Mindshifters Group 4-28-09
Reply
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Mindshifters Group 4-21-2009
This week’s group meeting began with discussing reactions to last week’s video and the introduction to the book by Gregg Braden, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief. I just began reading this book and I have enjoyed and greatly benefited from several of Gregg Braden’s books prior to this one.
The book has an opening page which sounds as though it could be taken directly from Dr. Michael Ryce’s lecture titled Empowered to Heal. Dr. Ryce talks in that lecture about how the content of our brain’s cells resonates with an energy dependent upon the content of our stored realities. If I have anger stored in my mind it will resonate and send out vibrations which will interact with the world and I will see the world as angry, or as something be angry about. If I have fear in my mind it will resonate and send out vibrations which will interact with the world and I will see the world as fearful or as something to fear. If I have love in my mind it will resonate and interact with the world and I will see the world as loving and lovable.
Gregg Braden has clearly been studying some of the same works as Dr. Michael Ryce, as witnessed by the following paragraphs from the preface to his new book.
“In the instant of our first breath, we are infused with the single greatest force in the universe–the power to translate the possibilities of our minds into the reality of our world. To fully awaken our power, however, requires a subtle change in the way we think of ourselves in life, a shift in belief.
Just the way sound creates visible waves as it travels through a droplet of water, our ‘belief waves’ ripple through the quantum fabric of the universe to become our bodies and the healing, abundance, and peace — or disease, lack, and suffering– that we experience in life. And just the way we can tune a sound to change its patterns, we can tune our beliefs to preserve or destroy all that we cherish, including life itself.
In a malleable world where everything from atoms to cells is changing to match our beliefs, we’re limited only by the way we think of ourselves in that world.
This book is dedicated to our acceptance of such an awesome power and our knowing that we are never more than a belief away from our greatest love, deepest healing, and most profound miracles.”
So far the book is shaping up to be a real eye opener and a blessing.
We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.
Mindshifters and Mayan Calendar Lecture
Last night the Mindshifters group watched the first part of a lecture by Ian Lungold, explaining the nature of the Mayan Calendars, (www.mayanmajix.com). The biggest thing I took from the first part of the lecture is the validation from a wide variety of cultures that as human beings we are more than just our physical bodies. The talk begins by explaining how the calendar is the exact dead center of any culture. This is because the calendar is the culture’s agreement about what day and time it is, and how and when business, rest, and recreation should be conducted. Ian discusses how our current culture is built around a calendar which was introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory and is therefore called the Gregorian Calendar. He explains that this particular calendar tracks the physical movement of our planet around our sun, and nothing else. Therefore the use of this calendar forces our entire culture to focus on nothing other than the physical aspect of our existence. Ian points out that many previous cultures had multiple calendars and most of them had calendars with 360 day cycles. When ‘modern’ scientists discovered these calendars they assumed that the culture was primitive and that the calendar was inaccurate and only a rough approximation of the time it takes our earth to travel around the sun, (365.25 days).
The reality is that most of those cultures knew about the time it took our planet to travel around the sun, and some of them had separate calendars for that purpose, but many of them also had 360 day calendars. It is just that those cultures had determined that there were other realities which were just as important, or even more important than the physical aspect of their existence. Ian raises the question about what those other calendars were measuring and tracking for those cultures. He proposes that those other calendars were tracking different cycles of energy and motion, other than the purely physical and very specific movement of our planet around our sun. He points out that every planet spins, or turns 360 degrees, and that every circle has 360 degrees, and that since so many cultures had calendars with 360 day cycles, it is worth investigating what those calendars had in common and what they may have been tracking.
Ian also points out that once the Gregorian calendar was adopted by the Catholics, the Spanish and the Catholics went out to “save” and convert different cultures which they conquered. They had to kill many people in those cultures before they were able to force the culture to give up their existing calendars and adopt the Gregorian calendar. He points out that much of the spiritual and energetic knowledge from each of those cultures was lost as they were forced to accept a calendar that focused exclusively on the physical motion of our earth around our sun. Ian goes on to discuss two of the three calendars which were used by the Mayan culture for more than five thousand years before they were “discovered” by “modern” scientists in the jungles of South America.
Two of the Mayan calendars were related to larger, spiritual, energetic forces, other than the physical energy of our bodies and our planet. The Mayans believed that souls chose what day they were going to be born, and therefore the first name of every Mayan was the name of the day they were born. This served as a constant reminder to the person about what they wanted to accomplish in their life. This means that within the Mayan culture there were constant reminders of the energetic and spiritual aspects of existence. This got me to thinking about how different life would be if there were as many daily reminders on television, radio and in the movies about compassion, gratitude, service to others, energetic connection to all things, and Love, as there are daily reminders about material wealth, accumulation, competition, ‘physical beauty’, greed, one-up-manship, and sex. As I let myself think about this possibility I got very emotional and felt chills running through my body. I realized that I have no idea what a world like this would look like. I can only say that it would be radically different from the world I was raised in and the world I am living in today.
I have often heard the quote from Gandhi which says, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world”. And it seems like an overwhelming task when I realize how much the culture invests in sending out messages about the physical world and the material possessions and the instant gratification from external sources. I started to long for a culture which would honor all things equally, both the energetic/spiritual and the material aspects of our world. Then I realized that it was up to me to work on my own focus and continuously strive to achieve that balance within my own consciousness, and the focus of my conscious thought and intention.
I felt a bit overwhelmed at first. Then I thought about the people who attend the Mindshifters group and people like Dr. Michael Ryce, Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, and countless others who are working, writing, blogging, lecturing and working on themselves to help change the focus of those who are willing. I am grateful to be living in the age when the Internet and media, which is spewing so much of the message of materialism, greed, and instant physical gratification, is also available to spread the message of balance, energetic and spiritual awareness, and Love.
We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.
Empowered To Heal Part II
In this week’s meeting of the Mindshifters group we watched the second half of the lecture by Dr. Michael Ryce titled, Empowered To Heal. The first part of the talk focused on the difference between the physical body and the “mind” that accompanies the physical body, and the soul, and the “mind” which accompanies the soul. The idea was presented of the physical mind being survival oriented and unable to do anything other than react to circumstances in a programmed way, much as the robin that builds the same kind of nest each year, or the salmon which returns to the place of its spawning to lay eggs and die. The point was made that we have both the physical, “carbon based” memory which is reaction based, and the spiritual, energetically based mind, which allows us to choose our own actions. The soul and the energetic mind are seen to be the seat of real intelligence and the freedom of choice, or free will, which we have come to view as one of the things which separates us from the rest of the natural world.
One of the most powerful lines in the lecture for me was related to the fact that, “If I don’t know how the world works, and how my mind energy influences the world, it is easy for me to see myself as a victim.”. As one of the lines in the Reality Management Worksheet states, “With blame, I hide my power.” If I am blaming others for what I feel and what happens in my life, I am not able to see how I influence the events in my life and how I create all of my emotions and reactions.
I create my own reality, (my internal experience), and my interpretation and reaction to the events in my life is infinitely more important than the events themselves. As I mentioned in the last post, the research evidence is clear, we choose to be happy or sad, regardless of the events in our lives. This is seen clearly in comparing the happiness ratings for people who have won the lottery and those who have become paraplegic, and finding that one year after each event the happiness ratings are nearly identical for those two groups of people. How could it be that those who became paraplegic a year ago, are just as happy as those who won the lottery a year ago?What could possibly explain this finding? This is as powerful an example as I can imagine, to demonstrate that we choose to be happy or choose to be sad, and that the external events in our lives are not nearly as important as how we interpret and respond to those external events.
There is substantial research which demonstrates that we create our own happiness and some of it is reviewed in the book Happy For No Reason, by Marci Shimoff. In this book, Marci gives examples of people who have every external reason to be sad, angry or depressed, and yet they choose to be happy. Marci gives a list of exercises which anyone can use to develop the habit of being happy and maintain a positive outlook through the ups and downs of life.
The last 90 minutes of the Mindshifters group was spent working on Reality Management worksheets. This is the tool for canceling and dismantling a false reality in our minds. The tool is available for free from www.whyagain.com. This is a powerful tool for improving one’s quality of life by relieving negative emotions and the energy that goes with them. I did my worksheet on the anger that I felt when a file cabinet was delivered late, and turned out to be the wrong cabinet. This left me 90 minutes to completely re-arrange and re-organize my office and clean up the resulting mess, before I had to start seeing clients again. Near the end of this clean up routine and just before my next client was scheduled to arrive, I got angry when I tried to open a garbage bag to put something in it and found it was tied closed with a knot.
My anger at inanimate objects proved once again to be a difficult challenge for me to overcome. I realized as I completed the worksheet that I have been trying to hide my anger from others and that this was contributing to my difficulty in resolving the problem. It is our secrets which keep us sick, and I became aware that my desire to hide my anger was feeding my conclusion that I was unlovable because I had anger. The real good news is that now I can actively work to end the secret and resolve the problem of my anger response to inanimate objects. I feel a noticeable relief at recognizing the pattern of trying to keep my anger a secret and realizing that I no longer need to hide the fact that I get angry when things don’t work the way I think they should.
We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.
Empowered To Heal Part II
Last night the Mindshifters group watched the second part of the lecture by Dr. Michael Ryce titled, Empowered To Heal. One of the most powerful lines in the lecture for me was related to the fact that, “If I don’t know how the world works, and how my mind energy influences the world, it is easy for me to see myself as a victim.”. As one of the lines in the Reality Management Worksheet states, “With blame, I hide my power.” If I am blaming others for what I feel and what happens in my life, I am not able to see how I influence the events in my life and how I create all of my emotions and reactions.
I create my own reality, (my internal experience), and my interpretation and reaction to the events in my life is infinitely more important than the events themselves. As I mentioned in the last post, the research evidence is clear, we choose to be happy or sad, regardless of the events in our lives. This is seen clearly in comparing the happiness ratings for people who have won the lottery and those who have become parapalegic, and finding that one year after each event the happiness ratings are nearly identical for those two groups of people. How could it be that those who became parapalegic a year ago, are just as happy as those who won the lottery a year ago?What could possibly explain this finding? This is as powerful an example as I can imagine, to demonstrate that we choose to be happy or choose to be sad, and that the external events in our lives are not nearly as important as how we interpret and respond to those external events.
There is substantial research which demonstrates that we create our own happiness and some of it is reviewed in the book Happy For No Reason, by Marci Shimoff. In this book, Marci gives examples of people who have every external reason to be sad, angry or depressed, and yet they choose to be happy. Marci gives a list of exercises which anyone can use to develop the habit of being happy and maintain a positive outlook through the ups and downs of life.
Mindshifters Group 3-31-09
The Mindshifters group on Tuesday night watched the first half of the Michael Ryce lecture titled, “Empowered to Heal”. The first part of the talk focused on the difference between the physical body and the “mind” that accompanies the physical body, and the soul, and the “mind” which accompanies the soul. The idea of the physical mind being survival oriented and unable to do anything other than react to circumstances in a programmed way, much as the robin that builds the same kind of nest each year, or the salmon which returns to the place of its spawning to lay eggs and die. The point was made that we have both the physical, “carbon based” memory, and the spiritual, energetically based mind, which allows us to choose our own actions.