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Safety & Support

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Safety and support.  These two seem to go hand and hand.  If we feel safe, we feel supported and if supported, we feel safe.  A sense of safety is what gives us permission to relax, to breathe, to be.  When we don’t feel safe we guard, we tense, we hold back, we pretend, and we don’t fully express ourselves, because we feel at threat.  Whether that threat is external, as in something or someone might hurt or harm us, or internal, as in we might hurt or reject ourselves, it leads to the same experience of constriction and non-fullness.  In contrast to be rested in a well of safety, allows us to drink in the fulfilling sustentation that is the essence of life.  It allows us to feel ourselves and our interconnectedness within the web of creation.  Being outside of the well so to speak, keeps us vigilantly alert to the protection of our survival, as a self-contained being that feels it has nothing to rely on except perhaps itself.  

What exactly is safety and how does one experience more of it?  Safety is a felt sense that all is well.  That no matter what is or isn’t happening, you are ok.  There is an undisturbable stability in safety.  How do you rest into this sense?  One might say that it’s a process, and one could also say that it occurs in a moment.  In any moment where you tune into the fact that you are ok, you come into contact with the rest of safety.  You likely experience this often throughout your day, you just simply don’t tune into it as it’s in the background of your awareness, not the forefront.  What you are more keenly attuned to, is when it is, that you don’t feel safe.  There is an alert, tense, unrested quality that appears and your awareness fuses with that experience.  It then seems like that is all there is.  You paste this moment onto all moments, and life then feels like one continuous stream of unsafety. 

To some degree we have all experienced feeling not safe.  We have all felt some types of physical, emotional or mental threats from self or others.  Whether it be physical harm, wars, rape, medical procedures, fires, car accidents, deaths, robbery, unkind words spoken, rejection, rigidity or any of the gamut of unpleasantries, we’ve all felt the need to protect ourselves from something.  You could say that the entire unwinding process that one goes through is to unwind the tension accumulated from actual and potential threats.  Many of the threats that we experience are micro.  We simply feel them as tightness in our body and when pointed to, we let them go.  While others feel macro, more personal, deeper, and like we have been sifting life through them since we were wee little ones.  

NAVIGATING UNCERTAINTY

Learning to relax

It seems as though one of the prime challenges of being human is navigating uncertainty.  We simply just don’t know what is going to happen next.  Then, put on top of that, having lots of unpleasant experiences, and it sets us up to feel like we can never take a full breath because something bad might happen if we do.  Relaxing feels unsafe.  Being tense feels safer.  So even though we don’t like the experience of feeling tense all of the time, we choose it on a subconscious level because it is the safer and more familiar choice.  We feel that at least this way we won’t be caught off guard, and maybe we can prevent potential harm that may exist in the next moment.  While this is logical to the aspect of ourselves that is scared and has been hurt, it doesn’t make as much sense to the part of you that just wants to relax and enjoy life.

We find ourselves in the conundrum of wanting to relax and not wanting to relax at the same time, or said another way, wanting to just be and not wanting to just be.  What do we do from here?  Do we risk allowing ourselves to relax and then potentially feeling hurt?  Or do we continue to hold tight, brace ourselves and prevent the blow of impact that might be coming our way whenever it pleases?  There is a perceived risk involved in opening, allowing, relaxing and being.  Is that a risk that you are willing to take?  For some the answer is yes and for others it’s no.  There is no right or wrong here.  It is not about forcing yourself to relax, which is quite the paradox, but rather it’s like creating an invitation.  You don’t always have to say yes to the invitation, but sometimes it’s nice to go to the party.  To experience the peace and joy that taking a full breath brings.  

In order to transmute and alchemize the painful experiences we’ve experienced, we must find a way for the breath of our awareness to get inside of them.  Without that we simply experience life through the lens of the tension pattern that has been created to protect us from feeling.  How does our breath get into these places that we don’t want to feel, that we didn’t want to experience, and that we wish hadn’t happened?  It takes a willingness to turn towards the turmoil, the demon, the darkness, and accept it.  You don’t have to accept that it was ok, but only that it happened.  Fair or unfair.  Right or not right.  Just or unjust.  You allow what exists to exist and end the resistance to the fact that it occurred.  That’s the first step that allows breath.  Whatever it is, whatever it was, it happened.  In that moment of acceptance your awareness starts to unwind from the tension pattern and it begins to notice that something else exists besides it.  That there is more here than what you’ve been able to attune to up to this point.  That there is indeed another frequency or flavor of existing.  A world of safety and support peaks out from behind the clouds.

This is the process to experiencing more safety and support in your day to day living.  If you are in resistance (ie. tension) you won’t feel safe and won’t attune to the safety that is here.  You will feel unsupported and unable to see the support.  You will operate self-contained and like a separate aspect of creation rather than interconnected within it.  None of this negative, it’s simply a flavor of experience.  In order to have a new flavor there are perceived risks to take.  The risk to let go, to unwind, to breathe, to relax and to feel joy.  The more you take the risk to feel these frequencies, the more accessible they will become to you.  Soon enough you will find yourself experiencing the feeling of safety and support, taking in the nourishment of life and living in harmony with yourself and your environment.  

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

Your True Significance

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YOUR TRUE SIGNIFICANCE 

Downloading programs

Seems as though we are constantly seeking for something that is not here.  We chase sensations, emotional states and experiences that satiate our need to feel full and complete.  There appears to be an incessant hunger that never feels satisfied.  Living in a near constant state of dissatisfaction is the norm for most people.  Always waiting to get to the next thing where we can momentarily feel relief from the gnawing emptiness of our ordinary lives.  We project the emptiness that we feel inside, onto the screen of our lives.  When our screen is full of stuff we notice the inner hunger less, but when the screen appears sparse we begin to feel that ache again.  The impulse to keep things full so that we don’t have to see or feel the emptiness inside is like an addiction.  We will create anything we can to keep our minds diverted from our inner world.  Sensations, relationship problems, health challenges, and money difficulties are some of the ways we keep ourselves outwardly preoccupied so that we don’t have to deal with the emptiness inside.

You might say that this emptiness is rooted in a belief that we are not enough.  It is the collective programming that we all give and receive once we incarnate into these human forms.  The good thing about programming is that it can constantly be upgraded.  As soon as we find something that works better or is more efficient, we can download the new program.  We don’t have to, but we can.  We clearly know this from the age of computers and cell phones.  The same is true for our psychological software.  When you see or recognize that something works better, or in this case, feels better, you can upgrade to that program if you so choose.  Programs in this case are beliefs or perceptions.  

Now you know that when you download a new program upgrade for your computer or phone, you don’t go back and forth between the old and the new.  You don’t download version 14.2 and then keep going back to download 14.1 or 14.0.  You just stick with the newest version, that is unless there is some major flaw with it, and in that case you typically just wait until they work out the bugs and create version 14.3.  You also know that you don’t get rid of the old program, you just simply choose what program you want to operate in and download it.  You choosing 14.2 doesn’t get rid of 14.0, it just makes it so that 14.2 is the program that you see.  

You can do this with your beliefs as well.  There is no one saying that you need to oscillate in between a belief that says you are not good enough and than one that says that you are.  You can just pick.  It doesn’t mean the other belief goes away, it just means that you don’t operate inside of it anymore because it is not functional in your device.  You can make it functional again if you want to, but you don’t have to.  This doesn’t bypass anything.  It just makes you in choice and in charge of what programs you choose to run.   

THE PARALLEL REALITIES OF YOUR CHOICES 

You are the king/queen of your game

You can think of each of your choices as parallel realities because that is what they are.  Choices to see or believe one thing will lead to different experiences than other choices.  This is obvious but we often don’t really recognize the power we have to determine our experience of reality.  Despite what you might think, there isn’t one objective reality that everyone experiences the same way.  The experiences of so called reality are as varied as the multitude of infinite perspectives interpreting what is seen.  What is seen determines how we experience it.  So while it may seem that everyone looks at an airplane, or a flower, or a rock and sees airplane, flower and rock, this is simply because we have agreed upon definitions of these things and therefore all see them the “same”.  Yet you are the definition maker, so you can decide to define anything you see however you would like to.  There are no rules here except the ones you decide to impose.  How you define what you see will determine how you experience it.   

This brings us further down the rabbit hole of parallel realities.  Let’s say your car just up and combusts one day.   You look out into the parking lot and see that it is up in flames.  How do you interpret this?  One choice is tragedy.  You loved the car, it has sentimental value and it can never be replaced.  Your experience of reality is irreparable loss.  Another choice is to look out in complete neutrality.  You have no care either way.  It doesn’t matter at all what has happened to the car.  It is simply a logistical matter of cleaning up the mess.  Your experience of reality is neutrality.  A third choice is to look out in excitement.  You perceive this to be the best blessing that has ever been bestowed on you.  Now you get to look for the car of your dreams.  Your experience of reality is an exciting future.  While on the appearance level all three of these choices may look the same, the car explodes, the car gets cleaned up and you look for a new car, the experience all of these three choices is radically different.  These are different and distinct realities even if on the surface they look alike.  Don’t be deceived by the appearance of things and conclude that if it looks the “same” it is the same for everyone. 

As we continue to evolve we are likely going to go in the direction of further seeing, recognizing and utilizing the power that we are to create what we want our experience of reality to be.  It’s not that we go out to the thing over there and change it.  It’s that we change how we see that thing over there and it then becomes another reality for us.  I know this seems too simple and your mind probably has resistance to the little amount of effort this takes and perhaps doesn’t believe it has this much power, yet reality is inside our minds, not out there inside of things.  There is nothing inside of things.  They are empty.  You are what is full.  You, we, the collective of humanity has had it backwards all along.  We infuse life with the abundance of our awareness, energy and perspectives, life doesn’t infuse us with anything.  It is just a neutral, blank slate for us to make meaning out of.  Because we have all been so conditioned to believe that the stuff tells us who we are, we have taken on the emptiness of stuff as a reflection of ourselves.  We think that more stuff will make us feel less empty, but if we are courageous enough to look deep down inside, we will see that more stuff makes us feel even more empty.  This is because we are putting more reflections of emptiness of substance in our mirror reflection called our reality to look at.  Then we wonder why we feel so worthless, powerless and like we and/or life are not enough.  

Disengage from the game you are playing with yourself.  You are operator of this whole shenanigan that you call your reality.  Stop deluding yourself that you are a pawn in the game.  You are the king/queen.  This is your game.  Choose in alignment with your preference.  

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

The Galactic Human

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THE GALACTIC HUMAN 

A matter of perspective

In some way or other we are all evolving.  We are learning, creating, and discovering things about ourselves.  While it may seem that things are the same from day to day, when we zoom out and look at ourselves from the perspective of decades, we can more easily see the fact that we are evolving and that our experience of ourselves is changing.  Even though one week may seem the same to the next week, it is not.  While there are similarities there is not sameness.  Our experience is different, even if miniscule.  Every second is a complete reorganization from the second before, it’s simply that our story about what we are experiencing creates a sense of linearity, which turns into days, week and years.

As we continue to evolve, or said another way, as we become more self-aware and wake up to more of ourselves, where we see from expands.  Our vantage point is wider and becomes more inclusive of what is already here.  You could call this a galactic perspective.  One that is larger and more comprehensive.  The galactic human that sees from a wider viewpoint is not different than the you that you are now in this very moment.  What is different is where you see yourself from.  The human perspective is typically limited to physical objects, to what can be perceived through the physical senses, and some smatterings of emotions and thoughts.  The galactic perspective includes all of those aspects of being a physical human, but it also takes into account more.  Inside its perspective is the world of subtle energy, the simultaneity of everything happening all at once and the interconnected heart.  Vibrational communication, transmission of energy and information through your mind-body rather than identification as the mind-body, and the inclusivity of everything inside of one being, are natural to what it knows.  

Integrating as the galactic human is really a matter of perspective.  How we see ourselves and what the mirrors around us tell us that we are, are key components to living more galactically informed.  If we keep looking out from the same glasses and into the same mirrors, we will keep getting the same information.  However if we have a new set of glasses or different reflections, then we can see ourselves from wider perspectives.  When we see ourselves, or are seen as the galactic human, we instantly become it.  I say instantly because we already are it, it’s simply that now we can see it.  The seeing of it makes it come alive inside of our experience of ourselves.   

REAWAKENING THE MAGIC OF WHAT’S HERE 

Knowing what you are

There can be a tendency to want to escape from here, from where we are now on this planet we call earth.  We have an idea that somewhere, or really anywhere else in the galaxy, is better than here.  It can be challenging to see the magic of being human on this planet at this time with all of the incoherence that exists among and between the people here.  Incoherence is simply a confusion in the system due to a lack of awareness of self.  Confusion is a non-seeing or a mis-seeing or what one is, a not knowing or lack of recognition the nature of ourselves.  We don’t feel, see or know that we are love and therefore we don’t experience anything as magical.  Rather our experience is of dread, discontent, anxiety, depression and the like.  When we don’t clearly see ourselves our experience reflects our very own confusion back to us.  

Our confusion doesn’t ever touch what we are.  The love doesn’t go anywhere.  It is always here simply waiting to be seen or recognized.  When it is seen it feels amazing.  We may have some initial resistance to it in that we may not feel worthy of it, yet deeper down inside we feel the inklings of what can only be described as home.  A remembrance or knowing of ourselves, even if it’s not fully clear or we push it away some.  Something gets touched, activated, and presenced even if only for a moment.  A moment is enough.  It is enough to remember and each remembering builds upon itself.  You can’t unsee what you’ve seen.  While you may attempt to deny or posture around it in order to prove that you aren’t worthy of it, even still you can’t not be worthy of what you are.

The more we see and remember ourselves, the less confusion we experience and we become increasingly coherent.  We literally create a more coherent field in and around us.  This field of coherency allows us to have a different experience of being human.  An experience that appears and feels more magical, more alive and more expansive.  It allows us to experience ourselves galactically, interdimensionally, multidimensionally and communicating with greater and greater aspects of ourselves.  While these things might seem otherworldly, or simply other than you, they are not.  They are you, at and from a wider perspective of yourself.  You don’t communicate with other beings in other worlds, but instead you realize that you are a larger being that is more inclusive of what you currently perceive to be other beings and other worlds.  You bring the magic and aliveness that you project and idealize as living somewhere else in the cosmos and bring it here now inside of your current experience.  

The galactic human simply knows what it is.  It knows that it is love.  It is unmovable in this knowing.  This knowing reawakens the love that already is and brings it into a pulsing, alive, felt experience.  Your heartbeat and the beat of the planet fall into resonance.  Your lived experience becomes harmoniously aligned with the heart of creation and the interconnection of yourself at all levels of your being.  The living galactic human is being breathed through your body as you are now.  It is relaying itself through your mind and informing your actions.  See yourself as what you are, find and receive reflections wherever you can, and more and more your lived experience will reflect that of the galactic human.  

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

Inside of Awareness

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INSIDE OF AWARENESS 

Everything exists in you

Everything that exists, exists inside of awareness.  Awareness is the root of existence.  Things, ideas, feelings, sensations, experiences, your body, everyone else’s body, planets, galaxies, stars and all dimensions of reality are all inside of awareness.  There is nothing outside of awareness that exists.  Now you might not be aware of everything that exists inside of awareness, but you can be aware that you are aware, and that whatever you need to be aware of inside of awareness will always be revealed to you as you need to be aware of it.  

Noticing awareness is simple.  It is the fact that you are awake, aware, present, that there is something that is noticing.  The more you notice that something is noticing, the more you rest into pure awareness.  Pure awareness is wakefulness without focus on the content of awareness.  Everything is made out of this awareness, that’s why everything exists inside of it.  There is nothing other than awareness.  There is no non-awareness or non-existence.  By definition non-existence does not exist. Therefore non-existence doesn’t exist.  You can create an experience of something not existing inside of awareness, but that is an experience of non-existing and not non-existence because there is an awareness there experiencing it.  

While this might all seem a bit confusing or complex it really isn’t.  The fact that you are aware is undeniable and it is by the fact that you are aware that you can experience anything and everything that you do.  We often confuse ourselves as the body through which we feel sensations through, yet we are what is aware of the body.  The body is not aware of us.  Therefore the body is inside of awareness and we are aware of the sensations of it.  The body is inside of you, you are not inside of it.  The more you rest into noticing pure awareness, the more you can be aware of, inside of awareness.  When we confuse ourselves as the body we limit what we can feel and sense to it.  This is why it seems that we can’t feel what is happening inside of other people’s bodies or things going on in other parts of the world or the galaxy.  It is also why as we become increasingly self-aware we can feel and sense other people more easily just like we sense ourselves and we can tune into things outside of our immediate environment or even have contact with beings in other dimensions.  This isn’t an experience of overwhelm or of taking things “on” for other people, but rather it is simply a shared experience of ourselves from a larger, more inclusive perspective.   

PURE AWARENESS IN YOUR TRUE SELF

Creator of experience

You’ve never experience another person.  Yep that’s right.  You’ve only ever experienced your interpretation of them.  Everyone, or every focalized point of awareness inside of the one awareness, is having their own experience of everything and everyone they experience.  And everything and everyone they experience gets experienced through the filters and lens that they have in place inside of the their energetic makeup.  This is why you only ever experience your interpretation of someone or something.  In a way you could say we are all in own little realities that are inclusive of everything and everyone we experience, and while there might be some agreed upon experiences and attributes that seem collective to our experiencing, at the end of the day we are the only one aware inside of our awareness.  We are the only one looking out from the lens we look from.  Therefore we are doing the determining of whatever it is we are experiencing.

This awareness that is doing the “aware-ing” is you.  There is no other you.  You are pure awareness.  As pure awareness you experience yourself in novel ways and create new modes and forms of expression and creation.  These, let’s say outward expressions even though nothing is really out, then come back and inform you at the level of your pure aware self.  This is the process of experience and creation.  You are the creator of this experience and expression of yourself.  This is quite a jump of perspective from thinking of yourself as a person in body on planet Earth.  The person in a body on planet Earth is your current iteration of your experience, but it is not you.   It is your creation.  

As we surrender our personality’s views, perspectives, and meanings about things that we hold so dear, we give up only our experience of limitation.  We rest into our larger self (aka pure awareness), which actually knows what our personality self constantly feels separate from.  Surrender is not a loss of anything except for the perception of loss.  Surrender is a remembering, a coming home, a welcoming, a gaining of insight, wisdom, knowledge and love from which we feel so disconnected from when we are identified as a being a person inside of a body.  Remember your body is inside of you.  You are the awareness that knows the body, not the personality in the body.

Waking up, ascending and enlightenment, is nothing other than the recognition of your self as pure awareness.  It is the conscious living and creating from the recognition of your true self as awareness.  The full recognition of your self as the creator of your experience of your body, your environments and all of things you create.  Rest assured this is not a heavy burden that your personality self has to somehow figure out how to do and create.  Rather you expand beyond your ordinary thinking mind with its limited views and perspectives into what feels more like a field of pure awareness that is pregnant with energy and life.  This vitality is you.  This potentiality is your playground.  You are free inside of your experience with the recognition that you are not your experience, but rather the creator of it.  

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

Stably Rested as Love

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STABLY RESTED AS LOVE 

The insurmountable task

Love is magic.  Magic is love.  They are the same substance.  Invigorating and giving life to all that is.  To be stable as love is to experience every single moment as magically enchanting and completely full in itself, while revealing the mystery in wonder and awe.  It is being as a child is, innocent, present and purely in love.   How do we retain and remember our innocence, our pure childlike wonder and awe, despite what we experience all around us?  How do we be what we innately are in a world that is fabricated from self-serving and preserving objectives, which sometimes include our own?  To be rested in love, in a world that is not rested in love, is a mighty task.  Sometimes a seemingly insurmountable one.  A near constant attunement to one’s self, and a complete devotion to love is required if we desire to stably rest as love.

So many times you have heard, read, preached, understood and have known what I speak of when I say that all is love.  You know that love is the truth, the way, and all that truly exists when you break everything down to its core constituent.  Yet this knowledge is not enough to make love your stable, day in day out, lived experience no matter what you see, feel, hear or touch.  When we experience something as not love, we label this experience as a challenge or problem.  Every problem, challenge or obstacle you face is simply a teaching tool to break down your barriers to experiencing everything as love.  The problem is not a problem in the way you think it is.  Challenges show you where you are not integrated, not whole, and where you holding things out of love.  As humans we try to fix, avoid or run from problems and challenges, and in attempting to not face them, we postpone the very catalyst that can bring us more fully into the experience of the truth of love.

The easier path is to resign to the conditions that exist.  To match the collective frequency of the forgetfulness of love as the only realness, and to be unstably thrown about by the changing tides of every single thing that arises.  Yes this is actually the easier path, which is why it is so well chosen and why so few experience being stably rested as love no matter what.  While easier is easier, and takes less energy, no change in experience occurs.  You continue to feel powerlessly defeated by the collective frequency of this planetary experience from which it feels there is no escape but death.  To experience the stability of love you must move towards the problems and challenges, so that you can transmute and alchemize them back into their original essence, that of course, being love.   

UNDERNEATH THE COVERS 

Only more love

Underneath the covers, the masks, the facades, the fears and all of fronts, and in all the dark corners and closets, you will only ever find love.  The only question is will you have the courage to look, to take off the masks and face the fear that whatever is underneath them is not love?  Will you stop pretending that something besides love exists?  That there is some other force in the universe that is not benevolent, isn’t working for you or doesn’t have your back.  The moment you stop pretending or insisting that there is some such other force than love is the very same moment that you will stop experiencing it.  What will remain is the only true power in all of creation, which is love.  

It is not by knowledge that you will come into the lived experience of being stably rested as love, but rather through the direct application of using every problem and challenge that is delivered to you.  Rather than collapsing in fear, shutting down or reacting in resistance, open to whatever is being presented.  Again this is not easy.  Opening into what we are scared of takes deliberate focus and 100% devotion to love.  It means being willing to feel the fear.   Without this you will not penetrate your fears, but rather they will penetrate you.  While opening may feel vulnerable, it will put you in a position of power because you are no longer running.  You are present and available to what is here.  This is a state of resourcefulness even if you have no idea what is going to happen, if you are going to be ok, or how it will all work out.  

To experience everything, the entirety of existence, like the innocent child, full or wonder and awe, perceiving magic around every corner, is the natural state.  Everything else is made up stuff that we’ve pasted on top of the essence of creation.  Our delusions feel very real.  Solid like concrete.  Factual.  Impenetrable.  Yet magic shifts and changes in the blink of an eye.  It is mutable, constantly reforming itself over and over and over again.  Its only solidity is its ever changing mutability.  It is not impossible to live as a child experiences.  It does not mean that you become a child, but only that you see as one, in remembrance and connection with your true essence.  

To the best of your ability alchemize your problems and challenges, and you will come to live rested as love.  It is a process of refinement, of purification, back into the natural state.  You do not have to resonant or succumb to the collective frequency.  You contain all of the power of the one when you are rested as love.  Challenge the collective to rise to you rather than you drop to it.  You can do this.  Accept the work that comes along with it.  Open to your fears.  Keep moving towards and you will accelerate, increasing your vibration to match closer and closer to that of the pure essence of love.  If you do, you will have returned to what you knew when you were a child and the magic of love will be your new waking dream.  All you will see and experience will be love.

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Analysis 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

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

Embodiment

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EMBODIMENT 

Finding the ground

Embodiment.  Seems like in some way we are all on a quest for greater embodiment.  To be present, in this moment, participating in the full experience of life.  In spiritual circles embodiment is a popular topic and is often referred to as being “in” our body, feeling the sensations, and moving our bodies with the inner rhythms of our being.   It seems that the aim of the embodiment movement is the shift from living in our head/thoughts into a more visceral, connected or integrated experience of existing.  Along with embodiment comes the idea of being grounded, which we often associate with a down or into our physical body direction.  

For many people there is an experience of overwhelming activity in their day to day, which can feel scattering, lead to being hyper-mentally focused, and or an experience of being “up”.  This up or scatter is what people attempt to bring down through embodiment practices.  These practices are incredibly beneficial, particularly if we feel disconnected from our physicalness or from our feeling body, but they are not the full picture of embodiment.  While they can greatly support us feeling more alive and engaged if we are stuck in our heads, the overarching goal of existing is not to be more “in” our physical body.  Rather the goal, so to speak, is to be or express more completely in and through all our bodies, of which the physical body is but one expression of who we are.  

The most pertinent questions here now are how do we be grounded, energized and expressing through all of our bodies?  And how do we become aware of the life and intelligence in all aspects of ourselves?  Our physical, emotional, mental and soul bodies are all vital expressions of our beingness.  True embodiment is being present in all directions and levels of ourselves.  Being grounded up, down, in and out.  If we are too physically focused our spiritual bodies might not be energized.  If we are too spiritually focused our physical, mental or emotional bodies might not be energized.  There can be any combination of these occurring.  You might wonder how you would ground up and out, since this is not the typical direction that people associate with the ground.  As a reframe, think of ground as everywhere and more as a state of being rather than as a dense form.  Throughout the entire universe there is ground.  Ground is not just down into the earth, but it is water, it is sky, it is the infinite cosmic expanse.  Ground is also not just physical, but it is subtle and etheric.  In fact the most coherent and stable ground is pure light itself; ever present, always here and the source of all life. 

GROUND OF BEING 

All bodies

If ground is everywhere, then you can experience ground in your physical body, ground in your emotions, ground in your thoughts and ground in your soul.  You might wonder what it looks like to be grounded in all of your bodies.  Being grounded in your physical body means your sensory-motor skills are intact and things are running smoothly with all of your physical body parts.  You are also not overly tense and breath moves freely through your body.  Being grounded in your emotional body means you know what you are feeling and you can feel your emotions when they are present.  You don’t try to think your emotions and you are not numb to them either.  Rather emotions are present, you feel them and the energy of them moves.  Being grounded in your mental body means that you have clear, coherent and organized thoughts.  You can pay attention to detail, follow things through and also see the larger perspective of how things fit together and impact each other.  Being grounded in your soul body means you know your multifaceted, multidimensional nature.  You feel connected to your heart and the hearts of others through yours.  You know knowledge without needing to learn it in book or from someone else.  You regularly feel ecstatic states of bliss and rapture.

Each of our bodies do have different directionality, frequency and relative size or distance.  Physical body density is slower.  You can see the size of this body with your physical eyes and the directionality is down/in.  The emotional body is less dense, but still has substance or thickness to it even in its non-physicalness.  Emotions can feel heavy or light and the direction can be up or down.  The mental body is less physical as we don’t directly see thoughts with our eyes like we do our physical body.  The frequency of thoughts is higher than emotions or the physical body, and the direction tends to be up.  The soul body is the most subtle of our bodies.  It has the fastest frequency, and is the largest and most expansive of all of our bodies.  Its direction is up and out, and eventually all pervasive as you reach full fusion or unity.  I share all of this because as you learn to ground in each of your bodies, knowing how they move and where to find them is useful.  If you are constantly drawing your energy and awareness down and in, then it may be more challenging to find coherent thought or expansive states of unified bliss and rapture.  Opposite of that if you are always up and out, your physical body or emotional body may be a bit more elusive to you.  

Embodiment includes of all you, in all directions and all rhythms.  Sometimes you may need to find up, at other times down, sometimes in and at other times out, until eventually you are rested in the allness of everythingness that has no direction and no distinction of bodies because it is just one unified whole.  This is the ground of all being.  The source from which all life sprouts forth from and returns to.  The source of existence and existing.  We are all already this.  The journey of embodiment is the expression of this source into infinite forms (ie. what we call creation or the universe), until the eventual return of the essence of these forms dissolves back into the source from which it emerged.  Returning to itself.  Expanding out and contracting back in.  Embodiment is the creation, it is the expansion out.  The return to source is the dissolution of all bodies and forms, aka disembodiment, but that is a topic for another time.  

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

Magic of the Spine

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MAGIC OF THE SPINE 

Conduit between spirit and form

You might not have heard or known, but your spine is a conduit for magic.  Real, live, magic.  Yes, that’s right.  Perhaps you’ve only thought of your spine as just a bunch of bones that make up your back, but there is much more going on back there then what meets the ordinary eye.  First of all your spine is not just a bunch of bones.  Yes there are bones, lots of beautiful bones, but the bones aren’t even the most exciting structure back there.  The bones house or encase the spinal cord.  Thank goddess for those bones.  We need them in order to protect that spinal cord.  The spinal cord is that ever so precious structure that allows communication between spirit and body to take place.  Yep you read that correctly, spirit communicates to your body right through your glorious spinal cord.  

A few definitions first.  What is spirit?  Spirit is intelligence.  It is awareness.  It is the source of all knowing and life.  It is all information that is available for everything in creation.  It is breath.  It enlivens or gives life to all forms.  What is body?  Body is form.  It is where awareness (ie. spirit) has localized and configured into a specific structure that we call body.  It is also typically what we identify as ourselves.  Sometimes we like to differentiate our brain from our body, but the brain is body as well.  It’s form equally enlivened or organized by the intelligence of spirit.  Just like your liver has the functions of detoxification and bile production, your brain has the functions of memory, thinking, personality and so many other functions, many of which are not even activated or awake.

The tone of the structures of the body determine how spirit moves through it.  What does that mean?  It means that the positioning, holding and posturing of the tissues of the body, directly influence how intelligent awareness can enliven, move through, and organize them.  The spinal cord is the central tissue structure in the body, which connects to and has immediate impact on every single structure inside of the body.  The tone of the spinal cord determines how information gets communicated to the liver, kidneys, muscles, brain and everything else in the body.  This is why the spine is a conduit for magic.  It provides the path for how spirit moves through, energizes and wakes up all the functions that these bodies have.   

KUNDALINI ENERGY

Movement of the spine

It is no accident that our chakras (i.e. our body’s energy centers) are aligned along the vertical axis of the spine, and why yogis and meditators pay special attention to their posture and unwinding tissue tension in order to achieve desired states of consciousness through their practices.  If you are familiar with yogic Indian teachings you’ve likely heard about kundalini energy.  It is described as an energy that is coiled in the shape of serpent at the base of the spine.  It lies dormant there until the right conditions for when it can begin to rise up the spine.  As it rises up the spine it activates, clears and awakens the chakras that are aligned along the vertical axis.  As each chakra is enlivened, functions of the body and its various components can change.  New sensory faculties can awaken, different perspectives can be seen, personalities can alter, until Nirvana or enlightenment is experienced.  For some this experience is the natural progression of inner work and spiritual discipline.  For others it can occur spontaneously during energy work, ingestion of medicinal substances, sexual experiences, or in the presence of someone who has activated their own kundalini.  

In Network Spinal Analysis we use the term “Somatopsychic Wave” rather than kundalini energy, but regardless of the term used, it is pointing to the same thing.  Network Spinal supports the unwinding of the tonal tissue patterns in the spinal cord.  When those tissue patterns begin to unwind, the energy that sits at the base of the spine begins to awaken.  With that awakening there is a rising of energy up the spine.   For some this is a gradual, subtle sensation of movement from deep inside of the body.  For others it is an intense expression of movement that seems to be beyond the physical body and can be clearly seen by the visual eye.  

Kundalini is a force of instability.  Its purpose is to clear stuff out and shake stuff up.  It destabilizes tension patterns so that spirit can move through and more fully infuse, invigorate and activate these bodies of ours.  It clears the way for intelligence to freely circulate throughout.  It helps support personal transformation and spiritual growth.  It assists in the embodiment of our soul and states of ecstatic rapture.  Physically it allows life force intelligence to flow to our organs and glands.  Emotionally it helps us open into and feel our emotions.   Mentally it clears the way for more confidence, brightest and clarity.  Soulfully it helps us find the center of ourselves, our inner knowing, our truth and our heart.  

It’s evident, our spines are downright magical.  When the tone of the tissues of the spinal cord change, so does our entire experience of life, for better or worse.  The body and all of its components come alive because of spirit, and spirit organizes the body.  When was the last time you thought of your body as spirit’s home rather than as your personal identity?  Heaven is already on earth by the simple fact that spirit enlivens a body.  We are everything we’ve been waiting for and everything we’ve been waiting for has been here all along.  

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

Letting Your Soul Be Seen

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LETTING YOUR SOUL BE SEEN 

Finding your heart

Whether you know it or not, you are an expression of light.  The light is the one infinite source of all of life.  Everything that is created comes from this source.  The light is clear, pure, aware, intelligent, and it just is.  Pure being.  Endlessly radiating.  You can’t not be this even if you try hard not be it, deny it or don’t know it.  Regardless, your fundamental essence is a spark of the brightest light you could ever imagine.  That spark is called the Soul.  Other terms that could be used to describe it are your Higher Self, the Heart, or Love.  That spark of purity and innocence can be most easily seen and felt in babies the first few months after they are born.  They do not have the filters, dampeners or defenses in place yet that distort the light.  The light and love they emit is clearly evident and transmitted.  They are not attempting to hide, dim or deny anything.  

As we develop our body and mind, and begin to have experiences, we start to bend the light that we are.  This doesn’t make us any less the light, but rather only adds twists, turns, and rotations to the light’s expression as it moves through the vehicles of our body and mind.  Some of these twists and turns distort or block our knowingness or remembrance of the spark of light that we are.  This means that we forget that we are a Soul, but again and of prime importance, our forgetting of what we are doesn’t make us any less it.  We are still a Soul.  That never changes.  Our light, our presence is never touched by our forgetting of it.  

Also just because you forget something or it’s blocked from your view, doesn’t mean that you can’t remember it or discover where it’s been hiding out.  Just like you can forget where you put your keys and then you can find them, it’s the same for your Soul.  It may take some work to untwist and detangle some of the stuff so that you can begin to see your pure essence, hence the need for inner work of increasing one’s awareness of self.  You typically don’t find your keys unless you look for them.  The best is when you’ve been looking for them and all the while you were holding onto them in your hand.  This is what it is like to re-discover your Soul.  You seek to find it and then realize it’s been with you all along.  Still we must do the seeking in order to uncover and  realize what is already here.  

UNWINDING THE TWISTS & TURNS 

Doing the inner work

The distortions of light develop in response to a perceived need to protect ourselves from hurt or harm.  When we perceive threat, we twist or turn in order to move away from or not feel physical, emotional or mental pain.  While these twists and turns dampen our experience of suffering, they also dampen our experience of being the source of light that we are.  We lose sight of our Soul.  Hence the massive amount of spiritual disconnection most of us feel.  This process occurs mostly unconsciously.  If we were self-aware, we would turn towards the experience, feel the impact, allow the sensations, feelings and thoughts to move through us, open our heart to the source of pain, love it and remain connected to our Soul.  If you are avoiding feeling the feels of life and protecting your heart, you can’t love with it.  Love is the portal into Soul.  This is the path of healing and what you learn to do as you spiritually wake up.

So while our self-protective defenses serve an important function of personal and social survival, they distort our experience of the light.  Our defenses are intelligent and the moment they perceive threat they will activate.  You could also exchange the word threat with the word stress.  When you feel stress, something feels scarce or threatened, even if you aren’t aware of what feels scarce and threatened.  You might not even associate the words stress or overwhelm with feeling threat.  This is why it’s so important to do your inner work.  Through inner work you wake up your own awareness to yourself.  You bring the light back.  You begin to see your defenses, why they get activated and what is underneath them.  As soon as you see through them they unwind.  The bends unbind and you open into your Soul.  The light is clearer and you can see yourself again.

Once we begin to open into our Soul we typically feel lighter, freer and more expansive.  However we can have all kinds of stories and beliefs as to why it is not safe to allow others to see our Soul or why it’s not safe to fully express ourselves.  Our defenses can arise just that quickly again.  We fear judgment from others or that we are unworthy of being the light that we are.  We are afraid people will reject or feel bad around us if we express and allow the light that we are to be seen.  We might feel some shame for feeling bliss or ecstasy, or feel too big and bright.  We fear people’s confusion as to why we are the way we are and what we are experiencing and expressing.  We jump into the practicalities of life and prioritize them rather than valuing the expression of our Soul.  We grasp back onto our stressors and irritations, wanting to hold onto them rather than dissolve into our Soul where they are all resolved.  

It is vulnerable to let our Soul, Heart and true Self be seen.  However the more inner work you do to increase your awareness of your patterns the less you will perceive threat, and the less vulnerable it will feel to express the light of your Soul.  It will just be you, being you, heart wide open, undefended, feeling the feels of life, allowing what is to be and loving it all exactly as it is.  

Do the work to remember the spark that you are and then let it be seen.

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