awareness

Inside of Awareness

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

INSIDE OF AWARENESS 

Everything exists in you

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

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

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

PURE AWARENESS IN YOUR TRUE SELF

Creator of experience

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

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

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

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

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

FROM SPIRITUAL SEEKING TO SPIRITUAL BEING

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FROM SPIRITUAL SEEKING TO  SPIRITUAL BEING

Misidentification with the objects of our awareness

Conceptually most all of us know that we are spiritual beings.  We somehow recognize that there is something more to us than flesh, bones and the thoughts we think.  We theoretically understand this, but have difficultly coming from being.  Rather we come from mental concepts and physical sensations, using those as proof of our existence, without really investigating the source of our concepts and sensations.  If we did do a little bit of investigation we would come to see that we are what is aware of the thoughts and the body and everything in between.  We are the being, the awareness, that notices those things, therefore we can’t be them.  It’s kind of like looking at a table and identifying yourself as it.  However you know that you aren’t the table, but rather that you are aware of the table.  The same is true for everything that you are aware of, it’s simply that most of us have misidentified ourselves as the objects of our awareness rather than see ourselves as the being that knows the objects.  

This misidentification with the objects of our awareness is the reason that we spiritually seek.  We seek because we feel that there is something missing.  That something which feels like it’s missing only feels that way because we have placed our focus and sense of self onto things that are not our self.  This leaves a feeling of a void, an emptiness of sorts, or a longing for something that we know exists, but that we just can’t seem to figure out how to get, realize or know it.  We somehow feel separate from and that feeling of separateness comes from thinking that we are an object of our awareness.  So we seek to find and feel whole, because we have misidentified ourselves as a part.  This seeking for wholeness or oneness is the core of the healing or spiritual journey.  

It is not bad or wrong to seek.  In fact the seeking impulse can provide us with the experiences we need in order to remember what we are and the skills, knowledge, and awareness to realize what is already here.  When we realize what is already here spiritual seeking shifts into spiritual being.  There is however a bit of a dog chasing its tail scenario that can happen on the spiritual path if you are not clear in your intentions.  What I mean is that if you don’t have genuine desire to know yourself, you can get lost in all of the glitter and sparkle of the spiritual journey.  You can fall into chasing more objects of physical and metaphysical pleasure, rather than keeping your eye on the ball.  You get lost in the game and take detours on the path that bring you back to where you started rather than in the direction of spiritual being.  Purifying your desire to know yourself is the brightest light you can shine on your path.   

SILENCE IS YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND 

Just Be 

Somewhere some great master said that ‘silence is the greatest teacher.”   I couldn’t agree more.  To our busy mind with all of its thoughts this seems like a strange impossibility.  How could you ever learn anything from silence, after all there is nothing there?  Don’t you need content or information in order to learn?  This is how we are conditioned yes, but this conditioning has also brought us to the state of being we are currently experiencing as life.  One where we are constantly searching for more content, more answers, more reasons, which we think will provide us with the clarity of being we desire, but all they ever do is send us down more and more rabbit holes and leave us feeling overwhelmed.  Yet we continue to function in this way hoping that somewhere we will find the light at the end of hole.  

The light we are seeking lives in the silence of our own minds.  Getting ourselves to be innerly silent can be a mighty task, which we why we must have such a strong desire to know ourselves in the first place.  If we don’t then we will simply continue to allow ourselves to be distracted in and by thoughts, feelings, sensations and any other content we can find to latch our awareness onto.  The mind really, really loves content.  It is, its jam.  It’s bread and butter.  It’s life force.  Without content the mind feel useless, and because we are merged with the mind and its content as who we are, then we personally feel useless.  Other experiences that arise in silence are boredom, frustration or irritation, loneliness, restlessness, purposeless, and others.  

I have found that there are stages to the “getting innerly silent process.”  When you are first learning how to get silent by sitting or lying down and just beginning to let go of some of the content, taking a few breaths, you start feeling some sense of relaxation.  This typically feels good to us.  If however you go a bit deeper into the letting go process, sitting or lying longer, you will find lots of areas where you don’t want to let go.  You may notice this as tension in areas of the body, sensations getting louder, mental tension, thinking and being lost in the thoughts, scattered, restlessness, or feeling emotions.  Once you move through that stage, I often find the next stage to be an insightful stage.  This is where you still aren’t completely focused on being yet, but you are less fixated with the objects of your awareness.  There is now more space for you to see things from a larger perspective.  You might get insights, intuitions or be able to see your patterns or habits more clearly.  Once you move through that, I find the next stage to be simply noticing that you are, that you be.  There may still be thoughts, feelings or sensations, but you are no longer focused on them.  You are only focused on that you be.  This is often peaceful, restful and the tendency is to want to stay here, to be absorbed in simply being.  Sometimes this stage will come with feelings of bliss, energy or an increased alertness or wakefulness.  None of those things are required, but they can be present.  

The longer you allow yourself to be present to “that you be” the more you come to know yourself and less identified you are with the objects of your awareness.  I have this to be the most direct path to self-realization.  Try it out.  It takes desire, commitment and some discipline, but the rewards are epic.  It’s the end of spiritual seeking and the beginning of spiritual being.  

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

PEAK EXPERIENCE INTEGRATION

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PEAK EXPERIENCE INTEGRATION 

Going beyond the known

Many of you have had those experiences of pure bliss or ecstatic rapture.  Moments of profundity and transcendental insight.  Where you experienced or knew something beyond what your ordinary senses and mind experience on a day to day basis.  Something that left you feeling touched, moved, alive, open, integrated and whole.  Words often cannot describe these experiences.  In fact when we use words to explain them, the words tend to make the experiences seem more ordinary than they are.  Yet often we want to share something of these moments with others so we do our best to translate them into mental thoughts and ideas, even though they will never truly fit inside of them.  

Peak experiences are gateways for waking up our awareness to the fact that there is more than what we’ve been experiencing life to be.  They stretch us beyond our known world into something more expansive and inclusive.  They often show us that there is indeed something behind the appearance of solid matter and physicalness, and beyond the ordinary thoughts we think.  If we’ve never had a peak experience it’s hard to believe that there is anything more to existence than what we experience as our everyday reality.  We simply have to take it on faith that there is something more, that is until something pops us out of our ordinary experiencing.  Even if we had 1, 2, 10 or a 100 peak experiences it can still be easy to fall back into our normal, habituated way of seeing reality as a physical machine devoid of spirit or essence.  

Peak experiences can occur at any moment and don’t necessarily require anything on our behalf in order to “make” them happen.  There are however certain conditions that seem to make the probability of them occurring more likely.  One is an earnest and sincere desire to know one’s self or know the true nature of reality even if you don’t fully know what that means.  Our desire for this creates the internal conditions along with an attractive force that set the stage for extrasensory or beyond sensory peak type of experiences.  Any type of inner or somatic work that you do, which helps dismantle your physical and mental defenses, increases your receptiveness to these types of experiences as well.  Other activators can be near death experiences, traumatic experiences such as car accidents or other physical/emotional threats, consuming psychedelic substances, meditation, lucid dreaming, sweat lodges and other healing work, particularly when there is a group field effect in place that supports going beyond the known.   

FUNCTION OF PEAK EXPERIENCES 

Bring the extraordinary to life

The function of the peak experience seems to be to give us a new or wider perspective on what is, viewing life in a different light than how we’ve been seeing it.  They also tend to increase our hunger for truth, knowing more of what is, and bring us more into alignment with ourselves and the larger organizing principles of life.  We get to feel what it’s like to vibrate at a higher energetic state with more awareness, openness and inclusion.  I find that it’s fairly natural to desire more of these experiences once you begin to taste them, yet the peak experience without the integration of it, is simply chasing pleasure and in the longterm is not fulfilling.  It’s like sex without love.  It may feel good in the moment, but it doesn’t have any lasting ripples on your state of being or what you create as your day to day reality.  

For many the desire for these experiences is to help bridge the so called gap between what is experienced on the more ordinary levels of reality and what gets glimpsed, tasted and known as reality through them.  Our minds may not believe that the essence of those experiences can really become our day to day reality, and that is the very debris that we need to clear.  Sometimes peak experiences are not “pleasurable” in the ordinary way we think of pleasure, but rather they are uncomfortably revealing.  They reveal where we have thoughts and beliefs that don’t support a more alive, rich and expansive way of being.  It’s like interference in the system of naturalness or our natural state of being.  That interference is made of up of stories and perspectives that we’ve created about our experiences that are distorted or not in alignment with the truth of what is.  Even though we might be very convinced of our perspectives and feel that they are all very accurate, our conviction doesn’t make them true if they are not in alignment with how the larger organizing principle views life, which is always love and acceptance of all.  

The desire to hold anything separate decreases as we open into more and more.  As our rigidities soften, our dissociations land home, and our completeness is accepted by us there is less and less that we can even perceive as separate.  This is the perspective you taste during peak moments, and yes for the most part it feels good, or better stated it feels like unified ecstasy that is grounded and all pervasive, that knows without figuring anything out, that loves without thought, and that is without anything.  Integrating these experiences is work.  It’s the core reason why we do any of this inner work to begin with.  To live the truth of our being, which is free, boundless, unified, whole, in love and at peace, that’s why we do it.  

There is infinite oneness from which infinite possibilities are birthed and brought into expression.  The deeper you know this infinite oneness to be the truth of existence and the source of all, the more available and capable you are to bring these possibilities to life.  Beyond ordinary, non-ordinary and extraordinary is increasingly and increasingly more probable to be your lived experience as you commit to integrating and bringing your peak experiences to life.

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

BE THE SOURCE OF WELLNESS

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BE THE SOURCE OF WELLNESS

Get to give

Most are in a constant strive to get.  Get possessions, get relationships, get money, get fame, get love, get safety, get healthy, get enlightened, get well.  Getting seems to be the only way we experience what we want, or at least we think it is.  Many of our social and cultural structures are built around getting something or getting somewhere.  School, competitive sports, the right job, the creative business, even vacations, meditation, and leisure activities can become sources of getting for us when the intention is to get something out of them even if it’s relaxation.  

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with getting.  It’s simply that getting is an outsourcing of our own power.  It is also a never-ending, scarce way to approach life because it seems as though there will always be more that you need to get.  The perspective that drives this approach is rooted in a sense of lack of a self.  When there is not recognition of a self, of a you, that has impact and is a creator, than the source of creatorship or power appears to come from the things we perceive to be around us.  This is classical projection or disowning one’s power or self.  

While many people in spiritual circles and communities are busy attempting to dismantle their sense of a self, or ego identity as a separate individual, you must first discover that there is a self to dismantle.  If you don’t you will continue to come from disempowered views even if you occasionally experience high states of energy or have spiritual insights and experiences.  From a developmental perspective there is first non-awareness of self (or a pre-self) in which it seems life is randomly happening and there is a getting to survive.  Secondly there is development of a self, of a person, that has impact, that can do stuff and where there is a you that is happening to life.  Here we get in order to validate that we are a self and that we are important.  Thirdly there is non-self or transcending the sense of a separate individual person self into a unified sense of one self.  To develop from the second to third we must transition from getting perspectives to giving perspectives.  Here to give is to get as all is one being, yet that is only realized through first making the shift from get to give.   

GETTING IS NOT THE ONLY WAY TO RECEIVE

The frequency you choose

As much as we might believe that getting is the only way to receive what we think we want or need, it’s only because that is the prime way we’ve been operating.  We think we need to get something in order to experience what we desire.  For example if we don’t feel relaxed we think we need to do something or find someone to “give” us relaxation. Hence we need to get relaxation from somewhere. This can go for anything we are attempting to get like wealth, relationships, love, safety, health, enlightenment, wellness, and on.  Most people think they need to get these things or how else on earth will they ever experience them.  

Like everything else getting is simply a frequency.  When we vibrate with the frequency of “get” then we are vibrating with a sense of what we want isn’t here and that we must somehow, someway get it.  Essentially we are vibrating with the frequency of “not” or “lack.”  Nearly everyone is doing this, but they are unconscious to it, and even beyond that they don’t realize that they are in charge of their frequency to begin with.  The way I see it, the only true responsibility any of us has is to our frequency.   Though we might think we are responsible for all the comings and goings of life, of people’s reactions and feelings, and on and on, the only one real responsibility we have is how we choose to vibrate.  Yet we must recognize our choosing and that it is our choice first.  This is where that second stage of development comes in, the recognition of a self, a self that does onto life, prior to merging into the one self. 

In the recognition that we choose what we vibrate as you see that how you vibrate is what you give.  You give your vibration.  It’s natural and effortless regards of whatever vibration you choose to be, whether it’s lack or abundance, or getting or giving.  What you give is also what you then experience.  This is how you experience all things you want to experience without trying to go out and get them.  You must ask yourself what is at the core of everything it is that you want to get.  When you find the core of it, whether its love, safety, supported, nurtured, cared for, vital, free or well, decide to choose that vibration to be.  This is the only way you actually experience it.  Even if you continue to believe in the getting path, many of you know that you will get things that you think will give you what you want, but sooner rather than later, you feel not how you wanted to feel or how you hoped the thing would make you feel.  It’s because you never owned, you never became it.  You never became the vibration of what you wanted, you only temporarily projected it onto something, but then realized that all something’s change, and with the change so did your feeling state of what you desired.  

In order to not be shifted by all the changing of things you must be in ownership of what you vibrate.  Not in a sort of, sometimes way, where you are still trying to get what you want, while pretending to be spiritual.  Rather this is to be the source of wellness, after all you are it.  It is the end of using permission slips and projections.  To own that you are the source, is to be fully responsible for how you experience everything inside of your experience.  You are not responsible for the experience, rather only what you give to it, what you be, what you vibrate.  It is the end of the chase and of the never-ending experience of scarcity, but only if you so choose.  The projection, the appearance, the experience, won’t change until you do, or better said the projection, appearance or experience will mirror whatever it is you vibrate.  

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

SUBTLE FEELINGS & SENSATIONS

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SUBTLE FEELINGS & SENSATIONS 

Journeying deeper into Self

We all have a thousand feelings and sensations per day.  Many of those feelings & sensations we don’t fully register.  For example we often don’t register the feeling of our butt on a chair unless we have been sitting for too long, nor do we feel our feet on the ground unless we deliberately focus on those feelings.  Instead of feeling every nuance our nervous system does something that is called accommodation.  In this way we learn to tune out or become less aware of all the “ordinary” feelings and sensations that we have on a day to day basis.  

This accommodation or tuning out function has pros and cons.  On the pro side of things most of us don’t want to be feeling every single sensation that arises as it would become distracting.  We would never get things done because we would be feeling every aspect of every moment.  It would be hard to be focused on anything else.  Also for people who tend towards vigilance and/or hypersensitivity, feeling every aspect of their experience would feel overwhelming.  For these reasons the accommodating function of the nervous system is beneficial.  

Now for the cons.  On the journey of deepening into self-recognition it is helpful to have gateways and pointers.  Due to the fact that we are physically focused right now we have these bodies with nervous systems that can perceive sensations and feelings.  These sensations and feelings are pointers into developing greater awareness of self.  If we’ve simply accommodated to say the sensations of our fears or anxieties to the point that they don’t register with us than we lose valuable access points into our patterns, which means that the patterns go unchecked.  When a pattern is unchecked it runs the show of our life, but does so unconscious to our knowing of it.  

The dance then becomes the selective attunement to the subtleties of your feelings and sensations.  For some this means coming out of automatic mode and noticing those feelings and sensations that you’ve been overriding without knowing that you’ve been overriding them.  Slowing down enough to recognize that you are having a feeling or sensation that perhaps isn’t overt, but is present.  For others, particularly those that tend to be more sensitive to sensations or feelings, it’s the willingness to feel them rather than going into overwhelm or victimization to them as if they are somehow bigger than you.   

TECHNOLOGY OF AWARENESS 

Going through the sensation portal

There is an obvious difference between an overt sensation or feeling and a subtle one.  When we override the subtle ones than life has to speak to us in louder ways to get our attention for our own learning, healing and growing.  We’ve collectively agreed to call those louder ways that life speaks to us physical symptoms, which come with a set of labels and conditions.  However the subtle feelings and sensations are the ones that, if we can tune into them, the current medical model says its all in our heads because they have no way to measure them.  Its clearly not that they don’t exist inside of our experience, but instead that our current level of technology can’t attune to it.  

Good thing we don’t need to rely on external technology to tell us information about ourselves.  We have within our body some of the most advanced technology available on planet earth and in fact in this entire universe.  That technology is called our awareness.  Awareness is alert, awake, clear, attentive, and conscious.  This entire life journey is about becoming more awake, conscious of ourselves and of this awareness that we are.  One of the prime ways this occurs is through paying attention and noticing what is in our experience and what it is pointing too.  Through investigation of this we learn what those sensations and feelings are all about and why they are created in the first place.     

One fundamental thing to understand is that all sensations and feelings, subtle or overt, are simply catalyst for learning.  They arise to teach us something about ourselves, about the way we do life, about who we are and who we think we are, about what we are here to share and be.  That is really it.  No more meaning than that.  We can try to make them into problems and things that need to be fixed or changed, but in truth that is not what they are.  The perspective of seeing them as problems is viewed through the lens of wrongness and trying to make the forms of life permanent when they are not and are not meant to be. 

The more you can shift your focus to the perspective that life is about learning rather than trying to make this human experience consistent or permanent, the more flexible you will be in navigating subtle and overt sensations and feelings.  The more willing you are to slow down the more you will tune into your subtle nature and less you will bypass, overlook or accommodate to those sensations and feelings that are portals into greater understanding of yourself.  The more you prioritize self-growth, self-recognition and self-mastery the more energy that will become available to you to penetrate through all of the relevant sensations and feelings so you can see what they are actually made of, which is a conglomerate of thoughts, ideas and beliefs about self and life.  The freer you will become.  The more stable in self you will feel.  The less fear will arise because you will have seen through the roots of it.  These are the rewards of tuning to the subtleties and going in and through the sensation and feeling portals of life.  Utilize what’s been given to you.  Rather than see it as an interference, be curious and come to know the gift of it.  It all arises for your benefit and growth.  There is no other reason.  

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

SECURE DESTRUCTION YOU CAN TRUST

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SECURE DESTRUCTION YOU  CAN TRUST

The healing shake up

Earlier this week I was sitting in my car while stopped at a traffic intersection.  There was a large cargo truck in front of me that had the words “secure destruction you can trust” written on it.  I found this to be a very interesting and slightly comical phrase.  As I further looked at the truck it became evident to me that this truck belonged to a document destruction company, which clearly is an appropriate tagline for such a business.  However I also thought what an appropriate slogan for the healing process!  Healing is indeed a process of secure destruction that must be navigated through trust.  

Many people in the general public don’t perceive the destructive or destabilizing aspect of healing.  In fact most look for “healing” because they want more stability or less perceived uncertainty.  Often what these people are really looking for is not healing, but instead something to return them to a previous state of being or functioning that has been disrupted by a set of conditions in their body or life.  Returning to a previous state of functioning is not healing, it is a temporary bandaid.  Its buys you time until you are ready to actually heal.  Healing is a deep remembering of self, of what you are beyond the conditioning, a return to unshakable and undeniable love.  What I have found is that when our life gets shook up in unfavorable ways (what we might term a crisis of sorts) this is prime fertile ground for healing.  In fact little to no healing happens without the shake up.  

You might wonder why do we need the shake up?  Why don’t we just heal without things, including our bodies or lives, needing to fall apart?  The reason is that most people are not motivated in comfort.  When we feel comfortably stable there often isn’t momentum to grow.  When we are in comfort we may not even recognize that there is more to explore, share and know about ourselves.  Also we may not be able to see some of our limiting patterns and beliefs that keep us trapped in boxes inside of our own minds without the shake up.  

So the shake up, the destabilization and destruction, serves.  It serves our remembrance of ourselves, which is our healing.   Its serves by breaking down that which no longer serves.  Even though we often don’t like it and would rather be anywhere else then inside of massive instability, it is required which is why it is present.   When it no longer serves it will no longer be necessary and therefore will not manifest itself, but until then it is part of the way we grow.  One of the main reasons that we suffer inside of the destruction phase of a healing process is because we don’t trust it.  We don’t trust the intelligent process of life and therefore attempt to fix it so that we can return to our previous sense of self and stability.  But what if you aren’t meant to go back to who you were before?  What if you are meant to instead recognize a new version of yourself entirely?  That is after all what healing, growth and evolution is all about.   

CONSCIOUSNESS & PHYSICAL HEALING 

Spirit-matter

Consciousness is a state of wakefulness or awareness.  The brighter your wakefulness or awareness is the more you recognize yourself.  This is healing.  It’s healing because to see, recognize, or remember ourselves aligns our individual perspective with the larger, more encompassing perspective that we are.  We are often looking through this tiny pinhole perspective and extrapolating it to be the ultimate truth of all that we are, when in actuality we are much, much, much more then what we see through our tiny little viewpoint.  The wider our lens becomes, the more inclusive it becomes, the more allowing we are of life and the less we attempt to control and manipulate it.  We learn to love and accept what is just as it is.  This means accepting what we don’t understand, what we don’t agree with, often what we don’t want and discovering that this is what heals us.

One might say that everything in the universe is consciousness.  That all forms that you see, feel and touch are simply awareness.  I find it interesting that there is still a deep non-recognition of this.  We attempt to manipulate forms while not paying any attention to that which is awake, alive and the essence of the form.  We are deeply unaware of ourselves.  Even when we do begin to recognize and metaphorically taste, touch and smell ourselves beyond the forms we tend to externalize or make our essence other.  In fact we put it into this fancy category that we call “spirituality”.  Spirituality or spirit is none other than you.  It is inescapable as you cannot be other than you.  Spirituality is not reserved for some people or some times or places.  It is all that there is.  You could never leave it.  You can only not recognize it.  

Consciousness is not separate from matter.  It is matter.  It is simply vibrating at a slower wavelength than say thoughts or emotions.  Other words for consciousness are awareness, intelligence or information.  Awareness is intelligent.  The more your individual awareness recognizes itself the more intelligent you become.  I don’t mean the kind of mental intelligence that most of us think about as intelligence, though that is included as well, but instead I’m talking about self-organizing, self-healing, self-knowing intelligence.  This is the intelligence that organizes every single detail and moment in the universe.  Call it universal intelligence if you prefer.  This universal intelligence is in total and complete charge.  This intelligence is you.  

This is why all healing is remembering.  A remembering that you are this intelligence.  The focus on consciousness knowing itself turns the brightness knob up.  More brightness means more resourcefulness, more knowing, more intelligent navigating, and better listening and attuning to self.  Seeing and hearing the lessons you are learning more clearly and feeling less like a passive victim of circumstances and conditions.  At first you become co-creator, an active participant in the unfolding of each lesson and moment, until ultimately separation ceases to be perceived and you recognize the one creator as your true identity.  

Forms (including your body) are simply mirrors, pictures, reflections of consciousness, of you.  When you realize this inseparable nature you stop seeking outside of you for a magical pill or answer.  You are the magical pill and answer.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t elements inside the seeming form mirage that will be supportive to you, as there most likely will be.  But do recognize their function as consciousness illuminators, permission slips or pathways that carve the way inside your own awareness to more deeply know itself and it’s inherent self-healing, self-organizing and self-knowing power.  

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

Bliss

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Bliss

Ecstasy of being

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

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

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

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

Bliss Beyond Beliefs 

Allowing bliss to reign

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

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

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

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

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

Body Intelligence

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Body Intelligence

Stress & Acceptance Physiology

There is a natural intelligence to our bodies.  It is clearly evident that our bodies know how to coordinate a zillion biochemical process each day without us even being aware of it.  Modern medicine has barely scratched the surface in understanding the complexity of the way that our body operates and functions.  While it has made advances in looking at the physical components and parts it almost never steps back to see what is the operating force for this physical body in the first place.  

It is obvious that when we cut or injure ourselves that our body initiates a sequence of events to heal the tissue.  Different tissues tend to repair at different rates.  Many of what we label disease processes are the body’s intelligence attempting to recalibrate or heal itself in the best way it can given the situation it finds itself within.  Even when things seem maladaptive to us, meaning producing some kind of symptoms, this is often an intelligent process that is initiated to help adapt and heal the body.  This is also why simply eliminating symptoms can be dangerous as the body created them for a purpose, which is to support homeostasis and healing.  The adaptability and capacity of this body intelligence is really quite astounding and one that we often don’t give much attention to unless it seems to not be working correctly.  

This begs the question as to why it seems that this intelligence fails us at times.  Why does the body not repair after injury or find that perfect balance in its internal processes that we maybe once experienced?  Why does the body’s intelligence sometimes need external or outside assistance?  Lets start with the most significant cases first and work our way backwards.  In the most significant of cases an injury or insult to the body structure is so great that the body’s intelligence can’t reconnect and revitalize that part of the body despite its best attempts to do so.  You might see this with a car accident where there is loss of a limb or a stroke when a portion of the brain dies.  Connection has been severed and the body’s intelligence simply can’t reach or reconnect to that part.  When a part of this body is disconnected from its intelligence source its energetic resource is limited and it eventually ceases to function.  This is what we would call a death process of that part.  When intelligence completely ceases to inform this body structure that is what we call a full or complete death of this physical form.  Again this is the most significant of cases. 

Now at the body level we experience death processes every minute and this does not mean that a portion of the body or the entire body dies.  Believe it or not millions of cells die each second and millions of new ones are born each second.  Unbelievable I know but look it up for yourself.  The death process is actually a very important part of the regulation and health of this body, so much so that I would say that our resistance to a death process occurring is one of the major factors that interferes with our ability to heal.  Wait, what did I just say?  Yep you read correctly.  Due to our often impatience, fear, loss of stability in our body of what once was and wanting to go back to how we felt in our body before a pain or symptom arose we tend not want to let go of what once was.  We thus create a state of resistance aka stress physiology in our body and we are attempting to live in the past which always creates suffering because its impossible to do so.  In this way we interfere with the emergence of the new (which is on the other side of every death) by holding onto the old with the grips of our current idea of life.  When we are unwilling to accept what is, including the potential or actual death of the way that things were, we get stuck.  When we are stuck we desperately seek for some answer or some clarity that will bring us back to the knowing we once knew rather than this new state of uncertainty and instability that we find ourselves in.   

Now back to the body’s intelligence.  The body’s intelligence is always programmed towards health, vitality and wholeness in its actions.  When communication between our body tissues and the intelligence that informs them are intact and not interfered with this information is effortlessly communicated behind the scenes of our conscious awareness and our body functions optimally.  However if this information cannot reach the tissues of the body for some reason then the communication cannot get relayed.  In my opinion and experience the number one thing that interferes with this communication process is us.  Meaning we create the interference in the system through the inner state of being that we are choosing.  Now are there other things that interfere with this communication besides our inner state of being?  The answer is most definitely yes.  Not creating a good physical environment for the body by consuming crappy foods, crappy thoughts and not taking care of the physical body in the ways it needs all interfere.  These things are vitally important to our physical health and vitality, but they are not the entire story.  

The good news is that in many cases reconnection can be re-established.  The sometimes hard to swallow news is that we first have to accept the current-present-now state of our body before that connection comes back to life and our tissues can be re-vitalized.  On a body level this means that we have drop resistance, drop fight/flight mode, drop stress physiology so that the body intelligence can reconnect.  The physiology of stress (aka resistance) blocks physical healing and blocks the communication of the intelligence of the body with the body tissues.  Stress and healing physiologically work in opposition.  On a mental-emotional level this often means we have to stop thinking and start feeling the loss of what was, feeling the pain of not being able to go back, and feeling all of the other difficult emotions that are connected to not feeling or experiencing how you want to be feeling and experiencing being in your body.  

Acceptance physiology is radically different than stress physiology.  It’s the physiology of flowing, communicating, non-interfered with body intelligence.  When we quit holding onto what was, which is embracing the death of what we once knew, only then will we see the new that can emerge.  The clarity that we were so hungry for when we were feeling stuck begins to illuminate our experience.  We can see what needs to be done and take actions accordingly.  We become increasingly ready for whatever we need to do and be.  Our physical body may still be experiencing some symptoms but our relationship to their expression has dramatically changed such that we don’t even really mind that their present if they are.  This is the power of acceptance.  You have this power.  We all have this power.  

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

Connected Movement

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Connected Movement

Motion guided by thought

Unless you are a dancer, athlete or have practiced a lot of body awareness you probably don’t really pay too much attention to how your body moves.  Rather than tuning into our body’s natural movements or allowing our bodies to be moved we tend to think or do our movements.  Thinking our movements comes from our thinker deciding it wants to do something and then our body following through on that thought with the necessary actions.  For example say you are sitting on your couch and you have the thought that you would like an apple from the kitchen.  Your body then gets up and walks to the kitchen in response to this thought.  This is the process or act of doing.  This motion is guided by the thoughts in your head and often not in connection with the larger rhythms of your consciousness.  

When motion is guided by thought alone it is mechanical in nature, meaning you have to do the motion and there isn’t a sense of aliveness inherent within the movement itself.  In this previous sentence you are the thinker (as that is what most people identify themselves as) and the thinker/you is guiding the motion.  The process of pure doing, or moving guided by thought, involves effort and there isn’t a synergistic flow to it or something that is energizing it; you have to put all the work into it.  Another way to say this is that the movement is not connected.  Disconnected movement is movement guided by thought that feels like you have to do the work to produce the action.  This is how most people move most of the time.  

When our thoughts are the primary motivator of our movements we are then thus limited in our movements by the thoughts we think.  Our thoughts decide what movements we take, where we go, where we don’t go, how we are and aren’t able to express ourselves through our movements (including the movement of voice/sound) and what we think we are physically capable of doing.  The effects of this are vast and include how the movement of a single joint in our body moves or doesn’t move, the way a muscle or group of muscles tense up, or the posturing we hold ourselves in and extends into the expression of our purpose and what we move towards and away from in life.  When our movements are guided by the mechanical nature of thought intelligence we experience the limitation of our thoughts through this physical body which intelligence moves within. 

Intelligently Guided Motion 

Beyond the thinker

You may be wondering what can move us besides our thoughts?  Believe it or not there is something more intelligent then your thoughts that can guide your movements.  We are largely conditioned to believe that we are the thoughts we think, or one step beyond that, that we are thinker of the thoughts we think, and that our identity stops there.  This creates a limited perspective on who/what we are and that limited perspective is what gets expressed through these bodily forms as movement.  

What is this intelligence that lives beyond our thinking minds which can inform our movements and how do you access it within your own consciousness and experience?  One of the first pieces I’ve found to be fundamental for people in discovering themselves beyond their thinking mind is the development of body awareness.  What this means is learning how to drop your awareness from your head/thoughts into your body and simply rest it there.  Through learning how to rest your awareness into different parts of your body you begin to notice yourself and your energy within your body rather than be focused in your thoughts.  This opens your awareness to the more subtle aspects of your being.  This is simple in application, but requires a consistent practice to discipline where you allow your attention to go as it will almost always want to immediately go back into your thoughts.  

Navigating your awareness into your body you begin to learn presence and how to simply be without doing.  It is then through the next step of turning your attention towards your beingness that you become aware of yourself at that level beyond thoughts.  It is also here that spontaneously organized movement can arise that is generated not through your thoughts but through your being.  Here movement is effortless and not limited, controlled or determined by your thoughts.  It is also not mechanical, but instead has it own coordination and defies what the thinking mind previously thought possible.  The mind cannot makes sense of it, nor is it necessarily supposed to be able too.  Here, you the person, must have also developed enough trust, faith and surrender or you will not be able to experience beyond your thinking mind.  Without trust, faith and surrender the mind is simply unwilling or not ready to let go.  It needs more time to keep its confined, limited and illusionary sense of safety a little longer before experiencing freedom.  

At first some people experience this more organized, spontaneous movement as scary, strange or other worldly, but it is simply the waking up of your awareness to the beingness aspect of itself where thoughts don’t interfere and the intelligence beyond your thinking mind can get a moment to enter your body and organize it in a more efficient configuration.  Life is always evolving and moving towards greater organization, intelligence and knowledge of itself.  This is built into the blueprint of creation.  It is natural that we are waking up to this next aspect of ourselves where we tune to the more subtle aspects of our nature and our thinking minds get out of the drivers seat.  Here a more highly ordered and energized intelligence (that we are) can stream through and use the vehicle of the thinking of mind to express through rather than the thinking mind running the show.  Overtime and with more tastes we become more stable and rested at this level of our being and our identity shifts from thinker into illuminator or simply pure awareness.  

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