Neutrality, The Heart, and The Body

The human race has arrived at a critical transition into the fourth evolutionary stage in a seven-stage process leading to mastery. This transition is equivalent to puberty, a time when children grow up to enter the beginning stages of adulthood. We can call this the mature stage or adolescent stage, leaving behind the young soul or child stage and looking ahead to the old soul stage of adulthood. During this new stage we must learn to open our hearts, master relationships, and learn to live cooperatively with one another and the planet itself. This is a very tall order but it is a natural process and we are equipped for the job. It will take some time to sort out what we need to leave behind and what we must adopt in order to succeed, approximately sixty years. Puberty is messy and chaotic but it does not last forever thank God. In fact it is relatively quick.

This fourth stage will be focused on the fourth chakra, the fourth of seven primary chakras or gates that when opened, lead to mastery of living. The fourth or heart chakra is quite interesting because of its location above the lower three and below the upper three, exactly in the mid position. As in electrical current the lower three are negative, the upper three are positive and the heart occupies the neutral position.

Most people don’t think of their hearts as neutral because they equate it with strong emotion. People guard their hearts from the pain of suffering and betrayal and open their hearts around babies and love interests. We think of the heart as being warm or cold, open or closed, strong or weak, heavy or light, and so on, however, in essence the heart is the neutral place, the place where we are not attached, the place where we do not care what happens because we are neutral. Think of those fortunate people who say before they die, “I know it is all perfect. I know everything is going to be fine. I accept everything. I love you all without any conditions, without any judgment, I have no regrets.” This is neutrality at its best. This is where we are happiest. This is the doorway to mastery and enlightenment. It is the way of the heart.

Here are some stories about non-neutrality and how we get to neutral little by little. These stories are true stories based on my own experience but they are only teaching stories and they do not define who I am, only where I have been. They could be anyone’s stories, perhaps your stories, because we all have stories like them.

Drama and Trauma in Childhood

When I was four years old I was on a trip with my family driving from San Diego, California over to Mexicali in Mexico to attend my favorite uncles funeral. The road was a treacherous winding mountain highway through a rugged Anza Borrego Desert landscape and I was riding in the front seat of an old Plymouth between my parents. There were no seat belts in 1952 and the dashboard was hard metal. As we came around a curve a truck was passing another truck coming from the opposite direction in our lane. There was no place to go. On our right were a guardrail and a steep cliff that went down for about five hundred feet. I was very small so I could see nothing but I heard a great screech, a sickening crunch, breaking glass, and I saw the dashboard come up to meet my face. That is all I remember of the accident until a few minutes later. I had blood all over my face and my nose was bleeding badly. Miraculously no one else was seriously injured but the car was totaled and hanging over the guardrail in mid air. I remember we had difficulty exiting the car because of its position and the danger it could go over.

Somehow we continued our trip to Mexicali, Mexico in a rental car. There I was confronted with my first experience of death. My uncle was laid out unceremoniously on a table cold and dead. Later I watched as his body was lowered into a dark hole in the ground and the dirt was shoveled into it. Women were screaming and crying and the atmosphere was terrifying. This was a border town in Mexico in 1952, raw and unvarnished.

These events were what Latino shamans call a major susto, a fright, and what these days we call a traumatic event. First there was an injury to the body, in this case a concussion and a bloody face. Then it was followed the next day by an emotional trauma of shocking loss at my uncle’s funeral and the reality that people go away for good into holes in the ground.

As a result of what happened I decided that the world was not necessarily a safe place. I saw that anything could happen in the blink of an eye that could threaten my safety and change my world in a second. I also saw that people I loved could leave and never come back again, that the earth swallowed them up. This was a lot to take in at four years old and I clearly could not understand it all. But I did feel pain and knew I could be badly injured.

I identified with the notion that “I am very vulnerable”, that “death is brutal and scary,” that “dark holes swallow people up,” and that “people can suddenly leave me.” For years growing up I had scary dreams and a great fear of the dark (the dark hole in the ground that swallowed my uncle). You could say that I was not neutral about myself, the safety of my body, of not being in control driving, and not neutral about the dark.

As a result in my life I had PTSD associated with riding in a car when I was not driving. For years I would have an exaggerated response to swerves, squealing tires, horns, tailgating, and any kind of loud unexpected noises. My whole body would tense and jerk to get out of the way. This had a way of reinforcing the belief that I was not safe when I was not in control. The pattern was reinforced when I was fourteen years old and heard from inside my house a terrific squeal from braking tires and a loud thump. I ran outside to find my eighty two year old grandmother lying in the street mortally wounded. She had been my primary caretaker throughout my childhood and the trauma of that happening beyond my control was quite severe. There was nothing I could do to prevent it.

In addition in my life I have had a total of five major accidents in cars, three where I was a passenger. I drew these experiences to myself as a result of my non-neutrality when riding in a car. Little by little I have been able to let go of most of the susto through shamanic practice and I reframed my identity as a survivor of practically anything. However, even with years of work my body still reacts to a sudden threat in traffic, always when I am a passenger and not in control of the car. This will need continued forgiveness to find the ultimate neutral response, complete relaxation and acceptance.

As a child I was not neutral about the dark, especially behind me. I always had some fear of the dark when my parents switched out the lights and I was alone in my bed. There were unseen things moving about in the dark, I just knew it. Later when I was in my fifties my mother told me there had been a murder in that house. That is why they had bought it so cheaply. Death was stalking there. More forgiveness needed.

When I was six or seven years old I had to confront my fear of the dark by walking through an unlit warehouse at night to retrieve my father’s car keys that he had left in a small dark room at the other end of a huge building. I was the only one that could fit into a small opening that my father had pried with a crowbar between the outside door and the door jam. My father told me earnestly that I would have to overcome my fear and get them. This required me to find huge courage and helped to change my image as a scaredy-cat to a tough individual who could face anything. There were many demons of my own making in that warehouse that night but I fought them all off. I was not neutral at all. My father praised me up and down for what I had done and that made a big positive difference in how I saw myself.

My next challenge with the help of the Inner Shaman was to neutralize this bravado altogether so that nothing remained of a reaction to darkness. Yet even though I have little fear of the dark today, I am surprised sometimes that it will crop up suddenly when I have to walk through a dark corridor and a part of me reacts, the small boy who is alone in the dark. The fear is always of something that will attack from behind me. That old past life memory of being throttled from the back in the dark still needs some more forgiving and erasing. As one of my Shipibo teachers has often said, “Poco a poco, little by little you will heal.” These things may have taken lifetimes to form and they can take some years of concerted effort to erase. The fear occupies the space where love could be but they cannot co-exist, it is one or the other and fear is not the final answer.

Finding Neutrality about the Body

Remote Healing

Each month, around the new and full moons, Jose, Lena or Anna leads a remote shamanic healing session. These approximately 30 minute sessions are designed to be experienced in a quiet, safe place free from distraction. Even if you cannot join live they can be very powerful, and always include a good clearing and beautiful icaros. Recording access is included for a short time afterwards. See the product description for dates and times.

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Almost every experience we have affects the body somehow because this is the major vehicle we use to have our experiences. There is a tiny crystalline electromagnetic field around each cell of the body that allows it to retain memory. The cellular aspect of the body either takes on the pain of an event directly as in my car crash at age four or through the emotions that are experienced intensely through the body. These are the parts of the body that become most vulnerable and where we lose our neutrality rapidly. These memories of pain or emotional wounding often cause us to distrust or turn against our bodies. Sometimes we turn against our bodies when we discover that they do not conform to contemporary ideas about beauty and acceptability. They become sources of emotional pain from criticism and rejection. I remember hating that I was skinny when I was in high school because all the girls like the brawny guys.

Almost no one is neutral about her or his body. Ask people what they don’t like about their bodies and they will give you a laundry list no matter how beautiful or handsome they are. Ask what they like and there is some silence and then they might name one or two things.

Not being neutral about the body is a problem because the lack of neutrality is mostly experienced as an insult and as a vote of no confidence by the body itself. This slowly erodes your self-esteem over a long period of time and you can end up hating the way you look. Lack of neutrality about the body is mostly associated with fear. “If I have a weird crooked nose then I am afraid no one will be attracted to me and then I will be alone with no one to love me.” “If I have unruly hair I will look unpolished and then I am afraid I will not make a good impression and I will not get jobs and opportunities.” “If I am overweight people will think I am a slob and they will make fun of me and I will be alone.” You get the idea.

The shamanic way is not to look in the mirror and experience shame and embarrassment nor is it to look into the mirror and think how attractive you are. These are not neutral stances and because they are not they will bring you various unwanted types of experience. Hating your body will bring experiences that verify that your body is not attractive to others. Being overly involved in your looks will bring you attention from people that are either overly narcissistic or not neutral about you either. That spells trouble. The shamanic way would be to look into the mirror and think, “Good, this body will serve my purposes just fine.” This is a fairly neutral stance that in almost all cases happens to be true because you have the body you need to get the job done whether you know it or not.

The Inner shaman is unconcerned about the appearance of your body as long as you are fairly clean and healthy. All it wants is a body that works well. It has no use for conventional judgments and opinions.

Exercise: Getting neutral about your body

• Make two lists on a sheet of paper or in your computer. One list is what you like about your body and the other list is what you dislike about your body. Take your time with these lists and get specific.
• Next, after each item on your list of dislikes, be sure to list what fear is associated with that body part.
• Next after each item on your “dislike” list ask the following question: What if I liked this part of myself instead? What difference would that make in my experience?
• After each item on your “like” list, ask yourself the following question: What if I was totally neutral about this part of my body? What difference would it make in my experience? What am I afraid of if I was only neutral about this aspect? What would I lose?

Finding Neutrality

Finding neutrality about your body allows you forgive your body and forgiving your body allows you to accept it on its terms. Accepting your body allows it to flourish and feel loved, further allowing it to remain healthy, strong, and coherent. This is exactly what the great teacher Jesus was getting at when he said, “I am the resurrection and the life” and “Behold, I make all things new.”

Getting neutral allows for a resurrection, a revival, a rebirth, a renewal, a resurgence, a revitalization, a reappearance, a new edge if you will, each moment fresh and new where there is enormous power available to harness. The word reappearance suggests that something has disappeared and it has showed up again, in this case neutrality, and when it reappears there is a flash of re-creation where life is affirmed. So when you confront something you are not neutral about, you have died a little bit there and the statement “I am the resurrection and the life” brings back the higher frequency and the creation into it.

Exercise in Neutrality

Try it with something you have lost your neutrality about and see what happens.
While thinking of what you are not neutral about, say “I am the resurrection and the light.”
Realize that it is the big I Am that is being referred to here, all that is that you are a part of. The little I Am can resurrect and be alive too but on a smaller scale.
Now say it as if you are part of the big I Am.
Repeat as many times as you need to in order to feel the shift.
Now use the other statement, “Behold, I make all things new.” When you become neutral everything is new. When you make things new, you become neutral. It works either way.

Now if you are thinking, I can’t say that, I am not God, you might want to think again. What isn’t God? Yes, You can say it. Jesus taught by example. He meant, repeat after me, “I am the resurrection and the Life.” Repeat after me, “Behold I make all things new.” Few understood what he was saying, but it was extremely valuable and powerful. It was a way to reset the game, to get back to neutral, to forgive everything and start fresh. He gave us tools and we refused to use them misunderstanding his meaning and thinking he was only setting himself apart and talking about himself as a superior being. Why would he do that? Superior beings don’t reference being superior or they would not be masters. They teach you how to get there yourself so you can join them in mastery. Enjoy.

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José Stevens

José Luis Stevens, PhD is the president and co-founder (with wife Lena) of Power Path Seminars, an international school and consulting firm dedicated to the study and application of shamanism and indigenous wisdom to business and everyday life. José completed a ten-year apprenticeship with a Huichol (Wixarika) Maracame (Huichol shaman) in the Sierras of Central Mexico. In addition, he is studying with Shipibo shamans in the Peruvian Amazon and with Paqos (shamans) in the Andes in Peru. In 1983 he completed his doctoral dissertation at the California Institute of Integral Studies focusing on the interface between shamanism and western psychological counseling. Since then, he has studied cross-cultural shamanism around the world to distill the core elements of shamanic healing and practice. He is the author of twenty books and numerous articles including Encounters With Power, Awaken The Inner Shaman, The Power Path, Secrets of Shamanism, Transforming Your Dragons and How To Pray The Shaman’s Way.