Yesterday, I gave a workshop at the Arise Music and Camping Festival with Ahva Lenay: Heart-Connected Relationships. We led a simple exercise in which one person told another that they were glad they were present. Some participants readily admitted that it was hard for them to receive the appreciation. And then, for others, there was a melting of the heart.

We had just gotten together in a tent in the middle of the festival. There were over 100 people present. You could see tears welling up in people’s eyes. It made me think about how starved we are for heart connection without knowing it. So many people in our Western culture are an emotional desert and do not even know it. So we walk around thirsty. And then we do not offer a flow from the heart to each other, and we have a hard time receiving it.

What is that all about? It is the result of living from the neck up. We are living in a culture that is living that way and it is killing us.

Today, I was watching Keahi Ewa do a beautiful hula. I thought, Let it in. Let it in. Let it in! I thought of that for her and for all of us who were witnessing the dance. Let it in. When we are living from the neck up, all this wonderful life energy that is coming to us descends through the human form to the level of the closed heart, and it cannot get in. It is blocked. The heart has to crack open so that the energy of the cosmos that gives us life can get into this body.

Life-giving energy is supposed to get all the way into the body, vitalizing us at every level. When it doesn’t, we are not knowing healthy living. We are not wise, because we are disconnected from ourselves and from the cycle of life all around us. And we are not in position to help one another because life-giving energy is not getting into us, so it cannot flow to another person. Words that should carry the current of love and blessing come out like dry paper when we are living from the neck up. Living from the neck up, we get clever but stupid, all at the same time, because to be wise you have to let it in.

When we are letting it in, our words are flowing Universal Love into someone else if they will receive it. We are meant to live with Universal Love and be able to not only drink it in ourselves but share it with the people around us. We are here as part of a great experiment that is about letting that happen. Could we form a community of people who are letting it in? And what would that feel like? It might feel pretty good! It might go beautifully well. We might become highly intelligent.

The Arise Festival is probably the best-run music festival on the planet, and it is gaining that reputation. This is largely due to the people who lead it. Truly spiritual people are intelligent people. They are truly smart people, because they are letting it in, and they are being guided. When a collective gathering of people is letting it in, we are vibrating together and we are seeing together, and energetically the energy that we are letting in is filling the space. In the coherent field that is created in this way, we see better. The coherent field of energy and consciousness is getting into all the spaces of our shared field so that we have vision and we have wisdom, and we have reach into all the little things that matter.

In the culture at large, we have a phase problem. We as human beings are out of phase because there is a blockage in the human energy system at the level of the heart and the thymus gland. The energy that we are designed to receive into our bodies, descending from the pineal gland, can’t get in. It is as if you are tuning in an old fashioned radio. Today, you often just press the right button. But there used to be a dial and, if it was not dialed just right, there was static. You couldn’t hear the broadcast clearly.

Do you see any static in your world? Watch the morning news—static! Human communication is out of phase. Everybody is pointing the finger at everybody else, and there is no solution in sight.

We are so full of static in our culture, living from the neck up, that we begin to think it is normal to live that way. And yet, if we have an experience of coming into phase with the creative power that is coming into us, there is no static. Life-giving energy is grounding in our body and it is grounding in all the forms of Creation around us.

Recently, Brook LeVan, a biodynamic farmer, offered his consulting services at Sunrise Ranch. We are very serious about the agriculture in this valley and have been since 1945. There have been no chemical fertilizers and no chemical pesticides, and enlightened methods of cultivation. What Brook said to us was it all begins with the soil.

What he said was that in a place like this, or at his farm out in Carbondale, Colorado, the farm flourishes when the farmers know that it all begins with the soil. It all begins with the elements that nourish the soil so that the soil can live.

We have some soil. We walk around with it every day. We call it human flesh. Creative energy needs to come into it. And yet there has been hardpan, just like there tends to be here in Colorado. Where there is hardpan, the rain cannot come in and living things have a hard time growing. Only when we are humble enough to realize that the physical matters are we in service to the fertility of the earth and the fertility of our bodies. We are not here to pollute the earth and we are not here to live in our heads and deprive our bodies of life-giving energy. We are here to enjoy Planet Earth and care for her as we are meant to care for our own bodies.

When we are humble enough to realize that the soil matters and we care for that soil, it becomes alive. And then life rises up from the soil. Plants grow. Out in our pastures the grass grows, the cows grow, and all the processes of life thrive. Elemental energy ascends in the cycle of life and rises up through our human bodies. Energy is ascending, and we live. And yet, in our culture, we have been eating dead food and thinking it does not matter; dead food that has been sitting on a shelf, that has got preservatives in it, that is GMO, and that is often not even the right food for a human being to eat anyway.

So we have a food problem and we have a soil problem, but we also have a spiritual problem, because none of that would be happening if we were not living from the neck up. When you are connected at a heart level to all of Creation and the people around you, you act differently. You exchange something different; you are caring for other people and you are caring for the space that you are in, in a different way. You have life-giving energy to share. You have love to share. You could put your hand on somebody else’s shoulder and say words that help love enter in for that person. It is the most natural thing in the world, a primal thing, to simply tell another person that we appreciate that they are in our space.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being in my space. Thank you for being on the planet with me. Thank you that we get to share this life together, you and me, with all our friends and relations.

In that gratitude, creative energy is pouring into us, and it is pouring out.