Surfing the Inner Ocean

Kairotrophy for the Inner Healer

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

〰 Naomi Shihab Nye 〰

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The Taboo of Showing Affection

You’d be surprised, at how many people actually waste what they know,

not to mention waste what they feel.

〰 Nikki Giovanni 〰

Our elders knew to keep emotions under wraps. My four brothers and myself grew up in a safe, sheltered, beautiful home, with constant reminders of how privileged and fortunate we were. Lucky to be born into a perfect family. Advantaged to be raised in a perfect childhood.

It should have instilled an unshakeable sense of security inside our core, the experience of good fortune leading to perpetual happiness. — Why didn’t that happen?

We didn’t feel loved. We felt flawed — under pressure to prove, continuously, that we were deserving of such a perfect environment, which we had to earn, by rising to the impossible challenge of being perfect children.

Love was conditional. Praise as rare as a hug. Affection practically non-existent.

Did our parents not love us?

They claimed they did. They didn’t manage to show it. They did show affection amongst themselves, talked about how much they loved each other, how they never had an argument. We, the children of the perfect couple, felt excluded from their private marital bliss.

The irony ~ or tragedy ~ of the situation was that our parents fully believed their own theory of their deep love for us. They loved children in general, allegedly. They worked with children, complete strangers, and treated them ‘as their own’.

Why did their love not reach our infantile hearts?

The penny dropped a few years ago when a family friend, who had grown up in a comparable environment, told me that his parents were very careful not to show him how enamoured they were with their sweet little boy.

“Don’t let Peter know how cute he is,” they would warn each other and any relatives or friends. They believed that showing ‘too much affection’, or praising a child for their natural talents, beautiful looks, or endearing behaviour would ‘ruin the character’.

Shows of affection were almost taboo in such families. Any expression of emotion was frowned upon as immature, or crude ~ regarded as animalistic, perhaps ~ dismissed as savage or uncultured…?

These were European middle-class families of devout Christians (in Germany and the UK) who believed that humans are born in sin, and therefore condemned to a life of redeeming oneself for wrongs and flaws and guilt as a matter of religious duty.

The principle mattered more that the young living innocent human. Before you’d have a chance to commit anything sinful, you already were a sinner, by the basic act of being born human.

At the same time, ‘being human’ also meant belonging to the superior species, born to ‘conquer nature and subdue her’ ~ including, or beginning with, one’s own nature. ‘Being Christian’ meant superior to the heathen on one hand, and born to serve on the other, ‘in the footsteps of Christ’, however you might interpret such a mission.

We were not taught explicitly how to handle emotions, whether affection or aversion. Our emotional education was non-verbal, implicit, passed on from one generation to the next by osmosis.

Talking about emotions was part of the taboo. Only people who had ‘psychological problems’ might do that. Having ‘emotional problems’ meant being on the slippery slope to the lunatic asylum.

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Wrestling with Emotional Beasts

Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.

〰 Rainer Maria Rilke 〰

Expressions of emotions in any shape or form could be signs of insanity ~ in the minds of our elders. They were terrified of their own emotions, and this fear extended to the emotional outbursts of their adorable offspring.

If you nip any signs of dangerous emotions in the bud ~ so the logic ~ they don’t stand a chance to take root and grow in the inner soil. That pure innocent inner soil will remain free from filthy feelings and murky sentiments, which have a tendency to spread like noxious weeds.

Children must be shielded from their own feelings by preventing expression from the earliest start. In this light, the instruction, “when a baby cries after having its basic needs met, you must let it cry,” makes perfect sense. “Sooner or later the crying will stop, and you will rase a well behaved, sweet natured child.”

Moulding the infantile character, uncontaminated by the ‘impurities of emotions produced by the evils of the human Instinct’, was an emphatic goal.

In 1939 David R. Hawkins (1927-2012) had a near death experience resulting in a spiritual awakening. He was 12 years old, and this was only the beginning. At the age of 38, by then a successful psychoanalyst, Hawkins was struck by a fatal illness. But instead of dying, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation, leaving him with a sense of oneness and a complete loss of motivation to pursue his career or any economic success.

Dr. Hawkins discovered an unexpected gift. “I could perceive the reality that underlay personalities; I saw how the origin of emotional sickness lay in people’s belief that they were their personalities.”

Following this experience, the young and successful psychoanalyst left his practice and became a hermit, before embarking on a journey as a consciousness researcher and author. He discovered his ‘Map of Consciousness’ in the 1970s, first published in 1995 in his bestselling book Power vs. Force, and explained in detail in his final work The Map of Consciousness Explained.

Despite the declaration that the reproduction of the map is prohibited, its contents are readily available, on various websites online and in the books mentioned above.

Here is a list of common ‘emotional states’ ~ some of them overlap with the map conceived by Dr. Hawkins ~ along with comments and recommendations how to deal with such experiences in the Christian ways of my elders*:

Shame, embarrassment, bashfulness, mortification ~ a natural state of being born a sinner, pray for forgiveness, eat humble pie.

Guilt, culpability, disgrace, self-condemnation, self-reproach ~ confess real or perceived wrongdoings, express regret and promise to do better in the future.

Apathy, indifference, listlessness ~ pull yourself together and do something useful. Remember that “the devils makes work for idle hands.”

Grief, sadness, sorrow, mourning, disappointment ~ loss and sorrow are natural aspects of the human experience, think of fellow humans less fortunate than yourself, don’t wallow in self-pity.

Fear, anxiety, worry, timidness, apprehension ~ in the face of danger or challenges it is normal to feel afraid, these are opportunities to become stronger, don’t give into the weakness, if necessary fake strength until you become stronger.

Desire, envy, greed, covetousness, selfishness ~ be grateful for what you have been given, count your blessings, practice sharing your gifts with others.

Anger, Frustration, Rage, Fury ~ anger is a god-given emotion which can be put to good use, make sure you don’t do or say anything destructive while angry, channel your anger into service, take a cold shower, or go for a walk in nature.

Pride, arrogance, haughtiness, vanity ~ don’t get too big for your boots, play down your achievements, remember that they are gifts and practice gratitude, remember that ‘pride comes before the fall.’

Courage, bravery, valour, audacity ~ practice courage in the face of fear and/or threatening situations, step up especially when you have the opportunity to help others.

Neutrality, poise, equanimity, composure, presence, serenity ~ a desirable state of mind, practice to maintain or return to this inner state through contemplation and regular reading of wisdom teachings.

Joy, excitement, happiness ~ when you are happy, count your blessings, don’t get overexcited, find ways to share your good fortune with others and uplift them.

*please note: this list of ‘recommendations’ is neither endorsed by Dr. Hawkins nor by myself!

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Non-Linear Energy Fields of Consciousness

We change the world not by what we say or do

but as a consequence of what we have become.

〰 David R. Hawkins 〰

Dr. Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness arrived as an unexpected gift, reminiscent of my experience with the Noctarine. Initially he didn’t know what to do with this information. Should he share it with troubled fellow humans, or keep it to himself?

David R. Hawkins himself reached his own ‘higher emotional levels’ not through contemplative practices, but through spontaneous profound transformation preceded by NDEs.

Having received his ‘Map of Consciousness’, Hawkins was initially reluctant to share it. He was aware that the hierarchical order of ‘emotional states’ could easily be misunderstood. (each state is associated with an energy vibration, measurable through the newly discovered technique of muscle testing, aka kinesiology. According to such testing, shame is associated with the greatest level of weakness. From pride and courage upwards ~ continuing towards love and enlightenment as the ‘highest state’ ~ humans experience increasing levels of strength).

“Higher’ and ‘lower’ are terms of convenience for the linear mind and do not express actual reality,” editor Fran Grace explains in her introduction to The Map of Consciousness Explained. “In Reality, there is no such thing as higher or lower, for all life serves the whole by virtue of what it is. Is a tall tree better than a short tree? A cat better than a squirrel? As Dr. Hawkins writes, “Everything reveals the miracle of existence and, therefore, everything, without exception, is equal to everything else by virtue of its existence.”

This map was not intended as a tool for transformation. It can be used as a calibration instrument. It enables the user to read situations or people with regard to their true essence and intention. Dr. Hawkins clarifies: “The Map of Consciousness allows us a way of discerning essence as opposed to perception… When we calibrate something according to the Map of Consciousness, we are discerning the level of truth, love, integrity, and benignity in something or someone. We’re interested to know the truth and the essence of the energy field, which is about motive and intention.”

Despite such clear and pure intentions and explanations, the Map of Consciousness is being (ab)used as a tool to try to manipulate emotional experience, which is not its purpose! The different ‘emotional states’ (not all of them are emotional) in the map represent fields of consciousness, described as non linear energy fields, or attractor fields.

Fran Grace shares how she once asked Hawkins, “What was the progression of your consciousness in this lifetime?” … “It can’t be described,” he finally said. “You don’t go from one level to the next in linear fashion. It’s more accurate to say it’s phasic, like the weather.”

Fear, for example, won’t be transformed by diverting the attention to audacity, temporarily. Transformation requires that the experiencer dives wholeheartedly through the non-linear energy field of fear and absorbs the understanding of ‘the power that lies in the perceived weakness associated with the emotional state’.

Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness is designed to achieve greater coherence, which can only happen if applied with total authenticity. “The challenge is to be completely detached from the outcome,” he writes. “Most people have an unconscious attachment to a certain answer, so their testing is not accurate.”

When mixing an actual emotional experience with a more desirable ‘higher state of consciousness’ you inevitably generate and sustain incoherence, which promotes dis-ease within the organism.

M on Unsplash

Emotions in the Noctarine Web of Consciousness

I’m not interested in who suffered the most

I’m interested in people getting over it.

〰 Naomi Shihab Nye 〰

In the Noctarine model of Consciousness, emotions are feelings in motion. Emotions are feelings charged with information, on a mission to deliver their message. Emotions are Acknows ~ acts of knowing ~ of the Instinct.

Emotions play an important role in the evolution of individual human Consciousness (IHC). They trigger the impulse to grow from one structure of Consciousness to the next::: from embryonic to infantile — from infantile to adolescent — from adolescent to adult — from adult to elder Consciousness.

In Western culture, this essential function has been consigned to oblivion for hundreds of years ~ rare exceptions aside such as demonstrated by David R. Hawkins. The Instinct, instead of being recognised as a vital Faculty of the living organism of IHC, was declared ‘outdated’, her Acknows labelled ‘irrational, illogical, insane’.

To feel and express fear in the absence of danger, for example, made no sense — if you measured and tried to comprehend the world solely with the limited grasp of the Intellect, informed by what is visible and tangible to the Body.

To suppressing and attempt to annihilate those senseless, stupid, dangerous emotions was deemed ‘reasonable, logical, sensible’. Various theories were developed to support this interpretation of the Instinct, and it continues to be the dominant view.

With the arrival of Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness and the Noctarine Web of Consciousness, it is beginning to dawn on us that the prolonged and consistent repression of emotions has produced a society suffering with a wide range of serious problems, including the pandemics of degenerative diseases, autoimmune diseases mental and emotional dis-ease, spiritual dis-ease, loss of elderhood, loss of sense of self and coherence, struggles to find our unique purpose, to fulfil our potential, to develop our IHC into maturity, and consequently an inability to contribute to the healthy development of collective human Consciousness.

Because the Instinct and her Acknows play a crucial role in an entangled pile of dilemmas, it should come as no surprise that we need to give special attention to this vital Faculty in our personal healing process.

Emotions can be overwhelming. They can be scary. They can feel threatening. But most of these feelings charged with information are secondary emotional responses to our primary emotions ~ messages from the Instinct ~ which have been left unprocessed due to the age-old relentless suppression.

The good news is, emotions don’t need to be processed in a linear fashion! As soon as we process and assimilate the current emotional experience, the information is shared across the vast space of the inner ocean.

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Evolving and Emotional Healing Are Inseparable

Evolution as a miracle of systemic connectivity and interdependence.

〰 Philipp Blom 〰

We are all trauma survivors. We live in a traumatised society. We are born into the unprocessed trauma stories of our ancestors and carry those stories forward like an endowment. The legacy of our elders and all our relations includes the ‘lower emotional states’ which they have never been able to assimilate and transform, because transformation requires deep understanding.

When a host of IHC rises to the challenge of processing and integrating a present moment of ‘emotional weakness’, we are not only healing the current experience. The healing information instantly ripples through the currents of the inner ocean to share the information with the whole organism.

Likewise when an individual human rises to the challenge of processing and integrating their personal trauma, we are not only embarking on our own healing journey. We are making a unique and far reaching contribution to healing, regenerating, and evolving collective Consciousness.

It makes perfect sense when we understand how interconnected we truly are, both within and as individuals in the universe. German philosopher Philipp Blom writes “Like a single tree in a forest, this organism cannot be fully described or understood as an individual, but only as a part, a nodal point in a network of events and motivations, a ‘momentary state of the life that vibrates through all these states.” (from Subjugate the Earth)

The Instinct carries the title Inner Healer. Our individual journey affects others in many more ways than we can grasp in our moments of struggle, when we feel particularly alone and cut off from the world.

The struggle represents awakening from embryonic to infantile Consciousness. It brings the deep pain of past trauma into present awareness. The Inner Healer lends her voice to all immature inner creatures trapped in the inner permafrost (see Chapter 7 Emotional Messengers). Listening to the voice of the Inner Healer with compassion and attention is in itself profoundly healing.

The assumption that humans can stumble out of a painful and haunted past to smoothly leap into a happily ever after future is a utopian folktale. It ignores the integrity of all human experience and the related need to integrate every incomprehensible episode which seems to threaten our coherence.

Evolution means growing, and growing means transforming as a whole organism, not hypertrophy of one limb to compensate for an atrophied other part.

Emotions, the messages of the Inner Healer, move us. They cause turbulence, waves of rage or bliss, sparks of anger or excitement, surges of fear, embarrassment, guilt, shame, overwhelming grief, and compassion. Emotions can flood the entire organism with a sense of strength or weakness.

We cannot get away from the dark emotions and pick only the bright ones, because they all play their part in the evolution of this miracle of systemic connectivity which is our own living organism Consciousness. To support our own evolutionary processes, the best we can do is to meet ourselves with unconditional compassion ~ especially in the dark and wild zones of emotional experience.

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Communicating with the Instinct in her Native Language

Just like you wouldn’t use a certain kind

of meter to measure electricity that doesn’t measure electricity,

there’s another kind of perspective that you bring to understand or move within time.

〰 Joy Harjo 〰

The anthropocentric mind has a habit of rejecting unwanted experiences, wanting to replace them with positive ones. Trying to exchange those nasty and unpleasant ‘lower emotional states’ for more desirable ‘higher states of consciousness’ is tempting.

It seems to make sense to the Intellect. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the desired effect because the Instinct speaks a different language. She communicates in the language of emotions.

We should all know by now that negative emotions don’t go away by rejecting them. They can, however, be transformed relatively easily by meeting them with compassion.

This may seem counterintuitive to the Inner Expert, I know. Here it helps to remember that each of the Inner Keepers of Integrity lives in their own world, each quite distinct from all the others. Not only do they speak their own native languages, they operate from quite different mindsets.

The Inner Healer lives in the realm called Inner Ocean Reality, where everything is connected with everything else. She doesn’t perceive the darker emotions as separate from the brighter states of mind. They simply express the other end of the same spectrum, and a healthy equilibrium can only be achieved through the interplay of all vibrations.

The Instinct responds particularly well to compassionate attention. Therefore, it didn’t surprise me when I read in Power vs. Force that, “without compassion, little of any significance is ever accomplished in human endeavors.”

The Map of Consciousness presents ‘emotional states’ in hierarchical order from the lowest (Shame) to the highest (Enlightenment). The anthropocentric mind interprets this as an evolutionary ladder of the human experience from abysmal darkness to the heights of spiritual clarity and wisdom.

Dr. Hawkins states clearly that this is a misunderstanding. In order to transform and heal negative emotional states we must meet them with compassion. “We may generalize to the greater social context from individual therapies, wherein the patient can’t be truly cured or fundamentally healed until he invokes the power of compassion, both for himself and others. At that point, the healed may become a healer.”

Compassion is essential because it belongs to the vocabulary of the Instinct. It is the language all emotions understand and to which they spontaneously show a positive response.

In the Noctarine, all negative states are also known as ‘immature inner creatures’. Immature creatures (or lower levels of consciousness) can never be transformed through ‘positive affirmations’ (as some spiritual teachers and lifestyle coaches suggest) ~ by focussing on 'pride and courage’ instead of ‘shame and fear’, for example.

Such a manoeuvre is equivalent to discarding persons who have failed to pass a grade and replacing them with more successful candidates. It leaves the immature inner creatures feeling abandoned and in greater despair than before!

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The Transformative Powers of Love and Compassion

Love becomes the sole motivator of the continuance of physical existence.

〰 David R. Hawkins 〰

Natural processes of growing and evolving are aligned with universal laws. Always. This principle has not stopped the anthropocentric mind making up humanoid ‘laws’, trying to bend the rules and manipulate the trajectory of nature…

What applies to the outer world can be found in relation to the inner world too. In his book The Map of Consciousness Explained Hawkins clarifies that this is NOT how evolution or growth work.

Some people may experience temporary benefits some times, but the principle of the natural process of evolving/growing cannot be fooled, leap-frogged or bypassed. The universal principle of the natural process of evolving/growing relies on transformation ~ as taught in all ancient wisdom traditions.

Every gardener knows that you cannot make growth happen. We can only create favourable conditions in which a plant is happy to grow. (Ok, there are manipulative and artificial methods to give the impression of growth, but the products of such plants lack quality and substance. The fruit taste insipid. The plants themselves are infertile and often prone to disease.)

Here we are talking about the natural, healthy, self-sustaining process of growing and evolving. This process depends on an intrinsic vital power, inherent in every living creature, and it is activated by certain environmental conditions, including wholesome nourishment and compassion.

In vibrational language, such wholesome sustenance can be summed up in one word: Love. Tending to a living being with love means giving it the best chance to thrive.

Love has been consistently measured as a 'higher level of consciousness’ by Dr. Hawkins (and others), much higher than fear, shame, guilt, or any of the so-called ‘negative emotions’ or states of Consciousness reacting to NSE.

Genuine healthy growing doesn’t happen by getting rid of the emotions which you experience as negative and undesirable. You may be able to fool others and even yourself by playing the part of a ‘serene, poised, and enlightened’ human being, but you cannot deceive your own Instinct.

Consciousness can only evolve by transforming the experience of the ‘lower vibrations’. Such transformation can only happen when your own mind develops an entirely new and transformed understanding of the so-called ‘negative experience’.

Breakthroughs happen consistently when we are able to embrace and take care of our immature inner creatures with a more mature and loving attitude. Or as Dr. Hawkins put it, “the higher the level of consciousness of the observation, the greater the impact on the observed.”

Through such transformative understanding, immature inner creatures are not replaced. They grow into their mature counterparts.

Noctarine Mandala of the Instinct © Veronika Bond, 2025

Into the Wave of the Self-Propelling Instinct

Nature is orderly.

That which appears to be chaotic

in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

〰 Gary Snyder 〰

The Mandala of this Map of the Instinct shows eight nodes where the Inner Healer interacts with all vital Faculties of Consciousness. Each node is comparable with a key synapse of the physical nervous system.

Information is not ‘produced’ by either of the Faculties. Energy is generated through interaction between Faculties, and meaning can be sourced from subjective experience.

This alchemical process between energy, information and meaning enables us to regain inner power and balance whenever it is temporarily lost. As Hawkins points out, “On examination, we’ll see that power arises from meaning. It has to do with motive, and it has to do with principle. Power is always associated with that which supports the significance of life itself.”

The Inner Healer rarely, if ever, acts by herself (this is true for all 8 Faculties). It is the intention of the Will in exchange with the Instinct that generates emotional messages, which trigger a wave of responses throughout the organism, propelled forward from one node to the next, meaning carried forward and evolving from one synapse to another.

6 ∞ 1 ~ Emoceanic, the Inner Language of the Instinct (synapse with the Will)

6 ∞ 2 ~ Holopathy, the Essence of the Instinct (synapse with the Soul)

6 ∞ 3 ~ Equanimity, the Power of the Instinct (synapse with the Inspiration)

6 ∞ 4 ~ Harmonites, the Clan of the Instinct (synapse with the Intuition)

6 ∞ 5 ~ Inner Ocean Reality, the Sphere of Reality of the Instinct (synapse with the Imagination)

6 ∞ 6 ~ Sensitivity, the Sentience of the Instinct (synapse with the Inner Healer herself)

6 ∞ 7 ~ Providence, the Perspective of the Instinct (synapse with the Intellect)

6 ∞ 8 ~ Sensor, the Function of the Instinct (synapse with the Body)

In this list of nodes, the sequence is lifted directly from the Noctarine Web of Consciousness. In everyday life, inner experience doesn’t happen in neat sequences. Reactions are sparked spontaneously and often simultaneously and responses surge in parallel or contrary or across one another without consideration for making sense, rhyme or reason to the human mind. It is as if each Faculty has a mind of their own.

This is where transformation happens. This is when growth spirals. This is how evolutions evolve. This is the way non-linear waves and vibrations roll and swell, surge and recoil.

When swept out of your centre by turbulent emotions, you can, as Serene Jones suggests, “move into a place where it is something that you can find a place for in your soul and in your heart — not in such a way that it immobilizes you, but actually propels you into the future, through love.”

To surf the waves of your Inner Ocean, guided by your Inner Healer, slip into the stream of the attached download.

Kairotrophy For The Inner Healer

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