Galactic Breasts (lactos= milk)

I’m going to call my mum in England today, even though English Mothers’ Day was weeks ago.

My mum may be partly responsible for our safety, since she has devoted much of her life to the banning of nuclear weapons. Here’s a story about her, as part an article that my friend Asandra requested for her blog in the Miami Examiner here http://bit.ly/divinemom.

One day in the early 90s I was visiting my darling mother in England, and we were actually having tea in a teashop (which you Americans might expect us to do, but which we had never done before!). All of a sudden, during a lull in the conversation she asked me–she actually asked me!:

“Katie, what is it that you do?”

Now, you might think she would have asked before, since I had been doing “it” already for 20 years. But since I had defected from the family’s academic tradition of being atheist scientists, and become instead some kind of spiritual weirdo, my family operated a sort of “don’t ask, don’t be told” policy. So this was a very exciting moment for me! Perhaps I would get some validation from mummy! I knew I only had one or two sentences, at most, before she would glaze over, so I stammered out something about “it’s kind of like psychology but more focused in the body.”

She froze, and fixed me with one of those looks. After a few beats she spoke in a loud, shocked voice:

“The BODY?… WHATEVER FOR?”

If you are born as a Komodo dragon, and mother gazes into your eyes, you stay very quiet. Because when mom gets “that look” in her eyes, it isn’t maternal lovie-dovieness, but hunger. Komodos––and many other reptiles–are cannibals who eat their young.

But we are human beings, and we cried when we were separated from mommy, and, in a deep sense, we are still crying. We are mammals (from the latin mamma, or breast), and who we are has everything to do with our mothers, and the bond of oneness that we formed–or didn’t–with her in our early years. We evolved past our reptilian phase by developing a “mammalian” or “limbic” brain which makes us very emotional creatures. Our bond with our mother makes us who we are, literally: all our physical and emotional systems are designed to develop in a healthy way by what’s called “limbic regulation.” For example, experiments have shown that by snuggling with mom we get our heartbeat strengthened much more effectively than if we are simply placed next to a heater simulating mother’s warmth.

More to the point, our bond with mommy lays a basis for us to feel safe in life, and connected, one with our source, our Great Mother.

Or not. Mothering is imperfect, especially in our Western world. I don’t need to go on and on about this: we all know it. Since many of us didn’t have a perfect bond with Her (and of course this is a cultural problem–there is no blame), we find ourselves as adults, in a wild and crazy search to restore and repair this bond. Our relationships are all about this, yet often reflect the tears in this primal bonding. In other words, in trying to heal our feeling of separation, we attract partners who resemble the more challenging aspects of how we experienced our mothers–engulfing, avoidant, or the most crazy-making: ambivalent (running hot and cold). So often, instead of healing, we simply reiterate our wounds.

And many of us turn to spirituality. We feel a deep separation in our core and, perhaps after trying and failing to resolve it with “worldly” fixes, seek a transcendent source to heal and love us. This is right and good. In fact, you could almost say that we might have chosen difficult mothering experiences to drive us onto the spiritual path. Ammaji was an abused child.

Where I’ve seen a problem arise, for myself and for hundreds of people I’ve worked with, is that as in relationships, we can often unwittingly reiterate our wounds through the spiritual teachers and paths we are drawn to. In my case, for example, as you might have guessed, my mother was not very affectionate or “hands-on.” This was not her fault; it was what she learned. Yet it caused me to seek solace in a spiritual path with a guru, in my 20s, that took me completely out of my body. I was a full-vows monk for a decade, and lived in a kind of disembodied “higher consciousness” that was really a sort of cosmic dissociation.

Eventually, I crashed, and spent my 30s coming back in and meeting the body and painbody. Eventually in my 40s I had a breakthrough experience in which I found myself swimming for several days in an infinite ocean of energy. I found that I could surf its waves. It told me to call it “motherwave.” I discovered directly that the All That Is, God/Goddess, wanted to include the body and emotions. to mother me palpably and directly, without any intermediary, such as a partner or a drug. When I began teaching this I called it Motherwave, for obvious reasons. Now after 15 years, my realizations have evolved and it’s called The Infinite Wave, or i-Wave. The first i-Wave training is about to happen in June. Check it out at  www.theinfinitewave.com

We were birthed as waves from an infinite ocean and we can swim in her again

Before you read on, I’d like to announce the birth of

my new INFINITE WAVE website and

the new wave of my work. Yes! Check it out at www.theinfinitewave.com.

This is a fairly long post, and they won’t always be this long, but the subject of “Initiation” is not such an easy one to gloss over quickly or bypass (I wish it were a “quickie!”).

Hope you enjoy – it builds towards something, and the best bit is at the end

If your life feels confusing or challenging, you may be undergoing a soul initiation. I know I am, and it’s certainly quite challenging. I also know (and this is a blog, not a PR device, yet this is still very true) that I couldn’t possibly be moving through this initiation with any grace, love or cheerfulness without the Infinite Wave consciousness tools I use every day, including the new meltdown™, and i-Wave™, and more. So if you’re struggling, do check out my website and contact me for private work if you’re so inspired.

“Initiation” is the name I have often given to my motherwave and soulwave trainings (and I’ll continue this in The Infinite Wave trainings), because I’ve always wanted them to create an actual movement into something new and greater, the real, as-yet-untaken next step for each person, rather than just a workshop where you get high and then go home and wait for the next fix. As the “Initiator” of these experiences for hundreds of people over many years, I know what it feels like to watch people come in at the beginning, fixated (or “dry,” as I call it) in suspicion or fear or projection or some limiting self-concept or other. I’ve watched as many of them then get “wet” ––relax their fixated sense of self and of other, and open up to greater possibility, to the presence of greater––well, Presence!  It became really obvious from my side of things that the Initiation was real, that I wasn’t doing it, and that it was going to work IF there was that agreement between the person and their own guidance to allow it. I watched countless tearful, joyful breakthroughs… the sense of relief, of disbelief, of gratitude, and so on. It became my norm to be around this atmosphere, and trust in the process.

And then there is my own initiation. It’s not happening, for me, in a training with a group of people, although there is a very small group of us (close friends and private clients) who are going through a similar initiatory experience. I wish I were on the other side of it, and some of the time, I am, but some of the time I’m still kind of in the doorway, wondering if this process––life at the edge of total surrender––is really safe.

So, I’ve been thinking about the concept of initiation, because I’m in one, like it or not (although I suppose I signed up in some other dimension or outside time and space). Something greater than me is carrying me through a doorway that I don’t really know about. You could say that it’s Me who is carrying me through this doorway, surfing on this doorwave, but for all intents and purposes, it’s something beyond me that is calling the shots. And when I start feeling that it’s me who has to make this journey, quite frankly I can’t do it. To be honest, parts of me are fighting for their lives.

Really, I feel as though I’ve been in one initiation after another, or perhaps one very long one, for most of my life. Can you relate? But right now it’s pretty intense. Everything in my life––all the categories like love, wealth, health, purpose––are in free fall. They’re not bad, mind you, just in free fall. Into what? Into whose arms? Yes, it is into some One’s arms. The initiation lies in the fact that I am learning to get used to that, learning to feel it in my bones.

What is an initiation? How is it different from, say, a lesson? I would say that an initiation is a movement into something you don’t know, AND you don’t know that you don’t know it. Otherwise you could just read the textbook. Also, obviously, an initiation is not just mental. You need to feel it in your bones. Initiation means that something greater inducts something smaller into itself. The snafu is that the one to be initiated doesn’t know what is happening. She doesn’t really know she needs an initiation, because she thinks she knows it all. To use common spiritual terms, the ego cannot imagine anything beyond itself. Even if the ego entertains an idea of “God” or “Higher Power,” or “Oneness,” or “Emptiness,” it still feels, most of the time, like the center of the universe, responsible for its own life, with all the misery that this causes.

A way the mind or ego tricks us (me) is by thinking that this––that I’m perceiving right now––is all there is. And that I know all there is. Of course, I may not actually know Bali, for example, but I have “Bali” categorized in some part of my brain. And although I’ve been all over the world, the parts that I haven’t been to yet are categorized, subtly, as “the parts I haven’t been to yet,” and thus I once again know it all. My mother hasn’t been to the movies much, for decades, because she has a story about people eating potato chips loudly in the seats around her (really!). But she reads the reviews, and can converse quite lucidly on all the latest movies and Oscar nominations.

In a way, don’t we all do the same thing? We take a picture of a moving, expanding, infinite reality, then we print it out, put it on our wall, and call it reality. Even our inspirations are something we realized last week or year, yet in my experience realizations change radically over time. There is a spiral of memes (which basically means “beliefs”) that meanders back and forth as my consciousness expands up and out. In other words, one year I am being experientially taught the value of, say, commitment; the next year perhaps I am being taught about freedom. Yet if I over-identified with the commitment idea, made a story out of it, made an identity out of it, then I won’t be available for what life is teaching me now. Of course, in this evolution of consciousness, everything “transcends and includes” what came before, rather than just sea-sawing back and forth. So it isn’t that I marry this year and escape the next, but perhaps that within last year’s commitment I now explore a deeper sense of freedom, and so on.

Yet to be really available to what life is trying to initiate me into now, today, takes a lot of trust, humility, breathing, releasing the need to know, be right, be safe (although in fact the Initiator is always leading me back to true safety). For me, it takes a spiritual practice I call Meltdown, that wakes me up again and again.

I’m not blaming myself for this “categorizing” mechanism in my brain or ego; it was apparently set up by evolution to help us survive. You’ve probably read this kind of stuff, but the short version is that because humans spend such a long period of time outside the protective womb, yet still in a dependent, helpless state, the human brain is organized to take in all the information that the child will need to survive as quickly as possible. No time to explore every new flower. At some point, flowers are flowers, and we have to move on to learning about saber-toothed tigers. No time to explore every tiger: if it has that gleam in its eye and big teeth, it is categorized as danger and we run, and so on.

This happens in our so-called mind and our so-called body. Early impressions form a matrix of mental, emotional, sensorial information instructing us how to react. “Dog bit me when I was 3––see a dog, run!” “Mom was crazy and needy, need her but gotta separate from her––women crazy and needy, need them, but gotta separate from them.” And on and on.

While thinking about the subject of initiation, I came across a whole piece about it by Joel Goldsmith, my favorite writer (an American realized mystic who died in 1964––I recommend you read anything by him!).  Talking of secret brotherhoods and their initiations throughout the ages, he says the following (which for fun I have annotated with my rebellious child’s reactions, in italics):

“The initiates must undergo certain trials, tests, and examinations before they are admitted to the brotherhood; and while the actual initiation may differ in its exterior form, the tests and trials and examinations are all alike in this respect: the initiates must go through difficult and terrifying experiences.

(“Oh goody!”)

“…Eventually, those who survive the simpler tests and temptations come to the ultimate one. The final test is that of being faced with death in some form, such as being brought to the brink of a cliff, and being told––and of course one must be obedient–-to jump off the cliff onto the rocks or the waters beneath. The cliff is so high and the rocks below are so jagged that there is no hope of survival. To jump means death. Which will it be: death or disobedience.

(“Definitely disobedience.. You can’t make me!”)

If it is disobedience, there is no hope of being admitted to the Brotherhood (“abusive chauvinist basterds!”). If it is death, that also ends all hope (“Duh!”). But there are some brothers in the order: (“Hmmm!”) and therefore some must have survived the test; some must have endured and come through the ordeal.

There is the test, a test which each one within himself must decide to take or not. Needless to say, anyone who is obedient and jumps off the cliff automatically becomes a member of the Brotherhood because long before he can reach the rocks, he has awakened and found that the whole experience was an illusion. (“Wha-a-a-t! If you had just told me that before!!”) He had been hypnotized into seeing and accepting all these pictures, but from the very first to the last, none of them was ever real.

(“Sounds like what my friend Lawrence experienced in his 3 NDE’s!”)

…Those who survived the final test were admitted to the Brotherhood, but something far greater had happened to them than becoming a part of a spiritual order. They had learned the great secret that all human experience is a state of illusion, and that the conditions they had been tempted to see and believe did not exist anywhere in the realm of the real.

Today we are the initiates, and right now we are taking the degrees of brotherhood. Right now, we are being tested and tried with experience of lack and limitation, sin, or disease (“Yup, except the sin part!”). We may not realize that we are undergoing an initiation, but we are… The human mind cannot pierce the veil of material sense any more than the initiates in the Brotherhood could see through the temptations presented to them while under hypnotism. It is only as they come out from the hypnotism that some, by divine grace, receive enough light to know that they had been hypnotized and are thus enabled to disregard the experiences they have gone through. Others, still under a measure of hypnotism, believe that what they are experiencing is real and run out to do something about it.

(“Ah yes, I know that one!”)

from Leave Your Nets, by Joel Goldsmith (read it or be square!)

And talking of running out to “do something about it;” what I have been guided to practice is basically: not to do that! This doesn’t mean “don’t do anything.” It just means, don’t do anything except what I’m guided to do. I’m quite busy and creative and serving people, but I’m not frantically trying to “fix” my life. I’m trusting in my Great Initiator, which I happily call God, to guide me, protect me, provide for me. Of course, a lot of the time this guidance, protection, provision, comes through people, places and things. Thank You, God, in all Your forms!

I feel as though I have walked––or been walked––out onto a plank at the edge of that cliff Joel talks about. I’m on the verge of jumping. I’m more or less convinced that I will be caught, that the fear matrix I am trying to lift off from is just an illusion, but every now and then I make the mistake of sharing where I am with the wrong person, and their fear causes me to freeze up. So I’m keeping very private about it all. You’ll notice that I’m not telling any personal details here. But I’m with you in my heart and I hope that all this means something to some of you and is helpful.

WHAT DOORWAY?
Do you feel as though you are trying to find a door, or stuck in the doorway, or even a corridor? The joke goes: When one door closes, another opens, but man, these corridors are a bitch! Yet… how funny is the corridor feeling, right now? How long have you been in transition? For some of us, it feels as though we have been in a transformational process for our entire lives. Permanent, chronic transitionitis! For others, things were going along just fine until they weren’t, and now we’re trying to make some sense of radical losses, instability, chaos

What doorway am I talking about? For some, it’s just a vaguely-felt longing for something beyond the grind of daily struggle. For others, its that mysterious portal in reality that opened for you, that time you had your awakening experience, or your brief visit to enlightenment or Oneness or Godness. You know how you got there, more or less. Yet here you are again, anxious about things, about yourself, your money, health condition, relationships, trying to control your so-called life. In other words, it was a revolving door and it spat you back out into the anteroom. You may still be talking the enlightened talk, but you’re not yet walking the walk of truly feeling that freedom, joy and love that you knew on the other side.

Perhaps, to get back there, you keep trying the same formula over and over­­a spiritual practice, a lover or teacher, even a diet or a magic plant­­in hopes of getting back. But you can’t go back the same way, because the doorway has moved. The doorway is the doorway to Real Life, and life is fluid, like a river. “You can never step in the same river twice,” said Heraclitus, (one of the few Greek philosophers who was into Oneness rather than Twoness, and the dynamic fluid nature of things, rather than some idealized concept of stillness).

Can you relate to the feeling of trying to get through a doorway, a portal, into what feels like the other side of yourself? You may have read, or heard, or you may remember that THIS IS NOT ALL THERE IS. Life’s pains, losses and stresses, especially your own unmanageable mind and tendencies, may have brought you to your knees, and that is one way of knocking at the door. Success and getting what you thought you wanted can be stressful enough sometimes bring you to the doorway quite quickly. Fear, especially, can have you banging on the door, demanding to be freed from your mind.

I find myself in this doorway. I spend periods of opeaceful time in Oneness, yet learning to abide continuously in the experience of being-with-God is the work, for me. Or the non-work, non-doing… which is it? Parts of me are resisting their dissolution, like children having a mega-tantrum, and parts of me just feel like they just can’t quite feel it, be it, live it. But don’t worry, I’m not going to start talking about parts and having them talk to each other! Enough of that! There is only One they should be talking to!

BUT… HOW?
So much has been written and spoken about all this. I’ve read and heard a lot of it. But I haven’t heard many offers of HOW––of truly skillful means to navigate through the waves––the tsunamis––of the human transformational process from duality into Oneness. In fact, I’ve heard many teachers scoff at students who are saying “But HOW…?” The teacher seems to be on the other side, and seems to be suggesting that you should “just GET it.” There is no way through, apparently, except to sit and listen to the teacher say that there is no way through…

Or they will say, “There is no door, there is no separation, it’s all right here, just be here now or realize what I am realizing. Don’t you get it?”

Well, no! And having been a teacher for a long time I know how easy it is, especially while teaching, to become drunk on the wisdom that life is flowing through you, yet still not quite integrate it all into an embodied, ongoing experience of… well, in the interests of economy, I think I’ll call it Oneness. What about that Monday morning loneliness after the weekend retreat?

I sat with a radiant teacher last night who kept emphasizing that there are no guarantees in life or on the spiritual path. Well, duh! Why do I need you to tell me this? I’m human and I need some help. I’m not asking for a guarantee, at least from you personally. But my human heart needs encouragement, and this feels battering. I told her this, in front of the class, in a friendly way.

To avoid this kind of spiritual sado-masochism, I offer this website and series of articles to help you find and catch a wave that you can surf through your own doorway. A doorwave.

Yes, ultimately you can’t make yourself melt into Oneness. It’s a movement of grace. But if grace is a bus, it’s really good to be at the bus stop. And if grace is a moving bus, it would be good to learn how to run and jump when it comes close. If grace is a moving wave, it would be good to learn a certain kind of surfing, so that when the Big One comes, it can take you all the way home.

Welcome to the Doorwave!

This happened just now, so I’m going to write it as now, even though it’s a “recent now,” and technically there is no such thing…

I just lost it! I couldn’t stand the beauty and I am distracting myself by writing, which is so much less than the thing itself…

The point of what is coming down and through here is not yet-another-nature-description, but something that to me, feels more helpful. Perhaps a drop in the tool-ocean of how to come back to my/our Self.

I am  sitting at my window doing my morning-moving-meditation-waving thing (m-m-m-medi-waving?). If you’ve been in my place you know it’s all about The View––San Francisco Bay with the city in the distance like a cute architect’s model and, in the near-distance, angelic islands and the Audubon society hill… Oh, the ever-changing sky and wave-patterns! All my musings on waves are fleshed out, hydrated in real, moving life-wave-lessons here.

This morning it is lilac and peachy when I come out for some decaf green tea. Sky and its wet mirror as one giant mural at the end of my living room. I sit in my chair where I have been practicing active receptivity (see my article on meditation). As I melt down into the inner (but not really) ocean of cosmic and divine and personal and impersonal waves intersecting as this feeling of me, moving my bod in strange patterns of shaking, then a trippy Hinduish dance, then a deep, breathing tide, I watch the Nature Special:

To say it’s different every day would be too obvious. It’s not just different, it’s NEW every day, freshly downloaded from source like God’s Blog, local Bay Area edition. The lilac-and-peachy fades into a white, pastel brightness. Ah, I think, dawn has passed and the day is here. Yet after the first peachiness fades, the whole movie phases through whiteness back into intense orange clouds again. Something to do with the angle of the sun, which I can’t see yet.

And the birds! Omigod! There is the pelican squadron that swoops through on patrol. The odd, weird-looking duckish loner birds, (I’m grateful for not knowing all the names because they just look like cosmic Disney creatures to me) swimming around on their own, then suddenly disappearing underwater. I watch to see where they will re-emerge, yet it’s always much, much further away than I expected.

But what really does me in is the egret, soaring through the center of the picture, then slowly landing at the water’s edge, walking with backwards-knees, pecking for food. I think it’s a snowy egret––that kind with the pointy Mohawk. And all of a sudden I am losing it.

I’m asking for God (why I call It “God” here), but when It comes and starts to break the gauge on my receptivity thermostat, I freak! I’m like one of those tourists we all laugh at––and are––roaming the world with our cameras, and now movie-phones, recording all the shocking beauty for later consumption, or for gaining status with friends, or something. Oh boy, you should have seen that sunset over the Grand Canyon!

Oh boy, you should have felt that sunrise God-wave that broke through my invisible border patrol this morning, causing me to shoot out of my chair and race to the computer. “That’s just TOO MUCH!” said my nervous (comfort) system. The funny thing is, my P.A.T., which is a device from my old motherwave/soulwave trainings meaning Personal Addictive Theme, or “the bottom-line basic invisible belief I have about myself/life which informs all my perceptions” is…

Ta dah… “I’m Too Much!”

I am too much. You are too much. God is too much. It’s all too much. Trying to figure my life out is too much.

So: how to come back to my/our real Self? I’m just noticing my reactions here, not trying to fix it all, letting it ride through like a wave. Surfing it. In life-so-far, I’ve found that this gradually or quickly melts things down. In a good way.

P.S. The God-wave just pulled me in for a few moments. The holy tide refreshed me, reset my mind a bit:

Aha! Of course! That outer something that I am always railing against, struggling with, whether I call it the economy, the body, the swine flu, God, life, the wheel of karma… it’s all me! Small “m.” This is embarrassingly obvious and I know you know it already. If there is anything that is God, it may contain my hall-of-mirrors ego with all its stories and projections, but it is Not That. And so, I Am Not That.

I know you already know this. How can words become a wave that crosses the mind’s sea-wall? How can I open my sea-wall in total receptivity to receive the egret and God and all of Me?

If wanting was invented for anything, I want this. The other stuff is growing a bit old and not working. I open myself to Your Too Muchness, now.