Sample passage from my Gritty Real-World Spiritual Fiction Adventure book to be finished this year!

A passage from Chapter 3 of my second book, to be finished this year called, 

"This is it."

Enjoy!

3

"777, huh," he said aloud to himself as he walked up to the bus stop, "the bus should be the quickest way to the docks." He got on and quickly sat in the first open seat he saw, the vehicle was fairly crowded, and he didn't venture for eye contact among the sea of empty faces. "Only 5 stops, not too bad," Shanyn thought. He found the closest open window to look out of and gazed towards it. As his gaze began to glaze over, he felt himself zone out.

             Suddenly his attention narrowed to a sharp vortex as he heard the voice. It was coming from behind him in the next row, her, the weird old lady from the previous evening. But what really peaked his attention as they continued conversing behind him, was what they were saying. He felt like he was in the twilight zone, she was talking about being in this oneness, like she referred to with Shanyn just the night before. He listened, it seemed interesting to him.

              "It permeates all things everywhere," she spoke enthusiastically, kind of odd for those around her, noticeable by their expressions, as they glared at her judgmentally. As if completely unaware of her ignorant onlookers, she spoke with quiet confidence, "There is no place that it is not, for you see, it is everything, but even though it is everything, it is also nothing."

            "Lady, I don't know where you escaped from, but I hope they find you soon," the sharp attack, viciously ignorant, flew from the mouth of the overly-self-assured-wanna-be-gangster seated across from her. Shanyn wondered what she would say as he tried to figure out what she was saying to begin with.

            "They can find me any where; all they have to do is open their eyes, just like you, my young friend. Anything you search for is right here in front of you. Are you sure you can't see it?" she questioned the thug with such solemn patience, totally void of frustration, or anger. Her voice still filled with a joy that Shanyn just didn't get. It was so alien to him; he just sat there, intently listening.

             "All I can see lady, is that you are full of shit," with that he jumped up, stared her down for a moment, as if to intimidate the harmless elderly woman, then quickly threw his shoulders forward to try to make her flinch. She didn't even blink, her eyes transfixed on him with perfect understanding. Complete and total peace emanated from the mysterious mistress as she acknowledged her confronter. The young black teenager stood up straight, confused at what was occurring right before his very eyes. The people on the bus all looked on now, yet with an odd sense of detachment, as if they were watching television. Shanyn kept vigilant, knowing he would try to step in if the boy became physical.

              Then the young gangster-in-training reacted in a most peculiar way. His maliciously intent stare slowly faded. His face went placid and he seemed genuinely at peace for a moment. It was almost as if she had spread whatever it was she was immersed in with him, because it was apparently working. He smiled at her in a way that suggested sincere gratitude, as if she had released all of his inner pain or something. As always, in typical New York tradition, no one around them noticed a thing. Everyone except Shanyn didn't, anyway. He wondered if she just perpetually perused the city, freeing random souls with open-ended ideas and bliss inducing stares.

              The boy sat down and gave the grandmotherly person his full, undivided attention. She softly cleared her throat and began, "The best part of this Oneness is that it will never run out, being everything and all. It is pure peace to know there is no end and that everything you think you know is an illusion; just endless cycles, form to form from form to form from form to form, etc. etcetera, ad infinitum. If we can close our mind enough, the conscious "cluttered" collection of thoughts we call a mind, then it will all be revealed in one eternal peace to this piece of our relativized reality so just be it now, there is nothing else to know..."

          Shanyn felt the words echo through his quieted mind, feeling at ease and vulnerable towards her. It frightened yet intrigued him as he sat there listening to the illumined rant as she went on and on. He swore he could feel the peace just emanate from her in waves of pulsing energy. He looked up when the bus stopped again, as if he had just stepped back into reality. "Shit, it figures," he torted to himself as he noticed that the bus was already one stop past where he wanted to be. With that realization, he snapped back to full consciousness and leaped towards the bus doors. "At least it's only four blocks, it could have been far worse."\

As he looked down the road he could see the docks in the distance.  He glanced down at his watch and saw that it was 1:17.  Quickening his pace over a couple steps he wondered what the place would look like.  Was it a shady, dark place, cold and damp?  Or is it a clean and warm set up almost seeming too nice to be a warehouse?  He visualized the two scenarios as he came up to the last block now.  He could see it clearly now, the large 777, high up on the corner of the building.   High walls made the sevens look almost menacing on the side of the warehouse.  The place’s height created a shadowed area to the left of the doors.

            He walked up the steps quickly, two at a time and reached to open the door.  It was locked.  He knocked, and it echoed faintly in the distance.  The smells of rotting fish and putrid sea air lit up his nostrils in a deep breath.  “Nothing like the East River,” he thought as he waited patiently.  The darkness of the alley created an odd effect for Shanyn as he glanced up to see blue skies and fluffy white clouds meandering overhead gently through the air.

“Kreeeeeeeee! Boom!” the door assaulted his ears as it slowly opened.  “Who are you?” spouted an abrupt, raspy deep voice as a man emerged from the shadowy interior.  The distinct voice revealed him as the man from the telephone.  An almost monstrous mountain of a person, he stood just under the top of the doorway and peered down at Shanyn with eyes that seemed weathered beyond their years. 

“I called about the job,” Shanyn said with a smile on his face, trying to hide the serious uneasiness the man’s daunting figure posed to his smaller stature.  “I’m here to speak to the supervisor; I think I spoke to you on the phone.  The name’s Shanyn,” and he reached out his hand to try to break the tension he sensed was growing.

The man looked at his hand coldly, then said, “Follow me.”  With that he pushed the doors open further, turned around and went back down the steps he had just come up.  As he ventured after him through the doorway the room opened up like a cathedral.  The warehouse walls just rose up and up to the smaller rectangular windows near the roof.  Sunlight poured through the windows projecting down onto what looked like a small area of offices with the more formal, dirty, smelly, warehouse out in the distance.  The clanking his escort made as he walked down the metal steps was the only sound audible beyond the industrial sized fans droning on far overhead.  An odd aroma of gasoline coupled with what can only be described as plastic melting made his stomach turn over and cringe, leaving him slightly light headed as he descended into the place.

Expect more snippets over the course of the year, I am 150 pages into the book, so we are almost to completion!

Just be.

My first book:  The Art of Falling

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Falling-Rev-Brien-Egan/dp/1515405591/

My websites:

beoneherenow.webs.com

campnow.webs.com

ilvermornysummercamp.webs.com

jedicamp.webs.com

My YouTube channel:

            https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClxve29mvUghOIwrQrWb-Ew

Timeless awareness

To create healing now we must be in this presence to embody our past in order to move through it...

This awareness of now is the key to release, the key to peace and moving away from a life lived in the past or for the future.  So what does that truly mean, being in the now, living for today, or staying fully present? 

Being present isn't just about being aware of where you are physically, although that is a factor. A main secret to it's mastery is in the embodiment of being in the now emotionally as well.  So what does that mean?  It means being beyond the emotions, knowing that they are but passing states caused by events in the past or future oncoming events we are focusing on.  The release of this pent up storage of feeling puts you beyond hurt or worry, to a place where it is easy to see that everything will work out in the right and perfect way.  We will see things as Thom Yorke from Radiohead put it with, "everything in its right place."

So just as I have been bringing back in over and over in these posts, a major part of emotional presence lies in embracing or acknowledging these feelings or emotions so that they can be let go of.  This isn't just referring to the negative feelings either, for good must be released as well.  When we let go of them we do not enter into some emotionless state though, if that is where your thoughts were taking you.  No, rather the opposite takes place really.  We go into a hyper-emotive state where we can more objectively see others emotions clearly as well as understand our own motivations for our feelings as well. 

It's like stepping back and pulling the wool off of our emotional eyes so that we can understand all the "Whys" to our emotive experiences.  

It gives us a clear picture of who we are without all of our emotional baggage that everyone gets buried under whether through suppression or from over expression.  Remember, suppression of emotions doesn't make them go away, they only fester and well up.

So let me give you a shovel so you can start to dig yourself out of this emotional grave...

An easy mental exercise to help you identify these aberrant emotions we are working to be beyond lies in seeing the emotions as detached from your highest self.  So how do we check in with this true self, with our "silent witness," as Deepak Chopra would call it?

Taking about ten minutes each day on your own to do this visualization will help to become more aware of yourself and your emotional states so that you can work to transcend.

Now follow along and visualize this to yourself, picture it in your mind, as you read along with me. First take a deep, full breath in, all the way down to your belly and let it out slowly now, and spend a few moments just focusing on your breath as it comes in and out slowly and calmly.  Now picture the sky up above you with the bright sun high up overhead.  Feel the warmth of the sun on your face as you continue to take deep full centering breaths calming and relaxing you now as you bask in the light of the sun.  Just be still in this moment.  Now as you are quiet and still notice as thoughts about your day, worries about deadlines or any of life's difficulties just spill out into your stillness, almost as though you are holding back a levee of thoughts and its slowly seeping out.  Now see in your mind these repetitive thoughts, some negative, some not, these thoughts you have about who you are and what you are, how you feel and what you think of your surroundings.  You know those thoughts that play like a tape recording throughout your day.  Watch now as the thoughts transform in your mind into clouds as they fill up the sky and block the warmth from the sun.  So now picture yourself safely rising up into the sky through those clouds of busy and negatively patterned thoughts. 

Realize that as you are coming out of the cloud cover up back into the brilliance and warmth of the sun that you are moving beyond these limiting thoughts back to the you that is eternal.  You are transcending to the witness, that infinite part of you that is not attached to any emotions or preconceived notions of what the world is like. It is being in that childlike innocence.  This is where you are now.  See the clouds below you now as they drift past and feel the powerful connection from the warmth of the sun revitalizing your true self.  Know that you are beyond your emotions.  Now slowly bring yourself back into this space, the room you are in feeling comfortable and relaxed in your body, knowing in a deep place that you are better for this, and it is so.

Being beyond is its own state of perception, apart from our normal waking consciousness for the simple yet deeply significant fact that we become self aware and fully conscious in a metaphysically open state.  

In other words, there is nothing binding us to our ego.  This is the hyper-conscious state that athletes describe when they are having their best performance or game and are in the flow state where everything seems effortless.

Keep practicing with the visualization and comment below on how it is helping you move to the timelessness of now.

Light for your path

A dark embrace

Acceptance of what is is an embrace of life in all of its richness of color...  

Be those colors shaded to darker hues or lightened to pastels, all of our experiences in life have enriched it to be the colors we perceive.  The issues that arise in our life, be them physical, emotional or spiritual will remain persistent and continue to fester and injure us more and more if we cannot grasp their value and place in our perception.  This blocking we create from the denial of our true selves is so detrimental to our being that it will even create illness and dis-ease. 

What we run from chases us, and what we hide from searches for us...  

When people cannot embrace all aspects of themselves, they become trapped in the event, time frame or mental state which they are trying to avoid.  Its as though our spirit has a bookmark in the timeline novel that is our life and when we refuse to turn the page or read the whole excerpt, it saves our space until we do.  Unfortunately saving your space causes you to become mentally and often physically stuck there as well.  I have seen many people so stuck in a particular event or time period that they miss the beauty and wonder that is right in front of them. 

Now not all of these shadows are self-inflicted, though a fair amount are...  

No child asks to be abused, and no spouse asks to be cheated on or mistreated.  (On the soul level we all choose our experience, but that is for another discussion) People can overcome these setbacks and devastations if they can find their inner courage to completely face the issue or fears and move through them.  This is by no means a one step easy process, it can take years or lifetimes for some of us, but it can be done.  

The first and most imperative rung on this ladder of healing is accepting what is and what has been... 

It is acknowledging where we have come from in order for us to take those steps forward.  It is not letting ourselves become destroyed by what can best be described as our “acomodador,” as Paulo Coelho describes in his book, The Zahir, that will give us the power to move on and grow from the experiences of our lives in a positive way.  In The Zahir, Coelho quotes from a book called Magical Practices in Northern Mexico which describes the concept:

“The acomodador or giving-up point: there is always an event in our lives that is responsible for us failing to progress: a trauma, a particularly bitter defeat, a disappointment in love, even a victory that we did not quite understand, can make cowards of us and prevent us from moving on. As part of the process of increasing his hidden up powers, the shaman must first free himself from that giving-up point and, to do so, he must review his whole life and find out where it occurred.”

Rising up and being with ourselves in our point of accommodating, or point of becoming stuck in our ego into being complacent or stopping to evolve or grow is the best way to let go of that trauma. It is the first leap to overcoming all odds.  This reviewing of ones life is a major aspect of what Jung called, the shadow work.  It is a first step in renewal and rebirth if one is being consumed by their acomodador.

Let us combine our efforts to help embrace our shadows so that we may again become whole.

We will stitch them back to our feet as our hero Peter Pan has done.

Watch Peter chase his shadow down here...

Light for your path...

Embracing the Shadow, Healing the Past

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them, shadows, projections, our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight, the camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.                                                                                                                                   ―Chuck Palahniuk

Embracing the Shadow,

Healing the                         Past

          In this Saturday afternoon workshop on June 20^th, led by Rev. Brien

 Egan CHt, CRM, CKRM, you will be a part of a powerful group healing and 

releasing workshop using EFT, hypnotherapy, visualizations, the Sedona 

method, and pranic breathwork.

You will learn to identify the aspects of your shadow self and the fears of your subconscious to embrace and release the held past trauma and stressors of your life keeping you from your full potential. 

         Exploring your shadow self and how to relieve the past by being present 

and aware in the now, you will discover how to affect lasting change in your life 

journey.

Join us June 20^th from 1pm-4pm!

www.beoneherenow.webs.com

nowherebe8@gmail.com

Can we illumine our shadows?

So what is our shadow self? 

What definition does science give for the natural phenomenon of shadows?

Science tells us that a shadow is created where light is hidden from a space or blocked.  This creates a darker area where it is more difficult to see.  It is perceived as being shaded and less bright.  If an area is completely enveloped in shadow it may be an area of total pitch black darkness.  It will be an area without color or form. 

Light is what gives these objects in the dark their shape and definition.  It illumines those hidden things and gives a meaning and purpose to reality.  As science tells us at the core level, we are all just packets of light quanta reflecting the hologram of the universe back giving consciousness to the matter created in the interconnection of the subatomic realms as space connects with time in all directions at once.  The blocking of the sun from what is being perceived almost makes it disappear in a way.  A shadow will conceal or distort what is truly there.  It will keep what is real masked and in the dark.  And so it is with us...

Carl Jung focused a great deal of his work on revealing and working with one's shadow self.  He was very interested in tearing away at those hidden constructs in our psyche which form negative aspects of the ego self.  The ego being that face which is put on for the public to see and judge with its masks and filters.  These efforts were made to study and know how the subconscious and unconscious mind work were so that he could learn and understand how to free our personality and persona from those negative behaviors and actions which have defined us and caused our reactions to the world. 
His early work with Freud helped him to see how those aspects of ourselves that are imprinted on our subconscious mind at a very early age are able to dictate how we will act and be for our entire lives if attention and work is not done to adjust our behaviors and destinies.  He wanted to help show us how we can free our experience from the difficulties we create for ourselves in our life by becoming more conscious and aware.
His work looked at through the scope of Buddhism or Hindu perspective has us viewing the release of our attachments as a first step to breaking down our ego self to get to the deeper parts of our experience, those parts which are hidden, a.k.a. our shadow selves.  It is those parts which we either can't even see ourselves, or those parts which we desperately try to look away from that form our ego mind and shape the way we interact with and view the world around us. 

Jung recognized, just as the Buddhist, Sufi, Essene and Hindu monks have understood for thousands of years now, that in order to reach those higher states of being and consciousness (some call samadhi, moksha, nirvana, enlightenment, being in the christ-like or buddha state) we must illuminate our shadows in all aspects of the self.  Every great master in history has had to rise above turmoil to achieve their enlightened state.

So how on earth could we possibly do that?

This daunting task which most people shy away from or vehemently fight against will shake a person to the very core of their existence.  That is precisely the process though, to strip away all aspects of the self until we can see what is truly there.  We need to shine a spotlight on every aspect of our selves from the simple flaws we might not see all the way to the deep dark skeletons some keep tucked away from the world.  It is only by examining and revealing all aspects of ourselves that we can work through those difficult shadows. 

The first and most important step though in working through something difficult, as explained by any effective major psychological teaching is to recognize what is there, and owning it.  Embracing our shadows, losing the fears we drown our lives in, will help us to overcome those aspects we can't seem to rise out of.  Admitting and owning ones flaws and struggles us a task for the courageous, for we must have resolve and strength if we are to endure our undoing to be able to give our consciousness the reboot it deserves. Just as Bill W. tells the world with AA, the first step is admitting that there is something to improve.  It is acknowledging that we are imperfect.

Can you see your imperfections?

The hardest part of our journey is recognizing where we are and taking steps to move beyond what we are and what situation we came into on this earthly plane.

Let's work together to rediscover our true selves...

Let's follow Peter Pan's lead as he found his shadow and reattached it to himself, just as he made himself whole again by embracing his shadow, so too can we!

Light for your path...

