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If you’ve read part 1 of Healing Sciatic Nerve and Back Pain, you’ll know that I’m dealing with pain in my sciatic nerve and possibly a bulging disc in my lower back.  This second part of the topic is going to go over what changes I’m making and what treatment has been effective for me.

Physical treatment

The physical level is usually where the focus goes when treating pain.  Allopathic conventions don’t suspect unrest in the emotional or mental realms too often.  I’m not one to skip out on modern medical practices, because in my beliefs about reality, there is credibility and they work.  To shun them and do purely alternative medicine would be foolish for me.  I know my belief structure well enough to know I can support myself in many ways and on many levels.

My first support came from my chiropractor.  I hadn’t seen her in years but she was glad (and sad) to see me again.  She knows if I’m coming to her office I’m having a bad day.  She did some diagnostics on me and determined I had sciatic pain and it was coming from my lower back.  The muscles in my gluteal area and left leg were like steel cables.  I needed some massage and time off my feet to let all that calm down.

The next support was taking time off work.  I hated doing this and really felt I was going to fall into financial lack, but I got my shifts covered for two weeks.  As is stands now it might be 4-6 weeks until I can be an EMT again.  I’d rather be working than have back/sciatic pain, but my health comes first.

My acupuncturist is the best guy in the world — he combines his talent in traditional Chinese medicine (he was trained in China too), a great sense of humor, and a love for geeky technology.  Really.  Who can stick needles in you and talk about graphics cards, L2 caches, and how many Japanese Zeros he shot down in his last online mission?  He also prescribed some herbs for me to take to support my back and gave me a list of foods to avoid that tend to increase inflammation.

One session where I came in with bad spasms he gave me a bottle of Formula 303. It is an all-natural formula to help with muscle spasms, tension, and stress.  The other herbs I’m taking are from Seven Forests, called Liquidambar.

I also saw a buddy of mine who is a doctor and he said I should take 800mg Ibuprofen 3x day for the inflammation and also gave me a prescription for a muscle relaxer to help with my spasms.  He recommended I go to physical therapy, even though it is quite expensive.   (Use your judgement on taking muscle relaxers and  Formula 303 at the same time.  I do, and I’m not sluggish or fuzzy at all.)

I see the chiropractor and acupuncturist once a week.  The acupuncturist is now doing electrical stims on me, and that is the cat’s jammies. I feel soooo good when I leave after a stim session.  I highly recommend them.

Treating the mind

In part 1, I mentioned mental pain.   I have a lot of non-supportive thoughts that are out of the moment.   These thoughts congregate and get stuck because I don’t see them or receive them.  Reigning in the mind is part of my therapy.   The mind works like a computer and seems to follow the GIGO rule.  That’s, Garbage In = Garbage Out.  Step one is to stop creating more mental garbage, and step two will be dealing with what’s accumulated thus far. 

I listened to the Power of Now again to gain some insight.  Here’s what Tolle has to say in Chapter 4:

When you learn to be the witness of your thoughts and emotions, which is an essential part of being present, you may be surprised when you first become aware of the background static of ordinary unconsciousness and realize how rarely, if ever, you are truly at ease within yourself.

On the level of your thinking, you will find a great deal of resistance in the form of judgement, discontent and mental projection away from the now.

On the emotional level, there will be an undercurrent of un-ease, tension, boredom, or nervousness.  Both are aspects of the mind in its habitual resistance mode.

So how can I free myself of these things?

The answer: Awareness

Tolle, again:

Make it conscious. Observe the many ways in which unease, discontent and tension arise within you through unnecessary judgement, resistance to what is, and denial of the now. …

Make it a habit to monitor your mental/emotional state through self observation.

“Am I at ease in this moment?”  Ask yourself this frequently.

“What’s going on inside me at this moment?”

I was getting caught up in what was happening outside myself and totally  ignoring what was going on the inside myself.

So I would pause many times during my day and ask myself, “how do I feel?”

“What am I thinking?  Is it about now or the future?  Is my body in any pain or discomfort.  Am I resisting anything in this moment?”

When I came upon a stream of thought about the future I would say to myself, “I’m not doing this anymore.  I’m focusing on the present, now.”   It is a very direct statement to myself about where I desire to focus my awareness. 

I do stay in the present more, but I do drift into future and past a lot.  The difference is I catch myself every time, where the thoughts used to be under the radar.  Now, I’m still creating thoughts that are not grounded in reality.  Does that matter?  It depends…

It depends on attitude.  When I catch myself out of the moment I don’t berate myself, “oh, you dummy you did it again!”  That is called non-reception, which means I’m not receiving the experience in the moment.  Another way to say it is the the experience in the moment is not OK.  Remember when I said the thoughts were getting ”stuck”?  They do that because I’m not practicing reception, which means I am the creator of this experience and I allow it to be as it is.  Throwing judgement on the moment just adds denial to it — more stuff to get stuck.

If an out-of-the-moment thought comes into my awareness and I receive it, there is no problem.  I’m not accumulating any more mental garbage.  The key here is to not exclude certain thoughts (say by forcing myself to have all positive thoughts), it is to receive everything I create and let them be as they are, without judgement.

The Emotional Body

While all my thoughts were piling up like cars on a California freeway in heavy fog, I wasn’t paying much attention to my emotional body.  When I’m not paying attention to my mental noise, the emotional body will produce feelings of unease to alert me to get back in the moment, get out of my denial, and see what’s going on.  But I was missing all the signals.  There was really no space for reception of the mental or emotional realities, I was just filling the space with mental junk, not awareness.

Back in 2004 when I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail, I had the largest emotional opening of my life.  Many hikers do and it opens the doorway to experiencing magic.  “Trail magic” is what its called by long-distance hikers.  It’s hard to put it into words but life starts giving you stuff without you even asking for it.  What you need comes to you without effort.

The emotional body is feminine.  Nature is feminine and thru hikers would find it hard not to have her rub off on them when they walk with her for six months.  When I got off the trail I was very open indeed, the sky was the limit, everything was easy.  Gradually I forgot about my connection to her as I merged myself back into “normal” life.  My emotional body took a backseat to my patterned responses to modern living.

My emotional body was screaming in pain and I couldn’t hear it.  It is supposed to flow like water and within me it became slow and sluggish.  Just like my mental body, I got stuff stuck everywhere.

(If I ignore the mental and I ignore the emotional, there’s only one place left to go — the physical.  And that finally got my attention.)

Getting her to move again when I cannot

If I could move, I could energize my emotional body easily — just go on a hike.  The memories would pour in and start a chain reaction of bliss.  But I cannot move too much — just a little bit around the house, that’s all.  I don’t want to make things worse by upsetting my back and put me in more pain.

Focus on the belly

The belly is the place in the physical body where the emotional body anchors in.   (The head is the place where the mental body connects to the physical form.)  Wanna see what’s going on in the emotions?  Focus your awareness on the belly area and breathe.   Soon you will get feelings in the body or the space outside the belly.  At first this didn’t work for me, I was too closed down so I tried to access my emotion from the point of pain within myself.

Focus on the pain

I used my awareness and traveled to my sciatic pain and to my lower back.  Torrents of emotion were there — layers of distress, anger, self-hatred, fear, helplessness, and sadness.  All these are waiting for me to experience them.  They are stuck there until I do.  It took me a week of focusing on the pain and coaching from friends and teachers to finally start crying.  I was finally feeling everything that had accumulated in that space.

The experience was very literal.  I cannot move.  And the emotions related to that were my frustrations about the lack of movement in my life and self-abuse for the lack of movement.  So many desires I wanted to fulfill, and I was hedging on many of them out of fear.  That was the message I was trying to bring to my consciousness.

It  is a good idea to talk to the parts of the body that are in pain.  There is a lot of expression that has to happen.  And once you let it out, the healing begins.

Journal the emotional body

This is a good practice in general, not just for people in pain.  When you channel your emotional body at first you have to go off of faith and just start writing.  The expression of the emotional body is in feeling and is can manifest in many ways.  It can be written, emotional, the feeling you should take a walk in nature, go play an instrument, rage, crying, drawing, etc.   She has many ways to express herself and for me the most comfortable way has been with writing.

She tells me what she needs to open up.  She encourages me.  Sometimes she’s angry that I cannot move. 

I will journal my emotional body daily and summarize at the end of the week.  I look for what denials I’m playing with in my experience.  Recognizing those I can then do a “course correction” and change a habit or just have more awareness to catch myself falling back into denial.

Connect to the Goddess and nature.

 Another great way to reconnect to your emotional body is through the Goddess.   Everyone, male and female, carries feminine or Goddess energy within them.  My friend Terri gave me a CD of her Goddess inspired chanting and told me to buy the Goddess Guidance Oracle Cards by Doreen Virtue.  This is a deck of 42 cards having beautiful artwork.  Each Goddess has a focus of feminine energy and by tapping into the Goddess herself, or into the attributes she represents (if connecting to Goddess is too foreign for you), you will awaken that energy in yourself and your emotional body.   Some Goddesses you’ll click with right away.  For me that was Mother Mary and Dana — very familiar energy especially from when I was doing healings.  And, some felt very foreign to me.  I know when I feel that way, the Goddess represents a part of me that I am afraid of touching.  It is a sure sign that I need to spend some time with that energy and my feelings around that energy. 

Nature heals.   How can it not?  It is the feminine essence in different clothes.  Long ago I was injured from an accident and had chronic pain.  I noticed that every time I took a walk in the woods, the pain would decrease greatly.  (And this was before I was into anything spiritual or transformational)  About 10 minutes after I exited the woods, my pain would return.

Another story is from my thru hike of the Appalachian Trail.  I was in Massachusetts and stayed at a friend’s summer home over the fourth of July weekend.  I had come down with chills, fever, fatigue, and joint pains on my three days off.  I knew I had classic Lyme Disease symptoms and it seemed that most everyone on the trail got it in 2004.  I went to the hospital and got a prescription for Doxycyclene. 

I was raring to get back on the trail so I dragged my tired, lethargic, and achy body back on the trail a day later.  Fifteen minutes, FIFTEEN MINUTES, after stepping back into the forest I had not one symptom of Lyme Disease.  I was awake, happy, warm, and had no aches or pains. 

So what I’m saying is, if you’ve got a lot of pain, don’t sit inside all day.  Get out into nature.  If that’s your backyard or Central Park, great.  Look at the clouds, the snow, the trees, listen to what you can hear and forget about the past and future.  If you’ve got pain, feel it — but stay in the moment.  I know back pain can keep you flat on your back for weeks. Play some nature sound CDs or watch a TV show that inspires you or makes you laugh, but, get out as soon as you can.  Nature is inspiring and it will lift your spirits and help you heal faster.

(Yes, it looks like there will be a part 3.  Plenty more insights to go around.)

In January I had something that felt like a muscle pull in my tush; right where my wallet sits. I didn’t pay much mind to it, I switched my wallet to the other side or carried it in a pocket and told myself it would work its way back to health in time.

Well, the pain lingered and then started to feel electrical in nature. I knew the sciatic nerve runs right through that area and asking a few friends in the medical field diagnosed me with sciatica. The pain can come from an inflamed piriformis muscle pressing on the nerve or from a disc in the back doing the same thing. A disc irritating the sciatic nerve can cause the muscles in the leg and bottocks to spasm, thereby opening the sciatic nerve to secondary irritation from the spasming muscles.

My first look at this pain came in the form of reflection. Reflection is taking the current moment and making it a mirror of yourself. Here I’m looking at my body and asking what am I showing myself in the mirror.

When using reflection, first try to be as literal as possible:

I have pain and it is where my wallet sits.

So what does wallet represent? Money.

I’m showing me I have pain around the issue of money.

Then this struck me:

I’m showing me money is a pain in my ass.

At first this is what I went with for an issue to work on. Later it all changed when my pain got worse and I incorporated my painful movement (oops forgot that one) in with the reflection.

Now if you’re thinking I irritated my piriformis muscle by squashing it between my wallet and gluteal region or irritated a disc, think again. That’s the easy cause and effect explanation. Seeing it in that light will not bring me any higher consciousness or growth. I would be treating symptoms and hoping for the best; which is what most everyone does.

I am creating all my experience now. That’s the underlying theme of this blog. You are the creator. And if you read this blog and apply it to your life situation, you will grow into a more conscious creator. Now, I didn’t consciously give myself this pain. Who would? If you’ve read Creatorship in the Now, you know that most all our choices are unconscious, so getting pain from nowhere doesn’t surprise me one bit.

So what’s the purpose of pain?

I have to wrestle with this a lot. When I get pain I immediately go into denial — “I must have done something wrong” or “I’m punishing myself for something I’m not understanding”. This kind of thought adds more denial to the denial I already have in place. I have thoughts such as:

“I shouldn’t have this pain.”

“I wish it would go away.”

“This is not right (so I am wrong).”

Pain is a messenger, a late sign as an EMT would say. What would the early signs be? This particular dis-ease started in the mental body and I totally missed it. If it is not caught in the mental body (it is not received so it gets stuck), I will have an emotion about it. Call it fear or a general unease. If I still do not respond to that it will show up in the physical body, which is historically when I actually listen to myself. I am quite devastated when I get pain in my body and all systems go on alert when it’s really painful. All the tools, like reflection, come out of the woodwork and I do things I should have done earlier. My pattern is I wait until I get a serious ache or pain.

So I’m trying to tell me something about me. It is something I’m trying to get a grip on and it is holding me back from what I want to do in life. I have to cross this bridge to get what I want. I go back into reflection a bit deeper, this time with the help of friends and I uncover more information about my pain.

It is in the sciatic nerve.

It is in my lower back, left leg, and buttock.

It makes moving very difficult.

I can’t do any of the things I want to do.

(all this is the reflection of myself in the moment)

One thing I didn’t realize initially is the sciatic nerve is connected to the spinal cord and thus the brain. The brain is the place where the mental body interfaces with the physical body. My pain is coming from thought. That’s pretty simple and I overlooked it.

One of my teachers said”, “you know what physical pain feels like, right?

“Yes”.

“And emotional pain?”

“Yes”.

“Do you realize there’s mental pain?”

“No. I never even considered all the thoughts running through my head could have such a consequence.”

My teacher also said physical pain is usually a reflection of non-reception on the surface. I was working this thing at 20,000 leagues below the surface of myself when it was floating right on top. I dove right by the obvious and went after the deep seated denials.

Mental Pain

At first mental pain was weird. I mean, what is it and how is it experienced? For me it is all the thoughts I have which do not support me. It is all the self-judgements and self-deprication that I don’t even hear myself doing.

A real life example: say I’m building a wall in my house. I will have this mental commentary going on about why I’m doing it a certain way. Not that I’m doing anything wrong… I’m building the frame, making sure it’s square, secure… I’m making sure there’s enough nailers for sheetrock, etc. But I’m running this story in case someone asks me why I’m doing it the way I’m doing it. Ok, well that’s a story around justification, so I must be thinking I’m wrong, and to think I’m wrong, somewhere I have to think I need to be right.

In the moment I’m just building a wall. The reality of it is I’m not right, I’m not wrong, I’m just here, now. But, I’m instantly telling me I’m wrong from the get go and devising a story to prove how right I am. That is mental pain. The thoughts do not support me in the moment. If you are a student of the Subjective Reality model you could call what I’m doing incongruency.

Thinking of the future, another favorite pastime, also diverts my focus away from the here and now. Being out of the present moment allows all these thoughts to ramble on in the first place.

Bringing it all together

To relate this more to my life I need to bring all the pieces together to make a picture. My back represents support of self. I’m having trouble moving. I’m not doing much of anything except lying down. My issue involves the mental body since it involves a painful sciatic nerve. And way back this also had something to do with money. I’ll see if I can work that in here too.

So, I want to do things, but I cannot move. My self support (back) is faltering because of the painful thoughts in my head. How does that relate to my life?

What are the things I want to do that I believe I can’t or will not move on? That’s easy, I have a whole list on my wall. When I look at some of them I say to myself, “I’d love to take the one month class around the world with Vywamus, but I just don’t see where I’m going to get the money”. Same with hiking the PCT in 2008. I also want to create a unique website/community for hikers… The list goes on and on.

And where is my mind with these things? What does that low-level chatter say that I do not consciously hear? I’m focused on how I can’t do it or how hard it will be to do it. Even before I start working on them! There’s the mental pain of non-support. I’m focused on what isn’t instead of what is. It took a lot of physical pain to get me to look at myself close enough to hear what is going on in the background of my mind. I slowed down my physical movement almost to a stop so I could not focus on any other activities besides the message that was trying to get through.

My process of this goes even deeper and I learn new things about myself each day. I will continue that process with you in another post and also talk about what I am doing as far as recovery goes. I am up and around these days but I need to be very conscious of how I move to prevent muscle spasms; which goes hand-in-hand with being very conscious of my movement within my creative flow.

Sciatica

I haven’t updated lately because I haven’t been able to do anything. Well, except lie down and see the acupuncturist and chiropractor. I have some very painful sciatic pain at the moment and my efforts to cure it on the physical level hasn’t worked one bit. I was treating the pain as something I had to get rid of, not something that was trying to give me a message.

And that message was loud and clear: “I am going to incapacitate you until you slow down and give me your full attention… no more ignoring me”.

It is still a painful time for me, but I am making great discoveries about myself, pain, and receiving support during my process. Focusing my awareness has been a particular challenge too.

I will get into the nitty-gritty detail in my next post or two. I can’t seem to get the laptop in a comfortable position while laying down :), so I will be typing it as I can. I hope this will help others who have pain in their body.

Money, Passive Income, and Agloco

Money is a really sticky piece of denial and one of the hardest ones to deal with in my opinion. While things don’t go “poof” for me yet, I will be posting my ideas on passive income streams. If I’m going to be playing with denial it might as well be something that earns me cash without me working so much.

This will also be covered more deeply in a near future post (as my back let’s me) but I want to introduce everyone to Agloco. It is very much like AllAdvantage before the dot com crash.

John Chow has written a lot about Agloco it and I urge you to sign up now. (And sign up with me. That link has my Agloco number attached) Even though you don’t know what you’re doing with it yet, just do it. This venture may work; it may not. And if it doesn’t, you don’t lose anything.

Yes it’s a multi-level, but it doesn’t cost anything and you can drop out if it’s not for you. I turned this idea down four times until John Chow beat it into my brain. Read some of John’s posts; he knows what he’s talking about.
Here’s something I read on Valerie Underhill’s site. She has a great site for promo ideas.

-Agloco is risk free.
-Agloco cost nothing to participate, no upgrade, no outlay, $0.
-Agloco will pay you up to 5 hours of your time online every month.
-Agloco will pay you a percentage of all your referrals and indirect referrals down through five levels, as they spend time online.
-Agloco will have a simple viewbar you may download that tracks your time online. [and serves up contextual ads]

The viewbar is not ready yet, but you might as well start building your groups. There is a lot of support out for this project and for getting people to sign up. Passive income + easy = what I’m looking for.

Sign up now!

I’m going to go a little more in-depth into the points I was making in the Manifestation 101 - The Basics of Manifestation post.

You are the creator of ALL your experience.

If this is a new concept to you, take it in little bites. Don’t try fathom being responsible for the upkeep of the whole universe if you never see yourself responsible for many of the things in your day-to-day experience. Start small with what is around you and the things that you directly experience.

Reading the news, seeing the stressful things that go on in the world, and then beating yourself up for creating such atrocities it won’t get you anywhere. A lot of working with creatorship and reflection is letting things be and not asking “why did I create that?”

To bring creatorship closer to home at first, recognize what you’re creating in the moment. Try not to judge it if you feel it’s a negative thing. It’s a great feeling to get all green lights while traveling across town, and very easy to say to self, “I am creating this, now”. It is another thing to sit behind a screaming child in a long checkout line at the supermarket and say the same thing without trying to push the whole experience away.

So, as you sit at work, say “I am creating this job, now”. As you drive your car you could say, “I am creating movement now”. When you look in the mirror say, “I create this body now…” Say them out loud if you can.

Why does every sentence end with “now”? Because it is a good reminder that you create in the moment. You cannot create in the past or in the future. As the channeled teacher Seth says, “the point of power is now.” Also Eckhart Tolle in recent years has written a great book called, “The Power of Now”. Being in the now is very important in this phase of our evolution. I recommend reading Tolle’s book or listening to it on CD.

Why am I asking you to be conscious of your creations by saying the easy ones out loud during your day? Part of creatorship is receiving you are the creator. That is one of the first denials you will see come up again and again when you start this work. If you believe that you are not the creator of all your experience and “others” create part of your experience, then you will be powerless to change many things in your life. Not being the creator makes you a victim to others, society, and even God.

Manifestation requires you to be present.

Being in the now will put you in a state of presence. You need to be grounded in your body, in the physical plane, to manifest on the physical plane.

A lot of new age teachings think little of the human form, like it’s a piece of baggage I have to carry around until I ascend to somewhere else. Throw that thought away. For the next step in our evolution it is CRITICAL you stay in your body and become grounded in it. Yes, it’s nice to open the crown and 3rd eye chakra up up really wide and float, but the root chakra is where it’s at. The root chakra is the element of fire — the fire of manifestation. An example of fire in the root chakra we are all familiar with is sexual energy.

We usually keep the root chakra under heavy guard because we fear it so much. Too much fire in there! At least we think so. I have a lot of judgements on my root and I am still working though them. Many lightworkers have the root and heart in polarity and it really stunts us from the start. Being present with your fire will bring up lots of stuff for you too work on. Never a dull moment.

The Conscious and the Unconscious

Do I actually create my body in the moment? How do I know? I’m not making an intention like, “I choose to experience a physical body now.” Well, at least not consciously. If I create all my experience and I have a physical body and surroundings, I must be doing it unconsciously.

If I think about all the things, places, events, people, thoughts, and emotions in my environment, 99% of everything I create must come from the unconscious self. And furthermore, I must create all of this effortlessly, since I don’t really, consciously, participate in manifesting it.

And, since I’m spending not even a thought on making the entire universe come together before me, manifestation must be effortless. It is. But why haven’t I created the life I dream about? Well, in one sense I have — I am creating my experience exactly the way I want it and it is manifesting, now. But what about the dream? Why don’t I see that? There are two things we’re going to learn about later called non-reception and denial. That will show you why the dream is not here and why the things you and I want manifest so slowly.

Consciousness is an evolutionary accelerator. If you’re reading this you’re choosing to be a more conscious creator. Start by noticing what you are creating in the moment, whether it be an ice cream sundae or a traffic jam, and vocalize it or say it to yourself. I am creating ______ now. Get used to the idea of being the creator of all your experience.

We manifest all our experience with an energy called choice. Manifest is a word meaning to make evident or certain by showing or displaying. This implies manifestation is limited to the physical, but we also manifest our thoughts, emotions, and things we have no clue of happening in other realities.

Why read through this? Isn’t this just another personal development blog with a different twist? Well, it’s the salty dog of personal development blogs, and actually I don’t even like calling it personal development, but I have to use that so the search engines and you will find me. Not many people search on “choice manifests” these days.

Below are the principles of manifestation. This is the base, the bedrock, I will be working with. In here there will be some jargon and words that are defined differently than what you’re used to in English. Please, go with it for now and I will give more meaning to them later.

MANIFESTATION

You are the creator of ALL your experience.

Yes, every last bit — the good, the bad, and all the things going on in the world that you never notice. You are a powerful manifestor. You run the show. You are the audience, the projector, and the big screen your experience is played on.

Manifestation requires you to be present.

You have to be in the here and now, energetically in your body. You need to be grounded and engaging with the root chakra.

You create through choice.

“choice” here does not mean “a decision”. It is an energy of the root chakra that humanity is playing with for the purpose of manifestation.

Choice is conscious and unconscious

All that stuff that looks like it’s outside of yourself (other people, things, events, the world, taxes, etc.) is all created by you. And it is the unconscious part of self that is doing the majority of the creating. The aim of this blog is to get a little more of the unconscious choice over to the conscious side so the magical side life can be experienced.

CHOICE

As I said, I am using the word “choice” to describe an energy that originates in the root chakra that we use for manifestation. Your choice manifests as simply as you breath in and out.

Every choice is a unique act of creation. They are mutually exclusive and do not interfere with each other. One choice cannot cancel another one out. Creations that are seemingly opposite, can exist side by side.

All choices manifest, and they manifest now. Choice, your ability to manifest, only exists in the present. You cannot manifest in the past or for the future.

There is no “why” or reason, choice just is.

Choices are yours and for yourself only. You cannot make another’s choices for them.

Choice is multi-dimensional (or multi-experiential). The choice manifests in all aspects of your experience. Getting a new car will manifest physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and so on. Manifesting a new physical object does not limit the creation to the physical plane.

DENIAL

Denial is a choice and we regularly play with denial in our experience. Denial is creating something and pretending you did not. How many times have you said, “that’s not my fault!” Right there you are playing with denial. I said in the beginning, “You are the creator of ALL your experience”. We will talk about denial a lot in this blog.

You can only deny that which you have already created. This means if you say you don’t have enough money, you have actually created “enough money” and you are pretending you don’t have money. Your reality will manifest this way (see reflection below) to show you what you are creating.

Denial is the missing ingredient from practices like the Law of Attraction, Intention Manifestation, and the like. People wonder why these methods either don’t work for them or there is a lot of delay in manifestation.

Denial is not something to get rid of. This I am learning right now. I said above that all choices manifest and denial is pretending a choice did not manifest. It is something you need to be conscious of in your creatorship. The choice of denial is manifesting and so is the choice the denial is hiding.

REFLECTION

The manifested world in front of us is a reflection of us. People, places, and events in our awareness are our reflections. It’s easy to see reflection in people you enjoy being with, but very difficult to accept the ones you dislike are actually reflections of self.

The property of reflection exists in all the dimensions, but we have our consciousness focused so much in the physical dimension. Why? In the physical dimension you can’t blow off reflection like in other dimensions. Self is trying to make a point to self here, and the physical dimension is the “in your face” dimension. What’s it like walking around all-day with a mirror in front of you? It can be downright painful, and the denial we play with always shows up in that mirror too.

SELF

You are the consciousness that exists everywhere. This includes your body, the physical universe, and everything non-physical. Another way people refer to this is saying “all is one”. I’ll say “self” when I’m talking about the all-encompassing being that you are.

My friend Annalise is a high school student. Where I live the students can become part of the town’s ambulance crew and go on calls during their school day. Annalise is one of them, and I, not a high school student by far, work on the ambulance two days a week.

The students run their own organization, create their duty schedules, and develop their own training classes with the help of adult advisors. On the days students are on call, they wear their uniforms, complete with pagers and day-glow trauma sheers. (aside: I am always surprised the trauma sheers have yet to be seen as a “weapon” in school. If any other kid in the school wore a bright orange pair of scissors on his pants he’d probably get expelled. But I digress…) Which students I get to work with on the crew is pretty random and I am always surprised in the morning when I check who is on duty with me. We run two adult EMTs and two high school students during the day, and if any of you have ever worked EMS, that’s a full bus indeed.

Two weeks ago Annalise was on the crew with me. It was early-morning and she was in her 1st-block English class. Her class’s assignment was to get a feeling of what peace felt like and write about it. In class, they were instructed to close their eyes, breath rythmically, listen to soft music, and think about their peace or what their peace was. Now, I am not a fan of public school, but I do take notice if a teacher goes a bit beyond their boundaries to give the students a different experience. I’m betting 100% of these kids have never contemplated trying meditation and this was a slick way to get them a different experiece of their waking state, be it in “English” class. They definately got an experience, but I don’t know if they took it all in.

Now, things started smoothly, the soft music and the intent of experienceing peace filled the room. Drifting, drifting, then Beep! Beep! Beep! Everyone is ripped from their la-la-land experience of peace as Annalise’s pager ignites it’s warble, cutting through the soft music. The voice of the dispatcher trails down the hall as Annalise dashes for the ambulance.

After our emergency call, the student half of the duty crew returns to school, retrieve their books, and check on what what they missed. When they are finished with classes, the kids walk across the street to the ambulance building and hang out with us until our shift ends at 6 PM.

At the building I jokingly asked Annalise how everyone reacted to their earlier experience of peace. Her friends from English said the teacher considered the excercise a failure. I was suprised. I said, “no, that experience should be taken literally, that was your experience of peace in the moment, pager interruption and all.” She thought for a second and I saw the lightbulb go on. She understood I was saying the intent of the exercise was to experince peace and write about it, and what they got was exactly their experience of peace.

It is like saying to self, “show me how I do peace.” Self then shows you quite matter-of-factly that you can maintain peace for a very brief time and then you create some distraction to pull you out of it.

But the outcome didn’t match the mind’s idea, its expectation, of how the event was supposed to play out, so the experience is rejected as a failure and the valuable information you were trying to give yourself is lost.

So now I’m going to give two realizations from this. First, some speculation on why the peace exercise was so short on peace. And I’m going to briefly talk about reflection, one of the tools that I hope you will use for the rest of your life.

Space and Expansion

Here’s what I think went on in the class exercise: Everyone got quiet and settled into their breathing and soft music. The mood in the room slowed all those minds down to the point where some space could open up. When space opens you get expansion, of self. And that expansion also will stimulate things that normally get no time in the consciousness (for a reason). Whether self is not wanting to see what’s there below the level of thought or the fear of the unknown that expansiveness can bring, everyone wanted out.

Annalise’s pager was a great manifestation for that. I doubt the students would stand up and say, “I’m uncomfortable, I don’t want to do this anymore” or “I’m bored, let do something else”. There’s way too many different social pressures, from both the peer and teacher levels, to disrupt class. So the pager going off was an acceptible way to leave the exercise.

A pager is but one way we distract ourselves. For the high schoolers, TV, text messaging, and video/phone games are the distractions of choice that I see. (And I want to note that none of these things are bad, you can do them all quite consciously if you choose.)

Reflection

The physical world is a reflection of self. You can gain all types of insight by seeing people and situations as a reflection of yourself (because it is).

Here the reflection is: when I go about finding my peace I interrupt myself instead of staying there.

To see the peace exercise as a failure, the students missed the message they were trying to give themselves. If the teacher let go of his expectations of how the excercise was to turn out, then the value of it could have been received by all.

Getting rid of the notion of failure or accidents or mistakes, we can learn a lot about ourselves and what we are creating in the moment. We dismiss entire experiences when they do not meet our expectations. If we don’t see reality as it is, our creative spark suffers, and we continute to create based on the filter we stick in front of our perception.

We are always supporting ourselves with a mirror held right in front of us. How often does that idea stay in our awareness when we are doing a task, working at our job, or interacting with people? We look at and remember our success in life, and if we gave the same attention to our failures, looking underneath what seems to be bad luck, we can begin steering ourselves down the path to being more conscious creators.

When I decided to write a manifestation blog I searched the web for what was already out there. There are a ton of sites, some practical, and many dipping into the metaphysical. There are techniques, top 10 lists, and meditations — something for everyone.

Dipping further into the realm of manifestation there is much excitement about the Law of Attraction (1,250,000 hits), Intention-Manifestation (40K hits), and Subjective Reality (156K hits on Google).

My first exposure to the “Law of Attraction” was a book title by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Esther is the channel of a group of non-physical beings called Abraham. As I scanned through the links on Google I can see people who have seminars, CD/DVD disks for purchase, and there’s even a movie. I’m kinda scared to even write Law of attraction on my site. Seems like I should be typing Law of Attraction â„¢.

A few of the sites use Abraham’s words: “that which is like unto itself is drawn.” Wow, that’s a mouthful. I think an easier way of saying that is like attracts like. According to the “law”, we attract whatever we choose to give our attention to. If you read further on on any of these websites, we are told that we create through our thoughts. That got me thinking if anyone has ever gotten the Law of Attraction (LoA) to work, well, if at all.

This blog is about manifestation, creatorship, fire, and lifting the denial that is around our ability to manifest whatever we want. It will go down a different path than LoA and Intention-Manifestation, removing the denials present in those systems, and moving along side the Subjective Reality theory.

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