June 27 2014 - It has been about a year since I posted anything to this blog. Last post was at  the start of the June 2013 Transfiguration Retreat in Petaluma, California, when I felt optimistic. However (though it was wonderful meeting so the teachers I had only heard about or seen in videos) the retreat ended up being a bit disappointing, by which I mean that it did not seem to consolidate or advance my experience in any way obvious to me. Afterward I fell into a mild "rot" and for months I didn't feel any expanded consciousness and didn't want to talk with any teachers or do anything to further consciousness. However, we had signed up for the Transormation Retreat in Fairfield in October, so though I probably wouldn't have particularly wanted to go, we had paid for it and Marcia certainly wanted to go, so we went. Nothing outstanding or obvious happened there, though I certainly enjoyed it. Marcia and I went to Albuquerque after Fairfield and there we attended a sitting with Deidre Huestis. and each had a subsequent session with her. Deidre told me that if I was looking for consciousness as something separate I wouldn't find it, because once one has experienced embodied consciousness it never again is separate. That was helpful. A few days later, while driving north in NM I was reading Saniel's book Waking Down and one passage sent me into a very settled, grounded state, similar to what I had felt a few times after my Consciousness Clarification session with Fax Gilbert (which I haven't even mentioned in this blog--there's so much catching up to do!). Anyway, it was a passage that said it is absolutely 100% OK to feel confused about who you are.

I don't remember too much else happening, but in December I started feeling some enlivenment and on that basis I felt to call Ted Strauss. I told him that I thought I "got" what consciousness is, but that I didn't "get" unity. Ted led me through some exercises in feeling myself in objects outside. After the session I went back to my computer and resumed work on whatever I had been doing before, then a warning voice in my head said--don't just go back to your computer, silly--practice what Ted showed you! So I started the exercise and soon started feeling strong release or relief of some sort. A few tears came, then I realized that I felt completely HERE, grounded, part of everything, and physically limp... (like a piece of spaghetti, as I expressed it at the time). I totally understood Saniel's phrase "great relief." I totally understood Saniel's "equalization of pressures" analogy. I was no longer subtly resisting my surroundings, I was at the same "level" as everything else. I remember feeling: "It's easier to be everything than to be somebody." I thought I had probably had my Second Birth.  I felt that I should write to Saniel and thank him profusely for his work. I felt that life was really on a different basis now, and that now I had the chance to actually live life right. I felt regret that this came so late in my life.  One of the effects I noticed was a feeling of ease and lack of resistance to other people. I could sit with someone I didn't know that well and just be there easily with them. I had heard that it's good to be bold and claim things like states of consciousness, so I emailed all the people in my small groups and said I though I had had my SB. The feeling of wonderful well-being persisted for a few days, maybe a week. Then it faded away. The grounded, all here, expanded feeling came back briefly when we went to visit Bill and Pauline in Honolulu. Pauline said she noticed that I was more settled and warmer. I thought that was perceptive of her, as that's how I felt. But again, it faded. It might reappear for a few moments now and again, but was not steady.

I will post more "catch-up" material later.