Preface

How It got to Us.

Most of us have the impression that we were clean slates when we arrived out of the womb; little clean white pages, ready to be written on. However, that’s not true. As science has progressed throughout the ages, we have come to understand the energetic nature of Life much more. Matter is really ‘thick energy’ coagulated into certain forms, floating in a sea of more energy, waves of it washing through us all the time. When we breath, pieces of ancient DNA, collected in the air, are sucked into us, becoming us, in a not unsimilar way to that which happens when we ingest food. The food becomes us. We become the food. Energy never dies, so all the other beings that the air has passed through, over the lifetime of Life, gift us with pieces of themselves every breath we take. Likewise, our out-breath contains energy patterns of our own that we bequeath to the air itself.

DNA is all over the place. There is a concept called microchimerism.  When we have sex with each other, pieces of the other remain in our bodies for untold periods of time. For a mother, her child’s DNA stays with her for years after the birth. The child is already a combination of parental energy gifts. The word Wairua in the Māori language can be broken down into wai for water or spirit, and rua for their number two. A Kaumatua, and my teacher told me these are the rivers of spirit that flow through us, one from our mother, the other from our father. These are obviously not the only influences acting on us from the moment of conception. From A microchimeric point of view, both parents come with an existing load of other DNA as well as energy patterns, which they pass onto us in the act of procreation.

We know from computer science that energy can be programmed. So can our DNA. The idea that it was fixed for the duration was disproved by the discovery of epigenetic, showing that DNA responds to messages from the environment we find ourselves in. It makes up the adaptability that has allowed us and all living beings to change as change occurs around us. There is a continued flow of energetic information being circulated to the nucleus of our cells all the time. Evolution actually depends on it, personally and collectively. Nature is incredibly clever. Babies are bundles of ever-changing energetic patterns and pieces of cell, all coming to them courtesy of something, someone, else. This little living package therefore comes with a whole energetic archive from the get-go. But now the journey becomes more intense. Growing and living in Mum's body, essentially breathing her air as her blood flows through us, we are another organ affected by all her existing once. Her emotions we feel. Her thoughts affect us. We experience what her body also goes through. We don’t understand it as we don’t yet have a brain to interpret all this data. But we experience it and it imprints on us.

So it is that all the beliefs that she has been culturalized into are your data base, creating the beginnings of the archives that will become your mind. If the brain is the hardware, then the mind is the software that tells it what to do in most cases. Even the autonomic nervous system that goes about its job making sure that all the vital bits keep operating, will eventually be modified to some extent by the patterns that form in the mind from the continued programming that will continue on for our entire life. Not always for the best. In fact, all the bodily systems are affected by what we end up ‘thinking’. Thinking is a process that comes later as the left hemisphere of the brain developes. I learned recently that it is only the right hemisphere that developes in the womb at all. We have such a lot to do to catch up with other mammals once we are out of the womb. While colts and herd animals are running with the herd 20 minutes after birth, we have barely opened our eyes. Dependent as we are, we lay there absorbing all that is going on around us. Not all that we learn is going to serve us well throughout life.

So we end up back at the concept of ownership that has shaped our way of being since the Agrarian Revolution, that I talk about in depth in the Infinite Compass. When we were part of nature, like the deer and the wild horses, our natural instincts guided us to ensure our place in the natural system. The minute someone put a fence up and declared ownership of those natural resources the game changed. A group of humans became what we will call the elites, assuming to have what the others across the fence did not. It was no longer about instincts but about trying to play a new game to stay alive without listening to Nature and ourselves. Instead, we have been trained to listen to everyone else, regardless whether they know any better or not.  In childhood we have no choice. Powerless as we are we are brought up the way we are brought up, often feeling all wrong. Growing up becomes a trial by error, as we try to do what we’re told, but continually go against ourselves, wondering what’s wrong with us. There is nothing wrong with us. It’s what we have been trained into that doesn’t work because it’s not about our well-being. It’s about making sure we are an obedient unit on the conveyor belt of production, making a lots of things for the elites to own, whether we like it or not. After nine millennia we don’t remember any other way of being human.

It's safe to say that every single one of us has these dysfunctional beliefs at the core of the belief structures that now make up our mind. By adolescence, we are beginning to see the physical effects of the choices we have made based on the instructions we have received. We blame ourselves or we blame someone else hoping to pass on the responsibility for the debacle we are now facing. But we can’t.  Though they may have influenced us, they are not the people that made the choices. The ‘blame game’ gets us nowhere except going around in circles. Even our much-maligned parents were only doing what they had been told or shown. They, like each of us, were told that this is just the way life is. It doesn’t have to be. Its actually a very short time in the greater scheme of things that we have been living this way. In The Infinite Compass I outline the many micro changes that had to take place in our soul to create the mess we have made. The whole workings of our internal world had to be reshaped to do it. It didn’t happen at one point in history. It grew on us day by day, year by year, millennia by millennia. They call it the ’frog in the hot water’ syndrome. You drop a frog in a pot of cold water, it’s fine. You heat it up a little and it’s in seventh heaven. Luxuriating in its gifted spa, it doesn’t notice as the heat is increased to the point where it cooks, but by then it’s too late. Like an adult leaving their adolescent, it is only now that we are seeing the far-reaching consequences of this process of Patriarchal enculturalisation. The jury is still out as to whether we are cooked or not, but its certainly time to wake up to the injurious conditions it has created for human psychological and the resulting physiological health.

We must do something, and we are. We are heading for doctors’ surgeries for prescriptions of the latest sedative or anti-depressant. But Patriarchal systems cannot cure problems Patriarchy has created. Most of the systems we have in place are enculturalised by it, designed to make sure that nothing rocks the boat it has so painstakingly (for the 99%) created for itself survival. That extended even to the way we are treated at birth, ensuring that our birth process was controlled by a male medical profession at a remove from the natural birthing processes of women.  The oxytocin that settles and welcomes us into this world with our mother’s breast milk was replaced with bottled formula, a poor, but convenient, substance that ensures the economic system doesn’t miss too many beats. The problem is that all these patriarchal innovation cause feelings of insecurity, fear, and doubt in the energetic body of these little humans, new to the planet. Even if they managed to miss the worst of the conditioning from their parents in utero, they get a dose as soon as they hit the atmosphere.

We have been told not to dwell on the past. We are told that our modern world is as good as it gets. The people that show up to work with me feel differently. If it was so good, why are they depressed, anxious, in difficult relationships with others and often suffering physically? That’s what they want to find out, but the counseling profession has been trained in the art of moving the furniture around without creating any lasting change. Their hands are tied if they cannot look to the history of their client for clues. Because it’s in history, both personal and species wide that we find where things went wrong. If we don’t find out where that is, we have no idea the changes that need to take place to bring about balance in our lives. If our therapists are too scared to take us there, where do we turn except chemicals? I began to realise that if we had different, person-centered cultures, I wouldn’t be in business. One of the first things I say to clients is that there is nothing wrong with them. It’s what they have been brought up to believe that doesn’t work, along with the shackles that places on meeting our needs appropriately to our individual essence.

And so, the work begins. Can we change our ways of understanding Life and living so that we can be fully who we are, exploring all the creative talent that comes with that? Yes, we can! It will take courage, time, and commitment to do the work required, but we can get there. I know, because everything I work with and teach, I have proven on myself first and foremost. I have worked for 40 years with clients that, if they are willing to make the changes we discover, thrive. In these four decades many changes have been happening at the edge: Gabor Mate’s work with trauma, Bruce Lipton’s work with epigenetics, the discovery of brain plasticity, the Me-Too movement, assisted by female political leaders that have shown the way. But we still have to do our own work. There are no magic wands to wave, or pills to take. The early feminists used to say the personal is political. If we are going to save the species we have to save ourselves first, one session at a time.