After having my blood pressure be relatively stable since August after it spiked in May of this year, it spiked again last week. I am once again surrendering to the release of old emotional patterns. (You may appreciate reading my earlier blog post if this is news to you: Three Days Without Anxiety Medication.)
I am not feeling anxiety so much as just aware of an inner state of stress. Dr. Jane Oelke used The Emotion Code to help me identify the hidden cause/s of this current state of being revved up. The Emotion Code uses kinesiology (muscle testing) to connect to the subconscious mind to find out where the blockages are and what emotions they are related to. Then a magnet is rolled over the corresponding body meridians several times to release those emotional energy blockages. Three major areas showed up: a feeling of vulnerability that was inherited from my paternal great-grandmother, the sense of not feeling supported by my husband in 2009, and an overall feeling of being peeved. My body is helping me acknowledge that buried emotions are a very serious situation.
I have been pouring through journal entries from 2009. Journal writing helps me not hide from my shadow. I am reading my past rants and raves and witnessing my understandable desire for things to have been different than they were and better than they are. I witness with compassion the desperate feeling that getting things turned around was all up to me.
In the midst of my letting go, what a blessing to watch Let’s Laugh Our Way to Enlightenment, a talk by Barbara Marx Hubbard. Barbara has been called “the voice for conscious evolution…” by Deepak Chopra. She is the subject of Neale Donald Walsch’s book The Mother of Invention. And many would agree she is the global ambassador for conscious change. This paragraph is from Barbara’s website:
At her heart, Barbara Marx Hubbard is a visionary, a social innovator. She is an evolutionary thinker who believes that global change happens when we work collectively and selflessly for the greater good. She realizes that the lessons of evolution teach us that problems are evolutionary drivers, and crises precede transformation, giving a new way of seeing and responding to our global situation.
One thing becomes very clear—we could laugh more. Here are some of my notes from that talk: Laughter is the gateway. Laughter forces us into, seduces us into, demands that we be in, anchors us in the now. Laughter hold the largest truths paradoxically. The garden of Eden is not true, it is paradox. Laughter stimulates feel good hormones. Laughter brackets your ego so you begin to see from a clearer place. Laughter facilitates the field of collective intelligence. Laughter releases what we need to let go of so we can see clearly.
Barbara clarifies the point that she is not talking about forced laughter. She is talking about the laughter that arises spontaneously from genuine joy. She says our joy enhances perception—and the soul is a faculty of perception.
The impulse of evolution in me and in us has a frequency of God intelligence particularly when you say yes to it…. God has an internal joy of wanting to create creators…. So when I laugh, God’s laughing inside me. When you laugh, God’s laughing inside you. God feels our laughter just as God feels our tears. God sits and laughs on high. When we laugh, we feel the divine voice saying, “Yes!”
This is certainly the key. When I was guest pastor at Pilgrim Congregational Church on December 4, 2016, I expressed a wish for all humans to feel/sense/know our divinity and to mirror the divinity back to others in the world.
Joel also watched the talk on laughter, and while he has appreciated Barbara Marx Hubbard’s books, and agreed with her points on laughter in this talk, he did not at all resonate with the man she was presenting with. Soon after I sent the talk to Joel, Joel forwarded a Wikipedia entry on Barbara’s co-presenter, Marc Gafni.
I felt the stress rise in my body as I read the information. Marc has been accused of sexual impropriety—on multiple occasions. For one thing, Joel has a very advanced BS detector. I could envy that. For another thing, we know that Wikipedia has an agenda. Everything we read online probably has an opposite point of view posted somewhere else online. That said, I know what I could feel in my body was a life-long (perhaps many lives long) core sense of guilt and shame. Those toxic emotions activated these toxic questions:
“What would people think if they knew everything I have ever done? Would the divine truth I am so passionate to share be discounted totally because of my past actions or inactions? Have people been harmed by my sins of commission or omission?”
We are now aware of the painful results of having grown up influenced by the theology of Original Sin. So, this inherited vulnerability, these shadow self-doubts, that old pattern of panic can be welcomed. These are the lies divine truth is willing to reveal!
We are blessed with this truth. This truth is reality worthy for our beginning the New Year. This truth is wonderful to live for the rest of our days. This is how the divine truth was channeled by Barbara Brodsky at retreat on November 13, 2016:
I am the one you have called Jeshua. I came in love for all beings. I did not suggest ever that people should suffer, or that people must suffer to reach a higher plane. My dear brother and friend Siddartha Gautama (note from Debra – this is the Buddha) also did not say that people should suffer, only that suffering is inevitable until you awaken and understand that nature of suffering. But why should you continue to suffer? I came to teach you love. Some of those who brought my teachings into a religion created the idea of sin. I did not come to save people from their sins. I came to remind all of you, that you already are awakened, that you also are the Christ. The word “Christ” means “awakened one,” and I came to remind you that you are that Awakened One; not to be a model put up on a pedestal, but to take your hands and walk with you and support you knowing your own truth of love. How could it be otherwise? You are love.
The rest of it is, as Aaron would say, mental objects, just ideas in your head, ideas that have been so deeply ingrained, that you have somehow a stain on you and you must do something special to eradicate that stain. You have all been in mud puddles, yes. You’re splashed all over with it. Get in the shower. It rinses right off. But if you think it has seeped into the skin so that you must use a scouring pad to scour it off then you will bleed, there will be pain, and that is not what I came to share. The only answer is love.
My colleague and friend, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, writes a wonderful column in Spirituality and Health Magazine. Here is what Rami illuminates for us about sin:
You can live godly or ungodly, but God is unchanged. If you are “swimming” in an ungodly manner, you aren’t sinning against God or separate from God. You are simply working against your own best interest… No separation is possible; no return is necessary.
….Sinning against God is like trying to punch a wave; no matter how hard your strike, you can’t do any damage. Think in terms of swimming in the ocean. If you swim with the current, the ocean works with you. If you swim against it, the ocean works against you. While this matters greatly to you, it matters not all to the ocean. And regardless of which way you choose to swim, you are always in the ocean.
So, join me in totally letting go of any old programming. Any sin of the past was just it was punching waves.
Let go of guilt and shame. You might appreciate this EFT Tapping exercise that can help. Let go of old programming. Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face. Let’s laugh!
