Break down to break through

Where attention goes, energy flows.

Last Friday was a full moon on 8/8, a date known in astrology as the “Lion’s Gate.” This means the sun is in Leo, and there’s alignment with our brighest star Sirius, the constellation Orion’s Belt and the Earth. People see it as a portal or energy vortex, a time for manifesting or calling in something new.

As usual, I’m writing this against a backdrop of contradictions: outside, a beautiful summer’s day. A single crow circles the valley, its wings wobbling like a prop plane. The marine layer crouches in the distance, framing the far ridge. And on the news, fresh horrors roll in from the middle east, DC and everywhere else experiencing crisis points large and small. What is my current reality then? Some blend of it all, but mostly the crow and the valley.

People keep asking, how are you doing? and I haven’t known how to answer. My mind races through some math calculating the body’s felt sense plus the brain’s activity, divided by the weight of the world, and spits out a few words of response. If it’s positive, I feel guilty for not being in solidarity with the extreme chaos and pain happening, guilty for being okay, most days more than ok, as all of *this* (waves hands egg-beater style) is going on. If my response is negative, I feel guilty for not being more grateful for my wide-open, peaceful sun-soaked environment. I feel guilty for my relative safety and well-being. There is no good honest answer unless I let something go.

A few days before the Lions Gate portal opened, and as I was driving home from a family reunion, I listened to Rick Rubin’s interview with Dr. Joe Dispenza on his podcast Tetragrammaton. If I needed a case for a mindset shift, here it was. Dispenza has written multiple books over the past 20 years, and I read Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself about 8 years ago. I remember feeling inspired and also mildly skeptical of his confident applications of quantum physics to some of our more complex conundrums of health and human behavior. It’s that simple, he was saying, but I was not ready to hear it.

For those not familiar, Dispenza is not just an author but has a cult-like following. His ethos is that factors like genes, injuries or circumstances do not determine a person’s fate, and that learning how to be in the unknown is not only important to dreaming big, but also to healing the mind and body.

He has a scientific and medical background, but his approach is rooted in quantum theory: that in the quantum field of particles and waves, everything is possible. By accessing this out-of-time, no-body, no-space dimension (through meditation and visualization, breath, sound, and group experiences) you train your body to live in that possible future free from pain, suffering, or addiction. And by doing this, you actively shift your current reality and become a magnet for the new one. You emanate the energy of already having solved the problem or overcome the disease: and the universe, your physical cells, people around you respond to that new truth. And so it is.

Of course that’s an oversimplification. Not surprisingly, Dispenza is not universally accepted and loved. If you search online you’ll see a whole line of skeptics criticizing him for his research methods, his pay-to-play conferences, and more — and I get it. We’ve been burned by the commercializing of spirituality, and it’s hard to trust something wrapped up and sold to us, especially by a middle-aged chiropractor in a button-up shirt, and especially when it’s something as mystical as this is.

But this also isn’t a new theory. There have been versions of manifestation and communal healing in cultures and religions throughout history. And to me, not only is it “sensical magic,” a term I think I just made up, meaning the logic stacks and it seems correct that our physical realities would be more susceptible to energy than we once thought.

But also the personal stories speak for themselves—stories like MS patients leaving their wheelchairs behind, cancer survivors eliminating all traces of a tumor, depression patients healing by transforming the gut biome without medication or intervention. (Testimonials are here for the curious.) To be clear, I’ve never been to a Dispenza retreat, and I’m surprising myself that today’s writing is a tribute to Dispenza, but his meditations have changed my life. Two years ago, I opened a notebook and an audio track and followed his instructions to write down details of my dream of a future home: not the timeline, but its most important qualities. I spent a month doing the meditations, visualizing the home and feeling into that future state of possibility, with no clear idea of how the pieces would come together and the resources would arrive. And yet within six months the dream came true. Not without a scramble and some drama, and not exactly as I’d envisioned, but in some ways even more miraculous.

Warning, says the voice in my head. This sounds like privilege. Don’t forget, all of *this* is still going on. Genocides, ICE raids, dismantling of social services. It’s all still there. But although the wellness industry has co-opted the word *manifestation* to sell potions and workshops, the concept is not one of privilege. There is effort, and then there is shift. And right now, both are needed on all levels. As Audrey Lorde said, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Meaning that to transform inequitable systems, we need different ways of thinking and being.

Last month I shared some thoughts and questions about effective protest. The protest is the recipe; the personal transformation affects the quality of ingredients.

Hotel USA

In my own quest to understand, I keep zooming out and allowing many things to be true at once: the peaceful valley and the chaotic other. And I have to believe that right now, change requires tuning in to more than just one level of reality. Assuming there is no new possibility, no unknown potential, will surely keep us all trapped and on the same precarious course.

While we’re talking bout individual and collective systemic breakdowns and divisions, under the surface this chaos is fueled by pain. Reactions to pain include numbing out, harming others, clinging to identity. This is what drives my curiosity toward healing, deeper self understanding and wider self-realization. It’s foundational. Pain and otherness drives our division, our wars. Renee Sills of Embodied Astrology (my go-to) talks about it in this week’s breakdown of the next two weeks between the full moon Lion’s Gate and new moon on the 22nd of August, sharing that emotions like mistrust and hatred also do terrible things to the human body. Stress hormones flood the system and reactions ruin relationships, also tied to health. When we do good by others, when we care for society, we are directly taking care of ourselves. And we can tend to our own repair as an offering with larger collective benefit.

After listening to the entire two-hour Dispenza interview during my drive — with a few necessary breaks for silence and songs, it’s dense — I was back inside that feeling of possibility. A small Covid outbreak had disrupted the reunion, but I knew from my seat in the car that I would stay healthy. I was inspired by the points made about creativity, that it doesn’t happen in moments of processing the past or planning for the future but only in the space of the present, in what he calls the unknown.

Of course there is more going on here on Earth than meets the eye. Of course the energetic field would matter as much as the physical one. It’s how people have near-death experiences, how medical miracles defy science. Cells can rearrange themselves, genes can turn off and on. It helps to remember those diagrams from high school science class that show atoms and molecules constantly vibrating, in motion, quivering and rotating — it’s only from our clumsy human scale that we see solid matter. We are energy, we are responding to and creating larger fields of vibration. We made a video about it once, resetting an Alan Watts passage about the basic pulse of life to new music - watch it here.

Last month a rare interview with Hunter Biden was released on Channel 5, the independent youtube feed of Andrew Callahan. I hadn’t heard of Andrew before, and I think of Hunter with the weary memory of past campaigns, but I listened to all three hours and fifteen minutes of this interview. It captured me with its how humble, honest and matter-of-fact Hunter is when speaking on topics that are deeply personal, sensitive and often PR landmines: his crack addition, the infamous “laptop” (do we even know what it meant?), his years-late tax payments explained as accidental missed filings, along with a forgotten or ignored career in public service, his attempts at being an artist.

We’re used to these types of interviews being a dance, filled with careful pauses and talking points. Instead Hunter is blunt, raw and dropping long strings of f-bombs as he gets fired up. It’s unusual and refreshing. He has the egoless clarity of someone in recovery, one who has seen rock bottom and found his way out the other side. In this case, his reputation was decimated beyond public repair. But the gift the media gave him is that he no longer cares what anyone thinks, and has found his own redemption in a loving family and an art practice. He has nothing left to lose and everything to gain at this point by sharing his story, not because it’s exceptional but rather because it’s not: pain like his is universal. It made me examine my own judgements, what I had absorbed about his addiction and tax evasion, based on news headlines and cultural programming.

Our nervous systems are tired of being deceived, and when I hear an interview that I expected to be propaganda and instead it sounds like someone’s truth, it’s a breath of fresh air. For just a moment, I can feel the old structures dying, their projections flickering and waning from people willing to call their bluff. And the energy inspires us, pulls us toward something new.

Dispenza describes his work to Rubin like this: I give people my greatest understanding of the truth and multiple opportunities to experience it. And the beauty not just with his community but with so many stories of healing and transformation is that the pain is the catalyst for a new reality. People in Dispenza’s workshops say “without my hardship, I wouldn’t have discovered my connection to the unknown.” The rocks in life’s road aren’t in the way; they ARE the road. The obstacles are often the point, they are inevitable and they force us to focus our energy and decide what matters. I first heard this idea in an On Being interview with music producer Joe Henry, and I wrote a song about it called Shit Happens.

From Henry: Well, we’re sort of seduced into thinking that, like, here’s life and then there’s these bad things that can happen that are like obstacles that just fall into your road. As if the obstacle is not the road, you know? We want to think that, all things being equal, we should be content all the time and would be except for these pesky flies that want to ruin every picnic — as if that isn’t what the picnic is.

Renee also shares the idea that breakthroughs often happen after breakdowns. Individuals need to hit rock bottom before they deal with their problem, and so do nations. The horrible part, she says, is how many beings are affected… there is a lot of collateral damage. Unnecessary, outrages. And, maybe, humanity is on a learning path — and whatever we go through next 20 years will shape us in surviving and thriving. Help us remember interconnections, belonging, and what is good for us. I think we are at that turning point.

Kintsugi is a Japanese ceramics technique where cracks of a broken piece of pottery are filled with gold, making the resulting object both stronger and more beautiful. When my dad died we played the tune “Let the Mystery Be” over and over, to try and make sense of it all. Now we’re renovating the backyard barn that made him sick into a music studio. When it came time to seal the cement floor, I pointed out the large crack that ran from North to South — a remnant from the ’89 earthquake, my other greatest trauma. And instead of hiding it under the finish, I picked a grayish brown — the closest to gold we could find — so it would live on as part of the barn, and part of me.

Backing track: Original, playing around in Logic with loops and synth tones.