I’m writing this post as a result of the most recent weekend intensive with Joey Klein, a modern mystic I’ve studied under for over a year.  Every encounter with Joey is intense and teaches techniques that can dramatically change one’s life, but this one seemed even more so.  It went into detail with how to completely unhook from unhealthy mental patterns, allowing us to transform.

Since that weekend I’ve felt as though I was bubbling over with a great and powerful secret and have been trying to figure out how to share it with my friends, family, and clients.  I feel I could write books on the information he shared and it still wouldn’t say enough.  This blog entry is my current best approximation of what he taught and I am learning.

Part I – Acceptance

For me this was the biggest part of the weekend, but it’s still just a warm up to the true work of transforming a pattern in your life.  Joey said shame and guilt are the energetic glue that hold patterns in place.  Acceptance, gratitude, and forgiveness are the energies that help to unbind and release patterns from your mind/body/energy system.  For this:

1.  Accept the pattern inside yourself.

2.  Have gratitude for the role the pattern has served in your life.

3.  Forgive the pattern for being there, and ask for forgiveness for your part in it.

Accepting the pattern means seeing it clearly for what it is.  Joey gave us a five hour break during the weekend to identify our triggers for a pattern that felt most ingrained in our lives, the biggest “stuck” point.  We were then to write out our mental, emotional, and physical responses (“when this happens, I do this”).

This can get a little intense, as it requires cultivating an awareness of a mostly unconscious pattern that prefers to hide when we look for it.  My acupuncturist calls this “stalking” a pattern, and says its a way to draw energy away from it (he’d actually been working with me on this concept for a number of months, Joey helped me clarify and understand more deeply what this means).

If you can really identify your full mental, emotional, and physical reaction to a pattern, you’ll probably notice that any good feelings you may try to shift into to escape the pattern are actually part of it.  For me, I wanted to feel “hopeful and included” when encountering a trigger.  I discovered that hopeful and included are actually present in the pattern when the full range of emotions are listed out, so trying to replace a “negative” thought/emotion with a positive one can actually help keep a pattern in place.  This was a major revelation for me.  Another big one is you do not have to know why a pattern is there in order to change it. Being able to identify it is enough, trying to understand why it’s there feeds the pattern and is what gets people stuck in therapy for 30 years (boring).

Part II – Create a New Pattern

I wrote a lot of notes here.  I’m going to share them, and then go into the last step:

– You cannot define what you want based on what you don’t have.  If you extrapolate what you want from what you have and don’t like you’ll end up with what you don’t want.

– Accept that you don’t know what it is you want. Most likely in your life you’ve tasted a piece of what you’re longing for, be curious to explore more of what it is and be open to the mystery.  To use an old metaphor, you can’t tell what an elephant is if all you can see is the trunk.  If you were to then focus on the trunk, you’d probably end up chasing after snakes and miss a whole herd of elephants.  So, allow yourself to be curious about what’s there and open to what shows up.

– When you become clear on your patterns, you can create and direct your emotions vs. being led by them.

– Consciously create a new association, a new pattern. Below is how.

Joey led us through a powerful meditation in which we connected to our higher selves, and asked the higher self to be present and activated in our bodies.  From this place he asked us what quality or “state of being” we identified with.  States of being are related to the soul and outside of emotions.  They don’t float by and change depending on outside circumstances.  “Joy” is a state, “happiness” is an emotion.

States people at the workshop named are:  Peace, Tranquility, Divine Love, Harmony, and Joy.  Peace and Divine Love are probably the favorites, other good ones include Abundance, Confidence, Power, and Compassion.  You can open into your heart and ask for your Higher Self to be present with you, and from there feel into what state of being has the most resonance for you.

For myself I identified with Harmony, and have had the homework to create a mental pattern to sustain harmony in my life.  At night when I’m going to sleep I imagine my body is made of light, with each molecule individually shining with white light.  I then imagine this light body surrounded by the energy of harmony (which I also see as shining white light, but with a different texture or quality than my body).  As I breathe I feel the energy of harmony infusing into my cells, permeating my entire being so I surrender to harmony at my deepest level.

In the morning when I wake up I take a breath and remember the feeling of harmony infusing my light body.  Then throughout the day as I encounter internal resistance and attachments to the old pattern, I center in the awareness of harmony.  It requires a level of vigilance, as I discovered when just last night I wanted to argue with my friend about how/why a situation in my life that related to my pattern wasn’t actually good.  I realized I was still believing in the pattern, and stepped out to breathe in the sense of harmony once more.  From that place the situation actually looks entirely different, and can be an impetus for me to feel pleasure or even happiness.  This is a pretty intense revelation, and I’ve been sitting with it.

Closing Notes

Pick whichever pattern has the most charge for you and stick with it.  This is because all patterns arise from the same source.  A pattern set up by your relationship with your father will play out in every other relationship in your life, so if you jump off that track to focus on the pattern with your boss and then to a romantic partner you’ll end up digging a lot of shallow holes and never reach water, i.e. transform.

Joey said to in each moment look at what you are choosing.  Ask, do I want to choose love or fear in this moment?  When someone says something to me, do I choose to respond with love or fear?  When triggered by a pattern, do I choose love or fear?  Focus on creating conscious awareness of your choices in each moment, and you will not recognize yourself a year from now.

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There’s more.  As I unravel it for myself, I will share it here.  In the meantime I’m happy to consider this blog post an advertisement for Joey Klein and the power of his work.  Joey will be teaching another intensive in Portland in July and this will include free events you can attend beforehand to learn more about what working with him is like.  Visithttp://www.joeyklein.com to learn more.