Changing Focus to Find the “I AM”

By Elisa Novick

I so appreciate that Planet Waves, Eric, my editors, and all who work so hard to make it happen, have provided me with a platform from which I can reach my words and my heart out to many people. I can speak about what matters to me without having to translate, tone down, or make my words palatable to some unknown so-called mainstream audience that one can never please. This is precious!

Elisa Novick; photo by Eric.

My gratitude goes to all of you from Planet Waves who’ve responded to my articles and interviews with your comments, love, and for some, engaging in sessions and taking courses I offer. I am deeply aware that most of those helping to create the Thriving Planet World Tour came through Planet Waves. Planet Waves is far more than a website; it is a valuable resource and loving community and it is worthy of your support.

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Multidimensional awareness — we all have it, we have it all. So why aren’t we aware of it? Does it matter why? Each in our own way, we are dismantling the layers of programming and limitations we’ve placed against ourselves or taken in from others in seeking to know who we are. That is the processing of awakening.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “I Am the Walrus”

When I taught my first Healers’ Training in 1996, my guidance indicated that about 95% of what we think and feel isn’t ours. As I looked around the room at 24 people that first evening, I could see that we were overlaid with so much training, modeling, inculcation, and outdated decisions made in reaction to past experience, that we’d twisted ourselves out of recognition of anything true to us (I call it “pretzelitis”). Yet, somehow there is something so beautiful and real that can shine through in a moment.

When someone comes to me feeling overburdened and struggling to come out from under a load of pain, worry or grief, I’ll often tell him what percentage of what he is feeling is actually his. Such relief when one realizes, “Yes, I could handle the 7% of this that is mine. And the rest I can let go of or give back to those it belongs to and they can handle what is theirs, too.”

When we look into each other we can look for what needs to be healed, or we can look for the inner beauty that needs no healing. Part of my job as a healer is to discern and remember for the one before me, that magnificent being inside, as that one learns to become aware of it for herself.

One of the reasons I’ve facilitated the Laboratory of Life workshops for more than 20 years is that I realized as I began learning and facilitating the work, that the study of how we interact in relationship can teach so much about who we are. The feedback we receive by moving in and out of relationship with others in a multitude of ways provides essential learning that is impossible to experience alone.

Groups (or any relationships) can provide wondrous mirrors in which we learn so much about ourselves and practice new ways of being, or they can be a place where we get so intertwined that we lose all sense of who we are as individuals (more usual). The art of becoming our own singular, fully individuated self and being able to be that within a group is a form of mastery that needs to be practiced and honed over and over.

We can move into a oneness or identification with another for specific purposes, such as closeness or understanding. We can come into cooperation for a project, service or creation. But we want the freedom of being able to step out of that, to withdraw our individual forces, to have the clarity and demarcation of individual self and to extract the gold from those experiences. That after all is the purpose of the soul and it is an art.

When I release your beingness out of me, there is a sense of relief, even when the merging or interpenetration of our fields was lovely. Contrary to what most people believe or do, it can be a lot easier and more fun when we are not intermingled with others. They become more interesting, differentiated, colorful, surprising.

When I work with people in relationship, and especially couples for whom I will officiate a wedding, I like to have them practice the movement into and out of oneness. Some couples do either oneness or distinct two-ness habitually and then the relationship fatigues or never quite satisfies. When we can be real and allow and honor our differences, there is so much more freedom and possibility. This is a dance worth learning.

Once we are comfortable having more options available to us and trust ourselves with the freedom to move into and out of relationship — which translates into allowing ourselves many different states of consciousness — expanding into multidimensional consciousness wherein the entire cosmos is our playground becomes just a matter of discerning where to place our focus.

 

You are welcomed to participate in the Thriving Planet World Tour. To listen to and read past conversations with Elisa Novick on Planet Waves, plus her articles, please use this link. You’re invited to visit her website and Facebook page.

Elisa Novick, MSS does profound work as a healer, teacher, counselor, coach, minister, and facilitator of workshops and trainings in personal, professional, and spiritual development. She can assist you to clear personal, karmic and genetic patterns that have limited you and teach you exquisite attunement skills so you can become the magnificent master of life and Light that all of us are destined to be. Elisa has been assisting people in their growth since 1982 through her counseling practice and in facilitating over 1,000 workshops in holistic health, human development, family constellation, systemic constellation, organizational dynamics, planetary healing and spiritual awareness. You may email her directly at elisanovick [at] thrivingplanet [dot] org.

4 thoughts on “Changing Focus to Find the “I AM””

  1. How I love when you all love what I love! These are such essential learnings that I find everyone needs to learn on their journey into mastery. And I had such a good laugh, Strawberrylaughter, when you said, “Hell, I could own 50%…” Thank you Amanda and xtica. I benefit when I do it, write it, and when you get it and acknowledge it. In this way the world transforms.

  2. wonderful always and just at the right time Elisa!
    and strawberry laughter, i just love that phrase “the cacophony quieted…” so so poetic!
    peace and blessings to you both and all of the pw readers today

  3. thank you, elisa, for phrasing the things you do in the way that you do in this piece. i think it spells out some important, basic concepts that can make relating closely with another much less reactive and much more prone to mutual benefit, healing and growth if both people ar eon the same page. but it does take time to get there.

  4. Elisa, this is incredible. “95% of what we think and feel isn’t ours.” There’s so much liberation in that, simply accepting that ‘the crazy I’m in is largely not mine.’ I’ve been drawn to energy healing over the past year, having finally given up on western medicine after 5 years of chronic lyme zombie-dom. And knowing that a) this emotional-psychic-energetic shitstorm I’m in is largely inherited or absorbed, and b) that energetically the patterns can be stopped; the pain healed, the cacophony quieted…it changes absolutely everything. It puts the power back into my hands, in a perspective that feels manageable. I can own 5% of this. Hell, I could own 50%. (And part of the problem is that I try to.)
    I feel like much of the time I hover just at the edge of understanding what you’re offering, but when your message clicks, it’s like a lightning bolt to somewhere deep inside, somewhere that’s hurting and begging for illumination.
    This is truly beautiful; thank you for sharing.

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