ANCESTOR CONNECTION – GAINING WISDOM FROM ANCIENT CULTURES FOR USE IN MODERN TIMES

By Jane Battenberg

He threw bits of bones and things onto the mat and began to talk about my life from their patterns only he could discern.  He said I was being guided and helped in my work by a great aunt on my father’s side.  He instructed me to meditate to get her name and then to give a dinner party for all my ancestors.  I left this session with the wizened, gifted African healer, P.H. Mntshali, amazed by the accuracy of his reading as by the strangeness of it all to my western mind.  However, I dutifully meditated for the name and got Emily.  That evening I placed food in as many tiny saucers as my kitchen table would hold, sending a mental  invitation to all my ancestors, including my deceased Dad, to join me in their honor.  As I nibbled on the food, I tried to focus on acknowledging my genealogical lineage.

I was startled out of this by the sudden ringing of the phone.  It was my Mom, who by the way never calls me unless it is very important.  She said she and my sister were thinking of me and decided to call to chat.  Laughing, I told them I was in the middle of a dinner party for our ancestors, and Dad said to give her his love.  She wasn’t at all surprised, and when asked if Dad had ever mentioned an Emily in the family tree, she said she’d check his family bible.   Several days later she reported there was a great aunt Emily among the dozen or so names written!  That seeming well beyond coincidence, I felt suffused with a loving, warm glow of support and belonging.

Valuing connections to the ancestors as an essential part of life has played a central role in most indigenous and ancient cultures, among them Native American, Chinese and Hawaiian.  In fact, most of these cultures consider connection with, pleasing and honoring ones ancestors to be an integral part of daily ritual as well as wealth and well-being.  “All my relations” is a common greeting used when entering a sweat lodge.  When Hawaiians chant their genealogy, they do it without taking a breath in the middle, for to break the lineage with a breath would be dishonoring them.

A study of the Hawaiian language discloses a deeply ingrained belief in the connection and relationship between everything.   Everything, even the most mundane, has a spiritual base, which is why they did not separate the two.  When fishing, one connected with the elements, the weather patterns. the ocean and the fish as well as the presiding spirits. 

The Hawaiian language is made up mostly of vowels, which all visitors struggle with.  However, each vowel is a word in itself, forming the spiritual base for the language and structuring its users’ thinking to “see God in everything”.   A is feminine, awakening, enlightenment, nurturing.  O is masculine, whole, source, big picture.  I is connection to Spirit, creativity, passion.  E is spreading out, announcing, gentle.  U is transformation, magic, magnificent. 

To extract the deep, spiritual meaning for ancestors, Aumakua,  each vowel and each syllable must be looked at.   Kua means backbone, support.  Akua means divine, God, spirit.   Makua means parent, guardian.  Au means era, passing of time, tide current.  Taken together, it means the loving, guardian ancestors providing backbone and support from the spiritual realm over time.  When the vowels alone are translated, a deeper spiritual meaning emerges:  A u a u a…A awaken U to transform, U transform to A awaken.

In other cultures names had meaning, such as a flower or a particular quality as it related to the person.  Especially if named after another person, maybe a famous warrior or skilled writer, the person then continued the lineage of that quality in his life.  All the names in a genealogy then told a story of the collection of individual qualities that made up their lineage.  In English our names don’t usually have a meaning, other than being named for a favorite aunt or friend, which leaves us with less richness of legacy and less connection to the whole.

In our modern time there are evidences aplenty of our being cut off from and separate from. We use natural resources as if inexhaustible, connection to nature means cutting the grass, and family members are those thorns we gripe about.  Many people have no clue what the first names of their great grandparents were, and ancestors have no meaning in our lives, since they are all dead anyway.  Perhaps there is wisdom to be gleaned from the ancient cultures of the world that can begin to knit us back into a cohesive web, where spiritual and mundane, living and spirit, (wo)man and nature are in constant relationship.

You can get a name reading of your soul’s life purpose from the Hawaiian translation of the vowels in your name by calling Jane Battenberg (714)556-7858 or Leon Kalili (714-662-0836.

BALANCING ACTS

By Jane Rigney Battenberg

Last year I chose to explore and deepen my understanding of Balance in my life.  The first thing that happened after choosing Balance to be my partner for a year was that my life suddenly became filled with extremes that demanded balance!  This article is about what I learned from that yearlong exploration.

Balance is a mid-way point between potential extremes.  Like dancing on the edge of a sword, it requires constant micro-adjustments to maintain.  I immersed myself in play, that joie de vivre that brings a healthy balance to intense work.  At the same time I began major new work projects that demanded new levels of creativity and skill.  Work was my passion and motivation while play gave camaraderie, rest, fitness and an antidote to burnout.  By passionately committing to both work and play, it soon became excruciatingly evident that something had to give!  

Do What You Love:  I first prioritized what was most important to me, what gave me “juice” and love, those things that I would choose above others.  Choosing a combo of work and play, I was as committed to revitalizing self as to what I gave out to work and others.  Then, like squeezing a wet sponge, the less important things got eliminated.  “Just say no” became easier to do because I had committed to what was most vital to me.  I had a template for choosing how to spend my time.   If a person loves their family and spends all their time at work, in the long run one could say they really don’t value family.  We vote with our time about what we value, which requires ruthless balance.

Start/Stop/Maintain or Change:   If you never threw away any of your clothes, your closet would be a hopeless jumble of needed and no-longer-used items.  New clothes are needed to replace outworn items and to fit the times, different images, different activities.  Clothes also require regular cleaning and fixing.  We habitually are better at some of these than others.  Ask yourself, of these activities, Start, Stop and Maintain or Change, which you do best and which worst.  Is it easy or hard to generate new ideas and projects?  Are you good or not at keeping things running, fixing and changing as needed?  Do you complete things or let them drag on and on?  Once you have taken a realistic stock of your tendencies, it is time to bring more balance in these areas.   Flow in life depends on balancing these three.  Get a spreadsheet and ask yourself these questions:

              What am I not starting that I need to?

              What can I start?

              What am I not maintaining or changing that I could?

              What needs more maintenance or change?

              What am I not completing that I need to?

              What can I stop doing?

Again, a balance of these is essential for healthy flow in life.

Law of Three – Tension Between Opposites Creates Movement:   Consider a couple dancing together – both must maintain a certain amount of tension while simultaneously being attentive to each other.  If either collapses or tries to dominate, it is no longer a dance.  The dance occurs because of the balance between the two.  Ana loves her freedom to be able to choose in the moment what to do and be free to follow her intuition.  She wants to be a writer, and she has set aside several hours each day to write.  She finds this daily grind very confining.  Yet she is using the tension of that confinement opposing her natural desire for spontaneity to elevate her writing skills and to achieve her goal.   Picture a climber who wants to go up a steep crevice with no toeholds on it.  The smart climber will put their back to one wall and feet against the opposite wall, using the tension between the two to “shinny up” (that’s a southern technical term!) to the top.  It is a maxim that nothing new is ever created without opposites.   Whether it is male/female, freedom/routine structure, current situation/desired outcome, all creativity demands two opposing forces to birth, invent, accomplish.  It’s like you can’t hit a target unless you have one.   Once you understand this principle of using and balancing the tension between opposing forces, you can consciously use it in your life to move forward.

Clara grew up in an international commune, mostly separated from her parents and raised in a collective, strict, controlling environment.  A long history of abuse, a controlling marriage, 5 children and religious dictum molded her into a very compliant, submissive and depressed woman.  Her only outlet was dance, which she had learned in China, India and some college.  And dance, she did!  Her only self-expression allowed, she danced her emotions and pain with intensity.  Eventually, she left the controlling marriage, with no means of support for her children.   She reunited with her parents to begin healing their relationship.  She also began healing herself through creating her story in dance, a series of powerful vignettes accompanied by her recorded voice weaving the tales to the music and movement.   She danced the feminine, submissive, giving up herself to authority, only living for others until she found the deep well of self inside, finding her inner strength and power.  Only then was she able to feel compassion, love and forgiveness.  Only then was she able to turn to caring for her children.  She danced the healing balance, which spoke to the core in all of us, finding our demons and shadow sides to be able to reconcile them. 

Oranges and Raisins:  If you fill a bowl with oranges, there is still room for pecans.   Then there is still room for raisins.  Then you can still pour sugar into the bowl.  Then there’s still room for some water.  By breaking a large project (orange) down into smaller tasks (raisins), you can fit them into small bits of otherwise wasted time.  Looming projects can be less daunting, getting started easier and procrastination less likely when you can do some of the smaller, simpler tasks.  Whenever you really, really want to do something, you will find the time for it.  Time is elastic like that.

Just Say No:  Do you ever find yourself getting pulled into something because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, you want to be nice, to gain approval or out of  a sense of guilt? A friend told me about her email being totally shut down because someone had sent her a file with lots of photos which used up all her computer memory.   Once that file had been removed, she could receive all her emails again.  It was a great metaphor for how we let relatively unimportant things in life clog up the flow. Fighting serial monotony means taking habitual things off automatic so that you will have the time to do what feeds your passion, joy and satisfaction.

Principles for Balance:

        * Choose your Passions:  Consciously decide what you value most, those things you 

           love deeply and most want to accomplish.

• Closet Cleaning:  Use the Start/Stop/Change or Maintain model to find and fix what is out of balance.
• Dance Partners:  Balance and forward movement are accomplished by getting conscious about the opposing forces involved, including the emotional ones, and then reconciling them.
• Oranges and Raisins:  Knowing what you want to accomplish then allows you to break things down into smaller tasks.  You can then work on multiple projects at a time and get more accomplished in the same time.
• Just Say No:  It takes ruthless courage to stick with what you value rather than succumb to the lesser important requests.  If you don’t, however, it may overload your system or you’ll end up with something less than what you truly value.

 I offer these principles to be considered in creating balance in life.  I hope they are useful to you.

LETS GET PHYSICAL –

THE BODYMIND CONNECTION

Is there a connection between our physical body and our thoughts?  Imagine you are holding a large, ripe lemon.  You scratch the peel and sniff that lemony smell.  Now imagine you cut it in half and sniff the inside.  Now lick it.  By now you are probably experiencing something in your mouth, like a puckering or salivating, and maybe your face is changing a bit.  Whether it’s aches and pains, suspected disease conditions or even whether some holistic remedy will work (acupuncture included), too often people say, “that’s all in your mind.”  It’s just a placebo means that what you are taking doesn’t really work, it’s all in your head.  The fact is that placebos work a whopping 40% of the time – a pretty good record for many medicines.  How does that placebo effect work so effectively?

Up until 1986, there was no scientific proof of the mind/body connection.  Throughout history mystics and regular people have believed that one’s thoughts could influence reality or at least the body, but there was no scientific proof.  Then, neuroscientist Dr. Candace Pert discovered the connection in her work with neurotransmitters.  In her fascinating, novel-like book, Molecules of Emotion, she describes her pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking brain and body.  Her revolutionary work explains the scientific basis for popular wisdom about having “gut feelings”, how emotional states or moods are produced by the various neuropeptides, and what we experience as an emotion is produced by the activation of a particular neuronal circuit simultaneously throughout the brain and the body.  Since neurotransmitters and their receptors are in both the brain and the body, the mind is in the body as well as the brain.  Deepak Chopra popularized this by saying that every cell of your body is eavesdropping on your every thought.

This discovery of the bodymind connection could be as revolutionary as discovering the earth is round, not flat.  If we adjust our thinking accordingly, the changes can affect all aspects of our lives.  Take education as an example.  School programs that involve the entire body in the learning process through art, dance, singing and movement seem to be more successful, particularly with hyperactive children.  ADD-diagnosed children cease being a problem in a learning environment that engages all their bodymind senses.  Take emotional health as another example.   Unresolved negative emotions are stored in the neurology of the body.  There are two ways to clear them, through body work and through mental/emotional therapy, with a combination of the two recommended.  A frustrated, angry person might find peace of mind by working out, running, massage or yoga.  A back ache might have an emotional basis of fear of not being supported, which when emotionally cleared allows the backache to vanish.  A client’s bleeding ulcers completely disappeared after our emotional/mental therapy, according to the hospital’s scope.  Take spirituality as an example.  It is a lot easier to move oneself into a prayerful, meditative state through singing, chanting, group readings, breathing, and the like.  Since you can’t intellectually meditate, the alternative is to engage the body in some way to get to the trance-like state that allows you to slip into a deep meditation.  Many find keeping their body fit, as their temple, through good nutrition, exercise, quality time with loved ones and balance lets them more deeply experience their spirituality.

As food for thought, just consider for a week your own bodymind connections.  If you have any body discomfort, look at what thoughts you are constantly thinking to see if there is a connection.  There is often a metaphor, like jaw clenching related to something felt but not expressed, diabetes as not enough sweetness in life, shoulders as shouldering too many or other peoples’ burdens.  Louise Hay’s book, Heal Your Body – The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them, is an excellent source.  If you are dealing with emotional issues, complement your work by adding in physical releases such as body work, acupuncture, yoga, and exercise.  If you are learning something new, engage all of your body senses in the process rather than just your brain.  If you want to deepen your spiritual practice, it is said that one must descend fully into the physical before ascending spiritually.  This process can allow you to become more conscious of where we deny or fully use our bodymind connection in our daily life.

WHAT’S REALLY IMPORTANT?

Have you ever felt like you were struggling against some monumental problem or emotion that was as unyielding as a lamp post?  I recently visited family, only to find myself immersed in old childhood emotions.  Yep – up against that dern lamp post!  I really wanted to re-create myself, to pull myself up by my bootstraps out of that muck.  But how to do that?

The question is the answer.  The very questions we ask ourselves are like steps that can lead us away from or around a problem – or on the contrary, even take us deeper into it.  So, how is this useful in getting around that dern lamp post we kept metaphorically running into in life?  When you are caught up in a problem or emotion, you are really in the details of it with not much big-picture perspective.  For instance, there was this man, head to toe with a lamp post, pushing and struggling against it, as he tried in vain to move forward.  A passerby asked him what he was doing and he said, “I’m trying to get home but this dern lamp post is in my way!”  

To move to a bigger perspective, you can ask:      

• What’s my (higher) purpose?
• What’s my intention?
• What is this an example of?

The man up against the lamp post forgot that his intention was to get home so he could kick off his shoes and relax.  He was so engrossed in pushing against the lamp post that he couldn’t step back to see he just had to walk around it in order to get on with his original purpose.  By asking big-picture questions, he remembers the intention for his daily actions, which lets him step back to see space around the “problem” (lamp post).  When I was immersed in some old childhood emotions, I asked myself what my real purpose was in being with my family members.  I found the emotions lifting as I re-membered it was to share love and support with them. Remembering this higher purpose for our family interactions dissolved those old childhood emotions for me.

By using these simple yet powerful questions, you can get the perspective to see your way around problems and sort out which details are important.    Two business partners who can’t even agree on the wallpaper color for their office agree that their purpose for the business is to make a profit.  Any way they do that as long as they make a profit now makes the wallpaper issue an inconsequential detail.  Focusing on our vision, our higher intention, keeps us from being sidetracked into wasteful, useless details or emotions that don’t align with our big purpose.

A powerful meditative exercise is for one day to ask yourself about everything you do, every thought you think or feeling you have: What is my purpose for this?  What is my highest intention?  You go to the grocery store and ask,  what is the purpose?  To get food, of course.  Food for what purpose?  To give me energy and keep me alive.  Energy and aliveness for what purpose?  So I can do the work I am here for.  That may lead you to buy fresh vegetables instead of cookies!  By constantly questioning everything in your daily life, you may find dramatic shifts, new solutions, even more spirituality.  Take yourself off automatic and look at everything through these powerful questions to re-create yourself in alignment with your values and purpose.

Spring forward…Fall Back: Eternal cycles

As daffodils, freesias and narcissus begin popping up from the bulbs I planted last year,  they remind me of thoughts planted yesterday that bloom into tomorrow’s “reality”.  A friend of mine, an accountant by profession, would always recheck the restaurant bill for accuracy.  It was usually wrong, and by quite a bit.  Alarmed, I began carrying a calculator and did the same.  I found that the bill was usually right, and when it wasn’t, it was often in my favor.  The difference was that he expected the bill to be wrong and I expected it to be right. 

Recall the Greek myth of Persephone, goddess of springtime, daughter of Demeter, who was abducted by the Underworld God, Hades.  Imagine yourself into being a young woman.  Leave your “real” body and become a lithe, attractive, youthful woman.  They call you Sef, short for Persephone.  It’s boring in the castle on such a warm spring day, so you decide to pick flowers in the meadow.  A particularly attractive flower catches your attention and you reach down to pick it.  Suddenly you find yourself on the wrong end of a huge, hellacious beast!  Oops  - wrong flower!  Uh oh!  He’s taking you down under the earth to his realm.  As the sunlight of day fades, you descend deeper into the depths of despair.  Losing all hope of rescue, you resort to the only thing left – eating!  Accepting a few pomegranate seeds, you allow the sweet sourness to assuage your depression. 

Here in this dark underworld you are the queen.  And no one above knows it, until one day you are surprised by a visit from a lawyer, sent by your mother, Demeter.  “I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” the lawyer confides.  “The good news is that you can come back up to the world of happiness, sunshine and friends.  The bad news is, since you ate something here, you must return for six months out of each year to be queen of this underworld.”

Back in your castle, as you journal about your experiences, you realize you are no longer god-like.  Now you will go through the human cycles of emotions, from sunlight to the underworld and back.  There will always be cycles.  The question is, will you focus on the sunlight or the underworld?  Persephone actually ends up doing good works, helping lost souls, in her underworld time.  In a sense, our negative emotions are our own underworld.  Emotions are magnetic in nature, meaning if you are an angry person or have blocked all expression of anger, you may magnetically attract into your life angry people or situations. Once you’ve done some “spring cleaning” on those emotions, you regain the choice of what to focus on instead.

Focus is a tricky thing.  If I tell you not to think of a purple giraffe, you have to think of that Disney giraffe before you can negate it.  The unconscious mind actually doesn’t process negatives very well.  Tell a kid not to write on the wall or spill their drink, and they are immediately doing it.  Ever gone on a diet and all you focus on is NOT having food?  Diets like that are doubly hard because you’re really focusing on - delete the NOT - having food.  We can expect to cycle through positive as well as negative emotions – that’s life.  The question is, where is our focus and what experiences are we drawing to us?

THE GRACE OF RECEIVING –

WHAT’S SPIRITUAL ABOUT RECEIVING???

How many times has someone offered to give you something and, even though you could use it, you refused?  “A dear friend of mine offered to buy me a very expensive watch with crushed opals in the face, but I just couldn’t let him do it.”   “Let me help you clean up.  No, that’s okay, I know where everything goes, and it’ll be easier just to do it myself.”  “Can I give you a lift?  No, I already bought my bus ticket, so I’d better use it!”

Often we find ourselves refusing help, gifts, even companionship from dear friends and family.  There’s just something about it that is hard to accept.  The question is, what is spiritual about receiving, when we’ve been taught that it is better to give than to receive? 

Let’s take a look at what might motivate this resistance to receiving.  Do you have the belief that a little receiving is good, but too much receiving is selfish?  On the other hand, you might be indebted to the giver, dependent on them in some way.  Now you owe them a favor in this give-and-take accounting.  Rather than be obligated, it might be easier not to accept their offer.  Besides, some people use giving as a way to buy your love or to weasel in to get something for themselves.  If giving is manipulative, it would be safer not to receive.

It could basically be a trust issue.  “My son relies on me.  I f I rely on someone else and they betray me, then I’m putting my son at risk.”  If you open yourself up to receiving from someone, you could get burned.    Or they could betray you or let you down.  Perhaps it is better not to let anyone in.  It is certainly safer than being vulnerable to heartache.  I don’t need anyone to help me.  I can do this myself.  If I don’t receive from you, you won’t get close to me and you can’t hurt me.

Underneath, perhaps you feel a deep sense of unworthiness.  Let’s face it, how many of us feel a strong sense of self worth?  One of the most common problems holding us back from being our full potential is a nagging (or full-blown!) sense of inadequacy, lack of self worth, guilt or shame.  Frequently, children take on the responsibility and guilt for everything around them, including divorce, abandonment, abuse and molestation.  They make a limiting decision that somehow they weren’t good enough, for if they were, it wouldn’t have happened.  This could turn into becoming a people pleaser.  “I felt so unworthy as a kid that when I would baby-sit, if the parents offered me a glass of juice or cookie, I couldn’t even accept because of a deep gnawing feeling of being unworthy.”

If the above didn’t light up your circuits about receiving, perhaps you are selfish and think the world owes you a living!  Or maybe you are well-balanced with a healthy sense of self worth, trust,  security and appropriate boundaries.  The discussion so far isn’t so much about reasons why it is not okay to receive, as it is indicators or signals for an opportunity for personal growth.  Our relationship to receiving is a way of ferreting out our own issues of trust, safety, betrayal, self worth, guilt and shame.  I once asked a client who couldn’t open to receiving, to open up to receive the warmth of the sun.  He couldn’t even accept that until he cleared issues with his own self worth! 

Suppose the many times we shut ourselves off from receiving actually blocks our spirituality?  To open one’s heart up to God, to spirituality, even to love and connectedness requires receiving in the highest sense.  Accepting something (that you feel is appropriate to accept) can actually be turned into a spiritual practice.  For example, the next time someone compliments you, allow that to feed your self-worthiness, opening your heart to the grace of receiving.  Receiving may be the highest form of connectedness and spirituality! 

A suggested exercise is to build up a tolerance to receiving without feeling guilty.  While writing this article, I was practicing “receiving” and noticing my own reactions.  Friends appeared from every corner to push my “receiving” buttons with compliments and helpful gestures.  Sometimes I gracefully received, and sometimes I resisted, thought of ways to pay back or felt undeserving.  I hadn’t been aware of how many times I shunned receiving.  It got better:  yesterday I sneezed in Home Depot, and two separate people immediately said “God bless you!”   I smiled at the grace.

THE Nth FACTOR

Energetic well being is a result of many things:  good nutrition, rest, exercise, yoga, a loving support system, spirituality and a positive attitude, not to mention good genes.  I propose there is something else, which I am calling “the Nth Factor”, something far less tangible and possibly more important to our energetic well being than the above list.

We can find people responding to treatments that appear to be less than scientific in many arenas.  Some of these:

• The Placebo Effect:  people will respond to “sugar pills” the same as medicine a whopping 40% of the time.
• Spiritual prayer, revivals, Reiki, etc. have documented successes.
• People with terminal diseases have spontaneous remissions, tumors and conditions disappearing, for unexplained reasons.
• Some people just never get sick, never miss a day of work, don’t catch the flu that everyone else is getting.

There is growing evidence that we are more energetic beings than bodies with parts, akin to the mechanical nature of a car.  A brief review of some of these areas will get us on the same page:

• Quantum Physics:  replacing the mechanistic Newtonian Physics, we discover that at the lowest subatomic level of “matter”, we are highly-oscillating bits of virtual matter.  We are mostly made up of space with what appears to be solid being an electromagnetic force field.  Subatomic particles can move backward and forward in time (The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav).  If you turn one of twin particles separated in space, the other will turn at the same time.  While looking at a sample of my blood in a Dark Field Scope, I got angry.  I saw my blood sample react by becoming agitated, even though it was outside of my body!
• Mind-Body Connection via Neurotransmitters:  In 1986 Dr. Candace Pert’s groundbreaking research (Molecules of Emotion) provided scientific proof that the mind and body function together as an integrated system, linked by the neurotransmitters that form an information network.  Emotions are linked to physical pain, as proven by John E. Sarno, M.D. (Healing Back Pain-The Mind-Body Connection).   He asserts that back pain is only rarely the result of structural problems, rather it stems from muscular tension of repressed emotional problems.  Even acknowledging the emotional component would frequently cause Dr. Sarno’s patients’ back pains to disappear.
• Auras and Energetic Fields Around Living Things:  Dr. Valerie Hunt developed a way to videotape the human aura.  One can see a woman’s aura grow large and white as she moves into deep meditation.  As her young son runs by, her own aura bends toward him and turns pink.  Kirilian photography shows the energy patterns coming off living things.  One photo showed the difference between a hand at rest and one giving Reiki.  Another demonstrated the greater energy contained in organic foods.
• Our Holographic Nature:  When you shine a laser beam through a holographic plate, you get a 3-D image, like R2D2’s images in Star Wars.  If you were to tear that photographic plate into tiny pieces and shined a light through any of them, you would still get the same 3-D image!  Holographic means every part contains the blueprint of the whole.  Studies with salamanders showed that if you minced up their brains and reinserted even a tiny portion of it, they could still function (The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot).  A man functioning with 120 I.Q. as a respected mathemetician was found in a post-mortem autopsy to only have a few brain cells around the perimeter of the Neo-cortex.  He was able from these to recreate his normal brain functions.  Nobel-prize winning work has been done by such people as David Bohm, Carl Pribram and Rupert Sheldrake on the holographic nature as well as the intelligent, conscious implicate order of the universe.

The Nth Factor:  I am calling this ability to move beyond the exterior world to tap an inner resource the Nth Factor.  I have touched on examples of it and then moved to leading edge research and technology that supports it.  What is this Nth Factor?  It is an energy that seems to be drawn from our mind-body’s ability to tap into a greater source of energy.  Whether we call it deep implicate order intelligence, God, or a quantum energy field, it is a vast well of resource we can access. 

New Order or Chaos?  Why, you may ask, should we care about this Nth Factor?  First, in a world that is growing more complex and overloaded with information, there is coming a breaking point where we either evolve to a new way of being or succumb to the chaos.  We need new, more efficient ways to cope.  (If all telephone calls still required a human operator to manually connect them, we’d need to employ over ½ the population in the U.S. to do it.)

Uranus in Pisces:  For the second, let’s turn to astrology (“Transformation Versus Fear”, Ysanne Kutternik-Lewis.)  Astrologically, we are moving into a new 7-year cycle with the Awakener, Uranus moving into Pisces.  Uranus, the planet of change and disruption of old patterns, paradigms and beliefs, has left Aquarius, where we have had 7 years of technological innovations.  (Evidence, the explosion of the internet.)  Polarizations and cracks in old realities will force us to choose either transformation or fear.  We will be experiencing a breaking apart of dearly-held illusions, dependency patterns and security needs as our higher selves and intuition will emerge.  We move to the new technology of the interior world, treating intuition and imagination as real technologies just as we honored the exterior world technologies of endless gadgets with Uranus’s inventive journey through Aquarius.  Now more than ever it is imperative to honor the technologies of our inner world.  For, coincidentally, the end of this next 7 years is the end of the Mayan Calendar, where humanity begins anew.

It is in this arena where the Nth Factor comes to the fore in importance.  How can one develop their Nth Factor?  One way is to take time for meditation, prayer and journeying to access other dimensions and connect with your Higher Self, God, the implicate consciousness of reality.  Dr. Jean Houston (Jump Time) urges us to spend 1- hours early every morning while the external world is still quiet to journey, meditate and download energy and information.  Developing the Nth Factor can stimulate your energetic well being and stretch time to soothe our resource-stretched lives.

Dr. Jane Battenberg and Ysanne Kutternik-Lewis, world-renown astrologer residing in England, will be co-presenting workshops on this topic in October.  Call 714-556-7858 for information.

USING TIME TO TRANSFORM

I was at our cabin in the North Carolina mountains, helping my Dad chop wood.  I was hammering on a new axe handle when suddenly the hammer slipped and slammed into my hand, causing immediate pain and swelling.  Remembering a technique from Serge Kahili King, I first looked at the events leading up to that moment to clear any unknown emotional causes in my thinking from an injury.  Next, I re-ran the sequence of events in my mind with a different outcome.  I acted it out, raising the hammer and almost hitting my hand, this time feeling the relief of just missing it.  It took about 60 times of reenacting it as if I missed my hand, before the pain, swelling and black-blue disappeared completely.  No more pain – as if it hadn’t happened, all to the amusement of my Dad.

Time is tricky.  Five minutes in pain can seem like hours; time flies when you’re having fun.  But what if you could actually use time to transform your life?  Instead of being measured in absolute minutes and hours and once gone never to be again, suppose time, instead of being something concrete, set in stone, were as malleable as a child’s modeling clay.

Imagine an experiment where a machine sends 100 balls out which will go 50% of the time to the right and 50% to the left.   The 50% chance of going one way is as predictable as flipping a coin for heads or tails.  Experimenters that were good at thought projection “willed” the ball to go to the right and were able to influence the ball to go that way to a statistically-significant degree.  Now imagine the machine has sent its 100 balls out but no one has looked at the results yet.  Meditators were also able to influence the results even after the balls had been sent – as long as the results had not been seen yet!  It seemed as if they could meditate on the past, and influence the already-determined outcome.  For more on this, see The Interrelationship Between Mind and Matter by Beverly Rubik. 

How do you know who you are when you wake up in the morning?  You remember who you are – your happies, your sads, your physical conditions. You have an entire history of memories – of emotional experiences, schooling, learnings, beliefs, family history, your body size, body experiences, etc.  All those memories make up who you think you are.  Now let’s look at how the past determines who you are.  A woman with Multiple Personalities (MPD) had full-blown adult diabetes with one personality, as tested by her blood sample.  She then changed personalities and instantly shifted to not having diabetes, as evidenced by an immediate blood test.  Another was allergic to orange juice with one personality and not allergic with a second.  In both cases the different memories, life experiences and beliefs that one personality had versus the other resulted in different physical conditions.  Your past affects who you think you are.

The unconscious mind takes everything as if it is now.  If you are remembering something in the past, your unconscious is literally recreating the neurotransmitters, hormones and peptides that were activated in your body then - now.  If you go back and actively imagine a past event with full emotional investment, you change the way your body stores that memory, and you literally change who you are.  (Remember the one personality who had diabetes and the other that did not.)  The same is true for the future.  If you actively imagine something in the future turning out just as you’d like it, feeling all the emotional pleasures of it, as if it is happening now, you are installing a program in your unconscious to give you that very thing.   The unconscious knows it has already happened like that in the future, so it gears everything to that reality.  Active imagination plus emotional investment equals a different reality, whether past or future.

Turning to science for corollaries, we find that the observers not only influence  the observed but can determine what is observed by their expectations.   If you expect to see a photon act as a wave of energy, it does.  If you measure it as if it is a particle of matter, it is.  By our interaction we also affect the past.  The past lives in the living present.

Perhaps you don’t like the way you handled a situation.  You may feel guilty, a little sad, maybe even resentful.  You can go back in your mind to that situation, with all the insights, increased wisdom and perspective from now, and replay it, handling it in a better way.  Noticing how good you feel about how it turns out this time, bring that feeling to now.  It’s as if you now have two “histories” of that event, which gives you more behavioral choices in any future situations.  With a little practice, perhaps this technique can be applied to global situations as well as to ourselves.  All we’ve got is our mind.  If the past and future are truly malleable, then we have a responsibility to make up our mind as we want it, or someone will make it up for us.

To experience a weekend course in the above, call 714-556-7858 for

“Negative to Positive in Minutes.”

Active imagination plus emotional investment equals a different reality, whether past or future.

VESSEL OF LIGHT

By Jane Battenberg, MA, DCH

This article contains material from an upcoming book with this title by Leon Kalili and Jane Battenberg.

The ancient Hawaiians had a concept of the body being a vessel of light, like a canoe or a gourd container. This concept paints a picture of our being a bowl filled with light.  Whenever we have concerns, upsets or worries, it is as if grit, pebbles or even boulders have landed in our bowl, weighing us down and blocking the light.  Hawaiians believe it is very important to simply turn our bowl over to empty out the stones so the light shines through unimpeded.

When one journeys in a canoe, it is important to keep it in good shape.  It is also important not to carry too much stuff.  A canoe filled with burdens sits too low in the water and isn’t able to navigate the waters as easily.  It doesn’t respond to the paddle as quickly, taking more time and effort to steer.  It can despondently swamp instead of floating buoyantly and joyously on the crest of the wave. 

Your body allows you to journey and experience things.  Your body is a tool used to get from one place to another.  Your body allows you to navigate through the waters of life.  Therefore one should honor and respect the body’s functioning by paying attention to it instead of being disconnected from it.  Keep it in tip-top shape, so it serves the journeyer well. 

The body vessel is meant to contain light, energy, pure potential, creativity and joy.  It is important to clean the body regularly of baggage that impedes and clogs these.  The ancient Hawaiians knew this and regularly turned their vessel over, dumping out whatever was blocking the light and joyous expression. 

How, you may be wondering, does one keep their vessel clean?  Is that just a metaphor or are there really things one can do on a regular basis?  Hawaiians use many techniques to release what weighs us down or darkens our light.  The following are some ways that Hawaiians “huli”, turn over, their vessels of light to clean them.

• Take care how you talk to and about yourself and others.  Most of us have said to ourselves something like, “Oh, that was stupid!  You dummy, why don’t you watch what you’re doing.”  Many self-conversations drag farther into negative, destructive self-talk.  A first step in emptying your bowl is to talk respectfully and positively to yourself.  Extending that courteous manner to others further helps keep the bowl clean.

• Resolve issues quickly so they don’t build up.  If we build up irritations, grudges and unspoken resentments, it is like putting pebbles in our bowl that block the light.  Better to talk about them and let them go rather than carry around a whole bowlful.  Better to keep your canoe light and buoyant.  Have you ever started talking out some disagreement with a friend or loved one and suddenly they are reminding you of something you did last week, last year, five years ago, or even when you were a kid?  They never dumped out their bowl!  They had been carrying around those old resentments like pebbles that blocked not only their light but how they saw you.

• Many Hawaiians regularly use the ha  breath to clear their minds, release upsets and to center and calm themselves.  The ha breath is in a one to two ratio, with the outbreath twice as long, breathing in for a count of four and out for a count of eight.  Use your exhale breath to release tensions and emotions along with the stale air.  In Hula class if someone would come in distracted or upset, the kumu, teacher, would tell them to take some deep “haaa” breaths (long exhale, making a sighing sound), and to leave their worries behind.

• Avoid shame, embarrassment, guilt and resentment.  By being mindful of their connection to others and to their environment, the Hawaiians honor their responsibility, their kuleana or duty, in this area.  By keeping these connections respectful and clean, they avoid hilahila, shame and embarrassment from disrespectful actions.  They believe that one should caretake with humbleness these connections, whether to the land, the fish, the plants or the elders.  Disrespect brings repercussions, certain outcomes, like a poor crop, no fish in the nets, or shameful feelings that precipitate poor health.   Even not respecting the environment can mean it will respond back in some negative way.  If this seems a little foreign to you, just remember you are glimpsing the experience of a different culture with subtle but powerful differences in values!

The concept of our bodies giving off light is not limited to the Hawaiians.  Many master paintings portray saints, holy people, Jesus, Buddha and the like with halos of light around their heads.  Kirilian photography measures the light corona of energy emitted from an energized object such as a person’s hand or a leaf.    To end on a light note, they say angels fly because they take themselves lightly!  The “cleaner” we keep our vessels of light, the greater conductors of light we become.

Jane Battenberg is available for private sessions, lomi-lomi massage and Huna workshops.  Her website is www.changewithin.com.

What’s Love Got to Do With It:  Values, Passion and Kite Strings

Do you remember, perhaps in your childhood, someone or maybe a pet that you loved dearly with all the passion and unconditionalness that a child can feel?  Sometimes it was a grandparent or a favorite aunt or uncle.  For others it was their dog, their best friend and constant companion.  Or a “bestest” friend or first sweetheart.  Someone, somewhere that you gave all your love to.  Perhaps even a quiet place, the woods, the ocean, your own private retreat spot.  For some it was music, and for others it was passion for a sport.  Something you could immerse yourself in totally, love yourself, forget time and even forget about eating.

Those things that touched us deeply in our early years became gems of light that helped form us, gave us role models for more mature experiences of love, lit our way, sustained, molded and nurtured our soul.  Like the tiny kite string is essential for the beautiful kite to fly, they enabled us to live with love and passion later in life.  They helped shape our values.

What we value actually determines how we spend our time, energy and resources.  If we don’t value it, there is no motivation to do it.  Have you ever procrastinated cleaning up a messy room, with nooooo motivation to do it?  It’s only when something you value came into play, like the opinion of friends coming over that you got the motivation to clean.  No one likes to do their taxes, but eventually we value something else more, like a clean record, not having our bank account and wages garnished, or don’t they take your first born or your right arm if you don’t pay your taxes?  At the deepest unconscious level our values affect our behavior, our decisions, and after-the-fact our evaluation of how well we did.  Values are the kinesthetic, the feeling, the love, the passion behind our behavior.

It is a fairly simple process to find your values.  First, choose a context, an area of your life, such as relationship, family, career or health/fitness.   Next, have someone ask you (or ask yourself), “What’s important to you in (relationship)?  Have them ask you that same question about the area you chose again and again, listing your responses, using your exact word(s).  Do this quickly, so you don’t have time to think.  Your answers should be short, usually one word, like “trust, compatibility, communication, freedom, respect, chemistry”.  Have them ask the question until you have run out of words.  You will probably pause several times to think, which will activate the deeper, more unconscious values. 

Continue until you have a list that sounds right, that feels good, that looks complete, usually around 10 items.  Next, rank order them, putting #1 by the most important value to you, #2 by the second most important, and so on.  Then rewrite the list in the order you chose.  Now you can see by looking at the top three to five values what motivates you.  If you chose career, and income wasn’t even on the list, for example, you can see why you may be financially struggling.   It is no wonder, since at the unconscious level money doesn’t motivate you.   You may see values that conflict, such as spending time with your family or friend versus needing freedom and alone-time. 

Looking at your values can give you key insights into why you do what you do and how you make decisions.  If you do not like them, then it is an opportunity to do some personal change work.  Perhaps you made a decision early in life that you can’t have money and love.  Maybe your need for freedom from family is really a protection against “needy people”.   Our values are what fuel our passion, what we love and what motivate us.  Eliciting your own values is an excellent way to take stock and see what is really driving your behavior, as you begin this new year.

                                                                                   Jane Rigney Battenberg      1/14/03

I’M IN THE  MOOD FOR COLOR 

-  by  Dr. Jane Battenberg and Martha M. Rigney

“My chronic lower back pain disappeared with twenty seconds of yellow light on my forehead.  Another time I got rid of a sore throat with one minute of blue light.”    A woman with chronic liver problems lost all discomfort after twenty minutes of green light (N. Matthews).   My daughter’s grades improved and her reading ability increased from not being able to read a whole book to majoring in English in college after twenty light treatments using a Lumatron (author’s study).  Two teen subjects stopped having violent temper tantrums, and their college grades went from C’s and D’s to A’s and B’s after the same treatments. 

Not only do our eyes see light, but our whole body is light sensitive.   Our skin absorbs light and acts as a prism to break out the different colors, which become information to the body.  Blind people can accurately detect colors with their hands.  We absorb the light around us just as much as the air we breathe, and our body responds to different color frequencies.  Color and light control our “biological clock”, mood, sleep and wakefulness, subjective energy levels and appetite for carbohydrates.  The autonomic nervous system that controls heart rate, lungs, intestines, glands and other organs is influenced by the nerve endings in the skin.  These wavelength frequencies are able to penetrate into the capillaries and are absorbed by the blood, creating wide changes in the body’s metabolic, endocrine, emotional and vitality functions.  Just as we can suffer from malnutrition, we can also have malillumination, as color seems to be a necessary nutrient to the brain and body.

We eat faster in a restaurant with orange (check the fast food places), while we tend to linger and relax when surrounded by green.  Yellow stimulates thinking, and we sleep deeper in blue sheets.  In winter a red jacket will give a warmer sensation than a blue one.   Blue hospital rooms following major surgery promote calm and healing; blue rooms are sometimes used to quiet violent inmates in mental institutions.

In the late 1800’s two men successfully pioneered using colored lights applied to the body to treat various conditions.  They were Dinshah Ghadiali and Dr. Edwin Babbitt.  Others who contributed to color therapeutics included Rudolph Steiner, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Bunsen and Sir William Crookes.  By the advent of pharmaceutical antibiotics, these colored light treatments were actively discouraged.  Dinshah was prosecuted in Federal Court for fraud, the Post Office would not send his material, and his work was destroyed in a fire at his Institute.   As late as 1985 the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) prevented the Dinshah Health Society from selling their color projectors, contending they were medical devices.  Dinshah had astoundingly successful color treatments for curing diseases and for conditions ranging from burns, candida, incontinence, teething, tendonitis, insect bites and phobias, to name but a few.  In one of his more famous cases he cured the severely burned skin of a child who was considered hopeless even for skin graft.  The child’s burns were healed with only a fraction of the usual scar tissue.  He thought the potency of light and color went far beyond that of drugs and serums.

Recent studies also show that color has healing properties.  A standard procedure in hospital neonatal units for underdeveloped livers of newborns is bilirubin lights, accelerating the conversion of bilirubin to bile, proving that light has a direct effect on the liver and kidneys.  A study on the effect of light on rheumatoid arthritis showed that blue light shined on the affected area reduced pain.  Tremor, torticollis and some conditions in Parkinsons can be diminished by protecting the person from red or yellow, such as by wearing green-lens glasses.  Light therapies have had documented successes in the treatment of Seasonal Affective Disorders (SAD), sleep disorders, depressive states, dyslexia, PMS, phobias, carbohydrate craving, obesity and headaches.  In the field of education, greater attention span, visual and auditory memory, emotional well being, less hyperactivity and tension, and improved ability to handle criticism and confrontation were reported with light therapy.

Now, forty years later, color is on the way back, this time in new form.  It has been  found that our bodies emit color electro-magnetic energy.  Our cells act as tiny photo-electric batteries.  Not only do cells share chemical reactions, they gather light and send it to other cells.  This light network is one of the main communication systems in the body.  Since the body is made up of color and communication within it is in living color, color can be an important therapeutic modality.  Peter Mandel of Germany developed Colorpuncture to apply the right frequency of color to specific points in the body, releasing energetic information that goes instantly through the body, affecting the most subtle functioning of cells, organs and even our minds.  It works directly on the information stored in our light bodies  as well as thoughts, memories, feelings and experiences, instantly making deep and subtle changes.  Operating under a new physics where we are not bound by the laws of mechanics and a fixed, eye-for-eye universe, we slip into a very fluid universe where changes are easy and effortless.  Forgiveness is natural, our minds expand and an inner light awakens.

All colors have different properties and psychological effects.  Red, orange and yellow are outer, yang, day colors, warming and stimulating.  Blue, green and violet are inner directed, cooler, mellowing colors.   Blue may be relaxing to one person and depressing to another.  Red may make one person feel anxious and be uplifting and motivating to another.  To experiment with and experience the effects of color, any medium is fair game.   Immerse yourself in the experience of one color, say green.  Eat only green foods, wear green, surround yourself with that color, even use green-tinted glasses.   Gels or plastic color sheets over a light or flashlight can be used on your body and the room.  Do this for a day to feel what effects that color has on you.   Notice how you feel, what emotions come up, and where you feel that color in your body.  If that color had a voice, what would it say to you?  Does it make you feel uplifted or earthbound, restful or anxious?  Notice your breathing for depth or shallowness.  Does it sedate or tonify, is it warming or cooling?   More than liking or disliking a color, you can explore the effect it has on your energy and physical body, your psyche and your light body.

As we have explored, colors are more than esthetics or personal preference.  They have a direct influence on our entire being.  Colors can not only clear destructive patterns but also turn on fresh qualities of intelligence.   

Suggested Reading:

Light Years Ahead – The Illustrated Guide to Full Spectrum and colored Light in Mindbody Healing, Brian Breiling, 1996

Let There Be Light, Darius Dinshah, 1985

Light, Medicine of the Future, Jacob Lieberman, OD, PhD, 1991

Light:  The Master Matrix, Nishant Matthews, 1996

Martha Rigney works with Vision Improvement and does color light treatments in Raleigh, North Carolina.  919-821-0000, visioneducators.com.  Jane Battenberg works with vision improvement and Lumatron light therapy in Costa Mesa.  714-556-7858, changewithin.com.

THE POWER OF YOUR WORD

Declaration, Creation, Manifestation:  She was pregnant with her second child, visiting her Dad locally.  As I had taught her ski patrol and performed their marriage ceremony, I was very excited to see her at a party given for her.  The doctors had diagnosed a potentially serious condition called Placenta Previa.  At the party I knelt down and placed my hands on her belly, silently connecting with the child.  Then I said, “This condition will be gone in three weeks.”    A month later, her Dad reminded me of that conversation and told me that she had gone to her doctor.  He told her he didn’t know why the previous doctors had given the diagnosis, because there was no evidence at all of the condition!  Having no conscious idea of why I had said the condition would disappear in three weeks, I was as amazed as my friends at the power of the verbal declaration.

Some years ago I was skiing with a friend at Alta, Utah.  Dark clouds were roiling overhead, as a heavy snow storm was imminent.  For our last run of the day I suggested we ski down a mogul field (bumps).  My friend pointed out the obvious fact that the light would be so flat we wouldn’t be able to see to ski.  Laughingly, I declared that once we got to the bump run, the clouds would part and the sun would come out just long enough for us to ski down.  As we neared the bumpy slope, my friend began to shout hysterically.  The dark storm clouds opened to let the sun shine through just long enough for us to ski the slope, before a heavy snowfall began.

Beliefs Shape Reality:  A client found that at his core he believed he was darkness, a blackness in his heart, full of sadness and fear.  All his life experiences bore this out, reconfirming this belief, leaving him no choice he thought but to conclude that somehow at his core was darkness and non-love, with his sole purpose being suffering and sacrificing for God.  His word, his belief, had become “law” in his life, a self-fulfilling prophecy that caused much suffering in his broken relationships.  When at last he was able to entertain the idea that the belief came before the experiences and shaped his life experiences, he agreed to change his belief.  Using Time Dimension Therapy techniques he was able to go back before deciding he was darkness, to a time before conception when he was the light, one with God.  He created a shaft of light that recalibrated his entire life experiences, obliterating the sadness and fear.  His new decision about being light and peace at his core has now become the word, the law, in his life. 

Words Evoke Images That Program Reality:  If we get what we declare and what we believe to be true or possible, how many times do we undo positive manifestations by saying what we do not want?    What do you want in a relationship?  Well, I do not want a person who is -- (fill in the blank).  How many times do we tell someone what not to do?  You’re going to have an accident if you keep driving like that.  You always talk too much, you’re always late, you always lose your temper.  What does a child do shortly after being told not to spill their drink?  Oops – you guessed it!  It takes a very conscientious parent to phrase things in the positive rather than saying what not to do.  We may start with describing what we don’t want as a springboard to moving on to imaging what we do want.  The trick is, we image the words, and they become an unconscious suggestion.  When you read, “Don’t think of a yellow taxicab”, you first see that yellow cab and then have to try to erase it from your mind.  Diets often fail miserably because the focus is on not thinking of food, which only creates images of food, making some people eat even more than before the “diet”. 

The Power of the Word to Actualize the Potential:  The boundary between two worlds seems to be where magic can occur.  The “changing of the guard” between breathing in and breathing out, that instant between taking in oxygen and releasing waste products, is one example.  The pendulum shift from “tick” to “tock”, that split instant when one doesn’t know if it is moving in one direction or has started back in the other, is another.  The boundary between potential and actual, between creative ideas and actualizing them into form, is another place for magic.  The transition between possibility and actuality can be seen as the magical place where one’s belief, declaration, word, prayer or decision can affect reality.  This could be the key to the power to actualize.  One day a friend’s son, believing he could break the current swim record at a meet, knocked not just one or two but seven unbelievable seconds off his personal best.  Rather than worrying if he was going to do well, he focused on his belief that he could swim faster than ever before – and he did. 

The Moral of the Story:  A man sat under a Buddha Tree and was told that whatever he thought would be.  So he wished for wealth, and he was wealthy.  He conceived of a fine castle and had it.  He imagined a beautiful wife and many wonderful children and it came to pass.  Soon he worried that it was too good to be true and perhaps he would lose his money, and he did.  Then, seeing things go downhill, he worried that the peace in the land would not last, and war broke out.  He wondered if his wife was unfaithful, and she was.  He feared the plague, and it came.  The moral of the story is that whatever we think might happen, will. Our thoughts and our words have the power to become self-fulfilling manifestations or prayers.

B.Y.O.B:  BEYOND YOUR OWN BELIEF

By Dr. Jane Battenberg

I was barely scraping by financially, living in a tiny apartment and scrimping wherever possible.  In looking at my astrology chart prepared in a workshop I was attending, I could see not one but three triangles that formed a beautiful Star of David in it.  Curious, I asked what they might mean.  After a hesitation, the instructor said, “you’ll never have to worry about money.”  Imagine me looking back and forth between my belief about money, that it was scarce and you had to work hard for it, and the chart’s declaration that it was always abundant for me.  Back and forth I looked, puzzled and curious.  Then it hit me.  I could make money scarce, but since it was going against my natural flow, it was much harder to create that reality.  But I could.  Or I could relax and let natural abundance come to me.  I could have it either way, except one way was swimming upstream and the other was easy.  The only thing I needed to do was to change my belief about it.  When I got that realization, I said, “Done!!!”   Shortly after, a small piece of property that had been breaking even for many years went way up in value allowing me to buy a home, and clients came more easily.   I don’t take abundance for granted even today.  But the experience of consciously deciding to change my belief about money and relaxing into a natural flow was profound! 

Who we believe ourselves to be is constantly changing.  Before you learned to read, you weren’t “a reader”.  Until you actually learned to drive, you weren’t a driver.  “When I was a child, I spake as a child; when I grew up, I put away such childish things.”  We are continually morphing into new identities, new images of ourselves:  a child, a rapper, a student, a teacher, a programmer, a marathoner, a grandparent, an elder.

Suppose for a minute that you are what you believe you are.  Then your belief acts as a program that runs your reality computer.  Your belief is a template, a pattern that shapes your every experience, even your body.  Well, if that is true, you may ask, how do I change my belief?  We all get stuck in emotions and patterns that we’d rather not have.  “I’ve been depressed all my life.”  “I always seem to attract men/women who use me and cheat on me and want me to take care of them.”   “I don’t seem to have the enlightening, spiritual experiences that other people do.”  “I’m no good at math.”  These patterns must be coming out of some unconscious belief, because we certainly wouldn’t choose them consciously!  They are “technical difficulties beyond our control” – maybe! 

Imagine yourself with a lampshade over your head, trying to see the world around you as something other than the inside of a shade.  Or think of a stage hypnosis show where the hypnotist gets the volunteers to cluck like a chicken and do other stupid things.  That is what happens when we get stuck in the loop of a problem pattern.  We are in a trance, meaning even though we know better, we keep doing the same negative behaviors, over and over again.  Problems are trances, where we cluck like chickens and do stupid things.  Like having a lampshade over our head, we think the problem is reality.  We’ve been hypnotized into believing that it is who we are and the way things are. We don’t know how to change our belief, the template, the negative pattern that we keep repeating over and over. 

Stephen Wolinsky in Trances People Live says this self-created hypnotic trance appears to happen to us, when in fact it is a Deep Trance Phenomenon.  Hypnosis is characterized by the shrinking, narrowing and fixating of focus and attention, bypassing the conscious mind.  We literally shrink our world down until we identify with our problem, thinking it identifies and defines us.  The moment we become our problem, we cannot see other options and we lose perspective, choice and other resources.  Once we shrink ourselves down to become the belief (problem), we become completely isolated inside that experience.  “I’m not good enough.”  “I’m a loser.”  Anything you believe, meaning you identify with it, is going to limit you by blocking out any other experiences or perspectives.

One way to look at this problem trance is that it is a small circle of limitation nested in a larger circle of unlimited possibilities.  The way out of it and the way to break the trance is to                                 get outside the boundary of the problem.  Like pricking a balloon

                                                        with a needle, once you get outside the problem, you

                                                        literally destroy its boundary.  Once you can imagine a

                                                        time before the problem existed, you have taken the

                                                        lampshade off your head.  You can see new possibilities

                                                        and new ways of being.  You can make new beliefs that

              contain more possibility.  It is like Columbus.  People in his time thought the world was flat and if you sailed the ocean, you would fall off the edge.  Once people found out the earth was round, they were outside the limitation of the flat-earth belief.

Here are some suggested ways for breaking the belief trance. Perhaps even seeing your limiting beliefs as a hypnotic trance may help you choose to break them.

• Go Before It Existed:  First, feel the emotions and experience of your limiting belief.  Then ask yourself to go back in time to before that limitation and those emotions ever existed.  Go as far back as needed, even if you have to go back before you existed!  Once you get before the belief existed, you have literally broken the trance.
• Meditative State:  Get into a meditative, flow state that allows you to see yourself without that limiting belief as well as with it.  Notice all the choices you have without it. 
• Higher Help:  Use your Higher Self, guides, Spiritual support, etc. to help you see a larger perspective.  Use them to help you reframe the situation you believed described you.

To summarize, the key point would be that any limiting belief or problem is really a hypnotic trance where you have identified with its narrow focus.  That means you have blocked out other possibilities and perspectives.  In reality, you are not your problems.  Change your beliefs, de-identify with your problems and break the trance.  It is as easy as making up a story about how it was before the problem ever existed.  Good luck!

HOW TO COAX YOUR INNER-TRUTH CAT TO SIT ON YOUR LAP

Have you ever tried to herd cats?  Or tried to make a cat sit on your lap?  Coaxing the Muse of Inner Truth to visit you is a little like that.  Once when I was working in a Corporate America management job (another lifetime?), management was having difficulties resolving some issues with the union.  Some never-tried solutions were desperately needed to reduce the mounting tensions.  Over the weekend, nestled in a mountain cabin near Ashland, I emptied my mind and asked for some new solution to come.  Every time I started talking to myself or ruminating over events (called “obsessively worrying”), I would stop myself.  I would re-issue the desire to have a new solution, re-empty my mind and wait.  After what seemed like a very long time, I saw my two hands, one made into a fist and the other open.  That “simple image” became the template for working out an agreement – stand firm on bottom-line things and extend an open-handed, flexible approach on others.  In itself, it wasn’t a solution, but it was very effective in directing our approach.

Like a sweet flowing spring, a child’s ability to imagine and to play make-believe is constantly flowing.  As adults, we can revert to this same free-flowing ease of visualizing when we “just make it up”.  There is no right or wrong answer and thus nothing to have performance anxiety about when we let the sweet muse of childhood come and sit on our lap.  Finding a solution to a problem or achieving sweet release from a nagging negative emotion or destructive pattern is finding our inner truth.  Inner truths come when we open ourselves up to ideas flowing to us.  We’ve all spent time worrying obsessively over some problem, where we go over and over the same thoughts, building our anxiety and bad feelings.  That’s not opening to the Inner Truth Muse!  The loopy worrying is done in our heads.   To invite the muse, we need to move down into our heart and our body.

We use our left-brain intellect to figure things out.  That serves us well, from concepts, principles and design down to flowcharts, timetables and evaluations.   However, sometimes we get stuck, in a problem, an unproductive emotion or a recurring limiting pattern that despite all logic to the contrary, we keep repeating!    It’s as if we go into a trance and keep repeating the same negative pattern over and over, despite what our head tells us to do.  Intellectually we can see that our behavior is unproductive or self destructive, but we can’t seem to break out of it.  It is times like this when we can invite our Inner-Truth Cat to come and sit on our lap. 

Like wiggling a nail loose from the hole it’s in, the idea is to keep looking at the problem pattern from different perspectives.  Often it takes more than one perspective for it to finally come loose.  Here are five perspectives that can help.  Time Perspective:  Look at the pattern and see how long it has existed.  Go back to before you had that pattern and notice how it feels, your opinion of yourself and what view of life you have.  Now go out into the future many years to a point where you no longer have this pattern.  Notice how that feels and what you learned in order to let go of the pattern.  Again, these may not lift the emotion or pattern, but they may ease it.  Remember wiggling the nail back and forth to extract it from the hole.

Others View:  When we can see the problem from outside ourselves, we will frequently get fresh ideas.  Look at yourself or the problem as if you were someone else looking back at you, like your partner, your parent or a respected mentor.  How would they see you?  What would they see that you couldn’t see when you were stuck in it?  Go way high above your life and look down on the whole situation.  From this removed perspective, seeing the big picture, what insights do you get?

Place of Planning:  Go to before you were ever conceived, to the Place of Planning to come into this life.  (Make it up.)   First notice how it feels there, and how that feels different than you felt in your present situation.  Do you feel love and support there?  Are there guides, wise beings or the Divine there for you to consult with?  Ask them for advice and guidance.  There should be a book or receptacle of knowledge there, as well.  Open it and read your three purposes for this life.  Once you reconnect with them, bring them with you back to the present.  What shifted?

Before It Existed:  Go before the emotion or problem ever existed.  Go back in time, even if you have to go to a past life or even before existence.  Your job is to “make it up”, and go back, back, back until you get before you were ever caught in the problem trance.  Once there, notice how it feels, what difference in perspective you have and how you feel about yourself.  How is your self-esteem there?  Once you get before the emotion and problem, you have literally moved yourself out of the trance, and all that is left is to notice things you couldn’t see when you were in it.

Reframe:  What point of view can you have that will shift how you experience the problem?  My cat is getting old and has developed some obnoxious habits.  I was getting quite upset at him until I reframed the situation.  I told myself he might not be around much longer, so I should enjoy him while I can.  Every time he meows loudly, I cuddle and love him, remembering to enjoy every minute he’s still alive.  Not only did it calm me, but he’s much better as well.  Not doing well at something?  Oh, that just means you are learning!  Children don’t call you as much as you’d like?  How wonderful that you have raised them so well that they don’t need to constantly ask for advice and money.  (Well, that one may be a bit farfetched, admittedly.)

In a quiet, relaxed place, putting yourself in a day-dreamy, meditative trance, invite your sweet Inner Truth Cat to creep into your mind to play.  By making your mind a blank screen that your Inner Truth Muse can project images onto, you are opening yourself up to a vast wealth of multi-dimensional richness, there for the asking, when you allow your mind to empty and “make it up”.

NATURE AS TEACHER,  NATURE AS TEMPLATE

By Jane Rigney Battenberg

We are the acorns through which flow the patterns of mighty oak trees.  As a seed, each of us becomes the manifested existence of the mind knowing itself.  Through us, the world knows itself.  We are the flow through for star stuff and galaxies.

Nature teaches us how to be.  Any solution can be found by observing the patterns of Nature.  The farther away from Nature we stray, the more out of balance we become.  Imagine a completely synthetic, man-made world, where everything, including our food, housing and clothing, is inorganic and synthetic.  No more wood, no sweet peaches, no cotton or silk.  Imagine living in a bubble where the artificial light simulates natural sunlight, and where the recycled air is regulated to be a certain percentage of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen.  How long would we last?  What would our quality of life be?

One way to heal ourselves and our increasingly polluted environment and overused natural resources is to listen to the indigenous people.   For some of this wisdom, I asked Loretta Cook, Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, to share her thoughts on this.  Starting with the big picture and the connection of everything, she said everybody has a magic.   “Wakantanka” is big holy magic that is very serious.   It’s not just magic, but serious, big, sacred magic.  We accept all of life in its entirety, connecting with all of the winged, connecting with all of the 4-leggeds, connecting with the minerals.   In this way we express our big magic by connecting with all of nature.

Our current lifestyles are by and large void of ritual and ceremony, which used to feed our souls and were a way to connect with the larger stuff of life, the flow through of star stuff and galaxies.  Ceremonies can bring about changes through the symbolic enactments, as powerful as prayer and focused thought form.  An example of a healing nature ritual is to find trees native to your area and plant them with ceremony.  They hold the spiritual power and depth that fast-growing crops do not have.  In California it might be the redwood tree.  On the island of Moloka’i, Hawai’I, kumu John Kaimikaua started a project to replant tiny Lehua tree seedlings in an area long stripped of its lovely sacred Lehua forests.  School children and hula “halau’s” (schools) became involved in this ritual to restore some of the original foliage.   It was accompanied by prayer, hula dances and chanting, and today the seedlings are growing into a successful reforestation project.

Loretta Cook says that they are taught to only take as much as they need, so there will always be enough for everybody in the world.  Always look out for each other.  We have not done that, so it will take many, many years to restore and heal our natural resources.  We need to be extra mindful of that, to help conserve and to make up for our past indulgences and over-usage.   Small rituals may not make much of a difference right away, but symbolically they become powerful trimtabs, a phrase coined by Buckminster Fuller.  (A trimtab is the tiny rudder that turns the big rudder that turns the huge oceanliner.)  One suggested ritual is to turn off the water while you brush your teeth, rather than letting it run.  Each tiny act becomes a prayer ritual to offset our world of “convenience”.

Tax-deductible donations may be made to the Oglala Lakota Timber Project at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota at P.O. Box 859, Chaderon, NE 69337.

BODY WISDOM

By Dr. Jane Rigney Battenberg

Body Wisdom Beyond Conscious Awareness:  Waiting in a long grocery line, my daughter and I experimented with two coke cans, one regular and the other diet, to pass the time.  I would put one in her hand, neither of us knowing whether it was regular or diet, and then muscle test her.  She was always weaker with the sugared one.  How could her body detect which had sugar???  Soon the entire grocery line was engrossed in our experiment!  Try this one yourself:  take something you want to see if it would be good for you, hold it up to your chest, feet together and knees softened and relaxed.  Allow your body to sway slightly, forward or backward.  Forward means your body likes it, and back means it wants to avoid it.   It may take a moment for the body to decide if it likes the substance, sometimes swaying back and forth until finally deciding.  Try it!  Your body can “grok” energies that you consciously have no clue about.

Love attractions work in a similar mysterious way – pheromones, smell, some inner Geiger counter or sensing radar that attracts us to some and repels us from others.  Ever been on the freeway and for some reason you move over a lane or want to move away from a nearby car for no apparent reason?  Or in a crowd you want to avoid someone just because of their “vibes”?   Just yesterday I avoided an accident by this feeling, only to have the driver hit a truck behind me.  Frequently I will put my hands on a massage client just to connect with them only to have them exclaim that that is the exact spot where their trouble is!  When asked how I knew to go to that place, I admit that my head had no clue.  It is all body wisdom, allowing the body to do its thing.

Body Wisdom Potential:  We have ten to the ten to the 11th power of potential neurological connections in our body, several hundred gazillion, if we’re counting.  Yet we use a mere 5% of our mental and 10% of our physical capacities.  Plus most of our senses can be replicated by other senses, holographically (every part contains the blueprint for the whole).  Blind people can pick out of a bag the red yarn, separating it from the blue yarn, by “seeing” with their touch.  (References:  Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot and Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain by Ostrander and Shroeder.)

Our skin is our major sense organ.  We can actually breathe thru our skin.  Our skin is not like saran wrap, even though it keeps out bacteria and foreign substances.  It can actually absorb or repel.  And what unconscious powers we have over our bodies!  Once a nurse was having difficulty giving me a shot, because somehow my body was able to tighten up the blood vessels to repel the needle, sliding it off.  No amount of conscious relaxation could override my body’s resistance!  A recent hypnotherapy client was able to anesthetize a part of his body, making it cold and unmovable.

A teacher of mine was totally deaf.  Yet, once she met a person, she was able to talk to them even by phone by tuning in with some other sense.  Once I tested it by asking her mentally (not aloud), as she was walking away from me, back turned.  I thought, “What restaurant are we were going to go to?”  The hair on my body stood up and my mouth dropped when she turned around and answered me!

Mind-Body Connection:  He woke up with a backache every day of his life.  Medical checks reveled no physical cause.  When we went back to age 5, the first time he felt resentment, he found that he had decided he’d have to “stiffen up and do it all himself” as the result of an event.  After he talked to that little 5-year old to get him to make a different decision that gave him more choice and flexibility, he never had a backache again.  Instantly gone!

1n 1986 Dr. Candace Pert made ground-breaking discoveries that the mind and body were intricately connected like heads and tails of a coin via the neurotransmitters.  Our emotions are not just controlled by our hormones and peptides, our emotions ARE our chemical neurotransmitters.   What we feel as an emotion is literally a chemical that our body produces. 

One way to influence our emotions is by how we view the world.  When we “mess with” our internal representations of the world, the pictures, sounds, feelings we store called memories, we can literally change who we are.  When we change our mind, we change our body by the instant communication between mind and body via the neurotransmitters.  That’s how the woman with Multiple Personalities, could have diabetes with one personality, which would instantly disappear when she changed personalities.  Because that personality didn’t have the same life experiences, values and memories that the other one did, it didn’t have diabetes.  Now how could her body change be instant???  It is because the only way we know how to be who we are is by our memories, the stories we tell ourselves, our values and beliefs.  When those are changed, we instantly morph into someone who fits those new changes.

Listening to Body Wisdom:  Listening to the body takes trust and attention to subtle signals.  It takes teaching oneself to make finer and finer sensory distinctions.   It also takes paying attention to the subtle messages.  It is easy to think you are imagining it or to override those subtle signals with “head logic”.   The more one listens, the more the body is encouraged to share its wisdom.  Like all of us, it loves to be listened to!

SHAH!  TALK TO THE HAND ‘CAUSE THE FACE AIN’T LISTENING!

By Jane Rigney Battenberg

“Would you go out with me?”  “In your dreams!”  How many times have you wanted something that seemed so out of reach that you could only get it in your dreams?   Dreams, that cotton-candy stuff that wisps in and out of our consciousness in paroxysms of pleasure or gnarly nightmares, nattering nabobs of negativism or scintillating sensualities of celestialism form the other-worldly reality of our unconscious.  Dreamy stuff may seem plausible but nonsensical, stream-of-consciousness with emotional import that grabs our attention and pulls us down under the surface of the conscious to that underworld where reality is gestated.

The question then becomes whether it is all in your imagination, “a figment of your imagination, you must be dreaming. ”  Or could it be a place where you image something into reality?   Dr. Jean Houston talks about “the mediocrity of having a diffident relationship to the genius of inner space.”  She passionately pleads with people to develop their inner life so that they can connect with their higher destiny and orchestrate their moods of creativity.  She distinguishes between imagination and the imaginal world.  Imagination is the reproduction and reordering of already-existing ideas.  The imaginal realm on the other hand produces (not reproduces) big-picture perspectives, new creations, new paradigms and patterns.

A friend of mine who writes software told me this story about emerging patterns.  He was contemplating thousands of lines of a software program, when suddenly he saw a much simpler way to express it in only several hundred lines.  He was profoundly affected by the experience of such an elegantly simple solution popping into his awareness.  Ever since, he has tapped into that ability to wait until a beautifully streamlined pattern emerges in his mind.  Before that experience he thought he was just a programmer; after that, he knew he was a creative pattern maker with a unique ability.

If you have ever seen a picture of an iceberg, you may have seen the tip above the water as deceptively bland when compared to the vast beauty of the gigantic ice formation below.  Like that, our unconscious minds hold vast caverns of potential and beauty when compared to our conscious, intellectual minds.  In order to tap into that potential, one may explore the boundary between the two.  What are you thinking of just before you wake up in the morning?  Just before you resurface to awake, what are your first stirrings of awareness?  And right before you fall asleep, when your body gets very still, where do you go?  Have you watched a child as sleep begins to overtake them and their thoughts turn inward to the dream state?  Eyes still open, they become very still, as if already asleep.  That is the hypnagogic state, the drowsy period between awake and sleep, during which fantasies and hallucinations often occur. 

We constantly slip back and forth between waking and dreaming as naturally-occurring states.  What is important is to be able to go there at will and to use that state to create what we want.  Each of us has our unique way to enter into that imaginal realm, whether it is meditation, daydreaming, visualization or just “spacing out”.   If your hand is your unconscious, and your face represents your intellectual, conscious state, how do you get the two to talk to each other?  First, explore the ways you slip into the meditative, imaginal realm.  What time of day is most conducive for you to do this?  Does it happen automatically or do you perform some ritual to get to that state?  What makes your mind chatter recede and the dream patterns begin to emerge?  I suggest actually writing down how you best move into this state, as if writing down a formula or set of instructions.

The next step is identifying the gestative seed to be cultivated.  In order for you to use the imaginal realm instead of the imagination, identify where you want a new paradigm, a creatively powerful innovative way of thinking or a different way of looking at or solving something.  Set that as your intention and then go into the trance state of the imaginal realm, allowing the Muse of the Implicate Order to communicate.  The complexity of our world seems to demand we go deeper for new paradigms.  Will you be satisfied with a mediocre relationship with your inner dream world or will you cultivate the genius of your inner space? 

UP FOR GRABS

By Dr. Jane Rigney Battenberg

High in the Peruvian Andes our little group excitedly followed our leader, Kevin Ryerson, to the entrance to Machu Picchu.  This was an anticipated highlight of our two-week trip, and we were ready for a great adventure.  As we entered the ancient grounds, I began to feel lethargic.  This was unusual since we had acclimatized for a week at a higher elevation.  Soon, I found I could hardly walk, as if I weighed a ton.  When I asked Kevin, he said it was probably sadness.  Although I am not the suggestible type, tears began rolling down my cheeks.  I sobbed all the way through our tour, puzzled by where such a flood of emotions could be coming from. 

At the top of the ruins was a sundial, where a group member did a reading on a past life I had had there.  I was supposedly left there by my beloved father, who went away to fight the Spanish.  I never saw him again.  In the days to come, I scrambled like a mountain goat all over the steep terraces, even climbing the daunting Huayna Picchu with ease.  My Spanish became very fluent, and it was as if I were truly at home there.  Memories?  Perhaps.  Our family had lived in Peru during my high school years.  When we visited Machu Picchu for the first time back when I was only fifteen, I remembered having felt the same lethargic sadness then, barely able to move!

Sometimes a person has a strong knowing about a former life.  This is particularly true with children.  I recently talked to a pre-schooler who insisted that he was a famous soccer player “before”.  He was quite matter-of-fact about it, supplying his parents with many details.  Other times, like in my Machu Picchu story above, the “memories” are like swirling shadowy dream stuff out of which is extracted possible shape and meaning.

Clients who have recurring patterns in their lives that limit them or have negative emotional snares are encouraged to explore the roots of the patterns in past lives.   We go back to the very first time they ever experienced the emotion or pattern.  Their unconscious mind makes up some story about what happened.  It is in the context of that story that any reframing and insights can be gained.  Is the story a memory of a real past life?  Perhaps.  But it doesn’t really matter.  It is only an archetype, a myth, a context for the person to gain new learnings and insights. Life is a point of view.  Past life dramas give leverage for us to change by changing our point of view.  The shift in point of view is then like installing an update in your computer.  It applies to all lives after it, including the present.  It changes the person.

Whether past lives are “real” and we know they exist, or if they are made up and we believe or disbelieve in them, I go for the practical.  If past lives have a practical side or usefulness, then I am interested.  Here are some possible uses, whether past lives are fact or fiction.

• They may give insight into skills, life patterns or core beliefs that we have.  This may be particularly useful with children who “remember” previous lives or events.  The person can be seen in a larger context, a bigger picture.  Like seeing the whole iceberg rather than just the tip, these past lives provide greater definition of both our skills and our issues.

• They may provide a way for the unconscious mind to give us metaphors.  These metaphors may contain the seeds of limitations, issues to resolve or ways to expand our consciousness.  Like telling children stories with morals or values, we can use these past life stories to be greater than our local self.

• Like pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we can invent ourselves in a larger context.  We are constantly bombarded by stories that depict reality for us and sell their own values.  If we reach into ourselves for these stories rather than get them from movies, TV, novels and the like, we are literally taking charge of our own evolution.  If we don’t like the “story”, we can change it, because, after all, it is our story.

Our society puts great emphasis on left-brain, analytical, logical and rational processing.  To balance this, we can practice more right-brain, holistic, artistic, intuitive thinking.  One way is to explore possible past lives we might have had.  Whether this produces a daydream fantasy or results in expanded consciousness of self reinventing is up for grabs.

ARTICLE ON WOMEN REDUCING STRESS BY TENDING AND BEFRIENDING: