The Alchemy of Intimate Engagement : Filters for personal + global evolution
There's a few reasons why certain people succeed at their mission and others flounder. You can go balls-to-the-walls Tim Ferris style and tunnel through everyone in your path, or you can practice a fiercely intelligent, mindfully driven approach to accomplish your mission.
The old way is killing our planet. The new way is evolving humankind, using technology and human ingenuity to better all our lives, bring us closer together, and begin reversing some of the damage caused by the industrial and post-industrial revolutions (and the rational-modernist thinking behind them). Either way, you better believe with all your heart in what you're doing. The new way is fiercely compassionate and wildly intelligent. It says, YES you understand the world is F*d, but you're not going to stand around waiting for some ungodly policy-maker to come and fix it, or throw your money at a crusty old non-profit in the hopes they'll make the bad stuff go away. It just ain't gonna happen. You know that through your own personal advancement, through your actions, support and engagement with the people who are changing the way we think -- and the way we actually live -- you will change the course of history.
You are who I'm writing for. Thanks for being here, and thanks for doing what you do. You don't need recognition, and you don't need my encouragement, but you may need a little more guidance to refine your filters for engagement with the world. It can be a rough world out there...
I'm about to discuss creating energetic filters and intimate spaces in your life, and extending those to your engagement with the social world online, including Twitter and F*book. If this is painful to read already, this is probably not for you. That’s OK, you don't have to look far for great mainstream advice on using social media and improving your life all over the web. Vaya con dios.
Twitter has become a sort of salon for me lately. With a highly filtered intake, I’m able to devote much more attention to the people that resonate, and the advancement of important ideas. This is crucial to my own development, and the relevance of my work. In order to do this effectively -- you must learn to engage more advanced systems of mindful engagement and energetic protection. My own inner work is what has enabled me to approach the world online with this measured social intimacy.
What’s emerged from my measured and filtered use of Twitter -- following less than 100 people, and only following those I really resonate with, who are sharing what I care about at this moment -- is a sort of intimate engagement with the world at the leading edge of new ideas relevant to me and my group.
This is a harsh contrast to my older traditional approach to information gathering, which was based on growing "bigger ears” (ala Chris Brogan), enlisting various technologies to make global sweeps for capturing all related content, and filtering it through my own brain. It’s just not sustainable. I’ve also followed thousands of people on Twitter in the past, segmenting my favorites into lists on Tweetdeck and pretty much ignoring the primary stream. Lots of people do this, and it’s an OK way to build follower numbers, but it’s really not an authentic or effective approach to deep engagement.
I’d much prefer to have 100 really active, engaged and resonant people following me, than 10,000 people who are somewhat vaguely connected to my interests and not really there. I think that’s true for a lot of people. (If you don’t really “GET” Twitter yet, I’ll prescribe a simple approach to using it effectively in the “further explorations” section below). I think this piece will help you understand why, with the right filters, it can be an important tool for your personal evolution and that of human civilization.
Even with filters in place, without a measured approach to social engagement online, it’s easy to forget yourself, fall down the rabbit hole and become completely obsessed with the interaction and the buzz. I’m sure you’re familiar with this...
Getting intimate with yourself first
Speaking from experience, any challenges you may have with engaging authentically online will likely stem from your own lack of engagement with your true self. No matter how much time you spend worrying about your problems, or engaging with your ideas, unless you’re actively witnessing, processing and releasing them into the world, you’re going to have a lot of challenges engaging with others also. Learning to be kind and authentic with yourself, and embracing your own needs and desires, will automatically extend your compassion and empathy for others.
When you engage intimately and authentically with yourself, your relationships to others will improve, and your interactions online will yield a lot more happiness for you and everyone else.
Where to start...
One easy place to start is with the interactions online that rub you the wrong way. For instance, someone tweets or shares about their latest and greatest achievement. Do you:
A: Snarl and grovel to yourself, proceeding to pick apart their lovely little creation, and finding all the flaws and stupidities therein...?
B: Leave a little comment of encouragement or RT them with a ‘Yes!’, while secretly envious at their success...?
C: Feel gladness in your heart that someone is following their impulses and letting the creative spirit flow through them, get inspired by what they’re doing and channel the inspiration into your own work...?
If your response is anything approximating A or B, it’s a great opportunity to step away and reflect on what’s really going on. More than likely there’s some latent frustration about your own stymied creative spirit, some past failures, or the dreams you apparently signed away with your mortgage contract or somewhere else along the way...
Sitting with those emotions, and inquiring what’s going on -- allowing them to be present, and allowing yourself to witness the situation in there, this is getting intimate with yourself. With this level of openness you’re free to create and love and give as you please. But first there must be the openness and love in your own heart. You gotta FEEL GOOD first, as Danielle so eloquently put it in our 2:43 seconds anchoring into freedom interview video.
Creating Intimate Spaces
Getting intimate with yourself requires creating intimate spaces to operate and thrive in. Intimate spaces are places in which only you, and the select few people you choose, are allow in. Sometimes everyone is shut out, even your thoughts if you can manage it. You turn off the wireless connection, put the phone on airplane mode, close out the world, and just sit with yourself and dive in to the silence.
For those who just don’t seem to have the ability to do this, either due to circumstance or personal resistance, you have to be fierce and vigilant. You have to draw really strong boundaries, and decide for yourself what are the priorities in your life. What are you really here for? If you’re waiting for the time to come in which you’ll finally be free and living the life you envision, chances are you’ll be waiting to your grave.
Likewise, if you see a better future and you're patiently withstanding the slow transition to that time, the transition may take years or decades. Just don’t get too patient.
In my own experience, no matter how hard you work at getting to that life, you’ll never get there until you’ve already arrived with your heart and soul 100%. That means, as much as you can possibly manage, eliminate what isn’t working in your life, and take active steps to convert and transmute those things into circumstances that DO work. Sometimes it’s the smallest shift that makes the difference. Mostly it means:
Facing up to who you are, what you’ve been put here on earth to do, and how deep your commitment to that really is. If the commitment runs deep, then you’ll do whatever it takes to get there, and stop floundering around in a life that doesn’t work for you.
The Energetic Filter
I’m going to wrap this up for now by sharing a basic practice for installing a light shield to create the ultimate filter for your engagement with the world, and the intimate enjoyment of your personal life.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit over the past year, especially since evolving my online media business to take on coaching and consulting clients on a much deeper level. Having been trained in shamanic healing and studying with some of the greatest living masters of our time over the past decade has given me a unique vantage point at the cross-section of human and technological evolution.
In the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with this even more, as I consider the light shield as more of a two-way filter for the world. It filters what comes in, and what goes out, infusing everything with light and dissolving any negative energy that may pass through. Of course, if there’s a lot of darkness and confusion in your own energy field, it becomes harder to install an effective light shield, so the first thing I recommend for those who don’t have a regular practice is to calibrate your energy field to the luminous frequency of light. From there, this work proceeds with much greater ease.
The next thing is to get in a quiet space of presence with yourself, and envision a shield of white light extending from your heart or spirit, enveloping and surrounding you. You already have a luminous energy field by default, so this is just strengthening and energizing the field. Envision the shield extending out a few feet beyond arm’s distance, and sit with that until you feel it pretty strongly. Install the shield permanently by invoking the assistance of your high self along these lines: “I call on my high self and spirit guides to install this shield of white light, and may only the highest good be permitted through my luminous energy field.”
The light-shield exercise and variation is described in further detail in part one of the Epic Source Flow email series.
It’s important to note that the shield is not meant to block out other people. Rather it’s simply filtering the energy that comes in and out, and converting or dissolving it as it passes through. It gives you the space to engage with your own life in a very tender and intimate way, really filtering out the madness and thought forms of collective humanity from your own highly-evolved intelligence and awareness, strengthening your connection to the source of life. It also tends to shape the way you see the world, and your relationships with others.
Try it and see what happens. Then write about it, share your experience or thoughts with other people, and let me know too. You can often find me on Twitter, and feel free to ask me questions there or send me your thoughts. :)
You may find that the shield needs to be invoked regularly until it’s permanently installed. You may also wish to visualize the shield dissolving any energetic cords you may have to and from other people, as well as your online entities and creations, as these cords are quite common and tend to interfere with our thought processes and overall well-being.
Wrapping up
Practice bringing this awareness to your engagements online. Watch how you interact, and what you bring to the playing field. When it comes to Facebook, although I came close to leaving it altogether, I’ve found that the measured intimacy approach seems to work well with engaging there as well, making the experience a lot more enjoyable.
One more thing to keep in mind: Creating sacred spaces for engaging with yourself is essential to this process. Starting with a clean, minimal environment helps a great deal, as does caring for your body and creating a temple of your home. There are some further links for exploring below.
As you become more intimately engaged with yourself, and cultivate more effective filters of engagement with the world, you’ll find that the quality of your life improves noticeably and immediately. Through a sort of alchemy of intimacy, the interactions that once seemed mundane and trivial become magical and infused with love and power. This is an essential practice for any warrior of the light.
In Love and Light, Satya
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Further reading:
Leo provides some really great insights into simplifying your life, removing clutter and other crap that's stopping you from having the clarity you need to actualize your potential in the free focus manifesto.
If you haven’t read my last post on the death of social media, and the triumph of love, it provides some further context for how to approach your work online.
David Elliott. the formerly reluctant healer, offers his entire new Healing book here. I've worked very closely with David, and he is the real deal. A remarkable modern-day shaman healer.
How to use Twitter the right way:
1. If you’re new just sign up for an account using your real name, or a shortened version, add a pic + short bio, follow me and everyone I follow. Retweet stuff you like, but most importantly just send thoughtful replies to those who tweet stuff that you’re into. You’ll get the hang of it.
2. Don’t look at Twitter as a broadcasting or promotional medium, just use it as an extension of your true authentic self. Use it to build and deepen relationships with people you resonate with and care about. Remember that any tweets starting with an @reply will only be seen in the feed of the person you mention and whoever follows the two of you.
3. Tweet about stuff that matters! Don't just tweet whatever comes out at the top of your head. Use Gwen Bell's razor's edge approach: "I think to myself, if this were my last status update, if this were it...and it's all riding on this one update, would I be ok with that?"
4. Try not to pay too much attention to numbers, followers, stats, or retweets. Just stay light and see how you can use it as an extension of your greater mission and joy here on earth.
5. Listen and watch what your people are tweeting. Close your eyes and feel the space between the tweets. That’s where the deepest knowledge filters in.