ground of being

Embodiment

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EMBODIMENT 

Finding the ground

Embodiment.  Seems like in some way we are all on a quest for greater embodiment.  To be present, in this moment, participating in the full experience of life.  In spiritual circles embodiment is a popular topic and is often referred to as being “in” our body, feeling the sensations, and moving our bodies with the inner rhythms of our being.   It seems that the aim of the embodiment movement is the shift from living in our head/thoughts into a more visceral, connected or integrated experience of existing.  Along with embodiment comes the idea of being grounded, which we often associate with a down or into our physical body direction.  

For many people there is an experience of overwhelming activity in their day to day, which can feel scattering, lead to being hyper-mentally focused, and or an experience of being “up”.  This up or scatter is what people attempt to bring down through embodiment practices.  These practices are incredibly beneficial, particularly if we feel disconnected from our physicalness or from our feeling body, but they are not the full picture of embodiment.  While they can greatly support us feeling more alive and engaged if we are stuck in our heads, the overarching goal of existing is not to be more “in” our physical body.  Rather the goal, so to speak, is to be or express more completely in and through all our bodies, of which the physical body is but one expression of who we are.  

The most pertinent questions here now are how do we be grounded, energized and expressing through all of our bodies?  And how do we become aware of the life and intelligence in all aspects of ourselves?  Our physical, emotional, mental and soul bodies are all vital expressions of our beingness.  True embodiment is being present in all directions and levels of ourselves.  Being grounded up, down, in and out.  If we are too physically focused our spiritual bodies might not be energized.  If we are too spiritually focused our physical, mental or emotional bodies might not be energized.  There can be any combination of these occurring.  You might wonder how you would ground up and out, since this is not the typical direction that people associate with the ground.  As a reframe, think of ground as everywhere and more as a state of being rather than as a dense form.  Throughout the entire universe there is ground.  Ground is not just down into the earth, but it is water, it is sky, it is the infinite cosmic expanse.  Ground is also not just physical, but it is subtle and etheric.  In fact the most coherent and stable ground is pure light itself; ever present, always here and the source of all life. 

GROUND OF BEING 

All bodies

If ground is everywhere, then you can experience ground in your physical body, ground in your emotions, ground in your thoughts and ground in your soul.  You might wonder what it looks like to be grounded in all of your bodies.  Being grounded in your physical body means your sensory-motor skills are intact and things are running smoothly with all of your physical body parts.  You are also not overly tense and breath moves freely through your body.  Being grounded in your emotional body means you know what you are feeling and you can feel your emotions when they are present.  You don’t try to think your emotions and you are not numb to them either.  Rather emotions are present, you feel them and the energy of them moves.  Being grounded in your mental body means that you have clear, coherent and organized thoughts.  You can pay attention to detail, follow things through and also see the larger perspective of how things fit together and impact each other.  Being grounded in your soul body means you know your multifaceted, multidimensional nature.  You feel connected to your heart and the hearts of others through yours.  You know knowledge without needing to learn it in book or from someone else.  You regularly feel ecstatic states of bliss and rapture.

Each of our bodies do have different directionality, frequency and relative size or distance.  Physical body density is slower.  You can see the size of this body with your physical eyes and the directionality is down/in.  The emotional body is less dense, but still has substance or thickness to it even in its non-physicalness.  Emotions can feel heavy or light and the direction can be up or down.  The mental body is less physical as we don’t directly see thoughts with our eyes like we do our physical body.  The frequency of thoughts is higher than emotions or the physical body, and the direction tends to be up.  The soul body is the most subtle of our bodies.  It has the fastest frequency, and is the largest and most expansive of all of our bodies.  Its direction is up and out, and eventually all pervasive as you reach full fusion or unity.  I share all of this because as you learn to ground in each of your bodies, knowing how they move and where to find them is useful.  If you are constantly drawing your energy and awareness down and in, then it may be more challenging to find coherent thought or expansive states of unified bliss and rapture.  Opposite of that if you are always up and out, your physical body or emotional body may be a bit more elusive to you.  

Embodiment includes of all you, in all directions and all rhythms.  Sometimes you may need to find up, at other times down, sometimes in and at other times out, until eventually you are rested in the allness of everythingness that has no direction and no distinction of bodies because it is just one unified whole.  This is the ground of all being.  The source from which all life sprouts forth from and returns to.  The source of existence and existing.  We are all already this.  The journey of embodiment is the expression of this source into infinite forms (ie. what we call creation or the universe), until the eventual return of the essence of these forms dissolves back into the source from which it emerged.  Returning to itself.  Expanding out and contracting back in.  Embodiment is the creation, it is the expansion out.  The return to source is the dissolution of all bodies and forms, aka disembodiment, but that is a topic for another time.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Analysis Chiropractic, 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

True Stability

Dr. Amanda Love Leave a comment

True Stability 

Finding the ground of your being

Star explosion with particles and raysIn some way we are all seeking for stability.  A sense of groundedness, hereness and ok-ness.  The search for these things is often sought in external circumstances or situations.  Once we have the job, the money, the house, the relationships, the health, the sense of personal value and contribution, then we think we will feel secure.  But what happens when all of that crumbles?  Who and what are we then?  What stability exists when there are no external structures in place to make us feel safe?  It is truly only when all forms destabilize that the real opportunity to know ourselves arrives.

The root of stability is never found in the forms, it is instead found in your pure essential nature, devoid of all appearances.  What this means is that not until all forms dissolve and all constructs fall away in your awareness can you see the essence of what remains, which is pure being, which is the real you.  The only true stability is here.  It is the pure awareness that never changes, never comes and goes, is always here, always present.  There are no illusions of stability here.  There is only the knowingness of the ground of being or the ground of your self.  This is the pure state of stability itself.  

The path to stability is not by striving, proving and achieving, but instead is through self-acceptance.  Forces of instability which seem to throw you out of your center of stability only throw you out of your delusion of center.  They show you where you are still giving your power away and looking “out there” to feel ok.  Ultimately you cannot leave yourself,  you can only be shown where you still believe that you can leave yourself.  

To fully accept yourself and discover the path to true stability is not as easy as it sounds.  It means that you must face and feel all the places that bring up a sense of instability for you.  Feeling instability equates to feeling those things we fear.  Primarily what we fear boils down to the perception of loss of love, belonging or some other form of death (i.e. something going away).  It is through avoiding the feeling of the loss, separation, and alienation that we perpetuate the loss, separation and alienation and thus the experience of fear.  The magic, the miracle, comes through us allowing the feeling of loss, as through that we make contact with ourselves again and with that sense of stability which never truly left.   

Forces of Instability 

Fuel to know yourself

18291054 - blue ocean waveDue to the fact that we have been largely misinformed or have not realized our true essential nature we have come to adopt less than complete ideas about ourselves.  These ideas are distortions of the truth, not the pure truth itself.  Most people are living with a fragmented perspective of what/who they are without the full realization that they are living in this way.  It is frequently not until something disruptive comes into our lives and shakes us up a bit that we realize that there is possibly something more than what we’ve known.   

If we are too comfortable in our illusions of stability then we don’t have the opportunity to grow and realize more of ourselves and unearth the distortions of truth that we have come to believe about ourselves.  Instead we will just simply live the status quo hoping that not too much changes and fighting tooth and nail if it does because we don’t want our delusion of stability to end.  However I promise you that you don’t let the shake up occur you will never taste true stability or know yourself because you will be too locked into your stories of what you need to be safe.  

Transformation is always about instability.  People often say that they want to transform as if its some popular spiritual thing to do, but people almost never say they want to completely deconstruct all their false structures of safety and support and then actually do it.  People don’t do it because they get caught in the fear of loss of something and rather than move into it, they move away from it. 

Instability is necessary, but it is only necessary because we don’t know the truth of ourselves yet.  When instability arises see it as the opportunity that it is.  The opportunity to taste, know and eventually rest into a true stability that remains despite all of the coming or going of forms.  Do your best not to judge the shake up as wrong or bad, as if you do you will suffer or project your suffering onto others, rather than transform.  Recognize that instability tends to come in waves.  Some waves are more potent than other waves.  See the waves as gifts that you can ride into the truth of you.  

Transformation is simply as process to know ourselves as the true stability that we are.  A stability that is made of love.  A love that is complete, inclusive and which from all coming and goings arise.  Full self-acceptance is your free ticket into knowing this stability.  An acceptance that ends all fear and which absolutely no wave can shake.  Allow the instability, move into the instability, accept the fear that arises as you move deeper into the wave and you will alas be reunited with the entire ocean.  

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