  “You wouldn’t go to the hospital if you were hurt?” she asked incredulously, missing the point.  She then wished me luck and promptly hung up.
 
Even while I was talking with the relentless, obviously well trained and accomplished telemarketer about my beliefs and outlook on health and life outcomes, I could feel that second guessing going on deep inside of me, down there in the subconscious “parking garages” of what we call the Binary Level.  “But what if I’m wrong?” it whispered.  “That would be awful…”  I recognized the feeling from other occasions, like explaining energy healing to skeptical strangers.  I also knew that this was exactly what the telemarketer was counting on me thinking.  I somehow objectively observed it all happening in real time; this inner struggle to stand my ground and have faith in what I knew.  There was still an uneasy feeling, and that voice.  Was it just whimpering, or the “voice of reason”?
 
Sitting there with Kate, I made a verbal list of what I knew of myself and my faith:  I knew I had it, that it was very big, and of great strength to have gotten me this far.  I also knew that I struggled with consciously experiencing it.  I seldom felt something reassuring kick in when I felt I needed it.  There was clear evidence of some kind of internal reckoning about faith.  Was it simply a conflict between belief and doubt, or was it more of a disconnect—my turning faith off, like flipping the switch on some inner kitchen appliance.  I could visualize that having happened for any number of traumatic reasons in my life, but the nature of an underlying conflict was more obscure.  I felt unsure how to get directly to the issue, but my instincts told me that if we started a Guided Head Movement healing for me about feeling faith, the conflict would likely show itself.
 
I decided to ask Kate to use the statement, “Brad, I want you to feel your faith,” as the healing request for the process.  As she said it and started to roll my head for the NO portion of the no/yes sequence, I gauged the level of resistance within me.  I recognized it from other healings, not only for me or Kate, but with clients in our Healing Center as well.  It was like that of a child afraid of water being asked to jump into the pool.  I knew there would be resistance and eventual relenting.  I knew the water of Faith wouldn’t be so bad once I was in it, but I had to somehow get past whatever was stopping me from diving in.
 
Then I heard words form from deep inside of me, first the word, “sense”, rapidly followed by “nonsensical”, and finally a whole sentence, “Faith isn’t sensical.”  That was it.  Faith, a spiritual standpoint, didn’t make sense.  Suddenly I recognized the problem I was having and how widespread it was in my personal world.  Little of what I focused on doing or what I believed in made much “sense” in a logical, provable, rational way.  I was experiencing conflict over whether all of Creation was purely logical, (reason-able) as science would have us believe, or spiritual, as um… religion would have us believe.  (Hmm…)  And there was the rub: vast discrepancies between scientific, religious, and spiritual points of view, with “me” in the middle.
 
To my thoughtful conscious mind, the paradigm of a spiritual Universe made a kind of sense, but my under-the-radar, childlike, inner self wasn’t sure.  It had the fear-based religious story I knew wasn’t true, and the nay-saying of others to deal with.  (Throw in the Tooth Fairy and any “imaginary” beings I was told I was seeing to add to my confusion.)  At some early point in my life this caused a disconnection of faith at the control center down on the Binary Level because I couldn’t agree with myself on what to believe in.  (“Oh, shoot…  Just unplug it, Charley!”)
 
We switched the healing request to; “I want you to know, faith makes sense.”  As soon as Kate said that to me I felt things activating, even before she started to turn my head.  What happened next as she started to roll my head from side to side took me and my logical mind totally off guard.  There was this commotion somewhere deep inside of my psyche that I felt more than saw.  I described it to Kate as someone tearing things up, the way a boozed-up rock star would gleefully trash a room; tearing up books and magazines, busting furniture, pulling down the curtains.  There was no anger involved, just a frenzied ripping apart of something—an old system of belief and being perhaps.  The issue’s energy shifted immediately, confirmed by a muscle test, but with it also came new ideas about the concept of “making sense” and who was choosing what it was for me.  Personally, faith made perfect sense.
 
Kate had also been second guessing herself over what “made sense” and I helped her shift it with a similar Guided Head Movement healing.  As we talked about the healing we recognized that the issue of things needing to make a particular brand of sense (be sensical) was also holding us up in other areas of our life.  It was pretty obvious that concepts like art, love, energy healing, intuition, meditation, helping strangers, necessary play, prayer, and faith made little if any logical, practical “sense” in the rude, fiscally oriented, technologically driven world around us.
 
The dilemma with the tipi wasn’t really where to buy it, getting the best deal, what configuration to select, or the possible headaches of dealing with another rather bulky, unusual possession, but whether or not having a tipi made any sense at all in the first place.  The real question was; …made senseto whom?  To Kate and me, it made perfect sense, but not to our inner policemen (Cue the sirens…) who wanted to keep us in line with societal systems of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, wise and foolish.
 
For that matter, by business standards the whole idea of The Mesa made little sense.  Our “business plan” was non-existent because it came from Spirit and our souls.  Our first goal is to help people and make the world a better place, not just make money.  From a CEO’s point of view we are too generous with our time, and don’t concern ourselves enough with profit margins, shop lifting prevention, liability “exposure”, meticulous record keeping, inflated appearances, or “monetizing” healing.  We just know that what we are doing is our spiritual mission, (There is no “Plan B”.) but have spent far too much time and energy wrestling with the societal “sense” of it and second guessing ourselves.  Now we could stop.
 
Curiously, when we looked at some of the other things our inner selves regarded as non-sensical and second guessed about, we found that for the two of us it was art, not love (what we often see as foundational in our healing work) that appeared as the key to breaking down our old system of what made sense and what didn’t.  Clearly art’s not what we have been taught it is, but the mystery of Creation itself.  Somewhere in our Beings, we already knew that.  We remembered its metaphysical, shamanic, and necessary  nature, but few others seemed to register it on the level we did.  To an empath, those kind of energy numbers feel overwhelming and defeating.  We have to develop ways to cope with conformity, like dimming faith, dimming love, and dimming art.  This gets worse and worse with time and experience.
 
I still vividly remember being 18 yrs old and carving a large wooden sculpture in my mother’s basement, talking out loud to myself about what I was engaging in to the rhythm of mallet and chisel:  I love doing this; standing here and making chips, I said.  It feels good.  But what good is it?  People need refrigerators, they don’t need art, I lamented, but kept on chipping.  I was dealing with society’s and my parents’ view of the impracticality of art.  They didn’t see the same kind of sense I saw it make.  This probably started for me in kindergarten when I heard my teacher say, “It’s time to put your crayons away now…”
 
For my wife, it was in college that the sensicalness of art was called vividly into question.  She had already chosen Communications Graphics as her major to hopefully attain a practical way of earning a living with her art talent.  A well meaning guidance counselor encouraged her to add Art Education as a “fall back” double major, which of course, made sense.  When she graduated it was much easier for Kate to become a teacher than studio artist or commercial designer.  She followed the path of least (or was it greater?) resistance for many years until “retiring” from her teaching job to be full time at The Mesa.  Many times I have seen her stymied by the “artist’s block” caused by that silent questioning, “Does this make any sense?”  Fortunately for me and Kate, we did not forget that art is the most sensical thing we both know, and our Spirits encouraged us to go on.  Second guessing ourselves was the vestigial holdover of values externally exacted on us by the adults in our world.  When we did healings for each other about the sense that art makes, many other intangibles made sense, too.
 
We encourage you: Call up your faith, your love, your art; no matter what others think in terms of sense or non-sense.  Take back your inner knowing of what’s sensical for you.  We’ll be here to pass out crayons, and help you let go of the second guessing.

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Disconnecting from Negative Motivation

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Brad Silberberg

Many people these days are thinking themselves into a frenzy, not even realizing that they are thinking at all, because it passes by their own awareness like so many subliminal Coca-Cola ads on the movie theater screen in their minds.  Our conscious thinking, the thoughts we know we’re having, is responsive and usually fairly relative.  We may see ourselves or situations as this way or that way at any given moment, depending on the circumstances.  There are choices to be made, possibilities to be sorted though, actions to be turned off or on.

This other repetitive, under-the-radar, subconscious thinking is often harshly negative and going on unabated in the background at a level we have learned to largely ignore, because it would otherwise drive us to distraction.  Some of the time we are able to drown it out by mentally putting our fingers in our ears and saying, “la-la-la-la-la-la-la…,” but in more quiet moments and times of crisis, it still gets through to gnaw on our hearts.  It’s happening way down on what we have dubbed the Binary Level.

On the Binary, things are reactive and absolute.  It’s all knee-jerk, black or white, with no gray areas.  It’s the place in our psyche where there is no questioning, no maybe, no choices zero through nine, but just ones or zeros, yes or no, off or on, go or no-go.  It’s where the little switches in our deepest emotional being are flipped in one position and not free to move back and forth with our conscious will.  They are padlocked there by old emotional pain, trauma, and negative programming, preventing us from changing their position even if and when we become aware of their presence and which way they are flipped.  It is our root level operating system.

Kate and I have been seeing that our own Binary Level issues are the ones that most strongly keep us from needed action even when we consciously “know better” and draw us towards self-loathing, stalling, self-destructive, or self-sabotaging behavior seemingly without a clue why we’re doing it.  It’s the place where “I want to–” turns into “I just can’t”, “I don’t want to–” becomes “I can’t help myself”, and “I could–” slips into “I can’t change”.  Luckily, with some careful Kinesiology (muscle testing) we’ve been getting glimpses of what’s in place on our Binaries, and with our Guided Head Movement healings we have become adept at removing the padlocks and freeing the switches.

What we’re beginning to recognize is that much of what is locked for us on the Binary Level got that way because of our exposure to negative motivation as a teaching tool.  In our formative years, we were often taught through avoidance—avoidance of pain, suffering, lack, rejection, displeasing others, humiliation, etc.  Short of physical punishment, we were molded through the use of heavyweight motivators.  Fear was used to teach us to be safe, to keep from being rejected (fit in), and to avoid angering others.  Guilt and shame were used to get us to steer clear of misbehaving, to tell the acceptable truth, and generally conform.  Lack was used to teach us to be responsible for belongings, to conserve precious resources, and to share.

While these motivators worked conveniently well for our parents and even for us when we were little, they locked down emotional switches establishing limited patterns of behavior on the Binary.  As we get older, the pressure down there builds and builds until the system begins to totally backfire, emotionally preventing us from doing what our now more mature reason, creativity, capability, and freedom of choice would have us do.  We get stuck.

Luckily, and because of our pressing desire to heal ourselves, we have discovered an expression to use for unearthing those Binary Level padlocks that stemmed from negative motivators with our Guided Head Movement healings: “You just think ______.”  This comes from the understanding that we create much of our (internal) reality through our thoughts alone.  The way we have seen it, anything phrased that way that we’d reply “NO” to through Kinesiology (muscle testing) indicates something on the Binary that is regarded as absolute and immutable.  (“No, I don’t just think I’m a failure.  I am.”)  Giving a “YES” response indicates that we are aware that we sometimes, humanly, just entertain such possibilities.

What if we’re just thinking we’re afraid, stupid, a failure, not loveable, etc?  What if we could do so without all the fearful certainty?  It was with great curiosity that we began to search out what we were denying we were thinking ourselves out of or into.  We quickly compiled a list and started unlocking.  The sensation of freedom was enormous as we unlocked self imposed limitations like, “You just think something’s the matter with you,” and “You just think you’re lost.”  We’ve experienced the release of much anger and grief.

Today was case in point.  I found Kate sitting once again in front of a large blank piece of drawing paper, wanting to start a drawing but finding herself unable to make a mark.  She felt blocked.  I had seen her do this several times over the last couple of days and offered to help her figure out what was stopping her.  It wasn’t lack of confidence in her artistic ability, because we both knew it would easily flow out of her on demand.  It wasn’t that she lacked ideas about what to draw; she had too many in fact.  As we sat down and started in with some muscle testing questions to find out what were the roots of the impediment, three things showed up pretty quickly.

One was simply not knowing how to start.  Another was guilt over all the other “important” things she “should” have been doing instead of making art; like cleaning the house for instance.  The third had to do with the possibility that she might not like the drawing and have “wasted” the paper.  I told her that my own choice was for her to make her art, not clean the house, and that we had lots of paper.  I reminded her that it was one of the cheapest art materials she could use, but I could tell that the prospect of “ruining” an otherwise “perfectly good” piece of paper with a mediocre drawing still troubled her.

We crafted three statements to test for Binary Level denial of her thinking: “You just think you don’t know how to start,” “You just think you’re guilty,” and “You just think you’re wasteful.”  Kate tested weak or “NO” for all three, indicating that she saw those conditions as beyond the control of her thoughts.  I tested the same way myself.

We set about unlocking Kate’s Binary thoughts first, and all kinds of images came into her head.  She could feel the patterns break up and we confirmed that with muscle testing.  We talked about how the negative nature of her childhood motivators had been keeping her from her heart’s desires.  We then set about helping me unlock.  My guides suggested that we start with the wastefulness issue.

As soon as Kate started to guide my head in a side-to-side, “NO!” movement, I exploded into tears of deep grief.  I recognized how powerfully I had been influenced by being “guilted” into conserving my parents’ precious resources.  Unfortunately, I learned much too well.  I recognized that on the Binary Level I saw my very existence as wasteful, my very presence on the planet consuming resources that would be better left unused.  I felt the urge to save every bag tie, recycle every scrap of paper, and eat questionably old leftovers, even though I knew full well it wasn’t necessarily the best thing to do.

Suddenly, I recalled an incident from elementary school, maybe third or fourth grade.  My mother had been packing me sandwiches for my sack lunch that I simply didn’t like.  I would take a few bites from them, wrap them back up, toss them in the big trash barrel in the cafeteria, and eat the other goodies.  One day one of the teachers on duty (not my own) saw me do this.  She made me pull my sandwich back out of the trash and eat it, telling me how wasteful I was and that she would call my mother if I didn’t.  I was totally scared and humiliated.  That was just the kind of experience that locks our internal switches and it reinforced my extreme aversion to what I saw as wastefulness.  I had forgotten about it.

It took several repeats of NO and YES head movements for my pattern to unlock.  All at once I started to feel a decidedly physical something happening in my body, starting at my right foot and oddly spinning through my whole aura up my right side and down my left.  I felt hugely relieved and started yawning deeply.  When we muscle tested again, not only had the wastefulness issue shifted, but so to had my self-perceived guilt.

Here are more examples of the kind of “You just think _________ ,” themes we’ve examined in the last couple of days.  Only some of them were locked within us:

“You just think you’re hurt.”
“…you’re sick.”
“…you’re stupid.”
“…you’re a failure.”
“…you’re not a real artist.”
“…no one loves you.”
“…the worst is going to happen.”
“…you’re a liar.”
“…you’re in trouble.”
“…you’re ashamed.”
“…you’re a mama’s boy.”

This last theme was also highly emotional for me.  I had so fully taken on this negative motivation to get my mother’s love, protection, attention, and a unique place in the family unit that I actually believed it.  I treated myself as a weakling and a coward.  I was also hugely angry about it and spent much time and energy struggling to keep it at bay.  As we did the unlocking Guided Head Movement healing, I saw that it was merely a role I played within my family that worked well when I was a child, but became a self-image “mask” that I grudgingly, but compliantly wore into my adulthood, something many men do, despite reason and my Soul knowing.  I have now taken it off.

I came back into the living room later on to find Kate once again stalled in front of the blank paper.  She told me that she was having thoughts about how her drawing would turn out and that she wanted to do it in her own style instead of copying that of some past or present master.  As we talked about it again, something I said sparked tears for my dear wife; my conviction that making art is never a trivial issue because it is an act of spirituality.  Her tears were, in part, because she did not feel her efforts would be worthy.  She felt that what she had to give the viewer on that piece of paper would not be enough.  She muscle tested “NO” for, “You just think that you don’t give enough.”  Some part of her was convinced she didn’t, reflecting a deep inner conflict for this most generous woman.

After we unlocked it for her with a healing, I took Kate by the hand and led her into our office.  We stood together in front of the framed drawing of her mother Kate had made when she was just 4 yrs old.  She knew where I was going—that even the gift of that simple child’s drawing had been enough giving for God and for her mother.  It was only later in life that something changed for Kate and she perceived herself as not giving enough.  This was not surprising in a world that teaches us that our parents gave us life, and that Jesus died for our sins.  How can we ever give enough to pay that all back?  When I peeked into the living room a half hour later, Kate was busily working away, drawing a Spirit Bear.

In order for our world to change, we must each change.  To do this we must move from negative to positive motivation for what we think and do and teach our children that way.  The process starts with observing ourselves and becoming aware of what makes us tick.  Unlocking our emotional and mental locks is relatively easier than identifying them in the first place, but it is not impossible.  It does take some time and a bit of patience.  You, and our world, are worth it.

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Joy of Gardening: Rediscovering a Connection with Nature.

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Brad Silberberg

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Betty, a Washington County, PA Master Gardener.  She had called us at The Mesa to ask questions about Medicine Wheels.  It turned out that she was a registered nurse who also ran a plant nursery and was planning a presentation for an upcoming Master Gardener seminar in the spring on the concept of “Healing Gardens”.  She had read a book about Medicine Wheel gardens and had found our website when searching the internet on the topic.  Betty said that she had some questions about things like the Four Directions colors and if there were specific traditions about planting in Medicine Wheels so she could include them in her upcoming PowerPoint presentation.

At first I just listened as Betty did most of the talking without a break.  She had not understood a lot of what she had read about Native American customs and kept asking more and more questions without giving me any chance to respond until I just had to interrupt.  I started to tell her about the ancient tradition of Medicine Wheels and how the idea of planting gardens in them seemed to be a more modern idea.  What began to become clear to me as our conversation continued in a more shared fashion was how different my world has become from most people’s because it is structured by spiritual awareness.  That, and the fact that Betty was noticing something.

Betty explained to me how she had become aware of the concept of the healing nature of gardening and that she wanted to combine her desire to help others that she had heretofore expressed only through her medical vocation with her personal interest in plants.  She was excited about the medicinal herbs she already had growing, and kept asking questions like how to know what color plants to plant in which part of a Medicine Wheel.  I could tell that her background in biomedicine had her in a box.  What was missing seemed to be a felt sense of the spiritual connection possible with The Wheel, the Plant Nation, Mother Earth, and within true healing; the Spirit part.

I went on to tell her that Medicine Wheels were many things, including real and interactive vortexes of spiritual energy and connection that were palpable to me.  I did my best to find words to describe to Betty how Native American wisdom sees the interconnectedness of all things, (Mitakuye Oyasin, or “All My Relations”) and how that relationship is honored with mutual respect, gratitude, and offerings of thanks-in-advance for what is asked for.

Then Betty began telling me a story.  She had been having an open house event at her nursery where there were activities for children.  Several were in attendance, gleefully romping around the gardens.  Suddenly, Betty spied a curious sight.  No less than five garter snakes had come out of the weeds to sun themselves and were all in a line, each coiled up neatly, basking in the midday heat.  A northern water snake had also come out of the pond to join them when the children began to notice their presence and started shrieking.  Some of the kids’ parents started saying things like, “I know what I’d do… I’d kill them right quick.”  Betty saw the opportunity for what she herself described as a “teachable moment”.  I was impressed.

Betty went on to convey to me how she told the children that if they settled down and just left the snakes in peace, they wouldn’t hurt them.  She also related how snakes are beneficial parts of Nature, explaining how they control other garden pests.  While she recognized that seeing all of the snakes together was a sight she had never seen and might likely never see again, Betty talked about it as if it was a totally random occurrence.  She was “getting it”, I thought—but only part of it.  I told Betty that those creatures presented themselves to her, the children, and their parents for a very obvious lesson about tolerance and coexistence.  What I could feel was missing for Betty was the concept that they might have done it in an orchestrated fashion—on purpose.

Betty also went on to tell me how she has designated part of her many acre garden as a “Fairy Trail” for kids.  She talked about fairies in a way that suggested she believed in their existence and had a kind of respect and fondness for them.  I told her about the concept of working co-creatively with Nature devas (creational spirits) to grow healthier more productive plants, citing how people at Findhorn in northern Scotland were able to grow robust, healthy plants in pure sand with the help of local Nature spirits.

At some point in our discussion, Betty started talking to me in the displaced way of speaking I have noticed many people unconsciously employ, using the pronoun “You” when she was really talking about her own experience, as in; “You feel bad when people do such and so…” when she was really referring to her own sadness instead of mine.  I passed on that teachable moment, (Re: The Power of “Languaging”, a Mesa Creative Arts Center workshop.) because she was hinting at something—her own awakening:

“A lot of people like to garden, because they like to have flowers around,” Betty said.  “They’re pretty.  When people are serious gardeners… after a while you begin to notice something bigger.  You feel something else that you can’t describe.  You don’t have words for it,” She added.  “I can describe it,” I offered.  “That’s part of what Kate and I do.  We help people find ways to talk about uncommon experiences in plain words.”

I went on to tell Betty that the “bigness” she and her gardening friends had been experiencing was a level of connection with Nature that has become uncommon in our techno-driven lives.  It is so uncommon, in fact, that popular culture no longer has much language to describe it.  I told her that we have found that a lack of such language can make people shy about admitting their experiences—even to themselves, making them easier to pass off as “not real”.

I did my best to give Betty a sense of how greatly we have muffled our ability to sense the vast spiritual energies, patterns, and consciousnesses present in Nature, both by our blind race to dominate her and by filling our space with man-made frequencies that cancel them out or distract our attention.  I could sense that some part of her knew exactly what I was talking about whether she could describe it or not.

To me, my conversation with Betty was a tiny shred of evidence that people are waking up, and that there is still hope that Humanity will change for the better.  I’m seeing and hearing more stories like Betty’s everywhere I go these days and find them deeply gratifying and encouraging proof that Creation has a plan that we, in the end, cannot completely resist.

Betty will be out to see us in a couple of weeks to learn more about the Medicine Wheel, Nature Spirits, and Native American wisdom first hand.  Her story is a reminder that modern life being what it is, if we spend enough time in the garden, allow ourselves to silence our minds, and be seduced by the moment, sometimes—in the still quiet amongst plants, bugs, soil, and sun, something still manages to get through our dim awareness and touch us.  It is proof of what Indians say about things that have real power having that power whether we believe in them or not.  Nature is reaching out to all of us and will work its way through our defenses the way water will always find the tiniest crack to seep through.  Like Betty, part of you wants desperately to taste and savor it.  The Light is winning, drop by drop.

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Releasing Resolutions: New Year’s 2012

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Brad Silberberg

Over the last couple of decades of my life I have usually felt that New Years, like so many other American/Gregorian calendar holidays, is just another day like any other.  It always seemed so arbitrary, coming some ten days or so after the Winter Solstice, a convention of a cycle of 12 unequal man-made months assembled in an era now distant in time and consciousness.  To me, Nature has appeared to take very little notice of it in years past, the same way the deer, blue jays, or oak trees don’t make much difference of weekends or the 4th of July.

While that may be true, something different seemed to happen this New Year’s.  Maybe it was just the crescendo point in a normal seasonal cycle of rising and falling energy around the time of the Solstice magnified by an intensely bright full moon on the 9th of January, but it felt like something else; a ratcheting up of the energy of Creation, Divinely timed to the start of this much touted year.  What I’ve noticed by the lack of rejoicing in the mundane world is that not everyone seems to be experiencing it.  How could that be?

I’ve read several astrological reports, telling me what this or that planet is doing and how those heavenly bodies are the cause of things being stirred up as the new year is just beginning.  The point of view of some is that these celestial orbs are demanding our attention and mercilessly thumping us into change.  My personal sense is that they, too, are moving to the rhythm of something greater and are not at the root of it, but were set in precise motion at a time before time, like so many billiard balls in a carefully planned “six-ball-in-the side-pocket” break.  To me they are dancing parallel with us at great distance, not playing the tune.  They are cosmic ballerinas, and we are stumbling to stay in step.

When it comes right down to it, though, it really doesn’t matter from where or when the flow of energy I’m captivated by originates, just that I have been moved by it.  I feel that it has massively motivated Kate and me in a few new directions, as well as supplying an impetus to actually (finally!) follow through on some old and still valid plans.  It has prompted us to find new, deeper, and more fundamental levels of inner experience to heal that have enabled us to let go of self-restriction and even a couple of bad habits.  We feel it will continue to urge us to forge ahead.

Suddenly, and what at first glance might seem inexplicably, we feel like tackling things we’ve been putting off and are engaging in them together without much fuss.  We find ourselves more intuitive, outspoken, effective, and willing to deal calmly with disappointment when it (less frequently) arises and more gently with each other when we disagree.  We’re going with The Flow and it’s a lovely fast and rising current.  I’m not saying that it was because of the turn of the New Year, but the moment seemed like some kind of landmark for it.

So if this energy is somehow as I perceive it; universal and brightly flowing through all things right now as we enter 2012, why is there still so much chaos and despair on the news instead of more of what we and a few others we know are personally experiencing?  It’s about dimensionality.  (Huh?)

Lifetimes of materialism and “reason” have led us to believe that everything behaves the way hard, 3-dimensional physical matter does.  One thing is not simultaneously another (my desk is not that chair across the room), things can’t move and stand still at the same time, and two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same tick of the clock.  We see evidence of this all the time in the “normal” world, like when vying for that last open parking spot at the Mall right before Christmas.

What I’m sensing more clearly now is that the non-physical elements of reality; energies, consciousnesses, creational blueprints and, especially, the chameleon-like parts of our own inner selves can and indeed do occupy the same “here-ness” at the same “now-ness”.  They are immobile but somehow still move.  They can be cold yet hot, black and yet white.  They overlap and weave in and out in a way that defies our 3rd-dimensional and physically based “sense”, so we tend to shut down and shut them out of our awareness, focusing our perception on only one self-created, limited reality we all nod knowingly about.

In truth we can be happy and sad at the same time; want to go the to movies and cower at home at the same moment with equal enthusiasm, succeed or fail with the same efforts.  We can be dragged down by wholesale negativity, or soar on the wings of higher vibration and consciousness that simultaneously (co-) exist.  We can ride the stars while stuck in traffic on the Parkway, and build our dream while others sleepwalk through life.

We habitually tend to pretend that we don’t notice this because we were never taught how to deal with it, refusing to “look under the hood” because we don’t know which thingy the oil goes in, yet are living within more than one reality space without ever having to get out of bed.  As of the last week or so, however, it seems to be getting harder to ignore.  The good part is that when we get to realizing all of this dimensional blending as a precursor to Universal Unity and learn to embrace it instead of stubbornly resisting or cinching up in fear, we get to choose to partake of it.  We can pick and choose the kinds of energy, consciousness, and outcomes we want to live and work with, and sidestep the rest like a graceful bullfighter.  (Olé!)

Through personal transformation and healing on our lowest dimensional levels we can attune to this freshening, higher dimensional breeze instead of being blown over by it.  We can select the coinciding inner ways of being that we want to embody, release the imbalanced ones without having to retreat from life, and set sail.  Fortunately, the new energies of 2012 are making it greatly easier for us to do so right now if we let them.  Please note:  This is a limited time offer and may not be repeated.  The Door is closing.  Sadly for some, I feel that, too.

So, instead of making unrealistic or perfectionist “resolutions” for the New Year, why not just relax and set an “intention to pay attention”, tune in to the new and improved Flow of Creation, and begin to move your feet?  A new and more fulfilling reality is jogging easily right alongside you without breaking a sweat as you stumble awkwardly through your busy life, waiting for you to turn your head and notice it Cheshire-grinning back at you.  It may be right there within your reach, rushing forward and yet waiting stock-still for you to grasp it at the same time, because it has that ability—and a desire for you to catch up.  That can happen when you move beyond 3 dimensions.  A part of you remembers how.

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Grace: Are You Worthy of Loving Patience?

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

Certain lessons seem to emerge over and over again to pummel us in life, mainly because we’re not learning them.  Sometimes it’s greater mastery that’s eluding us, that feeling of still missing a finer point of one of life’s mostly-assembled puzzles.  Other times, it’s the basic level of something that we’re simply not getting—over and over again.  While many people seem completely oblivious to the fact that there are any lessons in life beyond the “school of hard knocks” kind of stuff, even those of us who are spiritually aware can be ignoring painful issues that we have come here to this Earth to learn about.

One of those themes was bubbling up for me and Kate again over the last few weeks, coming to a head yesterday morning.  It was about patience, something both of us readily admitted we had problems dealing with.  We came by it honestly, the “go-go-go” igniting fire of our common astrological moon in Aries making it squirmy at best for us to wait for much of anything or resist provocation from anyone.

Outwardly, I seemed to most a patient man.  I kept a good professional lid on things with difficult situations, students, visitors, and healing clients at The Mesa.  I practiced great restraint, reminding myself it was the spiritual and loving thing to do, even when my emotions were telling me otherwise.  I was able to get through long difficult tasks like 2hr hypnotherapy regression sessions, accounting snafus, or assembling websites with recalcitrant computers.  People would often look at my artwork and say, “Oh, you must have lots of patience to do things like this.”

My usual reply would be that my definition of patience was “the ability to wait comfortably”, something I readily admitted having trouble with.  Wikipedia defines patience as (in part): “… the level of endurance one can take before negativity.”  What I saw myself as having was focus, determination, drive, and perseverance; the ability to stick with something until it was completed no matter how negative it all felt.  All too often for me though, negativity held the ultimate victory.

I was pretty good at waiting, mind you.  I could stand in line for hours for something I wanted, wait through a long diatribe for my chance for rebuttal, or years for our success with The Mesa, but I did it out of perseverance, self-discipline, and perceived necessity, and often without emotional or mental ease.  (“Dis-ease?” Hmm…)  I could doggedly put up with things or people that challenged me.

Patience seemed to me like little more than holding back.  I often felt like a dog with a biscuit on his nose, listening to his owner saying “wait… wait… wait…,” salivating while anticipating the signal to eat the treat.  I knew I would get what I wanted sooner or later, but the “how long?” of it sometimes drove me impatient.  I was that way with physical or emotional pain.  I could endure it if I knew relatively when it would stop, but became fearful and angry when my suffering appeared open ended.

I had more trouble mustering real patience in an easy, graceful way with certain tasks, but especially when it came to dealing with other people.  In grade school I was great at waiting for Summer vacation to arrive, but had a hard time waiting comfortably for the kid in front of me to finish getting his drink from the water fountain.  Later in life, I got impatient when someone walked or drove slowly in front of me, failed to understand what seemed like very clear instructions I was giving them, or when my species (Humanity, that is–) wasn’t “getting it” with respect to things like the dangers of runaway consumerism, the real price of fracking, the fact that all experience is shared experience, and that things that can’t be scientifically measured are still “real”.

Wikipedia’s article on patience goes on to state that the Buddhist definition of it makes a distinction from the English (Western) version, with patience also referring to “… not returning harm, rather than merely enduring a difficult situation.  It is the ability to control one’s emotions even when being criticized or attacked.”  As I read it, I understood that “returning harm” could come in the form of physical lashing out, but also as the emotional daggers I mightily resisted throwing.  I still felt their sharpness, and that was not patience.

It was often sheer mental and emotional torture for me to be disagreed with or criticized.  I felt like I was being “hit” and wanted to hit back.  I neither knew nor had been taught any polite or “grown up” way to deal with the emotional energy generated within me, so I generally just stuffed it down and pretended I was OK with it.  My threshold for frustration suppression was pretty high, but it took its toll on my body, mind, and spirit.

I steadfastly reserved tantrums for private, or when I simply couldn’t bear things any longer at times when my cup ranneth over.  A couple of days ago, a combination of circumstances (Getting a runaround from Verizon on our week long home phone outage and a separate issue with the Mesa account, spending an hour counseling a friend I accidently autodialed when making another call, helping Kate with balky online shopping services, and having every other size cardboard shipping box except the ones I needed.) on top of other issues that had been building for weeks caused my endurance of life’s flow to wear so thin that I erupted into outward anger.

Usually these days, consciously witnessing myself getting angry would have been even more upsetting to me, but in the heat of this particular moment I didn’t even care that I was or what the root level cause might have been.  On top of everything else, (or because of it) I had suddenly developed mild conjunctivitis (pinkeye) in my left eye, making my vision blurry.  I knew it was all telling me something, but at the time I had no interest in deciphering what the lesson was.

It wasn’t until the following morning that I was mentally and emotionally collected enough to start asking myself and my Guides questions about why I had gotten so angry.  I also looked in Louise Hay’s book, You Can Heal Your Life, to see her take on my pinkeye “dis-ease”.  In her view, it was all about frustration, anger and “not wanting to see”, pretty much what I had been experiencing, but what in particular, was I wanting to look away from?

As I started to talk with my Guides and my overlapping inner selves asking what I didn’t like seeing, what first surfaced was blame about the behavior of others; unaware people and the deteriorating conditions in the world around me.  I knew that things would take some time to resolve through Creation’s efforts as we moved through 2012 and beyond, but I was externalizing my lack of ease and needed to find a way to be at peace inside of myself with all of life.

It didn’t take long to figure out that it was all about patience again, a lesson that kept cropping up for me, but what specifically had caused the pressure cooker to explode?  Kate helped me with some muscle testing (Kinesiology) to get a better picture of my inner landscape.  Statements about my “I” and inner “YOU” showed that they were having no real problem with patience; enduring without negativity.  We came down to the sense that it was the still-young “Brad” component of my Being that was refusing to have patience with life as it presented itself.  Being told, “Be patient, Brad,” elicited a weak or NO response, evidence of fearful resistance inside me.

We proceeded to the living room floor to do a NO/YES Guided Head Movement healing for my inner “Brad”, starting with that same statement, “Be patient, Brad”.  This led us through a chain of deeper and deeper levels of the issue that emerged as the healing progressed.  We asked “Brad” if “he” knew how to be patient, and got a surprising YES muscle test.  Was he willing to be?  NO, … but why?

My mind drifted to the idea of patience as an energy stream.  Where did it come from, I wondered?  Could I create it?  It felt that way.  As I was about to ask my Guides about it, I could feel it flow into me from Creation/God just from turning my attention to it.  My Guides indicated that I could generate patience energy, and my other inner parts agreed that they could create it—but not “Brad”.

We shifted to a healing to help “Brad” accept that he could create patience, but my attention was on the still flowing energy from Creation.  Suddenly I singled out something that I was feeling within that sensation, much the way one would detect a hint of vanilla within a more complex scent.  It was the love component of patience, something I had never thought about or was aware of having experienced in my life.

As I felt my way into this loving patience from God, I had a flash of recognition and burst into tears, releasing old frustration and pain I had been storing for most of my life.  This was the potential of patience, I thought, the possibility to elevate it from rough “put-up-with-ness” to an act of love.  I was feeling God’s infinite and non-judgmental loving patience with me, what some might call “Grace”.

I have rarely, if ever, experienced from people any sort of loving patience for me when I tripped up, didn’t understand, lagged behind, was afraid, or fell flat on my face.  In that moment I imagined what it might look like, and saw a scene of some kind elder gently guiding my hand to make something I was struggling with.  There was no criticism, no push for perfection, no hurry.  We were in the moment together without time.  It was warm and beautiful.  It was also an experience I had never had and longed for.  That vision started tears flowing again.

When I was growing up, my parents had little patience for anything or anyone, let alone me.  They had not learned it.  At best what they had for me was limited and conditional tolerance, and certainly not the unconditional love that goes beyond simple “enduring without negativity”.  I never felt loving patience in school, through religion, or in relationships with adults.  I was unable to give it to myself because I had no idea how it all worked.

Through my tears, I had found the next deeper level of my pain.  Not only had I missed out on loving patience, I realized that with its prior absence in my life I had come to see myself unworthy of it.  My young mind had no other rationale for missing out on what seemed so vital.

People are pretty impatient these days, especially in our American culture.  With instant communication, fast food, next day shipping, and microwave cooking, we have developed a “drive thru” mentality that leaves almost no room for loving patience.  Its lack shows up as rudeness, road-rage, paltry 15 minute appointments allotted for doctor visits, “No Child Left Behind”, attention deficit disorder, and a culture that demands instant gratification … or else.  Aren’t we worthy of loving patience?

When one of our healing clients states that they feel unworthy, we ask, Unworthy of what?  Love?  Being cared for?  We know that there is a specific issue.  Through muscle testing we asked my inner “Brad” if he was worthy of patience and got a NO response.  We asked if he was worthy of God’s patience, and got another NO.  We also asked if he was blocking God’s patience and got a YES.  I wasn’t letting it through because I felt I didn’t deserve it.  “Brad” still perceived the vestigial and anthropomorphic God of my childhood who was even more impatient than his parents.  I had imprinted a concept of God, rather than being schooled in God’s energy.  I was still learning about it.

For my healing, Kate told my inner “Brad” that he was worthy of patience and guided my head for NO (“shaking”) then YES (nodding) as we have learned to do.  As I lay there opening to it, many more things became clear.  I got a sense of how much energy I had stuffed down in frustration, anger, and fear from the impatience of others with me, resulting in my own lack of easy patience.  I saw how surrendering to loving patience was a major part of “releasing the outcome” and the creative flow, and that my lack of it had jammed the gears of my art making and manifesting of many things I wanted.

The more I “tried” to be patient and merely tolerated, the more my desires seemed to elude me, often for long periods of time; the ensuing frustration eroding my patience even further.  I realized the enormity of the loving patience exhibited by God, my Guides, and the Higher Beings who look after me, and how hard Creation must have had to work to give me the great abundance it already has.

As “Brad’s” resistance faded and my energy shifted as the healing progressed, I saw scenes of times when I was impatient with others.  I saw how we all mirror that negativity back and forth between us; impatience begetting impatience, anger begetting anger.  I saw the need to learn this amazing new lesson of engaging loving patience well, and teach it to children, introducing them to its energy to free them from this cultural cycle.  I felt deserving of patience, especially from God, knowing that from that higher source it would be infinitely granted no matter what.

Watching what I was experiencing, Kate recognized that she had a similar issue about feeling unworthy of patience.  As a consequence she also had trouble with holding on to tolerance without negativity for extended periods of time.  On a still and quiet night when her first marriage was on the verge of divorce and her mother slipping into dementia, she had actually heard the oak tree that lives next to our deck speak the word out loud to her.  “Patience.”

At times when our positive tolerance for things like a lack of financial reward for our work, people who were afraid of change, and viral materialism in our outer world wore thin, Kate and I bounced impatience back and forth with each other, amplifying the discordant energy like the multiple images seen in two facing mirrors.  We did our best to be patient out of respect for each other, but I saw when it would slip away from her, and she from me.

We talked about times we remembered being short with each other or reacting negatively to being questioned or criticized, and knew that it could be different.  I had already done the hard work of deep emotional digging.  From witnessing my own struggle empathically, Kate’s healing was faster and less emotional.  We both felt hugely different.  By nightfall, my eye was much better.

At this time of holidays, family gatherings, and resolutions for the New Year, why don’t we all look for ways to practice being more lovingly patient with each other and ourselves.  The upcoming Winter Solstice is an energetic window just perfect for that kind of change.  In doing so, we can tap into the flow of loving patience from Creation, be buoyed up by it, and spread that light around the world.  This is just the kind of thing that needs to happen to make 2012 the pivotal year it has been prophesied to be for Humanity.  I’m willing to release the outcome and be lovingly patient, … and so is “Brad”.

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Remebering Your Spiritual Lineage

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

Our trip to the beach during Thanksgiving week 2011 was marvelous and full of learning.  It felt so good to be at the ocean again, feeling the energy of the water, wind, and sand.  The temperatures reached nearly 70 degrees by the weekend, which gave us a much needed respite from colder Fall weather.  We engineered time to walk on the beach at sunrise, and to traverse the boardwalk a couple of times.  A few die-hards still had their shops open, and Kate was able to add to her seashell collection.

Even though things were hectic, with healing sessions running until 10pm on the night before Thanksgiving, we were still able to relax and enjoy the “place energy” that is so different from here in the Pittsburgh area.  The consciousness of the resort town is different than that present here in the Burgettstown or Pittsburgh area, with rental and vacation real estate and the money involved driving everything.  Working with clients was different too, in that they brought different concerns to the healing table.

The folks we worked with in OCNJ were clients of our friend’s beach block massage center, many of whom could afford it as a feel-good luxury.  The majority were concerned about their careers, and how to expand their business to not only keep up with but surpass the Joneses.  We saw very few who brought up physical health issues, or sited old emotional trauma as their reason for seeking help, even though these energies did emerge in many healings.  This was very different from the concerns of those we see at The Mesa, where our clients are often in much more dire life circumstances.

Two women had driven two hours to come and see us, but I almost didn’t get to work with them.  As we were chatting when they first arrived, they both proudly mentioned being “in recovery” for long periods of time.  I started a firestorm when describing how our Guided Head Movement healings have helped people by asking if they thought they could ever be recovered instead of in perpetual recovery.  This suggestion brought up such great fear, rage, and finger pointing that the women almost walked out.

Thankfully, Kate intervened with a pertinent story about her mother.  I decided to leave everything up to Spirit and say nothing more that could possibly antagonize the women on this touchy subject.  I was in a place of willingness to let them leave if that was for their highest good, and had no intention of trying to convince them that their very resistance showed the need for the healing their Higher Selves had directed them to.  Luckily (For me, as it turned out.) they decided to stay, with the least resistant and angry one agreeing to the first healing session while her companion sulked and sat with Kate for a Seashell Divination reading.

When we came out from our session, the angry lady had cooled down from the seashells’ water energy and asked her friend a simple question with respect to the healing session, “Was it worth it?”.  Her companion replied that it surely had been, and that she recognized that they had come all that way for exactly what they were getting.  As I took the second woman into the “Mermaid Room” for her healing (It has a waterbed type massage table, another story all by itself!) I released the outcome of the session, knowing that the seashells had softened her up, that I could surely help her, and that something big was about to happen.

The woman had self-image issues that had been interfering with her finding a love relationship that was honest and reciprocal.  The theme we narrowed things down to for her YES/NO Guided Head Movement healing was one I had worked with for others before; “Remember who you are”.  I explained that this wasn’t about her family or what she had achieved in life, but about remembering who she was on the level of her Soul.

Just before we were about to start with the actual guided healing, something else came into my head to suggest for her to remember that stunned me; her Spiritual Lineage.  It was something reminiscent of the unbroken line of energy of great spiritual teachers here on Earth, each connected to their master and their master’s masters, going back to the Buddhas, the Jesuses, and other lesser known holy men and women who spread enlightenment.  It just wasn’t from this world.

In No-Time I had gotten a download from Spirit about the whole concept, but had first seen my own instead of my client’s.  My higher sight swung past the Soul I had been at important points in past lives, seeing familiar and new flashes of being a healer, priest, spiritual leader, etc, but something else I had never considered sprang into my awareness.  I got a sense of all of the masters who had taught me on the Spirit Side—in between incarnations, during my sleep, and in astral projection.  I sensed that my education and training thus far was a huge and careful investment in energy, loving guidance, and Light.  I was seeing it.

Obviously, I was remembering my own Spiritual Lineage, but was I in acceptance of the magnitude of it?  I decided to let that wait for the moment and turned my attention back to my client, realizing that only a split second had passed.  When I told her what I was getting about her Spiritual Lineage and how she needed to remember that she was a member of spiritual “royalty”, she gasped.  “That’s the same thing your wife just told me!” said the woman.  (Later she told Kate that when I had said basically the same thing she had just heard from her, she “wanted to throw up.”)

The two women left as our new “best friends”, vowing to keep in touch with us in the future.  When we returned to our room, I told Kate about the gift that had been given to me.  When we checked to see if we were accepting our Spiritual (and Twin Flame) Lineage, we both got negative muscle tests.  It all seemed too fantastic to our little materio-emotional selves to acknowledge.

We proceeded to do Guided Head Movement healings for each other and could feel the issue and its energy shift.  When I thought about the concept later after my healing, I got a better idea of what I had seen.  I pondered the comparison of my ancestry to my Spiritual Lineage and an expression that I have often repeated to our students came to my mind:  While we owe much to our forebears, what we truly are has come through our ancestry but is not from it.  We are from Spirit.  That is our origin and our true nature.  (I drive a Ford pickup truck, but I’m not a Ford!)

When I picture the difference between my ancestral line and Spiritual Lineage, I see it this way:  My ancestry is physical and horizontal, going back through my mom and dad and branching out like roots or a tree laying on its side.  My Spiritual Lineage on the other hand, is meta-physical and goes vertically, branching out like a tree of Light through my masterful Soul, Spirit Guides, Ascended Masters, Angels, and Beings of Light I can only imagine.

The time is now for all of us Light Workers to remember our Spiritual Lineage and why we have come here to this Earth at this amazing time for Humanity.  Now that you’ve been reminded of the concept, you can turn your attention to it and connect with it through meditation, dreams, creative endeavors, and ceremony.  It’s the best way to honor what has been invested in you and do what you’ve come here to do—change the world.

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Giving in to How Others Interpret Us

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

I was talking with a visitor to The Mesa the other day who was concerned about their spiritual path for this lifetime.  They felt unsure about what they were doing as their life’s work and wondering what they had come here to do.  They wanted to be doing something “more” than they were, but felt they had no idea what that was.  They were expecting something important, but to whom?

I remarked that some part of me had always known what I was here to do, having made elaborate plans for it on the other side.  I talked about having packed a spiritual “suitcase” with all the particulars I would need for this lifetime’s work, like how I’d look, my astrological makeup, the energy of my voice, and creative gifts, to name a few.  I had gotten derailed from where I was headed for a while in my youth, but something (my Soul) had helped me find my way because I could still hear it and chose to listen.

To make a point about my little “suitcase”, I found myself telling the visitor about the Mayans’ Tzolkin calendar cycle and how it was used to understand a new born child’s life path.  The system assigns a number “tone” from one to thirteen paired with one of 20 sun signs in sequence to each day, resulting in 260 distinct combinations of energy and spiritual significance.

I mentioned how each of those 260 permutations reflected spiritually significant patterns that the Maya had come to recognize.  They lived their lives in harmony with the energy of each day, and didn’t attempt to push past it to do something not supported by it.  I explained how they saw the energy of a baby’s day of birth as reflected by their Tzolkin “astrology” as an indication of that child’s chosen path in life.

A baby’s parents would review their child’s Tzolkin combination trusting that their child had chosen their entry point into the recurring cycle so as to use specific universal, cosmic, and creational energies (their “suitcase”) to complete their contribution to Mayan society and attain their maximum spiritual growth.  They respected and honored that choice and did what they could to support it.

If a son came into the world on a day that reflected warrior energy, for instance, his parents would make sure that he was trained in the art of war and didn’t encourage him to be a brick mason or a healer.  If their daughter was born on a day whose Tzolkin reflected spiritual devotion, she would be taken for training to serve in the temples, not to work in the fields or be a basket maker.

They would find the most competent teacher in their village to teach their child what they came to Earth to do.  They actively looked for and defended their offspring’s destiny and helped them to fulfill it.

As I told this little story to my singular audience, I was suddenly struck by how amazing it was that I have managed to live the creative and spiritual life I have.  It was stunning to me in that moment how my own parents had so grossly misread my very obvious gifts that I began to manifest at such a young age, and pushed me into doing so many things that were largely against my nature.  I guess they hadn’t checked my Tzolkin.

How could they have not realized what a great talent I had for working with my hands to make art and crafts of all kinds and not promoted it?  (“Oh my God,” they might have said, “look what he can do!  It’s amazing…  Our little boy is going to be an artist!  Let’s get him some art lessons, quick.”)  It was right there in front of them, but my gifts were somehow invisible to them.  They only saw what they wanted me to be and how I was failing at it.

In the past when I thought about my childhood and the abuse I received for doggedly pursuing my muse (I made things anyway), I would feel angry, sad, helpless, or victimized.  This time it was different.  I laughed out loud.  It was suddenly ridiculous to me that my parents could have possibly misread what I was here to do.  It was written all over me, but they were looking for something else; a weird and ill-defined sort of perfection.

Maybe I felt differently now because I was allowing myself to recognize more and more how much innate skill I actually had back then and how I developed that skill over time with hardly any instruction from others.  No one would or could teach me, so I taught myself.  What was changing for me was that I was disconnecting from my parents’ misjudgment of who and what I was.

I had always focused on how they had judged me so harshly, implying that I was stupid, incompetent, lazy, etc, but had just as much trouble as they did seeing what was overlooked—basically, most of my unique and good qualities.  I was springing free of their lack of insight about their own son and reveling in what I had still managed to be.

It felt glorious as I continued to talk about it.  I was feeling my great competency.  Not that I’m necessarily any kind of superhero or renaissance man, but that I’m really pretty good at a variety of things, some of which few people I have met have mastered.  It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity with my parents; not just confusion over what was simply an immature swan rather than ugly duckling.  My parents couldn’t tell an eagle from a ground hog, an artist and “old Soul” from a … well, whatever they vaguely thought I should be.  It was simply absurd and that allowed me to separate from the sorrow of it.

As I laughed, I recognized that what had been driving me crazy in my life was not being judged per se, but bothering to pay any attention to how other people interpreted me—what meaning they had assigned to who or what I was.  Even when I was a small boy, I knew they were wrong about me.  I just got hung up on the insistence of the interpretations.

People couldn’t find a way to “translate” me into their own low vibrational native language, so they made something up about me in their minds.  (“No speako your lingo.”)  For me the trouble came when I tried so hard to blend in with what my parents and others thought they knew about me to gain acceptance and started to lose my native tongue as well as the language of my Soul.  Luckily, it came back to me.

Merely interpreting people is very akin to the danger of learning a tiny bit of a foreign language before traveling to a country where no English is spoken.  There’s a tendency to believe you are understanding more than you are.  It only takes one incident to get you to start really listening up:

I once got yelled at for touching the fruit in a tiny shop near the train station in Innsbruck Austria.  In the town in Switzerland I had just left, it was OK to do so.  I thought the owner was just making small talk, only getting every other word in German until he said very loudly in heavily accented English, “Didn’t you understand what I said?!!  You can’t touch the fruit here!”

In Innsbruck, you asked for 3 apples, they picked them out, and bagged them for you.  It was the local custom.  No touching allowed.  When I went on to my next destination in Germany, I sheepishly pointed to the fruit in the market.  The owner just laughed and motioned for me to pick it out myself.  I have often found myself in the same odd place with people, not really getting the local (Earth) custom of interpreting each other instead of making an effort to understand.

Let’s start taking the time to pay attention, use our discernment, and really get to know others instead of merely interpreting them.  Maybe you can find ways to help them remember who they really are along the way.  While you’re at it, look for ways to shed the interpretations of others you’ve allowed to stick to you like so many brightly colored Post-It notes, covering up your talents and gifts.  Maybe you’ll remember who you are, and laugh, too.  Auf wiedersehen!

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