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Read this on GabrielGonsalves.com Dear Reader, Have you ever found yourself living two separate lives? In one, you’re the version of you that shows up for people, steady, present, someone others come to for help. In the other, alone, you’re doing the thing you swore last time was the last time, and some part of you starts wondering which one of those two people is real. That gap doesn’t close on its own. Left alone, it just widens, quietly, until you’re managing two entire versions of yourself and calling the exhaustion something else. I know that gap personally. Mine ran for many years, and for most of them I had no real idea how to close it, only strategies for managing the shame that came after. This week I want to tell you, pretty raw, how I began to close mine, and how the same process turned into one of my Christ consciousness meditations many of you have told me they’ve helped you heal. Here’s the story of how that meditation came to be. Let’s begin. I Was Living Two Separate Lives. Here's How Christ Consciousness Helped Me Break the Pattern.
Two Lives, One Big MessFor years, I lived two separate lives. In one of them, I stood in front of rooms full of people and taught them how to open their hearts. In the other, alone, late at night, I felt the same hot wave of shame roll through me that I’d felt a hundred times before, promising myself, again, that this was the last time I’d give in to my addiction to pornography. It never was the last time. Willpower didn’t do it. Neither did the law of attraction, though I tried that too and half-believed it for a while. I tapped on my own collarbone in a hotel room once, because a book told me EFT would click something loose. It didn’t. Years of therapy actually did something: I could tell you, with real clarity, exactly why I did what I did, trace the whole thing back to something that happened to me as a kid, sexual abuse I’d never found a way to get past. Knowing why and getting past it turned out to be two different things. For a long time, I confused them. What that addiction cost me wasn’t only the hours or the shame that followed. It cost me trust, in myself first, then slowly in the possibility that I could ever become the man I already sensed, somewhere underneath all of it, I was here to be. There was a night I hit a real floor. An ordinary night where I’d run out of my own coping strategies, one after another, until there weren’t any left. I got a piece of paper and wrote a letter to Jesus, the same practice I described in The Story Behind My Most-Watched Sacred Heart Meditation. I told him what I was: imperfect, still doing the thing I’d promised myself innumerable times I’d stopped doing. Then I asked him to fix what was broken in me and help me become who I came here to be. I didn’t expect anything to answer that letter. I only knew I couldn’t keep carrying the weight of pretending, alone, for one more year. What followed that letter changed the direction of my life. What the Visions Showed MeDuring a series of ayahuasca ceremonies some time later, I had visions where Jesus showed up, not the distant figure from Sunday school, something closer, more immediate than an idea usually gets. In one of them I understood something so plainly I laughed out loud, alone, in the dark, which probably says something about how long it had taken me to see it. I had to let go of everything I thought I already knew about love. Every careful, managed definition I’d built over the years. All the walls, put up one at a time, meant to keep my heart from ever being hurt that badly again. And I still can’t fully tell, even now, whether taking them down was the bravest thing I’ve done or just the thing I ran out of energy to keep doing. I began to see, slowly and then all at once, that my addictive pattern was never really about the addiction itself. It was a pain avoidance mechanism, built by a much younger version of me who had no other way to survive a pain and a disconnection that had never been named, let alone healed. Once I could see that clearly, without flinching away from it, I stopped fighting the symptom and started asking what it had been protecting me from feeling. There was one moment in that ceremony I still come back to. The presence I understood to be Christ said something close to: You’ve invited me into your heart. Now you must invite me into your life, into every part of your body where you were wounded as a child. It landed less like an instruction and more like a door opening. I just didn’t know yet where in my body that invitation was supposed to go. Where the Wound Lived in My BodyThe abuse I survived as a child did real, specific damage, not evenly across my whole system, mostly concentrated in my root and sacral centers, the ones most traditions link to safety in your own body and to your own creative and sexual life force. I could feel exactly where that damage lived, because I’d spent years unconsciously organizing my whole life around avoiding that one location inside myself. That’s not just a spiritual claim. Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk both spent careers showing the same thing from the trauma side: the body keeps the score, storing what a child’s mind couldn’t process at the time. Somewhere in your body there’s very likely a specific place, not some vague overall feeling, an actual place, that’s been waiting a long time for love’s healing to reach it directly. So that’s where the wound actually lived, not as an idea, but as a location. Knowing that was one thing. Figuring out how to actually reach it, on purpose, was another.
Working Out the Mechanics of Healing ItAround that same period, I came across Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s work on invoking what she called Christ’s electromagnetic blueprint: essentially invoking the pattern of Christ to be superimposed over your own field. I got the concept the moment I read it. But when I tried applying it as one broad, general invocation, sweeping over my whole body at once the way she described, it didn’t land anywhere specific. That’s when I remembered a Kriya yoga course I’d taken years earlier in LA, through the Self-Realization Fellowship, Yogananda’s organization. One of the core exercises there was reciting a mantra, Om Namah Narayanaya, while focusing your attention and your breath into each chakra, one at a time, instead of all at once. Putting these two frameworks together is how I landed on the practice: Prophet’s invocation, but moved through the body the way Kriya yoga had already trained me to do it. Instead of one broad sweep, I went center by center: crown, third eye, throat, heart, solar plexus, sacral, root, letting the energy in and staying there, patiently, until I could feel something shift. Some opened almost right away. The root still hasn’t, not fully. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I started wondering what would happen if I stopped keeping somatic healing, neuroscience, and spiritual tradition in separate lanes. What if I let them talk to each other, and built a practice that called this energy in on purpose, straight into the places I’d just learned to open? From there, it stopped being about what to name it, and became about what the energy of Christ actually does once it reaches those wounded places. The Ultimate Truth: Only Love HealsTraditionally, there are said to be five pathways to God: through knowledge, through service, through meditation, through devotion, and through love, none more advanced than the others. I’ve chosen love, the same path I described in A Personal Reflection on Christ Consciousness, the I AM Presence, and Jesus’s Core Teachings: a path to God through unconditional love. And unconditional love is exactly what Christ came to teach, so for me the two aren’t separate anymore. Christ is what unconditional love looks like concentrated enough to work with, made available to this planet for the first time in a way people could reach it. Only love actually heals what shame broke, and the practice I eventually built comes down to exactly that: bringing the energy of Christ’s love directly into the most wounded aspects of myself, the same places I’d just spent the last two sections learning how to locate. That same state has a name in the coherence science too, the one behind Christ Consciousness: Meeting Christ Without the Institutional Cage Around Him: the coherent heart. Not just a nice metaphor, a real, measurable, physiological state your body can enter. Different vocabulary, same door. The Christ Consciousness Meditation I DevelopedUnderstanding that only love heals is one thing. Actually working with it is another, and for years I looked for a way to make that second part concrete instead of vague. Here’s the actual technique, the one that came out of dealing with my own root and sacral stuff, if you want to try it on your own. And if you’d rather be guided through it, that’s coming up right after. It has two movements. First, you ask Christ, or whatever name your own heart trusts for this, to come and live inside you. Not as a metaphor. As a real presence you’re making room for, the way you’d clear a chair for someone you were expecting. The second part is where it stops being a belief and starts being a practice: you activate the feeling itself, love, gratitude, appreciation, until it’s real in your body and not just an idea sitting in your head, then radiate that feeling into each of your chakras, one at a time, instead of leaving it as a single vague warmth somewhere behind your ribs. Chakra is Sanskrit for wheel, an energy wheel, and it’s a more precise word than “center,” so I’ll use it here instead of talking around it. Underneath very different vocabulary, this is close to what happens physiologically when your heart moves into coherence, the same state I walked through the science of last week. Sustained, specific attention on one part of your body, held together with a felt sense of love, isn’t only a spiritual technique. In HeartMath’s language it’s also a way of training your nervous system toward order instead of chaos, one region at a time. Awakening Divine Love in Your HeartThe guided meditation Awakening Divine Love in Your Heart walks you through this same thing in full, twenty-five minutes, my voice doing the pacing so you don’t have to remember the sequence. It’s not a separate teaching, just the same thing, recorded, so you don’t have to arrive at it the slow way I did. There’s a shorter version too, Christ Consciousness Activation, seventeen minutes, built around a different image: a stone you’re carrying, transformed into something that was never meant to weigh you down. I go back and forth on which one I’d recommend first, for what it’s worth. This is probably also close to what makes Joe Dispenza’s meditations work for so many people. Same underlying mechanism: sustained attention, regulated breath, a real, felt emotion held long enough to change your physiology, just without the name Christ attached to any of it, which is its own kind of doorway for people who’d close the moment they heard that word. I get a fair number of people who found their way to me exactly that way, coming from his kind of meditation into mine. What they tell me they appreciate is that I’m more explicit. I say Christ, by name, instead of leaving it unnamed, the way you’d introduce a guest at your own table instead of leaving them nameless because it might make someone else uncomfortable. Final ThoughtsI shared all of this here today, not to show you how far I’ve come, but so you could see that if I found my way through it, you can too. So here’s what all of this comes down to: You cannot heal alone by only talking about what happened to you. Somatic healing work also helps, but it isn’t enough on its own. Real healing happens when you invite a Higher Love into your darkest, deepest wounded places. The same love Jesus actually taught, embodied, and was willing to die for. Love is an energy field that by its nature is caring, nurturing, and supportive of all life. It’s generated and channeled through your heart, and heart coherence is the best scientific proof that it’s real. If you’re right now in the middle of a healing journey, keep this as the only underlying principle. In the end, only love heals. Love redeems, love unifies, love resurrects, and makes all things new. This was Jesus’s core teaching and the promise he left his disciples. Available to you the moment you invite it in, and become receptive to it. From my heart to yours, —Gabriel PS. Enrollment for the next Heart Warrior Bootcamp is now open. If anything in this article hit close to home and you want real support turning it into an actual practice, meeting your own shame with unconditional love instead of more willpower, simply reply to this email with the word "Warrior" and I'll send you the details personally. PPS. When you're ready, here are several ways I can support you on your journey. Disclaimer: This email is provided for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, psychological, or professional advice. The teachings and practices shared here are not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a licensed physician, therapist, or mental health professional. If you are experiencing a medical or mental health concern, please consult a qualified professional. |
Gabriel Gonsalves's weekly inspiration, practical advice and spiritual wisdom for living wholeheartedly.
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