One of these is essential to the way the physical realm works, the other is nothing more than a two-dimensional belief system. Some people use the terms duality and polarity interchangeably, but I'm going to make a strong distinction between the two for the sake of clarity.

The first thing to understand about duality is that it divides, it's either one thing or the other. Black or white, right or wrong, good or evil. It does this through judgement, separating things and creating conflict. Duality is how human beings, who have much more in common than not, are convinced to fight with and even kill each other. Duality is used to create an "us versus them" mentality.

Now polarity is something else entirely. Where duality has a positive and negative that conflict with each other, polarity has a positive and negative that attract each other. In the case of what recently happened with our Sun's poles, they can even switch places. Polarity is complimentary forces that work together to create balance, duality is the belief in opposing forces that conflict with each other and create chaos.

I want to describe the process I go through to clear stagnant energy from my subtle body and open up the chakras. This is something that has brought enormous joy into my life, peace into my heart, cleared away anxiety and depression, and also brought much greater health and energy to my physical body as well. I've learned to not worry, and to work with life instead of struggling against it. It's also brought greater intuition, empathy and artistic talent into my life. It's been a holistic change, and I could easily write a whole article just listing the benefits alone.

Before I get into the process more, I need to do a bit of a disclaimer. This is not something to be done ritualistically. It's not meant to encourage unconscious, habitual repetition, in fact it's meant to break you out of that. This is about living life, your life, and how you do that is up to you. You are beautifully unique and this isn't about telling you the right and wrong ways to live your life. This is what has worked for me, and I'm sharing it with the intention that it may assist you as well.

Now the first step is to quiet the mind. To consciously clear the energetic body, you need to be aware of it, and that's very difficult when an overactive mind is constantly demanding attention. This is where meditation comes in, learning to let go of the mind and embrace Consciousness. Meditation is simply quieting the mind, it doesn't matter so much how you do it. I started with sitting closed-eyed, alone, in a quiet room, then gradually expanded the meditation to encompass every aspect of my life. Eventually I stopped needing a peaceful outer environment to have a peaceful inner environment, though at first, a peaceful, quiet spot was very helpful in quieting the mind.

A new year, and a number of failed predictions for the previous year from various sources. I see the same patterns repeating themselves, so this message seems relevant again:

This is something we get asked continually, "When is Ascension?", "When is First Contact?", "When is The Event?". I wonder if people have any idea how long these questions have been asked? This whole idea that a day or a series of events would come along to solve humanity's problems is ancient, it can be found in Zoroastrianism which predates Judaism. And this belief that it's all going to happen "soon", do you know how long people have believed this? It's part of the bible, so at the very least around 2,000 years, probably much longer.

For thousands of years this day has been predicted over and over and over again, and yet it hasn't come. Even today, we seem to get a new prediction of when "it" will happen at least once a week. It's a shortcut to popularity by predicting something will happen, people like that. We see the stats on our site, and we know how popular those messages are. People really want to believe this, and I wonder if they're conscious of the same patterns repeating over and over again?

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

We've watched more of these predictions fail than I care to count. Even now, I know there's at least one prediction of something happening sometime this week, and another predicting something 8 days from when I write this. So easy it is to just believe someone else and wait, but is that how real change occurs? How long have people tried this for?

If you're like most people, you live almost entirely in your mind. There's a constant internal dialog going on, the mind always talking to itself. "I need to do this...", "What if that...", "Yesterday I...".  As soon as one thought is finished, another pops up. This is going on non-stop, so much so that really paying attention to all these thoughts would start to drive you nuts, so all the thinking starts getting pushed into the unconscious where it goes on automatically, habitually.

This is dangerous though, and the fact that nearly everyone else is doing it too doesn't make it any less so. Your thoughts influence enormously how you perceive your world. In new age jargon, this is the "you create your reality".  Your beliefs are the lens through which you see the world, though for most, it's more accurate to say your beliefs are your world. To let the mind ramble on unconsciously is very dangerous because it will go on absorbing, and modifying beliefs without any conscious direction from you, and these beliefs will direct your whole life.

When you're unaware of your own thoughts, you're like a leaf blowing in the wind, and it becomes very easy for people to manipulate you. The media can just repeat something over and over again, and whether or not it's true, the majority of people will start repeating it as fact. Most mainstream forms of media, advertisers and politicians have refined manipulating people into an art. They even know the emotional triggers people have that feed into unconsciousness, one of which is sex. Get people a little bit aroused, get the mind excited and it becomes easy to sneak thoughts into them. Other common triggers are things like violence, fear, or the promise of money. If someone can convince your mind that they can fulfill your desires, they can very easily control you.

This is perhaps the most popular of all the current spiritual platitudes, "let go". Even in mainstream society you can't avoid this advice, "Let it go" is the main musical number for a very popular movie at the moment. Despite it being a generic piece of pop culture, there actually is some very deep wisdom to letting go, but it needs a little more explanation than simply telling people to let go.

Let's go straight to a situation where letting go is the most difficult, the bond between a mother and her child. If I tell the mother to let go of the child, what does that mean? Does she just drop the baby on the floor? Does she pack up supplies for her 5 year-old and send him off to make his own way in the world? Does she become emotionally cold to her teenager? The kind of letting go I'm talking about has nothing to do with any of those situations. Letting go means releasing the expectations we have for another person, which actually leads to a deeper love, an Unconditional Love.

Desire gets in the way of Love, it can easily destroy a relationship between a parent and a child. What happens if the child doesn't live up to the expectations the parent has? It leads to conflict and resentment, the very things that interfere with love. Letting go of a child is simply allowing the child to be themselves. It means still loving them no matter what they do, without conditions, whether they become a doctor or a criminal. It means so longer judging the child based upon the parent's value system. Letting go is about releasing control, releasing our desires for another, that's what true letting go is about.