Breathing Meditation class

In this class, Taylor Ellwood will teach you Taoist breathing techniques that
you can use for meditation and for achieving closer connection to your body.
Knowing how to breath correctly can help improve your health. You will learn:

• The Fusion of the Five Elements breathing and how you can use it to help you work with negative emotions and release them
• The Taoist Water breathing technique which can help you dissolve internal blockages
• How to use your breathing to attune yourself to your body’s consciousness.

When: July 9th at 1pm at New Awakenings Bookstore
404 East Main Street, Battle Ground, WA 98604
RSVP: 360-687-7817

Space/Time Magic Course

Space and time are two elements of our lives that we live with and use every day. In the classic models of magic, these elements are not overtly included. In this class, I will show you how to integrate both of these elements into your magical work. You will learn why its important to factor time and space into your magical workings, as well as how the inclusion of these elements can radically change your understanding of magic. You will also learn:

• How movement and space can be used to construct sacred space.
• How to manifest multiple possibilities using sigils.
• How to create a sigil web that maps your life in terms of space and time.
• How to work with your future and past selves.
• How to work with alternate selves and learn from them.
• Free e-book version of Space/Time Magic included! 

Space and Time are two elements that we can’t ignore if we want to really understand magic. This class will help you take your magic to the next level.

To RSVP, go here

Something we’ve both said to him is that it’s ok for him to move on. And we both mean it, because we don’t want him to suffer. But we also still feel attachment (quite naturally) and so we’re also in this process of letting go of him. We don’t want to let go of our memories of him, but we want to honor his passage and need to transition. So letting go for us is recognizing that need to let him move on and honor that passage without clinging to him and making him stay longer just because of us.

I’ve been doing some meditation and breath work on this as I’ve been letting go of my attachments to Caspian. I’ll admit that I’ve only known him for 8 months, since we first moved him up here, but in that time I’ve come to love him and consider him one of my furkids. Letting go has involved releasing that energetic connection to him, in part to give him some healing energy to aide in his passing, and in part to give myself closure to his place in my life. With each breath I’ve allowed myself to grieve and to release, To honor and to know.

In magical work it is urged that a person doesn’t become attached to their results. This is wisely done, because when we get attached, we can become obsessive about what we desire. Learning to let go can mean that you also let go of your need to have control and recognize that it can be just as powerful to step back.

I’m letting go of Caspian but I’m not forgetting him or his significance to my life. He’ll always be one of my cats, no matter where he goes…just as I’ll always be one of his humans. But by letting go of him in this moment, I can help him pass with peace.

The dream work is proving using for the internal work that I’m continuing to do. One possible avenue that I’m goign to explore is purposely planting a suggestion or focus for the dream, that wouldn’t focus just on internal issues, but could even be used as a way to connect with the consciousness of the body. I’ll keep people updated with what I find.

I’ll post further reports as I continue to integrate more steps in, but it always fascinates me to see how even doing one step of a process can produce changes, provided you’re consistent about doing it. I think that consistency is what makes anything you do effective. You can be a really powerful magician, but if you don’t exercise the magical muscle, it won’t mean as much as the person who diligently practices and follows through.

Book Review: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

This book provides what I would consider to be the best practices of lucid dreaming and dream practice. The author doesn’t focus on the psychology of dreams, though he does provide some insights on what dreams can reveal about issues you’re working on. Instead the focus of this book is on how the techniques can be used to help you release attachment to those issues and achieve a state of connection with the universe, without being drawn back to samsaric existence. It’s a very good book to read, but an even better one to do the practices. I’ve started doing them and already noticed some positive results. I’d recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about Dzogchen and for anyone who wants to use dream yoga for spiritual and physical well being. You can purchase it at Amazon (Affiliate link) or Powells (Affiliate link)

Book Review: Taoist Yoga by Charles Luk

I found this book to be an insightful read into Taoist internal alchemy, however I’d also say that anyone reading it needs to have at least a couple years experience to even begin to get the concepts discussed. What I found was that the book provided greater clarity about some of the different exercises I’d already done, but I also realized that if I didn’t already have experience with those exercises, I probably wouldn’t get what the author was discussing. It’s a useful book to have for an intermediate to advanced Taoist meditation practitioner. 5 out 5

Amazon link

Powells link

Recently I decided to try out my first paratheatre ritual. I’ve recently been doing some internal work around intimacy and my issues with being intimate and also being in relationships (friendship or otherwise) where there wasn’t much intimacy. I thought it might be useful to embody intimacy or at least try to, using paratheatre. I felt that integrating my body fully into the embodiment was essential for really communicating with my subconscious about intimacy and the issues surrounding it.

I felt very vulnerable when I invoked intimacy into my state of no-form and began to move. In a sense I felt like a child, innocent and unsure of myself, experiencing something for myself that I wasn’t really certain of. Intimacy for me involved opening up and so I initially started out very shielded in how I positioned my arms and legs and gradually I began to loosen them and from that loosened my body up further, gradually allowing myself to feel a state of what I would consider to be gentle warmth. Sometimes I would hug myself or gently touch my shoulder or leg. I wasn’t striving to be sensual, and I didn’t feel that way. But I did feel intimate with myself in a manner that invited myself to be gentle and loving.

As I experienced this feeling of intimacy I paid attention to thoughts, feelings, and whatever else came to my experience that would help me communicate with my issues around intimacy. I learned quite a bit about how I sometimes make it hard to accept what someone wants to give, but also how much I’ve picked relationships with people (friends and lovers) that didn’t necessarily invite intimacy into my life.

When I was ready, I put myself back into no-form and grounded the sensation and feeling of intimacy…but after the working I also felt more comfortable when my partner offered it to me, and also was more aware of what has informed my tendency to fantasize about intimacy. I’ll definitely be using paratheatre in the future for some of my internal work, and I have to say that learning about Laban really did help with integrating paratheatre into my magical practice.

Some patterns of behavior are good and some are dysfunctional. One of the ways you can recognize a pattern of behavior and analyze is to look at the overall history of your life for patterns of behavior you’ve acted out. For example, one pattern of behavior I had until the mid twenties was a tendency to try and date people I knew would reject me. What those people got out of that pattern I can’t speak to, but for me it was based on a root belief of abandonment and figuring it was better to know I’d be rejected then take an actual risk, and in an odd way this behavior makes sense, but it doesn’t lead to a lot of happiness.

One of the best ways to discover patterns in your life that you don’t like is to identify what you regret. The emotion of regret usually indicates that you’ve done something you’d like to change, but spending some time looking at the circumstance(s) can help you identify the pattern of behavior. Once you’ve identified it, you need to trace it back to the root experience. It’s in that experience that the behavior pattern was first formed and its in that experience that it needs to be resolved, because the pattern of behavior is based off the reasoning of that initial pattern. At the same time its useful to also revisit other iterations of the pattern and find resolution for those moments as well. By finding resolution you can conclusively change the behavior. To find resolution, its useful to do a pathworking meditation where you revisit the moments where the pattern of behavior showed up and then changed what happened with new behavior that you want to act on.

We are only at the whims of our respective behaviors if we choose to do nothing about them. Once we consciously recognize a behavior that is unhealthy, it is our responsibility to change that behavior instead of continuing to act it out. And once it has changed, life does seem to get better and simpler.

I recognized this particular pattern of behavior recently when I started examining how I’ve used imagination to provide a feeling of control as it pertains to my sexual identity. And I’ve realized that this issue goes to the core of my sexual identity, back to when I was raped, because I had no control then. It’s replicated itself in the relationships I’ve been in, but until now I never fully acknowledged how much my tendency to fantasize has come about as a direct result of my initial experience, and a desire to have control as a safety mechanism to protect me from having such an experience again.

Yet no fantasy can really replace life or the experience of it…and there’s much less control in the experience of life, and under the right circumstances much less need as well for such control. In fact, it seems to me that the need for control is a result of the lack of self-control a person has (something which is his/her own responsibility), though it can also arise from a situation where a person was made to feel s/he had no control. As I continue to do my internal work and take responsibility for the different dysfunctions of my own life, I find that I need less control of anything else, because I have control of my responses and as long as I have that, then control of anything else ceases to matter. Or rather, more to the point, by taking control of my choices and actions, I can choose how to handle situations and be grounded in that, regardless of how things turn out. In the end the only control you do have is that which you exert over your actions, and your ability to consequently navigate through situations by understanding what you can choose to contribute or not to them.

What do you think?

Book Review: Wonders of the Natural Mind by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

I highly recommend this book as an excellent introduction to the Bon tradition of Tibet. In this book the author explains what the Bon tradition is and how it differs from Buddhist beliefs and practices. The author explores in depth the foundational beliefs and practices of the Bon tradition while also explaining how they can be meaningfully applied to the life of the practitioner. What I like is that its also clear that this tradition has its own perspective on emptiness, which I found useful for getting a new perspective on it. Overall, I recommend this book for anyone serious about doing internal work.

Powells affiliate link

Amazon affiliate link

Instead of repressing the monkey mind, which is ultimately a futile effort, it’s better to work with it. And by that I mean it’s better to start a dialogue with it. When it brings up a random issue, ask it why it brought up and start exploring it mentally. You’ll usually find that it leads you to a source of stress and concern in your life. So you can continue to try and ignore that source of stress or you can work with the monkey mind to resolve the source of stress. Mind you, the monkey mind will raise lots of questions and concerns, but that’s why it’s there. It’s a filter, an agitator, and it won’t go away until you’ve addressed its concerns.

When I work with my monkey mind, I use it as a detector of issues that are bothering me. Sometimes its helped me discover some really deep issues, such as my fear of emptiness and most recently a tendency to fantasize in order to fulfill intimacy needs. And that’s what makes the monkey mind so useful. It challenges me to be aware of my issues instead of trying to ignore them.  I like that because then I can proactively work on those issues via meditation instead of letting them build up and be acted out in my life. So the monkey mind is actually your friend, not your enemy. Make friends with it and find out what it can teach you.

But you really can’t separate the body from meditation, because you are rooting yourself in the experience of changing your physiology to accomplish an altered state of consciousness. This is why breath plays such a role in meditation. Breath is the key to accessing the body and bringing it into a state of physiological receptivity for an altered state of consciousness. By focusing awareness on the breath a person becomes aware of the body and can slow it down enough to enter into an altered state. Or alternately a person can do some kind of excitatory activity to achieve the same level of awareness. In either case, the body is the foundational core by which meditation is achieved. It’s worth remembering that if you want to make meditation a part of your tool set.