Thanks to all of you who came out to support our "first" BlogTalkRadio chat! I thought it was a great success, and I'm looking forward to more in the future.
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[Shepherd begins with a comic routine...]
Welcome to the Michael Show, winner of 7 Golden Orb awards for Best Talk Radio on the Causal Plane! Starring your favorite entity, MICHAEL!!! With special guest fragments, king-cast warrior Michael, warrior-cast king Michael, priest-cast king Michael, and many, many more! With sidekicks Ed McMahon, Dave Gregg, and Shepherd Hoodwin.
Brought to you by Carnation Instant Milk, the perfect food for your baby, now with GMO milk from cows with genes spliced with Michael's! So your baby will get all that good Causal nutrition it needs to grow up to be a Michael channel someday.
And now, Heeeeeeere's Michael
[Grounding exercise omitted]
Opening Comments
We regard each of you as a healer. What heals, ultimately, is consciousness.
When you start to offer healing, you might feel, at first, an increase in discomfort. As a healer, you are vulnerable--you must be in order to heal--when you expose yourself to less-evolved energies. An inexperienced healer can sometimes feel overwhelmed by them, as if you were hit by something. The way to handle this is to focus strongly your attention on the qualities you wish to bring. The three basic universal forces are love, which aligns with inspiration; truth, intellect; and beauty, energy (or manifestation). In any situation in which you feel something destructive or ugly, you can call upon these qualities.
For instance, let’s say that somebody says something nasty or unfair to you. He is likely dealing with some difficult issues that may not be all that much about you personally. Sometimes, a person has just built up a lot of frustration and is letting off steam, and you are there, so it is dumped on you. What most people do is engage, because it triggers their own frustrations. Many actually see this as a good opportunity to dump, too: "He is dumping on me, so I will dump on him." It's sort of like mud wrestling, getting down and dirty, both letting off steam even if they are muddied and bloodied as a result.
This comes under the heading of "growing through pain." When you consciously become a spiritual student (everyone is an unconscious spiritual student) and take charge of your own evolution, you begin to understand that there are alternative ways of dealing with such a situation.
Unfortunately, most who have aspired to this have thought the only alternative was to stuff down their frustrations, slap on a phony smile, and try to get through it. That does keep a lid on things, which is sometimes the best that can be hoped for. However, for more advanced students, you can deal with your frustrations in a number of other ways.
There are therapeutic techniques that have been pioneered in alternative psychology in recent generations. For example, if you feel angry, you might hit a punching bag imagining it's the person who is bothering you, but with the intention of getting it out of your system but not doing psychic harm to the person (we are not speaking here of the equivalent of sticking pins in a voodoo doll). In other words, you hold a loving intent to release the old pent-up energy, which may also have little to do with the person who is triggering you. It could, in fact, go back to your childhood or even past lives. The person’s offense may only be the most recent and relatively small layer of frustration.
Even more advanced, still, is to handle it in a kind of meditation where you relax and invite all your pent-up frustrations to come up in the environment of love that you are creating in your personal space. You may invite that frustration to tell you its stories as if you were a loving therapist, parent, or friend listening to someone who needs to unload. As you witness your own unpleasant experiences in a way that says, "It's all right now. I love you. Go ahead and let this out,” you may not need to act out the aggression physically.
However, sitting with it in meditation may make your body want to move in some way if these old energies are stuck in it. Even if they are from a past life, they may be in your body now. So if your body wants to move, go ahead and move it in a safe way so that you don’t hurt yourself or your environment. You may want to hit something but you might just want to move in strange ways; it might look like you are having a mild seizure or something similar, since your body is releasing old, crippling energies. Sometimes, you might cry. Tears can be quite healing--they often accompany the realization of truth; they allow you to let go of something.
Now that you are aware that there are ways you can release your frustrations, you may have less of a need to engage with the person who is being inappropriate and who is triggering your desire to be inappropriate, as well. This is an excellent foundation for later forgiveness, not only of this person but of all those who have contributed to your many layers of frustration.
Life on the physical plane is designed to be frustrating. If everything were smooth sailing all the time, if nothing got in your way, there would be no learning. You could say that there is more frustration than there needs to be, but the level of collective frustration is a collective choice. For most of you, your society has chosen a high level of stress and complexity in order to accelerate learning, but that has also accelerated wounding. This gives you more opportunities to practice your healing skills, so, ultimately, it can be useful.
Still, you can individually choose to remove yourself from some of the frustrations of your situation; for one thing, you can chose to interact with fewer challenging people. You may not be able to eliminate them entirely, but you can probably reduce them. When you are no longer looking for people with whom you can get into a fight so that you can express some of your stored frustrations, you will certainly have fewer combative people in your life.
With practice, you can more successfully deal with your desire to react negatively by enfolding your reactions in love, truth, and beauty. If you are not able to fully release your frustrations in the moment, you can be increasingly confident that you will be able to do so when you get the chance to spend some time with them. However, sometimes a personal attack seems to come out of the blue, and you are not ready for it; you might feel viscerally like it punched you in the gut. You hadn't established a space of light that could repel it, so it takes you by surprise.
This is actually easy to deal with if you have your wits about you. That is that key, because when you are taken by surprise, you sometimes lose your wits. However, if you hold onto them, the first thing to do as a healer is to establish a strong intention that your own pain is connecting with those universal forces and is dissipating rapidly. Mothers instinctively knows how to do this when they comfort a squalling baby--just "be" with the hurt part of yourself, and it will quickly recover, especially if you have been practicing this. Then, as a healer, you can look at the other person in the same way: with compassion.
This is not to say that you should be in denial of the fact that this person upset you, but you could also remind yourself that she is probably hurting, too, perhaps having a "bad day," or would not have acted that way. You can afford to be generous in this regard when you already know that you can take care of yourself, that you don’t have to be her victim. Even if there is some momentary sting and things are coming up for you, you know that she can’t really hurt you long-term. However, if you try to be generous when you do not have this confidence, it will be harder; the generosity will not be so unconditional. It might come out as something to the effect of "I forgive you, but I still hate your guts."
That kind of statement is common in how people approach relationships. It is an improvement over "I am going to get revenge," but it is not as satisfying as being able to truly forgive, which, in this instance, involves disconnecting from the personal issues and not making them your own, not carrying their attack with you, nursing grudges and so forth.
If you think that you are not a skilled healer, all you need to do is use your ability to imagine things, such as a calm, peaceful, grounded state of being. If you are more visual, envision what that would look like; if you are more sensual, conjure what it would feel like. In both cases, hold the idea that you are creating this. If you stay with it long enough, you can arrive at a place where you feel as calm as you wish to feel--your result will reflect how much time and energy you invest in this intention.
What is holding you back from total relaxation? There may be a block in your body that draws your attention when you ask this question. If so, go to that spot and bring your loving presence to it. That alone might be enough to dissolve it. Also, when you are in the flow and are connecting with higher universal forces, you have access to information you might not otherwise, which can help you find out what is stopping you from feeling good, and help you release it.
Noticing your breathing and letting it be relaxed can help. Also, you might recall a time when you were out in nature and felt great, as if you didn’t have a care in the world: All you hear are the sounds of the birds singing and the breeze in the trees. Your body naturally feels that it is part of that environment; this is how it wants to feel. Let your breathing come into alignment with nature.
People often breathe and otherwise resonate in alignment with their human environment--for example, their workplace, where perhaps people are agitated. Sensitive people tend to feel that right away, and your heart rate and breathing may speed up as a result. Instead, you can take charge and stay in alignment with the heartbeat of nature, and then you might be able to calm down people around you rather than you taking on their wound-up state.
This sort of thing becomes easer and easier with practice. If it is not something you have worked with before, it will be foreign, of course, but after a while, you can learn to do it almost automatically, and you will feel better in your life as a result.
In healing work, you often become aware of things that were there all the time, but you were not in touch with earlier. When it is your intention to heal something, the unhealed factors need to come up in order to come out, so you may feel worse before you feel better, but you will feel better if you see it through. One benefit of becoming more spiritually conscious is that it can help you feel better more of the time.
Q. My stomach is lighter and warmer. I've never experienced such a thing before; I had visited healers but never felt anything--this is the first experience I can actually feel.
A. Perhaps the effectiveness of this is that we are not merely trying to heal you, but are approaching you as a fellow healer and are involving you in the process. In general, we would recommend this approach. Even if you are doing healing work on a child, you can involve her, inviting her to notice feelings and tell you about them. You might ask her, "If this feeling were an animal, what kind of animal would it be?"
Whenever you engage a person you are working with, you will usually get better results, because they are taking responsibility for their own healing. You are working with them and not on them.
There are stories of Jesus doing remarkable healings. People tend to assume that he just somehow automatically knew how to do them, but, in fact, he practiced. He had natural talent for it, but did not start out early in life being as good at it as he became after practice and study. He was a particularly powerful soul, but each of you are powerful in your own way. The record says that he told his students that they could do what he did.
The Bible stories might be thought of as a “best of” compilation. Most healing work is not instantaneous or otherwise overtly impressive, because it always, in part, depends on the recipient's willingness and ability to receive healing. In addition, each of you can improve your skills--it just takes practice. Working with children and animals are great ways to practice.
Everything is energy: E=mc2. There are people who don’t know anything about healing techniques, but their presence is healing because they are full of love, their thoughts are positive, and they have a lot of vitality. When you come into their presence, you feel better. That is being a healer. However, when you have some technique, as well (which does not need to be complicated), you can be more precise and powerful in your work.
Source: http://www.michaelteachings.com/shep_chat_01-13-08.html
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