5 Minutes to Deep Peace on Thursday 9/13

You will be entertained at the very least and enlightenment is an option.

http://advancedmeditation.com/cmd.php?Clk=2095310

Thursday, 9/13, there is a teleconference call where you can learn more about this. There will be sample meditations and a chance at a free gift worth $400.

http://advancedmeditation.com/cmd.php?Clk=2095310 

Trust me. You want to try this. The IAM Meditations are the product of the fertile mind of Steven Sashen who is also responsible for much of the Shampoo Method we talk about here every day.

It’s completely safe. I’d trust this guy with my life.

This feeling, this is what we have all been looking for our whole lives. It’s like coming home.

Love, Ann  

Shampoo Series – Inner Health

Health

I have learned that most health issues – physical, mental and emotional  – have to do with using our body as a toxic dump for things that were never meant to go in our mouths (or our minds.)

This is rooted in lack of spiritual trust, relaxation and peace.

We think we have to do things to support and protect ourselves from the illusion of attacks from “outside.” There is no “outside.” All that stuff we think is attacking us, be it other people, viruses, pollution, disagreement, countries, ALL of it, is our own THINKING.

“Reality is kinder than your thinking.”  Byron Katie

We terrorize ourselves with lies and stories about the past and the future and this keeps us from experiencing a True Present.

The habitual tension and stress keeps our bodies in a nearly constant state of agitation and red alert both waking and sleeping, which tears down our mental, emotional and physical health over the years. Depending on our diet and exercise habits, this creates illness (aka dis-EASE) of various types.

Meditation reconnects us with a true present and inner peace.

Then, and only then, can we really begin to heal.

IAM meditations are still my favorites.

Starting back in the 80’s I have sporadically done cleanses, mostly Arise & Shine – www.ariseandshine.com. If you like to read, I would highly recommend Dr. Richard Anderson’s book, Cleanse and Purify Thyself. Basically, we need to clean out the toxic dump that we’ve poured coffee, white sugar, white flour, cooked foods and other unnatural substances into all of these years. First, remove the toxins, then support it by not doing that anymore.

We use herbs, lots of good clean water, whole foods in their natural state, etc. to support that health.

We do yoga, exercise, sex and breathwork to bring our bodies into better physical balance.

We talk with others – counselors, friends, and support groups (like the 12 Step groups, and group counseling, seminars and workshops) to return to mental/emotional health.

We question our thoughts with The Work of Byron Katie, Quantum Wealth, Sedona Method and other paths to clarity.

And we continue to meditate and stay connected to our inner wisdom to know specifically which of these to do and when. We make no decisions for ourselves. We allow Guidance to arise from within.

Thus, when life’s seeming challenges arise – death of a loved one, divorce, a dis-ease, job issues, relationship questions – we go inside, find that inner peace in Wholeness, and we are guided in peace and truth.

I could say much more about the details of which healing modalities I have found valuable through the years, but I think the framework is enough for now.

I ran this much of the article by my friend in London and he reminded me of somthing very important:

It is just as stressful to make “health” a rule or a requirement.

If we try to use external “rules” instead of inner guidance then those external, stressful, imposed ideas or concepts about how things “should be” can be just as counterproductive as junk food.

Our Guidance may be to eat the chocolate chip cookie.

Love, Ann

“Health is a result of relinquishing attack thoughts.”

                          –  A Course in Miracles

One Woman’s Beltane

“All women are she,”
Mykonos once told me.

“Treat each woman as the Goddess,
because she is.

Women are built to reveal openness –
they are nature’s mechanism of surrender –
and they wait for a man they could trust
with their utterly surrendered heart.

Few women ever meet such a man,
so most women suffer terribly, longing their entire lives.”

– David Deida, Wild Nights

Some of yesterday’s quotes, being from David Deida’s Wild Nights, were from the masculine perspective. You know, I appreciate what Deida says to men and I want any man that I’m involved with to know those experiences from the inside, and understand what it is to pierce and penetrate my heart (not just my pussy).

Today I want to think about this from my feminine perspective, though. For that Deida wrote Dear Lover and his books for both genders include some great ideas, as well.

From what I read, from a man’s perspective, the fear is of being engulfed, swallowed or smothered by a woman. But from a women’s perspective, my fear is of being pierced, penetrated, or wounded by a man.

Very biologically correct, hmm?

Both genders fear surrender to God, letting go, dying into God’s bliss, being lived and breathed by Spirit.

Deida refers to the “Him shaped space” that most feminine women have.

I know exactly what he is talking about.

I do long to be filled. There is space for a man inside me and I want that.

My roommate is surprised when I fold her sheets and wash blankets  for her, put away dishes and boils water for her tea for her before she wakes up. I explained to her that my nurturing energy has to go somewhere and until He comes along, she is elected recipient of some of that.

It feels hard to hold that space open, not try to fill it with whoever and whatever shows up next.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.

– Richard Bach, Illusions

Naturally, I have opportunities to do that and I long to be filled.

Sometimes that is the healthy, kind thing to do for myself. It seems very stressful to me to wait, to hold that emptiness. Well, so it seems. Chances are good that it is my thoughts about holding that space that are actually the stressful part. I’m looking for those, checking them when I find them (often in my blog writing, thanks guys) and finding that Whole Place beyond peace/stress, right/wrong, empty/full as much as I can.

That’s the same temptation, for me, to surrender to Swami Vishwananda. I imagine that he can fill that space fairly well as a spiritual partner, without sex, without a traditional relationship. I was trying to explain that yesterday to Taylor. Taylor has no experience with the California type spiritual path of gurus, chanting, meditation, etc. although he’s lived here all his life. It’s a foreign world to him.

At the same time, I can feel his search. Taylor ran across me, so I figure he must be open to hearing some of this. Every man I meet seems to be. I talk with them, send them to the blog, to web sites, books, whatever comes up. Some of them hang around to become friends. Some don’t.

I’ve been doing Steven’s Goal-Free Goal Setting meditation nearly every day for a month now. I think I missed one day. And for nearly 30 days, the Goal is the same, maybe a slightly different aspect of it, but it’s the same.

About 4 or 5 times in each meditation, the instructions say, “Now, check and see if you still want that goal. Maybe yes, maybe no. Either way. See how wanting is different now.”

I do. And it is.

Yes, I still want to be married to a man who can fuck me straight to God.

With or without sex, by the way.

Yes, I can do that myself. Can and do.

And when I check, I still want a man to penetrate me, take me, teach with me, talk with me, sing with me, make love with me. Make love in our home, in our community, in our world, through opening to each other, through teaching, writing, singing, traveling.

I started to write that the picture gets clearer every day. At the same time it gets more open and more vague. There’s more space, too. Does that make sense? Can you feel what that would mean? (If not, try Goal-Goal Setting for 30 days and I’m pretty sure you’ll have some kind of similar experience. It’s one of the IAM meditations, the last one, because it includes several others.)

I’ll be teaching Goal-Free Goal Setting to a class in a government office in a couple of weeks. I am looking forward to that and I’d love to do more of it.

I just keep doing what I do, being who I am, and in the process I am bound to meet a man who’s doing some of the same stuff and looking for a woman to play with him.

I want to say that I have a little trouble with where Deida’s writing seems to come from. He talks about yearning, which is wanting, which is stressful. It puts me in a pretty nasty place, very masculine, going out to hunt for what I want. When I don’t find it, I feel stressed, angry, tense. 

That isn’t the clarity I’ve learned from IAM meditations and Quantum . . . well, Steven teaches Quantum Wealth, but I tend to take Quantum Relationships by my own personal focus during the class.  

The last few days I’ve had a very clear sense that this man is already inside me.

Literally.

Think about it.

My definition of God is “the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.” It is like Matthew Fox’s panentheism – God in all things. Or Steven Sashen’s “All That Is.” (The title of one of his best IAM meditations.)

If I am part of that Whole, and what else is there?

By definition, that’s All There Is.

So, He is part of that, too, and we are already part of each other. All that remains is to look into each other’s eyes and find what we already know.

Well, that’s my Beltane fire. I think it’s time to have some chocolate coffee.

Love, Ann

“Look with your understanding.
Find out what you already know.
And you’ll see the way to fly.”

– Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Shampoo Series – Nothing Tastes Good

I’m trying to eat only what I want and only what tastes good, but nothing is tasting good.

Tamari almonds have a slightly rancid taste. My Braeburn apple is mealy. The Earl Grey tea – the maple syrup in it, really – has that bitter sugar aftertaste and the caffeine will send me to the bathroom all day.

None of that is what I want, but the rich purple tea cup  is delicious to look at and the warmth on my hands is pulling me inward. I cleared papers off the desk to put it where I could glance at it once in a while.

This has been going on for a while.

I just don’t know what to eat.

Not surprising. For lots of reasons.

It’s parallel to why I’m on my 32nd day of complete sexual abstinence (self and other).

Sex didn’t feel good.

It felt tense and worried, sometimes hurried.

That’s why I’m abstaining from self-pleasuring as well as sex with others. I got bored with what was often just a little relief that only left me very, very hungry.

It’s been a joke for a while:

What does Ann want after you give her orgasms? More orgasms.

Sure, I know how to relax and have some really blissful far-out mind-blowing see-God orgasms.

But I wasn’t taking the time or paying the attention to doing that. Even wanting that was stressful.

So if I don’t know what I want, I’ll just want nothing for a while.

I get hungry or I get horny. 

I relax the wanting contraction or repair an opposite  or inquire about my thinking. I can notice whether I’m eating something or thinking about sex and orgasms with myself or someone else because I want Safety, Control or Approval.

Maybe I eat something and it doesn’t taste good. Or maybe it does. Once in a while it does.

It’s just kind of a process. The Buddhists might call it mindfulness.

Steven tells a story, I think it’s in the All That Is IAM Meditation, about a time when he was at a conference eating cafeteria food. They had an all-you-can-eat thing set up. He was just blissing out on how good everything tasted.

Then he heard someone complaining about how bad the food was. He checked his food again. It was pretty bad, actually.

Rather than buying into that “tastes bad” story, he says he chose to just stick with his story about how good everything was.

Hmm, now there’s an idea.

On the other hand, I could definitely stand to drop a few pounds. And waiting for a suitable mate is definitely on my agenda.

Maybe I’ll just stick with the story about how, so far, nothing tastes good. Maybe that contrast will help me notice when it does taste good?

I don’t know, but I’m going to play with this some more.

Do you have any suggestions?

Love, Ann

Shampoo Series – Sex, Death and Love

“What would you rather consider besides sex & death?”

Not much I admitted . . . “

– David Deida, Wild Nights

I agree.

I’d add love to the list. Love is more than sex and death. I think Deida would agree.

I was talking to Jared last year right after we both met Swami Vishwananda. I remember saying, “That’s what enlightenment is. We both want to die before we die.”

It felt so good to share that space with him, with anyone. I’m sure that’s part of what draws me to love sex so much. I try to live what Heinlein writes, “Thou art God,” from Stranger in a Strange Land. Spider Robinson carries the message even further in Time Pressure and DeathKiller. Actually, that sort of thing is in both of their books. That’s why I read them.

But David Deida, ohmygod.

When men ask me, “What’s the best book I could read on how to relate to women?” or “What’s the best book on how to be a Dom?” The answer is the same, even if you have no interest in the latter.

Read Way of the Superior Man by David Deida.

Women, you want to understand men? Read that, too. Then go read Dear Lover by David Deida to understand yourself and what it takes to be who you are, which amounts to the “getting what you want” that we are so focused on. When you’re done with that one? Enchanted Love by Marianne Williamson.

Deida is very good at differentiating between gender and gender orientation and sexual orientation, which are 3 different things. Deida does not assume that all male-bodied persons have a masculine temperament, nor that all female-bodied persons have a feminine temperament. We don’t. We embody every note on a musical scale and every color of the rainbow, and many in-between. We play different ones, paint different aspects, all the time.

Orgasm is la petite morte for a reason. We let go of our fear and die into the moment.

Deida says that polarity is required for sexuality. That seems to be true. I’m submissive and feminine. I know it didn’t work so well when I tried to be dominant and masculine, since that’s not where I seem to live. I cannot quite imagine being in the middle of the spectrum. What is it like not to live at one end of sexual polarity? Are you sexual then? I have wondered about that. Or does such a person exist?

Do you have any comments to add? 

Katie says it, too, but not so erotically as Deida does:

“Love is so vast within itself. It’s where you die. You don’t die into fear; you die into love. It’s so vast that it will burn you up. It’s so jealous and greedy for itself mirrored back that it will leave you nothing. And when you’re feeling that if you don’t give it away you’ll die in it, it’s so vast there is nothing you can do with it. All you can do is be it.”

Byron Katie

Until we know that, we tend to want something. Katie also says, “Personalities don’t love, they want something.”  But the more we realize this, the more we are responsible for what we know.

Stereotypically, men want freedom and women want union.

Give it up. It’s hopeless on both sides.

Ironically, that’s the only way to get what we want.

Giving up is what all of these ideas I talk about bring us to.

Releasing & Receiving, Zooming in on Death, Re-Pairing the Universe, A Course in Miracles, The Work of Byron Katie, IAM – Instant Advanced Meditation.

Every one of them is about letting go, giving up, and practicing spaciousness, receptiveness, so that what we “want” can show up. I mean what we really want, too, not the car or the girl or the new whateveritis. What we think those things will give us – that’s what we really want.

Check.

What do you want?

Now, what do you think having that will give you?

Great.

Why not just go for that directly?

Or, as Katie says:

“When you come to the place where you don’t want anything from your partner, it’s like “Bingo! You just won the lottery!” If I want something from my partner, I need to take a look at my thinking. Because I already have everything. We all do. That’s how I can sit here so comfortably. I don’t want anything from you. I don’t even want your freedom, if you don’t. I don’t even want your peace. But if *you* want it, that’s all that’s left of my want. So I’m going to join you there, because I remember what it was to want. And if you’re not interested in your freedom, then that’s what I want. I want your heaven, I want your hell, I want whatever you want because I love you.”

– Byron Katie 

“Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

– Kahlil Gibran

 

“Look with your understanding,

Find out what you already know,

and you’ll see the way to fly.”

– Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Do you want to know that place where Katie says “you don’t want anything?”  I do.

One way I practice is with these:

http://www.advancedmeditation.com/cmd.php?af=570391

Love, Ann

 

 

Shampoo Series – God Has No Bitter Aftertaste

One of the things I am noticing while I fast from food and sex is that the sweetness I’m experiencing right now has no bitter aftertaste.

I think “I want sex” or “I want chocolate,” but really, most of the time, those both have a bitter aftertaste. No, of course not always, but often.

I did Steven’s Goal-Free Goal Setting Meditation this morning. That is the final IAM Meditation. It’s the last one because it incorporates several of the others and assumes you’ve done those first and know how.

Yes, the following page is a sales page, but I’m not asking you to buy anything, just showing you where to find it if you want it.

Instant Advanced Meditation – Free Sample
http://www.advancedmeditation.com/cmd.php?af=570391

Anyway, after I did the meditation I had the thought that when I go after something that isn’t really meeting the hunger it was meant to fill, like sugar, chocolate, coffee, and sex without love & connection, there is definitely a bitter aftertaste.

If I ran it through The Work of Byron Katie it would go something like:

I want sex/chocolate.

Is it true? No. Absolutely? No.

(By the way, it’s fine if your answer is Yes. Mine just isn’t. There are no right or wrong answers.)

How do I react when I believe I want sex/chocolate?

I eat it.  (Go ahead, snicker, I did.)

I indulge in whatever form of sex or chocolate is available within my limits. I feel guilty. I stress over whether to have it or do it or not. I’m tense. I am not myself. I’m hard to be around. You can continue your own list.

Who would I be without this thought, I want sex/chocolate?

Myself. Peaceful. Noticing the bliss inside me. High. Very high. Like God.

And then I notice that this has no bitter aftertaste. I ate a bit of chocolate yesterday and after I swallowed, the bitterness of the sugar really bothered me, same with the maple syrup in my tea. It was fine while it was in my mouth, but then, yuck. That nearly kept me from having tea with maple syrup today, but no, not quite.

So, I can Zoom In on the Edges of the feeling of the sugar on my tongue or the Edge of the bitterness it left on my tongue. (Doing that now, since I just drank some vanilla tea.)

It’s funny. With the Zooming In meditations, the farther in I go, the less I can find the sensation anymore, or my word for it changes, but usually, there is just Space. I guess that makes sense. I’ve heard that there is far more Space than Matter making up what we call the world.

I like that thought – more Space than Matter.

Do you see the metaphor? Just in case, I’ll spell it out:

It doesn’t matter much. There is plenty of space.

Oh God, right now the radio is playing Seven Bridges Road by The Eagles. Jesus, I love the harmonies in that. Definitely lots of space, no bitter aftertaste.

Love, Ann

“Seven Bridges Road”

There are stars
In the Southern sky
Southward as you go
There is moonlight
And moss in the trees
Down the Seven Bridges Road

Now I have loved you like a baby
Like some lonesome child
And I have loved you in a tame way
And I have loved you wild

Sometimes there’s a part of me
Has to turn from here and go
Running like a child from these warm stars
Down the Seven Bridges Road

There are stars in the Southern sky
And if ever you decide
You should go
There is a taste of time sweetened honey
Down the Seven Bridges Road

             – The Eagles