Amara Strand

How useful is my advice? ⠀ ⠀ In my Peerless and Mastery courses, I give a lot of practical ways to quiet the mind. Is this useful advice? Yesterday I did a private consultation in which I reframed my client's perspective: Is this mental chatter even a "problem" that you need to do something about? Do you even NEED to quiet the mind? ⠀ ⠀ It seems very different, these two perspectives. One is that you need to master the mind, learn techniques to turn down or even shut off the chatter in order to claim enough space for that elusive *something else* to emerge. What is it? Wisdom? Presence? Your Essential Nature? The other perspective is that holding onto this idea that mental chatter is a problem that needs to be remedied so you can claim some kind of pristine awareness, perfect awakening, is in fact just part of the mechanics of seeking...part of the same mind mechanics that generate the chatter in the first place. ⠀ ⠀ Both perspectives are true, depending on what level you are operating from. This is important to understand. You seek, you seek outside yourself, and inevitably you seek through the experience and wisdom and advice of others. But you can only digest and use the advice that is appropriate to your level. That's why you'll come across teachings that you feel in your gut are *true*, and yet if you try to apply them you get really weird or no results. They lead to more confusion. Then more seeking. But you're pointed in the wrong direction! You need the advice and teaching that is not only true, but true for you...where you are.⠀ ⠀ And that means also that when you are no longer where you are...when you've moved past that into truly new territory, a fundamentally new level...your old methods, the old teachings, the previous advice...may no longer be appropriate for you anymore. This is so hard, because they were true and they did work. Those practices are like old friends. You are faithful to them. But they are not old friends. They are steps on a ladder that you leave behind without looking back as you move ahead. The only precious teachings are the ones you need, the ones that are appropriate for you right now.

My birthday is like my own personal New Year. I love spending my birthday by myself, out in nature, suspended in this liminal space between what was and what is to come. ⠀ ⠀ This morning I went out before dawn to the beach and spent the twilight with a handsome flock of shorebirds and a school of what looked like baby sand sharks, playing in the tide right up to the sandy shore. ⠀ ⠀ It's a relief to be here, no one asking me to be anybody. No one telling me who I am based on their personal storyline. Though, I suppose that is not entirely true. I met a bird this morning who looked me over and said, "You look a lot like that woman who fed me."

Into the unknown. ⠀ ⠀ How many of you can relate these days? ⠀ ⠀ I've been busy the past few months. Kind of amazing how much effort it's taken, just to throw myself into the unknown. Finally, I put my entire home into storage and hit the road, before dawn on a Sunday, and drove away. Hundreds of miles, to a friend's house -- the first chapter in my life without a home. I guess that makes me nomadic. Nomadic sounds more elegant than homeless! Over the coming months we'll see just how "elegant" it ends up being. ⠀ ⠀ My goal is to get enough money together to leave the country for a year. Work remotely from SE Asia, where I will have more time to devote to the work I love.⠀ ⠀ For now...into the wall of fog. Into the unknown.

In martial arts, one expects to be thrown to the ground, hard. You know it will happen, so rather than avoiding it, you learn to fall well. There is a point in sparing when you know it’s over and you are going down. Up until that point, you are using all your Upright strategies. At that very point of recognizing the reality, that you are going down, you immediately switch into your Falling strategy.⠀ ⠀ In life, you need to have both. But you are almost never taught to a)recognize and admit that you are going down and b)how to do that like a pro.

You are in a dismantling phase, a transition. It is painful and confusing, and I’m sorry, but there is no way to escape those feelings, even through “spirituality”…which can be one of the worst detours ever. It is not the last one you will go through. It happens at the end of certain stages or cycles. This is a huge accomplishment. It doesn’t ever feel that way, but getting to the end of a cycle and letting yourself actually digest and alchemize all the dead mind stuff and old persona paradigms rather than continue to find novel ways to prop them up so that the show can go on for another season…this is awesome. Congratulations are in order!⠀ ⠀ The process is yucky, and I can’t make it feel any better, except to let you know you are not alone. And also, this may be really most important…there is nothing wrong with you. When you hit the wall at the end of a cycle and nothing really works anymore, your first reaction is that something is WRONG and needs to be fixed. You work like mad trying to find a way to fix it. Your scour books, blogs, forums, ancient texts…whatever! There is nothing wrong with you. It does not feel good to be in The In Between, but you are exactly where you should be.⠀ ⠀ You can spend a long time in this liminal space, but you don’t have to. It will be hard anyway, but you can make it harder than necessary, or…only as hard as it needs to be.

Most people experience neutrality as something that feels uncomfortable so they automatically fill it — they look for something really positive, like doing a heart opening love love love meditation or they go for the Twinkies, naff, low rez version and open the floodgates to static, inner gossip, worry, or whatever.⠀ ⠀ Just imagine if I went door to door selling the miracle of Neutrality. Not bliss or happiness or union with God, but just the amazing gift of being steady and totally at ease in neutral. A real big money maker? I don’t think so.

Fabulous Woo Experiment: Are you game? ⠀ ⠀ Woo Fact: I have the ability to send healing and comforting (and who knows what else) energy to people. I can do it through my hands or over distances. But I have to at least have an idea of who the person is. I don't need to know them personally, but I need to have some way to single them out for the send.⠀ ⠀ My first Fabulous Woo Experiment is to see if I can deliver this through some other medium. It really doesn't matter what the medium is. In this case, I made a sigil. I'm asking people who want to participate to interact with the sigil in their preferred manner and then let me know if they experienced any results. ⠀ ⠀ Game? Here ya go: https://buff.ly/2TTFDFC

Ritual work is reweaving the fabric of your being. If you’re not working at that level, with that devotion and sincerity, then you’re just going through the motions, skimming the surface. You may get some small benefit, but then, if you’re totally honest with yourself, you’ll come to the realization that the small game is the only game you’re playing…because it’s safe. The small benefit is really all you are after, and the more energy you can spend to get the small benefit, the better, because you feel like you are really serious, really making an effort.

Develop the habit of living outside your comfort zone. It brings to mind the archetype of the Explorer. As you move into unknown territory, you take with you what you have learned so far, but you have to have the mental habit of holding that knowledge lightly and not imposing it on what you find in this new territory. ⠀ ⠀ What do you really know about yourself, and your life as it is? What is Unknown Territory? Does it need to be something exotic or novel? When you regard the details and relationships that populate your daily life as unfamiliar and actually look, actually see -- you find they are not familiar at all. ⠀ ⠀ The fewer filters, the clearer the seeing…and then you could be in the same house with the same people you’ve always known and somehow it’s like you’re in a whole new world.⠀ ⠀ Encountering the Old as if it were New, moving through even the most mundane of days embodying this Explorer archetype, changes you. If you dedicate yourself and keep at it, this facility to strip away filters and see becomes habit, effortless. ⠀ ⠀ The clearer you can see, the better you can navigate. Seeing even one thing clearly can often collapse an entire collective, an entire network of interlaced “hooks” or Default Programming. It’s not like you have to tackle each and every one individually (how exhausting that would be!).

Reality, or the manifested world, pops in and out of existence. It's kind of like a sine wave -- above the midline the world exists, then it drops below the midline and does not. It does this continuously, all the time. ⠀ ⠀ Our minds stitch together the "manifestation", the above-the-midline parts of the wave, and we experience continuity -- an unbroken chain. When in fact we are constantly dropping into the Void, we spend equal time under the midline as we do above it. ⠀ ⠀ When we pop back above the midline, there is no absolute reason things should be the same as before we dropped into the Void. ⠀ ⠀ I realize this all sounds like metaphysical cotton candy. How can you know this is true, and more importantly, if it is true, so what? When I became enlightened, I went through a period of experiencing this sine wave of existence. I've no idea how, but I perceived the movement. And when we crossed the midline on the way up, there was a loud sound that accompanied it, like breaking the sound barrier. ⠀ ⠀ Obviously, no one can live like that, constantly perceiving this movement. So luckily it was temporary. Then we get to the all important "so what?" This question is at the heart of everything for me. If it has no place in the actual living of one's life, who the hell cares?