Sunday, August 14, 2011

Mindfulness and expansion

I've been working with a counselor to assist with my evolution process.  I've found it very helpful to have another person there as a ground and witness as I venture into my own energetic experience of being.  Recently, I really experienced an amazing shift.  Part of what's so cool about it is that I had no idea what was going to happen when I started.  I just sat down and closed my eyes and started feeling what was in my body and communicating it to the lovely woman who has made it her vocation to assist with this.  

I followed the thread of my own experience and sensations and thoughts in the moment.  I used my understanding to offer forgiveness and thanks.  Out of this, eventually a beautiful lightness was revealed to me.  It wasn't really something I saw, as I'm not all that visual, but it was more of a feeling of spaciousness and love and energy.  At that point, I sensed that we were accompanied by other beings who reside in that vibration all the time.  It was a wow moment. 

Later I thought, hey, I have really learned a lot in life to be able to do this process so easily.  And that's true.  But then I watched a video on youtube about the shift in consciousness happening in this time period, and one of the commentators said that a sort of window is opened and we have abilities and access that we did not have before.  That felt true to me also - that it has become easier than ever to tune in and follow the flow of awareness to find resolution of old problems, hurts, and misunderstandings.  And I want to do that, because it lifts all of us.  We are in this together.

The universe offers confirmations.  I got an email from Jason Siff, a Buddhist teacher, who said, "What occurs to me about meditation practice is that we have difficulty being with our experience. We’ll use all sorts of means in order not to stay with what it is we’re going through."  So he suggested, "In practicing in a more receptive and allowing way, our tendency to steer our attention away from something that’s uncomfortable becomes interesting. It’s an ability we’ve developed in a variety of ways. We can then start to look at some of these habits that we’ve developed that have worked quite well."  I think this is insightful. Finding a way to be receptive to our own resistance.  Finding an experience interesting, being curious, is a way of dis-identifying from it, which is important to do - otherwise, you become the thing, and you can't see around it. 

This can happen very fast.  For example, one kind of resistance I have had is that I get a spacey feeling in my head.  I felt that, I said, "I have a spacey feeling" and felt it, and it soon shifted.  I also felt tired at one point.  I noticed where the tired feeling was in my body (sort of a dark weight in front of me, not in my body per se), and shortly, it morphed into a sense of defiantly not wanting to do anything because of a thought that anything I can do in this life is not going to help me feel better.  In other words, I felt just like an adolescent!  What shifted it was I didn't become that feeling.  I felt it, observed it, noticed where it was coming from in my body, stated it, appreciated what it was, and it changed again.  I love this process! 

This spiral of learning, uncovering, mining, allowing, expressing, appreciating, keeps unfolding.  Yesterday after a meditation I followed the thread of sensation in my throat to a loud sound, which turned into a "no!" and then a sort of memory of what it was like being a child in the midst of the darkness that can be human nature. What's interesting to me about this is that the present-time experiencing of the memory is not at all what it was like at the time.  At the time, I didn't think, "Oh, all these people around me are asleep and acting out of some lower impulses."  I was just cruising along in the moment and sometimes, some painful stuff happened, and I may have reacted some, but mostly I just swallowed hard and moved into the next moment. 

But from the expanded place that is my now, I can feel how on a deeper level, behind the scenes, I was a light being who fell asleep and woke up in this life and felt shock after shock at how harsh and hostile being a human is.  As I recover the integrity of who I really am, my view of the experience is big enough to encompass all that - the dullness and impulsiveness that fueled so many insults, the woundedness of every person's heart, and the ultimate integrity of each being despite their apparent brutishness.  And it takes its proper place - really just a small part of the span of our time here.  Mostly we are immersed in an environment of stunning beauty and incredible abundance.  And we are motivated by a desire to do the right thing (even if misguided).  We humans more or less offer tenderness to those we love.  And love we do.  That is the strongest, most impervious, persistent, and undying impulse and force behind everything. 

When you wash your windows, in pours the light. It's so strong that it can feel uncomfortable to bathe in it unshielded.  I think we are mostly not accustomed to it.  But it's the truth, and we crave it.  Beneath all the other cravings, is that one.  Craving love, craving that pure beauty, the energy of life.  

When John Perkins said at lecture I attended a year or so back that we have to create a new dream to create a new world, I kept wondering what that might look like.  Gradually I have seen that, for me, it has to do with the transformation of my own consciousness, the gradual unwinding of the fear that emerging into darkness had generated.  This begins to transform my relationships, and thus ripples out into the collective.  There may also be a rippling out and a lifting up that takes place on a less visible plane.  I hope so.  

For all of us, I wish for emergence from the collective dream of powerlessness, in which we live in the shadow of cataclysm and dearth.  Into the true dream of cooperation, caring, compassion, concern, and communion with the whole body of humanity as we stand equal to and a part of all that is.  I think this is the new dream, and I hope that more and more of us can wake up to the possibility.  

2 comments:

  1. The right counselor can be a wonderful companion and guide. Glad you have someone like that.

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