Your Custom Text Here
Meditation for Healing Fear
There is a lot of fear going on.
It’s old: passed down through generations, vibrating through the web of life, each fragment of abandoned fear signaling us deeper into confusion about who we are.
Its role in the web has become distorted, and on some level, we believe it’s who we are. For certain people, this is very convenient!
For most of us, it inhibits the sacred expression of our Creative Will.
We can start healing relationship to fear by meeting it in our bodies, via the Heart Center.
Below is a meditation anyone can do, to begin working with fear structures in your body.
You can do it in stages as you read each prompt, record yourself reading it slowly and then listen, or however you like.
MEDITATION FOR HEALING FEAR
Stage I
Look around the space you’re in. Grab the corners of the room, and own it as your space to work in, where you can be totally, unconditionally, yourself.
Press your feet into the floor a few times, and find the ground. Relax and give the full weight of your body to the Earth.
Soften, so that the natural motion of your breath can flow and pulse through your whole body.
If your skin was sort of like a balloon, let the breath’s motion give a satisfying stretch to the skin at the top of your inhalation, and a wonderful release at the end of the exhalation.
Bring this motion into the legs and down into the soles of your feet, communicating the rhythms of your breath and heartbeat down into the planet.
Stage II
Go into the center of your heart, and release the light in its core.
Let your breath and the rhythm of your heartbeat bring this light to anywhere you are holding fear in your body, in the form of many threads of light.
Let these places vibrating in fear become entrained to the rhythm of your heart.
Notice how areas of fear appear in your mind’s eye, or as sensations.
Instead of conducting the orchestra, let your mind be a curious observer as you notice how the fear structures respond to the light and rhythm from your heart.
Ask Guidance to show you which fears are yours, and which belong to someone else, ancestors, or another time and place. Stay in present time.
Let your Heart and the Earth work the circuitry of your energy field while you relax and rest in the process for as long as you like.
As the light rhythms begin to melt and repattern the places vibrating in fear, let whatever energies are not yours drip down into the Earth where they are recycled, or delivered to where they need to go.
Ask Spirit Guidance to complete any finishing touches to protect the healing you’ve initiated.
Completion
To complete, bring your awareness back into the soles of your feet and release some of your heart’s unique light-signature down into the Earth.
Dedicate whatever positive karma is generated by this meditation to the well being of all beings, everywhere.
Let me know how it goes!
If you’d like to connect with this work live, practice together and ask questions or get feedback, join my mailing list to be notified about upcoming free Community Meditations (zoom), classes and retreats.
I’d love to see you there.
© zach sharrin intuitive energy work
2nd Chakra Healing inquiry: Opening up to Feelings and Sensation
2nd Chakra:
Location: A couple inches below the navel, in front of the spine.
The 2nd chakra is an energetic center of expression: feelings, bonding (relationships), sexual energy and sympathetic attunement.
It’s an important creative center… feelings run the (human) world!
To begin tuning into your own 2nd chakra, start on the level of sensation:
following the natural movement of your breath down into your belly, ask your breath to show you where your second chakra is now.
Supposedly it’s a couple inches below the navel, in front of your spine. How are you experiencing it? Does it have a shape, color or feeling tone in this moment? Is it centered in your body, or more over to one side or the other? Is it pleasant, neutral or unpleasant to be connecting with this chakra?
Take a moment to let your 2nd chakra appear to you, guided by these questions.
Does bringing your awareness into this area elicit any pleasant or unpleasant feelings?
If you struggle with visualization, stay with subtle physical sensation.
Try not to edit the information with your mind, or superimpose something you believe mentally onto your experience.
It’s not unusual for people to not be able to breathe as far down as the abdomen. How far down can your breathing go now? From wherever your breath is landing, wave to the 2nd chakra from there and say, “hello!”
At the end of this post are some statements you could experiment with as a way to connect with the 2nd chakra. As always, let the statements be received by your body and the chakras, and allow them to respond.
You don’t want to use these statements to brainwash yourself - they’re for opening up inner conversation.
Stay curious, and stay with the feelings that arise.
Watch them, feel them as sensation in your body and energy field.
What do they bring up for you?
Do memories, stories or certain beliefs begin to surface?
If you don’t feel anything, stay with it, or try again another time. Don’t force anything.
We can’t technically feel nothing, so you could try tuning the microscope of your awareness to a higher power, and see if something very subtle is going on. It doesn’t have to make sense - feelings and emotions are a different language than logic and analysis. Sometimes they can be translated in ways that our rational minds understand, but many times we need to be willing to step into the language of emotions- feeling and sensations, and accept them for what they are: energy.
Sometimes we feel numb - which is not nothing. Try checking in again at another time.
We hold a lot of history in our 2nd chakras.
An important part of healing is learning our history: the developmental stories of this lifetime, and trans-personally over many lives. As we do, we start recognizing patterns: the way we game ourselves, and we can decide if this is how we want to continue.
Some of this learning of our history will be remembering, some of it will be re-assembling, and importantly - some of it will be learning to feel more deeply, sometimes without an evident narrative.
Whatever needs to emerge as a story to inform your growth, will emerge.
If it doesn’t, you’ll need to allow feelings to move without explanation.
Getting real with ourselves usually entails a lot of pushed down emotional energy starting to move, and it’s important to let it.
Don’t let the control freak parts of your mind vet each feeling before you validate it, this is distraction away from forward movement. Feelings are just feelings. They may be nuts, but they are valid for what they are.
Throughout your healing and growth process, you’ll probably revisit certain parts of your story over and over again. This is not a sign that you’re not making progress.
Sometimes we need to revisit an event from the past that we thought we’d resolved, with more maturity.
Other times we can get stuck in the loop of a story: in this case we keep returning to the story to justify some part of our identity, and it’s time to move attention into the body and drop the story, and instead stay with the feelings (energies) trapped in the story, using ground and bare attention until the energy shifts.
This stage is sometimes experienced as a grieving process, and may bring up deep fears around who you are and what your life is about… get support and keep going: you may be about to go through a big transformation.
Whichever phase of your process you’re in right now, working with the statements in this post can help you explore ownership of the 2nd chakra beyond its negative (trauma) programming.
Remember that emotions are energies in motion: if we stay with them, they will to move and transform as they need to. Healing = moving energy.
Statements for Healing the 2nd Chakra
I need relationship.
I need to be connected to all of myself and for that to be ok.
I need to know that I will not reject myself if another rejects me. When I am hurt or disappointed, it’s ok because I connect with the hurt, I am there with my disappointment.
I need to be in sympathetic attunement with my bodies: Earth, physical, emotional, pain, astral in order to bring in more of my light and evolve my soul’s patterns.
I can connect, give and receive here, because I don’t manipulate my own experience - for myself or others.
I protect myself at this level, so that I can feel what I am feeling and grow through that inner relationship.
1st Chakra Healing inquiry
1st Chakra:
Base of the spine, deep in the bowl of your pelvis.
Energy center of grounding, survival programming for the physical body. Belonging and enoughness.
It’s a little artificial to talk about the chakras separately because they’re an ecosystem, but I’m going to isolate the first and second chakras to highlight certain issues many of us hold at these levels, that are in need of healing.
Most of us rely on the inner “guidance” of accumulated negative pictures. Because these inner images of what is ‘real or true’ are painful, we launch into our minds, further separating us from ground, and the reality of what is unfolding in and around us in present time.
These negative images are records of past expereinces. We don’t need to destroy them, but we do need to de-energize them by allowing ourselves to feel and emote (move the old energy) out of them so that they do not feel like realities we’re obligated to repeat over and over again. Being stuck on these pictures is how “fate” is created. Healing them creates choices.
When we learn to ground unconditionally, through these painful experiences, and connect directly with the Earth, we can relax the 1st and 2nd chakras out of their contraction around negative experiences, and draw on these spaces as the sources of inner guidance that they are meant to be.
The first chakra is located at the base of the spine, deep in the bowl of your pelvis. You could check in with your first chakra as you read this, simply by taking a few deep breaths, and allowing the motion of your breath to come all the way down into this space.
The first chakra deals with being, and your survival programming: It holds your physical and nonphysical memories (and expectations) about being and enoughness. Some of these beliefs are from your physical body’s cellular memory.
Because many of us have a certain numbness or fogginess about our pelvis, I find it helpful to imagine sending the motion of your breath down into the chair you’re sitting on. If the chair can tell that breath is coming into the first chakra, you’re doing it!
Ask yourself some questions here, and let the answers be felt, not imagined or mocked up in your mental mind. If you don’t get a response that’s ok. No response can mean that you’re in the early stages of opening up inner communication with your body, and / or that there is something there that your mind feels a strong resistance to.
You may have some more recent trauma healing to unwind before it feels safe to feel into this area. The only place to start is where you are. Keep checking in with it when you feel like it.
What do your body’s physical ancestors believe about survival? Is life difficult? Does your lineage hold a belief that everything you’d ever need is always provided?
Other pieces of information in your 1st chakra are accumulated from your own spiritual continuum, which has experienced many different bodies, and holds memories informed by each one. Certain lives that were particularly traumatic, or likewise those that were inflection points in your soul’s growth process may hold particular charge.
What are your soul’s memories of being in different bodies?
Did different bodies feel different than this one? Were there some you are glad to be done with, or others you are still holding grief about leaving?
You may think you know some of these answers in your mind already, so experiment with asking directly to the 1st chakra. Allow the chakra to reply non verbally, through visualization, sensation, a word, symbol or other form of communication.
I want to emphasize that these pictures, both those originating in the lineage of your current body and those that you’ve brought into this lifetime, may be operating out of present time: they are like static declarations amidst a flow of experience.
Given any particular moment, they may align more or less with the possibilities arising. A picture that is skillful will allow you to move forward and support movement of energy and growth. Pictures that are not relevant will distort your reality, creatively shaping it to align with the bias of the picture. Pictures are not really ever good or bad - they’re created out of experience, and only create problems when we’re attached to them, meaning that we derive a sense of identity from them that is contracted, and in opposition to the natural flow of impermanence, {which does not just mean that all good things end, but also bad things.)
Pictures tell us who we are. What we can recognize by bringing them into conscious awareness is that we’re also more than our pictures. They may define us in 3D reality, but who and what we actually are transcends the scope of any picture. We are part of many simultaneous realities.
By knowing about our pictures and taking responsibility for them, we can own them, and come into choice about how they are going to operate in the larger picture of our evolution.
In a healing process, its important to accept our pictures, and not get so identified that we become victims of them.
Our attachment to pictures at the level of the 1st chakra may be particularly strong because they are pictures (identities) that are tied to survival.
What are the stories or pictures in your first chakra about being alive, in a human body? Is it a good thing? At the level of the 1st chakra, do you feel that you have always had, and always will have everything you need?
Your mind may answer these questions in one way, but it’s often not the same answer that your 1st chakra has; so try once again sending a few breaths down into the space of the 1st chakra, and ask it some questions. Allow a wide range of responses, especially for non verbal ones, even subtle sensations. Keep asking questions: where is the 1st chakra right now? Let your body draw your awareness to its location - I said it was at the bottom of your spine, but is it? Is it more over to one side? Does it have a color, or feeling tone? If you send the the message, “ I love you and am always here for you” to the first chakra, how does the chakra respond? Try saying something nasty like, “ I am never ok”. How does the 1st chakra respond?
One important thing here is to let the chakra answer. It may answer immediately, or take some time. Just relax and breathe. If it says something that doesn’t make sense to you, that’s probably a good thing - don’t edit in your mind because you don’t prefer the response you’re getting. Sit with it, notice the reaction in your mind (especially when you don’t understand or don’t like the response) and you may end up getting new information that evolves your relationship to your 1st chakra. In fact, just being a good listener to yourself is an amazing first step to having a better relationship with yourself. We all like people who are good at listening to us - if we want to have a good relationship with ourselves, we need to be good listeners for ourselves too.
Most of us hold painful pictures in our 1st chakras that have to do with separation. We separated from our mothers body at birth, and as we’ve grown and developed our bodies, language and minds, we may feel alternately excited to be evolving into an individual, as well as hold grief and a sense of unreality about who we are, because on some level it’s painful to be separate. We feel divided from ourselves and the Earth.
Some of us may feel at the level of the 1st chakra that we will never be totally ok, never have enough simply because we’re separate, which is very scary.
What needs to happen is to be with the experience of separateness, allowing it to be held as whatever it feels like in the moment. By relating to the inner experience of separateness, we develop a relationship with it - which begins to heal the gap, and de-energize the picture as a center of gravity. As we become ‘un stuck’ on a picture, different vantage points emerge, and a previously insurmountable “truth” may feel more like a misunderstanding meant to be lived through, in order to evolve consciousness.
If you’d like to experiment with building conscious relationship with the 1st chakra for healing, you could try out some of the statements below, and see how your chakras respond.
Remember that affirmation / statement work is about opening dialogue within yourself - not brainwashing.
If some of these statements elicit a strong rejection, allow yourself to go into a felt dialogue with what they bring up.
For example, if a statement like “ I always have what I need” brings up an inner response like, “ That’s never been true, I’ve never been supported”, that’s important information. Some part of you feels that way.
Now you can begin to have a relationship with the part that feels it’s never been supported. Even a contentious relationship can be the beginning of something better.
Be a good listener to yourself, and as always, use what’s relevant to you, disregard what’s not.
1st chakra statements
I’m supported and belong to the earth.
I always have what I need.
I create what I need, the earth and life always support me unconditionally.
I am: and that is the way it’s supposed to be.
I am equal. No being is better than another.
It’s ok for me to enjoy the creative life force energy that is mine. It is supposed to be there and does not belong to someone else, nor do I owe it to someone else. It also does not harm others when I own it.
Other people do not need me to feed them my energy.
I wanted to exist very badly. I have huge disappointment about how difficult it is.
I need to know the difference between memories, and present time.
When I need to feel this difference, I anchor into my mother, the Earth’s core, from where i can step out of my minds unknowing + confusion about what is now and what is an image.
I also honor these images when I need to - from my family, from my own lives, from the shared experience of this planet and others, that tell me what is going to happen: that I will be betrayed, I will harm others, I will have to manipulate and be manipulated to simulate connection. I honor these images and I honor that they are projections, not real or true unless I will them to be.
I honor the feeling inside myself that I need to participate + perpetuate these pictures, and I honor my sovereignty: the right to de-energize them and step more fully into the opportunity and responsibilities of this body and this lifetime.
Separation is an experience. It is not the ultimate truth. If I accept this experience as something that appears to be happening, I can own and accept it as my perception, and it will reveal something new to me that I need to learn.
Now it is Clear by WS Merwin
NOW IT IS CLEAR
Now it is clear to me that no leaves are mine
no roots are mine
that wherever I go I will be a spine of smoke in the forest
and the forest will know it
we will both know it
and that birds vanish because of something
that I remember
flying through me as though I were a great wind
as the stones settle into the ground
the trees into themselves
staring as though I were a great wind
which is what I pray for
it is clear to me that I cannot return
but that some of us will meet once more
even here
like our own statues
and some of us still later without names
and some of us will burn with the speed
of endless departures
and be found and lost no more
Revelation Must Be Terrible by David Whyte
Revelation must be
terrible with no time left
to say goodbye.
Imagine that moment
staring at the still waters
with only the brief tremor
of your body to say
you are leaving everything
and everyone you know behind.
Being far from home is hard, but you know,
at least we are exiled together.
When you open your eyes to the world
you are on your own for
the first time. No one is
even interested in saving you now
and the world steps in
to test the calm fluidity of your body
from moment to moment
as if it believed you could join
its vibrant dance
of fire and calmness and final stillness.
As if you were meant to be exactly
where you are, as if
like the dark branch of a desert river
you could flow on without a speck
of guilt and everything
everywhere would still be just as it should be.
As if your place in the world mattered
and the world could
neither speak nor hear the fullness of
its own bitter and beautiful cry
without the deep well
of your body resonating in the echo.
Knowing that it takes only
that one, terrible
word to make the circle complete,
revelation must be terrible
knowing you can
never hide your voice again.
— David Whyte
from Fire in the Earth
©1992 Many Rivers Press
Some Questions You Might Ask
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
Mary Oliver
amnesia in dreams and life . . .
“We all have had the experience of going into a room to do or get something or other and forgetting when we get there what it was we had intended to do. Worse yet, we may not even notice that we have forgotten why we were there, and instead just do something we habitually do in that room. This trivial bit of the psychopathology of everyday life offers a compelling analogy to the amnesia we experience not just in dreams but in our lives as a whole.”
Stephen La Berge - Scientist
contemplative image
Geologic time spiral scale
Lots of things I love about this picture; wonderful tool for contemplation. My favorite part is how it illustrates that we don’t know how this all got started or where it’s going. Magic!
Might be hard to see on the screen but the present moment is at the very ‘end’, represented by sky scrapers and humans bottom center - right at the cliff’s edge of the next moment from now. . .
We are always at that edge. Yikes! or Wee! depending on how you see it
You Who Want
“You Who Want . . .” by Hadewijch II
You who want
knowledge,
seek the Oneness
within.
There you
will find
the clear mirror
already waiting.
From Poetry Foundation:
“Little is known about the life of Middle Dutch visionary and poet Hadewijch, except what can be gleaned from her 13th century writings. Many scholars believe she lived in Antwerp, and her fluency in Dutch, Latin, and French can be taken as evidence that she received an education typically limited to the wealthy. She joined a group of beguines, evangelical women who, outside the monastic system, took vows of poverty, chastity, and service while remaining in the world.
Her texts, which include religious poetry, accounts of visions, and religious letters, were written in the vernacular. Hadewijch used elements of the poetic tradition of troubadour poetry, which celebrated romantic love, to construct her ecstatic renderings of yearning for the beloved. Hadewijch has been the subject of much recent study in the fields of feminist theology and historiography. Her work was first translated into English in 1980 when Hadewijch: The Complete Works appeared as part of the Classics of Western Spirituality series. The seminal critical study of her writing, Hadewijch: Writer – Beguine – Love Mystic, by Paul Mommaers with Elisabeth Dutton (1989), won the Flemish Prijs De Standaard and was translated into English in 2004. Poet Jane Hirshfield included a selection of Hadewijch’s poetry in the anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994), and a feature film, Hadewijch, inspired by her life and directed by Bruno Dumont, was first screened in 2010.
A group of poems was found along with Hadewijch's manuscripts, written in what appears to be another hand and bearing a more advanced vocabulary than the other poems. Since scholars have long disputed the authority of these poems, they have been set off from Hadewijch's known works and their author is referred to as 'Hadewijch II', who may have been Hadewijch or one of her acquaintances.
The location of her grave is not known.”
Love takes off the masks . . .
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
I am not a person
I am not a person.
I am a succession of persons
Held together by memory.
When the string breaks,
The beads scatter.
By Lindley Williams Hubbell
Disrupting Karma
KARMA can be a scary word! I’m careful about how and when I use it with clients in a reading or process session.
A wise perspective from Buddhist master Mingyur Rinpoche:
“Karma is not destiny. It is not fate. It has become popular to conclude, “ That’s my karma,” in a way that implies, “ there’s nothing I can do about this.”
That’s a complete misunderstanding. We are born with impulses and inclinations, tastes and characteristics. That’s obvious. yet our impulse for aggression does not necessarily lead to murder.
Our instinct for kindness does not necessarily lea to boundless compassion.
The maturation of any instinct, like that of a seed, depends on circumstances and conditions. But it remains our responsibility to make the most of what we have, and what we are born with, by taking the reins and directing our activities.
Karma contributes to everyday situations that we find ourselves in. It contributes to our family context, the type of work we do, and our financial circumstances.
It shapes our appetites and behavior.
It increases and decreases possibilities.
Karma is not a life sentence, but more like a predilection we can work with - and change. It is not immutable.
. . . we learn to detect impulses in their early stages. We can check an impulse toward anger before exploding like a volcano. If we do not recognize that impulse, then the repetition of angry outbursts strengthens the tendency towards anger and creates its own karmic energy, its own propensity for reoccurrence.
Recognition allows us to disrupt the habitual identification that we have with the impulse, and therefore to separate from it.
We can also learn to cultivate our impulse for kindness so that it permeates our entire being for our own benefit and for that of others.
Our humanness provides us with the choice between positive and negative.
Our karma may shift he balance one way or another. But the choices that we make are our responsibility, and they condition our future.”
Love Ramble
“ Most of my films deal with people who are stuck in certain routines and habits that don’t make them happy. They want to change, but they need something to push them. I think it’s mostly love that causes them to break their routines and move on.” - Wong Kar-wai
Archaic Bust of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
"One turning and burning diamond". . .
So many garish lamps in the dying brain’s lamp-show,
Forget about them.
Concentrate on the essence, concentrate on the Light.
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,
The Light streams towards you from all things,
All people, all possible permutations of good, evil, thought, passion.
The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,
Endlessly emanating all things.
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes
-Rumi
Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
“Do not hold regrets.
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.”
Excerpt from poem “ For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
Link to full poem: https://poets.org/poem/calling-spirit-back-wandering-earth-its-human-feet
How do beliefs about death and dying shape living?
As Ninakawa lay dying, zen master Ikkyu visited him: Shall I lead you on?” Ikkyu asked.
Ninakawa replied: “ I came here alone and I go alone. What help could you be to me?”
Ikkyu answered: “ If you think you really come and go, that is your delusion. Let me show you the path on which there is no coming and going.”
With his words, Ikkyu had revealed the path so clearly that Ninakawa died and passed away.
Excerpt from " Graceful Exits: how Great Beings Die" By Sushila Blackman
I find reflecting on death to be one of the most powerful spiritual / existential contemplations. Whether or not we’re ready to look at death head on, the beliefs we hold unconsciously about it have huge influences on how we feel about ourselves and the meaning of our life. Exploring assumptions about death and dying means exploring assumptions about living!
Liberational Spirituality Class Materials
Going through files and found this handout from Liberational Spirituality class I did in 2018.
