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Master of Limitation

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MASTER OF LIMITATION 

Human experiencing

Having a human experience often feels like one hard thing after the next.  Roadblocks, challenges, and hoops to jump through every single day.  Wanting things to work out, manifest and be as we desire them to be often feels like one failure and miss after another.  All of the little annoying arising we must deal with when we would much rather just feel flow and ease.  We get tastes of flow and ease, but then, just like that, it seems to disappear and we find ourselves trodding uphill, against the current of life and fighting against what we don’t want, so that we can hopefully get to what we do.  Why isn’t it easier?  If we are all powerful creators like all of the spiritual teachers tell us we are, then why can’t we have what we desire in each moment?  These are great questions, for which I don’t have any grand answers, except that, this is the way it is.  It’s as if we are here to learn how to navigate in an environment of extreme challenge and limitation.

The experience of limitation of capabilities, capacities, power, resources, opportunities and overall self, can really dim the joy we experience.  It takes whatever light is inside of us, and like a dimmer switch, gets lower and lower, until we can’t see anymore and all we experience is darkness, confusion, and powerlessness.  We don’t know who we are, what we are or why we are.  We just feel disconnected.  This is suffering.  This is, for the most part, the human experience.  The fact that we can find levity, joy and some sense of purpose, is nothing short of a miracle considering it all.  In suffering it’s hard to be grateful and nearly impossible to feel connected.  I’m not sure why it’s necessary that we experience this, only that somehow it’s relevant because we are experiencing it.  

I could hypothesis that perhaps it’s simply to learn how to be a master of limitation.  Not necessarily to overcome it and no longer experience it, though that is all well and fine if you do, but to develop ourselves in such a way that no matter what handicaps we have given ourselves or that have been given to us, we can learn how to adapt and use whatever it is that we have available to us in whatever ways that we can.  We may want it all to be a bit more magical than that, especially if we’ve experienced states of being where we were less bound by limitations.  Yet perhaps it’s about allowing ourselves to have this human experience of limitation, exploring what we will inside of it, and being a master of limitation, rather than trying to somehow get beyond it all so that we don’t experience it anymore.     

CHANGING THE SEER 

Mastering being human

When we allow ourselves to have the experience of limitation, challenge, obstacle, inconvenience and the like, we embrace our experience rather than fight it.  This embracing of the experience doesn’t necessarily change the outer experience, but it does change our inner one.  We may still not like what is happening, it may not be our preference or desire, but it no longer has us completely hooked.  We are less triggered and therefore inherently less bound and more spacious inside of the experience of whatever the limitation is.  Well this might not equal the experience we want to be experiencing, it will end our resistance to what is and we will feel more accepting and empowered just by that shift.  

While it might not feel like you choose this human experience and everything that comes with it, somehow here you are.  You’ve arrived here, chosen or not, and the only thing you can do is make the best out of it.  It’s kind of like arriving to a party that you find to be less exciting than you originally thought it would be.  You find it rude to exit the party early, so you can either drag yourself through the party until it ends or you can find some way to make it kind of interesting for yourself.  That is where your choice comes in.  You may not always get to choose the environment of the party and all of the people at it, but you do get to choose how you want to experience it.  As I see it this is true self-empowerment.  

We often get confused by all the messages we hear about how to manifest our reality and make it what we want it to be.  We think this means that we should have all the things we desire to have, and when we don’t have them we somehow think we are failing, and then feel even more frustrated by our lack in making our situations different than they are.  Being the creator of your reality is not about controlling all of the circumstances, situations and happenings of your life to match your preference.  It about shifting your inner state of being to match the state of being you prefer to be in no matter what is happening with the situations and experiences of your life.  It is easy to be in our preferred state of being when everything looks and feels like we want it too.  It is quite a challenge to do so when life doesn’t.  This is how we become a master of limitation.  

No matter what limitation, obstacle, or the grim appearance of our life shows to us, in order to become a master of limitation you must only look out and see what you prefer to see, rather than what your mind tells you is there.  Some people might call this delusion, I prefer to call it sanity.  It might just be the only true way to change the world.  As we see so it is.  Without this skill, and eventual mastery, you are subjected to what your mind tells you that you are experiencing rather than innerly experiencing what you desire to experience.  When you take your cue from the grim appearance of life, rather than from yourself and what you desire to see, you are left feeling absolute powerlessness, from which no change can occur.  To master limitation you must accept what you see, and rather than try to change the appearance of it, change that which is doing the looking, which is you. 

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado

Moment to Moment Surrender

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MOMENT TO MOMENT SURRENDER 

Nuanced subtlety

What does it mean to live surrendered?  We often speak of surrender as something we do in situations where we are relinquishing the outcome of anything happening in a particular way.  For example we might find ourselves intensely desiring or holding onto a specific thing occurring or not occurring.  We mentally regurgitate it over and over and create tension in our body as we attempt to control the unfolding of it with our mind.  Often we will reach a point where we simply can’t try to control it any longer and we let go.  This is what we refer to as surrender.  We let the outcome be the outcome even if it is an undesirable outcome.  Our attachment dissolves.  We feel the release of trying to impose our will on the situation and we simply let it be.  We’ve surrendered.  Now we can just be and allow the movements of life to move about.  

When there is a situation that feels big to us, it is easy to see how this process works.  There is a build up of tension to the point where we simply can’t take it anymore and it seems that the only choice is to let go.  But what about all of the space in between, the small tensions that arise in our day to day living that we just live with, that we’ve accommodated to tolerating as our baseline for existing?  We often wonder why we don’t always feel flow, or why some days seem easy and others so challenging?  It seems that our stable base of goodness comes and goes, and that it isn’t in our control.  We don’t realize that what seems to interfere with our stable base of flow and ease is our tolerance for small little tensions that we hold onto without really knowing that we are.  We may notice tension in our body, or that our breath doesn’t feel as full, or we may feel the clunkiness of the day or week, but it’s a mystery to us why we feel this way and why we can’t just get back to flow.  We can get back to flow, but first we must realize what small little tensions we are tolerating in our life.

Recognizing what we are tolerating and holding onto requires subtlety.  We must become more subtle and nuanced in paying attention to ourselves in an inquisitive way.  Often this means slowing down for moments throughout our day so that we can pay attention.  As soon as we notice effort, pushing, non-presence, or trying to just get through, we need to use this as a signal to ourselves to pause and inquire as to what we are feeling below the effort.  Diving in and bringing to awareness or light whatever subtle thing(s) we are trying to manipulate, control or manage.  Once you identity it, you can, just like that let it go.   

FINDING FLOW

Knowing what you are holding

The flow we desire is here now inside the same moment where we feel effort, strain or tension.  By recognizing the subtle little tensions you hold and being willing to let go of them as you notice them, you come into moment to moment surrender.  This is living surrendered.  It doesn’t mean that you are passive to life, but rather that you allow life to be as it is in response to you.  You take action on life in the ways you desire and then you allow life to give you the fruits of those actions in whatever ways it will.  You detach from insisting that your desires should manifest in any particular way.  If you do this you will experience the freedom that is always here, but which you simply are not attuned to when you are bound inside of your tensions.  

You might wonder why you tolerate a bunch of little tensions throughout your day or why you indulge in being non-present.  It’s this.  We tend to think that all of the things we hold onto are important.  Somehow we perceive that it’s vital that we hold on to say a certain perspective we have, a feeling we are feeling, or a thought that we are mulling over and over.  There is some value we find in not letting go of whatever it is we are holding onto.  Some of it is habit, meaning we are unconscious to what we are holding so we just hold it, but as soon as we are aware of what we are holding onto it is no longer a habit, but rather a choice.  When we bring into awareness our tensions we make the them conscious.  Once we are conscious we are in charge. 

We may or may not like being in charge of ourselves.  We may not want to have as much power over ourselves as we think we want.  Regardless the power is yours.  There is nothing you can do about the power that you are/have except give it away to circumstances, events, situations or other people, or claim it as your own.  Either way it’s still yours.  You are free to do whatever you’d like to do with your power.  If you choose to claim it then you are able to let go of whatever you’d like to and also hold onto whatever you want to hold onto.  It’s now what you are choosing rather than it seemingly being the random state of being that you are in.  You now know why you feel effort or flow, and you realize that you can shift whenever you want to.  

Each time you notice that you are not in the state of being that you desire, you can check in and discover what little tension is interfering and let it go if you want to experience flow again.  It’s this commitment that creates a stability in your state of being because now you recognize that you can consciously choose your state.  This is moment to moment surrender.  It’s the giving away of what your mind thinks is so important and opening into what is instead.  At our core we all want to be open into the presence of being and the aliveness of this moment.  It’s where all the richness resides.  We hold on because we somehow think that through holding onto whatever we are holding onto, that we will arrive in this richness because we will get what we want.  Surrender allows us to receive what we truly want which is often beyond what our minds can perceive. 

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

You Don’t Need to Do More

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YOU DON’T NEED TO DO MORE

Be as you are

Nearly all of us have bought into the story that we need to do more and more and more.  It’s as though we could give everything we’ve got to give and somehow we still come up short in what we think we need to give.  The doing, and the thoughts of all the doing, are exhausting.  We then wonder why we are so tired and depleted, and yet we keep attempting to give more than we’ve got to give.  What happens when we run out of fuel, but we keep giving anyways?  Breakdown.  Breakdown of our body, our mind and our lives.  We see the breakdown and still we don’t stop trying to give more than we’ve got to give.  

Where does this insatiable need to do more come from?  It comes from a deep seated belief that we are not enough.  We think that if we can somehow give or do more, then we can bridge the gap between our not enoughness and what we think we need to give in order for it to be enough.  It’s as if all of our doing can somehow compensate for our sense of not being enough in/as our natural state of being.  As an extension of this, our sense of not enoughness often shows up as a feeling of lack in abundance of resources.  We give or do more, more, more so that we don’t feel this lack of enoughness.  We fear that if we don’t over-give or over-do then we won’t have what we need or we won’t be taken care of.  So we are like slaves to our avoidance of feeling the not enoughness that we fear we are.  

It’s an edge for many of us to simply be rested as ourselves without feeling the inner obligation, necessity, or burden to do or give more than is natural for us to give or do.  We hope that our doing will make us feel like we are enough.  We try to get to enough through our giving rather than simply being enough.  It’s a losing game, because we can never feel or experience what we don’t first become.  We must become enough before we will experience the feelings of enoughness.  Nothing we do can will ever sustainably get us to feeling complete.  We are attempting to do it backwards.  We somehow think that we have to prove, attain or show our worthiness in order to experience it.  Yet the recognition or realization of our enoughness, in our already state of being as we are, is the answer to the end of feeling not enough.  When we see ourselves and what we have to naturally give as enough in its expression, then so it is.  This doesn’t always mean that the people or things in our life will always get what they want from us, but it does mean that you will be alignment with yourself as you are.   

A WORLD OF ENOUGHNESS 

Abundant in abundance

A world of absolute and complete enoughness.  Can you even imagine what that would feel or be like?  Imagination is exactly what we need.  Imagination that is rooted in knowing that it is already so.  In this way our imaginations can create the playing field of experience to match what we are already convicted in to be true.  This is the way it works.  It’s already working this way.  It’s simply that what we are currently convicted in is lack of enoughness of self, and the projection of that is the experience of lack in this world.  One might say that we are abundant in lack.  There is no real lack, but only the perception of it.  That is true for how we view ourselves and the world.  We can see ourselves as not enough, but we can never actually be not enough.  This is not to say that other flavors, resources or beings might not be needed in certain situations in life, but just because something more or else is needed has nothing to do with our inherent enoughness.  

We don’t need to be everything, we just need to be ourselves.  Being ourselves is enough even if more is needed.  We don’t have be the more.  This is why there are billions of beings on this planet.  Each being has the responsibility to be itself, nothing more and nothing less.  Neither is even possible.  You can always and only be what you are.  You can try to be more, but this where burnout and breakdown occurs.  Give over trying to be it all in order to be enough, and let in all of the other beings in this life to support whatever is needed in each and every moment.  We are not designed to do it all or be it all rather we are designed to be who we are, just as we are.  

It takes courage to not take it all on as yours.  Courage to trust that you being you is enough.  That you can love yourself just as you are and you don’t have to first be more.  Give what you want to give.  Do what you want to do.  Let whatever your giving and doing is be enough.  It is.  Just because you think that other people, or the situations of your life, want or need more of you than you have capacity to give or be, it’s ok to let it be or let them want.  It’s ok if they are disappointed or upset and/or if you are disappointed in yourself.  Come back to knowing that you are enough in your current state of giving, being and doing.  Get more and more convicted in the knowing of your enoughness.  The paradox is that the less you attempt to be more than you are, the more of you that you’ll have to give.  

Knowing you are enough is the same as loving yourself.  Honor who you are.  Stop wishing you could somehow be different or more.  That’s unkind, and if you value kindness then start with yourself.  You will naturally grow, expand and develop as a being, but none of that growth makes you more than you already are in this moment.  You are complete and enough right now in exactly whatever it is you give and do.  More giving or doing doesn’t make you more. Recognize your enoughness now and you will experience a world of enough.  A world that is abundant in abundance rather than abundant in lack.  It all starts and ends in how you view it.  How you see, so it is.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Analysis Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado

Opening Into Your Multidimensional Self

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OPENING INTO YOUR MULTIDIMENSIONAL  SELF

Parallel realities, telepathy & nonlinear travel

Multidimensionality seems to be a popular metaphysical term, but what exactly does it mean and how do you access your multidimensionality?  Simply put multidimensional means more than one dimension.  We already know that we are living inside of four dimensions.  Three of those dimensions are spacial, height, width and depth, and the fourth dimension is that of time.  These dimensions are familiar to us even if we don’t put consciousness awareness on them outside of when we are measuring something we want to buy to see if it’s the right fit or we looking at our watch to check the time.  It’s simply the environment we live within based on what our consciousness perceives to be reality.  What if, however, there are more dimensions than the four we know of, and how do we bring them into conscious awareness?

When multidimensionality is spoken of inside of spiritual containers it often comes with ideas of fractals, geometric wormholes, past and future lives, parallel realities, greater sensory capacities, communication with other galactic beings, telepathy and travel beyond the confines of linear time.  For some people these ideas are incredibly exciting topics and yet they seem impossible to practically experience, and for others they just seem like sci-fi or fantasy.  How do we bridge the impossibility gap and experience what seems like fantasy as reality?  Certainly it’s obvious that there is more in existence than we can sense with our currently sensory capabilities.  The expanse of this ginormous, infinite universe is evidence enough of that fact. Yet it often feels like a mystery to us on how to access more than what we sense with our senses.  

There is one definitional distinction to make before proceeding, that is of the difference between dimensions and densities.  Densities are vibrational frequencies that exist inside of a dimensional or multidimensional awareness.  You can think of the analogy of a beam of light containing different colors, these are like the densities.  There are eight basic vibrational states of consciousness (i.e. densities) that make up an octave within creation.  There are infinite octaves of densities and likely infinite dimensions as well.  Collectively human consciousness vibrates at what is considered 3rd density and is moving into 4th density.   When we move from 3rd to 4th density we will still have physical form and we still operate within 4 dimensions, but moving into 5th density vibrational awareness moves us into 5 dimensions.  A 5th density vibrational awareness with 5 dimensional reality is a nonphysical existence.  You are still a being, but a being without physicality.  All of that said, you can access these different levels of consciousness and dimensions inside of your current human existence in order to inform your current self, but you can’t reside inside of these different higher levels without shifting from a physical to nonphysical existence.   

ACCESSING MORE OF YOU 

Matching vibrational states

Understanding where we are now in our current state of consciousness inside of density and dimensional frequency gives our mind a contextual reference point or map of possibility.  An awareness that there is more beyond our current knowing even though we don’t know it yet from our point of view.  Just like you’ve learned many, many things from the time you were born to now, you will continue to learn more things as you are exposed to them.  When you were a baby it likely seemed impossible to run, skip or jump, yet because you had inner motivation and drive you learned how.  Same is true for learning the next, and next, level of things that currently seem impossible to you.  Things such as jumping parallel realities, telepathy, and connecting with information from your past and future selves and other beings throughout the universe.  

When we, in our individual consciousness, match the vibrational frequency of that which we want to know or access, then we instantly vibrate in sync with it and can know whatever information or energy that exists there.  A match in frequency makes possible the natural exchange of information.  This begs the question as to how you become a vibrational frequency match for everything that you want to experience and know.  You have probably heard people say a million times in spiritual circles to “raise your vibration”.  This is often associated with seeing people jump up and down, move their body all around and always being “positive” in order to generate more energy in their bodies.  You can experience things like this at a Tony Robbins program and other motivational, self-help groups.  This can be a helpful entry point, yet often the “high vibrational state” fizzles out a few days after the program ends because it’s not self-generated.  It’s more like riding a high.  We call this a temporary state change.  It’s great for seeing that there is more, yet if it’s not sustained then you go back to your ordinary resting vibrational state.  

In order to match the vibrational frequency of what you want to experience you must become it.  Know that there is a version of you somewhere in the universe that already knows how to access everything you want to access.  When you imagine that version of you that already knows how, notice how they feel, think, behave and what they know.  Then match that frequency.  Let that version of what you are imagining be a template or a mirror for the current vibrational version of yourself that is here now.  In this way you will learn to match that frequency and have access to what is known at that density and dimensional frequency of existence.  You already know how to do this.  It is how you currently learn.  We learn through mirroring and matching others in our physical reality.  If you’ve ever spent time around a toddler you know this to be true.  They mirror everything we do or say.  That is how they learn the vibrational frequency of consciousness here on this planet.  You can also do this nonphysically as well, you simply have to believe that you can.  Clear out your impossibility beliefs that say you can’t and know you can.  Once you know you can then it will be old hat to you.  Remember you once didn’t know anything about this current state of consciousness you are in now, you learned it all, and you can learn whatever your big old heart desires. 

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

Be Done Being Scared

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BE DONE BEING SCARED 

Fear is optional

Believe it or not fear is optional.   Literally believe it or not.  Most people don’t perceive fear to be a choice.  Rather most feel that fear simply happens to them, and they don’t recognize themselves as the source of it.  While it can seem very, very convincing that the source of our fear is somewhere outside of us, I assure you that it’s not, because nothing we feel is.  Everything we feel, we feel inside of us, and what allows us to feel whatever it is we feel, is us.  If there was no us here then there would be no feeling in response to anything.  The common denominator in all of it, is us.  It’s obvious and yet most people don’t really see it.

Why does it seem that fear just happens and that we can’t control it? It’s like this.  When we look out at something, say an event, a person, or a circumstance, we perceive it through our lenses and filters of what we’ve learned and experienced.  Then we decide if it’s scary or not.  This happens automatically for most of us and so it seems that the thing is the source of fear.  We don’t recognize that what we are experiencing is our story and beliefs projected onto the objects or circumstances.  If we slowed this process down, and made it conscious rather than automatic, we would see that we don’t actually look out and see fear, but rather we look out and see our meanings and definitions about what it is that we think we are looking at.  Based on those definitions, we then have certain thoughts, feelings and physiological responses.  

While we are busy attempting to control all of our feelings and the physiological responses of the fear that we imagine is out there, over there, or somewhere, we fail to go to the core of the fear.  While we might be successful at managing the sensations that come along with our perceptions of what is, we often don’t look at the perceptions themselves.  Instead we attempt to fix, numb or change the effects that we feel, hoping and praying, that we will stop feeling them.  Imagine recognizing that you are the source of your fear response.  Notice how empowered you would feel when you know that you can change how you are feeling by changing how you are seeing.  You can.  Fear doesn’t have to be part of your experience.  It’s not a given or a must.  The more self-aware you become and the more you will realize yourself as the source of what you feel, the evidence will reveal itself to you through your direct experience of living without fear. 

BECOMING MORE RESOURCEFUL 

Redefining our definitions

You might ask, what about when I need to or should be scared?  What if I’m being threatened, harmed or my survival is at risk?  It’s interesting that we fear, that if we don’t fear, then we won’t take the appropriate actions in response to situations where we need to take them.  It like fear is our security blanket and we think we need it to feel safe.  Yet our continued insistence in holding onto it, is what continues to make us feel unsafe.  What the conundrum.  What I would say is that the reason why we don’t take appropriate actions that we need to take is because we fear, not because we don’t.  For example say someone is threatening you with a knife or raping you, you fear and freeze, and let them harm you. If you have a little more energy in your system you flee or fight back.  One could say the more fear you feel in a situation the less resourceful you are.  If you have ever seen the movie Divergent you can see a perfect example of what it’s like to be in your most terrifying scenarios, move through your fear, and have more energy and resourcefulness available to navigate the situation at hand.  You literally become present and when you are present you know what to do and how to respond.  You don’t need the fear in order to respond. The moral of the story is that the more powerless we believe ourselves to be, the more fearful we will feel, and less capacity we have to navigate our lives.  

We have all been born into definitions of fear that we have learned to take on as our own.  We have all had experiences where those definitions played themselves out in our experience.  I don’t think there are exceptions to this.  Perhaps there are a few unicorns out there on this planet who somehow managed not to get the fear definitions and messages, but I’ve never met any of them.  I say this because fear likes to think that it is the only one that has experienced what it has experienced and it/we like to stay justified in our stories of fear.  We insist that we should be afraid and that it’s impossible not feel fear based on what we’ve experienced in this life.  We feel our trauma is too big or has been bigger than others, and that’s why we are more afraid.  I am not here to compare anyone’s trauma to another’s, but rather to state that we have all experienced what we might call trauma, and we all have to find our way through our limited stories of fear into freedom.  

If you want to hold onto your definitions, stories and the validation of your fear through your experiences of it, please do.  I am not here to tell you what to do or not do.  Everything serves us until it doesn’t.  I will say that what we tend to be most scared of is our freedom, not our fear.  Paradoxically if we were a little more afraid of our fear we’d have less of it, because we push away what we are afraid of.  Do you get that?  I’m not suggesting you do that, rather to simply see the irony in it.  When we perpetuate our perspectives of fear, others who know their freedom to choose fear or not, appear as a threat to us.  We become more comfortable with fear and with those who feel it.  Similar vibrations create resonance, even if it’s ultimately not what we really want to be feeling.  

We don’t feel safe because we choose fear.  We fear to let go of our fear, because freedom feels unsafe when we are afraid.  There is a way through it all.  If you notice you feel fear, don’t deny it or pretend it doesn’t exist.  Feel it and then ask yourself what it is made of.  How are you seeing in order to be feeling what you feel?  It begins and ends in your willingness and courage to look at the source of your fears.  See what they are made of and inquire. Be in conscious awareness of your choosing rather than in automatic reaction.  You are free to become as free as you desire.  The ball is in your hands. 

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

Emptying into Openness

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EMPTYING INTO OPENNESS 

Beyond open-mindedness

Most people like to think of themselves as being open-minded.  What is often meant by this is that we are available to perspectives, points of views and ways of thinking or behaving that are different than our own.  While we might not take on those ways of behaving or thinking, we don’t judge, shame or ridicule others for doing so.  While this is a valuable developmental stage in becoming less egocentric, it is rather rudimentary in the larger scheme of what it is to be open.  I could very simply state that to be open is not only the acceptance of all points of views, but beyond that the dissolution of all perspectives and points of view, most importantly your own.  That is another level of openness, where even your own perspectives don’t interfere with what is.  

For a moment feel what it is like to be empty of all things that you think you know.  All things that you’ve learned and experienced up to this point.  The easiest way to do this is to stop engaging with any thought that might be passing through your mind in this moment.  Just let it be rather than merging your awareness with and into it.  When you stop engaging with your thoughts, you are left with the clear space of being.  Some people call this emptiness, awareness or the open sky.  The thing about this is that there is nothing for the mind to grab onto and therefore nothing for it to identify itself with.  Some minds interpret this negatively and may feel fear at this level of non-engagement with stuff.  Fear of dissolving, of not mattering, of not having significance or worth, and of feeling like everything in the world will fall apart.  It is not so much that everything in the external world will fall apart or that your body will dissolve into thin air, rather its simply that your mind quits interpreting everything it perceives through the lenses you’ve learned and worn.  

While this may feel scary to some, my friends, this is freedom.  Yes freedom can feel scary to the mind that has ever only known imprisonment.  A mind that has been stuck inside of its’ perspectives and points of view that have given it a sense of the known.  Perspectives that you don’t even know that you’re trapped inside of.  The openness of being is stepping into the moment, which is unknown, and which unfolds itself inside of itself.  It cannot be pre-known or preplanned.  It can only be experienced presently.  While we are hungry for this level of unbridled novelty and aliveness, we are simultaneously terrified of what happens to the sense of stability, safety and security that we get from thinking that we know stuff.   

DEATH OF SELF-DELUSION 

Stable ground of self

When we are without our learned perspectives for even just a few moments, we get a taste freedom.  Yet letting go of what we know feels sometimes confusing and like a bunch of little micro-deaths.  That belief, thought or idea about life, that we had so much conviction in just a moment ago, now no longer gets front stage, as we relinquish our grasp on it.  What happens now to our sense of self, to our identity, to who we think we are and what we know?  You might wonder how can we function in this space of not knowing.  What I can say is that you are already functioning in this space of not knowing, it’s only that you’ve deluded yourself into believing that you know.  That deluded knowledge or knowing, while comforting, is also a prison of monotonous stagnation.  So it’s not so much about “how” will you function if you let go of all of your preconceived notions about everything, because you already are functioning in empirical uncertainty, but more about consciously choosing to not delude yourself anymore.  

The choice to not delude yourself anymore awakens you out of your self-imposed prison.  To not indulge in the stories or fantasies that your mind conjures up about what is, and not give any type of meaning to what is occurring or not occurring and rather simply experience it in its innocence, is the freedom that we all dream of.  The full permission for everything, including ourselves, to just be, in every single moment.  Anew.  Like a child seeing the world.  While we all think we want this, what we don’t realize is that we have to give up everything we think we know first.  That can seem like a high stake gamble to the one that is thoroughly invested in its’ identity, what it thinks it wants and needs, it’s stories, and all of the stuff that seems so tangible that it has created.  

Surrendering our thoughts can feel like death of our dreams, worth, purpose, significance and stable ground.  Yet thoughts are not as stable as we like to think they are.  One moment the thought “I am amazing” can arise and in the next moment “I suck” can arise.  We grapple.  Which is right, and which is wrong?  Am I this or am I that?  How stable does that feel to you?  Not stable at all, which is why, underneath it all, none of us feel like we have any stability.  We attempt to create stability through the ever changing sea of thoughts that run through our minds, rather than in just being.  In “I am”, rather than I am this or that, we find the stability we seek.  That stability is in an identity that is not fused with anything.  No thought, feeling or sensation about itself, but rather simply itself being.  

To live open we must untether ourselves from the false, from the points of views and perspectives that keep us seeing through dirty glasses.  Tempting the emptiness is like seducing the mystery to show herself to us.  It’s playful, exciting and light.  It’s like falling into the abyss and discovering the net that’s been there all along.  There is no real danger in the emptiness of freedom, only the imagined danger of what you think recognizing your open self might be.  Emptying into openness reveals only the innocence of pure being and the rested stable ground of yourself.

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

Soul Illumination

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SOUL ILLUMINATION 

Our multidimensional self

Whether we are aware of it or not we are all a soul.  You may wonder what it means to be a soul.  Being a soul is much different than being a person.  While the soul includes our personality, dreams, goals, thoughts, emotions and to do lists, it also includes much more.  It has added dimensions of energy and awareness that provide for expanded perspectives of experience and knowing.  In short the soul has access to more.  We are all hungry for this and yet sometimes it feels like an impossible trek to find our way to soul.  This is because being human gives us enough stuff to focus on to keep us busy for our lifetime.  It is easy to get caught up in all of the stuff and lose sight, or simply not focus on, anything beyond it.  Sensations, emotions and thoughts take up most of our bandwidth most of the time, and therefore there is not much energy or awareness left for soul.  

The good news is that soul exists, or is, regardless if we are paying attention to it or not.  The real question is, how conscious do you want to be of your soul?  Soul brings added dimensions and depths to your experience.  It is kind of like reading a book, but rather than just focusing on the content of the book, you see where the content came from, the past and future impact that the book had/has, and how the sentences say more than the concepts they share.  You feel, smell, and taste the words, all the while still seeing the physical nature of the book.  You notice the energetic qualities of the author of the book, and also from where they accessed the information as they wrote the words.  There is simply more to your experience because there is more of you there to experience it.  You can think of the difference between an infant’s experience of a book compared to that of an adult’s experience of the same book.  They will be two very different experiences because there are different aspects of self available from which to experience and know.  

There are no shortcuts into soul, even though many people try to find them.  There is a natural progression to the soul body coming more and more online.  We can however expose ourselves to environmental conditions that support the development of soul.  Just like a child would not learn to talk, read, write and develop its mental body in these ways unless it was exposed to environmental conditions that supported this, same for our soul.  What are the soul’s conditions for development?  Conditions include inner and outer fields that are more densely packed with light and greater coherence, clarity of mental content or clutter, and heart centered spaces.  Soul is more readily revealed when there are a collective of beings that resonate together in a similar frequency, hence the potency of things such as healing retreats or group healing.   

CLEARING THE WAY FOR SOUL 

Preparing the path

We can support soul’s development by clearing the way for it.  Just like if a child was learning to walk we would clear the path in front, so that the way was unimpeded.  We can also do this for our soul.  What interferes with the soul’s clear path and our conscious awareness of our soul?  Fixation on thoughts.  Thoughts are what we trip over as we progress on our path to soul.  When we are children our parents clear the way for us so that we can walk without running into furniture or falling over toys.  Even still we will sometimes fall and bump into things, because our parents aren’t always there every time we move.  Eventually we learn to navigate around the stuff.  As adults on the path to realizing our soul, there are people who can help us clear the path by emanating the frequency of heart/soul, so that we can tune our own antennas to it, even if only momentarily while we are in their presence.  Yet no one can go inside of our mind to remove the obstacles of our thoughts.  Rather it is us who must do this task. Here meditation becomes our most trusted ally on the path.  Without finding ways to navigate around our own thoughts, sustainably resting in our soul will be challenging.   

Obstacles are part of the path.  They help us learn by teaching us how to use our focus.  If we focus on the obstacle, we get lost in it and forget what the heck we were intending to do in the first place.  This is the state of the mind of most human beings.  We are lost in the obstacle, fixated on it, and have forgotten what we are doing.  This would be like the child falling and getting lost in playing with the toy that it tripped over, forgetting altogether that it was walking.  There is no problem in this.  The child will get the impulse to walk again once it is done being enamored with the toy.  Similarly we will get the impulse to seek our soul again, when we are done with the thought that we are currently entranced by.

We can learn to increase our capacity to transition from fixation on thought into the space of the soul by increasing our self-awareness.  You can’t shift your focus from your thoughts unless you know that you are focused on them.  Seems obvious and simple enough.  Yet we are often unaware that we are thinking, rather most of the time we are just thinking.  There is a big difference.  The difference is that if we are aware that we are thinking, we can consciously shift our focus off of the thought.  If we are just thinking there is no conscious awareness there and therefore nothing that is able to shift the focus.  We have to become conscious first, be aware that we are thinking, and not just thinking.  

Once you become aware, if you still are having trouble shifting your focus, then I find the easiest way to work with this is to simply let it be.  Let the thought just be.  Don’t try to do anything about it.  Just notice it.  Through this you will slowly start to release your grip on the thought and more space will arrive between your awareness and the thought.  As this space increases soul comes more into focus, because soul is the awareness that is aware.  This method works for sensations too.  If you find yourself fused with a sensation, unable to shift your focus off of it and its taking up the bandwidth of your awareness, just let it be, and eventually you will loosen your grip on it.  The quickest way to clear emotions that are taking up space is just to feel them.  

Soul is less mysterious than we think it is and yet it is full of magic, wonder and awe, particularly from our mind’s perspective and what we presently have access to in our current stage of development.  It is much closer on our developmental path than it is far away.  It is the next rung on the ladder.  Keeping clearing the obstacles and so soon enough you will be dancing with your soul.

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Analysis Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado

Bound & Unbound Energy

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BOUND & UNBOUND ENERGY 

Intelligence and it’s creations

We have all heard that everything is energy.  It is one of those things that we know conceptually, but perhaps haven’t given much contemplation as to what it actually means and how it impacts our lives.  You might be someone who feels that the world of energy is a bit elusive to you as it is framed in healing and spiritual contexts.  For example maybe you feel like you’ve never felt energy before or at least have never experienced it like other people seem to experience it.  Yet if everything is energy then you’ve undeniable experienced it.  Science tells us energy equal mass times the speed of light squared.  This means that matter and energy are interchangeable.  They are different expressions of the same thing, so if you’ve experienced mass, which again you clearly have, then you’ve experienced energy.

You may then wonder why the experience of energy seems to be different for you then it appears to be for others.  This brings us to the conversation of bound and unbound energy.  Bound energy is energy that is organized into a form.  Forms are both gross/dense in nature, meaning they are physical say like our human body, buildings and mountains.  Pretty much everything we consider to be an object in a dense form.  Forms are also subtle in nature, meaning emotions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and concepts are all forms as well.  If there was no binding of energy there would be no forms at all.  This means we wouldn’t be able to create anything, including a thought, idea, emotion or any kind of physical form. When there is no form to energy, meaning it is not organized into a specific configuration, then this is what is called unbound energy.  You can also think of unbound energy as  the energy of potential.  It is what is available to create or manifest with and from.  

So what organizes unbound energy into forms?  The answer is Universal Intelligence.  Other terms for this are, pure awareness or being.  That which is, knows, be’s and exists, is full of all of the information that creates this entire universe that we experience, including what we experience as ourselves.  Sometimes people will refer to this universal intelligence as the codes for creation, the blueprint of the universe or God/Goddess.  This is why meditators seek to empty their minds out from all concepts, including thoughts, feelings, and sensations, because as we empty our minds out of all of this content we can notice the pure awareness or pure being that remains.  Even though initially this may seem boring for some, or like “nothing is happening”, “nothing is happening” is the gateway into the infinite source of intelligence that creates this universe, and beyond that what you actually are.    

RETURN TO FREEDOM 

Unwinding back into our original state

To recap, bound energy is that which is organized into both subtle and dense forms.  Unbound energy is the energy of potential, which is available for forms to be created out of, and that which organizes or binds energy is called universal intelligence.  Without the binding of energy we would have no manifest creation.  “Creation,” if you will, would just be pure being, there would be no substance to it like we currently experience.  There would be no objects, other people, ideas, thoughts, feelings, sensations, or anything at all.  It would just be being.  Many people say that creation was created so that this original being could experience itself through different expressions of itself.  This is where oneness or primordial essence begins and ends, in pure being, in itself.  Everything is born out of being and will eventually return back to being.  It is also often said that everything is an illusion, meaning that all of creation and the forms that get created mask or hide that which is their true nature.  This is why if we focus solely on the form, like our human mind mostly does, but we don’t see through the form to the essence of what it is made of, then we are lost in the illusion so to speak.  

Let us revisit bound energy again and make some distinctions.  Bound energy can have varying degrees of boundness inside of its forms.  For example if your spinal cord is very tense and tight it contains more bound energy than a relaxed spinal cord does.  This means that your experience of your physical body will seem more dense and solid if your spinal cord is taut than if it is relaxed.  Within subtler forms such as thoughts or emotions, some thoughts are more binding than other thoughts.  Same is true for emotions.  It is quite obvious that emotions such as joy and giddiness feel lighter than anger or sadness.  Joy and giddiness contain more unbound energy and therefore we feel freer when we feel those emotions than when we feel anger or sadness.  It is also obvious that the thought “the world and everyone in it is out to get me” feels more constricting and defeating then the thought “everything is working out for me.”  Again there is more energy available in the second thought, more possibility and more light.  The degree to which we pay attention to these nuances of how we operate will determine the energy and reality we experience.  We don’t experience reality, but rather we experience our interpretation of reality based on the available amount of energy we have access to.  If you aren’t experiencing the reality or the energy state that you want to it’s not because it’s “reality’s” fault, it’s simple due to how and where you place your focus.  

The more unbound we become, the more we feel what we think of as “energy”, both in physical and spiritual ways.  There is no such thing as a person that doesn’t feel energy.  We are all experiencing energy all of the time.  It’s simply a matter of how bound or unbound it is.  Doing practices such as meditation give us an opportunity to completely rest in the unbound nature of the original self, which is limitless, infinite and all knowing.  Then doing the inner work of feeling our heavier emotions (rather than avoiding them or pretending they don’t exist) so that we can unbind the energy of them, and shifting our focus from our denser thoughts to thoughts that feel lighter, allows us to experience those more spiritually free states.  What we call more spiritual is simply less bound.  Those states are even more bright with light and energy, and it is where we feel the most free.  In some way everyone is seeking this.  The return to our original state; perfect, whole and free.

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Analysis Chiropractic, Boulder, Colorado

Embracing Aloneness

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EMBRACING ALONENESS 

Alone & relational time

Most everyone likes a little alone time.  Time to reset, time to reflect, and time to just be.  We all seem to welcome a little bit of alone time.  What happens though when that alone time is longer than we want it to be?  We switch from welcoming aloneness into feeling lonely.  We begin to mark our worth, value and significance based on who wants to spend time with us and aloneness becomes our worst enemy.  We feel frustrated, resentful and jealous of others that seem to not be alone and wonder why we are.  If we aren’t desiring aloneness and we are alone, it can really activate our insecurities about who we are as a person in relation to others, and beyond that our purpose in this world.  

Alone time, and spending time with others, are both important.  The balance of that is different for each person.  Sometimes though it seems like we don’t really get to choose.  That’s where we go off keel.  We want alone time but feel like we can’t get it.  Or the flip of that, we want social-relational connection and it’s not available.  Our lack of feeling of choice in the matter leaves us feeling all sorts of unpleasant things.  There is so much tied up into aloneness.  Most people have strategies to somehow avoid feeling it.  They do this by planning many, many activities and keeping their lives as busy as possible with stuff, much of which they don’t even enjoy or like, so that they never have a chance to feel lonely.  Other people have strategies that keep other people at bay, which can be beneficial when we do indeed want alone time, however when we don’t want to be by ourselves this strategy reinforces our sense or story of aloneness.  

Regardless of the strategy used to navigate aloneness, at the core it boils down to our feeling of choice in the matter, and in desiring what’s present rather than focusing on what’s not.  Our mind’s obsession of focusing on lack doesn’t help us.  We have a fixation on noticing what isn’t present, rather than what is.  This focus keeps us feeling disempowered when really we have all the power.  If we shifted our focus onto what is, rather than what we think isn’t, we’d realize the power we have.  Whether we are with other people or not, our state of is-ness never changes.  Being with people can’t add or subtract to our beingness.  We can’t be more or less based on if another person is present with us, notices us or cares about us.  We can only think or feel that we can be.  Even our thought or feeling that our worth or significance can be impacted by another person’s presence or absence, doesn’t affect our state of beingness.  We still are the same being regardless of how or what we think of our self, or how other’s think or view us.  Nothing can affect our being and therefore nothing can affect our worth, value or significance, including another person’s presence or absence. 

ARE THERE EVEN OTHER PEOPLE? 

Oneness

It seems very convincing that there are other people.  After all you see, feel and think inside of your body and then it seems like other people are doing that inside of their bodies.  But what exactly are other people and at what level of consciousness does the consciousness of other people, and that of yours, merge into one?  Maybe that sounds a little sci-fi for you, or perhaps a little to woo.  Yet I believe that is where we are headed.  Isn’t that what all of this oneness stuff eludes too?  How can there many if there is just one?  Is many the illusion or is one the illusion?  All good questions for your contemplations.

What I can tell you from my direct experience is that as I become less different, distinct or distinguished in my sense of self the more telepathic I’ve become, meaning the less separate my thoughts are from other’s thoughts.  The more I make what seems to be other, the same as me, the more interconnected, or dare I even say, one we become.  We move and act in response to the same stimulus, that stimulus being love.  Essentially what this means is that the more we move into love and include everything in/as that love, the less distinctions exist.  The more you realize that you couldn’t be alone even if you tried because everything that exists, exists in/as one.  One may seem lonely, because after all it’s just one, yet it’s one that includes all. 

That may all be a bit to nondual for you and perhaps a bit conceptual, so I will bring it back to the relational level.  Coming into alignment with life, or said another way, choosing what is, shifts you from feeling powerless into feeling powerful.  When we feel powerful, and decide to choose aloneness when it presents itself inside of our experience rather than wanting it to be different, we embrace aloneness.  It ends the stories we have about aloneness and transforms the experience that we have of it.  The charge we had about being alone dissolves.  We see the opportunity and gift inside of both alone time and relational time. Yes this can really be your experience of aloneness.

When we embrace aloneness and transform our experience to it we get to find the stillness and silence of our own mind.  That silence is a great teacher.  Through it we discover what we be.  There is nothing more fundamental for the human being to discover than this.  Our being often gets lost or covered up in all of the engaging and interacting that we do.  Finding that which just is, that be’s, is the root or ground for all interacting and relating to occur in the first place.  Getting to know this being that we are, that never changes, never goes anywhere, that is the most stable, unwavering presence that is, brings a richness, aliveness and fullness to our experience of ourselves.  In the fullness of being, loneliness isn’t even a thought.  You realize that being is all there is whether you are by yourself or with others.  You cannot escape this beingness.  You can’t not be.  You can only come to know the being that you are, and through that knowing discover the fullness of yourself that always was, is and will ever be.

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

Heart Magic

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HEART MAGIC

Dying to the self

There is no doubt, the energy of the heart is magic.  Those who have tasted, felt or touched their heart know its power, its bliss and its vastness.  It is the most advanced intelligence, and I would even say technology or tool, that we have access to inside of this human experience.  When we find our heart we realize that everything that our mind or body has created or tries to create, pales in comparison to what and how the heart creates.  Resting into the heart reveals a way of being, seeing and relating that includes everything and everyone inside of it.  Nothing is left out and everything is loved.  With this knowingness everything is possible.

If the heart is so powerful how come more of us don’t access and use it?  Well my friends that is a good question.  Why don’t we?  The easiest answer I can give is because it means death of our ego.  This means death of thinking that our minds know best, death of what we think we want, death of our life lived for own pleasures and preferences.  Death, death, death.  My friends we don’t like death.  In fact as a society we pretend that death doesn’t exist.  If we do acknowledge its existence our perspective of it is grim, depressing and full of sadness.  Something that is so obvious and undeniably evident and yet we deny it, try to postpone it, hold on for dear life, that is until we simply can’t anymore.  If we learned to allow things to die, if we gave everything it’s rights back to it’s natural course, including our wants, desires, dreams, ideas, perspectives, and so on, we would more easily find our heart.  We would naturally find ourselves open to whatever is and in the field of infinite possibilities rather than finite completion.  We would instantly reconnect to the magic.

Why death you ask?  It is death of the individualistic, of the egocentric, of the self-centric focus, of which none of us escape.  We are born innocent, without a self and in connection with our essence.  Then we develop an ego in order to survive our world.  The more our personality and identity develops the more we forget our original self.  It is the natural course of human development.  Without our ego mind we would have a very hard time adapting to or being part of this world.  But the journey doesn’t stop there.  There is development of our being which is beyond the mind, it’s simply that we have to give the reigns over and let something else be in charge.  From the perspective of our human identity this feels like death.  To our soul however it feels like coming home.  It is a birth, yet to our mind’s ideas about what life is or should be, it feels like misery.  We can either involuntarily collapse into suffering and feel victimized by the happenings of life, or we can voluntarily die to our stories, ideas, hopes and dreams and open into a world of wonder beyond where our mind’s imaginations lie.   

WORLD OF WONDER 

Voluntary relinquishment

The voluntary choice to relinquish ourselves is what is called surrender.  People like to think that surrender is easy and they use the term casually, but to truly surrender means that you will likely feel the pain of death.  It means you are willingly opening into that pain which you’ve done your ultimate best to avoid acknowledging or feeling, and you are choosing to let die that which is ready to die.  

So you’ve gone through the death portal, now what?  Now you are open, available and you just are.  Your heart is free.  You are at peace.  You’ve let the resentments, angers, insistences, pushes and pulls all go.  You are simply available for exactly what is in front of you.  You are no longer wishing that something else was.  The longing for something different dies and you arrive into the present moment of what is here now.  You feel humble and available.  You don’t know any grand knowledge.  You’ve just let the things go.  They’re gone.  Now life can move through you unimpeded.  This is the beginning of the field of heart magic and the world of wonder and awe.  

The more times you go through the death portal, the more you rest into this field.  As you let things be as they are, more and more this field of wonder opens up to you.  You might not be overtly aware of it at first.  It may be more subtle and just beyond your ordinary resting awareness.  You might notice an increase in synchronicities or being more telepathic, such as knowing when someone is going to call you or manifesting the best parking spot.  You might feel less tense.  Your breath might be easier and you feel less agitated or anxious in a general sense.  Things seem to take a bit less effort and you feel less depleted.  As you rest more and more into the field of the heart its presence is more obvious to you, and you begin to see and know the interconnectedness and inseparability of everything.  More and more you see everything as one all pervasive, intelligent and sovereign love.   

The field of heart magic is a collective or unified field.  When you are rested in the heart, then other hearts will feel this and respond to it.  They might not even know why they respond, they just do because all are connected at this level of the field.  Even if people knowingly or unknowingly respond to it, they may still have doubts, insecurities, feel separate, and choose their mind’s ideas over this all loving love.  Again giving up on our picture of life does not come easy.  We typically need to experience some life disruption, pain or suffering to get us to even entertain surrender.  If our life is too easy or comfortable there is nothing to push us into the next stage of development.  We need some kind of catalyst.  All of the catalyst you experience, the disruption, the pain, the suffering, the confusion is all to get you to your edge, to where you will willingly surrender, so that you can find your way into the heart.  Next time you are experiencing some kind of distress, something that you don’t want to be feeling or experiencing, remember this is exactly what you need in order to help you open into the field of heart magic.  Rather than turning away, face forward and move into whatever is presenting itself to you.  Even if it doesn’t feel like it, it is a gift.  Given to you by you, to help you remember your very nature, your most essential self, and your complete heart.

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado