Issue #7

Part One – Know Thyself

“You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt and disbelief.” from the movie "The Matrix" 

As a Valentine’s Day treat, love yourself! Be kind to yourself, treat yourself to something special. Talk to yourself. How well do you really know yourself? How do you define yourself and what does it mean to you to be you (whether you are male/female, old/young, strong/weak, smart/slow, beautiful/ugly, talented/simple). Who or what helped you mold this view of yourself?

 We are prisoners to ‘the matrix’ in the sense that we believe we are something we are not; how often have you asked yourself “why did I do that?” Who is in control of your life? Is it really you, and if so, then why are so many things in your life not the way you want them to be? We are prisoners to ourselves, to our parasite as Toltecs call it, or our egos. We find ourselves doing, thinking and feeling what our parasite/ego tells us we should be doing, generally what society deems “appropriate” or “correct”.

 As humans, we are all here to grow and evolve. We are here to learn who and what we are, to know ourselves.

 Can we know what is in a book without reading it? Can we know how to ride a bike without ever having gotten on one? Can we know what love is without having been in a relationship? Whether we deem an experience as positive or negative, pleasurable or painful it teaches us about life, about our personalities. It is by experiencing life that we come to know ourselves.

 So, for this Valentine’s Day begin to intend to know yourself. Talk to yourself; find out what makes you happy and sad. Why do these things make you happy or sad? To truly know yourself you have to love yourself and you have to be willing to have the courage to see yourself for what you truly are: your strengths, your shortcomings; your ability to impact your life and life’s ability to impact you.

 Love, Light & Peace

Kalyn

As we begin to shine the light of awareness on our inner world we begin to see the roots of our domestication. We are domesticated primarily by our caregivers or parents. Our siblings, teachers in school, peers, and society also contribute to our domestication, but most of our patterns and wounding are instilled in us during the first six or seven years of our life.

When they become aware of the roots of their domestication I often hear my apprentices and students say, “How do I deal with this?” Or, “I have so much anger towards my parents. How do I handle this?” Or, “I find myself blaming my parents, is this blaming okay?”

Our parents are the ones who instilled the wounding we live with today. However, it is our responsibility to heal ourselves. This is the way the system is set up.

What this means is that through stalking and observing ourselves we come to recognize our patterns, wounding, and stuck places. We come to see that they are the result of our upbringing. But to transform these patterns and heal the wounding it does no good to blame our parents.

As Gurdjieff, the Sufi sage used to say, “Before we can escape from prison, we must know we are in one.” Through the Mastery of Awareness we become aware of just how limited our life has become. We become aware of how much we are creatures of habit run by life long patterns. We become aware of our conditioning, wounding and domestication. We begin to see that our parents are a primary source of our original domestication.

We must recognize and acknowledge that our parents were a major source of the prison we now find ourselves in, but recognizing and acknowledging are different than blaming. As adults, we are now responsible for our own transformation, and nothing anyone else does can do it for us, including our parents.

Sometimes when we see the extent of our prison we may become very angry at our parents and society for causing our suffering. This anger can actually be a positive emotion if we let it process through us and don’t hang on to it. Anger can be used to release resentment. We must release our resentment. The heat of anger can transform and heal us. We don’t want to suppress the anger, however we don’t want to turn it into blame. We simply be with the anger and let it do its work to transform us. This is actually an advanced technique called internal conflict.

It is okay to be angry at our parents, our wounding and suffering. Being angry does not mean we don’t love our parents. But we must process the anger through. Many of us have a lifetime of suppressed anger. We were not allowed to express emotions such as anger when we were young. We can tell our parents that we are very angry at them. Sometimes a confrontation is necessary. But we cannot blame them. We must realize that their dysfunction was simply passed down to them from their parents, and they in turn passed it down to us. We live in a dense timeframe. No person, no family in this timeframe is free from dysfunction. We can’t blame anyone for this, it is what is. If we blame we do not take responsibility for our own healing. And, as adults, the only way we are able to heal, transform and evolve is to take responsibility for our own freedom. No one else can do it for us. Nothing anyone can do, including our parents, will change this.

For those of us who are parents it is also good to realize that we are also passing the dysfunction of this timeframe to our children. Until we have substantially clean, cleared and healed our tonal it can’t be helped. It doesn’t matter how many ideals and beliefs around love we have, unless we ourselves have healed and cleared our inner world, we will inevitably pass our dysfunction down to our children. We can’t escape from prison unless we know we are in prison. We put our children into the same prison we are in without even knowing it. In the Mastery of Awareness we begin to be aware of how deep our incarceration is. In the Mastery of Transformation we experience true transformation of our inner and outer worlds. In the Mastery of Intent we begin the path of evolution through aligning to our Nagual aspects.

The good news is that our greatest weaknesses and most wounded places have the potential to become our greatest strengths.

Love and Light,

Kris

Answer:

Hello Nidhi,

Every one of us is unique and we each have different life-lessons. Ponder and meditate on your reasons for wanting to leave the bookkeeping and wanting to follow herbalism and drumming. What do you like and dislike about each? What motivates you to want to change jobs? Are there aspects of the bookkeeping (life-lessons) which you want to run away from?

The reality of a career change is that it is very difficult to make the transition and to build up a steady clientele base so that you are able to rely on the income from the new job. As such, many people work very hard at both until their new job can sustain itself. This is a good way to test and see whether this is a path you are meant to take: if the time and energy you put into herbalism and drumming begin to generate interest and a means of income, then you will be able to take logical and appropriate steps towards increasing the time spent here and decreasing the time spent doing bookkeeping. Because working two jobs at the same time is very tiring, you may consider placing the time and energy into one new career, such as the drumming. As this career grows you can switch to a part-time bookkeeping and then add the herbalism.

The Toltec Path is a path of the Heart. However, the Toltec Path requires that we work on healing ourselves so that we can distinguish between our true desires and ego/parasite desires (which are not fulfilling and generally expend our time and energy to no avail). When we do the work of clearing, cleaning and healing ourselves then we are open and able to perceive our true desires; we are able to truly follow our hearts!

Love, Light & Peace - Kalyn

Question:
Is knowingness the same as intuition or gut feeling? I know for me, sometimes a question/issue will come up and I'll need guidance. If I can slow down, get the chatter in my head to quiet (which is still extremely difficult for me), I actually can physically feel changes in my lower abdomen and sometimes I feel it in my chest. My chest feels real full.

 Answer:
Intuition, and gut feeling are similar to knowingness but employ different aspects of Self.

The intuitive body is one of the first bodies of non-structure. There is a strong connection between our emotional body and our intuitive body. This is why women are sometimes more intuitive, because they have a tendency to be more centered in their emotional bodies than men. This is a generalization and everyone is different.

Gut feeling comes, like the name implies, from the gut or our body. In Japanese they have a word "haragei" that is similar in meaning to gut feeling. Successful Japanese businessmen are said to develop haragei when making decisions. The decisions aren't based on logic but are based on a gut feeling. If we want to generalize, men are more prone to have a gut feeling as they generally are more physical body-oriented and women have more of a tendency to use their intuition. Again, this is a generalization and both men and women can develop their gut feelings or intuitive body.

The physical body is able to sense things beyond time and space without thought. It is related to the instinctive center of the body. Animals use their instinctive center to know.

It is very good to continue to develop your body sense. When you have a sense of things that you just know without thought, take note of the sensation in your body. The next time you wish to "know" something try to recall the process and the same sensation.

Knowingness is somewhat different than intuition and gut feeling. You must rise in frequency to access knowingness. Knowingness is often very large, like a huge ball. It can take several days to for the mental body to unravel knowingness and bring it into structure.

Love & Light - Kris

K2