alternative healthcare

END OF CONTROL

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END OF CONTROL 

Finding freedom through acceptance

The seeds of control and manipulation run deep inside of us.  They are often subtle, elusive and out of our own sight, yet this does not make them any less present.  The attempts we make to control ourselves, control others, control circumstances, control emotions, control thoughts and control sensations is endless.  The way we feel when we aren’t in control or we don’t know what is going to happen next is the paradox of terrified freedom.  Oh how we hunger to feel free and yet the terror of freedom with its constant present moment to moment unfolding and no thing being certain in the future, keeps us locked inside of our self-made prison.  

To state the blatantly obvious, control runs contrary to freedom.  Anything we attempt to control physically, or even just inside of our minds, impinges on the freedom of that which we are attempting to manipulate.  Now if the thing/person that we are attempting to control already knows its inner state of freedom than our attempts will be fruitless, as that which knows it’s already free cannot be controlled, coerced or led to believe other.  Its free will is known and what’s known cannot be unknown.  However if that which we attempt to control is not aware of its free will then it is easily manipulated.  This is why its easier to manipulate a piece of wood, which does not yet know its free will, then say a human being that is more aware of itself and that it has some level of free will. I am obviously speaking from the perspective that everything is alive and conscious in the universe and all is on a path of waking up more and more to its fully conscious and free state.  

I want to bring into the mix here the topic of structures and organizational frameworks that create personal and societal rules of engagement.  Many people may feel that structures or organizational frameworks of any kind impinge on their freedom.  This may show up as simply as having resistance to creating a daily schedule for yourself, or being in a committed relationship with one other person, or even having a single job that you do.  These containers may, on the surface, appear to impinge on your freedom.  The same can be said about larger systems and structures that make up our shared collective experience.  The way that I see it is that structures inherent in and of themselves do not limit freedom.  In fact structures are needed to support freedom and create organization within the creative process.  However when structures are infused with control, rigidity and manipulation, and do not support the awakening to free will, then they will feel limiting rather than freedom enhancing.  The key is the recognition of the consciousness of one’s self inside of or in relationship to the structure.  Does the consciousness know its power and feel that its in choice and can decide for itself at any time, or does it not know its power and therefore feels victimized by the container that is either self-made or collective made.  Through the recognition and knowing that you are always in charge you can come to appreciate and even love the support of structures.  They are simply learning tools that help bring creative impulses into organized beauty.   

NON-SELECTIVE ACCEPTANCE 

Freeing all experience

Now that we have those basics covered let’s come back to the seeds of control inside of your own mind.  There are really two basic paths that you can take in any moment.  One is to control self/other/experience and the other is to accept self/other/experience.  Depending on what you choose you will get a very different experience of life.  I invite you to try to not think of it in terms of positive and negative, but instead of cultivating what it is that you truly desire.  Feel into control and feel into acceptance.  Decide which feels better to you.  There is not a right/wrong here, but only that which you truly desire.  It is different for each person and there is learning in both choices.  I would say for the vast majority of people, particularly if you’ve found and are reading this article, acceptance feels better to you.  From my current level of understanding, at the higher levels of awareness all control must move into acceptance, so in some ways it may be easier to choose acceptance now rather than postponing it for later.  However I want to emphasize it is each beings choice to either control or accept self and other.  

I want to make another side note here that the less empowered you are, meaning the less you know yourself, the more likely you are to desire to be controlled as it provides a sense of external safety.  You are also more likely to go along with other people’s rules, ideas and do as we are told as you don’t really recognize yourself yet.  This makes it very easy for those beings who have chosen the path of control to manipulate you.  This is different than being controlling yourself.  It is instead a disownment of your power, an unconscious giving away of it where you haven’t even moved to the point of conscious choice yet.  When you are inside of this perspective there is just life happening as an “independent from self phenomena,” and it feels like you and the world are separate.  Many people that have a innate tendency towards the path of acceptance are still asleep in their consciousness, so their choice for acceptance is not yet actively engaged.  Due to this they passively submit, which is a very different energy than active acceptance, even though on the surface they may look similar.  The true power of active acceptance does not arrive until you wake up and choose it.  This how you come to learn that you can move mountains through acceptance, and that force, control, and manipulation are not needed to create powerful change.  

We are at a point in our evolution where its vitally important to be aware that we have choice and to make it consciously.  Again many beings that are more acceptance oriented are not aware of the level of control and manipulation that they are creating on a day to day basis inside their life and psyche.  Its time to wake up and see yourself.  Illuminating yourself is what gives you the capacity to consciously choose.  Notice any tendencies you have to cling to outcome, to try to make yourself or things/people different than they are, to manipulate others through kindness or doing certain things so that you feel safe, ok and accepted by them.  Also notice where you to want people to be a certain way, perhaps think like you, behave like you and where you think you are right and they are wrong.  Notice where you want to get something from someone or from a situation and the tactics you use to get that thing.  Getting something from any situation or person can be as simple as wanting a person to feel differently than they do so that you feel better about how they feel, or trying to get attention or love so you feel better about yourself.  Most people are doing this stuff all day long and then wonder why they are sick, exhausted and in pain.  They are because all day long they are engaging in the mostly unconscious patterns of manipulation and control which is incoherent with their true nature of acceptance.  

This is not selective acceptance.  To choose the path of acceptance is to accept all.  This means you will be required to accept things that you think are wrong, that you despise, that every ounce of your being resists.  All I can say is that that is the path of acceptance as I’ve come to know it.  It is also the path to total freedom of all and the lived energetic aliveness of love.  When you accept that which you previously held in non-acceptance you come into alignment with yourself and with the universe.  Your power is infinite and your touch is magic.  You recognize yourself more fully and come to know that nothing is separate from you.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

SOUL’S JOURNEY

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SOUL’S JOURNEY

Outside the box

We are all on a soul’s journey.  Current incarnational destination, Planet Earth.  Your journey did not start when you were born into this body, nor will it end when you leave this body.  While you are in this body you learn to call yourself human and think of yourself as this body, but you are not.  This human experience is simply one stop along a infinite spiraling journey that your soul is embarking on to learn, teach, expand and make manifest its creative potential.  

Your life is not what you think it’s about.  Most people are absorbed in the content of the day to day life of what it means to be and think yourself as human.  Things like how to survive, pay bills, build family and relationships, connect with people, have good health, manifest dreams and desires, have fun and hopefully create cool stuff are the typical human scripts.  This lens of human focus is narrow and rarely takes into account anything beyond the surface appearance of what is occurring.  Well all of these aspects of the human experience provide learning, adventure, and add value to your soul’s journey, they often occur out of connection with the knowingness of your actual self.  There is nothing wrong or bad about this, its simply an incomplete knowingness or lack of awareness as what is really going on beyond the senses and the logical mind.  Due to this we think our life is about all the stuff and about our individual human selves when really it is about the recognition of our true nature as the source or creator of all the experiences.  Said another way life is not about the experiences, but instead about the recognition of the experiencer.  

The way I see it is that there is a master architect that organizes all of this experience that we call being human including the opportunities we have or don’t have.  We are largely unaware of this architect.  Sometimes we notice synchronicity or what we might call magic and that gives us a glimpse of the architect, but yet it remains a mystery as to what is really going on here as experiences continue to endlessly come our way.  Just as a person locked inside a room for their entire life would not know that anything outside of that room existed, being human is similar.  As humans we are unaware of the box that we are living inside of.  We don’t know that there is a box nor that there is something outside of that box, until we find the door and open it.   

BECOMING ENSPIRITED 

Return of life

The master architect is the soul.  You can think of your soul as less personal than you probably tend to do.  Your soul is more like a consciousness or a state of knowing rather than a being with some other form somewhere in a far away distance galaxy or dimension.  In fact your soul is here now informing your mind and body and organizing your life, whether you are aware of it or not.  It is the intelligence that knows.  It is the knower.  It is the actual you rather than the person human you that you think you are.  There is nowhere that your soul is not.

Part of having the human experience is about being unaware of the architect.  Even though to some aspect of consciousness the architect is blatantly obvious, to human consciousness it is not.  Yet we are now moving into a time of evolving beyond human.  Human is simply one stage of consciousness, one platform of learning, of which there are infinite platforms.  Humanness is not the be all end all.  It is not the top of the hierarchy.  Our consciousness and thus perceptibility is expanding to see what else is here that we have not been able to see before.  

Waking up means to become aware of the next level of consciousness that comes after human.  Rather than being asleep to yourself you start to recognize yourself.  Rather than experience being the thing that takes up the entire screen of your focus and attention, the shift is made to the experiencer, to the soul.  The focus is turned inward and then outward rather than simply outwardly focused.  This is the recognition of the soul’s journey.  Through this recognition you become enspirited, meaning you remember that you are spirit and not a body and that you have never been a body.  Life returns to you.  Memory returns.  You are no longer lost to yourself.  The aliveness of everything, even of the densest matter, is easily recognized.  What we call form, appearance or experience is simply vibrational packets of consciousness that organize themselves according to the information contained within.  This all becomes common sense, common knowledge, and common experience.  

The cracking open and breaking down of the perpetual mental fixations on thoughts (aka things) takes us out of solidity and into fluidity.  Through fluidity we can merge and go beyond the rules and structures that keep us locked inside of the human mind.  As we destabilize our sense of the self as merely human the world follows suit and destabilizes right with our awareness even if it looks the same to others within it.  As they recognize themselves the appearance of the world will change for them as well.  As we each individually and collectively recognize ourselves enspirited, as more than human and not as experience, but as the creator of experience the world re-stabilizes into something else entirely. 

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

FEAR

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FEAR 

Perception of powerlessness

What is fear?  Fear is the thought that something bad might happen or the perception/belief that something bad is happening in this moment.  Fear often comes with a cascade of emotions and bodily sensations such as panic, powerlessness, unsteadiness, tension, pain or uneasiness.  Fear is almost always found right along side of uncertainty, where the uncertainty is undesirable by the perceiver.  The hallmark of fear is a sense of unavoidable, uncontrollable doom of which you can do nothing about.  A sense of powerlessness to circumstance floods your mind.  The typical reactions to this powerlessness are to brace yourself for potential impact, become apathetically detached or fight it all costs.  

You have all heard the saying that “what we fear controls us” and it’s true.  We give our free will or our power to whatever it is we fear.  It then decides for us rather than us being the decider.  We forfeit our chooser-ship-ness and allow ourselves to be chosen for by the thing out there or over there that we deem as frightening or unwanted.  We do this blindly.  In a way you could call it an act of faith.  Faith in our conviction of powerlessness in which our blind act of handing over our power reinforces.  

Why do we so blindly and obediently give away our power?  Partly because we don’t actually know that we have it.  Your free will is your power.  They are synonymous.  Most do not know or are unfamiliar with their own power, meaning they don’t realize themselves as having free will.  There are no classes in our early educational system that talk about that fact that you are free being, that you have free will or that focus on simply allowing you to be yourself.  Rarely are your natural impulses allowed to be expressed, but instead the opposite is the case.  We are told what to do, where to go, when to be there and how to conform.  Very little if any attention gets placed on the inherent nature of our sovereign, free self.  No wonder we are such a lost and confused society.  We don’t realize our free will because it has become so entangled with the culturally accepted norms of our society.  Often to be in your power, or choosing for yourself rather than based on what others may view as right, gives the appearance of being set apart from them.  There are certain others that may want nothing to do with you if you decide for yourself and it is contrary to how they view.  You may view some of those others as being very important to you.  They may provide for you physically or emotionally, and since our most basic need is connection we will do whatever it takes to not lose connection with others less we feel isolated, alone or unsupported.  This is how we innocently give away the power we didn’t even know we had.   

FEAR’S REMEDY

Knowing your inherent freeness 

Yes you are already free.  In this moment you have all the freedom and free you will ever have, no matter what the circumstances are that are currently showing up on your screen of life.  Your free will has always been intact.  The fact that this has probably not felt like the experience you always have is only simply because you have not realized this basic truth, that you are already free.  You still believe part of you to not be free yet, which means you don’t experience seamless freedom.  You believe you need this thing or that thing, this person or that person, this situation or that situation, and so you manipulate yourself (which includes conforming, compressing or not being yourself) in order to try to get what you think you need or want.  You develop strategy, sometimes very efficient and effective strategy, but there is no trust, only reliance on strategy.  This means you can never truly relax or rest, hence the tension, unease, pain and discomfort of fear prevail in your experience.  

People often view freedom as external, meaning being able to do the things they want to do, live where they want to live, be in relationship with who they want, have their body function in a particular way, etc.  Inner freedom has nothing to do with this idea of external freedom or being able to do what you want or have the things you want.  See if we view freedom as an external phenomenon than all the ducks always have to be lining up in the right rows, and if one one duck falls out of alignment then the system crashes and we are not free again.  This is not true freedom.  Even though many people think that they want freedom, and that they will be free when their circumstances of life line up with their picture of what they think they want, most people don’t actually want inner freedom.  Instead they want the external picture of what they think freedom is. I am not suggesting that you should not have preferences or desires and not move towards them.  I personally believe you should follow those impulses.  Instead I am simply pointing to the fact that freedom does not live inside of them.  Freedom lives inside of you.  How can you be in the worst, most undesirable situation and still recognize that you are free.  That’s true inner freedom.  What would that take?  What would it take to simply be yourself?  It takes only one ingredient.  That ingredient is trust.  Trust in yourself.

I’ve noticed an interesting dynamic over the years.  Despite the fact that many people think that they want to be free, sovereign and realized in their power, in actuality most people really don’t.  They want someone to tell them what to do because they feel so lost and uncertain inside.  They want someone else to direct the ship, to support them, to take care of them, to provide certainty for them so that they don’t have to decide for themselves. They want an authority figure so they can just rest already because they are so tired of being scared and lost.   So much so that they are willing to give their free will up and over for it.   What lays underneath it all is that ultimately people don’t want to be wrong, alone, unloved or unsupported.  These are our greatest fears, and because we are unwilling to face their potential and see through them, we live in the dark and lack trust.  While in the dark we grip to anything that we can, anything that seems to maybe know, because we feel we do not.  Self-doubt is the story we hold dear and remain steadfastly devoted to our conviction in our powerlessness.  To wake up from this all, to stop blindly giving over your free will, you must directly plunge into what you fear most so that you can experiential develop the trust that comes through doing so.  This is not something that will just automatically occur.  You must take an active role in this process to wake up to the truth that there is nothing to fear.  That fear is only a perception, a story and that you can find your way through it to the other side.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

PEACE & HARMONY

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PEACE & HARMONY 

Our inner & outer worlds

Peace and harmony, the condition that so many people say that they desire.  To be in a state of eternal peace, calm, balance and harmony within one’s self and with their seemingly external environment is the final destination so to speak for many.  People may experience inner peace, but their outer world may look chaotic and vis versa, they may see outer peace in their environment yet their inner world is turbulent.  How do these inner and outer worlds merge and are they even supposed too?

By in large we are a “collective of individuals” who are all at some level attempting to get their own needs and wants met, along with making a contribution to the collective in some way, i.e. making the world a better place through our presence and actions.  Within these motivations and intentions we may feel like there is not enough of something (meaning our needs might not be met) so we run around in survival mode inside of our minds strategizing how we can make it all work so that we can survive.  This perspective of scarcity is clearly not in congruence with inner peace.  When we are stuck inside this perspective of scarcity, even if we have a million dollars in the bank and can logically see that this is plenty of money, we will continue to feel fear that we might not have enough.  Here the disturbance lives inside of our own mind and we do not feel rested, calm or at peace even though the external world is abundant.  These same disturbances can live in our outer world too.  There may be something that appears to be a threat in our outer world, perhaps disrupting the environment and lives of others, while simultaneously we feel at complete peace and calm inside.  Our inner state is unperturbed and not matching that of the outer world.  

There is more often than not a congruence between our inner and outer worlds.  The reason for this being that most individuals take their cue from their environment and/or project their inner state onto external circumstances.  So if something appears to be bad in the outer world people will match that in their inner world and thus feel bad inside.  The opposite goes as well, if someone wakes up in the morning and feels amazing, energized and fully vibrant then they will tend to project that onto their outer environment despite what might actually be appearing.  This is how two people can look at the same thing and see it completely differently.  This is also why it sometimes appears that people live in different worlds from each other, because in some ways they actually are living in different realities.  

I personally believe that we are at a time in our evolution where this disparity will become increasingly and increasingly more evident.  Where based on people’s chosen perspectives they will create outer worlds together that match their inner frequencies.  It may even be that at some point that beings of slightly different frequencies may not be able to physically perceive each other anymore as the different frequencies band together creating more coherence within themselves as a collective of like frequency.  Like waves riding on top of or parallel to each other with less and less mixed frequencies and more distinctly coherent and unified frequencies coming together.  Literal parallel realities which have none or minimal interaction with each other as they offer completely different experiences.  Again speaking from my personal perspective I believe this is similar to what happens in what we have come to call the death process.  There is a different frequency in which the spirit of the body transitions into, which is why we can no longer see them, however they are very much still in existence just imperceptible to us from our current frequency.  Death simply being a transition into the new.  Some beings may pick another human body and reincarnate into a similar type of experience and others may have learned everything they came to learn/express and move into another frequency experience.  Either way I see us on Earth, while embodied, making this transition collectively, some will be repeating this cycle and staying at the current frequency to learn/express more at this vibratory level, while others are ready for the next vibratory level of beingness.   

COLLECTIVE TENDENCY TOWARDS DISHARMONY 

Coming into right relationship with what is

Our current frequency or collective has a tendency towards disharmony.  The prime reason for this being that we still perceive ourselves to be separate from our environment and from other people.  This sets up the conditions of needing to live for a “me”, take care of a “me” and support a “me”.  As long as the perspective of being an individual is primary we will also need to protect ourselves from perceived others including our perceived outer environment.  This will bread more war, both outer and inner, as we will always have to defend ourselves from the evil thing, which in truth is just an aspect of ourselves, but we cannot perceive this if we continue to insist on the perspective of separation.  So we will fight, protect, avoid and try to get rid of or stop certain things inside of the appearance because we fear the end of our personal, egocentric existence.  In truth your small limited person centric consciousness cannot stop life from occurring.  You can definitely attempt to hide your portion of the One that you are from life, avoid life, avoid certain people or experiences, however in the end its all included and at some point on your soul’s journey you will, you must, come face to face with everything you attempt to push away.  This is how you will come to know your unity, your oneness will all.  From the smallest microbe to the largest galaxy, you are one with it all.  

Due to the fact that we do not intimately and undoubtedly know ourselves as One we do not know harmony.  Harmony is an impossibility from the perception of separation.  You see harmony is health.  Health of our human body, health of our planet as the larger body, and even health of our universe as the One body.  Most of us don’t think in scales this big, but instead only see ourselves as human(s) and maybe our planet as being important.  However every action you take either physically or in consciousness has an impact on the entire universe.  

In our healthcare system we call harmony homeostasis, however we only look at it from a physiologically perspective.  If all of the chemical reports reveal the right ratios and numbers we think that is health.  Never mind the investigation of where harmony comes from in the first place.  To be in harmony is to be in right relationship with.  This means to see all as extension of you.  In this way you can come into right relationship with your cells, bacteria, viruses, cancers, and the myriad of other “afflictions” that can occur to this physical vehicle.  Things are only afflictions if you are not in harmony.  People fear because they do not see that they are the operator of this vehicle, that they can come into harmony with themselves and with everything else and thus see the effects of that that harmony play out through this human vehicle.  Instead they feel the need to fight the foreign invader and fail to see how they can come into harmony with what is and produce health.  When will we believe more in the power of peace and harmony than we do in the power of destruction, alienation, fighting and war?  

All that is required is a change in belief.  To see harmony as the power that it is.  To believe in its power.  To stop protecting ourselves from ourselves.  To see ourselves in and as all.  To see how coming into right relationship with what is is more powerful than resistance and fighting what is.  To do so, to choose so, creates an entirely different outer world.  This may seem too simple for some to believe.  They want it to be harder, more complex, but really what they want is to hold onto their belief that destruction and war is what heals and creates harmony.  They also want to continue to hold onto the belief that they are separate from their own body, from other humans, from plants, animals, insects, trees, dirt, bacteria, other worldly beings, other planets and the universe.  They prefer the story line that they are alone in the universe and that life is solely up to them.  

Life is not solely up to you and simultaneously you matter beyond infinity.  Come to understand that you are part of one much larger beingness of which you have never been separate, you’ve only believed your separateness.  Its just a belief, one that can be changed by you, through you.  In opening your own mind to the possibility that separation is simply an illusion, just a veil or mask through which you’ve been looking through, you will come to see that you could never be separate from anything ever.  What is possible is that you are connected in and as the source of all.  Human consciousness on this planet is like a cancer in the universe believing itself to be separate from the whole of the universe.  The universe is benevolent and is organized towards increasingly higher and higher orders of coherence, i.e. wholeness.  It is time for the cancer of our consciousness to heal, to come into its knowingness of itself and reunite with its universal family remembering the power of peace and harmony.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

UN-CONDITION THE SPACE OF YOU

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UN-CONDITION THE SPACE OF YOU

Birthplace of programs, patterns & conditions 

Often in spiritual circles we talk about deprograming or de-conditioning ourselves from the programs and conditions we’ve learned, which are either untrue or don’t serve us any longer.  Much of our personal work and development is focused on dismantling these patterns that create inauthentic ways of being, so that ultimately we can simply be ourselves just as we are with nothing added or subtracted.  In fact much, if not all of our suffering, stems from disconnection from ourselves (i.e. not knowing ourselves) and then attempting to be someone or something out of that sense of disconnected emptiness.  This creates the entire gamut of patterns, programs, strategies and conditions that come along with attempting to be someone or something other than what we nakedly and innately are.  

What are these programs, patterns and conditions really made up of?  All patterns are simply made up out of thought.  Those thoughts inform, direct and mold the forms and behaviors that you see and experience.  The root of thoughts are beliefs, the root of belief is perspective, and the root of perspective is simply perception or the ability to perceive.  So the fact that you can perceive (i.e. that you are aware) creates a perspective or lens from which beliefs, thoughts and forms are birthed or brought into creation.  Each level back is less conditioned or patterned.  Forms are the most conditioned or patterned, thoughts a little less so, beliefs even less so, perspectives less so than beliefs, and pure perception/awareness is the least conditioned.  This is why as people become more steeped in pure awareness (which is the most refined or primordial essence or substance if you want to call it that) the more transparent they become.  Transparent in actual form, less fixated in thought, and less biased and strongly held in their beliefs.  This is the space of what all of the work of de-conditioning or deprogramming brings us all directly into contact with and ultimately shifts our sense of identity.  

See when we are fixated on the body and the thoughts in our head we think ourselves to be a separate human being, that becomes our identity.  Be clear that separate human being is just a thought.  When we start to recognize the beliefs that create the thoughts and forms, we see ourselves as less and less separate as we begin to be able to change our thoughts and see the direct impact of that change on our physical world.  This makes us feel less separate from and more a part of or interconnected, so our identity is more like a web of beings rather than just a separate individual being.  When the beliefs become clearer and clearer and lighter and lighter we open into the recognition of perspective, which is like the lens through which light is focalized.  Here our identity is that of what I would call the soul or higher self.  We realized our selves beyond a linear timeline seeing our entire trajectory or journey forward, backward and now.  Until finally even the lens is transcended and all that remains is pure light or pure awareness, which is non-localized, spacious, all encompassing and all pervasive.  Here identify is just one, one beingness, which is what I call the God state.   

BEING UNCONDITIONAL SPACE

Giving the gift that you are

Now that we are clear on how conditions arrive in the first place we can easily see that as we track our way back to the source of it all we arrive in that unconditional, non-localized, all pervasive space of ourselves.  This is the purest state of being possible and it is your true self; it is what and who you are.  (Side note: There is a traversing beyond beingness itself which is to remove yourself completely from creation. It is quite advanced and another transition all together which I will not address in this article.)

When you know yourself as God, or as pure awareness, the space of you is unconditioned.  This means that anything and everything is possible as no conditions are set and no programmed responses have been decided or determined.  It also means that anything that interacts with this unconditional space has an opportunity to see, remember and know itself clearly.  For example say that there is a group of 5 sitting in a room and one of those in the group has recognition of the unconditional space that they are and they’re completely rested in that knowingness.  Through the restedness they have in themselves, in what they are, they naturally and effortlessly emit that and it becomes the container of the group or room.  What will then organically occur is that any beings that are present in that group who are more transparent in their form, thoughts, beliefs and perspective will naturally and effortlessly meet that awareness.  To whatever degree one is transparent in self will be the degree to which they can meet that awareness.  Of course that awareness does not stop at the container of the four walls and therefore has opportunity to be picked up by any and all open enough to become coherent with it.

When no conditions are set and no programmed responses have been decided or determined God just simply is and moves.  This is where we recognize that self-organizing principle of life that does itself by itself.  Our heart flies open and moves towards God, merging into that source of what it is through the recognition of itself.  If we are still fused with our thoughts including our worries, concerns, plans for our future and such, than we may try to define it, put it in a box, label it, force it somehow, or figure it out, but when we are beyond the box of our thoughts we simply allow it and recognize it as God and eventually as ourselves.  

To un-condition yourself, which is simply to remember yourself, is the biggest gift and really the only gift any of us have to give.  The giving being inherent and naturally occurring, you couldn’t stop it even if you tried.  Your thoughts, actions, behaviors, and movements are all seamlessly in God as God.  Nothing being out of flow or coherence.  Not acting as the person you, but from the knowingness of what is prior to it all.  

It all boils down to what you desire and where you place your focus.  Do you desire to play in the world of forms, manipulating and achieving, moving from here to there, feeling like you have purpose in a particular way and hoping to find peace and happiness once everything settles into place?  If so you will not have the penetrative power that you need to break through the layers of your own mind.  Do you desire to know yourself, know the truth and know God and is that your one and only sole desire that you seek at the expense of all else realizing there will never be an external settling into place or peace and happiness found in anything you do, achieve or accomplish?  If so you will have the fuel that you need to realize yourself and so it will be.  You then become the gift that you’ve been all along and your radiance touches all.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis and Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

STABILITY IN THE MYSTERY

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STABILITY IN THE MYSTERY

End your avoidance of the unknown

Let’s face it, life is one big fat mystery.  No matter how much we create meaning, define, categorize, label, plan, coordinate and directionalize our lives, at the core none of us have any real clue as to what this thing called life really is or what is going to happen next.  We spend an awful, and I mean awful, amount of energy attempting to navigate, predict and strategize the next move and the next move, juggling the pieces and the parts, so that nothing falls between the cracks or goes contrary to the plan.  Mind you those cracks and plan interferences are the one and only place that we can actually get a taste of the true mysterious nature of life rather than this self-architected, controlled chaos that we’ve attempted to create and which we call life.  The cracks, which we avoid like the plague, are our only real hope of seeing through this illusionary story of the life that we’ve created and deluded ourselves into believing as the one real, true reality.

Why do we avoid the cracks and the plan interferences?  There are a couple reasons.  The first being that we have an assumption that we are right or that the way we see the world is right, so when something occurs that doesn’t seem to fit with what we think should be then we view it as wrong and create a splice or separation in our perspective.  This divide comes with the sense that we need to fix the situation somehow, to right it so that it is no longer wrong.  Life then becomes a constant play of attempting to fix, solve, or correct things so that they align with our “right” perspective.  If things don’t align with our right perspective we suffer, if they do align we feel temporary goodness while silently waiting for the next shoe to drop, or the next problem we need to solve.  Another way to say this is that we avoid the cracks because we have certain internal expectations or stories about life, about our life specifically, what it should look like, feel like, all the things that need to happen or not happen, etc.  If something comes along that interferes with the ideas that we have about our life we often dislike it because we view it as something that shouldn’t be, as a deterrent.  We fail to see that what is happening should be happening just as it’s happening and we attempt to “get our lives back on track” without seeing that our life could never truly be off track.  We avoid the mystery of the thing we view as the “deterrent” brings, because we feel like we don’t know inside the mystery and we fight to get back to the known, which is this proverbial track we think we should be on.  

Clearly this demonstrates how much our minds like to be in the know.  They like to feel like they have a plan, that they know what is going on and where they are going.  They also like to know that certain things will be guaranteed and that there will be some sense of certainty, safety and security in whatever outcome they desire.  The mind is very uncomfortable when it senses that it doesn’t know, doesn’t have a plan or things aren’t guaranteed.  It might feel stupid, scared, confused, lost, limited, disappointed, unsafe, unstable, wrong, ashamed, etc. when it perceives that it doesn’t know what’s going on or where it is going.  This is yet another reason that we avoid the cracks and plan interferences.  When our sense of safety, security, purpose, value, worth and validation is dependent on circumstances (i.e. plans and life occurrences happening or turning out a certain way) then we manipulate, control, effort and at all costs try to make life be what we think it should be.   

ENDING THE STORY OF YOU 

Reunification in God

So really what’s so bad about the mystery?  Well as I’ve described above, from the mind”s perspective the mystery can be completely terrifying.  It is the end of our perceived sense of rightness along with death of the perspective of wrongness, which most of us want desperately to hold on to even though it feels soooo bad.  Feeling safe, secure, stable and comfortable in the world of objects being in a certain place or configuration dissolves.  Instead one must learn to be in a constant state of faith, never ending faith, in which true safety and stability is found.  Living in the mystery can also be the end of feeling that you are on your path or purpose, which is connected to one’s worth and value as a person.  I will make a side note here that a person first does need to develop a sense of individual purpose and worth, which is often achieved through their capacity to make things happen in the physical manifest world in a particular way.  This is a stage of ego/self development and an important one.  However what I am pointing to here in this article is the next stage where that illusionary sense of worth, that has been derived based on one’s capacity to make things happen, is ready to be seen through and transcended so that true inherent worth and value can be known.

Coming face to face with the mystery and deciding to stay there without trying to make something permanent takes your willingness to end your story about life.  Most people are not ready to end their story.  The story, the thoughts, the concepts, and the ideas is where most humans hang out.  Its fantastical, with ups and down, highs and lows, drama and boredom, creation and destruction, and although it seems very real from the mind’s perspective, it’s ultimately unreal and simply all made up in your head.  The mind has a great capacity to make things appear very real, very physical, very solid, and it is only through finding your way through your mind by falling into the cracks and going with the plan interferences that the seeming realness can reveal its un-realness to you.   

The beauty of the mystery is that it is the birthplace of infinite energy and infinite possibilities.  It is prior to form or manifestation.  As you trek forward in your development and awareness of self, in a way you are actually trekking back, back to the beginning, to the more primordial state of being.  At some point you realize that there is no forward or back but rather that everything is occurring right now.  This is presence.  This is having arrived.  Arriving is not stagnant or stationary but it is stable.  Stable not in the made up world of appearances and ideas, but in its knowing of it’s self.  The more allowing you are of the mystery the more stable you are in your true self.  To not have to know anything in particular, but instead to move into knowingness itself, which ironically is the mystery, brings the freedom of being beyond a separate person living for its survival, protection, importance and worth.

This is the beginning of life not being about you, not being about your plan, your goals, your wants, your desires, your dreams, your problems, your needs, your perceived purpose, your perspectives or your anything.  This ending of your personal life opens you into the space of God, of infinite intelligence and energy, and an unwavering stability in the mysterious unfolding of this thing we call creation or life.  As no longer a separate object in a universe you move with and as, rather than making up stories about what is.  Nothing recognized as separate, disconnected or wrong.  No attachment to what you think should be.  You realize movement and stability as one in the same as they arise out of each other.  Yes this is a seeming death of sorts, a complete dis-identification with everything you think of as you and which makes you who you think you are.  At some point all consciousness will arrive here, however your choice to consciously and deliberately choose the end of your perceived self-importance will accelerate your return to unity.  To join with God again in consciousness, in awareness, is to remember yourself.  All that is required is the end of the separate personal you who thinks its living a life for its own and even for others betterment.  In truth there is no such thing.  There is no you and there is no others.  There is only God being and God expressing.  There has never been anything else.  Everything else has been made up.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Abundance as the Natural State

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ABUNDANCE AS THE NATURAL STATE

Focusing on what is

So much we are focused on what isn’t.  We spend our energy thinking about all the things that we desire as if they are somehow lacking now with the aspiration that we will attain them at some future date.  This is the near constant game that our mind’s play on us.  It goes something like this.  Look out at the manifestation of this thing that we call physical reality.  See how there are certain things not in your visual or mental perspective that you would like to see or believe are there.  Things such as cars, houses, clothes, friendships, partnerships, children, jobs, degrees, money, vacations, etc.  Decide that at some future date those things will be there.  Work to achieve said things until they arrive at future date.  Become happy when things arrive and become sad when they don’t arrive.  In many ways this sums up our human existence.  

While exciting at first, or exciting when you are feeling successful, living simply to achieve your desires is temporary unsustainable happiness that is dependent on what is showing up being in alignment with what you think should be there.  Read that sentence again until it really sinks in.  What if there is another way to live besides for the achievement of your desires?  Would you be willing to stop focusing on what is missing from your experience and trying to get something from it that you perceive isn’t there?  Many people might initially say yes however when it comes to implementation, follow through is often poor.  We are addicted to focusing on what we think isn’t there and such our experience is one of lack, followed by effort and trying, and feeling only success if we can somehow get the thing to appear to us.  This is the cycle of suffering.

You might be thinking how do I not perceive lack when clearly I can’t perceive the thing that I want as being in my direct experience.  First I will say that your focus on it not being here is all that keeps it from being perceivable to you and what pushes it away or keeps it out from your direct experience.  Mostly we are unaware that we are even doing this, however whatever we insist upon will be what we experience even when we are unconscious as to what it is that we are insisting upon.  Something to entertain to help you open up your perspective is the recognition that somewhere what you desire exists.  It is not out of creation, it just simply is not directly here now.  This perspective can be a bridge for you until you can more fully rest in the abundance of is-ness itself and begin to slowly shift your focus on what is rather than what isn’t.  If you fully shift your focus solely onto what is, even if only for a few seconds, the abundance of life as the natural state will be evidently clear. 

COMPLETENESS OF ISNESS

Want nothing to be different than it is

Due to that fact that most all of us think that the goal of life is to achieve our desires and then die we completely miss the fact of our own existence.  We place most of our attention on the stuff of life and very little, if any, attention on the fact that we exist, that we be, that we are, and so we are unfamiliar with ourselves or with is-ness.  Simply is-ness is.  Is-ness is before any forms or before anything takes shape in our perceptible and sensorial experience.  Recognizing is-ness is the recognition of completion, abundance and the natural state prior to phenomena.  

You may wonder how you can more fully pay attention to the fact that you exist.  The easiest way that I have found is to set yourself in the attitude of not wanting anything to be different than it is.  When you stop resisting what is, either through giving up your focus on what is not or by directly surrendering to your conflict with whatever the appearances are that are showing up for you in any given moment, you are left only with is-ness.  That pure state of beingness before thought forms emerge which begin to inform your experience.  In addition to not wanting anything to be different than it is, is also not wanting anything from anything.  In this way you end your desires to get something from anything.  When you do this you will see how much of your energy and attention it takes to engage in life by trying to get something that you perceive you want, think will benefit you, keep you safe or ensure your survival.  Once suspended, all of that energy and attention that was bound up in getting, can then be redirected into the pure focus on your beingness rather than on trying to somehow manipulate life to your liking.

What I am pointing to here is quite simple in application, so it begs the question as to why we don’t follow through.  Why do we stop ourselves even before we try?  Why do we want so much to hold onto our perspective of lack which leads to effort and trying rather than surrender to life and experience the abundance of it?  First the mind doesn’t like simplicity.  It wants it to be more complicated than that so it will do its best to try and complicate and confuse things for you.  Two, we often think that our desires and preferences are more important than they actually are, so we don’t want to give them up.  We confuse our desires, preferences and what we think should be (rather than what is) for self-empowerment and therefore think we need to justly fight or stand up for what we want.  When we don’t get what we want, or achieve what we want, we feel cheated or somehow worthless or not valuable.  It’s hard for our egos to swallow the fact that they really aren’t that important.  That what we want isn’t that important and often not even relevant.  It feels like a punch in the stomach, or a death of sorts, like everything you thought was so important no longer being so.  This is the beginning of the dis-identification of the ego as you and the surrender into the god state where you come to know the real you.  

Lastly we’ve confused our happiness, joy, bliss, safety, security and ok-ness to be locked up in something seemingly out there so we keep trying to get it from out there somewhere, in circumstances and conditions.  It will never be found there because conditions always change.  What doesn’t change is you, is is-ness.  Is-ness always is.  It doesn’t come and go.  It is the stability in the ever changing sea of appearances.  Lock onto that instead and you will know yourself and what true sustainable abundant, bliss, joy, freedom and safety is.  No more will you need to seek it out in the world of appearances. When you arrive here you will begin to see that your necessity to make things happen through the physical lessens and your more formless nature will be more real than the form.  Greater ease and effortless doing naturally emerges.  You become more in agreement with God, with the real you, and that alignment, though death to your ego, will set you free.  That is divine union.  That is mergence with God.  That is the return of oneness remembering itself.  My best advice is to stop being so stubborn and just let God be as God is and you will discover everlasting peace.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

LEFT OUT OF THE GLORY OF GOD

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LEFT OUT OF THE GLORY OF GOD

Denying your Divinity

The primary drive of our soul is to remember and reunite with ourselves.  Most have completely forgotten their truest essence and only think or know conceptually what spirit is.  We have built up layers of beliefs (aka defenses) that perpetuate the experience of disconnection and separation from our goodness and the glory of God.  What do I mean by glory of God?  Simply the purest, most distilled, refined and inherently perfect and good true nature of ourselves.  We are God, we are the Creator, we are the perfection of all that is expressed through this human form, and yet we deny, push away or resist this thus resisting ourselves and creating a lived reality of suffering, pain and disconnection.

The spiritual journey is the remembering, reclaiming and reuniting with that which we already are and have always been.    You have never ever been anything but God expressed through a myriad of various forms, whose form is currently this human body.  The beliefs that keep you in resistance and denial to fully knowing this operate ever so subtlety underneath your conscious awareness.  This is why it is important to never stop seeking to know yourself.  To commit full heartedly to the journey over and over and over again, as without your devoted commitment you postpone the remembering of yourself.

Why do we resist what we are?  Why do we resist that we are good, pure and perfect?  Simply because we don’t believe it.  That’s it.  Its really that simple.  We don’t believe it.  Why don’t we believe it?  We don’t believe it because people, who also don’t know themselves, who don’t know their inherently perfect divine self, have conditioned our thinking mind-matrix to be in alignment with theirs.  We’ve agreed, consciously or not, to abide by others rules and stories so that we fit in with them, so that our needs and wants are taken care of and so that we aren’t left out.  In choosing to not feel left out on a societal and relational level we have given away our own true knowing of ourselves.  Anything that feels like it might threaten our basic human needs or wants for resources, love or connection takes precedence over divine connection.  To accept or believe that we are good, perfect, divine and complete throws a wrench into our entire internal system and threatens everything we think we know and everything we think we need. 

BEING THE CREATOR

Self-Empowered

We hear so much these days that we are the creator, but is this something that we just say in spiritual circles to feel cool or do we really, really get it.  Do we really get just how powerful we are or do we still think that our lives are happening to us kind of randomly?  Many people think they are more self-empowered than they actually are.  By in large people are living disempowered even if they are doing and saying all of the right things and in all the right spiritual communities.  Only if you are fully rested in your perfect wholeness and without personal bias are you truly self-empowered.  

We tend to view a self-empowered person as one who is manifesting everything they want and living in alignment with their personal dreams.  What this tends to look like is having an aligned job, standing up for all the right causes, having a healthy body, having seamless relational dynamics, and having all of your desires (physical and nonphysical) met. Many, many strive for this, and while it is a step on the developmental ladder, it is not full self-empowerment.  Full self-empowered living is not about having the perfect spiritual appearance of life, its about knowing that you are complete perfection no matter what.  

Being fully self-empowered paradoxically has very little to do with you at the personality-physical expression level at all, even though this is what we tend to associate it with.  To be truly self-empowered is to recognize that your personal preferences, desires and life, while relatively important for this moment in space-time, have very little ultimate importance.  This may sting a little at first thought as you might want to hold onto your personal agendas, significance and righteousness.  Feelings of confusion, aimlessness or directionlessness that are along the lines of “well if I’m not that, or this thing I care about isn’t important, than what/who am I” may also arise.  This is not the ultimate goal however as we let go of the limited perspective of self with limited power, which is often all we’ve ever known up to this point, we enter a mysterious emptiness that is frequently uncomfortable and disturbing to the personality mind that likes to always be in the know. 

Many are suffering because they are placing too much attention and giving too much significance to their small selves.  In my opinion this is actually an epidemic in personal growth and spiritual communities.   Yes we want practices and skills to dismantle the beliefs that keep us separate and keep us out of our true glory as God, yet frequently we don’t realize that this means that ultimately we have to let go of this idea that we have of a separate, disconnected and worthless self all together.  Its funny that we often don’t realize this end goal if you will to personal growth work.  That we must divorce or break up with our thoughts/beliefs that insist on our lack of complete perfection and goodness.  To not do so and to continue to insist on your worthlessness, is actually a selfishly arrogant act that sucks the energy and life out everything around it and postpones your joy and happiness.  To deny, push away, or resist that which you are, is energy depleting for you and all around you.  The fastest way to self-empowerment and self-knowing is to stop insisting that you suck.  

We are not a separate entity/person no matter how much appearances seem that way.  There is no such thing.  We could not be disconnected from God if we tried.  We are one, we are God, no division, no separation.  To be self-empowered means to love self and know self as Love.  There is no higher commitment than to be fully devoted to that knowing.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Being Forgiveness

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BEING FORGIVENESS 

Resistance, wrongness & righteousness

What is forgiveness? What would it be like to live and be forgiveness?  In a nutshell forgiveness is the dissolution of charge.  It is resolution.  It is the allowing of what is to be as it is.  It’s the opening of one’s self, or one’s system, to that which it had previously withdrawn or removed itself from.  It is the end of insistence on your rightness and the washing away of your biases.  It is the return to non-separation.  It is instantaneous peace, freedom and bliss.

Forgiveness is the gateway into everything that we desire.  Forgiveness of self, other and all.  Ultimately to forgive, no matter what it seems like we are forgiving, is to come out of an erroneous perspective that we’ve been holding onto and into the truth.  That is why we always feel clearer and better after we forgive, because we are seeing from a perspective that is in greater alignment with the truth of what is.  The truth always feels better to us.  

Why do we not instantly move from suffering, charge or being stuck in a perspective into forgiveness?  Really we could at any moment choose this instantaneous transformation yet most of us don’t because we are too busy continuing our fight (internal or external) with what is.  Resistance is a tricky thing and hard for most of us to see in ourselves.  Sometimes we can feel the effects of our inner resistance as tension or pain in the body, but often we don’t make the connection that the stress, tension or pain we feel is part of our own inner resistance to something that is.  We attempt to address these effects that we feel in our body (i.e. tension or pain), but without going to the core and looking at what it is that we are in resistance to in the first place.  This is an endless chase that resolves nothing and provides only temporary relief.  

We also hate feeling wrong so we will fight to the end to prove, justify, and validate why something or someone else’s behavior, action or perspective is wrong and we are right.  When we go to the depths of wrongness it often brings a sense of inner shame and the pushing away of ourselves from ourselves.  It is the experience of self-resistance rather than self-love.  The proving or justifying that we do in order to not feel shame or self-rejection may be expressed subtly inside our own thoughts and mind and or it may be expressed more externally through the pushing away of certain people or things in our life.  The more righteous and insistent we are on our viewpoint the more we will suffer and the longer we delay the peace and freedom we desire.  The insistence of the rightness of our perspective and the wrongness of another’s is the prime reason why we don’t forgive. 

KNOW THYSELF 

Free will to forgive

When we live in a state of resistance or non-forgiveness we are withdrawing our love from certain aspects of creation.  There is no greater pain than to withdraw our love and put up energetic walls between self and other.  This is to live disconnected and experience separation, suffering, helplessness and powerlessness.  The only way to experience and know your power and live in connection is to be willing to put down your guards, dissolve your illusionary walls of self-protection and be rested open in a state of forgiveness of all.  True power comes from the heart and from not needing to push away any part of your experience.  When you can fully receive all of your experience you have won your internal battle and have mastered yourself.  This is what it is to be forgiveness.  

It is important to remember that you can choose this at any moment and in any experience.  Your free will to forgive can never be compromised by anyone other than yourself.  To choose and live moment to moment forgiveness opens up a portal of sorts in your beingness to infinite energy and intelligence.  You become agenda-less and therefore have access to the infinite wisdom and love that you are.  Your very essence serves you and all of creation.  

Some people may feel scared to put down their walls and drop their guards.  They may not yet know the power of love or be rested in the support that comes with it.  They may fear getting hurt, feeling pain, or being vulnerable or susceptible to attack- whether that attack is from others or self.  This is an indication of trying to control or manage life (rather than be present with and open to it) by attempting to push away or prevent certain feelings, sensations or experiences.  This is part of the inner resistance I was mentioning above and it can be tricky to see in ourselves because it is so engrained in the way that we operate.  In fact we often confuse our walls, guards and protection mechanisms as ourselves, as who we think we are, when really they are simply the aspects that interfere with or cloud our ability to truly see and know ourselves.  

Dismantling the resistance that we have built inside of our own selves opens us into love, which is our essence and true nature.  When we don’t yet know love we feel disconnected from our power because love is the ultimate power and the ultimate protector.  Inherent in love is everything we could ever want or need.  Love illuminates, invites, includes and is fiercely coherent in its capacity to organize everything into it.  Love leaves nothing out.  

Forgiveness is our be-line into ourselves.  It is the fastest way, the accelerated path, to knowing ourselves.  Know Thyself is one of, if not the prime tenet of all wisdom traditions.  Forgiveness is its key.  Use it if you so desire to move as quickly as possible into the light or your own consciousness.  God is none other than the clearest, most perfected perspective of yourself.  Clear the canvas of your mind and come to know yourself in what remains.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration

Bliss

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Bliss

Ecstasy of being

Who doesn’t desire more bliss? The pure joy and ecstasy of simply being.  Whether we seek bliss through objects, relationships, service work, recreation, nature, food or other means, we all hunger for it.  Its at the root of what drives all of our meditation, personal growth work and willingness to dismantle our programmed sense of self.  Ironically bliss, which is very thing that we are, which we claim to desire more than anything else, is the very thing that we give away a million times a day.  

Why is it that we give bliss, which again is our essential nature or self, away so often?  Why is it that other things seem more important than bliss and therefore reign as primary in our day to day experience.  To begin many people do not realize that they are in charge of themselves.  What I mean by this is that most people are significantly disempowered and are unaware that they are deciding their life.  They believe that life is random, including their emotional states, and they just hope that they wake up on any given day and feel good.  With this lack of awareness of self there is the appearance that circumstances decide for you and that there really is nothing you can do about it.  When we disown our power in this way we fail to see any responsibility or accountability that we have for our self and our state of being.  We therefore hope for something great, magical, or some object/person that we desire to come along and fix us or make things perfect and right, and we become part of the circumstance rather than the creator of it.

Outside of lack of awareness of self and the disownment of our power what things interfere with us choosing bliss moment to moment?  One of the prime things that interferes is our minds need to know what’s happening or where things are going and our attachment to things or outcomes.  When we desire a thing or outcome more than we desire bliss, then the thing or outcome is what is in charge and no longer is bliss center stage.  Often we fear loss of an object/outcome or even loss of the thought of an object/outcome, because we have confused the object/outcome with our state of bliss.  

If bliss had an enemy, which it doesn’t, but if it did, its enemy would be certainty.  Nothing compresses, flattens, and attempts to put bliss in a box more than the our mind’s perceived need for certainty.  Uncertainty is bliss’s playground while certainty is the mind’s.  Nothing is certain until you decide on it.  Take great care and attention to what it is you decide on as that will be your experience. 

Bliss Beyond Beliefs 

Allowing bliss to reign

There are umpteen million beliefs that interfere with bliss.  They are along the lines of thinking you don’t deserve it, can’t have/be it, impossible to live in at all times, its not real, bliss is only for some people, its not enough, its impractical, its more important to be right, tragedy can’t be blissful, bliss is not sustainable, too many things are wrong in me, too many things are wrong in the world, bliss is circumstantial, it’s only for sometimes, can’t be blissful for no reason, can’t be blissful if other people aren’t… and the list goes on and on.  These are our roadblocks in bliss.  Imagine a road that is made of pure bliss that goes on forever and ever.  Now imagine that every 10 feet there is red light.  All of those red lights are your interfering beliefs that arise and pause your experience of bliss.  The more red lights on your road the less you get to experience the road.  

When we do the work of investigating our beliefs we have fewer and fewer red lights on our road.  This is a worthwhile journey, though arduous and seemingly unending at times.  This begs the question as to if there is a more accelerated way to reclaiming bliss.  Can we in one full swoop be fully rested as bliss here and now in this human experience?  The short answer is absolutely yes.  What’s required is to see bliss inside of every single face, circumstance and experience no matter what is appearing.  In essence replacing everything you perceive with its actual true state, which is bliss.  This brings you into correct seeing, and it is a tall order for most people.  Hence the arduous path of self-inquiry and investigation is often needed.  

Why bliss you might ask?  Well outside the fact that it’s your natural state, it is also what makes things come alive, organizes and reorganizes forms, is self-intelligent, and not to mention feels A-MA-ZING!  There has never been a moment when I regretted being rested and moved by and as bliss.  It is the dismantler of all untruth, the dissolver of all inauthenticity, the lover all expressions, the breaker of chains, the wise one, the mover, the knower.  It’s the portal into your most absolute self.  So really a better question to ask is why not bliss?  

When you give away all of your insistences, biases, and attachments to people, objects, and outcomes, bliss is more and more revealed to you and becomes more and more your direct experience of reality.  The greater your willingness to give away your roadblocks and red lights and give into the bliss that is already here the more you will enjoy your human experience.  The more purposeful you will feel even if you “do” nothing.  The ease with which you will be able to engage on relational levels with other people will increase.  The fears and thoughts that once crippled you will be no more.  Everything you perceive will look more inviting to you.  Truly when you give everything over to bliss is the first time that you can genuinely serve or care.  To be without agenda or attachment to outcome is to allow love to simply be and move as it so intelligently is organized to do.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado