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CLEAR YOUR SH*T OUT

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CLEAR YOUR SH*T OUT 

Be a vessel for source

We all have shit.  Lots and lots of shit.  We are full of it.  Most are solely consumed in it and don’t even know it.  It is the source of our dissatisfaction, our disempowerment and our suffering.  So what is all of this shit and where does it come from?  It is all of the stories, beliefs, opinions, ideas, judgments, and everything we think we know about stuff and life.  Essentially it’s everything we make up about who we think we are, what life is and the rightness or wrongness of what’s happened or is currently happening to us or in the world.  The source of all of our shit is our own thoughts and beliefs about stuff and the societal conditioning and norms that we learn from others and take on as our own.  We are often extremely convicted in our shit.  It gives us a sense of personal individual identity.  To let go of it means that we have to admit defeat to the fact that we actually don’t know and accept that which often feels unacceptable to us.  For many this is a tall order and most would rather keep their experience of dissatisfaction, disempowerment and suffering than dismantle their personal ego.  

Outside of the obvious, and perhaps it’s all obvious, you may wonder why anyone would want to clear out their shit and give away everything they think they know about life.  Well besides knowing your power, feeling fulfilled and ending suffering for yourself, it is also the gateway to being a vessel for source and living joyfully in levity and service.  When we empty out all of the shit inside of us, our mind and body become a clear container for life to be as it and move through us in the most precise, gracious and graceful ways.  It is only from this state of emptiness of self that we can truly be of service to others and life without any personal agenda whatsoever.  It is a state of true allowance and a giving to, rather than attempting to get anything at all to happen or be any way other than it is.  To our minds this might feel or seem like lack of progress or forward momentum, but to all of our souls it’s a welcome home.  

All progress is to get to better or get to perfection, but when you accept that as the current state then all of the sudden there is no where to get.  You’ve instantly arrived where you have been trying to get.  Again most people’s minds will fight this tooth and nail because it means that whatever you’ve thought about something, some injustice you feel you’ve seen or experienced, something you’ve perceived as not right, must be forgiven and allowed to return to its natural state of wholeness within your mind.  Our minds experience this as failure and yet paradoxically we become more free and in connection with all of life when we stop fighting.  This is healing, and beyond that, this is healed.   

THE JOY OF BEING A VESSEL 

Surrendering self

There is tremendous joy in surrendering to what is and becoming an empty vessel of pure service.  To give your life over to that sourceful intelligence that created the entire universe, that put galaxies in place and planets into orbit, which sees and knows way beyond what the human mind does, relieves so much pressure on your system.  For some this might not seem all that exciting on initial thought.  To give away our agendas of all the things we think we want, that feel important to us, and simply be moved by the source of life itself can feel scary to the mind.  We may feel loss of control.  We might have thoughts that we will be purposeless if we don’t have a clear trajectory of what is next.  We often fear the quiet, the silence or non-activity because it seems to threaten our worth and sense of contribution, safety or survival.  Most people lack trust in the silence so they fill up the spaciousness of their mind with as many thoughts as possible about everything that has happened, is happening or might happen.  In this way we can’t hear in the silence, and feeling nothing is there, we busy ourselves as much as they can so that we don’t feel the uncomfortableness of the fertile spontaneous present arising of the mystery of silence.

Much to your surprise you might discover that on an appearance level your life doesn’t look that much different when you give away all the stuff inside of you that keeps you full of your own self.  You may live in the same place, have the same job, be engaged in the same relationships, yet even though things look the same on the outside, where you are coming from on the inside is completely different.  Coming from your current thoughts and beliefs about stuff versus coming from pure emptiness that remains when you give away all of that stuff, generates a completely different experience even it looks the same from the outside.  The level of presence, connection, ease, purity, depth of impact and non-attachment you feel is worlds different than what most people are experiencing inside of their minds in their day to day experience.  

There really is nothing greater that I’ve found than giving away the personal mind stuff and being open to whatever is present.  To be available in this way allows you to feel rested inside of every single moment.  There is no time or place where you need to leave this rest to go outside of yourself and meet something other than you.  All of you is included inside of the moment when you drop all of your ideas, thoughts and agendas about what’s happened or is happening.  Here you experience magic in action, because your mind doesn’t have it figured out yet, but somehow that which knows all moves through you.  What comes through is stuff you wouldn’t have even been able to figure out or make up.  You know, but don’t know how you know.  You do, but don’t really know what you are doing.  Yet eternal yumminess is all you ever experience no matter how things unfold and you realize your tiny little person mind could never take credit for it all.  This is mastery of the yourself to the point where you are willing to surrender yourself completely to all of you rather than just what you think you are.  This brings an indescribable peace to your experience because you no longer have any personal attachment to anything that happens, and paradoxically in giving yourself away you finally experience the freedom you’ve always innately longed for.

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

LIFE IS NOT ABOUT YOU

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LIFE IS NOT ABOUT YOU

Serving others, serving life

One of the most sure fire ways to have a disappointing, unfulfilling and neutral/boring life experience is to make your life about you.  As soon as we develop awareness of self we begin to claim me, me, me.  It is all about our needs, wants and preferences and we have little awareness of others.  We see this in young children.  As part of our developmental journey we must learn to recognize and include others and see that life is not about getting what we want, however many people have been stunted along this developmental progression.  Many people, actually I’d venture to say most people, have as the focus of their life getting everything they want.  While not all have emotional outbursts about not getting what they want, the general aim of their life is about achieving their desires for themselves even if its masked underneath the appearance of serving others.  

As a caveat I will say that as adults it is fundamental that you have all your basic security, health and well-being needs met.  This is a baseline must.  Without this baseline stability in yourself of knowing your capacity to be well and take care or yourself, your survival mechanism will take precedence and your life will be about keeping this physical vehicle alive and well.  This baseline is likely a lot less extensive then you may initially think.  We really need very little in order to have all of our basic needs met.  Making sure this is in check for you is not making your life about you, but rather ensuring that you have the physical ability to make life not about you.  

One of the most important self-inquiry explorations you can do for yourself is to see where you are attempting to get something from others.  Whether its love, affection, attention, money, security, safety, approval, kindness, words of affirmation, someone “getting” you, being there for you or meeting you, its all about you.  Also notice where you might be giving to others in order to get these things.  That can be a sneaky way where it looks like we are serving, but really we are wanting to make sure we are safe, seen and supported.  Seeing these areas in yourself is the fertile ground for where you need to go to work on yourself.  As long as you are attempting to get anything from anyone you cannot be of service to them because you have agenda.  Even if your agenda feels innocent, justified or something you need because you are “human”, it is still agenda and distorts the purity of what is to be of true service, which is giving to life rather than taking from it.   

DEDICATING YOUR LIFE TO SERVING OTHERS 

Generating flow & energy

You may ask why you would want to dedicate your life to serving others and giving to life.  At some point, in this lifetime or one of your next ones, you will realize that there is nothing to gain in the getting.  It is a dead end.  The energy gets absorbed by you and stops.  There is a near constant replenishment that you must always be focused on in order to sustain you.  While there are temporary highs there is no sustainability in your presence, your energy or your state of being.  This is what its like for your life to be about you.  

In contrast when we give to life, when we serve life and others, we generate flow and energy.  Energy exchange is the name of the game of life.  You cannot develop past a certain point until you get this fundamental working of the universe.  Giving is receiving and receiving is giving, but not until you stop trying to get through either your giving or receiving.  What I find that most people truly desire is to simply be themselves.  When we are being just as we are without agenda, we radiate, we give naturally.  Sometimes people have the perception that to serve or give to life or others is exhausting and depleting.  That they have to go outside themselves to give “over there” endlessly.  This is not the case.  If you are depleting yourself in your giving you are out of balance, which indicates that there is still some agenda in your giving.  When your giving is pure it should be energizing for you.  

The reward if you will, of dedicating your life to serving, is the constant influx and flow of energy.  It’s not that serving others makes you a better person or that it is the right thing to do.  Please don’t “do it” for that reason.  Instead it is a way of honoring, energizing, including, evolving and giving to all of life.  Only choose service to others if you really want to and if it resonates for you.  Going back to our early development again, when we are just developing self-awareness our world is small with just ourselves and our few primary caretakers.  However the world is much larger than our nuclear family and the way to include more of it inside of our own developmental process is by serving others.  

Serving others stretches the boxes and containers of our zone of impact and increases the power that we have to create in and through love.  It opens our hearts into more as we begin to see beyond ourselves and our individual needs, wants and preferences.  We can let go of not getting what we want and instead focus on giving what we want.  We start to see one family rather than multiple, separate, individual families.  Other begins to seem more and more like self.  All of these realizations are aspects that wake you up more and more to the true unified nature.  

I invite you to start each and every day this week with the simple questions of asking yourself, who is it that I want to be today?  How do I want to show up?  How do I want to serve?  How do I want to give to others and life?  You don’t have to have the answers, just ask the questions and let it be revealed to you.  Allow the intention to guide your each and every thought and action.  

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

PAIN OF NOT EMBRACING PERFECTION

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PAIN OF NOT EMBRACING  PERFECTION

Disagreeing with the universe

In the spiritual growth community we are all so busy working on ourselves.  Attempting to do it right by clearing our trauma, healing our wounds and purifying ourselves to ever more refined versions of ourselves.  While we are engaged in this journey towards our ultimate remembering and purest expression we often lose sight of the fact that we have never left the innate perfection that we are.  Though at times we seem to have disconnected or forgotten this, the truth remains that we could never not be what we are even if it has been temporarily placed out of our sight.  

To say or view from the perspective of imperfection creates all the suffering that we could ever imagine, and which we do imagine every single day.  Imperfection implies that the intelligence that organizes this universe, including your body, mind and every single little detail of creation, somewhere made a mistake.  This is the birthplace of the view of wrongness, error and separation.  For certain aspects of creation to be included and others not is an illusion that we perpetuate over and over again which lives inside the idea of imperfection.  

Imperfection is simply an idea, a view, a judgment, a perspective.  There is no actual truth to it.  It’s preference and bias.  What one person sees as perfection another sees as imperfect.  This occurs infinitely inside of this idea of imperfection.  See healing happens the moment that we remember that we are perfect and therefore so is everything else.  We may not like what shows up on the screen of life, but that doesn’t alter its perfection.  When we get this completely through and through the healing journey ceases because it’s no longer relevant.  What is true is remembered and evident is the nature of what is.  

This begs the question as to why we hold tight to the perspective of imperfection even when we “get” spiritually that we are perfect.  Why don’t we accept our total, complete and absolute perfection right now in this moment and every moment that will ever follow?  What exactly are we waiting for?  This is a really good question to ask yourself.  What stands in the way of you embracing every single aspect of yourself and this entire universe as innately perfect?  Do you still think some things are wrong?  If so what are those things, and what will it take shift your perspective of them?  Whatever it is that you don’t include will stay un-included until you directly and consciously include it.  How much longer do you want to wait?  How much more suffering do you want to endure?  When is it enough? Only you can determine and decide this for yourself.   

SELF & OTHER FORGIVENESS 

Courage and humility

If there is a tool that bridges this sometimes seemingly gaping gap between perfection and imperfection it is self and other forgiveness.  Forgiveness “corrects” the perspective, removes the hate, and ends the insistence on rightness and wrongness.  It softens the heart and drops the veil of separation that never was.  It ends the roles of victim and victor.  It doesn’t negate or say what happened did or didn’t happen, but it clears the slate.  No karmic charge, no battle to fight, no war to be won, nothing to prove or justify.  Inner & outer peace, harmony and resolution are the effects of forgiveness.  

Forgiveness requires courage.  Why?  Because to open our heart towards what feels hurtful often seems like the wrong direction to our minds.  Our minds want to protect us from all pain and that is why we build walls of separation inside of our experiences.  It takes bravery to move towards rather than away from these experiences.  To let down our walls and allow ourselves to feel instead of continuing to choose the path of self-protection.  This must be a very deliberate, conscious choosing on our part.  This will not just automatically happen because for most people the default mode is self-defense rather than self-love or other-love.  The seeming paradox is that love it the ultimate protector, and not the mind with its defenses which are wired to keep you separate from the rest of creation.  To love one’s self (or love other) is to bravely walk into the fire of our own mind and refuse to not allow light of our awareness to shine.  To see what we are trying to hold separate, and to feel how much more pain holding separate causes us rather then feeling the hurt that we are resisting.  To then choose to feel the pain so that the energy can move through our system and the charge can find its resolution.

Forgiveness requires humility.  Why?  Because we must end our insistence on rightness/wrongness in order to forgive.  To arrive at the place of “I don’t know better than that which organizes this entire universe” is incredibly humbling to the personality we identify ourselves as.  People avoid and deny this level of humility at all costs because they want to be right and feel justified in their rightness.  What happened happened.  What I am I am.  No right and no wrong.  End of story.  End of all stories.  The mind hates this.  Some people feel this is a permission slip for people to do or get away with “bad” things or to ignore changes that need to be made.  I am suggesting neither, but instead to see what is possible through the power of forgiveness.  To see what naturally and organically organizes itself into different configurations without force, effort, punishment, or shaming when the true essence of what is is seen, reflected, and given.  I dare you.  

The power of the heart is stronger, more real and more palpable then any limiting perspective, including that of imperfection.  Choosing forgiveness opens the door directly into the heart.  Heart leads, mind follows.  This is what most all hunger for even if they can’t fully articulate it in this way yet.  The only thing standing in the way is your insistence on the idea of imperfection.  That’s it.  Imperfection really is just a thought and not an actual thing.  I know this may be hard for your mind to believe, but its worth investigating and changing this belief for yourself.  Your joy and freedom from suffering awaits on the other side of it.  

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

LIVING INTENTIONALLY

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LIVING INTENTIONALLY 

Beyond hopefulness

How often do you set an intention?  If you are like most people I’d imagine you do so relatively regularly particularly around New Years, birthdays or other significant events and time landmarks.  Setting intentions is a very common practice and even so most people do not live very intentionally.  There is a tremendous difference between setting intentions and living intentionally.  Typically when we set an intention it is for something that we want to show up in our physical reality.  Perhaps it’s setting the intention to purchase a house, find a relationship, read more books, eat healthy, exercise more, or start a new business.  If you are really ambitious you might intend things like world peace, the end of hunger or the awakening of humanity.  While there is nothing wrong with setting intentions, in fact I recommend that people do, it does not equate to living intentionally.  

See as humans we tend to be quite lazy.  Even if we “do a lot of stuff” we can still be incredibly lazy.  In fact I believe that some of the least lazy people might not do much at all.  Strange paradox right?  What I mean by lazy is that we tend to lack mental discipline, focus and the harnessing of our own will power.  We tend to just let life happen and hope for the best even if we keep ourselves busy with a lot of stuff.  Often all of that stuff is a distraction from living intentionally.  If we are more spiritually oriented, rather than just hope it all works out for the best we might say that we leave it all up to divine orchestration and intervention.  While that is not entirely inaccurate many people use it as a cop out to not show up or discipline themselves, and they fail to recognize that THEY ARE the divine orchestration and intervention.  The divine is not something other than them, it is them, and the use of their own personal will is their divine power.  

Being “hopeful” is pretty strong indicator that you are not aware of your divine power and you are expecting/waiting for something to save you or the other humans on this planet.  Its empty and lacks power (aka lacks you).  See true intentional living has less to do with what is happening in the manifest world and more to do with where you are coming from.  What I mean by that is knowing why you exist, what convictions you hold to be truth and allowing that to be the guiding light for all that you do.  Ask yourself are you just doing on automatic pilot and routine, or is each breath and action deliberate.  You might sense some heaviness or impossibility around making every action deliberate because it may feel like a lot, and you are right it is a lot, and it is what is required if you truly want to live in an awake and empowered physical manifest reality.  Living intentional means you take no action from a sleepy, unconscious, or automatic state.  Instead you are constantly attuning to where it is you are coming from.   

WHERE YOU ARE COMING FROM 

Why you exist

Do you know where you are coming from?  This is the first step.  Most people do not know what internally motivates them, what is actually important to them, what they are convicted in or why they even exist at all.  Where you are coming from and why you exist are synonymous.  You must decide this for yourself if you are to choose the path of intentional living.  No one will do this for you and it will not just magically reveal itself.  It must be a deliberate chosen knowing.  As tempting as it is to reduce ourselves to things, objects, roles, jobs, businesses, physical creations and the like, none of these things are why you exist.  Not to say that certain of these things won’t be ways that you choose to express the why of why you exist, none of them define the why.  We are so accustom to externalizing our power that it may be challenging for you to get what I am saying here, but its worth getting.

If you don’t know why you exist then you will follow the societal standards that have been laid out and think that a successful life means that you accomplished them all and an unsuccessful life means you didn’t.  This is akin to being a robot as it is void of any real life.  If you have enough awareness, at some point you realize that getting and doing (or not getting and doing) all the stuff, matters not at all.   Not at all.  All of the getting and doing will keep coming and going, its ceaseless, it will never stop.  If you arrive at a place where you think its all done, you will soon realize its not, it keeps going.  If you don’t ever realize that it is where you are coming that matters, then you will eventually find yourself stressed, exhausted, depleted, and waiting for a “vacation” or for physical life to end so you can have some peace.  Even death is not an escape.  

So how do decide why you exist? Well you just do.  We all know it for ourselves because it is who we are, its simply that most do not ever self-inquire.  People are so busy in the doing and thinking of life that their actual being is extremely neglected.  In fact most have never even made contact with their being, believe it or not.  One thing that often arises when we begin to self-inquire as to why we exist is that we often don’t feel worthy of what we are.  If for example we say we exist to “be love” and thus where we choose to come from is love, we may feel some shyness or inhibition in claiming this for ourselves.  We might also reject it by saying to ourselves that being love is not enough and fall back into our reliance on what we are doing rather than where we are coming from in order to feel a sense of worth.   

To live intentionally you must fully claim where you are coming from 100% of the time.  It must be in the forefront of everything that you think or do.  In this way you stop being lazy and filling your life with stuff that you think you’re supposed to be doing.  You become more aware, more actively participating even if you are not doing anything in particular.  You harness your power of will, which again is your divine power.  Life stops just happening.  You stop being hopeful.  You stop caring so much about what things look or feel like.  Your desire or need to control anything lessens and your vigilance to your own self, to your own state of where you are coming from increases.  You become the intention you set and therefore realize it matters not if it actually physically manifests.  The security and stability in your being dominates and you become unmovable and unshakable by any change of appearance.   

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

END OF CONTROL

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END OF CONTROL 

Finding freedom through acceptance

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

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

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

NON-SELECTIVE ACCEPTANCE 

Freeing all experience

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

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

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

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

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

SOUL’S JOURNEY

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SOUL’S JOURNEY

Outside the box

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

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

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

BECOMING ENSPIRITED 

Return of life

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

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

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

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

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

REMEMBERING

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REMEMBERING

Who you are, what you are, why you are

We are all hungry to remember.  Remember who we are, what we are, why we are.  We have become so accustom to the black cloud of forgetfulness that most simply do not even realize that there is something to remember.  Yet there is often a deep longing for something that we can’t quite describe yet somehow know is there.  If we are lucky, which is simply another word for incredibly disciplined and focused, than that longing inspires us to seek.  Seeking are those actions, whether internal or external in nature, that we take which drive us into remembering.  

Getting to a place of remembering is not a passive process and yet the paradox is that all that is required is to receive.  To enter into a state of receiving that which is already here and available to you.  In general most people are not very receptive.  They are filled with the contents of this dreamscape we call reality and there is no space for anything else to enter.  When the content of our beliefs and thoughts consumes us we are disconnected from the true reality of ourselves.  We think we are the character that we are playing in this dream and don’t see that we are the creator of it.  We miss the most obvious, and yet nearly all people miss the most obvious.  This is why nearly all of humanity is asleep even though their eyes are open.  Asleep because they lack awareness of their true self.  This creates a mundane, flat, and ordinary appearance and experience.   

This disconnection from knowing ourselves leaves us feeling powerless, like we aren’t in charge and don’t have choice.  One of the most important aspects of remembering is your decision to decide that you can.  The indoctrinate of impossibility within which we are cloaked in must be pierced by you for you.  You must see that you can, and beyond that, that you must choose remembering for yourself.  It will not passively fall upon you.  That is not to say that there is no grace, because there is, however grace arrives when you’ve reached the edge of your purely devoted discipline to the seeking impulse to remember and know yourself beyond all else.  

It may be strange for you to realize that you really don’t know who you are at all.  All that you know is what you think yourself to be and what you’ve been told you are.  Yet the you that is the real you cannot be touched, defined, labeled or put into any boxes.  The you that is the real you is free, unnamed, and inexhaustibly present and powerful. 

WHY YOU ARE 

Delivering what you came to deliver

Why are you may be the most important relative question to ask and answer.  One of the prime reasons that makes remembering who and what you are so important is so that you can deliver your why.  Your why is why you incarnated into this body and dream-human-reality in the first place.  Why are you even here?  Do you know?  Many do not.  They are simply going about the motions of being human, following the blueprints that are written inside this matrix reality that we currently live within, and many don’t question or seek beyond that programming.

What’s the value in seeking beyond the programming?  Well for starters everything becomes richer, more alive, brighter and infused with life.  Since we are the very essence of life, bringing ourselves back to life is a good start.  It is the how of how we bring the non-ordinary, magical, and colorful into our everyday lived experience.  This comes with the feeling state of love, bliss, ecstasy and greater unity with all.  It also breaks up our perception of a linear time-space continuum and opens us into different realms, places on our time line and a more multi-dimensional reality rather than a linearly directed one.  Seeking beyond the programming also allows you to bring through the ideas, gifts, energies, expressions and manifestations that you came here to bring through moment by moment and piece by piece.  Each one of us has a different flavor of uniqueness that we came here to create from and share, but if we don’t remember ourselves then it feels like a guessing game rather than a clear directed path and knowingness.  

See the only thing that stands “in the way” of you remembering you and experiencing more life, are these programs of impossibility.  When we look through the lens of impossibility, then remembering feels hard and amount of energy we need to conjure up feels like more than we can access.  However when we look through the lens of possibility, even of maybe possible, then remembering feels lighter (because we are not weighed down by that impossibility belief) and the energy required is more available to us.  

The golden key is in our remembrance.  We must wake ourselves up from our slumber, from our sleeping state of unconsciously living our lives, and remember that we are the creator of it.  The contents are not disconnected from the creator of them.  They exist only because of the creator.  But you are not the contents.  Through remembering your creator self you can consciously create and deliberately bring forth your desired playground.  This isn’t fantasy anymore than the fantasy of the current reality that we live.  We’ve simply created a fantasy-reality that is the current state, and we can rightfully and deservedly so create another seemingly different and more colorfully playful one that is filled levity and joy.  All that is required is for you to prioritize and outright demand from yourself to remember yourself above all else.  You can and you deserve it.  We all deserve it. Don’t settle for what has been issued out.  Decide what you want to create no matter how outrageous it may seem and go for it.  I mean what else is there to live for really.

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

FEAR

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FEAR 

Perception of powerlessness

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

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

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

FEAR’S REMEDY

Knowing your inherent freeness 

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

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

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

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

LOVE

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LOVE 

Perceived & perceiver

Love.  We are all trying to find love, get love, give love, be love.  As the New Year arises and people set their intentions it is clearly evident that every intention is simply a call, cry, or plea for love.  For love to be felt and lived.  For love to be seen, experienced, rested into and breathed moment to moment.  For the heart to be flung open, consuming all that is inside of it.  The hunger for lived love is palpable, more palpable than ever before on this planet.  

How do we fall so fully into love?  How do we let love consume us completely?  How do we vow and unshakably commit to remain in love no matter what?  Love is the natural state.  It is the truth.  It is pure, it is free and it is contentless.  Everything that appears is what we put on top of love.  Labels, definitions, stories, worldly desires, rules, ideas, constructs, people, relationships, etc are all made out of love, yet these things can cloud our vision if we lose sight of the substance from which they are made.  When we get caught in the appearance and forget the essence we feel disconnected from love.  When we feel disconnected it’s not that love has gone anywhere, its simply that we’ve shifted our focus from love to an assumed object or thing instead.  

To stay acutely focused on the nature of a perceived thing or object rather than to focus on the object itself is the gateway into seeing, knowing, remembering and resting into Love.  At times some of the appearances that arise inside of our human experience do not feel or seem to be made out of love.  They seem to be made out of some other substance because we wonder how something that hurts, looks ugly, smells bad or is clearly unkind could be made out Love.  There is however no other substance in the universe for anything to be made up out of so how could anything be other than this primordial essence that we call love.  

Rather than the thing/appearance itself not being love it is instead the observer, judger or subject that deems it so, meaning it is you that deems it so.  You as the decider of what you see decide what you see.  It is a worthwhile self-investigation to thoroughly assess what you include and what you un-include as love.  That which you view as made up of something other than love is where the jewels of healing wait for you.  It is in the seeing of what you keep outside, different or other than love that gives you the answer to the question of how to remain in love no matter what.  Acceptance of all, even that which we do not understand brings us deeper and deeper into love’s all encompassing embrace.   

EVER PRESENT LOVE 

Seeing what already is

When you’ve lost connection to the heart re-connecting can be instantaneous or it can be a long drawn out process.  It simply depends on how long you want to insist that a particular flavor or experience is something other than love.  Sometimes that flavor which we resist to include in love is our own self.  Perhaps its something about our body or the way we look, what value we feel we contribute or not, or a personality trait we have or don’t have.  Whatever it is, we view its presence or lack therefore, as an indicator of something that is not love.  

As you move deeper into acceptance, and in particular self-acceptance, you can’t not begin to see the perfected everything of allness.  All of your own and others idiosynchronicities, behaviors, thoughts and perspectives seem to matter less and less and the illuminated background of them comes more into view.  This is a purification process where the distilled compound that remains is the natural essence that was always there, but simply covered from view by you.  

See situations can stay the same, sensations can be as they are, thoughts can keep their limited view and yet you can come to see beyond them.  Rather than the incessant impulse to change them you can’t but help to fall in love with them just as they are.  The inner battle quiets down as the clarity of the power of love to recognize itself becomes evident.  When love wakes up to love, meaning when you realize your nature as love, when you see the truth, then nothing is left out and nothing needs or could be different than it is.  

Love is always here, always accessible, even in the darkest of places in our minds.  Its not a matter of creating love, generating love, or becoming more love because all of those things are actually impossible.  You couldn’t be more love than you are right now.  There couldn’t be more love in the world than there is now.  Creation is love itself.  We can’t put love into creation, we can only see that it is already there and end the delusion in our minds that it is not.  

Anytime we hope for something we push it away because we fail to see that it’s already here.  This goes for love.  Anytime we hope that we will feel more love or that the world will be a more loving place we push away that reality.  The only real “change” naturally takes place through the seeing of what already is here, not by attempting to make it different.  Difference occurs, change happens, through recognition of the essence of all being love, not through force or power over.  We must wake up to see love now in every situation, thought, feeling, sensation, image, idea, concept, word, person, dynamic and the entirety of creation.  It is through this recognition, this seeing of Self, that the natural harmonious interplay of all the dancing pieces and parts can be seen.  When one sees itself, remembers itself, then everything moves in the seamless, perfected, orchestrated magic and nothing operates separate from anything else.  

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

UN-CONDITION THE SPACE OF YOU

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UN-CONDITION THE SPACE OF YOU

Birthplace of programs, patterns & conditions 

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

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

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

BEING UNCONDITIONAL SPACE

Giving the gift that you are

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

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

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

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

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

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