Evolution of Creation and the Economy: The Tao of the Dow

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

Monday (8/8/11), the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 634 points after Standard and Poor’s downgraded the US government’s credit rating, sending tsunami shockwaves through global markets for days.  My wife, Kate, and I first found out about it in our local, old-timey hardware store here in Burgettstown when we stopped in to get birdseed for our winged friends.  John, the owner, who tends to be very vocal with his (usually crotchety) opinions was just fuming with anger and frustration, reflecting the helpless feelings he, and others were experiencing over the news.

I found myself wishing I could forget what I had just heard.  I had been having a really good day up until that point, and could feel that a part of me was already starting to pucker from the awareness of yet another bad economic omen.  Consciously, I recognized that I could still continue my good day as if I had never heard the news and that it might not be as bad as it sounded.  My physical and emotional sensations, however, pointed to the last vestiges of my inherited “poverty consciousness” resonating on yellow alert.  I did a pretty good job of putting the whole thing out of my mind as we continued on down the road to The Mesa, imitating the sounds of the oncoming cars and trucks that rushed past our window and laughing as we went.

When we got there, our Mesa bank statement was in the mailbox, and I immediately sat down to reconcile our checkbook with it.  After years of putting off such chores until the last minute because dealing with things like bill paying and bottom lines spun me out of balance, I had come to a more healed place of tackling them right away.  As I crunched the numbers, I felt relieved as I saw we had enough money in the bank to easily take care of our bills for the coming weeks, but it remained to be seen if there would be any left over to take home for ourselves.  Shipping a recent art project to Norway and restocking the Mesa gift shop had necessitated running up a large charge bill, one that would soon be arriving in the same mailbox.  That, I knew, would be taken care of too, but I could still sense something inside of me that felt uncertain.

I reminded myself that more money would soon arrive for us and that Spirit was supporting us in our work helping others.  I could feel in my higher nature that it was true.  Things had been going better and better for The Mesa in the overall scheme of things, even with the poor economy, and I felt genuinely optimistic about our long term survival.  Still, I could feel that little worry gearbox, whirring busily away somewhere deep inside of me.  I took note of it, casually attributing it to my own unconscious fiscal concerns.  We had just sunk a lot of money into repairs for our only running vehicle, which necessitated taking a little more cash out of my IRA to keep our short term personal finances afloat.  In the back of my ego-mind I wondered what the plummeting stock market may have done to what was left of my so called “retirement” account.

I finished with the checkbook and tucked all the paperwork neatly away before joining Kate out in the workshop.  She was making “Corn Maiden” figures out of ceramic clay like the ones we had seen from Pueblo Indian culture to add to a primitive, sawdust firing we were planning.  This Southwest Native American spirit brings health, fertility, and sustenance with her body and her breath so that “the people” might live.  The figures that Kate was making were beautiful, and potent reminders to us of how the material world depends on Spirit.  I sat down and worked for a while too, making a shell-shaped smudging bowl.  I largely forgot about the Dow and how it might impact my IRA and our future.  With no class scheduled for the evening, we enjoyed working creatively for a long time before going home for a late dinner.

We ate, and I was back at the computer answering emails by the time the 11pm news came on with the full scary story about the Dow’s nosedive and its possible impact on our nation’s economy.  I could barely hear it from the living room as Kate watched, so I peeked on Google to find out the “why” of the big story.  I went back to looking at emails but could feel an inner uneasiness still sloshing around.  I joined Kate to watch a few minutes of “Nightline,” and as simply as they described the stock market situation, it seemed totally incomprehensible and absurd.  “Three trillion dollars of wealth have disappeared,” spouted the talking head on the screen, but the money was never “real”.  What exactly had happened?  It was artificially inflated, projected value, not actual assets, that had vanished.  It had little to do with the NOW, but I knew, sadly, that it had the potential to become a self-fulfilling disaster prophesy; the downturn news sinking the economy, taking with it the hopes, dreams, and future security of many Americans.

We turned off the TV and were getting ready for bed around midnight when the phone rang.  It was a very spiritually connected friend of ours who knows I’m up late.  I already knew she’d be checking in because she was feeling what I was— not our own fear of any economic crisis, but the fear of others.  It was palpable in the Allness and what was causing the inner “whirr” I was experiencing.  Our friend had spent the evening watching the news and fielding emails and phone calls from the folks in her “tribe”, all worried sick about how they were going to pay their future bills.  She had been doing what she does; reassuring people and sending out Light for us all.  We were witnessing events unfolding that had been long predicted by the Mayan Calendar, other indigenous prophecies, astrology reports, and our own spiritual guidance.  It was just one more wakeup call for humanity to realize that our institutions had become unstable and completely irrelevant to where Creation was taking us.  People were afraid to let go, imagining they’d fall.

I had felt the crisis build for weeks, hearing bits and pieces about the budget deficit “impasse” that Congress was dealing with, (Read that as: “Bunch of egoic crybabies who can’t allow themselves to agree in order to insure the communal good”.  Did that sound judgmental…?) and what effects that might have on the US credit rating and world markets.  Standard and Poor’s was threatening to downgrade America’s score for weeks, knowing right along that it was just an opinion about the future, one that would screw up the economy even more.

This was amazing to me in light of the fact that the US government had long ago promoted their business by legislation mandating that banks and insurance companies use credit rating services (like S&P) for their investments to protect the American people from being saddled with bad debts.  They were compelled to bite the hand that had fed them.  Pessimistically predicting that our feuding leaders would only have more and more trouble solving our economic woes, they gave the whole country an A-minus on our term paper, blowing our 4.0 grade point credit average, and causing the whole world to doubt we’d ever amount to much.

It didn’t seem to matter that S & P’s had been wrong, massively wrong, in their calculations (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ezra-klein-how-sandp-downgraded-the-government–and-itself/2011/08/08/gIQAc39A3I_story.html) and had been before.  They had missed problems with Enron until they went into default, and the risky investments that brought down the mortgage banking system.  People were scared and the market dove as a result.  It seemed like the old story of the Frog and the Scorpion.  (Short version: Scorpion wants to cross river.  Frog offers help if Scorpion promises not to sting.  Scorpion gets on Frog’s back for swim.  Stings him half way across river.  Dying Frog asks why.  Scorpion just being Scorpion…)

It all looked to me as if no one could help themselves, and in fact they couldn’t, because they were under the influence, unknowingly—of the Evolution of Creation.  The picture was just hard to see wearing “material world glasses” and (falsely) perceiving everything to be strictly matter/linear time-oriented in nature.  It reminded me of the time I had tried on the “drunk glasses” that local police had brought to a health fair at a nearby high school.  I couldn’t walk straight with them on, but they hadn’t changed who I was or what was going on around me.  Only my perception had changed and Creation was working powerfully to change ours.  Could it make us see our commonality, our interdependence, our connection through the Allness?  Would we recognize the Spiritual underpinnings of what was happening, let go of relentless pursuit of “more”, and make changes in how we deal with each other?

Yep, being spiritually connected and empathic can be a bitch sometimes.  I’m not the only one who is, but I’m one of a relatively small population that is actually aware that we all are.  It’s just that many of us are either wearing distorting “glasses” (earmuffs, nose plugs, gloves, body padding, etc) or are in fearful denial of our connections.  Feeling other people or the Allness as “me” is a different level of awareness or consciousness that many have turned off because we simply aren’t taught how to experience or deal with it.  I won’t tell you that everything is going to be OK from a material standpoint, but spiritually speaking, it is.  We, as human beings, are just being asked to change, accept each other and our (common) spiritual nature, and heal from our material madness.  Simple, huh?  (Would somebody please tell that to the young folks who are burning and looting London over “lack of stuff”?)

I can hear you asking, “So what do I do?”  (No, I don’t hear-hear it, but I do “get” it empathically.  <Grin>)  First of all, recognize your connections with the Allness and how you are affected by it, locally and globally.  Ask yourself, “Is this my own fear I’m feeling, or is it coming from mass consciousness?”  What is your Soul telling you?  Learn to just sense things from “other” and let them go by “sorting the mail” instead of reading and acting on its “contents”:  If you were working in the post office and you saw John Doe’s electric bill go by, you’d just look at the address, pass it from one hand to the other and into the proper mailbag.  You wouldn’t open it, read it, or upon seeing that it was overdue and threatening shut off, pay it.  (“Holy Smokes! John owes $200?!!  I’d better pay this right away!  Where’s my checkbook?!!”)  You’d simply take notice that it was an electric bill for John and send it on along.  You can do the same with other people’s fear, worry, doubt, anger, jealousy, sadness, etc; sensing it and passing it back along into the Allness.  It’s not your job to own it or resolve it singlehandedly.

There’s also something else you can do.  If you can muster the energy, generosity, and focus, you can send Light back into the Allness grid.  For you see, that mail delivery system works in both directions.  If we each do our part and pump The Collective up with Light, it will raise the shared vibration of all in question and things will go better for us two-leggeds.  When I suggested doing exactly this to someone lately, their response was a fearful one:  “Oh, no,” they said, “It would be like trying to help someone who is drowning.  If I touch them, they’ll pull me down.  I’d look for a stick or something so I’d have leverage.  Then I might be able to help them without sacrificing myself.”  I reminded them about another kind of leverage that’s available to all of us, that of grabbing onto Spirit with one hand while extending the other to those who are struggling.  There are ways to work that out, but it starts with knowing how the system works.  It can be as easy as mailing a letter.

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Creating Change with Baby Steps

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

It is said that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.  It occurs to me that another definition of having lost touch with reality might also be doing nothing and expecting different results.  We hear it all the time in the world around us.  People want things to change in their personal lives and for the world at large, yet simply sit back and wait for something different than what’s already happening.  Sometimes they become very emotional; sad, resentful, angry, or even depressed because what they want doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.  They just don’t seem to notice their own lack of effort when it comes to bringing positive change into being.

We live in a time where our lives are becoming more and more passive.  We are blessed with a technological world that is much safer and easier to survive in (relatively speaking) than the one our ancient ancestors endured.  Food is generally plentiful in our industrialized country so we don’t need to spend all day hunting, gathering, or tending the fields.  Most of the things we need or use in our modern lives are manufactured for us, so we don’t have to work physically hard making our own shelter, clothing, furniture, or tools.  Our children learn, not by physical experience, but by listening to someone tell them “facts” as they sit idle.  Even our entertainment has become less participatory as we sit and watch movies or sports, surf the internet, or listen to recorded music.

In theory, all of our modern “labor saving” conveniences should be freeing up our time to enjoy life and engage in higher pursuits, but their rising costs are making it so we have to work more hours and become more stressed out to acquire them.  At the end of the day, people are tired and so drained that they have little motivation to do anything to make their personal existence feel better, let alone make efforts to change the world.  This can make them feel trapped in an unkind universe where they have no recourse but to go with an unpleasant flow.  But going with the flow doesn’t mean that you can’t use your paddle to steer around the rocks or stop to rescue a fellow traveler who has fallen out of their little canoe.

If we want to feel different, if we want our inner and outer worlds to change for the better, we have to take steps in that direction.  Not only does “the Lord help those who help themselves”, but action attracts energy for more action.  We allow so many things to stop us; time, money, distance, weather, inconvenience, etc.  Sometimes it’s the weight of past failures pressing upon us that makes us shy away from action.  At others, it’s feeling unsure of what course to take.  Some people are willing to join in group action as long as someone else initiates, but have trouble self-starting.  We can do all the crying out or praying for deliverance we want, but in the end, we’re the ones who have to get up off the couch and move forward.  The good news is that it doesn’t have to be at a dead run right out of the starting blocks, but can start with baby steps.

When you were a baby and just learning to walk, you were so eager to move.  You watched your parents and older siblings easily fly around the room, upright, and wanted to do the same.  You didn’t just sit and cry about it, did you?  You got to your feet however you could and began to make your first wobbly steps.  Mommy or Daddy saw you and would kneel with outstretched arms and encourage you to come to them.  Smiling and laughing, you’d take a step or two and invariably fall.  Did you decide that you simply “weren’t a walker” and quit right then and there.  Nope.  You probably laughed and squealed with joy, got up, and took a few more unsteady steps, only to fall again, giggling in delight.  Eventually, you made it all the way across the living room and into your parents arms without a thought or care in the world.  From then on, you strode more and more confidently around the house or yard, exploring your new world and relationship to it.

So why do we succumb to inertia and stop moving?  In part, we forget how it feels to take baby steps.  You see, we human beings get used to sensations very quickly and stop consciously acknowledging them.  We come to take the things we’re “good at” for granted, (like becoming expert walkers, talkers, eaters, shirt buttoners, etc.) but beat ourselves up when we don’t achieve comparable success at new skills right off the bat, especially when someone else makes it look easy or succeeds first.

Another thing that changed for us after the experience of learning to walk was that our cognitive skills grew and we began to think in a verbal, aware way.  (Thank God I wasn’t having conscious thoughts when I was learning to walk—I could just hear them: “Dang, mommy and daddy walk good! I’ll never get the hang of this and walk like they do.  Looks like I’ll be crawling to high school.”)  Thinking brought the possibility of worry, fear, self-doubt, low self-esteem, and looking before we leaped.  Over time, thinking about doing new, or possibly unsuccessful things can become more and more traumatic to us with each successive perceived “failure” and we can come to stop taking actions out of fear we’ll struggle physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually.  The truth is that we don’t actually fail until we stop taking action.  The answer is to go back to basics—Baby Basics.

So what are some practical “baby steps” you can take to feel better and start to move forward on your creative, healing or spiritual trajectory?  Start by engaging your Inner Baby.  Remind yourself of what it felt like to be in love with yourself, your body, the family dog, whatever came into your field of view, and every new experience.  What follows is a brief list of simple and effective actions you can take to help yourself feel better, become more active, and begin to heal your inner world.  When each one of us heals our inner landscape, the world outside will change, too.

  1. Take time to consciously clear your energy every day.  Smudge with sage or incense, use sound from a bell, singing bowl, or tuning forks.  Sit quiet somewhere for a few moments and visualize the dusty dirt and greasy grime of day to day life being released as steam, smoke, or flowing down into the Earth.  Brush yourself with a feather.  Take a shower or bath with intention—the intention to be cleaned and cleared by the water.  Talk to the water and thank it.
  2. Align with Creation.  Reconnect with The Light of the living world by using a candle, small fire, or the Sun.  (“Gather” the light with your hands and place it successively into your mind, heart, and body.)
  3. Rebalance yourself and energy systems often.  Hold rocks, crystals, or personal “power objects” or place them on your body for a few minutes.  Trace your energy meridians.  Listen to restorative or uplifting music.  Take breaks to rest and recombobulate.
  4. Get up and move your body, especially when feeling intense distress.  Walk, jog, dance, ride a bike, roll on the floor, shake your arms, or bounce up and down in place.
  5. Engage in little rituals and ceremonies of your own design.  Light a candle in gratitude and say a prayer for those who are hungry.  At meals, leave a tiny food offering for your Spirit Guides or ancestors.  (Native Americans call this “Feeding the Spirits”).  A powerful one we have used is to go outside before bedtime every night for a week or even a month and make a little offering of tobacco, corn meal, water, food, or other things to “ALL MY RELATIONS” (… any and all Beings from anywhere, anytime, anyplace who would come and help with your rebalancing, healing, and enlightenment).  Be mindful to notice any changes in how you feel or your life outcomes.  Get a deck of inspirational cards and read one a day.
  6. Set up an altar (large or tiny) with things that have meaning for you to remind you of what is important in life.  Pick them up to touch or hold them while you visualize about their meaning. 
  7. Engage in service for others.  Do a good deed.  Visit someone who has lost a loved one.  Pick up trash on your block, or clear the snow off your neighbor’s sidewalk.  Put water or food out for birds or wild animals.  If you’re not up to serving meals to the homeless, make dinner for a sick friend or parents with a new baby.  Visit with people in a nursing home or read to kids at the local library.
  8. Make some Baby Art!  Finger paint, play with Play-Doh, or get crayons and color.  (We’re here when you’re ready to “graduate” to more heady stuff…)
  9. Engage in Sound Making.  Play a drum, shake a rattle, sing in the shower.  Learn a Native American song on YouTube.  Play with your voice and make funny sounds.  Say stuff kids would say in your best 4yr old voice.  (“Hey!  That’s MY Barbie!”)
  10. Join with like minded others.  It doesn’t matter if it’s watching the Steelers, hooking up with a meditation circle, taking a class, or joining a knitting group.  We are here to heal through relationship, not in isolation.  When we join together, we can raise much more energy towards that end than “the sum of the parts”.
  11. Take quiet time.  Close your eyes and explore the vast Universe that is your own being.  (It’s called “meditating”.)  Spend a day in silence, or without reading anything.
  12. Go out in Nature.  Sit on the grass and look for bugs.  Walk in the park.  Stroll through the woods.  Wade in a creek.  Lay on a blanket and star gaze.
  13. Most importantly: Give yourself a break and Start Where You Are.  You may be overweight, out of shape, feeling inept, or without skills.  OK, so you’re not an expert belly dancer, poet, baker, tennis player, artist, or energy healer.  It’s not a race.  If you hadn’t noticed, new Babies are arriving everyday who will look up to you for your achievements and want to learn from you.  No “expert” was born that way.  We may come into this world with “gifts” we chose for this lifetime, but they do not develop unless we use them.  (Are you so sure you’ve already opened all of yours?)
  14. Come to The Mesa Creative Arts Center (Oops! Did I say that out loud?) to learn about healing, sit in the Medicine Wheel, walk by the lake, make some art, talk from the heart, or participate in a ceremony.  That way you won’t have to go it alone.  Email, call, or come by to see us and we’ll further explain the items on this list for you and add to it.

The coming “shift” that has been predicted for Humanity by spiritual masters and indigenous cultures is not, by any means, a “done deal”.  Each of us have to make choices to commit to changes that will bring it about.  Last Sunday (7/31/11) we entered the 5th Day of the current level of the Mayan Calendar (according to Carl Johann Calleman).  This 18 day period (through 8/17) is a time of breakthrough energy coming to us from the Flow of Creation.  It’s a time of “budding” and is most suited to our forward movement in life.  It’s time to get moving, Baby…

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Ugly Duckling Syndrome

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

We’ve been talking with a lot of highly spiritual people lately who are having crippling self-esteem issues.  They fear they’re not good enough, are too different, or just feel out of place here on this Earth.  For many, it’s gotten to the point where their anxiety is making them feel stuck in life or stopping them from walking their spiritual path.  When we look at them, we don’t see all of the bad things that they see about themselves.  We see them for the beautiful, capable, Light-filled beings they truly are.  So what’s their problem?  Why don’t they see what we see?  They have what we lovingly refer to as U.D.S.— “Ugly Duckling Syndrome”.

Remember the metaphoric story of personal transformation, first published in 1843 by Hans Christian Andersen?  An egg hatches in a mother duck’s nest, but one of the hatchlings doesn’t look like the rest.  He’s constantly teased and ostracized as being “ugly” and for being unable to do “duck things”.  Much misfortune befalls him before he grows up and finally sees his reflection in a frozen pond.  What he sees is not an ugly duck at all, but the beautiful swan he has become.  The trouble really started for our swan hero simply because he was raised by ducks who could not or would not recognize his inner beauty before it had a chance to show.  This in turn caused him to doubt himself and endure great hardship before eventually and triumphantly joining a flock of majestic swans.  His only “flaw” was being different from those who cruelly judged him.

This scenario is just what we see with many of the tender, loving, old souls who have come here to this Earth to turn it into a planet of spiritual “swans”.  Our Ugly Duckling friends feel out of place in their families and sometimes on the planet in general because somehow their swan egg found its way into a duck nest.  They have been rejected, abused, and/or beaten down emotionally and psychologically by the mean-spirited, narrow-minded “ducks” of this world.  Being in the minority and out of step with the quackers around them led these little cygnets to feel badly about themselves and they have fallen into fowl despair.  They have been doubting their innate beauty, worth, and spiritual abilities because their duck-families and barnyard neighbors just couldn’t or wouldn’t see them.  It would have made them feel too much like ducks.

How can you recognize the “ducks” of this world?  They’re the spiritually immature, materially focused, short-sighted folks who want everyone else to be just like them.  Ducks will try to convince you that they are humanitarians, but would sell their grandmother for a quick duck-buck.  They quack that they’re concerned about the environment, but would pollute their home pond for personal gain.  When threatened, ducks will flock together to defend their corrupt institutions, limiting rules, and within-the-box ways of thinking.  They’ll bury their heads under their wings to avoid seeing alternatives to their beliefs and customs and squawk loudly if you challenge them.  Ducks have no imagination and cringe at creativity.  They’re too busy to stop and smell the cattails and don’t want you to, either.

So why does it happen that spiritual swans turn up in nests of ducks?  It all starts on the Spirit Side before we come down here for another lifetime.  If we come into feathered families that greatly challenge us, we have the potential to spiritually learn more, faster.  (Like getting the same college degree in two years instead of four at the same cost.)  It sounded like a great fast-track program, one that we may have deemed a necessity taking into account the rapidly approaching shift coming for Humanity.  We pictured our part in the coming “Swan-topia” and our souls smiled.

When we got here on the ground we discovered a different reality.  We found ourselves in the middle of Quacker-Nation, and wondering if we chose wisely.  (For some of us, it has turned out more like joining the army to get a degree and finding ourselves in a foxhole being shot at.)  We may have also volunteered to join the ranks of our duck-families in order to help those birds of a soul-feather, either because of Karma or selflessness, but that help was not welcomed or accepted.

After we give the troubled spiritual “swans” we hear from these days our Ugly Duckling Syndrome “diagnosis”, (Note for ducks:  We know we are not doctors and therefore prohibited by law from “diagnosing” anything.  Lighten up!) we give them the following advice:  It’s not you!  We live in a “duck” world.  You can’t expect ducks to be swans or to see your swan-ness.  (We love to watch their faces change as this new awareness sinks in.)  We ask them if they are up to the challenge of leading the flock instead of tagging along with the rest of the brood.  They usually get it.

Many highly spiritual souls have been born into families of “ducks” that saw them as ugly, stupid, inferior, or weird “ducklings” when they didn’t look or act like them— like a duck.  Just like the Ugly Duckling from the fairy tale, they have taken their duck-families’ words and deeds seriously and personally because like young waterfowl they were imprinted by, and bonded with the ones who were supposed to love and care for them.  I know from where I speak.  I ended up with ducks, too.  We chose them to learn to see and trust our true spiritual selves in the face of all odds so that we could help transform our world through the lessons we learn.  If it all works out, living with ducks forces us to figure it all out pretty fast.  When it doesn’t, it can result in mounting self-esteem issues, fear, and failure.

The trouble for us Ugly Ducklings begins when we try to be like our duck families, friends, or neighbors.  We zip up our little yellow duck-suits and pretend we like what they like, feel what they feel, and care about what they pay attention to.  We also feign that we’re not psychic, don’t feel their emotional energy, and can’t read their minds.  We try out for sports we can’t play, major in courses we couldn’t care less about, or hold soul-killing jobs just to earn a ducky-paycheck, trying to please ducks and fit in with them.  Then we feel sad, angry, or like a square egg in a round hole when it all doesn’t work out.  Amazingly, when we’ve looked in the mirror we’ve seen the same inner ugliness and ineptitude reported to us by the ducks around us.  The issue was skewed comparing.  What did we expect from using ducks as mirrors?  Swan Lake?

I used to joke that I was raised by wolves, but they were just ducks.  My duck-family pressured me to conform and made it unmistakably known when I was out of step.  My artistic abilities and empathic sensitivities were systematically derided, discouraged, and punished.  My younger brother is an un-awakened Ugly Duckling as well and has always struggled to walk like a duck.  He sees auras and trance channels but doesn’t see any duck-use for them.  My senior sibling, The Scientist, took the path of least resistance and is duck through and through.  He fell into line with my parents, his teachers, and clergy because it was safe and out of fear of reprisal.  He still pokes fun at me for my spiritual proclivity and non-duck lifestyle.  Sometimes ducks can be jealous that they are not swans themselves.

Over time, the emotional and spiritual pressure of trying to be like a duck in order to achieve duckcess became more and more overwhelming for me and I became unproducktive, depressed and physically ill.  Fortunately, and just like the Ugly Duckling of the fable, when I was at my lowest point in life, I started to get glimpses of other swans.  They were the other spiritual souls that I met as I embarked on a path to heal myself and I began to take another look at who I was.  It didn’t take too long to suspect that I, too, was a swan, albeit one raised by ducks.  As my discernment grew, I started to see ducks for what they are; fearful, repressed, and often angry souls, blindly following the tail of the duck ahead of them as they waddle through life.  Firmly stuck in their egos, they try to convince others to be like them too, for it makes them feel better about their duckiness.

I bless my wife, Kate, in that her family recognized her artistic and spiritual nature and while not always understanding it, mostly encouraged and honored her.  Sadly, they too, were raised and influenced by ducks and had some trouble seeing their own swan nature.  With good intentions, Kate was reminded by them and other ducks of the importance of finding a way to get the perks of duckdom by giving up her dream of being an artist for something safer, like teaching school.  As beautiful and talented as she is, she still doubted herself because she wasn’t good enough— at being a duck.  When I met her, Kate reflected my swan-nature back to me and I got a glimpse of the inner beauty I had only hoped was within me.  I’m still working to allow it to fully emerge.

Ugly Ducklings of the world, there’s nothing wrong with us!  It’s all a case of mistaken identity.  We have come to define ourselves by duck-standards instead of our own higher, spiritual ones because there was no one around to help us remember our soul nature— just ducks.  You’re not here to buy into their world but to build a better one.  We can’t let their incessant quacking wear us down.  (I find imagining them sounding like Donald Duck helps.)  No one’s clipped your wings, young swan.  You just can’t fly like a duck!

In truth, all of us are “swans” at the level of our souls.  Some of us have just spent many lifetimes living like ducks and the habit is hard to break.  Now the Evolution of Creation is encouraging us all to look into impartial, non-duck mirrors and see our true selves.  Spirit has a plan for this planet.  It’s destined to become “Swan World”.  I think the ducks know this and want to stop it because they like being ducks.  It’s easier to be a duck than spiritual.  Ducks also get more stuff because they’re willing to fight over it and hoard it.  (Material things are very seducktive.)  It’s a lot harder living the life of a spiritual swan, but it’s worth it.

So what’s an Ugly Duckling to do?  First of all, memorize this important truth:  If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, IT’S A DUCK!  Learn to recognize ducks for what they are and yourself for the spiritual Being that is beginning to emerge.  It’s a simple process of deducktion.  Make note of the duck nature of the mundane world around you and acknowledge it without internalizing its negativity.  Know when you’re stepping in “duck-stuff” and steer clear of it.

Second, look for other Ugly Ducklings and acknowledge them.  (We all need to swim together to turn the tide.)  Seek out and hang with swans whenever you can.  You’ll feel better.  Lastly, learn to wing it—have faith in yourself and allow yourself to soar no matter what the ducks say or how they look at you.  Teach the ducks another way to BE by letting your swan-light show wherever you go.

One caution: beware of ducks that fancy themselves swans.  You’ll see them in the form of people who are trying to appear spiritual when they are still totally stuck in their duck-egos.  They see holistic healing and spiritual development as money making, ego boosting, “growth industries” and will tell you what you “should” do. (Be like them, of course.)  They’ll want you to join their flock and pay them for the privilege.  Trust your inner-swan and you’ll know which bird is which.

 If you get a chance, come by the Mesa Creative Swan Center and join with other swans to make art, be psychic, talk about spiritual topics openly, give a healing, hug, laugh, sing, dance, beat drums, and other decidedly non-ducky stuff.  On your way in, glance at the little lake on the road up the hill to The Mesa and you might see the two real-live swans who live there.  They are warrior-birds, and the local ducks know not to mess with them.  Otherwise, they’d kick their tails and send them quacking.

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No More “Business As Usual”

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

“Omis Chom”.  (Translation: “The burden of heat”)  That’s how my Israeli blacksmith friend, Itzik Atzmon used his native Hebrew to describe the one-two punch of 90 degree heat and 90 percent humidity during the two summers he lived near me in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.  Having lived all of his life in the dryness of arid Israel, he was used to heat, but not the smothering humidity that is part and parcel of summers in the former swampland that became our nations’ capitol.

The weather here in Pittsburgh has been blazing hot this week and the humidity has reached levels of stickiness that I not so fondly remember from my former life in DC.  That has only added to the discomfort that people here were already feeling in their lives.  As we reach the midpoint of the 4th Night of the current cycle of the Mayan Calendar today, the “dark” energies coming from the Flow of Creation can feel even more oppressive than the weather.  Creation has always been encouraging us to evolve along with it and become more loving, compassionate, and spiritual, but its methodology has changed.  It used to be much more gentle in its approach…  “Could you maybe, possibly, consider a just a little bit of change?  …I mean, if it’s not too much trouble, of course…” it used to whisper.  “Could you maybe start thinking about being just an teeny, tiny bit more spiritual sometime soon?” it would implore.

Over the last few decades, that whispering got louder, but most of us had been ignoring the gentle pleading.  Since the Harmonic Convergence in 1983, the volume of the calling has grown and the tone became more stern, but after trying for so long to shout over the distractions of our material world, Creation is no longer cajoling, pleading, or warning, but shoving us forward, stiff-armed and without a word, face-first into the duality of our foibles, failings, and fears.  We have seen many people at The Mesa and out in our neighborhood who are caught so off guard by this that they are falling flat on their faces, but are looking to the material world for the source of the push.  This only adds to their confusion and frustration as they grope for things outside of themselves on which to place the blame for their discomfort.

There are also those who have heard the call, but don’t know how to step forward in their lives.  The fact that family, friends, and coworkers seem to be carrying on with business as usual makes it all the harder for them to tune to, and follow the higher vibration.  The truth is that Creation is on the move and picking up speed.  There’s method to its perceived madness.  There are things that it used to support energetically that it no longer will.  (Imagine a pair of cupped hands, letting sand spill from between them.)  Thankfully, there are also new things, better things, that Creation couldn’t support yet because their time had not yet arrived that it is now beginning to.  (Envision the same pair of cupped hands, coming together to hold a stream of water being poured from above.)

The Flow of Creation will no longer support a “business as usual” approach to ANYTHING.  You can forget it!  Our institutions and societal structures are already crumbling.  The way we have been personally and as a species is slipping away like that sand.  If you try to stand on it, you’ll be skidding and sliding as you follow it down.  The alternative is to surrender to the course of the Divine Plan and go with the flow of the water, to be caught and supported in that loving pool.  Now is the time.

So what to do?  One answer we hear over and over is to come together.  We have been raised with competition, “free enterprise” (read that as: “It’s OK to screw people as long as it’s not illegal—or I don’t get caught.”), “survival of the fittest”, and “every man for himself”.  The support for those kinds of outmoded systems is draining quickly away.  What is building is a reservoir of energy that can be much more easily tapped into by groups of people joining their consciousness and their efforts, recognizing our shared stake in healing and the survival of our world.  Whether it is in meditation circles, healing shares, creative events, or spiritual ceremonies, together we can bring through much more of that energy for our mutual benefit than we can for and by ourselves.  Isolation is not the answer.

A group of us saw and felt the direct effects of gathering together this past weekend in our Sacred Pipe ceremony with Cree Indian spiritual teacher, Jody Ground.  Now we just have to find ways to implement it on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis so that we can join our hands with those of Creation and improve our world.  We offer our Mesa Creative Arts Center space and our organizing efforts as an altar, a focusing and coming together place for All Our Relations; that’s one definition of the Spanish word, “mesa”.  We accept it as our role to provide the time and place.  It’s up to you to show up.  We’ll light a candle to guide your way.

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Imagining the Worst

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

It’s amazing the little games we play in our heads.  What’s sad about them is that those games often run our emotions and our lives while “we” feel we don’t have any control.  Our rapidly developing healing method of guided head movements has given us a new tool to stop the games and our experience with it has caused us to look at what we think and feel much more closely.  We’ve been making good use of the “digital readout” of finger Kinesiology and a little (dare I say it?) analytical thinking to sort out just what is going through our wordless thoughts and why.  The most fascinating part of it has been finally recognizing some of our outmoded, compartmentalized, convoluted, and unworkable strategies for navigating our lives for what they are; outmoded, compartmentalized, convoluted, and unworkable…, not to mention the fact that they rarely succeed and make us feel even more miserable.

One such strategy we’ve come to recognize as rampant is imagining the worst.  Many of us were taught to do just that when we were kids, because our parents firmly believed it would keep us safe or were just repeating what they had been told by their parents.  (“Don’t play in the street… You’ll get run over!”)  It’s easy to repeat clichés, and a lot harder for moms and dads to give thoughtful advice to help children find their way through life without instilling fear and worry.  Once their kids reach school age, many parents can’t or won’t take the time to engage in the process of actually giving their children experience with adult aspects of living life along with requisite patient reassurance.

Largely, our parents just wanted to protect us, but the patterns set a little too well for many of us and we unconsciously came to use worrying as virtual reality protection in a danger filled world.  Now in our adulthood, not only do we make pictures in our minds of what we don’t want to have happen, often it’s the most painful, disastrous result we can think of and we wig ourselves out.  The picture is so horrifying to a part of us that it turns on all our inner fire alarms and shuts down our motivational engines, stopping us dead in the water.  (It’s better to be really, really careful…) 

We think of situations going astray way before they ever do, often before we even make a move toward dealing with them.  For many people, negative imagining goes on constantly in the mind and is so habitual that it goes largely unnoticed by thoughtful awareness.  It repeats and repeats because the pattern isn’t recognized in an enlightening way.  It lacks a triggering “aha” moment.  The amazing thing is how we actually feel the emotional pain of (bad) results we envision happening as if we were already experiencing them.  They’re not happening in sequential time and may never, but it is so completely real in our own minds that that it “is”, right now.

Usually this is done with little or no proof that our fantasy scenario will ever happen.  It comes from F.E.A.R.—False Evidence, Appearing Real.  It’s not just the evidence that’s false, it’s our belief in the appropriateness of our emotional response in the face of a lack of knowing what the outcome will really be.  We all have access to knowing outcomes in advance (it’s called intuition) and there are practical ways to get there.  First we have to clear our minds of cyclical fearful imagining.

For some, worrying is gravely incapacitating.  They “know” that their delayed medical test results are because they have a fatal illness and tie themselves into knots when it’s just a busy week at the lab.  They have fantasy conversations with the boss that end in their request for a raise turning into a demeaning confrontation, so they don’t ask.  They hesitate to return calls from the bank because they’re sure they’re overdrawn when it’s just a customer survey.  I know.  I’ve done similar things for years.  It’s a tough way to live.

Happily, as I came to heal a number of pieces of my worry system I was able to start observing it in action in a calm, rational way and lately could stop it before my fearful imagining would get too intense.  What was truly remarkable for me was the day earlier this week when I realized that everything would be peacefully resolved with something I was in the heat of struggling with; setting up the new blog on our Mesa website.  I had an experience of, um… “feel-knowing” it on some new level even while my mind was still fretting and my emotions were churning out fear and doubt.  I witnessed the polarity of these two opposing realities and recognized that the situation I was dealing with could and would go another way; calmly and successfully.  I knew-knew it would simply be a matter of time.  I didn’t need to get suddenly smarter or call in the cyber Marines to handle it for me.

This, I feel, was a benefit of many healings with our guided head movement technique.  When I have been the recipient of these healings, I can absolutely feel that each will eventually allow me to reset my inner operating system about the issue at hand and resolve my resistance into acceptance and knowing.  I have no doubts, the only unknown being how many repetitions it might take.  (My record is something like 14.)  Somehow the process has been allowing me to slowly let go of worry as a pseudo coping mechanism and wade into life’s deeper waters without it.

I suppose that the trouble was that when my parents showed me how to worry about being a small one in a big world, they never told me when I could stop.  When would I be old enough to get things done with adult facility and confidence without feeling like a helpless child?  I robotically followed the program in the absence of a new command.  You’ve seen the cartoon version of this:  The absentminded inventor instructs his mechanical creation to cut up the vegetables for soup.  “Don’t stop until you’ve cut everything up,” he says, rushing off to a meeting.  The robot proceeds to chop up all the veggies, and then starts in on chopping up the furniture and everything else in the kitchen because it wasn’t told to stop chopping.  It’s funnier in the cartoons than it is in our lives.

Using muscle testing, we found that it was not “I”, the more outward, impersonal, savvy part of myself that interfaces rather freely with the world that didn’t know when to stop imagining the worst.  It was that inner, deeper, more private and emotional me, the part that knows itself as “You” (as in “Didn’t I tell You not to do that?!!”).  That part of me knew that worrying didn’t really help to solve things, but literally couldn’t help itself from engaging in it.

It couldn’t stop.  It couldn’t not do it and the bond was palpable.  It knew how to, but a circuit breaker had been set and padlocked in place that prevented it somehow.  I saw it consciously ,but couldn’t get around it and into action.  As my wife, Kate, helped me with the guided shaking and nodding of my head as I made the statement “You can’t stop imagining the worst,” I could feel the padlock come off with a whole body-compressing twitch.  Then I felt something inside of me expand.  It only had taken a few repetitions to shift.  That’s how lightly that iron fetter was held in place.

When I went back to the computer, I found solutions to all of the problems I was having setting up technical aspects of not only the blog itself, but also how to seamlessly link it to our website.  I found them on Google, the same place I had unsuccessfully searched the same body of information the previous day.  After that it was only a matter of mouse clicks; robotic work, but done by me with new emotional ease, confidence, and awareness.  I had gotten past an emotional wall and I felt a new kind of capability, without having any new skills.

The experience was a reminder that memorizing facts or learning sequences for doing tasks are not the only keys to learning.  In our souls, we have an innate faith and optimism in our human potential that can help us to solve any of life’s riddles.  We just need to begin to deconstruct our layers of old habits, mind games, and emotional escape routes for that Light to shine through.  It starts with becoming diligently and more honestly self-aware.  It’s easier when we have the support of people who really care to hold space for us as we take baby steps.  We’re here to teeter along with you and catch you if you stumble.  Let’s take a walk.

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Finding Fault

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

As the 4th of July holiday weekend approached, my wife, Kate, asked me about tackling a couple of little fix up jobs around the house.  She asked me innocently enough, starting out her request by acknowledging how hard I had been working lately and apologizing for suggesting any additions to my workload.  Still, she reminded me that we also had to take care of our house and keep it livable while we helped others.  She said she was doing her best not to be critical of me and I believed her.  I wanted not to take anything personally from it, but became extremely aware of something the more she described the request.  I was cringing inside.  Not only did I feel resistance to doing the jobs, I was feeling an unwanted sense of responsibility that I wanted to push back against.  It felt like she was saying that it was because of me the jobs were still undone.  I’d had this feeling before, but this time I was very conscious of how I was processing it.

 I was able to step back from myself and see that my reaction was not about the couple of simple tasks that Kate had asked about, but the way she had brought them up that had somehow triggered something bigger and deeper.  I readily admitted that I had been increasingly resistant to taking on not only household repairs, but also some other things in our life that could improve our lot and I didn’t like being reminded about them.

 I couldn’t say why I retreated from them exactly; not consciously, anyway, just that I dreaded some painful yet unnamable result.  I wasn’t afraid to work hard, figure things out, or engage in a little worthwhile struggle, but continually put off these things and felt badly towards myself for shirking them.  I also knew that when whatever it was inside of my inner operating system decided to let go of that resisting, I would jump right into any given one of those endeavors, complete it quickly and masterfully.  I just didn’t know how or when that would happen.

Kate reiterated that she didn’t mean to upset me by asking, but there were things she just needed my help with.  I answered that I knew she couldn’t do the chores alone and acknowledged that she didn’t mean to insinuate that I was lazy or uncaring.  I admitted that I was having a negative response to being asked and was, by then, literally vibrating internally as some very deep conflict in my psyche was becoming more activated by our conversation.  Kate was aware of it too, and gently encouraged me to keep talking.  Other things I had been avoiding without being able to put my finger onto why came to mind, and the one that had I especially been stalling over for more than two years; an online store for the Mesa’s website.

 There had been all kinds of little problems with getting it put up on the internet that I had eventually resolved, but newer ones still stopped me.  Trouble was, I knew I was letting them.  Something made me give up before I got even close to building the store; something I obviously wanted to avoid.  In the past, I had speculated that I was just balking at wearing any more hats; administering the store and filling the orders turning into more unwelcome work for me.  As Kate and I continued to talk about it, I muscle tested myself about unpleasant scenarios with the store, and additional work wasn’t a contender.

 One loose thread I remembered had to do with how people might react to what they were charged for shipping.  I pointed to figuring out fair shipping costs within the confines of the software as the latest roadblock, but I could admit there were likely ways to get around it.  One muscle test showed an inner fear that customers might be unhappy and complain.  As I thought about it, I speculated out loud that sooner or later someone would not like how long it took to receive their merchandise, complain about color variations, criticize how the store was arranged, or want a refund.  That kind of thing just comes with the territory of doing business.  I wanted increased business.  I just didn’t want to deal with feeling whatever that feedback might translate into emotionally for me and I was imagining the pain already happening.

 As I kept talking, a word came up in my mind that said it all; fault.  I imagined that people would find fault with our web store, our merchandise, or, worse yet—me, and I would feel responsible, exactly what they (and my parents) would want me to feel.  That’s what I was seeking to avoid by putting off building the online store.  Muscle testing confirmed it, as did the little light that had come on in my mind when that door was opened.  Not only did I want to avoid any beef that people might have with me but more so the imagined fault I might locate in myself and the searing despair I might feel at being unable yet again to “fix” it.

 I had taken Kate’s request for help around the house the way I habitually took things.  I heard her saying it was my fault things weren’t done without her actually saying it.  That outer “fault” reflected the internal faults I was tallying within myself; bad partner, irresponsible caretaker of possessions, inefficient time waster, etc.  I felt like Kate was criticizing me when she actually didn’t because my internal critic’s fault finding radar was locked on target.  Kate resonated with the same issue and felt badly about even asking.  It was like guitar feedback and seemed to amplify things somehow.

 I felt a little angry and didn’t want to be.  Feeling angry was a way of pushing back with righteous indignation against the injustice of being on the receiving end of fault finding so many times when I was growing up.  This was the tip of an iceberg-sized suppressed pain and fear from a pattern frozen into my mind by hypercritical parents and other family members, likely well before I was 5yrs old.  My mother, father, and paternal grandmother constantly found fault with everything and everyone and especially, it seemed, …with me.

 The question: “What’s wrong with you?!!” was burned into my brain.  That’s the kind of question that makes our internal hard drives spin out of control as they search through infinite possibilities to find THE answer.  The problem there is that NOTHING is “wrong” with us, so the search is always fruitless… and endless.  My soul knew this but my little kid mind didn’t register any more than my parents’, teachers’ and other big peoples’ angst and dissatisfaction with something about me.  I could only imagine what it was and make up scenarios.  This pattern became well established inside of me and grew over time as selected faults were repeatedly pointed out to me, causing me to constantly watch vigilantly for possible “wrongnesses” as a means of self-protection. 

 From early on, my eye instantly went to what I saw as flaws in things.  This was a blessing and a curse.  It allowed me to have the “artistic eye” that enabled me to make beautiful things, but drove me crazy when an unavoidable, uncontrollable, or undesirable “wrongness” showed up in something I had done.  Outwardly, I became a reluctant perfectionist.  I had more trouble living with the flaws I saw within myself.  The spiritual teachings I had studied told me to accept and love them as part of my Shadow Self and I did my best to weather the feelings.  The truth was, I hated the fact that I had become so adept at noticing what was “wrong” with things, instead of what was beautiful and good.  Mentally, I wrestled against such thoughts, but an emotional engine inside of me made life’s little imperfections stick out like so many sore thumbs—and I was the biggest one.

 The significance with how this issue was presenting itself this time was the contrast in my mind between concepts of flaws and faults; a fineness of language.  A quick check showed that while some dictionary definitions used the two words synonymously, there were slight differences.  Flaws are often viewed as unseen or concealed imperfections that impair soundness, whereas faults can be classified as unattractive or unsatisfactory features, especially in a piece of work or in a person’s character.  Ahh…, character.

 Flaws can just be manifestations of nature, like an unseen crack that causes a delicate vase to break spontaneously without being touched.  We don’t see them unless we’re looking for them.  Faults show.  They are glaring “wrongnesses” that other people, (and often we, ourselves) are unsatisfied with.  They’re right there grinning at us.  Some unspoken agreement implies that we have responsibility for the dissatisfaction ours cause for others and that we could do something about them but just don’t, because we’re ignorant, lazy, or incompetent for instance.  We seldom have control over our flaws.  Faults are willful and blamable breaches of character.

 If we’re “properly trained”, we take on this onus.  It wasn’t screwing up the home repair projects or the potential imperfections of web commerce I was worried about, it was experiencing my face being pushed yet again into responsibility for my own imagined shortcomings.  I needed no help with that.  The way I grew to observe was biased and narrow in that my focus went to things and behaviors that stuck out as faults.  I would see any lack of symmetry in a particular leaf, flower, or person as imperfect or “deformed” instead of as an individual miracle of nature.  I wanted to see only what I considered perfection.  I saw them as unattractive and they reminded me of the pain of what I saw as my own ugliness.

 I was doggedly doing what I was impressed to do; taking notice of all the pock marks, scratches, pimples, stains, asymmetries, and crooked edges on things and the fear, anger, reluctance, greed, jealousy, and unsatisfying incompetencies in people.  They leapt out at me even when I didn’t want to notice them.  What I was missing was that these were only tiny parts of the whole picture and a glaringly selective one at that that my fear repeatedly directed my attention to.  I realized that some part of me was keeping a running inventory of faults in the world around me, consuming a tremendous amount of personal energy, attention, and unconscious “data space” in the process.  It was even worse when it came to myself.

 Finding fault in another takes scrutiny and pressure off of the beholder.  Several episodes with angry fault finders at The Mesa who couldn’t see their own hand in life’s situations were blindsides and usually came on the heels of some good deed or service we had done.  I took them very personally and traumatically.  Over my lifetime fault and responsibility became much the same thing to me and everything became my fault; people not showing up for a visiting teacher’s class, a student’s lopsided project, a client that didn’t heal, and once that lightning had set Mesa Verde on fire.  (It’s a long story…)

 Over time, my need to avoid additional pain of new fault finding from within or without approached phobic proportions and the safety mechanism of avoidance behavior would kick in to stop me in my tracks.  Better not to even attempt things or interact with people than to risk feeling “faulty”.  I was saying NO to fault finding in my world and retreating from living my life more fully because of the need to avoid the pain of possessing implied faults.

 As Kate and I have come to realize with things we say NO to in life, the rejection of fault finding was causing us to look for and see it everywhere.  Unconsciously, we suspected everyone as potentially finding fault with us, including each other.  We passed it back and forth between us.  We rejected fault finding because we knew in our hearts and souls that that kind of continual and usually trivial criticism was tremendously hurtful and an unloving way to deal with other people, not to mention our own inner selves, but we had bought into it.  That we indulged in it ourselves made it all the more painful.  We saw fault finding not only as a personal issue, but for the hardened, embedded societal system that is part and parcel of what needs to change in our world for humanity to live spiritually and humanely.

 It was time to do something about it.  I laid down on the floor with Kate by my head so that we could shift this paradigm to one of acceptance, change, and release.  As we went through our little head turning therapy to shift what we shake our heads at in life, I could feel how much I was suppressing anger and pain about all the internal and external fault finding I had endured in my life.  The word endure comes from the Latin “to make hard” and I had so tightly compacted my feelings about fault finding that it took a while for them to melt into the tears that I had been holding back for so long.  (“Why are you crying?!!”)  I had wanted to accept myself more fully and couldn’t because of irreconcilable “faults”.  I wanted to stop seeing the “wrongnesses” in everyone and everything, but had felt morbidly compelled to seek them out.  Now that pattern was breaking up and falling away with each guided head movement.

 It took many repetitions for my saying NO to fault finding to change to surrender and acceptance and I felt the eventual conversion inside of my psyche.  It felt very freeing and expanding and muscle testing confirmed that the inner change had taken.  Kate required far fewer go-rounds after witnessing for me and she too, felt freed by a new inner choice.  We checked in with each other and saw how fault finding was destroying the lives of many people we knew.  We would no longer fight with this entrenched system.  We’d just create new ones for ourselves and spread the word to others.

 The big lesson we both took away from the experience was the need for all of us to give up the fault finding system we silently agree to and replace it with one that universally looks for compassion, love, and beauty in all.  This is a choice each one of us can make in our lives, the cumulative effects of which will be a shift in how all people deal with each other.  This is where Creation is urging us to go as we have entered the 4th Day of the Mayan calendar on 7/25/11.  It’s time for new points of view and ways of doing things to take dominance.  We can each declare our individual independence from popular but antiquated systems of separation and competition like fault finding that are destined to fall away.  That way our separate drops of water may change the ocean of humanity.  Happy 4th of July!

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Awareness vs. Thought

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

An email newsletter we recently received from an astrologer in another city contained this quote, attributed to Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  I like the way Einstein looked at things and his outspoken nature.  He has always been a sort of a hero to me, in part because his cosmic sense of our physical world.  He knew that his scientific observations hinted at a spiritual foundation of the universe.

 I thought about using the quote as an illustration of how we work with bringing healing change through creative methods in our work at The Mesa.  Certainly I knew what the words in the quote meant and their implication that we need to “think outside the box” in order to solve problems.  Yes, I thought, changing how we think and being open minded are important in order for us to make things different in our lives, but something about the words didn’t feel right.

 Sadly, what passes as “thinking” these days is often the simple regurgitation of the ideas of others without any real experience, questioning, understanding, or creative expansion.  More and more, we are finding that the problem is not simply how people are thinking per se, but the fact that they are living in their heads; trying to solve all of their problems through the limiting practice of thought.  Usually, the root of what is out of balance for them is not on the level of conscious, aware thought at all, but emotional or spiritual in nature and deeply submerged or suppressed within their psyche.  So many times we’ve heard the stories from people whose therapists told them they had to learn to “just think differently” to stop being angry, sad, depressed, or afraid, when the origins of these disturbances were buried on levels of unconscious, non-verbal fears, misunderstandings, and negating programming that their thoughts simply mirrored.

 As I continued to ponder this simple sentence, I found myself wondering when Einstein had said it and if those were actually his words.  So many things on the web are passed along as “facts” these days when they are not so, and get repeated from site to site by webmasters too lazy to do their own research.  So, I proceeded to do what I have learned to do; I checked the quote out on the internet search engines.  There I found many sources who cited this little saying and various interpretations of its meaning.  Still, there was no date listed for the quote on any of the sites I perused, so I kept checking.  Eventually, I came to a discussion page on Yahoo where someone had asked what the quote meant.

 Buried in the comments section was a notation that the words so often repeated were not exactly what Einstein had said.  The actual quote being: “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.”  It wasn’t about thinking at all, I said to myself, but levels of awareness.  Something inside of me knew that the words weren’t a match with Einstein’s energy and consciousness.  They had been interpreted by people with a smaller awareness.  Thinking is analysis of ideas and perceptions, but you can’t think about what you’re not aware of.  Awareness goes beyond the mind but is not always recognized by it.  Higher awareness eventually leads to greater understanding, much as my own awareness had tipped me off about the so-called quote.

 When you were young, you were likely taught to use a fork and a spoon, crayons and scissors, read a book, ride a bike, and drive a car.  Did anyone ever teach you to work with your emotions or those of others?  Were you taught to listen to your heart?  You were probably taught how to care for your clothes, wash dishes, and maybe feed the family pet, but what about feeding your soul?  This focus on “smart” thinking and rote practice over higher awareness is a reflection of the education system in our country that values rational thought above all and denies that emotions or spiritual notions are valid experiences of life.  People are not learning how to engage in deep observation or self-examination, but to actually avoid looking at anything beyond how white their teeth are.  The result is smart, rational people who are ready to explode and can’t figure out why.  They are failing at dealing with life because they are trying to solve all their issues externally when that’s not the level on which they exist.

 In our work with private clients as well as with students in Mesa workshops, we see so many people who are sick, upset, stuck, confused, broke, resentful, worried, and/or afraid.  Their lives are a mess.  Many know all about the “Law of Attraction” and “The Secret”.  Some have been writing affirmations on their bathroom mirrors.  They have done the requisite asking (as in: “Ask and it is given.”) but nothing is changing for them.  In fact, things have been getting slowly worse as they get older.  They already have changed at least some of their thinking and are taking small steps toward a more simple, spiritual kind of life.  They want to practice Love and Light, but it just doesn’t always seem to come out that way.  Some are at wit’s end with their bad feeling life situations, even though they have been doing “all the right things” they had read about in books.  What they lack is awareness.  It’s visible to us.

 A recent session with a client was very telling in this regard.  This very intelligent but narrowly schooled person had been involved in some bad feeling experiences with coworkers and was still upset days later.  She wanted to know why she couldn’t let go of it.  As my client described what had happened, it was apparent that she was not only looking for ways to justify her anger at her coworkers, but also feeling conflicted over her own reactions to the perceived indiscretions.  She didn’t like what was done to her nor what she herself had done in return.  At one point, I asked what was more troubling to my client, what her coworkers had “done to” her or the tense new situation that resulted from her retaliatory shunning of the offenders.  She sat and stammered, not knowing where to start.  What are you feeling as you think about each aspect?, I asked.  The confused look on her face told me the story; she couldn’t sort out her own feelings nor put them into words.

 I had to walk my client through the possibilities of what she might be feeling inside for her to finally recognize that the disapproval of her coworkers was far more painful to her than the resentful sting from their actions.  As much as she wanted to push back against feeling victimized, being “disapproved of” was far more painful.  Once brought to her attention, my client was able to see this longstanding issue and its impact on her life.  It had gotten worse and worse feeling over time and caused her to become (by her own admission) “addicted” to seeking approval.  This brought on more bad feeling experiences as my client then did things she didn’t really want to do in order to please others and avoided what she felt might be rejected.  Her life had become increasingly nerve wracking and virtually devoid of fun.

 Still, there was good news.  My client had found a new level of awareness, one different than the original limited one from her childhood when approval was stingily withheld.  She realized that every time she was exposed to disapproval she took it very personally and wanted to push back against it, instead of maintaining a good sense of self and letting it roll off her back.  Incidents ignited traumatic cycles of internal pain that often took days or weeks to run out of emotional steam.

 There was also help for her.  The new technique we had recently discovered quickly and effectively shifted my client’s unconscious system of motivation.  It took several repetitions but working together we were able to shift that system from a hard stance of saying “NO” to disapproval to a softer, “YES”, changing resistance of what is into acceptance; changing perspective at a new level of awareness for my client.  By session’s end, she was also able to recognize that she was being disapproving to others herself and then self-rejecting over it.  Now that could change, too.

 It’s time for all of us to move beyond reason and thought to new levels of awareness if we are going to solve our longstanding personal problems, those of our society, and the world.  We can’t do it by following “business as usual” methods, viewpoints, or lines of thought.  As of now, the Flow of Creation will no longer support or permit it.  It just doesn’t fit with where it, and we, are going as we move toward 2012 and beyond.  We need to switch over to a higher level of awareness—a more all encompassing, spiritually-based awareness.  We can do this by exercising our emotional, creative, and spiritual “muscles” as well as our brains and expanding our awareness of being aware: our consciousness.

 How can we go about it?  First of all, we can pay attention:  Go out and study nature.  People watch.  Be self observant without becoming self absorbed.  Experiment and wonder.  Make time for meditation (Wednesday nights at The Mesa!) so you can listen to the soundless voice inside of yourself.  Let your hands create without thinking.  Go out of your head and into your body by dancing, swimming, or walking.  Notice how you feel as you’re feeling it and track what you idly think.  Trust your senses and let your experiences teach you.  Most of all, listen to your heart and follow your spirit.  Einstein will be smiling.

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Clearing Space: Divesting the “Good Stuff”

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

We’ve been hearing lately from many people who are gleefully engaged in “de-cluttering”.  What a great idea!  When things are piled up in our homes it can literally constrict the flow of healthy life force through our living spaces.  Whether the drive is “spring cleaning” or good Feng Shui tenets, clearing clutter from closets and coffee tables feels better, in part because it frees up that flow.  There is also another aspect about our possessions that can create a drain on our energy resources.  That is the fact that every object we own is attached to our personal energy field, each one tying up tiny amounts of our life force through our unconscious connection to it.

 On some level, part of us accounts for everything we own, for we’ve been taught to maintain, clean, track, inventory, protect, and determine the social and monetary value of our belongings.  (Do you save your “good” dishes for special occasions?)  As our inner mind does that on a continuing basis, we psychically carry our possessions with us wherever we go.  Imagine every one of your belongings being tied to you with a long string, trailing behind you like tin cans on the bumper of a newlywed couple’s car and you’ll get the picture.  Wouldn’t that slow you down a little as you walked through life?  Might it make you want to pare down what you owned?

 Listening to stories of recent joyful donation trips to Goodwill or the Salvation Army told by our Mesa friends once again got my wife, Kate, to making noises about “clearing out the junk” in our house.  We each have things the other might call “junk”, but are respectful of each other’s emotional reluctance to part with any of it.  Many times we had started in on this kind of sorting through of belongings, only to become stalled by indecision on what to keep and what to pass along.  Couple that with the fact that we are people who are able to see blessings in nearly everything and you might grasp the magnitude of our dilemma.

 This time, the inspiration to downsize coincided with our reading of Dr. Carl Hammerschlag’s book, The Theft of Spirit.  In it, the good doctor talks about how our possessions often end up “owning us” and that it is not until we give something away that it ceases to own us and we gain ownership of it instead.  But if I give it away, I’ll no longer have it, I thought, and I filed the concept away for later consideration.

 I could feel that I still had deep rooted conflicts about possessions and the material nature of physical life.  Kate did too.  We came by them honestly, I told myself.  As artists and spiritual people, we see everything as able to be turned into something beautiful or useful.  As a blacksmith, I see every scrap of metal as able to be recycled into wall hooks, nails, or small tools.  (Blacksmiths were the very first recyclers, you know!)  Stray sticks can be made into drum beater handles, water bottle caps used as glue reservoirs, broken glass can be melted into beads, and torn leather jackets fashioned into crystal pouches or medicine bags.

 Our environmental ethics also clashed with our energetic understanding of the curse of clutter, embodied in our recognition that there is really no “away” in, “thrown away”.  It all goes somewhere, usually just out of our sight.  We agonized over tossing old but repairable items into the trash.  We felt responsibility for stray twist ties and rubber bands.  We saved yogurt tubs for rinsing paint brushes, tie dyed stained tee shirts, and plotted ways to turn torn jeans into tote bags.

 Add to all of this the fact that I was taught poverty consciousness by my parents.  Possessions were something to be diligently protected and cared for.  Shoes had to be repeatedly shined, good clothes were saved for special occasions, and new things had to last a long, long time.  We always had to finish the “old” apples or bananas before eating the freshly bought ones, practically guaranteeing that the new ones would lose their appeal in over ripeness before we got to them.  Nothing was to be given away unless it no longer fit our body or age level, nothing was to be thrown out until it was completely, shabbily used up.

 This internalized indoctrination caused me to hold onto physical property even though it was counter to my true nature, even things that I didn’t really like, need, or use very often.  I found myself “protecting” possessions by not using them until they went completely out of style, dry rotted, or were so hopelessly out of date technologically that their special batteries or other consumables could no longer be purchased to be able to use them.  Then I felt sad or angry at myself for not taking better care of or getting enough use out of them.  I had been taught to squeeze every last drop of “value” out of what I had invested in, no matter how small it was.

 When Kate and I discussed clearing out the closets again a day or so later, we saw part of why we had trouble with releasing possessions.  People talk about downsizing glibly in terms of “getting rid of stuff”.  We all know how to get rid of “stuff”–  you throw it out or leave it somewhere for someone who is truly without.  But what about all the things that are still “good”?  Still relatively new-looking and usable, perhaps, but not needed, loved, or any longer used.  What’s the right thing to be done with them?  Do we sell them?  Would it be appropriate to simply give them away when we could probably could get something for them?  How much would we ask?  Would it really matter if we just threw them out?  (Insert my mother’s voice saying something here…)  Our heads knew it was time to move things along but our emotions weren’t sure how to go about it.  It involved choices.  We had to be responsible.  It stopped us dead in our tracks.

 We recognized a layer of confusion at work here, a conflict between our spiritual knowing and the cultural scorekeeping system we were raised with.  To Spirit, things have no intrinsic worth.  Our life force is far more precious.  Our capitalistic culture and emotional upbringing see things differently and suggest to us that things are very important, often more important than we are.  We were stuck trying to emotionally determine a value for possessions by systems that our hearts and souls didn’t buy into (no pun intended), even though those items held no practical value to us anymore.

 We knew how to “get rid of stuff”.  What we didn’t know how to do was this other thing; somehow moving along items of indeterminate emotional and ambiguous financial value.  Finally, a word for what we needed to do came to us: divesting.  I looked on the internet at the definition of divest, and the relevant meaning was the third one listed: “to sell off or dispose of investments”.  We were still seeing too much of other people’s idea of value in what we had to bring ourselves to willingly divest it.  There was too much tied up, in-vested in these things we owned.  Was it just the money we or others had spent that made us hold on to them?  No, the outlay was our lives, our history, and our projected selves.  This hinted at a deep seated confusion about our own value, wrapped up in what we had accumulated.

 Kate and I checked with Kinesiology (muscle testing) and both of our inner minds were saying “YES” to “getting rid of stuff”, but not surprisingly “NO” to divesting.  Here was a resistance to letting go of things that still had value(s) attached to them.  Working with our new little healing method, we were able to quickly reverse that inner resistance to divesting and get a new perspective.  Moving “good” things along was OK, completely up to our judgment, and even healthy.

 Kate immediately went to work clearing out our entry closet.  She brought things of mine into our office so I could review them as I worked on our summer class brochure.  This time, the good jackets we never wore and some other “valuables” actually went out the door to Goodwill within a day.  Other nearly new items went to the Mesa and then home with students who “always wanted” the items we were divesting.  Our blessings were spread.

 Oh… so what was the first dictionary definition given for divesting?  To strip of power.  (Literally, to take away your clothing, your vestments of authority.)  For us, something very opposite was happening.  By learning to materially divest instead of only “getting rid of stuff” we were actually taking back our power and energy from what had previously owned us.  The problem hadn’t so much been determining the worth of what we had than internalized concepts of value.

 It is our spiritual inheritance to recognize that material things are transient and relative value has just been a way to wield power and (often selfishly)control distribution of resources.  This needs to change for humanity to move from conflict, separation and scarcity towards compassion, unity, and sharing.  Native Americans would say that everything, including our bodies, are only borrowed from Spirit and will someday be returned to Spirit.  We own nothing but our essence.

 I could see that Dr. Hammerschlag idea that we couldn’t own things until we gave them away had to do with willingness to divest freeing us from external systems of “value” that allow material objects to have a hold on us.  By changing that perspective we will be able to move to a spiritual value system of Being rather than having; cherishing people, love, and peace instead of “stuff”.  Happy Divesting!

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Yes… but, Yes… if, Yes… Absolutely!

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

As Kate and I have continued to use Kinesiology to explore what in Life we are saying “YES” and “NO” to and shift them with our little head shaking and nodding healing process we’ve assembled, we have come face to face with an old, rather than new wrinkle; “Yes, but…” behavior.  We have seen this approach to Abundant Life from our students, healing clients, friends, and within ourselves.  With “Yes, but…,” we want to say “YES!”, but can’t quite allow ourselves to because of existing circumstances; fear, old traumas, “rules”, or well… just because.  (“Yes, I want to come to The Mesa and be creative, BUT it’s so far from where I live.”)  Lately we’ve come across another variation of this resistance to Abundant Life within us in the conditional form of “Yes, IF…”  We see this as the next step up the ladder towards accepting our birthright to Abundant Life, but still subject to forces seen as outside of ourselves.  This one is tied to future expectations, results, and circumstance we view as being out of our control.  (“Yes, I know meditating would help me relax.  I’d do it IF I had more time.”)

 The final step in opening to Abundant Life we call, “Yes, absolutely!”  No tap dancing, back pedaling, excuse-making, conditions, or waffling to it, it’s total commitment to the affirmative.  Now we see “Yes, but…” and “Yes, if…” for what they really are: “NO” in flimsy disguise.  When I muscle tested myself about saying “YES!” to the Abundant Life all around me each late spring morning, I got a “NO” response from my body and saw yet another way I was resisting the Flow of Creation that wants to stream through all of us.  Kate helped me with one of our healings and this unconscious choice and the accompanying muscle test shifted immediately to a “YES!” (absolutely!)  It felt different; like plugging in an appliance or power tool whose switch was already in the “on” position.  I could still feel the structure of my old habit of resistance, but it felt like it no longer held any power over me.  It might take a day or so to get used to letting the “juice” of Life’s vibrational current flow fully through me, but I know we humans adapt to sensations very quickly.  Nature has so much to teach us, if only we’re listening.

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Abundant Life and Polarities

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

I wake up early these days– earlier than I’d like to since I often stay up late taking care of emails, website maintenance, and other writing for our work at The Mesa.  Kate and I live out in the country where the deep quiet and wide spaces between homes allow us to leave the windows open and curtains parted.  We’ve been doing so recently as the nights have finally gotten warm.  I wanted to attribute my early wakefulness to the advancing hour of dawn as we get closer to the summer’s official debut on June 21st, but it’s more than that causing me to stir.  There’s a lot going on in the Allness around me.

 Nearly every morning, we are serenaded by sequences of bird calls that start before the break of day.  Our feathered friends seem to politely take turns with their various sounds and repeat them in order, pausing in between.  I hear the neighbors’ rooster’s “err-err-ERR-err”, a mourning dove’s “ooo-WEE-ooo, ooo- ooo- ooo”, and the rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker hammering on a hollow tree, the cycle repeating over and over distinctly without overlap.  I can’t help but listen and smile at their earnestness.  Sometimes turkeys, mockingbirds, catbirds, or chickens are part of the queue, but the timed calls always have enough variance to keep my ear and mind away from sleep.  I look at the clock and pull the pillow over my head in an attempt to doze for a few minutes longer, but there is something else unseen and unheard stirring me.

 I had already been aware, at least in theory, of the different Nature energies of the year’s four seasons and their effect on us.  The wisdom of traditional Chinese Medicine tells us that we humans need to readjust our energy systems to work in concert with seasonal changes or we will be out of balance with our world.  Acupuncturists recommend that even those who are well and fit come in four times a year to get rebalanced for seasonal Earth energies.  Ayurveda, the ancient healing wisdom of India, teaches us to eat season-appropriate foods to match our bodies up with the time of year.  The Native American Medicine Wheel associates each seasonal quadrant with different aspects of body, mind, and spirit.  It reminds us of the changing energies of the Natural World in the repeating yearly cycle and their individual lessons for us.

 Every season has its own vibration.  Fall is the time when the trees shed their leaves and send their sap down into their roots.  It’s a time when Nature is shutting down for the coming of winter, turning off the lights to go to sleep.  I have often felt a vague sadness from it, like the last minutes of a great party when friends are saying goodbye.  I’d be filled with a notion of things ending as the trees became bare and the skies grayed.  My body clock shifts with the shortening days and I’ve always wanted to stop “saving daylight” much earlier than we do.

 Winter has sometimes been tough for me as the short hours of daylight made me pine for the sun and frigid temperatures caused me to focus on simply sitting somewhere warm.  It’s the time of year to “go into the tipi”, when much in Nature dies so that it can be reborn in the spring.  In that time of slowed vibration (cold) I perceive a deafening silence and separation that I have at times pushed back against, in part because it makes me slow down and turn inward.  This is exactly what Nature intends us to do– not plow through the snow to get to the office, mall, or mailbox.

 In early spring, the plants and animals begin to stir again and I feel the transitional aspect to that awakening.  Sap rises and the trees behind our house become tinged with pink as buds form.  As Nature rubs the sleep from its eyes and the days get longer, I feel the approach of something that’s not quite here yet, like a train in the distance.  Suddenly in May (April where I used to live in the DC Metro area) Nature bursts forth with exponential growth.  The myriad plants that surround me are all putting their life-force (not imaginary!) into new limbs, leaves, and fragrant structures of reproduction.  I can almost feel their ardent photosynthesis.  Our neighbors’ bees buzz around our open windows and the birds are raising their young, teaching them wing and song.  Nature is in heightened motion.

 Now, the approach of summer is waking me up before I want to be.  The Allness feels too “loud”.  It seems an intrusion, the “neighbors” next door being too boisterous and noisy for such an early hour.  What is this energy that’s so exuberant and potent that I can’t sleep through it?  Abundant Life.  I’m being bathed in it, bombarded by it, and it will not be denied.  Not even the pillow over my head can keep it out.  Spring has changed the nature of its vibration as summer quickly approaches, raising it as things heat up.  It’s the spiritual, sexual, creative energy of life in full swing all around me I’m feeling.  But what about inside of me?  Am I letting this energy in?  Am I vibrating in sync with it and radiating it back, or resisting and turning away?  The pillow over my head tells the story.

 Soon summer will be upon me, humming along with heat and humidity, long sunny days and nights filled with lightning bugs and the sounds of cicadas.  Gardens will grow, young animals will mature, and people will be busy with barbeques and vacations.  I’m happy wearing shorts and flip-flops again, and enjoy the daylight that lasts until after 9.  I look forward to the approaching Summer Solstice, which marks the first “real” day of summer, but not without a touch of sadness.  Why?  Just like the winter Solstice heralds the return of the sun from that season’s darkness, after the Solstice the days will be getting shorter again, even as the sun becomes warmer.  It feels like saying “hello” and “goodbye”, both at the same time.

 As I think about the seasons it occurs to me that the transitional times of spring and fall have always been my favorite parts of year.  It’s not too hot or too cold, and Nature is not too active or too quiet.  Spring and fall feel balanced to me.  Winter’s Yin (cold, dark, and dying) and summer’s Yang (heat, light, and Abundant Life) have felt, well… extreme to me.  Today I get it.  They’re POLARITIES, and while they feel uncomfortable to my sensitive Piscean system, I could choose to look at them differently.

 When I pushed the pillow off my head and got up this morning, I muscle tested myself about saying “YES” to spring, summer, fall, and winter respectively.  I got confirmation from my body-mind to what I already knew.  I was saying “NO” to the extremes of summer and winter and “YES” to the “balanced” seasons of spring and fall.  I was also saying “NO” to the rush of Abundant Life around me.  As I pondered these results a deeper truth emerged for me.  What I was really saying “NO” to was polarities in general; life and death, male and female, good and bad, lack and plenty, activity and rest.  That’s what I was pushing back against, the experience of opposites, the swings of life from one extreme to the other in both my outer and inner worlds.  As summer heats up, the days get shorter.  As winter grows colder, light increases.  Might I see the overall balance instead?

 Kate helped me with one of our new little healings, guiding me to switch my inner operating system from saying “NO” to life’s polarities to “YES!”.  I could feel energy shifting and swirling in my body as something released in my solar plexus.  When we were done, the muscle tests had shifted, my body-mind saying “YES” not only to polarities in general, but also to summer, winter, and the rustle of Abundant Life.  I feel different somehow, more energized, focused, and open to the Flow of Creation with all it offers.  Now I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow morning brings and my new response to the exuberance of a late spring dawn.

 We can’t allow life’s polarities to shut us down.  We’re here to merge polarities on this Earth as we move toward the unity that Creation intends for us.  In order to do so, we must welcome opposites where they exist and find ways to bring fire and water together with neither being consumed by the other.  This doesn’t mean we have to necessarily like life’s polar extremes or promote any one of them, only accept their existence and admit them as part of our inner world.  The trick is not to push back against one or the other, but to see them as parts of a paired whole.  Maybe that way we will someday hold them in balance.

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