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Alchemy?
Rosemary and I are moving into the “scurry” phase of life getting ready to travel for the next 10 days. We are going west first for a workshop for “holistic practitioners” to gain traction in the market place. Since I left the field of marketing in the corporate world more than two years ago I have learned a great deal about how to market in the new world of Web 2.0 and all that goes with it. One of the purposes in my retirement was to devote full time to getting the word out about Rosemary and her gifts. And I’ve been scrambling ever since. I frequently tell people “I don’t know how I ever found time for a 9 to 5 job before retiring!
From the west we are heading all the way east for some family time and to plan a wedding for some very dear friends of ours. So, if you notice a day or two of missing blog posts you’ll know why. (I thought another thing I had retired from was frequent travel! I retired from an airline communications company for which travel was second nature. That nature seems to have followed me into retirement.)
I am the blessed and frequent recipient of Rosemary’s gifts! Last night she hosted “Conversations with The Other Side,” one of her regular events where participants get messages from The Other Side – from loved ones who have crossed over, angels, guides and spirit guides. It is always a good time with some laughter, some tears, and deep wisdom.
And true to form I did receive some fascinating messages last evening concluding with a visit by a “wizard from the middle ages”! And, yes, historic personalities, real and legendary, do show up from time to time; we also had John Adams make an appearance last night. The message from my wizard guide was to take a close look at alchemy; to “tune into the teachings of alchemy at the very deepest levels. Understanding of alchemy, about what we can do with ourselves, is becoming more and more needed on the planet because the whole evolution of human consciousness is relying on alchemical shifts within human beings. That’s how the energy shift is going to happen.”
OK, then! No problem here; I’ll get right on it! Seriously we do have several books on alchemy which I’ll be taking with me as I travel. And I do have a background, my first degree, in chemistry (not sure if this gives me a head start or not!).
Actually the real head start I have is a book I’ve been reading by Joseph Donlan: “Ordaining Reality.” (It’s now actually three books, the unabridged version and two abridged versions for people who want to get right to the meat.) Mr. Donlan states his purpose behind the books “is to explain the underlying laws of nature supporting the theory that positive thinking produces positive results. This knowledge will significantly enhance your ability to bring about desired changes in your life.” And if I hear my “wizard guide” correctly, alchemy can be used to bring about these desired changes. What I’m thinking is Mr. Donlan’s book is about the underpinnings of alchemy.
One of Rosemary’s favorite expressions is: “change your mind, change your life, change the world.” And I’ve seen this work time and again. Mr. Donlan’s work explains why this is so. Clearly there are alchemical processes at work here, and I’ll do a lot of further reading to not only discover these processes, but put them to work in my life and let you know how to activate them in yours!
At this point you may be wondering what this has to do with “The Goddess.”My message from “my wizard” was to investigate alchemy not for curiosity’s sake or for the academic enjoyment of the pursuit of knowledge. He said I need to help people “understand how alchemy happens in the 21st century – how people can get rid of the lower vibration of lead and turn it into the higher vibration of gold.” This is the ascendant story all over again; this is Inanna, born a Moon Goddess, descending to Earth to bless her people with growth, descending to the lower world to appease the Goddess Ereshkigal, rising again to reestablish her rightful place and ascending to the upper world again in her cycle of birth, life, death and new life. Lead vibration to gold vibration is part of this cycle. The golden grain from the fertile Earth is part of this cycle. The moon phases and Sun seasons are part of this cycle. My adventures into alchemy parallel my adventures with The Goddess.
Stay tuned for my further adventures!
Men and Grief (Part 1)
Yesterday I wrote about men learning how to nurture and explored the role of women in teaching men. And I argued that perhaps it is not up to women to teach us but rather for us to go inside and find our hearts, find our compassion, find our nurturing spirit there. This is, of course, easy to say. But for many of us it is not so easy to do. And, perhaps there are some stages we need to address, some growth areas to go through before we get all the way to our nurturing spirits.
Men have heart; it is inside them; and they can get in touch with it, frequently do! Too often that heart, that feeling comes bubbling, even bursting out as anger. I’ve encountered angry men much of my life. In fact, again too often, I have been an angry man. Where does this anger come from? Why are men angry and what are they angry about? I believe a lot of our anger comes from stuffing our feelings, way down deep in our dark places. These feelings are unprocessed, unexamined; they are hidden and raw. They come up and out, flashing and hot, as anger; often we may not even have a particularly good cause behind the anger. It doesn’t take much to trigger repressed feelings. And, anger is the one emotion that it seems safe or comfortable for men to express: “men are men” and can be “rightfully angry.”
But how “grown up” is it to only express our feelings as anger? Is there a more conscious way to behave, a more evolved, higher-vibrational way to express our passion?
A first step is to process feelings rather than stuff them. And I believe one of the primal feelings that men stuff is their grief. There has been a lot of excellent work done around this subject. Grief is one of the key motivating forces behind the so called “men’s movement” from the early 1980s spear-headed by wonderful men like Robert Bly, Robert Moore, Michael Meade and the other leaders of the mytho-poetic men’s movement. Robert Bly, extraordinary poet and severe critic of the Viet Nam war, all war actually, examined men’s grief in the context of returning Viet Nam veterans. There is a lot of grief about that war on all sides. It usually was expressed as anger, but the underbelly of that anger was grief. There was a shared grief about that whole era from the late 60s on; and a lot of it remains unprocessed, unexamined. And, it’s pretty clear that few lessons were learned by those of us who lived through that time. But in the 80s some of us began to process some of that grief. It is a long process.
Another of my excellent teachers I am so blessed to have in my life, Martín Prechtel, also does a lot of work around grief. He offers a recording that I highly recommend to everyone; it is a deep expression of something I am trying to get at here; “Grief and Praise” is available: www.floweringmountain.com/CATALOG.html.
We have much to grieve! Some things are immediate and personal, like the loss of a loved one, a parent, a friend; some may be a bit more distant but no less personal, like the loss of life through natural disasters we seem to be experiencing at an accelerating rate; some may be distant in either space or time, like wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or war in Viet Nam, assassinations; and some may be very distant like our national history of slavery and genocide. Once we start digging there is much to grieve!
In the current issue of “Archaeology” there is an article on “Cloning Neanderthals.” Recent evidence indicates that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were in in contact for several thousand years and there was likely some interbreeding. Neanderthals “disappeared” – became extinct – about 30,000 years ago. Did Homo sapiens have anything to do with that extinction process? We will never know, but I wonder if old stories, like Cain and Abel, are some ancient, “cellular memory” of that evolutionary process. And is part of our interest in bringing Neanderthal DNA back to life in some way motivated by our unexamined grief?
Perhaps I reach back too far. And perhaps there is no reason to reach back very far at all. Grief, like so many things to be examined, is like an onion: as one layer is peeled back another is revealed. And the deeper we examine our feelings, especially grief, the deeper we can experience true and healthy emotions.
There is a lot here; I am far from peeling away the layers to get to compassion. I’ll continue this thread on grief in Thursday’s post.
Meanwhile, how are you in touch with your grief?
Men and The Goddess 