Part 2 (I know, I’ve already done part 2!)

I mean this is part 2 of the blog. I’m done, for now, with trying to pass on what New Energy is all about. I’ve got work to do. I have to work out what it’s all about myself!

I want to write this for me now, and that would probably be a more valuable way for you to follow what I am attempting to achieve if you are interested. I will try and provide enough information for you to keep up.

I don’t know if I will get around to writing part 3 of  ‘How I got here’. I suddenly developed an aversion to blog writing at that point. Just to get you up to speed, the scientific rationalist approach didn’t seem to give me any of the answers I was looking for and I found a source in things like ‘Conversations with God’, and having thus become familiar with the idea of channelling and being really keen to get an other-worldly view on what on earth we were doing here, Kryon, The Group, and eventually The Crimson Circle.

Said Circle turned out to feel like My Place, if you know what I mean, and I was used, by then, to identifying what felt right within. And we (in the Crimson Circle) have just undergone a much more major change than we had probably anticipated. The Crimson Circle was based around the channellings of a, you know, ‘person’ called Tobias who has recently, let’s say, retired and been taken over by Adamus Saint Germain. Look up Saint Germain. He has an interesting history in human form. Not human form now.

Yeah, I know I’m getting weird but I can’t be bothered easing you into it any more. Come along for the ride if you like.

So, the much more major change to which I referred is that until now we have been getting the hang of disconnecting from Old Energy, but now it’s time to start working with New. I can’t believe I didn’t notice that we hadn’t got to the real point yet, though I’m glad I didn’t or I would have been filled with impatience all this time. I did, certainly, run out of purpose and motivation but it still didn’t cross my mind that that was because we hadn’t yet replaced the old with anything new.

Because, here is some information about New Energy that I haven’t yet tried to explain on account of that old approach of mine of trying to give it to you in digestible quantities. Old Energy was vibrational. Reality was created through oppositional forces. Gravity and centrifugal forces, light and dark, good and evil, up and down, happy and sad. That is how the world has been operating all along, that has been the actual defining force of reality. And it’s not only in this world, this level of reality, or so I’m told.

Now here’s a story I’ve been reluctant to pass on to you because I DON’T LIKE IT. But it’s nevertheless the one I use to make sense of the reality in which I find myself. It comes to you courtesy of Tobias and he calls it the story of Jack:

In the beginning there was . . . well, clearly not Nothing because there is not Nothing now. This is my story so far, not Tobias’. I just can’t get over the fact that there isn’t Nothing. How did Something happen?

Anyway, I don’t know the answer to that, but stuff exists. I certainly do, anyway. So the original fact was, in the beginning there was consciousness. And that consciousness had no reference point and so couldn’t know itself, so that consciousness divided itsef into two complementary halves, male and female. (Back to Tobias’ story now.) And they had a son and he was called Jack and they all lived happily in The Kingdom full of warmth and security and general wonderfulness. (I’m embellishing a bit, you understand.)

But Jack grew up and, you know, wanted to leave home. He wanted to find out what was outside the kingdom, he wanted to explore. It’s like, my mother and father created this place, now I want to go out and create my own.

So Jack went through what Tobias refers to as ‘ the wall of fire’ and was shattered into a million pieces, was devastated, suddenly found that he couldn’t get back home now that he had gone outside its boundaries and has spent the rest of the history of conscious reality trying to get back!

Now do you see why I don’t like the story?

I may be being too literal but I tend to interpret the million pieces as all the new separate consciousnesses that were suddenly created. You and I. And everyone else, human and non. The same as the original consciousness that sought to know itself and so created aspects of itself and then a Kingdom, a home. Point being, that’s what we came here to do, be creator gods all over again. But in new and unique ways.

Back to Tobias’ story, and it gets a bit awkward here because I always thought of gods as esentially wise and all-seeing and especially not selfish and grasping, but the next phase was one of war. Tobias says the Star Wars movies aren’t a bad analogy because we are not yet talking human beings who perceive themselves to have limited power. These are, you know, gods! They want to get back home, they are desperate, and the idea seems to arise that if they can concentrate everyone’s energy, someone might be able to make it back across the wall of fire. So stealing energy becomes a tactic.

How do all-powerful beings win a war against each other? Correct, they don’t. They reach a stalemate. Enter earth and, after a while, humanity. The idea was to replay the star wars in a slowed-down version of reality to try and undo the stalemate. So the history of humanity has been a game of giving and taking energy, of pyramids of power, a replaying of these wars of the gods.

There are many things I don’t like about this story. I mean how could a bunch of gods be so stupid? Why on earth didn’t any of them turn around and say, ‘Well since we’re here let’s get on with what we came here for and start creating a whole new reality?’ (Another story, not Tobias’, but some of them did. Not important for the point at hand.)

Like it or not, though, this story makes sense of human existence for me. I can interpret the whole game in these terms and so it’s the one I use. And the point is that the reason people like me are now on a quest to explore New Energy is that the human game has achieved its purpose, the stalemate has been undone – I don’t know how, but it makes sense that that’s why it’s time to move on.

Nobody knows, I’m told, exactly how New Energy works, how it behaves. It is a brand new form of reality. I should say no one knows. I am getting my information from other-worldly sources and they don’t know either. What they do know is that while Old Energy was vibrational, New Energy is expansional. It is not finite in quantity, so I’m thinking there is now such a thing as a free lunch. I guess it is coming in now because we have finally turned around and undertaken to get on with the original project of expanding consciousness, of becoming whole new creator gods. Adamus tells us that New Energy is there but we now have the task of bringing it in, becoming humans who operate within that reality system. Apparently I am one of the ones who have made it their business to take on the task, so I won’t be good at it but I’m willing to make a fool of myself if it means we don’t have to have any more of these silly wars and things.

How I got here part 2: Scientific rationalism

I used to be married to a scientist and hence a lot of our friends were scientists. When you hang around in that crowd you get used to an attitude of scepticism. All those airy-fairy ideas about intuition, ghosts, life after death, astrology, ESP. Prove it, they would say, or don’t talk about it. I wasn’t particularly prone to airy-fairy ideas other than the standard christian-based ones that most of us grew up with so I was perfectly comfortable in this environment. And anyway, scientific rationalism is the other half of the default system of beliefs common in our culture – an uncomfortable mix but we live with it as best we can.

One such friend who had thought it through more thoroughly than most explained to me that he believed only the evidence before his eyes (or his microscope) and that that could explain it all. We are purely physical beings, consciousness is simply a by-product of life which is a kind of chemical reaction, and when we die our consciousness ends with our bodies. There is no god, no mastermind, no greater reason for life than that.

Life is an accident of nature which is an accident of, you know, existence.

Several years later, I adopted this attitude as best I could. At the time I had a group of friends who liked to see psychics and were  interested in astrology and I would think, ‘Why do you believe in this stuff? Where is the evidence? Where did the ideas come from? Couldn’t someone have just made it up?’

But I gradually found that I had to fill in the gaps in my rationalist system of beliefs. One thing I had never accepted was that consciousness was finite. As a child I used to look into the mirror and try and locate the centre of the looker, the experiencer. It seemed to be somewhere in my eyes or behind my eyes but it was also not the kind of thing that could be located or isolated to a place. At about the age of four I asked my mother if she was real, knowing that she couldn’t provide me with much reassurance since she would probably continue to act the part if she was indeed a figment of my imagination. I was having an uncomfortable realisation that I couldn’t really know if everything in my world was a creation of my mind or if it had its own independent existence. All I could know was that I was perceiving stuff. All I could really know was that I Was.

(She assured me she was real, by the way, but that only told me that she was either a figment of my imagination that was a liar, or that she was real and was telling the truth. I still didn’t know which. Thank goodness she continued to nurture me and love me and keep me alive, whichever she was.)

My daughter asked me that same question at that same age.

So if the most compelling evidence about reality is actually somewhere behind my eyes rather than before my eyes, scientific discovery is about the second level of reality, not the first. It is about making predictions about cause and effect in this possibly-imaginary world. When my scientist friend chose to believe that our consciousness dies with our bodies, it was simply his chosen belief about an issue over which science has little jurisdiction. Some of the most important of life’s questions cannot be addressed by scientific method. It can’t help airy-fairy spiritualists and it can’t help scientists.

How I got here part 1: Christian values

Of all the reality models in all the universe, why did I have to choose this one?

Tim Brownson is not a subscriber to the view that we generate our own experience but, loving a good debate, often asks for explanations or justifications of the law of attraction from ‘believers’ and I find myself with no interest in trying to convince someone for whom this view has no appeal. This is an important aspect of my philosophy: if it doesn’t feel right for you then it’s not right for you. End of story.

And then I remember times when I have seen a glimmer in what someone is telling me and have expressed my doubts because I want them answered, only to have the person wave the discussion away saying I am free to believe what I choose. Sometimes you can’t get people to explain it to you when you really want to know.

And, let’s face it, explaining the New Energy model of reality as carefully as possible is what I am here for. So I’ll describe the evolution of my own understanding of this existence in which we find ourselves, from my learned world-view as a child, through my experiments with hard-nosed rationalism, and up to the present. Why does the idea of New Energy make sense of it all for me? This could take a few posts.

We all have a default position that feels the most natural and comfortable to us, and that is the world view we were born into. I was born into a church-going family in a christian society, namely Australia. The only church in our town was Presbyterian, if that’s important, and in retrospect I think we practiced what I would now describe as a relatively enlightened version of the religion, focusing less on personal guilt and fear, and more on making for a loving and caring world.

Nevertheless the guilt and fear were there. The ultimate threat was that of eternal damnation and the church can (and, let’s face it, historically does) throw any demand at its members and receive cowed obedience. I never found an answer to that fear until I began to understand the New Energy model, but I do remember at about the age of 12 noticing that guilt was  not a productive emotion, and trying to release it. With some success. (Damn you, Default Position!)

I adopted the whole christian philosophy fairly enthusiastically during my teens – if you’re going to do it at all you might as well do it properly – but eventually I looked within and noticed that the central tenet of the religion to which I subscribed didn’t seem to hold any personal relevance to me. I didn’t really understand why it was so important that Jesus should die and be resurrected. I couldn’t find any sense of original sin within me or any need for redemption.

Surprisingly, I can understand it better now as a non-christian New Energy kinda dude. The eating of the fruit of knowledge is describing our decision to separate our consciousness into individual god-entities rather than remain as part of The One, and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is the shock of separation. We were so desperate to find our way back into the Garden we forgot what this whole individual-god-entity thing was intended for and are only finding the resolution of that issue about now. Hence, new era, New Energy.

Jesus was bringing the beginnings of this reminder to humanity – it’s been 2000 years in gestation – that we are not guilty little chess pieces being played with, we are the children of, you know, God, consciousness, the universe. And what happens to children? They grow up and become the same as their parents. The same but somehow different. Unique but equal.

Well . . . maybe I still don’t know what the significance of the death and resurrection is. Perhaps it was intended to be a kind of historical exclamation mark and if so it did its job. Christianity took off. It was a hit.

So, having failed to find an internal resonance with the religion, I put Christianity on hold pending further enlightenment. I am inclined to regard religion as having a mostly detrimental influence on humanity, having been wielded as a political tool for creating powerless and obedient subjects, but I carried some valuable experiences and perceptions into the next phase of my life. My other-worldly beliefs had given me some other-worldly perceptions such as two or three incidents of understanding and feeling a universal, unconditional love. ‘It’s not about anything you do, or whether you are good or bad,’ these experiences told me, ‘Unbounded love is intrinsically yours.’

At that time I didn’t invent a whole new philosophy to replace the one I had abandoned, I just muddled along with a kind of incidental internal dialogue with some non-physical god-like being with whom I tried to muster some purpose to this strange exercise called human existence. It was several years later I had a brief fling with scientific rationalism, but more about that later.

Other people’s business

I tried to explain to some real-world friends recently my view that we create everything that happens to us. It made me realise that to people who have never heard of this concept before, it’s a pretty difficult one to get your mind around. A lot of people who might visit a blog like this will have already heard of the law of attraction which subscribes to this view, so I have failed to explain the idea to those who haven’t.

Such as my friends the other day.

Before my friends could begin to grasp the idea, we had to get clear that I’m saying our reality is largely created at the unconscious level. I’m not talking about blaming people for their misfortunes or judging people who have everything as better or more worthy than the unlucky ones. It’s not about worthiness.

I once read a book called Childrens’ Past Lives. Now, my-friends-the-other-day would struggle with the whole past-lives issue too but, for now, read the book if you like because that’s not what I’m here to talk about. The author  noticed that her children could describe in one sentence the purpose of any past life they could remember. For example, her two children said they had come into the same family in this life so that they could learn to treat each other well, after not so much success with that in previous lives. There is another level of purpose to the events we create in our lives beyond the conscious pursuit of pleasure or fulfilment. There is our unconscious, or higher conscious, purpose.

And when you stop and notice, it often takes hardship or even trauma to get a message through to the whole self. I have a condition called fibromyalgia and once I had got the message it seemed to be giving me that it was important to SLOW DOWN, I would tell it it could go away now. I would take care of the slowing down task on my own.

It didn’t. And, you know, there are so many things in the world that seem to take priority over slowing down. Slowing down can wait till tomorrow after I have met this crucial deadline or made the money for this important bill, or gone out with these old friends because I can’t possibly say no to them again or they will think I don’t like them any more.

The body says it better. It says Slow Down NOW! THIS is more important than all the world.

O-kaaay. . .

What I’m trying to say is adversity might be the perfect tool to create the outcome that serves our own higher-conscious purpose. Not that adversity is such a necessary tool any more but, again, that might be for another day. Suffice it for now to say that New Energy has put paid to that.

This idea that we create everything that happens to us is fundamental to everything I am trying to explain here and especially to the next thing I want to explain which is that judgement – of others or of ourselves – and the concepts of right and wrong or morality are no longer relevant or appropriate. It doesn’t really matter if you still judge – I do sometimes just for fun – but to be living effectively in the New Energy it’s important to keep in mind that whatever anyone else chooses to do is entirely their decision and if it affects me that’s because I created that effect and not because they are an asshole. Whatever happens to me is about me and it’s a distraction to start attributing blame or, more to the point, it disempowers me.

If these ideas are new to you, you are probably saying, ‘Where’s the proof?? Show me how I create all these external events!’ and I’m taking the easy road and saying I have no intention of doing that. It’s a theory, a model that may work for you, that may feel right or may not. It’s a suggestion. See if you like it. Everyone has an understanding of reality that is a theory or a model. The most hard-nosed rationalists might use the model that what you see is what you get and what you don’t see doesn’t exist. They can’t prove this either. Choose the one that works for you.

Teenage sex and other parental soap-boxery

I might be calling the kettle black with that soap box reference because I do have strong feelings about this, but it is also a part of the resumption of personal power and responsibility that is at the centre of the New Energy revolution.

I have a male friend whose 14-year-old daughter lives with her mother. Said mother has always been the strict and controlling variety of parent which was mostly fine for all concerned until recently. My friend’s daughter, let’s call her X since that is how her mother is inclined to characterise her at the moment, has got in with an older group of friends and her mother doesn’t approve and has banned the friendship. So X lied and went and spent a night with this group, including a 20-year-old man.

The mother is, of course, not handling it well to the extent that X is refusing to live with her any more so her father might have to move to the area so she can live with him. But the main issue as far as everyone including her father is concerned is did she have sex with this 20-year-old man? If so her mother will certainly send him off to jail if she has a say in it. Which, as far as she’s concerned, she does.

I keep on saying to my friend, her father, ‘What’s the big deal about the age of the man? Or about a 14-year-old having sex?’ Fourteen-year-old girls are mostly physically mature. They are designed for having sex. In the right conditions a lot of them want to have sex. Why do parents have this automatic blocking reflex, this automatic assumption that their teenager must be prevented from going where she chooses to go?

I have never received a convincing response to this question. People talk to me about the risk of stds, of unwanted pregnancy, or of being preyed upon by someone who could take advantage of their naivety, but all of these risks are best avoided with open lines of communication between the parent and teenager while she navigates this emotionally hazardous new path.

And the age difference? I just don’t know what that’s about. Why is it assumed, even by law in Australia, that it is better for an inexperienced girl to have her first fumbling sexual experience with an inexperienced boy, when she is still living the fairytale that he wants intimacy and the promise of blissful domesticity, and he is still living the passion to spread his seed as far and wide as he can? Both so pathetically unaware of the other’s agenda.

The issue of interference with another’s personal power is in its greyest area when it comes to parenthood because it is actually a parent’s job to obstruct a child’s wishes sometimes when that child has little or no understanding of safety or of social or practical necessity. All parents have to position themselves somewhere on a spectrum between extreme caution and extreme risk in regard to how much freedom they give their child as they navigate the hazardous path of human life. And on a spectrum of compromise between the parent’s lifestyle choices and those of the child. Somewhere between tadpoles in the bath and mudpies on the kitchen floor, and sparkling hygiene with narry a toy out of place.

Teenagers are not the same as children. They are, when you think about it, essentially adults who haven’t quite got control of their limbs. One thing teenagers are generally very clear about is that they are not receptive to being told how to run ther lives, they are not willing to have their decisions made for them. They could certainly use as much advice as they can get to avoid the pits they are prone to falling into, but they will only accept what is offered freely. They will only accept automony.

My parallel universe

Imagination is such an ordinary part of our everyday life, I was amazed when I found the wealth of information it could unlock when I discovered Silvia Hartmann’s Project Sanctuary. If you are interested in getting this whole New Energy thing this is pretty important, for mine. Check it out in my guest post over here.

Going with your own flow

Essentially, the difference with New Energy is that our ‘higher self’ (or insert your favourite term) is here too, in our conscious awareness. The task is to bring the human self and the higher self into alignment which is like living in flow, living without inner conflict and, a big one for me, knowing why.

How do you know what your higher self wants?

By noticing what you want. Your higher self makes its opinions known through your desires, through what you feel like doing. You’d think this would be easy, you’d think we would have been following the promptings of our higher selves all along – and in a way we have – but look at how the Old Energy world was set up. We were filled with fear, with religious obligations, piety and such, even celibacy, prone to making vows and commitments, walking a path of hard slog for long-term gain, making something of ourselves. There was not much room for noticing what we wanted to do now and freely pursuing that.

I had a conversation today about justifying being ’slack’. I have a friend who’s daughter will start school soon so she will have more time available. ‘But I still just want to work three days a week,’ she said, ‘I want to have a bit of time for doing whatever I want.’ And then she and everyone else launched into a list of justifications for doing what she wanted to make it sound morally supportable.

‘How about: You want to and you can?’ said I. Nobody really heard me. We have a very tenacious attachment of guilt to doing what we want. We still have a very strong work ethic, and ‘work’ in said ethic has to be a bit of a chore. If it’s something we enjoy it’s not considered work and not considered morally valuable.

If you want to become more aligned with your flow, practise these expressions and feel how they roll off the tongue:

Because I want to.  and

Because I don’t want to.

It’s most important not to overlook the full stop. It’s not about, ‘I don’t want to because of some external factor that makes it appropriate that I don’t do it,’ it starts and finishes with identifying what you feel like doing. If you get the hang of it you won’t have to come up with so many lies:

I’m busy that night.

 I’m feeling sick.

 My grandmother died. 

 My cat ate it.

Been there. Don’t go there any more. My daughters and I have been following the feel-like-it principle for many years and now know how it goes to say no to each other. When a proposal arises, we each look inside ourselves and respond with either,

‘I don’t seem to feel like doing that.’ or

 ‘Yes, that seems to appeal to me.’

. . . following our noses along the path of least resistance, the flow of our personal, unified intents.

Pond life

The way to make things happen in the New Energy is to make your choice and then see what arises, follow the feel-like-it principle, pursue any opportunities that seem to inspire you. You don’t physically make it happen by pushing against reality, you allow it to happen by being open to reality.

When I first chose to adopt a New Energy approach to life while reading a Kryon channel I entered into a bit of  crisis. It was as though I was overwhelmed by the weight of the importance I had attached to the Issues of Life,  and it took me a couple of months to crawl out from under them. When eventually I emerged I came armed with an important new life philosophy: It Doesn’t Matter.

Profound, I know.

It was as though life was a murky pond that I had hunkered down to fit under the surface of, and now I had stood up. I could see all those old, dreadfully important issues way down there welling around my ankles.

It starts with you. For me it starts with me. The only actual, perceptible reality is that I am, in this moment. It’s not even true to say I am here, because even ‘here’ is outside of my actual known reality, it’s like a stage set, it’s outside of my felt existence. And ‘now’ is the only actual known moment. Me now is the zero point, everything stems from this.

So ponds and issues and stage sets stem from me, I do not stem from them. This is a good way of understanding the difference between Old and New Energy, that Old was a game of being subject to our own creations and New is understanding that we create them and we can change them if we want.

Don’t swim if there’s no water

I visit a lot of blogs that espouse beliefs or techniques that I don’t agree with. There is only one reason I continue to visit them and it’s the most important reason of all in the Kingdom of Hilary (I’m Hilary, hi! Welcome to my Kingdom.), because I want to.

(Suddenly I am overflowing with the things I want to tell you and I don’t know where to start.  Already I have introduced a tangeant that merits some explanation, but I’ll make my original point first:)

All the world’s a supermarket of beliefs

and all the men and women merely shoppers.

And some of us are stacking the shelves, and some of us are manufacturing the products but you get my point. All of us still have to shop at the supermarket. So if someone else’s blog advice is contrary to mine, I don’t feel obliged to tell them why they are wrong and to persuade the whole world that it should listen to me. What anyone else does or chooses is none of my business and to try and affect an outcome in them is to try and interfere with their personal power. I don’t know if you have picked it up yet, but a central theme of Life in The New Energy is that everyone retains their autonomy, makes their own decisions, and Knows Their Own Truth. I simply put my product on the shelves and leave the readers to select what works for them. If someone else’s version of reality conflicts with mine, it will be appropriate for some shoppers while mine will work for others.

Here’s a word that a lot of my favourite bloggers use:

Striving.

Now I won’t  be having with any of that kind of behaviour around here! You will not find this word in the list of ingredients on any of my products. Put your glasses on and check closely. It won’t be there.

Think of it this way: Old Energy is running in water and New Energy is running on dry land. But even more, Old Energy is dragging a car with a rope and New Energy is getting in and driving it. Ooh, oooh, I know: Old Energy is like, you’ve just arrived in a new city and you have booked a hotel. Weighed under all your luggage you go and buy a map and look up the address and then you find some bus and train timetables and you work out your route and, still hauling aforementioned luggage, you start your journey. New Energy is calling a taxi and telling the driver where you want to go as (s)he loads your luggage into the boot of the car.

The last analagy is best because you don’t need to know how to get there. You make a choice and it comes to you. Yours only to watch and be amazed.

When I first aligned myself deliberately with New Energy I started seeing double or triple numbers everywhere – whenever I looked at a clock, on number plates of cars, whenever I looked at the cricket score on TV. Everyone who adopts this view of reality comes saying the same thing, ‘What’s with all these repeating numbers? What does it all mean?’ It means, ‘You have stepped into a reality where everything is not random, the events around you are direct responses to the choices you make.’  They always were, but we lived in a reality based on a belief that this was not the case and so that is how it behaved.

You can’t drive a car when you are out in front pulling it by a rope. You can’t swim on dry land. In New Energy you can’t get anywhere by striving. That would be like turning the air back into water. Striving is to compact your molecules, if you know what I mean, and try and push reality into the shape you choose through the solidity of your body. It’s confrontational, it’s the clash of opposites. Reality is not, actually, outside of us. . .

but I’m tired and I can see I keep on coming up with more and more controversial statements that will need explanation and that might have to be for another day.

Personal peace 101

When I mentioned on Tim Brownson’s blog that anyone can achieve personal peace right now he was sceptical. Actually sceptical is not the mot juste here. He didn’t believe me.

So it occurred to me that if I am prepared to make such a claim it’s no use to anyone if I keep it to myself. Better tell you how to achieve personal peace right now right now. Not later.

Peace is easy because it’s the absence of stuff. I might not be able to tell you how to achieve a state of joy right now, or inspiration, because those are positive states, those are things you bring in. (Actually I may be able tell you how to achieve them one day too – I’ll get back to you on that.) But peace is simply letting go and allowing it to be.

How do you let go?

That’s easy too. Easiest thing in the world. Imagine you are hanging onto a rope for dear life because you are suspended by it over some abyss. Leaving aside the concept of a terrifying drop and painful, if mercifully quick, death it’s much easier to let go of the rope than hang onto it. You loosen your muscles. You relax.

Okay, so you die if you choose personal peace in this example which may or may not be the aim of the exercise, but bear with me for a minute. Let’s move from there to my habit of holding up any aeroplane I may be in by the armrests. Same instinctual response to danger as in the example above but considerably less effective. A waste of energy, in fact. Even if the plane were doing somersaults at the time or plunging vertically towards the earth, I’m pretty sure my armrest manoeuvres would make no difference to the outcome. I am yet to hear a flight crew after a near miss congratulating its passengers and saying, ‘Thanks for your armrest assistance, guys. We could never have done it without you. ‘

How about supporting your favourite football team or tennis star? We attach ourselves to an outcome with our muscles just like holding onto a rope to prevent actual death, or holding up an aeroplane just in case. It’s essentially the same bodily response and peace is achieved in the same way. Relax the muscles. Of course supporting a sports star or team is something we choose to do so peace isn’t always the preferred option, but there are plenty of situations in our lives in which we habitually resort to the Aeroplane Armrest Response. Perhaps you have applied for a job that seems perfect for you or that will provide a desperately-needed income; perhaps you are in an audition for a gig that could launch the actualisation of all your dreams; maybe you are going through chemotherapy for cancer or are waiting for the results of an HIV test.

We think it’s inevitable that we would worry in these situations in spite of the fact that worrying, contracting our soul, will make no difference to the outcome, or may even be detrimental. I’m saying don’t clench. Don’t resist and don’t clench. Feel afraid openly. Don’t try to be calm, to look on the bright side, to be strong, to stay positive. Allow all the feelings you may naturally be experiencing, and allow them with no resistance. Make like flywire, as I said to Tim Brownson, don’t set up a solid bodily reflection of the outcome you do not want, allow the outcome and all its demons to pass through you, or even to stay and party for a while, unimpeded.

Breathing can help.

Now I know that if you are reading this you are probably breathing already but let me explain. I have had two babies via the route God intended and I was taught breathing exercises  to use in chidbirth during my first pregnancy. We learned to breathe more deeply and slowly than before to the extent that we could watch the second hand do a full circuit of the clock face as we took one breath in and let it slowly out again. And we did exercises of contracting the muscles in, say, one leg and having someone check the floppiness of all our other limbs. Because childbirth is the extreme contraction of certain muscles which are best left unaided by the rest. I mean you can’t facilitate the process of childbirth by holding up the armrests. You can hinder it.

It’s hard to take deep, slow breaths into your diaphram, through the middle and upper sections of your lungs at the same time as holding a resistance pattern in your body. It’s easy, on the other hand, to notice where you are holding resistance and to let it go if you are breathing consciously.

The resistance model of achievement.

We are used to being in a process of achieving the life we want, of becoming the person we want to be, and we are used to thinking we have to reject everything that exists that isn’t a part of that ideal in order to propel us there. In other words we set up patterns of resistance to what is in our bodies, we hold the aeroplane up by the armrests. 

In fact there is no logical reason for doing it this way. There is no need to reject our current state to allow something different to take its place. For most of us the absence of a state of peace is a habitual state of rejection of what is. What about allowing everything as it is? What about allowing yourself to be exactly who you are right now? You may be able to think of a better option but you don’t have to clench to get there. I can give you a clench-free method of getting there one of these days too. Start here, and be at peace in this place.

The answer in a nutshell.

Make like flywire, let it flow through. Don’t clench. Let it be. Let the aeroplane fly. It will anyway.