Thriving on a City Grid: Being Human Again

By Christina Dietz

Let Your True Being Radiate in the City

The contemporary world, driven by technology and herd consciousness, pressures us to move at an artificial pace that blocks the extraordinary potential of our minds, hearts, emotions, and bodies. But in fact, it is possible to experience everyday unconditional love for li

• Language: English
• Publisher: Technicolor Adventures
• Release date: Jul 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737249924

Christina Dietz

Christina Dietz is a social entrepreneur who guides others in vibrant, graceful ways to awaken with ease to the supreme embodiment of their soul on Earth. Her intent is to help the collective celebrate into the new paradigm of heaven on Earth. Christina offers this divine transmission through her artwork, writing, speaking, and sensory wellbeing practice in Austin, Texas. In addition to one-on-one soul embodiment sessions, she facilitates color therapy with groups for all kinds of purposes from rehabilitation of juvenile offenders to team building and wellness retreats and activations for employees of fashion brands like Lululemon and Goop. She created a color therapy affirmation greeting card line to assist in beautiful inner shifts. She is a visionary tapped into Source and sharing the good news. Christina contributed a chapter to the anthology Healthy, Abundant, and Wise. Thriving on a City Grid is her first book.

Book preview

THRIVING ON A CITY GRID

A decorative image

BEING HUMAN AGAIN

CHRISTINA DIETZ

TECHNICOLOR ADVENTURES

AUSTIN, TEXAS

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright © 2021 by Christina Dietz

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher through the website or email below.

Christina Dietz / Technicolor Adventures

Website: https://heartartcolortherapy.com

Email: mailto:[e-mail]

Copy editing and book production by Gunning Writer Works

Cover design by Gus Yoo

Book Layout © Book Design Templates

Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the email address or website above.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021910256

Thriving on a City Grid / Christina Dietz —1st ed.

ISBN 978-1-7372499-2-4 (epub ebook)

DEDICATION

To Heaven and Earth, for bestowing grace upon all beings.

To God, for blazing passion in my being each moment with your words. Glory to God. May we celebrate our light together.

May all beings be free.

May all beings be bliss.

EPIGRAPH

Your time is first of all for you to be—to be alive, to be peace.*

—Thich Nhat Hanh

To be bliss.

preface

A decorative image

MY STORY

I SPENT MUCH of my twenties in a concurrent state of limbo and hyperawareness triggered by my instincts. For three years, I had a mysterious illness that was making me sick. Eventually, I was diagnosed with black mold poisoning. There was a deadly systemic fungal infection in my brain and gut that I had picked up over a number of years in a few places that included my college dormitory at the University of Southern California, a dank apartment in Florence, Italy, and an old house in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of tests later, I found out I have a certain gene missing (methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase), making me highly vulnerable to any kind of toxic exposure. Black mold just happens to be the most serious toxin that developed in my body. Left untreated, I would have died.

In cities, mold occurs from leaks in a house that go unresolved. You can air out a house to breathe in fresh air, new life, or at least new air to circulate, but the problem comes right back once the windows and door are closed. Mold is a cause of stagnation or a problem not being attended to. I had more than just mold to purify and treat; I purified the conditional and limited versions encapsulating the truest me.

The building codes in the United States have a low bar, so unscrupulous contractors use many toxic materials and prioritize cheap parts to make more money while creating structures that are not sound. If we lived in purer homes with less toxins, cities would be composed of clearer people connected to their wisdom—where our gifts and purpose would radiate forth with ease and grace.

Our cultivation of home is very important. Are we in harmony with this home or not? This will tell us a thing or two if we are in harmony with ourselves and our world around us. We have all the power we could ever need.

For me, I walked a black mold dance because I was not in my human power. I was born with a lot of spirit and unsure of manmade environments forgetting to use the tool of the human spirit, interconnected with the teacher and medicine of nature.

It was a bizarre, yet miraculous experience to have this particular illness. I was having an experience wherein I simultaneously felt like I was deep in the caves of my deteriorating body and out of my body, floating just above my head. This state lasted for a few years. I was only twenty-one when it started. The blessing of my black mold intoxication was that it set me up to have some unusual experiences, showing me wonderful perspectives about our inner world as humans and how we perceive the outer world. Essentially, I had inhaled a fungus—a mushroom of sorts. I had what felt like mushrooms growing inside me with an extreme heaviness feeling.

Was I dying or about to truly live for the first time? I did not know.

I did a fermentation sit. I marinated in the blackest parts of myself and looked the dark of myself in the human condition and the dark of our world right in the face. This was one of the most blessed experiences of my life. Imagine engaging in conversation with people from this strange, miraculous perspective.

An unanticipated benefit of my toxicity was developing new clarity and insight during the stillness of resting to recover my health several years later.

That fermentation sit, or resting period, was when I first began relating to my human self and spirit together—simultaneously. Perhaps my spirit was prematurely engaged to protect my human self mentally, emotionally, and energetically in relation to the earthly experience and the suffering I was enduring—especially since I had a sweet, soft, and kind personality. I am delicate like a flower in person. I am also wildly vibrant and strong in spirit.

Looking back, I see that I naturally allowed my wisdom to protect me when I was vulnerable throughout the period of misunderstanding of my symptoms by the professionals I went to for support. Some treated me as if I were crazy, believing either that I had a psychosomatic illness or that I was making up the whole thing—which was frustrating. They dumped pills on me when I did not need them, prescribing them for depression and anxiety. I spoke up big time for myself—another lesson I needed to learn—and rejected this solution pushed hard on me, trying to convince me this illusion is my medicine and answer. My wisdom was like a best friend looking out for me the entire time. A question I leaned in to explore was, What is the source of this wisdom? I knew it was beyond me.

Your inner wisdom is your best friend. Even if everyone around you doubts your awareness and the truth of your direct experience of life inside your body, your inner wisdom will always believe you and resonate with your truth. Stilling into your unique rhythm and enjoying it are two keys to thriving on a city grid that we will explore together in this book.

Connecting to our souls is much easier when we are present in our sensory being bodies, which means going slower to discover all the small and big magical gifts life is beaming at us. The small daily gifts sustain us for when times appear stormy.

Due to my sickness, I was eventually forced to stop working. My new job was managing my health. I took this job on like my life depended on it—and it did. At that time, my most urgent concern was that I was sick and seeking help. I met with the smartest western doctors and the most gifted eastern practitioners. This was all I initially knew to do. Ultimately, I was met with a terrifying truth. A realization.

No one was able to help me.

After three years of seeking a diagnosis, I finally accepted that none of the doctors I had seen could diagnose me, and I understood that if I kept going in the same way the stress of the cycle of searching, hoping, and being disappointed would only worsen my condition.

A second challenge I had to overcome was social. The prolonged uncertainty I had about my health was risking my tribal support—support from friends and family. It is hard for people to handle ambiguity. Those around me were wrapped up in focusing on the not-knowing element in my story. They wanted logic, answers—any kind of rational explanation to calm their minds. Having no answer as to what was making me sick made people really uncomfortable. This was a lingering issue. I represented the unknown, problems, lack of clarity—all the things many of us leave for our subconscious to house in a suppressed state.

I made people nervous.

My energy to fight off the skeptics was fading, so it was time to get creative. I needed to move beyond my personal fears and the group fear so I could look at my situation with fresh eyes. Guided by intuition’s wisdom, I then shifted my focus and asked myself, What do I know?

An answer came: Something from my environment was making me sick.

Asking that question and receiving such a clear answer was the beginning of a sweet, lifelong friendship with my inner voice. Its wisdom led me to take a new path. I bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand.

Each of us has wisdom that can open us to infinite pathways and solutions. Trusting this innate wisdom—trusting ourselves and our own voice—is a key principle for thriving on a city grid. I see a city grid as a linear design occupying space by creating boundaries for structure and organization to facilitate a better flow of traffic and moving parts. And it can also be so much more, as we will explore together.

Putting the puzzle pieces of my illness together so I could emerge into my vibrancy required me to become much quieter, much more still, and much more observant and awake to the subtle nature of life. For the past ten years, I have been quietly focused in observing life—all the subtle energies of consciousness at play with our human cultural world, the cosmos, and the natural kingdom.

At age twenty-five, I was diagnosed with black mold toxicity by Ann Shippy, M.D., a functional medicine doctor in Austin, Texas, where I live now. Under Dr. Shippy’s divine guidance, I began a two-year treatment protocol to kill the systemic fungal infection at a rate that was safe for my liver, kidneys, and brain to filter out toxins. Have you ever met a person along your path that feels like an angel? Dr. Shippy is an angel of grace that I finally allowed to receive in my life. During most of the period I was detoxing, I felt very sluggish and mentally processed my world very slowly. My body was in a high state of stress, so I spent hours resting and healing while lying horizontal in bed.

The blessing in disguise was that the experience—which unfolded at an extremely slowed-down pace, like time was being suspended—allowed me to engage with life in a much different way than most young people my age. I opened up to my beingness—my soul—because it was all I had with me since I could no longer do much else anymore. I was there stuck with myself. It was like I was doing a long meditation while sitting with myself—or really, laying with myself.

My whole self.

That’s the part you can’t get away from—you at your deepest core constantly flashing signals that you need to become less busy or to clear what’s in your way so you can flourish and enjoy the richness, light, and depth of our palette of life.

For better or for worse, I opened up to God’s plan for me. What else did I have? Getting sicker? Dying? Luckily or divinely, my Hail Mary attempt worked.

My external reality began to fall apart since I could not maintain enough energy to continue to work or participate in social activities. Maintaining a friendship was difficult as most of my friends were in a far different headspace than me. This was tough because I had thrived my whole life off of having fun with friends. But I met a new part of myself, a part that isn’t conditioned to please itself through the entertainment of going places and doing things. Although by nature I am a super active, curious person—traveling, hiking, biking, adventuring to wild places, connecting with friends and meeting new cultures—I put that lifestyle on hiatus. I was forced to by the great teacher in my life at that time—black mold.

In treatment, I was stuck with the unconditioned part of myself: my being. Doing Christina was now consciously connecting with the strong presence of Love from her being. This shift from doing to being initiated a series of healing experiences centered on unconditional love—where anything in me, any thought, any emotion, that was unlike this strong presence would come up to the light of my awareness with an invitation to be purified. I had no idea I was headed for these spontaneous phenomena—or this miracle of purification. I was a girl who got very sick and it ended up turning into a miraculous experience of getting to experience God’s heart, my heart.

My human self’s fears were irrational. For instance, the idea that I was alone and vulnerable weaved small and large in my thoughts throughout the first part of my healing. But the reducing narrative I had subconsciously going on in my mind slowly faded as I was physically detoxing from the mold spores. My consciousness gradually shifted, and I began affirming myself more and more.

This was the mighty interplay of my spirit and my human self. It became easier and easier to be receptive to the unconditional love I already am.

The loving presence of my spirit supported me in purifying not only my thought patterns and stored emotional energy from this lifetime but also from prior lifetimes—I tapped into direct realizing of my eternal being. As a human experience, this process felt natural. I did not need to ask anyone about what was going on or read any books about it to understand it as it was occurring. The process did not feel scary; it just felt true and right. I did not speak to anyone about this. I was fully in it and all-allowing.

My energy field got a deep cleansing too during treatment. A whole eclipse of my ego, a mental detox occurring simultaneously with my doctor’s detox protocol, made me feel like tons of dense energy were being filtered out of my energy system and released through my body. And it was bewildering, exciting, and out of this world. And here all of this was happening right in Dallas, Texas, in my apartment where I would try to muster up enough energy to get up from lying down to make sustenance for myself.

My analogy for being purified of mental and emotional heaviness is that it felt like I was opening a present from a really good place far, far away. I knew that the unwrapping of the gift would take an amount of time that I could not control or predict. And I knew that what felt like awful emotional experiences and overwhelm to my brain right then would soon become—in retrospect—the most awesome thing I’d ever experienced. I was getting closer to arriving into my essence, clearing one calcified layer at a time. It was evident as it was happening that this inner adventure had some sort of tangible gravity to it with the black mold clearing out of me—making it all the more exciting to my human self. I used to soak my feet in a little detox bath of clay, seaweed, and other algae for fifteen to thirty minutes every single day for two years. Sometimes twice a day. The waters became so muddy. I would remember the Chinese proverb, no mud, no blossom. I literally sat with and in my mud wholeheartedly for two years. I felt a kindred appreciation for this deep aspect of our darkness, our beloved mud.

Here was the flower fully devoted to opening unto itself, to reveal its center. Prepared to transcend the dark, to become the dark, by falling in love with all the blessings and wisdom it revealed. My raw holy essence was there with me all along and emanating from my being although I had been unaware of its existence previously. In retrospect, this opening to the core or unfolding of petals or emotional unraveling just occurred of itself because I fully surrendered myself to the higher will of healing what I thought, in the beginning, was just a physical issue.

Oh boy, it sure went beyond that! I had no idea the adventure I was going into. One that I am still in today. In peace and bliss.

It took seven years from start to finish to go through this process of transformation, which primed me to consciously experience my essence beyond time and place. Three years on my own and four years with the assistance of my doctor. Two years of learning how to maintain a solid foundation. Because I was super slowed down from the sickness, it was way easier to hear my intuition and sense the currents of subtle energy around me. As I was processing my new perceptive acuity—like the sensitivity of a frog or coral to its environment combined with eagle like vision—and the pure energy of my being, I was perplexed by my sensing how many people in cities were running around with insanely high stress levels. I had been one of them. It was from traveling in and out of nature and cities all over the world specifically through this time period that I could really clearly see the difference. I explored Berlin, Hong Kong, Prague, Italy, California, India, Brazil, Kenya, New Zealand, Switzerland, Colorado, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Bali. I could see that the people I interacted with in the city were doing so much all the time, feeling so busy internally, and numbing their nervous systems to calm down. It felt like people—their thoughts and feelings—were transparent to me. In their presence, I could immediately see and feel their energetic state and suffering with total clarity because I was transmuting my own.

While I was undiagnosed for three years, I noticed that colors began standing out to me and felt therapeutic. Most often, I experienced relief, hope, and a rebalancing from them. I gravitated towards different ones in different moments, from what foods I was eating for healing my body to suddenly shifting out of a ten-year black and white art palette to creating art with a rich, vibrant one. I was drawn to the green of New Zealand and other colorful countries for healing and revitalizing my spirit. Later, I realized color is light and light to me is Spirit. God had been helping me heal emotionally and mentally from the trauma of my disease all along through all the colors.

During this same period, I came across Aura-Soma, a holistic therapy that uses color and nature to assist others in connecting to their vibrant essence, their truth, and the hidden blessings in their daily life. On a completely different path than my career up to that point, I became enamored with this soul therapy and the world of color pulsing all around me that was helping me heal.

Color is a modality to evolve your thought patterns and emotional experience of your life, or purely as a delightful inspiration to embody your warm, golden essence—your gorgeous knockout expression. As someone born with a sensitive eye, the path of creating art and being a color therapist has taken me on a wild, refreshing adventure to see and experience the world around me aglow. I am so flushed in gratitude that it only feels right to share it.

The light of our spirit is universal loving awareness and a shared divine essence that all of us are born with that gives us the potential to tap into for grace in healing suffering and karma. Everyone has the power to activate our beingness—to embody this energy at the cellular level—and radiate positive frequencies of peace, love, and harmony to all living and nonliving things around us. We can glow our beingness now even if we feel as though we are broken or incomplete. We are already pure. Truth and love is naturally emitted when the being side of a human is engaged. This divinity brings us colorfully alive and assures that we may enjoy peaceful wellbeing in the hyperstimulation of the city just as we enjoy ourselves out in nature. It also ensures us with grace, forgiveness, compassion, and a hell of a lot of blessing.

Introduction

A decorative image

OUR RADIANCE

"There is within you a soul, hungry to glow with the radiance of the awakened

self."¹

—Michael Beckwith

Our radiance is a light ever present. We are peace beyond understanding. That’s it. This essence of our divinity shines brightly all the time. But sometimes there is something blocking that radiance from being seen—something acting like a dirty air conditioner filter. In Thriving on a City Grid, I will suggest that we embody our beingness. By this, I mean removing the filters that prevent our light from being witnessed and experienced.

Okay, so what does this nebulous word being actually mean? Let’s go on an adventure to enjoy this miraculous gift we have all been blessed with.

Our inner being is a microcosm, a gloriously detailed system comprising our purest, innermost truth and essence. Within every truth or belief, there is an even deeper truth spiraling from zero to infinity indefinitely. Imagine Saturn, a planet with rings around it. Each ring can be a new layer of truth moving inward until the innermost fusion is reached and occurs. When our essence is activated, our inner brilliance connects into a network of other activated essences into a galaxy of vibrating sonic light energy, a highly brilliant brain of immense help to our planet. Being in touch with this eye within the eye or heart within the heart transmutes the energy of stress, anger, sadness, or helplessness we are feeling into the energy of surrender, compassion, forgiveness, self-acceptance, and love.

Shifting our perspective on our human experience opens us to our wholeness and to our beauty. It is an affirmation of our innate worth. When we feel complete, we have less of a desire to seek anything external to comfort us, solve our problems, or reduce our pain. This book will be a refreshing lens to see the world through.

First, we will examine what keeps us from embodying our entire beauty and truth in the city. As human beings, our brains are wired with a negativity bias: It is easier for us to remember traumatic memories than positive memories. Remembering the bad times could be a protective survival mechanism generated by our instincts. This short-term positive feedback can become detrimental in the long-term when we do not release the protection from the initial experience. Irrational protection that carries with us into adulthood could be why we develop chronically limiting beliefs like I am not good enough or I am not worthy of unconditional love. And it could be why we struggle to connect into the beauty of the world like when we were kids.

As city dwellers, our limiting beliefs from childhood can be an additional heaping amount of internalized energy our bodies and minds get bogged down with to subconsciously process on top of all the energy we are inadvertently processing in the city. Fortunately, we can cleanse our mental and emotional lenses so that they are not energetically hazy and we can express our organic divine personalities, which are derived from our spiritual essence. Our minds and bodies are built upon a foundational energy grid of peace, love, and harmony that resonates with the positive experiences we have in the world. The brain has the capability to begin creating new associations with the world around us from pain to cherished life experiences and blessings. Wisdom is in the eye of the beholder. This book will be a way to wash the windows of our perception clean into vision.

Living in a city, it is essential to recognize we have visionary power: We can choose what we identify with and connect to—and it can be positive stuff. What we highlight in our world with our attention either fosters a lit-up, flourishing consciousness or an overwhelmed, dull experience of life. I have experienced both. In a city, we can easily get swept away by a chaotic, fast-paced, sensory overload of people, cars, and information.

The divine, untainted, pure energy of existence that is eternally occurring and ever-present within us also extends in every direction around us throughout the world into the cosmos of eternity. But if we’re not connecting into it consciously, then it remains silent and sleeping until we wake it up. Then it feels like having a heart with eyes that have been closed and now suddenly are open. We see our world through the heart’s eyes—with double sacred vision. The heart’s vision coexists with the mind’s eye (more on this later).

The feeling of oneness is a simultaneous experience of our human-beingness and our resonance with the universal light. It is the remembrance of the interconnected nature of the collective consciousness.

Each of us is an unconscious channel for the effortless osmosis of this loving energy. Radiating out of us, this energy interconnects us with everything. We are one with all things, everything, in existence.

Enlivening Our Being in the City

Okay, so we all agree humans are hardwired to connect as social creatures and experience our oneness with nature. Two-thirds of us will be city dwellers by 2050. It feels like the more cities grow, the more anxiety, tiredness, and overwhelm increase as people spiral inward into fear from increasing amounts of stress. And while you and I may be older by then (thirty years from the time of writing) or not live to see this shift, we will witness and be a part of the sacred developmental shift of the supercity as it is emerging. A profound propensity exists in seeing that our cities support our natural beingness and the natural beingness of our children for the overall health, evolution, and wellbeing of humanity and this planet earth.

Something has to change at a deeper level. And cities are only continuing to evolve. In today’s cities, going within or being in touch with our naturally calm and cheerful energy in the little moments of the day often feels challenging to experience. Because we are going within and forgetting to look outward into our world in all the magic, awe, and wonder that a child with clear eyes sees. I am proposing that we can see this way too on a regular basis in our normal week. In fact, this lens is an essential part of feeling truly alive.

Our beingness often seems faraway, which is why many people have yet to even experience their essential energy. This essential nature of who we are communicates and bridges harmony with the world around us. Many of us may receive tiny tastes of our potential glory in quiet reflective moments or when we’re outdoors in nature. But we often don’t enjoy a five-course meal of it throughout the day in the city. Part of this surface-level awareness could exist because we could think we aren’t worthy at times to receive glory in the entire scope of the meal. But part of the reason could be because of barriers to entry, like lacking the proper utensils to infuse our vision and create connection. Nature activates this divine vertical channel of existence for us abundantly when we are in the