knowing

THERE IS NO VEIL

Dr. Amanda Love Leave a comment

THERE IS NO VEIL 

Why we feel disconnected from knowing

We are all trying to know something, to figure something out, to find something, and yet none of us really know what that something is that we are attempting to discover.  Maybe we think it’s clarity, or understanding, or insight, yet it appears to be on the other side of something.  It’s as though there is this veil, this thing we can’t see past or across, this disconnection or separation from knowing.  But what if that seeming veil of disconnection that comes with the feeling sense of being lost, in the dark, or clouded isn’t actually real?  What if there is nothing in between you and the known?  What if we are just making up this whole disconnection thing even though it seems so real to us?

Like so many things that seem real to us until we realize that they are not, our feeling sense experience of disconnection from knowing seems as real as our arm.  It really feels real that we don’t know and that knowing is somewhere else, on the other side, or separate from where we are, what we know and who we are.  It feels like knowing must come from some other source, like a mysterious person, event or thing knows and we have to figure it out or get to it so that we can know.  But what if that seeming distance, that seeming separation from knowing, is simply a perspective?  What if we believe we are separate and are thus just playing out our belief in it.  Our beliefs seem real, until we realize they aren’t.

For a moment think of your life like a repeating groundhog’s day just like that 90s movie with Bill Murray.  Each day you wake up and it’s the exact same thing.  At first you are a little taken back by it, maybe even annoyed, frustrated or bored.  After days, weeks and months go on like this you start to realize that you know what’s coming, and because you know what’s coming you relax a little bit.  You start to shake things up, play around with stuff, and you take almost nothing seriously.  Each day you experiment with being and doing something new because you know that the next day will bring the same set of circumstances and conditions.  

Knowing that you know and realizing that there is no veil is like this.  Rather than being cautious, holding your breathe, being concerned about how things will turn out, or trying to figure things out, you stop being vigilant.  You realize that nothing is really serious and that all this cautiousness (aka fear) that you experience is simply because you are playing out the game that you don’t know (and I assure you it is a game).  And because you believe that you don’t know you feel uncertain and unsure that things will be ok.  You doubt ok-ness and therefore live vigilant to the potential that things will be not ok, or even that they will be bad or horrible.  You therefore don’t relax, feel tense and are constantly afraid at some level that the shoe will drop.  So you desperately attempt to hold onto the shoe, however the shoe is simply a thought, it has no solid substance, so there is nothing stable to hold onto, so you feel unstable.  All the while unconsciously repeating over and over and over and over and over again in your mind the thought “something bad might happen” or “something might not be ok”.   

LOVE IS ALWAYS ACCESSIBLE

Choosing knowing & connection

When we know that things are ok we feel free and therefore we openly give ourselves and radiate to and with field of life.  You could say we freely express love or what we are.  We perceive no threat, therefore we have nothing we need to protect from ourselves or others.  We are free to be ourselves fully.  We tend to not mind or care what happens because we know all is well regardless.  It doesn’t mean we don’t care as a quality of heart, in fact quite the opposite.  We don’t care about story lines or what we or others think should or shouldn’t be, but rather care about love and all of its  expressions.  This is the experience of joy or happiness that isn’t based on any conditions, but rather a state of beingness that we just are or is.  When we don’t believe or know that things will always be ok no matter what, we contain and hold.  We don’t radiate or give to the field of life, because we fear something will go wrong or that we or others will be harmed.  We self-preserve.  Self-preservation is limited to only exchange energy and information with itself.  This is why it often feels cut off or separate.  There is frequently the feeling sense that there is not enough of something, such as resources, money, food, love, connection, joy, happiness, etc.  Limitation feels real.

It seems crazy that something as seemingly small as a belief that things will be ok versus things won’t be ok could really make such a big difference in our day to day experience of this life, yet it does.  Some people want to argue that it’s not that simple.  They want to keep playing the victim to life rather than recognizing themselves as the creator of it, so they will conjure up a million and ten excuses why they can’t change or choose.  That’s ok, and if at some point they want to have a different experience of life then they are going to have to wake up a little bit and realize what they are choosing and choose differently.  It can feel hard and sometimes even impossible to see ourselves, choose differently and take new actions based on our choosing, yet there is nothing too big, too far, or too unknown for you to transform.  You are bigger than your childhood traumas, your relationship challenges, and your sensations and emotions.  There isn’t anyone that is human that hasn’t experienced all of these things and yet those things are not the problems that we tend to think are.  Rather they are the teachers that we have in this life to help us remember who we are and to help us shift our perspective of disconnection and separation back into remembrance that we know.  

When we realize that the veil of disconnection is not real, that it is just a perspective that we can choose or not, we know love.  Love becomes instantly accessible to us rather than it being pushed out to some future moment when things are more right, clear or perfect.  See we often think that we need some clarity, insight, answer or understanding first, but love/connection comes first.  Clarity, insight, answers and understanding follow.  We feel bad when we aren’t in love and we feel good when we are.  When I say in love I don’t mean it in the context of a relationship with another person, but rather in the pure state of being it.  Love is all anyone ever really wants.  We think we want other stuff besides love because we think we will get love in the stuff.  Stuff like other people, activities, events, health or answers, however we will only ever get reflections of love from all that stuff, which is not a stable source of it.  In order to know love you must recognize yourself as the source of it.  You must become it.  You must become what you are.  Then love never leaves.  In truth it never has.  You’ve never been disconnected from the never ending source of pure bliss, ecstasy, union and connection that you are.  You only thought you were.  And just like you conjured up the thought of disconnection, you can conjure up the thought of connection.  Stop taking your cues about who or what you are from your previous life experiences and reflections.  Rather project out onto life the knowing that you are love, that you know, that you are connected, and you will transform everything into that.   

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

Free will

Dr. Amanda Love Leave a comment

Free will 

Reclamation of our true nature

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

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

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

Living in awareness of choice

Touching our true essence vs. knowing it as us 

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

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

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

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

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