self-empowered

GOING WITH LIFE

Dr. Amanda Love Leave a comment

GOING WITH LIFE 

Separation to liberation

We spend an awful lot of energy keeping ourselves separate from life, understandably so.  We are given a name, develop characteristics, preferences, likes, dislikes, roles, habits and patterns of thinking and behaving that create an identity of who we come to know ourselves as.  An identity that seems like a separate person who is distinct from other persons.  We have functional control over this physical body, we sense through it, and we assume that we are located inside of it.  We believe the information that our senses give us and what our thoughts tell us as fact.  We don’t recognize that we are what is aware of the sensations or thoughts, and not the sensations or thoughts themselves.  Said another way we become our experience rather than recognizing we are what is aware of our experience.  All of this reinforces our sense of separateness from awareness rather than one with it.  We feel powerless to something that seems other than us and find ourselves kind of at odds with life.  

When we feel at odds it’s like we are always working against something and there is a sense of hardness that comes with it.  It’s the feeling that there is you and then there is this other thing, object, or person, which you have to work with to do something to.  Like this other thing, object, or person is separate and you have to maintain that separateness.  If you decided to make a bold move one day and didn’t maintain that separateness, all of life would flow and you would recognize that you can pay attention to content (i.e. sensations & thoughts) or you can pay attention to the fact that you are aware while all the content comes and goes.  What is important here is that you would get that you aren’t what you experience, but rather you are what is aware of the experience.  You would feel freedom instantly rather than the bound-ness of maintaining separation, but this freedom of rejoining yourself feels chaotic, destabilizing and unknown to your current sense of being a separate person with the identity that you have created as yourself.

To go with life rather than feeling at odds, or like you have to go to work on it by attempting to do something to it, is to stop fighting anything.  It’s to end the thought that anything needs to be different.  It is the cessation of the idea that there is somewhere else to get to where you will feel amazing and where all of your prayers are answered.  There is no location that exists other than where you are.  The freedom you seek is contained inside this moment and every moment.  You will not ever arrive somewhere other because there is no other and there is no out there.  At some point we must stop running from thing to thing to thing hoping to find relief and answers.  There is nothing out there. 

ENDING NEEDS 

Arriving in the present

Part of maintaining separation is the illusion of needs.  When we believe ourselves to be a separate person we feel as though we have a lot of needs and that we somehow we have to work to get them met.  However as we merge back into ourselves, into non-separation, we realize that all needs are met because everything is gotten.  Meaning life has its own back.  It’s completely taken care of.  It’s fulfilled and all set.  When we are in contact with ourselves we know this, and when we are disconnected we don’t know it.  To be free of needing anything is to be truly free.  You lose all agenda that might have subtle underpinnings in your subconscious.  You can just be because there isn’t anything pulling you out of yourself to go and get or figure out.  Everything is also known even though paradoxically your mind knows nothing.

There are a few fundamental points to emphasize here in arriving where you are and the cessation of needs.  One is a foundational acceptance that absolutely nothing needs to change or be different than it is.  Along the same lines it would suffice to say that all is well just as it is.  Creating this as the container for your mind allows your mind to relax its incessant attempts to hook into thoughts in order to do or figure out something that it perceives to be other than itself.  There might still be thoughts, but you simply notice them rather than become them.  The next piece is giving yourself permission to not have to know and be in the space of the unknown, which is another term for the present moment.  When we arrive here to the present moment nothing is known and everything is revealed.  Our minds tend not to easily surrender themselves because the job of our mind is to maintain “known-ness”, identity and separation.  To give away what we think we know renders our mind useless and minds like to be used.  From the perspective of our mind “unknown” equals the experience of confusion.  This is one of our least favorite states of being, however learning to be good with confusion without attempting to get rid of it by making something certain again, is the gateway into now and to going with life.

To go with life is to know your freedom and experience it.  It’s to no longer be at odds with anything.  It’s to no longer perceive separation.  It’s to no longer control the happenings of life.  It’s to no longer insist that anything, including yourself, be any certain way other than what it is.  The experience of this is rested while awake.  The experience of this is peace.  It is not an outside job, it’s an inner one.  It’s not far fetched or out of reach, it’s all already here.  There is no distance to traverse, no progress that needs to be made, and there’s nothing more that you need to get or figure out first.  Available in this moment is liberation.  It requires nothing to be different than it is right now.  You don’t need to be more worthy than you already are.  You don’t need to love yourself more first.  Stop trying to get somewhere so that you can arrive and be where you are already.  You will not recognize wholeness and perfection somewhere out there at a future date if you don’t recognize it now.  Liberation is available, “achievable” and is the natural state.  It requires nothing to be done in order to “get” it.  The only sacrifice, if you want to call it that, is giving away your current state of everything you think you know.  What we think we know is actually confusion and what we perceive to be unknown and therefore confusing is truth and freedom.  

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

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

LEFT OUT OF THE GLORY OF GOD

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LEFT OUT OF THE GLORY OF GOD

Denying your Divinity

The primary drive of our soul is to remember and reunite with ourselves.  Most have completely forgotten their truest essence and only think or know conceptually what spirit is.  We have built up layers of beliefs (aka defenses) that perpetuate the experience of disconnection and separation from our goodness and the glory of God.  What do I mean by glory of God?  Simply the purest, most distilled, refined and inherently perfect and good true nature of ourselves.  We are God, we are the Creator, we are the perfection of all that is expressed through this human form, and yet we deny, push away or resist this thus resisting ourselves and creating a lived reality of suffering, pain and disconnection.

The spiritual journey is the remembering, reclaiming and reuniting with that which we already are and have always been.    You have never ever been anything but God expressed through a myriad of various forms, whose form is currently this human body.  The beliefs that keep you in resistance and denial to fully knowing this operate ever so subtlety underneath your conscious awareness.  This is why it is important to never stop seeking to know yourself.  To commit full heartedly to the journey over and over and over again, as without your devoted commitment you postpone the remembering of yourself.

Why do we resist what we are?  Why do we resist that we are good, pure and perfect?  Simply because we don’t believe it.  That’s it.  Its really that simple.  We don’t believe it.  Why don’t we believe it?  We don’t believe it because people, who also don’t know themselves, who don’t know their inherently perfect divine self, have conditioned our thinking mind-matrix to be in alignment with theirs.  We’ve agreed, consciously or not, to abide by others rules and stories so that we fit in with them, so that our needs and wants are taken care of and so that we aren’t left out.  In choosing to not feel left out on a societal and relational level we have given away our own true knowing of ourselves.  Anything that feels like it might threaten our basic human needs or wants for resources, love or connection takes precedence over divine connection.  To accept or believe that we are good, perfect, divine and complete throws a wrench into our entire internal system and threatens everything we think we know and everything we think we need. 

BEING THE CREATOR

Self-Empowered

We hear so much these days that we are the creator, but is this something that we just say in spiritual circles to feel cool or do we really, really get it.  Do we really get just how powerful we are or do we still think that our lives are happening to us kind of randomly?  Many people think they are more self-empowered than they actually are.  By in large people are living disempowered even if they are doing and saying all of the right things and in all the right spiritual communities.  Only if you are fully rested in your perfect wholeness and without personal bias are you truly self-empowered.  

We tend to view a self-empowered person as one who is manifesting everything they want and living in alignment with their personal dreams.  What this tends to look like is having an aligned job, standing up for all the right causes, having a healthy body, having seamless relational dynamics, and having all of your desires (physical and nonphysical) met. Many, many strive for this, and while it is a step on the developmental ladder, it is not full self-empowerment.  Full self-empowered living is not about having the perfect spiritual appearance of life, its about knowing that you are complete perfection no matter what.  

Being fully self-empowered paradoxically has very little to do with you at the personality-physical expression level at all, even though this is what we tend to associate it with.  To be truly self-empowered is to recognize that your personal preferences, desires and life, while relatively important for this moment in space-time, have very little ultimate importance.  This may sting a little at first thought as you might want to hold onto your personal agendas, significance and righteousness.  Feelings of confusion, aimlessness or directionlessness that are along the lines of “well if I’m not that, or this thing I care about isn’t important, than what/who am I” may also arise.  This is not the ultimate goal however as we let go of the limited perspective of self with limited power, which is often all we’ve ever known up to this point, we enter a mysterious emptiness that is frequently uncomfortable and disturbing to the personality mind that likes to always be in the know. 

Many are suffering because they are placing too much attention and giving too much significance to their small selves.  In my opinion this is actually an epidemic in personal growth and spiritual communities.   Yes we want practices and skills to dismantle the beliefs that keep us separate and keep us out of our true glory as God, yet frequently we don’t realize that this means that ultimately we have to let go of this idea that we have of a separate, disconnected and worthless self all together.  Its funny that we often don’t realize this end goal if you will to personal growth work.  That we must divorce or break up with our thoughts/beliefs that insist on our lack of complete perfection and goodness.  To not do so and to continue to insist on your worthlessness, is actually a selfishly arrogant act that sucks the energy and life out everything around it and postpones your joy and happiness.  To deny, push away, or resist that which you are, is energy depleting for you and all around you.  The fastest way to self-empowerment and self-knowing is to stop insisting that you suck.  

We are not a separate entity/person no matter how much appearances seem that way.  There is no such thing.  We could not be disconnected from God if we tried.  We are one, we are God, no division, no separation.  To be self-empowered means to love self and know self as Love.  There is no higher commitment than to be fully devoted to that knowing.  

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