Sat, 29 January 2011
(Free Phone Meditation Sun, Feb 6 at 2pm EDT. See www.healingchants.com>Calendar for call in information) I find that the lessons my guides like to share with me are often brought to my attention in my normal waking life. Recently, I noticed that not only is the media reporting on the events they usually cover, such as natural disasters and political upheavals, but they are also covering the resulting prayer gatherings and peace rallies. Likewise, with each unfolding situation, my email box fills with announcements of group meditations and prayers. I’m betting yours does too. The invitations for most meditation events I receive include notes that the intention is to “heal” or “bring peace” to a person or situation on the planet. Other emails request me to “send light and love” or good thoughts, prayer and energy towards curing illness for someone or helping with a difficult family matter. Certainly I feel a sense of compassion for those who are suffering. Yet the underlying intention of this sort of goal-oriented prayer has never felt accurate to me. This morning as I was wrestling with how to address another round of these emails, I heard a sentence being formed out loud in my head. “The more unencumbered by personal intentions your prayers are, the more effective they are.” While I attributed the sentence to one of my guides, the idea was not new to me. Growing up as the eldest granddaughter of a minister, I heard again every Easter the Bible story of Jesus’ overheard prayer “…Not my will, but Thine, be done.” As a mystically inclined seeker of the Divine, I know it from passages in the Bhagavad Gita, the Emissaries of Divine Light, and the teachings of Yogananda. And in the world of energy healing, I immediately recalled the ways in which several teachers have shared this same philosophy with me. Spiritual healer and teacher Ken Page points out that whenever we send energy, even “love and light”, we are opening ourselves to an energy exchange. Something will come back to us from the person or situation we are targeting with our prayers. I would add that the more our intention is to change a person or situation, the more the energy that comes back to us will also try to change us! Drunvalo Melchizedek, author and originator of the MerKaBa Meditation, points out that we live in a polarized world. In this world where there is both good and evil, right and wrong, we create both aspects of whatever we wish for, even though our intention is to create only one aspect. When our prayers are formed “for the good” by our mental capacity, an equal amount of our energy is also creating the opposite effect. I find that Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” applies to how we pray. If we indeed pray for what would appear to be a “good” outcome to any situation, then we are also unconsciously putting an equal amount of energy into praying for a “bad” outcome. How can this be? My metaphysical answer is this: Because we live in a world that is based on Free Will, we as a group of souls decided to create polarity. On a practical level this means that what appears to me as “bad” might actually be the catalyst for a much larger movement of Spiritual growth. In our human form, we are not able to see the larger picture of events that are working themselves out. It is only natural for us to pray for that which makes one more comfortable, happier, and healthier. But our soul’s journey is to explore how we, while in human form, create comfort and ease, generate joy and find balance in our physical bodies. While our personality would prefer to jump to the end of our soul’s learning process and enter into a life of perfect comfort, our soul want to learn all that is possible while here in human form. And sometimes that includes the experience of discomfort in order to motivate useful changes in our lives. In a study done in the 1990s, hospitalized cardiac patients were prayed for in directed and non-directed prayer, and compared to a group that received no prayers. (this was a small study, probably funded as part of the Complimentary and Alternative Medicine Studies, and most likely related to a university hospital. If you know this exact study please let me know as I have lost the original published article) Unlike many similar studies which divided patients into only two groups, this particular study divided patients into three groups. The group that received no prayers did the least well in terms of their physical recovery. The second group received prayers of directed healing: “Please heal the heart of _______,” for example. The third group of patients received non-directed healing. “May God’s will be done in the life of ________.” Not surprisingly the third group of patients had the highest recovery rate. As their report states: “With non goal-directed prayer, the group of over-soaked beans gave off water and moved down toward normal, and the under-soaked beans took on water and moved up toward normal. The different needs [of the soybeans] were met.” The group of soybeans receiving directed goal prayers remained either over saturated with water as well as too dry. The potential within the soybeans receiving non-directed, non-goal oriented prayer to bring themselves into balance was activated by the energy of the prayers. This same inner potential to achieve balance was not successfully accessed by those soybeans receiving directed or goal-oriented prayers. This is a strong lesson for all of us, whether or not we consider ourselves to be healers. Letting ourselves honor, especially during times of great need, the innate intelligence of God that lies within each person or situation allows the power of Spirit that is already present within each person or situation to shine more brightly. Telling God how to heal a person, bring peace to a situation or fix a perceived problem actually constricts the movement of Spirit, and thus the potential healing that God would desire to bring through that person or situation. I have no doubt that it is easier to pray for a soybean to follow its own inner intelligence than to find within ourselves a space of neutrality and compassion from which we can pray without a fixed goal for those we know or for painful world situations. This is perhaps one of the most difficult lessons we, as humans, have decided to learn. Healing and prayer are not about results. Healing and prayer happen when we allow our own compassionate heart to open and simply be with another’s pain. In this way God is awakened from within, and Love is remembered.
Norma Gentile www.HealingChants.com
Norma Gentile, sound shaman, is an intuitive healer and channeler. She incorporates her training as a professional musician into her meditation albums and recordings of healing music. Many songs, meditations and group consultations are offered freely through her website’s newsletter. www.HealingChants.com
Category:blog
-- posted at: 3:51pm EDT
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Mon, 10 January 2011
Category:blog
-- posted at: 2:31am EDT
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Sun, 2 January 2011
Songs and Meditation from Mary to help you grow into Yourself |
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Sun, 2 January 2011
(Eclipses, Velcro and Spiritual Magnificence) We are sitting in the midst of two energetic motions. One is pulling away habitual comfortable surroundings, while the other is inviting us to peer into the unknown darkness. And this darkness can be unnerving to view, particularly if we also feel unsteady in our body. It is as if the upcoming eclipse (Jan 4) is the doorway into what we have always wanted in our life, but have not let ourselves give any substantive energy towards manifesting. We have believed what our family, our society and our neighbors have told us about ourselves. In the eyes of others, we could not rise to spiritual magnificence. So how could we possibly be worthy of even imagining our inner dream, let alone manifesting it? The full moon lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice (Dec 21) is now ripping away the facades of habit, belief and behavior we have developed in relation to the outer world. My guides are explaining that it is like the magic trick of pulling the tablecloth off of an exquisitely set table. The wine glasses, plates, cups and silverware remain. They are now resting on the bare table. Only the tablecloth is gone. In our current scenario the tablecloth represents the underpinning beliefs that we have used to create external circumstances of our life. The bare table represents our new foundation. The wobbling wine glasses represent that off-balance feeling we might experience during these weeks of quick change. And being that we are still practicing our ability to co-create with Spirit, a wine glass might topple over and need an external hand to steady it. On January 4 the second in a series of eclipses spanning several years will occur. You probably remember the intensity of the first of these eclipses, which occurred early last week during the Winter Solstice December 21, 2010. This first eclipse is pulling the tablecloth out from underneath us. The upcoming eclipse offers us the opportunity to step into manifestation in a new way. But only if we let the tablecloth be completely pulled out from underneath us. Like many of the eclipses coming up in the next few years, the pair of eclipses (December 21, 2010 and January 4, 2011) is bringing up into our awareness those emotional patterns that we have taken upon us which are not our own. During the weeks before and after each eclipse we will be very aware of these patterns so that we might release them back to wherever or whenever they belong. These emotional patterns are attached to underlying emotions and beliefs that we are ready to change. In order to get to our issues in this lifetime we must release the emotional patterns we have taken on that do not actually belong to us. My guides suggested thinking of how we take on energies, emotions and patterns from other people a bit like how Velcro works There are two halves to every Velcro – one half (the side with the hooks) is the side that contains a personal issue that our soul wishes to address and learn about in this lifetime now. This hook side has attracted to itself bits and pieces of the fuzzy side, the other half of Velcro, from other people, other lifetimes, and even other realities. Each time we feel the emotion or think about the issue related to our hook side of the Velcro we feel overwhelmed. Because we are! Our own portion of the issue lies underneath this pile of emotional fuzzy Velcros that belong to others. We have no way of addressing, healing or changing all these energies that aren’t ours. In the moment we realize that we can’t change something, we are free to release it. In fact, we become of service to all of humanity when we release a pattern or energy onto its next step. We don’t need to know where an energy is going or how it might move. The energy has its own consciousness and its own evolutionary plan. It knows where to go and how to get there. We just need to honor that somehow fuzzy Velcro pieces became attached to one of our hook Velcro pieces. We can thank the fuzzy Velcro pieces for being heavy enough or numerous enough or painful enough that we have looked and seen our own hook Velcro side of an issue that we need to address. As we thank it for showing us our own Velcro piece, the pieces of fuzzy Velcro depart. Over time our own Velcro piece releases all the other pieces that had become attached to it. Our personal issue related to that particular Velcro hook becomes manageable. The emotional pattern no longer overwhelms us. We can consider the issue that the Velcro represents in our life, and it feels like something we can indeed do something about. Most of the time just asking “is this emotion, thought, or physical sensation really mine?” will assist the energy of a fuzzy Velcro to move enough so that you notice it has changed. That is how you know when a pattern is ready to leave. Most of the time we have already received whatever lesson or message the emotion, thought or physical sensation relates to. If there is still a bit of information or an insight that we need to receive, it will either flash into your mind as the energy moves out, or it may come to you during a dream or meditation later on. A friend called me as I was writing this. He had just returned from a trip to work in his field of healing within a spiritual community. He had thoroughly enjoyed being with the community and sharing his healing gifts with them. He had already been invited back for a return visit. When I asked internally if there was a lesson here, the guides mentioned this was in part about his body being nourished accurately. He was learning about the importance of self-care. He felt obligated to follow the diet that the community observed. But it was not a diet that accurately nourished his body. I passed that thought onto him, and he agreed. It had already occurred to him that he needed to address this, and so it was validating for him to hear from an outside source such as my guides and myself that this was indeed an important point. As it became clear to him that he would need to speak with someone in the community about his own nutritional needs, he reported feeling better. But I could see at least one pattern, which was fairly large, persisted. I tossed out a few ideas to see if I could help him figure out what else his soul wanted him to know. “Maybe it is about your previous trip to the ocean?” “Or something unresolved from last month?” No reaction. He said he didn’t think so. My thoughts returned to the community he had just returned from. “What is the relationship of the energy above his head and the community?” I asked my guides internally. In a fraction of a second I saw how tightly knit the community was, and how protective its spiritual leader and founder was of all those living within the community. He had died years ago, and yet something of his energy was leaning into my friend’s 7th chakra just above his head. I framed what I was sensing into a question, and posed it aloud to my friend. “I wonder if it has to do with the original founder of the spiritual community?” My own head suddenly ached. The dark energy was now in my crown chakra too. At the same time I saw the energy pattern darken and grow more prominent above my friend’s head. I asked the guides to share with me what was going on. They suggested that my friend “talk” to the discomfort he was experiencing, respecting it as if it were the community’s founder. My friend went along with the idea. He let the founder know that his healing work with community members was to assist the members in their spiritual path. The treatments were only offered to people when it was appropriate for them. He was not inflicting any treatments upon those who would not benefit from the treatment. As he communed in silence for a moment with the founder’s energies, my headache released. The dark energy above my friend’s head appeared to dissolve. “That is much better,” my friend reported. All it took was noticing the pattern of discomfort, giving it permission to step forward into awareness, and then communicating with it. Sometimes we can do this ourselves. Sometimes it is easier to have someone else there to point out the obvious things we miss. I am fond of saying that this process is like cutting hair. While we can trim the hair around our face, we can’t see accurately or easily enough to give ourselves a good haircut in the back of our heads. So too we can’t see all the energies that interact with us from the inside of our aura and the inside of our own lives.
My best to each of you, -Norma
Category:blog
-- posted at: 1:30am EDT
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