If you go through a full-on awakening with the dark nights and die-offs and dissolution of the brainbox, chances are you would not be able to keep your current stable life--everything can fall away. During my awakening I didn't have a job for 10 months. However, even in the midst of such upheaval there is the possibility of being supported in unconventional ways. People "should" pay a lot to a body worker that is in the throws of an awakening because their scalar-healing energy is enormously greater at this time, and bodywork is thus truly transformational for those ready to receive it. One spiritual practitioner I massaged was so ready, he had a 3 day die-off after a session. Others complained of feeling too much love while on the table, because my system was opening them. I cannot begin to express to you how contagious kundalini energy is. Because of the perturbation of normal levels of consciousness however, the results are never predictable.

One of the problems of body-working individuals while in the height of a kundalini awakening is that ones system is massively opened with nitric oxide, vasopression, oxytocin and such and this triggers a similar chemical release in the client. Now Heart Expansion chemistry is similar to that for sexual arousal and so people who are ignorant about such matters get confused and think that it's time for sex. So one would need a very advanced, informed and well boundaried cliental in order to do bodywork professionally during a kundalini awakening. There may be no faster way to evolve a population however if people knew what they were doing.

Because of the restructuring that is going on in the sensorymotor cortex, cerebellum and brainstem sensory-motor body-centered psychotherapies like Hakomi and Rosen Method are particularly useful during kundalini awakenings. Reading: Body-Centered Psychotherapy: The Hakomi Method: The Integrated Use of Mindfulness, Nonviolence and the Body by Ron Kurtz. For advanced practictioners: The Sensitive Nervous System, by David S. Butler.

After finishing this book I could start focusing on my condition and I found I had become numb to myself. The endorphins give bliss and take away pain, but they also make one numb to sensory touch. So I have begun to bodywork on myself several hours a night. I became aware that underneath the numbness is a vast touch hunger, which is painful to prehension. If one is not consciously aware of the numbness, one is simultaneously not aware of the hunger underneath. I imagine the sensory and dearmoring benefits of working on myself will help revive the numbed out brain areas and body nerves.

Along with this numbness is a lack of emotions, perhaps due to having nothing to be emotional about. But irrespective of external conditions, there is a certain emotional "flatness" within. The physical and emotional numbness are no doubt the same phenomena. Underneath the emotional numbness there must also be vast emotional hunger, but I haven't come across that yet. For "touching" this emotional hunger this I assume one needs the equivilant of massage for ones emotions. Healing the numbness of the abandoned/betrayed child requires actually touching the pain that brought on that numbness and then filling that void with life, blood, love and spirit that we never received.

So how does one raise oneself above survival mode, when survival is calling. By rewiring the action maps in the cerebellum? I have been listening to Kelly Howells' audio tapes "Destiny" and "Desire"...after I acknowledged my physical "deadness," I went looking for this emotional void I knew must be there. I found some of it with the use of the Desire CD. Of course the major band of contraction is in the diaphragm, and the whole "emotional core" of my body is sore. But I didn't notice this until I went looking for it. There is a point at mid-life I suppose when one loses hope and belief in dreams...and this represents an emotional and spiritual death. So I have to essentially train myself to recover the Mystery.

How can we "touch" the deepest parts of ourselves? Whose arms can you unfold into? I suggest Kelly Howells tapes at www.brainsync.com In the absence of those in our lives that can mirror and travel with us to new places and spaces, these tapes help to give us at least a taste of a deeper experience of ourselves. Eg: Attract Love, Awakening Kundalini, Deep Insight, Ecstasy, Faith, Desire, Increase Creativity, Destiny, Sacred Body, Unfold Your Potential.

If you need help in uncovering and releasing the armor that is preventing a full experience of life, perhaps you could find a bioenergetic therapist in your area. The bioenergetic psychotherapist helps their clients to understand how and why their patterns of constriction developed in an effort to help them to survive in an early environment that was not supportive of their being. Understanding a person's specific patterns of blocked self-expression suggests the basic defensive structure resulting from their personal psychological history and how these very defenses that are hindering their life today.

These somatic defenses affect their emotional well-being by decreasing energy level and restricting the capacity for genuine self-expression in relationships. As these repressed emotions emerge, clients begin to realize that these chronic defense patterns inhibit their capacity for spontaneity and creativity in self-expression; with this armor they are not free or charged enough to feel joy, happiness, love, sadness, fear, sensuality and anger. As clients progress in bioenergetic psychotherapy, old, ineffective patterns which block connection, pleasure, spontaneity and joy slowly dissolve. Through the physical and emotional release of body work and the experience of a safe, healthy, supportive connection with a therapist, the bioenergetic client can connect and relate to his/her self and others in new, more satisfying ways.

It may be painful to do so, but ones closure needs to be touched and transformed in order to "come alive."

EVOLUTIONARY ANIMAL MASSAGE

Evolutionary Animal Massage…is bodywork using a map of the body based on ontogenic and phylogenic development of the species and organism.

One of the things I discovered is that the arse is wired for breathing. If one works on the pelvic crests and gluteus an impulse to breathe arises. Along with this is the energization of the thyroid gland (metabolism) and carotid gland in the neck which governs carbon dioxide levels of the blood to ensure the brain gets enough oxygen. Why you ask is the arse wired for breathing? Well consider us as four legged animals on the planes of Africa…predators go for the haunches, so there must be specific wiring to ensure that any tactile impact on the gluteus muscles kicks in the breathing and metabolism to allow the animal readiness for fight or flight. Since most of us in this day and age are breathing impaired that means we all need a lot of arse massage to reset our breathing mechanisms.

I found the shame button in the rhomboids between the scapulas at about 4th thoracic vertebra. It’s where the line of the ridge bone of the scapula intersects the spine, because the trapezius and deltoids fix to the ridge bone…thus shame with its hunching of the shoulders, and suspension of breath.

I think the guilt button is located slightly above the adrenal glands. Shame is a type of sadness and defeat, while guilt is more wired into the fear response than shame is. Guilt is a deeply sunken point whose influence penetrates thru the ribs and into the lungs/diaphragm.

The muscles on the front of the forearm are wired for “hunger.” Not just hunger for food but trigger an all pervasive hunger or general deprivation. This is because it is the hands/arms which reach out for sustenance and engagement. This means that extensive work on the forearms will increase the satiety chemistry in the brain and will probably aid in overcoming deprivation and addictions….and neediness in general.

If we are each true to our own highest calling, and true to ourselves, we can be true with another...as such it is soul meeting soul. There in is the magic.

Since we are communal animals, we have hardwired into our system a need for touch, that is in no way less important than our need for food. No way less important that is, to the “realization” of our being. We have a daily demand for a certain quota of food to nourish our body…we also have a daily demand for a certain quota of quality touch to fulfill our being.

If however we are socio-emotionally deprived and either have an absence or a negative in the relationship department, then both our body and brain are constructed in a touch-scarcity fashion. Largely we are unconscious to the pain of such deprivation or abuse and yet it “becomes us.”

The muscles and nerves that hold the majority of the pain of an inadequate love/touch quota, are those muscles and nerves that are prominent in social engagement. That is the jaw, neck, upper back, arms and shoulders are the main areas of consequence where we will find the gnawing pain of social void.

The lack of neuronal development, flow of consciousness and lifeblood in these areas then become the source for ongoing social removal…preventing the kind of joyous communion through which cosmic satiety is possible.

We are organisms built for love, and to find ourselves and develop through love. This is the essence of our humanity. When perfect socio-emotional satiety does not occur we are forever touch-hungry…waiting to be found, waiting to be realized, waiting to be touched, waiting to be born from our single lives into a grander notion of being…

Bringing a touch deprived body to satiety through massage can cause the jaw to vibrate like it does on the drug Ecstasy. Chronic deprivation creates a tension of resignation which is held in the jaw. This tension is liberated via endorphins acting on the serotonergic neurons. Serotonin being a major player in the digestive tract, and the jaw obviously representing the “entrance” to the serotonergic system. In fetal development the pineal gland emerges from the roof of the mouth and translocates into its position in the brain. And the pineal gland of course is a major source of the production of serotonin, melatonin and tryptamines. The drug Ecstasy has a major influence on the serotonergic system in the body. The release of the jaw with the use of this drug and also with massage shows a similar mechanism in unblocking the repressive mechanisms that hold the tension of deprivation in the body.

The high art of life requires the high art of massage and the high art of laughter in order to catalyze a larger order of being. We transform through really meeting, touching and bringing forth presence. Presence awareness is not a denial of any part of our being, but a sensitization to the whole of it.

ONE WAY WIRING

I massaged a woman who had had a couple of car accidents the other day, and her nervous system had her in its grips even tho she has done lots of therapy and works for a spiritual retreat center, does spiritual practice and has a guru. So I starting looking at the underlying principle...why does our nervous system hold us to ransom and there seems virtually little we can do about it. Other than waiting for the world to get into balance, perhaps there is something we can work out that will return us to the baseline relaxation state of the unthreatened animal…ie: to peace. Our bodies are built for such potential bliss and peace and yet we seldom achieve the kind of wellbeing that should be ours by right of our natural animal inheritance.

"In these impure times we encounter many hindrances and so we need a special method for transforming difficult conditions into causes of spiritual paths that bring pure happiness. If we are not able to transform adverse circumstances into the causes of spiritual paths, we will find it extremely difficult to maintain the peaceful mind that is necessary to complete our spiritual practices. We need to transform whatever circumstances we meet whether good or bad into the spiritual path by channeling all our actions in a virtuous direction." Kelsang Gyatso, Universal Compassion.

Part of the skill of using both "bad and good" as fuel for the path is recognizing that the Universe is a jokester. We find good and bad invariably go together such that great good often brings up great bad and vice versa. Phenomena, consciousness and life itself is a checkerboard of light and dark. Light leading into dark, and dark leading into light, such that both seem equally necessary for conscious to awaken and for creation to unfold.

Paradox abounds, for example we might find negativity hidden within a spiritual community more so than in a general community. Thus embracing the enigmatic checkerboard with humor is probably one of the best methods of getting the vice-grip of the nervous system to let go. Humor at least keeps us relatively sane on the rollercoaster of life.

The brain is wired so that the autonomic/unconscious brain can override and dictate to the cortex, but it's not well wired in the opposite direction. This means to regulate the reptilian brain we need to use our rational, aesthetic and imaginative faculties to create environmental, relational and circumstantial “conditions” by which the reptilian system can be soothed, opened and seduced into loosing its grip. If we do not do this then the shocks, traumas, dangers and insults of daily life are likely to propel the reptilian brain into a permanent death grip on our organism, to which our thing mind has little say.

What this means in effect is the higher spiritual faculties then have to dance to the tune of a hyperactive, hypervigilant reptilian brain, which parasitically usurps our higher functioning. Once we get caught in this reptilian dominant state it’s unlikely that we will be able to transform our conditions in order for the vice of reactivity, defense and shutdown to be relieved. Thus we live in a greatly inhibited and diminished condition in which the body's resources are burned up in ergotropic (energy dissipating) metabolism and we end up too tired, unenthused and despirited to make changes toward a larger sphere of life.

Nondual/Vedanta circumvents this one way wiring through cultivating the sense that everything is illusion/maya, and through yogic practices that reinforce and stabilize higher consciousness so conditions have less of an impact on our nervous system. Buddhism does it through the no-self doctrine and the Bodhisattva vow which turns attention outside away from ourselves and in regard for others.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers : An Updated Guide To Stress, Stress Related Diseases, and Coping by Robert M. Sapolsky "Scientific American" Library
The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament by Robert M. Sapolsky
Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death by Robert M. Sapolsky
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060101faessay85110-p0/robert-m-sapolsky/a-natural-history-of-peace.html

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