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Remembering Your Future

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

REMEMBERING YOUR FUTURE

Conviction in what has already been

What if you knew that you were capable of achieving whatever it is that you desire, even if from where you stand now it feels confusing, scary or overwhelming?  If somehow you saw the path of your future self, the one that already accomplished whatever it is you are currently wanting to do?  Imagine the sense of confidence you would feel in the knowing that you already did whatever it is you are working towards now.  That you already somehow, someway did it, and now you know it can and has been done by you.  Perhaps you don’t know all the details, but you’ve glimpsed that it’s possible, and beyond possible, that you literally have already found the way, already walked the steps, figured all the things out, that you now know.  Just like you know what you did yesterday, last week and last year, you also somehow know what you did tomorrow, next week and next year.

Perhaps this seems far stretched for some of you.  After all it appears that time goes in one linear direction and that you can only know what has happened in the past.  You may wonder how you could possibly know what happens in the future from where you stand now, but what if you can?  What if you can remember your future just like you remember your past?  You may argue that the future hasn’t happened yet, so how could you know it, but how do you know for certain that the future hasn’t happened yet?  How do you know for certain that everything isn’t happening all at once, but that your awareness is simply tuning into this particular location, which you call your current present moment?  Just because you’ve been experiencing life in a certain way doesn’t mean that it’s only that way.  

The conviction that we have of our past experiences is strong.  For example say that you went to the grocery store yesterday to get groceries.  If I asked you right now if you went to the grocery store yesterday you would be 100% convicted that you did.  It would likely be impossible for me to tell you differently.  You simply wouldn’t believe me, because you have 100% knowing that you did.  You can see the groceries in your refrigerator as proof.  You could say you are fully confident in what you did yesterday.  What if you could use that same skill, but for the future.  If you were 100% convicted today in what you did tomorrow.  If you already knew what you did in the future it would be impossible for me or anyone else to tell you differently, including your own self.  You would have zero doubt in what’s possible, what you are capable of, and what’s been achieved.  

BLUEPRINT OF COMPLETION 

Information from your future self

While remembering your future equally to remembering your past might not yet seem possible to you, recognize it’s only because you have a belief that life doesn’t work this way.  You have a belief that life goes in just one linear direction and your belief gets reinforced by you then experiencing life in one linear like fashion.  Entertaining the possibility that perhaps life is happening in all directions might seem like sci-fi.  Yet the conviction we feel by the certainty of our experience is a potent determiner of our experience.  Getting this and opening into the possibility that perhaps you can experience life in a different order than you’ve been experiencing it up this point, will clearly provide you with an unshakeable certainty of what is.  This unshakeable certainty will/does manifest as your reality, because what we experience as reality is simply what we are certain about.  

Take anything that you desire to experience or hope for in the future, and put it in the forefront of your mind.  Perhaps it’s financial abundance, a contribution to others, a beach house, a relationship, a healthy body or really anything else that you desire.  Rather than somehow trying to create or manifest this vision, simply tune into how you’ve already gotten there.  Even if you don’t yet know all the details, simply allow yourself to see how you’ve already done it.  Just like you see what you did yesterday, see what you did tomorrow.  Also see how you’ve previously accomplished things that you once felt like you didn’t know how, but that you did accomplish them somehow.  See that you did and can.  See that you know the path even if the details aren’t fully clear.  This isn’t make believe although it might feel like you are making it up at first.  Recognize that you have already done this thing that you desire to do or experience.  Somehow, someway you’ve already accomplished this.  Feel how good it feels to arrive and also how good it feels to know that you already know how to arrive.  

What we know, we experience.  What we feel uncertain about we hope and pray will work out, which never feels good because our locus of power is outside of us.  Knowing is self-generated.  It doesn’t come from your experience, it comes from you and then it penetrates your experience.  You can simply just decide to have conviction in whatever it is you want.  You don’t need to wait for some special knowledge or experience first, unless you want to.  When you come from your future self that has already achieved what you desire to now, there is no special thing you will tell yourself per say.  Rather it’s simply the knowingness of, “well of course that’s how it is.” 

Let your future self be the vibrational blueprint of completion for you.  When you do there will be nothing stopping you, because the only thing that ever stops us are our doubts.  When you simply know, you take actions inside of that knowing, which you know will lead to what you already know has been accomplished.  In this way you can just relax and enjoy the ride.  Your conviction is what is steering the ship, the completion has already been taken care of.  Life is the experience of the details in between the two now moments.  You get to experience those details in whatever way you would like, but when you come from conviction it is often a more joyful experience.  As always the choice is yours.

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

Be Done Being Scared

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BE DONE BEING SCARED 

Fear is optional

Believe it or not fear is optional.   Literally believe it or not.  Most people don’t perceive fear to be a choice.  Rather most feel that fear simply happens to them, and they don’t recognize themselves as the source of it.  While it can seem very, very convincing that the source of our fear is somewhere outside of us, I assure you that it’s not, because nothing we feel is.  Everything we feel, we feel inside of us, and what allows us to feel whatever it is we feel, is us.  If there was no us here then there would be no feeling in response to anything.  The common denominator in all of it, is us.  It’s obvious and yet most people don’t really see it.

Why does it seem that fear just happens and that we can’t control it? It’s like this.  When we look out at something, say an event, a person, or a circumstance, we perceive it through our lenses and filters of what we’ve learned and experienced.  Then we decide if it’s scary or not.  This happens automatically for most of us and so it seems that the thing is the source of fear.  We don’t recognize that what we are experiencing is our story and beliefs projected onto the objects or circumstances.  If we slowed this process down, and made it conscious rather than automatic, we would see that we don’t actually look out and see fear, but rather we look out and see our meanings and definitions about what it is that we think we are looking at.  Based on those definitions, we then have certain thoughts, feelings and physiological responses.  

While we are busy attempting to control all of our feelings and the physiological responses of the fear that we imagine is out there, over there, or somewhere, we fail to go to the core of the fear.  While we might be successful at managing the sensations that come along with our perceptions of what is, we often don’t look at the perceptions themselves.  Instead we attempt to fix, numb or change the effects that we feel, hoping and praying, that we will stop feeling them.  Imagine recognizing that you are the source of your fear response.  Notice how empowered you would feel when you know that you can change how you are feeling by changing how you are seeing.  You can.  Fear doesn’t have to be part of your experience.  It’s not a given or a must.  The more self-aware you become and the more you will realize yourself as the source of what you feel, the evidence will reveal itself to you through your direct experience of living without fear. 

BECOMING MORE RESOURCEFUL 

Redefining our definitions

You might ask, what about when I need to or should be scared?  What if I’m being threatened, harmed or my survival is at risk?  It’s interesting that we fear, that if we don’t fear, then we won’t take the appropriate actions in response to situations where we need to take them.  It like fear is our security blanket and we think we need it to feel safe.  Yet our continued insistence in holding onto it, is what continues to make us feel unsafe.  What the conundrum.  What I would say is that the reason why we don’t take appropriate actions that we need to take is because we fear, not because we don’t.  For example say someone is threatening you with a knife or raping you, you fear and freeze, and let them harm you. If you have a little more energy in your system you flee or fight back.  One could say the more fear you feel in a situation the less resourceful you are.  If you have ever seen the movie Divergent you can see a perfect example of what it’s like to be in your most terrifying scenarios, move through your fear, and have more energy and resourcefulness available to navigate the situation at hand.  You literally become present and when you are present you know what to do and how to respond.  You don’t need the fear in order to respond. The moral of the story is that the more powerless we believe ourselves to be, the more fearful we will feel, and less capacity we have to navigate our lives.  

We have all been born into definitions of fear that we have learned to take on as our own.  We have all had experiences where those definitions played themselves out in our experience.  I don’t think there are exceptions to this.  Perhaps there are a few unicorns out there on this planet who somehow managed not to get the fear definitions and messages, but I’ve never met any of them.  I say this because fear likes to think that it is the only one that has experienced what it has experienced and it/we like to stay justified in our stories of fear.  We insist that we should be afraid and that it’s impossible not feel fear based on what we’ve experienced in this life.  We feel our trauma is too big or has been bigger than others, and that’s why we are more afraid.  I am not here to compare anyone’s trauma to another’s, but rather to state that we have all experienced what we might call trauma, and we all have to find our way through our limited stories of fear into freedom.  

If you want to hold onto your definitions, stories and the validation of your fear through your experiences of it, please do.  I am not here to tell you what to do or not do.  Everything serves us until it doesn’t.  I will say that what we tend to be most scared of is our freedom, not our fear.  Paradoxically if we were a little more afraid of our fear we’d have less of it, because we push away what we are afraid of.  Do you get that?  I’m not suggesting you do that, rather to simply see the irony in it.  When we perpetuate our perspectives of fear, others who know their freedom to choose fear or not, appear as a threat to us.  We become more comfortable with fear and with those who feel it.  Similar vibrations create resonance, even if it’s ultimately not what we really want to be feeling.  

We don’t feel safe because we choose fear.  We fear to let go of our fear, because freedom feels unsafe when we are afraid.  There is a way through it all.  If you notice you feel fear, don’t deny it or pretend it doesn’t exist.  Feel it and then ask yourself what it is made of.  How are you seeing in order to be feeling what you feel?  It begins and ends in your willingness and courage to look at the source of your fears.  See what they are made of and inquire. Be in conscious awareness of your choosing rather than in automatic reaction.  You are free to become as free as you desire.  The ball is in your hands. 

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

Emptying into Openness

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EMPTYING INTO OPENNESS 

Beyond open-mindedness

Most people like to think of themselves as being open-minded.  What is often meant by this is that we are available to perspectives, points of views and ways of thinking or behaving that are different than our own.  While we might not take on those ways of behaving or thinking, we don’t judge, shame or ridicule others for doing so.  While this is a valuable developmental stage in becoming less egocentric, it is rather rudimentary in the larger scheme of what it is to be open.  I could very simply state that to be open is not only the acceptance of all points of views, but beyond that the dissolution of all perspectives and points of view, most importantly your own.  That is another level of openness, where even your own perspectives don’t interfere with what is.  

For a moment feel what it is like to be empty of all things that you think you know.  All things that you’ve learned and experienced up to this point.  The easiest way to do this is to stop engaging with any thought that might be passing through your mind in this moment.  Just let it be rather than merging your awareness with and into it.  When you stop engaging with your thoughts, you are left with the clear space of being.  Some people call this emptiness, awareness or the open sky.  The thing about this is that there is nothing for the mind to grab onto and therefore nothing for it to identify itself with.  Some minds interpret this negatively and may feel fear at this level of non-engagement with stuff.  Fear of dissolving, of not mattering, of not having significance or worth, and of feeling like everything in the world will fall apart.  It is not so much that everything in the external world will fall apart or that your body will dissolve into thin air, rather its simply that your mind quits interpreting everything it perceives through the lenses you’ve learned and worn.  

While this may feel scary to some, my friends, this is freedom.  Yes freedom can feel scary to the mind that has ever only known imprisonment.  A mind that has been stuck inside of its’ perspectives and points of view that have given it a sense of the known.  Perspectives that you don’t even know that you’re trapped inside of.  The openness of being is stepping into the moment, which is unknown, and which unfolds itself inside of itself.  It cannot be pre-known or preplanned.  It can only be experienced presently.  While we are hungry for this level of unbridled novelty and aliveness, we are simultaneously terrified of what happens to the sense of stability, safety and security that we get from thinking that we know stuff.   

DEATH OF SELF-DELUSION 

Stable ground of self

When we are without our learned perspectives for even just a few moments, we get a taste freedom.  Yet letting go of what we know feels sometimes confusing and like a bunch of little micro-deaths.  That belief, thought or idea about life, that we had so much conviction in just a moment ago, now no longer gets front stage, as we relinquish our grasp on it.  What happens now to our sense of self, to our identity, to who we think we are and what we know?  You might wonder how can we function in this space of not knowing.  What I can say is that you are already functioning in this space of not knowing, it’s only that you’ve deluded yourself into believing that you know.  That deluded knowledge or knowing, while comforting, is also a prison of monotonous stagnation.  So it’s not so much about “how” will you function if you let go of all of your preconceived notions about everything, because you already are functioning in empirical uncertainty, but more about consciously choosing to not delude yourself anymore.  

The choice to not delude yourself anymore awakens you out of your self-imposed prison.  To not indulge in the stories or fantasies that your mind conjures up about what is, and not give any type of meaning to what is occurring or not occurring and rather simply experience it in its innocence, is the freedom that we all dream of.  The full permission for everything, including ourselves, to just be, in every single moment.  Anew.  Like a child seeing the world.  While we all think we want this, what we don’t realize is that we have to give up everything we think we know first.  That can seem like a high stake gamble to the one that is thoroughly invested in its’ identity, what it thinks it wants and needs, it’s stories, and all of the stuff that seems so tangible that it has created.  

Surrendering our thoughts can feel like death of our dreams, worth, purpose, significance and stable ground.  Yet thoughts are not as stable as we like to think they are.  One moment the thought “I am amazing” can arise and in the next moment “I suck” can arise.  We grapple.  Which is right, and which is wrong?  Am I this or am I that?  How stable does that feel to you?  Not stable at all, which is why, underneath it all, none of us feel like we have any stability.  We attempt to create stability through the ever changing sea of thoughts that run through our minds, rather than in just being.  In “I am”, rather than I am this or that, we find the stability we seek.  That stability is in an identity that is not fused with anything.  No thought, feeling or sensation about itself, but rather simply itself being.  

To live open we must untether ourselves from the false, from the points of views and perspectives that keep us seeing through dirty glasses.  Tempting the emptiness is like seducing the mystery to show herself to us.  It’s playful, exciting and light.  It’s like falling into the abyss and discovering the net that’s been there all along.  There is no real danger in the emptiness of freedom, only the imagined danger of what you think recognizing your open self might be.  Emptying into openness reveals only the innocence of pure being and the rested stable ground of yourself.

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

Soul Illumination

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SOUL ILLUMINATION 

Our multidimensional self

Whether we are aware of it or not we are all a soul.  You may wonder what it means to be a soul.  Being a soul is much different than being a person.  While the soul includes our personality, dreams, goals, thoughts, emotions and to do lists, it also includes much more.  It has added dimensions of energy and awareness that provide for expanded perspectives of experience and knowing.  In short the soul has access to more.  We are all hungry for this and yet sometimes it feels like an impossible trek to find our way to soul.  This is because being human gives us enough stuff to focus on to keep us busy for our lifetime.  It is easy to get caught up in all of the stuff and lose sight, or simply not focus on, anything beyond it.  Sensations, emotions and thoughts take up most of our bandwidth most of the time, and therefore there is not much energy or awareness left for soul.  

The good news is that soul exists, or is, regardless if we are paying attention to it or not.  The real question is, how conscious do you want to be of your soul?  Soul brings added dimensions and depths to your experience.  It is kind of like reading a book, but rather than just focusing on the content of the book, you see where the content came from, the past and future impact that the book had/has, and how the sentences say more than the concepts they share.  You feel, smell, and taste the words, all the while still seeing the physical nature of the book.  You notice the energetic qualities of the author of the book, and also from where they accessed the information as they wrote the words.  There is simply more to your experience because there is more of you there to experience it.  You can think of the difference between an infant’s experience of a book compared to that of an adult’s experience of the same book.  They will be two very different experiences because there are different aspects of self available from which to experience and know.  

There are no shortcuts into soul, even though many people try to find them.  There is a natural progression to the soul body coming more and more online.  We can however expose ourselves to environmental conditions that support the development of soul.  Just like a child would not learn to talk, read, write and develop its mental body in these ways unless it was exposed to environmental conditions that supported this, same for our soul.  What are the soul’s conditions for development?  Conditions include inner and outer fields that are more densely packed with light and greater coherence, clarity of mental content or clutter, and heart centered spaces.  Soul is more readily revealed when there are a collective of beings that resonate together in a similar frequency, hence the potency of things such as healing retreats or group healing.   

CLEARING THE WAY FOR SOUL 

Preparing the path

We can support soul’s development by clearing the way for it.  Just like if a child was learning to walk we would clear the path in front, so that the way was unimpeded.  We can also do this for our soul.  What interferes with the soul’s clear path and our conscious awareness of our soul?  Fixation on thoughts.  Thoughts are what we trip over as we progress on our path to soul.  When we are children our parents clear the way for us so that we can walk without running into furniture or falling over toys.  Even still we will sometimes fall and bump into things, because our parents aren’t always there every time we move.  Eventually we learn to navigate around the stuff.  As adults on the path to realizing our soul, there are people who can help us clear the path by emanating the frequency of heart/soul, so that we can tune our own antennas to it, even if only momentarily while we are in their presence.  Yet no one can go inside of our mind to remove the obstacles of our thoughts.  Rather it is us who must do this task. Here meditation becomes our most trusted ally on the path.  Without finding ways to navigate around our own thoughts, sustainably resting in our soul will be challenging.   

Obstacles are part of the path.  They help us learn by teaching us how to use our focus.  If we focus on the obstacle, we get lost in it and forget what the heck we were intending to do in the first place.  This is the state of the mind of most human beings.  We are lost in the obstacle, fixated on it, and have forgotten what we are doing.  This would be like the child falling and getting lost in playing with the toy that it tripped over, forgetting altogether that it was walking.  There is no problem in this.  The child will get the impulse to walk again once it is done being enamored with the toy.  Similarly we will get the impulse to seek our soul again, when we are done with the thought that we are currently entranced by.

We can learn to increase our capacity to transition from fixation on thought into the space of the soul by increasing our self-awareness.  You can’t shift your focus from your thoughts unless you know that you are focused on them.  Seems obvious and simple enough.  Yet we are often unaware that we are thinking, rather most of the time we are just thinking.  There is a big difference.  The difference is that if we are aware that we are thinking, we can consciously shift our focus off of the thought.  If we are just thinking there is no conscious awareness there and therefore nothing that is able to shift the focus.  We have to become conscious first, be aware that we are thinking, and not just thinking.  

Once you become aware, if you still are having trouble shifting your focus, then I find the easiest way to work with this is to simply let it be.  Let the thought just be.  Don’t try to do anything about it.  Just notice it.  Through this you will slowly start to release your grip on the thought and more space will arrive between your awareness and the thought.  As this space increases soul comes more into focus, because soul is the awareness that is aware.  This method works for sensations too.  If you find yourself fused with a sensation, unable to shift your focus off of it and its taking up the bandwidth of your awareness, just let it be, and eventually you will loosen your grip on it.  The quickest way to clear emotions that are taking up space is just to feel them.  

Soul is less mysterious than we think it is and yet it is full of magic, wonder and awe, particularly from our mind’s perspective and what we presently have access to in our current stage of development.  It is much closer on our developmental path than it is far away.  It is the next rung on the ladder.  Keeping clearing the obstacles and so soon enough you will be dancing with your soul.

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

Embracing Aloneness

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EMBRACING ALONENESS 

Alone & relational time

Most everyone likes a little alone time.  Time to reset, time to reflect, and time to just be.  We all seem to welcome a little bit of alone time.  What happens though when that alone time is longer than we want it to be?  We switch from welcoming aloneness into feeling lonely.  We begin to mark our worth, value and significance based on who wants to spend time with us and aloneness becomes our worst enemy.  We feel frustrated, resentful and jealous of others that seem to not be alone and wonder why we are.  If we aren’t desiring aloneness and we are alone, it can really activate our insecurities about who we are as a person in relation to others, and beyond that our purpose in this world.  

Alone time, and spending time with others, are both important.  The balance of that is different for each person.  Sometimes though it seems like we don’t really get to choose.  That’s where we go off keel.  We want alone time but feel like we can’t get it.  Or the flip of that, we want social-relational connection and it’s not available.  Our lack of feeling of choice in the matter leaves us feeling all sorts of unpleasant things.  There is so much tied up into aloneness.  Most people have strategies to somehow avoid feeling it.  They do this by planning many, many activities and keeping their lives as busy as possible with stuff, much of which they don’t even enjoy or like, so that they never have a chance to feel lonely.  Other people have strategies that keep other people at bay, which can be beneficial when we do indeed want alone time, however when we don’t want to be by ourselves this strategy reinforces our sense or story of aloneness.  

Regardless of the strategy used to navigate aloneness, at the core it boils down to our feeling of choice in the matter, and in desiring what’s present rather than focusing on what’s not.  Our mind’s obsession of focusing on lack doesn’t help us.  We have a fixation on noticing what isn’t present, rather than what is.  This focus keeps us feeling disempowered when really we have all the power.  If we shifted our focus onto what is, rather than what we think isn’t, we’d realize the power we have.  Whether we are with other people or not, our state of is-ness never changes.  Being with people can’t add or subtract to our beingness.  We can’t be more or less based on if another person is present with us, notices us or cares about us.  We can only think or feel that we can be.  Even our thought or feeling that our worth or significance can be impacted by another person’s presence or absence, doesn’t affect our state of beingness.  We still are the same being regardless of how or what we think of our self, or how other’s think or view us.  Nothing can affect our being and therefore nothing can affect our worth, value or significance, including another person’s presence or absence. 

ARE THERE EVEN OTHER PEOPLE? 

Oneness

It seems very convincing that there are other people.  After all you see, feel and think inside of your body and then it seems like other people are doing that inside of their bodies.  But what exactly are other people and at what level of consciousness does the consciousness of other people, and that of yours, merge into one?  Maybe that sounds a little sci-fi for you, or perhaps a little to woo.  Yet I believe that is where we are headed.  Isn’t that what all of this oneness stuff eludes too?  How can there many if there is just one?  Is many the illusion or is one the illusion?  All good questions for your contemplations.

What I can tell you from my direct experience is that as I become less different, distinct or distinguished in my sense of self the more telepathic I’ve become, meaning the less separate my thoughts are from other’s thoughts.  The more I make what seems to be other, the same as me, the more interconnected, or dare I even say, one we become.  We move and act in response to the same stimulus, that stimulus being love.  Essentially what this means is that the more we move into love and include everything in/as that love, the less distinctions exist.  The more you realize that you couldn’t be alone even if you tried because everything that exists, exists in/as one.  One may seem lonely, because after all it’s just one, yet it’s one that includes all. 

That may all be a bit to nondual for you and perhaps a bit conceptual, so I will bring it back to the relational level.  Coming into alignment with life, or said another way, choosing what is, shifts you from feeling powerless into feeling powerful.  When we feel powerful, and decide to choose aloneness when it presents itself inside of our experience rather than wanting it to be different, we embrace aloneness.  It ends the stories we have about aloneness and transforms the experience that we have of it.  The charge we had about being alone dissolves.  We see the opportunity and gift inside of both alone time and relational time. Yes this can really be your experience of aloneness.

When we embrace aloneness and transform our experience to it we get to find the stillness and silence of our own mind.  That silence is a great teacher.  Through it we discover what we be.  There is nothing more fundamental for the human being to discover than this.  Our being often gets lost or covered up in all of the engaging and interacting that we do.  Finding that which just is, that be’s, is the root or ground for all interacting and relating to occur in the first place.  Getting to know this being that we are, that never changes, never goes anywhere, that is the most stable, unwavering presence that is, brings a richness, aliveness and fullness to our experience of ourselves.  In the fullness of being, loneliness isn’t even a thought.  You realize that being is all there is whether you are by yourself or with others.  You cannot escape this beingness.  You can’t not be.  You can only come to know the being that you are, and through that knowing discover the fullness of yourself that always was, is and will ever be.

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

Heart Magic

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HEART MAGIC

Dying to the self

There is no doubt, the energy of the heart is magic.  Those who have tasted, felt or touched their heart know its power, its bliss and its vastness.  It is the most advanced intelligence, and I would even say technology or tool, that we have access to inside of this human experience.  When we find our heart we realize that everything that our mind or body has created or tries to create, pales in comparison to what and how the heart creates.  Resting into the heart reveals a way of being, seeing and relating that includes everything and everyone inside of it.  Nothing is left out and everything is loved.  With this knowingness everything is possible.

If the heart is so powerful how come more of us don’t access and use it?  Well my friends that is a good question.  Why don’t we?  The easiest answer I can give is because it means death of our ego.  This means death of thinking that our minds know best, death of what we think we want, death of our life lived for own pleasures and preferences.  Death, death, death.  My friends we don’t like death.  In fact as a society we pretend that death doesn’t exist.  If we do acknowledge its existence our perspective of it is grim, depressing and full of sadness.  Something that is so obvious and undeniably evident and yet we deny it, try to postpone it, hold on for dear life, that is until we simply can’t anymore.  If we learned to allow things to die, if we gave everything it’s rights back to it’s natural course, including our wants, desires, dreams, ideas, perspectives, and so on, we would more easily find our heart.  We would naturally find ourselves open to whatever is and in the field of infinite possibilities rather than finite completion.  We would instantly reconnect to the magic.

Why death you ask?  It is death of the individualistic, of the egocentric, of the self-centric focus, of which none of us escape.  We are born innocent, without a self and in connection with our essence.  Then we develop an ego in order to survive our world.  The more our personality and identity develops the more we forget our original self.  It is the natural course of human development.  Without our ego mind we would have a very hard time adapting to or being part of this world.  But the journey doesn’t stop there.  There is development of our being which is beyond the mind, it’s simply that we have to give the reigns over and let something else be in charge.  From the perspective of our human identity this feels like death.  To our soul however it feels like coming home.  It is a birth, yet to our mind’s ideas about what life is or should be, it feels like misery.  We can either involuntarily collapse into suffering and feel victimized by the happenings of life, or we can voluntarily die to our stories, ideas, hopes and dreams and open into a world of wonder beyond where our mind’s imaginations lie.   

WORLD OF WONDER 

Voluntary relinquishment

The voluntary choice to relinquish ourselves is what is called surrender.  People like to think that surrender is easy and they use the term casually, but to truly surrender means that you will likely feel the pain of death.  It means you are willingly opening into that pain which you’ve done your ultimate best to avoid acknowledging or feeling, and you are choosing to let die that which is ready to die.  

So you’ve gone through the death portal, now what?  Now you are open, available and you just are.  Your heart is free.  You are at peace.  You’ve let the resentments, angers, insistences, pushes and pulls all go.  You are simply available for exactly what is in front of you.  You are no longer wishing that something else was.  The longing for something different dies and you arrive into the present moment of what is here now.  You feel humble and available.  You don’t know any grand knowledge.  You’ve just let the things go.  They’re gone.  Now life can move through you unimpeded.  This is the beginning of the field of heart magic and the world of wonder and awe.  

The more times you go through the death portal, the more you rest into this field.  As you let things be as they are, more and more this field of wonder opens up to you.  You might not be overtly aware of it at first.  It may be more subtle and just beyond your ordinary resting awareness.  You might notice an increase in synchronicities or being more telepathic, such as knowing when someone is going to call you or manifesting the best parking spot.  You might feel less tense.  Your breath might be easier and you feel less agitated or anxious in a general sense.  Things seem to take a bit less effort and you feel less depleted.  As you rest more and more into the field of the heart its presence is more obvious to you, and you begin to see and know the interconnectedness and inseparability of everything.  More and more you see everything as one all pervasive, intelligent and sovereign love.   

The field of heart magic is a collective or unified field.  When you are rested in the heart, then other hearts will feel this and respond to it.  They might not even know why they respond, they just do because all are connected at this level of the field.  Even if people knowingly or unknowingly respond to it, they may still have doubts, insecurities, feel separate, and choose their mind’s ideas over this all loving love.  Again giving up on our picture of life does not come easy.  We typically need to experience some life disruption, pain or suffering to get us to even entertain surrender.  If our life is too easy or comfortable there is nothing to push us into the next stage of development.  We need some kind of catalyst.  All of the catalyst you experience, the disruption, the pain, the suffering, the confusion is all to get you to your edge, to where you will willingly surrender, so that you can find your way into the heart.  Next time you are experiencing some kind of distress, something that you don’t want to be feeling or experiencing, remember this is exactly what you need in order to help you open into the field of heart magic.  Rather than turning away, face forward and move into whatever is presenting itself to you.  Even if it doesn’t feel like it, it is a gift.  Given to you by you, to help you remember your very nature, your most essential self, and your complete heart.

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

Committing to Love

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COMMITTING TO LOVE 

Not as easy peasy

People who see themselves as being on a spiritual path, often have as one of their top values, to come from love in all things.  The desire to feel blissful, juicy, aliveness in every single moment, as the baseline for existing.  We strive to be connected, in flow, with our hearts open and unshakably rested as a presence of loving goodness.  Even though most of us feel a strong desire for this, and to share this love with the world, many of us are not really committed to it.  It sounds good in theory.  We might even start imagining the creation of our next program or offering to help the world somehow be more loving.  We get excited about the possibilities of how beautiful and peaceful life would be if everyone came from love.  If the whole wide world was one big heart centered yum fest where everyone was supporting, looking out and caring about everyone else.  Like a magical island where ecstatic rapture and divine bliss are the norm.  Oh yes we all want to live there, or I should say we all want to live there in theory.

The reality is that most of us don’t really want it.  Why do I say that you ask?  I say it because we are not choosing it.  For 99% of the people on this planet this is not a lived reality.  It’s just a concept.  A fantastical idea that feels good to think about.  Perhaps we choose that all embracing, allowing and present love for moments, like when we are at a retreat, program, festival or on some exotic vacation.  But when we come back to “reality” or whatever we mean by our more ordinary lives, we find ourselves stuck inside of our typical triggered responses to the movements of life.  Something upsets us and we get pissed.  Things don’t turn out how we had hoped and we see failure and doom.  Everything feels like hard work or an uphill battle.  We judge ourselves and others when things don’t live up to our expectations. We can’t stop thinking about stuff, tense up, plot for retaliation or desperately try to find way out of it all.  

I am not suggesting that it’s easy peasy to choose love.  The truth is, when life is not feeling like we are merrily floating down the stream of it, it is hard to choose love.  Love seems like the furthest option from our reach.  We are hooked into our story about what life is supposed to be rather than choosing to love it for what it is.  When things feel unjust, unfair, not right or unwelcome, or when we feel unappreciated, not seen or undervalued, choosing love is hard.  In choosing love our egos take a hit.  It seems we have to swallow something that tastes really, really bad.  How do we let go of that thing we keep saying we want to let go of, but which we keep holding onto for dear life?  We let go by letting go.  We feel the little micro ego death that comes with it.  The death of not getting what we want or what we feel like we deserve.  Then we experience the openness that remains when we relinquish.  That openness, which is the fertile field of bliss and rapture.   

NORMALIZING RAPTURE 

The doorway in

If more people were choosing love, then more of us would be experiencing ecstatic rapture as the norm rather than an unpleasant, drab, harsh world.  Magical rapture would be our ordinary reality.  It is however quite remarkable how much we don’t allow ourselves to feel good.  It’s like we all have this internal goodness meter, and we can only let it go so high before we start to find ways to make ourselves feel not quite as good.  A little bit of joy and happiness is acceptable throughout our day, but not too much.  A tad of pleasure and ecstasy is ok from time to time, but not too often and as long as no one else sees you experiencing it.  This is the inner reality most of us live.  Can you even remember when the last time was that you allowed yourself to feel uncontrollably ecstatic in front of others, outside of an alcohol or drug induced state?  Before you started to be self-conscious and began to value fitting in and caring about what others think of you.

What if we didn’t need to find ways to feel less good?  What if we didn’t get hooked anymore into our stories about what is or isn’t, in order to bring our state of being down?  What if we were more committed to being love than to receiving what we want or getting justice?  When we commit to love we bring ourselves into the reality of rapture, of direct commune with the divine, not as a concept or idea, but as our very being.  There is nothing outside of us required for this to become our experience.  It is an inner commitment, an inner choice, by you and for which only you can make.  Containers can be set to deepen the inner permission, but you are the permission giver.  

The permission to feel good, while simultaneously letting things go that we don’t really want to hang onto anyways, is the doorway to rapture.  Rapture simply because you want to choose it rather than what your mind tells you that you should choose.  Some people might think that this naive or stupid, and your mind will likely fight you some on this, insisting that you are letting things go that you shouldn’t.  Your habituated thoughts will attempt to find ways to get you to hold on, to fight, to seek righteousness, because your thoughts think they know how to get you what you want, but they always come up short.  What you want lies beyond them, in the world of the heart.  

While committing to love and living from the heart may feel like defeat to the mind, the result is that you get to experience that state of rapturous delight the moment you choose love.  You don’t have to wait until your thoughts agree, or until your physical reality says so.  You get to experience it the moment you decide to let go of your current commitment to discontent, frustration and misery.   While those states are familiar and addicting because we have normalized them as our reality, we can begin to normalize rapture now.  Rapture is our nature.  It’s what we are made of. Unification with our essence is rapturous union with the divine.  Committing to love in face of everything is the doorway in.

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Spiritual Guide, Boulder, Colorado

See As Your Higher Self Sees

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SEE AS YOUR HIGHER SELF SEES 

Working with discontent

Many of us relate to our presence and purpose for being here on this earth as bridging the gap between spiritual knowing and human experience.  But what does that really mean, and beyond meaning, what does it require of us?  We may be aware of our higher self, or of a self that sees and knows that all is well and perfect.  While the perspectives and knowings of this self are easy to tap into when we like what we see and feel inside of our human experience, our higher self’s perspectives and knowings just as easily go out the window the moment we experience discontent, powerlessness, irritation, sadness or anything else that we don’t like feeling.  The heaviness of heart that arises in the face of experiencing what we don’t want or prefer to, disconnects us from the view that our higher self sees.

Likely most are familiar with heaviness of heart.  For many it may actually be all they know.  Some people live in a perpetual state of discontent and it is so familiar that they don’t even realize they are living it.  Discontent has simply become their mode of operation.  This state of heaviness comes with the point of view that if only things, people and experiences could somehow be different, then everything would be better.  While this point of view may be valid, things might be better if they were different than they are, it doesn’t change the fact that things are as they are now.  Our hoping that things will be different keeps us from accepting things as they are.  The paradox of this all is that things often don’t shift or change until they are accepted in their current configuration.

If we want to bridge the gap between our spiritual knowings and human experiencing we must bring our spiritual knowings into this human experiencing.  That doesn’t mean teaching others about what the most enlightened perspective is from our point of view.  Rather it means seeing spirit inside of this human experience exactly as it is currently configured.  While you may have incarnated to do or create particular things, your intention for doing those things should simply be because it brings you joy to do them, not because you think they are going to fix this world or the people in it.  The people and the world don’t need fixing, they only need love.  If you really tune into your true desire for existing it is likely only to be and share love through your creations and not to fix anything.  Fixing brings a weight, pressure or burden with it, where creating just to express and share love, feels joyous and light.    

BEYOND UNDERSTANDING

Avoiding death and failure

One of the prime things that keeps us out of accepting what is now, is that we don’t understand why things are the way they are.  Especially if we have vision and can see all of the grand possibilities for what the human experience could be for ourselves or others, we get stuck in our own confusion about the way it is and needing to make sense of it all.  This needing to make sense of it or coming to terms with the state of whatever it is you are currently experiencing in your reality, postpones your acceptance of it.  Sometimes acceptance feels like death.  That death is the death of the dream or the vision that you are wishing was, rather than what is.  Sometimes acceptance feels like failure.   The failure of making happen what you think you were supposed to make happen, or things being what you hoped they would have been or are. 

We avoid feeling failure and death at all costs, hence the postponement of acceptance.  The thing is that all we are really avoiding are our ideas about what is or is supposed to be.  If we let go of our ideas about perfectionism, idealism, better than and the like, then we can actually experience those things inside of our current experience.  It is our ideas about what is or what is supposed to be, that keep us from bridging the gap of spiritual knowing and human experiencing.  These ideas or ideals keep us from seeing as our higher self sees.  

I am not suggesting that you lower your standards.  Quite the opposite.  You must continue to discern what feels aligned for you to participate with or not.  Beyond that I invite you to raise the standards for how much love you can be and see inside of what is.  Your reality responds to how you see it.  If there are aspects of your reality that persist in the ignorance of themselves and deny the love you see them as, then you may find it appropriate to not directly engage with those elements.  Not from a place of resistance, frustration or irritation, but rather from a moving towards or along the path where the love you see everything as is available to be received.  You don’t need to exhaust yourself in attempting to have love be received.  Rather allow it to simply be an invitation or offering that can be received or not, and move along your path appropriately.  There is no failure when you come from love, even if things don’t match up to how your ideas think they should be.  

Understand that you don’t need to understand why it all is the way it is.  Why things have occurred or do occur as they do.  Understanding is not required in order to love.  Love is how your higher self sees.  It sees and knows all as love.  Even if there are elements or aspects of creation that are ignorant to knowing themselves as love, still your higher self sees and knows it all to be love.  Next time you experience or see ignorance inside of this human experience, simply remind yourself that ignorance too is love, love that has forgotten itself.  Turn your heart towards love and move in the direction that is most aligned for you.  

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

Letting Your Soul Be Seen

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LETTING YOUR SOUL BE SEEN 

Finding your heart

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

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

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

UNWINDING THE TWISTS & TURNS 

Doing the inner work

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning to Love Life

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LEARNING TO LOVE LIFE 

Logic is not the answer

This life is not always a walk in the park.  In fact much of the time there is challenge, hard work and lots of arduous learning to be had.  Sure there are rhythms when things flow smoothly and all goes according to our desired plan, yet there are many rhythms when things don’t.  Rhythms where we feel lost, confused, bored, restless, stressed, and where we are ready to be off planet in some peaceful paradise where things work easily and we feel good all of the time.  Yet the fact remains that we are here on this planet, with this physical human body and there are things to be learned, shared and created right here where we are.  How do we make peace with being where we are even when we don’t like it?  How do we live in acceptance rather than resistance to our experience of challenge, work and learning?

When things are difficult many of us are good at logically rationalizing the situation.  For example say you are experiencing a tough rhythm.  Something you really want isn’t working out.  You feel confused and lost as to what is going on in your life.  You keep trying to think and find a logistical way out of the situation or something that will make it work out, but you are just spinning.  You can’t seem to find your way through.  You feel stuck, and little hopeless.  This is an incredibly common scenario.  You might logically know that somehow everything is going to be just fine, and while you logically know this you can’t quite seem to get yourself to really believe it because you are still spinning inside of it all.  Utilizing logic is not the solution at this stage of the game.

While logic is not the solution, this doesn’t stop us from trying to use it in order to get out of whatever it is we don’t want to experience in this life.  The reason why logic is not the answer is because from our mind’s perspective it is illogical to accept what we don’t like or understand, and ultimately acceptance is the solution to learning to love life as it is.  Your logic will likely not get you into acceptance of whatever is, but rather will keep you continuing to strategize how to not accept whatever is showing up in your life that you don’t want or understand.  Accepting what is also means that we have to feel what is.  This is again why we default to logic.  Most people prefer being tortured inside of the tornado of their thoughts rather than feel their emotions about what is.   

LOVING WHERE YOU ARE 

Accepting what is

Feeling our emotion about what is, bridges the gap between what we are logically trying to get ourselves to figure out and accepting what is.  When we feel emotion it clears out our resistances.  We stop trying to fight an uphill battle and therefore we can take a breath.  We may still not like, prefer or want what is, but we are no longer trying to deny, escape or get out of its existence.  We are rather just with what is, no longer fleeing from the dangers of feeling our emotions about it.  We’ve felt the thing, or more accurately we’ve felt our emotions about the thing.  We now experience some space, some ease and some peace.  We may not have clarity or know what we need to do, because perhaps there is nothing to do, or maybe there is, but either way we are more embracing of being in this moment rather than trying to get out of it and into the next one where we perceive we will feel more peace, joy or excitement.  

How does all of this lead to loving where you are?  When you are more accepting you are naturally more loving of everything.  You can still not like certain things, but your liking or not of what is, doesn’t touch you loving it.  Yes that’s right you can love what is, and simultaneously not like it.  You can respond with authenticity and grace, receiving what you don’t like and loving it exactly as it is.  But as long as you are in resistance to what is and not feeling your emotions about it, your mind can’t grok how this would be even possible.  Acceptance of what is opens the doorway in your mind so that you can comprehend this.  

Until we reach acceptance of what is no real change can occur in us or in how we perceive or feel about the situations of our life.  Instead we will just keep trying to fight or flee from it.  We won’t find love where we are if we are resisting what’s here.  You can’t escape your resistances.  You will take them with you into your next situation, and your next one, and the one after that, and on and on for eternity.  They don’t just go away because you insulate yourself from them through carefully crafting or controlling your environments.  Rather you only keep them at bay while they lurk in the depths waiting for their next opportunity to present themselves so that you can heal, resolve, and integrate them rather than move away from them.  

To not love where you are in this moment is to reject life and be in a state of unappreciation, and there is nothing more painful than that.  If your circumstances or situations change to your liking and then you decide to love life, your love is conditional.  The condition of your love being that your preferences are met.  This is not the stable, unshakeable, unconditional, divine love that we all seek to know.  To know this love is to become it.  How bold is to love life even when it’s not up to your liking?  How brave do you need to be in order to feel, accept and love life as it is and know that it will work out perfectly for you even if you don’t like it? This is what takes in order to learn to love life and to love where you are in this moment.  

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