Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 18

Spirit of a Nondual Elixir – 4 Ways to Deeply Relax

Relaxation is a hot product in the dimension of 3rd millennium human. We watch violence and stress in movies to let the body relax. We create casts of twisted news stories of disaster, tragedy and perpetual condemnation and dictate them as the real world, to keep ourselves relaxed. We build icons and idols towering above the domains of mere mortality to ease the system. We design a myriad of legalized drugs and prescribe relaxation over the counter. We build and maintain arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, fight wars and terrorize the terrorists in the name of this elixir – relaxation.  We plummet the earth of her finite resources and at the same time poison her atmosphere for the sake of a little bit of short-term ease. We burn with ambition, seek to become someone other than who we are, strive to possess, control, convert or educate one another and work endlessly to keep our imagined enemies at bay – so that we can relax – later.

What is this prize – this relaxation – which never really comes but that’s found at the core of so much of our striving? What happens when we actually begin to relax?

[image error]Every experiential journey into the depths of who we are are begins, continues and ends with relaxation. What we commonly mean by “relax” is to move to a relatively lower level of stress. Often this involves distraction from the tensed-up energetic boundaries of the separate self through external entertainment. Yet distraction is not the same as relaxation, it simply delays the stress for later – projecting consciousness outside of the inner world for relief.

There is a sound spiritual psychology behind this. As we are not in any definable form separate from our external environment, what we perceive as outside can have a calming effect on the condensed inner energy system. When we walk through nature for example, the resonance of harmony outside of ourself, and the gentle left-right rhythm of our walking can release the pressure that has built up through our inner world. When we watch a suspense movie, the end of the fictional suspense and the resolution of the plot can signal the chemicals of resolution and successful problem solving to our psyche. Even if the plot ends bad, at least the horror is kept behind the glass of the TV screen – it’s not real – so we can safely process a whole load of horror through the movie.

What happens when we relax? Relaxation is about surrender, about softening and opening. It’s about an agreement to be here, in physical form. Yet the first symptom of increasing relaxation is often pain. As we relax and put our feet up at the end of a hard day, for example, the first thing we notice could be how much our feet are aching, or how the muscles in our neck are clenched. Awareness of this stress is relaxation happening. As relax more deeply into and around the pain, the process of relaxation can be experienced as almost pleasurable. The wonder of tired feet, the heaviness of the body as it surrenders to gravity, the soft nothingness of a mind that has been sparking thoughts all day, and now can just open to the impressions of the sunset.

Yet we are more than just bodies. We are also composed of energetic contractions of feelings and emotions. The shame on being proved wrong at the work place – echoing an old shame from childhood; the stranger on the bus that looked like a dead parent so for a fleeting moment we thought they were back; the perennial sense of isolation that accompanies the quest to survive “out there” in the world of people.

Also these energetic contractions – often closely embedded with physical stress – begin to relax and open that moment we decide to come home to ourselves and rest. In this, relaxation is a spiritual practise and a healing art. It is only through relaxing equally into the areas of comfort and discomfort that the unfolding of the psyche can take place – telling its woes, signalling its pain, and moving still deeper to rest. This multilayered transformation of stress and depression into peace is utterly vital to our sustainability in form. And the degree to which we are able to relax through the body is an unbounded, direct route to universal peace.

Here are four pointers to deepening the psychospiritual art of relaxation:

1.Don’t Delay Relaxation.

[image error]Now is the time to relax, because there is simply no other time. If we wait until we’ve come safely home, found our beloved and locked and bolted the door before we agree to relax, then what we’re relaxing into is likely to be a bed of nails, delayed gratification, anger, suspense and depression. Relaxation has nothing to do with past and future, it’s a deepening and sinking into the layers of perception that can only happen in real time.

We’re programmed to believe in crude either-or fixtures. When there is anger, we can’t relax; while we’re in debt, we can’t relax; while their is suffering in Africa, we can’t relax; as long as that hideous person works in your office, relaxation will have to wait. This dualistic notion of relaxation is building an inner bomb of stress, that if it can’t explode will start to solidify in layers of deep depression.

Relaxation is a practise that can happen each and every time you experience anything. Warm wind on the face, relax the body, relax into the experience. Looking at the view across a crowded bus, relax the eyes, relax the senses. Someone is screaming at you? Relax within the screaming. Taking a pee in a crowded shopping center? Take an extra few moments to relax into the home of the body. Relaxation is possible together with every single moment of experience. We only lose it because of the way we’re programmed. Home comes with us everywhere. We never need throw ourselves out.

2.You’re breathing anyway, so relax in it.

[image error]The breath is a wonderful barometer of our state of stress and distress. When we’re troubled, breath becomes more shallow, uneven, and often even stops for some moments. By bringing our attention to the flow of our breathing – together with whatever else is happening in any moment – we are signalling to our breathing that it is possible to relax (because someone is home).

The art is not necessarily to interfere with our breathing (however disturbed it is), but to notice it. Then, to push just a little bit more on the outbreath. The out-breath clears the lungs of dead air, that piles up according to the amount of stress we’re enduring. When we blow out the exhale, allowing the inhale to take care of itself, the breath will gradually regulate to increasing naturalness.

What’s genius about this practise of perpetual mindfulness throughout our day-to-day life is that the more we practise it, the more it gets built in to our system. Whether or not we consciously intend it, we can find ourselves blowing out stress and being reborn with the in-breath. It even continues during the periods of our sleep – which is the period of deepest relaxation when all our systems get refreshed, healed and rejuvenated.

3.Don’t get distracted by pain.

[image error]When we have been for a while in stress of depression, we have built a habit of avoiding any kind of suffering out of deep aversion to the greater suffering of trauma. When someone is depressed starts to walk, for example, the somatic agony just from the sense perceptions generated by movement can send them in despair to the bleakest thoughts of the mind.

The key to relaxation is that it is primarily a relaxation out of the programs of mind. By moving out of the roads most travelled in the head, into direct sense perception that is opened through the relaxed deepening into the body, real relief is possible. But in this it’s necessary to be diligent in the art of relaxation. When we are walking through a depression for example, and meet that sense of depression even in the space where our feet touch the earth, the challenge is to relax with softness and curiosity into the pain and discomfort of that. When our body is swept with tiredness, relax into the sensation of tiredness.

This relaxation into the suffering of what is, means we open more deeply, into the perception of what else is here: a humming bird; the life in the grass, the clouds patterning the sky.

4.Agree to relax beyond the separate self.

[image error]The belief is a separate self in which inner and outer worlds are divided is at source of most of our stress, depression, anxiety and rage. Just maintaining this belief in the “I” verses the outer world demands a tremendous amount of vigilance and vitality. As long as we believe ourselves as separate from the whole, we must constantly monitor the external threat, which means we are perpetually in fear. Our psyche begins to look like an alert system for incoming attack:  a 24/7 sensor for alien invasion. We even begin to depend on that sense of threat to increase our vitality through quick fixes of adrenaline. Yet none of this is genuinely relaxed, although it could pretend to be, as a winning strategy to survive.

Relaxation always involves a release or expansion of the energetic boundaries of the separate self. The very meaning of ‘home’ (which is where some of us relax) is all about being able to release that sense of separation – to belong together with the whole – even if that whole ends on the front door step.

As we relax during our day-to-day life, the irrational frontiers of the separate self will come forward, as if to remind us of the great threat and the deadly things that could happen. We belief that listening to these warning will make us safer. What actually happens is that when we are in fear, our perception narrows and we lose our connection to our environment which is the greatest safety we could strive for. Yet at the same time, we need to be aware of our psychological borders that protect our inner areas of sensitivity (where we have been wounded).

The art is to not stop relaxing when we meet such a border. Respect our own borders (and those of o[image error]thers), but allow a relaxation beyond them. The border remains, but the relaxation continues, from the ground up.

It is a terrible fallacy about the nature of boundaries that we believe that they should bind the limits of our perception and in this, justify a constant renewal of stress. The strongest boundary we can put between ourselves and others is one founded in the core of our own physical relaxation. As long as this relaxation is allowed as a continuum, we even get the freedom to adjust our boundaries according to need, if and when we choose.

Relaxation is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and the greatest gift we can offer the world. It’s not a dull thing, but is charged with the energy of renewal, peace, love and compassion. Try it. We’d love to hear how it goes.

 

Relaxation Response Proves Positive – The Science of Meditation

Study reveals how mind-body medicine could cut health care costs





By Sue McGreevey, Massachusetts General Hospital Public Affairs

Relaxation-response techniques, such as meditation, yoga, and prayer, could reduce the need for health care services by 43 percent, according to a study at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) that looked at participants in a relaxation-response-focused training program.

Previous studies have shown that eliciting the relaxation response — a physiologic state of deep rest — not only relieves stress and anxiety, but also affects physiologic factors such as blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen consumption.

The paper’s authors noted that stress-related illnesses, such as anxiety and depression, are the third-highest causes of health expenditures in the United States after heart disease and cancer (which also are affected by stress).

The study, based at MGH’s Institute for Technology Assessment and the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) for Mind Body Medicine, found that individuals in the relaxation-response program used fewer health care services in the year after their participation than in the preceding year.

The report was published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

“Our study’s primary finding is that programs that train patients to elicit the relaxation response — specifically those taught at the BHI — can also dramatically reduce health care utilization,” said James E. Stahl of the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, who led the study. “These programs promote wellness and, in our environment of constrained health care resources, could potentially ease the burden on our health delivery systems at minimal cost and at no real risk.” Previously affiliated with the Benson-Henry Institute, Stahl is now based at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

The relaxation response was first described more than 40 years ago by Harvard Medical School Professor Herbert Benson, founder and director emeritus of the BHI and a co-author of the current study. The physiologic opposite of the well-documented fight-or-flight response, the relaxation response is elicited by practices including meditation, deep breathing, and prayer, and has been shown to be helpful in the treatment of stress-related disorders ranging from anxiety to hypertension.

To analyze the potential impact of mind-body interventions like the relaxation response on use of health care services, the researchers examined information available through the Research Patient Data Registry (RPDR) of Partners HealthCare. The research team gathered data on individuals participating in the BHI Relaxation Response Resiliency Program (3RP) from 2006 to 2014. The program combined elicitation of the relaxation response with social support, cognitive-skills training, and positive psychology designed to build resiliency.

Data regarding more than 4,400 3RP participants’ use of Partners system services in the years before and after their participation was compared with information from a demographically matched control group of almost 13,150 Partners patients over a similar two-year period. To address the possibility that 3RP participants had been more frequent users of health services in the year before their participation, the researchers also compared a subgroup of almost 1,200 3RP participants that excluded those with the highest pre-participation utilization levels with a subgroup of 222 controls whose initial healthcare utilization exactly matched those of the 3RP participants in the first of the two studied years.

Based on the number of health care encounters in the studied period, which included interactions in any setting — imaging studies, lab tests, and procedures — the 3RP participants had an average reduction of 43 percent in their use of health care services in the year after their participation.

The control group had an overall, but not statistically significant, increase in service utilization in the second year. The utilization-matched 3RP subgroup had a reduction of around 25 percent across all clinical services. Clinical areas in which 3RP participation was associated with the greatest reduction in service utilization were neurologic, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and gastrointestinal. The investigators estimate that the price of participating in programs like 3RP would be made up in costs savings in four to six months or less.

Stahl noted that the results of this investigation need to be validated by a prospective study that would also explore where and when best to use mind-body interventions like the Benson-Henry Relaxation Response Resiliency Program.

“I think of it this way: There are many gates to wellness, but not everyone is ready to walk through a particular gate at a given time. From a public health perspective, it is better to be prepared to offer these tools to people in their customary settings than to wait for them to seek out these interventions. For that reason, we feel that mind-body interventions — which are both low-cost and essentially risk-free — should perhaps be incorporated into regular preventive care.”

Benson added, “From the outset, our primary goal has been to enhance the health and well-being of people by counteracting the harmful effects of stress and alleviating the many diseases that are caused or exacerbated by stress. The challenge now is to disseminate these findings, which we feel will be of great interest to health care payors [such as insurance companies] and policy makers.”

Benson is the Mind Body Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Stahl is an associate professor of Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock.

Additional co-authors of the PLOS ONE paper were Michelle Dossett, John Denninger, Darshan Mehta, Roberta Goldman, and Gregory Fricchione of the Benson-Henry Institute; and Scott LaJoie of the University of Louisville.

Silence is the Language of our Sentient Universe

Before, between, behind, above and underneath the formation of every thought is silence. Without silence, no thought, no vibration, no form could come to be. Without silence, thought would not be possible at all.

Silence is not a dense nothingness, It’s not an absence of thought. Silence is the subtle soil out of which every sound, each subtle vibration arises, takes unique form, and into which it rests.

Silence has quality. From the denser silence of resistance through to the thinner silences of non-verbal atmospheres, it is a language in itself. Silence speaks a language beneath the time-based polarities of the thinking mind.

In silence, there are no borders, just gradations, slopes, rifts and valleys. In silence there is inherently no disconnection. Silence is invitation to unity, which is why we can so often feel ashamed when silence is here between us.

What is this shameful silence? Is it the shame that is unclothed when the borders between the private inside and the public outside are touched? Is it the pain of exposure of a layer of resistance to being here as one, together in peace? Can this shame of silence teach us where we are not free to be? Is shame not also silent? Where does the silence of shame end and the silence of love begin? Who could say where the silence deep inside ourselves is separate from the silence out there, which we can hear with our ears? Where does private silence end and and melt into the boundless, natural, universal silence?

Silence is the language of our sentient universe.

When we listen to the silence of another, we listen at a layer deeper than their words. We can hear the anger behind the obligation of kindness. We can hear the language of personal survival speaking through words that pretend togetherness. In the silence we can sense the fear underlying the most enraged diatribe, or the insecurity beneath the empowered dictation of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’.

Listening to the silence is not surrender, Listening to the silence brings us simultaneously to the causal layers of the energy playing out in symptomatic sentences expressed by us, to us, around us. Silence needs no translator as she speaks. Words are optional.

Many of us are formed by a silence that has been used as a weapon to try and annihilate our souls.

We are the children that should be seen and not heard when our father speaks. The babies that impoverished their families and bothered them with questions.

We are the women that when they expressed themselves were castigated, imprisoned, humiliated and condemned.

We are the minorities who should not attract attention, and be silent to survive. We are the injured ones, who learned that lack of silence means death and that silence is death.

How did we learn to believe that the right to silence belongs only to the powerful few? Who gave them the authority to order silence, to break it, make it and impregnate it with lies?

Stay silent. Don’t say anything. Conceal your thoughts. Conceal your face, for it also speaks. Conceal your eyes because expression is also an outrage to a national order where you have no right to belong. Bow your head. Lower. Lower your head and be still. Be silent. Surrender. Wait for the blow to come.

One tragedy of the dynamics of power and abuse that have left their footprints on our personalities is that the magnificent resource of silence has been barred from our perception. Where might is right, because it can beat you up, exclude you and rob your body of air, there we find that silence, or silencing is used as a weapon. And the experience of silence gets encoded as punishment.

It’s time to reclaim the silence. The deeper we move into the free-fall through silence, the more natural our expression can become. The more we allow silence, the more precise and refined our expression. As we fall through the veils of silence, the listener opens up and we might realize that we were never alone, but always heard.

The more we reclaim the inner and outer home of silence, with its qualities of reflexive care, peace and indestructibility, the more our voice deepens to express these qualities into the world. And we must express these qualities into the world.

Be silent. Not as a punishment. Not as a retreat. Not as an obligation.

Be silence in freedom, out of which every form of expression can emerge through our body, cells, voice and through the melodies of the soul. Be silence in deepest, living peace. Be silence beyond and through all forms that get born and die.

Be silence in freedom, that an unfettered prayer of universal care might rise with the resonance of the truest voice alive, sung by the goddess for the creator, in his ear, so that he might know himself again.

Imagine a Freedom Beyond Imagination

For millennia, across the planet an elixir of physical evolution has been breaking in slow motion out of the shell of its own, tender incubation. Evolution is happening. It’s creation in slow motion, from generation to generation, in which the human species is the most physical of all forms.

The human is the most physical, as it is the most embodied. Rather than forgiven, natural telepathy, we developed language through which to communicate. In the place of instinctive knowing, the subtle biology of the brain processes a slower vibration we call knowledge. Rather than the purity of attraction, we witness the physical forms of imagination and mental agenda. In place of the purity of belonging within the circle of life, we developed the fear of survival, the fear of rejection, of death, insanity, sexuality and illness.

Physical creation is taking form through the dense matter of our neural networks – and it takes time.

[image error]The notion that we are in evolution through which we – the human animal – are learning to make the paradigm shift from fear to love is not a new one. Countless individuals – the bright, navigational stars of our era – have reiterated this fundamental message: the evolution is from fear to love, from the suffering of separation to the wholeness of the heart. The message is embedded in the notebooks of our greatest scientists; it’s repeated through the soul cry of our poets and in the lyrics of our musicians. It’s in the classics of literature and in all the holy texts. The mind must cease the survivalist strategies of fear, and surrender itself to the expansive neural networks of love. The conditioned mind must surrender: it must be baptized in the ocean of the heart.

Yet love is not an intoxicant that can be drunk at will. It can’t be water-cannoned on the crowds or used to control the species. It’s not a sympathy-plea trumpeting the secret agenda to survive the sword of judgement. It’s not a thing we can create or a thing we can possess. It’s not the magic potion that brings us our life partner, our wealth and our fundamental right to belong. It won’t do any of that, as humans are born to be servants to love. Love is not a creation of the mind to be of service to humans. These movements of control are not about love but about the same old fears in a myriad of new disguises.

The deeper secrets of love are found in the invincible, relentless and ever present domains of freedom out of which love arises, in and of itself. Where the open connection to inner freedom is lost, love degenerates into separation between lovers and a self that believes itself separate yet suffers the perpetual fear and pain of separation. In this, the deeper, immutable evolution is not from fear to love, but from fear to freedom.

Imagine a freedom that has always been here, that is here now, and that will always be here.

Begin to develop an allowance of that sense of freedom that can die and be reborn, change, suffer, enjoy and celebrate the spiral of life and evolution.

Imagine a freedom through which there is no question about belonging as part of a whole, through which every moment of every thought, every action and every inaction is always, already forgiven.

Imagine a freedom where our personality, our ego, our longings, our grief and our failure or success are all equally precious as expressions of an inevitable evolution.

[image error]Imagine an individual freedom where mob psychology no longer gives us form, where insult is irrelevant and where healing is a joy beyond mental description. Imagine a freedom through which we can serve the whole in perpetual expansion simple by allowing everything and anything to move through us without consequence.

Imagine a freedom where we can surrender the sense organs, including the brain into pure opening of a channel of receptivity – listening, smelling, touching, tasting, seeing and organically receiving all the impressions of life in her glorious, creative explosion in slow motion.

Imagine a freedom in which we can rest all of ourselves, whenever we need and whenever we choose, and that nurtures us in our melting in his arms with endless peace, infinite resource and perpetual rejuvenation.

This is not a fantasy. This freedom is here, as you, right now. The only condition it carries is that no-one can take it away The only descriptor is that it can never be damaged. The only requirement is to be fearless enough to allow it – even into the core of our most hidden fears.

Creation is a destructive process. As physically, we evolve from fear to freedom, it becomes apparent that the freedom has always been here, as us, and all that was needed was for the fear to evaporate – out of its myriad, imaginary forms – back into this.

The Myth of Attaining Enlightenment – Cate Montana

By Cate Montana

[image error]

Cate Montana

The old Biblical saying “seek and ye shall find” is absolutely true. Unless we seek knowledge, we’ll be forever ignorant. Unless we seek greater answers to the fundamental questions about existence, we’ll blindly accept whatever dogma is fed us. Unless we seek to change over the course of our lives, we’ll remain stuck in a rut, going nowhere.

When the accepted truths of religion and society fail to satisfy the hunger inside for truth, there’s nothing else to do but seek alternatives. And therein lies one of the primary problems with spiritual seeking.

After leaving one system of thought, it’s just human nature that most people are quickly and easily enticed into an alternative system. We’re trained from childhood to believe having the “right answers”—whether to a math problem, a history lesson, or what happens to us after death—is of paramount importance. The need for right answers is so deeply ingrained we don’t even notice it.

So what happens when we leave an established religious system that no longer suits us? Most of us go straight out and quickly adopt a new system of thought that is … um … just another system of thought. Certainly that’s what I did.

As soon as I reached escape velocity from my Episcopal and Catholic roots I went on a seeking binge, devouring books about angels and spirit guides, yogis and kundalini energy, vegetarianism and high colonics. I fell into the arms of New Age thought and settled in, thinking, “Aha! Now I’ve found the truth! Now I’ve found my tribe!”

I had no idea I’d simply replaced one system of “truth” with another much more exotically intriguing but equally hide-bound system. Ten years, a million books and two teachers later, I knew everything there was to know. All you had to do was ask me. Reincarnation? Check. Astral projection? Check. The origin of Creation? Check. Manifestation? Check. Meditation? Check. Holotropic breath work?  Oops. Missed that one.

Above all else, the new belief system I adopted held forth the ideal of seeking enlightenment. The ultimate place of ultimate answers—the Holy Grail of spirituality—enlightenment is what all serious seekers sought. So I sought enlightenment too. And because I was a nice spiritual person I wanted the whole world to become enlightened—just preferably not before me. After all, part of the appeal was getting there ahead of others. I quite fancied the vision of myself in white robes on a stage, teaching others “the way.”

Never mind enlightenment isn’t something that can be acquired. I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I wasn’t happy and that I didn’t particularly like myself and that a lot of books and teachers said enlightenment was the answer to my misery, self-doubt, fear and confusion. Once I had that in my pocket, all would be well.

Being a high-achieving “lean-in” type, I started climbing the enlightenment mountain at a furious pace. I isolated myself in a one-room cabin with no indoor plumbing in the mountains of north Georgia in the US and spent three years living on my savings, meditating, sometimes for days on end, taking only a short break every 24 hours to feed my dogs and have a small handful of food and some water myself.

Almost 20 years and some 20,000+ hours of meditation later, I discovered the joke was on me. Falling into deep states of non-dual awareness where all sense of self is absent and knower and known become one, I came face-to-face with the inescapable realization that “I” can never become enlightened because enlightenment is the absence of all sense of “self.”

Ha! The absence of “me” is bliss. Oneness arrives upon “my” departure. How could I take credit for that?

The discovery that seeking enlightenment was a fool’s errand driven by my ego’s desire to accomplish “the ultimate” and escape the painful condition of being “me”—the discovery that enlightenment cannot be attained because the very act of seeking enlightenment concretizes the ego doing the seeking—was the single-most ghastly and cosmically funny moment of my life.

But what about liberation?

[image error]It took me years after that to realize liberation while still living as a human being is possible. Granted, it’s not the ultimate liberation. But hey, what good is ultimate liberation if you’re not around to enjoy it?

Transpersonal consciousness, on the other hand, is totally do-able and enjoyable.

A state of mind psychologists are aware of where the illusions of the ego’s separation from life and others (and all the fears that come from the illusion of separation) fall away, transpersonal consciousness is the middle ground between personal ego consciousness and egoless transcendence. A liberated stepping-stone state where genuine connection and security, peace and fulfillment, creativity and self-love reside, the transpersonal is the state of mind where ego awareness expands beyond personal boundaries and a profound sense of connection with all beings and life itself is experienced.

Best of all, unlike enlightenment, transpersonal awareness can be taught. And don’t you know the world would be a better place if it were.

In my book The E Word: Ego, Enlightenment & Other Essentials I outline numerous meditations and practices to aid people in moving into transpersonal awareness. Here is one of those exercises.

Practice – Hi Me!

This exercise is designed to stretch your boundaries and expand your awareness to consciously include other beings and more of life. Mostly I do this whenever I’m walking outdoors.

As I walk and notice things—the branches of a tree dripping with rain, a blossoming rhododendron, a Great Horned Owl hooting in the forest, a crow calling overhead—I greet them saying (or thinking) “Hi me!”

I consciously acknowledge their individual presence while acknowledging the larger Truth that these beings are not separate from me: that at the deepest level of what’s real they are me.

Just in a different form!

Variations:

Sometimes I’ll see a horse galloping across a field or an eagle winging overhead and call out, “You’re so beautiful!!” Then, acknowledging union with that being I immediately add, “I’m so beautiful!”

Or standing in awe of a sunrise or a view I think, “How stunning.” And then I open my arms wide, taking the view into me and say (or think) as I include myself in the picture:

“I am so beautiful!”

Usually in that kind of glorious moment I say it out loud more than once. If no one’s around, I SHOUT it. Of course if I’m at a backyard barbeque I just pause and drink the beauty in, then, in my mind’s eye, step into the picture and include myself while thinking thoughts of gratitude and appreciation that include: “I am so beautiful!”

People Variation:

I do the same thing when I meet people. This is trickier because I’m usually so busy remembering names and responding to the person that I forget. But when they walk away I often watch them go thinking, “Hi me. So nice to meet you and see myself in such a unique form doing such different work.”

And for a few moments I try to imagine that I’m walking away as that person. I put myself in their shoes for a few seconds.

This really helps drop barriers and judgment against people who think and believe differently than I do. They are me—just in a different form!

 

Author of The E Word: Ego, Enlightenment & Other Essentials and Unearthing Venus, Cate is a dauntless explorer of inner and outer worlds, has a master’s degree in humanistic psychology, and writes and teaches about the ego, transpersonal consciousness, evolution, and quantum physics. She lives in the US, in the Pacific Northwest. www.catemontana.com

The book can be purchased online here.

 

The Nondual Power of Purity: 5 Ways to Be for Real

Is purity weakness? Does it compromise our position and leave us undefended? Popular misconception would have us believe that purity is close to naivety, that it’s a weakness of the stupid and unskilled: the golden chain around the sacrificial lamb. Yet purity is one of the strongest energies available to human experience.

Scientifically seen, a pure diamond, for example, can be  up to 90–225 GPa. If alcohol is ingested in its pure form, we won’t last long. Anyone who works with essential oils will know the power of pure scent, just as anyone who has experienced homeopathy will be familiar with the impact of purity in remedies. Purity is close to potency. Yet so often, rather than being our greatest strength, it can be experienced as the greatest aggravant. Why?

In a deeper sense, we are all of us, collectively, in a process of purification. The structure of the human psyche, at present, is heavily dependant on ego structure in order to protect the raw personality for over-reaction – the kind that can spin the individual into crisis in terms of his or her place in society. Ego is born in order to protect our inner (often inherited) wounds. It’s a shell based on presenting a certain image – towards the outside world, and also towards our own inner critic. As such, it’s basis is deception. Born from the outset out of the intense difficulty in feeling at home in an alien social field, ego attempts to disguise or mask all that seems to be rejected, or discordant to the outer world.

Caught in the mental conditions of time and space, ego is constantly in a state of comparison and measurement. These conditions mean that from the layer of ego, life can be experienced as a constant threat of annihilation. If the other is more, then I must be less. If the other is successful, then I am a failure. If the other wins, then I lose. The agendas of survival, mutated into imagined success, create an interdependency of competition in order for measurement to take place. This play-out is powered by the wounds of the past and reaches for the winning moment of the future. The present moment, or real time, is lost, together with naturalness, responsivity and deeper safety.

[image error]

Inviolable purity as the nondual source to contractions wound the experience of shame and disgust.

Purity as a nondual quality is not a structure but a living aspect of who we are, behind structures of ego and behind structures of personality. When we begin to relax and reunite with the living energy of purity, even our worst egocentric moments can be experienced or remembered for the purity of their own process. When we allow this purity which can never be damaged or taken away, then even our greatest shame (the root cause of cover-up) can sink back to its original pain – a pain which is inherently purifying, and returning us home to the purity of being or the purity of awareness that is at the ground of all experience.

Purity is an indispensable part of our freedom in human form, as humans. This is a living purity which exists unconditionally to the mess we are in. The contraction of purity is experienced through the horrors of shame (at the inner layer) and disgust (towards the outer form, even a split form of our own psyche). In the area of inherited trauma, shame and disgust are the traumatic inheritence and the wisdom of purity is found in inherited resilience.

Shame – born through a history of physical and even sexual trauma – is one of the hardest emotions to allow. We tend to throw it outside of ourselves even a second before we know we are feeling it. As such, work with purity will always encounter core layers of shame, sentient pain and a degree of existential horror around the theme of belonging. Work with shame and disgust often involves acute physical symptoms, such as disgust as if we have ingested poison, are a sense of burning as if we were burnt at the stake.

[image error]

Nondual qualities or qualia of consciousness arising out of source prior to the physical conditions of time and space.

As with all nondual qualities, purity is not an abstraction. Purity disorders tend to feature with fully charged emotion in the most innocuous environments: loading the dishwasher, small-talk, map-reading. The panic to control the conditions around purity can be rife, leading to exaggerated and grandiose scenes, that later seem to be surreal in their loss of context and proportion. The average control freak is often standing on a floor of shame.

Below are five guidelines to reconnect with the purity which is our birthright, and which is inseparable from who we are.

1.Honesty

Shame is connected with the ‘outer’ world and the reflex to cover up parts of ourselves to avoid rejection. The cover-up often takes the form of disguising what is true in the moment. While truth as an absolute, cannot be expressed, the intention towards truth as expressed in honest communication can be.

The formula is simple. When we lie, we damage communication. When communication is damaged, trust is lost. When trust is lost, we are disempowered. The lie that sought to protect us from social rejection, becomes the very cause of social isolation. We have isolated ourselves through misrepresentation.

When reality breaks down and we move collectively into a dynamic of kill-or-be-killed, or a state of survival, lying can be the right thing. For example, telling the gestapo that your neighbor is not Jewish could have been heroic. However, even for this kind of lie, we need to be free enough in the purity of our deeper truth to let it live through us without damage. We need to be anchored deeply in the truth of our inner purity.

All the way to the simplest stuff, the question must remain. Does this transaction need this lie in order to be? Does the water need the mud in order to be water? Does the sky need the clouds in order to be sky? Do I need to lie, in order to be “I”? And why?

2.Mindfulness

When we bring our attention to our breathing, breathing in the contraction or ‘bad’ energy in our system, and breathing out purity, we give perspective to the tyrannical hold that the contraction has on our whole system. With relaxed, mindful breathing, the stakes are lowered and perspective is born. Mindfulness introduces the element of the present moment which allows us to unhook our grasping towards future escape from past pain. It can also unveil the core pain behind our disconnection of purity. The space and time created around the experience of this pain is vital for its healing. Pain needs to sing, not be hidden, concealed and smothered under blankets of denial. When it can sing, at a certain stage its song will be sung, with only the memory remaining.

3. Unhook Identity

When this energy of dissonance or impurity is no longer owned as ‘mine’ or labelled as ‘yours’, it is given permission to live in its own right. This can be hard at first, as foul energy tends to move most of our psyche into aversion. Yet in truth, shame is not personal, it’s collective. It’s thrown around the social field like hot cakes. It’s used as a weapon of cruelty by ourselves against ourselves. We’re born into the shame of our parents and grandparents, and we transmit it to our children. It is an area where we are looking at collective evolution. Therefore the depersonalization of shame is critical to the wellbeing of the whole. Only then can it begin to expand and cry out, tell its sentient story, and return the carnal wound out of which it was born. By degrees it transforms into purity – a ground of expression and communication that liberates our expression and connection from fear. Also this purity is neither mine nor yours, it just is who we are at source.

4. Go Softly

As already indicated, processes of purification can involve transforming our greatest demons into allies. Sometimes, we are talking about the core of existential angst, the worst horrors from the dark night of the soul. While the choice to go inside to seek the truth of all we are will always involve at some stage the realization of our darkest illusions as illusory, there is nothing to be gained by trying to fix 1000s of years of inherited horror at once. When we move with softness towards an energetic contraction, the contraction by itself begins to relax. It is enough at first for us to simply be conscious of our inner issues for a healing process to enfold. The softer we move, the more softly it will open.  In softness there is refinement, texture and depth. Nothing need be left out. This is one of the mercies of form.

5. Vigilance with Condemnation

When we move or are moved into inner precincts of horror – or even horrors as witnessed in the world we believe is ‘out there’, the temptation to move into judgement can undercut even our consciousness. We get judgmental as a reflex before we even know it happened. The are is to be vigilant of this. Watch also the judgement of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as a symptom of the contraction – an immutable part of the contraction itself. Listen to your judgements, but try not to get caught by them. Experience it happening, but don’t invest in it. Be courageous in letting the story of purity unfold without boxing it up in a newly formed system of beliefs.

 

Beauty is Enough for Peace

What’s not to love my friend, when you’re sitting on top of a hill,


gazing at the moon and everything is still?


The house sits in the valley, proud and old and timeless,


for those who live within her are from


here, there, and nowhere at all.

I have been seeking in thought and time,


I have lacked, have lacked a friend,


The only friend worth counting,


the one on which I sit, which holds me,


which echoes my every mood as it exists


here, and now, and in this moment and always.


 


Moon, lilac surround.


And peaceful in your every moment of watching,


and ending, a stillness, and nothing.


 


And life awakes as two dogs run down a lane,


And another pinpoint of thought,


of this moment, follows in its own way,


connected disconnected and neither.


 


And back to the sound of the crow, a yellow moon,


And an aching sadness of the aloneness,


that floats above the naval,


disconnected from you, from earth, from trees.


 


How did I know which way to come, to come to this place,


to this now, to this forever?


 


Flow river flow,


flow this ache down this hill into the ground,


until I stand, these tears wept,


this forever known, and know nothing.


 


There is a tree down there in the valley,


which stands tall and white, next to another,


they make a little pathway between, V,


of touching near the ground.


Riding the wind a bird soars


and a glint down in the valley says


– there is something here.


 


I sit like a blob of flesh on the ground,


the cells identified as disconnected, as alone,


as the thing of the stuff world, that moves and then Rots.


The rest of the world exists in harmony


– how am I separate?


 


What craziness is this that separated me out?


The ‘circle of life’ is for Elton John only,


with shiny sequins, long gowns and a commercial world


that sings of peace yet knows nothing.


 


Touch me, beauty is enough for peace.


The intellect can ride a wave


until the frothing foam lands you on a beach of nothing.


Stimulated, the cells will shake and shimmer and search for meaning.


Meaning may come in bursts of highs and lows,


of nothings and some things.


But will it stay my friend,


will it not be washed away by the tide?


 


For when the tide has washed away


the beach of sparkle, of crap of shit and grime


what is left?


burning rocks under the sun where feet tread


– scorched for lack of earth.


 


Rather sit here, sit here with what


can be considered empty nothing,


sit in nothing, look inward, feel down,


touch the Earth with its beauty,


and let me find something here,


for I have been searching, for many ages past.


 


Tamsin 11.01.16

Let the Music Play – Dancing Through Duality

The creation of all we could ever experience, all we could ever think, all we could ever dream, depends on the splitting of the one source into two. The birth of our world(s) can be seen through the lenses of the whole spectrum of feelings and emotions. We are here as a punishment, we fell from grace; Life is something to be endured or survived; we are inherently failing as part of the universe; life is good; life is a miracle; life is a curse; life is beauty. These are the kind of somatic beliefs that filter and create our perception of reality.

The core split in creation between subject and object; between the one that ‘sees’ and that which is ‘seen’ is full of clarity, and not colored by judgement or the aversion to pain. Yet the arch of suffering emerges in that very split that allows us all to be. In suffering we seek to cling to what we perceive as the cure, while missing the evidence that for two to emerge out of one, the one must always be here. The one is before the two, within the two and an inextricable part of the two.

So it is with peace. Each decision, each inner fight or emotional struggle, is made of and exists through the one peace. For example in the conflict between success and failure, the peace which is beyond every conflict prevails. The learning that is behind every success and failure continues as a nondual position. When we rest in that learning, the one peace beyond conflict also infuses the field. We begin to understand that failure is the key element of success and that every success if made of failure. They inter-depend.

When we allow the one seer at the source of all we are, we begin to dance in duality, without ever having been divided. What looks like suffering, can then be experienced as the very soil out of which we flower. We wish you freedom in this dance of dualities, purity in the music and bliss in each reborn moment.

We are here for this.

“The partner of war is surrender. Peace has not opposite. In Peace, surrender and war are one.”

Being Here in Unity – How Emptiness Unveils the Miracle of Life

I AM HERE ~ Unity 

“It is in the dense dimension of physical matter that emptiness becomes most apparent.”

Extract from I AM HERE ~ Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty by Georgi Y. Johnson.

The soul aspect which pervades as a background to the dimension of emptiness is unity. Often this statement produces an immediate kvetch. Unity? In the root? The idea that it is precisely the ‘lower’ dimension – all that ugly physical stuff – which is the opening to sacred unity can appear as a paradox. Yet what we know as the ‘lowest’ dimension – physical matter – is also in some ways the most inviolate, strong and the most suffused with the perpetual sanctity of creation and the emergence of form. It is in the dense dimension of physical matter that emptiness becomes most apparent.

When we contemplate the densest expression of energy available to our perception – the physical world – the world of bones, flesh, cement, mortar and neatly painted asphalt, it becomes clear that there can be no unity which does not contain that. If we excluded the matter of which we are composed as individual humans, it wouldn’t be unity but escapism. In truth matter does not divide us: it is the most tangible, physical proof of our unity.

Our physical bodies, alive as they are, are also the clearest declaration of physical unity. They declare it constantly, these bodies, as they drag behind us as we venture forth in our ‘higher’ process of spiritual development. Loyally, they ground it all. Whether conscious or not, and beyond the furthest reaches of our awareness, these bodies persist as a magnificent composition of universal matter.

Although we can find a thousand reasons why not to think about it right now, these bodies of ours are also in transformation. We will undergo a death process, and the physical body will be cremated or buried in order to slowly decompose into the elements. Even the fresh air we are breathing is suffused with the particles of bodies of those that have lived and died.

And this is not only a future event. Within the timeless, vertical dimension of the present moment, our physical conception and our decomposition are coexisting. There is no greater proof and fact of the transience of form than our physical flesh and blood, and the hard ground on which it stands.

At the heart of matter, we are one.

So potent is this, that when there is sound it vibrates through every molecule and cell of our physical bodies, whether or not we know or like the other people in the room. We are responding in unity to every passing truck, and each whisper from a baby’s lips, whether or not we allow it within our awareness or know it within our consciousness. At the heart of matter, we are one.

This basis of unity contains the mid-dimension of sentient awareness and the upper dimension of wisdom and peace. It is the infinite empire that allows the stillness of eternity, the stillness of being and the stillness of silence. It is the powerful support to passion, ecstasy and bliss. It is the unending perimeter of self-realization as it turns back towards a refining of enlightenment and awakening.

Dissolving in this soul aspect of unity, behind time and space, within the great and persuasive playing field of creation in the grey space between polarities, we are one.

If we return to the story of the unborn, we notice that in the coming together of two sides of a polarity, man and woman, something new is born: the embryo of all that we are. If this embryo could report, it would be telling that its formation is a kind of vibration, a movement in which it has been separated from the pure atmosphere of peace, love and unity from which it emerged. It would be almost cynical about the division – because it is still composed within peace, love and unity, and it knows the division is transient.

Just as a handful of sand lifted from the seashore is still sand, and knows it can be scattered in all directions across the planet, yet it can never have its ‘sandness’ taken away, even if every grain were to be spiralled through infinite space. Just as a reflection of light gives light and is composed of light. Just as the water in our bodies and in each individual cell is part of the universal element of water, and when it returns to the ocean will become the ocean. Just in this way, we are an inseparable part of creation as it manifests, moment by moment.

Unity is not the same as Uniform. Uniformity blinds perception. Unity allows perception into the universe.

The Power of Belief – Placebo Power as 1st Source of Healing

There are two questions pertaining to the self – the metaphysical and empirical – that are often confounded. The latter is best approached through neurology as V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, illustrates in this fascinating lecture at UC Berkeley. [Recorded on 03/01/2016]

Evolving the Body-Mind

Did you ever see a child hurt her knee, recover from the pain for an hour, and then on seeing her mother, scream again as if the pain was fresh? This isn’t just acting out. The pain is reawakened as a way to communicate the distress to the parent, perhaps to seek a deeper release or togetherness in experience.

The brain is not a fixed, well-defined entity. The pain registering through any branch of the nervous system is identified by the brain, and the brain then also controls it. Once the brain has it mapped that a particular limb is in pain, for example, it can continue signalling pain long after the stimulus has past.  and far from being a passive recipient of the pain, the brain always controls the pain signals we feel and plastically changes itself creating pain from non-existent locations.”

Phantom Pain is Pain

In the video above, Prof. V.S. Ramachandran,  discusses many of the ways our belief control our experience. Most impressively, is his training of phantom limbs with mirrors, for the relief of phantom pain, and his reference to the treatment of OCD, through the witnessing of someone else carrying out the compulsive behaviour. This has far reaching implications for the psychology of non-duality.

Ramachandran’s work makes clear that in treating physical illness, we are not only looking at the bottom-up convention of seeing injured link – brain signal – pain, as the chief biological process. We are also, dramatically looking at top-down: the perception of the brain, or the historic patterns encoded on the brain through repetition and trauma, have a direct impact on the experience of pain in the body itself. It’s both bottom-up and top-down, and from the deeper perspective of spiritual healing, perhaps neither.

Emotional Contractions and Pain

In the video above, Prof. Ramachandran discusses the two pain responses: chronic and acute. In a situation of chronic pain, we withdraw the limb or body part from the cause of the pain. In a situation of acute pain, the body part freezes or immobilizes. Movement itself causes pain so the solution is to not move at all. Swelling of affected areas is one biological affect of the system of immobilization as a protection.

When we move into psychological dimensions (remembering that deep emotional pain lights up the same brain centers as physical pain), we see a similar effect energetically. When someone hurts you, we tend to need to push away, or run away. We try and get away from the source of the pain. This is an acute contraction, but it still has movement. A chronic psychological contraction is that which immobilizes us: we freeze. This freeze, and the progressive immobilization of energy around the pain center, is where psychological trauma sets in. It isolates the experience from the general flow of the body.

Interestingly, Ramachandran again discusses mirror neurons, (which he jokingly coins empathy neurons, or Gandhi neurons), as the means through which we can potentially heal each other. When we are open to someone who doesn’t share the same area of contraction, we have the possibility to “live through them”, training the brain in healthy response patterns, that can then be picked up. (What he doesn’t mention is that the law of attraction will also gravitate us towards others with similar contractions in neural networks, see The Dark Side of the Mirror Neuron). In all, the individual responsibility to evolve the mind out of the limitation of binary belief systems on the very fabric of the reality we create becomes clear. The more of us who can rest in the neuroplastic space of a mind of non-discrimination, the more the rest of us will learn to rest there too.

Belief & Immunology

As seen in the video above, the nature of our beliefs also has a direct impact on our immunity. Despite the dismissal of many forms of healing, mindfulness and alternative medicine as working through the ‘placebo’, it seems that the expansive structures of belief in q positive outcome, does have a direct impact on our actual ability to get better. The placebo could explain the positive effects of all medications, (not just homeopathic!)

In 2016, researchers from Technion Israel revealed a direct link between the placebo effect (which they term ‘optimistic mindset’) and the bodies immune system. “Our study explains how areas of the brain associated with positive emotions can affect the body’s coping with diseases,” explains Prof. Asya Rolls. “Placebo is a complex phenomenon in which the patient’s expectation of recovery affects his state of health. Expectation of improvement and arousal of positive emotions are reflected in the activity of neurons in the brain.  Therefore we decided to understand, at the molecular level, how areas of the brain associated with positive feelings affect the functioning of the immune system, which is basically the body’s main defense system. We have no doubt that an understanding the mechanisms connecting the brain to this system could lead to significant medical applications based on the effect of the mind on the body.”

Immunological health has been linked to cancer, with immunotherapy being a front line of promise in future cancer therapies. The power of belief, and trust in a benevolent source of healing outside of the private self, would seem to be enormously supportive of the organism as a whole. And we have a feeling that this is just the beginning of the story.

Beliefs & Nondual Therapy

The secret behind the placebo effect, is not in the switch to positive beliefs over negative (although this could have some positive impact), but in the surrender of all beliefs to what is perceived as a benevolent authority outside the perimeters of the separate self or body mind.

This surrender in itself has a neuroplasticity that allows brain networks to release and reform. When beliefs are released from their dictatorial role over reality, the organism as itself will flow with its in-built, inherent tendency towards harmony – the same harmony that is everywhere in creation.

Out of the insights of nondual therapy, each belief is formed around a structure of polarity. The basic polarity is inside V outside, or ‘me’ V ‘other’, An inquiry into structures of belief, which are often inherited through the generations, must begin with a degree of mindfulness about the nature of thoughts in the head.

The stages of inquiry, that include some sentient sourcing of the emotional energy of a contraction/trauma, could go like this:

Locate a key belief (eg. I am stupid).
Feel how believing that belief is make you feel inside the body-mind (eg, angry, frozen, blank), and where these feelings are located in the body.
Ask yourself: is this belief true? (Only a yes or no answer wanted, as we’re talking to binary mind)
Find what for you is the opposite (shadow) belief. (eg. I am clever),
Feel how believing that belief is make you feel inside the body-mind (this can be surprising)
Imagine how it would feel to be free of both beliefs.
Check in on the physical layer of pain contraction and invite it lovingly to relax, as it’s OK to relax now.
Listen to any story the remaining contraction has to tell.