Last Updated on August 5, 2015
This article was written somewhat spontaneously in the form of an email to a friend. This friend was dealing with the fact that someone close to him (a brother) had appeared to have been deceptive with him about certain intentions that he had. This friend was somewhat takenaback about this. We were exploring the issue by email. The following is something I have been asked by numerous people in my workshops, etc., to please put into writing. So here it is. Enjoy.
I have modified and added to it were appropriate so that it will make more sense outside of the context in which I originally wrote it.
So, you are facing a challenge in your world. Something has come up between you and someone close to you? Who hasn’t had this arise in their experience? Few, if any, of us, I am sure.
It is easy to get caught up in our story about the issue and our story about the people involved in the issue. This is what most people (in our modern world) typically do.
However, what this issue has brought up in your world is where your Power is calling you to be present.
As you said, the person involved in this has his own journey to play out and to experience. That is primarily his business, and not yours. He is dreaming his own dream, for his own unfolding.
My own observation is that it is my capacity to forgive (which means to deeply release the stories I hold an emotional charge within) those people who appear to do me harm which ultimately sets me free. In setting myself free from such dynamics I ultimately set them free from these dynamics too… at least in my world and in relation to me.
I have found that in order to forgive it is important I first allow myself to feel (without analysis, story, language, thought process) the energetic charge that arises. This charge of energy emerges most grossly as physical disease. More subtle than this it will have (and perhaps continue to do so) arise as an emotional experience. More subtle than this is arises as a subtle felt-sense within the body-mind. My observation has been that this “charge” is in fact my own Spirit or life-force or vital energy. That energy has an intention to incarnate (into my body) and then be birthed into the world (through my creativity or creative expression). That process of incarnation and birthing is aborted or miscarried when I check-out of consciously participating in the process. Just as a mother checking-out of the gestation and birthing process (i.e. smoking, taking drugs, drinking alcohol) can result in a miscarriage or still birth. She has to be present to the fullness of the process if she is to birth the fullest possible expression of Man in the form of a child. We are, in effect, the midwives to our own Soul.
What I have found is that when I have an experience which feels to be too much… too much to handle, or too much to incorporate into my map of the world, or too much to integrate, or even too much to remain alive to… then that experience gets separated out from my ordinary waking consciousness. Much like the body will separate off malignant cells or toxins in the body. It can create a wall around those cells to try to starve them, or a wall around toxins to keep them separate from the rest of the body until such time as it can deal with them. I figure we do the same thing at a subtle level with any experience we are unable to integrate in the moment it arises. It gets put aside for another day. But each time that energy tries to reemerge (and it will, because there is a strong cosmic-creative intention moving it… the intention to incarnate or to emerge into matter/form) what modern “westernised” Man tends to do is analyse it with the rational mind.This usually results in telling the sames stories about it that were concocted back when the original event occured. These stories are oftentimes redundant and no longer appropriate. The stories we have about things as children, for instance, our not necessary the most life-affirming stories to live with as mature adults.
The challenge is that the rational mind is only set up to deal with the known. It is great at analysing and mapping out the known, yet useless when it comes to accessing the unknown. Because this life-force has been trapped in the unknown (it never had the chance to emerge into the known) it is still very much unknown. The only thing we “know” about it is the story we have created around it. Yet that story is typically inaccurate. This story is made up of whatever our conscious and subconscious mind could come up with in order to justify not integrating that life-force in the first place. That story may be made up of bits and pieces of lies and half-truths we have learnt from our parents, teachers, priests, society, etc. Lies that we have at one point knowingly or (more commonly) unknowingly given our power away to.
So if the rational-thinking-mind is not quiped for accessing the unknown, how do we access the unknown and not get caught up in our stories?
The HEART is Man’s doorway into the unknown. The HEART, as a centre of perception within Man (one that is perhaps 5000x more powerful than the brain if it’s measurable energy field is anything to go by) works through subtle sensation, through pulsations of psycho-energetic frequencies (oscilating rhythms) within the cellular and subtle structures of the body. Therefore it is best accessed or consciously participated with through our ability to feel. Hence people with HEART–people who approach life primarily through the Heart as opposed to primarily the intellect–are typically empathic and they feel a lot more than people lacking in HEART. the intellect is typically dry, cold, and aloof compared to the intelligence of the Heart.
So, when it comes to feeling the dis-integrated life-force (Power) emerging through the body-mind, there is no two ways about it. We simply have to take the time to feel. Which may mean lying down or sitting in meditation, breathing deeply and consciously (to invoke a clear flow of prana/life-force), and allowing ourself to be AWARE of the subtle felt-sense within the body. The habit pattern ordinary Man has to contend with is that as soon as he/she starts to feel even an inkling of the dis-integrated life-force he/she will spontaneously shift the focus of attention from the body up into the rational thinking mind. This is where the breath comes into play. Consciously following the breath and and out of the body-mind and remaining attentive to that flow will automatically keep our attention focused in the body-mind and away from the rationalising (words, thought, story).
Sometimes I ask myself, “How did modern Man get to this place of not feeling?” I suspect that our retreat away from nature has a big part to play in it. Nature communicates through (what Man experiences as) feeling and therefore a full and life-sustaining relationship with nature requires that Man feel. There is no two ways about it. In the natural world if you stop feeling an accrate impression of and communication with the environment around you, before you know it you will have eaten a toxic plant or a tiger will be eating you for lunch. As we retreated from nature into the safety of our town walls, fences, denuded landscapes (grass fields where there were once jungles and forrests), and eventually houses, and these days even massive high-rise buildings, Man no longer feels. BUT nature is unavoidable. We ARE an emergence of the natural world. So all those dangers we escaped from in the jungles which moved us to feel and made feeling so crucial to life and our well-being, are now replaced by those that arise from within. Feeling is still just as crucial.
I suspect that there is no mistake in all of this. As far as I can tell, by facing this challenge of having to uncover our capacity to feel, it now becomes an act of conscious intent. Through this, Man is evolving from unconsciously feeling, to unconsciously not feeling, to consciously not feeling, to consciously feeling…. which may then enter back into unconsciously feeling but with a whole new level of energy to it than where we started out with. This is just a hypotheses, off of the top of my head as I write this.
Coming back to forgiveness. For me, to deeply forgive is to come into that place of consciously feeling and recognising that at a cosmic level no-thing happened to me. The wrong-doing I perceived as real, simply never happened (in the way that I think it did). There is ONLY consciousness unfolding. There is a grand cosmic conspiracy at work or at play… and that conspiracy (literally in Latin, conspiratus –> with-breath or with-spirit) is one of the formless emerging into form. From Man’s personal perspective that translates as Man’s enlightenment or illumination, and from there, Man’s conscious participation in Creation.
How does this play out in practical terms?
- Drop the person who appeared to “wrong” you (and any other manifestation of the apparent “other”) out of the picture.
- Use the story that arose (anything with words involved… the words we are spelling out in our mind and thus under the [magic] “spell” of) only as needed in order to find a point of attentive contact with the feelings behind the story.
- Track those feelings by simply remaining present to them, and aware of them.
- Use a constant circular flow of breath to keep the energy and consciousness moving. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Breath into the areas where the feelings are arising.
- It is not necessary to go back into full blown emotion, catharsis, and potentially emotional trauma around those feelings. That is another way of avoiding the feeling. From a Vedic/Yogic/Ayurvedic perspective emotion is the result of thought intersecting with feelings.
- Of course, if emotion arises, that is fine. We can move through it and the stories (mental thoughts) will unravel from the life-force/feelings they had attached to and mis-qualified.
- Nature is self-perfecting. Nature is intelligently designed to ceaselessly and constantly reorientate itself into greater and greater expressions of order and Life. That includes us! We only have to be present to the flow of life-force within our body-mind…. this felt-sense or subtle feeling… and nature will take care of the rest.
- Where entities (Malu) and intrusive energies are involved we may need to call upon our own I AM Presence, or our helpers in the spirit realms, or nature (through plant medicines such as Ayahuasca, etc.), or a Shaman/Healer to assist with removing them. Simply put, we don’t have to battle it out alone. Just as the cells in our body don’t battle things out alone. The cells work together as a collective and intelligent whole. When they cease to work that way we end up with malignancies, etc.
That is the gist of it. This is a process I share in many of my workshops, where relevant.
This kind of feeling I refer to as fealing (with an A). It is an acronym for Forever Expanding Awareness in Liberation. FEAL. Playing with the words and letters, we have a form of feeling that has less emotion involved, and more awareness.
Man must feal in order to heal. We must heal in order to get real. Only when we get real do we live life fully and with zeal!
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