Redeem the Reactive Reptile

In a previous posting, I mentioned the Mayan mystical symbol of the feathered serpent which expresses the goal of achieving an inner union of your lower, reactive-reptile nature with your higher, loving nature. One way to do this is by shifting your focus from fear and anger to love. Eventually, you can drop all techniques. Simple mindful awareness will enable you to shift effortlessly. It is as if your awareness becomes like the morning sun dissolving the clouds of night. The clouds of stress and conflict dissipate when you shine upon them the light of love that you are in the core of your being.

[The passage below is taken from 8 Steps to Love: How to Return to Love When You Need it the Most—The Moment Stress & Conflict Begin (www.drsrj.com).

Return to Love: Shift Your Focus & Energy Technique

With the shift your focus and energy technique, you use the sharp-focused awareness that is your sword of love to penetrate into the heart of your stress. You cut through your confusion to see what your stress tells you about what you hate and would love to have happen instead.

Note: It is important to express love with the same or more intensity with which you feel your negative emotions. Exaggerate the movements to really reach into your heart as if to grab your negative emotions and then shift, lift and return them to love. Remember, you are redeeming the reptile, the dragon, your lower nature with your higher loving nature as you hear and feel with your heart what your negative emotions are “t”– telling you. As you open your fists, imagine releasing the butterfly of love, your capacity to love freely without clinging like the caterpillar.

Once you have a feel for this, you can mentally shift the energy of hate to love, by simply visualizing yourself making the movements instead of doing them. You use this technique in the heat of the moment. Practice in your daily life and with your stress list. Use the exact wording until you get the hang of it.The wording is deceptively simple yet very powerful. It helps you accept the message of your negative emotions as valid and valuable and it helps you return quickly to love so you can focus on and move toward what you love and want.

The phrase and that’s because is important as it links love and hate which is something we learn to separate in childhood in a primitive attempt to cope with the fear of expressing our anger. As children, we are prone to magical thinking when it comes to anger. We fear that our thoughts will somehow harm or kill our parents. This would leave us alone and abandoned. The other fear is that, since they are bigger than us, they will harm or kill us. Both fears are repressed, but the fear of losing love if we express our anger, stays with us. This phrase is a kind of mantra, a mental device, we can say that can really help us redirect the flow of our energy from our negative emotions back to love.

With this technique we redeem the reptile in us, the dragon, our lower nature driven by fear and anger with our higher nature of love.

1. Make a fist with both hands and pull them to your heart. Round your shoulders. Tighten your body and squat down slightly as you breathe in and then say aloud, “My feeling bad (or my fear, anger, sadness) is telling me that I hate…(breathe out and fill in the blank) __________.”

2. Now open your hands. Expand your chest. Stand up straight and as you extend your arms over your head as though reaching for the sky, breathe out and say aloud, “And that’s because I love…(breathe out and fill in the blank) ______.”

• Today, redeem the reptile by shifting the fear focus of any negative emtions that arise back into a love focus. You zero in on what you would love to have happen (desired outcome) instead of on what you would hate to have happen (feared outcome).

The plane to Guatemala stopped for a quick layover in Dallas and a man sat down one seat over from me, and he holds up a book. I think that he is handing me my book that I had left on the empty seat between us. It is The Celestine Prophecy and he points to the book I have with me The Celestine Vision. His name is Ken and I discover that he is going to Tikal to study with the shamans as well. And here we were seated in the same row reading books by the same author. The meaningful coincidences just kept coming.

Ken saw that I had been writing some notes and asked me about what I was writing. I told him it was about the symbolism of the dragon for my book, Slay the Dragon—Not Each Other. Ken tells me of a legend that involves a dragon. It is a legend he heard from a shaman of the Onondaga Indians, one of the seven tribes of the Iroquois Nation.

A dragon was flying through the heavens. After growing tired, it rolls itself into a ball, goes to sleep and becomes the earth. One day the dragon will awaken and resume its journey through the heavens.

Instantly, I am struck by the synchronicity. In addition, it is a beautiful symbol of the idea of the transformation of the Earth at the heart of the Mayan teachings. Suddenly, we hit turbulence and the plane is really shaking for what the pilot cautions us may be for quite a while.
After fifteen minutes of turbulence, I began thinking about my physical separation from the woman I loved. As the thought came to me that although I would love to be with her, I realize that I can handle the physical separation for love continues to exist even when we are not in the physical presence of our beloved.

The turbulence stops immediately as I feel at peace with being apart from my love. Obviously, I can’t say my thought caused the plane to stop shaking but what a message. As I focus on love and not loss, the turbulence within me and around me stops instantly. Then it hits me—there is no separation from love.
As I reflect on how we are never separated from love, I realize that love is the dynamic and enduring energy animating all of life. I then consider that when we are feeling love by being with or even thinking of someone we love, we feel alive all over; and when we are doing something we love, our actions flow effortlessly. (excerpted from the first chapter of A Matter of Love)

• Today, as you go through your day try out the following affirmation. Breathe in, pause, and, as you as you exhale, relax and silently say, “I AM never separated from the expansive energy and peaceful power of love.” Then, breathe in, pause, and, as you exhale, relax and silently say, “For, in the core of my being, my innermost heart, I AM the expansive energy and peaceful power of love.”