Ben Ralston

Why Life is So Difficult in the World Today (and Mankind in Such a Mess).

Photograph: ‘Eight-Tear-Year-Old Woman’ – www.paulprescott.com

You are pure consciousness. Perfect, sacred, divine. This is the essence of your being and it is the essence of all being.

Whether the being of a stone, stream, star, or an animal, all is consciousness. The universe itself is built with building blocks of consciousness but no microscope will ever be strong enough to see it.

It can only be felt.

Our ancient ancestors felt it. That is why they said that stones and streams and stars had their own spirits. They felt the spirits of the stars through the core of their own being, their own spirit, and they gave the stars names.



We have become separated from our own spirit.. And so we no longer feel the spirit of the world around us, even though that is why we are here – in this body, on this earth, at this time. We are here to experience relationship. To know the spirit of the world around us through our own sense of being. That is the purpose of this life, truly. To Be, but to Be in relationship to the world around.

A few choose the path of renunciation (renouncing worldly pleasure in favor of the search for enlightenment) – as did I, until I met my beautiful wife. Some choose a life partner while others have many partners along the way. For most of us choices include children, friendships, and professional relationships. We also have relationships with the Earth, our animal neighbors, the stars above.

Ultimately this is the true test of our skill in life: are we able to truly be ourselves even whilst in relationship to others and the world around us?

It’s quite a test. Let’s be honest – most of us are failing miserably! Most of us barely manage the first part – to know ourselves deeply.

Why is this? Why is it that we feel so alone, disconnected, and lost? Why have we been making the same mistakes – history repeating itself – again and again, generation after generation? Why is the divorce rate higher than ever; more war than ever; more fear and stress and crisis?

The answer is very simple: trauma. Mankind experienced a very specific trauma, the trauma of separation (this is what the biblical story of the Garden of Eden is about), and since then has been stuck in the belief that we are indeed each of us separate beings. As long as we believe ourselves to be essentially alone, we have to fend for ourselves – and then fear, greed, and corruption are born.

How and when we first experienced this trauma of separation is almost impossible to say. Perhaps it coincided with the development of our highly advanced neo-cortex brain (the tree of knowledge): the part of us that is unique amongst all these species here on Earth. As we became more ‘intelligent’, so we lost touch with our essential selves and our sacred relationship with nature. Our Egos were born in all their terrible, petty, controlling glory. We then – using our newfound intelligence – began to birth our children in unnatural ways and our sense of separation was confirmed and compounded.

But the real question is not why this happened, but what are we going to do about it?

Positive thinking, when you have a deep subconscious fear, does nothing. Energy healing can be a temporary ‘band-aid’, but without removing the cause, the problem persists. The psychological approach is highly inefficient because the problem is not ‘in our heads’ – it’s in our bodies. It’s felt as a concrete, very real, physical sense of separation. We sense that we are deeply disconnected – not only from the world around us, but – more importantly – from our own spirit.

What can we do about it?

Well, first of all, the fact that you have read this far into this article is encouraging: you are interested in your own Self. You want to know true love and be done with fear. You want to do more than just survive; you want to thrive. And you want to experience the whole of your being, not just a limited perception of it.

So please, keep reading. Keep investigating yourself. Continue to search.

But know that ultimately what separates you from the truth and freedom and love that you yearn for is just like a shadow – insubstantial. And just as easily as you walk through your shadow, so too can you let go of subconscious blockages. In my next article here on Naturala I’ll explain how.

Subconscious blockages have no substance. They are not permanent, and therefore not real. They are like emotions, thoughts, feelings – they can be experienced, but they do not define you. They are not you. They seem real – but they are not.

What is real, what is permanent, is consciousness. And it’s the same consciousness that is in every living being, and every corner of the universe. You are not alone or separate. That illusion could not be further from the truth.

How to let go or release buried emotions and suppressed feelings?

A talk about healing and personal development. What causes our emotional problems, and how can we solve them?
Answer – trauma is what causes almost all our problems, and healing trauma solves them. And healing trauma can be fast, easy, and fun!

Hope you didn’t get too seasick watching it! I’ll try to keep future videos a little more ‘stable 🙂

3 steps to profound healing (broken heart, bones, spirit)

I bleed. 
My heart bleeds out into the lonely night, and only the yearning for daylight; only the memory of a better day gives me hope…
Do you know what I mean? I know you do.
At least on some level, you do.

I’m a healer. I work as a therapist, I counsel people, and I heal their wounds (mostly emotional, but also physical). I didn’t ever desire to do this. I wanted to do many things, but never this…

When it came on me though, I knew it was my calling.
Healing is the simplest, most natural thing in the world. There are just 3 simple steps that you have to take to heal almost anything.
Of course, not everything can be healed. But even most things that are thought incurable can be.
And these are the 3 steps:
1.   Take responsibility for it.
Whatever the problem, it’s your problem. Own it. It’s yours. Not anyone else’s.
Even though you may have thought in the past that it was someone else’s fault.
Even if you wanted it to be someone else’s problem.
It isn’t. It wasn’t. It’s yours, and yours alone.
Own it.
Face it.
 Imagine that this problem is (literally) in your hands. Hold it up before your eyes and look into it deeply. This belongs to you alone. You alone can let it go.
But first, you must own it.
When you have taken responsibility you no longer blame others; and you no longer look for outside of yourself for the answers.

You know that you are responsible for your own change.
Quite often people call me and ask if I can help their partner / parent / friend. I have learnt to say ‘no’ in those situations. If that person had taken responsibility, they would be calling me themselves. If they haven’t taken responsibility, I can’t help them. Neither can you.
2.   Find the cause of the problem.
This is not so hard as it may seem, but it’s not as easy as step 3. It’s not as hard as step 1 though. Most people don’t make it past step 1. You should know that. If someone comes to me having taken step 1 (having taken responsibility for their problem) then I can almost always help them. And when they do come, I have the utmost respect – because I know what it takes to come to that point. It takes humility, and dignity, and courage. It takes being real. Most people don’t have that courage, and that’s why the world is in the state it is in…but more of that in a moment.
To find the cause of the problem, there is a very simple formula. Trace the problem (to use the analogy of a tree) to its roots. The topmost branches of the problem are in the head. The outermost symptoms are in the head (thoughts, beliefs, idea). The trunk of the problem is in the heart (emotions). The roots are in the gut(deeper feelings of trauma)… and the cause is in a reaction to those deep feelings of trauma. The reaction is a survival instinct.
Ask the question “how does this problem make me feel?” And then keep on asking that question until you come to the deepest feeling. Then ask yourself: “When I feel that deepest feeling, what do I want to do?”
The answer will be a survival instinct – almost all of our problems are rooted in our survival instincts.
There are exceptions to this rule – secondary gain is the most common one.
But if you clear the secondary gain (the process is almost identical to the one outlined above) then very often the problem falls away immediately.
Step 3: Heal the cause.
This is so easy as to be almost ridiculous.
Yes, that’s right. Healing is easy.
Taking responsibility is hard. Finding the cause is a little tricky, but when you know how, it’s pretty easy too. But healing the root cause of almost all our problems (gut-based survival instincts) is a doddle.
The cause of the problem is a subconscious blockage. To be specific, the blockage is a subconscious association between safety / survival and an instinct (fight, flight, and freeze – and their many variations: for example, fight may translate into feelings of wanting to run, hide, escape, etc.)
So if the nature of the problem is that it is subconscious, we heal it by simply making it conscious.
You see, our essence is pure consciousness. Light.
The blockage is like a shadow.
In the same way that you can remove a shadow by simply throwing light on it, you heal the subconscious blockage by bringing the light of your awareness to it.
This is mindfulness, and the power of it cannot be overstated.
When I heal a client’s blockage, I bring us both into a state of presence (here and now), and we acknowledge the blockage.
Our combined awareness (the light) bearing down on the blockage (shadow) makes it simply disappear.
The blockage is like an uninvited guest. When he is discovered, he leaves promptly. He is in fact waiting to be discovered, and wants to leave. He has a guilty conscience. He doesn’t belong there.
What belongs there is pure consciousness. When the blockage is removed, pure consciousness flows through the space again naturally, spontaneously and joyfully.
***


This is the most important thing in the world! There is no issue more urgent. Nothing is more worthy of your attention, time, and energy.
The world is in the state it’s in because so many of us are motivated unconsciously by survival instincts. In one word: fear.
We behave the way we do as a species (war, abuse, greed, hypocrisy, corruption) not because we are innately bad. On the contrary, we are innately good – our essence is goodness, or God-ness (“made in the image of God”).
However, our innate goodness has been tainted by the very thing that makes us so intelligent. Our higher thinking. Somewhere along the line human beings forgot how to quickly and easily release trauma (wild animals do it naturally). We instead learnt to hold on to our trauma. And those instincts that helped us to survivethe trauma stayed locked in place – permanently switched on.

So that our lives become ruled by subconscious tendencies towards fighting (conquer, destroy, kill, argue, conflict, win, etc); flight (hide, run away, escape, remain passive, etc); and freezing (numbness, paralysis, stiffness, lock-down, tightening up, etc).
This is why you may be a highly evolved, spiritual person, but have health, emotional, or psychological problems. Because there is something in your subconscious that trips you up and interferes with your essential nature from expressing itself naturally.
It all comes down to survival instincts.
When enough of us heal these blockages, I am sure there will be peace on earth, because peacefulness is the natural inclination of life. War is an aberration, like murder.
Death, killing, sickness – these are not aberrations – they are natural and necessary aspects of life. But war, murder, corruption and abuse are the consequence of un-released and un-healed traumas.
It’s so, so simple. We have the tools to forge a new society, a new earth, a new humanity.

Healing ourselves is the ultimate environmental activism.


It is a political act.


It is an expression of Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satya (truthfulness) and compassion.

Let us heal ourselves and each other.
Let us heal the global heart that is bleeding and crying out for us to stop abusing ourselves.
“He who saves one man saves mankind”
Save yourself. Save mankind.

My wife told me to edit this (too graphic). I didn’t – read at your own discretion.



I had a miserable childhood.
Don’t get me wrong: I was blessed with great parents who gave me very strong foundations. But beyond that, I got a fairly tough deal.
Each and every school I went to sucked. Sucked with a capital S.
Strange really because they were all private schools; or as we say in England (in a typically counter-intuitive, oxymoronic kind of a way), public schools. The schools that parents have to pay a lot of money to send their kids to.
So I supposedly had one of the best educations that money can buy! Sure didn’t feel like it though… and I suspect that education is not something that can, or should be, bought…
***
When I was six, we lived in Israel for a year. I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew when we first got there, and I didn’t know a soul, but the ‘teacher’ made me stand facing into the corner at the front of the classroom, all the Israeli kids behind me sniggering at the pale, dumb kid who even the teacher didn’t like.
My mother had to pick me up from hospital one day – I’d had my head cracked open by a rock-wielding Israelite. I must admit, I may have thrown the first stone. But his was a lot bigger…



At the end of that year we moved back to England, and my ‘education’ began in earnest…

***
My first school back home: the ‘headmistress’ force-fed me (fairly violently) a particularly disgusting school dinner. I was about 8 years old I guess. To this day I would rather chew my own legs off than eat rice pudding.
Her husband, the ‘headmaster’, on a separate occasion punished me by taking me into his office – he closed the door, made me take my pants down, and bent me over his desk. He then beat me with a stick across my buttocks, gently. I suspect that he was playing with himself at the same time.
At that school, I had not a single nice teacher. Not one. There were only grey, lifeless, totally uninspired, empty-shell ghost-shadow excuses for human beings pretending to teach us. They didn’t teach. They stood at the front of the room and pointed their fingers, looking bored. The only thing to learn from them was that life is mindless, repetitive, and without joy.
When we, the children, mirrored their boredom, we were punished, usually by being given pages of ‘lines’ to write out as extra homework. Usually from the bible.
I would do my lines in bed with a flashlight so that I didn’t have to tell my parents that I’d been ‘bad’. One time my Father came in and caught me with a bible in bed (I’d managed to hide the paper and pen when I heard him coming). The memory of his face now makes me laugh. He obviously thought that his 9-year-old son was doing late night bible studies, and probably had visions of me becoming a priest!
He said something like:
“Ah, you’re reading the bible, eh? Yes, it’s an, er… interesting book isn’t it?”
Let me tell you – to a 9-year-old boy, the bible is anything but interesting. But I nodded and waited for him to leave so that I could finish my lines.

***
One day, when I was about 11, my mother told me she was taking me out of the school a year early. She’d enrolled me in a new school. I remember her saying to me somewhat apologetically:
“You haven’t been happy here have you?”
So I went to a new school for a year. It was much better. We had to travel a bit further each day to get there, but there were some nice teachers. Also, again, some very lifeless ones, but it was better. One of the nice teachers turned out to be a bit too nice though. He was the drama teacher, and he gave me the lead role in the school play: Hiawatha. He also invited me to his on-campus apartment where he played hardcore porn on his VHS and encouraged me to masturbate. He then sat in a chair slightly behind me, and masturbated himself…
I was afraid of him; fascinated by the beautiful naked women and the sex that he introduced me to; and deeply uncomfortable with the various situations that I kept finding myself in with him. But I didn’t tell anyone. Abused children rarely do…
He ingratiated himself with my parents by nursing my budding acting abilities (for which my Ma was grateful), and before I knew it he’d become a ‘family friend’. He’d come for barbecues and evening meals and I’d sit there inwardly squirming.

***
When I was 13 I went to high school, and for some strange reason I asked my parents if I could board there. I remember having fantasies of pillow fights and midnight snacks. I had two brothers 10 years younger than me, and perhaps I just craved the company of my peers. I don’t know. But the fun I had hoped to find wasn’t there. Instead there was an accepted culture of bullying and abuse that dated back to the dark ages – literally. Public schools in England are renowned for it.
The teachers weren’t so bad though, although I can’t say that any of them were great teachers. They still seemed pretty bored.
Except one. Mr Green, an English teacher. I will never, ever forget that man. He was only there for a year, but he changed my life. In many ways, he probably saved it.


At that school every teacher had a nickname. All the nicknames were things like ‘Witch’ (the very creepy chemistry teacher) and ‘Buttocks’ (the geography teacher whose arse was so large that she had to go sideways through doors. No kidding. I went through a phase of having a crush on her so bad that I would sit with an erection through entire geography classes. If ever she asked me to stand up and come to the front of the class I had to will my penis to behave: not easy when you’re 13-years-old).
Mr Green had long sideburns, and his nickname was… ‘Sideburns’. I wondered at the time how he got away with such an innocuous nickname. Now I realize that it was a sign of our affection for him.

How else do teenagers say “I love you”?
To me he was like a pool of glistening water, an oasis in a burning sandy-hot desert. Going to his classes I was excited, inspired, engaged. He gave us books to read that I could understand and believe in, and he read them out loud with us, sharing his passion with us. Every word of his was measured, had meaning, and was offered elegantly, with a smile.
His eyes shone, and he would encourage us when we did well, and berate us when we were fools, but everything was done with love.
One day I found out that he was leaving to go to a better school. I remember vividly how I felt. Betrayed, distraught, abandoned. He was too good for me.
He left, and I was alone with the shadows for the rest of my time there.
One sentence of his haunts me (in a ‘friendly ghost’ way) to this day. I must have not done something that I should have done (apologized to someone for something?), and he asked me why not – why hadn’t I done it? I couldn’t answer him. And he said:
“Ahh. You’re a moral coward”
I think that I’ve been trying to prove him wrong ever since.
Isn’t that what a great teacher does? Every word and action transmits wisdom, and the world around them becomes a wiser, better place.
Every word of his was a stone dropped carefully into the pond of my young mind, and his concentric circles of compassion and understanding continue to ripple on through my life, even to this day.
If only there were more teachers like that, eh?




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Abuse causes trauma. The trauma of abuse, until healed, causes countless problems later in life. Abuse does not need to be obvious (i.e. sexual abuse). It can also be subtle, (i.e. lack of attention from parents). Most people who suffer abuse tend to find themselves in a cycle of abuse – as was clearly my case. The good news is that it is very, very easy now to heal trauma. And it is no longer necessary to talk about what happened (to relive the experience). If you, or anyone you know, lives with the consequences of abuse or trauma, please contact me, because I can help.

2 things wrong here: One: ‘priests’ who abuse children. Two: a ‘church’ that has $166m in spare change.

Photo credit: Peter Watts

The thing that struck me most about this story of an order of Catholic Jesuits who have agreed to pay out $166m to the (Native American) victims of child abuse (at the hands of their priests) was not the sexual abuse.
We all know that priests have been abusing children sexually. We know how widespread it’s been (and hope it no longer is). Somehow, it’s not that shocking anymore. Amazing how easily we become desensitized to something isn’t it?
The thing that hit me most was the money.
What business does the Church, or any so-called religious institution, have hoarding hundreds of millions of dollars?!
I somehow can’t imagine Jesus ‘saving for a rainy day’.
I mean, it’s not like there are people starving in the world is it? Or villages without water? Or vast numbers of homeless refugees?
I’m not saying that the ‘victims’ of those priests don’t deserve a little compensation.
I’m saying that they shouldn’t need to be compensated, because they should never have been abused in the first place.
And a church that is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, and whose representatives damage the people they are meant to protect, needs to be seriously questioned.