Monday, June 10, 2013

Soul Pursuits has a new home!

Hello, dear friends. I have moved my Soul Pursuits blog to www.liannedowney.com See you there!

If you enjoyed some of my posts here, I plan to leave them in place. But you'll find updates and postscripts, if any, at the new site. (For instance, I'm going to explore my new, less-fearful relationship with bears later this summer.)

If you read my earlier posts about my experiment with The Schwarzbein Principle healing program, "Why I Got Fat on Purpose," I have deleted them since it did not work well for me. I gained the expected pounds in my quest for adrenal healing, but also gained a number of weight-related health problems. Duh! I don't recommend it! Good news: I've gone off the program and am now losing the weight and getting very healthy again. Yay!

Lastly, my new book, Speed Your Evolution: Become the Star Being You Are Meant to Be, will be out soon, available in paper or digital wherever books are sold.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Cosmic Dancer Dance in Film Awards 2012


Dance scene from Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson

In honor of my novel Cosmic Dancer---a metaphysical tale of dance, love, and dancing between lifetimes---I am announcing the winners in the first annual
Cosmic Dancer Dance in Film Awards
for
English-language films released in 2012
Joseph and I love dancing, and therefore dance movies.
Give us any kind of dancing: West Side Story, Dirty Dancing, Flash Dance, The Turning Point, Boot Men, Dance with Me, Saturday Night Fever, Center Stage, Step Up, Bollywood movies, and on and on. We've watched all three films titled Shall We Dance? Not to mention documentaries and television celebrations of dance and dancers, along with a number of movies that we suffered through only for the dancing. 
Can't leave out the old films with Fred, Ginger, Gene, and others hoofing it all over the silver screen: on ships, over furniture, up walls, around hotel rooms, among parades, and in the rain.
More recently, we've had to rely on television series to keep our dance mania alive while some real stinkers have shown up at the cineplex.
But in 2012 we noticed filmmakers using dance in exciting new ways, featuring choreographers we’ve come to love. We wanted to honor and applaud those efforts to bring quality dancing into movie theaters.
Hence the Cosmic Dancer Dance in Film Awards, which we hope to make an annual tradition, encouraging more good dancing in excellent films.
If you love dance, dancers, and dancing,  please join us to promote better dancing in the movies by sharing our winners list around the Net via Facebook, Twitter, your own blog, or wherever! And be sure to support the makers of the following films.

Which were your favorites this year? Or for all time? We’d love to hear your opinions in the comments section below! Did we miss any good ones?

* * * *
2012 Winners of the Cosmic Dancer Dance in Film Awards 

Best Dramatic Use of Dance: Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright.
      For a stunningly clever Viennese waltz choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and for the director’s overall use of choreographed movement. Apparently, we’re not the only ones who noticed how extraordinary the Wright/Cherkaoui team was:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/arts/dance/sidi-larbi-cherkaouis-choreography-for-anna-karenina.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Best Choreography: Travis Wall, Christopher Scott, Jamal Sims, and Chuck Maldonado, choreographers of Step Up Revolution, directed by Scott Speer
     For their wild, daring, passionate, and innovative numbers.

Kathryn McCormick and Ryan Guzman in Step Up Revolution
Best Dancing: The dancers of Step Up Revolution, especially Kathryn McCormick
     For keeping up with those choreographers and pushing the envelope.
 
Most Therapeutic Use of Dance: Silver Linings Playbook, directed by David O. Russell, choreographed by Mandy Moore
     You’ll understand why if you watch the film!

Scene from Silver Linings Playbook
 * * * *
Now it’s difficult to choose “bests” without coming across a few disappointments, and sometimes the disappointment is so harsh, you just have to mention it in the hope that you can discourage such missteps by future filmmakers. That’s my excuse anyway.

Most Underused Dancer: Julianne Hough in Rock of Ages, directed by Adam Shankman, choreographed by Adam Shankman and Mia Michaels
     It’s a fun movie, but she’s a dancer we’d like to see more from. We had to find her edited-out dance scene with Tom Cruise on YouTube, where it seems to be very popular (and R-rated).

Most Ill-Used Dancer: Channing Tatum in Magic Mike, directed by Steven Soderbergh, choreographed by Alison Faulk.
     His talent deserves better than this dark mess.

Fastest Turn-Off:  Battlefield America, directed by Chris Stokes, choreographers’ names withheld to protect the innocent.
     Joseph and I used to brag that they’d never make a dance movie we couldn’t enjoy but we were wrong. A trite script is one thing, but too many unlikable characters and odious plot lines and it becomes this year’s reject, winning the dubious “Fastest Turn-Off” award after only 34 minutes! The dancing might have been good, but we wouldn’t know because of the poor camera angles and editing on the little bit we could stand to watch.

* * * *
I’m happy to say Julianne Hough must have a great sense of humor and made up for her lack of dancing in Rock of Ages at an after-party for the Golden Globes. Wish we’d been there to see it! Here’s the photo she posted on Instagram: http://instagram.com/p/Udpboaifw4/

Happy dancing and movie-going!
We’ve got high hopes for 2013!

Saturday, August 4, 2012

The Psychic-Energetic Side of the Games: What Makes an Olympic Champion?

Inside the 2012 Olympic Flame - Courtesy NBC
Have you been hooked by the excitement of Olympic competitions this week? Me too. I especially enjoy trying to decipher the psychic energy forces at work in and around these amazing athletes.

For instance, we all know that every one of those little girls and young women in shiny leotards can perfectly execute those gravity-defying feats, else they wouldn’t be where they are. Yet what inner and outer forces of interdimensional energy determine who sticks the landing and who doesn’t?

And perhaps you watched Michael Phelps lose a race by something like five hundredths of a second simply because he decided to coast for that last nano-breath and his competitor never slowed. Five hundredths of a second! What inner or outer force stayed his propulsion?

In an interview with NBC after all his competitions were over, Phelps said he caught himself with a wrong attitude in those early days. He hadn't been smiling. He determined to smile more and just have fun being in that incredible Olympic environment. What happened next? Gold medals, records breaking, he became "the greatest Olympian ever." What did it take? A positive, happy state of mind.
And what about the 71-year-old Japanese equestrian who credits his continued competition in the incredibly difficult dressage events to a “magical connection” with his horse? He’s not kidding about that.

What we often call magic is an expression of the higher-frequency energy Intelligence functioning within and without each one of us, connecting us to one another, our environment—and yes, even our horses, dogs, cats, birds, whales, dolphins, bears, and other wild creatures.

Our science is only beginning to reach into and understand these higher-dimensional influences, where our souls traffic with one another, and with the Infinite Intelligence that serves as our Eternal Source.
So in an intensive, competitive, striving, reaching, and soul-committed atmosphere like the Summer Olympics, the psychic energies swirling around each athlete, connecting them to their sport, their fans, and their detractors, comprise the larger part of the story.

A “Psychic” Tradition

The Greeks not only invented this spectacle of human excellence as an alternative to warring, they originated the word psychic. Our English word derives from the Greek  psychikos, meaning of the soul, or life. It also relates to the Greek psyche, meaning breath. The Greek goddess Psyche is said to represent the human soul, usually depicted with butterfly wings to indicate immortality (which, by the way, is why you’ll find the butterfly theme showing up in both my novels and nonfiction books about reincarnation).

Wikipedia will tell you psychikos means mind or mental, but I believe that definition has been influenced by the modern usage of our word psychic, which only came into the English language in the late nineteenth century and is now too commonly associated with 900-numbers.
When I say psychic, I’m talking about energy, really, but of an interdimensional nature—the kind of energy that carries intelligence from dimension to dimension, the stuff of which we’re made. We often forget that our soulic essence is pure energy, the part of ourselves that serves as the software motivating our physical bodies. But the Games give us plenty of opportunities to watch and learn.

The Pagan, Mystical Games

According to my research, the ancient Olympic Games continued for twelve hundred years before a newly Christian emperor of Rome abolished them in 393 C.E. “because of their pagan influences.”  
Hmmm … I wonder if the original Games openly acknowledged the spiritual side of the competition? The mastery of internal and external psychic energy required to win? Remember, our current frontiers of science, the quest to understand and detect the newly identified Dark Energy and Dark Matter that comprise 96% of our universe, are also what an early Christian might have termed a “pagan belief in mystical forces.”

I also learned that all the Great Minds of the Golden Age participated in the ancient Olympics, from Pythagoras to Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, and that poets, playwrights, musicians, actors, and painters took part in the competitions. You can bet these luminaries considered the psychical aspects of Olympic competition to be a major factor!

Eventually, the Games even honored a woman: the first Olympic mother, who broke the upon-pain-of-death strictures against female attendance to watch the son she’d trained as he became a champion fighter. In her ecstasy over his success, her disguise fell off and she was about to suffer the traditional penalty (being thrown off a high cliff) when the judges relented and let her live. After all, she was the mother of a champion. What could be holier than that? (Have you been watching the parent-cams in the stands? Yikes—talk about painful!)

Yes, way back in the day, they knew what it was all about, and it was both humbling and ennobling. Just as it is now for those of us who watch and learn in our present lifetimes (wink, wink).

The Olympic Flame rising -- Courtesy Danny Boyle & NBC
What It Takes to Win
What separates a winner from the rest? In most cases, these athletes are at peak physical fitness. Less than a hair’s breadth separates them, according to all measurements of physical skill.

But what about their psychic energy? Is it marred by fear, nerves, insecurity, self-defeatism, ego? Yes, too much ego can be a real detriment, as we’ve all witnessed. Just as not enough ego could hold back a timid competitor.

So balance—not on a narrow beam but within the individual athlete’s energy systems—can make a huge difference in performance. Think of this next time you watch a competition. Watch the energy surrounding and emanating from the individual, which anyone can detect by their facial expressions, their own words used to describe their sport and their performance, their interaction with others, and for the more sensitive, that intangible yet tangible aura of confidence versus fear or self-doubt.

In the online Olympic Museum (currently shut down for redesign), I found this gem about the minds of champions:

Intrusive Thoughts—Countering Strategy  
Negative thoughts which invade the mind generate doubts and disrupt the body. It is these which most frequently cause the fatal hesitation and eliminate the player from the match or competition. These intrusive thoughts must be kept at bay with constructive thoughts which the champion uses as a countering strategy.”
Oh boy, that’s a strategy we could all use every day!

A little later on, the same site describes The Zone:

The athlete going into The Zone is at the height of his form, his technical mastery, and his sensations.” (emphasis mine)
Never mind the gender bias in the language (presumably that will go away in the site’s redesign)—even the IOC recognizes the importance of mental control and perception, even to the highest levels that we might consider in a very modern sense to be “psychic.”

Did you catch the brief clip of a champion skeet shooter? How did she hit every single moving target? Normal sight could not possibly have detected those objects in time to send a signal to the fingers! Like playing an instrument, this is all taking place in the realm of the unconscious but highly Intelligent, multi-dimensional Mind that knows faster than we can think. How often is this kind of speedy psychic response a factor in the Olympic games?

But there are deeper factors to consider when looking at the energetic side of the Olympics. Joseph and I love taking things apart to understand what makes them tick, interdimensionally. Here are some of the elements we’ve discussed:

Travel Dislocations

It is not yet, but one day will become widely known that travel interferes with acupuncture meridians (i.e., the flow of energy into and out of muscles and all the tissues of the body), by changing our association with the Earth’s own energy meridians. Our bodies align themselves compatibly with the energies flowing into and through our present location on Earth. When we travel any long distance, we are thrown out of this alignment. That, in turn, affects us physically.

Eden Energy Medicine practitioners like me know how to make adjustments for this misalignment, and can quickly put an individual back into their best form with a few balancing and synchronizing methods. I assume any athlete incorporating Eastern medicine into their fitness preparation will also know what to do, or who to turn to for this kind of adjustment.

Everyone else will suffer from what the public calls “jet lag.” They’ll eventually adjust, meaning competing athletes probably fly in early if they can in order to compensate. If they arrive at the last minute and make no compensations, their performances will be impaired. (And they thought shipping personalized high-jump poles was the only challenge!)

Our connection to the Earth itself is energetic, mutable, and essential. It’s one of our primary interdimensional associations.

Note how well the Asian athletes are performing. Could the acceptance and application of Eastern medicine, and from the finest practitioners available, provide a competitive edge?

Kinesio Tape

Did you watch the Chinese synchronized divers perform, both men and women? Amazing, aren’t they? I’ll talk more about their performance in a minute. But did you notice the kinesiology tape, the red plastic strip down one woman’s back, or the brown strip up a man’s leg? Or a fancy black pattern on a man's shoulder?

Joseph said, “I’ll bet it has to do with acupuncture meridians.”
Sure enough, I started Googling and found the company that gave away 56,000 rolls of it in Beijing in 2008. Champions used it. The company became famous. More athletes wanted it. But conventional science so far hasn’t pinpointed why it’s helping, or even if it is helping. Still, these Gold-medal winners have sworn by it.

Injuries are lessened, muscles stretch further or refrain from overstretching, blood and lymph drain from swollen areas; so say the inventors. But looking deeper, these effects may be the result of a shift in mental perspective by the athlete using the tape.

My theory is that, whatever it might do or not do physically, the tape sensation focuses consciousness on the chosen spot in a different way. And given the way the tape is applied, at the physical level it may also be tracing or supporting various acupuncture meridians or points, while causing the athlete’s mind to stimulate those points by giving them attention, thus influencing the flow of energy into and around the body.

On their website, the manufacturers say the various colors of the tape are not relevant. I would say that the colors would further influence the athlete’s mental response to the tape, and that mental response is everything when it comes to the body’s health and efficiency.

Environmental Influences

At any Olympics, competing athletes will suffer a host of environmental influences: unaccustomed housing, food, and people. We form energetic connections with all these aspects of our lives, and any disruption here can also influence performance. I’m sure most training programs take this into account—I would hope so, anyway. Instinctively, athletes may try to surround themselves with only positive, supportive people.

But without conscious awareness of all the interdimensional factors of energy exchange between individuals, it would be all too easy for extraneous influences to cloud the thoughts, interfere in concentration, deplete the personal storehouse of energy, introduce destructive astral entity obsessions into the aura (see my post, “Who Are Your Astral Companions?”), and so on.

And these are all above and beyond the usual considerations of food poisoning, allergies, lack of appetite, vacillating team spirit, and supportive vs. destructive coaching.

All of these affect the mental state and hence the bodily function, except perhaps food poisoning, which could work in reverse: the body’s weakening affecting the athlete’s mental state, diminishing his or her confidence in addition to the depleted physical energy.

Electronic Interference

Electronic influences are also rampant in the modern games, as television advertisers are gleefully pointing out. Athletes are surrounded by every imaginable type of electronic device during their performance and training.

Unfortunately, most electronic equipment in today’s world emits what is known as “dirty electricity,” which detrimentally affects human energy systems to such a degree that new research, when not suppressed by financial interests, is slowly coming to light connecting this influence to outbreaks of cancer clusters, brain tumors, diabetes, and other degenerative diseases. This is as a result of long-term exposure.
But even in the short term, an electronic device too close to the body causes trouble for the body’s own energy systems, which are tuned to the natural energies of the Earth. Man-made electrical equipment, including fluorescent lighting and battery-powered devices, by ignoring nature’s patterning, will set up an abnormal influence at odds with nature and the human body. As the body entrains with the electronics instead of nature, something occurs which energy medicine practitioners refer to as a “homolateral condition.”

This means that energies which, in a healthy individual, will criss-cross the body in figure-eight patterns, crossing from left to right to fuel muscle, tissue, and brain function, soon begin to flow in a limited pattern, straight up-and-down the sides of the body. This brings on terrible fatigue, sometimes nausea and headaches, and reduces mental and physical effectiveness, as well as immune function, by as much as fifty percent.

Not everyone is susceptible to this influence; some are more sensitive than others. Have you ever noticed yourself growing tired after long sessions near your favorite electronic device, whether TV or computer, or washing machine and refrigerator? Do you ever feel nauseous or exhausted in a big-box store that uses massive lighting fixtures and electronic security devices?

A few bold inventors have developed devices that will mitigate this interference with the body’s normal energy patterns, including Joseph and me. J Yes, I’m an inventor! Well, not really. We are more like innovators in energy medicine, in that we’ve adapted the use of man-made lead crystal into something we use to counteract the homolateral-causing effects of many environmental factors, including electronic devices. Our Crystal Energizers are very cheap, costing pennies to make, and we don’t sell them. I promise to write about them here soon, so you can experiment with them for yourself. (Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog!)

Meanwhile, you can purchase expensive sports jewelry that makes a similar attempt, although I’m not familiar with the effectiveness of all in the marketplace. Some we’ve encountered  have not passed our muscle-testing and were, in fact, causing the very condition our clients were trying to alleviate. But if you’re a fan of Dancing with the Stars, you may remember Gilles and Cheryl competing? And do you recall the strange “necklaces” they both wore during rehearsals and performances? They were examples of one of those expensive versions of health jewelry. It seemed to work very well for them in dance competition.

(I would love to rattle on about why Dancesport still has not been allowed into the Olympics, but I will practice some of that restraint and self-mastery Olympic athletes must learn and save that for another day.)

Crowds, Announcers, Fans, and Detractors

Most Olympic athletes appear to have trained well to ignore loud noises, unexpected shouts, negative sniping, over-adoring fans, and TV announcers who ask inane questions.

But from our Eden Energy Medicine training, we know that negative thoughts alone can affect a person’s muscle performance. We've demonstrated this in our classes, using applied kinesiology (muscle-testing).

We’d stand an individual up front and have the class bombard them with negative thoughts. I know, cruel; but necessary for science, we've rationalized. Also surprisingly difficult to do in that otherwise positive setting! The real world is not so kind, however.

Always, the person’s muscles failed as we silently signalled the class where the subject couldn’t see us. We even set up this experiment with the subject out of the room, so they had no idea what it was all about, and no conscious awareness of the wave of negativity coming toward them. And why would they expect it in such a class?

When we reversed the polarity, in other words, when we surreptitiously asked the class to think positive thoughts toward them again, their muscles would hold firm. Everyone is always shocked by this demonstration, and we thank Donna Eden for bringing it to our attention.

Yet it was a class setting—how true could it be?
One day, Joseph and I were in a health food store testing weird, natural-brand toothpastes with muscle testing. I was about to test something on Joseph when I saw over his shoulder an individual who came around the corner of an aisle, unbeknownst to Joseph, and gave him a terribly ugly stare. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought because we were in a part of the country so conservative that muscle-testing was akin to voodoo sacrifice. But floomp! Joseph’s muscles instantly failed! It wasn’t the toothpaste; that tested fine later. It was the man’s thoughts directed toward him! And Joseph had no idea the man even existed.

So every negative and positive thought directed to an athlete is having an influence on that individual’s muscular system, whether that athlete is aware of it or not.

Wow. That’s the real power of psychic energy.

In the class, we taught people a simple way to “zip-up” the energy system to protect against this influence. We then proved that protection worked, again via muscle-testing. (More thanks to our training in Eden Energy Medicine.)

Presumably, well-trained Olympians have strengthened all aspects of their energy systems while training their bodies. But what if an athlete is temporarily or even permanently “unzipped” (a weakness in a particular meridian essential to their inner strength). Many situations can cause one’s energies to be open to this sort of influence, and even our zip-up method is only a temporary fix. So to win against all negative thinking, many levels of psychic, energetic strength must be kept in place throughout the competition.

This is why we find the commentary of TV personalities so offensive when they exhibit cultural or political bias in their running remarks during an event. That’s the real voodoo at work. We heard one commentator derogating the Mexican men’s synchronized diving team, even as they proved her wrong, wrong, wrong by demonstrating the opposite of her remarks and going on to win the silver medal!

During that same event, the massive popularity of one British diver, causing a huge crowd turnout, didn’t seem to help him. In fact, his performance was notably below expectations. Could it be that the adulation was so overwhelming, it negatively affected that precarious balance of ego a champion must achieve? Certainly. Especially for a young, inexperienced competitor.

On the other hand, tape-delayed television broadcasts are denying some athletes the psychic, mental support of their fans back home. Watch how well the British are faring in competitions where they weren’t expected to do well. Home-team advantage has a lot to do with supportive crowd energy, and that crowd energy works both ways, either positive or negative. It includes TV viewing audiences, whose thoughts aren’t limited by distance.

So with the taped-delayed broadcasts, I miss knowing that my silent cheering could actually help a competitor. I’ll be glad when live coverage becomes the norm, no matter where you are on the planet.

A brass "petal" for every country attending!
Past-Life Influences
You knew I’d get to this sooner or later, didn’t you?

This is a vast subject when you talk about the interdimensional aspects of the Olympic Games. I hinted earlier that some of us may have attended or participated in the original Games. But there are so many other factors of influence, as with all of life.
Just as champions have often risen higher in response to present-life tragedies and difficulties, many of them may be responding to past-life experiences they are trying to balance or overcome.

In his post-competitions interview, Michael Phelps let slip that he "loves sharks" and thinks they are fascinating creatures and he's always wanted to swim with Great Whites. In fact, he'd just made plans to do exactly that with a fellow swimmer from South Africa. They'll use shark cages, of course, but do you suppose the world's fastest competitive swimmer might have been propelled across those pools because of a prior-life encounter with a shark he couldn't outswim?

It's not uncommon to be either repelled by or attracted to a past-life nemesis; either reaction indicates a history. And it's often the case that the pursuit of sporting excellence is chosen by the individual as a way to balance out and put to rest a past-life terror.

Or what of the swimmer overcoming a fear engendered by drowning in a prior life? Or the archer who’s spent many lifetimes perfecting that skill, although perhaps not always for mere competitive sport? Now she’s turning that once-destructive skill into something more positive, while setting an example for others.

It’s always fun to try to see in these competitors how this event might fit into the mosaic of many lives for them. The personal accomplishment might be far more important than medals won, with an eternal influence on all future lifetimes.

And when it comes to past lives, you have to remember that sometimes losing could be the important personal, evolutionary lesson the individual was aiming for. You have to look at the big picture, the soulic scope, as it were.

The Harmony of Synchronized Diving, aka Teamwork

This is one of my favorite events so far because it demonstrates the kind of harmony and unity that two individuals (or more) can achieve as psychic polarities. Talk about entrainment! Beautiful to watch the humble way in which each diver must work with the other to accomplish these amazing feats! A true example of mastery that extends beyond the self. But how many of these relationships extend beyond a single lifetime?

Everyone laughed at the two girls who shared a love for rubber duckys, but what of their other, oddly compatible traits? Hmm, looks like a case of past-life connections to me.

Water Polo, aka Cutthroat Competition

At the other end of the spectrum, extreme violent adversity. Yikes! We caught a performance of the U. S. women’s water polo team during our lunch break. Two of its members live here in San Diego and I hope I do not ever meet them in a dark alley! I watched them incurring karma all over that pool.

This is a different kind of competition, where the psychic energy put into play is adversarial and purposely destructive. Not my favorite sport, although the men’s team showed considerably more finesse and surprisingly less violence than the women in the matches we watched. They also had better tans their their British competitors. J I confess, they were more fun to watch than the violence of the women’s match, but I do believe I am demonstrating a gender bias, so I’ll move on to:

Chasing the Morphic Field

If you’re not familiar with Rupert Sheldrake’s work, maybe we’ll call this section “Chasing the Yellow Line,” referring to the yellow world or Olympic record times that NBC is projecting over swim competitions, so that it looks like the swimmers are chasing this moving line to the end of the Olympic pool, where a few have broken past it to achieve new records. It’s a clever broadcasting device, and a good visual indicator for how the world’s collective psychic beliefs are changed as that record falls.

My understanding of Sheldrake’s work and his coined term morphic field is that, every once in a while, humanity will break through to a new standard. Soon after, others are quick to duplicate this previously “impossible” feat. Of course Sheldrake’s life’s work is much more complex than this, but Joseph and I call the yellow line the Morphic Field Line.

Why is it that it takes one person long, excruciating effort to accomplish something no one else has done before? And then many people are able to follow soon after, with relative ease? Because of our embedded beliefs in certain limitations. Which only tells us how truly powerful our beliefs can be.

We watched the Mexican divers debut a new synchronized diving move while they were winning that silver medal, a dive so twistingly complex and never before attempted at the Olympics that I can’t recall exactly what they did. But it was stunning. And you can bet that at the next Olympics we’ll see it many more times.

This is one more extraordinary way in which the champions of the Olympic Games lead us all into a new collective state of being, a new psychic state of awareness in which the realm of the possible is suddenly expanded.

Watching the Parent-Cam

There’s a term and new studies proving that human beings literally embody what they watch another go through, and danged if I can remember the term. Can anyone help me out? I printed out the article and saved it somewhere I cannot find. Sympathetic resonance? Brainwave entrainment? Nah, not either of those, although they sound like the right descriptive. It means that if we watch something violent, we embed it within ourselves as if we’d experienced it. Same if we watch something wonderful. (Filmmakers don’t like you to consider this.)

To understand the phenomenon, you merely have to watch the parent-cams NBC has installed in viewing stands to record parental reactions to their offspring Olympians’ performances. That is, if you can stand to watch! These in-audience performances nearly always bring me to tears as my own “sympathetic resonance” kicks in for these tortured souls. Love is one of the most powerful psychic energies we express!

The most striking example so far came during a broadcast of the women’s gymnastics team qualification rounds, when Aly Raisman’s parents were grimacing, bobbing, and weaving with every move she made, as if they could make the movements for her by sheer parental will, culminating in an extreme display of relief, joy, and exhaustion commingled when her performance ended.

NBC showed us this parental performance several times, as if once was not enough to experience this painfully sympathetic display. From watching those two, I think being an Olympic parent might be the toughest challenge of the Games!

However, just as with prayer, this type of psychic energy could indeed transfer a strong, helpful, positive input from parent to child and actually assist in their performance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go back to watching. I’ll leave you with some fun links to explore. But please use the Comments section to relate your own opinions and experiences of the psychic side of the Olympics! I’d love to read your insights!

And if you liked this post, please share it, tweet it, FB it, DIGG it, pin it. You’ll help more people think through the physical and into the more expansive reaches of life. Thank you! (And if you want to read or share it on your Kindle, go to Soul Pursuits Blog for a free trial subscription.)

* * * * * * *
Links:
A brief explanation of Sheldrake’s work:
A fun and informative video cartoon about the ancient Olympics:
“Champion in the Mind”—a link to the old exhibit from the IOC’s virtual Olympic Museum:
From the company that started the kinesiology tape phenomenon:
http://www.kinesiotaping.hk/what-is-Kinesio-Tape.html

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Gardening with the Fairies, Part III

What is a faery, anyway? Frankly, I don’t know.

When I started this blog entry, I was still operating on the vague notions I’ve had all along about these Intelligences that seem to be operating in our gardens, wherever we live. But when I went to look up the various spellings and designations for the beings we’re calling fairies, I ran into a lot of dogma and ancient beliefs and tales and legends. And I also decided, like so many other contemporary writers, that somehow faery or faerie looks and feels more poetically appropriate and suitable than fairy. Maybe too many modern so-called “fairytales” have tainted that spelling with something other than what I mean here.

But what is that exactly? Lianne, just what DO you mean by garden faery (or fairy)?

Also, when I sent the first draft of Part I to Laird William for his permission to speak of his work with Fairy Realms Reiki, I was suddenly self-conscious about my ignorance on this faerie subject, let alone confused about spelling. How could I be writing so fast and furious about something I actually, truly know nothing about?

I do know that what I’ve been envisioning in the garden really isn’t like any of the explanations or definitions or traditions I read about on Wikipedia. It’s close to the deva concept, but not really. That would mislead you. Sigh.

So now that you've read Part I, and Part II about the lessons we've learned from the fairies, I will embark on a CoAuthored venture to enlighten both you and me. I shall ask my Cosmic CoAuthors just what it is that Joseph and I are experiencing in the garden.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Gardening with the Fairies, Part II

This was cropped out of an untouched (I swear!) image
Joseph took in our back yard:
Here's the original, which I found just this morning while selecting images for this blog post!
A trick of the light? Or ... a real garden fairy caught playing in the sunbeams?
The photo was taken in our back yard in December, 2010, nine months after we moved into this rental house in the Tierrasanta area of San Diego. But we never noticed the fairy image before today! It was just another shot of sunlight and fallen leaves and rocks in our collection ... until now, when I've come to write the follow-up to Part I of "Gardening with the Fairies." (If you haven't read Part I yet, follow that link.)
Okay, if that doesn't convince you that the fairies have followed us to California, how about the story of this little one. I first spotted it, this lonely little sunflower, forcing its way up into the patio from between the loosely laid pavement and the ill-fitting boards the landlord installed, evidence of the birdseed we'd tried putting out last summer (until it attracted a rat in the fall, the most undesirable sort of fairy, a story I'll get to in a moment.)

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Gardening with the Fairies, Part I


Do you believe in fairies?

A few years ago when we lived in Michigan, we rented a house several streets from the shores of Lake Michigan. The back yard was nothing more than weeds shaved down to stubs in an effort to mimic a lawn. The landlady even apologized for it. But we loved the house.

So when a friend of ours announced that he was gaining his Fairy Realms Reiki attunement, we immediately asked him to practice on our back yard.

Monday, February 6, 2012

What's a Life Color, Anyway?


I'm often making references to Life Colors these days, so I've been thinking I should explain but hadn't figured out where to start. This week a Facebook friend from Camborne, Cornwall, England, gave me the perfect opening.

I got myself in trouble, you see, by mentioning in a public conversation that someone was an "Indigo Life Color." My friend leaped in and asked to know more. I tried to put her off to another source because I don't do "readings," but she's such a delightful person, I relented. Here's what happened: