love

Letting Your Soul Be Seen

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LETTING YOUR SOUL BE SEEN 

Finding your heart

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

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

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

UNWINDING THE TWISTS & TURNS 

Doing the inner work

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

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

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

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

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

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

INEXHAUSTIBLE SOURCE OF LOVE

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INEXHAUSTIBLE SOURCE OF LOVE  

Recognizing what is

What moves us?  What drives us?  What is our fuel source? What are we made of?  At the source of everything is love.  We know this, at least we know it conceptually, but how do we really grok this, get this and live this?  Love is boundless, infinite and inexhaustible, yet why does it seem scarce and limited inside of our experience?  Let’s first be clear on our definitions.  Love is not an emotion, but it is the source of all emotion.  Love is not a thought, but it is the source of all thought.  Love is not a sensation, but it is the source of all sensations.  Understand we often confuse love for its expressions rather than recognize it as the source of all expressions.  Love is the birthplace/birth space of all of creation.  It’s the very fabric of the universe, that which everything is made from.  

Love is exchanged or expressed when it is recognized, acknowledged or made aware of by you, by your awareness.  The primary reason that love seems to be limited or scare is because it remains largely unrecognized in our day to day life.  Whatever we tune our awareness to or focus on we see.  Sometimes, or rather oftentimes, we look out and we see our judgments, labels, stories and ideas about what we think we are seeing rather than seeing what is, which is love.  When our judgments, labels, stories and ideas dominate our awareness, which they do for most people, then our life experience is the fabrication of those things.  We see what we think rather than what actually is.   

You can see here that love is not what’s limited, but only our experience of it is limited based on what we choose to see.  To see all as love, as what it is, is a high ask of ourselves.  Our conditioning is such that to our mind’s stories and ideas this seems ridiculous.  We have a multitude of perspectives, experiences, situations and things that we do not, and often refuse to see as love.  For example things that have created physical, mental or emotional pain for ourselves or others we tend not to see as love.  Things that we don’t understand or that we disagree with we tend to leave out of love.   While some expressions of love may be sourced from a more distorted or confused perspective, at their core they are still love.  When love in its purity isn’t recognized as such then it continues to play out and create expressions of love that are more twisted or bent.  Not until the source of love can be looked upon and seen as what it is and have itself reflected back to it, can it come to see itself and unbind some of its bent or confused perspectives.  But we tend to not do this for ourselves or for others.  Rather we look at the confused expression of love and offer only our judgments, fears and condemnation.  Hence we live in a collective reality where love seems limited and scarce.   

KNOWING YOURSELF AS LOVE 

Seeing self as the source

In order to see all as love, and to recognize love at its source, you must first know yourself as the source of love.  You are not able to mirror or reflect love to other aspects of creation if you don’t first know yourself as it.  While this might seem obvious it’s a pretty big missing link for most.  The primary human wounding is unworthiness and unlovability, which is the opposite end of the spectrum of knowing yourself as love.  Knowing yourself as love is seeing yourself as it.  It’s beyond sensing, feeling or thinking of yourself as love.  Although those are great entry points they still don’t go direct to the source of love, but rather utilize expressions of it.  To be rested as love, to know it without doubt, to recognize yourself unequivocally as it, to no longer need to think, feel or sense yourself as it because you are it, is to know yourself as love.  

Why don’t we know it?  Primarily because we’ve agreed to forget for learning sake.  Also because there are not many pure mirrors available on this planet to reflect this knowing to us.  The result is that we don’t see ourselves very clearly.  It’s like we are constantly looking at reflections in the mirror that are bent, twisted and distorted, except they look “normal” to us.  They look like who we think we are and therefore we’ve come to identify with those reflections more and more as the years have gone by.  Just because something feels normal or has become familiar to us, such as our sense of identity, it doesn’t mean it’s accurate.  As we’ve come to believe and accept the reflections given to us from distorted mirrors about what/who we are, we’ve naturally created our life experiences based upon these beliefs and see life through our bent perspectives.  Hence again we experience a world scarce and limited in love and genuinely can’t figure out why because we don’t recognize the source of the reflections is our very own self, and how we see our very own being is what we experience life to be.  

If we are indeed love, then how do we know ourselves to be it?  The most direct path would be to simply accept it as fact.  This is however a radical shift for most people’s belief systems and therefore direct acceptance, while entirely possible, is not highly probable.  The more experiential way is to commit/devote to seeing yourself as love.  Multiple times a day reflect to yourself that you are love.  I suggest not focusing on your form when you do this.  Many times people will practice loving their form/body, or qualities they have, or things that they do for themselves or others.  Again those are expressions of love, but they are not recognizing the source of it.  Instead go to the source.  The essence of you is love.  It is what you are made of.  It is what/who you are.  Yes your body, your qualities  and all the things you do are expressions of love, but they aren’t the source of it.  Come to know yourself, your actual self, not the fabricated body-personality of you that is made up of thoughts, labels and ideas that have been conditioned.  As you get this, begin to see others as this same source, and all things/experiences as well.   It is not out of your hands/heart to shift this entire creation.  The change is and has always been with and inside of us.  As we insist on seeing ourselves as what we are, and including the rest of creation inside of that perspective, we live a very different reality where love is abundant and inexhaustible.

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

BELIEVING IN MAGIC

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BELIEVING IN MAGIC 

Possibility, imagination & creation

Most of us love the idea of magic, but few of us actually believe in it.  It seems that magic is reserved only for small children.  Once we reach the age of “logical” brain development, magic becomes silly fantastical play that only little kids do and since we are becoming a “big” kid, magic goes out the window for us.  Why do we stop playing and believing in magic?  Why do we get so serious and realistic?  It’s really all about what we value as a society and what gets reinforced.  We get acknowledgment and praise for getting good grades, excelling at math and science, and for doing our school work well.  We don’t get acknowledgment for how well we play, the worlds we create with our imagination or how much we believed in magic today.  Since there is an innate human need to belong and be part of the group, we follow what the collective agrees to value even if it isn’t in alignment for us.  Despite our best efforts to stay connected to our steam of magic and all of its infinite possibilities, we often lose connection to it our mid-late childhood development.  

What is magic?  Magic is the space of possibility, imagination and creation.  What we often fail to realize is that we are imagining our entire reality.  We each are already master magicians (ie. creators).  The world we create/are creating is flat, mundane and logical because that is what has been reinforced to us as what’s real and important.  Therefore that is what we see and continue to create through our seeing.  In this way reality appears to be devoid of magic, but rather it’s that we’ve used our magical powers to create this seemingly ordinary experience.  Inside of this experience we pretend to know what is going to happen next, we create plans, schedules and routines that give us a sense of familiarity, and the world of infinite possibilities gets scaled down into just a few known potential outcomes for how things can be and operate.

You can see that regardless of whether or not you believe in magic, you are utilizing it everyday.  It’s simply a matter of tuning in, paying attention and inquiring into what it is you are creating.  We create with our imagination and our seeing.  Whatever you can imagine is possible you can create.  Again you are already doing it all of the time, it’s only that your range of what is possible is likely quite narrow and your active imaginative qualities are somewhat off line.  You keep creating the same reality because you aren’t conjuring up anything novel from the well of your creator powers.  The question then becomes how do you get yourself back on line, activating your imagination and making magic that makes your reality feel alive, invigorating, exciting, mysterious and blissful.  

GETTING TO THE HEART 

The well-spring of magic

The portal into our active imaginative qualities and creating a more magical reality experience for ourselves is finding our way into our heart.  We are born open and in the state of love.  This is why a young child’s heart is naturally open and why they have access to the world of their magic.  Even if you don’t perceive what they perceive or join them in their creations, they are in their own magically reality all of the time.  That is until they learn the seemingly “fixed and solid” natural of reality that we condition them with and they start to believe that they are a product of creation rather than the magician/creator of it.  This is when the world of infinite possibilities becomes only a small handful of options and we forget, lose touch or disconnect from the fact that we are the ones doing all of the creating.  

As time goes on, and we have more and more experiences of being human, we move further and further away from the source of ourselves.  This means we forget ourselves more and more with time.  In addition, many of the experiences that we have being human don’t feel good and we learn to protect ourselves from physical, emotional and mental pain.  Protection means that we shut down, close off and become less open and available to participate with creation.  Since we’ve forgotten that we are the magician/creator we feel powerless to the circumstances of life, and helpless to how we feel, sense and relate to life and others.  In essence it’s kind of big, confusing mess.  

Finding our way back into our heart often means feeling the things that shut it down in the first place.  When we feel the pain it breaks our hearts back open.  We move through the feelings rather than stay closed down and shut off.  We open into the pain rather than protect ourselves from it.  This is healing in a nutshell.  It’s not complicated, but it’s also not necessarily easy.  It takes quite a bit of courage and ginormous heap of trust in ourselves to reopen.  Well it might seem easier to stay closed and continue life as the mundane status quo, you will feel unsatisfied and non-magical.  Your experience of life will be functional, but it won’t necessarily be fun.  

Your heart is the well-spring of magic.  It makes everything come alive.  It allows all possibilities to emerge.  It activates your imagination and helps you remember that you are the magician of this creation.  The reward of feeling the pain becomes clearly evident as you embark on the journey.  Your commitment and devotion to the path is key.  Some days it will feel hard to find your heart, but your desire to do so will be your guiding light.  If your level of commitment or devotion is high then before you know it there will be nothing that doesn’t fit inside of your heart.  You will have engulfed all of creation in love.  This means you will undoubtedly experience magic as your lived reality moment to moment.  As always the choice lies in your hands, your heart and your desire.   

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

WANT WHAT YOU WANT MORE

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WANT WHAT YOU WANT MORE 

Stop living mixed frequencies 

Oftentimes we find ourselves mixed.  We want this, but feel that.  As badly as we think or say that we want to experience certain things or feelings more, we simultaneously tolerate not experiencing what we say we desire.  I call this living in mixed frequency.  When we have mixed frequencies we create experiences in our lives that don’t quite match up with our true desires and life doesn’t have that continuous flow to it.  We often feel like we are walking up hill, just getting through each day.   This is a low to neutral energy state where life feels mundane and we don’t really experience the magic of it.

When you find yourself in this state of being, of low to neutral energy levels, your experience of life may be ok, but it’s not great.  You may feel frustration or you may just feel like this is as good as it gets.  You might know that there’s more because you’ve tasted more, but you can’t seem to live there all of the time and you aren’t exactly sure why.  The reason is most likely because you have mixed frequencies and are tolerating things in your life that you don’t want.  “Things” that you don’t want could be physical in nature, but also, and maybe more importantly include tolerating thoughts, feelings and states of being that are incongruent with what you say you want.  For example you might say that you want to feel love all of the time.  You may tell yourself that your entire life is about feeling love.  In fact you may even think that the reason you exist is to feel and express love, and yet you tolerate feeling unloving.  Hence the birth of a mixed frequency.  You’re confused because your life isn’t what you want it to be and yet you don’t see that it’s because you are incongruent.  

We tend not to see this because we are generally not taught that we are responsible for our state of being.  Rather we believe that our state of being happens to us.  This means that when life looks like we want it to or expect it too, then we feel the state of being we desire.  When xyz happens then I feel love, or joy, or bliss.  We have it all backwards.  State of being comes first, and the happenings of life come second.  How it really works is when you feel love, joy, or bliss then xyz happens.  This is a massive rewire for most people, and it’s where our true conscious creator-ship power lives.  It’s where we learn that the stuff we create is made up of what we are.  If we don’t start with love, joy or bliss then whatever it is that we create has a different energetic signature.  That being the signature of whatever state of being we were in when we created, even if we were unconscious of our state of being or in automatic pilot mode while we where creating.   

TURN UP YOUR VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY

Making the shift

Making the shift from being subjected to your state of being, to being the source of your state of being, is revolutionary for your  experience and creation of life.  Yes you are the creator of this experience you are having whether or not it feels like you are, and whether or not you like what you’ve created.  So you might wonder how to stop creating from a state of mixed frequencies.  The first and perhaps only piece, is to turn up your vibrational frequency by wanting what you want more.  Turning up you desire knob.  Many people don’t feel that desirous.  Yet desire is your creative power.  The intensity with which you desire is the intensity with which you create what you want and un-mix your frequencies.  If you really wanted to run a marathon than you would get up every morning and practice running.  If you really wanted to be a doctor you would take all the courses you needed to get the degree.  If you really wanted to feel bliss, joy or love you would focus intensely on feeling those states of being.  It really isn’t rocket science, it’s simply desire.  

What it boils down to is that we don’t desire enough what we say/think we desire.  The great thing is that you can always increase your desire levels.  You simply have to make what you desire more important.  You have to really mean it.  You can call this discipline, or commitment, or devotion, but ultimately it’s desire.  Our human nature is quite lazy and so if it doesn’t perceive that it “has to be” disciplined or committed, then we won’t discipline or commit ourselves.  The result of that is that we tolerate things in our life that we really don’t want and we live in the energy low to neutral place.  It’s helpful to have a bit of discomfort or unease in order to propel us into action, into desire, into wanting what we really want.  If we are comfortable or too easeful we tend to flatten out.  

You could use the analogy of weight here.  Maybe you weigh 5-10 lbs more than you would like to, but you tolerate that because its not super uncomfortable yet.  When you get to 20-30 lbs more than you would like to weigh you are more uncomfortable and therefore have more momentum to commit to something in order to get to the weight you actually desire to be at.  Same thing applies for our internal state.  Maybe you tolerate not being in love, bliss or joy 50-60% of your day, but when its at 85-95% it gets to be unbearable and something must be done.  We all have different tolerance points.  As always I recommend making your tolerance level as close to 0% as you are willing.  If you do it will dramatically decrease and even end the mixed frequency cycle for you.  You will no longer be confused about why don’t experience what you know is possible, because you will be experiencing it more and more.  Your energy will move into higher or richer states of being.  This is simply an effect of being more in alignment with yourself, or said another way, more desirous of what you actually desire.  Be bold, and want what you want more despite your stories around it.  Dare to come into more alignment with yourself.  Utilize any tiny amount of uncomfortableness or unease as an indicator that you are not fully aligned with yourself somewhere and take action immediately.  Stop tolerating.  Discover that you are the creator of what you experience.  Turn up your vibrational frequency.  Experience aligned living.  

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

THERE IS NO VEIL

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THERE IS NO VEIL 

Why we feel disconnected from knowing

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

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

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

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

LOVE IS ALWAYS ACCESSIBLE

Choosing knowing & connection

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

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

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

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

RESPOND TO EVERYTHING WITH LOVE

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RESPOND TO EVERYTHING  WITH LOVE

Dancing with the mind

We tend to live quite polarized.  Liking this thing, not liking that thing.  Feeling joy when life looks like we want it to and frustration when it doesn’t.  As much as we like to think that we are always going with the flow and living in a state of surrendered acceptance, the truth is most of the time we are not.  The moment something looks or feels other than our preference we tend to go into some level of resistance.  Rather than welcoming what is present we tense up, get anxious and begin to strategize how we are going to survive or get what we want.  Our minds create worst case scenario stories about how what is, isn’t good, isn’t right and is going to turn out badly for us.

All of this puts us in a state of vigilant survival, which then activates us to react with self-protection.  Some of our ways of self-protection are more primitive and others more sophisticated.  The more primitive reactions are to shut down, withdraw, check out, avoid, attack or disappear completely.  More sophisticated reactions are to manage, rationalize, control, or contain whatever is occurring that we don’t prefer.  Be clear that whether we are utilizing a primitive or a more sophisticated reaction, both are means of self-protection in order to attempt to not experience what is occurring or manipulate it in some way.  Some of the more sophisticated self-protective reactions are viewed as “normal” or commonly accepted behaviors, but are still are coming from resistance to, rather than acceptance of what is.

It’s a tricky dance to not be taken by the mind because we often believe the stories it tells.  It’s hard not to as we’ve learned to look through the lens of it’s perspectives and have created an entire life through those lenses, both individually and collectively.  What we believe is so, or better said, what we believe is our experience.  This makes it hard to refute the mind because we will always experience validation of our beliefs of the stories it tells.  When it says “this is bad” we believe this is bad.  When it says “this is good” we believe this is good.  Hence the near constant state of polarization we live inside of.    The thing that many people don’t realize is that when the mind says “this is bad” you don’t have to believe it, or when they mind says “this is good”, again you don’t have to believe it.  See the bigger truth is that you, me, and everyone in between has no idea what is bad or what is good.  The best we can do is make assumptions about stuff and have preferences for things to be a certain way, but we have no freaking real idea what’s going on.  However because we think we know what is bad and what is good, we suffer and go into self-protection attempting to get things to be good again when we believe they are bad.  We appear to not suffer when things are good, but even when things are good we are often still suffering because our state of goodness is contingent upon things appearing/being a certain way that we deem as good.   

BEYOND STORY

Become the Creator

I have found that there is only one assumption free, agenda free, polarization free way to respond to the occurrences of life, which is to respond to everything with love.  It’s the only way to not personally suffer and to not create suffering through your insistence or perspective of bad or wrong.  Seeing things/self as bad, wrong or somehow lacking something, is the root of suffering.  To respond instead with love to everything that arises is to see it as complete, full, and perfect even if the mind views it as distorted or messed up.  Even distortion and mess is a perfect expression of the creator’s creation.  We somehow know this, yet refuse to believe it when it looks, feels or becomes personal to us, to our preferences, lifestyles and survival impulses.

Something we often forget, or perhaps don’t know, is that we are ultimately the story tellers.  It often seems too simple to us that we could just tell and believe a different story, yet we can.  In fact we are the only ones that can.  When we start the practice of responding to every single sensation, feeling, thought, world event, relational interaction and life experience with love, we open up the doorway inside the mind to write a different story or to end the stories all together.  You can write and believe whatever you so choose.  You can also stop writing and stop believing in anything at all.  There really are no rules here except the ones that you create.  For some this may seem or feel challenging.  One thing I hear people say is that they can’t get themselves to believe a different story.  For example if they feel bad, they just have to keep feeling bad and don’t see a way out if it.  They don’t see how by creating a different story they will feel better because they aren’t quite ready to let their current story go.  They want the appearance to change (their sensations, feelings, thoughts, some event, some experience) before they change their story.  However life works in the other direction.  We are the creators of what is.  What is does not inform us, we inform it.

We sometimes have strong attachments to the stories we believe about what things mean and how life works, and to our minds it may feel bad or wrong to turn our story around, even though the new story feels better.  Its’ a strange thing, but sometimes we want to hold onto grudges, wrong doings, or insisting that life, our body and everything else is not supporting us in some way.  This is a core story that runs deep throughout the human psyche.  You can transform it and you can thus forth have a different experience of life.  One that is free from insisting that the appearance of life look a certain way that you think means good.  One that is free from bad and good.  One where the only response is love, which is the response that always knows exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.  The more we respond with love the less “we” have to do.  The less life is up to us.  We rest more into trust and faith and the knowing that life is orchestrated in ways far beyond what our individual minds could ever fathom.  It is total possible to have this be your experience of life.  All that is required is that you stop insisting that you know anything.  You invite in whatever is present.  You respond to it with love.  You remain open to the magic and the mystery that reveals itself moment by moment.  You can’t know before you know.  You can only be present and know.  

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

MAGIC OF THE HEART

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MAGIC OF THE HEART 

Lived Remembrance 

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

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

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

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

YOUR HEART FREQUENCY 

Sound of Love

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

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

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

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

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

LOVING WHERE YOU ARE

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LOVING WHERE YOU ARE

Ending the chase of what’s next

It is no secret that we live in a near constant state of trying to get somewhere.  We make goals, create plans, and think about what is next.  We measure our progress from start to finish and course correct along the way.  Without some degree of forward momentum, and the feeling that we are creating or accomplishing what we set out to do, we often feel stuck or stagnant.  This itch to be other than where we are creates a gap inside of our experience.  That gap is a self-created illusion where we believe that there is somewhere to get and somewhere we think we’d rather be.  When we place ourselves inside that gap we miss what’s here as we are ambitiously move towards what is next.  

Rarely do we rest into and love exactly where we are.  There are many reasons for this.  Many people believe that what is here is not enough so they constantly strive for more.  The moment they arrive anywhere is the same moment they jump back into the gap between here and what’s next.  That sense of not enoughness can be personal and express as always attempting to make themselves better (self-improvement can fall into this category), or it can be projected onto external circumstances by always finding a new thing or cause that needs to be improved.  This is not to say that things, causes or personality traits can’t be shifted to express in more coherent ways, they absolutely can, but when it comes from a place of scarcity in where you are rather than abundance in where you are, its rooted rejection rather than acceptance.  This leads to a constant chase in attempting to get, rather than devoted service to what you love.

Other reasons people don’t rest and love exactly where they are is because they don’t trust that what’s here is good and right.  They have a belief that something is wrong or bad with what is present and that they must somehow change it in order for it to be good and right.  They bypass the goodness and rightness that’s here for their belief that it lives somewhere else.  In my opinion this is the true spiritual bypass.  People also tend to believe that the conditions of their life are dependent on them being able to fully express and be themselves, but this is backwards.  You fully expressing and being yourself creates the conditions of your life.  Since people believe the other way around they will go about trying to make the conditions of their life match their mind’s idea of what it thinks it needs in order to be rested and in love here.  This chasing of conditions is tempting because it seems to go somewhere and things appear to be happening in a forward direction, however it leads only to continuing your postponement of loving where you are.  Some people postpone in such a way for their entire life. 

MAKING CHANGE IN LOVE 

How you source

We tend to believe that we can’t make change in love.  Historically we have needed to be fed up, dissatisfied and frustrated with what is in order to have the fuel to create change in ourselves or the world.  Can you even fathom what it would be like to love where you are and also create movement or change?  I believe this is how it is done in most portions of the universe, but here on planet Earth we haven’t quite learned this yet.  We still hold strong to states of pain, suffering and dissatisfaction being our primary fuel for change.  Be clear that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, in fact it is currently required, I’m simply inviting that there is another way.  

In this moment entertain, feel, channel or drop into a state of full love and acceptance.  Do so right now in this very moment.  As you do notice how much energy becomes available to you.  Notice how you naturally overflow and emanate lightness and joy.  Feel the levity and also the fullness that’s here.  This is always here, its simply that you haven’t practiced paying attention in this way.  Instead you’ve practiced paying attention to what doesn’t work or feel good and for lack of a better term, lower states of energy.  You’ve focused on what has to be done, what needs fixed or improved, and how something is better somewhere other than here now.  You’ve created distance, but understand that this distance isn’t real.  Its a concept, a thought in your mind, nothing else.  It has no separate existence outside of your thought of it.  Just as easily as you create that thought of something will be better in the distance, you can create a thought of amazingness of what’s here right now.  

Just through the simplicity of shifting your focus you dramatically shift your energy state.  The more energy you feel the more easily movement and change naturally flow through you.  You don’t need to dislike or feel frustrated about what is in order to find a source of energy to create change.  You can both love what is now and then love what is next when it becomes now.  You don’t have to choose to love one moment over the next moment, you get to love both, and the changes that need to occur will.  The only real requirements are to watch where your focus goes and be in charge of it.  Deliberately choose the focus of your desire and know that it will determine the energy level that is available to you and how change will move through you.

To love what is, is to dissolve your agenda for what must be.  In giving your life over to your mission, to your purpose, to why you are, over and over and over again, you will always find yourself perfectly positioned and therefore life will also appear perfectly positioned to you.  You can’t find anything out there because there is no out there.  Distance is made up by you.  Your sense of location is unreal.  You can never actually move, you can only be.  Choose your being wisely through how you focus.  Know that change will always happen, but how it happens is up to you.  How you source your change makes all the difference.  Change sourced through love breeds more love.  Its silly to think other and yet many do.  Where you start you will end.  Where you create from will determine the creation. 

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

NO WHERE TO NOW HERE

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NO WHERE TO NOW HERE 

Stop trying to go somewhere

It’s curious where we are all trying to get.  Seems like there is always somewhere to go, some other destination to arrive at and some other experience to be gotten to already.  We live in this forward trajectory of next and next and next, while never realizing that we are living our former next now and that the nexts will keep coming indefinitely.  To pause our focus on what’s next and be where we are now seems trivial, mundane or as if its lacking something that we must get.  

One must wonder what fuels this quest to get something or somewhere other than where we are.  If we really just cut to the chase here, all trying to get somewhere other than where we are (which is impossible by the way) is rooted, fueled and motivated by a perception we have of lack.  We believe that something is not in our experience that should be or that we want to be in our experience.  So we attempt to fulfill that seeming void that we perceive.  That lack could be of anything.  Perhaps it’s lack of happiness, lack of feeling good, lack of freedom, lack of movement, lack of connection, lack of resources, lack of money, lack of love, lack of purpose and on and on.  

I promise you that however tempting and true it may seem that what you are looking for exists somewhere else, it does not.  There is nothing that exists “over there” that doesn’t also exist here now.  If we take it a step further there isn’t even really an “over there” or anything other than now.  Try to find proof that something outside of now exists.  To find proof you would somehow have to prove that you could be other than existence, essentially that you could not exist.  Try to not exist, to not be, to not is, to not be here and let me know how it goes and if you find success.  

There is only now happening and now is all that ever happens.  To live this is to be in eternal peace.  This is the end of resistance and of all getting, striving, attaining, moving towards, and progress.  To not fight with where you are, which is now and to not fight what is, relaxes everything inside of you and therefore your experience relaxes as well.  When now is recognized and received you work inside the moment, with creation, with the unfolding, rather than as a separate object that is trying to get somewhere else or to the next thing.  Experiences and appearances continue to move and change, but there is no more trying to get things to change.  You are, all is, and this moment which is all moments, can be nothing other than fully perfect and complete.  No lack.  Nothing missing.  No where to go or get.  All remembers and sees what it is and that nothing ever left itself.   

LETTING EVERYTHING GO 

Release all wanting of things to be different

Let everything go.  Let everything be.  Want nothing from anything.  This is the way to know freedom.  This is the way to be at peace forever.  This is the way to have everything you truly desire, which is everlasting presence.  To want something or someone to show up differently, act differently, be differently than they are, is to attempt to control life or control others and not allow them to be themselves.  When we hope, pray, or plea that things will be different than they are, we lose our center and act in ways that are not in alignment or integrity with who we are in order to get what we think we want.  We then doubt, question, over-analyze, lash out, withdraw, react and endlessly stir in the thoughts of our mind.  The result of this is that we feel stuck, trapped, lost, powerless and at the mercy of others or to our experience of life.  

Our attachments to our ideas of what we want and the forms that those ideas take, steer the boat of our life if we let them.  In fact most people spend their life trying to get all of their desires to manifest so that they can give themselves the permission slip to relax and feel good.  Our desires are the guiding light, the spark that fuels the choices we make and the directions we choose, however when we attach to the outcome of our desires in order to get a perceived need or want met that we feel is missing, we have a recipe for suffering.  

In letting everything go we are open to receive everything as it is.  We allow our desires to take on whatever forms and shapes that they want to take on rather than the ones we think they should take on.  In this way we let the mystery of what will be reveal itself to us here now rather than fixating on how it will turn out, which puts us in the “next” mode.  This frees us from having to control life or others.  For most of us controlling isn’t our most natural state so it feels bad to us yet we continue to do it because we perceive lack.  Letting everything go means letting go of our control, letting go of our insistences, letting go of our rights, wrongs and and injustices, and letting go of our ideas and perceptions of lack.

To let go is to live love.  It is to be love, to be your natural state, to receive everything as it is.  It is to be here now, to be present and experience the bliss that is presence.  It doesn’t mean that you will never have painful sensations, intense emotions, unpleasant thoughts or challenges.  It doesn’t mean that you will never experience discomfort or dis-ease.  It doesn’t mean that all of your dreams and desires will be made manifest.  It only means that you will be present, you will be awake, you will be here.  You will stop trying to get anywhere and you will be where you are.  You will learn-share everything you are meant to learn-share.  You will stop missing out on your life because you realize you can’t miss out.  You will stop resisting, pushing away or forcing anything.  Instead you let whatever comes to you come.

The thing about now here is that it never leaves.  There is no situation, circumstance, event, activity, or experience that is separate from here now.  This means that presence is all pervasive.  There is no anything that needs to push you into next mode.  Full permission to be here, just as it is and find peace inside of now.  

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

HAVE FUN NOT KNOWING

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HAVE FUN NOT KNOWING 

Welcoming uncertainty

Know, know, know.  We are eager to know what’s next, where we are going, what’s going to happen and how it’s all going to work out.  In fact we are so eager to know what will happen and to get to it already, that we don’t live in what is happening now.  The focus on the future, what it will bring or not bring, captivates our attention, consumes our thoughts and takes us right out of the present moment.  

We often don’t perceive much fun in not knowing.  In fact not knowing feels downright scary to most people as their sense of security, safety, validation and purpose is wrapped up in them knowing.  If you take a step back, a pretty far step back, and expand your perspective, you will see that everything is truly a mystery.  You’ve created routines, habits and schedules that make life look the same from day to day and give the appearance of knowing what is going to happen, but truly you don’t know.  If you stayed viewing from this larger perspective you would most likely start to notice feeling a sense of uncertainty and fear.  Due to this fear of uncertainty (which we mostly don’t let ourselves feel or even register that we feel) we do our best to create certainty.  Certainty in our relationships, our careers, the place we live, our families, our finances, our community, etc.  This artificially contrived sense of certainty gives us illusionary comfort in feeling that we will be ok because we know.  

So we must ask ourselves the question, how can not knowing be fun?  How can we change our relationship with uncertainty to one that feels good rather than one that feels bad?  If we don’t change our relationship with uncertainty than we will attempt to avoid it all costs because we perceive that it feels bad, and by nature we avoid things that don’t feel good.  However attempting to avoid uncertainty is also attempting to avoid the present since the present moment only reveals itself in the moment and not a single second before.  Trying to create certainty leads to a life that goes by and you don’t even know what really happened or if you even lived it.  You were so busy trying to get somewhere, figure out where you where headed and how to get there that you missed out on your life now.  Your life doesn’t happen in the future it happens now, this is it.   

LOVING WHAT IS 

Coming alive

One of the best ways to make not knowing fun and change your relationship with uncertainty is to love what is now.  To be a full fuck yes to what is here and committed to being here even if you don’t like what is here.  If you are busy living in fantasy land of what might happen, hasn’t happened yet or didn’t happen, you are screwed.  There really isn’t a more eloquent way to say it.  You are living in a made up world of “things will be better when…”, when I know my purpose, when I get a different job, when I have the relationship, partner or family I desire, when I find the perfect home, when I land my next gig or client, when I have this amount of money, when I find my next place to live, when I go on vacation, and on and on and on.  

To love what is stops you in your tracks.  It forces you to be present.  It forces your heart open.  It forces you to wake up and recognize what is here, what is already perfect, where you already are.  It does so really without any force at all, but will the power of love and loving.  When you choose to love what is rather than be somewhere other than you are (which is impossible by the way) you live for the first time.  To love is to live, to be alive.  Love requires that you let all resentments, hatreds, wrongness, failures, mistakes, imperfection, and the like go.  All of those perspectives keep you out of loving and therefore out of the present moment.  

Loving gives.  It gives to life.  It is what makes life come alive and be fun to live.  We all know this.  When uncertainty arises and you feel that sense of not knowing, and you recognize the pressure, stress or anxiety that are the side effects of your resistance to uncertainty, simply pause.  Take a breath.  Notice the feelings of stress, pressure, fear, and perhaps even doom and distress.  Notice that you are trying really hard to fight the feeling of not knowing, which comes with some threats to your sense of self, safety and purpose.  Simply allow.  Allow not knowing.  Open into the curiosity and even eventual playfulness that can arise from the mystery of what is to be revealed.  Don’t try to plan or figure out the reveal, when you will know, when you will get “there” wherever there is.  Just be here in the mystery of it.  Open into the mystery.  Invite it.  Welcome it.  Do not push it away or try to get through it.  Just be inside of it as if there is nothing to figure out and nowhere to go.  You already are where you are meant to be/go.  You already are doing what you are meant to be doing.  Will it change?  Yes it will always change.  

Trying to get (somewhere or something) contracts, tightens, constricts, and closes you off to all communication and information, whereas loving gives and allows for free exchange of energy, movement and information.  The paradox is that inside the mystery all is revealed, all is known.  Each moment fully informed, fully wise, fully self-aware.  That is the gift of presence, of the mystery, of the moment.  You can’t know from trying to know, but only from allowing the not known to be as it is.  In this way you create the space and container for all to be revealed to you inside the playful dance of creation.  

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