I am on board an easyJet plane from Amsterdam to England.  The plane is literally full of “Tribers”.  As I was standing in line to board this flight, I kept passing them, one after the other after the other.  We are all on this plane because we are all headed to the same place for the same event… A training that I am giving over the course of five days.  And now, up here in the sky, I can feel them in front of me and behind me.  They feel like the stability of wind beneath wings.  I imagine that this must be what it feels like for dolphins to swim in a pod from one place to another. 

It is also making me laugh because without even talking to one another about it, it turns out that we have the same natural habit, which is to “bless and protect” the plane.  So many of the Tribers get into planes and mentally do energy work on the plane itself.  They surround the plane in a kind of energetic bubble and call in higher dimensional entities to make the flight safe.  The most common color they chose to do this with is purple.  Now I am sitting in a plane that is consumed in a vibrating purple haze.

I spent the last few days in Amsterdam.  Amsterdam is such a weird city.  It has a reputation worldwide for being one of the craziest avant-garde cities in the world.  The place for partying.  The place for being able to exercise the aspect of yourself that normally must be kept under wraps.  Coming to Amsterdam from abroad, one expects a relatively dark city full of tattoo shops and places openly selling drugs and prostitutes in the windows.  Coming to Amsterdam, you discover that this is not an accurate picture of Amsterdam or its people.        

I have never seen so many bicycles in my life as in Amsterdam.  The city is literally infested with bicycles.  If I lived there, there would be no way I’d own a car.  Not because I like bicycling, but because driving in between all the swerving bicycles is too stressful to make driving worth it.

I was looking forward to visiting Amsterdam because when I was going through my competitive athlete phase of life, I transitioned from competitive ski racing to competitive long track speed skating.  At the Olympic Oval where I trained, all the teams in the world would come during the year for training and for races because it is the fastest ice on earth.  It is no secret that the Dutch speed skating team cannot be beat.  We used to stand there on the edge of the oval, in awe of their technique.  Speed skating is my strongest association with the Netherlands.  After visiting, I can see why they are the best in the world.  Amsterdam is a water city.  It is a city built on a river that was dammed.  Skating is part of the culture there.  The entire city is a city of canals.  You can think of the main part of Amsterdam as the center of an onion. Three main canals encircle it like layers of an onion, with many radial canals connecting them.  When the plethora of canals in the Netherlands freezes over, people can skate on them.  It is incredible. 

The dominant negative vibration of Amsterdam is: Split.  Resident within the people of Amsterdam is an internal division.  Amsterdam, as a reflection of the people, is full of the contrary energies of taboo and of containment.  On the one hand, taboo is celebrated in the culture and in oneself.  On the other hand, the people of Amsterdam are aloof.  Originally, I was tempted to say that aloof is the dominant negative vibration of the city.  But looking deeper into the individuals that call the city home, it is the fact that there is such juxtaposition inherent within them that causes this split within them.  And it is this split that is causing them pain.  There is great distance between their heart and their mind.  It is a very mind based culture.  When a culture embraces taboo, you would expect that culture to be emotionally free.  But emotionally, the Dutch are imprisoned, like so many of the white, Northern European cultures are.   It is a huge dichotomy.  The freedom and openness that the mind of the Dutch people of Amsterdam experiences is not enjoyed by the heart of the Dutch people of Amsterdam.  I see the pain of the dualistic expectations that the society places on the individual.  It is a land of mixed messages.  Messages like ‘be polite’ and ‘tell it like it is’ for example.  I think it would be incredible if people who live in Amsterdam, especially those who were raised in the Dutch culture, would sit down and specifically look at the mixed messages present within themselves and present within society itself.  I want them to see this “split” inside themselves.                                

The dominant positive vibration of Amsterdam is: Broad Minded.  In general, the people of Amsterdam think.  They think and they think and they think.  They stretch the boundaries of thought.  When they run into something that mentally limits them, they cannot and will not leave it in place.  This the real reason why “taboo” has been accepted there.  They will question something and whittle it down until it no longer limits them.  This has been referred to in the world as 'open-minded'.  But I do not think the people of Amsterdam are particularly open-minded because receptivity is a part of open mindedness.  The Dutch are not very receptive as a people.  The better way of putting it is that their mind is broad instead of open.  It is expansive in a way that leaves no opening in the middle of that expansion.  If they alter their perspective, it will be the result of their own questioning.  They have to own it entirely.  It will not be the result of being open and receptive to someone else’s point of view.

Amsterdam is a very unique city in the world.  It is unique even in its own country.  Much of the city is comprised of new, clean, modern architecture.  But if you visit the older parts of town, you can feel what the city once was.  The houses tower overhead.  Taxation used to occur according to the width of a house and so the people got around the tax by building their houses very thin and very tall.  Many of the houses lean forward over the street with giant hooks below the top roofs that used to be used to hoist things like furniture into the top levels of the house through the windows because (as I can attest to) there is no way you could get them up the incredibly steep, narrow staircases.  They were also used to hang things to preserve them from the floods that used to plague the city. 

Amsterdam is a great place to go if you want to explore the taboo and experience the freedom of a broad minded city without succumbing to the debauchery that other taboo embracing cities embody.  It is like the light side of taboo instead of the dark side of taboo.  

The next several days will be spent diving viciously deep into the inner landscapes of the emotional world.  Though we will technically be in a different part of Europe, our external travel will cease and will be replaced instead by inner travel.