Gregg Braden offers words of wisdom about the cycles of humanity and our spiritual evolution.
By Lisa Cedrone
Sometimes it’s hard to make sense of our world today. From terrorist attacks to police shootings…from natural disasters to man-made environmental catastrophes…from political strife to full-blown wars—why is there so much chaos and conflict across the globe? And why—as humanity is supposedly near the tipping point of spiritual awakening—are we so often overwhelmed, confused, and off balance in our day-to-day lives?
Many of us have been pondering these questions and, more importantly, doing our own work at different levels to navigate the often-turbulent waters of transition and become change agents for a new world. It’s not easy—often two steps forward and then one step back—yet we push onward looking for guideposts and practices that will lead us to new levels of consciousness, cooperation and harmony on Earth.
“Our world is changing in ways that we have never seen. For most of us, this change has been happening faster than we have been prepared to accept,”
said New York Times best-selling author and lecturer Gregg Braden. “If you haven’t already noticed, we are living in a world of extremes. It is no longer enough to be an expert in one topic. You have to know a little bit about a whole lot of things to get something done.”
On my own quest for answers and spiritual guidance this summer, I had the opportunity to hear Braden’s words of wisdom live at the Kyron Summer Lights Conference, which took place in Hot Springs, AR, in June. More than 600 people from across the United States and abroad converged to hear Lee Carroll channel Kryon and learn from leading researchers/authors bridging the worlds of science and spirituality including, in addition to Braden, Dr. Bruce Lipton (The Biology of Belief) and Joe Dispenza (The Placebo Effect).*
Skimming the Surface: The New Norm
At the event, something shifted in my personal understanding of our rapidly changing thinking and learning processes when Braden talked about the need to learn wide and shallow vs. narrow and deep, and then shared one of his favorite quotes from American biologist E. O. Wilson:
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
Maybe you can relate to my own experience in this regard: For almost a decade, I was very hard on myself, thinking something was “wrong” because my brain felt like a sieve and my attention span would wonder from topic to topic, conversation to conversation, and book to book. I often joked with a close friend, who also seemed to be simultaneously reading 10 books at any given time, that we were going “off the deep end.” For example, I would have a metaphysical question and then read and research like crazy, but I wouldn’t retain a whole lot of the material. I noticed that only certain things would stick in my mind, for what I thought were bizarre reasons, and the rest of the information would just slip through my neural network and disappear. Poof, it’s gone!
Then one day, about two years ago, I had an amazing discovery: I was retaining select slices of knowledge that appeared to be puzzle pieces. When I got the last piece an epiphany would happen. All of the parts would come together from many different sources and answers would materialize “out of thin air.” Still, I doubted myself frequently and remained in a state of semi-frustration during conversations with others and attempts to delve into new areas of learning. My doctor even suggested that perhaps I should try medicine for ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder)…No thanks.
What a relief to get confirmation from Braden’s presentation that skimming the surface rather than diving in deep is not only a desirable—but necessary—approach to processing information and turning it into wisdom as our world continues to change!
Turn It Over
“We have to think and live differently, perhaps more so now than at any time in the past,” explained Braden. “This isn’t about judging the past. The past has served us because it got us to where we are today. We’re here now, but the choices we made in the past were in the context of a different world. How we used to solve our problems is not working anymore.”
This has played out in my personal life through an understanding that I no longer need to force outcomes and solutions using my willpower. I now let solutions flow naturally with the assistance of my “higher guidance,” which I believe is a collaboration that includes my higher self (soul), non-physical guides and the creative source of the universe. Synchronicity—“the simultaneous occurrence of events/coincidences that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection”—is the confirmation that I am “tapped into” this process correctly and connected to the quantum field of all possibilities and outcomes.
Some people call this, “Let go and let God.”
Of course, this is much easier said than done, and the best way to build faith in the process is through direct experience. Try truly letting go of a problem and all the constricting energy around it, and then see what happens. Don’t look for a solution; let one reveal itself through synchronicity and then follow the path that unfolds without reservations. Start small and build confidence in the process over time.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I didn’t have that luxury; this new mode of operation hit me like a freight train when my life was completely going off the rails. Following a car accident that put me out of commission for almost a year—on the heels of a divorce that left me depressed and with zero financial resources—I found myself two weeks from being homeless. My rent was due, I was on Food Stamps (which my cats loved because canned tuna was a covered purchase but cat food was not), and I was just starting my freelance business and not making ends meet.
I was holding on to my old world for dear life: the great corporate career I left in Washington, D.C., the beautiful house my ex-husband negotiated in the divorce, the friends I missed, the BMW I had to sell, and the list goes on and on… At 40—gasp—I was going to need to move back in with my parents.
At the time my internal crisis was coming to a head, I was ghostwriting a book for the director of the Salvation Army’s Center for Hope in Sarasota, FL. I had been working on the project for almost a year, and I spent every Tuesday night attending his class for people in addiction recovery programs living at the homeless shelter. That week, I woke up on the Wednesday morning after the class in complete fear about the prospect of having to downsize my life once again to fit into my parents’ spare bedroom, and then something magical happened. I realized how ridiculous and self-centered my behavior was. I had just spent a year interacting with people who were living at the Salvation Army and grateful for the opportunity to be there and have any roof over their heads. And here I was with caring parents, who lived in a lovely home with room for me—and my cats.
I felt all that horrible, tight and fearful energy just wash away. It was an undeniable physical sensation that could not be faked. (You know what I’m talking about if you have ever experienced it.) I completely turned it over with gratitude and decided that what worked in the past was no longer serving me. I needed a new life—with new spiritual priorities—and I was ready to start it right now, even if that meant doing so from my parents’ guest bedroom.
I kid you not, two days later on Friday, the doorbell rang at 3:45 p.m. and it was the mail carrier. He had a certified letter that he had been trying to deliver for days and, if I was not home to sign for it today, the post office was going to return it to the sender. That letter was from a lawyer’s office, informing me I had a court case in Tampa the following Tuesday, and the firm was going to withdraw as my attorney if I did not respond by 4:00 p.m. that day! (The case, which involved an insurance claim, had been dragging on for years, and I forgot to give the law office a forwarding address when I moved six months prior.)
I immediately picked up the phone and dialed the number. When the receptionist answered, she said that my lawyer, Sam, had called into the office 30 minutes earlier to say he was canceling his plane ticket. Five minutes later Sam called me and said, “You are not going to believe this: I have been sitting at my computer for the past half hour trying to cancel my plane ticket, and every time I hit the “enter” button my computer crashes and I have to reboot it.”
So Sam showed up in Tampa as scheduled, the judge ruled in my favor, and the proceeds landed in my bank account just in time to snap up a short sale on the perfect condo for me, which my friend’s Realtor just happened to find by chance while hunting for an investment property for her and her husband. I had just enough money to buy the property and pay my rent for the two months it took to close the sale. How’s that for diving timing?
I knew in my heart that letting go of all the fear-based energy gave me access to solve this problem from a higher level. I truly learned through first-hand experience that the energy frequency we vibrate out emotionally and mentally serves as a catalyst and magnet for the same frequency to come back to us. In this case, acceptance, gratitude and love all reflected back from the universe—almost immediately—and a new door opened to usher in the next phase of my life.
As Braden said: “The better we know ourselves, the better we can thrive. We are not talking about just surviving…It is possible to thrive in this new world. This is the new normal. So many people are waiting for the world to go back to the way it used to be. It’s not going to happen. That world doesn’t exist anymore…We may not be able to change what is going on in the world, but we can change how we respond to what is going on in the world if we embrace the deepest truths of our existence.”
Those deeper truths include knowledge that we are powerful creators of our own reality, and the higher our vibration, the more easily we can intentionally assist in manifesting desired outcomes. For example, quantum physics has shown that subatomic particles come into existence as “physical matter” when they are observed. Otherwise, they behave as waveforms. As Braden pointed out, the higher our frequency, the more wavelike we are, and the easier it is for us to reach beyond the limits of matter and physical reality to use our thoughts, beliefs and intentions to co-create our future and the world around us.
Within this process, Braden added, chaos is a sign that things are ready to collapse into a higher order. An example of how this works can be seen visually through the science of Cymatics, in which vibration is projected through a medium to create patterns. As the frequency increases in the medium, the complexity increases in the pattern.
“We are all trying to increase our frequency, right? We are trying to raise the frequency of the planet and our bodies,”
explained Braden. “When you raise the frequency of anything, it has to go into chaos before it can reflect [its new pattern] in that higher frequency. It’s true for everything. You have all heard of a healing crisis. You begin to heal but you get worse before you get better. That is the chaos before moving into a higher order.”
At first, it feels like nothing is happening, which is why we become frustrated. Then we feel the build up to chaos, which feels like we are regressing. “This is the way all nature works,” Braden explained. “The key is that we are all living in cycles…We are all feeling this momentum—the feeling that something has to shift, something has to change… When we go through these collapses, they are nature’s triggers for solutions and evolution.”
Then the magic happens. We pop into a new frequency—a higher order of existence.
Author’s note: Stay tuned for highlights from talks by Dr. Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza in upcoming issues of Transformation. For more on Lee Carroll and Kryon, visit kryon.com.
Lisa Cedrone is the editor of Transformation Magazine and a freelance editor, writer, and graphic designer working primarily in the spiritual and alternative healing communities. Prior to establishing her Sarasota, FL-based freelance business in 2008, Lisa spent 20 years as an editor/editor-in-chief for two of the Top 10 business-to-business publishers in the United States, serving the apparel manufacturing and residential construction/building markets. Her company, DragonFly Nation, offers a wide range of creative services, with an emphasis on cost-effective, turnkey editorial and design projects for both print and web. Contact her at lisa@suncoasttransformation.com or visit DragonFlyNation.com.