Au Revoir, Emilie

Posted on April 14, 2014 by admin

I just heard the news of Emilie’s passing from my friend Deborah and I am feeling a deep sense of loss, for myself, and for all of us somanauts and explorers of the mystery of aliveness. Emilie was a mentor and friend and her deep support and encouragement of my own unfolding was incredibly powerful and important to me. She was unique, to say the least, and fearless and will be tremendously missed. This is from the Continuum web site and offers a brief glimpse into Emilie and her life’s work.

A Letter from Emilie Conrad, Continuum Founder

Although Continuum officially emerged in 1967, the work basically represents a lifetime of freeing myself from the confines of culture.

As a very young person, my intuition sensed that all life was imbued with a unifying spirit and somewhere within my body this spirit could be experienced. The impression I received from the world around me was, “God was elsewhere”.

For years, I had a recurring image of the movement of fish dissolving into the undulating waves of the ocean, becoming one inseparable reality. I felt that somewhere in a secret long ago, we were all swimming with the very same boundless wave movements of ocean fish, and if only I could discover how to get there, the “real” world would be revealed to me.

In 1953, I received a scholarship at the Katherine Dunham School in New York, where I steeped myself in the magical world of Haitian dance. A few years later, I arrived in Haiti, and through a series of fortunate events, I became involved in a newly formed folklore company as choreographer and lead dancer. It was there that I had an epiphany that would change the course of my life.

What I witnessed in the prayer rituals was the undulating movements I had been searching for all my life. Though I had seen these same movements at the Dunham School, it wasn’t until I was actually dancing in a Haitian hut and feeling myself drawn deeper into the primal call of the drums that my known self dissolved into the memory of those ancient rhythms. To this day, deep in my eyes, there still dances a timeless undulating resonance.

What I saw was how the undulating wave movements of the Haitian prayer became the connecting link to our spiritual bio-world. At last I saw the movement of ocean fish personified in human movement. I knew in that moment that these fluid undulating movements transcended time, place or culture and provided the crucial connection, linking organism to environment as an unbroken whole.

I returned from Haiti in 1960, and spent the next seven years exploring the universality of those undulating wave motions that so inspired me. These explorations eventually led to what is now known as Continuum. It’s important to know that each of us carries billions of years of an ongoing global process, a sequenced continuum of life on Earth, which is taking place within the galaxy and human alike.

We are basically fluid beings that have arrived on land. All living processes owe their lineage to the movement of water. Our implicate pre-existent memory beginning with the first cell, lies in the mysterious deep, quietly undulating, circulating, nourishing this aquatic being on its mission to planet earth. God is not elsewhere, but is moving through our cells and in every part of us with its undulating message. The fluid presence in our bodies is our fundamental environment; we are the moving water brought to land.

I would like to suggest that the far-reaching consequences of having a body are not just to serve as a conveyance, not just to propagate, but that we are composed of a mysterious substance that has no defined boundary. Without this substance we could not exist as humans. We may, at some time in the near future, learn to replace our pulsating wet body parts with metallic ones, in which case, we will become something quite different.

It was the vision of a universal human that beckoned me. I had no map to follow except my strong urge to experience our essential bio-lineage and my certainty that our existences were fed far beyond our cultural moorings. It is my belief that we carry in our cells, in our tissues, in the very throb of our existence an underlying flow that urges, inspires, flares our nostrils and beats our heart. This encompassing atmosphere of love has its own destiny — perhaps using humans as its messengers, this love has arrived on Earth.

Meditation: The Toroidal Field of the Heart

Posted on February 12, 2014 by admin

“Centered attention on the movement and activity of the heart, including stillness, is the foundation of biodynamic (craniosacral) practice, as I teach it.” Michael J. Shea.

In a previous post we introduced the torus as one of the most fundamental shapes in nature. Now we will begin to explore variations on a meditation centered on the toroidal field of energy emanating from and pouring into the human heart, and the ever present stillness that underlies all movement.

This will help begin the awakening of the light body, which we will then integrate with the sound (energy) body in the form of vibration, and the physical or structural body in the form of flesh, bones, water, organs and cells, so the three bodies can function as a whole, in stillness. Stabilizing the light body energy is the next and crucial step in the process of transforming human consciousness.

Step 1: Find a comfortable position for the meditation. Any sitting posture will do. Feel tall, wide and soft. Relax and drop everything into the breath. Release the breath and let it flow as effortlessly as possible.

Step 2: Bring your attention to your heart. The physical heart will do, although you can also use the heart chakra or the space just behind the physical heart to rest your awareness. Getting in the ballpark is good enough. Feel the energy here. It may be warm, vibrant, expansive, fluid. If the heart feels dark, heavy or unconsciousness, imagine a place in nature, or an experience in your life when your heart felt naturally soft and open. Nurture this feeling. Invite gratitude and loving kindness to arise. Feel that the heart is your center, your true home.

3. Now invite your heart energy to feel that is sits at the center of a torus with openings up to the heavens and down into the earth. Imagine your heart energy in the form of love, travels down through the bottom opening, through your root chakra, (the muladhara,) into the earth, dropping and spreading as it unites with all the layers and levels of Mother Earth. Allow your love to embrace all. Feel rooted, grounded and stable. find the stillness of Mother Earth and rest here.

4. Now allow the energies of Mother Earth, in the form of love and nurturing, to rise up into the center of the torus, through your root chakra, to the heart. feel the heart as a lens focusing the earths energies and send these throughout the body circulating around the toroidal field.

5. Now allow your heart to open to Father Sky, the heavens, sending love and well-being up to the moon, sun, stars, galaxies and onward, embracing the whole cosmos. Feel open, spacious and light. Find the heavenly stillness and rest there. Then receive the return of love from the heavenly realms pouring into your heart. Feel your heart full of love and send this on to your organs, cells, fluids and structures. Return to your heart and rest in the stillness there. Feel light, grounded, stable, centered, ready for the day.

Proof of Heaven

Posted on January 17, 2013 by admin

There are many fascinating stories arising on the front lines of the awakening process, but Eban Alexander’s has to be one of the wilder ones. Great book! Terrifying to the rationalists!

Eban is a neurosurgeon. He earned his M.D. at Duke University in 1980, continued his residency there as well as at Mass General Hospital and Harvard, went on to explore neuroendocrinology and cerebrovascular surgery and spent fifteen years on the faculty of Harvard Medical school as an associate professor of surgery with a specialization in neurosurgery. As a practicing surgeon, he operated on countless patients, many with serious brain injuries and aliments. He is a scientist par excellence. ” I adored that simplicity-the absolute honesty and cleanness of science. I respected that it left no room for fantasy or for sloppy thinking. If a fact could be established as tangible and trustworthy, it was acceptted. If not, then it was rejected.”

And, in November of 2008, he suddenly came down with a rare brain illness.

If you are familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” you might guess where this is going. But Eben’s story is even more mind-boggling. He developed a case of bacterial meningitis and was in a coma for seven days. His neocortex shut down totally. His attending physicians eventually told the family that he was never coming back, there had been too much trauma from the infection, which did not seem to respond to the various anti-biotics the medical team administered. But he did eventually awaken, rather suddenly, from the coma. And the story he returned with was shattering; shattering at least to his ‘sceptical-logical’ scientific mind.

In his out-of body travels he discovers the ‘underworld’, the ‘gate way’ and the ‘core’ and the absolute impossibility to describe his experiences in words or relate them to our earth bound ‘ordinary’ reality. “I know my biology, and while I am not a physicist, I’m no slouch at that, either. I know the difference between fantasy and reality, and I know that the experiences I am struggling to give you the vaguest, most completely unsatisfactory of, was the single most real experience of my life.”

“To say that there is still a chasm between our current scientific understanding of the universe and the truth as I saw it is a considerable understatement.” And, “perhaps the best way of conveying that part of that experience is to say I had a foretaste of another, larger kind of knowledge: one I believe human beings will be able to access in ever larger numbers in the future.”

“I saw the abundance of life throughout the countless universes, including some whose intelligence was advanced far beyond humanity. I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly.”

Finally, “It is my belief that we are now facing a crucial time in our existence. We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including its left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science—the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life—doesn’t contradict what I learned up there. But far too many people believe, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialistic world view, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

They are mistaken…. The unconditional love and acceptance that I experienced on my journey is the single most important discovery I have ever made, or will ever make, and as hard as I know it’s going to be to unpack the other lessons I learned while there, I also know in my heart that sharing this basic message—-one so simple that most children readily accept it—is the most important task I have.”