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The Art of Allowing
Sol Luckman
In the lonely and starkly beautiful high desert of northern New Mexico, my apprenticeship in the ways of spirit intensified as winter approached.
For the first time, I glimpsed—if briefly and inchoately—a foundational truth that would go on to inform every aspect of my work in DNA activation:
Spirit is not just energy, as it currently is understood by most Westerners, but a form of consciousness that underwrites all being.
True healing, which I have called “wholing” but which also might be described as transformation, being fundamentally spiritual in nature, cannot be achieved without activation of higher consciousness through energetic means of one kind or another.
Since everything is a form of conscious energy, including our bodies, activating ourselves ener-genetically to raise our consciousness often, if not always, results in physical improvement.
Integrating this higher consciousness requires knowledge and acceptance of the fact that from the limited perspective of our egos, we really do not control much of anything in our lives.
To get at this important truth, I often say that “life lives us”—by which I mean something rather different from the old hippy adage to just “go with the flow.”
Going with the flow implies a lack of guiding purpose behind our existence, a disposition to let things happen as they may and accept whatever occurs with a detached expression and shrug of the shoulders.
When we acknowledge that life lives us, on the other hand, we still are riding the currents of our individual destiny.
But if I may reason oxymoronically, by embracing our true purpose and potential as beings embodying particular aspects of Great Spirit, which expresses itself through us, we embrace a decidedly more active role in our personal surrender and service to divine will.
Here, it is important to emphasize that unlike much Eastern spirituality, in no way do I advocate that we suppress, repress or attempt to destroy our egos.
Achieving healing and transformation does not mean that we instantly dissolve back into the primordial soup of Source where we completely lose all sense of individuality.
Rather, genuine wholing involves a willingness to evolve our perception of identity away from a self mired in separation and fragmentation, to an identity rooted in the Self from which all things of a seemingly individual nature flow.
Ken Carey eloquently describes the relationship between spirit and ego: “For if your ego is a reflection of spirit, then even at its core, your ego is spirit.” In a healthy state, “both spirit and ego perform their respective roles equally centered in God.”
During the healing process, as consciousness increases, Carey explains that
your sense of self blossoms into an accurate awareness of who you are. This transformed awareness includes your former sense of being one among many, but it also includes an awareness … rooted in the singularity of Eternal Being from which all individuality unfolds.
Lacking such awareness, you remain “a latent possibility, a programmed product of human culture. You are not truly yourself.”
The awakening process, the Shift in consciousness that is fundamental to genuine healing and transformation, can be envisioned as an evolutionary movement from “victim consciousness,” in which we see ourselves as separate from the world, to “unity consciousness,” in which we realize not just that we are part of the world—but that we are the world.
Surrender at the level of our ego to this thoroughgoing personal metamorphosis, which is guided in all instances by our Higher Self, is not optional.
Rather, surrender is the first, all-important step in our ongoing journey toward realization of our inherent potential.
To be absolutely clear, as I am using the term, surrender does not mean that we must maintain a lukewarm attitude relative to the occasionally frustrating and sometimes bewildering unfoldment of our lives.
To the contrary, as we evolve our perspective and raise our consciousness, we begin to appreciate surrender to the spiritual guidance of our Higher Self as a viable means to an end, the only workable strategy for healing, wholing and becoming the complete individuals we were meant to be.
The reason my partner Leigh and I counsel clients to listen to their intuition and engage their imagination when making decisions is that spirit always speaks to us through the heart. Anything coming from the head is likely unchecked ego and usually serves to sidetrack us.
Not that we ever fully surrender the ego. As we move forward on our path of conscious personal mastery, the ego continues to play a valuable role by, most importantly, helping us protect and care for our physical body so that we may fulfill our spiritual purpose.
But having awakened to our true divine nature through stepping into unity consciousness, the ego no longer is leading the way. Instead of being our guide, the ego is now a follower—and this is as it should be.
Qigong, which is associated with Taoism, was a wonderful teacher in what I like to call the Art of Allowing, for which the Taoist term in Chinese, Wu Wei, can be translated as “doing by not doing.”
As opposed to mentally directed action, considered artificial, the philosophy of Wu Wei, which is at the heart of both Taoism and qigong, encourages intuitive, or natural, action.
As a practical example, the doing nothing of remaining motionless “hugging the tree” results in doing something obviously life-affirming by pooling huge amounts of bioenergy that can be used for healing, creativity, sex, and many other activities.
From a more philosophical perspective, the practice of Wu Wei can be thought of as your ego—“you”—learning to get out of your spirit’s “way” so that “thy will be done” and miracles of personal healing and transformation can occur.
As an American with a background in mainstream academics, the idea that there was any art to allowing initially was every bit as foreign to me as the words “Wu Wei.”
Although I considered myself a “free thinker,” I quickly discovered that I was far more culturally conditioned in the ways of ego, individualism, materialism and having to “make things happen” than I was comfortable admitting.
Shockingly, for something whose chief requirement was doing nothing, Wu Wei was the hardest thing I had ever (not) done. I came very close to throwing in the towel, cutting down the tree instead of hugging it every day.
Having facilitated the Regenetics Method for years now and worked with many westernized clients, I know I am far from alone in my culturally ingrained tendency to doubt the power of spiritual energy and resist allowing things to manifest naturally.
Not infrequently, Leigh and I receive emails from clients following their Potentiation like this:
Client: “I just can’t tell if I’m making any progress. I’m trying so hard.”
Us: “We’re sorry to hear that. How in particular do you feel that you’re not making progress?”
Client: “Well, I just feel rough all the time. I know I’m detoxing. Our last conversation really helped me understand that part of the process. But it’s just so uncomfortable.”
Us: “It certainly can be difficult. If you don’t mind our asking, are you doing any other things besides Regenetics to get well?”
Client: “Oh, yeah. Lots of things.”
Us: “Like what?”
Client: “Well, I’m doing ionized footbaths to draw out toxins—three times a week. I’m also getting regular lymphatic drainage and using a zapper several hours a day for parasites. I take a lot of homeopathics and supplements. And I just started a round of colonics and a colon cleansing diet—”
Us: “Hold on. You’re doing all of that, in addition to having just received Potentiation a few months ago?”
Client: “Yeah. What’s the matter?”
Us: “Didn’t you read in our materials to proceed gently with other modalities, since Potentiation can be a powerful activation?”
Client: “Of course. I just thought that, you know, since Regenetics only involves energy, I had to make something happen here. Do you think maybe I’m pushing myself too hard?”
Fortunately, I had an excellent qigong teacher who helped me integrate the Art of Allowing into my life because he was a living example of its power to strengthen the body.
From a chronically fatigued and emaciated young man on his deathbed, he had transformed through his own practice of qigong and Wu Wei into a robust, physically imposing martial artist who appeared the epitome of radiant physical health.
I am forever grateful to my teacher, a generous and gifted person whom I credit with helping me get back on my feet at one of the lowest points of my dark night of the soul.
But as one suffering acutely from chronic fatigue myself, I observed two subtle behaviors on his part that made me question whether he really had cured his illness—or simply had put it into remission by building up vast chi reserves through continuous qigong practice.
My teacher’s dependence on qigong was itself a possible sign that all was not entirely well in him. By his own admission, if he skipped hugging the tree more than a day or two, he started to feel “lousy.”
But even more indicative that his health probably remained compromised at a deep level was that he felt compelled to maintain a very strict diet, one nearly as severe as my own that almost completely avoided sugars and starches, which he admitted he still did not tolerate well.
In retrospect, my teacher’s unrelenting food sensitivities were a “red flag” that, despite years of qigong practice and an ascetic lifestyle, suggested he remained damaged genetically—most likely by vaccines.
Later, as I became aware of the role vaccines play in inducing autoimmunity, and thus many allergies, by negatively programming DNA, I started to wonder if it might be possible to “reprogram” damaged DNA to a state of healthy functioning.
I asked myself if this kind of reset might be capable of undoing sensitivities and other symptoms experienced by individuals suffering from autoimmune conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), and other essentially empty diagnoses.
Although I enjoyed qigong and never had been opposed to hard work, I wondered if there might be an even purer form of Wu Wei, an even more effective method of engaging the Art of Allowing that would empower me—and maybe others—to heal at a more profound level and leave behind meditation and daily practice in favor of being fully present in the world of daily activity.
It was this line of “passively purposeful” questioning, made possible by Wu Wei in the first place, that steered me unerringly downstream during the development of Potentiation.
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
DISCLAIMER: The Developers and all Facilitators of the Regenetics Method offer DNA activation as educators and ordained ministers, not medical doctors, and do not purport to diagnose, prevent or treat illness of any kind. Regenetics Method information and sessions are offered, and accepted, as exercises of freedom of speech and religion. The Developers and Facilitators of the Regenetics Method make no recommendations, claims, promises or guarantees relative to specific health challenges. You are solely responsible for your own medical treatment and care.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD, from which the above article was adapted. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. Characterized by Reader Views as a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND” and by Apex Reviews as a “mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast,” BEGINNER’S LUKE is also, as literature professor Niama Williams has written, a “spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at www.CrowRising.com.]
Vision Quest (Crow Medicine)
Sol Luckman
No sooner had I left graduate school at the end of May, 1998, than I was on my way to a brand-new variety of education that tremendously broadened my horizons—while also imparting much life energy, or chi (sometimes spelled qi), to my depleted and struggling systems.
Qigong is an ancient technique of energy healing related to tai chi. Through one of my remaining friends, I had been put in contact with a gifted qigong teacher, an American also in his early thirties who, several years previously, had traveled to China to study this venerable art to cure his extreme chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS or CFIDS).
I did not travel to China. But after the yard sale of yard sales, I crammed my scant belongings into my car and spent two days driving nearly twenty-four hours from the East Coast to New Mexico, where my qigong teacher taught a popular class attended by as many as a hundred students three times a week at dawn.
I think of this transitional, challenging and magical period of my life as my own personal “vision quest” that, for the first time, opened my eyes to the often misunderstood and underestimated worlds of spirit and energy.
In many indigenous cultures, the vision quest is the form initiation takes and constitutes the transition from adolescence to adulthood. When the initiate is old enough for vision questing, he (or she) typically spends several days or weeks alone in the wilderness, often while fasting.
Eventually, a particular animal, sometimes called the “totem animal” or “animal medicine,” visits the initiate in a dream, vision, or (more rarely) waking state.
The appearance of the totem animal embodying a specific spiritual power indicates the individual’s innate calling—which after returning to the tribe, the newly initiated young person pursues following a time of apprenticeship.
Curiously, I did not realize (at least consciously) that I was on any kind of vision quest. To be honest, I did not even know what a vision quest was.
I simply was living like a hermit in the windy, sage-covered high desert; eating the few foods my ravaged immune and digestive systems could tolerate; and practicing qigong often half the day because I intuitively felt I had to in order to survive.
Certainly, I had no awareness of being a shaman in training!
Now, anyone who has ever regularly spent half an hour “hugging the tree,” the primary practice in medical qigong, knows two things.
For starters, an enormous amount of bioenergy (chi) is pooled by maintaining this oddly difficult position between standing and squatting, arms loosely draped around an invisible trunk, eyes remaining calmly unfocused on nothing in particular.
The first time I experienced this powerful energy, it literally knocked me on my rear. I lay on the ground outside my rental panting for thirty minutes as waves of electric heat like cosmic hot flashes shook my body again and again.
This was the energy I ultimately used to strengthen myself enough to go on with my life. But I needed an entire summer of practice just to be able to accommodate it gracefully.
The second observation made by serious “tree huggers” is that in that meditative state where you are supposed to think about nothing, sometimes you successfully empty your head. But more often, you think about anything and everything.
Such was my case at first, but then an odd thing started to happen: every time I hugged the tree and aligned myself with the flow of spiritual energy, I thought of crows.
Ever since I was a kid, strangely, I had felt a strong affinity for crows, learning to imitate their caws and always appreciating their presence. But now, whenever I did qigong, crows were all I could think about. Not just that—crows started to appear everywhere in my life.
They circled raucously around me as I hugged the tree under the autumnal sky and perched beside me on my porch as I sipped herbal tea and wrote in my journal. Crow statues seemed to appear like weeds, suddenly and uncontrollably, all over my quaint little New Mexican town.
Almost every night, I dreamed of crows. I realized I was into the music of the Counting Crows. And when I started dabbling with watercolors, for the longest time crows were all I wanted to paint.
A fellow student in my qigong class, overhearing me describe my weird fascination with crows, was kind enough to loan me a copy of MEDICINE CARDS: THE DISCOVERY OF POWER THROUGH THE WAYS OF ANIMALS.
Turning to the section on Crow Medicine, I learned that in many native wisdom traditions, Crow is the totem animal, or “medicine,” that “knows the unknowable mysteries of creation,” guards holy texts, and upholds the sacred laws of being.
As keeper of the Creator’s linguistically-based knowledge of creation, as recorded in sacred texts, Crow is gifted with the special ability to modify universal rules and “shape-shift,” both personally and collectively.
In other words, Crow’s innate talent involves knowing how to manifest new ways of living and being.
When shortly thereafter I was prompted intuitively to read a magazine article (featuring a crow graphic) on vision questing, I realized in an epiphany that for months I had been receiving visits from my totem animal!
Apparently, Crow was trying to tell me through its repeated cawing that my calling involved recalling that I knew something important about creation, holy texts, and sacred law.
Humorously, I visualized myself as a phoenix-crow hybrid, a jet-black bird engulfed in indigo flames, hugging the tree with my wings alight as I stood pooling chi in the middle of my ashes. I actually painted a little watercolor close to this description.
The only problem was, while the phoenix imagery was crystal clear, it was years before I was able to grasp the meaning of the crow part of the picture.
But eventually, as I came to fathom the true nature of DNA—which you will not find in biology textbooks, but will learn more about shortly—while developing Potentiation, I understood why Crow had come to me so insistently.
DNA is the language-based holy text, the sacred law of creation that Crow guards and shape-shifts by calling out its inherent potential through linguistic means.
In fact, as I explain in detail in CONSCIOUS HEALING, the Regenetics Method very well may be an example of a type of ancient healing speech applied to genetics referred to in the Koran as the “Language of the Birds.”
(Excerpted from POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD)
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
