Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 17

Essence of Healing ~ Bob Moore

As I see it, healing is related to allowing your feelings to be expressed.

So you are bringing your qualities into this physical world, this giving an example of your connection to a level that you normally cannot explain, such as stillness in meditation. when giving healing to another person, then, in blending with that level, you are giving him an incentive, which may help him to realise his own connection to that same depth.

The qualities, the way I see them, are what we have built up or grown with, related to our acceptance of life or ways  of responding to life through different incarnations. And they are there all the time, not just when we are working with healing on a person-to-person basis. But when they are used consciously, we have this endeavour to give expression to what quality is, which can be helpful in bringing anyone into a more true experience of joy.It does not necessarily involve the use of your hands. But it does involve patience. In trying to help people to appreciate themselves, their relationship to light and what it means to them, for example, in the sense of not separating themselves between surface and depth, you need a lot of patience.

Is there an attraction between our problems and our qualities?

When we have a healing situation, then all that happens is that you are brought into a position where it is possible to give to a person, because he has asked for it, more relationship to the experience of depth, a depth that you yourself have already related to.

HEALING

Let us look at this word Healing. What does it really mean? In English it means correcting something which was wrong. So whichever way you look at it, whether it is a process which is taking you towards a point, or whether it is this actual point, is really the same.

If you are going to help another person, you have got to have something within you which this person can use. But with your qualities is related to the contact this person is trying to establish to his own qualities.  And this is the initial thing, where the whole healing situation begins.

Here, areas where you yourself are defective are no longer playing a part, because you have risen to this level of qualities. It may not be all your level of consciousness. At this point in time, it is the level where you are active, and which is producing the attraction from the other person to you. But remember what I said about development: a true contact with that area contains no selfish or ego aspect.

When we talk about ‘healer’ and ‘patient’ then it is alright as long as we take it on a physical level, but when we look deeper, the reality is, that we are all one. And we are all trying to establish this at-one-ment. When the qualities of two persons blend they are in a state of at-one-ment. If the underlying problems are allowed to take over,  then this prevents the state of at-one-ment or does not allow it to operate.

Spirituality is the combination of all these levels, which takes you into something different, so that you are moving beyond polarity into your qualities. Your qualities are not polar.

If we try to focus on what is going on in the individual in an effort to understand more about what actually takes place in healing, then I would like to ask you: Is there an attraction between our problems and our qualities?

Extract from: Conversations with Bob Moore.

An Inescapable Care ~ Georgi Y. Johnson

The quality of care has been confused with the demand that we ‘take care’ or be caring. Forcing care is not the care we are talking about here. So often care-taking is part of the negotiation that goes on in which we create dependencies to feel safe. If people need us because we take care of them, then they can’t abandon us, right? This kind of care-taking can often be driven by unresolved contractions around guilt and often lead the care-giver to a space of burn-out, flipping them into rage attacks and/or abandoning behaviours: “I have to take care of myself now!!!”

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Images on this post: 幸せの色

Likewise, the accusation of being uncaring or selfish carries a weight of condemnation, shame and rejection. This can cause us to lose the authentic connection with an unconditional care that is always here, inherent to our feeling awareness. When the demand that we care generates a forcing of care, then our freedom of expression and honesty gets distorted through contortions of form in which we try to avoid abandonment through attempting to conform. Of course, nobody really cares about these compromises and we feel abandoned anyway. It’s never good enough.

Care is not caught in the perimeters of measurement: being good enough or not good enough. Care is. We care the moment we are aware of something, whether we try to block the care connection or not. We care when we give up and say we don’t care – sometimes even more. Care surrounds us and suffuses all of nature. It’s inherent to the interconnectedness of all phenomena.

We are taught to believe that care is an activity done by the “I” in the play between subject and object. But it is not like this. The “I” can only interfere. Care is inherent in the object, in the subject and the consciousness that unites them. It is inseparable. It arises of itself, spontaneously and authentically, the moment the idea of subject as separate from object subsides. We don’t need to earn it and we don’t need to do anything with it: is here in and of itself as integral to our true nature.

Imagine the touch of a mother as she caresses the cheek of her new-born child, and the bliss this awakens in the experience of the baby. This is the power of care: healing, penetrating and connecting the parts of the whole. When we touch any object with care, care moves through us and it is possible to the experience this bliss. This includes the touch of our feet on the floor, the touch of the wind and the touch of our eyes.

It is the care within all contractions that calls out to us for attention. It is the care within our attention that moves to the contraction and that seeks to resolve it.

Care calls out for care. It is care that leads us to be cruel and care that leads us to be kind. Care is behind our anger and equally behind our fear. Care is in our jealousy and in our idolatry. It seeds our sense of loss and affirms our sense of gain. It is here when we are receptive, taking in the world, and it is here when we express our qualities into the world. We often lie because we care, we hate because we care and we reject because we care. It is the subtle intelligence behind the whole cycle of creation and destruction. It is the soft floor of the sentient dance of dualities.

How to experience unconditional care? The more we relax into pure awareness, allowing ourselves to be aware that we are aware, without grasping at anything that arises in the field and without pushing anything away, the more we can release even the concept of awareness itself, the more we can notice a fine resonance of care which is inseparable from awareness. It has a sweetness and familiarity which is beyond words. It impregnates every mite of experience. Yet it’s never far away. We will all find it in the sweet love that has been the atmosphere of our parents our care-givers, even if it was often obscured. We can find it because we were conceived through it. We can find it in contemplating he perfectly imperfect symmetry of our flower. We can feel it through the touch of the skin on our own bodies, or on any material object. It resonates on contact all by itself.

Care is at the root of suffering and a return to care is precisely that for which all suffering longs.

Do we care? It’s not in our power to negate it, because the care within us is more vast than we could ever imagine ourselves to be.

When Silence is Survival’s Game

PURE

Ice breaks the Northern winds,

here, the chest of knives make

the wind whistle a thin scream

of daughters frightened out of flow

with memory of slaughter,

until they chose to know

that silence is survival’s game

when each sound lifts

the executioner’s blame.

Shame. She is a poet-whore

whispering in rivers of pain

where no loss nor gain

could dub the disposal game

with any special, sacred name.

And the ice burns like lava

in sheaths of snow, purest flame

through words, thoughts

and every sad pretense to know,

where the forsaken go

when sleep drops the human floor.

Georgi

Survive or Thrive? Now is the time for Nondual Healing #nonduality

 

We live in a confusion of time, in which ‘reality’ increasingly makes nonsense of the rational mind. According to the American Psychological Association, stress levels are rising dramatically with each generation. On a scale of 1-10, the generation born at the turn of the millennium are reporting an average of 6 in the levels of stress experienced daily. More than ever, relaxation into the space inside and around ourselves has become a prerogative of survival. As the spiritual teacher, Russel Williams said with exquisite clarity: “If you’re getting tense, relax. The whole world is full of tension. That’s why it’s in trouble.”

In the breakage of spiritual emergency – nervous breakdown, burn-out, PTSD, depression, existential angst – cracks can be perceived in the consensual shield of reality. The light of pure existence shines through, from the inside-out and the outside-in. Often an alienation will be felt from the body, the name, the family and the whole network of identity where the psyche has been caught. This can be fearful – to be nobody, nowhere, doing nothing.

Worse, when the experience is described by a person in crisis, the survival of the personality is often seen by surrounding professionals as paramount, which reinforces the field of fear around the one that has ‘broken down’. In today’s climate, the realization that this ‘person’ is not absolute and not separate from the whole universe is likely to be labelled as a disorder. Tragically, medication can be employed to help pacify the senses and slow down the processing, aiming to restore the personality into (any) kind of identifiable form.

Yet such emergencies in our lives are at core, deep healing opportunities. They can be understood as invitations into greater freedom and relaxation in the space beyond the individual ‘me’ that strives to survive. A deepening of professional training in spiritual emergency could open the possibility from today’s conceptual lock-down in labels such as ‘depersonalization disorder’.

While it could be a short-term mercy, psychiatric medication tends to board up windows that need to burst open. Rather than giving more space for the wind to pass through freely, it ultimately creates more pressure and leads to more separation between the individual and the whole. It can take away the opportunity to release the trauma-formed beliefs that are no longer relevant. It can bar the sensitivity to the contraction of feelings and emotions in which the life-force of the personality is trapped. Beyond this, medication sometimes creates more problems than the historic one it purposes to solve, with a devastating lack of information on withdrawal, cessation and therapeutic alternatives.

When we believe in the monsters outside of ourselves, blinding the eyes and numbing the senses doesn’t take the monsters away. The deadening of perception of what is real and/or not real can cement the belief in external danger. It can make the sense of threat greater, while immobilizing the body from fight or flight.

Clear as day, as a backdrop to all confusion, the perennial presence of our own true nature remains, unchallenged and unchanging. When we first get a glimpse that we exist as ourselves, beyond ourselves, the nervous system can explode with energy. This is partly because the sudden freedom of perception can release a voltage that has been blocked for generations. Add to this that the breakage of personality that led to the experience of greater existence is often a traumatic one, in traumatic conditions, then it becomes clear that the need for a nondual therapeutic escort to prevent the psychosis is fundamental.

In the adrenaline rush of the awakened nervous system, untrained and unsupported, there is a possibility that the background pain of the conflict that broke the personality will still compel a new identification with wider, perhaps more unreal structures. Mental hospitals are full of messiahs. When my brother was sectioned during a spiritual emergency, he met at least three. Yet when a therapist is consolidated in nondual wisdom, this can help minimalize this risk of grasping towards structures of form from outside the innate personality.

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.”

Maya Angelou

Inherited Trauma: E-Class with Mark Wolynn

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Sunday March 26th, 2017
An interactive E-Class online with Mark Wolynn

FIND THE EVENT TIME IN YOUR AREA

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A unique opportunity to learn more about inherited family trauma with Mark Wolynn, author of: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who You Are and How to End the Cycle.

It Didn’t Start With You shows how the traumas of our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents can live in our unexplained depression, anxiety, fears, phobias, obsessive thoughts and physical symptoms—what scientists are now calling “secondary PTSD.”

Documenting the latest epigenetic research—how traumatic memories are transmitted through chemical changes in DNA—and the latest advances in neuroscience and the science of language, It Didn’t Start With You is an accessible and pragmatic guide to breaking inherited family patterns.

Event lasts: 2 hours

Price for participation: $85

 

WHAT IS INHERITED FAMILY TRAUMA?

Simply put, many of us relive the tragedies from previous generations and rarely make the link. Examples from the book include:

A man in jail for a crime he didn’t commit discovered he was paying the price for a murder his father had been acquitted for a generation earlier.
A woman who couldn’t understand her sudden indifference toward her husband was entangled with her grandmother who lost her husband tragically at the same age.
A young, Cambodian boy whose self-destructive behavior was linked to the murder of his grandfather by the Khmer Rouge.
A woman with claustrophobia—unable to ride in a plane or elevator—made the connection to her father’s parents who perished in a gas chamber.
A woman with a paralyzing fear that her child would die discovered that her grandparents lost two children before they immigrated to the United States.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE

The E-Class will open a process of self-discovery and healing through the epigenetic and psychological legacy of the ancestors, offering tools to identify the emotionally-charged language of fear that can link to unresolved trauma. This interactive E-Class, live with Mark Wollyn, offers mentorship and an introduction into to the integration of new trauma techniques into the practise of healing.

You will learn:

How to identify inherited family trauma that lives in your anxious words, fears, behaviors and unexplained physical symptoms.
How to map out the traumatic events in your family history that keep the cycle of suffering alive from generation to generation.
Practices, visualizations, healing sentences and other tools that can help you disentangle from an emotional legacy you’ve inherited.
How to create new neural pathways in your brain, new experiences in your body, and new vitality in your relationship with yourself and others.

“Mark Wolynn does a masterful job of illuminating the ways in which often unknown to us, our ancestors’ unresolved suffering disables us and binds us painfully to them. He gives us the tools and skills — an approach that combines understanding, imaginative dialogues, and compassionate reconnection—to free and heal ourselves.”

— James S. Gordon, MD, author of Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey Through Depression

“…a big step forward, advancing the fields of trauma therapy, mindfulness applications, and human understanding. It is a bold, creative, and compassionate work.”

—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

“…a compelling understanding of inherited trauma and fresh, powerful tools for relieving its suffering. Mark Wolynn is a wise and trustworthy guide on the journey toward healing.”

—Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

*After you have paid, be sure to register here, to receive email instructions on how to join the webinar, as well as introductory material and unique access to the recorded event.

The event is hosted by the I AM HERE community and is sponsored by the International School of Spiritual Psychology (ISSP).

 

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Inherited Trauma: E-Class with Mark Wollyn

[image error]
Sunday March 26th, 2017
An interactive E-Class online with Mark Wollyn

FIND THE EVENT TIME IN YOUR AREA

[image error]

 

A unique opportunity to learn more about inherited family trauma with Mark Wollyn, author of: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who You Are and How to End the Cycle.

It Didn’t Start With You shows how the traumas of our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents can live in our unexplained depression, anxiety, fears, phobias, obsessive thoughts and physical symptoms—what scientists are now calling “secondary PTSD.”

Documenting the latest epigenetic research—how traumatic memories are transmitted through chemical changes in DNA—and the latest advances in neuroscience and the science of language, It Didn’t Start With You is an accessible and pragmatic guide to breaking inherited family patterns.

Event lasts: 2 hours

Price for participation: $85

 

WHAT IS INHERITED FAMILY TRAUMA?

Simply put, many of us relive the tragedies from previous generations and rarely make the link. Examples from the book include:

A man in jail for a crime he didn’t commit discovered he was paying the price for a murder his father had been acquitted for a generation earlier.
A woman who couldn’t understand her sudden indifference toward her husband was entangled with her grandmother who lost her husband tragically at the same age.
A young, Cambodian boy whose self-destructive behavior was linked to the murder of his grandfather by the Khmer Rouge.
A woman with claustrophobia—unable to ride in a plane or elevator—made the connection to her father’s parents who perished in a gas chamber.
A woman with a paralyzing fear that her child would die discovered that her grandparents lost two children before they immigrated to the United States.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE

The E-Class will open a process of self-discovery and healing through the epigenetic and psychological legacy of the ancestors, offering tools to identify the emotionally-charged language of fear that can link to unresolved trauma. This interactive E-Class, live with Mark Wollyn, offers mentorship and an introduction into to the integration of new trauma techniques into the practise of healing.

You will learn:

How to identify inherited family trauma that lives in your anxious words, fears, behaviors and unexplained physical symptoms.
How to map out the traumatic events in your family history that keep the cycle of suffering alive from generation to generation.
Practices, visualizations, healing sentences and other tools that can help you disentangle from an emotional legacy you’ve inherited.
How to create new neural pathways in your brain, new experiences in your body, and new vitality in your relationship with yourself and others.

“Mark Wolynn does a masterful job of illuminating the ways in which often unknown to us, our ancestors’ unresolved suffering disables us and binds us painfully to them. He gives us the tools and skills — an approach that combines understanding, imaginative dialogues, and compassionate reconnection—to free and heal ourselves.”

— James S. Gordon, MD, author of Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey Through Depression

“…a big step forward, advancing the fields of trauma therapy, mindfulness applications, and human understanding. It is a bold, creative, and compassionate work.”

—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

“…a compelling understanding of inherited trauma and fresh, powerful tools for relieving its suffering. Mark Wolynn is a wise and trustworthy guide on the journey toward healing.”

—Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

*After you have paid, be sure to register here, to receive email instructions on how to join the webinar, as well as introductory material and unique access to the recorded event.

The event is hosted by the I AM HERE community and is sponsored by the International School of Spiritual Psychology (ISSP).

 

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The Weakness of Abuse – Dependency on the abused

Reposted from Letter of Note

In 1864, after 32 long years in the service of his master, Jourdon Anderson and his wife, Amanda, escaped a life of slavery when Union Army soldiers freed them from the plantation on which they had been working so tirelessly. They grasped the opportunity with vigour, quickly moved to Ohio where Jourdon could find paid work with which to support his growing family, and didn’t look back. Then, a year later, shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jourdon received a desperate letter from Patrick Henry Anderson, the man who used to own him, in which he was asked to return to work on the plantation and rescue his ailing business.

Jourdon’s reply to the person who enslaved his family, dictated from his home on August 7th, is everything you could wish for, and quite rightly was subsequently reprinted in numerous newspapers. Jourdon Anderson never returned to Big Spring, Tennessee. He passed away in 1907, aged 81, and is buried alongside his wife who died six years later. Together they had a total of eleven children.

(This letter, along with 124 other fascinating pieces of correspondence, can be found in the bestselling book, Letters of Note. For more info, visit Books of Note; Image: A group of escaped slaves in Virginia in 1862, courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

How To Tell If You Inherited Emotional Trauma and How To Break the Pattern

By Mark Wollyn

With new discoveries in epigenetics now making headlines, many of us are asking an important question: What are my children really inheriting? Can my baggage, the unfinished business I don’t deal with, pass on to my kids? Without knowing it, could I be hurting them?

To answer this comprehensively, we need to look at the science. The newest research in epigenetics tells us that you and I can inherit gene changes from traumas that our parents and grandparents experienced. It goes like this: When a trauma occurs, our bodies make a physiological change to better manage the stress.

This adaptive change can then be passed down to our children and grandchildren biologically preparing them to deal with similar trauma. This can be a good thing, unless, of course, the inherited changes create even more stress.

If our grandparents, for example, were traumatized from living in a war-torn country—explosions going off, people getting killed, the rattle of gunfire close by—they could pass on a survivor skill set to us—a body on hyper-alert, reflexes to react quickly to loud noises, and other such protective responses. This skill set would be helpful were we to also live in a country at war. However, living in a safe environment where this inheritance isn’t useful, the constant hypervigilance can create havoc in our bodies.

So, here’s the bad news: Yes, it’s true. Our parents’ and grandparents’ pain—their fears, their angers, their grief, their shutdowns—can all unwittingly become ours, a legacy we can perpetuate in our family. And here’s the sad part: Few of us ever make the link between our issues—our unexplained fear, anxiety, and depression—and what happened to our family members in a previous generation.

 Instead, we believe that we’re the source of our problem, that something must be wrong with us, or broken inside us, that makes us feel the way we do.

And it doesn’t end there. These unconscious patterns, along with whatever business we leave unfinished, can then be passed on to our children, and even to their children. What could be more painful than to see our children suffering, knowing that they continue to feel the pain we’ve left unattended?

Is there any good news? Absolutely. There are actions we can take that can help break the cycle.

Here’s the short list of things you can do:

1.Heal Your Own Stuff

Reconcile your broken relationships with your parents as well as with your child’s other parent. When we find someone’s behavior challenging, it’s helpful to consider the traumatic events in his or her family history. Remember, the residue of pain can pass forward. And children, because of their great innocence and loyalty, are easy targets.

Children can unconsciously carry what’s unresolved between their parents and mirror it in their own relationships. Or (as we’re learning from epigenetics), they can relive what’s unresolved behind the parents.

2. Shake the family tree and see what falls out.

What family secrets have been hidden? What stories didn’t get told? What traumas have never fully healed? It can be important to know these things, especially if we’re unconsciously reliving elements of traumas that don’t belong to us.

3. Tell your kids what you know about the traumas in your family.

Tell them the terrible things that happened to you and whatever you know about what happened to your parents and your grandparents. They could be the unwitting recipients of painful feelings from the past. When you tell them what tragedies smolder in the family history, it can come as a great relief to them—especially if they make the connection that they’ve been carrying what belongs to you or to your parents or grandparents.

I once worked with a guy who unconsciously attempted to atone for a murder his grandfather had committed. My client had attempted suicide three times. Finding himself still alive after the third attempt, he sought help. When I pointed out that he had been attempting to pay the ultimate price for crimes he never committed, he turned to me and said, “I don’t have to die? You mean it’s not me who needs to die?”

I’ve found that if we ignore the past, it can come back to haunt us. Yet when we explore it, we don’t always have to repeat it. We can break the cycle of suffering, so that our children can be free from having to live our pain in their lives.

Published in MIND BODY GREEN, June 13, 2016

NASA Telescope Reveals Largest Batch of Earth-Size, Habitable-Zone Planets Around Single Star

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.

The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

“This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.”

At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets.

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system. Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

The new results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and announced at a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them, allowing their density to be estimated.

Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated – scientists believe it could be an icy, “snowball-like” world, but further observations are needed.

“The seven wonders of TRAPPIST-1 are the first Earth-size planets that have been found orbiting this kind of star,” said Michael Gillon, lead author of the paper and the principal investigator of the TRAPPIST exoplanet survey at the University of Liege, Belgium. “It is also the best target yet for studying the atmospheres of potentially habitable, Earth-size worlds.”

In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf – is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun. The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.

The planets may also be tidally locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong winds blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.

Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. In the fall of 2016, Spitzer observed TRAPPIST-1 nearly continuously for 500 hours. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing – transits – of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system. Engineers optimized Spitzer’s ability to observe transiting planets during Spitzer’s “warm mission,” which began after the spacecraft’s coolant ran out as planned after the first five years of operations.

“This is the most exciting result I have seen in the 14 years of Spitzer operations,” said Sean Carey, manager of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. “Spitzer will follow up in the fall to further refine our understanding of these planets so that the James Webb Space Telescope can follow up. More observations of the system are sure to reveal more secrets.”

Following up on the Spitzer discovery, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has initiated the screening of four of the planets, including the three inside the habitable zone. These observations aim at assessing the presence of puffy, hydrogen-dominated atmospheres, typical for gaseous worlds like Neptune, around these planets.

In May 2016, the Hubble team observed the two innermost planets, and found no evidence for such puffy atmospheres. This strengthened the case that the planets closest to the star are rocky in nature.

“The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets,” said Nikole Lewis, co-leader of the Hubble study and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope also is studying the TRAPPIST-1 system, making measurements of the star’s minuscule changes in brightness due to transiting planets. Operating as the K2 mission, the spacecraft’s observations will allow astronomers to refine the properties of the known planets, as well as search for additional planets in the system. The K2 observations conclude in early March and will be made available on the public archive.

Spitzer, Hubble, and Kepler will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies using NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018. With much greater sensitivity, Webb will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone, and other components of a planet’s atmosphere. Webb also will analyze planets’ temperatures and surface pressures – key factors in assessing their habitability.

 

 

Fulfillment that Fulfills itself. A Nondual Elixir for Loss and Gain.

The partner of gain is loss.

Fulfilment has no opposite.

In fulfilment, loss and gain are one.

One morning, I was walking through a park with the children, and I noticed a new quality in the inner world. In the place of stress, there was a deep, wordless knowing. In the place of the forsaken, there was a sense of direction. In a flash, I realized that I didn’t know where I was going on this journey, and that it didn’t even matter. In the next moment, the thought came: “I don’t know when I’m going to die, and I even don’t care.” The burdens just dropped off like rucksacks of artillery I had been carrying for decades, in the search for an invisible enemy. I had been everybody, trying to save the world, I had been nobody in the dark contraction of depression, and now I was utterly fulfilled as any old somebody.

This: being the right person at the right place at the right time, this was a paradigm shift that would transform the forms this physical life through all dimensions. It is an unconditional feeling of fulfilment: it asks nothing of the future or the past. It lacks nothing and expands in wonder through the mysteries of the present moment. Everything, everyone, everywhere is unconditionally fulfilled. It is a feeling of great peace which includes a reunion with an inner source of happiness. It feels incredible easy. There is no stress in it.

Is it possible to feel fulfilled in every moment and through everything in any space? Could we experience the everything in the nothing and the nothing in the everything and rest in the fulfilment of that miraculous where of the something, where everything and nothing are one? #

There are the famous lines from William Blake talk about seeing the world in a grain of sand and infinity in a wild flower. Couldn’t it be the case that everything we need for fulfilment is here, right now? What would be the shift in consciousness required to allow that if not a deepening towards an unconditional space beyond the contraction of gain and loss?

While loss is a big happening in the form of physical life, especially from the perspective of the loser, it is also the closing of a cycle of form. When form closes its cycle, a great feeling of peace can descend. In peace, we release, or perhaps when we release, there is peace. There is no bypass to this, which is why grief processes are so important in honouring the cycle of form. The same resolution in peace is found when karmic lessons are done, life-times are closed, and when babies are born.

Every arrival is a fulfilment, as is every departure. Above all, it is a fulfilment of need. All contractions, when we listen to them, will tell us exactly what they need at any given moment. In fulfilling the need, we experience fulfilment. Fulfilment endlessly fulfils itself.

Fulfilment tends to get denied by general conditioning. There is a belief that if this is “enough”, then there won’t be any left for later. Progress will stop. We’ll lose our drive, our ambition, our purpose. This is untrue. Fulfilment is the start point and the arrival point. It is the purpose. It is the drive. It is the well-spring out of which everything can take form and everything can be released. It is the perpetual fountain of essential offering.

For this reason, it is important to realize fulfilment as a nondual position. We are the need and we are the fulfilment of that need. It is happening with every moment of consciousness. It is perfect in its process. Our lack is already fulfilled. Our gain is already fulfilled. Our misconceptions are already forgiven. We are that space of completion to which nothing can be added and nothing can be taken away. At source, we this purely aware space that runs through all things and through which all things come to life. Fulfilled, in and of itself.

Relaxation into the feeling of fulfilment releases the whip of agenda created by multiple contractions. Every nondual position is already fulfilled. It doesn’t depend on us to make it good.  What does fulfilment feel like? When we source the feeling, we can notice how we expand through a space that was already here. How peaceful it is. How content. How unconditional to need. In this space, the we are losers and winners, perfectly imperfect, beautifully flawed and ecstatically wounded. Nothing need be altered, and no ‘thing’ stays the same.

Extracted from Georgi’s upcoming book: Stillness of the Wind: an exploration of Nondual Healing.

“Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive.”

Thich Nhat Hanh