creator

FROM CONSUMPTION TO CREATION

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FROM CONSUMPTION TO  CREATION

Life is not ours to get

As much at it might seem that we are here to consume life, we are actually here to create it.  Due to the fact that most people are disconnected from the awareness of themselves as a creator, there is a tendency to experience life as an effect, a destination or something to consume.  Our minds like to generate trajectories of getting.  Getting to the next location, the next exciting opportunity, the next moment when we can relax, the next meal, or getting any one of our million perceived needs and wants met or fulfilled.  Consumption, or getting, is so natural to us that we don’t even notice that is how we are operating.  We might think that we are completely without agenda, yet if we investigate ourselves a bit deeper we will find where and how we attempt to manipulate life in order to get or consume for ourselves.

Consuming life comes from an attempt to create safety and pleasure, through and in, your outer experience.  Most look to find ease, stability and comfort through sensation, feeling and getting what we want or need.  This comes in a multitude of forms from what you put in your mouth, what you purchase, the thoughts you think, the motivation behind your actions and the structure of your life.  We attempt to feel satisfaction and fulfillment by what we consume, as if somehow consumption will make us feel permanently good, even if we know it is only temporary.  We must keep getting our fix so that we can maintain feeling good, relaxed and safe.  This becomes a chase.  A chase to keep consuming life.

Recognizing yourself as a creator has nothing to do with creating stability in the picture of life and safely consuming it so that the illusion of all of your needs and wants is met.  Rather it is about moving with life and what you are inspired and excited to bring forth.  Not for your own individual pleasures and safety, but simply because it’s fun for you to create.  Creating for nothing more than the action of creating itself.  A response to an impulse or a call that moves you.  Not creating to consume it, but rather to give your creation to life as your offering, your sharing, and your contribution of the impulse of excitement and desire that runs through you. 

Many create in order to consume.  We build businesses, buy things, create a family, plan trips, develop community, etc. in order to consume it, rather than giving it as a gift to life.  When was the last time you looked at your life and all you’ve created so far and saw it through the lens of what you are giving to life.  Your home, your car, your belongings, your business, your children, your family, your partner, your community, and on and on, are not yours.  They are not things or stuff you have, but rather they are what you can offer to life.  How do you use what you’ve created to give it to life rather than relate to it as something that is yours? 

GIFTS OF CREATING 

Magic of giving

There is an energetic reward of sorts for creating or giving to life.  The more we give to life, rather than attempt to get from life, the more energy we feel.  You might even say that our vibration, or state of being, elevates.  This comes with a sense of levity, spontaneity, aliveness, and excitement.  Things seem to flow and move together even if we don’t know or see how it’s all related and connected.  Giving to life, or giving to the things in our life, brings us into greater energetic coherence.  Asking how or what can I give to this will instantly align you with how you can serve in any moment.  Rather than feeling lost, confused, frustrated or hopeless, you will feel the inspiration of the impulse of giving and sharing yourself.  

For some people this might all sound exhausting.  All this giving.  A part of you might say, what about me?  How am I going to be ok?  Another part might insist that it doesn’t have any extra time or energy to give or create more.  You might feel or find yourself wanting to conserve what little energy you have, so you limit or cap your creation and fall into consumption.  Believe it or not, it actually drains our energy and lowers our state of vibration to simply consume life.  A life of consumption is kind of like a bottomless pit that can never be filled.  It feels heavy, tired and doesn’t have much motivation or desire.  It keeps getting and taking yet never feels full.  It only experiences temporary fulfillment.  Motivation and desire comes from creating and therefore the only way to fill this pit is to give to life.  

There is a magic that happens in creating that you don’t experience until you shift from consuming life to creating it.  See creating is the same as loving.  To create is to love.  When you create or give to life you are instantly included in all of it.  When you follow the call or the inspiration to create, you are taken care of.  Somehow, someway life will always support you.  You likely will not know how it will happen, and you might fall into doubt from time to time, but with continued focus on creating simply to create you will come to see that this is the case.  

There is nothing to grab and hold onto in this life.  You are a creator not a getter.  You are not a passive recipient or an effect of life, you are the creator of it.  When we try to stabilize life, or stabilize our outer experience so that we can consume it, we stagnate and feel lifeless.  We feel lifeless because we aren’t utilizing our life giving potential.  We focus on what isn’t, what we don’t have that we want, and feel powerless to our circumstance.  When instead you see that everything inside of your current experience is something you can ‘give life/love to’ rather than something you ‘have or get’, you activate and utilize your creator power.  When you ask yourself in every situation, what can I give to this, you come to life.  You feel energized.  You elevate.  It doesn’t even matter what you do or the things you create.  It matters only that you come from being the creator, from giving, from loving.  

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

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

BE USED

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BE USED 

Merging your will with Source

There is a divine, perfect intelligence that orchestrates this entire universe. From the rotation of planets and galaxies, down to the minuet aspects of your daily life, all is precisely positioned.  It seems like we are making choices, and yet even the decisions we make, no matter how hard or easy they seem, are sourced from a source that knows.  Whether we are aware of that source or not doesn’t matter in relation to what occurs.  What occurs will occur, the decisions and choices we make will be equally informed.  The only difference is our experience of what occurs, not in the actual occurrence itself.

This is not to say that all is preplanned or predestined.  Rather it is to say that in each moment there is an intelligence that knows and it is constantly informing all that occurs.  When I say that it is only our experience of what occurs that differs, is to say that how we view, perceive and respond to the appearances of life is our free will.  Our free will isn’t necessarily in the deciding or choosing of what occurs (though it seems that way), but rather how we decide to participate with what shows up.  In this way it is not a “separate from” or “life happening to you” experience.  Instead you are moved by this intelligence that knows in a symbiotic way where you are one with the occurrences and the intelligence.  

In order to know life and experience it in this way, your will must be one with the will of the creator of this orchestrated dance.  That means that what you think should happen or passionately desire to happen in your personal life or in the larger collective, must be surrendered to what is happening.  This is really a very easy thing to do outside of the fact that we attach greatly to what we think should be, what we perceive to be better or best, and to what we want.  It’s not the thoughts or the desire for what we want to experience that create the obstacles for us, but rather our attachment to them happening.  When our attachment to them happening supersedes our capacity to be present with what is actually occurring we suffer.  Even our suffering is perfectly positioned, part of the cosmic orchestration, of the creator expressing itself in all its various flavors, with the intention of knowing itself and purifying its perspectives into it’s own original source.   

THE CREATOR’S WILL 

Magic & love for whatever is

It is first important to remember that nothing happens outside of the creator’s will.  When I use the terms: creator, source or intelligence, I mean them to all point towards the same “thing”.  Pointing to that which knows, that which is, that which is aware.  Nothing can happen outside of awareness, therefore nothing happens outside of the creator’s will.  This is why surrendering to what is, which is a giving away of all of your insistences, preferences and righteousness, aligns your will (your awareness) with that of the creator’s will.  You know you have arrived here when there is no longer any charge left in your body-mind about anything that is occurring.  This is the first state of being where you can actually be useful and be used.

To be useful or be used is to be of service to the creator’s will.  Many people have a negative relationship to being used because they feel disempowered or less than.  However the only aspect that “gets disempowered” when you surrender is your own personal agendas and perceptions of what should be.  Not until you surrender can you participate with more awareness, with this larger source or intelligence that guides all of creation and life.  Until you arrive in surrender there will be fight, push/pull, attempting to figure it out or conquering energies.  This is all a result of your own (and the collective’s) resistance with what is.  If we all dropped our righteousness instantly, no charge would remain and the experience of life on this planet, with this collective beings, would be harmonious.  

Some of you might think or say: what about all of the stuff that is wrong, could be better or needs to be fixed?  What I would say to that is that the creator knows all, sees all and creates all.  To surrender your personal opinions, ideas and judgments of what is best, to an all knowing source of infinite intelligence does not make you more stupid or less useful.  It does the very opposite.  It gives you access to wisdom and resourcefulness that would otherwise be unseen by you.  As we clear out our own vessels we are better able to listen and follow.  We can more readily take action where the creator’s will moves us to take action.  When you realize your life is not about you, but rather that there is a much bigger game being played, you willingly take your position as a pawn on the board and let yourself be played.  

The result is magic and love for whatever is.  You get to fully participate in the present with what is.  You stop living in ideas and story, and open yourself to the mystery of creation happening now and now and now.  There is never dullness.  There is still feeling, desire and passion.  There is lots of movement.  There is clarity in not knowing, but in being moved, guided and used by that which does know.  There is deep satisfaction and fulfillment because you know nothing else more perfect could ever be other than what is now, and you share that knowing with every energy and person you meet.  You are in love and connection, and that love and connection consciously brings the will of the creator through you, and happening for all.  This is the creator’s will. 

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

YOUR BODY IS NOT SEPARATE FROM YOU

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YOUR BODY IS NOT SEPARATE FROM YOU 

The catalyst of bodily symptoms

Most people don’t like it when their body behaves in ways that seem dysfunctional.  People’s relationship to novel or chronic sensations, pains, or symptoms that don’t make sense often throw them into a state of alarm, panic and distress.  The struggle to attempt to change the expression through figuring out and controlling one’s self or environment can become life consuming.  Often the journey can feel exhausting and like it isn’t achieving the desired outcome.  

If you see from the perspective that this entire life experience is about learning, then including the experiences that you have in relationship with your body is no different.  Oftentimes however rather  than viewing from the perspective that life is about learning we attempt to find some solidity or permanence inside of our experience, particularly when it comes to our physical body.  Since most people identity as their body rather than the presence that makes their body come alive many feel intimately threatened by certain bodily sensations or symptoms.  That threat can come in the form of not being able to do things we feel we want to do, loss of certain functions that seem vital to our existence and a general hopeless or powerless perspective towards the body and its expressions.  

First I want to offer the perspective that you are not your body.  Your body is an instrument of you.  It is what you utilize inside of this human experience, but it is not you.  The body also does not function independent of you.  Just like a piano does not play without the pianist, your body does not function without you playing it.  Without you your body does not make a sound, a beep, or a single move.  This is important to fully understand.  See when things go “awry’ in our body we tend to view the body as separate from us and while your body is not you it does nothing without you.  

When we view our body as acting independently from us we disown ourselves in the equation and thus any power we have.  This is why we feel powerless, helpless and try to figure it all out as if it is something other than us.  It is not that we are actually powerless or helpless to our body, but only that we have the perspective that we are somehow separate from our body.  When we see through and dissolve the story of separation we no longer perceive disconnection or otherness.  There is no other thing inside of your body running the show.  It is only you inside your body running the show.  How could there be something or someone else inside of your body?  That one that is you is the one that is playing this instrument of your body.   

EMPOWERED YOU = HAPPY BODY 

You are the Creator

All learning is to help us realize more of ourselves, and the more realized we are of what we are, the more empowered we experience ourselves to be.  To say this another way the more we know ourselves, the more aware we are, and the more resourceful we are in navigating with the forms of life because we see more clearly how we are the creator of them.  The body is one of those forms of life, one in which we are seemingly more intimately connected too.  

In times when we perceive greater separation there is often the feeling that life and our body are against us.  Maybe we see our body’s symptoms, pains and expressions as punishment for something, or as unfair, or as wrong.  However our body is not against us as that would be absolutely impossible.  That would be like saying the piano is against the pianist.  How could that even be so?  Who would be inside the piano to be against anything.  The piano is inherently neutral and so is your body.  What chooses for or against is you.  

What I am pointing to here is a high level of empowerment and knowing yourself.  Not everyone is ready to take full responsibility for knowing themselves and therefore will keep trying to fix and manipulate the form.  The form will change in response to those manipulations, however it may or may not change your experience.  This is why people don’t arrive where they hope to arrive.  They are waiting on the form to inform them.  They are allowing the form to decide for them rather than deciding for themselves.  

The way I see it is that the body’s expressions are catalyst, meaning ways to help us wake up and realize ourselves.  They are learning tools.  They are not meant as punishment, or to harm us, and they are not wrong or unfair.  They are pointers, pointing us to pay attention to ourselves.  To see, choose, act, respond, think, and feel differently then we currently do.  To expand our range of life and possibility and move beyond our current perceptions of limitation.  To ultimately turn our awareness towards ourselves rather than the stuff of life.  To come to know ourselves.  This is how I see all of life.  There is nothing in this entire universe that isn’t moving towards greater self-recognition.  That is the impulse that drives all movement, all energy and all direction.  It drives your entire life even if you don’t yet see it.  

No forms are permanent.  We all know this despite our great efforts to try to make them so.  You are on an epic learning journey with the only destination being greater awareness of self.  The one stable, non-changing element is you.  Not your mind, thoughts, emotions, sensations or ideas about who you are, but your very essence.  Come to know that.  Realize that is all any of this is about.  Find safety in yourself, not in the ever changing world of forms.  

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

GIVING YOUR LIFE OVER TO WHY YOU EXIST

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GIVING YOUR LIFE OVER TO WHY YOU EXIST 

Focused on the things of life

As human beings with faculties of mind and memory we create images, stories and ideas about our life. What it should look like, how it should feel, what should occur and not occur, and the like. We are nearly constantly investing our energy and attention into the things of life. This is so natural and second nature to us that we don’t question or entertain that any other way of being/doing would be possible. This investment of our resources (i.e. our energy and awareness) into the things of life creates a dynamic where our well-being is contingent upon those things. With this we become fused, merged and attached to the things of life, including our stories and ideas about them, and we lose touch with the essence of our nature and why we exist at all. This creates an inner experience of simply trying to get through life as if there is some destination to arrive at and we miss out on the experience of what it is to be living.

When our focus is on the things of life we create agendas and expect outcomes. No matter how agenda-less and detached from outcome you think you are, the truth is you probably aren’t. Most people still want things and perceive they need things and therefore subtly, or not so subtly, attempt to get those needs and wants met through their thoughts and actions. This is agenda. As long as you perceive lack, meaning you perceive that you don’t have something you need or want, you will attempt in whatever ways you can to get it. This is a survival strategy based in the perspective that something is missing right now and that somehow what is is not complete. This is the most pervasive perspective on planet Earth right now, however it’s pervasiveness does not make it accurate.

It is important to get that you are the creator of your experience.  What you think or believe to be true will generate the image that you see reality to be.  What you put your energy and awareness into will dominate your life.  This is not just a fancy new age concept.  This is how creation works.  Perception is creation.  What you perceive, meaning how you see, will dictate what you see.  Giving your life (ie. your energy and attention) over to things, images, ideas and stories about life generates a very physical experience of life where you believe that you are the physicality.  You suffer when the image doesn’t reflect what you desire because you think you are the image and don’t recognize that you are the creator of the image.  You feel powerless to the image that you have created because you don’t realize you created it.  In this way we are victims to our own selves, yet don’t see ourselves and therefore don’t realize how we victimize ourselves to ourselves.  If that confusing its because it is confusing.  We have confused ourselves to be things (which we are not) and therefore experience limitation, frustration, powerless and lack.   

THE ILLUSION OF SACRIFICE 

A soul-driven life

So if we don’t give our life over to our ideas, then what do we give it over too? If we stop focusing on getting the money, relationships, family, house, car, health, our next business idea, our next save the world idea, social status, validation, approval, and the like then what else is there? See all that is the stuff of life and none of it is why you exist. Sure you will use certain of those expressions to carry out the why of why you exist, but none of the things of life are why you exist. This is incredibly important to understand. Without this awareness you will live disconnected from why you are, from why your soul took on a body in the first place. I can guarantee you that it did not do so just to smell the flowers and get absorbed in the stuff of living on planet earth. There is a mission, a calling, a purpose for your being here in a body, and from what I have discovered it is the only worthwhile focal point for this incarnative experience. All else is just distractions.

To the you that you think you are, living in such a singularly focused way where your sole purpose is the only determiner for all of the stuff that you do through this body, will feel like a sacrifice. The one you think you are (i.e. your name, personality, profession and all the ways you identify yourself) will feel let down, discouraged, at times aimless, confused and destabilized by this shift in focus. Again no matter how agenda-less you think you are, you probably aren’t. Are you willing to let everything, and I mean everything go, and shift to your sole purpose or calling being the only determiner for you? I can promise you that if you are willing you will never feel purposeless again. You will never wonder if you are doing what you came here to do, you will stop experiencing self-doubt, and you won’t regret your life when you are on your death bed. However I can also promise you that your life may not look like or feel like you want it too. Your life will no longer be “your” own, meaning your body-mind-personality ideas of what your life is. The paradox however is that it will also be the first time your life is in alignment because you will be in full connection with yourself.

From the perspective of the person this will be a colossal and complete sacrifice in complete uncertainty.  From the perspective of the soul it will be a coming home.  The one constant is free will.  You get to decide how you participate with all of this.  If you decide to make the transition from a person-centered life to soul-centered life a tremendous amount of faith will be required of you.  Your person will not know.  It will perpetually feel like it doesn’t know.  This is just part of the territory.  This is an act of faith that you will take several times a day.  You can’t get the soul to fit inside of the personality and therefore the personality will not understand.  It has to surrender itself.  There is no other way.  

Giving your life over to why you exist instead of the stuff of life liberates and aligns you with you. It frees you to actually be of service to life in every single moment. To give to life rather than get from life. There is not a single moment where your purpose, your calling, cannot be executed. Until you arrive here and become agenda-less you cannot be of true service because there will always be some underlying sneaky agenda running the show. You being you, knowing you, sharing you is the service. You generate this world of your purpose by aligning yourself with it over and over and over again. You come to see the illusion of sacrifice is just that, an illusion, because there is nothing else worth living for. You detach from being the stuff and rest into your calling, into your soul, and experience inner stability despite the ever changing appearances of life.

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

SOUL’S JOURNEY

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SOUL’S JOURNEY

Outside the box

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

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

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

BECOMING ENSPIRITED 

Return of life

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

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

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

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

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

LEFT OUT OF THE GLORY OF GOD

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LEFT OUT OF THE GLORY OF GOD

Denying your Divinity

The primary drive of our soul is to remember and reunite with ourselves.  Most have completely forgotten their truest essence and only think or know conceptually what spirit is.  We have built up layers of beliefs (aka defenses) that perpetuate the experience of disconnection and separation from our goodness and the glory of God.  What do I mean by glory of God?  Simply the purest, most distilled, refined and inherently perfect and good true nature of ourselves.  We are God, we are the Creator, we are the perfection of all that is expressed through this human form, and yet we deny, push away or resist this thus resisting ourselves and creating a lived reality of suffering, pain and disconnection.

The spiritual journey is the remembering, reclaiming and reuniting with that which we already are and have always been.    You have never ever been anything but God expressed through a myriad of various forms, whose form is currently this human body.  The beliefs that keep you in resistance and denial to fully knowing this operate ever so subtlety underneath your conscious awareness.  This is why it is important to never stop seeking to know yourself.  To commit full heartedly to the journey over and over and over again, as without your devoted commitment you postpone the remembering of yourself.

Why do we resist what we are?  Why do we resist that we are good, pure and perfect?  Simply because we don’t believe it.  That’s it.  Its really that simple.  We don’t believe it.  Why don’t we believe it?  We don’t believe it because people, who also don’t know themselves, who don’t know their inherently perfect divine self, have conditioned our thinking mind-matrix to be in alignment with theirs.  We’ve agreed, consciously or not, to abide by others rules and stories so that we fit in with them, so that our needs and wants are taken care of and so that we aren’t left out.  In choosing to not feel left out on a societal and relational level we have given away our own true knowing of ourselves.  Anything that feels like it might threaten our basic human needs or wants for resources, love or connection takes precedence over divine connection.  To accept or believe that we are good, perfect, divine and complete throws a wrench into our entire internal system and threatens everything we think we know and everything we think we need. 

BEING THE CREATOR

Self-Empowered

We hear so much these days that we are the creator, but is this something that we just say in spiritual circles to feel cool or do we really, really get it.  Do we really get just how powerful we are or do we still think that our lives are happening to us kind of randomly?  Many people think they are more self-empowered than they actually are.  By in large people are living disempowered even if they are doing and saying all of the right things and in all the right spiritual communities.  Only if you are fully rested in your perfect wholeness and without personal bias are you truly self-empowered.  

We tend to view a self-empowered person as one who is manifesting everything they want and living in alignment with their personal dreams.  What this tends to look like is having an aligned job, standing up for all the right causes, having a healthy body, having seamless relational dynamics, and having all of your desires (physical and nonphysical) met. Many, many strive for this, and while it is a step on the developmental ladder, it is not full self-empowerment.  Full self-empowered living is not about having the perfect spiritual appearance of life, its about knowing that you are complete perfection no matter what.  

Being fully self-empowered paradoxically has very little to do with you at the personality-physical expression level at all, even though this is what we tend to associate it with.  To be truly self-empowered is to recognize that your personal preferences, desires and life, while relatively important for this moment in space-time, have very little ultimate importance.  This may sting a little at first thought as you might want to hold onto your personal agendas, significance and righteousness.  Feelings of confusion, aimlessness or directionlessness that are along the lines of “well if I’m not that, or this thing I care about isn’t important, than what/who am I” may also arise.  This is not the ultimate goal however as we let go of the limited perspective of self with limited power, which is often all we’ve ever known up to this point, we enter a mysterious emptiness that is frequently uncomfortable and disturbing to the personality mind that likes to always be in the know. 

Many are suffering because they are placing too much attention and giving too much significance to their small selves.  In my opinion this is actually an epidemic in personal growth and spiritual communities.   Yes we want practices and skills to dismantle the beliefs that keep us separate and keep us out of our true glory as God, yet frequently we don’t realize that this means that ultimately we have to let go of this idea that we have of a separate, disconnected and worthless self all together.  Its funny that we often don’t realize this end goal if you will to personal growth work.  That we must divorce or break up with our thoughts/beliefs that insist on our lack of complete perfection and goodness.  To not do so and to continue to insist on your worthlessness, is actually a selfishly arrogant act that sucks the energy and life out everything around it and postpones your joy and happiness.  To deny, push away, or resist that which you are, is energy depleting for you and all around you.  The fastest way to self-empowerment and self-knowing is to stop insisting that you suck.  

We are not a separate entity/person no matter how much appearances seem that way.  There is no such thing.  We could not be disconnected from God if we tried.  We are one, we are God, no division, no separation.  To be self-empowered means to love self and know self as Love.  There is no higher commitment than to be fully devoted to that knowing.  

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

Dreaming Awake

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Dreaming Awake 

Sleep & wakefulness

EyeWe are all familiar with dreamtime.  Some of us may remember our dreams more than others, but we all dream.  Many people put dreams in the category of “not real”, meaning they have no definitive reality because they lack tangibility, linearity and consistency.  Yet most of the time when we are fully immersed in the dream experience we have no idea that we are dreaming.  We simply experience the dream and then at a certain time the dream ends or we wake up.  Most of the time while we are in the dream state things seem quite normal and ordinary to us kind as they would in our waking state.  Once we wake up only then do we realize that we were dreaming and not a moment before.  

One caveat to this is when we lucidly dream, which is when we literally wake up inside the dream and are able to manipulate the dream with our wakefulness or our conscious state of being in a dream rather than being the dream or the dream simply occurring as if by itself on automatic pilot.  You are both experiencing the dream and simultaneously realize that you are the dreamer dreaming the dream.  For those that have had this experience you know that this is where magic literally comes to life inside of the dream.  Seeming impossibilities become possible and the direct manifestation of those possibilities is experienced through the dream the moment you realize it.  You quite literally know your power and have access to energy and information that was previously elusive to you.  You feel so awake, empowered, energized and in direct knowing of the mystery of life, and your knowing becomes what you immediately experience.  There is no gap.

One of the things about the sleep dream state is that we get more access to our unconscious minds because our everyday conscious minds are resting.  Sleep is quite literally the resting of our conscious minds.  Our unconscious mind on the other hand is that aspect of mind that in our waking state is often obscured, but becomes unobscured when we fall asleep.  The unconscious mind is like a warehouse of dormant energy and information about ourselves, life, the universe and the cosmos at large.  This is what we access when we fall asleep.  When you fully wake up inside of a dream (ie. lucid dreaming) your conscious mind becomes active and your normally unconscious mind is also simultaneously present and available.  This is why I personally believe that the gap between knowing and direct experience/manifestation is eliminated in these instances.  That which is normally forgotten when we are awake in just our conscious thinking mind is intact along with our conscious thinking mind.  This is a recipe for infinite knowing and direct experiencing.   

Dream of Reality 

Thoughts like dreams

RipMany spiritual teachings talk about how what we view as reality is really just a dream.  That when we wake up from our sleeping dream we are simply awakening into another aspect of the dream that seems more real or permanent due to our conscious thinking mind creating a sense of continuity through its patterns of thought and memory.  Yet this experience that we call reality seems to be missing a lot of information and energy and many of us sense this through a subtle (or not so subtle) feeling of disconnection from something.  Most people can’t even really put their finger on what is missing, they just feel this sense of being lost or in the dark along with the feeling that there is something more.  

If we are indeed dreaming right this very moment, asleep to the unconscious part of our mind which contains all knowledge and infinite free energy, can we not wake up into the aspect of our mind that is asleep when our conscious minds are awake?  I do believe that this is what spiritual teachers are pointing to when they talk about awakening.  This is the dropping of the veil, where worlds become one again or better stated where mind becomes one again.  The conscious mind reconnecting into the infinite sea of unconsciousness, sparking it and making it come alive in the light of awareness, bringing to life infinite possibilities and manifestations out of this sea.

It is important to know that separation is simply a thought.  It is not a “real” thing.  In fact there are no real separate things.  There is only thought.  Thoughts are what tell you what you see, they are the information source for what you experience.  Conscious minds generate thought and thought creates worlds.  So if you recognize that there is not really a gap between the conscious and unconscious aspects of your mind, there is only a thought of separation or thought of a gap, then you can directly experience the non-separation that inherently is.  All that is required is that you drop the thought of separation.  

When you suspend focusing on the thoughts and forms that the conscious mind creates, even if only for a one second, you immediately drop your conscious mind into the vast spaciousness of the non-separate unconscious mind.  Some people call this pure awareness.  The configurations that patterns of thought (aka light) create and condense down into forms that we call reality are what give shape to pure awareness or the unconscious mind.  These thought/light configurations can create the illusion of separation and thus the feeling experience of it.  If you are identified with the forms, which are just configurations of light, and are asleep to that which is the former of the forms (ie. the dreamer), life will seem automatic, like it is just going along on its own and that you don’t have much to say or do about how it goes.  That is until you wake up.  Remember that only when you wake up from the sleeping dream do you realize that you’ve been dreaming all along.  Being inside of a thought (what we call reality) is like being inside of dream.  When you suspend or stop the thought even momentarily you create an opportunity to wake up from being inside of it where it is no longer dictating your experience.  All that remains is pure awareness not yet condensed into a form through a thought.  Increasing the brightness of your conscious awareness on the former of thoughts, the creator of all worlds, which is this pure awareness, will wake you from the dream of thoughts altogether.

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

Grounding into Love

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Grounding into Love 

Finding presence

37167614 - green leaves in heart shapeGrounding is a term that is used by many people in spiritual growth communities.  Often the idea is to feel one’s feet or to have the sense of more fully being in one’s body.  Due to the fact that most people spend a great deal of time in their heads being absorbed in their thoughts this idea of grounding is useful as a strategy to be more present or embodied.  

All of this begs the question as to what exactly is it that we are grounding into when we ground?  Most people will tend to create the sensation/felt experience of grounding into the earth or into their physical body.  They may go sit by a tree, lay on the grass or go for a hike to support the creation of this experience for themselves.  This time-out of sorts can help us decrease our focus on our thoughts and bring us more in touch with our sensorially body experience.  This frequently creates a temporary sense of ease, calmness and steadiness that we associate as being grounded.  When we give ourselves the space and environment to permission ourselves to unwind from our thoughts we naturally become more present.  Presence is what people are ultimately striving to achieve through this practice of grounding themselves.  Most all of us hunger to feel alive in the moment and not bogged down by thoughts about the past or the future.  To be presence is to be responsive, attuned and in the magical, effortless flow of life.  Thought or the process of thinking is the primary distractor of presence.  

Although presence is the true goal of grounding, sometimes people confuse grounding as the need to become more physical. Grounding truly has nothing to do with becoming more physical, or becoming “more your body”, or even having your awareness be located only inside your body.  To attempt to become more physical is to merge yourself further with the appearance of your body.  This may lead to a different sensorial-feeling experience, but does not necessarily lead to greater presence.  

You are the awareness having an experience of grounding rather than being the one that becomes more grounded.  Said another way, you are the one that knows grounded-ness or presence rather than the one that becomes grounded or present.  Grounding at its best is used for this purpose of turning your focus back onto yourself or onto awareness having the experience of having a body rather than focusing on trying to feel more of your body from the perspective of being inside of the body.    

Creator & Creation

Resting into Awareness

Illustration of spiral arrangement in nature. Fibonacci patternAwareness is all pervasive and non-local, meaning it is everywhere and inside of every“thing”.  For that all pervasive, non-local awareness to be aware of all aspects of creation, inclusive of your body, would be the definition of a fully conscious or enlightened creation, meaning a creation that knew itself as not independent or separate from the creator (which is awareness).  To be rested in and eventually as the creator is the ultimate ground, what some call the ground of being.

This brings us back to that initial question of what is it that we are grounding into when we ground ourselves?  Clearly it is not our body or the earth or really any thing whatsoever as that would be grounding into a changing, unstable appearance which would not feel very restful once that thing decides to change.  If we are attempting to ground into an appearance (our body, a tree, the earth) we will never feel or know true stability and we will find ourselves continually needing to “ground” because our ground keeps changing.  I would call this the illusion of grounding rather than true grounding.  Understand that many attempt to do grounding in this way.

What we are actually grounding into when we truly ground is our own very nature as awareness/creator rather than some aspect of creation.  Sometimes when the word creator is used we think of a person.  Our minds create this idea of a separate person that is creating, but the ultimate creator is not an individual person.  It is just intelligent, infinite awareness.  Intelligent, infinite awareness creates all of creation, which includes universes, dimensions, densities, suns, galaxies and every single being and form.  Some people call this intelligent, infinite awareness by the name God, Source or Love.   

As we ground by turning our focus towards awareness rather than into or on appearances all appearances simultaneously get illuminated as awareness.  The duality between form and formless, creator and creation dissolves.  One is not more or less important then the other because there is just one.  You can not get any more intimate then creator and creation as they are the same.  The creator expressing and making itself visible as creation.  You’ve always been looking right at the creator, right at infinite intelligence and yet you have only seen your labels and definitions of forms. 

For many this awareness of awareness or awareness of infinite intelligence is veiled and thus appearances are what seem to be the only true reality.  Whenever this is the case we will always think that we have to ground more into the physical aspects of reality in order to be more present and impactful.  The recognition that the physical and nonphysical are one in the same and that formlessness (the creator) comes alive through form (creation) is to be in direct realization of what makes all come alive.  It is here that we find ourselves rested in and as the ground of love.  It is here that we are most present to ourselves and can have the most impact, symbiosis and harmony with all forms of creation.  

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

Living Surrendered

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Living Surrendered 

Distinction of acceptance & surrender

34683163 - beautiful young woman jumping on a giant flowerMany people talk about their “need to surrender” as if its another thing on their to do list to get done that they keep procrastinating.  There’s an idea that surrender is this thing that you do once, or maybe a few times, in regards to a particular situation you find yourself within.  Most think that if they could just surrender or let go then their torment will end.  Within this mode of their thinking there is an inherent sense of powerlessness.  “If I could just let go” implies feeling choice-less and thus disempowered.  What many people are pointing to when they say that they need to surrender is really that they want to feel empowered and realize their choice in their situation rather than feeling like a victim of it or like its just happening to them. 

This above described situation is really a call for acceptance rather than surrender.  These terms mean different things though many people use them interchangeably.  Acceptance is accepting what is present.  This means accepting rather than fighting or resisting a situation that is currently present.  Acceptance is accepting what is known, what occurred, or what is here.  If we find ourselves in situations that we don’t fully like, that seem like something we don’t want, or that feel overwhelming or jarring to us, we typically don’t want to accept the situation as it is.  The reason for this not wanting to accept what is, is because underneath all the competent facades and masks that people wear, they feel largely disempowered and incapable of being able to work with what is present.  Due to this underlying feeling of disempowerment there develops an unwillingness to want to accept what is and instead we go into trying to manage or control the situation, or we feel collapsed and helpless about it.  This is how the traditional fight, flight or freeze protective/fear responses show up in our lives and keep us defensive rather than empowered.  

Learning acceptance of what is, is fundamental to feeling empowered and recognizing your choice in whatever situations you find yourself within.  Acceptance, will in a way, force you into experiencing your power.  It opens the door into your capacity to see your choices.  With this we often find ourselves stepping into situations needing to show up differently rather than expecting the situation to change.  This can be uncomfortable, which again is another reason we don’t want to accept what is, but ultimately it is what helps us realize our power and shift our underlying baseline feelings of disempowerment and victimhood.  

True surrendered-ness 

Working as intelligent energy

glittery lightSurrender has become such a popular term yet so few are actually experiencing what it is to live surrendered.  Surrender is not just this thing you do when you are at your whits end, feeling helpless and you don’t know what else to do.  In fact in my experience you must feel pretty empowered and know your worth in order to begin to truly taste surrender.  Surrender is an entire way of being and living.  As acceptance is an end of resistance to the known, surrender is an end of resistance to the unknown.  As acceptance is often a doorway into self-empowerment, surrender is a doorway into self-realization.  Self-empowerment is owning your personal value and worth, where self-realization is knowing yourself beyond the person.  Both self-empowerment and self-realization are important in terms of knowing your ultimate self and being able to live that here in this physical-relational world.  

Surrender requires that we use something beyond thought to navigate life. Rather than think-doing, which is how most people operate, surrendered living requires that we open into emptiness of thought, or empty the known.  Not being in resistance to the known is quite helpful for this and is why acceptance is often a preliminary skill set to living surrendered.  When we empty the known, yet simultaneously have unwavering confidence in the unknown (some people call this faith), then rather than thought moving you, soul moves you.  You could also substitute the words love, light, or god for soul.  It is an essence that is beyond what you as the identified thinker/person know.  In a way that thinker/person gets dis-abled, or unable to be used in its traditional mechanism, and something beyond what you’ve identified as you takes the reigns.  It moves your body-mind, it knows.  It knows exactly what to do without it going through your thoughts to figure it out first.  Your mind is still present its just not running the show in any way whatsoever.  

Living surrendered is to be overtaken by soul, by that intelligent energy-awareness that knows, which is really just you from a wider perspective.  Not everyone truly wants this now, nor is it relevant for everyone at this time.  Yet it is part of the developmental progression of beingness and at some point along the path its relevance will find everyone.  It is ultimately inescapable.  When its relevance does find you and you begin to taste surrender its like living magic.  The need for your mind to figure it all out decreases dramatically.  You realize the limitations of the mind and that you are not it.  You feel less and less separate.  There are no more boxes.  Being with another is like being with yourself.  Your body-mind is just moved.  The more and more your soul consumes you the more you realize that you are it and that you’ve never been this mind-personality-body ever.  You re-identify as soul, light, love, god.  

Things still happen, movement occurs, it is incredibly active and simultaneously still.  The perfect orchestration is revealed moment by moment as there is nothing that has to be other that what is.  There is full relinquishment of any personal agendas or will as you see yourself and know yourself, as soul, as Creator, as the One.  You are submerged in the mystery; willingly, gracefully and lovingly, dancing and moving to its rhythms.  

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