Cloud Of Unknowing vs. How Very Dare You

I think a lot about initiation of movement and how we think and what we think when we move. What biases are hidden in the patterns? What are the emotions and narratives that we think are the ground of being from which we leap, lap, and love?

“As I think, that’s how I feel/move and as I feel/move, that’s how I think.”

It’s rare to clear the decks and move from tabula rasa. More often, it is habit of long held beliefs and patterns that emote and locomote us. I am thirsty therefore I drink, often forgets that it’s five o’clock somewhere when grabbing a beer or 6 am somewhere when tapping the foot impatient for the coffee machine to hurry up already.

I have recently been confronted with my own patterns and biases. These questions were coupled with my own exploration in the foundations and life experiences that shape, literally, how I walk on this earth.

Questions started big: “Why do you resist calling yourself a healer, when you are channel?” “Why don’t you do bigger format events… why don’t you speak… what about Esalen?”

Then they got specific: “What is the shadow side of your work?” “What is scary about what you are feeling, in letting go of this pattern?”

All distilled to a target question: When I initiate a movement, is it coming from my old pattern of “hiding my magic” (since childhood) or the feeling of “how very dare you” think you’re magic (imposter syndrome) or does it come from the quantum cloud of unknowing where all possibilities exist.

(Bookmarking a question for the future: Why do we insist that children hide their magic and fall in line with the materialist / reductionist / binary system we all know isn’t working?)

The answer to the target question is a bit of both. My default mode out in the world is still hide your magic / you are an imposter. In the world, my body/mind is acting like it doesn’t believe in electricity, even though it has been shocked many times.

My default mode in my work is connecting to the cloud of unknowing. I have direct experience with quantum possibilities and can regularly tap into states that assist in breakthroughs for my clients. Most days, I am able to clear the decks and witness the magic. Up to this point, my practice has remained small by design, but what about growing so big that the world finds out. I won’t be able to hide. (What if my mother finds out? Yes, I still think that, even though I have tried to explain to her who I am.)

So how do I grow? In a world of trolls, critics, and dismissers of all that can’t be double blind tested, how do I develop a practice of putting magic out there nonetheless? I think a lot about Rupert Sheldrake when I think about my own fears of facing critics. His theory of Morphic Resonance has / had been labeled by pseudoscience and magical thinking by his critics. Bell’s Non-Locality and Einstein’s Spooky Action At A Distance are among the crazier theories that seem to break laws, but have been proven to be true often long after the lifetime of the theorist. Galileo was put under house arrest for heresy for the rest of his life for supporting Copernican Heliocentrism, but of course the sun is the center of the solar system.

I think maybe the practice is like many that I develop: It’s dying. Let each moment die and let each moment be reborn. It could be dying on the cross of unknowing or dying to the experience of uncertainty and all knowledge being provisional. It could be the sacrifice of facing embarrassment, to be a model for my children. Can I show them that, even though magic can be messy and is often unproven within our lifetime, we can find creases in the ether to make the miraculous happen and it’s worth the risk. What am I willing to die for?

If magic is heresy, then I was born a heretic and may as well die a heretic.