From the 10th floor of the hotel, the vernacular architecture of Queensland extends outwards until it is swallowed by even taller buildings.  Brisbane is unique in that you can see the way it has evolved over time.  As needs changed, so did the design of the city.  But the skeleton of the old version of the city remains.  Each century of architecture served as a platform for the next.  It is easy to see how some centuries valued aesthetics and others valued function.  It gives a feeling of great vibrational depth to the city.  It honestly feels like a big town rather than a city.

Brisbane is a city identified with its river. Like so many “river cities” it is as if the river is an artery that the city is completely dependent on.  It brings vital energy into the city.  The first day I arrived here, we met up with the volunteers for the Brisbane workshop for a potluck in the exquisite botanical garden here.  We sat in a tiny pavilion by the river watching boats make their way up and down it in the rain.  Its banks were flooded to the degree that the mud seemed beaten and churned.

I was told that no one goes swimming in the river because it is home to crocodiles.  I scanned the waters for a feel of them and even allowed some of my consciousness to slip below the surface of the water.  But I could not find any trace of crocodiles on that day.  To my surprise what I did find was sharks.  I found it a bit confusing because as far as I know the Brisbane River is technically a freshwater river.  But these sharks had the feel of salt-water sharks.  They had a stocky feel to them.  In fact they have similar energy to the black tip reef sharks I have been able to observe in the past.  They seemed physically distressed, mostly gripping to the bottom of the riverbed.  When I went into their perspective, it was as if their bodies were working hard to create adequate respiration.  Similar to when a physical human climbs a tall peak that does not have enough oxygen.  When the body cannot get adequate respiration, it begins to feel like the body is poisoned.  That is what these sharks felt like to me.  As if they were unable to rid themselves of toxins that their own body naturally creates.

The workshop that took place two days ago was one of the most multi-dimensional feeling workshops we’ve ever held.  Overall, the group was super esoteric.  It was my favorite workshop in a while.  It takes a huge amount of energy to direct an audience for over eight hours from the start to the complete closing of an event.  I usually feel like I am in a zone of creativity and empowerment but once the post event calm sets in, I often experience a crash in energy levels.  I was looking forward to drifting into a dreamless sleep.  However, after the workshop, I was pulled out of body to an area of the city called “the valley”.  If I were to be honest, this area of the city has the lowest vibration.  It is like a pocket of suffering.  The kind of suffering that is associated with perceiving unfairness.  Long standing resentment hangs like an energy fog in this area of town.  It is nothing more than an intense concentration of the more diffused dominant negative vibration belonging to the whole city… like poison in a river collecting in an eddy.  I spent the most time with a man who was homeless.  He had caught a virus and was suffering immensely.  I also spent time with several different people who have developed addictions to pain medications, two young men who were in the active phase of planning a series of muggings and a woman who was with her fifth “client” of the night.  I woke up with the same exhaustion I went to sleep with.  But some part of me feels privileged to have gotten a taste of the struggles that the people at the bottom tier of the social ladder face in this area of the globe.

Brisbane is a city with both depth and character.  It closes in around you like an embrace from a friendly anaconda.  Energetically, it feels like it holds you into yourself, but not with warmth and coziness.  Instead, with a kind of lukewarm intensity.  To understand what it is like in Brisbane, imagine that the Amazon rain forest, the city of Chicago and historical Georgia all came together and made a baby.  Brisbane is that baby.  I enjoy Brisbane in fact.  I was completely moved to a state of rapture by the sheer numbers and novelty of the enormous bats that fly like birds around the city at dusk.

The dominant negative vibration is: Sequester.  Something that is sequestered is hidden and isolated.  Part of what feels safe about Brisbane is that it has this sequestered feel to it.  This feeling is practically impossible to find in large metropolitan areas.  But let’s take a look at why this has developed into a negative thing in Brisbane.  It is a perfect vibrational match to the form of personal sequester that is occurring in the city.  Essentially, people are sequestered inside themselves.  People are hidden and isolated into themselves. I traced this collective imprint back and what I see again and again is that in the early lives of so many who call Brisbane home, there is a sense of humiliation.  This humiliation is the result of feeling violated.  Regardless of whether this violation is mental, emotional or physical, there is a sense of having lost integrity and dignity as a result.  And this loss of integrity/dignity has caused a reluctance to put themselves out in the world.  Instead, it has caused a negative form of introversion.  The lasting effect is one of trying to avoid being threatened.  People are hemmed into themselves and are now out of touch with the natural rhythms of life around them.  On a physical level, this has manifested as issues with the skin.  In fact, of anywhere I’ve been yet, Brisbane boasts the populous of people with the unhealthiest skin.  Toxins are collected in their skin and so many people are in the process of developing skin cancer.

This completely subconscious motive of trying to avoid a violating threat is interesting to observe because it is a vibrational match to the other issue in Brisbane, which is parasites.  I was taken aback by both the biodiversity and the amount of parasitic organisms that absolutely thrive in this area.  I instructed all members of the team I brought with me to be very careful about their water consumption and even showering habits.  I would not let anyone who came with me drink the local water.  Many of these parasitic organisms can coexist with other local life (including human life) without creating any serious side effects to surface.  And these parasites have a softer, more needy attitude to them than the often vicious and competitive attitude of parasites in places like India.  But in the end, parasitic relationships are all about taking what is not willingly given… Robbery.  And so, it is not what we would call healthy.  If anyone were having a real problem curing persistent ailment in Brisbane, on a purely physical level, I’d urge him or her to seriously consider trying a parasite cleanse.  I’d also recommend people supplement with vitamin b, vitamin d and healthy fats (especially including omega oils).  The residents of Brisbane are noticeably deficient in these 3 things.

The dominant positive vibration is: Reconstruction.  The dominant positive vibration of the city of Brisbane is integrally linked to the dominant negative vibration in the city.  When you are violated in such a way that integrity and dignity is broken, the only thing left to do is to rebuild.  And the structure of the new tends to be better than before.  On an external level, this is reflected in the city’s own storyline.  It has been violated by fire and consistently by floods and keeps coming back stronger than before.  The citizens of Brisbane have made a practice of rebuilding themselves.  I want to give you an idea of what the people here feel like energetically.  It is not that they are transformed.  It is not that they have been born again like a phoenix would.  It is that when they were deconstructed, they looked at the now collapsed building materials and decided to rebuild with those same materials.  The structure of what was created to take the place of the old is much more functional.  It better meets the needs at hand.  It is often more beautiful, but it contains the gravity of memory because the same elements that were part of the collapse are present today as part of the rebuild.  Even the large number of young people in the city contain this imprint of having been rebuilt.  Perhaps for them, even the decision to move to Brisbane was part of this self-reconstruction process.

I must say that when you are driven into yourself, most of the construction of self and much of the expansion then occurs internally instead of externally.  Whole landscapes are built internally the same way they would naturally be built externally.  The sheer depth of the internal landscapes of the average resident of Brisbane is staggering.  This also ads to the feeling of depth you get in the city.  There is internal newness being created all the time.  The best way to understand this is to imagine that each person contains an internal universe that is expanding as we speak.  But because people are hemmed into themselves, that expansion and depth is 100 percent contained.  It is invisible to the naked eye.  I think if you were not a perceptive person, you could have a friend in this city who acted no different on the outside (went to the same pubs, fished in the same river, worked the same job) while inside and without you knowing, they could have turned into a different person entirely multiple times over.  I find the people of Brisbane to be absolutely fascinating on the inside.  And there is something to be said about the sturdy and admirable character of those who rebuild themselves.

Yesterday, I boarded a plane bound for Melbourne.  Yet only stayed in Melbourne for less than 20 hours including sleep. We figured out that we would be in Australia at the same time as the Australian Open Tennis Tournament and got excited enough that we made the decision to attend.  We bought tickets to the semi finals, where we saw perhaps the two best tennis players of all time go up against each other, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic.  It was lucky in fact that we get to see them go up against each other in the semi final.  Despite feeling corroded in large crowds and having to close my ears to survive the applause, I love sports and seeing as how I’m currently learning how to play tennis, I was especially enthusiastic about getting to see last night’s match before boarding a plane to jump the puddle over to New Zealand.  It was a really good game.

I love the way that sports provide the perfect opportunity to go beyond what has been done before and to push the limits of what is possible.  I love the intensity of desire born from both the players and the fans.  I love the single pointed focus that sports both inspire and demand from people.  It is a lovely thing to behold.