ALCHEMY WISDOM: Messages for the Journey
August 2007
Turn and Face the Ch-ch-changes
The last several months brought many changes and opportunities my way, and if you haven’t visited my new office yet, you’ll find it at Maple Leaf Professional Center on Lake City Way NE in Seattle. This is a wonderful little space in a house of other counselors and massage therapists. When I first walked in, I knew this would be the perfect place for shifting consciousness and creating new realities, and, indeed, the sessions there have been amazing! You can find a map and directions on my website. For those of you who visited my office in Dr. Bartlett’s suite in Shoreline, you might be surprised to learn that he moved to new office space in Lynnwood. This was a good move for all of us, though I’ll miss seeing Richard and his family (and his crazy terrier) as often as I used to!
Whenever you make a change, whether you move to a new city, a new house, a new job, or just rearrange the furniture in the living room, you have a huge opportunity to shift everything else in your life right along with it. To capitalize on this phenomenon, I also chose to move to a new house at the same time I moved my office. And to make the changes even more substantial, I chose to go to California for a month to housesit right after the move was finished. So over the past two months, I have not had access to the old patterns that I had established by habit in all my old places. What a freeing experience! So this week, I have returned from California with some much-coveted new patterns, along with a new-found understanding of some profound states of bliss and happiness, which should serve me well in my work and my life.
Conscious Intent
How can you accomplish this level of shifting by simply rearranging your furniture? It all begins with your intent to layer one shift on top of the other. I had a martial arts teacher who would tell us, “It’s not what you do, it’s what you think as you do it.” Many of us hurry through our day just trying to get all the things done that we have set out to do. But each thing we do is really an opportunity to shift and change. I began playing with this idea many years ago when I would practice my martial arts kata. Many fighters have questioned the value of practicing a set of pre-planned movements, claiming an attacker is never going to follow such a pattern. But the value of kata, or forms, is to practice the skills and movements involved in the art, and watching a well-trained martial artist perform a kata is like watching a dance. The added advantage of the repetitive form practice was that I was able to use it as a base on which to layer other things that I wanted to practice. So if I was feeling short on compassion that day, I would set my intent for the forms practice to encode compassion. Thus each movement was the practice of compassion. Or if I wanted to let go of grief, then each movement that day would be an act of transforming grief into a more positive emotion. For me, doing something very physical really helped encode the change, but if you don’t have a regular exercise plan, you can still use this technique with something as simple as washing your dishes or preparing your evening meal.
Steps to Layering a Shift
1. Decide on your base. Make this something that you easily accomplish every day, and something that you never fail at. If it something that you do daily, then you can repeat the layering process over time, which can be helpful. Of course, if you are planning on climbing Mount Everest this year, then by all means, layer every life-changing shift you can onto that trip!
2. Set your intent as the layer. Choose anything you wish you could change (about you, not someone else). Maybe you feel your creativity is blocked, and you’d like to access more of your creativity.
3. Measure the thing you want to change. Ask yourself how you will know if you got results. How does it feel now when you try to access creativity? What would you like it to feel like? Be conscious about this measurement process or you might have trouble noticing the differences later.
4. Once you’ve set your intent, just forget about it. Now do the activity that is your base action. You don’t have to hold your intent in your mind while you’re doing the activity.
5. Make a second measurement. What does the thing you wanted to change feel like now? How do you feel when you think about it? If you sit down and try to do something creative, how does it feel different? For this measurement, you get only results or information. There is never a “failure” involved. If the difference you notice isn’t everything you expected, or if you don’t notice a change at that moment, check again in few hours.
6. Repeat the process the next time you do the base activity. (And email your results to me!)
Making Changes Stick
Many clients who come to the office or who have a phone session with me report big differences in how they feel about the issue we shifted in their sessions. However, some people also report that things were better for awhile, but then they “reverted” back to the old pain or block or feeling. It is true that Matrix Energetics and other consciousness modalities can provide rapid and quick shifts, but many of our underlying beliefs and habits need to shift right along with it in order for the change to have a lasting effect. I used to believe that I would have to “wait and see” to determine if a technique really worked, but I was missing the fact that I was in charge of whether it worked and whether the results “lasted.” But this is not how we are indoctrinated as we grow up. In fact, current medical models rely on the fact that results “wear off,” so we will need another adjustment, another prescription, another session. I too had a deeply ingrained idea that I might get some relief, but unless I was able to notice that the shift was incredibly huge, the problem would come back, so I was hesitant to suggest to clients that they were really better now!
Two really cool experiences taught me otherwise. One was an amazing client who came to me to help her shift a recurring thought pattern. We made the shift, and she said “oh, that’s better now!” And I asked her, “Don’t you want to see how you feel tomorrow?” And she replied, “No. It’s gone, I don’t want it anymore. Life’s too short!” I was literally stunned with the ease and grace with which she made this shift. And I realized that it was only my limiting beliefs that said I need to struggle with the change, that something bigger than me was in charge of whether the change lasted or not. The second experience occurred after I had a session with Cyndi Dale, a truly gifted healer. While the session itself was astounding, the next day I only felt subtly different. My belief that a HUGE difference must be noticed in order to really fix my HUGE problem was going to limit me here, if I let it. I thought back to my martial arts training. In the style I studied, the smallest movement necessary to divert an incoming punch was the preferred method. After all, a small movement conserved your energy, and it didn’t matter if the attacker missed his target by a centimeter or a mile, he still missed. As a martial artist I had learned to move only a fraction of a centimeter to be successful. No wildly flung blocks were needed to stay safe. I suddenly realized that as the movement created by just a centimeter continued, the subtle difference would continue to move me substantially from where I was. Imagine we have two overlapping lines. We divert the top line a millimeter, but as the two lines continue out from that point, they end up very far apart. One of my previous mentors used to talk about “living into” a change, but I never understood what that meant. Now I see that when there is a subtle difference, you decide that the subtlety will create the desired change, and “live into it,” or continue to follow that path, rather than jumping back onto the previous path.
Repetition Has Value
However, it is important not to be discouraged if you see a pattern reoccurring that you thought had shifted. Because some of the underlying beliefs we hold can sabotage our efforts, repetition is not a bad thing as you are learning to hold the states you desire. My amazing client who declared “Life is too short” has had a lot of practice holding and maintaining her desired states. This is one reason that coaching is such a big part of my practice. Many of us need tools and techniques that we can practice in order to maintain shifts until we reach that point where we no longer need the repetition or tools. In my experience, it does not take long. I practiced holding big states of possibility many times every day until I got to the point of absolutely knowing that I can access that state without fail at any moment. Matrix Energetics and other consciousness modalities are like many other things: we must practice them to be able to make them a part of who we are. It is not a failure to have two or three or even ten sessions with a practitioner as you are learning to become the change you desire!
A Big Thank You
So much of my learning about holding and transitioning into states of peace and happiness occurred while I was staying in California, and I want send a big thank you to all of those people who participated in the Matrix Energetics study groups. I learn so much from your stories and your creativity, and I really value having each of you supporting this profound shift in healing through consciousness technologies. It is much more fun to play together in these new worlds than to pursue the knowledge by myself. In addition, I warmly thank each of you who scheduled private sessions with me while I was there. It was such an honor to work with you and learn from you and witness your amazing abilities to create new realities and possibilities.
As always, thanks so much for all your support!
Blessings,
Reggi Shelley
Alchemy Wisdom