identity

UTILIZING IMAGINATION

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UTILIZING IMAGINATION

Giving non-reality form

Our imagination is the most potent creative tool that we have.  It far surpasses any mechanical device or conceptual knowledge we have in regards to bringing forth our creations into this world.  Without utilizing our imagination we simply create the same things that are known to us over and over again.  We then wonder why things look, feel and behave the same way and/or why our own patterns seem to never change.  What we often fail to recognize is that everything that is created has been imagined by someone at some point in time.  Imagination is the birthplace of all creation and the seed to transformation of all existing forms.  Part of what caps our imagination is that we have beliefs that say only x, y or z is possible.  Anything outside of our current beliefs is deemed impossible by our mind, and if we stretch too far, it’s just called fantasy or “made up non-reality.”

But what if made up non-reality is just the future of what is to come into creation.  I’d imagine that the person who created the airplane, the first MRI, the cell phone, the computer and on and on, had a hell of an imagination.  They would have to because they brought into existence creations that previously where uncreated.  Whether we are tapping into the collective unconscious and connecting with information contained there, or if we are simply making it all up in our own minds, we are bringing forth novelty into form.  This is the power of imagination.  Now it doesn’t stop at imagination.  If you want to make physical your imagination then there is work to be done.  Without the work imagination is just wishful thinking.  Physical manifestation requires output.  It requires taking action on what you envision, desire and dream of. 

I find that people are often either wonderful imagineers, but lack follow through in bringing their creations to life, or people are great doers, but don’t feel like they have much creative potential.  It can be easy to fall into thinking about stuff incessantly without following through on it, and equally easy to constantly be doing stuff without any time given to imaging new possibilities.  However both of these qualities are necessary in order to bring imagination to life and new and exciting manifestations into form.  This is after all how we up level our human experience.  The most important and key ingredient here is that you have to believe what you imagine is possible.  You don’t have to know how to do it, you just have to believe that it can be done.  I find this to be the bridge between imagination and action.  

IMAGINATION & SELF-DEVELOPMENT 

Creating new patterns

One of the overlooked areas is how we can use our imagination for self-development.  The same principles from above apply, however we utilize them in a more internal way.  Rather than focusing on something we want to create in our outer environment the focus shifts to our inner environment.  What new aspects, patterns or ways of being do we want to bring to life?  We can develop and recreate ourselves over and over again.  It’s unlikely that you possess all of the same characteristics that you did when you were 6 or 16 or 26.  Perhaps some things feel the same, but much has been altered, added or upgraded.  How we most often change aspects of ourselves comes through experiences that we have.  We learn through experiences and overtime we develop different ways of thinking, seeing and behaving.  For most people it seems that this process “just happens.”  What I mean by this is that most people are not actively pursuing change just for the sake of it and because they see everything as already perfect in themselves and their existence.  Rather life seems to give us experiences and then we develop through those experiences.  One of the cool things about imagination is that comes prior to our experience, not after it.  Imagining ourselves in novel ways, and changing our identity and the ways we engage with life can come before we have an experience that kind of “forces” us to change.  We don’t have to wait for life to hand us experiences (ie. opportunities) in order to up level ourselves.  We can simply choose to do it through using our imagination.  Once again there will need to be follow up with actions, and the fundamental belief that we can change is the foundational block that allows the entire picture to be built.    

You might be wondering what does all of this look like?  Well it’s really not that complex.  It starts with imagination.  What do you desire, envision and dream of for yourself?  How would you like to feel?  How would you like to be perceived or seen?  How would you like to behave, act or be?  Some of us are very good at doing this and for others it feels more challenging.  The challenge comes because we often feel like the same person because we are generating the same thoughts and feelings about ourselves.  This gives us the illusion of sameness and/or solidity in our identity.  However nothing is solid and everything can reorganize the energy of its form, therefore your identity is malleable.  As you begin the process of envisioning your most optimal configuration of self see where your impossibility beliefs arise.  Maybe you come up with a few things that feel alterable, but some that seem unalterable.  Simply take note.  Go to the edge of what your mind will still accept as possible.  This is where you can play.  If you perceive it to be impossible then you will have nowhere to go and you won’t take action on it.  Therefore go the edge of possibility and then start taking actions in alignment with whatever it is you come up with.  For example maybe one of things you desire is to feel joy.  The obvious action to this would be to activate more joy daily in your life.  Perhaps you want to become more intuitive.  Take actions that align with you in ways that you feel would help you bring your intuition to life.  Maybe you want to be seen as powerful, take actions that align with you feeling powerful.  This might mean changing the way you dress, how you drive, the places you eat, where you shop, the tone of your voice, the things you have in your house, and on and on.  This is a process, but with imagination and action you can become anew over and over again.  You can recreate yourself and all of your patterns.  Nothing is solid or fixed no matter how long you’ve been operating that way.  Nothing is irreversibly engrained.  

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

Becoming

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Becoming 

Making the shift into who you desire to be

VanityYou have all probably heard the phrase: think it, feel it, become it.  Its often used to reference a process of transformation in becoming something that what we desire to become.  We use our thoughts to think it, then our feeling bodies to feel the qualities we want to become, and through feeling it we become it.  When we want to become something anew there is often also a process of simultaneously undoing who we have previously thought ourselves to be as frequently who we desire to be now is in conflict with what we currently think we are.  

Most of us aren’t even really aware of who it is that we currently are and even beyond that. that who we are is a choice.  We don’t realize that we carry many underlying assumptions and hidden beliefs about ourselves that are based on our life experiences.  If fact most all of who we think we are has been based on our life experiences.  How frequently does it seem that our life experiences have just happened to us, particularly early on in our lives when a large portion of our identity is formed, but even continuing through into the present?  Therefore how much do we just assume that this is “just who I am” and not question it or think that we could ever be different?  This is one of the conundrum’s of having lived disempowered and not realizing that we have always been in the driver’s seat.  If we begin to see/accept that we have chosen every single one of our life experiences (this occurs through acceptance of what was/is) then we can begin to see how our identity has been chosen by us.  This is a breath of fresh air because that means we can also choose anew at any moment.

The assumptions we have about who we are also come with a lens of perception.  That lens of perception becomes the filter with which we then view ourselves through.  Meaning say that we have an assumption that we are weak, strong, cold, warm, unloving, loving, kind, unkind, likable or unlikeable, etc. then we experience ourselves as those qualities and we also view our world from that perception of ourselves.  This is quite literally how we “create our reality”.  Our reality is created by who it is that we think we are and that lens of perception than filters everything we see.  This is why if we want to change our reality (i.e. experience of life) we must actually just change ourselves, as reality follows our perception which comes from our sense of identity.  

Final Becoming 

Relinquishing our role identities 

Surreal portraitOne of the ways to bring more awareness to the self-discovery process of who it is you believe yourself to be is to take a look at your roles, and the responsibilities and activities that come along with them.  These are often indicators as to who it is we think that we are.  Perhaps you are a business man/woman, a scientist, doctor, community leader, a father/mother, daughter/son, wife/husband, an organizer or planner, an athlete, outdoorsy, indoorsy, a reader, an adventurist, etc.  Looking at your roles provides insight into who it is you identify yourself as being.

Again who it is you identify yourself as being is how you will experience yourself and the world.  Let’s say for example that you have the role of being a “wife” or an “athlete”.  Often when we take on a role, we identify as being that role.  You think that you are a wife or an athlete and therefore that role becomes part of your identity.  Every role always comes with some level of expectation of how we must show up within that role.  That expectation could be created by us or have been created by others.  Either way if we’ve agreed with ourselves that a particular expectation lives within a certain role, and if we don’t fulfill those expectations, then we take it as a personal deficit.  

The truth is that we are not our roles, nor the responsibilities or activities that come along with them, but because we are merged as the role then when we don’t meet those role’s responsibilities or perform the activities associated with the role we feel bad about ourselves.  The self that we feel bad about is not our true self.  The self we feel bad about is only the one with which we’ve come to identify ourselves as through becoming the role.  To relinquish being merged with our role’s identities doesn’t mean that we can’t/don’t still participate in the responsibilities and activities that come along these roles.  It simply means that we don’t identify ourselves as the role.  The falling away of being merged with any and all roles is what allows you to taste and know your true self, which is beyond any and all roles.  This is the final becoming.  

Simply put the process is this.  Fully accept yourself as you think you are right now.  Investigate your roles and decipher who it is that you’ve created yourself to be.  See how that has filtered your entire perception of life.  Recognize the power of think it, feel it, become it.  Who is it that you desire to be now?  Through full acceptance of who you’ve been there is no longer resistance or incongruence with who you are wanting to become.  Think and feel your current desire of who you want to be often.  Realize that the final becoming is the embrace of all the things you have thought that you are not.  This allows you to realize that you are all and ultimately that you are the chooser/becomer of whatever becomes and not the becoming itself.

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

Levels of Identity

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Levels of Identity 

Our reference points for who we are

3D Segmented Funnel ChartThere are different levels of identity.  Identity is a reference point for who/what we know ourselves to be.  Identity is important because depending on what we are identifying ourselves with or as will determine what we perceive and thus how we interact with everything in our world.  

So what are these different levels of identity?  I am going to describe 4 different “levels of identity” as I’ve come to know them. The 4 different levels are pre-rational, person, soul and God identity.  

Pre-rational identity

Pre-rational identity is that level of identity before we know ourselves as a self, or as an individual person.  This level of identity is pre-thought or pre-thinking ourselves into being.  There isn’t a sense of separateness between self and other selves because you don’t know yourself as a self yet.  In a sense you are your environment.  There isn’t the self awareness of having an experience.  You are experience and it’s simply happening.  This is seen in early stages of human life, especially noted in babies and very young toddlers before they know that a “me” exists.  Since you are experience and its simply happening there isn’t a “you” in the drivers seat, instead the environment is driving.  This is important especially if survival or emotional needs don’t get met by the environment that we are, because inherent in this is a sense of powerlessness to the environment.  When this occurs pathways can go undeveloped in our nervous system, particularly pathways that get fired when our nervous system experiences safety,  satiation, and rest.  Simultaneously other pathways get overdeveloped that relay information that environment is not safe, there is hunger, and to stay vigilant.  

When the pathways that know safety, satiation and rest are underdeveloped then the structure or framework that our system needs to integrate pre-rational identity gets halted and fragmentation or splitting of experience occurs.  We can call this distortion and it activates a cascade of protective mechanisms to try and keep us safe and alive.  Since there is a myriad of experiences that occur, some which fire safety pathways and some that fire pathways that say “not safe” what happens is that some fragmented parts stay at this pre-rational level of identity.  What this can show up as in our adult life is feeling victim or  powerless in certain aspects of our life.  You can also experience a general sense of not being able to relax or only being able to relax in certain environments or if certain conditions are met.  You may also experience that people or things aren’t safe or can’t be trusted, and that there may not be enough food or attention and love so you hoard or over consume.  There can also be a naivety about how things work and things can seem magical and mysterious.  This is also the place where life force (or body) intelligence and emotional intelligence reign.  What this means is that if we have aspects that have fragmented and are halted at this level of identity we can have challenges in physical health/healing and emotional resilience.  If this level of identity isn’t integrated there is also more reactivity and focus on survival, so we can see defensive and protective posturing and physiology that would be associated with fight, flight or freeze responses. 

Person identity

42052191 - women, black, worried.

At the level of person identity we have developed a sense of a separate self that is separate from others and from the environment.  This level of identity requires the faculties of mental intelligence which include the ability to think, discern,  see self as separate from other selves and be aware of feelings, sensations and as having a body without being identified as them.  There is a self that is aware that it has feelings and sensations which means you are not completely fused with them as them.  This begins to wake up choice, options, different possibilities and seeing the bigger picture, along with the awareness that you are in charge of and even the creator of your life.  

Usually around age 3 this person identity has showed up on the scene and it continues to develop into adolescence and early adulthood.  We can have experiences within this time that create fragmentation and distortion at this level of identity.  Some examples would be in not being seen as a unique person that we are, not having mirrored to us that we have skills and abilities, not being given options and being able to choose but instead being told what to do, and not having opportunity to express our unique nature.  These experiences don’t allow us to fire the pathways in our nervous system that are related to confidence, to feeling both failure and success and making it through, to feeling our power and our ability to choose, and to see how we impact our environment including our own body.  This stunts us in the development of our person identity as a separate self.  This can show up in us as adults by having difficulty with making choices, head being foggy, thoughts are unclear, difficulty knowing what you desire as a person or knowing your preferences, allowing people to walk all over you, or lacking confidence and drive.  In the nervous system this has less to do with protective posturing and fight/flight/freeze (though some of that may be present from on un-integrated pre-rational identity) and more to do with oscillating between disempowerment and feelings solidity and strength in self.  When person identity is not integrated the posturing tends to be more slumped or defeated, and as person identity get more integrated the posture becomes more upright and assertive.   

Soul identity

heart people vectorSoul identity is knowing yourself as in individuated being (like person identity), however there is awareness of your interconnectedness with all beings (and not just beings with physical, human form).  The separation of people and things is not like it is in person identity.  There are less solid barriers, defined edges and distinctions between people and objects.  Your experience is less “contained inside of  your own head” and is more fluid and interwoven with everything else.  Different from pre-rational identity you are not identified as the environment, but instead know your interconnectedness within it.  This allows you to experience a greater range of energy and you notice the presence of things and people more than their physical form or personality characteristics.  When your identity is at the soul level you are able to move your awareness around in your body and outside of your body and even into other bodies and objects, which is different than person identity where your awareness is primarily located in your head.  

This level of identity in connected with soul intelligence.  Soul intelligence is concerned with expanding and deepening in presence energy, love, wisdom, and interconnectedness.  Unity is at its core frequency.  The concerns that drive a person who is identified at soul level identity are how to be more awareness, knowingness of our truest nature and creating things to better serve the whole.  In general stabilizing in soul identity has been less accessible to humans.  We have had less mirrors available for mirroring this level of identity to us at our current planetary level of development, so the pathways are not as developed in our nervous systems, however this is changing.  The nervous system of someone who is identified at soul level identity expands to include what I call the “galactic” nervous system.  This is what allows you as an individuated being to be interconnected with everything else including what people may refer to as your “higher” self as well as other parallel versions of yourself and others.  Your thoughts are not just your thoughts, feelings are shared between people and things, information is more readily available to you but not through your normal pathways of mental intelligence or knowing, but instead through this soul intelligence or galactic highway.  The posturing is of the chest/heart being expanded and open, the head/neck come backwards instead of forward of the body and the physiology of the body is in greater communication and interconnectedness.  

God identity

32007403 - glittery lights silver abstract christmas background.

God identity goes beyond knowing yourself as anything individuated.  When you penetrate beyond the subtlest aspects of soul identity the only place left to identify with is One.  There is absolutely zero separation from anything in God identity.  You know  yourself as pure awareness, beyond all forms, beyond all energy, only aware of awareness in its most pure state.  There is no activity here, but instead primordial awakeness before anything is made manifest; simply being.  This is what most call our truest identity, yet some say there is still something even beyond this, something without beingness and without experience which is actually our truest identity.  

Since God identity is beyond form there is no posturing or physiology to note, but when someone is identified at this level while in form its like touching space.  There is a vast, open, pure and empty quality that expresses through their form.  There is no need for a nervous system to communicate with itself on an individuated level or a galactic level with others because you simply are everything.  All is instantaneous and happens at once.  Interconnectedness becomes one.  This is universal intelligence.  

Summary

Each level of identity is important, one is not better than the next.  From my current level of understanding these levels of identity are a developmental progression, each creating a foundation for the next.  You can be identified mostly in one level, say person identity, and you can simultaneously have tastes of these other identities.  But to truly stabilize at another level of identity you need multiple tastes of the next level and also full integration of the previous levels.  For example it would be very hard to stabilize in soul level identity if you have a lot of unresolved or unintegrated experiences at pre-rational or person level identity, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have tastes of it.  Typically when we have “peak” experiences, like say when we go to some type of transformational program, we get a taste of another level of identity that is possible.  If we’ve done enough integration work at previous levels than sometimes that’s all it takes to stabilize into a new identity.  However if we don’t stabilize at the next level of identity which we tasted than those parts of ourselves that still need to get integrated will rise up  into our awareness.  This is why sometime we actually go into chaos after a peak experience or a really high energy state.  The chaos is not bad or something to be fixed or gotten rid of but instead it is all of the stuff that we need to look at, address and be with so that we can really stabilize into the next level of our identity.  

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