Julia Star's blog site

  Based on over thirty years of work with veterans, first responders, and individuals facing illness and trauma, I have found this practice is essential before any meaningful conversation can begin. When I am practicing any kind of therapy with my patients, I always start with a somatic meditation, starting with a clearing breath using a longer out-breath followed by a grounding procedure, body scan, and central nervous system clearing.   I’m really doing charka clearing, although I don’t always describe it that way. Many people recognize what I’m doing and then we can discuss their experiences using more traditional terms. However, I explore the charkas in a flexible way, not assuming that we will find the conventional issues, colours or images as described by traditions such as Hindu yoga. I simply ask people to simply focus on the areas of their bodies where they feel emotional tension or unresolved trauma. Then we explore from there- exploring their interoception of se...

  The practice of life meditation centered on the solar plexus has been a deeply absorbing journey for me, extending over many years. Now, reflecting on this process some forty years after the original channeling from the fellowship of the River which I have written about before, I find myself drawn again to the River’s foundational instructions. This renewed focus continues to inspire me, inviting a return to the solar plexus as a core point of meditation. The solar plexus, as the River described, a place of a vast vortex inwards, but also outwards into connection with others. Through this meditation, I am transported into a state of peace—my mind becomes open, acutely aware, and attuned to a higher vibrational level of existence. I experience a profound sense of power rooted in this center. It is not a power exercised over the environment, objects, resources, or other people, but rather a profound connection to Source. This connection manifests as vitality and a sense of emptines...

  Following two weeks of practicing the Death meditation, and our discussion of its benefits, the River suggested I move on to a Life meditation. This meditation is the opposite of the Death Meditation but also the balancer and completion of the integration of life and death.  They suggested I start the life meditation by focusing on my knees. There are several reasons why they chose the knees. First of all, when I was six years old I was hit by a truck in my right knee which left me with a permanent limp. This injury affected me throughout my life, resulting in  flare ups into my hips and back and up into my shoulders and neck. Without my conscious knowledge, I have favoured the right side of my body all my life, and that lead to painful flare ups in my neck and shoulders. This injury caused many long years of agonizing migraines and flare ups. Awareness changes everything. Conscious aliveness is the first step to positive change. I have come to understand that knees rep...

 The next week when I met again with the River, a channeled fellowship whom I had been studying with as a student of spiritual self growth, to discuss my experiences with the death meditation which they had assigned the previous week. They had told me that I should start the Death Meditation by imagining the death of all my loved ones. (See previous post on the Death Meditation on my blog site https://longboatcounselling.blogspot.com/ ) Julia: Have I integrated the concept of death as you predicted I might do before my birthday? I only have a few days to go. River: Having come from the All into the Water Way soul path, already you are the child archetype, the child has very little difficulty integrating life and death. But what the child finds difficult is the thought of the parent dying. The parent within, or the adult within. In your case, it has never been a problem integrating death of the adult, but you have some balancing inner work to do with the parent guide within yo...

  I have written about death mediations over the years for many different publications and lead numerous workshops taking participants through this powerful practice.   I highly recommend this practice for any adult over the age of twenty-eight. Last fall and early winter are the best times of do the death meditation. Recently I’ve been persuading medical care givers who are attending to end of life patients to do this mediation themselves and also offer if for their patients if they are still cognizant enough to benefit from this preparation for the events at the end of our lives. We plan for everything else- birth, marriages, retirement-all events that mark new beginnings. But we do not celebrate endings-divorces and death. Although attitudes towards death have improved greatly over the past few years, there is still a mindset of death defiance in our culture. This meditation is also an excellent preparation for any psychedelic assisted therapy session. If individually...