Welcome to Season 2! The Chorus begins this season by describing what could be considered a next phase of Awakening for humans, which is the feeling of an acceleration. Whereas we might have consciously experienced an emotion – say depression – for weeks or months at a time previously, now we may find we fly through it much faster, in a matter of hours or minutes.
At this speed, we may spend more time coming to clarity about these emotions, beliefs and experiences by feeling them as opposed to thinking about them. Same (or expanded) clarity, new process.
Katie describes a human concept that typically reflects this accelerated and growing understanding: the sensation of inconvenience.
// View List of Season 2 Episodes
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Kick-off
And we’re back.
I think we should all take a collective deep breath. Because I know everything that happened to me in the interim between season one and season two, so I am guessing all the things that have happened for you…for those listening in real time.
And for those who are listening to a recording, and may have just finished season one, five minutes ago and are now starting season two, I would say maybe still take a deep breath. There’s a lot of energies in these podcasts, sometimes it takes a minute to just let them soak in a little bit.
On that note, for those of you who are joining us for the first time, welcome. And also, a note of housekeeping is that these episodes tend to build on each other. So follow your inspiration. If you would like to continue listening to these episodes, and starting with season two, by all means go for it. But also know that there are concepts that The Chorus and I will sort of breeze through a little faster, because we suspect or anticipate that you’ve already heard about these concepts in season one. And we will also be drawing the connections between the concepts more quickly.
And in addition to that, the stories will be continuing. So – spoiler alert – if you have not listened to the season finale of season one, then you might want to turn this off right now, if you do not want any surprises. Or, you know, just roll with it, it’ll be fine. But the beings that I mentioned having encountered in the season finale, and that I allude to in the rest of the season, will be making more in different appearances this season. And we will continue to talk about that, what that means for us, as a human species, and also for our story.
You know, as exciting, as amazing, as interesting as it is that we are not alone…in my experience, that has always come after an expansion in myself, a moment when I’ve seen more of what I am, or accepted more of it. I think this is true at the individual level. And I think it’s true at the aggregate.
Meaning, I believe, there’s a whole lot of context to our story that we are about to awaken to…Our history, if you like to put it on a linear timeline…Our story depending on which direction you take it from. However you want to say it, there’s more about US that we need to know or can know or will know, that will create a basis, perhaps, for the stories of all these other beings that we’re starting to encounter to plug into.
At the end of the day, you will find that the greatest story is your story. And all the beings that we get to share that with and then get to know their stories is part of the celebration of that fact.
In today’s episode, The Chorus kicks off this episode and the season, really, by talking about awakening and the speed of awakening. The oscillation between these two different perspectives that we’ve been talking about – the perspective of the five senses, and also our energetic perspective. And then I connect that to a human experience which many of us know well.
Ah, and one final note of housekeeping. Our book – The Book of Human Awakening – is now available on Amazon. The audio book is also available now, in case you want to listen to my voice read the book. It was me or Samuel L Jackson. Just kidding. But I kind of wish…I think he would be perfectly appropriate for awakening.
And then final note, we are launching our store with one product in it. Which I bet you’ll be able to guess by the end of the episode.
And now I bring you humanity’s infinitely available cheering squad, our favorite commentators on the experience of awakening, and our most cherished friends…The Chorus.
The Chorus
Beloved ones, we have missed you.
What an interesting phrase for non physical beings to say, for as you well know by now, we are aware of you, we are energetically connected to you all the time.
But in a way, with each day, as you continue on your paths of awakening, you are reconnecting more and more to the energetic parts of yourself that you had so intentionally, so purposefully, blinded yourselves to. Yur consciousnesses are expanding or becoming aware, yet again, you could say, of the vaster portions of yourself, that we have always been in contact with.
And yet, we have not been connected to this part of you, to this consciousness to the you that plunged yourselves into the experience of limitation. And so, we are celebrating, we are joyful over each moment of expansion that you experience here. For by each step, by each forward progress, there is more and more of you that we are able to bear witness to, to reconnect to and to love.
We understand that there is much happening in your societies right now. For there is much happening in your awakening, for there is much happening all around you in all other parts of the galaxies and the universe and your solar system, and you are becoming aware of more and more of these things.
As your perceptions continue to expand, you will have moments in which your five senses belief systems will activate and you will feel fearful, angry, frustrated, anxious, and all the many other things that you are now coming to understand are simply expressions of the energy of disallowance. In feeling these things, you know what is activating all those beliefs.
You could stop and name them. Understand root cause, identify where they all come from, what stimuli in your environment triggered them…But eventually, as you begin to oscillate faster and faster between the frequencies of disallowance and the frequencies you are expanding toward, you will find that perhaps there is no longer a need to stop and name them, to talk about and scrutinize them, to list them and prevent yourself from feeling them further.
Rather, you will expand into the sense of these things, the speed of which far surpasses what you could say about them with words. And as you do so, you will find that also your attention then shifts outward into the furthest extent of all frequencies that you are then able to perceive. And in doing so, you align, you expand into all that you are. And from that vantage point, perfectly understand everything that you had been feeling.
Both are options, both are paths, both are methods, both are ways, both are reflections of your expansion.
In these months to come, you will become so aware of your preference. So aware of your intuition and inspiration, that it may almost start to feel laughable that you ever went any other way.
Your limitation was perfect, powerful, and purposeful. You may look at it, for however much longer you wish. And when you are ready, we all are ready and waiting to welcome you home.
Discussion with Katie
Whenever I start recording an episode, I always feel like there’s so much to say. There’s so many things to connect what they just talked about to…And then inevitably, by the end of the episode, I get a sense that what was said was right. And also that it’s all kind of the same thing over and over again.
Now, I know from our human perspective, it’s not. These topics feel very different to us, it’s very distinct. When we talk about our mind-body instrument versus anger, or depression, versus things we’re starting to perceive, these all feel very diverse. They’re very varied topics, they feel very different to us.
And that’s true.
And then if I roll it up to their level, I see it from their perspective, which is basically just… you guys limited yourselves by choice, did it on purpose, for an expansive experience that expanded you all and us all.
And then it’s like all the color that fills in that line, that shape, that framework, is all the difference that we feel. But really, it’s all about this, isn’t it?
It’s all about us, what we made here and our awakening. And we’re experiencing it in different ways. And sometimes the world looks like it’s going crazy. And some days are hard and some days are great. Some days are divine. We see all the color that is in between these two perspectives. Because we’re the ones who get to live it.
The Chorus brought up something interesting in their message today…they pointed out that as we continue to expand, as we start to step into more of our energetic perception, there is a perspective from which we can view that where we will activate our beliefs of limitation. So as we start to perceive something new and different, we may also not want to perceive that new and different. The beliefs of limitation will still be doing their job basically, and saying, “no, we’re not going to look at that yet. We are not looking at tha. That is outside the game.” And we perceive that kind of friction in that case, specifically as fear or anxiety. And there are so many beliefs that cause us to turn away from that, as we talked about in season one when we talked about fear and anxiety.
And they’re saying that that is a valid part of awakening. And that’s a lot of what we talked about in season one…these different sensations.
And now they’re pointing out well, there’s potentially a next step where it starts to happen so fast, that you really don’t stop and look at it, and name it and talk about it, because that would be the pace of the mind. That would be the pace of judgments and thinking. And so though it’s valid – a valid perspective of awakening – it’s not the only perspective. And it’s not the only perspective that we’re going to go through as humans either.
And that’s what they’re suggesting today, they’re saying, “as you begin to speed up, the sense of these things will be more clear to you – will almost be more meaningful to you – than stopping to talk about it, and think about it.” It starts to become very fluid, and very real time. Where as you’re going through your day, you feel in a conscious way, all the emotions that are sort of fluctuating through you, almost faster than you could stop and connect a word to them. That is an expanded consciousness. That IS you’re growing awareness for all the things that you’re feeling, moment by moment. And now you could suppose that eventually we speed up to the speed that they talk about in the book, The Book of Human Awakening, and also in season one, where they say that speed is billions of times per second.
Now, we’re not quite there yet. I don’t know. Maybe you are. If you’re doing this billions of times per second, please call me? I would love to hear about it. But you know, for the most part, we’ve been in a place of naming things, which takes many minutes, sometimes sometimes hours to talk about that one thing.
You say, “gosh, I got so pissed off yesterday.” Well, that took me several seconds to just say out loud, right? Okay.
So the next step is sort of an acceleration into this – the conscious awareness of all the things that you’re feeling moment by moment without needing to name them. Because the recognition, the recognition is just as clear, it’s just as crisp, as if you and I spent an hour talking about it.
So if I go in and talk to my therapist, and I say, “I was so angry, and all this, and this happened…” And we have this amazing conversation, where I start to understand how I felt and why I felt that way…imagine where I would be at the beginning of that conversation, and by the end of the hour. By the end of the hour, I’ve moved through and into a lot of understanding – why that was there, what I believed that contributed to it, things I can do differently in the future…There’s just this grown awareness of that whole emotion.
Okay, so now take that moment, that sensation at the end of that hour, and now just plunk it down into a handful of seconds. In a flash in part of your day. So you’re standing in the kitchen, and somebody in your family or you know in your house does something that really pisses you off. Rather than needing the days to reflect on it, and the conversation with your therapist to come to clarity about it, it happens AS that’s happening. Does that make sense?
So it’s like that dual perspective that we sometimes have – sometimes people call it like an out of body experience, where you’re watching yourself do something, okay? – this is sort of that next step, where you’re not just watching it, like, “why the heck am I saying this stuff?”
That’s part of the initial process. This next step is sort of like you are recognizing it as it’s happening. You’re saying, “oh, man, here it comes again. There’s that anger. Wow, wow.”
That part of you is relatively calm as it’s happening. And in the beginning, this will feel a little weird to us. Because we are used to being driven by our emotional responses.
Anger, as a good example to us often feels overwhelming. So much so that you’re trying to calm yourself down and not smash the glass on the floor or whatever it is. And it’s so hard because you are so resonant with those frequencies of disallowance while also reaching for, expanding towards, other frequencies. And what The Chorus is saying today is happening is – you are gradually expanding beyond those frequencies of disallowance. And so your perspective is broader. Which also means that the intensity of resonance is lighter.
We know this sensation best when you go back into a situation that you’ve been in before – maybe it’s an argument you’ve had with someone over and over and over and over again, right? You always fight about money, you always fight about what to do about the kids, you always fight about how you always leave a mess, and it pisses them off. Okay? So there’s a recurring topic. And this is one of the first ways that we’ll recognize that this is starting to happen to us. Because as you go into that same old argument, rather than being consumed by the emotion and reacting, you have this sort of awareness, a recognition of the emotion itself. And it’s sort of like, “oh, we’re here again. We’re here again, there it is. It’s doing it.” And you don’t even need to name it. You’re not even scrutinizing it, you’re feeling through it. And that feeling brings a clarity about it.
And then the most interesting thing that happens next for humans..Typically, I don’t know, I’m a human. I’m speaking as a human, maybe other humans feel. It’s so hard to be general, when..the more you become aware of the infinite universe, the more all blanket statements, just…they don’t even make sense anymore. Ever. Everybody’s unique.
But anyways, okay, so we’re still coming out of a consensus driven reality. And so there are these experiences that we might have jointly, as a collective. Okay. So this next thing that happens for a human is typically that you recognize the anger, or the emotion, you know, you COULD feel that way, and maybe you SHOULD feel that way, but you kind of just don’t.
It’s not the same. It’s not as fired up as it was before. It’s not as intense. It’s not as like, you can’t even control it. And now you’re arguing and now it’s half hour later, and you don’t even know where you were, you just, you just had this big argument, where were you? Like, what was I thinking?
Compare that to the sort of like, “wow, I’ve been here a lot. I just, I don’t really care. I think I just…I can’t get angry about it in a way that I used to.” Right? And it may even happen, where others around you are sort of dubious of what’s going on you. They don’t like that you’re not pissed off. They’re sort of like, “how could you not be angry about this? He or she or they are still doing this? And last week, you were angry about this? And I was too and now you’re not? And I still am? What’s going on? Are you okay?”
You know, they sort of can’t accept the fact that you are more okay with whatever this the stimulus is, this trigger is.
I think this is happening more and more for us, especially in light of a global pandemic, and health. This is happening more and more for us in light of ongoing sort of endless politics. You see…you see these sort of intense situations that classically trigger in people, all sorts of beliefs: needs for protection, needs for prevention, wanting to get angry, wanting to find who’s responsible for this, placing blame…
You see all of this limitation. And you know, it’s limitation because it energizes more of the same, right? An energetic universe.
And you would rather not have a bunch of things that you need to protect yourself against, and yet you find yourself scouring the internet, trying to see what else you should buy or book or prepare in order to deal with this thing. And it feels heavy, doesn’t feel great. It feels like, “ugh.”
And then out of the corner of your mind, out of the corner of your being, this little happy voice sort of like pipes up and is sort of like, “let’s go do something else.”
And you feel it.
You feel it as ANOTHER VIABLE option.
I could continue to scour the internet and do this right now,…but I also could just…not. I also could just go make a sandwich or eat potato chips.
That is, as we discussed in season one, that sensation of laying down your sword. That we’ve all been enmeshed in these ongoing battles here, either in a pitch for survival with our own environment, or now as we have more sort of obvious experiences of fighting against each other, over what we believe to be finite or risky. And instead of being wholly consumed by the fear, or the anger of that battle, you feel something else. It’s sort of a, “ugh it’s the same old thing every time, isn’t it? I imagine there’ll be as many headlines tomorrow as there were today about how the world’s falling apart. I’m tired of hearing how the world’s falling apart.”
And others who notice this, if there are others who do…For a while there may not be, actually. You may start to feel this shift within yourself. And all the others who are still heavily resonant on those other frequencies, they won’t even notice you. Or they’ll think you’re sort of just uninteresting. And then as they start to sort of lighten their load as well, they’ll notice that you have too. And then they’ll say, “why aren’t you upset about this?”
I’ll give you a good example of this, speaking of health and the pandemic. Some of us who have had all sorts of mysterious manifestations in our bodies, mysterious illnesses, as we’ve gone through awakening…As we’ve talked about, in season one, the mind-body instrument, is a reflection of all of our beliefs. It is sort of a unified embodiment of our belief system complex that we perceive as the humanoid form.
So as we’re moving through beliefs in our awakening, as we’re expanding through them, and sort of starting to understand them, we play by the rules of the game. And the rules of the game, say, “well, you have to be limited. You can’t, you can’t just rocket out of here, you have to move through this stuff.” And often, not always, that looks like illness. Weird, mysterious things start happening to your body, the symptoms can be consistent, or they can move around, they can evolve and change over time. They can magically not show up when you’re at the doctor’s office. And then they’re awful like a week later, when you’re at home by yourself, right?
These things drive us through the beliefs because it opens us up to new possibilities. When no one else can explain it, and when we can’t seem to control it, we allow ourselves to turn towards new and different things that we might not otherwise have done. Maybe it’s alternative medicine, maybe it’s energetic healing, maybe it’s therapy, right? It opens a door.
And now we, as five senses humans, might focus on the door itself. It’s energetic healing, it’s this specific thing that I opened up to. And that’s true. But from another equally valid perspective, it’s simply about the energetic motion you’re going through, which is…opening.
Okay, so you’ve gone through maybe a long struggle with some sort of illness. And through that process, you’ve awakened to all sorts of things in your life, and you’ve sort of changed the way you’ve looked at your life, and you started exploring new and different things, and all this has happened.
And then at some point, you sort of stop wanting to battle the illness.
It was such a part of your day to day life for so long. And then you just sort of can’t quite care anymore.
As most of you know, by listening to season one, I went, I went through this process myself. I had a variety of mysterious symptoms that plagued me for many years. Made it more and more difficult for me to continue with my life as it was. It drove me to open up to The Chorus and to continue, actually, my pursuit of their message and their understanding, because I wasn’t healing. And the more I wasn’t healing, the more I was driven to understand. And as the symptoms worsened, almost to the point where basically to the point where I was completely incapacitated…my ability to connect with and to see other things as possible, was amplified.
Now, over the course of last year, and the podcast, I moved through a lot of beliefs about self acceptance, which you might say is one of the first steps of the awakening process – is sort of this coming to terms of, you know, I feel stuff, and I can’t deny that I feel this any longer. And that usually precipitates into some sort of major life changes. Not always, sometimes it’s just then a different way of taking action in your life. But that usually results in some different effects in your life.
And so as you move through that part of awakening, what you may find then is that your self acceptance begins to grow. Your allowance of everything that you are, is just broader, it’s bigger, it fits more stuff, even the stuff that you wish, maybe wasn’t there.
So the illness goes from being the main focus, you could say, of your life and solving it, solving it, solving it, right? “I’m going to try Reiki healing, I’m going to try this other stuff. Now I’m going to go to therapy, now I’m gonna change my diet, and I’m going to walk every day.” Right? There’s this intense focus on resolving this illness. You’re fighting it right, in a way, you’re battling it, you’re confronting it, you’re trying to remove it, because you think it’s wrong or bad, which is completely aligned to the rules of the game. And then as you move through these self acceptance steps, that urgency, that intensity with which you want to attack, something diminishes.
You lay down the sword.
And it may happen gradually, over time. Other things start to fill into your life. You start to get busy with other activities. And then every few days, you might have this moment of like, “Oh son of a gun, I haven’t really thought about calling that doctor. I guess I gotta call that doctor. I got to remember to call that doctor.”
And then maybe some more weeks pass. And you sort of don’t feel that strain of having to do things exactly the right way. Based on that protocol, or based on that thing that you had finally found that helped you. It loosens a little bit. Not entirely, but enough that maybe you feel like you could eat that other thing that you normally don’t eat, because it’s sometimes causes problems…but it’s okay. It was the only thing there was there to eat, it was pretty good. It’s okay. Right? You feel it’s sort of softening.
And then at some point, you may recognize that you are not fighting the illness at all anymore.
You have a new life, maybe a new way of living, a new way of thinking about things, new activities that are filling in. And the part of you that was so engaged in battling the illness, it sort of just dissolves, like fog.
Okay, so now getting back to the point that The Chrous was making today: you’ve gone through this process, you’ve gone through awakening and self acceptance and sort of things are shifting. Right? They’ve all shifted.
And then someone who cares about you, most likely realizes one day that you have strayed from the fight.
And it may come up in that they’re realizing that you don’t take the medicine that you used to, or you’re not following your protocol as strictly as you used to, or it’s just not a focus for you the way that it was. And they finally notice. And they say to you, “how come you’re not taking care of yourself the way that you used to?” But they can’t really say that, right? Because…you’re happy. And things are kind of going okay. And you acknowledge that you have this illness, and that you need to take care of yourself in this way. So it’s not like you’ve totally shunned it. You’re not pushing against the illness. You’re just letting it be. It is something that’s part of your life.
And so then someone might even say to you, “you used to be really nervous about this. You used to not want to do things because of this. You used to not leave your house for these periods of time in case you had a bout of this. What happened?”
And this is interesting because…if you give them a five senses explanation for the change, it’s probably going to fall short. It is not improbable that there will not be a test result that gives you a clean bill of health. There’s not a moment when suddenly you knew based on this evidence that it was all gone and done. It just fades.
It’s just…all the things that you have realized and moved through as a part of this. And so you really can’t show them anything for it, other than a string of days and weeks, and maybe months, where you were not engaged in the battle. And things went pretty well.
And so then this is what happens next, what The Chorus was talking about today, the acceleration. Your speed, with which you now oscillate between all these beliefs that you’ve been fighting and attacking and stabbing with a sword, for, I don’t know, billions of years. And now you’ve awakened to so many of them, by way of your awakening process, be it an illness or not, might be some other challenges, right, that brought you through these things. And so now you’re sort of standing at the top of a new mountain. And your sword is, you know, stuck down in the dirt, sort of slammed down into stone. And there it stands. And there you stand, and you see all these beliefs in a new way.
And The Chorus is saying, “yeah, now’s when you start flying.”
And you might say, “what do you mean? I still feel all those things down in the valley.” There they all are – 1000s of different versions of all the emotions that we all know quite well, positive and negative, I suppose. And you say, “I still feel those things. I still journey down the mountain and spend time in the hut of despair. And in the village of depression, and in the metropolis of anxiety.”
And The Chorus would say, “Yeah, we see that too. We see the valley, we see all those emotions on the five senses spectrum. Your game. That’s your game board, right there. You see it.”
And then they say, “but when you go down the hill, do you feel like you need to arm yourself for battle in the same way?”
And you might think about it for a second and say, “Well, no, I guess not. I mean, I see them all, I see how they all connect. And I see all the times I’ve been there before. And it still worked out. Somehow I was brought to a new understanding of something. It kept, it kept moving forward.
And The Chorus would say, “that’s it exactly. You’re not alone in those huts, and villages and metropolises. When you go there, you recognize the energetic pathways that you have already taken through all of those things. And so you are not as consumed in those places by the experience of arriving there. You hold a perspective that is more expanded of each of those places, by way of all the experiences you have had there before.”
And you might say, “yeah, I get that. When I walk into the hut of despair now. It’s like, well, I’ve been here before. Yep, I have definitely been here before. And I remember all the times I walked in, I remember all the times I sat in here – maybe for weeks or even months at a time – but I also remember all the times I walked out.”
And then The Chorus would say, “exactly. So now, you will probably still revisit the huts and the villages and the metropolises for a little while, but you’re gonna fly.”
And if you take that as like fly through the air over all of those places down in the valley, those emotional places, that works. But also they might mean like, LIGHTNING, moving through all of those places.
And so you might start to recognize this in your life already, where you get into a situation where you start to feel depressed…and we know from season one, that depression is an energetic eddy, by which you recognize, you sense, on some level, the vastness and the incredibleness of what is to come, and you also see no evidence of that on the five senses spectrum..and that gap, that distance that you are perceiving and also the emphasis on the fact that it is not yet here, feels to us, like being lost. Being numb, not knowing what to do. It is a heavy and thick feeling that we call depression.
So The Chorus might say, “yeah, see that log cabin over there. That’s the log cabin of depression.” No offense to log cabins. Sorry, if you’re a big fan and I just made it the home of depression. I like log cabins too. Okay, so anyways, for now, it’s the log cabin of depression. And they say, “okay, so when you go into that log cabin of depression – now, and in the future, it will continue to feel like you are flying through it. Meaning you arrive, and you say, here’s the cabin of depression. Here I am, again, oh yep, laying on the couch, there’s my favorite blanket. And now I’m out the door!”
Where you might have stayed on the couch in that blanket for like, weeks, months, years, who knows? It’s shorter now. You’re in there a lot less time before you fly out the door to the next thing.
Now in the beginning, as we return to the cabin of depression, and we recognize that we’ve been there before, our five senses beliefs will activate. And you will say, “damn it!” (And a whole other lot of curse words that I won’t say here). Okay, so you’ll say, “I’m back in the cabin! I’m back in the cabin of depression. I don’t want to be here again. I thought I already left this place.”
Do you remember that? Have you felt that?
Yeah, as you have gone through awakening, and started to recognize more and more consciously, all of these different places in the valley of our game. When you return for the first few times to those places, we’re pissed. Because we don’t want to be there. And we thought we already CONQUERED it. We thought we already, you know sort of laid waste to the cabin of depression. As we left it, we set it on fire, we set that mother on fire as we left, right?
So when you come back to it, rather than automatically being in a place of allowance, right? Which is according to the course, a cessation of participation in beliefs, right? So rather than being in the cabin of depression, and being all allowing, like, this is so amazing. Look what we built. Nowhere else can you go in the cabin of depression…we don’t say that. We say, “I do not want to be here again.”
And then we experience a variety of other things by way of that. Typically, you know, blame or regret or shame or anger and frustration. Okay, so there’s many things that we go through that I am simplistically calling it a cabin of depression. ALL of these things are dynamic and energetically connected.
Okay, so fast forward. You were in the cabin of depression. And you didn’t even know it for years on end. Okay, you finally clawed your way out of it. And then you got to the top of the hill, and you see the whole game for the first time. And you’re like, “Wow, holy cow. Chorus – this is amazing!”
And they say, “yeah!”
And then the sucking sound starts to come from the village and it sucks you down the hill into the cabin of depression. You say “no, I don’t want this! I don’t want to be here!” Okay?
So then you have a handful of times of going back through the whole game board, in a way, reluctantly, as you recognize that you are “back” in a place that you were before.
Okay, now fast forward to the next step. And this is what The Chorus is talking about today: you come back down the hill, you fly into the cabin of depression. Something sets you off, a whole host of things set you off, and like you blow through the door, and you’re standing in there. And you go, “oh, yeah, I’ve been here before.”
That reaction is actually a step forward in allowance. Do you feel the difference?
From no conscious recognition that that’s where you are for a period of time…
to conscious recognition that you know that’s where you are, but a resistance to being there, a dislike, a rejection of being there…
To now you fly into the cabin and it’s like an old friend. An old, crusty, curmudgeon friend, but you don’t really love to visit but also, they’re kind of just getting familiar to you now.
And so, you go, “all right, move over.” You tell all the other people on the depression couch in the log cabin. And you plop down, you grab the blanket. And you’re like, “Yep, I’m here.”
And that’s when the most amazing thing happens. Just as you’ve pulled the blanket over you and propped up your feet…you feel the urge to get up again. And you fly right back out the door. And at a million miles per hour, visit the metropolis, the huts, the villages, the cabins. You fly around the game board. so fast, that at times through awakening, even you will be surprised by how quickly it’s moving.
Meaning how quickly you’re moving.
You recognize as you go back through the game board, at faster and faster speeds, that before it would have taken you days to cross the distance between the cabin of depression and the metropolis of excitement. Kind of like a like a horse wagon journey. And now you’re on a lightning hoverboard. And before you know it like a flash, you’re excited again. And you’re like, “wow, this is really weird. Like I was way depressed yesterday. And today, I feel like life is amazing. How did that happen?”
Now I’ll ask you this, because I feel like it’s important from our perspective as humans. Oftentimes, when we see these new perspectives, when we become conscious of emotions in a new way, we want to be able to choose differently. That’s kind of what we were just talking about, right? The sucking sound that pulls you down the hill, back into the log cabin of depression feels to us like being forced, almost. Like if we were given another choice, we would not choose to go into that log cabin.
And so I want to explore for a minute, that sensation of feeling like the EMOTIONS have control of us. It softens as you move faster around the game board. But why?
And you might say, “well, I don’t get stuck in one of them for a period of time.”
That’s true. But why aren’t you getting stuck?
What’s the difference between the you that’s on the couch of depression for weeks at a time, and the you that burst through the door, plops down on the couch of depression, and before you know it feels inspired to fly right off the couch again and out the door?
You could say awakening. You could say that you’ve moved through beliefs. You could say that it’s allowance. That through the first phases of awakening, you were able to find ways to allow more of what you are each moment, no matter what cabin, or village or hut that you’re in. And all those would be true.
But there’s something even more specific from a human perspective isn’t there?
Let’s pause on our analogy of the valley of the game for a second. Leave our swords at the top of the hill. I will tell you a story.
A couple of weeks after I finished the last season of the podcast. And I was working through the final phases, getting the put the book up, the book published. I had some people asking me if we should continue to make some meetings or if we wanted to continue with contracts and things like that. And I said “no, I think I think for the next couple months, I’m just going to sort of take to recenter, and sort of align to everything that’s happened, and sort of reflect…”
And the word that kept coming up in my mind was STILLNESS. And it sounded so appealing. It sounded like…all last year while I was doing season one and finishing the book and coming to terms…that I was on sort of a marathon circuit of all sorts of things. And I was really excited to just sit still.
Now being an active person who’s typically very energeti, I will admit to you that I don’t think I have ever wished for that word before. I wish for getting things done experiencing things traveling, learning, talking. Basically, busy stuff. And sometimes I would wish for peace or calmness or understanding and clarity. But I don’t think the word stillness had ever crossed my lips before.
Now, do you think it was easy for someone like myself to embrace stillness over the next six to eight weeks? I can tell you that it was because shortly after I said that word, a handful of times, actually, over a few days,..I threw out my back.
It was weird. I’ve never thrown out my back before. I wasn’t straining it. I was having a really good time over these period of days, and my back just got worse and worse and worse. And so despite my best efforts to sort of just hobble along through the holidays, I didn’t really have a choice. I had to spend many days on my back, looking up at the ceiling, while all the busyness of the holidays closed in, while my family had to go on excursions without me..I mean, it it is probably literally the busiest time of the year and that is when I actually could do nothing. I had no choice but to be still.
I mean, it’s funny,..c’mon…I mean, awakening is…at times there’s nothing funnier.
So there I am laying on my back one day and I check in with The Chorus. Now, I’m sure, I’m sure by now you can guess what they were thinking. They thought that it was all incredible. Perfect! Like throwing out my back and being stuck, there was quite possibly the best thing I had done yet.
So as I laid there, being the person that I am, I said, “well, I might as well make the best of this. Like, it’s got to be stuff I could still get done.” Especially if like I hold my laptop in the air above my or rested on my knees just right in between, you know, icing and hot pads and whatever else are my back. And eventually, there just was not a lot that I could do. I mean, there’s only so many things you can like finish up online, or emails you can respond to, before you’re sort of out of stuff to do. But I didn’t really want to start watching movies. I mean, not kidding, I watched many. But eventually, even the movies sort of wear out their entertainment value.
And so I started to think of other things that I had never taken the time to think about.
Or that I wouldn’t have for another few weeks.
Like our future and and where we want to live, and stuff that I might just look up and see if that’s possible. Those fleeting thoughts. All the many fleeting thoughts that you sort of think to yourself, “oh, that’s interesting. I’ll get back to that later.” And you never do?
Well I had nothing else to do? So every single fleeting thought that came into my mind, I followed.
Things like, “I wonder what the weather’s like in that location this time of year?”
Things like, “I think I read a book about that a long time ago, what was that book called?”
Things like finally sending messages to people that I had meant to for a long time, but somehow never got around to.
And over the course of a few days. I was amazed to find that even when I could do nothing, move nothing, not even walk around my house, my entire life was starting to shift in its direction, based on my abilit – in my stillness – to do nothing other than follow in a moment by moment way, every single little thought that passed across my consciousness.
I became excited for possibility again. Where I thought that this whole year and the next book and the podcast, my whole future was laid out before me, suddenly, I started to recognize that that was just a mental projection. Funny how they sneak up on us still, isn’t it? It won’t be that way for much longer, we’re starting to see them more and more and more.
And so even though my body, I guess you could say, was still, my energy, my consciousness, the things that I was seeing, and recognizing and pulling together and connecting was perhaps faster than I had recognized that it had ever been throughout this entire process thus far.
So let’s go back to the hill above the valley of the game, and all the many places of these emotions and experiences of limitation that we have visited. And let’s sit and be still for just a second. Next to our swords that are on the ground.
I’m sort of playing with the jewels on the hilt of my sword remembering all the many epic times that I battled things with it, particularly myself. And then we hear the sucking sound. Oh, no! Here it comes! One of us is about to head back down the hill to the log cabin of depression, the pond of sadness, the swingset of regret – the many places in our game that we built.
And you turn to me and you say, “Katie, I hope it’s not me. Because I really don’t want to go back to that log cabin of depression. Even though I recognize that it’s faster now. Like, I don’t stay in there as long as I used to. But I still don’t love going there.”
I say, “yeah, I get that. There’s a part of you that knows that you are expanding beyond this valley. But now I have a question for you. If there’s a part of you, that is still active in the game, that still believes and creates the possibility of the log cabin of depression. And there’s a part of you that knows you are expanding through it. Which part of you is doing the sucking sound right now? Which part of you is leading you back through the game, in greater and greater levels of clarity, and which part of you doesn’t want to go?”
And then I might say, “you know, the couch in my log cabin of depression feels a lot more comfortable than it did before. Some days, I realize I’m going into it, and I sort of grab a bowl of popcorn on my way in. I acknowledge that the things that I thought I was going to get done that day are just not going to get done because stuff is happening. Emotions are happening. Things are happening. My energetic self, is doing and accomplishing many things. It’s like lightning. Even while I sit there on the couch of depression, it is transforming me and my perspective here in the game. I used to hate that couch of depression. And now it’s like a crusty curmudgeonly old friend that’s actually kind of comfortable…even when I don’t really want to be there.”
It starts to happen so much faster. You don’t stay in those places for long. And as you move faster and faster through the emotions, through the beliefs and the experiences of awakening, what you start to realize or to feel is your own speed. That flow, that lightning quality…from a perspective, could sound like a sucking sound pulling you back in.
But from another equally valid perspective, it is a growing network of light and connections that are illuminating and transforming our perceptions of the entire massive belief system complex and gameboard that we constructed.
The difference between the you that is stuck on the couch (of depression) and the you that can pop up again so quickly, is the difference YOU are seeing in your progression of awakening. It is a manifestation, a reflection, an example that you recognize consciously, of the progress you have made in allowing all of these things, in connecting all of these things, and the speed with which you are continuing to oscillate and move through all of these parts of ourselves that we constructed for our purposes here.
And then I might say, “you know, humans are far enough along in awakening that we even have a word for this.”
And you might say, “for the sucking sound?”
And I would say, “yeah: inconvenience. When our expanded self, when the universe, when creation is calling us down the hill, to greater and greater clarity about ourselves and the infinite beings that we are, our beliefs of limitation activate and tell us that that would be so inconvenient. And we don’t want to go.”
“You know, it used to sound like a sucking sound to me too. But then this one time, I had to lay on my back for a whole week and do nothing but listen to the sound of inconvenience. And you know what? The more I listened to it, the more the sound changed.”
As usual for us, it’s both. So you know what I call it now? The sweet sucking sound of inconvenience. I’ll put it on a mug for you. And every morning as you have your coffee or tea and something in convenient pops up you’ll know that you have a choice in determining what you hear.
So…give each other a high five later as we pass each other in the log cabin?
I have a feeling neither of us will be there for long.