heart

Letting Your Soul Be Seen

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LETTING YOUR SOUL BE SEEN 

Finding your heart

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

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

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

UNWINDING THE TWISTS & TURNS 

Doing the inner work

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

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

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

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

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

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

GETTING TO PERFECT

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GETTING TO PERFECT  

Attempting to create perfection

There is a constant stride in the direction of perfection.  We are always looking towards betterment, progress and more pleasant or pleasurable feelings and sensations so we can experience that flow of perfection.  Perfection being that state of being we experience when nothing seems to be out of alignment and all is going better than we planned.  When we perceive that we aren’t making progress, or we don’t feel as we’d like too, or life doesn’t appear to be working as we want, we try to find our way back into perfection by changing our environment or ourselves.  We attempt to get to perfect or somehow create it, rather than seeing perfect in what is appearing.  

The difference between attempting to create perfection rather than seeing the perfection in what is already here, is the difference between striving to get somewhere and being present now.  While this difference might seem slight to you, or it may only seem like semantics, I assure you that the two are quite different experiences of life.  While striving to get to perfection can feel rewarding, and even provide a sense of purpose, meaning and worth for you, it ends only in the continual chase to the next and next and next thing that we attempt to make perfect or right.  When we view through the lens of perceiving perfection to be lacking from any moment, we do not see what is already here.  Rather we view lack and project that onto our “reality” or life experience.  

So what does lack projected onto life experience look like?  Well it probably looks and feels a lot like your life.  It’s the feeling of wanting something, even if it’s small, to be different than it is.  This includes wanting yourself to be different in some way., including where you are on your “spiritual” journey.  It’s feeling slightly or overtly restless, and like you just can’t fully relax.  It’s hoping something will change and fear that it won’t.  It’s the feeling that circumstances decide how you feel about life, rather than you deciding how you feel about it.  It’s worrying about the state of anything including your own internal state of feeling, sensing or being.  It’s feeling doubtful.  Probably 1,000 times a day we have subtle flavors of these aspects creep into our mind.  Rarely do we freely accept every single thing that is in our experience.  Rather we let things grab us.  We don’t like what is so we resist it.  We then feel like life is not working, when really it’s simply our perspective and relationship to life which isn’t working for us, or at least it isn’t producing the experience we desire, which is typically freedom, presence and peace. 

RESTING INTO VS.  RESISTING LIFE

Gnawing fear of things undone

The heart of most people’s desire is to rest into life.  What we have however is more frequently an experience of sometimes resting and sometimes resisting.  There can be confusion about what resting into life means or is.  Often there is some fear that it means inaction, or even deeper to the root, that it means purposelessnesss, lack of personal value or that we won’t get what we want.  Being rested into life does not mean action or inaction, rather it is a way we be while engaged with activity or when non-engaged.  When we are rested into life we are simply being ourselves while doing and seeing that whatever is appearing is exactly perfect just as it is in this moment.  Rather than trying to achieve something, or get somewhere with our doing, we are more focused on our state of being while we do the doing or while activity is occurring.

This is a radical shift for most people.  We swim in the field of achievement, making progress, and getting somewhere other than where we are.  We also tend to live with the background gnawing fear that things will be left undone.  Most people like for things to feel resolved rather than in process.  We like the stuff of life to feel organized, in its place and complete.  When we don’t feel those things we attempt to create those feelings through the doing of stuff.  We try to get it all done so that we can rest, rather than come from rest and then get things done.  See when we come from rest we are present to the moment.  We may be doing some activity, but we are not attached to the activity going anywhere because we are simply present to it.  This allows us to experience freedom.  Freedom that is always there, but which is covered up underneath our sense that we need to get something done or finished.  

From this perspective you can see that it really isn’t about the activity or what happens or doesn’t happen.  You can also see that things will happen and get done regardless of how you be inside of them.  You must only ask yourself the question of how do you want to be in life?  How we be determines our experience of life.  Two people can experience the exact same circumstances, yet have completely different experiences of them.  The only difference is how they be.  Do you rest into life or do you resist it.  You get to decide for you.  Life, activity, movement and creation will keep happening endlessly and persistently regardless of how you feel about it.  The beautiful thing is that you get to choose how you feel about it.  That is freedom.  That is your free will.  In fact this sense of freedom is often where you are trying to get to with all of your doing.  You are attempting to get to that feeling of freedom, of liberated joy, of fully embracing what is, so why not just start there.  Then go about with all of your doing.  It’s logical.  It makes sense, way more sense than the way we tend to operate.  

Perfection is here now.  There is no where to get.  Movement, activity and life will continue.  Appearances, sensations, feelings, structures, bodies, and all things will change forms.  Despite, and with, all the changing forms you can choose to rest into what is.  It will open you into now and into the experience of aliveness and yum even when you don’t like or prefer what is appearing.  

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

MAGIC OF THE HEART

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MAGIC OF THE HEART 

Lived Remembrance 

The birthplace of all magic, mystery, fun and play lives within the heart.  Heart is not outside of you.  It lives and breathes you, and everything else in creation, into form.  Heart is that essence of which you are, of which we all are, yet remains unseen to the physical eye and unknown to the physical senses.  Heart is all pervasive and yet illusive to our ordinary reality and ordinary minds.  To reconnect and re-find our heart is to reconnect to the magic that lives inside of all things.  

The channel to heart is always open.  We must only tune ourselves to it in order to discover it.  The frequency of our unique soul essence is the gateway into the remembrance of what we are and the knowing, seeing, sensing of the love that simply is that primordial substratum, matrix, and information behind all things we perceive.  Even though sometimes heart seems distance and hard to find, in truth it is always here, present and ready for us to realize it.  Part of participating in this human experience is the forgetting of ourselves, of our essence, of love, and the unification of all in love.  We come to experience separation and forgetfulness and to find our way back into ourselves.  There is no right or wrong on this journey.  There is only the following of the breadcrumbs of excitement that guide your unique path.  

Tuning yourself to the frequency of your soul is the work.  It is the work of this incarnation if you choose remembrance as your intention for being here now.  For many this is relevant and desired.  There comes a time when one must stop talking about all things spiritual and instead live their essence.  Rather than think about what they want to be true or what they want to be their lived experience, they must simply live it.  This is the magic.  This is the alchemy.  Lived remembrance.

To live intentionally, devoted to why you are, is the only real tuning you need.  To run that pathway over and over and over again until it becomes the default program in your consciousness.  Until all you know and all you be is why you are.  This is the end of getting anywhere.  You’ve arrived.  There is simply the being and sharing of your arrival.  It is the air you breathe and the water you swim in.  No longer do you perceive separation of you and your purpose.  You are your purpose.  You are your intention for existing.  You know yourself.  Love is.  Love remains.  The channel is open and you have tuned to its frequency.   

YOUR HEART FREQUENCY 

Sound of Love

Heart could never not be yours.  You are not undeserving or unworthy of it.  You do not need to earn it or meditate your way into it.  You can’t be separate from it because it’s impossible for you to be separate from yourself, and heart is what you are.  Just try for a moment to be separate from yourself.  You can create content such as thoughts, feelings or sensations that seems to interfere or stand between you and heart, but there is not two of you.  You can’t exist over there and over here.  You can only exist, you can only be, there is just one.  Therefore its impossible for anything to be separate from anything else.  This is the teaching of the heart.  This is what the heart reveals when you tune yourself to why you are.  In that tuning you come into the knowing of the unity that is.  The one that expresses itself in a myriad of forms, some of which you have mistakenly identified yourself as.  

In the subtle, quiet stillness you can more clearly hear yourself.  You can hear the frequency of your heart, the sound of love.  Even when your thoughts, feelings and sensations appear to disrupt your frequency, in truth they really don’t.  While you are having the experience of disruption or interference, you still are, you still exist, and therefore love still is.  Untouched, unwavering and present.  It really is as simple as shifting your awareness to that knowing that love still is here now.  You can focus on the stuff, the thoughts, the story, the feelings, the sensations, the content of your experience, or you can focus on the fact that you are existing, being, and that love is what is present in being.  

Peace really is much closer than you think.  You can experience it in an instant.  That dropping of tension, of weight, of pressure, of constraint, is available just as soon as you stop focusing on the content of your experience.  Being is rested in love.  Love is, when you are.  This is when magic becomes your experience.  Rather than logic, linear awareness with cause and effect, black and white, and matter of fact thinking ruling your experience, you experience the dance, the flow, the rhythm and movement of intelligence at work, of love at work.  Synchronicity is the norm, life unfolds nonlinearly, and while the mind can’t make sense of it, the heart giggles in delight.

The frequency of heart is pure delight.  It naturally gives without doing.  It is so totally and completely energized.  It needs nothing from anything.  It knows how to move itself.  The body and mind obey the intelligence of the heart when you tune to the frequency of your soul.  Open into that channel of love over and over and over again, as much as you possibly can, each and every day.  Find whatever excuses, whatever reasons you can, to tune to your heart’s frequency.  Make it your number one priority no matter what experience is showing up, no matter what thoughts or feelings or sensations you are having.  Tune to love, to bliss, to God, until you remain rested there, until you no longer ever leave again.  This is the completion.  This is everything I know.

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

GIVE, GIVE, GIVE

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GIVE, GIVE, GIVE 

Stop withholding love

The most sustainably reliable way of being that produces fulfillment and happiness is giving.  Giving to others, giving to life, giving, giving, giving without any agenda or expectation of return.  Yet most of our energy and attention goes to what we will get from life.  We have been brainwashed into believing that getting is what brings us fulfillment, joy and happiness and that giving depletes our already scarce resources of time and energy.  Getting the relationship, the job, the family, the business, the vacation, the house, the attention, the perfect body, the healthy body, and on and on provides only the delusion of happiness in attainment   We even often only give in order to get, meaning we give ourselves to people or things in order get a result or something in return.

What does pure, without agenda or expectation giving, even look like?  To make it really simple it means that you would have to not want or need anything from anything or anyone.  This includes things like wanting love, attention, desire, recognition, acknowledgment, and praise, as well as survival needs such as financial or living support.  I get that that can seem like a really tall order and many people aren’t ready for that level selflessness. However until you arrive at that level of purity you will suffer and attempt to get things from life and others that seem to have the promise of joy and happiness inside of them, but which instead postpone true fulfillment.

Any time you suffer it’s because you don’t get, see or experience what you want or because what you give isn’t received by others in the way that you want it to be, which again is not experiencing what you want and hence your agenda in giving.  When we don’t freely give we withhold and distort love and it feels really, really bad.  What this typically manifests as is us feeling bad, being in a bad mood, feeling frustration or stuck-ness, not having clarity, being confused, and feeling powerless or not seeing choice in the matter at hand.  These feelings and experiences are life telling you that you are withholding love, which is also withholding yourself because love is what you are. When you try to hold onto something, get something, or keep something you think you want you will distort the love that you are.  The result is impure motives, drives and lack of any true lasting fulfillment. 

LOVING IS GIVING 

Opening the heart

Loving is giving and giving is loving. They are the same.  It is not hard to give.  In fact giving is more natural than anything because it is your nature.  You don’t have to have some special skill set or come up with some fancy thing to give to others or life.  Your being is giving, and when you have purity and agenda-less-ness, giving is the natural result.  For a moment think about the times when you thought about saying something nice to someone or doing a kind act that you felt naturally inclined to do, but then you didn’t do it.  Maybe you weren’t sure how they would take it, or you didn’t want to seem like too much, or you doubted yourself and made your giving silly or stupid.  In this example what happened is that you become more concerned with yourself than you did about giving.  You made it about you, as you cared more how it was received and how you would be seen.  This withholding seems innocent enough and yet its laden with self-centeredness.  

Keep in mind is that giving is organic. Sometimes people will over-give in order to feel right, worthy, or validated.  This too is a distortion of love as they seek for ok-ness, approval, value and worth.  There will be energy expenditure and energy transfer that may create feelings of tiredness to your physical, emotional or mental bodies, but there should not be depletion of your being.  If you are feeling depleted it is an indication that you are out of balance and need to reassess what really serves.  Are you doing too much because you are focused or attached to an outcome and are therefore over-extending yourself?  Are you doing too little, withholding, not giving to others and therefore not bringing energy into your system through giving and thus feeling depleted?  You having a fuel tank of gas and taking care of your self-care is absolutely essential if you are going to be of service in giving to others.  The intention remains though that taking care of you is to give to others, not an end in of itself.  

In order to naturally give, to be giving in and of yourself, your heart must be open and available.  Giving is a lot of work, draining and effortful if your heart is not online.  Opening your heart is both the first and last step.  When tension or resistance is suspended or resolved you radiate, emanate and overflow.  The easiest and quickest path to resolution is forgiveness.  For-give-ness.  For in forgiveness you give again, you choose to open your heart, you choose to let go of what you think you want or need, how you were done wrong or did wrong, and all agenda for getting or being received in any particular way.  Energy can now freely exchange in and out of your system.  You hold onto nothing and hold back nothing.  There is nothing to lose and only the gift of being and sharing remains.  

The gift is the giving of your being just as you are.  When your heart is open it includes all inside of it, all beings, all others.  Care is inherent.  As you increase your dial on what you can give to others all of your needs, wants and desires will be taken care of.  That which is in alignment with you will be your experience.  There is no lack when we give, but rather natural overflowing abundance of giving and being.  

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

PAIN OF NOT EMBRACING PERFECTION

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PAIN OF NOT EMBRACING  PERFECTION

Disagreeing with the universe

In the spiritual growth community we are all so busy working on ourselves.  Attempting to do it right by clearing our trauma, healing our wounds and purifying ourselves to ever more refined versions of ourselves.  While we are engaged in this journey towards our ultimate remembering and purest expression we often lose sight of the fact that we have never left the innate perfection that we are.  Though at times we seem to have disconnected or forgotten this, the truth remains that we could never not be what we are even if it has been temporarily placed out of our sight.  

To say or view from the perspective of imperfection creates all the suffering that we could ever imagine, and which we do imagine every single day.  Imperfection implies that the intelligence that organizes this universe, including your body, mind and every single little detail of creation, somewhere made a mistake.  This is the birthplace of the view of wrongness, error and separation.  For certain aspects of creation to be included and others not is an illusion that we perpetuate over and over again which lives inside the idea of imperfection.  

Imperfection is simply an idea, a view, a judgment, a perspective.  There is no actual truth to it.  It’s preference and bias.  What one person sees as perfection another sees as imperfect.  This occurs infinitely inside of this idea of imperfection.  See healing happens the moment that we remember that we are perfect and therefore so is everything else.  We may not like what shows up on the screen of life, but that doesn’t alter its perfection.  When we get this completely through and through the healing journey ceases because it’s no longer relevant.  What is true is remembered and evident is the nature of what is.  

This begs the question as to why we hold tight to the perspective of imperfection even when we “get” spiritually that we are perfect.  Why don’t we accept our total, complete and absolute perfection right now in this moment and every moment that will ever follow?  What exactly are we waiting for?  This is a really good question to ask yourself.  What stands in the way of you embracing every single aspect of yourself and this entire universe as innately perfect?  Do you still think some things are wrong?  If so what are those things, and what will it take shift your perspective of them?  Whatever it is that you don’t include will stay un-included until you directly and consciously include it.  How much longer do you want to wait?  How much more suffering do you want to endure?  When is it enough? Only you can determine and decide this for yourself.   

SELF & OTHER FORGIVENESS 

Courage and humility

If there is a tool that bridges this sometimes seemingly gaping gap between perfection and imperfection it is self and other forgiveness.  Forgiveness “corrects” the perspective, removes the hate, and ends the insistence on rightness and wrongness.  It softens the heart and drops the veil of separation that never was.  It ends the roles of victim and victor.  It doesn’t negate or say what happened did or didn’t happen, but it clears the slate.  No karmic charge, no battle to fight, no war to be won, nothing to prove or justify.  Inner & outer peace, harmony and resolution are the effects of forgiveness.  

Forgiveness requires courage.  Why?  Because to open our heart towards what feels hurtful often seems like the wrong direction to our minds.  Our minds want to protect us from all pain and that is why we build walls of separation inside of our experiences.  It takes bravery to move towards rather than away from these experiences.  To let down our walls and allow ourselves to feel instead of continuing to choose the path of self-protection.  This must be a very deliberate, conscious choosing on our part.  This will not just automatically happen because for most people the default mode is self-defense rather than self-love or other-love.  The seeming paradox is that love it the ultimate protector, and not the mind with its defenses which are wired to keep you separate from the rest of creation.  To love one’s self (or love other) is to bravely walk into the fire of our own mind and refuse to not allow light of our awareness to shine.  To see what we are trying to hold separate, and to feel how much more pain holding separate causes us rather then feeling the hurt that we are resisting.  To then choose to feel the pain so that the energy can move through our system and the charge can find its resolution.

Forgiveness requires humility.  Why?  Because we must end our insistence on rightness/wrongness in order to forgive.  To arrive at the place of “I don’t know better than that which organizes this entire universe” is incredibly humbling to the personality we identify ourselves as.  People avoid and deny this level of humility at all costs because they want to be right and feel justified in their rightness.  What happened happened.  What I am I am.  No right and no wrong.  End of story.  End of all stories.  The mind hates this.  Some people feel this is a permission slip for people to do or get away with “bad” things or to ignore changes that need to be made.  I am suggesting neither, but instead to see what is possible through the power of forgiveness.  To see what naturally and organically organizes itself into different configurations without force, effort, punishment, or shaming when the true essence of what is is seen, reflected, and given.  I dare you.  

The power of the heart is stronger, more real and more palpable then any limiting perspective, including that of imperfection.  Choosing forgiveness opens the door directly into the heart.  Heart leads, mind follows.  This is what most all hunger for even if they can’t fully articulate it in this way yet.  The only thing standing in the way is your insistence on the idea of imperfection.  That’s it.  Imperfection really is just a thought and not an actual thing.  I know this may be hard for your mind to believe, but its worth investigating and changing this belief for yourself.  Your joy and freedom from suffering awaits on the other side of it.  

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

Your Heart is the Knower

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Your Heart is the Knower

The Mind is not the Knower

So often we move about our lives trying to figure out what things means, preparing and plotting our next action steps and attempting to find answers to all of our questions about this mysterious universe.  We have a tendency to feel safer if we can make meaningful sense of things, find answers to our questions or have some type of clear direction that we can comfortably take.  Being in uncertainty, the unknown or the ever present present moment tends to feel too unstable for us and we seek for solidity in our thoughts or the physical universe.  

Why is it that we attempt to create safety through our minds perceived sense of knowing?  The most direct answer is because we think that we are our thoughts.  We are identified as our thoughts and believe that we are separate distinct entities disconnected from a larger knowingness.  If we were connected to a larger knowingness of ourselves we would never for even one second attempt to use our minds to create certainty, stability and a sense of knowing. Due to the fact that being veiled from the larger truth of ourselves is part of this human experience and learning, we seek for some solid ground through our thoughts because that is what is most accessible to us.  

Despite what you may think your mind is not the knower.  Your mind is simply a thinker.  It produces thoughts but does not know from where they come.  The knower is larger than or beyond the level or your mind.  If we step back and look at this from the perspective of levels of development we will see that development evolves from physical body (the survivor), to emotional body (the reactor), to mental body (the thinker) and then into soul (the heart).  Many humans right now are waking up, if you will, to level of soul, but it is not the natural default for most.  Rather mind and thoughts is the default and hence why we seem to perpetually come back to trying to figure things out as if we are separate object in a universe of separate objects that all act independent of each other and don’t share information or energy between them.  

When the mind is in charge it tries very hard to do, to figure out, to know and to make happen.  The mind also likes to make things difficult and complex where there isn’t difficulty or complexity.  It is the great confuser.  Yet the more confused we feel the more we try to think our way through it and end up in the vicious loop of which there is no way out.  The only way to find our way through is make contact with that which knows.  The gateway to the knower is through the heart.  The language with which the heart speaks is not with thoughts but instead with the energy vibration of love.  Leaning into this language is the clearer of all confusion and recognition of non-separateness.  

Getting to Know the Knower

Language of Love

Why is it seem so hard to lean into the heart?  Why do we look for something other than the language of love?  First things first.  Many of us have layers of protection around our heart-soul body making it difficult to even make contact with it.  These layers exist due to pains that we experience in our lives.  Most of us don’t consciously close ourselves off, it is simply the defensive nature of our nervous systems to protect us when we feel any type of pain, which is quite common on this human journey.  When this protective response gets activated its puts us in our more primitive bodies which are the physical, emotional and mental bodies.  Even though the mind is more complex in organization then the physical or emotional body it is still a more primitive body than that of the soul/heart body.  

Many people live their entire life in a mostly protected, defended state and are very functional and contribute great things to the world.  They have friends and families, successful careers or businesses and belong to communities.  Most people have no idea that they are living in a state of protection, that is until life brings them a situation which seems outside of what they can handle.  This is often loss in any of it forms.  Loss of loved one, loss of a relationship, loss of purpose, loss of health, loss of function of some part of the body, loss of resources, etc.  These experiences of loss are the biggest catalyst/activator that we have to evolve, wake up to more of ourselves and become undefended, and yet we tend to see them as catastrophic.  Many people don’t see how these situations are pushing them into growth and they stay focused solely on the loss.  

This brings me to language of the heart which is love and why we tend to not listen to it or see it as the knower.  When the mind is running the show of our lives we want linear, logical and mentally sound answers.  To the mind love seems too fluffy or like its not enough.  We often feel like we need more than just love.  We need hard, concrete, physical answers and quite frankly love doesn’t seem to be powerful enough for all of that.  So we seek and search for an answer that we can make sense out of rather than directly experiencing the all knowingness that comes with love.  We choose effort, fight and resistance over ease, grace and acceptance.  Why make it easy when we can make it hard and treacherous instead.  

The reason why most people have this perception of love as not quite powerful enough, or simply not enough, is because they have only experienced love for fleeting moments at a time.  Their baseline experience has not been such where love has been the primary experience day in and out for years or decades at a time.  In fact people rarely experience nothing but love all day long for even a single day at at time.  That which we experience more often tends to speak louder and we tend to place more belief and value in it.  Hence why our thoughts dominate and we tend to rely on them as that which knows best.  

Our heart is the knower.  Its doesn’t think, it knows.  When we lean into the heart, doubt dissolves and clear seeing is revealed.  There is no longer anything to figure out.  We realize that love is not only enough, but it is the organizer of everything and essence of our very nature.  Here is where the mysteries resolve themselves and the present moment comes alive as our direct experience.  There are no problems in love, nothing to fix or solve, there is only the pure knowing of the perfection that is and the playing out of that in all the myriad of forms.  

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

Power of Love

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Power of Love 

Infinite Life Force

16152518 - beautiful lotus backgroundMost all of us make claims to the power of love.  On some level we know that love is the ultimate everything and yet when things get “serious” or when we get caught up in our emotional or thinking bodies the power of love is forgotten.  Why is it that we drop love or downplay its position as the grand orchestrator of all of life when things get messy, unclear or uncertain?  Why does our thinking mind along with its linearity and rationality become the prime ruler rather than the heart?  

First of all let me just say that love is the source of infinite life force.  Life force is love, love is life force.  Life force is what makes everything come alive.  It is the breath of the universe and everything within it.  This is why when we feel like we are in love we feel alive, awake, alert and juiced up, because we actually are.  Love, whether for self, other or just as a state of being, brings with it infinite, inexhaustible life force.  It can not because love and life force are one and the same.  

Life force, energy and love are terms that can be used interchangeably.  Life force is the quite literal energy source that powers everything in the universe including your physical body.  It is fairly common knowledge at this point that everything in the universe is energy.  When all matter is broken down into its most basic components all that remains is vibrating energy.  That vibrating energy is life force/love.  Patterns of thoughts, beliefs and perceptions then give shape to that energy and the world of forms that we see with our eyes.

As powerful as our thoughts are in their ability to bring forms to life, they are nothing without the energy source of love to back them up.  Pure, unconditioned love is the most coherent, whole energy source that there is.  When we have thoughts that are fueled by less coherent states of energy, such as fear, rage, or rationality, they are much less efficient or effective and therefore the forms they create are not as optimal, complex or productive.  Less coherent states of energy are simply states of energy that are not as aware of their inherent wholeness.  Love knows it wholeness which is where its extreme power arises.   

Fall from Grace 

Perception of Wrongness

Spiritual conceptual image of a female angelWhen we think about the power of love without being connected with the knowingness of love our power is greatly diminished.  True power does not come from thought alone, but from the intimate acknowledging and resting into love so that its power naturally expresses.  The primarily perception that keeps us disconnected from knowing love intimately is the perception of wrongness.  

When we view through the perception of wrongness we create separation where there is none.  Separation creates a less coherent state of energy because within separation implies a lack of wholeness.  Wrongness means that something must be thrown out of the whole and when that occurs there is less energy/life force available to the system (individual or collective).  Say for example you (or your culture) judge multiple things about yourself, another person, or the environment as wrong.  The more you judge the more you shrink your perspective.  With this comes a sense of confinement and limitation.  Simultaneously the less innately good you feel and the less energy you have available to you.  Manifestation feels more effortful and there is greater disorganization in what gets created. This is a state of decreased coherency where your knowingness of love and ability to utilize the power of love is diminished.  This does not mean that love is actually diminished, but only your perception of it.  Again this happens at individual and collective system levels.  

Perceiving wrongness also brings on both sides of it righteousness and shame.  To defend one’s rightness or hide in one’s shame birth the entire gamut of defensive patterns of self-protection.  This is our fall from grace or love.  This is the imposition of limitation on life force.  This is the disconnection from our power, which is the power of love.   To restore connection and remember the power of love we must dismantle our belief in our own or others wrongness.  To know love rather than think love requires this.  

Love has no boundaries, it penetrates all.  Love brings light to even the darkest dark, to every recess of unconsciousness.  Nothing is brighter than love.  To stand in the radiance of love is to illuminate the entire world.  All healed, all whole, all intimately aware of itself.  From here the purest and most efficiently organized forms of creation are created.  Life force vitalizes all.  This doesn’t happen independently of you, it happens because of you.  At some point we must all surrender to love.  It is inevitable.  We must give away our addiction to less coherent thoughts of wrongness, missing and lack of wholeness, and open our system into greater coherency, full force life force and the power of love.  

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

Grace

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Grace

Resting in the heart

Young and beautiful ballerinaGrace.  Grace is the state of being that is revealed when all tensions have come to an end.  It is the space of the heart which remains when we are no longer trying to find, fix or figure things out.  Grace is empty and yet simultaneously full of love.  Grace is flow and synchronistic.  It is awareness aware of the divine timing of all occurrences.  It is not pressured.  It does not force.  It is peaceful and vitality alive.

Grace occurs or is, not by you giving up because you feel powerless or as a last stitch effort to try to impose your preference from a helpless state of being.  Instead grace is known through the complete ownership of your power in such that the only thing left is full relinquishment of that power into something beyond it.  Grace goes beyond the mind, beyond the person.  There is still a person/form and yet the reference point for knowing yourself is not the person/form.  Your reference point is something much more encompassing of which your mind-body is but a mere vehicle for.  

Being in a state of grace is being rested in the heart.  The heart is what is beyond the mind.  The heart can know the mind, but the mind cannot know the heart.  The mind can only respond to the felt effects of the heart.  Before we are ready to fully relinquish ourselves we will continually try to think or figure out what the heart is.  This is called thinking the heart, but the heart cannot be thought, it can only be experienced when we are ready to deeply surrender any and all resistance in which we have to it.   

Why would we resist the heart?  It seems contrary to what most of us think that our intentions are and yet ironically we live mostly in a state of perpetual resistance or disconnection from the heart.  This is called living in our heads and being consumed by our thoughts.  The most common reason for this, which underlies all other arising, is that we don’t feel worthy of love and we fear that we will be less than or insignificant if we fully surrender to the heart.  Our logical minds will try and reason their way into or out of the heart which is of no benefit.  You cannot prove your heart to your mind, you can only allow your mind to feel your heart.   

Resolving all tensions

Preparing yourself for the complete consumption by love 

soar like an eagleWhat is it to be all consumed by love, to only know love and no longer be identified as a separate mind-body person?  What does it take for this to be your everyday, every moment reality?  It takes everything and nothing less than that.  It takes all of you.  It requires that every morsel of your beingness be on board, be intentional, be devotional and directional into this single focus above every other focus.  You must want to be consumed by love more than you want anything else.  The entire process, the entirety of this so called spiritual journey, is all about the discovery of where you are not wholly devoted to this single focus.  

To prepare yourself for this final relinquishment of personal power and agenda into grace paradoxically takes all of your will.  We often don’t realize that our will drives the ship into surrender and grace.  Will and grace seem like opposite sides of the coin, but without your will and the realization that you can use your will, (which is self-empowerment0 you don’t have a chance.

The truth is that overtime everyone will naturally come to realize the state of grace and love, but it could take you eons and lifetimes rather than just this one lifetime if you don’t come to know your power and utilize your will.  Why most people feel stuck or frustrated in terms of their personal growth is because they are not harnessing, utilizing and realizing the power of themselves.  The ultimate self-empowerment ends in self-realization and self-realization is simply knowing the truth of who you are as love rather than as what you’ve learned yourself to be.

Preparation requires that we move forward and into tension, pushing ourselves beyond our perceived barriers of what we think is or what we know.  With this generation of tension and simultaneous forward momentum the gap between where we are and where we want to be gets bridged.  The tension/energy builds and builds and builds and builds until the only choice left is relinquishment into something bigger and beyond what we’ve known.  We come to edge of our own perceived limited threshold, stretch past our known container of self, and we go beyond it.  When we go beyond, all tensions discharge and we fall into the unknown, and here discover grace.  We come to know what it is to be rested in love because some new container that was previously unknown to us arrives and we are suspended it.  With deeper immersion and realization of self we merge and become one with this state of grace.  This is the all consumption of love and realization of the truth of what we are.

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

Love as the ultimate self-protection

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Love as the ultimate self-protection 

Survival responses

Young sporty man in kimono on white backgroundThere is an inherent impulse to protect ourselves when we feel a threat.  In these situations self-protection often looks like closing off our system and reacting from a place of survival.  With this there is a cascade of hormones and other biochemicals that are released in our body, which are collectively known as the sympathetic response (or in some cases the primitive parasympathetic response) of the nervous system; or what people commonly know as the fight, flight or freeze responses.  

These biological, primitive responses are the first place in which all experiences that we experience get filtered through.  When we have an experience we first filter it through the lens and level of “am I safe”, meaning will I survive or is my life at threat.  The second level which we filter through is if our sense of identity in relationship to ourselves is at threat (meaning how we feel about ourselves) and thirdly through the level and lens of if our sense of identity in relationship to others is at threat (meaning will others accept or not accept us).  If any of these levels feels at threat then we will react with some level of closing off and shutting down our system.  Some defensive responses are more sophisticated then others, but nevertheless there will be a physiological response where we feel separate from other selves and the primary objective that we will seek is survival of the body and preservation of our sense of self.  

In order to perceive a threat we must be in a dualistic frame of thinking.  Meaning we must see a separate you and a separate me.  If instead we were able to perceive as the oneness that is there would never be anything to protect yourself from as you would see everything as you.  Since most of us are not perceiving from oneness we have such a relationship with life that we must defend ourselves from it and continue to make sure that we are ok.  We do not sense the support that is there and therefore can’t feel what there is to rest into besides our own sense of an independent self that must continually look out for itself.  This is how most people live.       

Can love really keep me safe?

Becoming the field

Night sky with stars.The heart opens us into the field of one being, but we first must learn how to move our experiences up through the first three levels.  If we can’t allow an experience to move up through these levels then it will get lodged at the place where we can’t process it and we will be unable to integrate the experience all the way through our system ultimately into love and seeing it in its true essence.  When we can’t integrate an experience we get developmentally stuck there.  The experience gets frozen in space-time and we continue to replay it as if it’s solid, fixed, unchangeable and what we call “reality”.  When we recognize that this process is occurring this is when we often seek healing and support for ourselves.  

When we can move our experience to the level of our heart (the fourth level) this is where our capacity to remain open, instead of defended and protected, in the face of experience first arises. The distinction between self and other selves gets softer and more fluid.  As your awareness opens at this level you realize and become more the field between selves rather than an individual self.  At the level of field awareness you are more present and thus have the capacity to attune more to what is really going on.  There is more awareness, energy and intelligence available to you, as you, at this level.  Thus your attunement as the field directly effects the field, and since there isn’t a separate you at this level your perception of the experience will directly effect the outcome which you experience in its entirety.  

This is the level of awareness where having clarity in intention and opening the heart-mind to the knowing that the best possible outcome will be the result will directly effect the reality that you experience.  This is where love becomes the ultimate self-protector because it’s working at a level beyond individual selves and seeing all selves as one.  Deliberately and consciously creating your reality also occurs here.  To the separate, individuated mind this seems like an impossibility.  It doesn’t, nor can it, understand how this would be possible because it only has domain over the separate self as that is all it knows itself to be, and yet you are more than that.  

The biochemical cascade that is created in the body when the heart opens into love and into the awareness of one being is that of developed parasympathetic ease.  You physiologically feel the support which you can rest into, the container that is larger than individual self that feels that it needs to take care of itself all of the time because it doesn’t know anything beyond itself.  You realize yourself, this existence, as an expression of one being, and your nervous system connects in with the larger nervous system of that one being.  

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

Waking up your intuition

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Waking up your intuition 

Looking at the obvious

woman meditate closeup of handMany people have a desire to be more intuitive.  Yet some people feel like they aren’t intuitive, while others think that intuition is only for “psychic” people, and still others think that it’s all made up and only the facts matter.  I find that there are elements to these particular thoughts and belief systems in most all of us no matter how “intuitive” we are due to the culture and conditioning that we are constantly exposed too.  

Let’s first get clear on what intuition is.  Intuition is a deep listening and knowing of self.  It isn’t about being psychic and “knowing the future”, but it is the capacity to be extremely present to yourself so that you have clarity on what is most alive and relevant in a particular moment.  At the core of intuition is the capacity to hear yourself and a willingness to trust yourself no matter what.  Intuition doesn’t rely on facts or concepts to know, but it doesn’t necessarily not include them either.  I have found that often our capacity to really integrate and use our intuition is a blend of trusting ourselves along with confidence that is learned through experience and skill development from within our “factual or physical” world.  

Our intuition is often so close to us, meaning so obviously in front of our face, that we frequently don’t see it.  It seems paradoxical that this would be the case, yet when things are really close to us it is often hardest for us see to them clearly.  We also have this misconception that intuition is mysterious and elusive, but really it is as common as the physical objects you see with your human eyes.  The elusiveness or mysteriousness comes from distorted perspectives on the nature of intuition itself.  Intuition is as intimate to you as your breath.  You literally can’t be or live without it because it is by its very nature you.  It is the knowing aspect of yourself that knows beyond what your intellectual brain has learned about who and what you are.   

Learning to trust yourself 

Opening your heart

Follow your heartSo why does it sometimes feel hard to hear or know intuitively?  Why do we often feel like we are guessing or having to “think” it out or rationalize things, rather than simply know?  I have found that the primary reason we don’t feel like we know is because we 1) don’t trust ourselves and 2) we don’t actually really want to know yet because knowing would mean that we have to create a change in our life, or be or do something, which we are not fully ready for yet.   So what do we do instead?  We create this bubble of confusion inside of our heads by attempting to use our minds to figure it all out.  However bad we want our minds to be able to figure it out, or to know, they never do.  The mind is not equipped to know, its simply not organized or wired for that function, it is only a tool of producing thoughts.  So when we put all of our focus here inside of our thoughts it puts us into this mental fog, torment and what we call stress and confusion.  

So then if our minds are not equipped to know what aspect of ourselves is?  That which knows is our heart/soul.  You may have heard people say to “feel it with your heart” yet your mind tried to figure out what that meant rather than you being able to actually drop into your heart and feel.  This is because we are so mind dominated in our conditioning and ways of being on this planet.  We simply keep defaulting to the mind for everything and haven’t necessarily reinforced patterning and thus access to other aspects of ourselves.  We all have a heart/soul.  Feeling with our heart opens us into the intelligence of our soul.  This is the intelligence that knows.  This is where our intuition lives. 

In order to readily access and reference our intuition more frequently we must find ways to open our heart and learn how to feel again.  Due to life experiences many people have shut down access to their heart.  Again this is why we tend to live in this state of perpetual confusion.  We have or are living disconnected from a ginormous aspect of our being and so the highest aspect of ourselves that we tend to know is our mind and then we think this is where it all caps out, with what our minds can think and rationalize.  Your mind is just one aspect of your beingness.  There is more.  

As people progress in Network care they begin to taste and fire up the circuitry that helps them reconnect to their heart/soul.  They begin to experience themselves beyond their minds.  The mind may still try to come in and make sense of it all, but the more you taste and know your soul the less the mind comes in to figure it out and the more you rest into trust of this larger aspect of yourself even though your mind can’t make sense of it.  You experience live moving through you, energy moving through you, rather than you having to figure it out or do it with your mind.  Ease and grace move you and with time you learn to simply allow your mind to be confused, while you live an epic soul-informed life.  

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