I hope — I wonder — I feel guided to share with you this download that I received in the fall of 2010. I call it Beneath the Sand, and it opened a visceral practice of wholeness. That is to say, when people engage in this practice, have this experience, they have a visceral experience of wholeness. No matter what.

And the only thing that it takes to prepare for that is to embody — to drop into the hips. And on the way into the hips, all sorts of stuff gets enlivened. And some of it is unintegrated.

I studied philosophy in college, not because I had to but because I was excited about it — who gets excited about philosophy except for a philosopher, right? So what did I do when I learned the law of attraction? I thought, well, there’s got to be a foundation for this. I thought, oh, this whole channeling thing, that’s a bunch of bunk. There’s nothing real about that at all. I grew up in Boulder too, by the way, so I had the street cred. I just couldn’t believe it. So I started reading and I got all the way back to Charles Haanel’s book The Master Key System — do you know that book? It’s a really interesting book if you’re interested in practicing visualization. Very, very powerful book, written in the late 1800s.

So I’m doing the exercises in that book and spontaneously in comes this question: what is my purpose? I start asking the question while I’m doing these visualizations. I don’t know where the question comes from. Six months later, I’m just north of Sedona, Arizona, and a guy writes on a piece of paper as we’re doing a hippie dance closing meditation to a five-day in-silence vegan retreat where we do yoga — I didn’t understand all those things, and I certainly didn’t then, this body does not do yoga — he wrote on a piece of paper: you should be working as a healer.

So here comes the answer on a silver platter. Not the answer I was looking for. That often is the experience here. And what’s getting animated as we integrate is the separate self — the separate self that thinks, in all its wonderful, seriously beautiful ways, I am not the Divine, I am not you. This is something to overcome. This is something to fix. I need to figure out what’s wrong, and when I figure out what’s wrong I can make it right, and then I’ll be — projection, projection — perfect.

By the way, how do you think we look at the Divine from a disempowered and unintegrated perspective? We project. It’s a lens, it’s a consciousness. We see the world and divinity and ourselves and everyone through it.

So we have a co-creative relationship with the Divine here. This amazing — God is my servant too. Nobody will ever say that, but I do, because it stirs me up, and I kind of like to stir myself up. And if it stirs you up in the process, I’m totally fine with that, because that’s your unintegrated self coming up to be integrated.

Here I am, God’s servant. I subordinate myself to divinity. And I basically have no other choice if I’m really playing it out. It’s like, I want everything. I want nick nack Patty wack. And I either have one of two experiences — I have it. Intention, here it is. I manifest it. Or I didn’t. And maybe I have some experiences over here and some here. Maybe I have tons of experiences over here. And if that’s true, look what I do — I drop into, nothing ever works the way I wanted to, and I go into my stage one story. Or — boom — okay, that’s really cool. Flower, piano, monitor lights. But I’m not feeling different. Mansion. Dream car. Perfect mate. Best purpose under the sun, more money than I know what to do with, perfect health. But I don’t feel different. What’s wrong with me?

Isn’t that interesting? You can make everything, create it, manifest it. Or nothing. Or have an experience mixed of the two. And still — guaranteed — you’re not fulfilled. Can’t happen. Why? These are unintegrated. I cannot solve the illusion of separation from inside separation. I must pierce separation. What’s the first step? Surrender.

And I’m telling you, I’ve worked with people who can manifest anything and everything. And I’m telling you, all this stuff — the mansion, the car, the perfect mate, the perfect career, all the money in the world — it’s window dressing. That’s why I refer to all of those things as consciousness amplifiers. They are like the placeholder for the illusion of separation. We look at them and we go, what’s the energy of money? What’s the energy of perfect health? What’s the energy of the candle? We think they’re separate. They’re not separate, at least not in my experience. Not at all. It’s like saying you and I are different and this carpet is not us either. But you know what, that is not true.

I had this experience on the day I surrendered. By the way, I scheduled my surrender. Seriously. 2011. Ten days in advance I called up a friend and I said, next Thursday I’m going to surrender. It’s true. I need you to witness me. Can you hear the control? Scheduling surrender, right? Yes, control like crazy. I’m scheduling my surrender. I tell my friend, and then I give her specific instructions. You are not to intervene no matter what happens. You can’t do anything, say anything.

So I went to her house on that Thursday. It was June 30th, 2011. June 30th, a Thursday. And I did — I surrendered.

And you know what? The separate self comes up with all these projections. My separate self said, you’re gonna die. You’re not gonna see your kids anymore — you have two daughters, they’re gone. You won’t be able to do spiritual stuff anymore, you’ll have to go back into banking. You’ll have to dig ditches for a living. You’ll have to be an itinerant healer. You will be homeless. On and on and on.

And you know what I did to get ready for surrender? I visualized the things I was afraid of as real. I made them real. Now, this will strike fear at the core of anyone who’s committed to stage two consciousness, because they will say you are manifesting your fears. But guess what? If you’re in resistance to them, what do you think’s going on? So the only way this type-A control freak could surrender them was to wade into them and make them real. That way, if that was God’s plan for me, I’d already visited that nightmare and accepted it and embraced it. Seriously. I made myself homeless. Okay, what’s the next problem? I’m gonna be cold. I live in Colorado, I’m gonna be cold. Oh, I’ve got warm clothing. Well, I’ll bring it with me. I’ll be hungry — lots of restaurants, plenty of day-old food, that won’t be a problem. What’s next, what’s next, until there was no resistance. And then what happens when resistance is gone? You surrender. And what’s the experience? Freedom. Death and freedom — they are together, they are the same.

So Thursday morning I went through part one of surrender, wherein I thought I was dying. I think I may have sounded like a cow or a goat giving birth. Anyway, I made a lot of noise. There’s no recording, no video. I thought I was dying. Seriously. I thought I was dying. I’d never been in that much physical discomfort before, not even close. And then I thought, oh God. And then the real stuff happened.

On the other side, here’s a brief story. I opened my eyes. I was sobbing and laughing. And I opened my eyes and I could see divinity everywhere. I don’t mean like Jesus, Jesus, Jesus — I mean energy. I could see divinity everywhere. Nothing was differentiated. I mean, I could see, this is the carpet and so on, but it was just all light. It’s all light. I looked at my friend’s ankle and I saw darkness, and first words out of either of our mouths — I don’t know the whole day — does your ankle hurt? Yeah. How’d you know? Hang on a second. I looked at it, light, pain gone. Oh my God. I went out, we ate food. I was eating a roast beef wrap or something and like the cow was blessing me and I was blessing the cow. And I mean I wasn’t blessing like this or this — it wasn’t even that — it was just light, love is everywhere. Like the plant that became the castle, or the oil that refined to the gas that fueled the tractor — like all of it, all of it. The consciousness of the blade of grass, the same consciousness that I have. It was just unbelievable, an extraordinary experience.

And then comes the work of integrating all this stuff. Which so many messengers get confused by, because they’re like, well, I surrendered and then all this stuff hit the fan and it was so bad — what did I do wrong? You’re receiving your wholeness. This aspect of you is coming home to be enlivened. The only way it can happen is if the separate self is animated, and then it is transmuted. And how do you transmute that stuff? You embody your soul and you allow yourself to feel it. That’s divine alchemy. That’s all it takes.

That’s the log on the fire that is consumed by the fire of the Holy Spirit. When I say Holy Spirit, I don’t mean it in a religious way. I mean it in a — I’m crying, sobbing at the glory — brilliant light that is expressing through each of us. Not as an idea that I’m projecting. I see it. I feel it.

And when we are in an embodied state, all the way into the hips, when the soul is home, that fire is so hot it consumes everything. Everything that is not real is integrated and enlivened, and the not-real stuff gets unwrapped. It’s like a bunch of Christmas presents — or whatever holiday you want to celebrate, birthday, whatever. The problem is they’re wrapped in manure, probably the nicest way to say it. The separate self always shows up with manure-covered golden nuggets. We think, but we don’t know there’s a golden nugget in there, and we certainly don’t want to dig through it to figure out where the gold is. But once we are in our hips and we allow ourselves to feel it, the noise is gone, and all there is is more of the whole self to express.