9

BIOFIELD ANATOMY WISDOM

Learning Self-Care—Saying No, Cultivating Neutrality, and Using Love as the Ultimate Healing Tool

You have a great body. It is an intricate piece of technology and a sophisticated super-computer. It runs on peanuts and even regenerates itself. Your relationship with your body is one of the most important relationships you’ ll ever have. And since repairs are expensive and spare parts are hard to come by, it pays to make that relationship good.

STEVE GOODIER

“Flip the spin” is the name I give for a very simple exercise to help sensitive people deal with “bad vibes” from others or from their environment. I’ve experimented with different techniques over the years to deal with this issue, and this one seems to be the easiest and the most effective. Flip the spin is a metaphor based on the notion that what we call negative energy spirals toward us in a direction that causes us to feel worn out, run down, or sapped when we are exposed to it. We may also become sad, angry, or frustrated or feel somehow responsible for this negative energy or a variety of other nonbeneficial feeling states.

When you find yourself in the path of this energy, whether by choice—as in being there for a friend in crisis—or by circumstance, instead of resisting it or trying to erect a barrier to it (very challenging to do in my experience) you simply “catch it” with the energy of your solar plexus, allowing yourself to feel it for a moment, to empathize with it, and with a clear intent, gently flick it to get it to spin the other way, sending it back to the other person with a positive spin and the feeling of compassion. It’s that simple.

When we are really centered and grounded, we can radiate compassion continuously, which is a really nice state to maintain if you can. This is the essence of “lightworking” or spiritual alchemy—turning energetic lead into gold, or heavy, negative energies into light, positive energies. The more you practice it, the easier and more automatic it becomes. People I have shared this exercise with routinely report being amazed at how simple and effective it is.

SAYING NO

One of the things I have observed in this work is the tendency of so many people to say yes when what they really want or even need to say is no. I came to realize how often I did this in my own life. I had been raised by a stay-at-home mom who waited on all of us hand and foot. She fed us three meals a day and did laundry and housekeeping without ever asking for help, and even though we had chores, she took care of most everything. She never took days off, but every once in a while, maybe once every two or three months, she would have to lay down on the couch for a whole day with a migraine, which seemed to be the only way she could justify taking some down time.

We tend to parent the way we were parented, and I fell into very similar habits as those of my mother (minus the migraines). This worked well for a time, but when I started undergraduate school and was taking eighteen credits as well as seeing clients, it all became a bit too much. I’ll never forget the first time I realized that I was simply too exhausted to cook dinner and that I really just needed to go to bed. My husband is a carpenter and was working long days doing physical labor. He had gotten accustomed to coming home spent and was grateful to have a meal on the table. My boys were eight and eleven at the time, and they too were quite accustomed to Mom taking care of everything. On this particular evening, I announced to them that I was not cooking dinner, they could fend for themselves, and I went to bed, pulling the covers up over my head, wracked with guilt for saying no.

Since that time I have become much, much better at saying no and taking care of myself when I need to. I’ve trained my husband and my boys how to make a few different meals (or just get take-out), and I no longer feel the least bit guilty when I need to put my own needs first. Cassidy even said to me the other day, “Mom, if you don’t feel like cooking dinner, then just don’t. We’ll figure it out.”

Obviously, as a parent, there are times when you simply can’t put your own needs first, especially when your children are very young—which leads us to the next topic:

ASKING FOR HELP

As someone who was born and raised in New England, and having lived in Vermont for the past eleven years, I am very accustomed to the tradition of the self-sufficient individual. New Englanders—and it seems Vermonters in particular—place a high premium on being self-sufficient and not wanting or needing help from others. The irony is that these folks are the first to show up to help others and even thrive on being able to do so.

I had a client who was a giver by nature express to me his sentiment that “whoever gives the most in a relationship wins.” I pointed out to him that this was actually a selfish attitude because it made him the winner and didn’t give the other person the opportunity to feel the good feelings associated with giving. He was surprised to hear that, as he had not considered this perspective before.

Gracious receiving gives dignity to the act of giving. Being willing to receive help and support allows others to enjoy giving help and support. The fact of the matter is that sometimes we need help, when we are faced with a task that is too big, too overwhelming, too much to do ourselves. It’s important to learn to recognize these times—before you throw your back out moving the couch by yourself, or scream at your kids because you really needed a break, or end up late on a deadline because you didn’t recognize or realize that someone else could have helped you with it.

There is a personality type that I call “the good soldier” who carries on valiantly, never saying no to anyone, never asking for help, pushing herself well beyond the limits of her body and mind with regularity. And while this may be admirable, ultimately the body rebels—such a person finds herself exhausted, irritable, prone to infections, unable to sleep well, or self-medicating with food, alcohol, drugs, or shopping. To be truly healthy and to maintain a balanced state, it is important to learn to recognize when it is appropriate to say no, and to ask for help.

THE 80 PERCENT SYNDROME

The 80 percent syndrome is the name that describes the propensity for starting a project or task and finishing roughly 80 percent of it but then not seeing it through to the very end. These people’s lives are littered with unfinished projects (and often frustrated partners). For me it would show up in things like wash the laundry, dry the laundry, fold the laundry, but don’t put the laundry away—leave it on the dryer or in the basket or on top of the bureau. For men it can show up in unfinished trim work; last bits of painting left undone; project cars or motorcycles that sit incomplete, taking up space in garages. For artists it can result in unfinished paintings and sculptures; for writers, in abandoned articles and books. I used to do this myself until I started to understand why this occurs.

This syndrome often arises in people who have a lot of stuck energy in their fields regarding issues with one or the other or both parents. Because the third chakra is the chakra of setting goals and achieving them, our energy to complete tasks comes through here, and if a good portion of one’s third chakra vital energy is tied up in the past with unresolved hurts, we won’t have the gumption or chutzpah to finish our tasks. It simply isn’t there to draw upon. So if you have an 80 percenter in your life or if you yourself are one, don’t hold it against him, or if you are such a person, don’t beat yourself up. The good news is that tuning forks can be used to find, break up, and reintegrate this stuck energy so that you can go that extra mile to the finish line. And one of the things that I have learned, as a former 80 percenter, is that that extra mile isn’t really that hard or that far, and the payoff, the return on the investment of energy in feeling satisfied, far outweighs the small amount of energy required to go the extra distance to completion.

PURPLEWASHING

Purplewashing is a term I have coined to describe the tendency people have to gloss over, repress, or deny uncomfortable emotions, usually by “spiritualizing” the situation or by “being nice” about it. I call it purple-washing because it is similar to the concept of greenwashing, whereby corporations that are not really environmentally friendly engage in PR practices and advertising to make it seem as if they are by constructing a green veneer over an uglier truth.

Purplewashers skip anger and go right to forgiveness; they skip jealousy and go right to feeling happy for people; they push aside frustration and smile. They tend to label certain emotions as “bad” and unacceptable, and therefore fail to acknowledge them when they arise in the body. I use the color purple because just as green is considered the color of environmentalism, purple is the color of spiritualism, or the higher realms of thinking and being.

An emotion is an electro-chemical event, and any emotion that is repressed or denied is a repression and denial of one’s life force. Neurologist Candace Pert has shown that different emotions have different chemical compositions, and when we are having the experience of any of these emotions, their vibrational and chemical counterparts are generated and go in to circulation in our bodies. When an emotion goes unexpressed or unrecognized, the body does not digest or recycle it, it stores it, or as Pert says, “Emotions buried alive never die.”¹ Emotions always find a way of expressing themselves. What this means is that the energy of our emotions is always trying to be heard and expressed in some way, like anything buried alive might. If we don’t recognize them for what they are and find healthy ways to express them, they will find a way to express themselves anyway—in sickness or disease, tumultuous life situations, or an eventual mental or emotional breakdown.

A purplewasher can tend to have a sweet tooth; instead of really feeling and expressing anger, she instead consoles herself with chocolate or a glass of wine, thereby pacifying herself but not really doing anything about an issue when action of some sort may be indicated. This explains why unexpressed emotions can also express themselves in excess weight. One place in particular where emotional energy can accumulate as fat is at the base of the neck on the back. We’ve all seen people who have a lump in this area. The way I have come to understand and explain this fatty area is that it is the home of “the gatekeeper.” The gatekeeper decides which emotions may pass into the brain and therefore conscious cognition and which ones are forbidden.

I have definitely done a certain amount of purplewashing in my lifetime. Up until my midtwenties, I barely even recognized the emotion of anger in myself. I had grown up with a mother who was a feisty Irish redhead. She was calm and loving most of the time, but when she got angry, she got really angry, and she threw things. She once threw an entire table setting of silverware, plates, and glasses at my oldest brother, who was stuck cowering in the corner of the dining room. After my father’s stroke I never knew what was going to be flying around the house. So, after bearing witness to these terrifying displays of anger, I decided that “anger is bad,” something I didn’t want to feel.

I did the same thing with the emotion of fear. I’m not sure of the origin of this pattern in myself, but I became very good at repressing fear, and rarely if ever consciously recognized it in myself. In fact, it was one of the last emotions I learned to recognize when I was creating the biofield anatomy—which in hindsight is sort of odd given that fear is actually one of the easiest emotions to detect due to its pronounced and distinctive pulsing quality. But we can only recognize in another what we recognize in ourselves, and I had done a very good job of purple-washing fear in myself. A week or so after I finally heard it in a client, I was able to perceive it in myself and was quite surprised and even startled by it. At the time I was working part-time as a gardener, and I was sitting pulling weeds from under rose bushes, thinking about our current money problems. My husband was considerably overdue on payment for a large job he had completed, and the bills were starting to pile up. We still weren’t sure when or even if the check was coming, and I had no idea if we were going to be able to navigate much longer. All of a sudden it dawned on me that I was running the fear current. “That’s fear!” I exclaimed, both pleased and surprised to recognize it.

Another emotion I have suppressed is jealousy. The first time I ever really felt consciously jealous of someone was when I was in my early twenties, and it felt like poison running through my veins. This is a very uncomfortable emotion and I don’t ever want to feel this way again, I told myself. And I didn’t, for a very long time. But several years ago I was having a session with a shamanic counselor, and we were discussing emotions. “I don’t allow myself to feel jealousy,” I told her (this was before the insight about purplewashing). And she said, “Oh, that’s strange. Why would you want to stop yourself from feeling any of your emotions?” What a good question that was. The best answer I could come up with was that it was unpleasant, uncomfortable, and that I had judged jealousy as “bad” and cast it out of my awareness. Did that mean that I didn’t feel jealousy anymore? Or just that I wouldn’t let myself feel jealous? How lofty of me, really, to declare myself above jealousy. Do you see the purplewashing here?

Recently, I had the opportunity to experience the feeling of jealousy, to really let it flow through me. It wasn’t pleasant, not at all, but I let myself face it squarely, truly feel it. I also talked to a few friends about my experience—how true it is that confession is good for the soul. Feel the feeling, talk about the experience of the feeling, love yourself even though you are experiencing an unpleasant feeling, and it moves along. If we don’t, then the emotions that we deny tend to fester in one way or another.

I had a client who became defensive when I shared with her that she had a lot of stuck energy in the area that I relate to guilt and shame. This person was suffering from an autoimmune disorder that she had been unable to heal. When I told her what I perceived, she insisted that those weren’t feelings that she felt, seemingly implying that she knew better than to feel such base emotions (a sentiment I could obviously relate to). Were her suppressed emotions related to the disease? It would certainly seem so.

The bottom line is that as humans, we all experience the full spectrum of emotions, whether we recognize them or not. Unrecognized emotions act subconsciously in our lives according to the law of reciprocal vibration. What we put out, conscious or otherwise, is what we get back.

According to Human Design, a synthesis of several ancient systems, including astrology, the I Ching, the Vedic chakra system, and the Kabbalah, our emotions are a sort of navigation system designed to give us feedback about where we are on our path. They nudge us along, away from that which feels unpleasant or is unhealthy, toward that which is pleasant and healthy and appropriate for us. If we continually purple-wash, we may see ourselves as doing the right thing, but the quality of our life situation will show us what we are repressing.

MANAGING EMOTIONS

Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes a part of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. Out goes naivete, in comes wisdom; out goes anger, in comes discernment; out goes despair, in comes kindness. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive, and expansive. . . . The pain leaves you healthier than it found you.

MARTHA BECK

If you are willing to feel your emotions, you need to be able to know how to handle them, and this isn’t something we get a lot of guidance on culturally. Mostly we are simply told that they are not okay, and therefore we are expected to repress them in one way or another. But there are a few simple things we can do to deal with our emotions in a healthy way.

One important observation I have made is that the way people refer to their emotional experiences differs in different languages and cultures. In Germanic languages such as English and German, we refer to emotions in terms of “being” them: I am angry, I am sad, I am frustrated. In the Romance languages such as Italian, French, and Spanish, emotions are referred to in terms of “having” them: I am having anger, I am having sadness, I am having frustration. If you look at British people and then at Italians, who is freer in terms of their ability to express emotions?

Try this: say “I am angry.” Then say, “I am having anger.” What is the difference in your inner experience when you rephrase how you express your emotions? Which way allows you to feel okay about your emotional experience? Everyone I have ever shared this with finds the experience of having emotions more preferable to being the emotion. Not only is it a more comfortable way of expressing the experience, it is more accurate as well. Remember, emotions are like waves: they rise up, peak, and then fall away—if we allow them to. However, there are many ways to arrest the movement of the wave: smoke a cigarette, eat a chocolate bar, pour a drink, have sex, go shopping, take a pill, point a finger at someone else, mindlessly veg out in front of the TV. Capitalism provides us with limitless opportunities to avoid our emotions; it even encourages us to avoid our emotions, profiting off of our avoidances. And this is quite helpful, because emotions aren’t really permissible, especially for men, in our culture. Men are allowed to feel anger and not much else. How many of you heard growing up, “Big boys don’t cry” or “Nice girls don’t get angry.” We have all been very conditioned by our families and by Madison Avenue to not feel and not express those feelings.

The Centers for Disease Control says that 85 percent of all diseases are caused by stress. What is stress? An emotional response to a situation. Which means that 85 percent (perhaps even more) of diseases are caused by unexpressed, unacknowledged emotions. And yet, when you go to a doctor or a hospital, in most cases you are never asked about your life situation. You are examined, tested, poked, and prodded as if your meat machine was something separate from your emotional body.

Awhile ago a good friend of mine ended up in the emergency room because she was experiencing sudden tightness in her chest, heart palpitations, and extreme difficulty in breathing. She was put through a battery of tests, kept overnight for observation, and then was told there was nothing wrong with her. As it turns out she had had a very stressful experience, a sort of icing-on-the-cake experience with an alcoholic husband, and she had had a massive anxiety attack over it. She was having a mental and emotional crisis that was so extreme that her body went into overload, but not one person at the hospital asked her about her mental or emotional state.

Such is the state of modern medicine—and one of the reasons why sound balancing is a helpful and useful practice. In sound balancing the client doesn’t even need to be aware of what is going on emotionally, because the pattern of resistance that shows up with the tuning forks illustrates this beautifully.

I have a client who has a low-grade blood disorder and suffers from low energy. In one of his first sessions, he had so much frustration present that it felt like it was literally killing him. He was aware that he was frustrated but didn’t realize how much upset it was creating in his body until it was reflected back to him, because it was easy for him to hear the tonal quality of the fork and how dissonant it sounded. He went home with a homework assignment: to be mindful of the current of frustration running through his body. Over the course of successive sessions he displayed less and less of this in his field, as he learned to experience less and less frustration with his life situation through mindful awareness.

Emotions run like guardrails down the sides of our energetic bodies. They provide us with a feedback loop to make the adjustments we need to stay on keel. If we get too bogged down in one emotional state—for example, frustration—it drags us out of balance, or to use a boat metaphor, it causes us to tilt to port. In boats, from the back looking forward, the left side of the boat is port and the right side is starboard. Port tilts are expressed in sadness, frustration, disappointment, and stuckness; starboard tilts are anger, overdoing, guilt, shame, and powerlessness. (I also call these the left-hand ditch and the right-hand ditch). Actually, going too far to either side leads to powerlessness. One woman described the emotions on either side as being like Velcro walls and described herself as being in a Velcro suit, tearing herself off of one side she was stuck on only to be flung over to the other side and get stuck there for a time.

If we can learn to master really feeling our emotions, acknowledging them, allowing them to guide us to make the course corrections that are indicated for smooth sailing, we will be able to travel through life with much greater ease, the wind at our backs, and our balanced prow cutting easily through whatever waters we are navigating at the time.

THE INFLUENCE OF BELIEFS

Everyone has patterns that they act out over and over again. What I have found is that the tracks that get laid down early in life become the grooves we can get stuck in for the rest of our lives. Although an infinite potential exists in every moment, we continue to choose what is familiar to us, what fits in with our beliefs. Some of the most significant work I have done has been with beliefs that are formed under the age of seven.

Age seven is a crucial age in sound balancing work. I have found that this is the age where we begin to think critically about our environment and the people in it. My younger son, who was in sixth grade at the time, brought up this point spontaneously one day when I was driving him home from school. “By the time you are in second grade,” he said, “you have lost that innocence you had in kindergarten.” Prior to this we take everything as it comes, and we also tend to think that we are responsible for everything; it doesn’t occur to us that adults could be at fault for anything. Therefore, anything unpleasant in our world must be our fault. But when we reach the age of seven, we can see that others can also be at fault. Prior to that we can form very powerful self-limiting beliefs that inform the story of our lives. These beliefs are very fixed or stuck when I find them at the outer edge of the field, and the energy sunk in them often doesn’t move unless the belief is named.

I liken working with these stuck beliefs to digging burdock. If you have ever dug up burdock, you know exactly what I am talking about. It requires patience and tenacity to dig up burdock root, and it requires patience and tenacity to uproot a very fixed, self-limiting belief. Another metaphor I refer to is the device that an eye doctor uses to assess your vision, which has many different lenses; the doctor flips the lenses around, asking you which one makes you see better. Fixed, limiting beliefs are like lenses that distort our perception of reality. “I always ruin everything.” “No one cares about what I have to say.” “My needs aren’t important.” “Men aren’t supportive of me.” “Women aren’t supportive of me.” “I don’t deserve to be here.” “I’m not good at anything.” “I will never amount to anything.” “I’m not worthy of love, success, or happiness.”

Our senses are subjected to somewhere in the vicinity of forty million bytes of information per second, but we can only process forty bytes per second, which means that we screen out an awful lot of information. Generally, we perceive what fits in with our beliefs about what is possible.

Many of us have come across the story of the native people of South America not being able to see the big boats of the Spaniards when they arrived off their shores, even though they were right in front of their eyes. They couldn’t conceive of such things, therefore they could not see them. It was only after the shamans saw them and described them that the ordinary folks could finally see them.

I had a somewhat similar experience of imperception in my twenties. When my mom got her cancer diagnosis, I put all of us on a macrobiotic diet, as I had read that it could be helpful in healing cancer. Macrobiotics is a diet that consists largely of brown rice and vegetables and eliminates sugar, wheat, dairy, and most meat. I had been living on a diet of sugar, wheat, dairy, meat, and coffee up to this point, so this was a radical departure from what I had been eating most of my life. The macrobiotic diet also includes lots of leafy greens such as kale, collards, mustard greens, and the like, things I had never eaten in my entire life (I was an incredibly fussy eater as a kid). I noticed immediately that I was much calmer on the macrobiotic diet, and although it did nothing for my mother, it definitely helped the rest of us deal with her decline more peaceably than we would have otherwise.

One of the things that happened during this time was that my glasses started to bother me. I had been wearing glasses since I was thirteen for a mild case of nearsightedness, and I assumed that my vision must have gotten worse because that is what happens to people as they get older. So I made an appointment with my eye doctor, anticipating the need for a stronger prescription. Much to my surprise, after examining me the doctor said, “Well, the reason your glasses are bothering you is because you don’t need them anymore—you have perfect 20/20 vision.” When I drove home without my glasses on, I realized, apparently thanks to my better nutrition, that I actually could see everything at a distance, with none of the accustomed blurriness. I needed an authority to tell me I could see better before I could realize that I was seeing better, because seeing better did not fit in with my belief of “I am nearsighted and require glasses.” This is how so many of us go through our lives—not seeing or perceiving what is right in front of us because we do not believe it is possible.

How many of you have had the experience of having a particular problem for some time, and then discovering that you had what you needed to remedy the situation all along, you just didn’t see it?

CULTIVATING NEUTRALITY

Cultivating neutrality is how I describe the process of acquiring equanimity. What I mean by this is a state where you are neither happy nor sad, neither elevated nor depressed, but simply neutral. I think the edict that Americans are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” creates a problem that goes largely unexamined in our culture. There is a significant difference between pursuing happiness and simply being happy, and many people get caught up in the pursuit without ever really “catching” happiness. The staggering number of people who are on antidepressants is evidence alone that something is not working.

Often, if people suffer from depression, they feel a lot of pressure to be happy, but the distance between the low of depression and the high of happiness can seem like such a long way to go. Unable to get to happiness or to hold it once they may fleetingly experience it, they slip back down into depression. People try to think positively, only to find themselves completely overrun with negative feelings and self-reproach. They are gripped by the fear that something is going to come along to take away their happiness, and so they have a hard time even letting themselves feel it for fear of losing it.

When we cultivate neutrality, we don’t have to worry about any of this. We understand that life is full of ups and downs; good things happen and bad things happen, and that is the nature of life. We allow ourselves to feel all of our emotions as they arise, labeling none of them as “good” or “bad,” but simply seeing that they are part of the human experience. We allow them to play out as they need to with a good laugh or a good cry or maybe a brisk walk or some deep housecleaning if we are angry. When we allow our emotions to run their course, without judging them or repressing them or thinking we shouldn’t be feeling them, they move on. It’s only when we resist them, repress them, or judge them that they tend to stick around and create problems.

Neutrality is the place that we return to once the highs or lows have passed. And in neutrality, there is a certain peace—nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to fix, no agenda to push, no axe to grind, nothing to be except simply present. This is a lovely space, a state of mind where you can enjoy true rest, where there is no charge of happiness to maintain, no charge of sadness to wallow in or seek to escape from, and the place from where we can create our reality.

CREATING YOUR REALITY, OR THE LAW OF ATTRACTION

My people can have what they say, but my people keep saying what they have.

CHARLES CAPPS,
THE TONGUE: A CREATIVE FORCE

This quote, from the book The Tongue: A Creative Force, by Charles Capps, a retired farmer, land developer, and ordained minister, sums up the essence of reality creation, or the power of the word to create one’s reality. What it is saying is that the word is creative, and when we repeatedly say things like “I am broke” or “I am stuck” or “I am sick and tired,” that is what we are creating. It’s not just in what we say, but also in what we feel.

Most people have reality creation backward. They are waiting for outside circumstances to change before they will say “I am rich,” “My life is moving along nicely,” or “I feel great,” and then experience all the associated feelings that go along with that.

Remember, our life situation is an “exploded view” of our bodies and our fields. The body and its field is primary, is creative, and the life situation reflects that, not the other way around. When we keep saying what we have, we are creating more of that. Anything we resist tends to stick around (what you resist, persists) because we are giving it energy. It is only by being willing to cultivate different words and feelings first, and then not giving any attention or resistance to what shows up in opposition of that—because those things will continue to show up for a little while until the new pattern kicks in—that the new pattern begins to show up in the life situation.

Imagine what it feels like to be rich, to be successful, to own your own home, to have a new car, and feel those feelings first. I recently heard a story about someone who decided to start treating his old car the way he would treat a new car—keeping it clean and clutter-free, inside and out, feeling the feelings he imagined he would feel in a better car—and in a very short time, a nicer, newer car appeared suddenly and serendipitously in this person’s life. Your feelings will truly magnetize to you the outer circumstances that reflect those feelings, but there is a time gap in which faith is necessary, and this is where many people give up.

Here is a very simple exercise you can do anytime. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling? How do I want to feel? What needs to happen in order for me to feel that way, that I can control or affect right now?”

We can’t simply flush or eliminate feelings from our bodies without first listening to what they are trying to tell us. Remember, they are there as guideposts to keep you on keel, so if you are feeling a strong emotion, there is a message there for you, an indication that you must change course in some way, take some sort of action, communicate something to someone. Not heeding your emotions can lead you into the rough, and not learning to cultivate emotional discipline can keep you in the rough.

YOU ARE WORTHY

When I first started working with tuning forks, I was very surprised to discover that underneath every person’s “noise” is a harmonic signal. And when that signal came through clearly, the person was what I can only describe as “great.” I kept coming home and saying to my husband, “That person I worked on today was great!” I kept being somewhat astounded to discover this in virtually everyone.

Reflecting on my surprise made me realize that I had always just assumed, based on what I had been taught, that humans were imperfect, that we were fallen from grace, that we were fatally flawed somehow. Our Christian cosmology, even in our supposedly secular culture, had wormed its way into my brain and formed a subconscious belief that I was a “guilty sinner.” Even though I was actually raised in a religion-free home, the ubiquitous story of Adam and Eve and how they blew it—especially her—had apparently shaped my thinking without me realizing it. So here I was, surprised to see that this was not true—that here was the potential of perfect harmony, an aspect of humanness that was not out of sync with the universe, not out of step with nature, but actually quite in sync, beautifully, pleasingly, even jaw-droppingly in sync. I have never worked on anyone who does not have this harmonic potential.

The thing is that most of us associate with what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls our pain body. This is the aspect of the self that has borne all the wounds of one’s lifetime—traumas small and large, on every level of being. These can even be inherited traumas that have been vibrationally encoded into our energetic blueprint. Most of us don’t believe that clear harmony exists as a potential within each of us, and even if we did, the belief that we are not worthy would get in the way. I have found at the kernel of every dysfunction, at the core of every issue, this belief: I am not worthy.

I invite you to see where and how I’m not worthy shows up in your mind and in your life. I think it will surprise you how it is hidden in plain view everywhere. Your worthiness has nothing to do with anything you do—it simply is what you are. That you are not worthy is a lie; you are worthy, most worthy of simple harmony in your body, mind, and spirit, simply because that is the essence of who and what you truly are.

LOVE, THE ULTIMATE HEALING TOOL

When I turned forty-one, my son Quinn said to me, “Next year you are going to be the answer to life, the universe, and everything!” He was referring to the fact that forty-two is the number that answers that question in the iconic book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So when I turned forty-two, this was on my mind. It just so happened that at the time I was doing research on plasma and sacred geometry as an independent study for my master’s degree, and so I was actually thinking about these subjects quite a lot.

One morning I was in Burlington having my car serviced and spent some time waiting and having breakfast in a café there. It suddenly came to me that I wanted to write, but I had no paper of any kind except for my appointment book. I opened up to the block schedule planner in the back and promptly wrote the poem below, putting each line in one of the boxes. I am not inclined to write poetry; in fact, I had quite a run-in with my sophomore English teacher in high school around poetry because I thought poems were silly and didn’t want to have to write any, but this poem just sort of happened.

I have figured out the answer to life, the universe, and everything

And it is . . .

LOVE

Love does make the world go ’round

Gravity? Love

Electricity? Love

The strong force? Love

The weak force? Love

LOVE LOVE LOVE

Could it be more simple?

Could it be more obvious?

But we don’t see it

Right in front of us

All the time

We don’t see it

We don’t get it

We are looking for something more

But there is nothing more than

LOVE

Love is all there is

Love is the driving force of the universe

Of all creation

Of physics

Of biology

Of metaphysics

Pi = Love

Phi = Love

E = mc² = love

It is all

LOVE LOVE LOVE

Love is what heals you. Any place where you are not healed, you are not letting love happen in you, you are not loving yourself.

We have been taught that it is wrong to love ourselves, that it is selfish to love ourselves. It’s okay and appropriate to love others, to have compassion for others, but not ourselves. This is a lie. This is why so many people are sick. We’ve been taught that it doesn’t matter what we think or what we say, because we have no power. We believe we are powerless, because we do not understand the power of the word. We do not realize how creative words are.

One of the things I always say at lectures is that as a sound healer, I have learned that the most powerful thing in the universe is right under your nose . . . and it’s your mouth. By our words we create our lives.

What kinds of stories are you telling yourself and others about who you are? Healing is being willing to detach from your stories, to be willing to go into neutral and be open to other possibilities, to believe that you are worthy of those possibilities, to allow yourself to simply rest in the essence of the universe, which is, simply, love.