Harvard Square Coffee shop Intention Experiment, May 20, 2008

A sparrow finds his way into the café, yet has trouble finding his way out. It’s not entirely that he’s a dummy exactly. The layout of the entrance is confusing. The door is in a corner, but there is a glass wall enclosing the exit. When the bird flies in a straight line along the front window of the café, instead of flying out the door as he would expect t0, he flies straight into the glass wall that works as a buffer between the cold currents blowing on Massachsuetts Avenue and the patrons of the café.

Despite various action-oriented efforts of patrons and attendant work-study yoga student, the bird continues to flutter around in its glass prison, occasionally attempting to fly through the glass window at the front of the store.

Patrons try walking behind it, hoping to direct it to the passageway to freedom. A tea drinker tries distributing crumbs in a path between the bird and the doorway, but the bird is much too frightened to eat. Another patron suggests that perhaps his cap will make a container for the bird, and tries to catch it to show it the door. By now the bird has become so frightened that it merely crashes into the wall in a panic, intent on avoiding this human.

The dharma student who is serving the tea thinks maybe a wicker crate will do the trick, but she too is unlucky at convincing the bird that her efforts are in his best interest.

As if waking from a stupor, it suddenly occurs to me to suggest that we stop taking action and instead between the five of us just hold the intention that the poor sparrow finds his way to freedom. This is not to brag about my great prowess, tempting though that is. But merely that, as a student of Abraham-Hicks it has finally dawns on me that this is a great opportunity to put what they teach into practice. Abraham, channeled by Esther Hicks, emphasizes the power of taking the emotional journey first, rather than leading with action. Wayne Dyer named one of his books The Power of Intention. Abraham consistently extols the importance of lining up one's vibration (i.e., emotional set point) to match the desired outcome before embarking on a course of action.

The sparrow has created an opportunity for us to experiment with the concept. Compared with more personal issues, in this case it’s easy to be neutral about the outcome. I mean, I’m invested in this poor creature finding freedom and safety, but the outcome doesn’t weigh as heavily upon me as having the money to pay off my car loan, for example.

As soon as give words to the suggestion for us together to hold the intention for the bird’s successful flight away from captivity, the little fellow spreads his wings and soars up from his hiding place under one of the chairs in a corner of the café and out the door to freedom.

By this time we human witnesses bonded in our mutual desire to help him. There was far more interaction among us than one normally encounters in a café, even in Cambridge. I am sure that each one of us will have many occasions to remember and share this incident, recounting the tale of our participation in an ad hoc experiment demonstrating the power of intention.

Neutrality, Stress, and Meridians

We create Stress when we think it’s up to us alone to figure out a solution to our problems. In that state we’re often frantic, disconnected from source energy. We are unlikely to be grounded, so we don’t get the benefit of the Earth’s supportive energies. A state of neutrality increases the ability not to let things bother us, and thus reduces the stress response.

In terms of the acupuncture meridians, the “Triple Warmer” meridian carries the impulses that translate to a stressed physiolgy. Triple Warmer has the capacity to keep us alive. Charged with that responsibility, it can declare a state of emergency and grab energy from every other meridian except the one that feeds the heart. The first one that gets depleted as a result is the Spleen meridian, most closely associated with calmness, openness, fairness and well-being.

Triple Warmer links not only to the rest of the meridian system, but also to all of the endocrine glands, and, through the hypothalamus gland to the nervous system. Thus the setting of Triple Warmer – pointing toward or away from danger and stress – has a tremendous impact on our frame of mind and our health.

The hypothalamus gland correlates input from internal sources and sense organs. This data gets translated to a binary decision: respond with a sigh of relief, in relaxation, from the physiology that supports well-being or red alert: the situation warrants activating the stress response. The Well-Being Switch, available from http://products.HealingPoole.com, is my MA thesis, in which I describe how this small gland in the center of the brain acts as the mediator between these two profound physiological states.

On the physical level, the Spleen, in concert with the Pancreas, works with metabolism, helping to integrate nutrients. The pancreas produces many enzymes, and insulin in the islets of Langherhans. At a metaphysical level, spleen/ pancreas energy is responsible for integrating life experience. When be bring Triple Warmer and Spleen meridians into balance, well-being is augmented. Spleen energy allows for patience and trust, letting necessary things come to us as they are needed.

Triple Warmer energy can be activated by most elements of modern times. It wasn’t designed to cope with computers, televisions, remote controls, traffic, cell phones, indoor heating or electric lights. It doesn’t care much for season changes let alone climate change. Triple Warmer is a creature of habit, not fond of the strange, the unusual or the unfamiliar. However, with intention, there are many ways that we can upgrade Triple Warmer’s reactive habits and enhance Spleen energy – returning to neutral; breathing fully and deeply; practicing qigong, yoga, and t’ai chi; increasing mindfulness; meditating; chanting; and shining the light of awareness of our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions.

Does it bother you?

I’m busy learning how to be more Neutral. At first that sounds like not caring, not giving a damn. But it’s really about changing my mind about what I might at first perceive to be a problem. To give credit where it's due, I learned this notion from Kam Yuen, DC, who developed Yuen Energetics – a potent healing modality.

When you work with him, and you tell him what your problem is, the first thing he’ll ask you is: "Does it bother you?" initially I remember thinking "What a stupid question. Of COURSE it bothers me." But as he kept this up throughout our two-day training at Shaolin Temple (part of a 10 day trip to China in September, 2006) and he kept talking about being neutral, I started to grasp what he was getting at.

I am not yet always able to remember the importance of being neutral by a long shot. Still, because I teach T'ai chi, I started thinking about the metaphor. In T'ai chi, we make a yang, outward move followed by a yin, inward move. In that process more "neutral force" is created – an equal balance of yin and yang energies. Neutral force carries a higher vibration than the polarized yin and yang energies that it combines. When no longer polarized, the energy literally vibrates at a higher rate, and in that higher-vibrating energy, pain and tension dissipate. In the Tao, this is known as the Wu Chi -- the state of nothingness that exists prior to form.

When we access that neutrality we make room for spirit to guide us to a solution. We no longer need to figure out what action to take. It doesn't mean there will be no action; just that the 'figuring out' part falls away. The solution seems to surface from out of the void. And often, when it does, it just seems so obvious;

it's hard to fathom why it didn't occur to me earlier. It may be that something serendipitous occurs. Or I'm led to be “at the right place at the right time, or I just happen to read something that is timely. However things unfold as a result of coming to that neutral place, I’ve ended up working less hard at figuring out a solution.

Re-framing: a powerful tool for transformation

Re-Framing is an important and powerful tool, always at our disposal. All that is required to put it to use is to listen closely to the words you use. How do you describe an event to yourself or others? How can you change the wording to better serve your interests? And how do you know what will serve your interests? By how what you say or think makes you feel.

Supposing you have a massage, and don’t feel great afterwards. Rather than "it made me sick" you could re-frame your experience to say "That massage was deep. It may have released toxins a little faster than my system was able to discharge them, so I need to go a little more slowly and more gently for now. It wasn't the end of the world. It did help me understand just how important this body work can be in helping me heal. Apparently my first step is getting some of this stuck toxic stuff held in the tissues of my body to move, but I can do that at my own pace. My body will respond just knowing that I am getting more connected to it all the time and that I am focusing on my needs right now so that I can continue to move toward greater well-being.

Any of the books by Jerry and Esther Hicks – including The Astonishing Power of Emotions, The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent: Living the Art of Allowing, The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham, or Ask & It Is Given-- are excellent resources to help you get the gist of how potent a tool re-framing can be. These books are filled with examples of various situations to which you can apply this tool, staying in touch with how each statement you make leads you to feel.

The Sedona Method, developed by Lester Levinson, provides a useful method akin to mindfulness for connecting with and releasing emotions. The method describes in detail a hierarchy of emotions starting from the lowest vibration – Apathy, and working up the scale through Grief, Fear, Lust, Anger, Pride (the false kind where one feels better by comparing oneself to someone else – which usually covers over a deep sense of inadequacy) and on up to Courageousness, Appreciation, and Peace. This is good training to become more conversant with feelings, to recognize the differing vibrations of each emotion and to know what emotions are behind the thoughts that are being generated at any given moment.

However, one can, as Esther Hicks repeats in channeling the entity known as Abraham, “reach for a better feeling thought.” In other words, all that is essential is to notice whether your thought or statement makes you feel better or worse. If better, keep going. If worse, change the way you are expressing yourself. The task itself is simple. However, it requires changing habits, and thus paying attention to your thoughts. This takes considerably more investment: awareness, intention and attention. Listening to what you say and think is the key to change.

I Love to Do Phone Work

I love to do phone work, especially with folks who are already familiar with the approaches that I use. I've wondered about this preference, and realize that part of the reason is that I'm not distracted by visual cues and body language. This has led me to understand just how much information I pick up empathically. The more work I do by telephone the more I understand that I am always being bombarded with psychic input. But in a phone consultation I have the opportunity to use this information to direct the session and give feedback to my client, whereas in everyday interactions, it might escape my attention altogether.

Everything I experience doesn't actually originate with me and much does not even belong to me unless I claim it by wondering what it is about or what it means. Despite the fact that this is the topic of More Than Meets the Eye: Energy - a book I wrote and published in 1999, I can still forget, in the throws of some strong emotion, that it might not even be mine.

I became acutely aware of the extent of the saturation of psychic input in the energy field when I visited the pyramids at the Giza Plateau in Egypt. I was with Power Places Tours, and Barbara Hand Clow had told us that the King's Chamber was a 9th dimension space, so I was anticipating hearing spirit there. Instead I found it to be an incredibly, eerily quiet space, which indirectly brought my attention to how acclimated I'd become to psychic noise. (See Clow's Alchemy of the Nine Dimensions and Pleidian Agenda for more about her ideas about the attributes of the nine dimensions.)

When I first started working with clients and had less confidence, if I forgot the name of a chakra, or didn't follow the steps of a procedure in the way I'd been taught to do them, in my self talk I would immediately accuse myself of being stupid, forgetful, or inattentive. But as I gained experience I began to ask a different kind of question when I noticed myself doing things in an unexpected manner. If I skipped one of the chakras, I would ask myself why. Invariably I'd discover that these were not mistakes, but guidance directing my attention to something I might otherwise miss.

Now I pay close attention to my own mood. If I find myself getting distracted during a session, the chances are that my client has become energetically dissociated, and I can help direct her back into her body. If my client is telling me her "story" and I am tuning out, she is probably telling it from her "head" and is disconnected from the emotional content. Until I guide her back into her body and she reconnects with the emotional content of that story, recounting the tale will not change it. Encouraging her to slow the narrative down gives her the breathing space needed to allow the emotions connected with the tale to surface. Then we can transform them.

Here, too, my body reveals what is happening on the other end of the line. If the energy is moving, I find myself yawning, belching, burping, sighing. Sometimes I have to explain to a client that this by no means indicates that I am sleepy! Further, the more open the other person's energy body becomes, the less yawning I find myself doing. When the energy starts to move, it will find the most open energy system to move through. Even when I am at a great physical distance from my client, the energy acts as if we were in proximity. I can tell, too, when grief, anger, apathy or fear have been accessed, because I will feel them in my own body. This provides a distinct advantage, because knowing what emotion has surfaced gives me the ability to guide my client in transforming that energy.

Why I Don't Follow a Protocol

Recently I worked with two different individuals, each of whom had eyesight issues they wished to focus on. (Unintended pun). In the first case the person had found herself referring to "something I didn't see" in relation to ancestors. As we explored further, it turned out that there were roots to the issue seven generations back on both her mother's and her father's side of the family. Most of us living in the United States know little about our parents' grandparents' circumstances. Still, over and over again, in my office we discover that issues that remained unresolved in the lives of distant relatives can easily affect the energies of the present generation.

The magic of energy work is that with intention such things can be addressed and resolved using modalities like Tapas Acupressure Technique, Emotional Freedom Technique, Be Set Free Fast and others without ever knowing the details of a past traumatic episode. In this case we were able to do so using eye movement to access the areas in question, combined with the Be Set Free Fast cue word to transform stuck energy. It turned out that energy derived from the mother's branch of the family was accessed by moving the eyes in an orbit in one direction from the top center, while energy derived from the father's branch of the family was located by moving the eyes in the opposite direction. But I wouldn't even use that distinction to make a future protocol without considerably more evidence that such a rule could be extrapolated from working with numerous individuals on similar issues.

The second person's situation turned out to require a different approach. Of course, it is possible that she would have had some gains had we applied the same methodology that brought results for the first individual. I'd need many more experimental subjects before I could draw any conclusions. Still, I was guided to work with the second individual in a very different manner. It turned out that her preferred sensory mode is visual, and that she holds a strong vision for social and political justice. She doesn't like what she sees. We uncovered a belief that goes something like, "if others don't see things my way, I don't want to see either."

In her case there was also a relationship between seeing and being seen. In order to do the work she wants to do before the mainstream is able to accept these cutting edge approaches, she needs to be able to reach the population that needs her services without being seen as a threat by the authorities. As if to affirm the direction these metaphors were taking us, a fox appeared in her yard just as this information surfaced. Animal Speaks describes the fox as totem as representing invisibility and cunning among other attributes. In addition, a need to integrate "vision" on the physical, emotional, psychological, social, political, and spiritual levels presented itself. In other words, blockages to vision were manifesting symbolically at the physical level, but they were not actually physical problems. These realms were revealing an underlying structure where distinct realms overlapped merely to bring attention to the issues at hand.

In this second instance the preferred modality provided the best access through the individual's beliefs, thoughts, and ideas, while in the first instance, access to past generations was gained by working directly with subtle energy which was found by working with eye movement.

Eat, Pray, Love ..... and Read

The story goes like this. My niece suggested I might enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. The title sounds like my cup of tea. When I saw it at the Sacramento airport, as I prepared for the long flight to the East coast, I sprung for it - something I rarely do at an airport. It just doesn't seem right to pay full price for a book anymore. Well, actually, this is a topic I have internal arguments over. I can make things as complicated as even Elizabeth herself! It's never an easy choice. Buy on line, get a bargain. Put another independent bookstore out of business? VS: Get in the car. Burn fossil fuel. Buy from an independent bookseller. Pay full price. and feel good that I'm helping to keep the guy's store open. Go online and buy the book used but pay more for shipping than for the book. By the time I'm done there isn't much time left for reading :-)

But on this trip, feverish with a new cold, I sprung for the book, but didn't get very far into it on the flight home because I spent much of the flight sleeping. The book then lay unopened along with days of mail while I slowly recuperated. Meanwhile, my neighbor had lent me Obama's Dreams from my Father - his 2004 autobiography. My rule of thumb is if I find a riveting book I want to finish it before getting riveted by the next. It's not unusual for me to read 4 or 5 things at once, usually non-fiction. But then I can never remember who said what --- all that information gets synthesized somewhere within. Memoir is different. Obama has enough to worry about without having to be part of Elizabeth Gilbert's story.

Sometimes you can't tell if I've slept in a bed or not, but you can always tell if I've read a paperback. I cart it around with me, take it to lunch, stuff it into canvas bags. I was embarrassed. When I asked my neighbor if she would lend me Obama's first book, she took it down from her bookshelf and if I'd seen first the pristine condition it was in I doubt I'd have had the nerve to ask for it. My impulse to replace it with a brand new one was thwarted. She'd know, because she wrote her name in the front of hers, and had a couple of notes within. I hunted around for a way to reciprocate to make up for my clumsiness. There sat Eat, Pray, Love, just where I'd put it down a month earlier. Hmmm. I'd make a gift of it and get it off my back at the same time!

Two days later I heard the storm door open and close. When I went to investigate, there was Eat, Pray, Love with a note that she just had to have her own copy so she could write in it.

Sometimes I'm kind of dense, but this was like being hit by a 2 X 4. Alright. I guess I'm really supposed to read this book. So I put aside a stack of non-fiction, including A New Earth, which had been gifted to me by a dear friend, and which Oprah is discussing with Eckhart Tolle. At this point I've finished eating. (Wouldn't that be nice!) Well - I've finished eating with Elizabeth Gilbert in Italy. And I'm almost through praying with her in India. And half the time or more I'm wondering how she ended up in my head. Even though it ain't the same story. In fact she's deciding to be celibate at just about the time I'm beginning to wonder how I ended up that way all these years, and how much that has contributed to my current health challenges, which are many. But that's a different blog altogether.

So, all this to say how highly I recommend that you Eat, Pray, Love with Elizabeth Gilbert, and READ. And when stuff comes up as you read, transform it, just as she is doing!