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Bound & Unbound Energy

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BOUND & UNBOUND ENERGY 

Intelligence and it’s creations

We have all heard that everything is energy.  It is one of those things that we know conceptually, but perhaps haven’t given much contemplation as to what it actually means and how it impacts our lives.  You might be someone who feels that the world of energy is a bit elusive to you as it is framed in healing and spiritual contexts.  For example maybe you feel like you’ve never felt energy before or at least have never experienced it like other people seem to experience it.  Yet if everything is energy then you’ve undeniable experienced it.  Science tells us energy equal mass times the speed of light squared.  This means that matter and energy are interchangeable.  They are different expressions of the same thing, so if you’ve experienced mass, which again you clearly have, then you’ve experienced energy.

You may then wonder why the experience of energy seems to be different for you then it appears to be for others.  This brings us to the conversation of bound and unbound energy.  Bound energy is energy that is organized into a form.  Forms are both gross/dense in nature, meaning they are physical say like our human body, buildings and mountains.  Pretty much everything we consider to be an object in a dense form.  Forms are also subtle in nature, meaning emotions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and concepts are all forms as well.  If there was no binding of energy there would be no forms at all.  This means we wouldn’t be able to create anything, including a thought, idea, emotion or any kind of physical form. When there is no form to energy, meaning it is not organized into a specific configuration, then this is what is called unbound energy.  You can also think of unbound energy as  the energy of potential.  It is what is available to create or manifest with and from.  

So what organizes unbound energy into forms?  The answer is Universal Intelligence.  Other terms for this are, pure awareness or being.  That which is, knows, be’s and exists, is full of all of the information that creates this entire universe that we experience, including what we experience as ourselves.  Sometimes people will refer to this universal intelligence as the codes for creation, the blueprint of the universe or God/Goddess.  This is why meditators seek to empty their minds out from all concepts, including thoughts, feelings, and sensations, because as we empty our minds out of all of this content we can notice the pure awareness or pure being that remains.  Even though initially this may seem boring for some, or like “nothing is happening”, “nothing is happening” is the gateway into the infinite source of intelligence that creates this universe, and beyond that what you actually are.    

RETURN TO FREEDOM 

Unwinding back into our original state

To recap, bound energy is that which is organized into both subtle and dense forms.  Unbound energy is the energy of potential, which is available for forms to be created out of, and that which organizes or binds energy is called universal intelligence.  Without the binding of energy we would have no manifest creation.  “Creation,” if you will, would just be pure being, there would be no substance to it like we currently experience.  There would be no objects, other people, ideas, thoughts, feelings, sensations, or anything at all.  It would just be being.  Many people say that creation was created so that this original being could experience itself through different expressions of itself.  This is where oneness or primordial essence begins and ends, in pure being, in itself.  Everything is born out of being and will eventually return back to being.  It is also often said that everything is an illusion, meaning that all of creation and the forms that get created mask or hide that which is their true nature.  This is why if we focus solely on the form, like our human mind mostly does, but we don’t see through the form to the essence of what it is made of, then we are lost in the illusion so to speak.  

Let us revisit bound energy again and make some distinctions.  Bound energy can have varying degrees of boundness inside of its forms.  For example if your spinal cord is very tense and tight it contains more bound energy than a relaxed spinal cord does.  This means that your experience of your physical body will seem more dense and solid if your spinal cord is taut than if it is relaxed.  Within subtler forms such as thoughts or emotions, some thoughts are more binding than other thoughts.  Same is true for emotions.  It is quite obvious that emotions such as joy and giddiness feel lighter than anger or sadness.  Joy and giddiness contain more unbound energy and therefore we feel freer when we feel those emotions than when we feel anger or sadness.  It is also obvious that the thought “the world and everyone in it is out to get me” feels more constricting and defeating then the thought “everything is working out for me.”  Again there is more energy available in the second thought, more possibility and more light.  The degree to which we pay attention to these nuances of how we operate will determine the energy and reality we experience.  We don’t experience reality, but rather we experience our interpretation of reality based on the available amount of energy we have access to.  If you aren’t experiencing the reality or the energy state that you want to it’s not because it’s “reality’s” fault, it’s simple due to how and where you place your focus.  

The more unbound we become, the more we feel what we think of as “energy”, both in physical and spiritual ways.  There is no such thing as a person that doesn’t feel energy.  We are all experiencing energy all of the time.  It’s simply a matter of how bound or unbound it is.  Doing practices such as meditation give us an opportunity to completely rest in the unbound nature of the original self, which is limitless, infinite and all knowing.  Then doing the inner work of feeling our heavier emotions (rather than avoiding them or pretending they don’t exist) so that we can unbind the energy of them, and shifting our focus from our denser thoughts to thoughts that feel lighter, allows us to experience those more spiritually free states.  What we call more spiritual is simply less bound.  Those states are even more bright with light and energy, and it is where we feel the most free.  In some way everyone is seeking this.  The return to our original state; perfect, whole and free.

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

Living Fear Free

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LIVING FEAR FREE 

A life without threat

Consider fear for a moment.  Perhaps you don’t think of yourself as a “fearful” person.  Maybe you feel that you only experience fear occasionally in moments when it’s called for or justified.  Fear is a sneaky little gremlin.  It is disguised as anxiousness, avoidance, tension, being non-confrontational, or trying to fix situations, yourself or other people’s experience of life.  It can manifest as sensations in the body such as digestive upset, headaches, muscular aches and pains, jaw clenching, gripping, inflexibility, tightness, trouble sleeping, difficulty relaxing and more.  Fear is the basic response we have to feeling a sense of powerlessness or like things are out of our control.  When fear is present our lower brain centers are activated and our higher, more conscious brain areas are not being utilized.  Self-survival and preservation is the name of the game.  We can only think about how we will get through the next few moments or minutes, and have little capacity to zoom out and see the big picture.

I would venture to say the fear is somewhere in the background of our experience most of the time even if we aren’t aware of its presence.  It can easily be called up into the forefront when we perceive a threatening situation, thought, emotion or sensation.  Evaluate for a moment the contrasting experience.  What percentage of the time, while you are awake, do you feel completely at peace with nothing to fix, nowhere to go, nothing to get done, no urgency, no tension in your body or mind, and non-reactive without a single disruptive thought?  All without utilizing any substances to be in this state.  

Because a peaceful inner state of being is desirable for most people, and because most people don’t experience that, we often turn to substances, foods or medications to numb out the fearful feelings and sensations, so that for a few moments of our day we can feel relaxed.  Due to our reliance on things that we ingest to shift our state of being, we might not even know what we are feeling.  This is true for many.  We are so disconnected from our fearful feeling state of being because we do our best to numb it down as much as possible.  While this is an ok short-term strategy, this is not a way to live.  Yet this is the way that most are living.  Kind numb, kind of checked out and just going through the motions of life and getting all the things done.  We think life is “ok”, but deep inside we know its really not that great and we aren’t sure how to be any other way.   

WANTING PEACE 

Fantasy or reality

Imagine for a moment what it would feel like to never feel or perceive threat again.  To be invincible in the yourself and in the knowing that nothing can harm or hurt you.  That nothing at all is out to get you.  That absolutely everything is working for you.  That every sensation, feeling and thought is there to support you somehow.  To be absolutely empowered.  This is a far stretch for most.  In fact many people likely think that this is an improbable state of being and living.  Yet what if it is our next evolutionary step?  The next rung on the ladder of our development.  To be completely fear free and live openly and invitingly with all of our experience of life.  It may seem like fantastical thinking, yet to me it feels more like waking up from the nightmare that our mind has created about our experience, and experiencing more of the actual reality that is.

How do we get there?  It’s simpler than you might think.  It requires only a few things.  First is the overarching desire to live in a peaceful state of being no matter what.  This desire must be strong.  I mean really, really strong.  If you don’t have an unshakeable desire for peace than you will be easily disturbed, because let’s face it life and most of our current perspectives about life, give us a lot to be disturbed by.  Your desire is the hope you have in overcoming your environment, the stories you currently have about your environment, and the fuel you need to make the changes in your life for inner peace.  The second thing required is the willingness to feel all the “bad”, uncomfortable or non-peaceful things you attempt to avoid feeling by numbing, controlling, tensing up, people pleasing and the like.  If you aren’t willing to face your underlying feelings than you will forever be running from them and paradoxically then they will run you.  Whatever we avoid rules and chooses for us.  We are not in charge when we are not feeling all of our feelings head on.

You can see it’s really not complicated.  It does however mean that you will need to do some things differently.  You are going to have to change some of your habits, preferences or addictions to certain substances or activities that check you out from feeling.  You may need to slow yourself down so that you can be more subtle in your awareness of yourself and pay attention to what you are feeling.  If you are someone who is always with other people you may need to prioritize some alone time so you can self-reflect.  None of these things are hard, but they require change.  When we don’t really want to change something, then it feels hard to change, but when our desire for something is strong, the change is easy.  That’s why I said that your desire must be strong or else the journey will feel treacherous to you and you will perceive obstacles that seem impossible for you to overcome.

It is possible, and even probable if you so desire, to live fear free.  To be an open channel of peace, love and presence.  To be a rested, still, stable presence in a world of nonstop activity.  This is not an impossible feat.  In fact I believe it is our next collective developmental step in consciousness.  To come back to wholeness and to heal, is to unify with all that is.  If we perceive threat we will keep some parts separate, which keeps us separate.  To drop our guards and be brave enough to feel all the things, will return us into remembrance of the one unified whole of which we are. 

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

Effortless Stream of Giving

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EFFORTLESS STREAM OF GIVING 

Giving to life

Giving often feels like effort.  In fact most of us feel like we are giving all day long and find ourselves completely drained by the days end.  Giving can come with activity, busyness and action, and there is no doubt that activity without periods of rest can deplete our systems.  Yet there is a giving to life that happens even before action or activity occurs.  A state of being of giving that is prior to anything that we physically or mentally do.  In fact I’d suffice to say that much of our tiredness and depletion comes not from the activities themselves, but rather from not being in a state of giving while we go about doing our activities.  Again it’s not to deny that we need both periods of activity and rest, however the place from which we come from makes all the difference.

So how do we find this effortless stream of giving?  The good news is that we don’t have to go anywhere to find it because it lives right inside of us.  We only need to tap into it so to speak.  You’ve probably tapped into it before, but you likely didn’t know exactly what you were touching.  You might have related the experience of tapping into the effortless stream of giving as feeling defeat.  In fact the feeling of defeat is an entry point into the effortless stream of giving.  Yet most people get lost in their story about what is happening and keep trying to make their experience match their desire rather than feel defeat.  They keep banging away at attempting to make the appearance different rather than admitting defeat to the appearance.  Hence why they get so damn tired.  Hence why we are all so damn tired.  

When you stop trying to make the operations and happenings of life be different, there is no other choice but to let them be.  When you let them be as they are and participate with them as such, you stop forcing anything.  When forcing stops, so does resistance, tiredness and efforting.  If you’re constantly fighting the stream you are going to be expending a lot more energy and it’s going to feel like a lot more work than if you just went with it.  However going with the stream will at times feel like defeat and you must be willing to feel this defeat.  The beautiful thing about this, if you really get this, is that when you accept defeat you naturally open into giving.  You can’t not give to your experience when you are no longer fighting it.  When you allow what is to be how and what it is, you become the stream of giving organically.  There is nothing extra that you need to do.  It’s simply how it is when you are with life rather than at odds with it.  You may still not like your experience, but you won’t be as tired and the need to check yourself out of life so that you can rest and recover will be less.  You will start to find and feel rest inside of your experience, and here is where you are actually present, maybe for the first time ever. 

STOP WISHING INTENSITY AWAY 

Opportunities for being present

Sometimes life has to kind of beat us up a little bit before we are willing to accept defeat, so that we ultimately learn to live presently in full participation with the unfolding of life.  When we are experiencing this “beating up” of sorts we often label it under the disguise of the word “intensity.”  You’ve probably heard someone or maybe even yourself say, “wow things are really intense right now.”  It’s a very popular spiritual thing to say.  I hear that phrase many times a week.  When people say this often they are wanting that experience of intensity to go away,.  They are internally waiting, though they might not know they are waiting, until appearances and circumstances change so that they can feel lighter, better or less intensity.  The energy of this inner dynamic feels like wanting whatever is happening to just be over with already, because once it’s over you think you feel better.  Once the intensity is gone then you think you will be able to relax.

This is a trap.  It’s a trap because life is full of intensity and if you are waiting or trying to force the situations of intensity to go away, you will find yourself doing this until the day your body dies, and maybe even beyond, who knows.  Besides for it being a trap, when you wish your intensities to go away you rob yourself of incredibly potent opportunities for learning, which I call catalyst.  This catalyst, or these moments of extra intensity, bring the gift of breaking us down.  Why do we need to be broken down you ask?  Bluntly stated because most of us are living in arrogant, self-centered ways and seeing through limited perspectives that have nothing to do with what is actually occurring.  Most of these perspectives harm us or others rather than being helpful, yet they can be very convincing that they are trying to help.  These sneaky arrogant, self-centered ways along with their limited perspectives need to be dismantled so that we can stop acting in opposition to the unfolding of life and rather move with it.

The little bit tricky thing about all of this is that we typically greatly identify with these parts and perspectives that need to be dismantled, so we tend to not let them go out without a fight.  Hence the way of effort, force, resistance, which eventually results in tiredness and depletion that we may then lead to sickness, illness or adrenal fatigue.  This then brings us to the dire need for intensity in our lives, because often intensity is our only hope in dismantling these ways of being and limited perspectives once and for all.  Stopping wishing your intensities away.  See them rather as an opportunity to open into the effortless stream of giving.  

Breaking isn’t bad.  What’s breaking is energetic architecture that isn’t serving us living fully present.  Those structures need to break.  If they don’t we stay trapped and wonder why our experience of life doesn’t change for the better.  Even though many of us try to not feel the break of anything, breaking is natural.  The journey of growth is deconstruction and reconstruction.  If you aren’t regularly destructing then you probably aren’t growing much either.  Don’t try to always make things “good”, let things be “bad” or intense at times.  Even celebrate intensity if you can because within it is immense opportunity for something great to be born. 

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

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

Ending Urgency

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ENDING URGENCY 

There is nowhere better to get

Everyone in the world seems to be in a mad dash to get things done or be somewhere other than where they are.  We drive fast, think fast, move fast, send text messages fast, eat fast… fast, fast, fast.  Always onto the next thing and never being inside of what is now.  We have some kind of belief that somewhere else is better, more fun, more exciting, more relaxing, or more peaceful than where we are now.  If we could just get to those moments or times when everything looks and feels better and lock them in for eternity, then we could stop with all the urgency and just be.  Yet even when those transitory moments of peace or better come, we can’t seem to stop, slow down and enjoy the moment.  We only recognize that this moment will change and be gone soon enough.  

How do we ever live relaxed and in a state of “be”ing with the near constant change, activity and movement of life?  How do we stop trying to get somewhere and rather be where we are in each and every moment?  One of the most fundamental beliefs that we must work with in ourselves is the one that says that something is better than now.  How many times throughout your day do you find yourself engaged in an activity just hoping to get is over and done with?  Perhaps you feel this way during your morning workout, or when you are at work and things don’t seem to going as you want them too.  Maybe you can’t get something to work right on the computer, or you have a class at school you don’t enjoy, or an annoying neighbor, roommate or some other person you have to deal with.  When we find ourselves in these types of situations we mostly just want to be out.  For it to be done and over with because we do not feel pleasant, relaxed or at peace.  We think once this activity, task, conversation or situation is over then we can relax and be.  

The thing is life is loaded with movement, and might I even say what seems to feel like chaos, stickiness or mess.  There is simply a lot of stuff going on that never seems to stop and things are rarely perfectly packaged and placed as we would like them to be.  So what’s the answer here?  How do we bring what we want to experience to every situation that we find ourselves in?  Attempting to manipulate each and every experience, circumstance and/or person in our life (including ourselves) is exhausting, and quite frankly impossible, even though this is what most people try to do.  The answer rather is that we must pause our sense of urgency, of wanting to get out of our experience of “ick” or overwhelm, and drop into it rather than try to get out of it.  By moving into our experience the possibility to transform ourselves inside of it becomes available.  When we transform ourselves we transform our experience of whatever it is we are experiencing.   

LIFE’S PACING 

Surrendering beyond ourselves

Have you ever noticed that life seems to have its own pacing?  It operates at a speed or rhythm that sometimes aligns with our own and at other times not so much.  Sometimes the pace of life feels too fast and at other times too slow.  We may find ourselves feeling urgent in either scenario.  If the pace of life feels like it’s moving too fast then we try to speed ourselves us to meet that pace and the demands of all of the movement of life.  If the pace of life is too slow for us then again we try to speed ourselves up hoping that life will respond to us and speed up as well.  Either way we are gearing ourselves up for the race to somewhere else.  

Life’s pacing is largely out of our control.  There is a bigger orchestration at play to which we are mostly unaware.  Sure there might be things that you can do such as putting more or less activities into your day to day schedule, which you may actually need to do, but the bigger message here is in how you walk with life and it’s pace.  Not getting ahead of it or behind it, but rather being right with it as it unfolds.  What this requires is a surrender to the rhythm that is present rather than the rhythm we would prefer to be present.  While this might seem bold to say here it is: our preferences matter, but not that much.  While we are the kings and queens of our own world inside of our own heads, when it comes to the larger orchestration of life, we are part of the whole.  Often we don’t see from the whole, but only from the part we play.   In this way we are egocentric, not in a negative way, as it’s mostly innocent on our part.  Rather in a way in which we just simply don’t see the bigger picture.  We are not inside the heads of every single being in this universe seeing from the perspective of universal consciousness, therefore our scope and sight is limited to our own.  This creates immense confusion and frustration for us as we often don’t understand the what’s and why’s to the pacing and timing of things.  

Accepting confusion is one of the best ways to come back into rhythm with life’s pacing.  Understanding is not required for us to have acceptance.  In fact this is one of the great lessons of having this human experience.  Not necessarily an easy lesson, yet it does the job of eventually getting us into a state of surrender.  Surrendering to what is rather than what we prefer to be.  Only once we move into acceptance and surrender can we begin to see beyond ourselves and our egocentric human point of view.  We are in the unknown of what the moment is, contains and could be, rather than in our ideas, preferences or insistences about what is occurring.  

There is so much about the happenings that we don’t get to decide, even the happenings of our own bodies.  What we do get to decide is how we be, and whether or not we try to get out or be in rhythm with the moment.  When you feel urgency arise inside of you begin the practice of pausing.  Take a breath and let go of whatever you are energetically holding onto or trying to get done, and allow the state of “be”ing to be present inside of your experience.  Recognize that you can both be and engage in activity.  There is nothing to get over with, as there will always be more things.  Rather see the moment that you desire is now.  What you wish to experience is now.  Bring that to your experience and watch the magic reveal itself to you.  

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

More than Enough

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MORE THAN ENOUGH

Coping strategies to avoid

Feeling like we are not enough is the most pervasive of human wounds.  It is a cloak nearly all of us wear.  A deep sense of inadequacy, unworthiness, and unlovability.  Our biggest fear is that we are not lovable and that who we are is not valuable, and because of this we seek outside of ourselves for significance and love, thinking that it must be elsewhere.  That it must be something that we need to earn, achieve or somehow otherwise get.  This patterning, and our belief in our unlovability interferes more with the expression of ourselves than anything else does.  It is our biggest roadblock to fulfillment, health and well-being.  It stops us in our tracks, keeps us in our comfort zone, allows us to think small, live small and keep a certain distance from ourselves and others.

We have all learned strategies to cope or manage with the sense of fundamentally being not enough.  So much so that you might not even recognize the not enough story playing in the background of your psyche.  Some people learn to achieve, do and accomplish in order to not hear that voice of not enough.  Others learn to give as much as possible to others hoping that their not enoughness won’t be seen in the flurry of doing for others.  Other strategies include distracting ourselves with whatever we can find to distract ourselves with, leaving our body and living up in our heads or far away in the stars, creating or maintaining unaligned relationships, and/or distancing ourselves from life and others.  We all have utilized or are utilizing some or all of these strategies.  Without doing so life would be unimaginably hard.  Yet there is a cost to these strategies, which is that we never get to really just be or relax as ourselves.  

This keeps us exhausted and the fulfillment of the moment and the sweetness of life never seem to arrive.  It often feels like they are somewhere other than where we are.  If we can just keep up our strategies then we will get there.  We can see it on the horizon, even taste it, but it always seems like it’s just right out of our reach.  Never being able to surrender to and feel the not enoughness we keep at our strategies, convinced we will arrive in bliss, yet bliss can’t get in.  It can’t reach us or touch us because it is a completely different frequency than what we are currently constituting ourselves as (ie. not enough).  We can’t see how we are keeping all of it at bay.  We just believe that we are almost there while continuing to convince ourselves that there is somewhere else we can get too.  The thing is that there isn’t.  So that idea that we have in our mind stays just as that, an idea of fulfillment, bliss, and well-being that we continually chase and almost just touch, but never live. 

FINDING THE GIFT  

Being all that you are

Inside of every wound there is a gift.  In fact the entire spiritual journey is moving from wound into the gift of whatever the wound gives us.  It’s seeing how we couldn’t be who we are and share what we do without that wound.  However we can’t always just jump right into the gift from the wounded place.  There is learning involved (ie. transformation) before we can resolve, come to peace and give the gift that the wound gave us.  Even though most of us know conceptually that we are enough, many have not embodied it.  If they had we would be living in an incredibly self-empowered world, which we are not.  Rather we live constricted by our inner fears of expressing ourselves, of being not accepted by others, of not being able to make it, of not deserving, of being judged, cast out, separated, and of being left alone.  We feel these fears as limitations and often rather than noticing our deep story of inadequacy and unlovability we go into feeling like we don’t know how.  We think if we just knew the how or the what of our next step or steps then everything would be clear and we would feel better.

Not knowing how or what is our biggest “excuse”, if you will, to not move into our expression, power and worth.  It’s how we avoid, deny or escape the feelings of not enoughness.  The first step in any transformational process is courage.  That means courage to feel not enough rather than stuff it down or pretend that it’s not there (ie. spiritual bypassing).  Without acknowledging and feeling not enough we don’t have the energy, fuel or momentum to take new actions.  This is why we frequently feel like we don’t know how/what.  While it’s true that you may not know all of the details, when you face not enoughness head on you generate an inner power that knows how to figure it all out, even the stuff you currently don’t know.  

Often I hear people say that they don’t want to feel certain things, such as not enoughness, because they feel like they will never get out of them.  Like they will fall into a pit of despair from which there is no escape.  I find that the real pit of despair is avoidance of what we are feeling and/or staying in the story of what we are feeling, while not actually feeling what we feel.  The result of avoiding what we feel is that we experience stagnation, we feel stuck, we don’t grow, we continue to feel bound in limitation and never generate the energy we need to change.  While feeling things, like our sense of unworthiness or not enoughness, is not a picnic in the park, it will with time generate movement in your system.  You will start to see a pathway through.  You will begin to feel a hunger surge up inside of you.  You will take new action, think different thoughts, and see things in novel ways.  A power will rise up in you that says, “Enough of this!  I am enough! I do deserve! I do matter!”.  You become less and less afraid to express or be yourself.  You will discover the paradox of the simultaneity of relaxation and action.  

The gift in having the courage to face, feel and transform is that you give what you learn.  The world needs the gift of you.  No one else can be the specific frequency or flavor that you are.  Your flare is perfectly as it should be.  None is better or worse.  Moving that knowing from concept into embodiment is the missing link.  To surrender to who you are, just as you are, perceived inadequacies and all, everything included, is when you truly become a channel for all that you are here to be.  

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

Say Bye-Bye to Worry

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SAY BYE-BYE👋 TO WORRY 

Your most intimate friend

Most of us are familiar with worry.  In fact worry might be your most intimate friend.  We tend to spend more time with worry than we do our partner, family members, kids or friends.  Worry is often so intimate that it’s present inside of all of the activities that we do.  It’s there when we shower, while we exercise, as we’re working, and while we are getting groceries or pumping gas.  Subtly, or not so subtly, in the background is the thought, “will things work out” or “will things be ok”?  It’s like we are deathly afraid of how all the details of life will orchestrate themselves and we can’t seem to let it be.  Our best attempt to not feel totally helpless or powerless is to worry.  Somehow we think if we worry about whatever it is we are worried about then we can control how it all happens.  However because we know we can’t really control it, we stay in a perpetual state of worry, which you could also call stress or overwhelm.

In order to let go of worry we also have to let go of whatever outcome we are attempting to control.  Whatever thing we want to happen or not happen, the timing of something, and the flow of the details in between, we have to let it all have its own will.  We must give away our hope, agenda, insistence, and demand for the thing to happen in any particular way, or at all.  This is where it feels tricky to us because we perceive potential loss or lack.  If things don’t happen how we desire in our minds for them to happen, at the bare minimum we perceive inconvenience, and beyond that, that something might be lost.  That loss could be of anything.  A new possibility coming to birth, a relationship, how someone views or sees us, money, time or other resources, objects of our desire, a job, a project, our health, other’s health, and on and on.  We will do whatever we can not to experience loss of what we desire because loss feels like death, failure and can lead us into hopelessness, depression or despair.  So rather than facing the potential of all of that, instead we choose worry, because worry feels easier to feel compared to feeling the death of our dreams and desires.

The thing about worry though is that it hijacks the shit out of us.  We fall out of presence and into thinking about all of the things.  We are not available for what actually matters to us, who it is that we want to be and our chosen state of being.  We lose touch with the magic of life and ourselves.  On a physiologically level our body gets to experience the chemical cascade of worry, which looks like the inability to digest our food, sleep well, or feel energized, and we experience pain and tension in the body.  Then we get fixated on trying to fix all of these bodily expressions without addressing the core essence which creates their arising, which is worry.  While moving towards feeling loss, lack, or death of our dreams feels like a less desirable choice, you must ask yourself if it’s really worth the cost to keep avoiding your sense of feeling lack of control over all of the happenings of your life.   

THE OTHER SIDE OF WORRY 

Mystery revealing itself

We tend not to think too much about what is on the other side of worry.  Mostly we either wait in anxious anticipation, or we take massive action because we can’t sit still, and then we hope for the best.  The “best” being whatever our chosen preference is for the desired outcome.  The funny thing about being human is that we have such a small perspective on things, and despite our tiny viewpoint we think we know what’s best to happen.  It is a form of self-deceit that is mostly unconscious, because the majority of us have good intentions for what we desire.  However those good intentions, and our ideas of what those intentions look like when they are manifested at the physical level, interferes with our seeing.  It distorts and filters our perceptions.  We then create judgments or assumptions about what we are seeing rather than simply seeing it.  Those judgments and assumptions always feel bad because they are coming from our tiny little vantage point that thinks it knows what it’s looking at, all the while it’s missing 99.99% of the picture.  

Big picture here is that we have no idea what, the details or the timing of how things are supposed to occur.  We have ideas of how we would like it to all happen, but our knowledge of the actual reality of it stops there.  If we don’t recognize the limitation of our vantage point, of our filters and the distorted picture we have based on our preferences, then we will fall or push our way into control.  We will feel anxious.  We will experience overwhelm.  We will complain about being stressed.  All as avoidance to feel how much control we don’t have over things.  

Not having control over things does not mean that you are without power.  In fact it means the opposite.  Surrender is the ultimate power.  This is what you discover on the other side of worry.  When you stop avoiding feeling potential loss, a sense of powerlessness, or inconvenience you arrive into a state of presence and openness for life to reveal itself to you.  Presence in the ever present moment of revelation, meaning you come to know what it’s like to be in the unfolding rather than trying to managing the unfolding.  When you are no longer trying to control something it frees things up to respond and move, and what I really mean by that is that it frees you up to respond and move.  You become less rigid and fixated and more able to be a part of the unfolding.  This is also where the power of intention shines.  You can still intend for whatever it is you desire to intend, but rather than forcing the flow of it, you are in the flow with it.  It’s not two opposing forces, but one force moving and responding to itself.  You are not separate from what you desire, you are one with it, but as soon as you place what you desire out there onto a happening, object, event or person, you relate to it as separate from you and you have to figure out how to control or manipulate it in order for your preference to be experienced or expressed.  

The other side of worry is acceptance and peace.  It is a relinquishment of thinking that you know and a becoming present to what actually wants to happen, rather than what you think you want to happen.  You let things breathe, which ironically also means you breathe.  You experience life force returning to its unimpeded flow.  The intelligence that is life organizes itself with you included.  It still doesn’t mean that you will get what you want or that your desired preference will occur in the timing you desire, or even at all.  It does however mean that you breathe, you are at peace and in acceptance, your body receives easeful chemical cascades that allow it to function well and you get to be in the dance of the unfolding of the mystery revealing itself.

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

INTENTION & FOCUS

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INTENTION & FOCUS 

A dash of magic

Intention guides life.  Life follows focus.  To some degree we all know this yet most of us aren’t really utilizing the power of it in our day to day life.  Rather we are often unfocused, scattered and distracted.  We decide for a moment or maybe two, that we want to feel a certain way, walk in a particular direction, or take hold of our state of being, but in the next moment we forget it.  We then wonder why we can’t seem to have the healing, life or state of being that we desire.  Then, on top of it all, we have a long list of impossibility beliefs to add into the mix.  If we muster up our will and utilize our focus, then this or that impossibility belief rears its head.  Feeling overwhelmed by it all, we stop in our tracks and give up.  We return to distraction because we can’t seem to find a way through.  We find ourselves feeling stuck, like we (or things) will never change and we feel resigned to life the way it is.  

I think the prime difference between people who feel like they are living aligned and those that struggle to stay aligned is harnessing the power of intention and focus, along with not being afraid of a little magical thinking.  If you’ve ever spent any time around a baby you know that they see the world through the lens of magic.  Something appears in front of their visual field and they get absolutely ecstatic.  They have no idea how it arrived or even what it is.  They are simply enamored and in a state of bliss by whatever it is they see.  They attempt to interact with it however they can, having no idea at all what to do with it.  This is what we call playing.  Then due to the fact that they have no label, definition or meaning, all they experience is magic.  Magic being the essence of the thing and not the thing itself.  As soon as we give names to things we no longer see the magic, and rather see only what we’ve decided something is.  All other possibilities flatten.  

The other thing to notice is that when babies are playing they are totally focused.  They quite dislike it when you remove their “object of magic”, which they are entirely engrossed in.  Their attention might move from toy to toy, but they are just as present with the next non-labelled, no meaning magical thing that arrives into their sensory experience.  As we become toddlers and begin to develop our analytical thinking mind we want to know what everything is and what it all means.  We start to get lost in the world of concepts rather than in the pure potential of what is.  Our minds learn to multi-task and focus on facts, details and the like.  We lose connection to the essence of things and begin to focus on the things themselves.   We move out of present moment and into thought.  

IMAGINATION & REALITY 

Increasing will

And well who doesn’t love thinking?  To just let your mind wander from this thing to that thing.  To be lost in thought.  To contemplate.  To imagine.  It’s fun to imagine, yet for many it stops here.  You might think that imagination is just imagination, not reality.  You may even be very good at imagining, yet if you don’t have any intention or focus behind your imaginations they remain formless.  This is not a problem, again it’s great fun to imagine in our minds, it’s only that you will not have a different human world life experience.  You will be living in thought or concept.  There will be a disconnection between your imaginal world (you could also say your desired world) and what you actually experience.  We are at a stage of human development, in this space-time nexus, where there is massive disconnection between our desired realities and the ones we are living in.  It doesn’t need to be that way, however it does take a heap of intentional focus in order to bridge the seeming gap.

Intentional focus might not be as hard as it seems, but it may appear to come at some sacrifice.  See when we align ourselves with our intention and focus we have to let all of the other stuff go.  That other stuff consists of a lot.  It includes, but is not limited to all of our divergent or distracting thoughts, all of our tendencies to avoid what we think can or can’t be, our habits of comfort, our low demand energy states, our pictures or ideas of what our intention is supposed to look, be or feel like. We have so so so so many ideas, and while ideas are great for imagining possibilities, they can also get in the way of letting the picture of it all reveal itself to you.  Our desires or imaginations are like the seeds, our intention and focus the water, and the sprouting flower just sprouts as it does.  We don’t get to decide it’s appearance.  We can guide and set conditions for it, but we can determine its expression.  We can only nurture it’s becoming and then let it be what it will be. 

If we are too fixated in our analytical mind then we will overly focus on the form of what is.  We will perceive disappointment if the form doesn’t match our desire.  If we return to our infant pre-mind state, we can see only the essence, the magic, the seed, the desire and then accept the form, the picture, the image that is the result.  This acceptance is very different than resignation.  Acceptance sees the beauty in the appearance regardless, where resignation sees only what is doesn’t want in the appearance.  The distinction is the seer (ie. you).  From where do you see?  

Harnessing the power of intention and focus is learning to increase your will.  To be determined without attachment.  This is the dance of will and surrender.  Coming from and with everything you’ve got and then with full embrace letting it be as it is.  Giving or aligning your whole self to your intention in any given moment is magic.  Essence is seen and the forms naturally reconfigure in response.  This is not a forceful or manipulative will, but rather a sacrificial will of sorts.  A will that will give away all of its petty distractions, impossibility beliefs and preconceived ideas for its true desire or intention.  A will that aligns behinds itself and that is self-generative.  A will that takes all of you, but of which you can find absolutely nothing better to give yourself too.  A will that eventually becomes much bigger than you.

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

LANGUAGE OF THE HEART

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LANGUAGE OF THE HEART

Opening the heart

Each of our hearts speaks a language.  The essence of that language is love, which gets shared and expressed in different ways.  Some hearts speak through vibration using words, tones or other sounds either written or spoken.  Some hearts express through art, movement and touch, and still others through just still being.  The heart does not need words, but it might use words to express itself.  It does not need to draw, mold, move or touch, but it might do so in order to share itself with others.  While the language of the heart can be interpreted by placing words, labels, definitions and meanings upon it, it is beyond all ideas and concepts.  The language of the heart tends to evoke feeling in us.  A felt sense that touches us in some way or brings with it a sense of connection, depth and beyondness.  

In order to both express and receive the language of the heart your heart must be open.   You might wonder what it means exactly to have an open heart.  Simply put having an open heart means that you are without personal agenda, not attempting to protect your personal identity from others, but rather that you have a desire to share, express or serve others in some way through being yourself.  It means not being guarded from potential threats or loses to your personal sense of self (i.e. ego mind).  It means being available to and for life rather than closed off from it.  An open heart listens rather than insists.  It shares without force or manipulation.  It feels whatever is present without judgment or story of any kind.  It’s inclusive and discerning.  It cares about the essence of you and others.  It can be strong and even passionately ferrous at times, while rooted in being of service to love.  It doesn’t tolerate b.s. and yet loves all nonetheless.  It recognizes or knows that while life includes you it’s not about you.  

The language of the heart also has a different vibrational quality than what our thoughts, emotions or physical body have.  If you think of it in terms of wavelength, our physical bodies have the longest wavelength.  This is why they appear more solid, gross or dense.  Our emotions have a slightly shorter wavelength than our physical bodies, but a longer wavelength than our thoughts.  This is why you often have to slow yourself down in order to recognize what you are feeling and also why when you do feel something you move at a slower pace than if you are thinking.  Thoughts have a shorter wavelength than our emotions or our physical body.  This is why if you spend a lot of time thinking you might feel ungrounded or find yourself in a fast pace.  The frequency of the heart or soul body is an even shorter wavelength.  It is the subtlest of the bodies described here. Just like you can change the channel of the radio and tune into a different frequency, you can change the tone/tension in your nervous system and tune into these different frequencies of you.  No frequency/body is better than the other.  The key is to have them all energized and accessible to you.  Network entrainments help you shift the tonal patterns of your nervous system so that you can do this very thing.   

HEART VIBRATIONS 

Clearing the channels

The language and frequencies of the heart open us into a more multidimensional nature of reality.  While the mind tends to keep us in a linear, logical and 3D view of life, the heart breaks and bends all of those supposed rules.  This is why attempting to interpret or put meanings onto the expressions of the heart never really works.  We can do it, but really we just end up with a whole bunch of projections and the essence of the thing is covered up underneath all of our ideas and meanings about it.  Yet this is what the human mind likes to do.  It flattens the heart frequency out to its frequency so that the world seems safe, ordinary and consistent.  It’s boring, yet it’s what we tend to do so that we can make “sense” of it all, so that our minds feel like they understand something and can accept it.  While this isn’t bad it does postpone or dampen our access to our heart.  Even though the language of the heart’s expressions are varied and infinite their core message is the same.  Unification and oneness is the beat of their drum.  Knowing this can ease the mind’s endless search for meaning.  All meanings will eventually cease to be relevant in this realization.  

When we are ready and available the language of our heart simply expresses through us.  It’s not something we have to figure out how to do.  Your mind will really dislike that, yet it’s the way it is.  You can’t figure out your heart.  I mean you can try, but good luck.  Now there may be skill sets you need to learn or worldly knowledge that you need to acquire in order to give form to your heart’s frequency, but the form is not the essence of your heart.  Rather only the means to share it.  Don’t get too lost in perfecting forms and rather focus on the heart frequency that you are.  If more people did this we would have a lot less boring or mind numbing jobs that people are just trying to get through.  It’s not about the thing you do, but who you be inside of what you do.

While you can’t figure out your heart, you can prepare for its arrival and clear out the vessel of you for its expression.  Preparation for its arrival is doing the clean up work of all of your personal agendas.  This means doing the inner and outer work of dismantling the need to protect your personal separate self, as if there really even is one.  Remember this is what it takes to open the heart.  When the heart is open, expression is natural.  Just like when the bladder is open you naturally pee.  There’s nothing to figure out, it’s mechanics.   However if there is a bunch of stones in your bladder it makes it harder for the pee to come out.  That’s the clean up work you need to do.  Clear out the stones that interfere with you heart’s natural flow.  

There is nothing too non-ordinary for the heart.  In fact you can kind of think of the language of heart as non-ordinary.  If you are still self-conscious about looking weird, not being accepted by others, being judged or failing, then you know where to begin your clean up work.  When you are in your heart’s frequency you honestly don’t really care about that stuff anymore.  It’s just a non issue.  Your only intention is to be of service in the ways that your heart desires to express.  Your mind frequently won’t know what any of it means or what will come of it, but again you care less and less about needing to know.  You will find freedom in being you.

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