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Life Beyond Consumption

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LIFE BEYOND CONSUMPTION 

Our love of consuming

Being a consumer of life is the natural way of living for most people.  We love shopping and get excited when we have a package waiting for us at our front door.  We look forward to going to our favorite restaurants in order to eat and drink all of things that we enjoy.  We can’t wait to watch or read that new movie or book we’ve been waiting for to come out.  Scrolling our preferred social media apps to see what’s going on with our friends or in the world around us in one of our most preferred activities.  We are nearly constantly taking something in.  Whether that something is food, information, or tangible objects, we tend to like the feeling of things coming in.  In fact for many people this is how they relax.  In contrast, when it seems like life wants or demands something from us, even if we are the one creating that want or demand, we feel tense, vigilant or like we need to perform or show up in some extra alert way.  Sometimes just thinking about what we will have to give makes us tired.  

In a lot of ways consuming is easier.  We just sit back and let life in.  It doesn’t require any real effort on our part, except for perhaps deciding if we want to buy the shoes we like in brown or black, or choosing if we want to go with the fish or steak dinner at our favorite restaurant.  It’s low demand, not that complicated and in the end we feel some kind of satiation.  Our new outfit arrives, we get loaded up on information from our new book, or we get the latest news about our “friends” on social media, and we feel full.  Why does getting full feel so good?  It feels good because most people operate from a belief in scarcity and therefore any attempt to give feels like fuller depletion.  At least when they get they can momentarily not feel lack.  

Yes there is the obvious fact that we need to food to survive, albeit much less than most of us would like to think we need.  We also need clothes, but probably not near as many as we buy.  Information is helpful to make informed decisions about things we don’t know about it, but many of us are addicted to consuming information without taking any real action on the things we learn.  Social media can provide us with some sense of connection with others, but most people are just mindlessly scrolling to see if they are missing out on anything.  While most people probably wouldn’t fully admit it, they just want life to happen to them without them having to do much work.  This means that rather than creating we would prefer it be given to or have things done for us.  An example of this would be if someone gave you the option to either work your way to $1 million dollars or be given $1 million dollars, nearly everyone would opt for the later.   Case in point, most of us would prefer to receive support and care rather than give it. 

WORKING, CREATING & GIVING 

Stopping the consumption cycle

Giving is work.  It does require something from us, namely our time, energy, and focus, which are, our most precious of resources.  Because they are our most precious resources, we tend to want to conserve them, not use them up or give them away too readily less we run out of them.  But what are we really saving them for?  Do we think that if we don’t use them then we can store them up?  Are we afraid if we give our attention to one thing then we won’t have the energy, time or focus to give to another thing?  Perhaps you are ambivalent about what we want to give too.  Maybe you have difficulty making a decision about what is important to you.  Perhaps you just feel like you don’t have enough time, energy or focus and are living in scarcity about your state of inner resourcefulness.  We are always plotting in our mind what we think we have the inner resources for and therefore how willing we are to show up to life.  I am not denying that rest is important, it is, however most of us are way underestimating and underutilizing our capacities.  Why?  Because we think our inner resources are going to run out.  

I could tell you that there is no such thing as time, that it is simply a made up construct, but it’s likely that you will keep operating as if there is time.  I could tell you that you are the source of energy itself, but you will probably continue to feel like you don’t have enough of it.  I could tell you that you’ve got nothing but focus, yet you will claim that you get easily distracted.  These ways of thinking and believing are just habit.  In some ways you know that timelessness, infinite energy and inexhaustible focus are true, yet they aren’t true for your experience of life, at least not yet.  If you really embodied that there is a surplus of energy, no time and that you could focus on whatever you wanted to for however long you wanted too, what wouldn’t you do?  I imagine that your relationship to work, giving and creating would be mighty different.  I would think you would stop living by the clock in your head, your stories of limited energy and your distractible focus. 

Consuming is not the only way to live.  It’s not negative to consume.  We all need to consume some.  We need food, rest, nourishment, information, education, and social connection.  However when we are coming from scarcity of our inner resources of time, energy, and focus, with the fear that they might run out, then our consumption levels increase.  Sometimes to the point where we never feel satiated no matter how much we take in.  To remedy this we need to clearly know when we are full and stop consuming.  At that point rather than taking in more we need to switch to giving through work or creation.  That is the natural cycle of giving and receiving.  

Some people might say that they don’t know when they are full because they have overridden their fullness levels for so long.  If that is you I recommend this, when it stops feeling good and begins to feel bad, or like an addiction or obsession, or you find yourself becoming less present or more checked out, you know you’ve reached the fullness point.  So rather than watching another movie, reading another book, eating another piece of chocolate, having another drink or scrolling another social media app, stop in that moment and find a way to give, work or create instead.  This is when you move beyond a life of consumption.  The secret is that this is where energy, focus and timelessness live.  Never again will you fear them running out because you are living inside of them.

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

Breaking Up with Shame

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BREAKING UP WITH SHAME 

Exposing our hidden selves

Shame, which is an underlying sense that we ourselves are somehow bad or wrong, is a well grooved inner pathway for most.  Some people might first default to blame, which is simply shame projected outwards onto others.  Why do we carry around with us this sense that we are, or could be, bad or wrong?  Why is it that when other people disagree with how we are, or have opinions about how we should be, that we nearly immediately go into self-defense in the form of hatred or rejection of ourselves?  Shame is one of the most pervasive and debilitating feeling states.  When we feel it we tend to freeze, withdraw and judge ourselves.  We think thoughts along the lines of “if only I could be better or different than I am, then I wouldn’t be deficient, or bad or wrong, and people would love and include me.”  Talk about one of the most painful states of being in which there seems to be no good way out.  From the perspective of shame the only answer is for you to be different or better than you are in order to be loved and accepted.  This is battle that you will always end up losing.  You will lose because your sense of being loved and included is outside of you, and you will forever be chasing it because being loved and included is the most primary of all human needs and wants.  

We have endless strategies to avoid feeling shame.  One of the most primary ones is to stay hidden, to not allow others to see who we are, to put up fronts and be inauthentic so that people won’t judge us.  If we don’t let people see us then they can’t reject us or tell us that we are wrong.  If there is no one “real” at home inside of us for people to see then we can’t be accountable to being “wrong”.  If we just stay quiet enough, keep the peace, pretend to not know much including knowing who we are or what value we have to contribute or share, then we can avoid the painstaking judgment of others.  That is until we can’t.  There will be a time when someone judges us, when they disagree with us, when they perceive some kind of insufficiency in our actions or beingness.  There is no hiding then.  The cloak is off and we are exposed.  This is when the shame gets in.  We might react in anger, recoil in self-defense, or completely cut ourselves off from our own heart.  We are left with the feeling that we are bad and wrong, and often beating ourselves up about it or lashing out at others.  

You might be wondering where does shame come from.  It’s simple really.  It comes from a belief that you are bad or wrong.  Where did the belief come from?  The belief in badness or wrongness is such a pervasive societal belief that you would be hard pressed not to have pick it up somewhere along your human journey.  Maybe someone told you were bad or wrong when you were growing up.  Perhaps you learned it socially through peers groups, in school, or in your family.  It’s actually not so important where you picked up the belief, rather what is important is that you identify the belief living inside of yourself.  That you see it and recognize that you are now the source of it.  You are the one that keeps that belief alive, active, and true for you in your own psyche. 

NEVER BEEN WRONG 

Graceful learning

What if you’ve never ever been wrong?  Seems like a bold question, eh?  Would you believe it if I told you that you never have been?  For a moment you might feel some relief at that thought, but most people will go on to validate for themselves how it’s not true.  They will conjure up all of the times they’ve been bad or wrong in the past.  They will reinforce the belief in their wrongness or badness for themselves.  Most people don’t really want to believe that they are right and good.  When I speak about right and wrong as it relates to us as beings, I am not talking about detailed or factual information.  Yes you can be inaccurate about facts, or in recalling certain details, or about information.  What I am pointing to rather is who you are, including the things that you do and say.  If someone is frequently found to be insisting on their rightness by needing to be right about facts and information it’s often because they feel deeply wrong inside as to who they are.  It’s simply another shame avoidance strategy.  

Imagine for a minute if you could really embrace non-badness and non-wrongness.  If that could really be a reality for you.  How would you feel?  For most I would imagine that you would feel some sense of freedom.  It would be the end of self-doubt, the end of self-hatred and the beginning of an availability to life that you might have never experienced before.  See most of what we believe to be bad/good or wrong/right is based on what other people think or what culture/society says we should be like.  It’s not based on our own knowing.  If it was we would all just be being ourselves and wouldn’t think twice about it.  But almost no one is being fully and authentically who they are all of the time.  

Let’s talk about actions and things we say.  First of all people who love themselves and know that they are right and good don’t harm other people.  There simply isn’t motivation for it.  Doing harm to others is an outward expression that comes from a deep sense of self-hatred and self-rejection (i.e. shame).  Believe it or not, and it’s of course up to you to choose for yourself, but there are no actions or words that are bad or wrong.  Yikes.  You might disagree and you are more than welcome too, however the shame cycle never ends for you then.  You perceive some action or word as wrong in another.  You project that wrongness onto that person who now feels shame from your projection regarding their words or actions.  In response they act in some distorted fashion in order to not feel the shame.  Same goes for your own words and actions. What we perceive and feel we create.  The cycle continues unchecked into infinity.  

So then what about learning?  How do we learn if we don’t feel shame?  How do we up level and become more refined, loving and aware creatures towards ourselves and others?  Well again believe it or not, we don’t have to be bad or wrong in order to learn, and learning doesn’t mean that we are/were bad or wrong.  People can give their opinion to us, of something we did or shared, without us going into shame.  We can both stay open to the feedback and then decide what we want to do with that information.  Is there something constructive that we could learn from that person’s information without going into wrongness?  Could we just receive that information and note it or integrate it.  Perhaps there is nothing bad or wrong about what we did or didn’t do, but only learning to be had.  Also what if when you shared your experience of others with them you simply shared impact rather than judgment.  What if you took accountability for how you feel about what occurred while still providing information to another person about how their words/behaviors impacted you.  This is a high level skill yet it is learnable.  

We are all constantly learning and it doesn’t mean we are bad or wrong.  When you get this you can break up with shame.  While at one stage of your development perhaps shame was a good learning strategy for you, it’s also one that at some point quits serving you.  It limits your growth and keeps you disconnected from yourself, which in turn helps and serves no one. 

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

The Healing Journey

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THE HEALING JOURNEY 

Impatience

We are a quick fix society.  We want everything to happen instantly, if not yesterday.  Patience is not a virtue that many of us have anymore.  If our Amazon package comes a day or two later than what was originally projected we are irritated.  If we want to lose weight, but haven’t achieved our ideal size in 3 weeks time, we give up.  If the business we are creating isn’t up and thriving in 6 months time we see it as failure or not destined to be.  We think that everything is supposed to happen overnight, and don’t have much bandwidth for the journey.  The same is true for our healing.  If we have a sensation or feeling that we don’t like we think it’s supposed to be gone yesterday.  If we have thought patterns that we’ve been entertaining for most of our life we assume we should be able to completely be free of them in an instant.  When our sensation persists, the feelings we don’t want are still there and we continue to entertain thoughts that don’t serve us we see failure, either our own, or we project that sense of failure outwards onto others and see them as failing us.    

Even though we conceptually know that life is not about the destination but rather the journey, we are all trying to get to the destination.  We are all trying to get somewhere other than where we are.  We are trying to get out of this uncomfortable human experience rather than be present in it.  The attempt to get it over with (it being the sensation, feeling, thought, or experience that we don’t like or want) is our true suffering.  The result of resisting where we are is this gnawing, unsettling, anxious, depressive, distressful and disconnected state.  We go into wanting answers and certainty.  We jump from thing to thing thinking that our answers lie inside one of those things.  We think if we can just get some certainty about something then we will feel better.  If we could just know when this experience we don’t like will end, then we could rest.  Our impatience with not knowing and trying to get somewhere else, hijacks our capacity to be present and to heal.  We will not be able to touch healing or presence until we get this. 

Metamorphosis naturally emerges from presence.  Resistance keeps what’s in place in place.  Melting into what is frees us from it.  All of these things seem contradictory to the mind that thinks it needs to do something in order to fix it.  I’m not suggesting that there isn’t a time for action, quite the contrary.  Perfectly orchestrated action occurs when we come into agreement with what is.  The journey of healing is the return to wholeness, yet wholeness is now.  Unless we see the wholeness now, we not see it when we arrive at our preferred weight, when our business takes off, or when the sensations and feelings we think interfere with our experience of wholeness go away.   

SHOWING UP FOR YOURSELF

Learning the lessons of life

It takes a great deal of showing up for yourself in order to stop the pattern of impatience, which is really just avoiding the moment.  What do I mean by showing up for yourself?  I mean staying the course, being committed, having persistence, doing whatever it takes and being all in.  Don’t be flaky.  Dig your heels in.  Remember why you are and what’s important to you.  Don’t give up so easily.  Stop seeking instant gratification.  Surrender to your experience.  Celebrate the little and big victories every day, not just when what you think you want arrives.  The journey is a sequence of a billion tiny steps.  See the gift in each one.  Don’t want anything to go away.  Be more grateful for what is then you are desirous to achieve your goal.  Watch how that changes everything.

The reason that this changes everything is because you change.  The reason why being impatient and waiting for circumstances to change doesn’t make you any happier or bring you greater peace is because you don’t change in the process.  Something will arise inside of your experience in the next day, or week or month and you will find yourself cycling back into the same feelings of being impatient and wanting to get somewhere else.   You will never feel settled in yourself.  It’s not the circumstance changing that does anything except perhaps provide temporary relief.  The same gnawing, unsettling, anxious, depressive, distressful and disconnected state will follow you no matter what happens or doesn’t happen if you don’t realize that you are the source of it all.

Healing has absolutely nothing to do with anything going away.  Every sensation, feeling and thought that you have, that you don’t like, is a catalyst for you in some way.  What that means is that it contains learning for you.  There is something you are to discover, learn, accept and/or transform inside of you through this experience.  That’s it.  Despite all of our conditioning, which leads us to believe that healing is about certain feelings and sensations going away, this is not the case.  You can be perfectly healed, perfectly whole, and still experience feelings and sensations.  In fact it’s nearly guaranteed that you will.  When you approach feeling and sensation as information for learning and growth, rather than as a problem to be gotten rid of, you are effectively utilizing the catalyst that your higher self is offering you to learn whatever it is you need to learn.  

I’ve discovered over the years that nothing shifts until we learn what we are to learn from it.  Even if one sensation “goes away”, if we haven’t learned the lessons from it, it will manifest in another way or form.  You just can’t get rid of your learning, despite how hard you might try at times.  Just to be clear this is not a form of punishment from our higher self to us, but rather it’s a gift.  I know it can be hard to believe that, especially when we really dislike our sensations, feelings or experiences, yet everything in this universe is working for us, it’s not out to get us.  Imagine if you can start to see and experience everything from this lens.  How differently would you experience your sensations and feelings?  How much more readily would the lessons be apparent to you rather than you aimlessly seeking for answers and solutions?  

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

Playing All In

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PLAYING ALL IN 

Avoid failure & lack

Most of us only play part of the game of life.  We gravitate towards, and give our energy to, things that feel like a safe bet or a sure thing.  We back away from those things that feel uncertain or which require us to rest in faith rather than fact or certainty.  The result of this is that we feel like we are only partially in the game, partially invested, and therefore only partially create, experience or be what we desire.  Why don’t we play all in?  Why don’t we give life our all?  The answer is simple.  We don’t play full out because we are afraid to lose and/or we are afraid of what we might have to give up.  You can call losing failure (personal or circumstantial), not getting what we want, feeling pain, hurt, upset, disappointment or lack.  We run so much from feeling the experience of failure and lack that it keeps us from playing the game of life.  

It’s a bit of a paradox.  By not fully playing the game we lose before we lose.  We choose failure before failure chooses us.  It’s a tricky little strategy.  Most people aren’t even aware that they are doing this.  They are so used to giving a quarter, half, or three quarters of themselves, that they don’t even realize that there is more that the can give to playing the game.    They cap out or give themselves an arbitrary ceiling when they have so much more capacity beyond what they think.  They might be moving along with their life and then hit a place where they feel uncertain.  They aren’t sure how to proceed or what feels right.  Maybe they feel a lack of confidence, resources, skills or knowledge.  Often when we don’t know “how” we hit an inner stop sign and just stop.  We don’t move forward or then we begin to feel stagnate or like we aren’t progressing.  

I find that not knowing “how” is frequently a way we keep ourselves underneath an arbitrary ceiling.  As long as we don’t know how then we aren’t accountable or responsible to keep going, because after all we don’t know.  There are times when we need to learn a skill, take a class, get a mentor or gain some type of knowledge, but when you are committed and playing the game full out you never let that stop you.  You find a way because you are committed.  You don’t allow it to become a reason to stop playing the game.  You don’t stop.  Rather you show up and keep finding your way through the maze of this human experience, learning and growing along the path.  Remember the juice is not in getting to the destination, but rather who you become on the journey towards the destination.   

YOU DESERVE GREATNESS 

Utilizing your free will

In addition to fearing failure and lack, there is another reason why we don’t play full out.  It’s because we don’t feel like we deserve a great life.  We are so used to our current way of living, that stretching ourselves too far out from where we are feels like too much for us to allow in.  We are so used to living in a perpetual state of not ok-ness, or waiting for the not ok-ness to happen, that we accommodate to feeling not ok as our normal state of existence.  We don’t actually feel or believe that we could be ok or that it’s ok to be ok.  If our life is going good we hold our breath waiting for it to not be good.  We live in this near constant inner state of yoyo’ing back and forth between not feeling ok and then feeling ok but being worried about when it’s going to end.  

So there is a very simple fact that is important to just accept, I mean really accept, which is that everything is going to change.  Even if something has seemingly been the same for 5 minutes or 50 years, it is guaranteed to change at some point.  This is the nature of life.  Life is movement and movement is change.  Most people don’t like or invite change because it feels uncertain.  They don’t know what to expect, and beyond that they are afraid of what they might feel like on the other side of the change.  When you really accept the inevitability of change you are much more willing to play the game of life all in.  You get that nothing will remain, neither the things you like nor the things you don’t like.  Great things will come and go.  Crappy things will come and go.  There is a constant cycle of this happening all of the time.  You can’t hold anything in place that wants to change.  If you try to you will fail.  

What is beautiful about all of this is that when you accept this you will also learn that there is an inner resourcefulness inside of you.  You will discover that your free will is in how you choose to see whatever it is that you are experiencing.  This is your power, and it is mighty indeed.  In a single instant you can transform your experience of whatever it is you are experiencing, even if you’ve been experienced it for decades or lifetimes.  This means that even though you might feel loss, failure, disappointment, pain, or lack of something that you desire, you can always be good, or dare I even say, great.  This is not to bypass whatever it is you are feeling, rather it is rise above it and say there is more than this, I deserve more than this.  More than feeling the way I do, more than experiencing what I am experiencing, more.  This is where you come on line.  This is where you get back into the game and begin playing, really playing.  You’ve already felt the pain, the loss, the failure, the not ok, and you are done tolerating it.  The ball is in your court.  

Many people don’t let themselves get to this point.  They don’t put their foot down and say enough.  Rather they tolerate less than what they deserve simply because they don’t think they deserve more.  But you do.  You deserve whatever your big heart desires and you are equipped with the inner resourcefulness, ie. free will, that is required.  It’s your birthright.  It’s who you are.  If there are things along the way that you need to learn then you will learn them, and more than that, you will learn through them.  Choose to play the game full out. Life is ready and waiting for you to say yes to it.  

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