Pulse Check
taking my own temperature
My younger daughter had a recent run-in with pneumonia, and after her recovery, I fell ill myself and was on antibiotics for quite some time.
The various medication did help with my recovery, although I also noticed the subtle impacts it had on my energy field. There’s a tradeoff hiding somewhere in there, which I have yet to attempt a deep dive on.
What I have been taking stock on since I made the conscious decision to refine and improve my tone (see previous article), is how it has paved a path for me that is quite different than the spiritual path I have been used to since I started my journey.
For the longest time, I was proud to be a synthesizer. Taking bits and pieces from various teachers, techniques here and there, learnings from ancient texts as well as modern transmissions, and building a system that worked for me, including some of my own downloads and interpretations. It felt cool and that diversity and breadth made me feel “cultured” in the spiritual arts.
Sometime over the past year though, I noticed myself no longer being drawn to that. I had lost most of my FOMO. I didn’t want to keep up-to-date with the latest “discoveries” from others. I could listen to people gush about certain teachers and practices with the most raving reviews, and…I would just smile and move on.
That is not to say I have closed myself off to new learnings and understandings. But rather, I’ve stopped proactively chasing that novelty. If it is meant to come into my life, I trust that it will find a way to do so. Quietly and without hype or fanfare.
I’ve also stopped feeling the need to warn others. There was a spiritual teacher who I used to follow in the past, and who I now know had plagiarized others’ work, defrauded clients, and ran their inner circle with fear. When I saw someone I knew who started enthusiastically following this teacher recently, I did nothing. Said nothing to them. In the comments section of some of my older articles here, there are people who speak of these teachers with admiration. Even then, I didn’t warn them. Didn’t reveal what I knew.
The most I will say about it is: try to find the original source of the material you are learning, and stick to that whenever possible. It’s tempting to want a teacher who appears to have mastered the source material and is now offering services for “quick activations” or “simple explanations” or “a community to learn and grow together.” But it’s not worth it. Do the initial upfront hard work to learn from the source material yourself.
And if one has done that, the next part of it, which is considered even more counterintuitive by society’s standards, is to do nothing. Don’t try to share it with the world. Don’t try to package it up and sell it. Don’t try to take on mentees. Don’t try to build your own community.
Just let it be.
If there is one practice that has brought me more peace and joy in my life than anything else, this is it.
To backtrack a bit, are there people whose divine mission is to “spread the word” and/or “serve as teachers?” I believe so. However, they are not the ones speaking loudly and widely right now. They are not trying to build an audience or movement. They do not care for scale. Money is not a part of their operating manual. They do not practice public speaking and do not go on podcasts. And while they do create and build quite a bit in the background, they want their work to do the speaking more than their person. They do not speak often, and do not want anyone dependent on them for answers.
When they occasionally speak, few will hear, and even fewer will be able to comprehend. Only those who have, almost monotonously, refined their tones, will be able to pick up on these signatures. But that is not to understate the impact, because divine design was never built on addition of bodies or quantity. Linearity is itself a conditioning tool. So much so that we forgot that it is, and just passed it down generation after generation on auto-pilot.
It goes without saying that we live in a fast-changing world. The pace of everything has accelerated so much it feels like we have a jet pack strapped to our backs that never runs out of fuel.
In our personal lives, it mirrors this too. Events happen suddenly. People move in and out of our lives like tourists in subway stations. Frequency resonance brings people together rather than physical proximity, blood ties, 3-D hobbies, or shared grievances. One moment something makes sense, and the next moment it doesn’t. Advising/consulting becomes obsolete because everything is decided in that moment, and if you are not the one or ones co-creating that moment, it is not yours to impact.
And that is not to say we can’t have impact. It’s just that most of us have yet to grasp how real impact is created and measured. Or whether it should even be measured at all.
So many “experts” in every field today like to talk about uncertainty. But in each specific moment, having command of our own tone means the opposite: that there is certainty. Even if we were to claim uncertainty, we would be certain about it.
Before I understood this, I recall having a conversation with a seasoned individual, where I asked for advice on “if this happens, what should I do?” He said I can’t advise you to go left or right, up or down, or stand still. Everything is decided in that moment by the creator of that moment. And he was certain about that. It made me realize that running all these “what-if” scenarios didn’t serve the purpose they intended to. The real purpose was more along the lines of building confidence and trust in oneself and/or the team. As for what would actually transpire in those critical moments, it would not be what our linear minds would have imagined or predicted or prepared for.
And that’s OK. This is the current reality, and I’m here for it.
I’ve contemplated a lot lately on what gets a person to the point where they no longer have FOMO. That they stop trying to find/seek out another teacher, another technique, another community, another friend. And at the same time, they do not at all feel like they’ve mastered everything. Contrarily, they are open to the infinite-ness of improvement and refinement. They still play and explore, perhaps more than ever, but on their own rather than with expectations on self and others.
This article may be triggering for those who are still actively engaged in the activities mentioned above. I know my past self would have been triggered by the words that my present self is typing out. It can feel like judgment, yet here I am, not hiding that I have gone through all of these things too many times to count. One line of reasoning goes that one has to get it out of one’s system. And sometimes that takes multiple incarnations and that’s perfectly OK too. Patience is still a virtue, and it’s not limited to one lifetime.