center for inner alchemy

CREATING FROM PEACE

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CREATING FROM PEACE 

It’s possible 

We are constantly creating.  In fact we are creation machines.  Creators through and through.  There is nothing that you do that isn’t an act of creation.  From brushing your teeth in the morning to closing your eyes before bed, everything in between is an act of creation.  While some acts may seem more routine or mundane than others, they are all nonetheless still acts of creation, being birthed by and through you.  In most of the activities of our day we don’t really realize that we are creating, rather we see the activities of our day as our ‘“to do list” and we aspire to get everything done on the list.  Our sense of accomplishment, or rest or peace, is in the completion of our doing not in the act of doing it.  

Imagine for a moment what you would feel like if opened your eyes in the morning and your first line of priority was to generate a state of being of peace.  What if you did not allow yourself to get out of bed until peace was achieved throughout the entirety of your being.  No conflict, no restlessness, no worry, no thoughts of the day, just peace.  Now imagine getting out of bed and everything that you do comes from this state of peace.  How do you feel?  I’d imagine you feel totally amazing, and a feeling of fulfillment far beyond the satisfaction of getting things done.  Ask yourself now in this moment, do you believe it’s possible to operate and live life coming from peace?  If you don’t, what arises for you?  Many think they will not get things done, they believe all the stuff they want to produce won’t get created, and at the core of it they feel purposeless.  In general people derive a tremendous amount of their sense of worth from the things they do.  When the doing stops or gets threatened it feels like a threat to our value and worth.

To come from peace means you have nothing to prove (particularly your own worth and value) and nothing that you have to create or do.  It means you are creating/doing not from a sense of deficiency or perceiving a problem, but rather from pure joyful desire to create what you create and do what you do.  This is the end of inner chaos and dysregulation.  When you start with peace there are no problems to fix, only fun things to do with your body and mind.   How often do your creations come from lack, or from the perception that something is wrong that you think needs to be fixed or done?  Lack motivates most of our actions.  Yet if we zoom out and see a bigger picture, we can see that nothing is wrong and nothing needs fixed.  This seeing is foundational to consistently coming from peace.  You must only ask yourself how badly you want peace versus the chaos and dysregulation you regularly choose.  While it may seem that peace isn’t always available, it always is.  Even in the most distressed state of being, peace is there as an option for you to choose.  To step into it you must only let go of that which you are perceiving as wrong. 

BRINGING JOY TO EVERYTHING 

Creativity in action

Some people do not view themselves as creative, and yet it is impossible not to be.  What seems to distinguish someone who is “creative” versus someone who is “not creative” (which again is impossible) is how much fun they are having inside of their creation.  You could make the bed as a routine you do every morning, which may seem uncreative to you, or you could make the bed in joy, and alas it becomes a creation that feels creative to you.  You may find yourself making pillow and blanket art.  When you see that everything is creative nothing seems mundane anymore.  There is no more just getting through your day or your to do list.  Mundane is simply something we have yet to find how to bring joy too.  

When you start with peace, when you come from peace, you quickly realize that there is nowhere to get.  Most of our doing is an attempt to get to peace, but when you start in peace all of your attempts to get somewhere disappear.  You arrive and are alive.  Not the kind of alive that is a waking zombie that we call being human, but the awake kind of alive.  The rested alive wakefulness, which allows us to flow with life and for life to flow through us.  How wiling are you to give up your un-peace?  Are you ready to die to your insistence on chaos and distress?  Do you want to claim peace, joy and creativity as your consistent state of being from here on out?

It sometimes feels hard to imagine or believe that we can truly be peaceful.  Yet when we choose distress over peace we create a world of distress rather than peace, and while perhaps you have the perception that what you choose as one individual doesn’t really matter, it does.  Your choice for peace or distress impacts this collective reality that we experience as one consciousness.  We are all part of one unified awareness and we can’t help influence and impact one another.  The generation of reality starts and ends with awareness, with us.  We as one are the awareness that creates all, creates this entire universe, all dimensions of the cosmos.  You are more powerful that you currently dream you are.  

Find ways to bring joy to all that you create/do.  Rather than avoiding, ignoring or refusing to do things that you perceive as un-joyful, find ways to bring joy to them.  It is not the activity that is un-joyful, but rather your state of being from where you come from in your doing.  All creating can be made fun when you realize that nothing has to be done.  Release yourself from the prison of thinking that what you create needs to be created, and reclaim your joy.   This doesn’t mean that you won’t create or do, you will, but no longer will you need to for any reason whatsoever.  Here is where pure innocent organic joy is found.  Only your desire and choice to put your energy and attention where you put it will guide you.  No longer will you need anything from anything or anyone.  Nothing has to work out in any specific way according to your preferences and likes.  This is freedom.  You are the power for this.  Choose peace.  Come from peace.  Start in peace.  If you do the only reality you will experience will be joy, not because your reality is joy, but because that is what you choose.  

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

RESOLVING CHARGE

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RESOLVING CHARGE

Depolarizing our perspectives

Most people are familiar with charge.  Charge is polarization or activation in a particular perspective or way of thinking about an experience.  People deal with charge in different ways.  Some people get reactive and justify or defend their perspective, while others withdraw, become apathetic or move away from their experience.  Whether or not a person chooses to react or withdrawal, the charge remains unresolved in their system.  Unresolved charge perpetuates tension, irritation, restlessness and disconnection.  

Charge occurs because we have certain beliefs, perspectives and preferences about our experiences.  When our preferences or perspectives of an experience don’t match with what is actually occurring, we build up charge or resistance.  Another way to say this is that when we don’t want to accept what is occurring, because we want something else other than what is revealing itself to be happening, we create resistance.  Resistance is our attempt to not fully feel what is actually happening because its doesn’t feel good to us and it doesn’t align with what it is we think we want.  

Charge creates the experience of disruption to our sense of stable, rested beingness.  This means that it creates disruption in our capacity to be present and be of service in a way that supports others and supports interconnectedness.  So frequently people say that their desire is to be centered, unswayed, and rested in themselves no matter what is occurring.  Yet most people allow themselves to get pulled out of center by their very own perspectives and preferences.  There is nothing wrong with this, it’s simple that it creates an experience of being caught up in one’s own thoughts, rather than present to what is.  

In general I find that most people aren’t really aware of themselves in such a way to notice how they are creating their own experience of loss of centeredness or stability in self.  They don’t see that how they perceive an experience is what creates resistance, not the actual experience itself.  They also don’t want to feel how what is showing up is undesired or undesirable.  This creates the postponement of change in one’s life because when we are unwilling to feel what is, and that it is undesirable, then we don’t have the fuel to move on from our perspective and create the changes we desire in our state of being.  This keeps us in mental loops, which come with the feeling that we are stuck or can’t move on.   

FINDING YOUR WAY THROUGH

Death of your dreams

In order to resolve the charge it typically means that you must die to something.  That something is usually an idea, hope or desire you had about how an experience in your life, or life in general, would go or turn out.  This is often experienced as the death of a dream(s).  It is also referenced in spiritual circles as ego death, which is death of the individual purpose driven life.  As unappealing as this may sound, and as contradictory as it may seem to the self-empowerment movement, it is the portal to peace.  It is how you come to resolution, and become once again available to what is rather than what you’d hope was.  

It makes total and complete sense that we don’t want to feel death.  Death tends to not feel good to most of us so we move away from the experience of it.  We are not so willing to just plunge into death, so instead resistance to what is, is created.  We may find ourselves trying to tell ourselves we are ok with whatever is, but underneath it all we really aren’t.  We know we aren’t because we don’t feel absolute, total peace and resolve.  Rather we feel tense, but don’t know why.  We feel disconnected, but can’t figure out it logically.  We try to move forward, but feel we don’t know how.  Life seems to not be opening up for us because we aren’t opening into the death that needs to occur before rebirth can find its way through.  

By going into the portal of death you come to experience true surrender.  Surrender of your insistences, surrender to seeing your preferences being played out in the world, surrender to trying so hard to make things happen in a particular way, and you find yourself in a state of openness.   Open receptivity is our natural state of being minus all of the personal preferences and desires we create along the way of this human journey.  You become available to and for life, rather than to and for your own agendas, and the sense of untethered-ness to your own preferences is liberating.  To the person that you believe yourself to be this seems stupid and devastating, and yet only once you go through the portal of death of your dreams can you discover the freedom that lives here.  The freedom to simply be present with what is here, to be an open vessel of energy and information to give to life, to others and to other aspects of creation.  This is the only true fulfillment.  All else is only temporary gratification.  

To resolve charge is to be at peace and to be stably rested in yourself no matter what is occurring.  As you die to what you think you want and open to what is, you become harmony.  Though becoming harmony you share that frequency with all that you interact with in this world.  All then gets the opportunity to see, feel and find harmony within itself.  This is 100% within your capacity and ability.  It takes only the willingness to move towards what actually is and let it crack you open in whatever ways it does.  The heart then finds its expression and is your lived experience.  

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

THE GIFT OF YOURSELF

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THE GIFT OF YOURSELF 

You are the gift you give

For many people there is an innate drive to give to others.  To serve, help, and support others generally generates good feelings inside of us as long as our giving comes from a place of true desire rather than obligation or agenda.  We are taught early on that we must learn skills, trades or other tools and means in order to have something to give.  Those things become our contribution to others.  This is the whole idea of work, and of trading services and resources.  

While our skills, services and abilities can add value to people’s lives and create ease, flow or greater efficiency in the world, they are not the gift that we give.  Two different people can have similar skills, services or abilities and yet they give an entirely different gift.  Sure on the surface it may seem that two architects can write up similar plans for a building, and yet they produce very different feels or results with their plans.  You may wonder why this is so.  It is so, because it is the energy of you that brings the gift of what gets produced.  It is the heart, the core of who you are, that is the actual gift you give.

Now this may seem very obvious to you conceptually.  Of course you understand that it’s you and the not the thing, but also notice how much of your mental and physical energy you spend on searching for the next cool thing you are going to create, the next career you will have, the next relationship you will start, all the while thinking that it will be your new purpose, the new thing that will define you and give you some sense of contribution.  It is very easy to pin the thing, meaning it is very easy for us to say “oh there is this thing that I can do or give to others and that makes my existence worthwhile.”  To say to yourself “I created this product, shared this service with others or did this thing and it changed people’s life, it’s so amazing!”  It is innocent enough and perhaps even true that your skill or ability did change their life and yet it is still not the gift you give.  

See in order to recognize the gift, you must be able to recognize and see yourself.  We are quite blind and distorted in our perspectives of how we view our own self.  We are not very clear mirrors for our own reflection.  We tend to not view ourselves as very worthwhile in general and therefore it’s easier to project our goodness on things we do rather than on our own selves.  We project our worth onto things.  Then to top it off the world reinforces all of our do-gooding all the while also telling us that if we think too highly of ourselves we are selfish and arrogant. Oh the conundrum! 

BEING WORTH 

Self-gratitude

Unless you know your worth you can’t give, because your giving is giving you.  If you see nothing of value in and of yourself, naked and without skills, abilities and stuff, then nothing will radiate out of you.  Sure you will still do stuff, create stuff and function in the world, but you will grow tired because you are running on empty inside trying to generate worth through what you do.  Until you know how worthy you are you will always have agenda, because you will always be trying to get love rather than realizing you are it.

Your radiance is your gift.  How you shine is your gift. It is really, really simple.  You could never attain worth or get more worthy and valuable based on any skill or ability that you may have or acquire.  Again it doesn’t mean that your skills won’t help out the ease and flow of this human existence, but they are not your service.  You are your service independent of anything that is done.

Since it is impossible to increase our worth this begs the question of how do we elevate our sense of self-worth.  Our sense of self-worth and our actual self-worth are two very different things.  The journey is in how we bridge the seeming gap in between without it being based on things that we accomplish or do.  Since most of our confidence comes through feats of walking into the fire of our own fears and limitations it is based in accomplishment or doing.  

There is one fast and short easy way to elevate our sense of self-worth and that is gratitude.  Gratitude for ourselves just the way we are in any given moment.  Appreciating the quirks, oddities, subtleties, nuances, particularities, and the way that we are exactly as we are.  Ending the desire to change ourselves or make ourselves different in any way brings greater and greater self-acceptance.  

Anything other than total gratitude for self is self-absorption, self-denial, self-hatred and the true selfishness.  It’s the true selfishness because when we don’t feel amazing about ourselves then we focus on ourselves.  We focus on what’s wrong with us and how to be different or better.  When we are focused on ourselves our energy goes in rather than radiating out.  The result is that we feel depleted rather than energized.  Giving/being ourselves is energizing because it’s effortless.  It doesn’t need to be more or less.  It is complete in and off itself.  None of this means that we won’t grow or change, but instead simply that growth will come through acceptance of self rather than through non-acceptance.  

Develop a daily practice of self-gratitude, not for what you do, but for who you are.  Nothing added, nothing subtracted.  Just you as you are.  This will be your portal into a sense of stable, infinite self-worth where you will naturally radiate the gift that you are.   

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

OPEN TO RECEIVE

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OPEN TO RECEIVE 

Re-finding our natural state

Most humans are living as a closed unit or entity, perceiving themselves to be separate and distinct from others and life.  This closed-off-ness is elusive to most, but that doesn’t make its existence any less present.  Closed-off-ness is akin to protection.  A way to keep things, people, pain, pleasure or support out or away.  When our system is closed our ability to take things in or receive is impaired.  Even if all the love in the world showed up on our doorstep we aren’t able to perceive or receive if our system is closed. 

A closed system leads to a experience of disconnection.  That disconnection can be felt as disconnection from ourselves, from others, from support, from guidance, from spirit or God, from abundance, from partnership, from love, from anything and everything we desire.  We might wonder why we don’t have or experience the things that we want and yet can’t see how we aren’t open to receive them.  Closed-off-ness is hard, tough and pushes away, while receiving requires softness, invitation and welcoming in.  

It isn’t hard to be open and receive, in fact openness is our natural state.  The investigation or work is in discovering where we are pushing out or away rather than including and inviting in.  There are many reasons why we don’t receive or why we close our system off.  At some point we might have felt pain or hurt that our tender heart didn’t want to feel so it turned in or cold, and never or only selectively reopened.  We may feel we don’t deserve or aren’t worthy to receive because we learned somewhere that we have to earn everything and nothing can simply be given to us.  We might feel that it is selfish to receive.  We may have had experiences of people not showing up or being there for us so we learned that we had to do everything ourselves and became doers rather than receivers.  

You can see that breaches of trust, no one being there, disappointment, reaching without return, and not having our inherent worth reflected to us all create situations where we make a decision (conscious or not) to close ourselves off to others, ourselves and the very life force that keeps alive.  We then struggle with a sense of darkness, disconnect, and powerlessness.  This state of being is so “normal” to us that we actually think it to be normal when it’s not.   

UNSELECTIVE RECEIVING 

It’s worth it

In order to have an open system we must receive all things fully and equally.  Selective receiving, while a step, still lends to only a partially open system.  If we desire to dissolve our bubble of illusionary separation and distinction, and participate with the one field, the one being that we are, then partiality won’t cut it.  This means we have to receive the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, the attuned and the mis-attuned, the hard and the soft.  This is the real work.  This is the opening of your heart to all it.

How do you open your heart this wide?  The truth is your heart is already infinitely wide and includes everything inside of it.  There is nothing you need to “do” to open it wider.  Instead you only need to accept, allow and feel everything that is already contained inside of it.  Your unwillingness to feel and accept what is contained, held and living inside of your own heart will keep you from experiencing loving in your every day moment to moment existence.  There is nothing else that will keep you out of the experience of love except your own unwillingness to receive everything equally.  

I invite you to investigate your relationship to receiving.  Notice where you are willing to receive and where you are not willing to receive.  Notice where you push away and where you allow in.  Notice where you feel in the dark or disconnected and where you feel illuminated and connected.  Notice where you do and where you be.  You must develop awareness of where you are not open in order to be able to recognize where/what you are not willing to receive. 

Receiving is a gift.  When you receive others you receive the gift of them.  When you receive yourself you recognize the precious treasure that you are and your worth can never be questioned again.  When you receive support and guidance you learn through others learning.   When you receive yourself you teach others what you know yourself to be.  You come to recognize that there is nothing you need to protect yourself from because everything is you.  The only protection needed is to love, to receive what is exactly as it is.

To be open is to be in communication with all.  While there are times where doors are to be closed, or communication is to be lost, at some point all must come back into communication along the journey.  Nothing is or could ever truly be disconnected, no matter how dark or distorted it seems.  To recognize, to see, to receive the essence of what is allows and invites it back home into its remembrance.  In time everything and everyone remembers what it is, that it never left home and was never apart.  The journey of peeling back your layers of closed-off-ness and seeming separation is worth it.  Even if the journey seems long, treacherous, never ending and impossible at times, it is worth it.  To return to your natural open state of total and complete union with all is worth it.

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

DESIRE WITHOUT ATTACHMENT

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DESIRE WITHOUT ATTACHMENT 

Coming back to love

Oh the conundrum of desiring without attachment.  The wanting, the hunger, the joyful moving towards the heart’s desire without any supposition or assurance for the fruits of your labor to be experienced or made manifest.  A seeming almost impossible feat, to stay desirous and unattached, and yet the possibility is ripe inside each and every moment. In fact, if the ripeness of possibility of unattached desire is chosen, the experience is unconditional love, or just actual love as love has no conditions.  

Why do we make conditional or bind that which is free and unbound at its very nature?  Because we want certainty.  We want safety in knowing that something will be, look, feel or show up in a particular way.  That image we have of what we want seems to be linked to us getting it, as without the getting of it we feel unfulfilled or empty of it.  However as soon as we try to get the thing or experience, we become laden with agenda and utilize tactics of manipulation to get or keep what we want.  Now there is no problem in getting what you want, of receiving the fruits of your heart’s desire, it’s simply that it must not be required in order for you to be fulfilled, joyful and feel complete.  There must be no need to have it inside of your desire for it.  The completion is in the desiring not in the getting.  

To have your focus on the desiring rather than the getting often leaves you with feelings of vulnerability, uncertainty and exposure.  There is the wide open mystery in front of you, in which you have no idea what it holds, and yet you continue to keep your heart open in desire, in love.  You let the mystery give you whatever it does without you insisting or holding onto a single way in which its supposed to look or feel.  Inside of this is the death of your insistences, of your limited perspectives of righteousness and thinking you know what is best from your egocentric mind.  It is you saying “I love, I want, I desire and I’m yours” to the mystery “do to me, with me, through me what you will”.  This is surrender.  It is rapture with the divine.  It is where my will and thy will merge into one.   

COMMITTED TO LOVE 

The way to surrender

In order to get to the point of surrender you must have one hell of a commitment to love and loving.  Even though surrender is glorified in spiritual communities and people loosely use the term like its some walk in the park, it is not easy.  It is not easy for your mind to give up getting what it wants or trying to figure out how to get what it wants, truly.  For a moment activate feelings of deep want and desire in your current most intimate relationship while simultaneously not needing to have the experience of being with that person.  Feel deeply wanting all the nice things that you surround yourself with without needing them to be in your surroundings.  Try feeling your passion for all the causes you feel passionate about without needing any of them to change from their current state.  You can see now that without your full on devotion to loving, the lure of getting the objects or outcomes of your desires will sweep you in, captivate you and you will be powerless to it.  The only thing that will pull you out of your self-indulgence is your steadfast, ruthless, total and complete devotion to loving no matter what.  

Loving no matter what is a muscle worth building.  I’m not sure why there aren’t more gyms that cultivate this type of workout, but I suppose its because life just naturally gives us plenty of times in a single day to stretch, firm and bulk up this muscle.  Any time you notice tension, resistance, non-acceptance, holding your breath, or turning away from something or someone you have an opportunity to build your love muscle.  If you start a practice of coming back to love over and over and over again then you will begin to know what surrender is rather than just talking about it.  Once you taste surrender you realize that none, and I mean none, of the objects and outcomes of your desires are “supposed to happen.”  You realize how little you see and know, and that you have no freaking idea what is supposed to happen from and through your desire.  This may sound a little depressing at first.  I get it.  But what it actually is and feels like is a true, sincere humility.  All of your pride, arrogance and needing to know or get, goes out the window.  

Yet the wanting, the loving, the desiring that you feel continues if you let it.  That desiring is the creative impulse of the creator moving through you.  That impulse is love.  Your mind tries to distort or condition that impulse (i.e. condition love) by making images, stories, and ideas about what that creative impulse is supposed to create and look like in the manifest.  It then attaches the impulse to the picture it created and insists that the two go together when in fact they may or may not.  Your job, if you so choose, is only to remain open to what your desires want to look like rather than insisting that they fit into your original image. 

Feeling, following and acting on your desires is key to you expressing the gift of the creator through you, but it is not for you to determine the fruits of that desiring.  This is desire without attachment.  This is what it is to love.  The art of loving is an expressive adventure indeed.  It is a full playing of the game of life.  A welcoming invitation to what is in every single moment.  The willingness to prioritize, commit, and devote your life to loving opens you into a life of ecstatic surprise and mystery, filled with a richness that you could never fit into any image you could imagine.

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

WAKING UP FROM FEAR PARALYSIS

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WAKING UP FROM FEAR PARALYSIS 

The collective freezer

We are living in a collective freezer and largely unaware of the frigid weather all around us.  These cold conditions have paralyzed many of us into a state of contraction, numbness and disconnection.   Side effects of frozenness are subtlety holding your breath, tensing your body, not feeling safe to be yourself, not fully sharing or expressing yourself in world, believing things might go bad or not work out and feeling like you are not going to be ok.  Frozenness is riddled with worry, doubt, insecurity, inhibition, vigilance and absence of trust in self, other or life.  Its focus is on minimizing disruption, change, and uncertainty at all costs.  It is not concerned with thriving, evolution or advancement, but instead solely with preservation of what is and attempting to keep things the same.

Clearly it is impossible to keep things the same.  The one screamingly obvious truth is that everything is constantly changing.  Yet despite the obviousness of this we attempt to control the change.  This state of inner non-acceptance of what is keeps us looking in the rearview mirror.  Trying to keep a version of ourselves, our body, or our environment that was previously known to us.  Perhaps a version of our life that we liked more or that felt safer because it was more known to us thus giving us the illusion of greater stability.  What we fail to really accept is that everything has a rhythm, a beginning, middle and an end.  This is true for everything within the physical universe.  All will come and go.  

It is through stretching yourself into greater acceptance of this fact of the ever changing nature of the universe that you will begin the unthawing process.  When you stop trying to hold things in place you begin to recognize the movement that is all around you.  The block of ice that you’ve been keeping yourself inside of starts to melt.  The frigid, rigid fear container loses its sharp harshness and with that you begin to notice your breath again.  A warmth arrives that allows the muscles to relax.  That which you withheld or kept separate or silent now begins to move inside of you and take expression.  You stop worrying so much about yourself and instead start living again or maybe living for the first time.  

The important thing to realize here is that you are in charge of the defrosting process.  In fact it is 100% solely up to you.  That doesn’t mean that support isn’t available, because it is, but the choice to end the choice for fear is yours.  You don’t have to keep picking up the same fear story, feelings and sensations.  You are bigger than and beyond any fear thought.   

BEYOND THE CHOICE FOR FEAR

Finding all the places that you hide out

The first step in ending your attachment relationship with fear is by finding all the places where you choose it.  See our choosing of fear is largely unconscious to us.  We simply imbibe it as part of the air we breathe and don’t do much to question it because it’s one of those collectively agreed upon assumptions that has been left un-investigated.  Its takes a certain slowing down of the mind  and recognition of our more subtle beingness so that we can attune and clearly see these unconscious assumption patterns that we have about life.  

As you begin this investigation process into yourself you may find that there are certain things or situations that arise which you feel that fear is the only choice.  Where you get hijacked and your nervous system responds with the fear cascade of attack, protection, disconnection and vigilance.  These are your growth edges.  Wherever it is that you feel like you have no choice but to respond in a certain way is a misinformed and disempowered perspective.  The key that I want to keep pointing to here is choice.  It is one thing to deliberately choose fear and allow that choice to create the programmed nervous system response for that choice, it is another thing entirely to not consciously choose it and be swept into that response.  If a lion is chasing you choosing fear and the subsequent neurophysiological cascade that follows may be appropriate unless you want to get eaten, however rarely are any real lions chasing us.  

So outside those incredibly rare moments in our lives when we truly need our survival mechanism to be activated the choice for pure survival/preservation and the attack, flight or freeze response is just a default mode.  This should feel like really great news to you because it means that you are in charge.  You are not victim to your nervous system, instead it responds to you.  Its only that you have not been aware of your choice, of what you’ve been choosing or even that you can/do choose.  

This is why at some point we have to turn our attention from the outside world and all the seeming external triggers and look within.  Sometimes this seems like a dark and bleak void, and perhaps even boring direction.  This is only because we haven’t spent much time paying actual attention to ourselves and therefore there is this undiscovered terrain of which we have not navigated before.  You may feel like you don’t know how or what you are doing, and when you first open that inner door you may not see much.  But as with any worthwhile endeavor persistence pays off.  Your willingness and dedication to continue to peer inside reveals an previously unknown or unconscious world to you.  You come to see and know yourself.  You see the intricacies of your psyche and illuminate their workings simply with your attention and awareness on them.  It is here that you dismantle your conditioned responses to life and reclaim your active choice.  In truth the choice has always been yours, but until you turn within and unequivocally see that fact, your mind will play tricks of denial on you and you will project your power outwards onto objects, situations and other people.  The choice beyond fear is the choice for freedom and an experience of life where you are present, available and fully alive.  

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

EXCRUCIATING RHYTHMS

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EXCRUCIATING RHYTHMS 

Root of real happiness

We all have times when we want our lives to look, feel or be different than they are.  Where what is showing up is undesirable and not our preferred reality.  These sometimes excruciating moments and rhythms feel like they throw us under the bus.  Heaviness, ungrounded, sadness, anger and frustration is the state of being we experience.  Sometimes a sense of hopelessness or powerlessness ensues.  Our insight feels limited and we are low on appreciation because all we can see and feel is what we don’t want.  

When we find ourselves here often our number one agenda is to attempt to get out of these rhythms as quickly as possible.  We try to make the situation different, change it, get it over with, run from it, create something around it or somehow resolve it.  We hate the discomfort, difficulty and sense of doom we feel when we are here.  By in large we are pain avoiders and pleasure seekers.  When we feel pleasure (gain) we like our experience and when we feel pain (loss) we try to escape our experience.  The issue here is that we become chasers of all the feel good stuff and think that our happiness lives inside of these experiences.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  When we try to increase these pleasurable/preferable experiences and minimize the un-preferable ones there is a level of constant underlying management of life and we are never really present.  This mode of operation provides temporary/illusionary happiness that is circumstantial and always leave us disappointed and unfilled.  

The truth is that happiness lives inside of us not inside of our experiences.  This may be tricky for you to really get.  You may wonder how you could possibly experience joy while everything in your life (or the world) is not going according to your desires.  While you feel pain or have disease, while others suffer, while things look messy or are unsettled, while you don’t have the possessions, relationships, or money that you want, while things appear to limit your freedoms, while your friends or family members lose it, while personal and world crises persist.  See the thing is that we tend to blame circumstances for our state of being.  When circumstances are nice then “I choose to feel good”.  When circumstances not nice than “I choose to feel bad”.  Most people don’t realize that they are choosing in this way even though it is so apparently and undeniable clear.  When you give your power (aka your state of being) over to circumstances the result is feelings of disempowerment, randomness, and hope for something better that will shift the situation so that you feel like you can shift your own self.  Your power is in the appearance of life rather than being rested in you.  This will always lead to unhappiness because the only true happiness is when we are rested in our own power.   

ACCEPTING THE UNDESIRABLE 

Ending the pain/pleasure cycle

As much as this might come as a surprise to you, your wants, preferences or desires are not always what’s right or meant to happen.  People aren’t always supposed to be nice to you, consider you, like you or appreciate you.  Things aren’t always meant to run smoothly.  You are not always meant to get what you want.  It’s simply the way that it is.  In the new age spiritual culture where we are often so focused on “living our dreams” and “manifesting our reality” it may seem contradictory for me to say that maybe your dreams or preferences aren’t always what is the most important.  However when we get so wrapped up in the story of ourselves and the importance of what we think is important we miss the boat and aren’t connected to the larger rhythms of life.  We start to try to control the narrative (i.e. control our life) and simultaneously suck the energy out of it.  We can get easily lost inside of our own agendas and begin to attach to outcome.  No matter how well intended, pure or altruistic our ambitions are they still may not be what is meant to be.  This can be incredibly hard to accept.  

Accepting the undesirable is not something we readily do.  Again we are not big fans of feeling pain, particularly of the emotional nature.  However when we take a moment to pause and feel the underlying hurt, pain, loss or frustration of life, people and circumstance not being how we want them to be we allow the energy to express.  Rather than binding that energy in the form of resistance, tension, holding our breath, and bracing our bodies, the energy gets to move and we get to feel rather than be stuck in our resistance to feeling.  When we feel we instantly become clearer and more present.  It doesn’t mean that the situation has changed, but it does mean that we have changed.  We have allowed where we previously were resisting.  

In allowing that which doesn’t feel good we end the cycle of chasing pleasure and avoiding pain.  We come to experience what its like to be present no matter what is occurring.  We realize that pain and pleasure, preferable and non-preferable, desired and not desired are all simply transient.  They come and go.  They will always come and go.  We can’t speed it up or slow it down.  We can only allow ourselves to drop into whatever rhythm is present, excruciating or exuberant.  

We will like some things and dislike other things.  This will mostly likely continue for the rest of your incarnation.  Accepting the entire range of experience rather than attempting to control the experiences allows you to develop a depth of presence and stability of beingness.  That stability becomes the container for everything to simply have its experience.  Its the end of fixing or controlling anything.  No agenda.  Just pure, unadulterated freedom and true love.  There is nothing more powerful than this because everything is included just as it is.  Nothing pushed out, pushed away or gotten rid of.  You are with it all, inviting of it all, whether or not it is your preference.  Even though sensations, feelings or things may still be present that you don’t like or wish were different, you no longer resist their presence.  They are allowed to be as they are and as such you are free.

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

THERE IS NO OTHER

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THERE IS NO OTHER 

Unity is the one truth

We are all familiar with unity or oneness.  There is an innate impulse inside each of us towards unification.  That which feels or thinks itself separate hungers to come into connection with its otherness less it feels incomplete.  You could say that this unification impulse is what drives this entire universe.  The drive back towards itself.  If unity or oneness is truth then why is it that we perceive there to be an other or that things or people appear separate or distinct from us?  

The easiest explanation for this is that “you” are misidentified.  You are identified with the appearance of you, meaning the body and mind-personality characteristics, habits and preferences that make up the “me” you think and feel yourself to be.  As long as you focus and see only the appearance and rely on your senses to tell you what you are, you will remain misidentified.  The you that you experience yourself to be on a day to day basis is not the you that you are.  In fact it is impossible to experience yourself as any thing at all, you can only be yourself.  You can only be because that is what you are.  The only way to experience yourself is to recognize that you are, that you be.  You cannot experience your true self through forms or thoughts because you are prior to and creator of all forms and thoughts.  

All experience outside of directly recognizing your beingness is simple a projection of you (an appearance of you) and not the actual you.  Experiencer and experience are one because no experience can be experienced without the experiencer.  However when you are identified as the experience (meaning the sensations, thoughts and feelings that make up experience) without recognizing the experiencer you come to identify as the appearance.  Now separation seems to exist and a world of objects seems like the reality because you are disconnected from the source, from the experiencer, from you.  Thus the birth of the illusion of duality.   Duality or otherness appears, is perceived by you, solely because you are not in recognition of yourself.   

This idea of otherness is so second nature to us that we assume it to be true nearly all of the time.  We don’t even just make “other” people other than us, we even fragment ourselves into multiple parts.  We say things like “well a part of me knows and a part of me doesn’t” or “a part of me wants this and a part of me doesn’t”.  Again this is so second nature to us that it seems normal, but it’s not.  Who is the other you?  Is there not just one you?  Show me this you that is other than you.  You cannot, because there is just one you.  One presence.  One beingness.  One being.   

BECOMING COHERENT

The end of otherness

The sure fire fastest way to increase your coherence, your light, your alignment, and your frequency (which are all the same thing) is to dismantle your identification with the appearance and end your story of other.  When you perpetuate the perception of other, particularly other parts to your own being, you create mixed frequencies.  Mixed frequencies are by nature less coherent, contain less organized and efficient energy, and have capacity for less self-awareness.  They waver and flitter, they are not stabilized, typically they don’t work that well together and it takes a lot more energy to create anything from them.  When you are incoherent, aka innerly split, mixed and creating multiples of you, this is what you experience your life to be.  

To end the story of parts of you and rest in the fact that there is only one of you requires that you take 100% responsibility for yourself.  What I mean by that is you can no longer project say “laziness”, or that you don’t have what you want or do what you want, on a part of you.  You can no longer say a part of you knows or a part of you doesn’t know.  You either know or you don’t know, you either do what you want or you don’t do what you want.  You either show up or you don’t.  You must realize and accept that you, the only you that there is, is the one choosing what is currently appearing on the screen of your awareness or the projection of experience.  There are no shades of grey here as attempting to create shades of grey only produces scattered energy that is fueled by doubt, questions and other mental strategies of avoidance and postponement.  Another name for this is suffering.  

Turning your focus away from experience and towards that you be or that you are naturally opens up the realization of the experiencer and the absolute certainty and direct knowledge of unity.  The more you realize yourself the harder it is to continue the perception of separation until eventually it becomes impossible.  

Increasing your coherency allows you to create much more effortlessly and to feel and be more rested in yourself even without the impulse to have to create or serve.  This rest is not in the appearance of you, but your actual self.  In fact the appearance can be turbulent yet you remain undisturbed.  Wars can be happening, mass chaos, things going on in your body, tensions, conflicts and disagreements can be occurring and you don’t get hooked into any of it.  Its doesn’t mean you don’t take action where you feel the impulse to take action, you simply don’t take any of it personal, because you know there isn’t a real separate person to take it personal.  You naturally exude confidence and freedom because that is your true nature.

This isn’t rocket science and its not that hard.  In fact this is the organic flow of evolution.  To evolve is to increase coherency, complexity and energy efficiency.  We feel pain and suffering when we fight this natural flow.  Coherency and harmony starts and ends with you, as you are one and all is you.

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

INFINITE TIMELESSNESS

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INFINITE TIMELESSNESS 

Only the present is

From the human perspective we are born, have experiences and then die.  It seems to move in one linear direction.  One present moment to the next present moment, and the moments continue to come one after the other without so much as asking our opinion about it.  This trajectory is ceaseless in its perpetuity of continuousness.  We call this perpetuity past, present and future, but this endless moment exists only now without a future or past.  At the very core of what we call time is infinite timelessness of now and now and now.  This present moment is inescapable as it is the foundation of consciousness and creation.  

Due to the way our minds both file memories and visualize potentiality life seems to happen outside of this moment.  It seems something is occurring now and some things will occur later and some other things occurred previously, but nothing ever occurred or occurs outside of now.  What we view as past or future are really just thoughts bouncing around in our minds and have very little to do with time itself even though we’ve become accustom to calling it past or future. In fact our thinking about these thoughts now brings them into now, which is the prime way that people can feel like they are either “re-living” their past or that things are occurring along a linear progression.  This can be seen as us experiencing trauma patterns, identities, relationship dynamics, perspectives and beliefs from our “past” now.  It is only your thoughts about them that bring them into now.  Essentially you bring that information, patterning and programing to the present over and over and over again.  It’s not that you are living your past, because that would be impossible, but instead that you are carrying the same thoughts and perspectives into each present moment.  

Could you in one full swoop shift a belief or perspective?  Yes anyone could, it is your free will to do so.  In fact when you do this it is what we call healing.  Healing is really just shifting your perspective from viewing something through a lens that creates pain and suffering to one that creates liberation instead.  In this way healing is not process, but simply the moment that you decide to change your lens.  From there you create a different present moment that is filled with different information and energy, which to your human self looks and feels like living a different reality.  This can be done infinitely.  There is no end to it because there is no end to perspectives or the present moment.   

TEMPLATES OF POSSIBILITY 

Beyond the forward focus

As humans it seems as if we always want to get somewhere.  There is always somewhere that we are going, either physically or in thought.  This forward focus of attaining our desires and living a purposeful life seems to drive the ship as without it we become listless, depressed or bored.  While transformative and action oriented in nature, the focus on where we are going peaks when we’ve shared, lived and expressed all we feel we’ve come to share, live and express in outward ways.  Not from a hopeless having given up place, but from a place of having fulfilled our minds ideal of what some might call their destiny.  This often comes through the realization that there is no where to arrive to other than where you are.  In this way the destination ceases to exist.

What lives beyond the forward focus?  A resting into the present now.  You welcome the inescapable nature of the present whether it contains what you desire it to contain or not.  You realize the power of your thoughts and perspectives in the creation of your experience now.  You see that you really are in charge and see through the illusion of disempowerment, which comes from thinking you are the experience/creation rather than the creator of it.  Recognizing the power of thoughts and how they bring your present moment experience alive is the key to your creator abilities.  This is in fact how you are already creating each moment.  

The templates (you could call these beliefs and perspectives) already exist for every single possibility.  They are not outside of your reach nor something you need to somehow figure out.  There is only the self-investigation of what it is you are believing to be true in this moment and then deciding if you still want to believe it or not.  Also seeing how what you currently believe is either compatible or incompatible with what you desire now.  Often we want to hold onto certain perspectives so strongly even when they feel bad or creates suffering for ourselves.  It can feel like nothing is strong enough to dismantle them, yet you are that strong.  In fact your strength alone is the only thing in the entire universe that can dismantle it.  No person, thing, or magical fairy can do it for you.  It is 100% an inside job.  

You cannot live in a past or a future.  You can only live now.  This is your present moment.  All possibilities exist here.  Turn inwards to the present rather than outwards to the past or future and see the intricacies of the organization of your own beliefs and perspectives.  See how they create your experience.  You cannot get anywhere and there is nowhere to go back too.  Realize the vastness of that statement.  You cannot go back to a previous version of you, nor can you bypass this moment into something other than what it is.  What do you desire now?  What do you want to feel now?  What do you want to see now?  This is it.  The lure or the dread of the seeming past-future may grab you, but as soon as it does recognize once again what is here now.  See how you are creating it.  See if it is what you want to be creating.  This is the only true fulfillment because inside of it lives all that lives. 

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