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Memorial Day 2019
My fellow veterans,
Today, I’m mindful of my time in the art of war.
War is a part of our shared human life, and I think life must be seen as a whole to appreciate its parts. Destructive as war is, it produced a personal value in me, a strength, far greater than my personal cost, once I resolved to find it. This value would necessarily have to be tremendous to justify the price I paid in war. I found it did.
War depends on hatred to exist. However, because this is a love based universe, the thing more powerful than hatred is love. We honor veterans because on behalf of love they face into evil and hatred, sacrificing themselves to affirm the right of others to love. Thereby earning, by the experience, the lessons of both. I found love’s lesson gained in war by realizing the effort of will it took to actually enter the nature of love itself after my war was over.
I found to love took a far greater effort of will than to wage war, even with destruction, personal injury, collateral damage, and horror. That was no small thing. This is how I know you as a veteran, are uniquely qualified to enter and express love itself.
Turns out love’s a great creative power and annihilates evil on contact in and around us.
From the beginning, humanity has struggled to learn and live love. Progress was made but, as a group, we have failed. Not through lack of seeing love’s value, we do, but from the lack of the surrender of personal will it takes to enter love and then the strength of will it takes to express that Love. While that combination of strength, surrender, and commitment can be learned through many of the terrible ordeals of life, none are better suited to do it than war.
Examples of those who have demonstrated that Will to Love is the great heroes of history and myth we honor even more than we honor our heroes of war who have stood against hatred.
After I was a marine in Vietnam, I worked to experience and express love, not fight hate. It was doubly difficult because to love I had to first love myself past what I had become in war. As I worked to overcome my personal stuff to enter the impersonal power of Love, I became aware of the tremendous strength of will in me, that I had earned in action and thought lost was a secret weapon waiting to be summoned.
A warriors “will” becomes so strong they can overcome impossible obstacles and face horrific things including express the creative power of pure love, which in war, it does not occur to us to do.
I also realized in doing this why so few in the world actually live love and how valuable it is to others when they do. This value of expressing the actual power of love, and not its sentiment, is in how it inspires those around them in the strengthening of the ability in them to do it as well. How many of our leaders now cannot stay positive with love?
I believe there are enough veterans in the world, on all sides of all wars, to claim this world for love, ending all war, if even a small portion of us make the commitment and take the stand. This is not about any religion or movement. It is about humans creating with love as war is about destroying it. I am a part of and will help, all who attempt this no matter who they are or where they have been or what they have done.
In my case, I had nothing to lose because I had nothing left. So rather than end myself, or live crippled, I took the time to investigate the idea of love as a healing power. Along the way, I realized the difficulty and the greatness of succeeding at it.
Like you, I am a sword that has been tempered in a fierce fire. While I do not desire to use that will ever again in war, in the actual expression of love as a polished power creating good, it is my great joy.
I know you can do this if you want to, and if you try you will heal from your wounds. I also recognize those who master the power to love can end the war before it starts. They are the warriors of the future if humanity is to have one.
The free tools on this web page are a great place to start.
Have a great Memorial Day!
Semper Fi,
James McTague
P.S. As a gift for Memorial Day weekend check out the no-cost “I’m Free” Veterans Guided Visualization MP3 Bundle.
Although you can purchase this set at any time, this free gift offer is only valid Memorial Day and Veterans Day weekends. Veterans download yours now.
Finding Your Center
by James Daniel McTague
When we are off the map, out in the wilderness of our PTSD, a place where there is no clear way forward, that is when we wish we had a Helicopter.
If we could just rise above this location in our life, we might see the way ahead in our consciousness. A way through, a place where you are all right with the world and your weaknesses are becoming your strengths, in other words, a place where you are centered in your vast eternal Self.
As it turns out, you do. The answer to this out of balance condition is centering you in who you are, and locking yourself into that place.
Then, using the abundant will of the warrior, choosing to go forward with all other choices. Our PTSD crises are not, as some would have us suppose, an “illness” to be cured, rather it is a crisis in our consciousness to be worked through – no matter what circumstances produced it.
Because the crises are one of consciousness, which is the total of our awareness of self and surroundings, the helicopter you need is meditation. This process is our best answer to the chaos of mental, emotional and physical challenge that living the war experience can bring us. It does not negate any other treatment, but if applied with will and intention, it can pull you quickly into a clarity of what is right and what is wrong about handling your personal PTSD.
Moreover, it will give you the strength of heart to bring the needed changes in your life. The good news is there is always a way ahead for us, no matter what the circumstances. A way that leads to peace and joy. The hard news is that it is you who has to walk the walk, no matter what the circumstances.
For each of us it is a personal journey. This is because each of us has a personal story.
The power of our personal story in action is that it connects us to our own “warrior within” and the healing power of that warrior is far greater than its destructive power. This is true for us and for that which we wish to heal outside of ourselves. All of which commences once we are centered in our positive inner light. Not some magical make-believe light of hope, or faith, but standing in the down pouring Divine Will that resides at the core of every human, it is our nature without exception, and it is waiting for us to access it. This requires no religion, guru or outside idea of how things should be, or anyone’s idea of how things are. It is the access to truth itself, what is, that is true for everyone, everywhere in all circumstances.
To think we have been abandoned by our own Higher Self, due to conditions or actions is a common mistake. We are never abandoned; we only have been temporarily separated from our sense of deeper self due to circumstances, and reactions to things way beyond our understanding and momentarily losing our personalities ability to process and manage.
We have only to exercise our abundant will, and pull ourselves up into the clarity and centeredness that resides in us. That center can never be disturbed no matter what our personal life or our circumstances are. All that can happen is that we are pushed out from our Higher Self, and when we are, we must find our way back to develop our strengths. That is the nature of human evolution that moves us toward our individual growth and perfection.
This commentary promises a lot; however, until you try it you will not realize how much healing power resides in you. It will help you understand the relationship to your deeper self and it strengthens, that the experiences of PTSD are designed to bring about in us. By healing ourselves, we develop the needed strengths to move forward in our evolution, and the group evolution of humankind.
Those of us who have suffered PTSD have learned how meditation can offer clear solutions and useful answers. At this internet location, we are building a bridge in consciousness for all who suffer from within and seek true healing relief. There is no “one way” for this, and it works better with other practices that are self-healing.
The strength of these meditations are that they conflict with nothing in your life because it comes from the deeper part of your mind which resides in a place behind all suffering and who’s nature is love and wisdom.
Join a meditation with an open mind and we will demonstrate how to unlock your access to the great power inside you. The foundation of this process is the realization of the higher and lower self.
Your human personality, as you have come to know it, and your spiritual counterpart (your Soul, or Higher Self) are forever connected and related no matter what happens in your life. It is possible to lose sight of that connection and to sink into the depths of emotional despair, self-loathing or mental confusion and physical struggle with injuries or addictions, however, the relationship is strong and only awaits your activation to effect significant change in you. Meditation assumes that connection and places it in your hands.
We offer many free techniques and, some recorded meditations for getting started. We also offer live group meditation that will bring clarity to your crises of consciousness and relief from the torment of the unchangeable past by revealing the limitless future of positive existence that awaits you.
Unlock this healing power in yourself and let the down flowing love of your inner nature make you whole. We bring you what we have learned from our own PTSD and decades of practicing and teaching meditation; it is yours to apply to yourself for the discovery of its value to you.
These meditations require no previous understanding, no special abilities, no great effort. (You may recognize the significant resistance that is in you by putting forth the effort to change. Doing clarifies the varied nature of our emotional and mental bodies as they cling to their familiar image of “self,” the little self of our personality. You are their master and connecting with the inner warrior will demonstrate this.)
Guided meditation is available to you in these gifts. Group meditation only needs the cooperation of those who share it within the positive atmosphere of group consciousness. At the higher vibrations of this shared reality, the energies can be unbelievably transforming of the confusions and struggle of PTSD.
In group meditation you learn not how to endure the existence of the unlivable, you learn that it can be resolved and put under the control of your innate will, love and creative process where enduring becomes living and experience, no matter how terrible, becomes wisdom. You learn the unconditional support of others and that life itself is there for you because a life that is inherently good will help you heal and grow.
Of course, what you put in is what you get back. With some committed effort, you will immediately develop a greater understanding and then move your PTSD into something that is fading in the rearview mirror of your life and into your future that is one of freedom and positive possibilities.
I salute your service, I respect your condition, as it was my own, and I affirm your power to move beyond it into an empowering light of consciousness and a life of immense value and self-satisfaction.
We have only to do it together.
Share our resources and sample the short meditations we have created for you.
Semper Fi
JDM
P.S. Of the two meditations we have provided on this website, one is a short introduction to the meditation process with GG and myself, and the other is a centering meditation of about thirty minutes.
Enjoy.
© 2015 James Daniel McTague
How To Handle PTSD
Become A Spiritual Warrior
As a combat Marine, I have had the experiences of war and the PTSD to go along with it.
As a meditation teacher, a worker in spiritual consciousness for many years, I have a unique perspective on how PTSD can be handled, controlled and transformed into a stronger you, one far different from who you were before you entered the self-destructive adventure of war. One better for it.
Our human consciousness is born into and formed out of a limited relationship of living in the limited lifetime and personal cycle of a human life. Our Personality existence. When war intrudes into this short and limited cycle, when we are young and still new at living, it causes a violent distortion of emotion, mind and energies that cannot be reconciled to one small lifetime or normal human living.
Fortunately, in the grand cycle of eternal experience, one that we all enjoy in the true nature of our being, even if we are not normally consciousness of it, one lifetime is but a flicker of time. Powerful as the experiences of violence and chaos and self-destruction are, experiences of killing and being killed going on in and around us, in the long stream of life they will have little impact on our, or anyone else’s existence. There are far worse things that can happen to you than to be killed in war.
So one positive way we can handle life experiences that shatter our human nature beyond mortal repair, is to put them into perspective. We are each of us, in our individuality, far more than our experiences and far more than they can ever affect. Becoming conscious of this changes everything we think about war, our part in it and what to do with the aftermath. Once you become conscious of this truth everything changes. Healing begins. Light comes in. You begin to see a future you, far more than you ever imagined.
Another aspect of the war experience that can be used is this: Extreme experience has great value.
No matter how difficult the events, or far down into the bottomless horror of mental, emotional, physical extreme war can push us, no matter what we have to do to adapt and survive, to exactly the same extreme we have earned a positive rise in consciousness. Into a higher state of being. Because you have gone far beyond other humans in your experience of service and suffering from that service, regardless of the experiences and what you think or feel about them, you have earned a depth of understanding and meaning others cannot access. This is the law of being, the law of love.
That depth of compression and that height release can – and must – be used by you to catapult you into a spiritual awareness of your divine existence that can negate the horror and self-destruction that we are victim to from our war impacts. If to physical body, emotional nature or mental awareness or all three the spiritual result is the same. Above and beyond all that part of us we are familiar with is a true aspect of our higher nature that is ready and willing to step up and embrace the situation we are in.
Both Genevieve and I have worked many years with individuals in that limitless spiritual nature that is our birthright and our permanent self. We daily help individuals to control and clear the PTSD experiences and we are well aware of what you suffer and how to help you move beyond it.
This is not a simple process of our action from any outside point of view. It is a deep guided movement into the root of your being and the releasing of the terrible life distorting impact of compressed experiences by you. Experiences that go way beyond the normal human range of living.
Like war, we must take ourselves through the process, but with a guide and support. Having sat in many PTSD groups and been through countless nights of relentless horror from my own war drama, I do understand how hopeless it can look to the normal human consciousness. How powerless we seem against it. However, you are far more than that normal human consciousness, as war demonstrated to you in the process of screwing you up. Now we are going to access your positive, powerful, loving nature as a divine being, no matter how lost or suppressed, and bring you to your own rescue. You will at some point be grateful for all the experiences that created that PTSD. That is the firm goal.
If you need this help ask for it, you deserve it, you have earned it, and you will find you know far more about it than you think. I do not care what your religion, philosophy or lack of it, what is real is real. You are what you are.
You put yourself through the war experience. Now put yourself through the experience that will turn you into the opposite, a spiritual warrior for good, the good of you and others like you. Empower yourself to rise through and control your limited, distorted, human nature.
Drugs are only temporary and in the end will fail you. Suppressing the experiences without resolving the energy will only cause a breakdown further down the road. Shared group discussion will release and heal you so, if nothing else, find a veterans group and get into it. If you fell the pull, come to us for the spiritual training that puts into your hands the deeper power of your higher nature, soul and spirit and put them to work for you.
You are more than human and that is your way beyond the problem. We will help you open up that way and walk it into confidence and spiritual strength. Free of emotions that are destructive to you. Ending your human life will not help you as you will only find, to your dismay, that you are still very much alive and in deeper trouble than you were, and worse, without a body to work it out in.
There is only one way out and that is through. What you gain is priceless. This is something we do know something about. Contact us and we will establish a group process in a fun, live meditation transformation event to introduce you to your new Self.
– Dan McTague
Words from a friend and veteran
– To Returning Veterans
My name is James. You don’t need to know much about me. I will say this, I was a corporal in the Marines in Viet Nam from, 1966 to 1968, in and around Quang Tri Province, mostly at the DMZ, participating in a dozen or so field operations from Dong Ha to Khe Sahn, over the hundreds of days.
Along with my fellow marines, I learned a lot about war, earned a Presidential Unit Citation and a truck load of PTSD. Given that we didn’t have much help in those days for PTSD, it took me years to get involved in working on mine. During that time 50,000 veterans of Viet Nam, like me, committed suicide.
In today’s warriors it is even worse. Don’t ignore PTSD, it’s dangerous, but I promise you, it can be fixed. You have to help, it is your duty. Healing you, and others, is actually the positive side of being a warrior.
My war is far behind and most of us who fought it have come to terms with our PTSD, or we have been lost to it. So what I say here I say to those returning veterans and those of the more recent wars we have fought. I do remember the naked and almost violent sensitivity I experienced returning from war and realize the seemingly endless cycle it puts us into. Like a bad burn, it seems like the burning will never end. This is not so, it can and will go away and with some effort you can put a miracle in its place. Life supports warriors with an endless power including you as much as anyone who has ever lived. Not the power called will, but with another called love, Take advantage of it. We will help you.
So you have PTSD, welcome to the world of love and war. Without love there would be no PTSD. Without war love would have been snuffed out a long time ago. Now, using love, the greatest healing power you possess, let’s do something about it. Oh, and if you saw action and don’t think you have PTSD, guess again.
PTSD, it is all stored, unprocessed war. You gave it to others, they gave it to you, you gave it to yourself, it doesn’t matter. The buck stops here! You have to heal it.
Now, what about the healing power of love? It is the power that, in the end, redeems us all. You give it to yourself, you give it to others, they give it to you, it matters. As a veteran, with PTSD you may think you are far from love. Not true, you are closer to it that anyone. You have earned it.
The whole nine yards! Horror, fear, hatred, loathing, guilt, confusion, pain, loss, hopelessness, shattered identity, scrambled feelings, physical loss, pain and more pain, and more, much, much more. An endless stream of uncoiling, recreating, imaginary harm, based on our memory and the images of real harm; on-going, causing you and others around you, harm, long after the events. Yep, that pretty much sums PTSD up.
In our full realization of PTSD often we are so filled with so much of that horror, that we do not feel it is right even to be close to others, especially those we love, as if just being near us, can somehow harm them, somehow infect them, somehow make them create what we know can be so destructive to them. This toxicity is real. So is your power to get rid of it.
It makes you dangerous to yourself, dangerous to others and life often not worth living. In an attempt to self-medicate, to get away from it, it produces addiction in any form capable of separating us, for a few moments, from the close company of our PTSD.
Using drugs, as forms of numbing our sense of self, we can become separated from our higher self, our inner nature, the wounded conscience, love, our own soul that, by its awareness, brings us constant pain. When we push it away with drugs, we walk a dangerous path.
Stranger yet, somehow, in this total negativity, is our very real, understanding of the precious value of life, what its loss means to us and to others. We somehow are able to see the enormous beauty, grace and loving value of what has been lost, of what, in a perfect world, could and should be and what could and should never happen. It is PTSD and it belongs to us. It is also capable of being dissipated and healed in us, leaving us far stronger than we were before.
Well, if we want to get rid of PTSD, really want to, let’s do something about it. Let’s not just dump it, let’s transform it and replace it with its complete opposite. Let’s fix it. If we cannot completely fix our bodies from terrible damage we can at least fix the emotions, mind and restore the soul to us in a way that, believe it or not, in the end can make us grateful for the experiences – all of it!
You are in a perfect position to do that. You have nothing to lose, everything to gain and you have earned and paid for the lesson – good and bad. Now is the time to give yourself the reward.
Memorial Day
An open letter and offer to veterans everywhere
You have survived the ravages of war and lived through unspeakable tension, strain, and horror to return to your loved ones and the life you left behind.
You may have noticed that things are different from the way you remember them to be.
You may have noticed that you are different from the way you remember yourself to be.
Too successfully return to civilian life, your life, there are some things that would be helpful for you to understand. By understanding these things and having the tools to transition from the stress of your war experience back into civilian life you can make a successful transition home.
To help you continue to make a successful transition I have created a series of guided meditations with techniques and tools that can help. As my gift to you on Memorial Day and Veterans Day weekends, I would like to give you the first three CDs in my new “I’m Free” series. If you use them to resolve and come through the normal residuals of your wartime experience, you can transition back into the experience of being home and leave the experience of war where it belongs, behind you.
Perhaps the first thing you need to understand about the transition to home is that you have been through an experience that required you to have and to hone skills that may have saved your life and the lives of your buddies many times, but applying those same skills to your family life and your daily life can create challenges for you and those you love.
In wartime, you had to be super vigilant. The slightest sound may have signaled a need to bring you to full awareness, full alert, on guard and ready. That was true as you slept and as you were awake. This state of readiness was appropriate to war. This same state of readiness can result in sleepless nights that wear away your patience. You had to sleep with that edge in war. You now need to relearn a pathway to sleep that turns down that energy to let you have peaceful sleep.
Just as you trained your consciousness to be ever alert, now you need to train your consciousness to relax and be refreshed by a peaceful, secure sleep. That is why the first guided meditation in this gift bundle I’m Free To Relax is to help you release and leave behind the stress of war.
According to a 2011 Mayo Clinic article relaxation isn’t just about peace of mind or enjoying a hobby. Relaxation is a process that decreases the effects of stress on your mind and body. Relaxation techniques can help you cope with everyday stress and with stress related to various health problems.
Whether your stress is spiraling out of control or you’ve already got it tamed, you can benefit from learning relaxation techniques.
Learning relaxation techniques is easy and can reduce stress symptoms by:
- Lowering blood pressure
- Reducing muscle tension and chronic pain
- Improving concentration
- Reducing anger and frustration
- Boosting confidence to handle problems
Certainly, the constant stress of the strain of war can leave a myriad of little pains that do not serve you. You can release these pains now. You can leave them behind. They will be healed. This meditation can help you do that a little at a time, releasing and letting go of what you no longer need of the pains of war as you transition back into peace and family life.
As you once trained your full being for war, you can now train your full being for everyday peace of mind. Moreover, although this may not seem necessary or important, letting go of the little tensions and anxiety that a car parking in a strange place or stopping next to you can engender is a part of making that transition. The physiological response to the unusual, that is different, is part of what helped you survive in war. Those same physiological edges to alertness can, if not tuned back, leave you always in a state of hyper-awareness and hyper vigilance that makes you edgy and impatient with those you love.
They have not been through what you have experienced. They do not understand and hopefully will never have to understand. You do not need to continue to carry that edge with you. This first guided meditation in the series I’m Free To Relax will help you take that adrenalin edge off and begin to react to the stimulus of normal civilian life without the warrior’s edge.
The second meditation in the series is I’m Free To Sleep. This will help you learn to sleep again in a way that is appropriate to peacetime and family life.
Be assured that if you ever need the skills of ready response you learned in war, they will be available to you. You do not have to have them turned on all the time.
The third guided meditation in the series, I’m Feeling Free, is to help you release the emotions engendered by being in a situation where you had to see unspeakable things and maybe do unspeakable things.
These things can be a part of war. They may have been necessary and appropriate to the situation you were in. They were created in the past and can stay in the past. They have no place in the now.
You need to let yourself move that energy out of your body, out of your being, out of your consciousness. You need to now put it behind you, transform it, transmute it and release it.
We know from the science of physics we cannot destroy energy but we can change its form. This meditation is about transforming the emotions we are carrying from our past and letting them change into that which is positive and of service to others. It may not make sense that just focusing our mind and our attention on our emotions can change their form, but it works. It has been proven that energy follows thought. It is powerful and helps you release what was past to let you return to now so that you can enjoy and appreciate your life without carrying the war with you.
I have worked with Genevieve Gerard for over thirty years in transformation, healing, meditation groups and on many projects. She is eminently qualified having worked for many years with trauma victims. Genevieve created these products out of love to help those who suffer trauma, including me. Her guidance works.
-James McTague Vietnam 66-68
These well worded guided meditations may seem to be simple solutions to complex problems, but by using them regularly with an open heart and an open mind you will find that your energy gradually balances and the dynamic guardedness you have carried, that saved you in wartime but can now slay you in peacetime, is able to readjust to your current circumstances and begin to re-bridge the distance that seemed to exist between you and those you left behind.
These proven meditations only take 15 to 20 minutes each. They are guided so that you only need to follow along in your mind. Most people who have used the Sleep meditation say that they are asleep before the meditation is over (and that is perfectly ok.) What is great is there are no pharmaceutical side effects to these meditations. You can use them as often as you want and as often as you need them. Using them will help you shift your awareness to who you are beyond the experiences you have been through. They will help you regain and restore yourself, to your self.
Download The “I’m Free” 3-CD
Series Bundle Now
A note from the creator of these meditations:
I wrote these meditations after having studied meditation for over 45 years. For over 35 years as a counselor I have used guided meditation both in my own life and in helping others who have been through severe injury and pain. I have brought these meditation techniques to you to help with your transition back into your life. You have given enough, you have sacrificed enough. It is time to leave the war behind you and come to the world you sacrificed to serve for, able to fully participate in your life and receive all the love and joy that life can now offer to you. This series was created especially for you, for that purpose.
I recommend using I’m Feeling Free at least once a day or more times when emotional responses are troublesome. I’m Free to Relax can be used whenever the world is too much and you find yourself stressed out. I’m Free To Sleep is best used upon retiring for the night.
Please enjoy these as my gift to you on Memorial Day.
In Gratitude,
Genevieve Gerard
P.S. These techniques can be done quickly and silently at any time without anyone knowing and repetition enhances the effectiveness. Anyone can master these techniques; it’s as simple as breathing and only takes minutes to put into practice.
Although you can purchase this set at any time, this free gift offer is only valid Memorial Day and Veterans Day weekends. Veterans download yours now.
Please support our work and efforts to help returning veterans.
