[This is from a session specifically asking about the concept of shame, channeled May 2009.]

A new definition of shame

We would define shame thusly:

Shame is the submerging of your own desires and of a good part of your own identity when you are faced with what you perceive as an opposing energetic force coming toward you.

What is different in our perspective from this definition and the one in your dictionary is that we are describing a process. It is a process involving an energetic interaction between you and another, or indeed sometimes between parts of yourselves.  There are corollaries to this:

• This process is in the present moment.  No matter what your past is, any shame you feel is the result of this process happening Now.
  
• You ultimately have the power to choose differently regarding the energy flow of anything you feel shame about.
  

Energy flow associated with shame

We will give a descriptive example which is what could occur when you meet a stranger that seems to generate shame in you: say you meet someone that you haven't met before and you feel a wave of energy that feels to you like it's coming toward you. The feeling of shame is felt when you use that energy coming toward you as a catalyst to submerge your own desires — your own energetic "outwardness" — and instead feel the brunt of the full force of what you are perceiving is coming at you because you no longer have your normal "wall of defenses" around you.

You could also describe it as the creation of an opening within the façade (your identity, or ego) that you normally hold around you. This opening can feel like a sudden torrent and a violation, especially if you are a person who is normally energetically sensitive.

Most of you have at all times something of an energetic façade around you. This is part of your self-image. Its part of your energetic field. This is normal. But when there is a sudden shift in how you maintain that energetic field it often creates eruptions that can move into primal feelings like shame.

Question: How does that relate to what we culturally know as shame?

Let's use an example of a person who has experienced rape.

There is then a huge rip in the normal energetic façade that the person wears.  Something has happened to change the energetic structure that they are normally holding around themselves — because they've had a hugely physical and emotional experience that makes it difficult to maintain that normal energetic façade.  This energetic rip, or hole, can last for some time, especially as there is generally a lack of awareness that such rips can exist.

And so the creation of shame occurs — because with that rip existing, any energy that is perceived as coming toward that person will be then perceived as a reenactment of that initial feeling of violation.  Perhaps in the case of rape that hole is in the area of the second chakra. This hole comes and goes over time, but every time it's open a little bit in the face of an energetic onslaught, the person is reminded a little bit of that rape experience yet again. Then that hole rips wide open again, all the energy comes in, and it's experienced again as a feeling of shame.

Question: You've described it as an openness to energy, a hole, which doesn't necessarily sound awful, but the experience of it can be. It can be overwhelming.

That is correct. It depends upon the person. There are people who feel relatively little shame about anything. And that's simply how they are, how they chose to perceive energetic influences — their own and those belonging to other people.

In other words, people who are not particularly energetically sensitive will in general feel less shame than people who tend to be more energetically sensitive.

Before we get into individual experiences too deeply we want to talk a little bit about the social effects of shame. There is a cultural energetic façade that each of you wears in addition to your personal one.

You all know instinctively, energetically and through what you get from others (socially in terms of your upbringing, cultural imprinting, etc.) that you wear collectively this additional energetic façade. When there are really big disruptions in that energetic aura that all of you are engaged in together when it has something to do with a big cultural "no-no," then there will be feelings of shame more frequently associated with smaller incidents that run along the same lines. 

There is shame in your culture regarding the body: showing yourself naked is in general regarded as shameful.  Shame surrounding anger in woman exists as well.  Anything that's not considered culturally acceptable within a certain spectrum tends to elicit shame, especially for people who are more energetically sensitive and feel the energy of others more acutely than those who are less energetically sensitive.

Going back to the rape example: if you live in a culture where there is typically shame experienced over the experience of rape then experiencing that shame on an individual basis is more likely to occur than if you lived in a culture where there was no shame attached to the experience of rape.  The hole in the cultural energetic façade makes it easier to create a hole in your personal energetic façade.

Healing shame

Let's say that you are a person who experiences shame on a frequent basis because of repeated feelings of emotional onslaught and violation.

The question brought to us is "how to heal individual shame?"

We will work on this in two ways. There's how to heal a group-level collective shame that you experience on an individual basis, but as part of a group mindset.  There is also how to heal individual shame that is created on an individual basis, even if it taps into something that's a larger group collective type of shame.

Using our rape example again, it is possible to strengthen the energetic field on a consistent basis so that you no longer experience what you perceive of as a hole in that field when you feel someone's energy that reminds you of that rape experience. This can be done on a highly individual basis, but in general the easiest way to heal this quickly and not make a lifetime study of it would be this:

When you are faced with the beginnings of that feeling of shame, immediately focus on that area in your body where you feel the hole is, and begin to pour as much energy of You outward from there as you can.

Simply concentrate on that area and imagine that you have unlimited strength, power and energy within you and that you are allowing it to move outward from you from that point. You are taking up space.

This is not a defense — it is a wholeness.

This runs counter to your natural tendency, which would be to withdraw. It may be difficult, especially the first few times in trying this. But in effect what you will do is prevent any other energy from entering what you think of as your sphere by maintaining a sense of wholeness and completeness within yourself.

After a while you can train yourself to do this automatically so that you need not think about it on a conscious basis.

This is the easiest and quickest way. That is not in any way suggesting that it's going to be easy for everyone. (a gentle smile)  Remember that on an intellectual basis you can talk yourself out of almost anything that you're feeling and perceiving.  It will take trust in your intuition, your energetic perceptions, and your power to move and create energy.

Healing Cultural Shame

We will move on to healing bigger shame — the cultural type of shame. This tends to be a little more complicated, because you're experiencing it on an individual basis and  everyone's experience is highly individualized.

In general, the best way to heal your experience of collective shame is this: when you begin to feel those sensations that you connect to the feeling of shame, imagine yourself being a little bit distanced from the overall energetic structure of the social and cultural group you're a part of.  Know that that's "them" — they can have that feeling over there, but you are over here feeling whole and complete in your own energetic structure.

Again, the way we describe this is very simple. It's not as simple when you're faced with all the complex feelings that arise when you're feeling a feeling like shame which is so intangible and amorphous. It's not something that you can pick up from a table and hold in your hand. It's not even necessarily something that you can always identify as a feeling within your body!

So if you are capable of doing that and saying "this physical sensation I'm having now is what I associate with shame" then that is a huge step forward. You need not necessarily experience that and have that association for our suggestions to have some influence on how you end up experiencing shame for your life.

Question: Both of those are individual exercises. What are some suggestions when there's a couple or a very small intimate group that trusts each other?  Groups really help me.

If you have one other person who can work with you, one helpful exercise is to have one of you practice being the person feeling shame and other practice being the "energetically assaulting person".  Practice moving your energy back and forth in both of these roles as follows:

Stand facing one another about 6 feet apart — no closer. Don't look into one another's eyes — concentrate on a spot in the center of one another's chests.

One of you takes a step back and then takes a sudden step forward with the idea of pushing their energy into the other person. That other person is going to be the one who's normally experiencing that kind of thing as shame.

What the "shameful" person does is to concentrate on the part of their body that they associate with the hole in their energetic field.  They simply concentrate on that area, filling up the energy within their energetic field and moving it out through that point — and seeing what develops.

In a slightly larger group situation, from 4 to 8 people, you can again role-play where one of you is singling himself out from the group consciousness. The rest of the group would be talking about an issue that all of you tend to feel some shame over — whether it is the bad state of your political system or something that we discussed earlier, like public nudity. But all of you need to have some sense of shame over whatever topic that you decide to talk about.

One of you can distance himself somewhat from the rest of the group while the group continues to talk about these shameful things, not really making jokes but just mentioning anecdotal stories that caused a sense of shame. The person who is standing aside somewhat can practice separating his energy from the group. Again, this can take maybe a few minutes for each person. So everyone can have a turn with just a few minutes' worth of experimentation.

The long road of healing

No two paths of healing are the same, but it is true that healing personal shame will have a cumulative positive effect on the cultural shame that exists all around you.  As we see it, it is part of your global and collective path to begin to heal shame on a wide basis.  In time, we foresee that your world will one day look very different regarding the issue of shame, and your personal story today will influence that future yet to be.

[Channeled May, 2009]

What is energy work? A more basic question, perhaps, would be the exploration of what is energy.

Energy is the term that has come to be used to explain or to connote the basic life force that exists in and all around you. Its very intangibility to those who exist solely, in their perception, on the Earth-plane gives it an ethereal quality that makes it seem difficult to understand.

Often people say they cannot feel energy. What they really mean is: they do not know what they are feeling when they feel it.

Note that in this channeling the term "essence" is synonymous with the idea of "Higher Self".  It is you - far more of you that you are aware off.  You can read more of what essence is in this article and in this poem from essence.

This was adapted from a personal session, shared with permission.

Introduction

At any time in your life, your essence is making many choices you are unaware of.  Many times these choices may cause discomfort or bring up resistance.  For example, your essence may be infusing a different energy in your physicality, causing a structural reintegration, quickly replacing and regenerating many of the cells existing within your skeletal structure.  This brings an extra burden on the rest of your body which you feel on a conscious level and do not like because it is not your conscious mind that has chosen this.

Going Beyond Resisting Your Essence

Most of you tend to resist any changes taking place within you energetically or on a physical level that you don't feel 100% in conscious control of and compliant with.  If there's anything going on with you on an essence level, you tend to put up some resistance to that, especially if you do not have intellectual awareness of it.  This is part of your learning to simply flow and move along with what is going on.

In general people tend to resist change.   It's in some ways part of the physical plane experience.  You want to, as humans, understand, know and agree to anything that happens to you.  You want to feel that you are more or less in control of the situation.

So when you're not 100% completely connected to essence - and only a few people are - then you're going to feel some elements of feeling out of control when essence is prompting you, prodding you or welcoming certain energies that you may not have complete and total conscious awareness of.

Question: What can the average person do about this?

We would like to talk about the potential for a swine flu pandemic.

As we see it the recent attention to what has been called the 'swine flu" is but one manifestation of what is likely to be an outcropping of a number of different rapidly mutating flu strains that are going to be making their way around the world.

You've had avian flu, you now have swine flu, and if you know anything about the replicating mechanisms behind the viruses responsible for these flus, you know that they are able to rapidly mutate. You have also set the stage for this series of mutations by creating a very hospitable environment in which "super viruses" can grow and proliferate. You have created this hospitable environment by your seeming attention to detail when it comes to certain aspects of cleanliness, personal hygiene and antibacterial formulations, and also because of the way you treat your water and sewage systems. We could also go into the whole factory farm industry and its overuse of antibiotics — all of this together  has created this really juicy environment for these mutating strains to change at a rate that will be impossible to keep up with medically.

We see the potential being relatively high at this point for millions of people to die from various flu strains as they make their way around the world within the next two years — and this is only the beginning. You have created a global economy and a global awareness. People are traveling and are eating foods from all kinds of places. Your awareness of where things come from in your life is so diminished that you could be touching a keyboard created in China that was coughed on by someone who was ill before they even knew that they were ill. So these viruses are going to be difficult to contain.

Because these strains will be rapidly mutating, the medical industry is also eventually going to go through a rapid change in focus as a result. In other words, the eventual fallout of this to the western medical community will result in a big change in focus from what it has been. The economy of the pharmaceutical industries is going to collapse in the long term — for other reasons as well, but this will be the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

People's immune system response, in general, is lower now. The way that people eat has changed, mostly in Western countries, but truly everywhere because there are few countries that are not westernized to the point of being removed from one's roots. The way that most people eat (processed foots, eating foods that didn't come from your surrounding area, eating foods that are not right for you genetically based on your racial heritage, eating genetically modified foods, and eating foods that are either infected with a lot of harmful bacteria that your body then has to deal with, or are completely devoid of any helpful bacteria) is serving to greatly diminish the immune capacity of the species as a whole.

Much of this decreased immune response has been shored up artificially by the pharmaceutical industry. In other words, you are throwing drugs at various maladies in order to help you get over symptoms while not addressing the underlying causes, which are based on a lack of energetic strength or connection to chi. The more you as a people become divorced from the energy that is all around you that exists in nature, the energy that exists among one another, and the more you feel isolated and act as if you are isolated, the less connected you are with your own immune response.

We would say then that there is a better than 60% chance that what we have projected in terms of a pandemic — in other words, millions of deaths occurring due to a series of quickly mutating viruses — will be occurring within the next two years.

[Note: Approximately 60,000 people die of the flu in the United States alone every year, so this additional amount on a worldwide level does not look like a true epidemic.  Polaris did not indicate that this particular virus was going to be the cause, either.  They certainly do not support adding fear to this mix.  More was mentioned on what you can do at the May Monthly Message]

We have been as yet somewhat incomplete in our explanation of what we mean when we say "Love".

Love to you - in your perception that is based on cultural tradition, social cues, literature, music and real emotion - is limited.   It's limited in part because your perceptions are inherently limited, because you perceive what there is on the physical plane, which are things that you can touch feel things, imagine, see, hear, smell or taste.

But when we say love, we don't limit that to this good "heart" feeling that you get when culturally and socially you think of the work love.  We mean complete presence: a complete awareness.

And so saying that love is attention is accurate.  When you give your attention to something, you're not judging it.  You're not deeming it worthy, unworthy, good, bad, painful or beautiful. You are simply noticing.  You are simply being with it - and this is love.

This question was asked in the "Ask Polaris" forum.  You can read the full question with all the background here, but the full question can be summarized as:

"This friend was missing, and I energetically searched for her and got a clear sense that she was alive, and then I found out she wasn't.  What was happening?"

We will approach this different ways. We will speak to the particular events that have been asked of us and we will also speak to generalities. In this particular case there was enough energy left behind by the departing soul so as to create a sense of reality to the person who was sensing her.  In other words, in the reality (the particular parallel)  in which Miché's friend exists, her relative died early on during this time period.  There was quite a lot of energy associated with it that she was able to tap into and to feel an "aliveness".  Upon receiving word that the person had died and had been found, that energy source was then immediately terminated and that sense of aliveness was no longer present.  However at the same time, there was a parallel in which she lived for some time afterward.

Question: There's a been a lot of focus on Obama and his inauguration.   Could you give perspective on who he is?   What are his agreements and relationships with those around him and with the population at large?  Please include some Michael Teachings terms in this!

Let us talk about this man who has been so inspiring for a great many people.  There is of course no accident in this.  This is a soul who has some experience in leading great numbers of people.  He has acted as a war general throughout various parts of history, including surrounding Alexander the great, in the Napoleonic wars and other times that are widely known throughout history.

This is a fourth level mature priest who is drawing on some sixth level energies in order to collect on some karma.  There are a great number of people who "owe him a favor", and this is a life that he is tying together quite a few loose ends in order to create a completion of sorts.

[Note that these terms are from the Michael Teachings perspective and are supplemental.  You can learn more about the terminology by following the links]

This is part of where his "air of service" comes from.  He has plans to affect a great number of people all at one time: the country and the world.  There are a great number of people who are going to be affected by who he is and the energy that he brings to this role that he is playing.   

Make no mistake, he is aware that he is playing a role.  There is more to the man than the role that you see.  But he has conscious awareness of his effect upon other people. 

Here is something that could be said to come from your Essence, your innermost core of YOU.

I hope it connects you to your true Self.

I love you unconditionally.

I am your darkest criticisms of yourself.
I am your most expansive hopes and dreams.
I am the creation of universes that goes on inside yourself.
I am the destruction of all that you choose to leave behind.

I am your most explosive, raging, vindictive anger.
I am your most childlike, idealist, pollyanna hopes.
I am your most melancholic, hopeless, despairing sadness.
I am your most ebullient, rhapsodic, ecstatic joy.
I am your most panic-stricken, terrified, traumatized fear.

I am your most tranquil, Buddha-like, serenic peace.
I am your most expansive, all knowing perceptions.
I am your most impenetrable, unavoidable and insurmountable blocks.

I am everything you can imagine that is within you, and I am what you hope you are not

 

You express that you want oneness with me, and I laugh.
For this is where you already are.
You ask me to tell you what to do and I lovingly roll my eyes.
For I speak to you through your own desires.

You are where you are meant to be.
You are doing what you are meant to do.
You are connecting with whom you are meant to be connected with.
You are being who you are meant to be.

You can look outward and see me in others' eyes
and through the rolling hills and sturdy trees of nature.
You can also see me through the quiet space inside
that appears to you in deep meditation.

 

I am all of YOU.
Welcome me.  All of me.
I am here for you—inside, within, and around you.
I AM you.

When you welcome Me, you welcome You, and then you live the rapturous joy of loving your Self.

Welcome me.  Welcome You.

I Am You. All of You.