Thursday evening, while resting on my pillow, I am overwhelmed by the intensity of what just unfolded on Keith’s porch – by the intensity of emotion that my little four-year-old self had been carrying around through all of these years. As I drift off to sleep, gratitude for the emotional release swells in my heart – but a profound awareness also tells me that I am not yet done, that more early childhood emotion yet remains to be uncovered, examined, felt to the core, and released.
Time Twists
After a peaceful and relaxed Friday morning, I slip on my flip-flops and begin another ten-minute journey – one that I now feel as if I could make blindfolded at midnight in a torrential rain storm. Yes, I have walked this beautiful path to Keith’s home many more times than I could count – and I love the journey every time.
One single day seems like an eternity, yet weeks seem to flash by in what feel like seconds. On this eighth day of April, I feel as if I have been working with childhood shutdown issues for many decades.
But last night’s process still dominates my thoughts.
Dizzy Delight
Several times I awoke during the night, again feeling quite dizzy. This morning, as I rest, read, and meditate, the dizzy spells randomly continue. Still, my heart remains peaceful and content, confidently reassuring me that the swirling in my head is similar to what happens when a foot has been asleep. As the blood first rushes back in, the foot initially feels quite painful and disoriented.
“Yes,” my heart whispers, “the dizziness is the same as a foot waking up. The confusing sensations are merely part of the awakening of areas long deprived of life-force energies.”
With this perspective of confidence, I consider the dizzy spells to be delightful. I cannot wait to see what shut-down part of me wakes up next.
Return to Chaos
After an hour of drinking chocolate, introductory discussion, and go-to-glow meditations, Keith begins individual work, immediately turning to work with me.
“I would like to continue yesterday’s process.” I share with Keith. “Something tells me I have only scratched the surface of what happened to me as a child.”
Just as Keith begins to guide me into meditation, my favorite star-healer from yesterday wanders up to the porch and asks if she can join the ceremony. For the next twenty minutes, Keith engages this woman from New York in what I perceive as meaningless conversations that wastes valuable time.
“Just hand her a glass of chocolate and tell her to shut up.” I ponder judgmentally as I feel myself momentarily slipping into victimhood, annoyed at my process being interrupted.
My loving-observer part gently reassures me that this entire interruption is my creation – that my energy asked for it – that it is part of my process – that I need to find a space of unconditional love – and that there is a hidden treasure to be found.
During these twenty minutes of interruption I rapidly sink back into the energetic chaos of how a beautiful four-year-old boy felt while being bombarded with distracting energies that disconnected him from his magical unconditionally-loving self.
These throbbing chaotic energies seem to enter through my third eye area, first pounding around inside of my head, then migrating down into my heart chakra where they punch me energetically with even more painful force.
As Keith finally resumes the ceremony and immediately turns back to me, I know exactly why I needed the interruption of the previous twenty minutes.
“Thank you Keith,” I smile, “This little interruption has served me quite well. I am right back where I need to be, deeply experiencing that painful chaos in my heart.”
Serg-ical Interruption
The moment I finish sharing my insights with Keith, Serg immediately launches into deep emotional pain related to his own traumatic childhood shutdown, into the victimization that he felt as a child, and into his God/Separation drama.
As if on cue, Keith immediately leaves me to follow my own metaphorical threads while turning to work with my friend and mirror.
Rather than feeling annoyed by this second interruption, I choose to remain in my empowered state, again recognizing that everything is my creation, that this process is unfolding outside of me for a very good reason.
Reflected Issues
Literally everything that Keith discusses with Serg deeply resonates with me and my own emotional journey. It is as if Keith is speaking directly to me, focusing on my own childhood pain. The only difference being that he is looking at Serg when he speaks.
As I sink deeper into this new emotional release process, Keith soon returns to work with me.
Interruptions Galore
I explain my powerful insights regarding how Serg’s work has deeply triggered and assisted me, helping me to go even deeper. But rather than remaining to work with me, Keith suddenly begins to move on to work with someone else.
“You are interrupting me yet again?” I ask Keith with shock. “It seems like every time we start something today, you immediately abandon me to work with someone else.”
I quickly explain to Keith my sudden burst of insight – an insight that tells me that these interruptions are actually serving me.
“It seems that most of my life I have not felt as if I deserved help and attention.” I tell Keith with unfolding clarity. “If anyone else’s problem was more important than mine I was abandoned and ignored while the other person’s issues were addressed.”
“I would never speak up or say anything.” I add with emphasis. “I would simply become more invisible, sitting back and accepting that I don’t deserve … that I don’t get the help that I desire and need.”
There’s A Devil Inside
As Keith immediately guides me into an inner meditation, my abdomen begins to hurt with a vengeance. A feeling of considerable sharpness begins to poke me from the inside, painfully moving around the area of my belly button.
“What cartoon-like character is in your abdomen?” Keith asks with a grin.
I ponder for several minutes, but nothing comes to mind. I soon ask Keith if he would mind giving me a clue.
“You have a little devil in there with a pitch fork.” Keith unexpectedly gives me the answer. “It is poking you from the inside of your belly.”
Keith goes on to explain that my religious upbringing filled me with structured ideas about what God is – ideas that did not line up with my own perception of the divine energies flowing inside of me. The end result of this dilemma is that when I finally gave up and succumbed to the citizen-factory programming being thrust upon me, I literally felt as if I had a devil inside of me.
I Don’t Deserve …
A few minutes later, as I listen to Keith work with a beautiful woman across the porch, I listen intently as she explains her feelings to Keith.
“I feel like I don’t deserve…” She begins her sentence to Keith.
This simple sequence of six words suddenly unleashes painful energies that begin to poke me all over in my heart.
Tears begin to stream down my cheeks as I deeply experience the effects of those simple words: “I don’t deserve.”
Through most of my life, this underlying energy has ruled my behavior, causing me to hide in shadows, to step out of the way for others who seemed to be more important than me, to deprive myself of basic self-love at times when I needed it the most.
“Good, Brenda,” Keith immediately speaks from across the porch. “This is a great breakthrough.”
“Now take your little girl’s hand,” Keith briefly guides me, “and ask her to show you more about what you need to work on.”
Dancing Angels
“Little Sharon took me down some stairs and showed me a disgusting room.” I tell Keith when he later returns to work with me.
“The bottom two feet of the room were completely filled with what intuitively felt like human waste” I add with hesitation. “I was so distracted by that process that I did not stay there.”
“Call in a crew of angels with buckets,” Keith immediately guides me, “and go back down there. Put your Higher Self in charge of the crew and ask the angels to clean out the room for you.”
Within about thirty seconds of visualizing this process, I begin to sob. My heart is warmly overwhelmed by the loving assistance that I feel as I imagine the angels singing and dancing, lovingly cleaning up the horrible brown waste that drowns this metaphorical room.
Family Service
Briefly, my memories flash to an experience that happened when I was probably around nine years old. I had been wandering the neighborhood, taking on odd jobs to earn some spending money. An older gentleman living just around the corner from my home had hired me to clear all of the weeds from a nearby vacant lot. He offered to pay me the whopping sum of $6.00 US – a huge sum for a young child in the early 1960s.
I slaved in that vacant lot for what felt like days, struggling to cut through the jungle of weeds. As I was on the verge of giving up with failure, my parents suddenly came to the rescue, organizing a family gathering to support and to help me. In one long evening, my parents, brother and two sisters all helped me to successfully finish clearing the weeds from that huge lot.
I was deeply grateful for that unexpected loving support that helped me complete a seemingly impossible and difficult task.
Tears of Loving Gratitude
Tears continue to swell and stream down my cheeks as I bask in the love that I feel as I now imagine these loving angels performing another seemingly impossible and disgusting task. So much beautiful unconditional love pours through my heart as I sit back and watch them unselfishly doing the work for me.
At times the tears reach the level of deep sobbing, coming and going in intense waves while I continue to envision this room being lovingly cleaned by dancing and singing angels.
But try as I might, no matter how much I attempt to imagine it, the room never gets fully clean. The floor and walls continue to remain covered by an inch or two of yucky, brown, disgusting waste.
I ask my little inner child, Sharon, to wave her wand around. Momentarily, I see beautiful sparkling tile show through as the waste briefly disappears, but almost immediately the layers again return, refusing to allow the room to be fully cleansed.
An Inner Temple
Suddenly I burst into another round of even more intense tears as another realization floods my conscious mind.
“This room is my inner temple.” I tell Keith when he returns to work with me. “My inner temple is clogged and covered by layers of horrible human waste.”
Over time, my emotions stabilize and I begin to feel a deeply renewed energy in my hands – but the room continues to feel soiled and contaminated.
As the ceremony nears conclusion, my inner temple remains only partially cleansed, but a strong sense of peace whispers all is well – that the job will be completed later.
With a giggle in my eye, I grab a spoon and stick it into a nearby plastic container, quickly scooping two heaping spoonfuls of panela into my mouth. Panela is an unprocessed cane sugar – dried and then shaved into small chunks. We use it to sweeten our chocolate at the beginning of ceremonies. As Friday evening quickly fades, my little inner child tells me that she wants more sweetness in her life. I eagerly comply with this request.
As I stroll homeward, I am thrilled by my progress in uncovering further mysteries of my childhood shutdown, but I also intuitively know that much remains to be explored. I am excited to continue.
Faux Fashion Fantasies
After a beautiful Saturday of writing and socializing, I am right back at Keith’s magical porch on Sunday afternoon. I have no idea what I will discover, but my eagerness to explore pushes me onward into the unknown.
As Keith guides one woman deep into her subconscious, I choose to follow along and participate in my own self-guided process.
Soon, I find myself in a small waiting room. There is only one chair and a small table. Lying face up on the lone table is a women’s fashion magazine.
As I sit down, I feel as if I am waiting for some type of “expert” to walk into the waiting room – an expert who will soon call me into his office to provide me with the help that I seek. But all of my attention quickly focuses on the magazine.
Such a magazine is filled with articles, stories, and adds, telling me how to dress, how to apply makeup, how to act, how to think, how to be in a relationship, how to be … blah blah blah.
In my late thirties and early forties, I spent countless hours devouring such magazines, hoping to find some type of guidance that would teach me how to more adequately fit in as a woman striving to adapt to and belong in the competitive world around me.
“Isn’t it interesting,” I think to myself, “that I am relying on this magazine to give me outside opinions that will make me successful, pretty, loved, sexy, etc…
The message of my subconscious is clear. I have spent far too much time in my life waiting for outside experts to tell me who I am and how I should think and behave. The guidance I really crave – the guidance I actually need – comes only from my heart.
A Question of Deserving
Later in the ceremony, I again focus on the mild headache that continues to cloud the front of my forehead; it is a heavy feeling telling me that I am still blocked in my third-eye chakra. This mild headache has been making its presence known at almost every ceremony now for what feels like weeks.
“Pain is resistance.” I remind myself. “I wonder what it is that I continue to resist here in my third-eye chakra.”
I feel helpless and hopeless in discovering the answer. I have tried many times, and the intuitions continue to elude me. Today I would like to take a stab at perhaps uncovering another layer of the mystery, but I have no clue as to how to begin.
I remember that Keith frequently tells me that there are many things in our spiritual journey that we simply cannot do by ourselves without higher assistance. He likens the experience to someone walking along a trail, suddenly arriving at a wall of glass that is five meters tall. Without special equipment, no human can scale such an obstacle by themselves.
Keith teaches that at such points in our path, we need to humble ourselves and ask for help from higher energies such as our Higher Self. This act of asking is actually an important part of our process.
“Higher Self,” I begin to plead in my meditation. “I am stuck here. I haven’t got a clue how to proceed and I could really use some assistance now. Would you please help me with this obstacle in my spiritual path?”
As I go through the meditative-motions of asking for help, I begin to sink deeply into emotional and tear-filled resistance.
“I am feeling undeserving again.” I tell Keith as he responds to my surge of emotion. “I don’t feel worthy of assistance from my Higher Self.”
“Brenda,” Keith quickly points out, “the emotion that you just blocked was your Higher Self actually sending you unconditional love.”
Again, I push forward in my meditative journey. Repeatedly I go back to asking Higher Self for help. Over and over my heart is overwhelmed by tender emotions – joyful emotions of finally allowing myself to begin receiving assistance that I have previously not allowed. I almost laugh out loud as I imagine a group of giggling angels lovingly helping me to do something that I am incapable of doing by myself.
Front Row Seat
Suddenly, a new metaphor pops into my mind.
My left-brain self is sitting in the front row of a large movie theatre. I have an unlimited supply of popcorn, soda, and candy.
A feeling of relief floods my heart as I realize that I can simply sit here and watch the movie. I don’t need to be in charge of creating the script, of directing all the actors, and of trying to project every scene in the exact way that I think it should go.
No, I can simply sit here on the front row and let my right-brain operate the projector.
“This will be really fun.” I reassure myself as I imagine myself further surrendering control to my intuitive side.
“You might want to consider giving that part of yourself a headset/microphone link.” Keith suggests after listening to my current adventure.
Keith explains that by doing so, my left-brain rational mind will not feel left out and rejected. If it ever sees something in the movie that it would like to change or modify, it can simply relay the suggestion to right-brain via the headset – thus being a partner with right-brain rather then being pushed out of the flow completely.
I love my new metaphor … and to my delight so does my cloudy headache. While a small amount of heaviness continues to presence itself in front of my third-eye, I feel much lighter.
As I return home on Sunday, a beautiful feeling of loving peace flows through my soul.
Goodbye to Skye
Time continues to fly by, and the time for Skye to fly home to Canada has come all too quickly.
At 6:15 a.m. on Monday, April 11, Joy and I escort Skye down to the boat dock. She has been unable to purchase a tourist-shuttle ticket to the airport, but being the confident and experienced traveler that she now is, Skye totally trusts herself to be able to find her own way on public transportation. The first leg of her adventure will take her via boat to Panajachel.
A few minutes later, as a boat arrives, it is so overloaded with people and baggage that Skye refuses to even attempt boarding. I have to agree that it is one of the most overcrowded boats I have ever seen on the lake. Finally at 6:40 a.m., Skye steps into the next boat – one with considerably more available space.
We barely have time to hug and say goodbye before the boat pulls away from the dock, quickly disappearing into the distance.
Soon, Joy and I walk slowly back to my apartment. Have I said yet that I love my roommates?
I love you Skye. I will miss you, but I trust that our paths will cross, yet again.
In Clock We Trust
Joy and I quickly engage in an impromptu giggle fest. Lying side by side on the daybed in the living room, our conversation unexpectedly evolves into a delightful discussion about the craziness of time, clocks, and schedules.
It all begins as I mention an ongoing minor annoyance that seems to shadow me everywhere that I go in my travels. It seems that everyone in Mexico and Central America ignores the holy sanctity of the clock.
“How dare they have the audacity to live life on their own terms?” I joke sarcastically.
Soon our conversation turns hilarious as we begin chanting things like “In clock we trust,” “God save the clock,” and “All hail to the mighty clock.”
The discussion is actually quite profound as well as funny – talking about how we give so much of our personal power to the past and the future, focusing our entire lives around a clock and a schedule. The rabbit hole takes us further into discussions about time and space – about the crazy cultural conditioning that rules our lives around the issues of time.
Energy Healing
Joy has struggled with sinus congestion for several days now. After giggling for more than an hour, I feel guided to ask a simple question.
“Would you like me to try some energy work on your sinuses?” I ask Joy.
For the next hour I enter a deeply-centered energy of unconditional love, breathing meditatively while holding my hands in various positions around Joy’s head and neck. I feel the energy vibrations in my hands. My heart resonates with deep loving peace.
As I eventually feel guided to stop, I ask Joy for a little feedback.
To my sheer delight, she tells me that she experienced a lot of flowing energy, and that her sinuses have now dried up.
I don’t know why, but I continue to experience shock and amazement when such things happen.
Our conversation and experience is so empowering to both of us that we lose track of the almighty clock. To our delight we realize that we are running late – that if we leave right this very second we will be nearly fifteen minutes late as we walk into the Monday afternoon chocolate ceremony.
“In clock we trust.” Joy and I giggle in unison.
Energies Waking Up
During the afternoon ceremony, I immediately return to the same meditation in which I ended yesterday, visualizing my left-brain self on the front row of a movie theatre, munching on popcorn and drinking soda while allowing my intuitive/creative self to project the show.
I again call on Higher Self and the metaphorical angels to assist me with something. Anything would be nice.
I soon begin to feel chaotic energies – energies that make me feel quite dizzy – energies that bounce around in my head. Had it not been for the many lessons of the past week, I may have tried to immediately shut this experience down – interpreting the discomfort as painful and bad.
But now, I again think of a sleeping foot as the blood first rushes back in.
Yes, the discomfort in my head is painful and alarming at first, but I am thrilled to feel it – thrilled to realize that new life is returning to a long-dormant portion of my brain.
Pulsing Pains
At first I attempt to be directive, asking the angels to do specific things (under the direction of Higher Self of course) – things such as cleaning energy channels, rewiring areas of my brain, adjusting the auto-clench programming in my jaw, etc…
But then I begin to feel as if am “pushing the river.” Instead, I make my requests very generic, simply asking that the energies do whatever needs to be done – whatever I am ready for.
For a very long time, I simply sit in surrender, feeling extremely light-headed as pulsing pains begins to surface and then disappear in various areas of my head.
“What is happening, Brenda,” Keith guides me briefly, “is that your Higher Self is taking you on a journey.”
Keith further explains that my childhood shutdown process is being replayed in reverse order, as portions of the shutdown are now being energetically undone in the opposite order in which they occurred.
Suddenly the pain enters my eyebrows. The aching is quite intense. It does not move and it does not go away.
Second-Chakra Expression
“Go into that pain.” Keith guides me with confidence. “Lose yourself in that pain.”
As I do so, the pain only intensifies. It is a very familiar pain.
After a period of feeling and pondering, a deep intuitive realization finds its way into my mind.
“This pain is associated with my solar plexus – the chakra associated with my will and my power.” The inner voices whisper. “This pain closed off my third-eye vision, attempting to get me to stop seeing. Such energies got me into so much trouble as a child.”
I further immerse myself in the pain, going through another long period of dizziness and intense light-headedness.
“Brenda,” Keith eventually intervenes. “Imagine that the light-headedness wants to express itself somehow. How does it do it?”
“I feel the energy go through my mouth.” I respond to Keith. “This tells me that this light wants to express itself.”
Soon I feel intuitively guided to place one hand on my second chakra. With that hand, I sense a strong rush of energy going into my tummy as I breathe out through the mouth. Almost immediately, I experience a great deal of churning in the lower intestinal areas – churning that is centered right at the core of the chakra associated with sexuality and creativity – right at the core of the chakra whose ability to express was completely severed.
I continue to monitor and observe this adventure all the way to the end of the chocolate ceremony. To my delight, the sensations in my head return to normal as group eventually ends – letting me know once again, in a very powerful way, that the painful chaotic energies are all metaphors, not actual physical maladies.
The Rabbit-Hole of Time
I am thrilled by the unbelievable energetic journey that I continue to experience in the present, as I work toward healing energies from the past, which are also manifest only in the present.
And I love how the future is barely an ignored blip on the radar (but of course that blip is also in the present too).
In clock we trust … NOT!
I simply trust the flow of my life … the flow of an amazing healing journey that continues to unfold in perfect harmony, one beautiful and amazing present moment at a time.
Copyright © 2011 by Brenda Larsen, All Rights Reserved