power

BELIEFS, BELIEFS, BELIEFS

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BELIEFS BELIEFS BELIEFS 

Disowning our power

We all conceptually know the power of beliefs, yet most live in lack of true recognition of the power of their beliefs.  Even beyond that, most people are not aware of what they believe and they think that life somehow operates outside of what they believe about it.  Beliefs are like the lenses we wear on our eyes, they determine what we see and what we don’t see.  They determine what we feel and what we don’t feel, and also how we behave and function in our environments.  Beliefs create our experiences.  Whatever it is we experience and attract is based on our beliefs.  Our beliefs literally create the world we perceive.

Beliefs are fundamental to every aspect of our lives and yet we give them little credence.  We ignore and devalue the impact they have and most of the time aren’t even aware of what it is we are believing.  We insist that some other forces are at play other than our beliefs, and that those forces are more powerful, more based in reality or more true.  Understand that, that is also a belief.  It’s simply one that disowns and projects its power outside of it’s seeming self and creates separation between self and stuff.  When we participate in such a manner, where we disown our beliefs and project them on the stuff of life, we give the stuff of life our power.  The stuff of life has no independent power, it has only the power you’ve given to it.  In essence it seems that the picture, the experiences, the interactions, the people, our body, etc. is what has the power, but it does not.  It only has the power you’ve given it.  

This can seem confusing for the mind to grok.  This is because most people have some heavy duty beliefs in there that believe that things have independent power.  They only appear to if you believe that to be so.  The world you will perceive will be one of independent objects, where things will feel other to you and there will be some sense of separation or disconnection.  This is how the majority of humans operate.  As a species we come from a level of awareness that developmentally doesn’t know its power yet.  It’s like how a baby doesn’t know how to speak until it hears words and speaking is modeled to it.  As adults we don’t know our power until it is shown to us.  Then once we see it we can’t unsee it.  Our power comes through knowing and choosing what we believe; deliberately, precisely and consciously.  It’s taking responsibility for  ourselves in such a way that we know what we believe and take full accountability to the creations we manifest based on those beliefs.  

CHANGING BELIEFS 

Utilizing our power

Some of our beliefs are tricky to see because they are so close to our faces.  They are kind of like a contact lens.  If you are an avid contact lens wearer you don’t really know the lens is there until you, or someone else, tries to take it off of your eye.  Once it’s removed, meaning once you are no longer looking through the lens of that belief, only then can you actually see it.  If it remains on your eye without your awareness of it, it will simply be how you see the world.  No other perspective would even be apparent to you.  Often when the metaphorically contact lens is removed we recognize our belief(s) and clarity about how we experience life is revealed to us.  It is as if all the sudden we can see what we couldn’t see before.  

Perhaps some of you are at this stage where you can see a belief or a handful of beliefs, yet you feel that you struggle in changing or shifting them.  This is the juncture where you get to utilize and learn fluency with and in your power.  It’s like pulling out your sword, magic wand, wizard’s staff, or any other empowerment symbol that resonates with you.  Be clear that the symbol is inert by itself, however you get to learn to utilize your power through it.  It’s you that makes life come alive, not the other way around.  The key ingredient is conviction in choice.  If you are either not sure that you get to choose or you don’t have conviction (meaning true belief) in what you actually desire to believe, than it will feel hard to change a belief.  

The honest to god truth is that it is very easy to change a belief.  You just do it.  You are after all the only one in charge of your life.  There is no one else inside of your head choosing for you.  Its just you in there.  All of the struggle or seeming hardness is simply your desire to hold onto your current belief.  For some reason you think that whatever belief you are choosing to keep serves you more.  There is no wrongness in that.  Only the recognition of what you are choosing so that you can be clear about how you are creating the world you experience and take full accountability for it.  

Once you get this and start truly applying it you will begin to deconstruct how you’ve thought the world works.  It will be the end of the powerless, hopeless perspective.  You’re in charge.  You’ve always been.  You just didn’t know it.  This is the next stage of development for human consciousness.  To become aware of itself in such a way that it recognizes that it’s had the power all along.  Its the end of subject-object separation.  There is no more you and other, no more you and your body, no more you and your emotions, no more you and the stuff of life.  You recognize you as subject, as the central operating force or principle.  All responds to you, not the other way around.  It starts and ends with you and your beliefs.  Know what you are choosing and choose in accordance with the experience of life that you desire.  Nothing is impossible.  What you decide is real is real.  What you decide is hard is hard.  What you decide is easy is easy.  Even though it may seem that two people experience the world the same, they don’t.  Things are not as solid as they seem.  Play a little.  Take a chance.  Believe something radical and fully believe it.  Your conviction is your doorway into new experience and novel creations.  

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

FEAR

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FEAR 

Perception of powerlessness

What is fear?  Fear is the thought that something bad might happen or the perception/belief that something bad is happening in this moment.  Fear often comes with a cascade of emotions and bodily sensations such as panic, powerlessness, unsteadiness, tension, pain or uneasiness.  Fear is almost always found right along side of uncertainty, where the uncertainty is undesirable by the perceiver.  The hallmark of fear is a sense of unavoidable, uncontrollable doom of which you can do nothing about.  A sense of powerlessness to circumstance floods your mind.  The typical reactions to this powerlessness are to brace yourself for potential impact, become apathetically detached or fight it all costs.  

You have all heard the saying that “what we fear controls us” and it’s true.  We give our free will or our power to whatever it is we fear.  It then decides for us rather than us being the decider.  We forfeit our chooser-ship-ness and allow ourselves to be chosen for by the thing out there or over there that we deem as frightening or unwanted.  We do this blindly.  In a way you could call it an act of faith.  Faith in our conviction of powerlessness in which our blind act of handing over our power reinforces.  

Why do we so blindly and obediently give away our power?  Partly because we don’t actually know that we have it.  Your free will is your power.  They are synonymous.  Most do not know or are unfamiliar with their own power, meaning they don’t realize themselves as having free will.  There are no classes in our early educational system that talk about that fact that you are free being, that you have free will or that focus on simply allowing you to be yourself.  Rarely are your natural impulses allowed to be expressed, but instead the opposite is the case.  We are told what to do, where to go, when to be there and how to conform.  Very little if any attention gets placed on the inherent nature of our sovereign, free self.  No wonder we are such a lost and confused society.  We don’t realize our free will because it has become so entangled with the culturally accepted norms of our society.  Often to be in your power, or choosing for yourself rather than based on what others may view as right, gives the appearance of being set apart from them.  There are certain others that may want nothing to do with you if you decide for yourself and it is contrary to how they view.  You may view some of those others as being very important to you.  They may provide for you physically or emotionally, and since our most basic need is connection we will do whatever it takes to not lose connection with others less we feel isolated, alone or unsupported.  This is how we innocently give away the power we didn’t even know we had.   

FEAR’S REMEDY

Knowing your inherent freeness 

Yes you are already free.  In this moment you have all the freedom and free you will ever have, no matter what the circumstances are that are currently showing up on your screen of life.  Your free will has always been intact.  The fact that this has probably not felt like the experience you always have is only simply because you have not realized this basic truth, that you are already free.  You still believe part of you to not be free yet, which means you don’t experience seamless freedom.  You believe you need this thing or that thing, this person or that person, this situation or that situation, and so you manipulate yourself (which includes conforming, compressing or not being yourself) in order to try to get what you think you need or want.  You develop strategy, sometimes very efficient and effective strategy, but there is no trust, only reliance on strategy.  This means you can never truly relax or rest, hence the tension, unease, pain and discomfort of fear prevail in your experience.  

People often view freedom as external, meaning being able to do the things they want to do, live where they want to live, be in relationship with who they want, have their body function in a particular way, etc.  Inner freedom has nothing to do with this idea of external freedom or being able to do what you want or have the things you want.  See if we view freedom as an external phenomenon than all the ducks always have to be lining up in the right rows, and if one one duck falls out of alignment then the system crashes and we are not free again.  This is not true freedom.  Even though many people think that they want freedom, and that they will be free when their circumstances of life line up with their picture of what they think they want, most people don’t actually want inner freedom.  Instead they want the external picture of what they think freedom is. I am not suggesting that you should not have preferences or desires and not move towards them.  I personally believe you should follow those impulses.  Instead I am simply pointing to the fact that freedom does not live inside of them.  Freedom lives inside of you.  How can you be in the worst, most undesirable situation and still recognize that you are free.  That’s true inner freedom.  What would that take?  What would it take to simply be yourself?  It takes only one ingredient.  That ingredient is trust.  Trust in yourself.

I’ve noticed an interesting dynamic over the years.  Despite the fact that many people think that they want to be free, sovereign and realized in their power, in actuality most people really don’t.  They want someone to tell them what to do because they feel so lost and uncertain inside.  They want someone else to direct the ship, to support them, to take care of them, to provide certainty for them so that they don’t have to decide for themselves. They want an authority figure so they can just rest already because they are so tired of being scared and lost.   So much so that they are willing to give their free will up and over for it.   What lays underneath it all is that ultimately people don’t want to be wrong, alone, unloved or unsupported.  These are our greatest fears, and because we are unwilling to face their potential and see through them, we live in the dark and lack trust.  While in the dark we grip to anything that we can, anything that seems to maybe know, because we feel we do not.  Self-doubt is the story we hold dear and remain steadfastly devoted to our conviction in our powerlessness.  To wake up from this all, to stop blindly giving over your free will, you must directly plunge into what you fear most so that you can experiential develop the trust that comes through doing so.  This is not something that will just automatically occur.  You must take an active role in this process to wake up to the truth that there is nothing to fear.  That fear is only a perception, a story and that you can find your way through it to the other side.  

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

PEACE & HARMONY

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PEACE & HARMONY 

Our inner & outer worlds

Peace and harmony, the condition that so many people say that they desire.  To be in a state of eternal peace, calm, balance and harmony within one’s self and with their seemingly external environment is the final destination so to speak for many.  People may experience inner peace, but their outer world may look chaotic and vis versa, they may see outer peace in their environment yet their inner world is turbulent.  How do these inner and outer worlds merge and are they even supposed too?

By in large we are a “collective of individuals” who are all at some level attempting to get their own needs and wants met, along with making a contribution to the collective in some way, i.e. making the world a better place through our presence and actions.  Within these motivations and intentions we may feel like there is not enough of something (meaning our needs might not be met) so we run around in survival mode inside of our minds strategizing how we can make it all work so that we can survive.  This perspective of scarcity is clearly not in congruence with inner peace.  When we are stuck inside this perspective of scarcity, even if we have a million dollars in the bank and can logically see that this is plenty of money, we will continue to feel fear that we might not have enough.  Here the disturbance lives inside of our own mind and we do not feel rested, calm or at peace even though the external world is abundant.  These same disturbances can live in our outer world too.  There may be something that appears to be a threat in our outer world, perhaps disrupting the environment and lives of others, while simultaneously we feel at complete peace and calm inside.  Our inner state is unperturbed and not matching that of the outer world.  

There is more often than not a congruence between our inner and outer worlds.  The reason for this being that most individuals take their cue from their environment and/or project their inner state onto external circumstances.  So if something appears to be bad in the outer world people will match that in their inner world and thus feel bad inside.  The opposite goes as well, if someone wakes up in the morning and feels amazing, energized and fully vibrant then they will tend to project that onto their outer environment despite what might actually be appearing.  This is how two people can look at the same thing and see it completely differently.  This is also why it sometimes appears that people live in different worlds from each other, because in some ways they actually are living in different realities.  

I personally believe that we are at a time in our evolution where this disparity will become increasingly and increasingly more evident.  Where based on people’s chosen perspectives they will create outer worlds together that match their inner frequencies.  It may even be that at some point that beings of slightly different frequencies may not be able to physically perceive each other anymore as the different frequencies band together creating more coherence within themselves as a collective of like frequency.  Like waves riding on top of or parallel to each other with less and less mixed frequencies and more distinctly coherent and unified frequencies coming together.  Literal parallel realities which have none or minimal interaction with each other as they offer completely different experiences.  Again speaking from my personal perspective I believe this is similar to what happens in what we have come to call the death process.  There is a different frequency in which the spirit of the body transitions into, which is why we can no longer see them, however they are very much still in existence just imperceptible to us from our current frequency.  Death simply being a transition into the new.  Some beings may pick another human body and reincarnate into a similar type of experience and others may have learned everything they came to learn/express and move into another frequency experience.  Either way I see us on Earth, while embodied, making this transition collectively, some will be repeating this cycle and staying at the current frequency to learn/express more at this vibratory level, while others are ready for the next vibratory level of beingness.   

COLLECTIVE TENDENCY TOWARDS DISHARMONY 

Coming into right relationship with what is

Our current frequency or collective has a tendency towards disharmony.  The prime reason for this being that we still perceive ourselves to be separate from our environment and from other people.  This sets up the conditions of needing to live for a “me”, take care of a “me” and support a “me”.  As long as the perspective of being an individual is primary we will also need to protect ourselves from perceived others including our perceived outer environment.  This will bread more war, both outer and inner, as we will always have to defend ourselves from the evil thing, which in truth is just an aspect of ourselves, but we cannot perceive this if we continue to insist on the perspective of separation.  So we will fight, protect, avoid and try to get rid of or stop certain things inside of the appearance because we fear the end of our personal, egocentric existence.  In truth your small limited person centric consciousness cannot stop life from occurring.  You can definitely attempt to hide your portion of the One that you are from life, avoid life, avoid certain people or experiences, however in the end its all included and at some point on your soul’s journey you will, you must, come face to face with everything you attempt to push away.  This is how you will come to know your unity, your oneness will all.  From the smallest microbe to the largest galaxy, you are one with it all.  

Due to the fact that we do not intimately and undoubtedly know ourselves as One we do not know harmony.  Harmony is an impossibility from the perception of separation.  You see harmony is health.  Health of our human body, health of our planet as the larger body, and even health of our universe as the One body.  Most of us don’t think in scales this big, but instead only see ourselves as human(s) and maybe our planet as being important.  However every action you take either physically or in consciousness has an impact on the entire universe.  

In our healthcare system we call harmony homeostasis, however we only look at it from a physiologically perspective.  If all of the chemical reports reveal the right ratios and numbers we think that is health.  Never mind the investigation of where harmony comes from in the first place.  To be in harmony is to be in right relationship with.  This means to see all as extension of you.  In this way you can come into right relationship with your cells, bacteria, viruses, cancers, and the myriad of other “afflictions” that can occur to this physical vehicle.  Things are only afflictions if you are not in harmony.  People fear because they do not see that they are the operator of this vehicle, that they can come into harmony with themselves and with everything else and thus see the effects of that that harmony play out through this human vehicle.  Instead they feel the need to fight the foreign invader and fail to see how they can come into harmony with what is and produce health.  When will we believe more in the power of peace and harmony than we do in the power of destruction, alienation, fighting and war?  

All that is required is a change in belief.  To see harmony as the power that it is.  To believe in its power.  To stop protecting ourselves from ourselves.  To see ourselves in and as all.  To see how coming into right relationship with what is is more powerful than resistance and fighting what is.  To do so, to choose so, creates an entirely different outer world.  This may seem too simple for some to believe.  They want it to be harder, more complex, but really what they want is to hold onto their belief that destruction and war is what heals and creates harmony.  They also want to continue to hold onto the belief that they are separate from their own body, from other humans, from plants, animals, insects, trees, dirt, bacteria, other worldly beings, other planets and the universe.  They prefer the story line that they are alone in the universe and that life is solely up to them.  

Life is not solely up to you and simultaneously you matter beyond infinity.  Come to understand that you are part of one much larger beingness of which you have never been separate, you’ve only believed your separateness.  Its just a belief, one that can be changed by you, through you.  In opening your own mind to the possibility that separation is simply an illusion, just a veil or mask through which you’ve been looking through, you will come to see that you could never be separate from anything ever.  What is possible is that you are connected in and as the source of all.  Human consciousness on this planet is like a cancer in the universe believing itself to be separate from the whole of the universe.  The universe is benevolent and is organized towards increasingly higher and higher orders of coherence, i.e. wholeness.  It is time for the cancer of our consciousness to heal, to come into its knowingness of itself and reunite with its universal family remembering the power of peace and harmony.  

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

Destruction

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Destruction

Tides of transformation

Hot fires flames in round shapeMost of us fear destruction.  Yet destruction is an inevitable aspect of growth. Things can not stay the same and simultaneously look or be different.  When we allow our fear of deconstruction (i.e. what we think we will lose) to reign we feel stuck, frustrated and powerless. These feelings are simply the postponement of change that must occur.  The only thing that shifts frustration is forward movement. The tendency for most is instead to move backwards into the same habituated thinking patterns because they are known rather than to push forward into the unknown.  Growth does not occur in the known.

What it boils down to is that people want to feel different or have their life be different yet expect that they can remain the same.  They project that they want the situation or circumstance to change, but deny their participation in that change. They fail to see that in every moment life (including their body) responds to them, not to some mysterious, outside, unknown force.  They avoid and deny their power rather than own their power.  The building up of frustration and stuckness rather than the alleviation of it, is what provides the energy for forward momentum.  Due to the fact that we avoid feeling uncomfortable we don’t allow the build up of tension that is required to make change.  Instead we find the most accessible ways in which we can to alleviate it.  Frequently that involves dropping into a lower state of awareness or consciousness where we feel like things are continuing to happen to us, that we are powerless, and that someone or something must fix us rather than us recognizing ourselves in the equation.

If rather than running from our uncomfortable sensations and situations we learn to move towards them, not in a way to fix or get rid of them as if they are some separate object from us, but instead to make contact with ourselves through them, we will be able to harness the energy of stuckness to move forward.  This will begin to expand our perspective of our current situation or circumstance.  The moment that we move towards rather than away from, is the moment that we stretch ourselves beyond our known.  This stretching expands our view of what we can see and allows us to revisit that which previously felt separate to us with new eyes. It allows us to see our patterns and how we are creating the circumstances and situations we’re experiencing, including what’s happening within our body, so that we can make necessary changes that are required. It is at this point that the inevitable destruction that was always eminent is now so clearly in the forefront of our awareness.  It is now no longer a choice that we can grapple with, but instead a must that we must do. 

Destroyer 

Recognizing yourself in the equation

Female with Indian feather hat and colorful makeup.Ultimately destruction is about the dissolution or breakdown of aspects of our self that no longer serve our highest good and don’t allow for optimal function of our bodies and lives.  These parts of us, or more accurately these patterns which we have identified as who we are, are often mysterious to us in the early part of transformation. We can’t yet see that we are the ones creating the circumstances and situations because we are so fused as being the pattern or part.  However when transformation moves to mid phase we begin to gain insight into what is occurring and more importantly our participation with it.  At transformation’s end phase we clearly see how we have been in charge all along and that it’s never been about the situation or circumstance, ever. 

I invite you to see from the perspective that stuckness and frustration is a gift. It is a gift from you, to you, that is showing you that some aspect of your consciousness must be made more aware.  It is the way in which you are teaching yourself to wake up.  Rather than keeping the perspective that tension is a problem or that the circumstance is a problem, see it as an opportunity for growth. Accept that destruction and change is a part of growth.  As you move into the frustration and wake up to seeing your contribution to what is occurring, you will be required to change.  Recognize your own resistance to this.  Recognize your desire to maintain sameness or perceived safety and stability rather than instability and change.  Recognize that things will come and go as required whether you like it or not.  Know that some of those things you will want to hold onto for dear life and yet they remain incompatible with who it is you are waking up to be.  To continue to hold onto those things and attempt to control external circumstances will keep you in a state of suffering and stuckness and suffering and stuckness and suffering and stuckness until the point where you have finally had enough. 

Some of us will tolerate suffering and stuckness for such a long time because we are so afraid of change, growth and what we think we will lose along the way, but change and growth is the nature of this universe. To remain the same or in resistance/fear to change when change is eminent, is nothing short of a miserable life experience as the soul cannot express through you in the ways that it desires due to your persistent attempts to try to control it.  

Nothing remains the same.  Nothing.  You can hold onto absolutely nothing. The deeper that you can accept this the more easily you will allow the process of destruction and transformation to run its course in whatever ways are needed. This will accelerate your journey as a soul who’s sole function is to expand and express.  Ultimately you are the destroyer/changer.  Destruction and change do not happen to you, you are not a victim of them, instead you initiate them because you realize that you must.  This is the realization and actualization of your power. 

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

You’ve never been broken

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You’ve never been broken 

Dissolving the story

Colorful infinity signIt is so engrained in our everyday ordinary consciousness to believe that we are somehow and in someway broken.  We often don’t even realize that we are believing this story because it is so all pervasive.  We simply live it and in that way don’t see it.  It is similar to how we don’t see how we believe that we are a body, we just assume it to be that way and don’t realize that we are believing it to be so.  

There are so many basic assumptions that we all have and in this way we live blindly not really recognizing what we are believing to be true.  Then when other people reinforce those assumptions we find ourselves in a box, created in our own mind, of what we believe to be possible.  This box becomes what we call our life.  Often it can feel quite limited and confining, yet we can’t see our way beyond the box because we can’t yet see our assumptions about what we believe to be true.  

The story that you are broken, that something is missing from you or wrong with you, or that there is some kind of problem with you is one of the biggest myths of all times, yet nearly all of us believe it.  Say something starts working differently in your body so you go to someone to tell you what’s wrong with you, to reinforce what you are already believing (that something is wrong) and give you a label or “reason” for it.  Or perhaps something in your life isn’t going as you like it to so you dissect what is wrong with you in attempt to fix the problem.  Or some part of you expresses or behaves differently than others and you try to hide it so people don’t see your “malfunction.”  We are doing this all of the time.  Viewing ourselves from the perspective of “what’s wrong with me” and how do I figure it out, fix it or hide it.

All of these examples are simply stories that either we have told ourselves or that others have told us.  None of them have ever been the truth.  Just a narrative that someone thought made sense and we adopted that belief for ourselves.   

Resting into unbrokenness  

Aligned in your wholeness

mandala fractal.jpgIf everything has been a story then where do we go from here?  This is a great place to arrive.  Once you can see the stories you’ve been believing you can begin to rewrite them.  This is to become the author of your own life and to realize the power you have to write a story that you desire to live.  

To write your story of unbrokenness you must believe that you have never been broken.  This means that you must erase in your own mind any idea of lack, missing, impaired, un-whole, broken, dysfunctional, inept, or malfunctioning idea you have of yourself.  You must stop insisting that you are, or ever have been any of those ideas, even when others have told you that you are.  As soon as you stop insisting that you are any of those things than you will also simultaneously stop creating those ideas in your external reality.  

Due to the fact that most of us have had these ideas of brokenness reinforced to us by authority figures, parents, doctors, teachers, friends and the media it can be challenging to remain aligned in our knowingness otherwise.  When the consciousness of the entire culture and environment within which you live seems to continue to insist on the theory of brokenness it requires that you nearly continually remind yourself of your innate already whole nature, as the tendency to conform to the cultural beliefs/myths is strong.  

The more aligned you become in this knowingness of your wholeness, the less you believe what the culture believes.  As this occurs you will still see others playing out this story of brokenness in their own mind bubbles and creating stories that feel bad to them, but you will no longer believe it to be the truth.  In that way you can be a source of illumination for those that are finding their way beyond the bubble of the story of brokenness.  They may not be able to fully embrace the light of awareness that your knowingness offers, but some of the light of a that larger truth of unbrokenness will shine through and to whatever degree they are ready they will receive it.  

The biggest gift you can give is to know yourself and be yourself.  In this way you are a guiding light and reflective mirror for others to see their true selves.  This is how we support other selves in waking up to seeing and being more of the truth of who they are so that the collective juice within which we all swim is that of our innate wholeness.  

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