Stories

  When I came down from my 36-day fast in the mountain, a man named Ziga Nabernik arrived from Slovenia.  He was looking for The Beach, that mythical place in the Alex Garland Book.  I, too, once believed that it existed somewhere in the world, until I lived in the outer Beach long enough to figure out that the quintessential Beach of Eden exists within us all.The first time I gave him a healing session, his head burst into colors.  He said, “what was that? That was not a massage like you said it would.”  Another time, he regressed back to Rome.  He wasn’t watching the experience like it was in a movie.  He was really in a past life, being betrayed by his tribesmen, eventually dying at the hands of those “hideous Romans.”  When I left the beach for a week, I came back and he told me that he stepped on a poisonous insect.  After which, he lay on the tree house and before he knew it, his hands started to dance automatically and heal his injured foot. Later, the swell was gone.  The next day, the same thing happened, only this time, his hands did an intense massage dance around his head.Then another guy arrived named Tony, a doctor from Coron Island in Palawan.  He arrived depressed and tired.  When I first gave him a massage, his right arm just lifted into the sky and started to dance.  He obviously didn’t know what was supposed to happen.  In a sense, nor did I.  This was the first time anyone I massaged danced the way I automatically did.  Before long, his whole body was shaking, dancing, releasing so much energy that eventually, he was running the stretch of Kalipay beach, back and forth.  His experience lasted three weeks.  I saw him weeks after he left the beach and told me that he was able to apply the inner healing massage to some of his patients. Ziga too became a healer in his own right.  Fisher folk came to the beach and he would have them lie down as he took away their pains.That was affirming for me.  The visions I received in Kalipay was that whatever gift I was to receive from the Divine Mother is accessible naturally to the rest of the world.  Ziga’s and Dr. Tony’s experience was proof that the energy was not exclusive to me.  It was inclusive for all those willing to undergo the purgation process and had the heart to help others.There was a short stage when no one was dancing. My hands danced a very rapid kind of healing massage as I began to go from one fishing village to another. Then, people felt a surge of electricity entering their body but in turn, I felt drained.  In retrospect, almost everyone who came to me in those small communities in Palawan got healed. The energy had an effect on even difficult sicknesses such as Malaria and deafness.  Today, it isn’t the same.  Not everyone is healed, but the difference is that almost everyone dances.  The energy has evolved.  There is a prime lesson in differentiating partners who dance yet don’t get healed, and those who don’t dance but do get healed. One that I need not articulate, that you must find out for yourself.When I left Palawan right after my birthday (July, 2006), the manifestation of energy changed once more.  I felt the transition on the boat from Puerto Prinsesa to IloIlo en route to Davao City.  As I was lying on my cot, my hands began to vibrate.  I couldn’t stop it until I noticed people converged around a man at the far end of the room.  I approached the group and saw a guy convulsing.  I offered him a “reflexology” massage, and through slit eyes, he said he was willing.  When I touched him, his hand solidly raised to the air and I couldn’t move it with all my strength.  He looked like he was about to die.  Slowly, I lightly touched his wrists and felt a perceptible flow running through his arms.  Urging that flow to continue, I was able to make his arm dance slowly.  In those days, I didn’t have portable music yet.  I relied solely on the energy and I didn’t regard the healing yet as a dance.  I just saw them as particular movements that the body made when I touched them at certain points.  After a few minutes, the hands dropped and the man stopped convulsing.  He looked at me and asked me what happened.  He said he felt death closing in when suddenly, he was well.In Mindanao, the energy was the same.  Body parts of people would make certain poses and then freeze.  It was only when I felt that electric current and found a way to make it flow that the healing process would take effect.I was in Camiguin Island on Oct. 2006, when one of my good friends Ross who owns the treehouse resort I was staying in, asked me to facilitate a workshop for a large group of Koreans passing through on a peace camp journey.  I readily agreed with no idea as to what I was supposed to do.  I ended up discovering a group process that would make the Kalipay vision possible.  A group process wherein a large number of people can learn to heal and be healed in just a few minutes.  Suddenly, a whole town, a whole province, or even a whole country learning to heal was possible.  Or why not even a planet of healers?A few months after that, my mother gave me a 30G Ipod loaded with thousands of my brother’s music for Christmas; my brother gave me a portable speaker.  You can just imagine how my practice changed with the advent of music.It was when I moved to Manila that the vision became evident.  I met people who latched on to the work of bringing this into the world.  The first of which was Chato whom I met right after Kalimasada practice in the house of a friend.  She was instrumental in forming a strong foundation for a community that would later mother those who began to accept that the Inner Dance had the capacity to change them.  It was she who coined the term, the “Inner Dance,” pressured with what to text people to invite them to attend a healing retreat in Tagaytay, the first of many gatherings where people would discover this inner movement as I too rediscovered its many divergent forms I had forgotten since I left the Magic Island.Later, there were numerous people whose lives underwent some major changes as they began to accept their I AM’s as facilitators of healing that could bring flow to the world around them.  Troy Bernardo, for instance, has been travelling around Spain, and is fast becoming a popular healers with Brits, Italians and Spaniards there, even if those guys had been practicing healing before. He’s been experimenting with various kinds of rituals during gatherings. Justin Hakuta’s been attracting the Mayan connection in the strangest of places, New York City. Faced with the challenge of bringing energy to people in what he calls the “frenetic” big apple, he’s doing good giving healing sessions every weekend.  He developed his own unique and powerful method using breath that I really liked.There’s a guy named Joemar who arrived in one of the workshops late.  Before anyone had even touched him, he was in a trance, swaying around in a circle, until he fell off the chair.  For almost an hour, he danced a warrior dance I hadn’t seen anyone do except myself when I was alone in Palawan.  He is now travelling across some of the Philippines and much of Metro Manila healing almost any willing participant he meets on the street.  When he places his fingers across the windshield, the glass moistens with a clear trace of an energy line.There’s a guy in Cebu who underwent a two-hour catharsis.  In the middle of the session, he looked at me like he was about to kill me.  I went up to him, smiled, not knowing what was going to happen.  I tried sending light energies into his eyes, when he suddenly bounded around the room and changed his mood.  He became aware of the room, and after a time, forgot how to speak.  He became a child again, yet when you asked him the most profound questions you could think of, he could answer it by yes or no.  An hour later, he could do intensive Qi Gong movements without even knowing what it was called and could still recall it weeks after.  He had apparently accessed an ancient Chinese practice from that short session that both cleansed him and filled him up with energy. There are many more out there who’ve beautifully deepened and are now in the process of being led to wherever they find their higher selves hiding in.  Recently, I’m focused on the biodynamic farmers of North Cotabato, some indigo children I stumbled upon, and an occasional project or two with the UNDP in bringing inner energy to former combatants of the Moro National Liberation Front, both resulting in some very interesting sessions indeed. By now, it should be clear to you that the resonance is not coming just from coconuts, white sand and sea turtles.  It is a healing energy that has taken a life of its own, with a resonant power much affected by those bringing it to others.For those worried about this halo-halo resonant mix, the inner dance has a fail-safe insurance built into it.  It is sponsored by the energy of a patient mother spirit whose primary goal is to bring the flow back into the world.  I’ve seen people with the desire for manipulative power in their heads receive the inner movement and suddenly have their impure intentions bounce back instantly or over a long period of time. The Inner Dance has nothing to do with power or with trying to manipulate the outer.  The Inner Dance is only about Inner Strength.How to Live by your Self in a Deserted Island. There is nothing so intimate and crowded so as to live with just your self in the middle of nowhere, no matter how beautiful the surroundings.  Try it for a day and see if your weaknesses, your traumas and all your glitches don’t come bounding out of your inner woodwork.  They are necessary, though, for you to be able to look … to really look at yourself, discover that this is the me I’ve been hiding, the “I” that has brought me here.It took a few months for me to even just begin to really look at some of these parts that have been so instrumental to creating what I had become.  Many more months to admit that now is the time to transcend these life blockages in order to move on to my higher Ma-I.In Kalipay Beach, boredom and freedom are bedmates.  If I’m not doing whatever I want to be doing, I’m bored. The secret to conquering boredom is mastering the act of collapsing on the sand and just melting.  Just melting, being nothing, breathing in the fact that I have no meetings to attend, no classes I have to go to, no traffic I have to endure.  Until I start thinking how nice it would be waltz into coffee shop with a good book or to saunter into a film festival to watch an art film.  But then, I could just melt back into the white sand and think of how much pollution I would be breathing in, how much a cup of coffee in Starbucks costs, and I would be fine for half a day until I start craving again for distractions from the true work.  That and Chips Ahoy cookies.Which reminds me of a story you might appreciate.  A guy from IloIlo stumbled upon the beach one day in search of himself.  One night, he asked me a question: if I was stranded on a deserted beach and could wish for anything at all, what would it be?  I instantly offered, Chips Ahay Cookies!  As an afterthought, I mentioned to him how I would like to learn the ancient Chinese stick fighting technique called Wushu.  The very next day, nine people arrived on the way to another beach.  They decided to camp in Kalipay for a night because one of them knew the owner of the beach, an American named Carmen.And out of the nine people, there was one guy who brought some chocolate chip cookies. I don’t remember if they were Chips Ahoy!, I’m pretty sure they were.  But the astounding thing was that he was the 2^nd place winner in the Philippine National Wushu Championships the year before.  And for some reason, he kept insisting that he had to teach me a basic Wushu form, which ended up too complicated for me, but I retained enough of it nonetheless to mimic the form some bored mornings.The first time I climbed a coconut tree, despite how squat it was, my knees were making pounding noises against the trunk.  I was trembling that badly.  My fear of hunger eventually won over my fear of heights.  The next challenge was having to deal with an occasional gecko, snake, squirrel, fruit bat, or ant that co-habit the trees with yours truly.Opening a coconut without a bolo knife was a different matter altogether.  I know how Tom Hanks must have really felt.  I can now open a coconut in around ten ways.  The best part was learning how to pull myself through the branches to the topmost part of those tall swaying trees, just watching for passing birds or looking out for the two submerged sea turtles that lives only a few meters from the shore from that breath-taking viewpoint. Their heads would sometimes pop up like periscopes around mid-morning and late afternoons. On some nights, you might catch them laying their eggs on holes they dug, then burying them in sand. If you’re luckier still, you might catch the eggs hatching and watch the dozens of tiny turtles struggle to find the water.There was a man who sometimes visited me on the beach.  His name was Gener and he works in a French-owned beach house on the same island.  After more than a few months of solitude and coconuts, he once visited me with two bottles of wine, cheese, and cake.  After a glass or two, I couldn’t see my hands if I put them in front of my face.  Gener was accountable for plenty of good moments, talking about the Mayans, the Egyptian pyramids, UFO’s, the Knights Templars, and the Kalipay spirits.  He has eyes only for National Geographic and the Discovery Channel and thus, the only things he could update me on were such news.  I sometimes ask myself if I would have survived without those conversations with that man and his wonderful Londoner girlfriend, Kat. He’s somewhere in Europe now, probably missing the magic Island as much as I do.There was also a supposed caretaker named Itoy and because his wife was pregnant, they were always at the fishing village on the other side of the island.  There was a boat on the beach he was supposed to take care of which he never did.  And so, I was practically alone for weeks and months on end, seldom seeing another human being save for the fishermen passing by on their boats.And so, I learned to live with myself.  I learned that you can play scrabble alone.  I called it scrabble solitaire.  I also liked to gather the garbage that comes in with the tide.  I made installation art forms out of them, later creating a huge fence for my Flower of Life Garden.  What was best about the garbage is that most of it didn’t even come from the Philippines.  I was able to collect around ten different kinds of Procter and Gamble Shampoo bottles alone coming all the way from East Asia.  Most were from S.E.A. like Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia.  Gener even found a bottle with a Nazi sign underneath.  Who knows where that might have come from?  Garbage collection was good for a few months, until I got my hands on some matches from another visitor from America who stayed for around a week and a half.  The beach was always strewn with all these leaves.  I decided to pile them and burn them up.  There were so many leaves that I ended up piling more and more until I was just doing that the whole day, for three straight weeks.  As soon as I woke up (if I slept at all), I was piling leaves and burning them.  The next day was exactly the same.It wasn’t just leaves that were burning. Something inside me was getting seriously cleaned up.  I felt it.  It isn’t something I can describe in words.  It was tactile, like a resonant gap somewhere in me, where I knew there was something there before.  And that now, it was gone.I then felt that that this gap had to be replaced, or else it would fill itself up with the same old energy again.  That’s when I learned the art of dreaming.  And creating.  I found a way to re-create life every second of my wakeful days.  Every time a negative thought popped up, I would roll it into a ball and play with it until it was something else.  Something basic and good.  And when I did that enough, the change started happening.  I began to wake up … happy.  I started a daily morning regimen. Running, walking, until I was doing just that everyday, the whole day while I was awake.  Until I began to notice that I wasn’t sleepy anymore.  That I was just walking, sweating all day.  If I did sleep, it was two hours maximum.  And if I was eating, it was just one coconut a day.Such is the process of being cleansed.  Without tension of any kind physically or mentally, our need for physical sustenance and long sleep dwindles.Many of you doubt this.  There are many books out there that talk about people who have succeeded in transitioning to eating just fruits or raw vegetables. Many of those who subsist on live enzymes after many years, sleep only an hour or two a day, and eat very little.Inner Food.  Take the basic food groups and what nutritionists teach us we need to survive.  Fat, Protein, Carbohydrates, Sugar.Now, imagine a boring banana.Bananas don’t have fat, protein, carbohydrates or sugar.Now, imagine a needy hungry human.What if I told you that humans don’t need fat, protein, carbohydrates or sugar?When humans eat fat, their bodies undergo the rough digestive process of breaking down fat into simple fatty acids; protein into amino acids; carbohydrates into sugar; and sugar into glucose.Bananas have simple fatty acids, amino acids, and glucose.  Not to mention a host of other vitamins not present in most other food Thus, bananas already have all the basic essentials we need from food anyway, but, they don’t need to be broken down.  And if you free the enzymes you would have used to digest some of these food for hours and days – and instead use the same enzymes to metabolize, heal, cleanse and EVOLVE – what do you think would happen?  And if you just did that for years?  What would happen to your body?I lived in Kalipay for just a few years but when I left it, I had this naïve notion from my then inverse reality that everyone had probably transitioned to raw live enzyme food during my absence. Nothing else made sense. After I made the move back to the matrix, I suddenly felt so alone that I had nobody to eat with.  Eventually, I succumbed back to eating cooked food based on energy principles as I performed healing.  Nowadays, I spend half the month on total raw food and half the month eating anything people serve me, particularly when I go to Manila or Davao City for workshops and the like. It’s not because I’m tempted, there’s a resonance within what the people I deal with eat that I also need to take in, convert and assimilate.Inner Body. So, anyway, I was just living on coconuts when I went to the bathroom and noticed that my ______ was turning white.  I read somewhere that it is dying hemoglobin that turns our ________ brown or black.To add to that, though I hadn’t used shampoo in so long, my hair thinned and started to become silky.  As did my skin.  By now, after moving back to the civilization, my hair and my skin have returned to something similar to when I first moved to Kalipay, but I want to illustrate a point I’d rather not miss.  I used to be so dependent on products such as shampoo, soap, toothpaste, deodorant that I hadn’t realized just how useless these are when we are able to shift our complex and expensive needs to the most primal levels.  After many months of withdrawals, I never felt hungry, nor did I have body odor (although before I got to transition myself to this point, you wouldn’t want to have been anywhere near me).  This is what food does to us and the rough lifestyle of having to work for food how many hours a day, how many days a week, placing so much tension in our systems that we enter into a vicious cycle of having to work for what we need to maintain because we are working so hard in having to maintain them in the first place.As a working definition, spirituality does not have to dwell in the esoteric or the religious.  Spirituality can be this practical.  To live a life full of energy, simplicity and basic goodness.  To live a life that is light and free of weight.Alone on a deserted beach, there is no need to impress people; to base your actions on other people’s needs and expectations.  I would wake up and think to myself, “what should I do today?”  And every time, I would laugh loudly and lovingly utter the words, “whatever I want!”By the way, for my first year in Kalipay, I spent something like P756.00 in total.  That was mainly for writing materials. That averages to P63.00 per month or P2.10 per day for yellow ruled pad paper and some ballpens (and the tip for the boatman that took me to the mainland to get the stuff).Inner Planting. When I began to construct the Flower of Life Garden, I began to receive messages regarding myself, humanity, and particularly a very interesting planting system I used based on the 12/7 formula within the Flower of Life symbol.  I was able to gather some seeds from a faraway fishing village called Pulang Bato through the help of a fisherman who lived across the way, and basing it on the seven colors of the rainbow, I created a planting chart.  I was also instructed to create a sound resonating device using some old discarded bottles I found in the beach or that floated from the sea.  There seemed to be a connection between the seven tones in the musical scale and the seven colors.  Using the chakras and various parts of the body as a guide, I wrote down a chart that connected the seven days of the week with the twelve months of the year and twelve signs of the zodiac.  Some names of Greek gods and goddesses sprung up and I even used that over the roman zodiac signs.There was a moment after I finished planting the whole thing, when I just burned the chart I made, especially since I didn’t understand most of what I was doing.  Years later, I would be living with some biodynamic farmers who would tell me that Rudolf Steiner created a much similar calendar to what I created.  I haven’t found the gumption to burn any midnight oil over it, but the books are here in my space and it won’t be long until I take up the Key of Seven mysteries I had my mind set on as early on as my Mindanao walk.I also made a large compost using another resonant symbol called the Vesica Piscis.  It was divided into three compartments so that I could keep turning it in order to keep the aerobic and non-aerobic process ongoing.  This was the special moment I reserved each day when I would convert my frustrations into lighter matter, like the compost that later decayed into soil nutrients that plants could later use to ensure the growth of new plant life.The Secret Life of the Magic Island.  For years, even before I moved into it, Kalipay beach was known to be a mystical island where visitors dreamed vividly often of people in white, with long hair, white skin but who spoke Filipino and gave cryptic messages few understood. Many of these messages followed the theme of ascension.  I saw many of them in my dreams and in my waking state at night … along with many other creatures on the island that weren’t earthly.  Lights could also be seen floating around the trees, on the water or in the sky.  There were plenty of legends of sunken treasure, sightings of spirits and many visions.Knowing how the local fishermen knew about these legends, I would sometimes hide behind the trees during twilight and make strange noises to scare away the fishermen who boated to the waters across Kalipay, destroying the corals in front of the beach.  After a few of those hilarious games, the fishermen left the beach alone for most of the night time.The absentee caretaker eventually brought a cat to the beach.  When he and his wife eventually left the cat to fend for itself, I ended up with the dilemma of how to feed it.  When I got my hands on bananas from the fishing village, it wouldn’t take it.  But who would have thought that it liked coconuts?  That’s what it grew up on.  Coconuts, up until maybe half a year when it was big enough (not very big) to catch mice and lizards.  But even then, it still purred and mewed for me to climb a tree in the morning for food.  The cat was named Ming-Ming, which was what the caretaker named it.  All the while, I thought it was female, until I later learned that it was male.It was a strange cat.  At times, I felt a pain in my body during long fasts.  When I would wake up, the beach cat would be snoozing on that part of my body which wouldn’t be painful anymore.How To Walk Around Mindanao. Instantly, you would ask yourself, where would you sleep and what would you eat?One thing you have to understand is that I was in a big time trance during those days.  I had to pretend to people that I was normal, even if I felt that my feet weren’t on the ground most of the time.I slept where sleep took me.  On the road, in a forest, or in a bus station.  A lot of bus stations.  My solid rule was never to ask for money or food and wait to see where the journey would take me.  I later learned of an elderly lady who walked across the U.S. 28 times for almost thirty years (up to her 70’s!) without money or food in her pockets.  Her name was the peace pilgrim and she died the same day I was born.  I also learned that she began her journey at the same time of the year (beginning of January) at the same place (Pasadena, California) I first began to take everyday walks in preparation for the longer one I was to take.  Even in those days, I found myself in strange situations, looking for homeless people in Las Vegas, downtown San Francisco, or the slums of Los Angeles, talking to them all night about where they came from and how they ended up where they were then.  I sometimes slept with them in the cold just to see what it was like living the way they lived.Here is the only one secret I practiced to walking across Mindanao.  Put your left foot forward.  Shift your weight to your right as you step your right foot forward.  Repeat with your left.  Repeat with your right.  And so on.You just keep walking.  You don’t question your sanity.  You just keep walking, sweating, venting out negative energy.  I cannot count the moments when I would be sitting in a park and someone offers me food and drink.  How many times people ask me to stay at their place and spend time tutoring their children.  I confess I didn’t walk the entire length of Mindanao.  There are many places I still haven’t been to and there was a four month stay in Lanao and about a month in Camiguin and a few weeks in Davao when I stayed with kind souls, resting and walking in gardens and village streets at the latter part of the Mindanao quest.During the journey proper, people offered me clothes, ones I had to keep giving away because I cannot bear weight as I walked.  I survived on a small bag that fit two changes of shirts, an extra pair of shorts and a sarong (I began the whole thing on one pair of shorts, no shirt, and one pair of slippers).  In that blissful state I was in, even without money in my pockets, I always felt as if I was the richest person in the world.   

~ by kalimata777 on December 19, 2007.