Travels in a strange land

"...We shall not cease from our explorations and the end result of our exploring shall be that we return home and know the place for the very first time." T. S. Eliot

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I had a very interesting experience last week as I attended a parapsychology study group. I learned the limits of where I will, and won't go in my spiritual journey. I also Iearned that, even though my view of my spiritual home has changed tremendously, what was home is still home.

In the process of exploring anomalies, parapsychology, meditation and spiritual/metaphysical topics, I have travelled a lot of interesting paths. They have taken me through some interesting terrain, exploring various areas of consciousness studies and comparative religion. In the process I have explored the practices and traditions of a number of different faiths. I have tried to be fully open to the beliefs of others and intend to remain so. I have been exposed to Hindu and Buddhist teachings, to neo-pagan thought as well as shamanic and indigenous beliefs, and many others. There is an infinity of truths in each.

Several times, in studying and learning some particular tradition, I have found the road beckoned me to commit to that belief. A few years ago, while studying Vedic meditation, I found that the work had begun to develop more of a religious overtone. To pursue it would mean some type of allegiance to a new religion. While I find many of the Vedic teachings both attractive and fascinating, and Hinduism is a beautiful religion, it is not my religion. So ultimately, I parted ways with that school and eventually found another. One thing I have realized is that there is a line beyond which I won't go, a dotted line on which I won't sign.

Similarly, I had a recent experience in a psychic study group I attend, and in which I have many dear friends. In this particular group, we have explored a lot of different ESP techniques and in a recent meeting, they decided they will do some experimenting with neo-pagan magic and spells. To me, this requires commitment to a particular belief, signing on a dotted line of allegiance to a tradition that is arguably not compatible with my own. While I fully respect the journeys and beliefs of others, and while I still intend to remain active in the group, that particular experiment will have to go on without me.

I have studied neo-pagan beliefs, yet for all the truths I find in them, it is not my belief system. I have studied meditation with its roots deep in the Vedic traditions, yet that is not my religion. I have studied shamanism and indigenous spirituality - and in this, too, I find countless truths. Yet this is not my home faith, either.

We can explore and understand. But in the end, what do we identify with? For me, it has been the Christianity I grew up with - tempered with whatever I have learned during forays into the outside world. T.S.Elliot's words ring true deep within my heart, to explore and return home, and know the place for the very first time.

For me, this has been an ultimate truth - that the more I travel a spiritual path out in the metaphysical and theological universe, the more I discover about my own beliefs. I have learned much by studying elements of Judaism, Buddhism, History, Astrology, etc. I am fascinated with the tantalizing glimpses of Eastern thought in early Christianity - how the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Buddha look so similar. It has been a fascinating road, and the travels are just beginning.

Yet, during my travels, I still find myself returning home every so often. There is the familiar feel, the warmth of the open arms of my present-day parish, the traditional beliefs that both support and restrict. While spiritual wanderlust soon comes again, for a moment it is the fires of home that burn. Then I am off again.

Like a visitor in another country, I find myself fascinated, wide eyed at the wonders of the Universe. So many truths, so many ways to understand, so many roads to travel. Yet there are also falsehoods and dead ends, perhaps even perils. Every so often, discernment is the order of the day. And when the day is done, I hope I will have learned something new.

An itinerant explorer, I find many temporary homes, yet I'm not a citizen there. While learning the truths of many faiths, I don't feel as if I could swear allegiance in the strange land. I will always be a visitor, at home there for awhile, then moving on.

In the end, I hope I can bring some of those truths back with me, to once again return home and know the place for the very first time.

A day of twists, turns and progress.

This was a day of twists and turns. First thing in the morning, I discovered I had overslept. Then, when I looked out the window, I found we had had about an inch of snow on the ground (we're supposed to get about a foot this evening). It was a scramble to make it to my Wednesday morning networking meeting, and I ultimately got there about a half-hour late. Too late to get in on breakfast we normally have there.

In addition, as I was driving to the meeting I discovered that my car was about to die. So instead of the rest of the activities I was going to work on, I ended up at the garage getting that fixed. Instead of getting to my next meeting, I ended up at the garage waiting for the verdict on my car.

Eventually I got it - the thermostat had failed in such a way that it was causing the coolant to leak all over the place. As a result, no heat in the car and a pegged temperature gauge. And that's just what I could see/feel. What was going on in the engine itself, I don't want to think about - but only lasted until I got to the garage, which was only a few tens of minutes. Finally, I got a loaner car and I was off to the next meeting.

This was part of another little adventure in life - the Circle of Healing Arts is looking at moving. We are bursting at the seams, with all practice space full and several more practitioners wanting to join. We have been looking at buildings with more space. One or two buildings look attractive but the jury is still out - and we need to move relatively quickly as one of the people who is joining the coop is at the end of her lease in her current place. Yet as so often happens when you have a number of people involved in a decision, it results in a lot of considerations.

We have several different areas of practice all coming together to form a complimentary healing clinic. The end result will be one-stop shopping for anyone looking for integrative wellness. Hypnotherapy, massage therapy, acupuncture, energy work, yoga and meditation, you name it - it will all be available in one location. For a client looking for overall work, the situation should be ideal. So now, we need to find a place where we can grow.

It looks like one place we found will fit the bill and we are making great strides toward finalizing that deal. My hats off to Paula Frost, whom I regard as our de-facto leader in all of this. She has done an amazing job of orchestrating all of this. She has put things like this together before so I can see an experienced hand at the helm. If things go right we will have the deal together pretty soon. I can't wait. It will be great to see this come together. When it does, it will be a truly unique facility and organization - a truly integrative health clinic and a true healers' cooperative. And today looked like progress.

After that, I went back to the garage to get my car. The work was done. The heat works and the engine temperature is rock solid once again. In addition, my wallet is considerably lighter than it was at the beginning of the day - not the kind of weight loss I had in mind. :-)

So in the end, it was a day of twists and turns, including bleak gray skies, snow falling and cars crapping out - and then, finally progress.

new meetup group and stress-management class

I just put up a new meetup group for the Circle of Healing Arts.
It is a meetup group for healers, people interested in healing, and the curious.

http://www.meetup.com/The-Circle-of-Healing-Arts-Wellness-in-the-north-metro/

The primary geographical focus is in the north metro. However there is no limit to who can join. The only need is to be interested in integrative healing.


Stress management class:
The first event I'm posting in the group is my three-session class on stress management and stress reduction. I am teaching this at Spring Lake Park HS on Central Ave in Minneapolis on Wed May 8, 15 and 22 at 7PM.
The cost is $15 to cover the room for all three sessions.

I invite anyone interested to sign up through Facebook, meetup.com or on the spring Lake Park Community Ed website (details of this are TBD).

Or you can let me know via my website: http://www.explorewithhypnosismn.com.

More details on this as I get everything in place.
Hope U can make it.
-Craig

A very interesting I Ching

I had a very interesting result this evening, at the Theosophical society meeting. The meeting was on the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. We went through the theory behind it, and then did an exercise in it.

I threw a 63 = water over fire. The interpretation is "After the End = the time of equilibrium reached, going into decline or transition. It is a message of caution, suggesting that chaos and difficulty are at play.

Fire is the essence of change and energy, while water is the essence of spirit. They are opposites of each other, and form an equilibrium and a polarity in themselves. Fire being below, with movement being from the bottom up, indicates that change and transition, energy infusing spirit are the order of the day.

So the general theme of chaos continues - chaos and exploration. Pushing the boundaries of the known has always been my driving passion, and so this makes sense.

The question was how to proceed in my business, with somewhat of a fork in the road, or a duality between research/exploration and healing/service. My momentary, short-term drive has been to boost my healing work. Yet in the long run, all of the messages I get from the Universe are to focus on exploration, which is my true passion.

I have to believe that the two are compatible, yet I don't understand the relationship between the two. So in the end, the mystery remains a mystery, even if the question has been framed a little better.

Website updates

I purchased a new domain name today: www.ExploreWithHypnosisMN.com.

I did a lot more visibility work on my website today, including updating my Google Places profile and adding my profile to several other search sites. After playing with keywords, updating my Google places, etc. I'm now on the first page - mostly - I think. It was also pointed out to me that the www.explore-with-hypnosis.com wouldn't do very well due to the hyphenated name.
Unfortunately, www.ExploreWithHypnosis.com was already taken, which was why I had picked the hyphenated URL. Now, hopefully that change should correct the 'hyphen problem'.


The biggest change I made was to enter a new profile on Thumbtack.com. This is a service to allow people to request quotes from professionals. It looks pretty extensive, providing a lot of Q&A to address questions that people would typically ask. It also allows you to put your photos up there, your YouTube channel and other details. It's a cool site, with lots of ways to describe your business, etc.

Classic UFO Cases - then and now

Behold the midnight blog. It was another busy day - enjoyable and busy.
I did sessions during the day, then in the evening, I spent some time curled up with my 8-yr old puppies in front of the TV watching an old UFO documentary.

The documentary was UFOs, Best Evidence. It was dated in the Info banner at the bottom of the screen as being from 2011. But I think I remember most of the material, including the voice-over of Jonathan Frakes, from something like 10 years ago. The video material in the show was mostly to entirely from the 1990s, and I had seen a fair amount of it on the old TV show 'Sightings' back in the early to mid 90's.

Still, the material they had in the show was good stuff. The videos were stuff that was pretty high strangeness, and most of it is (I think) still unexplained. There were a couple that during the show, one or more experts were able to explain as blimps, reflections, etc. Yet in my view, that simply added credibility to the show. They didn't take everything carte blanche.

Several of the cases were classics. The cluster UFOs over Germany and Mexico, the "plasma craft" (?) over South America, the 'barrel' that Stan Romanek video'd over Red Rocks in Colorado, to name a few. They all were good sightings - classic unexplained cases.

The more I look into cases in modern times (i.e. the 2010's), the more I get the feeling that things haven't changed too much. I sensed there was a lot of the same material - orbs, luminescent craft, metallic disks, etc. The only thing that appears to be different today is that more of the objects sighted are triangular. Yet even that seems like it came into play during the 1990's. So it's not clear that any of the UFO dynamics have changed all that much.

Still, the strangeness of sightings tends to be on the rise, perhaps. In recent years, I've noted experiencers have described how UFOs seem to be more "in your face." Yet few if any of these are caught on camera. If they are, it's because they want to be seen. I doubt that any of the video events are by accident - at least not on the part of the phenomenon.

Many of the people who have captured video appear to also be experiencers. Sightings and a lot of other synchronistic and paranormal-type events seem to happen in the context of their lives. And so it's not surprising that they also tend to catch UFOs on film as well. I suspect that this has a fair amount to say about the dynamics of the phenomenon, but it's too late at night to think about that now.

In The Cosmic Bridge, I talk a lot about the interaction between the witness and the phenomenon. There is a bi-directional interaction between the UFO and the observer. In low strangeness cases, it's negligible. But as strangeness and closeness of the encounter increase, the bi-directionality increases as well. The phenomenon - or the sentience behind it, at least - is aware of, and observes the witness - a bidirectional relationship.

in very close encounters (events of the fourth kind - CE4 or AN4), the relationship becomes a full reality transformation. The experiencer is fully drawn into the phenomenon. The strangeness is at maximum and fully engages the experiencer's life.

Still, outside of abduction, the video capture is one of the marks of the phenomenon making itself known in the experiencer's life - and in the lives of all of us. Like the rest of the phenomenon, it maintains enough ambiguity to remain unaccepted in mainstream society (especially mainstream science). Yet it continues to tantalize us with some high quality glimpses into the reality of the visitors.

Now that cameras are nearly ubiquitous, new UFO photos and videos are probably shot every day. Assuming that sufficient investigation is done surrounding any reported video, the result should be an increasingly overt manifestation of the UFO phenomenon in human awareness. Yet the more we see of these videos, the more they seem to resemble the old classic footage from the 90's.

Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And like the documentary I watched this evening - the old presenting itself as new - the old footage and the old cases remain classic - historic, unexplained and still very meaningful.

Even then, these cases were classic, and they remain classic today.

Being present in a wonderful day

Today was one of those days that I hope is a sign of the future. Several new clients booked. I had some excellent moments of client work and several good business meetings. It was one of those days where life just seemed to flow.

Some times, it is tempting to wonder - can this last? It is one of those thought patterns we are best to avoid. It is a time when it is important to remember - be here now. Don't let things from the past and future get away with you. Don't take things for granted, get overconfident, etc.
The pendulum swings both ways, so when God gives you good fortune, use it. Be thankful, grateful and present. And I think that was the lesson of the day. Don't forget to be here now.

I had a couple of clients over the last few weeks where that was the primary issue. The person was either focused on the past - regret, guilt, anger, etc. - or on the future - fear and want. One of the two people kept telling me about the things she needed to do, the burdens she carried. What it looked like she needed more than anything was to be UN-hypnotized. She needed to break out of that rut - to break state, as I talked about in my last posting.

One commenter on my last post, in response to my comment about a good nap, said that he found meditation to be quite effective - especially when he didn't have time for a good nap. Soooo true. Meditation can be a really great way to break out of a limiting state, just like sleep, a good walk, etc. And in this case, I think that's what the one client I mentioned above has now been doing.

I told her about TM, the Himalayan tradition, and mindfulness meditation. All three are forms of meditation I try to practice regularly (with varying degrees of success). I find they help a lot - especially in combination, with intuition helping me to find that right mix of traditions. Amazingly enough, the more faithful I am to the discipline of meditation, the better the results. Go figure... :-)

So in this case, I interrupted the woman as she continued to ramble on about the difficulties of life and how the future looked pretty oppressive. I just said "Stop". She looked at me with a surprised look on her face and stopped. "Look at the wall. what color is it?"
"White," she said.
"Feet are on the floor, what does the floor feel like?"
"Solid," she replied.
We did this a couple more times, and each time, she looked more centered, more present.
I finally asked her how she felt. She looked and felt like a different person.

In subsequent trance work, we got to the core of the issues that had been weighing her down, but I think that even before we went into hypnotherapy work, our little un-hypnosis session, our mindfulness moment, helped her as much as anything else. It brought her out of the trance of future and past, and centered her reality on the here and now - and when listening to teachers like Eckhart Tolle, it appears that that's one of the biggest keys to personal happiness.

I haven't had contact with that particular client for a few months now. But last I heard she was doing well. Meanwhile, the challenge is to practice what I preached that day - to learn my own lesson.

Last night I was at the Lake Harriet practice circle, a psychic practice group where we get together twice a month to compare notes, talk and practice psychic exercises. Deb, the leader of the group, brought several card decks - this one was the Faery deck, to use for readings. Use your own discernment as to what you think of that, but the results were intriguing. They were totally consistent with what every other intuitive has told me over the last few weeks. - The lesson was to let go Be here now. Quit worrying, thinking so much about how to get my business going and growing. Instead, trust in God and be present in the moment.

It's something that is probably a life-long lesson for me, as it is for most people. Even though it's always easy to be present when times are good, today seemed to go well. Whether tomorrow, I continue to get it remains to be seen. Simply, for the moment, as the day concludes and I prepare for my (overdue) bed time, I hope I can retain a little of that lesson - being present in a wonderful day.