The Manifestation Station, July 8

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Tonight was the weekly manifestation class at Modern Zen (the building formerly known as Griffin's Loft). This is a class that seems - by its very nature - to work best when I am not prepping and when I haven't read fifty theories and nine thousand books on Manifestation and Creation (which to me sounds an awful lot like Manifestation in motion -- just letting it be). I thought I'd take the bull by the horns tonight and actually prep - i.e. -- discuss notes and theory.

See, I recently went to the library looking for books on spirituality, on manifestation, even on being present. I came away with an armful of books (the same armful I mentioned in the July 1st post), determined to Learn More About Manifestation.

Riiiiiighhhht.

Here's what happened. I remembered that I knew a lot more than I thought I did. I also learned that at some point, manifestation links into many, many ideas of spiritual surrender.

1. Thoughts Create Beliefs Create Action


2. Letting Go Will Help You On Many Levels


3. In Letting Go, We Can Only Control Ourselves


4. In the space of "Letting Go", create.

• How do you know you're manifesting what you need?

Someone asked a really great question tonight. "I want to do X thing. How do I know if I am on the path?"

By how you feel. If everytime you think about X thing, about YOU being in this situation, purely, you feel awesome and amazing and want to dance in your shoes and kiss small puppy dogs, then this is GOOD. If , on the other hand, merely thinking about X situation makes you feel drained, unhappy, or angry, then maybe this is not really something you want to do.

• Feelings are facts.

My mom used to throw this one at me and I used to look at her like she was insane. "What do you mean feelings are facts?" I would say. "Facts are facts." Well, mom really meant that feelings show where you are in the middle of a situation. How you feel often shows you what your needs are or are not. Where are you? What is happening for you? It's a biggie.

• "Good feels Good" -- Esther Hicks

I love this one.  Look at that. Good feels good. Was there ever so simple a statement?

That's it? Centuries of people being taught that pleasure of any kind means surefire damnation?

All of us, going forth, thinking that if we reaaaaalllly roll around in pleasure and catnip, the great hand of Big External Force (and sometimes Big Mamma or Papa SuperEgo) will destroy us in a blazing fire?

Think about all the ways society teaches us to put this aside. Don't have too much fun. Have a good time, but after that, come back in because supper's on the table. Good feels good. Let's start there. Good feels like alignment. Good feels like being with yourself. Good feels like whole. Good feels good. Brilliant.

• Negative Manifestation: "I was waiting for the other shoe to drop"?

Does the Universe ever wear shoes? Shoes are there to move us from point A to point Z. They are not there to hinder me, or you, or to drop into our existence and end what was, up until that point, a perfectly lovely time. This reminds me of that Monty Python sketch about The Hand of God.

• Are there any absolutes? (Or, Oh My God, I'm the Teacher.)

I love teaching. I love it. I love connecting with people. I also find myself coming up against the 'image' of a Teacher Who Needs To Know Everything, Ever, About Manifestation. In general, I must have all the answers for you, my student. Some days I believe this. (Those are the days where my beagle looks at me like "Weren't you questioning that five minutes ago?" She's right. She's a smart beagle.)

I walked into class tonight and basically said, "Look, I am your teacher and right now I'm having a small crisis of faith around what that means. It does not mean I know all the answers." I have no idea. The truth is that I know what I have read and studied, and what has worked for me, and what I have seen.

I am also learning about manifestation and some days I break all the rules of it (clamping down, clenching down) five times before I'm out of bed. I'm human. It happens. Sometimes I let go and am able to create and pull things to me in all kinds of awesome wonderful ways. Often, I am able to let go and create more and more. That's fun and wonderful.

• In Class: Manifestation Fortune Cookies

Tonight we did Manifestation Fortune Cookies. I passed around a small bag and every person pulled out a quote on manifestation. Weirdly (or actually, Purely Manifested!!!), every person seemed to draw the exact fortune that somehow mirrored something they had expressed during the class. Perfect. Total Manifestation at work.

Manifestation is faith is creation is God/Source/Divine/Us is letting go. It's all tied up somehow. It's one weird golden thread where all of it -- - becomes something we can hold on to and let it hold us.

Here's to being held and holding back.

G'night, all. Sleep well.

Mourning, Feelings, and Pema Chodron

Since starting Happy Ganesh in October of 2009, I've noticed something about certain parts of the healing field in general.  It seems like we encourage ourselves and others to have compassion. That's fine, ok. But all too often (at least in certain parts of the healing field) I feel like we're encouraged to have compassion in a way that actually sticks us firmly in the spiritual rather than really being HUMAN.

I also hear this a lot when it comes to grief. I've heard people in the healing field say to the grieving that the people they love are around them anyway, that they just miss the physical body. And that's true.

I feel angry about that idea. It  sounds like the reality of being human and feeling grief is being poo-pooed and traded in for a loftier, more spiritual model. Grief is grief. Love is love. Grief lays us low. It takes out of us everything we had to give --- and if we follow the path of grief, it really can bring you back to life. My experience with grief is that it destroyed me - and it showed me what I needed and what I didn't need. It showed me who I was, my own sense of humanity, my own terrors. It allows me to understand that I am alive. That, five years after my father's death and three years after my mother's death, I want to be alive.

If you are reading this and have lost someone, trust your grief. That's the best advice I have for you. Trust your feelings and trust the process. Since I started HG and started seeing mediumship clients, I've noticed that sometimes the session becomes open space for a lot of things to be worked through. I've had clients come in and tell me again and again that they "shouldn't be so sad because they just miss the physical body."

Somewhere along the lines, if my clients are really active in the healing path, they seem to feel guilty about their human losses. It's been five years, or two months, or ten years. Why do I still miss my husband/sister/mother/wife/father? Why can't I just look at their death as energy and be done with it?

Being human is the root of all of this. That means being in some of the most uncomfortable and scary emotions ever. It also means being in joy and happiness. My prayer is that we all find the courage to grief. To really grief for what's been lost. To get in there, get to the root of it, learn about it, and come back up, refreshed. And to go in again and again, if needed, to get to the root and then rise up to joy.

Pema Chodron, Buddhist nun and author, wrote a fantastic book called The Places That Scare You. In it, she basically talks about the danger of, basically, having a special set of neuroses that develop as a result of practicing bodhichitta (the awakened heart). In other words, in trying to *feel* our feelings and be *on a path*, we can drive ourselves a little nuts! If we're hard on ourselves in areas of life, we'll be hard on ourselves as healers, as humans, as people who are mourning, etc.

"One way [of developing neruroses] is to [...] use the training as just one more way that we don't measure up. If we train to become good or to escape from being a 'bad' person, then our thinking will remain just as polarized, just as stuck in right and wrong. We will use the training against ourselves." (p. 106)

In other words, rather than just letting ourselves feel, we'll put ourselves in a category and leave ourselves there. Good/bad. Good/bad. Should/Should Not. Fake BS concepts of spiritual/unspiritual. Being spiritual does not mean giving up being human. It - as I am learning constantly - means rooting yourself in your humanity. (Whew. What a ride.) It means doing it constantly. It means allowing yourself to be human because that is what you are. Your emotional system guides you to where you need to be.

Once, I had a newly grieving woman tell me that she knew she 'should' be over the loss of her husband because she'd read books on energy - and she knew that his energy was released. And she felt guilty for feeling as she felt. Was her husband released into energy? Sure. Did she have every right to miss his human form? Absolutely. To be human? To feel the depth of her own grief without shame? Yep.

Grief is not something that our culture teaches. Feeling feelings is not something that culture teaches. Letting yourself feel grief may be the hardest thing to feel. My first year without my mother was terrible. I leaned on friends. I was numb. I got washed out and washed back in again. And I went deeper into my own soul and into the reality of myself than ever, ever before.

In mediumship, I found -  very recently - that I had been totally submerging my own feelings of grief by buying into the whole concept of "I'm a medium. The fact that I can talk to my dead makes it better. I'm fine." It makes it easier and gives me a sense of spiritual connection, yes. But, what I learned was that I'd hidden certain parts of my very human grief and exchanged it for the purely spiritual. Working with people who have lost loved ones got me going deep within my own grief - and still gets me moving through it.

I hope I never stop.

I hope I can keep moving through my own process around grief and rage, loss and life, joy and gladness. Excitement to joy. To being fully human and accepting of my losses and excited about my open heart and its capacity to feel. This might take me until I'm 97 to really have it down to a science, but I'm willing.

I hope you can too. I hope that, for those of you reading this who are in mourning of some kind, whether its from a death, a letting go, or a moving on (such as an end to a personal relationship, friendship, move, or another big change), that you can keep following and trusting your own heart and your own process. Move through your grief. Let it come and go. Follow your uncomfortable feelings, your pain, and your grief, to your joy and your humanity. Your process is holy and sacred, and different from every other person's on this planet. It's different from mine. It's different from your neighbor's. And let your intentions be what they will be for you.

But for all that, to quote Stephen Sondheim from the musical Into The Woods, "No one is alone."

Thank you for reading.