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ALL IS ENOUGH

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ALL IS ENOUGH 

Shifting perspectives

Imagine what it would be like to look out at all of life and see it as enough.  To see nothing lacking, nothing missing and nothing that needs progress or change.  For a moment to be content with what is.  Notice how you feel when you look out and see enough.  Now share this same outward perspective of enoughness inwardly.  See yourself, your body, your inner journey, and wherever you are in life at this moment as enough.  Again notice how you feel.  Recognize the ease and sense of calm rested-ness that becomes instantly available when you see this way.  Notice how your entire system relaxes and you become present and available to whatever is here now.  This enoughness is what most all of us crave.  Many of us are tired.  Tired of feeling like life is scarce, like we have to work hard to survive, that we must stay vigilant, can never relax, or that something must change.  It’s exhausting to view from the perspective of not enough.  Yet most of us don’t realize that it is simply a perspective.  We believe scarcity to be reality.  

Enoughness is always present, always available, and always here.  It requires only that you bring your focus on it.  What we focus on we experience.  It’s challenging for the mind to accept this and to change its beliefs in this way.  We really want to keep believing what we believe even if what we believe doesn’t feel good.  We think that it’s the only option.  We don’t see ourselves in the equation as the source of our experience.  Due to this unawareness of ourselves as the source of what we experience we often feel powerless to our beliefs rather than in charge of them.  Until we see ourselves and simultaneously really, really want to believe something different, we won’t.  We will choose the same beliefs that feel bad, that generate the same feelings of fear, lack and scarcity, that is until we are truly fed up or things in our life or body break down.

It’s a bit of an interesting paradox that we have to really convince ourselves to want what we want.  We all want to feel abundant and in the state of enoughness, yet we must be really tempted to make that choice in perspective.  We will come up with one hundred million reasons why we can’t choose it, one hundred million ways to disbelieve that it’s possible, and one hundred million insistences why we must keep our old belief system of scarcity, lack and not enough.  Life will give us challenges where it will feel hard to choose the perspective of enoughness and yet that is the inner work required to make the change in belief.  The challenges are the perfect gift, the most pristine catalyst, that you need in order to choose the perspective of your true desire.   

INNER BOOTCAMP 

Choosing enough

Choosing the perspective you desire is not always easy.  When the experience of life appears empty of things you desire, or it feels like life is not working for you and you can’t make sense of what appears to not be inside of your experience, doubts arise.  When doubt is present you default to your habitual way of perceiving life, which for most is through the lack and scarcity lens.  Fear arises based on how you are perceiving things to be and you find yourself stuck.  Stuck in nothing more than a perspective, yet it feels like so much more than that.  You might wonder how things can just be a matter of perspective, perhaps it seems too simple, yet how could they be anything else?  Two people could experience the exact same situation or conditions, and experience them very different based on how they perceive the experience.  

Living from enoughness or completeness is entirely possible.  It is not fantastical to entertain this as your lived experience.  You must first start seeing the challenges that seem contrary to enoughness in your life as opportunities to learn it.  What this means is that when situations arise that seem to activate your lack, not enough, or scarce thoughts, you must see these situations as opportunities to choose a new perspective, and then you must actively choose to see abundance where you previously saw it as not.  Again your mind will likely resist this at first.  It won’t want to make the change in perspective because it doesn’t yet believe it.  That’s ok.  Choose it anyways and then notice that you begin to feel better.  You might oscillate back and forth between choosing lack and then choosing to see enough.  You might go back of forth 15-100 times for just one situation or challenge that presents itself, and that’s ok.  That oscillation back and forth is building a muscle, you inner muscle of enoughness.  

Lack perspectives can just be tricky to see.  They can come dressed up in a strong need to make progress or make something different.  Though this might seem very natural to you to want to make progress, because it is quite engrained in us that this is what we are supposed to be doing as humans, you must recognize what your need to make progress is rooted in.  Do you feel that there is somewhere better to get too?  Do you feel where you are is not enough?  Do you feel there is something wrong with what is happening now and you need to make it different?  All of that is rooted in lack and not enoughness.  

When instead you choose the perspective of enoughness and become rooted in it, life still flows, and there is still projects, activities and happenings.  The difference is that you play in the unfolding of life rather than try to make stuff happen to it.  It quite a bit more easeful even though there is still activity and doing occurring.  There is nothing to fix so you have less attachment to any outcome and your only purpose in doing is to have fun and because you enjoy it, not because something more or better must occur.  This is what is to come from enough rather than to try to get to enough.  If you keep trying to get there you will never arrive.  If instead you simply choose it, over and over and over again until you are rested there, then and only then will you experience it.  

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

INEXHAUSTIBLE SOURCE OF LOVE

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INEXHAUSTIBLE SOURCE OF LOVE  

Recognizing what is

What moves us?  What drives us?  What is our fuel source? What are we made of?  At the source of everything is love.  We know this, at least we know it conceptually, but how do we really grok this, get this and live this?  Love is boundless, infinite and inexhaustible, yet why does it seem scarce and limited inside of our experience?  Let’s first be clear on our definitions.  Love is not an emotion, but it is the source of all emotion.  Love is not a thought, but it is the source of all thought.  Love is not a sensation, but it is the source of all sensations.  Understand we often confuse love for its expressions rather than recognize it as the source of all expressions.  Love is the birthplace/birth space of all of creation.  It’s the very fabric of the universe, that which everything is made from.  

Love is exchanged or expressed when it is recognized, acknowledged or made aware of by you, by your awareness.  The primary reason that love seems to be limited or scare is because it remains largely unrecognized in our day to day life.  Whatever we tune our awareness to or focus on we see.  Sometimes, or rather oftentimes, we look out and we see our judgments, labels, stories and ideas about what we think we are seeing rather than seeing what is, which is love.  When our judgments, labels, stories and ideas dominate our awareness, which they do for most people, then our life experience is the fabrication of those things.  We see what we think rather than what actually is.   

You can see here that love is not what’s limited, but only our experience of it is limited based on what we choose to see.  To see all as love, as what it is, is a high ask of ourselves.  Our conditioning is such that to our mind’s stories and ideas this seems ridiculous.  We have a multitude of perspectives, experiences, situations and things that we do not, and often refuse to see as love.  For example things that have created physical, mental or emotional pain for ourselves or others we tend not to see as love.  Things that we don’t understand or that we disagree with we tend to leave out of love.   While some expressions of love may be sourced from a more distorted or confused perspective, at their core they are still love.  When love in its purity isn’t recognized as such then it continues to play out and create expressions of love that are more twisted or bent.  Not until the source of love can be looked upon and seen as what it is and have itself reflected back to it, can it come to see itself and unbind some of its bent or confused perspectives.  But we tend to not do this for ourselves or for others.  Rather we look at the confused expression of love and offer only our judgments, fears and condemnation.  Hence we live in a collective reality where love seems limited and scarce.   

KNOWING YOURSELF AS LOVE 

Seeing self as the source

In order to see all as love, and to recognize love at its source, you must first know yourself as the source of love.  You are not able to mirror or reflect love to other aspects of creation if you don’t first know yourself as it.  While this might seem obvious it’s a pretty big missing link for most.  The primary human wounding is unworthiness and unlovability, which is the opposite end of the spectrum of knowing yourself as love.  Knowing yourself as love is seeing yourself as it.  It’s beyond sensing, feeling or thinking of yourself as love.  Although those are great entry points they still don’t go direct to the source of love, but rather utilize expressions of it.  To be rested as love, to know it without doubt, to recognize yourself unequivocally as it, to no longer need to think, feel or sense yourself as it because you are it, is to know yourself as love.  

Why don’t we know it?  Primarily because we’ve agreed to forget for learning sake.  Also because there are not many pure mirrors available on this planet to reflect this knowing to us.  The result is that we don’t see ourselves very clearly.  It’s like we are constantly looking at reflections in the mirror that are bent, twisted and distorted, except they look “normal” to us.  They look like who we think we are and therefore we’ve come to identify with those reflections more and more as the years have gone by.  Just because something feels normal or has become familiar to us, such as our sense of identity, it doesn’t mean it’s accurate.  As we’ve come to believe and accept the reflections given to us from distorted mirrors about what/who we are, we’ve naturally created our life experiences based upon these beliefs and see life through our bent perspectives.  Hence again we experience a world scarce and limited in love and genuinely can’t figure out why because we don’t recognize the source of the reflections is our very own self, and how we see our very own being is what we experience life to be.  

If we are indeed love, then how do we know ourselves to be it?  The most direct path would be to simply accept it as fact.  This is however a radical shift for most people’s belief systems and therefore direct acceptance, while entirely possible, is not highly probable.  The more experiential way is to commit/devote to seeing yourself as love.  Multiple times a day reflect to yourself that you are love.  I suggest not focusing on your form when you do this.  Many times people will practice loving their form/body, or qualities they have, or things that they do for themselves or others.  Again those are expressions of love, but they are not recognizing the source of it.  Instead go to the source.  The essence of you is love.  It is what you are made of.  It is what/who you are.  Yes your body, your qualities  and all the things you do are expressions of love, but they aren’t the source of it.  Come to know yourself, your actual self, not the fabricated body-personality of you that is made up of thoughts, labels and ideas that have been conditioned.  As you get this, begin to see others as this same source, and all things/experiences as well.   It is not out of your hands/heart to shift this entire creation.  The change is and has always been with and inside of us.  As we insist on seeing ourselves as what we are, and including the rest of creation inside of that perspective, we live a very different reality where love is abundant and inexhaustible.

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

BELIEVING IN MAGIC

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BELIEVING IN MAGIC 

Possibility, imagination & creation

Most of us love the idea of magic, but few of us actually believe in it.  It seems that magic is reserved only for small children.  Once we reach the age of “logical” brain development, magic becomes silly fantastical play that only little kids do and since we are becoming a “big” kid, magic goes out the window for us.  Why do we stop playing and believing in magic?  Why do we get so serious and realistic?  It’s really all about what we value as a society and what gets reinforced.  We get acknowledgment and praise for getting good grades, excelling at math and science, and for doing our school work well.  We don’t get acknowledgment for how well we play, the worlds we create with our imagination or how much we believed in magic today.  Since there is an innate human need to belong and be part of the group, we follow what the collective agrees to value even if it isn’t in alignment for us.  Despite our best efforts to stay connected to our steam of magic and all of its infinite possibilities, we often lose connection to it our mid-late childhood development.  

What is magic?  Magic is the space of possibility, imagination and creation.  What we often fail to realize is that we are imagining our entire reality.  We each are already master magicians (ie. creators).  The world we create/are creating is flat, mundane and logical because that is what has been reinforced to us as what’s real and important.  Therefore that is what we see and continue to create through our seeing.  In this way reality appears to be devoid of magic, but rather it’s that we’ve used our magical powers to create this seemingly ordinary experience.  Inside of this experience we pretend to know what is going to happen next, we create plans, schedules and routines that give us a sense of familiarity, and the world of infinite possibilities gets scaled down into just a few known potential outcomes for how things can be and operate.

You can see that regardless of whether or not you believe in magic, you are utilizing it everyday.  It’s simply a matter of tuning in, paying attention and inquiring into what it is you are creating.  We create with our imagination and our seeing.  Whatever you can imagine is possible you can create.  Again you are already doing it all of the time, it’s only that your range of what is possible is likely quite narrow and your active imaginative qualities are somewhat off line.  You keep creating the same reality because you aren’t conjuring up anything novel from the well of your creator powers.  The question then becomes how do you get yourself back on line, activating your imagination and making magic that makes your reality feel alive, invigorating, exciting, mysterious and blissful.  

GETTING TO THE HEART 

The well-spring of magic

The portal into our active imaginative qualities and creating a more magical reality experience for ourselves is finding our way into our heart.  We are born open and in the state of love.  This is why a young child’s heart is naturally open and why they have access to the world of their magic.  Even if you don’t perceive what they perceive or join them in their creations, they are in their own magically reality all of the time.  That is until they learn the seemingly “fixed and solid” natural of reality that we condition them with and they start to believe that they are a product of creation rather than the magician/creator of it.  This is when the world of infinite possibilities becomes only a small handful of options and we forget, lose touch or disconnect from the fact that we are the ones doing all of the creating.  

As time goes on, and we have more and more experiences of being human, we move further and further away from the source of ourselves.  This means we forget ourselves more and more with time.  In addition, many of the experiences that we have being human don’t feel good and we learn to protect ourselves from physical, emotional and mental pain.  Protection means that we shut down, close off and become less open and available to participate with creation.  Since we’ve forgotten that we are the magician/creator we feel powerless to the circumstances of life, and helpless to how we feel, sense and relate to life and others.  In essence it’s kind of big, confusing mess.  

Finding our way back into our heart often means feeling the things that shut it down in the first place.  When we feel the pain it breaks our hearts back open.  We move through the feelings rather than stay closed down and shut off.  We open into the pain rather than protect ourselves from it.  This is healing in a nutshell.  It’s not complicated, but it’s also not necessarily easy.  It takes quite a bit of courage and ginormous heap of trust in ourselves to reopen.  Well it might seem easier to stay closed and continue life as the mundane status quo, you will feel unsatisfied and non-magical.  Your experience of life will be functional, but it won’t necessarily be fun.  

Your heart is the well-spring of magic.  It makes everything come alive.  It allows all possibilities to emerge.  It activates your imagination and helps you remember that you are the magician of this creation.  The reward of feeling the pain becomes clearly evident as you embark on the journey.  Your commitment and devotion to the path is key.  Some days it will feel hard to find your heart, but your desire to do so will be your guiding light.  If your level of commitment or devotion is high then before you know it there will be nothing that doesn’t fit inside of your heart.  You will have engulfed all of creation in love.  This means you will undoubtedly experience magic as your lived reality moment to moment.  As always the choice lies in your hands, your heart and your desire.   

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

GETTING BEYOND COMPLACENCY

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GETTING BEYOND COMPLACENCY

What do you tolerate? 

It’s easy to get lazy.  As humans we are creatures of habit.  After we do something a time or two or three, and the novelty of it wears off, we go into automatic pilot mode.  We assume that what is will always be the way it is because now we are used to it being that way.  We create the illusion of solid and fixed, and with this we stop being fully present.  Our experience of what was once novel and exciting now become more ordinary and with that we slip into a habituated state of being, which you could also call your “usual” state of awareness.  But who really wants usual and ordinary?  None of us do and yet it’s easier to maintain the lower frequency of usual than it is the higher frequency of excitement.  

In order to get beyond the habit of our usual state of being we need to literally stretch our bandwidth or increase our capacity for what we can maintain.  For most people stretching is a bit uncomfortable because it comes with a sense of effort and work.  It takes more energy to get out of our normal habituated ways of being then is does to continue with our automatic thoughts, behaviors and perceptions.  This energy expenditure is exactly what is required to increase our capacity and maintain a higher frequency, yet many chose the way of utilizing as little effort and energy as possible.  You could also equate this to not having enough desire or momentum to create change.  You might think you want something to be different in your life, but you don’t really want to put in the energy to make it different.  

We all have different tolerance levels.  Some people might tolerate being 10 pounds overweight while another person won’t tolerate being more than 2 pounds over.  Some people tolerate being out of alignment or distracted 50% of their day, while others won’t tolerate more than 10%.  There is no right or wrong here in regards to where you are at, it’s simply important to take note of it.  Take inventory of what your tolerance levels are in all the important areas of your life.  Then honestly ask yourself if you are ready to shift your level.  If you aren’t ready, what would it take for you to be ready?  In this way you get clarity around where you are and even if you aren’t ready to shift anything at least you can accept it and do the preparatory work required in order to be ready.  

Our vibrational state is up to us and only us.  No one can or will shift it for us.  Your level of desire and willingness to participate is key.  To move from your normal baseline to your next level is your work and responsibility.  You can use things or people as permission slips to feel certain ways, but ultimately you must become the source of your frequency in order for it to sustainable. 

FREQUENCY OF EXCITEMENT 

Becoming more childlike 

As much as we all like to feel excitement, most people aren’t feeling it much.  Our focus tends to be on all the things that need to get done, rather than on feeling amazing and following what feels good.  Many of our automatic patterns of behavior help us be efficient doers, which can at times be helpful, but they can also make us robotic.  We are going through the motions of life and doing all the things, but for what?  To get everything done so that we can do everything again tomorrow?  Where exactly do we think we will get to once all the doing is finished?  From what I can tell the activity of life, of this infinite creation, never stops.  We could constantly find ourselves doing something.  The goal is not the cessation of doing or activity, but rather to be present right now.  To find and feel our excitement in this moment and not when something is finished or done.

The frequency of excitement is high.  Think of a small child and how excited they get, and how much energy they have.  It’s off the charts.  They are pure examples of living excitement.  Yet we often feel tired by that level of excitement.  We don’t have the energy to keep up.  Where does energy come from anyways?  Why does it feel limited to us, but infinite in a small child?  Energy comes from excitement.  You generate energy through excitement.  Now I am not saying that rest is not beneficial.  Rest is necessary for these bodies.  What I am taking about is all the rest of the time when you are not resting.  You may also find that you require less rest the more you are able to maintain a higher frequency of energy in your day to day life. 

Like I mentioned earlier there is a stretching phase.  A phase when it feels like it takes a lot of energy to elevate yourself.  It’s true, it does.  Stretching is not effortless.  It requires work.  Work that will then require rest.  However at some point you will maintain at a new higher level of vibration that feels lighter, freer, and more childlike.  A child may swing on the same swing 50 times at the park and it will not be normal or ordinary to them.  They will find a way to feel excited about it each time, and then when some other object at the park strikes their fancy they will run over to it and play on it.  They continue to generate and follow their excitement.  

Giving yourself permission to live life in a more joyfully free and excited way is a permission slip worth giving yourself.  Trust the rhythms of life more.  The comings and the goings.  The ebbs and flows.  The natural pacing and rhythms.  Trust yourself more.  Your feelings and intuitions.  Your joy and excitement.  Follow them.  Do your best not to let your rational mind make things ordinary and normal.  Find novelty in swinging on the same swing 50 times.  Life is not flat or mundane on its own.  It requires our perspective of it to be flat or mundane.  Through what perspective do you see life?  If it’s not what you desire, are you ready to shift it?  Be willing to do the work required to raise yourself up and to get to the next vibrational level of yourself.  

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

CHOOSING OPENNESS

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CHOOSING OPENNESS 

Why we choose closed 

It’s easy to be closed.  It isn’t as overt as you might think it is.  In fact most people are closed and don’t even know it.  It tends to be what we think of as our natural state of being.  Comfortable and familiar to us, being closed keeps us contained and in our own little bubble of existing and feeling like we know what’s going to happen.  In contrast, openness feels more spacious, vulnerable and mysterious.  When we are open we can feel ourselves and others.  Often people have a negative relationship with feeling, especially if the feeling that’s present isn’t a “good” one.  This is why we close, and sometimes stay closed for most of our entire life.  

When we are closed we can avoid feeling the fullness of “bad” things or feelings.  While on the surface this might seem advantageous to you (which is why so many do this), but when viewing from the bigger picture of your life it’s quite disadvantageous.  The first reason it is disadvantageous is that when you are closed, and are unable to be feel, you lose connection with your guidance system and therefore yourself.  Feeling is guidance.  It’s your beeline to your higher self.  Emotions tell us how to proceed forward on our path and which choices to take.  What to say yes to and what to say no to.  When you can’t feel you will often have the experience of being lost, confused or stuck.  You can call this disconnection, and a sense of not knowing how to move forward or what actions to take in your life.  The second reason being closed is disadvantageous is that when you are closed you can’t feel the bad or the good, so your experience of life flattens.  It’s like being kind of numb.  You might sort of feel things, but your range of feeling is limited. Most days and experiences feel ordinary (aka non-magical).  You go through the motions of life, feeling human and like a separate person from other people.  Again you might not even know that things could be, or are, different than this.  It’s just your normal known state of existing or being in the world.  You don’t feel particularly bad, but you also don’t feel particularly good.  

Being closed feels protective.  It is a defense mechanism that we learn in order to not experience impact.  This is important when we don’t have the inner resources or awareness to be with that impact, and when we’ve either lost touch with ourselves or don’t yet know ourselves.  Examples of this are when we are infants, toddlers or young children and we had experiences that were too painful, scary or confusing to feel.  This is when we develop protective mechanisms.  Nearly all people are still functioning in their day to day life using these strategies.  This is why there is so much disconnect from self, others, animals, the planet, and the universe at large.  It’s why we feel separate and why people are often oblivious to their impact on self or others, or exceptionally vigilant to it.  It’s because we aren’t feeling or are afraid of feeling “bad” things.  It is not wrong.  It’s simply the stage of the game we are personally and collectively at; that is until we choose different. 

FEELING 

Good, bad and everything in between

It really isn’t as bad as you might think it is to feel things that don’t feel good.  In fact it’s rather freeing and liberating, but we aren’t there quite yet.  From where we are now it might seem scary to feel because you don’t know what will happen if you do.  Some people create stories that they will never stop feeling bad once they start.  That they will enter a bottomless pit of despair and suffering with no way out.  Others fear attracting more bad feelings to themselves.  Still others know that if they feel what they are feeling then something will need to change and they aren’t ready for that change yet.  Then there are those people that simply don’t even recognize that they are feeling.  All they know is that they don’t feel on par.  Maybe they have pain in their body, or things aren’t going how they would like them to be going in their life.  Maybe they feel irritated or they don’t sleep well.  Perhaps they have digestive issues or skin problems.  What we are feeling will manifest into our physical experience if we don’t feel it in our emotional bodies.  Feeling will do whatever it can to get our attention and find its expression, because remember feeling is nothing more than guidance, and our higher self wants nothing more earnestly than to guide us on this journey.  

Bad feelings have really gotten a bad rap.  There is an important distinction here between having a negative disposition on life and feeling bad feelings.  Bad feelings don’t equal having a negative outlook, that is unless you don’t feel them.  See many people that are angry, anxious or depressed, are so because they aren’t feeling, not because they are.  This is opposite to what most people believe.  Most people think that the people that seem generally negative on life must be feeling bad things all of the time, but what’s actually happening is that they are avoiding feeling bad things.  That is why they are angry, anxious and depressed.  When we feel bad feelings we liberate energy, and this feels good.  We get less angry, anxious and depressed rather than more.  We open rather than stay closed, and because openness is our true natural state of being, it feels good.  We feel connected even if we are feeling something bad.  

People that you view as having a generally positive disposition on life are regularly feeling bad things.  This is how they can stay positive.  It would otherwise be very challenging to do so because so much energy would be bound up in their system.  Bound energy is closed, looped, tight and distorted.  To have the courage to feel is to be honest with what’s present.  It’s to be authentic with what is.  It’s the opposite of spiritual bypassing, which is to have a kind of “false” positive disposition.  It’s to say everything is great when you aren’t actually experiencing great.  There is an incongruence there, it’s inauthentic, and it’s ok.  It’s simply another protective mechanism to not feel bad feelings, because for some reason you view them as less spiritual.  

To be open is to allow all.  Nothing needs fixed or changed.  All is allowed and all is ok.  It’s not hard to feel bad things when they arise, but it does take a practice of slowing down and paying attention to yourself.  When you are in the doing mode of life, you are often not focused on your feeling body.  This is when you don’t even know that you are feeling, or you notice that something is off, but don’t want to take the time to stop and feel it.  Feeling might feel foreign to you at first, but I promise with a little attention to it, it’s not as mysterious as it might seem.  The reward in it, is you being connected to yourself again.  It’s to have more guidance and clarity.  It’s to be able to feel life, yourself, others, and to have connection to all of existence on this planet and inside this universe.  It’s to have passion for life and to act in alignment and integrity with yourself, your path and your calling. 

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

THE ULTIMATE RECEIVER

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THE ULTIMATE RECEIVER 

Where’s your focus?

Receiving.  Most people have difficulty receiving.  As much as we all want to manifest and create we don’t give much attention or space to receiving.  Rather we work hard, and then harder, to create what we want and then wonder why we are so tired and still don’t have the life we desire.  While it seems that receiving would be the simplest of things, we defect it, avoid it or feel like there is never enough of what we need because we can’t receive what’s in front of us.  To receive is to be open, to be receptive, and most people spend their existence being closed off, shut down, narrow minded, and in judgement rather than in open receptivity.  We then wonder why life doesn’t look or feel like we desire.

We are quite wired to see what isn’t.  We focus on where we’re going and what we think we are going to get when we get there, and rarely see what’s here.  This is because we tend to live in a lack mindset.  We view whatever is here now as if it is missing something.  Something that we need to work to find or get into our lives.  We might perceive that we don’t have relationships that we want, money that we want, opportunities that we want, skills that we want, the inner state that we want, the outer environment that we want, feelings that we want, and on and on.  It really seems that life isn’t quite here yet, but will be here once something arrives inside of our experience so that we can give ourselves the permission to temporarily stop seeing through our lack glasses.  Our focus on lack is intense.  It pretty much takes up our entire bandwidth whether we are conscious or it or not.  This is why we feel bad so frequently.  

The thing is that in order to receive you have to see what is here rather than focus on what’s not here.  Since this is a mostly rare way for us humans to focus we are always feeling depleted.  Depleted because our focus is constantly on what isn’t in our experience, or what is in our experience that we don’t like.  When there is something we don’t like or doesn’t feel good, we attempt to get into our experience whatever we perceive is missing, which we believe will make us feel better.  At the core of this game of lack that we are playing out in our physical reality, is a sense of inner lack.  A sense that something about us is missing or incomplete.  A feeling that we somehow need to be different or more than we are.  So we reject ourselves.  We work really hard to prove ourselves.  We over stretch to attempt to meet what we think the people of the world want from us.  All the while not really realizing that we aren’t receiving our own selves.  Again we wonder why our life isn’t as we desire it to be.  Why aren’t we manifesting or creating what we want.  As long as we continue to come from lack, to come from the perspective that something is missing, that is all we will ever create.   

GRATITUDE 

The “how”

You might say that our “inability” or difficulty with receiving, stems back to the fact that nearly all of us feels a sense of inner lack.  You could call this the “not enough”  or “not good enough” perspective or wound.  It’s like an article of clothing that we all get when we are first born into this world.  Most of us have been wearing this piece of clothing for so long that it’s kind of become like a part of us. We’ve identified with it and let it become who or what we think we are.  It colors everything we see.  Other people, or reflections in our environment, have mirrored this not enoughness back to us and we’ve come to believe that lack must indeed be a very real thing.  After all we experience it and see it, don’t we?  

We experience what we see and what we see depends on the glasses (or clothes) we are looking through.  Said another way, we experience what we believe and not necessarily what is.  The good news is that all articles of clothing can be taken off even if they are really, really tight; even if they appear to be fused to our skin and inseparable from the tissues underneath, they can still be removed.  Essentially what I am saying is that every belief that you have can be changed or a new one can be chosen.  It may not be as hard as you think it is.  How might it be easy you ask?  All that is required is a quadruple shot of gratitude taken several times a day.  It is the instant cure for your lack mindset.

In general we tend to be incredibly ungrateful.  This is why the lack mindset is so strong and pervasive on this planet still.  It is why human consciousness doesn’t evolve.  It’s why people continue to be asleep, disconnected and working hard to prove themselves or get what they think will make them happy.  Every time you don’t receive yourself you are ungrateful.  For many people that is their constant state of being.  They know nothing else.  For others it’s more intermittent or dispersed, but nonetheless still present.  The level of self-rejection is high among humans and this makes it nearly impossible to receive, and ultimately therefore create, as creating is receiving.  When you have a belief that you are not worthy, that belief is incompatible with receiving.  It’s incompatible with being open to life or others.  It’s incompatible with manifesting your desired reality and seeing the abundant world that you want for yourself and others.

Many people don’t know that they aren’t receiving.  We are so used to pushing our energy in the outward, doing direction that the receiving, inward direction is quite foreign for most.  If you are very innerly or outerly busy this is key sign that you aren’t receiving.  Do your thoughts never stop?  Do you talk incessantly?  Do you listen or receive others without thinking about what you are going to say or do next?  Do you constantly need to be doing stuff for yourself or for others?  Is it hard to tune into yourself for more than few moments?  Do you feel tired a lot?  Are you “doing” your meditation rather than actually meditating?  These are all signs that you aren’t receiving.  In order to receive you must be worthy and know that nothing is missing from you.  That you are complete and whole as you are.  To bridge the gap from incomplete to complete you must only find, feel and radiate gratitude.  Gratitude for yourself, gratitude for what is in your experience now and gratitude for all future experiences.  At any moment you can tune yourself to become a stream of infinite, unconditional gratitude.  It is always here and available for your choosing.  

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

KNOW WHY YOU ARE

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KNOW WHY YOU ARE 

You do not exist to do

There really is nothing more pivotal, more important and more fundamental to your existence then knowing why you are.  Why you are is who you are.  Why you are is your existence.  It is the only function, the only purpose, the only intention that your existence serves.  So many people feel lost.  So many feel that they don’t know the very foundation of their being or why they exist at all.  It seems as though nothing makes sense and life feels hard as they attempt to try to make things happen from a state of disconnection from themselves.  When we don’t know why we are we feel helpless, like a circumstance to life, like a product of our environment of which we are powerless too.  It seems life can give and take things from us.  It seems like we have no control over it all.  

When we know why we are and we align our entire self with that knowing, we live without any agenda and nothing can interfere with what we know ourselves to be.  What we be, we are, and we give.  Our need to manipulate or control life to our desired appearance or picture ends.  All we care about is who we are, why we are and being that.  The outcome of anything ceases to matter at all.  This is freedom.  This is the full exercise and expression of our free will.  This is living power and the recognition that nothing can take that from you.  No person, no decision, no structure outside of yourself, and no inner thought, story, sensation or feeling can take away why you are.  

Why you are is not what you do.  What you do is informed by why you are when you know why you are, but what you do is not why you are.  You did not come here to be a doer.  You do not exist to do.  Doing is rather an extension or means of sharing why you are, but it is only a means to share and not the reason you exist.  So often we confuse why we are with what we do.  When we are more identified with our body, our personality and the things of our life, then we are with why we are, we feel at threat, unstable and we attempt to control all the parts and pieces of life.  When we are rested in why we are, the endless stream of thoughts about past and future pause.  You stop focusing on what you are doing and rather focus on why you are doing.  The ‘what’ seems almost trivial as you recognize that it is not the purpose or intention, but only a way to express the intention.  At first this can be a bit much to really look at as we gain so much of our identity, value and worth through what we do.  We may not want to let go of the doer/doing as our identity.  Yet as you reorient to why you are you will find freedom through letting go of the what, even if you worked really hard at creating it.   

THE WHOLE PICTURE 

Why you are is who you are

The picture of why you are is different than the picture of what you think you want.  The picture of why you are comes with what you want others to experience and know through your presence.  This is way, way, way more simple than most people think.  See because we don’t exist to do and make shit happen, because that is not who we are, we must look a little bit past the surface appearance of ourselves to see why we fundamentally exist in the first place.  You may be wondering how to discover this for yourself.  Start by locating a profound moment in your life.  Perhaps a moment or some moments where you felt fulfilled or in a peak state of being.  Notice what you felt.  What was the essence that made up those experiences?  What did you know or feel in those moments?  See if you can find repeating patterns between moments.  Is there a core theme?  If that seems elusive to you then another way to discover ‘why you are’ is ask yourself: what do you want to leave the people of the world knowing?  If you were to transition out of your body tomorrow what would you want people to know, feel or experience?  Whatever words you can find to describe that feeling state of being or knowing is the reason why you are.  It’s not more complex than that.

But boy do we love complexity.  The more complex, complicated, and involved we can make it the better.  The mind just loves to be lost in its own creation of conceptual confusion, meanwhile creating postponement for us in thinking about our purpose rather than living it or being it.  The mind always thinks it needs more of something first before you can live or know your purpose.  It needs more information, more learning, more money, more connections, more resources, more clarity, more self-worth, more love, more, more, more.  It really is endless.  Meanwhile while you’re busy feeling lost and confused, attempting to get more more more in order to be better, so you can know why you are and be of service, you could have just been being your calling.  

Again your calling, purpose, intention, or why you are is not something you need to figure out.  It is who you are.  It is natural.  It is present when you feel great and when you feel crappy.  It is there when you are clear and when you feel confused.  It’s available when you’re energized and when you’re tired.  It exists no matter what actions, projects, activities or creations are being done or not.  Why you are is not contingent on anything.  When you deliberately use your awareness/focus and place it on why you exist, rather than on what you are doing, you turn the light up on your calling.  You feel it more.  You feel yourself become it more.  You feel more aligned.  Things flow differently for you because your focus is on why you are rather than what you’re doing or creating.  Life responds to that.  People respond to that.  The truth is life and people are always responding to how you are being you, and when you deliberately align your focus with why you are, you have the experience of mountains moving without you having to physically move the mountain.  What you want people to get they get.  You are fulfilling your own mission for existing.  You could even say your mission is complete and you are just dancing in the experience of it playing itself out.  So for whatever reason you exist, whatever the intention for your being is, whatever you want to give the world or want the world to get by your presence, it’s here now.  Always in the background and patiently waiting for you to use your focus and bring it to the foreground.  To do so is live fulfilled.  

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