Rocking the Apocalypse: Staying Open and Strong in Dark Times
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Hello everyone. This is Dawn Boiani Sandberg from Crestone, Colorado from somaticsleepcoach.com. And it’s been quite a long time since I have recorded a video. And there was something of note that I said before that I wanted to bring up with everyone because it’s been pretty relevant in my life. And it has to do with basically how to rock the apocalypse, how to develop resiliency in very, very exceedingly dark times.
Now, human beings have been through tremendous world wars. My grandparents went through two wars. My mom grew up during the Vietnam War. So human society has always been riddled with a lot of conflict in wars and plagues and famine. So I mean, the only problem now is that we have the capacity to destroy all life on the planet. So the stakes are much higher than they ever were. But I had gone in recently to receive a clinical Qigong healing, kind of like Reiki on steroids.
Qigong Healing and Guidance
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I’ve got this wonderful Qigong practitioner teacher. She’s a senior Qigong practitioner, kind of this Obi-Wan woman in Boulder who does these clinical treatments with me. And she gave me some advice as to how to mitigate these hard times. And it directly relates to anyone who’s into mindfulness, meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, wellness.
So I wanted to share with you some of the insights and tools that she shared with me, how to develop strength and retain strength during these really, really hard times.
So what she said was, she said I had come in and I was experiencing, I have bouts of anxiety and insomnia from time to time. And she said basically in our system they have, like in Eastern thought, the chakra system. So they have seven main root chakras and there’s actually more subtle ones as well. And she said a human being that’s sort of healthy and flourishing, their chakras are sort of open and flowing.
The Chakra System
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So the root chakra, you feel grounded, sane, connected with the earth, your secret chakras, your passion, your creativity, your inspiration to kind of get up and make a meaningful life to make things happen, to create things in this life. The one at the naval chakra has to do with your sense of safety and power. And the heart chakra is feelings of love, compassion, forgiveness, openness, warmth, your basic warmth.
The throat chakra is being able to communicate and feel things. The chakra that is right in between the forehead has to do with intuition. And then there’s higher ones that have to do with sort of connection to source.
But she said when you’re flowing really well, those chakras, you’re going to be an open person. You’re going to be an effective communicator. You’re going to be able to manifest your visions. You’re going to feel a sense of warmth and wellness during the day.
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You’d be creative and inspired and not burnt out. But she said, “You have to be very careful because nowadays, especially with computers and social media, there’s just so much toxicity in the news and painful things. Wars, horrible uncovering of the Epstein files and the whole global elitist cabal of pedophiles and cannibals.”
I mean, this is like the darkest, horrible stuff that I believe it’s literally like the apocalyptic times. I know the book of Revelations, I’m not even a Christian, but the word apocalypse means to reveal that which had been hidden, to bring to light, to uncover which had been hidden.
So I mean, these Epstein files and the length of time that I think this has been covered up in human society, this pedophile trafficking of children and abusing them by sadistic, privileged people in power has been going on I think for hundreds and hundreds of years.
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And I think Epstein held a role that had been held by other people for maybe since time immemorial. I know the Catholics had all this kind of baby trafficking and hiding babies because they were not celibate when they’re all supposed to be nuns and priests. And this scandal stuff has been going on for forever.
And I’m really glad that it’s finally being brought to light, but it’s really hard to hear. And when you hear this much dark stuff arising all at once, it’s like a fire hose, you can’t really process it. It’s like way too much. It’s literally like a landslide of dark toxicity and horror, I mean, horrible images of things that we’re having to process.
So in order to stay open, you grieve or you get overwhelmed and it’s just impossible. So then we kind of dissociate and become numb. That’s one of the ways that the nervous system develops a coping mechanism to handle such dark things, all this bombing and stuff.
The Question of How to Stay Open
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So that’s the question I had to her, like, how do you stay empathic, open, and vulnerable in the darkest of times where the most gratisque stuff is coming forth? And we could all die. We could be in physical danger. There’s been suggestions that there’s going to be a retaliation on American soil.
So none of us are safe. I mean, these guys always threaten to use nuclear weapons. So we’re living on borrowed time, but I don’t even know what’s going to happen. So how do we deal with this?
So in the chakra system, when you’re taking on, and like I do scroll, I sit and watch for like two hours, like Instagram reels. And it actually, because it’s so unsafe and it’s so horrible, you kind of like dissociate, you kind of go numb or you have an adrenal response and that depletes your energy fields.
Energy Depletion and Contraction
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It depletes your chakras. They actually, chakras like a wheel, they’re supposed to kind of. The energy centers are sort of in the Indian system, they sort of spin. They spin sort of clockwise and they’re radiating out.
So when you’re being as open and flowing, your whole being is emanating wheels of energy into your life through speech, through creative energy, you’re alive and so things are flowing.
When you kind of lay there or sit on the computer for hours and just watch the super scary stuff, that whole energy center starts to deplete and you start to feel more afraid. You contract, you kind of go in like a turtle, you kind of contract like a potato bug.
So your life force energy field gets smaller and smaller rather than more radiant. In Tibetan tantras and Daoism. And they talk about like a person who’s attained enlightenment, you actually have a rainbow body and that’s a person who’s all of their energy fields are open and then they’re vibrating equally in a concurrent way that’s kind of our natural state of openness.
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So a person that would attain rainbow body is, a person whose chakras are kind of open and flowing and spinning and moving into life in a benevolent, compassionate, effective way.
So when we are taking on all this toxicity, that whole thing shrinks. And I also feel like it’s kind of like energy parasitic. They’re actually sort of soul stealing a little bit. All these things that the click bait, they want your attention, they want your life force.
They’re actually kind of harvesting our life force and it becomes more and more dim and they kind of own it because they can monetize it and use it for social control. So uh- it might not be too good to like give it to them all the time.
Now, I feel like it’s imperative, and I’ve said this before, to stay informed and to really know what’s going on. In fact, I just got off of a Zoom meeting where we had our county caucus.
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So we’re talking about who’s going to be elected and different county concerns. So I’m into being really informed, but my Qigong teacher told me it’s really important to not energetically contract through all of this horrible stuff because it becomes part of you.
Once you read and you see these kids being whatever, molested and all this stuff and bombing, and it becomes sort of part of your energy field. So I think it’s good to be informed, but it might be better to sort of read the news like we used to do in the olden days.
The old New York Times used to get printed and come to your door. So when you read it, you’re not having this direct visual input. And I’m not suggesting that we live in so much privilege that I can’t handle what’s going on, but I will die. I mean, it’s nervous system debilitating to have this fire hose of an influx of world wars and disgusting scandals that the mind can’t even process, the heart can’t process on a moment to moment basis.
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And some people are like living in these electronic milieus. So your soul is being stolen, your energy’s being depleted, you’re ineffective, and it’s just like the opposite of an enlightened, radiant, effective person in this world that’s living toward their highest good.
So she said, “In each moment, I want you to decide what things are going to bring in positive energy into your field, what things are going to open you or what things are going to contract you.”
And even if we have to go out and protest, you want to be protesting in a way that is open and effective, not like, “I’m ready to out myself and die and give up because I’ve lost hope.”
I mean, whatever we do to be effective, even if it’s social change, your being should still be open and grounded and your chakras should be flowing and your heart open and your mind clear. That’s how we need to live, even in the darkest of times.
Self-Care as a Spiritual Discipline
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And so self-care is a huge part of it. She told me to work on my spiritual practice on a daily basis, and that doesn’t need me necessarily like formal “I’m doing a thousand mantras a day and prostrations”~
But my husband, for instance, he gets up every morning and he jogs five miles and then he comes back and does stretching and yoga and then he will not watch the news in the morning. He just has a nice breakfast that’s in the sun or maybe he’ll watch the weather channel, which is bad enough because that’s pretty apocalyptic in and of itself.
But one to two hours a day of self-care, movement, cardio, exercise, stretching, sunshine, as an alternative to just this doomscrolling. I left Facebook a couple years ago and I never looked back. I have more time for my family and real friends and my daughter and my meditation practice.
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So I was so happy to leave Facebook and I highly recommend it. In fact, I don’t have the account completely deleted. I just have it deactivated, but because they’re monitoring and selling our information, I think I’m going to just delete it completely.
And so what my Qigong teacher also said as part of this whole protective strength of chakras and your own personal power is you want to kind of imagine like a protective field of white light around you to protect you from all of this toxic and dark stuff and that that light, it’s almost like a protective sort of semi-permeable membrane of white light around you.
Protecting Your Energy Field
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You can feel stuff, but you don’t let things destabilize your personal power and your sovereignty. You don’t contract. It’s kind of like she talked about it like eating bad food.
If you just are eating like McDonald’s, Burger King, fried food, toxic stuff, and smoking and drinking, and you’re not going to be healthy, you’re not going to be able to flourish in this life, you’re going to die early, you’re taking in toxicity.
So likewise, what we bring in in social media and the news constantly can be soul crushingly debilitating. And there’s a difference between being informed and effective and being depleted and your soul being stolen away or crushed.
So she said to me that when she was checking on my chakras, some of them had actually just stopped spinning. She has this way of doing an energy check and she said, “The engine’s not working.”
“So she said it was really important for me to do this self-care piece about two hours a day to mitigate these dark times so people can still grow spiritually, they can develop personally, you can still be effective in the world up until our last breath”
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I don’t know how long these dark times are going to last. I don’t know if we’ll survive it, but I will say I’d rather be brave and strong and in my heart and in my humanness to endure a time like this than to just give up and like, they call it in polyvagal theory, being in your ventral vagal in a dissociated, checked out, ineffective state of escapism.
And I wouldn’t even want to use my religion to sort of. An opiate of the mass is like I’m connecting to some alternate dimension somewhere.
I mean, I still think we want to be in this life and effective and really in this body and use that as a method of tool of a spiritual path. And I still think there’s an opportunity to protect your energy in these dark times and to still make decisions on a moment to moment basis that will either contract your field, shut down your chakras, or open.
Choosing Openness
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And the more open you are, even as you’re protesting, even whatever horrible thing comes, to stay grounded, clear, open-hearted, and in your power is the greatest gift you can give to this world and to yourself.
So the method, how do you do that? You have to make a conscious decision that all the time that we’re spending on Facebook, Instagram, and social media, and just wasting our time on YouTube with nonsense. And that even includes taking on spiritual teachings. It’s like more and more stuff can just be a distraction, right?
It’s like a few simple self-care things to keep the being healthy, keep the being strong, keep the being open was her suggestion to me.
So I wanted to impart that to you that just because we’re in what seems like apocalyptic times, and they may very well be, that doesn’t give us an excuse to just throw our own lives away into this toxic doom scrolling, social media addiction.
Holding the Light
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It feels kind of comforting because I’m like laying there watching this stuff, but what it’s doing is it’s soul stealing and it’s wasting my life and it can cause sickness and it causes ineffectiveness.
So my teacher said, “Be like a Jedi, be like strong, be like a powerful being, be a force of light and hold your light in times of darkness.” That is the greatest gift we can give to this world.
So I just wanted to share that insight and that commitment I have to myself more than anything, like before breakfast, before taking care of house, before work, the self-care piece of whatever that means to you.
If it’s going for a walk in the sun, doing a formal practice, doing yoga, qigong, something nurturing. And instead of having Facebook dialogues and Instagram, put on some really healing music, classical music, nature music, soundscapes, Native American flute music, clean your home, take care of your body, do whatever you can to connect to what’s called chi, to life force energy, and be as strong as you possibly can during this time.
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You get to choose what comes into your energy field. You get to choose what things you’re going to hop-nob with on a moment to moment basis. So it’s good to be informed, but don’t take in that dark stuff into your energy field and nervous system and let it break you.
So stay strong beings of light and rock on, rock the apocalypse and Godspeed~ well wishes to all of us during this hard time. It is exceedingly hard and so many lives are being lost. It’s unbearable, but that prompts me to do this, the commitment to the self-care piece and keep my being open and strong and viable.
Thank you for listening.
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