LIFE FORCE
The breath of life
You may not give much thought to life force, but life force is everywhere and everything. Life force is what makes things come alive. It gives life to all that is living. It is the breath you breathe, the movement you do, and the enabler of all that you experience. Without life force there would just be mechanistic mechanisms without vitality. Machines if you will, that have no inherent intelligent, awareness or capacity to be present with life. While many human minds on this planet think in mechanistic ways, what enables them to think in such ways is the fact that they are vital and alive. Infused with life force itself. For without life force the mind would not be able to formulate a thought. Life force gives life its capacity to do everything it does.
Life force is so obvious in its all pervasiveness, yet it is hidden in plain sight for most. While you are likely aware that you breathe, move and are alive or awake to some degree inside of your experience, you may not really get the profundity of life force. That is until perhaps you stop feeling so alive and awake. Contrast is a great teacher as it illuminates what is often masked in the routine of our day to day existence. Often much of our frustration in life is our seeming disconnect from this vitality that is the very essence of what we are. We hunger to feel more energized and alive and can’t quite seem to figure out how to. There isn’t a shortage of life force, but sometimes it feels that way. Like there isn’t enough energy and vitality for us. Why is this? It’s because rather than allowing life force to move, we bind it. All patterns, forms and structures are in a sense bound life force. Energy that has been organized in a certain way to allow things to move the way they do. How you experience life force is in direct relationship with the structures and forms that you’ve created in your body-mind.
Now if you are like most people you may not be aware of what structures you’ve created and/or how you’ve created them inside of your body-mind. In short this is what the whole idea of “waking up” is inside of spiritual circles. It’s the discovery of how you’ve created your reality and what the forms and structures are that determine how life force moves (or doesn’t move) as and through your experience. Forms can be physical in nature, like for example your body, and they can also be subtle in nature, for example like your thoughts and emotions. Again all of these forms are bound energy that create configurations for life force to express itself through.
TENSION IS BOUND LIFE FORCE
Too much or not enough
There isn’t anything else to make life out of except for life force. Without life force there’s no life. While some might take the position that nothing is inherently alive, by doing so they give themselves the experience of non-aliveness. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t alive, but rather only that with their aliveness they are creating an experience of non-aliveness. Tricky I know, but not really because we do this all of the time without being conscious of what we are doing. Whenever we feel disconnected, without vitality or energy, we are essentially to some degree doing this, but we aren’t really aware that we have a choice. Instead it just feels like this is “reality”. That low energy, lack of vitality, or disconnection is just what is and all that can be.
One of things I frequently say is that awareness is key. What we are aware of we can shift. What we are not aware of we can’t. This is why self-inquiry and investigation is vital, pun intended. While we might be able to make a temporary shift in a pattern or way of being just by being near someone who has a different perspective then us, we won’t sustain it if we aren’t aware of our own selves and what we are creating in our body-mind. Tension, as in tension in our body-mind, is a pattern of organized energy, and it’s alive. It is a pattern that is made out of life force, because again there isn’t anything else to make anything out of. Tension patterns allow for specific expressions and movements, and they also simultaneously don’t allow for certain expressions or movements. Tension is not negative, rather we simply want to be clear in the creation of the patterns of tension that we are creating. Absence of, or too little tone or tension means that our form is floppy or weak. We may not be able to hold ourselves up or shift how we hold because we lack awareness in a certain part of our body-mind. Excessive tone or tension means there is tightness and constriction, which creates limitations in how energy, vitality and life force moves.
When excessive tension unwinds, the life force that kept that pattern in place gets liberated. This means we feel release and the return of vitality to ourselves. The more tense we are, the more energy we have to liberate. When we liberate energy we feel free. When we have absence of tone or tension in an area of our body-mind, it means that we need to bring more awareness to that aspect of ourselves in order to develop it. You can think of it like growing up. As we grow developmentally from infants to adolescents we gain greater control and capacity to use of our bodies. However as we take things on that are not ours to take on, we create excess tension which is then experienced as limitation.
The name of the game is that we want to use life force to create patterns that allow us to feel fully expressed, alive and connected to the life force that we are. Life force is everything and everywhere. There is NO shortage of it. It is only our lack of awareness or excessive binding of it that creates the experience of shortage. Through developing practices of self-awareness, and unbinding what we’ve bound, we can come into full participation with life force and experience the magic and vitality of ourselves.
Dr. Amanda Love, Heart Opening – Subtle Energetic – Network Spinal Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado
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