freedom

GOING WITH LIFE

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GOING WITH LIFE 

Separation to liberation

We spend an awful lot of energy keeping ourselves separate from life, understandably so.  We are given a name, develop characteristics, preferences, likes, dislikes, roles, habits and patterns of thinking and behaving that create an identity of who we come to know ourselves as.  An identity that seems like a separate person who is distinct from other persons.  We have functional control over this physical body, we sense through it, and we assume that we are located inside of it.  We believe the information that our senses give us and what our thoughts tell us as fact.  We don’t recognize that we are what is aware of the sensations or thoughts, and not the sensations or thoughts themselves.  Said another way we become our experience rather than recognizing we are what is aware of our experience.  All of this reinforces our sense of separateness from awareness rather than one with it.  We feel powerless to something that seems other than us and find ourselves kind of at odds with life.  

When we feel at odds it’s like we are always working against something and there is a sense of hardness that comes with it.  It’s the feeling that there is you and then there is this other thing, object, or person, which you have to work with to do something to.  Like this other thing, object, or person is separate and you have to maintain that separateness.  If you decided to make a bold move one day and didn’t maintain that separateness, all of life would flow and you would recognize that you can pay attention to content (i.e. sensations & thoughts) or you can pay attention to the fact that you are aware while all the content comes and goes.  What is important here is that you would get that you aren’t what you experience, but rather you are what is aware of the experience.  You would feel freedom instantly rather than the bound-ness of maintaining separation, but this freedom of rejoining yourself feels chaotic, destabilizing and unknown to your current sense of being a separate person with the identity that you have created as yourself.

To go with life rather than feeling at odds, or like you have to go to work on it by attempting to do something to it, is to stop fighting anything.  It’s to end the thought that anything needs to be different.  It is the cessation of the idea that there is somewhere else to get to where you will feel amazing and where all of your prayers are answered.  There is no location that exists other than where you are.  The freedom you seek is contained inside this moment and every moment.  You will not ever arrive somewhere other because there is no other and there is no out there.  At some point we must stop running from thing to thing to thing hoping to find relief and answers.  There is nothing out there. 

ENDING NEEDS 

Arriving in the present

Part of maintaining separation is the illusion of needs.  When we believe ourselves to be a separate person we feel as though we have a lot of needs and that we somehow we have to work to get them met.  However as we merge back into ourselves, into non-separation, we realize that all needs are met because everything is gotten.  Meaning life has its own back.  It’s completely taken care of.  It’s fulfilled and all set.  When we are in contact with ourselves we know this, and when we are disconnected we don’t know it.  To be free of needing anything is to be truly free.  You lose all agenda that might have subtle underpinnings in your subconscious.  You can just be because there isn’t anything pulling you out of yourself to go and get or figure out.  Everything is also known even though paradoxically your mind knows nothing.

There are a few fundamental points to emphasize here in arriving where you are and the cessation of needs.  One is a foundational acceptance that absolutely nothing needs to change or be different than it is.  Along the same lines it would suffice to say that all is well just as it is.  Creating this as the container for your mind allows your mind to relax its incessant attempts to hook into thoughts in order to do or figure out something that it perceives to be other than itself.  There might still be thoughts, but you simply notice them rather than become them.  The next piece is giving yourself permission to not have to know and be in the space of the unknown, which is another term for the present moment.  When we arrive here to the present moment nothing is known and everything is revealed.  Our minds tend not to easily surrender themselves because the job of our mind is to maintain “known-ness”, identity and separation.  To give away what we think we know renders our mind useless and minds like to be used.  From the perspective of our mind “unknown” equals the experience of confusion.  This is one of our least favorite states of being, however learning to be good with confusion without attempting to get rid of it by making something certain again, is the gateway into now and to going with life.

To go with life is to know your freedom and experience it.  It’s to no longer be at odds with anything.  It’s to no longer perceive separation.  It’s to no longer control the happenings of life.  It’s to no longer insist that anything, including yourself, be any certain way other than what it is.  The experience of this is rested while awake.  The experience of this is peace.  It is not an outside job, it’s an inner one.  It’s not far fetched or out of reach, it’s all already here.  There is no distance to traverse, no progress that needs to be made, and there’s nothing more that you need to get or figure out first.  Available in this moment is liberation.  It requires nothing to be different than it is right now.  You don’t need to be more worthy than you already are.  You don’t need to love yourself more first.  Stop trying to get somewhere so that you can arrive and be where you are already.  You will not recognize wholeness and perfection somewhere out there at a future date if you don’t recognize it now.  Liberation is available, “achievable” and is the natural state.  It requires nothing to be done in order to “get” it.  The only sacrifice, if you want to call it that, is giving away your current state of everything you think you know.  What we think we know is actually confusion and what we perceive to be unknown and therefore confusing is truth and freedom.  

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

PERMISSION TO BE FREE

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PERMISSION TO BE FREE 

Acceptance of the rhythm

Our nature is free.  We are bound by nothing except our stories that we must be bound.  There is nothing limiting us except our beliefs that say we are.  We are infinite energy and awareness with a focalization in this bodily form, yet we live as if we are the form and feel imposed upon by its configurations and sensations.  The body is not a prison cell for awareness, but rather a tool for it.  We only feel like we are in a prison cell when we are identified as the body rather than seeing it as something we are using to express through.  You are not trapped, stuck or un-free in any way, other than the ways in which you believe yourself to be.

Even though we are by our very nature freedom itself we live in boxes, containers and mental constructs that say we are not free.  We then don’t feel the freedom that we are, but feel rather that life is a series of events that occur within limited capacity.  We then wait for life to bring us experiences that stretch us beyond our made up constraints so that we can taste ourselves again and reconnect to the freedom that we are.  For some people that taste of freedom is a relief and a remembering.  There is gratitude and inspiration.  For others there is confusion, uncomfortableness and destabilization as their sense of confinement is shaken.  While on some level they might think they want to remember and taste their freedom, it is ultimately too destabilizing to their sense of self.  Their identity of who they think they are is threatened and rather than enjoying their taste of freedom they learn to fear it.  

It is important to recognize that as much as you might say or feel that you want to be free or experience more of yourself, it may be more than you are ready for right now.  Attempting to force ourselves to be ready, rather than honoring the rhythm that’s present, is often a waste of our energy.  There are ways to prepare ourselves to be ready such as investigating our limiting beliefs, seeing where we externalize our power and taking actions to clean up our life so that it is in greater and greater alignment.  While preparing ourselves for freedom is important, so is honoring and fully accepting where we are at.  If you don’t yet fully live knowing you are free its ok.  You don’t have to race to the finish line.  Be where you are.  Accept where you are first.  Know that it is through this process of accepting where you are at in each stage of the journey that ends up being the resource you need to deepen in your knowing of self, of freedom.  Acceptance is the ultimate permission slip that guides you even when you think you haven’t yet arrived.   

LIVING FREE 

What does it look like?

When you live knowing that you’re free, your best friend is the mystery.  You no longer brace, protect, avoid or fear the unknown, but rather you invite it in as the new container for which you reside.  The container of the unknown has no edges or limitations.  It is an open box of possibility and potential.  It doesn’t make assumptions based on its past, nor does it try to control its future.  Freedom realizes that life is fresh and is happening now in this moment.  Living free doesn’t imply that you don’t work towards things you want to create into the manifest world, it simply means you create from alignment and joy.  Alignment and joy are your guiding principles.  If you aren’t coming from alignment and joy then you are required to shift things up in order to come from yourself again.

Living free also doesn’t mean that you stop having feelings, or that sensations in your body change or go away.  You can be free as fuck and still have pain in your body.  You can live free and still feel heartache.  Freedom doesn’t mean that you are robot, it just means that you aren’t bound by the sensations or feelings that you experience.  Your choices come from your alignment, not from attempting to control, avoid or get rid of certain sensations or feelings in your body-mind. When you decide based on what is true for your alignment and guidance, and not on what you think you should do, have to do, or is the right thing to do, this is living free.  Free to follow your inspiration, guidance and excitement.  

The experience is one of less attachment.  Logically the less attached you are to things, people and outcomes, the more freedom you experience.  Understand that attachment and love are different things.  You can love the shit out of things, people and outcomes, but the moment you attempt to control any of them is the moment that you bind yourself again.  There is immense freedom in loving.  Loving doesn’t bind you, your attachment to the object of your love does.  True loving actually comes from freedom.  If you don’t know your freedom, than you don’t know another’s freedom.  Not knowing your freedom with create dynamics of attachment as you attempt to get stability, freedom and knowledge of yourself out there somewhere rather than in you.  

Living free is living loving.  It is the most bold and courageous way to live from the perspective of humanness.  It requires immense faith and trust in the mystery, in the not knowing.  It exposes you as you are open with life rather than living trying to protect yourself from it.  There is nothing to avoid.  Everything is you.  Trust your guidance even when it seems you made a wrong choice.  Realize the impossibility of wrongness and learn through your choices rather than judge yourself for your choices.  End your doubt in yourself, in the universe and in God.  Only you can do this.  Discover that you are already free if you so desire too.

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

THERE IS NO OTHER

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THERE IS NO OTHER 

Unity is the one truth

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

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

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

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

BECOMING COHERENT

The end of otherness

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

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

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

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

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

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

END OF CONTROL

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END OF CONTROL 

Finding freedom through acceptance

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

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

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

NON-SELECTIVE ACCEPTANCE 

Freeing all experience

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

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

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

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

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

FEAR

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FEAR 

Perception of powerlessness

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

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

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

FEAR’S REMEDY

Knowing your inherent freeness 

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

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

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

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

Being Forgiveness

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BEING FORGIVENESS 

Resistance, wrongness & righteousness

What is forgiveness? What would it be like to live and be forgiveness?  In a nutshell forgiveness is the dissolution of charge.  It is resolution.  It is the allowing of what is to be as it is.  It’s the opening of one’s self, or one’s system, to that which it had previously withdrawn or removed itself from.  It is the end of insistence on your rightness and the washing away of your biases.  It is the return to non-separation.  It is instantaneous peace, freedom and bliss.

Forgiveness is the gateway into everything that we desire.  Forgiveness of self, other and all.  Ultimately to forgive, no matter what it seems like we are forgiving, is to come out of an erroneous perspective that we’ve been holding onto and into the truth.  That is why we always feel clearer and better after we forgive, because we are seeing from a perspective that is in greater alignment with the truth of what is.  The truth always feels better to us.  

Why do we not instantly move from suffering, charge or being stuck in a perspective into forgiveness?  Really we could at any moment choose this instantaneous transformation yet most of us don’t because we are too busy continuing our fight (internal or external) with what is.  Resistance is a tricky thing and hard for most of us to see in ourselves.  Sometimes we can feel the effects of our inner resistance as tension or pain in the body, but often we don’t make the connection that the stress, tension or pain we feel is part of our own inner resistance to something that is.  We attempt to address these effects that we feel in our body (i.e. tension or pain), but without going to the core and looking at what it is that we are in resistance to in the first place.  This is an endless chase that resolves nothing and provides only temporary relief.  

We also hate feeling wrong so we will fight to the end to prove, justify, and validate why something or someone else’s behavior, action or perspective is wrong and we are right.  When we go to the depths of wrongness it often brings a sense of inner shame and the pushing away of ourselves from ourselves.  It is the experience of self-resistance rather than self-love.  The proving or justifying that we do in order to not feel shame or self-rejection may be expressed subtly inside our own thoughts and mind and or it may be expressed more externally through the pushing away of certain people or things in our life.  The more righteous and insistent we are on our viewpoint the more we will suffer and the longer we delay the peace and freedom we desire.  The insistence of the rightness of our perspective and the wrongness of another’s is the prime reason why we don’t forgive. 

KNOW THYSELF 

Free will to forgive

When we live in a state of resistance or non-forgiveness we are withdrawing our love from certain aspects of creation.  There is no greater pain than to withdraw our love and put up energetic walls between self and other.  This is to live disconnected and experience separation, suffering, helplessness and powerlessness.  The only way to experience and know your power and live in connection is to be willing to put down your guards, dissolve your illusionary walls of self-protection and be rested open in a state of forgiveness of all.  True power comes from the heart and from not needing to push away any part of your experience.  When you can fully receive all of your experience you have won your internal battle and have mastered yourself.  This is what it is to be forgiveness.  

It is important to remember that you can choose this at any moment and in any experience.  Your free will to forgive can never be compromised by anyone other than yourself.  To choose and live moment to moment forgiveness opens up a portal of sorts in your beingness to infinite energy and intelligence.  You become agenda-less and therefore have access to the infinite wisdom and love that you are.  Your very essence serves you and all of creation.  

Some people may feel scared to put down their walls and drop their guards.  They may not yet know the power of love or be rested in the support that comes with it.  They may fear getting hurt, feeling pain, or being vulnerable or susceptible to attack- whether that attack is from others or self.  This is an indication of trying to control or manage life (rather than be present with and open to it) by attempting to push away or prevent certain feelings, sensations or experiences.  This is part of the inner resistance I was mentioning above and it can be tricky to see in ourselves because it is so engrained in the way that we operate.  In fact we often confuse our walls, guards and protection mechanisms as ourselves, as who we think we are, when really they are simply the aspects that interfere with or cloud our ability to truly see and know ourselves.  

Dismantling the resistance that we have built inside of our own selves opens us into love, which is our essence and true nature.  When we don’t yet know love we feel disconnected from our power because love is the ultimate power and the ultimate protector.  Inherent in love is everything we could ever want or need.  Love illuminates, invites, includes and is fiercely coherent in its capacity to organize everything into it.  Love leaves nothing out.  

Forgiveness is our be-line into ourselves.  It is the fastest way, the accelerated path, to knowing ourselves.  Know Thyself is one of, if not the prime tenet of all wisdom traditions.  Forgiveness is its key.  Use it if you so desire to move as quickly as possible into the light or your own consciousness.  God is none other than the clearest, most perfected perspective of yourself.  Clear the canvas of your mind and come to know yourself in what remains.  

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

Impermanence

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Impermanence 

Pleasure & pain principle

Four season treeMost people assume that things will always be the way that they are.  In fact this assumption is one of the the prime causes of suffering and disconnection.  Whether life feels painful or pleasurable we tend to default into thinking that it will always be this way even though from a more rational or practical perspective we know that it won’t be as everything is always changing.  Yet we are often in denial or oblivious to the fact of the ever changing nature of life.  

Why do we deny the blatantly obvious changing nature of life?  It almost always comes down to not wanting to feel loss of something.  Change means that things will come and go.  Some things we don’t want to let go of because they feel so good to us.  This could be a relationship, a family structure, the state of our body or health, the place we live, some possession we own, a job/career, etc.  We desire it and thus grasp onto it at all cost.  We feel pain at the thought of losing something we love or cherish in our experience.  This is a natural part of the human experience and yet the root of our suffering.  It is also the motivation for our attempts to control or manage all aspects of our life.  This is not only exhausting to us on a mental-emotional level, it also affects the health and functioning of our body.

The other side of perpetuating the illusion of permanence is when we don’t like our experience or what we tend to call pain.  For example we may be in a relationship we don’t want, have a sensation in our body that we don’t like, or dislike our job/career and yet we feel hopeless and like there is no way out or through.  We feel like it is just going to always be this way permanently and we find ourselves trapped in the illusion of solidity and fixation rather than realizing the ever changing nature of life that includes each and every expression and form. 

The uncertainty of things coming and going leaves us feeling like we are tethered to nothing at all and this experience of freedom is too much for most minds.  Minds like to know what comes next and will do their best to create certainty even if that certainty comes in the form of something we don’t want or prefer such as an uncomfortable body sensation, a job that we are over or a relationship that has ran its course.  The thing is that we don’t live in a certain, stable or known world.  In fact we live in the exact opposite.  Our resistance to uncertainty, instability and the mysterious nature of life keeps us trapped in a prison that lives only inside of our own minds.  This prison is home for most and what they believe reality to be.   

Embracing the Comings  & Goings

A gateway to gratitude 

Wave Hollow Inside OutIf asked, most people would say they prefer freedom and joy rather than constraint and suffering, and yet most people choose constraint and suffering without even realizing that it is their choice.  The way that we choose joy and freedom is through fully accepting and inviting in the ever changing nature of life.  By embracing the comings and goings we find ourselves in a perpetual state of gratitude and awe for life rather than attempting to manage and control it.  

Take for example the novelty of a new relationship, job, house or any other exciting thing.  In this beginning stage we often find ourselves elated and what many would name as “in love”.  We are in love because we are not taking anything for granted nor making anything too solid or permanent.  We don’t yet have assumptions about what will occur, as we don’t really know yet.  We have lots of excitement, but not too much attachment because there hasn’t been much of ourselves invested yet.  We feel hopefully for possibilities and yet remain in an open state of being in regards to how it all looks and feels.  There is much to be revealed, determined and experienced as we live it.  Most people love being in this novelty phase of unfixed excitement, yet it doesn’t take long for the mind to come in and attempt to make things more solid.  Particularly as we develop routines with these new aspects of our lives and they become more “integrated”, ordinary, solid or real.  

As soon as things become increasingly and increasingly more fixed we simultaneously “lose” that feeling of love.  This is not a coincidence.  What we really “lose” is novelty and the unattached state of gratitude that comes with it.  We create solid where there is not really solid and then when our sense of solid either become too solid (where we feel suffocated) or becomes less solid (when we we aren’t wanting it to change) we suffer.  

The less moveable and flexible we are with the comings and goings of life the more we will experience suffering.  Again these comings and goings include everything: your body and its sensations and the expressions of ease or dis‘ease’, your relationships with yourself and others, the state of your physical comforts or discomforts, financial resources, business failures or successes, the range of your emotional body, etc.  All of these things are always going to be in a state of constant flux.  Though there are times when your experience will be that some of aspects of your life are seemingly more stable, this too is just an illusion.  Its simply that the relevance/teachings that you are learning from those experiences takes longer or serves you and/or the rest of the creation more so they hang around for a longer duration of time until their relevance is complete.

Everything constructs and deconstructs, stabilizes and destabilizes, binds and becomes free again.  This is simply the nature of this universe that we live in.  Learning to ride this wave through embracing the comings and goings will keep you in a perpetual state of gratitude, awe and love, which is truly what we desire more than the constant appearance of any aspect of our reality being fixed or staying the same.  

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

Giving Everything Back to Source

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Giving Everything Back to Source 

Tendency to hold on

Studio shot of worried and upset caucasian woman holding hands in pray near chin, squeezing it tight and begging for something, smiling nervously and standing with closed eyes over gray backgroundAs human beings we tend to hold onto everything.  This perpetual holding on gives us a sense of security and like we can somehow manipulate our external reality if we just hold on a little bit tighter.  Holding on is our attempt to control the spontaneous, unpredictability of life so that we are not caught too far off our guard where we perceive that things might get or go “bad”.  This holding onto life keeps our life looking a particular way and provides us with the illusionary experience of consistency and sameness.  While a part of us feels better when this illusionary experience of life appears to be intact, another part of us feels stifled and like it can’t breathe inside of delusion we are perpetuating.  

We not only hold onto material things like homes, jobs, relationships and such, we also hold onto thoughts.  In fact we are almost never entirely without a thought.  For many people to open into the spacious, emptiness beyond thought is terrifying.  I believe that most have never done it for much longer than a second or two, if even that, which means that we are always holding onto something.  Why the terror to let go you may ask?  Perhaps we fear that this world that we live in now, with all the things that we know, will disappear.  Perhaps the tastes we’ve had of freedom have felt “too free” and we prefer some constraint and limitation over our freedom.  Maybe we’ve created the story that we don’t know how to let go, or maybe we don’t even know that we are holding life in the grips of our own mind.  

Regardless of our reasoning or our lack of awareness into ourselves as to our patterns of holding the result of holding is the same.  Holding on always creates some level of tension in our body-mind.  That tension then becomes the filter with which we interpret and experience everything and with which we come to believe what is.  Tension patterns also create disconnection from source or from the larger organizing principle of creation.  This is the inherent function of tension patterns, to be self-protective of this individuated body-mind organism that we call ourselves, and yet simultaneous with this comes reinforcement of the illusion of perceiving yourself as separate from the rest of creation.   

Reconnecting with Source 

Its easier than your mind thinks

Happy girl jumpingRe-establishing connection to source is always easier than our mind thinks that it is.  It is the job of our mind to make things way more complicated than they are in actuality.  People’s minds like to talk about how they have to do this or that, change this or that, or how they just have to surrender and let go already.  Yet for most this simply stays in their mind as another thought or idea that takes up space inside of the infinite spaciousness of ourselves.  I find if people are talking about their need to surrender and let go they are quite far from actually doing it.  Why does letting go or surrendering stay in the mind rather than become our direct experience?   It is because ultimately we don’t really want to let go of what we say we want to let go of.  We prefer our uncomfortable (or unnoticeable for some that have less awareness of themselves) tension patterns and delusional stories of reality over ease and truth because more than anything else we fear what we might lose.  

So fear of loss runs the show of our lives until we boldly and courageously decide to no longer let it.  Not until we are willing to lose everything can we truly experience surrender.  Few people arrive here without exhausting every other possible route first.  We quite literally exhaust ourselves into the truth.  Our beliefs in scarcity, lack, and wrongness, that we won’t have enough, be enough, achieve the right things, things won’t last or turn out, that we’ve failed, will be alone,  etc… triumphs.  

How do we walk this path towards surrender step by step?  I have found that to give everything back to source is the quickest route.  This means making the commitment to first tune into yourself and develop awareness of your patterns of tension and disconnection.  As tension patterns arise at the body level immediately release them.  Don’t try to figure them out or process them at length, simply just drop the tension.  Rather than continue to hold on to it, let it go, just like that.  You will notice instantly more ease and breath in your body.  You will also begin to realize just how powerful you are and how you are the creator of your own tension patterns.  Second is the willingness to let go of your thoughts as they arise.  This will take consistent practice for most.  If you get fixated on a thought recognize the fixation and then let the thought go.  This is important particularly for thoughts that really grab you and bring you into a less resourced and often fearful state.  

As you do this more and more you will be developing your skill set in giving back to source rather than taking from or holding on as if nothing else will ever come your way.  Whenever we give back we are instantaneously rewarded with more energy and aliveness.  What we hold onto we maintain.  At best our energy state stays neutral which means life looks the same and feels mundane most of the time.  However what we give back to life, to source, frees us up and thus we become available to exponentially greater and greater states of energy.  This also means that we almost never know what will happen.  We are in the moment of ever present aliveness, trust, and knowingness in the perfection of it all.  This is what at our heart of hearts we all desire and seek no matter how much our minds want to interfere.  

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

Your life is not your own

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Your life is not your own

Existence beyond being a body

Basic RGBTruly your life has never been your own.  What the heck does that mean?  If your life isn’t yours than whose is it?  That is a great beginning question to ask yourself.  We make a lot of assumptions about who/what we are with very little investigation as to if those assumptions are true.  One of the primary assumptions that pretty much most everyone makes is that they are a separate person.  It is hard to fathom otherwise.  If you aren’t the you that you’ve thought that you are then who are you exactly?  What would it even be like to know yourself other than the you that you think you are?

Let’s start at the beginning.  Not just the beginning of your memory or of this physical body, but of who/what you were before your were born.  Did you exist or does your existence only begin once you have a body, and even beyond that when you are aware that you have a body?  When you where a baby, prior to your physical memory or knowingness that you had a body or existed, did you not yet exist?  Simply because we don’t have a physical memory of our existence or an awareness that we exist does not mean that we do not exist.  Nothing proves this more than when we are infants, not yet knowing that we have a body or that we exist, and yet we clearly un-doubtingly exist.  

Existence has nothing to do with whether or not we have a body or know we have a body.  That being the case we must entertain that our life as we know our life to be may very well be made up of a bunch of untrue assumptions that we’ve simply learned that we are rather than the truth of who we are.  If this idea that you are not your body is true, and you exist without a body and even without the awareness that you exist, that poses a whole world of new questions to ask yourself about what is and what you are. 

Asking these questions opens up the doors to a new knowingness of yourself, but you must earnestly seek to find.  For without the hunger to discover more, more will not be discovered.  That impulse inside of you must be sparked alive in order to provide the energy needed to guide your path and attract the ever expanding awareness of who and what you are to you.   

The Grand Orchestrator 

Coming to know your true self

Bright Flower of Life With Stars On WhiteI like to use the analogy of the body, meaning this body that you have which currently houses your being, as one cell in a much larger body.  Just like this human body is made up of trillions of cells that are specialized to perform certain functions, there is a larger body which all humans, and really everything in creation, make up together.  As humans we often are not aware that this larger body, of which we are inseparably a part of, exists.  Yet simply because we are not aware of it doesn’t mean that it does not exist.  It just means that we haven’t become aware of it yet.  

For simplicity sake recognize that every human, animal, plant and mineral form on this earth is really just one body (not multiple bodies) and that every individuated expression, meaning each and every form of this one body, has its own specialized function depending on its blueprint.  At the level of the human body cell we call this blueprint DNA.  DNA is that encoded information which tells an individual cell in the body how to function.  Going to the next level up, which is the mind (i.e. what most of us identify as who we are) organizes the entire human organism so that there is harmonization of all of the cells and systems of the body working together rather than individual cells just doing their own thing.   In this way you can think of the mind as blueprint/DNA for the entire human body as a unit.  Then at the next level beyond that, that of the larger one body of which all is a part of, the blueprint is the soul.  The soul writes the instructions for all of creation.  You can think of the soul as the DNA for the collective creation body.  Even the soul, which knows oneness and inseparability, has something that informs it, which is the grand orchestrator.  You can call this source, God, Love or whatever name fits your fancy.  It is the ultimate intelligence from which all of creation or all of the universe is born and that which informs and organizes all of it.  

This brings us back to the beginning and this notion that your life is not your own.  Your life is 100% completely divinely orchestrated.  Not because your body or mind is in charge, but because something beyond what you may currently know is in charge.  When life appears to not be going your way or things occur that you don’t like, it is because you are seeing from a very limited perspective.  Its the perspective of being a separate human being, which you have never been.  That which is viewing the circumstances is the separate body-mind which is not yet aware of its larger body self.

So what is your choice here?  The choice is to surrender to that which appears to be mysterious to our mind and learn to develop faith.  Faith is how you will come to know yourself beyond the mind.  Faith is the bridge from mind to soul.  Faith allows you to recognize your self beyond this person you’ve come to know yourself to be.  Faith is the end of all resistances, all insistences, all wrongness, all judgment.  Faith is the end of experiencing separateness.  Faith is the end of suffering.  Faith brings you home into the remembrance and recognition of the larger truth that you are.  When you get this you experience total freedom and not the powerless that the mind thinks it will experience because it comes to the end of thinking its charge.  Instead you become fully empowered in the truth of you.

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

Free will

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Free will 

Reclamation of our true nature

Broken chainsWe all are and thus have free will.  Free will is that which underlies all things yet is often mysterious or elusive to us.  Many people’s free will is wrapped up in conditioning, so much so that free will can be unrecognizable to us as our free will, but instead is a bunch of assumptions that we simply believe in without investigation that seem to dictate our lives.  Because we simply believe without investigation of truth we can feel powerless or victim rather than as the free agents that we are.  The un-investigated belief decides for us rather than us recognizing that we are the one that decides whether the belief is true or not.  This is what is called “being asleep” or being unconscious to what we are.  

The reason why so many people are on a path to “waking up” is because they want to feel and be free, which is our true nature.  Its inherent in us to move towards more light, more awareness, more truth, more of us.  It is a natural impulse that is built into the entire universe including you.  In order to find your freedom, your free will, you must become more awake or conscious.  This occurs through a process of slowing down, investigating your beliefs and over time reclaiming and waking up to more and more of your free nature.  The term free will can be used synonymously with the term awareness.  To be aware is to be free.  

So where do you start?  I’ve found that having the hunger to be 100% responsible and 100% in charge of my own self is key.  Developing and committing to that desire no matter what.  If you don’t have the commitment to take 100% responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, actions, emotions and sensations then you will always find yourself victim to something.  This is not easy in a world where we have been brought up believing that life and circumstances are happening to us, rather than that we are the one creating them.  This is one of the most important beliefs to investigate.  When our lives don’t look like or feel like we want them to we often go to blaming circumstances or conditions rather than seeing how we have been creating unconsciously.  Your beliefs will create the reality you perceive whether you are conscious or unconscious as to what you believe.   

Living in awareness of choice

Touching our true essence vs. knowing it as us 

freedomUndoubtably we have all had experiences of touching or tasting our true essence.  It may have been through a peak experience, or during a meditation, or through taking a psychedelic, after a really restful nap, during entrainment or an SRI session, or by coming into direct contact with someone who has more awareness than us, etc.  All of these are vehicles, ways or portals into which we can get a taste of our more true essence and free will.  

A common tendency is to believe that it is the thing or person that gives us this experience of ourselves when really they are simply doorways or permission slips to what is always already there.  That which is always, already there must be pointed to less we go into idolizing the portal rather than what the portal opens up into, which is our true nature.  This can be frequently missed because again we have this inherent underlying belief that life is happening to us rather than we are the creators of our lives.  Said another way is that an experience of divinity is happening to us rather than we are the divine that is expressing.  

Its important to investigate your relationship with the above.  See where you still relate as life happening to you, experiences happening to you, God happening to you, rather than you as creator/God happening to life.  The bridge between touching your true essence and knowing your true essence as you starts through conscious, deliberate and intentional choosing.  

Most of the time we are simply waiting for things to happen to us or for us rather than being deliberate and intentionally setting our internal environment to the conditions we desire.  At first it can feel like work to create your internal environment to be conducive to your desires, and sometimes you have to start even more fundamental than that and explore what it is you truly do desire.  Again many of us are living desires that we’ve learned, that are not inherent to our personal, individualized theme and purpose, so we must weed out what is truly important to us from what is not truly important.  Once we decipher our true desires than we must align fully with it.  Set our internal space to it.  Ask ourselves questions that align us with it, over and over and over again.  Anywhere we catch ourselves being aimless we must become deliberate realizing that we truly are in charge of our experience 100%.  This empowers us and frees us.  Through this process we reclaim and realize our free will and free agency as creators of this creation we call life.  

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