“The true mathematical science is that which measureth the invisible lines and immortal beams which can pass through clod and turf, hill and dale. It was for this reason, it was accounted by all ancient priests the chiefest science; for it gave them power both in their words and works.”
John Dee ~ (English mathematician, court astronomer for Elizabeth I, teacher, Astrologer and alchemist)
Over the last 18 months I’ve felt drawn to ancient megalithic sites and civilisations. As part of my research for a trilogy of psychological/esoteric/metaphysical thrillers I’ve gone down some very deep and convoluted rabbit holes!
Having not long devoured Freddy Silva’s amazing book: The Divine Blueprint (Temples, power Places and the Global Plan to Shape the Human Soul), I decided I would visit the sacred site of Avebury in Wiltshire.
I was already in awe of ancient temples across the world (many of which are on my bucket list), but it has given me a newfound respect for the wisdom and knowledge of our ancient ancestors; how they incorporated cosmic alignments, mathematics and sacred geometry into stone circles, avenues and temples of stone.
Far from being inferior to ‘modern’ humans, Megalithic and ancient civilisations translated the mechanics of the cosmos into their constructions.
William Stukeley’s sketch of the Cove facing from the opposite direction to my photograph above. The barn is no longer there…
Freddy Silva expertly elucidates on what he believes are the seven principles which are shared by the vast majority of the sacred sites across the globe; a blend of forces of nature which have been engineered to bring people into intimate contact with the unseen worlds, where the sacred is distinguished from the profane on these hallowed grounds.
The seven principles of sacred space: water, electromagnetics, sacred measure, stone, sacred geometry, orientation and the human key. The book goes into much more detail.
I wholeheartedly recommend reading The Divine Blueprint, it’s absolutely mind-blowing in its revelations and information – all written in the author’s knowledgeable and friendly voice.
A fascinating text written on the walls of the temple of Edfu in Egypt states: ‘we’ll keep building temples until humans recognise the temple within themselves.’
I wanted to interact with the landscape temple complex of Avebury and experience for myself what Freddy Silva maintains is the ultimate purpose of any temple, or as he sometimes refers to as ‘mansions of the gods’: to interact with the consciousness of the individual, a correspondence between the land, temple and its influence on a population, on the elevation of the human spirit born of direct experience.
Through this subtle communication between the earth, temple and human beings, a gradual reinvigoration can occur of a lost link between the material and the spiritual, heightening our responsibility to the environment and bringing us more into sync with natural forces. The energies imparted can empower visitors, and the results and experiences one can have correspond to the level of intent and commitment they bring into the premises.
I definitely felt this during my trip to Avebury…
“Temples are repositories of power, designed by master craftsmen possessed of great spirituality and humility. And just as they are capable of altering the individual, so the electromagnetic individual can disrupt the temple, and creation myths and traditions warn of the dangers inherent in this two-way force.”
Freddy Silva (The Divine Blueprint)
I recall it was early September, and I travelled with my son. It was certainly a memorable day. We were fortunate it was the last glorious day of summer!
One of the largest stones we encountered. Will is 6ft 2in, so you can gauge the height.
Avebury doesn’t get as much exposure as its nearby relative, the bigger, bolder and more famous Stonehenge; but it’s a part of the combined UNESCO World Heritage Site and can still claim the title of the largest megalithic stone circle in the world.
Wiltshire is a somewhat mythical and mystical county, with its hundreds of mounds, giant’s graves, long barrows, dolmens, stone circles and conical mounds, which have for the most part miraculously survived the religious and cultural upheavals of the centuries – not to mention the more recent phenomena of crop circles (a whole other blog post for sure!).
The main concentration of the ancient phenomena is around Avebury and its surrounding temples and mounds, covering an area of roughly sixty square miles, forming one of the most respected and ritualised landscape temples ever known.
Another fascinating fact is that Avebury’s navel location lies on a latitude of 4/7 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, with Delphi at 3/7 and Karnak at 2/7. The ‘navel’ is where the original giant menhir once stood, marking the global geodetic significance of Avebury. A connection with Egypt cannot be ignored.
“All the stones of our whole Temple were called Ambres, even by our Phoenician founders, but this (the centre stone) particularly. The Egyptians by that name still called theirs obelisks.”
William Stukeley (antiquarian, physician and Anglican clergyman)
A freemason of his day, antiquarian and physician William Stukeley spent many years on-site at Avebury in the 1720’s, making drawings and documenting the terrible desecration and destruction he witnessed up to 1743, when farmers Griffin and Green removed the stones of The Sanctuary. There were two processional stone avenues that connected to Avebury Henge, covering a distance of three miles, each consisting of some 200 stones, of which sadly, only 32 remain.
The much depleted West Kennet stone avenue that William Stukeley documented. This was a sacred pathway to enter the site.
The Egyptian Connection
It’s hard to ignore the linguistic, astronomical alignment and temple building principles between ancient Egypt and Celtic Britain.
“Studies into the mathematical and linguistic origins of ancient British temples suggest a heavy Egyptian presence. The Celtic version of the obelisk is the menhir (upright stone), which represents the omphalos, the temple in its simplest form. Some of the largest examples weigh 400 tons, yet their simplicity makes them no less powerful than their appearance might give.
“In the northern Celtic lands their local names reveal Egyptian roots: they were called amberics, and one Cornish monolith was known as men amber (‘stone obelisk’ or ‘stone of the sun’). The connection appears at Stonehenge, whose approach is now the town of Amesbury: ames meaning ‘a place of the sun’ and bury ‘an enclosure’; its earlier name ambres-bury derives from the Egyptian amber or obelisk. Thus, the site of Stonehenge was known as an ‘enclosure of obelisks, a temple of the sun”.
“The Egyptian Karnak and its French namesake Carnac come from Karn Ac, ‘a seat or enclosure of great fire or light’. From this is derived carn and cairn in the Celtic language, the generic names for an earthen or stone enclosure, and Cernunnos, the horned fertility god of nature otherwise known as Pan. Such associations not only suggest a common Egyptian heredity, but also connect the sites with light, wisdom and fecundity.”
Freddy Silva (The Divine Blueprint)
Clava Cairns near Inverness and Culloden Moor, taken in January 2023 during a visit to my son. It was a welcome day away from the hospital. We were the first to visit the site after a heavy snowfall the night before. The snow seemed to coat the land in silence. It was so peaceful. The guide explained that when the site was originally built there were no trees, it was just open fields. The trees were planted by a the local land owner between 1870-71. It is believed that this is the stone circle that gave Diana Gabaldon inspiration for the standing stones featured in Outlander.
Silbury Hill
Before visiting Avebury we decided to stop a mile or so up the road to take a peek at the mysterious landscape mound of Silbury Hill. Silbury is the largest prehistoric manmade mound in Europe, named after the Phoenician sil meaning ‘light’. It’s now fenced off so people are discouraged from climbing it.
Freddy Silva gives some background to how Silbury Hill came about:
“Legend states that around 2650 BC local shamans received information from a group of spirit beings named Watchers, who instructed them to erect a six-stepped conical mound as an insurance policy for future times, when humanity would lose its connection to the divine. As word spread of the sacred construction project to be undertaken, merchants of Light came from all over Europe and as far as Phoenicia to take part in the building of this temple. Traditional historians scoffed at this idea until a shaft of dug to the center of the mound revealed a multitude of soils brought in from as far away as the Middle East, and established the date of construction at c.2600 BC.
“Exactly at the same time in Egypt, the temple seers at Saqqara were guided to build a six-stepped pyramid by a group of creator gods named Shining Ones, the equivalent to the Watchers, and the pyramid was subsequently erected by Imhotep, one of the architects of the gods.”
As you can see, William Stukeley’s sketch from 1723 depicts Silbury Hill appearing taller and more steep than my photograph above.
The Avebury complex was successfully maintained for around 3000 years before it slowly began to decline due to changing circumstances. It’s impressive to think that Neolithic peoples planned and engineered a ritual landscape of some sixty square miles – no mean feat considering their ‘supposed’ lack of modern technology!
Avebury is aligned to each solstice and equinox, with the site being positioned on a pattern of the eight-fold Celtic wheel of life, death and renewal.
But it seems that only in Britain would we build a village and a pub in the middle of such sacred land!
Fossils and seashells have been found across the undulating downs of the area, hinting at some prehistoric sea that existed there many thousands of years ago.
A great on the ground video from Lambourne Photography:
Avebury is said to be part of a ‘pyramid of light’ that covers a large part of the British Isles, established in prehistoric times to protect the land and its sacred places.
Freddy Silva used satellite images to link Avebury into a triangle (what he calls a Celtic three-step), with the Isle of Arran, a complex of six stone circles in the Moor of Machaire, one of the most important temple complexes in Scotland. Arran is the site of giant’s graves and plentiful eye witness accounts of luminous flying orbs of light. It has been measured as a high energy hotspot with a natural radiation count of 33 percent above the background.
The third site on triangle is the hill temple complex of Kealkill in southwest Ireland, consisting of a stone circle, a radial stone cairn and two attendant standing stones. These three points form an equilateral triangle, connecting all three sites over a distance of 960 miles.
Interestingly, the ancient priesthood of the area were noted to be exceptionally tall and with elongated skulls. It immediately makes me think of the Paracas skulls in Peru, (there are some fascinating videos by Brian Foerester on these), linked genetically to those discovered around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The Druids then became custodians of the ancient Celtic sites, who carried on with rituals and ceremonies according to the temple tradition, where positions of the Moon and Sun reinforced the relationship between people-land-cosmos and the core values of the temple. This is how cultures were sustained through the mists of time.
Ley lines and energy grids
As the relationship between the temple and its underlying telluric forces was reinforced from season to season it served a two-way purpose of energising the place of power, which meant that the temple became a mediating influence on the energy grid of the earth.
In 1966 John Mitchell made an amazing discovery as he was visiting sacred sites throughout southern England. He happened to be on top of Glastonbury Tor, with its distinctive tower dedicated to St. Michael, all that remains of a collapsed church after an earthquake in 1275.
From the top he saw a mirror image across the landscape known as the Barrowbridge Mump, which is also crowned by a ruined church consecrated to the same archangel. He noticed a kind of communication between these identical hills, with identical churches on the same north eastern trajectory.
As he journeyed back to Avebury, Mitchell found that many of the mounds, hills and churches all dedicated to St. Michael (or his earthly counterpart St. George), were linked by a straight line, known in geodetic studies as a ley.
“One of the great surviving traditions states that Avebury itself is a great serpent temple marking the geodetic centre of a line of consciousness stretching from Land’s End in Cornwall (not far from Michael’s Mount) to the opposite coast where it meets the North Sea at Hopton. “
John Mitchell
This idea was later proven through the geodetic calculations of Robert Forrest, and followed up by the late highly respected dowser Hamish Miller and investigative researcher Paul Broadhurst, who confirmed that entwined around the straight pole of the Michael Ley Line runs a current of telluric energy, which indeed flows through dozens of sacred locations associated with this powerful archangel.
Interestingly, the founder of the Vesica Institute, Dr. Robert J. Gilbert, has talked about how we have now entered the Michaelic Age, marking a time of spiritual growth and evolution as well as technological progress, due to last for approximately 300 years.
When Miller and Broadhurst reached the 5000 year old site of Avebury they discovered a second telluric current coiling itself around this invisible axis. This became known as the Mary line, which, like the Michael line, ran through sanctuaries dedicated to St. Mary or her mother St. Anne. They found that the Michael line carries a positive masculine charge, and the Mary line carries a negative or feminine charge.
The human energy field which is shaped like a torus (an etheric giant donut) extends around the body which also carries these polarities.
Our DNA is a superconductor, an incredible 10 billion miles of compressed spirals of information code that conducts electricity, light, waves and photons, so that our very physical blueprint is electromagnetic in nature. Our DNA uploads, downloads and stores data! No wonder sacred sites interact with us in such a profound way.
The Michael and Mary Ley lines run parallel and intertwine at certain nodes, along a spine of sites aligned to the path of the rising sun on the Celtic solar festival of Beltane. These ley lines extend around the earth, reaching the centre of the megalithic sacred site some 6000 miles away at Tiwanaku in Bolivia, and then it reaches around to the holiest shrine on Hainan Island, the sacred mountain of Wuzhi.
An interesting observation about the Vitruvian Man and sacred geometry at Tiwanaku:
Mitchell, Miller and Broadhurst tapped into the living memory of the land, just as the Aboriginal First Nations people have done for millennia in Australia.
During a mystical experience in the 1920s the naturalist Alfred Watkins was horseback riding in Hereford when he stopped to take in the view high up on hill, where the land revealed to him a network of lines, “standing out like glowing wires all over the surface of the country, intersecting at the sites of churches, old stones and other spots of traditional sanctity.”
“Snakes whichsoever move along the Earth. Which are in sky and in heaven… which are the arrows of sorcerers.
~ Yajurveda, c. 9000 BC
This network of tracks criss-crossing the country became known as Harepaths in the Saxon times, or ‘spirit roads’. Two of these famous tracks can still be walked today, both crossing to the east of Avebury: the Ridgeway track and the Icknield Way (this runs through my neighbouring town, Princes Risborough in the Chiltern Hills) and passes through the heart of the stone circle itself.
There’s a lot more detail about all the different ley lines and their locations in Freddy’s book as mentioned at the start, but needless to say, they all seem to connect sacred sites around the world, in what Freddy refers to as a ‘world-wide web of sacred power places acting as permanent reference points of an archaic library safeguarding knowledge for the long-term benefit of the human race, where ordinary people were able to plug into the consciousness of a grid whose reach lies far beyond the confines of this terrestrial sphere.’
“The Earth is linked to the sun by a network of magnetic portals which open every eight minutes.”
~ NASA
The Avebury circle
As you approach Avebury the high embankments of the henge fully concealed the stones, so that the inner sanctum was hidden from view. The ancients viewed the temple as a foundation of life, the personification of cosmic forces in perfect equilibrium. If the temple was desecrated by impure energies the umbilical connection between earth and heaven is lost, leading to the disintegration of the tribe it once nourished.
Small stone markers have been placed where the original sarsen stones once stood.
A description of Avebury from Freddy Silva’s book:
“The outer stone circle of Avebury – or what religious fanatics have left of it – once comprised a perimeter boundary of 99 stones (as with Tiwanaku), with a diameter of 1,100 feet; its closest comparison is the Ring of Brogar in the Isles of Orkney, which was erected at the same time, suggesting a link between the two locations. Within this ring of stones are two smaller circles of 27 and 29 stones, resembling two eggs in a frying pan, each respectively calibrated to the sidereal and synodic lunar cycles.”
It’s hard to describe the sensations invoked by walking among these strong and silent stone sentinels, laid out in specific patterns with devotional and divine intention. They have been integral to the landscape for millennia, witnessing aeons of history and peoples. I felt an energy rush like never before; a connection to the past, a connection to the land, a connection to the firmament and, most importantly, a connection to my heart.
Temple builders from Egypt to England regarded temple spaces a living organisms that sleep at night and awake at dawn. Readings taken at Avebury highlight this phenomenon. The surge in geomagnetic energy when the stones are imbued with solar energy point to Avebury being circles of deliberately aligned magnets.
Freddy describes this energetic warp and weft in his book Portals:
“It works like this: every morning, the Earth is subjected to a rise in the solar wind, which intensifies the planet’s geomagnetic field. At night, this field weakens, then picks up at dawn and the cycle repeats. At this point the geomagnetic field interacts with telluric currents flowing along the surface of the Earth, intensifying the current, which in turn is drawn to nearby sacred sites. These invisible rivers travel better along soil with a high content of metal and water, and probably quartz.”
He goes on to point out that the ancient builders were expressing the same principles at work in a modern atomic particle collider (hello CERN), in which airborne ions are steered in one direction.
I sat in the ‘Devil’s Chair’ for a bit, a seat-like depression in the huge southern circle entrance stone. I had the most intense and exquisite tingling sensation along my spine, which lasted for hours. It’s as if the earth energies being transmitted through the stone turbo charged my own electro-magnetic field. The historic pejorative nickname given by ignorant individuals belies its actual healing properties.
The ‘Devil’s Chair’ is hewn out from the stone on the left hand side. I think sheep as well as humans enjoy the energy of the place!
William Stukeley’s drawing of the Devil’s Chair from the same view, 301 years earlier… Notice how many more trees there were in 1723.
Will and I had a lovely lunch in a café close to the manor and also a relaxing saunter around the village. There is something magical about Avebury that stays with you. It’s like a portal in time, one that served the spiritual needs of our ancestors, that still brings comfort and wonder to modern man, a place to take a step out of hectic schedules to a time when we were more in-tune with mother earth and father sky.
The Rollright stone circle
After an unbelievably stressful start to the year I needed a reboot, so I took some time to visit the Rollright stone circle in Oxfordshire during spring, after reading about it in The Divine Blueprint. It’s much smaller than Stonehenge and Avebury, little known and therefore less touristy, but it certainly packs an energetic punch, with the bonus of amazing views and walks. There’s also a wonderful garden centre a few minutes up the road that has very tasty sustenance for walkers and explorers of Rollright.
Again I experienced the tingling sensation strongly up my back for a considerable period of time; even after leaving the site. I’ve never felt this anywhere except in Avebury and at Rollright.
The convergence of ley lines in a triangulation pattern was discovered at Rollright by the late master dowser Dennis Wheatley. Freddy Silva also writes about the concentric magnetic energy currents with the circumference of the King’s Men in this article about the subtle energy of sacred places.
Rollright, March 2025
A fascinating talk about megalithic Britain (covering Stonehenge, Avebury and Rollright), by Dennis Wheatley’s daughter Maria, an expert in geodetic energies herself:
We owe respect and gratitude to our long distant forbears, these megalithic master builders and those who later protected and cared for such sacred sites. These ancient geomancers possessed technology and skill we would struggle to replicate today, and their reach was truly global; connecting many, many ancient sites and civilisations around the world.
They imprint a long lost wisdom about expanding consciousness, living in harmony, existing in balance with the natural world and each other. You could call it a ‘divine download’…
The entrance to Avebury, a short walk from the visitor centre and car park.
I do not believe such sites were arbitrarily selected and created with stone age tools, but rather, were the work of advanced beings that are connected by higher knowledge and energy grids across the earth. This suggests to me that there is much more going in the ancient history of mankind, that leads one back into pre-history, beyond the antediluvian age.
But that is an epic tale for another day!
“Pyramids, stone circles, menhirs, dolmens, sanctuaries and mounds. Regardless of their shape and size, they all were built by faceless experts from forgotten ages to the same end: to act as mirrors of the heavens so that ordinary men and women may be transformed into gods.”
“Light and Sound are interwoven in the Language of Life.”
Elle Nicolai
I recently finished one of the most impactful and important books I am ever likely to read (and no doubt refer back to many times): The Book of 528 Prosperity Key of Love by Dr. Leonard Horowitz.
The knowledge contained in its pages will continue to be ingested and imbibed over time and repetition. This weighty book covers many aspects of life, existence and society at large; it is both mystical, mathematical and scientific. I will do my best to extrapolate the key points that I found helpful to evolve in my life and be of service to my valued readers.
Personally I have found immersing myself in the tones of 528Hz to be incredibly beneficial. I can literally feel my cells and spirit responding. It speaks to the eternal part of my being, showing me the sacred value of life. I feel truly alive in these beautiful sustaining sounds. It has helped not only me, but a beloved son in recovering from a recent trauma.
It really doesn’t matter if you understand the complex maths in the book or certain concepts, because all that really matters are the experiential effects.
“If LOVE is the Universal Healer, it makes sense that it would be spiritual energy carried universally on a special broadcasting ‘channel’ or wave frequency. This is just like your radio receiver that uses digital electromagnetic technology to tune into a ‘clear-channel’. 528Hz appears to carry a very special and very powerful signal for universal construction and reconstruction.
This ‘good vibration’ identified as the ‘miracle frequency’ at the heart of the ancient solfeggio, is, likewise, at the heart of the sound and light spectrums.”
Dr. Leonard Horowitz (The Book of 528: Prosperity Key of Love)
Musical Creationism
Dr. Horowitz’s aim in writing this manual for physical, mental, emotional and spiritual healing; a masterpiece of love, is to elucidate how the universe operates musically/mathematically, of which 528Hz is the central ‘string’ or tuning. He asserts that, “528 revelations can provide a peek into universal construction to help you reconstruct your life, enhance your life, enhance your health, co-create a better world, and celebrate peace and freedom.”
528 Hertz Frequency is:
Linked to the heart of everything.
Playing at the heart of the original Solfeggio musical scale.
Fundamental to Pi, Phi, the Golden Mean and all sacred geometry including circles, squares, arches and architecture.
The greenish-yellow of your heart chakra.
Required for space/time measurements.
Crucial to the mile with 5280 feet.
Needed to determine the speed of light; constructive to E=mc2 since energy, mass and light all depend on it.
Paramount to water structuring in the form of a tetrahedron
Central to Genesis command, “Let there be Light.”
Broadcast by the Sun and Jupiter (considered benefic planets in Vedic (Sidereal) astrology
Resonating the heart of rainbows and snowflakes
Celebrated throughout the world in the pigment chlorophyll – the reason grass is green. (The human eye can differentiate more shades of green than any other colour).
Structuring your haemoglobin and adding LOVE to prana, “the breath of life,” oxygen.
Is the Miracle note of the universe, and much more…
Just as the Renaissance heralded one of the greatest cultural transformations in Western culture, I believe 528Hz is one of the most powerful creative sounds and light frequencies that could bring mankind out of its modern technological and AI obsessed stupor.
528Hz is the spiritual panacea for the madness that pervades our world, where the masses are spiritually suppressed and mind-controlled by mainstream media that promotes barbarism, political and corporate agendas, polarisation, self-destruction and self-loathing.
The magical power of 528Hz:
With so much at stake on a planetary and global scale, as well as in our everyday lives, we can elevate our consciousness and our collective futures with the frequency of love. We are all dancing in a cosmic sound and light show!
528Hz generates more love in our cells and hearts, to overcome depression, fear, greed and recession with the higher vibrational resonance of love, joy, faith and courage to manifest abundance in all ways. All feelings and emotions are vibrations; energies or E-motions, what Dr. Horowitz calls “e” motions-electrons, communicating vibrational energy characterising numbers or cycles per second, called Hertz.
A musical-mathematical matrix:
Nikola Tesla famously said: “If humanity would only know the power of the 3s, 6s, 9s it would be a completely different universe.” What a tragedy that his research was confiscated after his death. I believe his lab contents would have freed humanity from the yoke of greedy energy companies that extort high profits and pollute the planet.
We tend to think of language as a verbal and written communication, but this book explores the creator’s language, which fundamentally is musical (wave like and vibrational) and mathematical, (fractal and geometric), the very warp and weft of the universe.
Polymath Robert Edward Grant has a rather beautiful philosophy; that music is the geometry you can hear and nature is the geometry you can see. It is deeply embedded in our everyday lives in ways we take for granted, but when we look a little deeper into ‘reality’ we can ascertain a more profound meaning.
Image by Aaron Burden Unsplash
Language is a creative technology. Dr. Horowitz explores alphanumerics (a code to transpose letters into numbers) Pythagorean numerology and gematria.
As can be seen in sacred geometry all natural structures are math based. The carbon-6 organic chemistry ring is a good example; a snowflake or honeycomb denotes an ordered structuring.
The number eight relays special meaning in that it is the ‘infinity sign’ (used by some companies in their logo, Such as the Virgin Media brand) it represents the creator, and the structure of the universe (a double donut or double toroid, a whole other subject based on physicist Nassim Haramein’s work).
Eight is the number for oxygen in the Periodic Table, and element number 8 carries the core energy (electron) for the miracle of life and hydrogen (element number 1) donates the electron yielding the math of ‘9’.
NASA have discovered that space is full of water, with ice crystals deep in space, and water in rocks on Mars.
“Across the universe, numbers are expressed elementally, supporting ‘hydrosonic’ creationism – that is, the constructive value of frequency vibrations moving through water that transmit energy, language, or mathematical intelligence to direct the flow and actual manifestation of matter.”
Dr. Leonard Horowitz (Book of 528)
There will be more on H2O later!
A scaled universe
Research from space/time physicist Dr. Harmut Muller is presented to support the importance of 528 and its Pythagorean reduction (5+2+8= 15 and 1+5=6) to ‘6’. A lot of the math by Marko Rodin and Victor Showell in chapter three was over my head, but essentially Muller’s findings (like those of Tesla), are that the universe is scaled, much in the same way as musical octaves are scaled.
Muller posits that at the core of a mathematically scaled universe is a ‘standing gravitational wave’, (SGW) like a wave of water and/or sustaining energy. All physical matter in space is required to phase-lock with gravitational forces, and this adherence is called ‘entrainment’.
Image by Jeremy Bishop Unsplash
He summarises that the water-filled universe is vibrating in whole number ratios, with the frequency, 528Hz, strongly and centrally represented within this musical matrix.
When seen in a Cymagraph 528Hz frequency vibrating in water produces waves and nodes flowing into a 36 pointed hydrosonic star, demonstrating a 360-degree circle.
Some musical history…
I’ve taken some excerpts from the book which explains music’s original intention, how it has evolved and been manipulated:
“There are two types of scales commonly referenced in music: 1) diatonic, and 2) chromatic. The diatonic scale is a simple whole note scale missing the half-tones, sharps and flats. You can think of this simpler scale as a piano keyboard without any black keys. Each ‘whole note’ represents a pitch whose frequency is a whole number. Alternatively, the chromatic scale grants greater ‘shades’ of music from the addition of half-tones, the black keys. Half tones reflect fractions of the whole notes , or ½ intervals between the whole numbers.
Image by Andrik Langfield Unsplash
Historically, ‘a diatonic scale with a chromatically alterable b/b-flat was first described by Hucbald of St. Amand’s treatise Musica, who adopted the tetrachord,’ D,E,F and G, and constructed the rest of the system following the model of the Greek Greater and Lesser Perfect Systems. These were the first steps in forging the modern ‘theoretical tradition’ of music.
“Acoustic vibrations project colours of light, based on their math; especially through water – a liquid crystal superconductor of sound and light.
The ancient sacred languages, including Hebrew, Sanskrit, Aramaic and Babylonian, touched people’s hearts more than their heads, and relayed intuitively or instinctively greater meanings, feelings and emotions, providing the technology for optimal communication and communion.”
“This spiritual capacity of sound to create or destroy relationships, between God and man, and interpersonally between people, was honoured by the Greek Greater Perfect System that was based on ancient Hebrew. This music was made using seven overlapping scales, or octaves species, called harmoniai, characterised by the pleasing harmony of pure tones, broadcasting the vibrations of whole numbers, within the species.
In other words, scale patterns , reflecting Fibonacci math patterns, using different pitches, were called ‘octave species,’ and were harmonically pleasing to your ears and uplifting to your heart or spirit.
Cosmic laws, the movement of plants, the best music, ways to tell time, and the LOVE in your heart, are all related to 528 Hz frequency. ”
The nefarious origins of standard tuning (A=440Hz) and the Devil’s Tone
It’s time to shed light on the evil origins of the manipulation of western music. The Rockefeller Foundation first tried to persuade the The American Foundation of Musicians to adopt A=440Hz standard tuning by providing a grant. It had limited success at that time, and was not at all accepted in Europe.
However, according to Horowitz, the British-German-American Cartel arrangement influenced the British Standards Institute (BSI), as well as European musicians to accept this ‘standardisation’ in 1939 by Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, (who was backed by the Third Reich which was financially backed by Rockefeller-Rothschild bankers).
Psychoacoustic manipulation was linked to the Rothschild-Rockefeller war investments in Germany, Britain and the USA, to establish the Western World’s standard musical tuning of A=440Hz.
When music is tuned to A=440Hz the F# note causes the dissonance between 528/741, known by musicologists as the ‘Devil’s Tone’.
Dr. Leonard Horowitz explains the Devil’s Tone and the meaning behind The Beatle’s Yellow Submarine film :
This is what Dr. Horowitz has to say about standard tuning:
“According to preliminary research, analysis, and professional discussions by Walton, Koehler, Reid, et al., on the web, A=440Hz frequency music conflicts with human energy centres (i.e., chakras) from the heart to the base of the spine. Alternatively, chakras above the heart are stimulated. Theoretically, the vibration stimulates ego and left-brain function, suppressing the “heart-mind,” intuition and creative inspiration.”
In essence, this cartel, rooted in the world of investment banking, has advanced a covert operation to control populations most loudly and profitably. Music bioenergetically affects your body chemistry, psychoneuroimmunology, and health. Your body is now vibrating musically, audibly and subliminally, according to an institutionally imposed frequency in harmony with aggression and in dissonance with LOVE.”
It’s time to break free from cultural indoctrination and explore more healing ‘pitches’ that promote psychosocial harmony, health, and ecstatic listening experiences. Is there an orchestra brave enough to put on a concert where A above middle C is tuned to A=444Hz and therefore in-tune with the beneficial 528Hz frequency?
I’m sure audiences would offer feedback if it was made clear what performing artists were aiming to achieve in finding a more holistic and pleasing experience for the concert goer.
The Science of Cymatics
Cymatics proves the power of sound to generate structures and affect physical matter.
Dr. Horowitz cites Ernst Chladni as being the first person to observe the shapes and forms created by sound vibrations moving electrons to form and shape matter, including the human body.
Chladni was born in 1756, and was both a musician and physicist, who laid the foundations for the discipline within physics called acoustics – the science of sound. He published his work, Discoveries Concerning the Theory of music in 1787, showing how sounds could generate visible structures and geometric forms. His work has been built upon by Peter Petterson and acoustic physicist John Stuart Reid.
“Sound gives birth to light.”
John Stuart Reid
A fascinating talk with John Stuart Reid on cymatics and vibrational healing, hosted by the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy:
“The spherical nature of audible sound: According to acoustic physics researcher, John Stuart Reid, all sounds that human’s hear are spherical in nature. He teaches that the term ‘sound wave’ gives a false impression that sound wiggles its way through air when in fact all audible sounds propagate spherically, which he terms ‘sound bubbles’. The leading edge of the bubble oscillates radially, and it is this expansion and contraction of the bubble that is the sound.”
Nassim Haramein
Holy Water – the pioneering work of Dr. Masaru Emoto
Water is an incredible substance, a substance integral to life that precipitates life; that carries memory and is conscious.
New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Masaru Emoto evidenced through his experiments that water responds to positive prayers differently from harsh words, yielding intelligent messages viewable at 20,000 times magnification.
Pure structured water vibrates in 528Hz, as does the entire hydrated universe, including snowflakes, which are hexagonally shaped because of the tetrahedron-shaped atomic structure of water – H2O- bearing 3 atoms.
Our bodies are made up of around 75 percent water.
“There is nothing like water. In its gaseous state, it defies the laws of gravity. So vibrating water with the sound of 528 is sure to produce a miraculous blessing, especially when coupled with faithful heart-felt loving intention and prayer.”
Dr. Leonard Horowitz
528Hz for Physical and Emotional Healing
Listening to the solfeggio tones and especially 528Hz is beneficial for all-round health. There are two types of sound healing: psycho-acoustic (listening to music) and more profoundly, vibro-acoustic (using tuning forks and Tibetan singing bowls) to effect the health of DNA, cells and emotional issues. Humming also produces this healing, see the recent book The Humming Effect by Johnathan Goldman.
How to Tune Your Guitar to Play in 528Hz Frequency of Love:
528 in the Arts
Aristotle wrote of virtuous love in Physics, the book that purportedly started scientific enquiry in the 3rd Century B.C. The first letters of the title – Philia, (Φιλία) is Greek for love. The word in Greek uses the symbol for Phi Φ, a mathematical constant (1.618 rounded to 3 decimals), characterising nature and God as love. Plato, Vitruvius, da Vinci and subsequent Pythagorean mystery school disciples shared his respect for phi, which was routinely used in physics and the arts to create ratios and proportions in music and architecture consistent with observations in nature.
Knowing that 528Hz is the Miracle note, ‘MI’ of the original solfeggio scale, could explain why Haydn’s 96th symphony (9+6=15 1+5=6) was given the sobriquet ‘the Miracle Symphony’. The classical composers knew about the original solfeggio.
There is a possibly apocryphal story that claims that as Haydn was conducting his 96th symphony a large crystal chandelier fell from the ceiling into the audience. Miraculously, no-one was supposedly hurt. The musical Phantom of the Opera, also features this crashing chandelier, and the demonic ‘music of the night’, as opposed to 528 ‘Music of the Light’.
432 Hz and 528 Hz EXPLAINED: The Most Powerful Frequencies in The Universe:
The DNA – Music Connection
DNA, the language of genetics is tied to music, the language of the universe. A fascinating study of bioacoustics by Susumu Ohno:
The ancient Solfeggio musical scale and the Perfect Circle of Sound
According to Dr Horowitz, “You are a digital bio-holographic precipitation, crystallization, miraculous manifestation of Divine LOVE vibrations coming out of water.”
This video gives an interesting and historical take on the original solfeggio scale and the benefits of each frequency:
Healing with sound
I love Jonathan Goldman’s equation regarding sound healing:
FREQUENCY + INTENTION = HEALING and also VIBRATION + VISUALISATION = MANIFESTATION
Image by Julio Lopez Unsplash
Robert Edward Grant’s work is also showing a more elevated path for humanity. He has worked on musical pitch in relation to sacred geometry and the musical wave of time:
As Dr. Horowitz says, now we know about the miracle tone of 528Hz and these healing solfeggio frequencies we have a choice; either remain in dissonance or vibe to a new cosmic song!
“For all healing, mental or material, is attuning each atom of the body, each reflex of the brain forces, to the awareness of the divine that lies within each atom, each cell of the body.”
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous lifestyle, Or to take nutrition against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.
Okay, I know I’ve taken liberties with the bard, but only to poetically make a point. And the point boils down to this: the quality of our life is directly related to our health, well-being and emotional states. The fact is, none of us are getting out of here alive; but surely it’s worth enjoying our allotted time on this amazing planet with optimal health and happiness as far as possible?
Image by Robert Collins on Unsplash
We can only live life to the full and reach our potential when we have the vim, vigour and vitality to pursue the work, past-times and relationships that give us fulfilment, meaning and enjoyment.
There is a traditional wisdom which tells us, a person with health has many goals, but the person without health has only one.
I also love these Chinese sayings about health: ‘If you wish to live long, take a walk after the meal’, and ‘the disease comes through the mouth. We have to pay attention to what we eat. To be healthy, we have to eat healthy and clean food’.
This may sound like a strange question, but if your body was a car, what car would it be? Would you want it to have sleek bodywork, shiny chrome and a finely tuned engine?
Image by Nate Johnson on Unsplash
How often would you service it?
Just like a car our body requires fuel, and the quality of the fuel, (our nutrition), and general care, (our lifestyle), determines to a large extent how long it will last and how well it performs. But unlike a car, our body cannot be replaced, only certain ‘parts’.
Your body is a miracle, a one of a kind factory original with unique specifications, never to be repeated. It is the sacred vehicle that powers the soul through physical experience.
Many of us would not think twice about regularly servicing our vehicle to make sure it is legal and safe to drive. We risk our own lives and others if we don’t. We give it an overhaul when it has seen a few miles to combat wear and tear and clear out stale spark plugs and change the oil.
Image by Dan Gold on Unsplash
How about clearing your arteries? How about reviving, replenishing and resetting your gut microbiome? If you clean an engine why not lift brain fog, why not put a bounce back in your step?
Would you let your car sit in the driveway gathering dust, or leave the lights on permanently to run the battery down? Perhaps you’d just ignore a puncture or faulty circuit?
Yet that is exactly what many of us do with our health!
We can struggle to take the time to recharge batteries, put in the best oil to lubricate the engine and keep it running in tip-top condition. We forget to top up water levels. We assume that swollen achy joints and stiffening limbs, digestive issues and the like can fixed by a few pills from the doctor. From what I’ve seen, the majority of drugs supress the body’s natural healing ability and produce unwanted side effects.
Remember Hippocrates, who stated: “Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.” He also said that natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.
And when the body has enough potent nutrition it’s remarkable what it can do. We underestimate the power of the mind, but the placebo effect proves our mind can be a great ally in our overall wellbeing.
Image by Kike Vega on Unsplash
There is much we can do to avoid such scenarios, and in the process lessen the burden on the NHS, which is in a politically induced crisis. Our beloved NHS spends a million pounds per hour in the fight against Type 2 Diabetes, a largely preventable disease.
If you have diabetes you are four times more likely to develop Alzheimers according to Dr. David Perlmutter. Many of these issues were highlighted in his Broken Brain series.
Western diets are designed for taste buds, convenience and profit, not for health.
You’ve likely heard the phrase you are what you eat, but you are what you assimilate or absorb. If you have leaky gut or are in insulin resistance, the chances are you won’t be absorbing anything like the nutrients your body could from fruit and vegetables.
Just like a dimmer switch, certain foods can switch genes on or off, down regulate or up regulate.
Metabolic dysfunction, the process behind obesity, diabetes, immune disorders, heart disease, and digestive issues, is surely the biggest threat to global health other than climate change.
Refined carbohydrates and processed/packaged foods contain excess sugar, additives, salt and trans-fats.
Typical Western diets mean we are overfed yet undernourished, literally digging an early grave with our teeth. Food companies (much like the tobacco industry) engineer their processed products to be addictive. They don’t care about whether their ‘products’ are made from real, nourishing food, only that it makes them a profit.
When the wrong foods upset the delicate balance of our gut microbiome and cause dysbiosis, the bad bacteria get a foothold and we find ourselves craving refined carbs; breads, pasta, cakes, cookies, milk chocolate, sugar and salt.
In my not too distant past when I worked in the corporate world, I often worked late and was tired, and many a night couldn’t be bothered to cook fresh ingredients just for myself.
A typical day for a professional might be:
Corn flakes or croissant for breakfast, or maybe just a coffee, followed by a sandwich, crisps, muffin, maybe an apple and sugary drink for lunch, and if tired after a long day at work (probably sitting for long periods), cook an oven ready meal with 1 or 2 vegetables. Some might be also adding alcohol with every evening meal.
It’s not a recipe for long term health and wellbeing.
WHY SUPPLEMENT?
Supermarkets irradiate their fruit and veg so that it lasts longer. An organic carrot purchased from a farm shop will probably go droopy quicker than one bought in a supermarket, but it will likely contain more nutrition. Food is picked too early before ripening and kept in cold storage for months at a time for commercial considerations.
An apple in cold storage will lose 50% of its nutrients for every month that it’s stored. Fruits are treated with hormones to make them bigger. Our food chain is being altered for the worse; more sugar is added, fibre is removed, and there are less polyphenols. There is no concern for nutrient density. How corn was grown in the wild one thousand years ago is very different from today.
Image by Christophe Maartens on Unsplash
Nowadays we have to contend with extra starch. Don’t even get me started on HFCS (high fructose corn syrup)!!
Farming methods have changed radically in just a hundred years in line with population growth. Fallow fields are a thing of the past, and over-farming, soil depletion, decline in bio-diversity and the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides is robbing our food of vital minerals and vitamins.
Image by Adrian Infernus on Unsplash
In 2014 a study by Sheffield University predicted that, on average, UK farm soils were capable of only 100 more harvests. This is sobering news.
Even healthy diets are less effective than they were just a decade ago due to intensive agriculture. You might have to eat 5-10 carrots to get the same nutrition that you would have got from one a decade ago.
It’s hardly surprising that illness is so prevalent with statistics like these: an average of 34.4% of the population aged 15 years and over do not consume any fruits or vegetables in a day. Only 51.4% of the general population eat 1-4 portions of fruit and vegetables in a day.
Five portions of fruit and veg a day is good for you, but 10 is much better and could prevent up to 7.8 million premature deaths worldwide every year, say scientists.
The findings of the study led by Imperial College London may dismay the two in three adults who struggle to manage three or four portions – perhaps some tomatoes in a sandwich at lunchtime, an apple and a few spoonfuls of peas at dinner.
However, a daily intake of even 200g, or two and a half standard 80g portions, is associated with a 16% reduced risk of heart disease, an 18% reduced risk of stroke, a 13% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, 4% reduced risk of cancer and a 15% reduction in the risk of premature death.
But the study suggests we should be piling up platefuls of vegetables and raiding the fruit bowl every day if we want the best chance of avoiding chronic diseases or an early death.
Epigenetics: The science of Human Empowerment
Epigenetics is the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. Our genetic blueprint is fixed for life, but how our blueprint manifests is not.
The body’s superstructure is constantly under revision based on how you live your life; what’s known as gene expression.
Epi comes from the Greek meaning above, and according to Dr. Bruce Lipton, this fits the scientific discovery that there is control above the genes. We may have inherited certain genes from our parents, but epigenetics shows us that it’s environmental signals that control biology.
This means that we are not victims, we can influence the way our genes express themselves.
Our genes are physical blueprints to make proteins, the primal element of life, and there are around 150,000 proteins in the human body. ‘Protein’ hails from the Latin for ‘primary particle’.
When we are born our metabolic systems are in perfect balance, but diet, lifestyle and environment affect our genes on a daily basis. Dr. Bruce Lipton asserts that our genes do not control our biology, but that WE control our genes with consciousness and life experiences.
Image by Krists Luhaers on Unsplash
This is good news, as it means we can affect what signals reach our genes by our mindset and lifestyle.
Genetics loads the gun – a person’s inherited predisposition to specific diseases or conditions – but diet and lifestyle determines if the trigger is pulled.
What we eat and drink, how we exercise, the air we breathe, the stress we endure are all things within our control to a large degree.
Earth’s 3 billion year old genetic legacy is present inside each of us, here and now. Much of the original ‘genetic stuff’ is still propagating inside the cells of your body. DNA is responsive to everything that happens in our lives.
The Hadza Tribe of Tanzania are the last known hunter gatherer society left on earth, and because their diet is varied and natural they have incredibly diverse and healthy microbiomes. A hunter gatherer lifestyle is not possible in western society, but we can aim to consume more diverse unprocessed foods and consider lifestyle factors.
Each of us is incredibly fortunate that our bodies can run automatically with almost total perfection for decades at a time. But unless we participate in our own well-being, sending conscious messages to our own genes, by our intentions and actions, running on automatic isn’t enough.
Radical well-being requires conscious choices. When you make the right choices your genes will co-operate with whatever you want. We are the captain of the ship of our own genetic expression.
Image by Darius Bashar on Unsplash
Let’s face it, none of us are getting out of here alive, but the goal is to live as old and young as possible. It’s about quality of life.
Elite Health can be achieved by being proactive in our attitude and habits relating to our well-being. As an elite health coach my aim to help people reach their optimal health; where age does not dictate ability.
Nutrition is a major aspect of epigenetics. As we age our nutritional needs change, our bodies don’t absorb vitamin B12 as well, we are often deficient in Magnesium, dubbed the ‘Master Mineral’ because it is required in over 300 biochemical reactions in the body.
Our cardiovascular system starts to deteriorate at around age 25, stiffening by 1% cumulatively every year, and over the years our blood vessels produce less and less Nitric Oxide so our arteries gather plaque. Then our circulation gets sluggish and we don’t get all the oxygen and nutrients we should.
Gut health has been little understood until recently, and it’s all about eating to feed the microbiome, your constantly changing gut garden.
A wonderful interview with Dr. David Perlmutter that discusses how diet affects your DNA:
Advanced nutraceuticals by Synergy Worldwide
I was fortunate to learn about Synergy’s supplements a few years ago, and they have had a massively positive impact on my life. I say that without a hint of hyperbole – they have been literally life changing.
I have never come across a company that is so dedicated to efficacy, quality, sustainability and research on the most pressing health challenges of our time. They display integrity at every level of their operation. Synergy Worldwide are the only nutritional company on the Forbes 100 list of America’s most trustworthy companies.
Synergy and their parent company, Nature’s Sunshine Products, have garnered quite a few accolades:
Forbes: “Top 100 Best Companies” where the company is described as being a ‘model of openness and integrity’. (It is the only supplement company to be listed).
Nutritional Outlook: “Number 1 Nutraceutical Manufacturer in the U.S.”
Business Ethics: “4th Most Ethical Company”
Wall Street Journal: “6th Best Direct Selling Opportunity”
Dunn & Bradstreet: 8th in “Top 100 Hottest Growing Businesses”
Named as one of the healthiest companies by Interactive health and given The Healthiest Company Award for 8 years in a row. (A USA reward).
Proargi9+ for the 4th year running has been listed in the Physician’s Desk Reference where it states that it is ‘the highest quality l’arginine supplement in the world’
Synergy produce their nutraceuticals at the multi-million dollar facility The Hughes Center for Research and Innovation, one of the most advanced manufacturing, testing and nutritional science laboratories in the world, staffed by a full-time team of 33 doctors, scientists and microbiologists.
They are the only nutritional company that I know of who regularly conduct human clinical trials. Their supplements are 100 percent botanical: pure, potent and proven.
I decided that my health was worth the investment in efficacious supplementation with products I can trust.
The Purify Programme can be purchased in the UK and from 27 countries around the world. Here is the Purify website link.
The power of greens!
Synergy’s latest launch is a green powerhouse – PRO 360 Wholefood Performance Greens.
I’ve been taking the new PRO 360 Wholefood Performance Greens for a few weeks weeks. I’ve noticed my fatigue has reduced, and my levels of concentration and productivity feel noticeably improved. My mood feels calmer and more centred, and my tendency to overeat has been significantly curbed. I’m pleased about this as although I eat well I do tend to eat quickly and therefore discover that I’ve eaten too much too late…
I find for me, the best time to take my PRO 360 Wholefood Performance Greens is half an hour before lunch. It sets me up for the afternoon.
A single scoop mixed with 300-500 ml of water (according to taste) provides two full servings of vegetables. The impressive ingredient list in PRO 360 is for health not taste, but to my surprise it’s the best tasting green drink I’ve ever consumed.
PRO 360 contains wholefood fibre, insoluble fibre to aid digestion, upcycled fruit fibre and polyphenols. Traditional changes in diet can take 30-60 days to make a difference in how you feel, but Synergy wanted people to feel immediate results.
They have therefore also added clinically evaluated levels of 4 different adaptogens and nootropics. The doses in PRO 360 are equivalent to those in clinical trials: 400mg of Schisandra to have a mood boosting effect, as well as reducing fatigue and a feeling of satiety. The effect of the adaptogens lasts for up to eight hours.
It has half the daily serving of Choline, which is critically important for nerve function and energy. Overall PRO 360 Wholefood Performance Greens has been formulated to improve metabolic health, help with weight management and to make you feel more relaxed and balanced. The effect of taking the drink regularly has cumulative benefits.
This is easy and convenient nutrition that will will the gaps in your nutritional intake. It can also be blended into a smoothie to ensure nutrition for younger, fussy eaters.
It can be a bit overwhelming to know where to start with your diet, so I would recommend taking my online health check questionnaire, which will give you a snapshot of your health and highlight the most important areas to focus on.
The main factors involved in wellbeing are diet, exercise, sleep and emotional/mental states. Mind, body and spirit are inseparable when it comes to our health…
Image by David Clode on Unsplash
Diet is a good place to start, and as Dr David R Hawkins used to say, it is the higher Self with a capital S that reminds us to take our vitamins!
“The road to health is paved with good intestines!”
“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”
Victor Hugo
On my morning school runs with my daughters during the recent cold snap, the Buckinghamshire countryside was resplendent like an Impressionist winter painting.
Some days the frozen ground was white and glittering with sun lit frost. A piercing blue sky lifted our melancholy thoughts at how cold and early it was, the multitude of roadworks and congestion we faced, and what looming exams my daughter had not done enough revision for.
Other days a low lying mist revealed an-other worldly beauty, a layered spectral effect, and the hidden blurry sun seemed like it would never burn it away.
I pointed out the scenic delights to my daughters, who glanced up from their digital worlds to briefly agree, before resuming in monosyllabic conversation. Being teenagers, they tend to find mornings most disagreeable!
As I drove home across country to avoid huge traffic tailbacks I saw a Red kite sitting on a hefty low branch which hung out as I drove under it. He sat serene and regal, seemingly resigned to the fact that he would not see accurately through the white haze from on high.
Thanks to many years of dedicated conservation work, Red kites are now ubiquitous across the Chilterns and we often see them soaring over our back garden.
They truly are the kings of the skies in this area.
The romantic in me began to accumulate words and thoughts, as the ghostly and sublime scenery captured my imagination. They eventually coalesced into a short poem…
It reminded me that even in perceived difficult conditions there is always something to be grateful for.
Thankfully winter will soon give way to spring, but in the growing power of winter’s limited light, I felt compelled to appreciate its role in the seasons of life, as well as nature.
Winter’s Light
Winter’s cruel chill permeates air and bone
Hibernation in Nature’s DNA, tugging at souls
A warm sanctuary emanates from home,
But in a shrivelled landscape life still knows
The secret sparks hidden within; take a breath,
There can be no new life before a death.
Winter’s light bathes the bleak land in bliss,
A comforting, gentle magnificence
Soft rays illuminate hearts out of darkness,
Sustaining hope, uplifting strained sentience
O’ wondrous star, casting a shimmering veil
A mysterious, misty pastel of beauty pale.
My soul craves your parsimonious warmth,
Though scant in hours spent, before
Dipping below a horizon to transform
Day to night; a presence I adore,
Devoid of summer’s searing harshness,
A glaring paradox of penury in largesse.
Beguiling winter’s light falls short of need,
A touch too far from desire’s reach,
Tantalising a burgeoning diaspora of seed
A spiritual force of patience to teach
You radiate your ethereal impermanence,
Precious succour, imbibed from winter’s firmament.
Virginia Burges
“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. “
Dr. Francis Crick ~ Nobel prize-winning co-discoverer of the DNA double helix.
Happy New Year! I sincerely hope 2023 will be filled with hope, health, abundance and joy for you.
I haven’t written in almost a year, I spent most of the last twelve months in crisis management mode, one of the toughest of my life in many ways. Thankfully, among the relentless traumatic personal challenges there were a few uplifting moments. I had to dig deep. My energy tanks were laid to waste.
I have a painted wooden plaque on my office wall that reads: Every day may not be good, but there’s good in every day. I find it’s just as relevant for weeks, months and years!
But like negotiating any deep valley that feels interminably arduous; seemingly beyond your physical, emotional and mental capabilities and endurance, if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep climbing, no matter how slowly, you will eventually clear the valley and reach a low level peak.
When you reach more and more accessible peaks, they eventually lead to a sky-touching peak. Your personal Everest. It’s what you do when you find yourself in a valley that determines how high the next peaks could be.
I like to think I’m entering what Dr. Benjamin Hardy terms a ‘post-traumatic growth’ state.
I thought I would kick-start my blog this year with a profound subject that has implications for all of us: the origin and meaning of life.
I hear you, am I really going there?!
I suspect ‘evolution’ will prove to be a thorny issue, but that’s no reason to shy away from it. This subject is a multi-disciplinary minefield; encompassing anthropology, archaeology, cosmology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, psychology, theology and quantum mechanics.
I suspect it will engender more questions than it answers, but asking the right questions and opening minds to a bigger discussion is a good starting point.
I never believed the literal story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. To me, its power is allegorical. And it really annoyed me that Eve got the blame for Man’s fall from Grace!
However, Darwin’s theory of evolutionnever sat right with me either. What did I know, a mere slip of a girl being taught science… I must admit though, many of the boys in our school displayed definite ape-like qualities…
It just seems so random (if you’ll excuse the pun) that human beings and indeed – all of life– is the result of a chance event that happened millennia ago, as conventional science suggests. Dr. Francis Crick surmised that the eloquence of life’s building blocks has to be the result of something more than a lucky quirk of nature.
Not believing in either explanation left a gaping hole in my mind as to the origins of Homo sapiens, aka Anatomical Modern Humans (AMHs). Scientists broadly agree that we originated around 200-300 thousand years ago. Cro-Magnon Man was the previous term. There are no discernible genetic differences between AMH’s and humans alive today.
After reading on the subject I’ve come to a personal subjective conclusion that Creation and Evolution are likely one and the same thing. All of nature, (including us), is unfolding in a myriad of glorious mysterious ways.
Homo sapiens are the only species who can consciously evolve. We can regulate our biology and have awareness (to varying degrees) of our emotional states and intuition. This knowledge alone empowers us to make positive changes and healthy progress in our lives. But, as I can attest, knowing and doing are two different things.
We can choose how to react in a given moment, and have the capacity to access deep states of intuition; something animals do instinctively through external environmental triggers.
We already have some of the answers needed to solve many global issues, but short-term selfish interests and lack of international co-operation have so far impeded the rapid progress needed.
The world is changing faster than we have been culturally conditioned to accept – in just one generation – and the challenges are set to exponentially increase if we don’t get a handle on the damage we are doing to the environment. No one alive has witnessed the cyclic convergence of climate, economy, conflict, geopolitics and health to the extent that we are currently experiencing. No one can dispute that we are living in a time of extremes.
As Einstein so eruditely pointed out, we cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it in the first place. It’s time to ‘upgrade our story’ and therefore our level of consciousness.
Our fundamental beliefs about who we are, how we got here and how to make the best of our lives underpin our individual and collective behaviour. A re-writing of the human story is long overdue…
Re-examining human origins to better navigate an uncertain future
It will become glaringly obvious that I’m not a fan of scientific materialism or reductionist thinking. I’m more of a Panpsychism kind of girl, erring towards matter from consciousness and the Holographic Universe theory.
I believe that clinging blindly to Darwin’s theory of evolution will not cut the mustard if we are to survive and thrive beyond this precarious, liminal time for our species.
Darwin is still gospel in mainstream scientific circles, and continues to be taught in school to my children’s generation. How would we view, I wonder, in this day and age, groups of people who still used a horse and cart to get from one place to another instead of using a car, train or bus? It would certainly expose them to derision. Yet this is what we are doing by doggedly clinging to Darwinism.
This series of posts is all about exploring new scientific data and establishing a more nuanced, honest and helpful story of our origins and capabilities that will better serve our collective future.
It’s not about debunking Darwin’s theory as more updating and modifying the knowledge that we have. Darwin did the best he could with the technology and observational skills at his disposal during his era. He was a brilliant man. Darwinian Theory should be regarded as a stepping stone rather than a religious doctrine. After all, Darwin had no knowledge of DNA…
Sacrilege I hear you say!
I didn’t set out to be deliberately iconoclastic, merely to search for the truth. Free-thinking is an underrated skill that is not well represented in the current educational curriculum. We tend to indoctrinate rather than empower creativity and curiosity.
Much of the reading I’ve done around evolution has challenged my own previously indoctrinated world view. But on reflection, what I’ve read makes total sense. I’m open to a new narrative on evolution.
Why shouldn’t we question and explore an unproventheory that has in mainstream quarters been falsely accepted as unequivocal truth?
Darwin himself doubted that his theory might not be enough to explain the complexity of life.
Darwin’s acolytes cherry picked the parts of his theory that they wanted to believe, and speculation was taught as fact. Various institutions and the people that supported them held his work as sacrosanct, and attempted to make Darwin’s work into something he himself never intended it to be. They employed his theory for purposes he never foresaw or intended.
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications” – the hallmark of evolution – “my theory would absolutely break down.”
Charles Darwin ~ Origin of Species 1859
Darwin himself in his twilight years moved away from academic Darwinism. He began to focus instead on the evolution of love, altruism and the genetic roots of human kindness over survival and struggle. He also gave credit to Jean Baptise Lamarck and his concept of the environment as the driving force in evolution.
Alfred Russell Wallace deserves more credit than history bestowed on him – as Darwin became the poster boy for Natural Selection and the theory of evolution. In his book, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, published in 1870, Wallace makes the following observation: “Natural Selection would only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of the philosopher.”
In other words, our species is over-endowed!
Among Darwin’s detractors it wasn’t just the church who opposed Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, scientists who were Darwin’s peers and in the century and a half preceding have also disagreed with his findings.
Their voices also deserve to be heard:
“Darwin’s theory is not inductive-not based on a series of acknowledged facts pointing to a general conclusion.” ~
Adam Sedgwick (1785 – 1873), Cambridge University – British Geologist and one of the founders of modern geology.
“There are…absolutely no facts either in the records of geology, or in the history of the past, or in the experience of the present, that can be referred to as proving evolution, or the development of one species from another by selection of any kind whatever.”
Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873) Harvard University – American Geologist
“The theory suffers from grave defects, which are becoming more and more apparent as time advances. It can no longer square with practical scientific knowledge, nor does it suffice for our theoretical grasp of the facts… No one can demonstrate that the limits of a species have ever been passed. These are the rubicons which evolutionists cannot cross… Darwin ransacked other spheres of practical research work for ideas… But his whole resulting scheme remains, to this day, foreign to scientifically established zoology, since actual changes of species by such means are still unknown.”
Albert Fleischmann (1862 – 1942) University of Erlangen – German Zoologist
“Evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit with it.”
H.S. Lipson (1910 – 1991) University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – British Phycist
“Evolution is the backbone of biology and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on unproven theory. Is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation. Both are concepts which the believers know to be true, but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.” ~
Leonard Harrison Matthews (1901 – 1986) Cambridge University – British Zoologist
“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from materials therein. I am at a loss to understand biologists’ widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.”
Sir Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) Cambridge University – British Astronomer, formed the theory of Stellar Nucleosynthesis
“Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more or less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. The truth is that despite the prestige of evolutionary theory and the tremendous intellectual effort towards reducing living systems to the confines of Darwinian thought, nature refuses to be imprisoned. In the final analysis we still know very little about how new forms of life arise. The ‘mystery of mysteries’ – the origin of new beings on earth – is still largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle.”
Michael Denton (1943-) British Biochemist, Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
“But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favoured by natural selection? You can’t fly with two percent of a wing or gain much protection from an iota’s similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation. How, in other words, can natural selection explain the incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborated form?”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) Harvard University – American Paleontologist and Evolutionary Biologist
“The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living beings create themselves, which is, in essence, a metaphysical claim… Thus, in the final analysis, evolutionism is in truth a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb.”
Wolfgang Smith (1930-) American Mathematician and Physicist
“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonised reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident is zero.”
Ilya Prigogne (1917 – 2003) Belgian Physical Chemist and Nobel prize winner
“All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere.”
Harold Urey (1831 – 1981) Nobel Prize-winning Chemist
Mathematicians have calculated that the probability for the existence of a common DNA molecule is one in a centillion, (or 1 with 600 zeros after it).
Mathematical challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution from the Hoover Institute:
Dissent from Darwin is an online declaration signed by 1,371 esteemed scientists from around the world (as of July 2015), in essence saying that as far as they are concerned the mystery of our origins is not yet solved.
Maybe the reason debates and discussion around evolutionary theory can be highly contentious and controversial is because the theory has deep moral, social, and religious implications, as well as being presented as scientific fact even though conflicting issues have yet to be resolved.
Darwin’s theory of evolution appeared to fit what he saw happening for one life form in one specific part of the world (the finches of the Galapagos Islands), he tried to generalise the theory to apply to all life everywhere, including humankind.
While the connections between ancient primates and modern humans on the evolutionary family tree are thought to exist, they have never been proven as fact – they are inferred and speculative connections up to this point in time.
No fossils that reflect an unbroken evolutionary journey from primates to more human-like beings have been discovered!
“Within the period of human history we do not know of a single instance of the transformation of one species into another.” ~ .
Thomas Morgan (winner of 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine & author of Evolution and Adaptation)
Morgan’s findings should serve as a warning of wholeheartedly embracing the theory of human evolution.
New scientific evidence is suggesting that certain physical features – including our eyes, our advanced nervous systems, and our brains – were already functional when anatomical modern humans (AMHs) arose around two hundred thousand years ago casts doubt on Darwin’s theory as it pertains to humankind.
The strange thing is that Darwin himself acknowledged the irony in the lack of physical evidence to support his theory. This could be explained in one of two ways: Either the geologists were interpreting the history of the earth incorrectly, or he himself had made an error in his interpreted observations that became the foundation of his theory.
Again, in Darwin’s own words from Origin of Species:
“Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? We meet with no such evidence, and this is the most obvious and forcible of the many objections which may be urged against my theory.”
Charles Darwin
Mutation of the FOXP2 gene
Saturday, February 28th 1953 was an important day for modern science. James Watson and Francis Crick announced to their colleagues over lunch in a Cambridge pub, “We have discovered the secret of life.” They had just discovered the double helix pattern of the DNA molecule – nature’s code for life.
Our DNA exists in every cell of our body, in structures that are called chromosomes. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in our cells. Each chromosome is made of smaller, precise physical markers called genes. These are our physical blueprints.
The Human Genome Project revealed that we have around 23,000 genes, roughly the same number as a worm and a fruit fly. This finding floored scientists, who expected the number to be more like 100,000. Since then genetic mapping has revealed that we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, 50 percent with a fruit fly, 80 percent with a cow, and 90 percent with a common house cat. It begged the question, if we have so much in common genetically with other creatures, then why are we so different from them?
The answer being that a single gene can be activated in different ways, and to different degrees, to do different things. In other words, it’s how our genes are activated, or expressed.
In 2009 a study was published in the journal Nature regarding the mutation of the FOXP2 gene, which is linked to our ability to form complex speech and language. The FOXP2 gene is found in both humans and chimpanzees, yet there is something in the way the FOXP2 gene expresses in humans that enables us to communicate in sophisticated forms of language.
According to Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology the mutation of this gene “happened in the same time frame when modern humans evolved.”
The speed and precision of the mutations in FOXP2, occurring in just the right two places in the DNA code is an example of the kind of change that does not lend itself to the theory of evolution as we currently understand it. Science cannot tell us what caused the change.
How do we account for what appears to be more of a spontaneous evolution?
The mystery of Human Chromosome 2 (HC2)
When scientists compared our chromosomes to our nearest primate relatives they discovered that chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes, compared with the 46 found in humans, which seemed to suggest humans were missing two chromosomes.
Advanced DNA sequencing technology has highlighted what wasn’t obvious before: that our missing DNA isn’t missing at all. The ‘missing’ DNA has always been present, however it has been modified and arranged to show that the second largest chromosome in the human body (HC2), actually contains smaller ‘missing’ chromosomes found in the chimp genome.
At some point in the past, for reasons that remain unknown and controversial, two separate chimp chromosomes got combined into a single larger chromosome that is our human chromosome 2.
To me a directed mutation makes the most sense, which acknowledges that some force or intelligence contributed towards the precision, timing and refining of the mutations that make us who we are. It opens what scientists have dubbed a ‘Pandora’s Box of possibilities’. The box has been opened by science, and the contents cannot be stuffed back in…
The Directed Mutation idea takes us into the realm of fields and unseen forces and an unseen intelligence that scientific materialism has been unwilling to consider. This premise can be explored in the mysterious realm of Quantum Mechanics. I’ll be exploring that further in the next post. Another theory being considered is the Stoned Ape Hypothesis.
Irreducible complexity
The profound depth and complexity of life would not have been something that Darwin, Lamarck, or British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace would have had had the ability to know, no scientist in the late 1800s nor early 1900s could have.
Irreducible complexity means that if any portion of a system stops working, the entire system fails. Could the human cell be the single most complex piece of machinery ever to exist?
There are a myriad of processes that are happening at any given moment in a cell, and when you consider the human body contains around 50 trillion cells, and this cellular structure works in harmony to enable us to go about our lives, it is all the more remarkable. The DNA of life is based upon order and structure and the sharing of information that tell our cells what to do and when to do it. In Nature this kind of order is viewed as a sign of intelligence.
Darwinism has inculcated the ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude into society, which explains why it is currently so toxic. Our social, cultural and economic systems have been built on unhealthy and shaky foundations over the last 150 years. It has lead to scientific materialism, the belief that we are just machines, as are animals, and the world is a non-living entity, entirely at our disposal. It is devoid of a reverence for life.
The Darwinian story of our origins speaks to our lower selves: we are random accidents and have no purpose or meaning other than a biological collection of matter that can only survive if we dominate others. This is the message being taught to impressionable children, when their foundational beliefs are being formed.
We see this principle at work in politics, economics and conflict in individuals and groups determined to reach power and hold onto it at all costs. Power over others and for its own sake and to cause suffering. These destructive human traits are given credence by Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism.
Talk about expressing our ‘selfish genes’! We live in the dysfunctional paradigm of scientific materialism.
The philosopher Herbert Spenser developed social Darwinism, and is also credited with the term survival of the fittest. The tragic implications of his theory enabled the Holocaust – the improving of humanity, the purifying of the race by winnowing out perceived genetic weakness and inferiors. Taken to its fullest application Darwinian theory underpinned the state sanctioned science and violence of Nazi Germany.
Moving from scientific materialism and the age of self-indulgence to a more harmonious way of being can help us usher in the age of self-responsibility. British scientist Timothy Lenton has described how, despite the sun warming by 25 percent since life on earth began around 3.8 billion years ago, our planet has somehow managed to regulate its climate and buffer that huge disparity. Lenton further suggested that evolutionary traits that benefit the system as a whole tend to be reinforced, while those that harm or destabilise the environment in an unfavourable way are restrained.
It is thought that the population of Earth will peak at around 10.4 billion people in the 2080s (along with the resulting needs for land, water, food and resources), and will thereafter decline. What is not commonly known perhaps, is that birth rates and fertility have been falling steadily since 1962 as measured by the UN. The rate of decline is much more steep currently.
World Bank statistics show that global fertility rates have dropped 57% since 1960 to below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman to sustain the population. Twenty seven countries now have fewer people than they did in 2010. Fifty nations are expecting declines to continue through 2050. The main concern on the fertility front is related to sperm concentrations, which have dropped from an average of 99 million/ml in 1970 to 47 million/ml in 2011 and are now around 40 million/ml, where conception is considered a rare occurrence.
This is not surprising considering the levels of stress, sedentary lifestyles, toxins in foods and environmental pollutants (such as forever chemicals PFAS) that we are exposed to. These toxins accumulate in our organs. Classed as anti-androgens, they can lower testosterone and the quality of sperm and eggs.
If scientific materialism’s days aren’t numbered then ours certainly are. A path towards Holism and more holistic lifestyles would benefit society immeasurably. And it all starts with our basal paradigm, the story of who we are.
Until next time!
“If an organism acquires a mutation that causes it to behave in an anti-Gaian’ manner, its spread will be restricted in that it will be at an evolutionary disadvantage.”
“If the 20th century has been, so to speak, the century of the brain, then the 21st century should be the century of the heart.”
Gary E.R. Schwartz Ph.D & Linda G.S. Sussex Ph.D
For all science’s importance and contribution to our understanding of the world, there is still not a single machine in the scientific field that can measure love. Love lies beyond logic.
I do, however, remember taking part in an interesting experiment on a personal development course a few years ago, where we used dowsing rods to measure someone’s energy field. It was certainly eye opening.
We were instructed to work in pairs. The ‘test subject’ was asked to stand still while the other person held the rods whilst standing at the other side of the room, who asked them to think about their family or people they loved, to feel appreciation and loving thoughts. They then held up the rods and walked towards the other person experiencing the loving feelings. As soon as the rods crossed each other it indicated the edge of their energy field or aura. The same process was then repeated with the test subject being asked to think sad thoughts, focus on things that upset them and made them angry as the person holding the rods walked towards them.
I must admit that I was sceptical at the outset of this experiment, but the results blew me away. Everyone in the room had universally the same outcome. The distance from when the rods crossed over at the edge of the energy field to the person having the emotions was much greater when those emotions were loving and uplifting, and much closer to the body when negative.
In other words, our way of being in the world affects ourselves and others. This subtle energy expands and contracts according to our moods and emotional states.
How can we define the myriad of feelings and plethora of emotions inspired by love?
That simple random act of kindness a stranger shows, especially at a time when you are feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders, or that peace of mind that infiltrates your cells when you are able to help someone else going through struggle.
Perhaps poetry comes closest, but for me, so does music. In fact all the expressive arts in some way or another emanate from love and communicate love.
The way of love is not
a subtle argument
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.
Rumi
Unconditional love is more than an emotion – it’s a way of being in the world.
I’m only just getting round to reflecting on last year, and deciding what my priorities, goals and intentions are for this year and beyond. In a way, I feel like I lost a lot of time through the pandemic, and I feel a quiet determination, an indefatigable spark to live my life on my terms without fear.
It takes courage to be your authentic self under rigid societal norms, stereotyped expectations and dogma. But if you listen to your heart it will always guide you in the right direction.
“Follow your heart. Your heart is the right guide in everything big.”
Khalil Gibran
I am currently ensconced in the upheaval of renovating two bedrooms at the same time, which began shortly after the New Year, (seduced perhaps, by the temporary euphoria of saying good bye to 2021, as well as by the needs of my daughters).
The physical and mental exhaustion caused by lugging furniture, clearing, decluttering, organising and the chaos that comes with such work of clearing entire rooms of everything (which has to be dispersed into the remaining living space for sorting), has been somewhat stressful. But I can finally see light at the end of the tunnel: a smoother domestic life for myself and my family, which I fervently hope will translate into increased harmony, productivity and greater joy all-round.
I find chaos deeply unsettling. Maybe it’s a metaphor for life at the moment. My mind, body and soul somehow seem to tune in to and reflect my immediate surroundings, so visualising a calmer future is a must for me! But through chaos comes order. Eventually…
No wonder completing my tax return felt more aggravating than usual!
Evolving from one state to a higher state often feels like an arduous undertaking, but worth the work even so.
I intended to write this post in January, but didn’t, as I had my urgent home renovation hat on; however it seems more fitting for February, which is designated in many countries as Heart Month.
Heart Month focuses on heart health and all matters relating to the heart. February was probably chosen because the 14th February is Valentine’s Day!
The heart has a mind of its own – literally
Anyone who has ever been in love knows that the heart does not always obey the head! This point was beautifully elucidated by Blaise Pascale:
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”
It turns out there is a scientific basis for Pascale’s erudite observation, which I’ll go into more detail on later in the post.
The heart is the first organ to develop in a growing fetus; and in our normal day to day lives it beats around 100,000 times per day, pumping 2,000 gallons of blood around 60,000 miles of arteries, veins, capillaries and blood vessels.
But being a vessel of miraculous circulation may not be its only purpose. Our ancestors regarded the human heart as the centre of thought, emotion, memory and personality – the true master organ of the body.
The heart is mentioned 830 times in the Bible, and features in 59 of the 66 books.
Proverbs: “Counsel in the heart of a man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out.”
Similarly, the native Omaha people of North America have a tradition: “Ask questions from your heart and you will be answered from the heart.”
The Lotus Sutra of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition teaches of the “hidden treasure of the heart”, which is described in scripture as being “as vast as the universe itself, which dispels any feelings of powerlessness.”
Decisions based on the heart’s wisdom will never be wrong for you.
A little brain in the heart
In 1991 an incredible discovery was published in the journal Neurocardiology by a team of scientists lead by Dr Armour from the University of Montreal; studying the close relationship between the brain and the heart. In the process of their research it was discovered that the human heart contains around 40,000 specialised neurons (sensory neurites), which form a communication network within the heart, operating independently of the brain. A little brain in the heart.
“The ‘heart brain’ is an intricate network of nerves, neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells similar to those found in the brain proper.”
Dr. Andrew Armour
The heart’s brain converts the language of the body – emotions – into the electrical language of the nervous system so that its messages make sense to the brain. Scientists are also investigating the heart’s brain role in other physical and mental functions such as:
Direct communication with sensory neurites in other organs of the body
The heart-based wisdom known as heart intelligence
Intentional states of deep intuition
Intentional precognitive abilities
The mechanism of self-healing
The awakening of super learning abilities and more.
The heart’s brain can think, learn and remember, sensing inner and outer worlds by itself, and when in harmony with our cranial brain provide a benefit of a single potent neural network shared by two separate organs.
The Coptic Christian saint, Macarius said of the heart:
“The heart itself is but a little vessel, and yet there are dragons, and there are lions, and there are venomous beasts, and all the treasures of wickedness; and there are rough uneven ways, there chasms; there likewise is God, there the angel, there the life and the Kingdom, there light and the apostles, there the heavenly cities, there the treasures, there are all things.”
How, I wonder, could he have possibly known, that the ‘all things’ category would include the ability of the heart to remember life events – even when the heart is no longer in the body of the person who experienced the events?!
Memories of the heart
I vaguely remember seeing a fictional film many moons ago (the title eludes me), where a person has a heart transplant and starts to have visions of the deceased person who’s heart they have been given. It seemed way out there. But truth really can be stranger than fiction…
Since the very first heart transplant in 1967, there are now thousands of heart transplant operations performed every year. Over time a curious phenomena began to occur, a side effect that was labelled memory transference. It seems that if the heart is alive the memories remain. Emotional memories are so deeply ingrained in the heart’s memory they can be experienced by a donor.
An incredible case was documented in the book The Heart’s Code, of which a section is dedicated to true life accounts of heart recipients. The case of an eight year old girl is particularly heart-rending. The young girl began having vivid and frightening dreams, nightmares, in which she was being chased, attacked and killed. Although the transplant was technically a success, the psychological impact of these nightmares became increasingly distressing.
The young girl was subsequently referred to a psychiatrist. She described a terrible event and images with such clarity, detail and consistency that the psychiatrist became convinced she was relaying actual memories. The question was from whose memory?
Eventually the authorities were contacted, an investigation conducted, and so it came to light that the young girl was remembering an unsolved murder from her own town. She was able to share the specific details of where, when and how the murder was carried out, remembering the words spoken during the attack, and was even able to say the name of the murderer. Tragically, the victim had been a 10 year old girl. Based on the details she was able to give the police, a man that fit the circumstances and description was arrested and put on trial. He was subsequently convicted of the assault and murder of the girl whose heart had been donated to the eight year old girl.
A fascinating documentary on this subject and the little brain in the heart:
The discovery of the ‘little brain in the heart’ has the potential to reveal a vast array of possibilities. These examples show me that the power of the heart is not to be underestimated.
Asking the heart for guidance
Typically we tend to use our brain, our reasoning capacities and logic when we are faced with choices and decisions. We mull thoughts over, examining the pros and cons, using the filters of past experience, our perceptions which are all bound to our sense of self-worth. Our minds tend to justify the answers we arrive at using circular reasoning, a way of thinking that supports a conclusion by restating it.
Sometimes a choice can be baffling through reason alone, and despite the advanced technology available to most people, the heart may just prove the most sophisticated technology we could have at our disposal. The heart can bypass mental filters and prejudice.
What if our heart intelligence knows instantly what’s true for us in the moment? What if we have the opportunity to access a deeper wisdom that transcends the bias of the mind?
We ignore our heart’s wisdom at our peril.
Would you agree that when you meet a person for the very first time you instantly form an impression of their character, and have a feeling whether you might like them or not before you have even exchanged a single word?
Our human instinct is the need to know if we are safe and if we can trust that person. This applies to friendship, business, love, romance and intimacy.
The speed at which this impression is formed is not the result of brain activity alone. As well as the ‘heart brain’, I also believe that our ‘gut brain’ has a role to play, giving us those all important ‘gut feelings’.
“At the center of this ability (INTUITION) is the human heart, which encompasses a degree of intelligence whose sophistication and vastness we are continuing to understand and explore. We now know this intelligence may cultivated to our advantage in many ways.”
Institute of HeartMath
Throughout the last two years of the Covi-19 pandemic, political and societal volatility and the increasingly frequent and disturbing climate events experienced, we have been collectively battered; physically, mentally and emotionally. We are living in extreme times.
Developing resilience
In addition to solving the manmade circumstances that have contributed to the challenging situations we are facing on an individual and collective scale, it is clear that developing resilience and embracing change in a healthy way will help us emerge into greater equilibrium and make better choices, thereby reducing the stress created in our lives.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre describes resilience as the capacity to “continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds.”
A great lecture on the science of resilience:
Heart-Brain Coherence
Personal resilience can be thought of as the combined force of the emotional, physical and psychological “batteries” that power us through life’s challenges, and expanded resilience is the juice that keeps our batteries continually charged. Life is so intense for may of us, we can’t afford to have low batteries…
Heart rate variability (HRV) is one way to measure the resilience of our heart. In summary, the greater the variability between beats, the greater the resilience we have in facing life’s stresses and the changes going on in our world.
I have been using a technique to create Heart-Brain Coherence, and for difficult choices I have also been asking my heart.
So although my focus will naturally be on my goals, using my heart as an unfailing barometer in my progress and for life in general is my underlying theme this year.
The ‘weighing of the heart‘
From the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead came the ritual weighing of the heart against the feather of Maat , the goddess of Truth and Justice. In Egyptian religion the heart was considered to contain all of the good and bad deeds of a person’s life, and was needed for judgment in the afterlife. To me, this is a great metaphor for life, as well as the afterlife. If you live with a heavy heart your life scales will be unbalanced. Living according to the wisdom of the heart keeps our scales in balance and harmony.
Wearing the world like a loose garment.
We will always face challenges, to a lesser or greater degree. Globally, as a species, we are going through profound changes, and our actions will determine the course of our evolution.
I have been guilty of allowing myself to become mired in anger, frustration, hopelessness and overwhelm with the current state of the world, and in particular with the appalling behaviour of our politicians. I’ve realised it’s perfectly natural to feel this way, (when I see things I cherish being systematically destroyed), as long as I work through it and release it in a healthy way, and not become attached to these particularly strong negative emotions. The Heart-Brain Coherence technique and letting go helps me to do that, as it allows a certain detachment from events that are out of my control.
Jesus’s advice to “wear the world like a loose garment” makes total sense in this context. Reframing the content of what is happening into a wider context enables me to transcend the pain of the events. I realise that enough people will feel the same as me, and at some point political and social change will come as a result of experiencing what doesn’t serve us.
Until the next time, from my heart to yours, in love, gratitude and wisdom…
Autumn, in her characteristic colourful cycle, is in full ochre bloom and bluster, with winter waiting conspicuously in the wings. Where has this year gone?
It has evaporated into time’s ether, barely noticeable under the weight of challenges this year has borne witness to. And, my dear reader, I guess you are also handling your own significant challenges. I hope you are safe and well.
I have been absent from my normal activities for a few months, a family crisis that, still unresolved, has totally derailed me; emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually. Suffice to say, that when a mother faces such a challenge involving one of her children it is no small thing. As a result, I had unintentionally put myself in the shadow side of Demeter’s archetypal shoes. She is one of the three vulnerable goddesses.
I plan to write about the archetypes of Greek mythology, it is a fascinating psychological subject. I have three main archetypes that affect my life: Artemis, Aphrodite and Demeter.
Gradually I have returned to a modicum of functioning, and a good measure of my recovery (apart from my family and friends), has been derived out in nature.
My garden in full autumnal swing!My Acer tree is my pride and joy…Autumnal canopy of our cherry tree
Normally playing my violin would offer substantial succour for such deeply felt pain, but unfortunately my violin bridge collapsed and other parts of my beloved instrument badly needed replacing as well. For a violin that’s over 120 years old, this maintenance and renovation has been 35 years overdue in my ownership!!
I’m not sure if that’s a metaphor for my life at the moment – I certainly have missed her shiny wooden curves and dulcet tones (when playing well at least). But there is hope on the horizon, for it is having a complete overhaul by one of the most talented restorers in the UK.
Hopefully I’ll be able to create a rich, melodic sound, (if I haven’t forgotten how to play in two months), even though my bank account will be much attenuated.
Taking up yoga and appreciating the raw beauty of my garden and going for walks have lifted my spirits a great deal.
I have written before about autumn – my favourite season despite my aversion to cold weather!
In the last few days of October last year, my best friend invited me away for a long weekend to her place in North Devon. It’s not an area I was particularly familiar with, (Cornwall has generally been my place of pilgrimage), but I found it lovely. I thought I would share some pictures of a trip Sophie and I made to the RHS Garden Rosemoor on a mild but wet and misty day. My retinas were overwhelmed by the colours and contrasts.
We also visited the home of Dartington Crystal, and consumed a hearty pub lunch after we spent an hour or two roaming around the stunningly wild coast of Hartland Point. Hartland was used as the coastal location of Manderley in the recent film based on Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel, Rebecca:
Of course photographs can never do justice compared to seeing such botanical wonders in the flesh, but it can at least give a sense of the beauty contained in a quiet valley of North Devon.
I have not written any poetry for some time, it has never been a talent of mine, but it is oddly cathartic and creative to let my mind wander in this direction whenever I think about nature.
Tread vivid crimson carpets; such preternatural hues,
Live and breathe the evanescent, intoxicating view.
RHS Garden Rosemoor – October 2020
“There is something so special in the early leaves drifting from the trees–as if we are all to be allowed a chance to peel, to refresh, to start again.”
My regular postman has always been friendly. He’s cheerful and affable, even when he is being buffeted or soaked by inclement British weather. He must have a mountain of mail and parcels to deliver, but he never seems hurried and is usually chatty.
In a world where we may see certain people on a daily basis and yet know little about them, we grow a certain familiarity, albeit a superficial one; so it’s refreshing when a deeper connection takes place.
Talking isn’t a big part of the job, especially as Royal Mail are (not surprisingly), more concerned with productivity than my ‘friendly neighbourhood postman’.
120 Year old post box. Image by Grooveland on Unsplash
I don’t know my postman’s real name – and he prefers to keep it that way after divulging some very personal information about himself the other day. He seemed to want to talk more than usual; we were having a conversation about a trip he had taken to Argentina to see his girlfriend at the time.
Before I continue, it’s only fair to warn you that this post contains some harrowing stories, read on at your own discretion.
He explained that he had gone out for a run and had accidentally crossed onto the rural land of a neighbour. He knew he was in trouble when armed guards apprehended him and hauled him up in front of the owner. Humble and apologetic, he explained that he was staying next door as a guest of his neighbour, and did not intend to trespass. The tension gradually eased and all was eventually forgiven as the suspicion evaporated.
He was still conscious that men were brandishing AK47s and joked to me that he wondered if he would have to suddenly revive ‘special skills’ that he hadn’t needed to use in a long while. However, the property owner offered him a job as a body guard, which he turned down.
By this point I had a strong inkling that my postman wasn’t your average guy…
He then slipped in that he wasn’t popular in Argentina. I frowned; this seemed an odd and decidedly provocative thing to say. When I queried why this might be so, he hesitated for a split second, and coolly informed me that he had previously been on a clandestine mission there, as part of a military team sent to apprehend a child sex trafficker.
My jaw must have dropped.
Maybe he trusted me, (I like to think I am a good listener), and he went on to reveal things I never would have guessed about him.
One thing I had always been curious about (but was too polite to ask), was why he was missing his top two middle teeth. He is quite muscular, although not overly tall, and in otherwise apparent good health. It is an unusual thing to see in a fit man, especially as the rest of his teeth seemed fine.
Well, now I know why.
Without asking him he told me that during his time in the army he was deployed to Iraq after the initial invasion, and spent time in enemy territory. He was captured and subsequently tortured. Although recruits are given resistance to interrogation training he admitted it wasn’t sufficient to prepare him for the real thing.
As he relayed the inevitable torture that followed, it seemed somewhat surreal. His teeth were forcibly removed.
His nails were pulled out and other excruciating things done to him which I didn’t dare ask about. He was rescued, he thinks, by Special Forces. It sounds like he is lucky to be alive. Some of his friends and colleagues weren’t so fortunate.
A conversation with a friend back at base shortly after being rescued resulted in his nickname that he adopted as his military handle: Jericho.
His speciality in the British army was as a sharpshooter. He said it required nerves of steel and an alert state over long periods of time. Sometimes they were given drugs to help them stay awake during critical missions.
Note to self: must remain on good terms with my postman!
“No soldier ever really survives a war.”
Audie Murphy
He told of another day when his convoy was hit by IEDs. Some vehicles were on fire, and he had to drag one of his friends, burning and screaming from a badly damaged vehicle, sadly unable to save his life.
What must that kind of horror do to a person?
In short, it causes trauma. Survivors guilt. These life and death situations are extreme experiences, and the army needs to do more to help soldiers adjust to civilian life.
I was appalled by what he was telling me, but he seemed to have reached a level of detachment about it. He admitted that he had suffered with PTSD after being discharged from the army.
Another difficult thing for him to deal with was the fact that the Iraqi army would shoot civilians that spoke to them or demonstrated any kind of co-operation. They would be lined up and executed in cold blood. His unit were told not to interfere, something a normal person would naturally find abhorrent and shocking. He hinted that he felt torn following orders at certain times, especially when he considered them to be wrong. I got the distinct impression that his conscience was the cause of insubordination at times.
Actively letting atrocities happen is surely as morally reprehensible as participating in them. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
Howard Zinn
He must have seen and done things no person could ever forget, let alone attempt to process in order to lead a normal life.
He told me that working on a farm after he was discharged helped him to adjust to civilian life. He regularly woke up screaming. He would feel angry, on edge and ready for combat at the drop of a hat. He found that meditation helped him to feel calmer and recover mentally.
Ernest Hemingway became a literary icon through the creative expression of his wartime experiences. Writing can enable healing and catharsis.
Jericho (as I refer to him now), also got involved in boxing for a while, but gave it up to protect his wrists and hands so he could continue to play the guitar injury free. He likes to do open-mic sessions and also writes songs.
Before too long he was back in the mission saddle (aka conflict hotspot), this time working for various PMCs (private military contractors).
He would tell me about parachuting into a scenario in the dead of night, which funnily enough he said didn’t scare him as much as climbing up a ladder!
Over a number of years he was deployed on missions in 78 countries, including the Middle East, Russia, various African nations, South America and so forth.
Some of the smaller, less established PMCs had questionable clients, and he told of being on jobs where he would come up against other mercenaries in the role of body guards that he knew from his time at another PMC. He also worked for an international contractor where different nationalities worked together. He has some American friends.
I felt honoured that he was telling me such personal things about his life – but, if I’m honest – also a little disturbed.
He also spoke of a helicopter landing in the park near his house one night as an old employer had sent men to ask him about breaking into a certain facility he had experience of. It seemed a tad creepy. I asked how he could remember such detail, but he insisted he could recall the mission and was able to help them.
There are clearly major drawbacks to his previous line of work, but I asked if being in the military had helped him to develop self-discipline, and he agreed it most definitely had. He would rise at 5 am to work-out before the day started, and felt himself to be a highly independent and resilient person.
Image by Sana Ullah on Unsplash
Jericho’s was the sort of background that is often used in action movies, although it did not sound glamorous, as such activities can sometimes be portrayed on screen. But still, it is far removed from the mundane act of delivering mail!
Being a postman is a million miles away from the adrenaline fuelled excitement and danger of his former career, and I think that’s just how he likes it at this stage of his life. He also talked about his family and other everyday minutiae.
I liked him anyway, before I knew more about him, but I have a new found respect for Jericho. He has had to adjust through the kind of intense lifestyle and experiences that most of us could not comprehend. It may have been his choice to go down that path, but none of us ever really know where a path we choose to walk will ultimately lead. He is an interesting person, and gave me permission to write about him without using his real name, thus ensuring anonymity.
I’m thinking of loosely basing a character on him!
It reminded me that everyone has a story in them, that appearances and career choices are not accurate barometers of someone’s character or past. You never know what someone has been through, or about their early upbringing.
It was a lesson that compassion and kindness is a balm to ease suffering and make someone’s day a bit brighter.
Listening to Jericho elicited thoughts about my paternal grandfather, Jonathan Patrick Haley, who everyone called Jack. I vaguely remember as a child the rare occasions when my grandfather would talk about his time in the RAAF, (Royal Australian Airforce) flying spitfires in Burma during World War Two.
My grandad is sitting on top of the fuselage, second from right. Tall, skinny, handsome with dark hair! Sadly many of the men pictured did not return home. It’s good to see my grandad in his prime, even if it is from an old, grainy black and white photo. I only remember him with a bald patch and white receding hair.
There was only so much he would share about his time as a reconnaissance pilot. My grandmother told me that his doctor thought he was too weak and malnourished to make it beyond six months after he returned home to life in Australia, but thankfully she nursed him back to health.
When my dad was young the Haley family emigrated to the UK. He was a tall, active, no-nonsense man, with a soft spot for his grandchildren. I was very close to him in my early childhood when we lived near them. My dad has his medals, including a Burma Star.
I looked up to my grandfather; he was a source of inspiration, confidence and comfort to me in my early childhood.
Jericho’s personal history is invisible beneath his red polo shirt uniform; only a cheerful, gappy smile hints at his previous life. People have hidden depths, and it can be revelatory exploring them, not least to gain a greater understanding of others and ourselves.
It’s amazing what you can learn when you take the time to get to know someone. Active listening is compassion in action. Heaven knows the world needs as much compassion as it can get right now.
“Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself.”
Since the dawn of time mankind has observed the cosmos in awe, and it continues to engender curiosity and fascination. The sparkling firmament that illuminated the night sky demonstrated to early Homo sapiens that there were forces around us beyond our comprehension. So far away, yet irresistible to the naked eye, beckoning for us to reach up and touch them. The sun, moon, planets and trillions of stars seem to feed our need for oneness, unity and connection to a greater power.
Caspar David Friedrich – Moonlight in the forest
The stars invoke the heavens; some dazzling far-off realm that is simultaneously part of us, (our physical form is made of stardust: elements that were created from supernova stars), and yet unfathomably vast, distant and eternal.
Christopher Columbus and many early explorers used the sun, moon and stars to navigate across oceans and deserts alike, while the moon has bathed earth and all who walk upon her in an ethereal, mystical glow through eons of nights of all our ancestors. Back then it must have been even more impressive, with little to no light pollution.
The eyes of our past were transfixed on the moon’s phases; was she waxing or waning, full or new?
Christopher Williams – Venice, Moonlight
Astronomers measured her movements and positions, alongside the other celestial bodies in our solar system. We are, if not entirely at their mercy, influenced greatly by these cosmic spheres; perhaps on occasion becoming a little too obsessed with our ‘birth sign’ traits…
The ancient seers and rishis of India developed Vedic astrology (a moon based system) from the time of the Vedas, the oldest and foremost scriptures of Hinduism. In western astrology my sun sign is Aries, but in Vedic astrology (which differs from western astrology by a whole month), I am a Pisces, and my moon is in Taurus.
The practice of arranged marriages, which were and still are common in India, used this system to accurately gauge affinity and compatibility between couples.
Thanks to Claudius Ptolemy, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, Christiaan Huygens, Giovanni Cassini, Charles Messier, Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and many others who were curious about the universe, over the centuries we mapped our cosmos and grew universal science as far as technology and knowledge would allow.
But even our closest celestial neighbour, the moon, remained elusive until Neil Armstrong’s vicarious ‘giant leap for mankind’ on the lunar surface in July 1969.
If the sun is the masculine ‘yang’, the moon is the feminine ‘yin’. Gentle and beguiling, and considered by some to be an emotional barometer.
She has always been our night time beacon and companion. Instead of scorching heat she casts soft hues and her powerful gravitational pull is responsible for the tides.
Albert Julius Olsson – Moonlight on the Coast
The forces the moon exerts on Earth and its inhabitants are experienced through physical sensations, mostly things that are enticing to humans; such as frolicking in the surf, or having a romantic meal or stroll under her otherworldly light. Moonlight on water is the most transfixing and mesmerising sight to behold.
Women tend to find that their menstrual cycles are synced with the lunar cycles, and the moon has been linked to fertility. In Greek mythology the goddess Artemis is associated with the hunt and the moon.
Artemis and Orion – Emilian School attributed
We assign meanings to the moon within our culture, with many references in literature, art and music.
I remember a cow jumping over the moon in a certain nursery rhyme!
With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies;
How silently, and with how wan a face.
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case;
I read it in thy looks; thy languished grace
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, even of fellowship, O moon, tell me,
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?
Sir Philip Sidney ~ Sonnet 31
Artists like Turner, Friedrich, Aivazovsky, Pether, Olsson, Grimshaw and van Gogh immortalised their evening views.
Vincent van Gogh – The Starry Night
Beethoven and Debussy wrote evocative music, (although it was Beethoven’s publisher that assigned the sobriquet ‘Moonlight’ Sonata).
Perhaps the cosmos inspires us to act from the higher part of ourselves more than we give it credit for.
Marianne North – Moon Reflected in a Turtle Pool, Seychelles
Today, May 26th is a total lunar eclipse. It was around lunchtime here in the UK, (sadly facing away from the moon) as the moon, earth and sun all align to create the phenomena. The shadow cast from the earth hides the light of the moon and has been likened to looking at the shadow part of ourselves.
To ancient peoples eclipses often signified a terrifying event – omens of bad luck as the ‘lights’ in the sky were thought to be Gods, and it was scary when the Gods went ‘dark’! In ancient India they recommended submerging oneself in a river and chanting during an eclipse.
Eclipses are considered a good time for looking inwards and spiritual growth, but not for starting new projects in the material realm. Pay attention to your feelings, intuition and dreams. Now is a good time to declutter, revisit old, unfinished projects and pay attention to relationships and the people you love. We’re probably all feeling extra sensitive at the moment.
John Moore of Ipswich – Moonlit Landscape
Eclipses can be powerful times for growth and clarity, but in any healing a crisis point occurs that is the ‘darkness before the dawn’, encouraging us to see what we need to fix, change or heal in order to have the life we want.
It is the very error of the moon; She comes more nearer earth than she was won’t, And makes men mad.
William Shakespeare ~ Othello
This lunar eclipse is also being referred to as the Super Flower Blood Moon; the red is perceived as the moon passes through Earth’s umbral shadow. I’m hoping for clear skies tonight so I can glimpse this stunning spectre.
The Super Flower Blood Moon over New York:
For those of us who slept through the Super Flower Blood Moon: Here's a quick time lapse taken early this morning 🌷🌕 pic.twitter.com/Q38GJ4WrWH
It would be the understatement of 2021 to say that January and February and most of March were tough months for our nation. There’s the usual January blues, when it’s dark and cold and everyone is a bit skint; but this year the individual and collective malaise was on another level.
Like most of the rest of the world, we were hit by another wave of the coronavirus pandemic, (over 127,000 families in the UK are mourning the loss of a loved one to Covid-19).
Now that we have emerged from the dire months of being cooped up indoors, (alongside the mental health implications of our covid incarcerations), the nation is tentatively looking ahead and the schools (thankfully) have now reopened. Many businesses were forced to close or operate at a reduced capacity. Income levels dropped off. Then there is the inevitable Brexit fallout hitting fisheries, imports and exports, and business in general, with untold damage to the economy – the full extent of which is yet to be truly calibrated.
With so many triggers for individual and collective stress, I may not be the only one who went through the January blues on steroids!!
Some days I felt like I was wandering aimlessly in a spiritual wilderness and would never feel joy again.
Image by Tengyart on Unsplash
Deep in the doldrums…
Now that I am on the other side of that particular episode I can reframe the experience and feel a certain relief and detachment. Some unresolved trauma from my childhood came up, which unfortunately was compounded as it coincided with lockdown and home schooling.
I barely managed under the extra workload of full-time home schooling two secondary school Year 7 & 9 daughters. For the most part, my youngest remained motivated and conscientious, but her older teenage sister did not, and trying to help her was exhausting. She suffered from a lack of social interaction. Those two and half months tested my patience and perseverance to the limit.
I’m sure many parents of school age children with limited indoor space must at times have felt some level of frustration, fatigue, lassitude, vexation, overwhelm and anxiety.
Most days, between the learning, the laundry and the kitchen, there was no time or energy for anything else. On top of that I was going through an intense healing process.
I have to admit that during those first two months I resorted to comfort eating and doing less exercise, (although I normally love hiking, we had biblical amounts of rain), and for most of January I went into total hibernation. I think my brain is still catching up.
I’ve had to forgive myself for my less than perfect attitude and cut myself some slack however, as these are unprecedented times. The accumulation of stress hit me like a volcanic eruption I couldn’t control. I just had to go with the flow…
I also watched, obsessed, as the geological equivalent appeared in Iceland, a short distance from where our family stayed in Grindavik during the summer of 2019. It would have been great to witness first hand.
Watching this amazing footage reminded me of Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom…
At times the overloaded, antsy feeling on my Central Nervous System was acute and physically uncomfortable. At other times I felt suffocated by ennui, accompanied by a total loss of motivation. I caught myself thinking ‘what’s the point?’ I realise now that this thought (and others like it), had arisen from a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness.
I’m not seeking sympathy, I know many people have suffered over the winter and continue to do so; but I share this personal experience to illustrate that my months of introspection and healing did yield positive results.
I needed to seek a solution; not just for me, but if it worked, to share with the wider world for anyone who continues to feel engulfed in an existential crisis, given all that we are dealing with.
What to do when you’ve sunk into a funk that you struggle to shake off?
I had to take it one day at a time. Deep breathing exercises and movement did help to calm me, as did meditation and practising gratitude. Even if it was only to appreciate that I had the opportunity to expunge some ‘dark’ emotional energy that was held deep in my body.
I realised I had to start small: I was only capable of making micro choices; which on a practical level helped me to regain some measure of control in my life. Focusing on the little steps and achievements built up my confidence and motivation bit by bit.
As I reflected on the difficult early months it informed my objectives for the rest of the year.
My main intention for 2021 is to live my life like a prayer. This is not a goal but a daily practice, and involves dedicating myself to being a servant of life in all its forms, appreciating the beauty of life, embracing a willingness to forgive shortcomings, to let go of the past (including resentments, negative emotions) and be a loving person.
Image by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
I’ve come to the conclusion that in the current global situation, being kind to one’s self and others, and a source of lovingness in the world is what will see humanity more serenely and successfully through this time. I knew I had to surrender my anger about the situation and the feeling of losing control of my life.
I rediscovered a book I bought a few years ago but hadn’t yet read: Letting Go – The Pathway of Surrender by Dr. David R Hawkins. I might have saved myself some anguish if I had, but they do say that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Doc Hawkins has been a major influence in my life. I’m only a short way in, but already I have shifted my energy.
Fake thoughts!
Having let go of some heavy psychological baggage over the preceding weeks, I noticed, to my delight, that my mind was considerably quieter. The incessant yapping of my thoughts had abated. This has been quite a revelation for me!
Not having to waste energy fighting the negative voice that tells me I’m not good enough, or how tough my life is has brought some much needed inner peace.
According to Dr Hawkins, it is the accumulated pressure of emotions that sparks a myriad of associated thoughts. Painful and destructive feelings trapped unconsciously in the body foments unhelpful and negative thoughts.
As an example, just one painful memory from early life that proves too overwhelming to handle is subsequently repressed (buried deep), in the psyche, and over many years can generate hundreds or thousands of thoughts. Dr. Hawkins asserts that when we surrender the underlying emotion all of those thoughts disappear instantly.
The Gray-LaVoilette scientific theory integrates psychology and neurophysiology and their research indicates that feeling tones organise thoughts and memory.
Hearing a lot of negative inner chatter is a sign that there’s unresolved emotional material being held in the body. When an underlying emotion is buried, forgotten or ignored, and not experienced, a person may not understand the reason for their actions.
Dr Hawkins suggests a simple way to become conscious of underlying emotions behind any activity, by asking: What for? With each answer, what for? is asked again and again, repeatedly until the basic feeling is uncovered. To be effective this method requires self-honesty.
Another revelation was discovering that thoughts are impersonal. They arise from the attractor field that a person is aligned with at any given moment. Now I try to watch these thoughts scudding across the sky of my mind like jostling clouds, I just watch them come and go, I try not to identify with them. They are just thoughts.
It is quite liberating to learn that thoughts emanate from unprocessed emotions. If we watch our thoughts we can ascertain the type of feelings that are responsible for them and begin the process of letting them go.
The 3 major mechanisms for dealing with difficult feelings
Essentially we have three major ways of handling negative emotions: suppression/repression, expression and escape.
Repression/suppression
This is the most common way of dealing with strong emotions. We don’t want to be overwhelmed, we are not sure how to cope, so we just sort of muddle through. Repression is the unconscious pushing down of feelings and suppression happens consciously. How we sort what feelings are repressed or suppressed is influenced by the unconscious programmes we carry within us from our childhood, upbringing, social expectations and life experience.
Image by M.T. ElGassier on Unsplash
When a feeling is repressed it is usually because there is so much guilt and fear over it that it is instantly thrust into the unconscious.
Instead of acknowledging or observing it, we deny the presence of an unpleasant feeling within us and project it onto the world and those around us. The feeling is eventually experienced as if it belongs to someone else. ‘They’ then become the enemy. Blame is placed on people, institutions, social conditions, God, luck, foreigners, ethnic groups (Brexit right there), and all other things outside ourselves. Through projection the individual maintains self-esteem at the expense of another.
Both methods carry psychosomatic consequences such as the manifestation of physical ailments and illness. If we don’t clear out this emotional garbage it impacts our lives down the road and weighs us down, limits our quality of life, relationships and inner peace becomes more elusive.
Expression
As the term suggests this method involves talking, venting and verbalising our feelings. This allows for just enough of the inner discomfort to be let out so the remainder can then be suppressed.
Dr Hawkins makes the point that many people in society, (me included, until I delved deeper into these mechanisms), believe that expressing their feelings frees them from the feelings. It has been shown that the expression of a feeling tends to propagate the feeling and give it greater energy.
Expressing in this way also allows what’s left to be suppressed out of awareness. The balance between suppression and expression depends on early training and the cultural norms of an individual.
A note on Freud…
Misinterpretations on the teachings of Sigmund Freud have resulted in the desire to express as a cure, because Freud identified suppression as the cause of neurosis. Freud suggested that the repressed feeling or impulse was to be neutralised, sublimated, socialised and channelled into the constructive drives of love, work and creativity.
Image by Kat Stokes on Unsplash
I regret the times I have dumped my negative feelings onto others, as now I know that they experience this venting as a form of attack – which they are then forced to suppress, express or escape. It is now thought that the expression of negativity results in the deterioration and destruction of relationships.
A better alternative is to take responsibility for our own feelings and neutralise them. This begins with developing awareness. If we can do this only positive, uplifting feelings remain to be expressed.
Escape
Diversion in one form or another helps us to avoid painful or scary feelings. Socially condoned activities like binge watching box sets, over-eating, drinking, sex and being a workaholic may help us dull things momentarily so we can cope in the moment, but are detrimental if used as a crutch long-term.
Shifting to the perspective of the witness…
Feelings are transient by nature; the important thing is to know that you are not your feelings, but that the ‘real’ you is merely witnessing them. When you become the observer you can cease identifying with negative feelings. Becoming more aware of your internal landscape is a progressive undertaking that enables you to become the witness rather than the experiencer of phenomena.
It’s not possible to both ‘watch’ and ‘resist’ a strong emotion at the same time. Resistance doesn’t serve you. It is resistance that keeps a feeling going. A feeling that is not resisted will disappear as the emotion behind it dissipates.
In other words, to some degree, it’s wise to wear your heart on your sleeve. You can only do something that doesn’t serve you if you do it unconsciously.
Stress
What causes you stress?
Image by Ben White on Unsplash
To attribute stress to outside factors is the projection of repressed feelings. Repressed feelings make us vulnerable to external stress. The word ‘stress’ is a bit ambiguous. When we say we are stressed, it covers a multitude of deeply held emotions!
Dr. Hawkins explains that the real source of stress is internal. Using the emotion of fear as an example, one might react to stress with fear if it is already present within to be triggered by an event. And let’s face it, there are plenty of ‘events’ going on around us at the moment. The more fear we hold inside the more the world appears to be a terrifying place. To the angry person the world is chaos, a mingling of frustration and vexation. The inner state influences the outer state.
Essentially, what we are holding inside (resisted emotions), colours our world…
Next time I feel stress I will see it as a warning sign that there is an accumulation of pressure from supressed and repressed feelings. Understanding that the havoc wreaked by stress is the result of our own hidden emotions puts us in control of handling it more effectively.
The energy of emotions
Emotions emit a vibrational energy field (I will cover more on this in a subsequent post), which in turn influences what kind of people are in our lives. All living things are connected on vibrational energy levels so our basic state is picked up and reacted to by all life forms around us.
It’s quite a wake up call to understand that our basic emotional states transmit themselves to the universe.
I like to imagine a pebble being dropped into fresh water and sending ripples out in concentric circles to the shore.
I feel this erudite Beatles song sums up the optimal state of allowing-ness and acceptance of all our emotions, without judgement:
Handling major crises
The Letting Go technique is very helpful in daily life, but it is also fundamental to shortening and alleviating extreme suffering when one is going through a crisis.
In such a situation it is easy to become overwhelmed by strong emotions, when we are vulnerable to be triggered by one of the major areas of supressed or repressed feelings. In this instance the main problem is not so much identifying the emotion as handling the overwhelm.
The three mechanisms the mind consciously employs to process emotions that were mentioned earlier – suppression/repression, expression and escape can be employed in a deliberate manner. They are only harmful when used unconsciously, if the person is not aware of what they are doing.
In an overwhelm, it is advisable to use them consciously. This is done so that the sheer intensity and quantity of emotion can be disassembled and let go bit by bit. By holding at bay the bulk of the emotion we can deal with as much emotion as we are capable of in that moment.
In this situation sharing the strong feelings with close friends or mentors reduces its intensity and the act of expressing the feeling releases some of the energy behind it. It is also advised to consciously use the escape mechanism to create some distance to the emotion, such as walking the dog, socialising, going to the movies (whenever that may be allowed), watching TV or making music.
When some of the overload has abated it’s easier to start to let go of small aspects of the situation. As we come out of overwhelm it is wise to recall that a certain portion of the emotion was purposefully suppressed or escaped. This is a good time to re-examine the feeling so that it does not cause residual harm, such as bitterness, unconscious guilt or lower self-esteem.
There is much more detail in the book, it really is one of the few manuals for life you’ll ever need. I hope to have relayed a valuable kernel or two of the profound teachings inside.
Letting go is a lifelong process, but it gets easier the more you do it, as you begin to feel lighter and happier in the aftermath of releasing.
There are no short cuts to emotional mastery; letting go and surrendering is the most direct route, as long as we are willing to explore the shadow aspect of our psyche and by doing so, shine the light of consciousness into the darkness. It can be a turbulent ride, but as Dr Hawkins asserts, you only ever have to handle the energy behind the feeling – which is finite and eventually runs out.
If every human being learned to effectively process their emotions the world would be a happier and less violent place. However, we are all at different points in the evolution of our individual consciousness, and as Gandhi stated, it’s our responsibility to become the change we wish to see in the world.
During my period of healing I noticed that I was judging myself for my lack of obvious progress over the winter months, but in the wake of my nascent recovery and heightened awareness, I realised I had in fact made huge progress!
Self-awareness, letting go, and being liberated from past trauma and disempowering beliefs is vital work.
“Because we are all part of the whole, when we heal something in ourselves, we heal it for the world. Each individual consciousness is connected to the collective consciousness at the energetic level; therefore, personal healing emerges collective healing.”
rhap.so.dy in words 