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California Dreamin’

Los Angeles

I’ve just returned from a wonderful week in LA. I was lucky. The winter disappeared while I was there. Instead of cold and rain I had brilliant blue skies and temperatures in the sixties and seventies. Wherever I went I ran into people I knew and loved. That always seems to happen to me whenever I’m in LA.

I made progress in getting producers interested in my novel THE SILENT STEPS OF GRACE. One day it will be a powerful and uplifting and inspiring movie that will help people in their lives. One very successful producer of several big movie hits called the book “tremendous”.  He also said that he found one of the story lines disturbing. That most certainly was the hidden history of the United States. The real history of this country is certainly not what we were all force fed in school.

He also asked me why I wanted to get involved in the movie business. “If you have a happy life and are o.k. financially why would you want to make your book into a movie?” he asked me.

“To see it come alive on the screen,” I replied. “Money and notoriety are a distant second.”

“You’ll pay a price for that,” he sighed. “You’ll be dealing with the worst people in the world. My advice is don’t do it.”

He may well be right. Only time will tell what the price of success is.

L.A. is an acquired taste. At first, it’s overwhelming. Huge, too many people and far too many cars. It takes time to get grounded and get your bearings. A friend of mine, who is a Ph. D. and runs a multi-discipline program at USC, calls LA a cesspool. It certainly is that. But if you take your time and separate the wheat from the chaff, you will find wonderful and extraordinary people. I know tons of them and am honored to call them my friends.

Getting around the city is a nightmare. It’s rush hour traffic all day long. One friend said if he has an appointment in Beverly Hills he’ll leave three hours early so he won’t be caught in heavy traffic. He’ll work in a coffee shop in Beverly Hills until it’s time for his meeting. That’s how bad the traffic is. Another friend of mine said it took him 90 minutes to go less than 2 miles. Several people said the traffic made LA almost unlivable.

LA has several advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages are:

  1. great climate
  2. very open and creative culture
  3. great food choices, particularly in Santa Monica and Venice
  4. Santa Monica and Venice are ground zero for healthy conscious eating
  5. Lots of organic restaurants
  6. Great health food stores, particularly Co-Opportunity in Santa Monica which may be the best health food store in the country
  7. Great beaches
  8. Great people
  9. Home of the movie and TV industries
  10. Lots of people striving to grow and become more conscious

The disadvantages are:

  1. High cost of living. Real estate is incredibly expensive. Rents are high.
  2. High taxes.
  3. Traffic and gridlock
  4. Lots of toxic people
  5. LA and Southern California are in the direct path of radioactive winds coming from the crippled reactors in Fukushima
  6. A monster quake that will level virtually every structure in SoCal could happen at any time.

For me, the cost and risk of living in LA outweigh the benefits of returning there to live. That’s why I left after living there for 16 years and will not return. My solution is to travel there frequently, see my friends and work to make my novel into a movie.

If you haven’t yet read THE SILENT STEPS OF GRACE you should. It’s a great story. It will move you, inspire you and educate you. In short, it’s a game changer. You will find more information about it on my website www.alanmesher.com or on amazon.com. It is available in both print and digital formats.

 

 

 

 

The Healing Cycle: From Grief to Relief Part 2

Grief

Carrying Karma Forward

“Besides,” I continued, “while you might feel out of sorts as you clear the heavy energies of grief from your system, just imagine having to carry that weight forward in your life. When you experienced your grief in its raw and elemental state last week, you felt exactly what you had been carrying around with you for years. It wasn’t hidden anymore or hanging over your life like a cloud of low-level depression and unhappiness, poisoning your existence and sapping your spirit of its vitality. Instead, you felt the entire weight of what had been buried in your heart and you embraced it. In choosing to face and clear  your grief, you chose expansion over confinement, happiness over depression, and a better future for yourself. So don’t worry about what you may feel in today’s session and in the days that follow. Focus instead on where you’re going and hope that even more toxic emotion comes out of you today than it did last week. If that should happen, it will only free you more.”

A Toxic Childhood

That week, more grief did pour out of her, but it was not all related to the death of her husband. Behind the grief of her husband’s passing was the sullen grief of her childhood. She had grown up in a cold house with a critical mother and an emotionally absent father. She had never felt safe in expressing her feelings in her family environment. To say what she felt or to stand up for what she wanted was to invite a withering attack from her mother. Her mother regularly shamed and humiliated her, making her feel small, inadequate, unwanted, and unloved. Given her background, it was not surprising that her whole strategy as a child was simply to survive. Her strategy for survival was anchored in pleasing her mother in order to reduce her exposure to more shame and verbal degradation.

A Self-defeating Strategy

When she became an adult, Barbara’s childhood strategy of pleasing others did not disappear. It had become too ingrained in her behavior. Although she had a new cast of people to relate to as an adult, the childhood pattern of how she related to them endured. It had become her unconscious governing belief. Her experience of being shamed by her mother had led her to conclude that she was unlovable. If I’m not loveable, her subconscious reasoned, then I have to work extra hard to get people to like me. Instead of trying to please her mother, she now tried to please her husband and sons.

As a result of Barbara’s childhood conditioning, she was unable to say how she really felt as a grown woman. She lacked the courage to stand up for herself and express her real needs. Her childhood survival theme of “hide your real feelings and don’t rock the boat under any circumstances” had become a constant form of unconscious oppression dominating her adult life. One of the problems in trying to please her own family was that she wasn’t getting love and respect from her husband and sons in return. All the giving went one way from her to them. There was nothing coming back to her, except more demands for her to do more things for them. She wasn’t being seen or respected for who she was. Underneath it all, she burned with unexpressed resentment, a resentment she could not even admit to herself. She was too focused on being a “lady.” In her case, being a lady was a cover for not facing her hidden rage, as well as a way to avoid facing her real feelings.

Release and Relief

As her second session progressed, Barbara’s tears of grief at her husband’s death turned to screams of rage at her mother for her coldness, her lack of love, and her failure to nurture and approve of her daughter. After a time, her rage turned to sobs, as she felt the grief of her childhood shame and humiliation. With her grief came the searing realization that she felt lost in life and had no idea of who she really was. As that insight hit her, Barbara’s sobs deepened and a plaintive scream arose from that deep, lost place inside her. The scream started out loud and fierce and long, running slowly out of steam until it became a whisper, then a sound no more. She took a moment, gathered the breath back into her body, and resumed her screaming. As her screams dwindled and died, her sobbing resumed. This time the sobs were soft, low, and rapid, one following after the other in a steady, constant rhythm. When her sobs ended, her body became ice cold and began to vibrate.

The session was now nearly concluded. Barbara was absolutely exhausted. However, I became quite excited for her when she told me that her body was vibrating all over and she was feeling ice cold. These symptoms were important markers in her healing just as they had been for Sean. The coldness that she was feeling represented the melting of the shame and loss of identity that had been frozen inside her as a young child and had plagued her ever since. As long as that frozen energy remained in her core she was powerless to move beyond it. The pattern of trying to please others to get their love would remain intact. Now that frozen energy was melting. It was a moment of great significance for Barbara. It meant that she was no longer trapped in the emotional context of her childhood. (To be continued.)

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Spiritual Light

Flickr by IpUrBeLtzhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/ipurbeltz/4810073442/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Why the World is So Unhappy

Spiritual Light saves, heals, does not discriminate or take sides, is equally available to everyone, and is free. If this is true why isn’t the world more peaceful,and why are so many people so unhappy? One part of the answer lies in the high degree of polarization that infects each national issue and every global concern. Both the national stage and the international arena are overwhelmed by the constant clash of religious, economic, social, political, environmental, and nationalistic forces. These conflicts wax and wane in their intensity but never completely disappear. They are now trending toward their zenith in all areas simultaneously.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/remix-man/3972348757/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Changing the World

Given the difficult conditions in the world what we can do as individuals to change the direction of events has never been more important. We can’t sit by and wait for the world to change or hope someone else will do it for us. The world will only change when enough of us have changed, not before. Spiritual growth is no longer a matter of personal preference but a world wide imperative that will impact the future of the planet. The other reason for the lack of world peace and personal unhappiness is that we are all challenged by a form of polarization that is at once eternal and personal.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/katerha/4894450261/sizes/s/in/photostream/

Transforming the Shadow

We each have light and dark elements in our soul. Our job is to transform the shadow side of our nature so we can let more spiritual light into our systems and stand in our real power. That is why we are here. It is no easy task. We won’t succeed in this mission unless we uproot the unconscious toxicity buried in our bodies. Much of this material comes from past life trauma that was never resolved. While we are no longer aware of these events they are the hidden cause of much of our present problems. They separate us from our soul and prevent us from expanding in the Light. Until we clear our darkness we can not stand in our power, be channels of unconditional love or vehicles through which spiritual light enters the world.

Where Peace Begins

With the world in chaos it is  a perfect time to remember that peace in this world begins with us. We are all accountable. The Light cannot be present on earth until it is present in
each of us. We are so much more powerful than we have been led by the PTB and the media to believe we are. Believe in yourself, not in what others say to control you and steal your power.