Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 21

Let Go of the Rudder

By Kerry Craig

I am finding myself spending a lot of time visiting this site in the short time I found it.

The past couple of years my mind has been set a whirl as I see so many diverse disciplines and human events coalescing and converging to some invisible point of resolution.

It’s gotten to the point that I’m starting to take notes to sort out and list these occurrences as there seem to be so much interlinking at this moment in time…

Did I say TIME? Chronological time was enough to handle, but now I also have this spatial, ethereal time to contend with… separate, yet they are inextricable from one another. It’s like a whirling Category 5 hurricane of Science and spirituality… chaotic on the outside yet inside is the eye of calm… and it is beginning to focus my own eye on the perfect Truths at its core.

I won’t even get into the way this has been manifesting itself to me personally and directly. like I’m being sent coded messages… and to ME!

I have NEVER been religious… Landing somewhere between agnostic and atheism…

Decades ago when I was 20 years old, I decided I would be better off going it all on my own..  but I wanted to have a plan. I made some promises to myself to guide me, so when faced with dilemmas, my guiding principles would give me direction… and now that I look back, I am amazed at how those promises were a perfect match for The Guiding principles of spirituality.

Back then, you couldn’t even say spirituality without being thought of as a blasphemer or some kind of snake oil salesman.

I look back now in amazement when I started to piece it all together and realize how the right events what happen at the right time, or the right people would show up in my life to advance my dreams.

I still see it.

I am convinced the same thing that guided me then is guiding me more directly and openly today.

Is it quantum mechanics, superstring theory, morphic resonance, the law of attraction? Is it this sea of electromagnetic energy and its connectivity we are all swimming about in?

I think this site may be the best place I have found to examine those questions. As if you have shown up exactly on time.

I have let go of the rudder. Well, At least I am holding it very loosely and trusting the current more and more. It has taken me here and I have a feeling my chronological time will be well spent examining the riches you contain.

I have already seen it happening.

The Still Small Voice is Speaking. Are we Sane Enough to Listen?

About a decade ago, two psychiatrists and a team of student psychiatrists asked me if I hear voices in my head. “Why, don’t you?” I answered. They looked grandiosely disapproving and all simultaneously ticked something in their notepads. Oh dear.

OK, with three babies under the age of two, living in a strange country, alienated from a foreign culture, investigating non-conventional terrorism and what (in 1999) I feared was an international threat from Al Qaeda, I had become out of balance and was having panic attacks. Three babies, a conventionally ‘damaged’ childhood, the outgrown hippy lifestyle and the advent of the espresso machine didn’t help.

But how did hearing voices in the head become a criteria for the psychiatric condemnation they call diagnosis?

An Inner Calling

The voices in my head, not the voices (or weird medication) of the psychiatrists are the guides that were to show me the way back to balance.

Luckily for me, I listened to them and refused the drugs. Luckily for me, these voices midwifed the death process of a tired and worn ego structure through which I had paddled through life prior to child birth. They laid that old form to rest in a sea of light, and took what was left, from feet upwards, on a path of healing, renewal and understanding. They are the ones that oversaw the passage from one form of personhood to the next, along its bumpy path and through all its twists and turns.

In the depression that emerged after the period of anxiety, it was these voices, speaking from the gut upwards towards a troubled and despairing mind, that showed me a break in the clouds on a rainy day in the UK, telling how just as the weather changes, so do the moods, but showing the infinity of the sky behind all weather, always blue, always endless, always here.

Often called the Still Small Voice, these voices of guidance can appear to resonate from outside of ourselves. They can sound from above the head (not often objectively, but in a way that we could think we are imagining them), or they can sound from our gut, quietly, calmly and unconditionally.

These are the kind of voices that when you decide a perfect plan of action from the head, and consult the gut, could quietly answer “No”. They often don’t say much (and in my case seem to compact meaning into poetry), but they are directly to the point with an almost impersonal overview of time and space that is impossible for the local mind to grasp.

In a way, the Still Small Voice, often tells you, directly from the vast store of unconscious impressions, where the land lies, while the mind remains caught in its own story and agenda. As such, the Still Small Voice can seem irrational from the perspective of the “rational” mind, yet I have learned never to ignore it. Even if it transmits just a simple sense of discomfort or boredom, it’s enough to just wait.

Later on, I took to channelling: directly contacting these voices with automatic writing. I received advice and guidance that is still applicable today. Yet when I asked these guides who they were, they answered: “I am the undercurrent of your own mind, sweet face.” Psychologically quite a sane answer, no?

Continue to: 3 Speakers Inside the Head

For more information on navigating the world of psychiatry and medication, follow the informative and inspirational blog: Beyond Meds.

Devotion & Doubt: Right-brain, Left-brain, and Existential Truth

Devotion and self-inquiry; spirituality and science: there’s Bhakti in the Jnana and Jnana in the Bhakti. We don’t get one without the other, but we do get to liberate both as needed.

It would be so remarkably easy if the human being could prostrate themselves and simply give away the whole of burden and challenge of their humanity to a guru, teacher, parent, priest, religion or heavenly entity. Yet we are collectively and often individually deeply disappointed in this endeavour. Gurus fail us; religion betrays us with the ruthless cut of discriminating authority; priests abuse us with threat and fear; and heavenly entities vanish in the dark night of the soul.

Historically, spiritually has been stalwartly moving down the path of devotion, ceremonious sanctification and prayer, yet experience has shown us, that this path in isolation has failed as each individual will sooner or later fall alone into the valley of the shadow of death.

At the same time, recent centuries witnessed a parallel movement: the path of inquiry. Where devotion failed, doubt – the evidence of not knowing anything at all – arose, birthing a wonder at the unknown and the indispensable sword of self-inquiry. Who am I? What am I? Where am I? From Copernicus who had the blasphemous audacity to suggest that the earth is not the center of the universe, through to the quantum physicists of today that are developing the mental ability to contain what to the binary mind appears as spooky, nonsensical paradox around the nature of matter, science stepped in to balance the devotional insistence of fear-based structures of religion.

As fear is often the underlying drive of both devotion and inquiry, the scientific approach has itself by degrees become dogmatic and evangelical (with crusader forms such as the pharmaceutical giants), while the religious approach has broken increasingly free into self-inquiry, questioning even the fundamental subject-object assumptions of science-based psychology.

Despite Copernicus, our spiritusl psychology still assumes humanity is the center of the universe – and that the world is flat, with a beginning and an end.

Indian philosophies have long recognized the two paths to truth: that of Bhakti (devotion) and of Jnana (Inquiry). In the spiritual chaos of our times, the competition between these two structures plays out in almost every arena: the path of devotion expresses itself in the search for ‘the teacher’ or ‘the way’ that will take us home. The path of inquiry can be found in an almost theologian dogmatism about spirituality – surfacing now with autocratic condemnations dressed in Sanskrit terminology, and to-die-for fights of spiritual ego.

Yet surrender through devotion and cutting through illusion through inquiry will always be part of every process of freedom, including the collective one. The question is, how to set both spiritual urges free to act as needed?

Perfectly reflecting the relaxed functioning of left brain and right brain, bhakti and Jnana must dance together, and this is a dance made possible through a consolidation in a position above both, independently of the dance of head and heart, that through its neutrality can set head and heart free to open.

Consciousness & Awareness, Head & Heart – it never was a competition, but an evolution into harmony.

This means that the Devotee will inevitably fall into the inherent insecurity embedded in his or her own interdependent, changing form – self inquiry will come and find them, (often with a pristine sword of left-brain cynicism). It also means that the nondual intellectual must by destiny collapse into the unbounded right-brain domain of devotion, falling radically, irrationally in love with  the source of all we existentially are.

In I AM HERE, the “I” is designated as the agent of inquiry, or Jnana. This is the “I” of the scientist that studies the external world, as if it were separate from his or her self. It’s the “I” of identification, of singularity and of time, sourced in pure consciousness and light. Left brain stuff.

The “AM” is connected to Being. It is the awareness of the heart, of sentience, of resonance and vibration. It’s the intuition that registers good feelings and bad feelings; harmonious atmospheres and discordant. It’s the deeper well of the sense of truth, and home to the inner compass that leads us unconditionally to source, of Bhakti. Its domain is spatial, observing the law of attraction in play through the resonant mass of sentient contractions. Right brain stuff.

The masterkey in I AM HERE is found in perception through Emptiness – the “HERE” of physical matter, the planet and the existential fact. It is the temporal and spatial container of all forms. When we fall into emptiness, it is seen that all that arises through the “I” in time, is passing. All that emerges through ‘Being’ in space, is changing form, yet that which surrenders to the impermanence of form is unaffected – a continuum.

Nonduality is a revolution in awakening, not just out of illusion of the private self, but out of the right-brain, left brain imbalances contained within the substance of the separate self.

The more we develop an ability to relax into this undefined, quantum, here (which is at the same time not ‘here’), the more left brain and right brain are free to move in harmony. The more we fall inwards into the source of all we are, the less we need to grasp at feeling perceptions or create identity or stories. Our brains become more plastic, able to release and chart new pathways for well being. They become neuroplastic, responsive reflectors of all phenomena. The heart is able to move with pure devotion when needed, radically falling in love with the source of itself. The left-brain is able to take up the unfettered sword of self-inquiry to clear misconception from the path, wherever it obstructs the light.

All are liberated to move together: devotion and inquiry; Bhakti and Jnana; thought and feeling; left-brain and right brain; time and space; eternity and infinity; science and spirituality. The only missing piece is gravity.

When Hell Freezes Over: Trauma & Nonduality

Even when hell freezes over, it is still here. We can numb ourselves to DREAD for a while, but sooner or later we will move through its precincts in processes of expansion and liberation.

In a traumatic environment (in which natural and authentic responses are repeatedly oppressed or punished), or through a traumatic event, the energetic impact can be uncontainable for the sentient form as a whole.

Pure perception of what is happening can pose a direct threat to structures of identity, character and freedom of feeling. As an emergency response, the windows of perception slam shut: the conscious mind stops processing, retreating to a witness position outside of the body; the sentient awareness shuts down at its root, as the emotional pain is so great. A way to express it is to say that the doors of the heart slam shut, leaving the body and mind to somehow negotiate connection and direction through a bypass of feelings and emotions.

Sometimes, (such as in childhood or in extreme events), the system is simply not mature enough or capable of processing the consequences and depth of traumatic experience. To a greater or lesser extent, forms of personality are being carved out in real time, mostly through the reflexive rejection of un-consumable mental and sentient data.

Yet the energetic impact doesn’t vanish because it is uncontained mentally or unprocessed through feelings and emotions. It is absorbed into the physical matter of the body, from where it exudes a mist. When the light of consciousness falls there, it begins to sing its tragic story. Sometimes that song is a scream of panic and rage, like one facing an immediate threat of death. Feelings and emotions come forward that are out of all context with the present situation. In psychological terms, there is a “loss of proportions”.

The traumatic state and frozen emotion is held in sensory freezes and visible through muscular postures. It is collected in the spine and pushed down to the tail-bone which is a storage hall of living experiential memory awaiting reunion (as well as a space of unlimited potentiality and unconditional power).

At the same time, all traumatic events are witnessed from the higher mind, outside of the body. They are witnessed and imprinted on a substrata of memory, yet without a natural linkage to feeling responses. This lack of integration even of conscious information with appropriate emotional responses is why a highly traumatized person can relate the most dreadful incidents with a totally incongruent feeling – such as laughter, or a wave of the hand as if the story is far from relevant.

http://perception.inner-growth.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/564031240.mp4

 

In psychology, these deflected and buried energetic forms are believed to be sourced in the ‘unconscious’: an indecipherable black box of the psyche that somehow escapes time and space and threatens to make us wild with its raw, irrational power.

It was only Carl Jung who introduced and researched (on himself) the possibility that this so called “Un”conscious could actually be the same dimension of unity, spiritual liberation, collective mythology and ultimately, freedom within form. “There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites;” he wrote, “hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.”

Part of our collective responsibility while we are here is to do what we can to defreeze the surface of hell. This can seem counter-intuitive: when hell is no longer frozen over, all hell breaks loose. Yet the trapped living energy in these subterranean halls of our collective being will not vanish.

The life in this energy will anyway create movement and effect the whole. It vibrates through the causal layers of feeling. It rattles and haunts through repeating dreams and through life-time patterns of karma. Yet the movement of transformation and healing of trauma is entirely possible. In the words of the pioneer of trauma therapy Peter Levine: “Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.”

In this process, the energy of dread can expand, refine and integrate, manifesting as compassion. The other possibility is that it is pushed so deeply into matter that matter loses its harmony, and begins to destroy the local unit for the sake of the preservation of the whole. This is the origin of many physical afflictions, and perhaps a reflection of the way in which our planet is presently being injured by our collective difficulty in coming to peace.

Angels in the Dread Fields

There is an interesting feature of the polarity of heaven and hell. While from the vantage point of heaven, we are able to contain hell (in a way that we can even feel the beauty in painful experiences), from the perspective of hell, heaven is almost impossible to find.

The promise of infinite love or eternal light, even the soul of purpose, seems to have been ripped from experience, as if it were a mere illusion. The naked vibrations and discords of pain that underpin the atmosphere of dread are far louder and more apparently ‘real’ than any silent or invisible whisper of hope.

One who is caught in this field is hardly aware of the energy of dread, as there is a deep resonance with it. It is ironic that many of the occupants of the hell-zones are not aware of their suffering as there is such a depth of familiarity with it as the furniture of home. Solidified as “the reality”, the dread field has become the earth and sky of what’s possible, and living has generated to automated degrees of selfishness, jealousy and competition.

For many, when that ‘resonance’, or man-made harmony within discord is disturbed, there can be an incredible resentment, jealousy or even a despising of “others” caught in the fantasy of love, peace, innocence, purity, truthfulness or freedom.

A rage can break loose that intends to defile the holy places, rip the sanctimonious ones from their imaginary thrones, and educate the innocent in the hardship of the real world. This “real” world needs to be impressed, if needed, by force, on the gullible ones who have lost their connection with the ‘reality’ of suffering.

A key minefield in this, is in the split between male and female, which plays through family systems and the structures of patriarchy. As these forms are often passed on from generation to generation, leaving the dread field can be still more confusing as it can feel like betrayal.

In one sense, many enactments of cruelty and horror (such as today’s infamous ISIS), are embodying this raging scream of suffering, (in vain, heroic guise), screaming through the global media networks that physical life is fragile: we bleed; we can be hurt; we suffer the agony of neglect; injustice; sexual oppression; lies and propaganda. It’s a collective projection of the trauma of us all and the deeper horror is that everywhere it takes form, it creates more trauma, more dread and more division.

Hell is an isolated ward in a hidden asylum of our being, covered by masks of social conformity. Yet there are angels in the dread fields. They will not be seen, felt or sensed unless we reach out, in our despair, for help.

Assistance will come by virtue of form, which is pure, living presence. Angels of the dread fields both witness and open the senses to the experience of hell, yet they are not made of its energies. This is the I AM HERE of presence that can have an alchemical effect in releasing living quality from traumatic contractions. They are like rods of light, timelessly waiting for us to make that one critical movement of releasing the separate self: the prayer to the unknown; the surrender to the source; the calling towards a higher power to set us free; the allowance of source to move towards source.

This call from the gut of pure being towards the imperceivable, wider universe requires an allowance of the one energy that dread most abhors: the energy of helplessness. The admission of helplessness is the opening needed for help to come. This movement of surrender, the unconditional supplication into the darkness, ruptures the walls of the separate self. When these walls are fractured, the light of awareness shines through like a signal towards home. The angels are suddenly seen.

We can call them angels, but we can also call them real people. They are those who have been to hell and back themselves, and whose lives have been transformed through the natural arising of care. They care for the “other” because they have been the other. The awareness which suffered in hell is now the awareness that can stay in hell with another, releasing its walls which are based on isolation. It never leaves hell, it simply expands to include far wider and purer dimensions.

This awareness spontaneously answers the call of the awareness locked in trauma. In this, there is a live link set up out of the precincts of despair into the ‘heaven’ that can contain hell. Form cares for form through the shared unity of awareness. Compassion is born.

Ownership and Doer-ship. Nothing is Personal

The disintegration of the energetic borders of the separate self: a moving and insightful description of freedom given by Anneke Broertjes after the December 2016 ZOOM Meditation Meetup online. (Published here with Ann’s permission).

Dear Georgi and Bart,

What a discovery, or better said, what a deepening of understanding and insight through your meditation and the session yesterday!!

I was lying awake for some time, pondering the insights in the dark in my bed. And I woke up this morning again with clarity about ” Ownership” and “Doer-ship”. 

Pieces of the puzzle fitting in the bigger picture.

It is not mine. Nothing is. Not even “my story” is. Every sensation or feeling is the Impersonal One expressing as that sensation. 

Without the name, or label Ann, what am I ???? 

It is Life, Impersonal Being as “a body”; which is a field of sensations; an alive Being, vibrating into a seeming body… given the name Anneke.

Nóthing is personal !!! Without the name What am I? Am I a story? No. It is just sensations glued together by memory. 

Years ago I saw, felt: Oh, even pain is not personal! But no one seemed to know that or understand what I felt. And then I doubted it. But pain is not personal either! When the story isn’t then what is in the story isn’t either.

Yes, these sensations, feelings, perceptions are uniquely experienced, but they are not mine. They are “Mine”. Impersonal movements of energy of the Whole. Júst Béing!! They are no ones.

The Infinite seemingly being finite, assuming the form of a personal me…a me that experiences feelings, sensations. That sees, smells…apparently!! But I know it is all felt, seen, smelled Here. 

Without a body am I still Ann? I mean, the body is also this Hereness, a field. No Ann to be found. Even the “body” and “the me” flow in and through Me. Without the name body what am I? No body…then no me either.

It is one vibrating alive whole. No need to keep anything, who would and where would I store it? Yet it happens…a trying to keep it, even the pain, keeping it “in”. As if the body is a form, a container in which stuff can be held, kept, with a lid on the container.

It needs a lot of energy and contraction to keep it “in”, which is to keep the idea of an “In, in this body, in me” alive. To press painful feelings down and in, to keep or hold onto what I like…thinking it has to do with “me and my body”.

Trying to keep it, inside an apparent body, is a wanting it to stay personal. Wanting IT to stay limited, confined to a me. To make this me-idea stay alive. But it is already dead. 

Yet it lives. This, the Here that I am manifests as a me feeling, a body feeling, an in- or out-feeling. Until it doesn’t.

It is one vibrating alive whole. No need to keep anything, who would and where would I store it?

I prayed for freedom, I asked for clarity and release….and my prayers have been heard. This is what has been offered. Your meditation and our talk are an opening, a deepening into a wider and deeper awareness of What I am.

“No ownership” is another word for “no doership”. It is the same.

I am Life. Life expressing as a sensation through a body and experienced as a me. But all the way always only This. And  nothing needs to be taken personal, or held, stuffed. I can let go of what isn’t mine already. Still it is a great feeling to let it go. To hand it to the real Owner…although no one owns anything. It only IS. To give it to God, to release it into the Whole.

I know the body meditations of Rupert Spira, but sometimes stopped when the flowing back into aware space began. I didn’t know why and something was so contracted. Holding on to the knots. It was as if the tights knots hung in space, dense rocks of compressed energy in Space…His meditations originate from Jean Klein and.. the Cashmere tantric tradition too!! Now I see the link!!! Like you come from that tradition. But now I have felt it, and know why it can be given away.

Oh, that is why releasing the tensions, but also the joyful feelings are like a giving back..no, not even giving back, but okay, I can’t find another way to say it now, to release what already is not mine, but feels stuck here. What already is made of aware alive Being… The illusion of Being being a me is released. Taken back into Itself!

Thank you ever so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I bow at the feet of Truth, of This. Of what is always Here. 

And thus I bow at your feet too!!

Much love and gratitude!! 

Ann

*Featured image from the wonderful Tenzin Dhondup, who photographs and shares the beauty of the natural environment of Tibet.

i-Exist 2017 – Oasis of Peace. Spiritual Retreat England with Georgi Y. Johnson and Bart ten Berge

Oasis of Peace
The 2017 i-Exist Active Spiritual Retreat
With Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson
April 11-18th, 2017
Neolithic England

An inner and outer adventure through ancient England. Hosted at the Abbey Retreat House in Glastonbury, we will rest, walk, meditate, explore and visit Stonehenge and other magical sites  where we meditate inside the stone circle and nature walks, and meditations in the Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury Tor, Wookey Hole and the ancient stone circle of Avebury.

Program
Registration

For Love of the Inner Child – Thich Nhat Hanh

Extracts from a talk from the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on the mindfulness of anger, given at The Green Lake Conference Center in Wisconsin in 2003, 

Breathing in, I see myself as a five-year-old child. Breathing out, I smile from the five-year-old child in me.

A five-year-old child is always vulnerable, fragile and he or she can get hurt very easily, so I have to handle a five-year-old child in a very gentle way. A five-year-old child as a flower get hurt and the wound will stay for a long time. And most of us have been five year old and the inner child in us is still alive. And the little child in us, in you all, may still have wounds within. That’s why in this meditation you go home and touch the five-year-old child in us, the five-year-old child that may be deeply wounded that you have neglected for a long time. The five-year-old child is always trying to call on us to pay attention to him or to her because you are so busy. You have had no time to go back to him or her. That’s a pity. This morning, you have an appointment. Breathing in, I see myself as a five-year-old child, breathing out I smile to the five-year-old child in me with compassion. He needs, she needs a lot of compassion and attention. In a five-year-old child, out smiling with compassion.

It would be very nice if every day you find a few minutes to sit down and talk to the five-year-old child in you and very healing, very comforting, because your five-year-old child, you as a five-year-old child, are still alive and need to be taken care of. Talk to him, talk to her, and you will see that child responding to you and feel better. And if she feels better, you feel better also. Talk to him, talk to her, every day.

Breathing in, I see my father as a five-year-old child. Breathing out, I smile to that five-year-old boy who was my father.

Breathing in, I see my father as the five-year-old child. You have not seen your father as the five-year-old child, but he had — he had been a five-year-old child before he became your father. And as a five-year-old boy, he was also vulnerable, fragile and he could get hurt very easily by your grandpa or your grandma and by other people. So if sometime he’s rough, he’s difficult, that is because of that, because he had been hurt as a five-year-old child. And if you understand that, you’ll not get angry at him anymore. You have compassion to him because he had been a five-year-old child and he may get a lot of suffering, get hurt deeply near the time he was a five-year-old child.

If you have a family album, if in that album there’s a picture of your father as a five-year-old that is a good object of meditation. Look at him when he was five year old and breath in and out and see the five-year-old child that is still alive in him and in your own self. And when you understand that he’s a five-year-old child who suffered very much, he got hurt deeply and very often, you will understand why sometimes he had behaved — sometime he behaved very rude to you. And suddenly your anger will melt and you have compassion and you feel much better.

Breathing in, I see my mother as a five-year-old girl. Breathing out, I smile to that wounded five-year-old girl who is my mother, mother as a five-year-old girl, smiling to mother as a five-year-old girl.

Breathing in, I see my mother as a five-year-old girl. Breathing out, I smile to let five-year-old girl that had been my mother. When my mother was five year old, she was also vulnerable, fragile and she may get hurt, wounded, very easily and she may not have had a teacher or a friend to help her to heal. That’s why the wound, the pain, continues in her. That is why sometimes she behaved not very kindly to you and you understand why because she had not been able to heal the pain in her. And if you can see your mother as a five-year-old girl vulnerable, fragile, you understand and you can forgive her very easily with compassion. The five-year-old girl who had been your mother is always alive in her and in you. Breathing in, I see my mother as a five-year-old girl. Breathing out, I smile to that wounded five-year-old girl who is my mother, mother as a five-year-old girl, smiling to mother as a five-year-old girl.

When you are a young person less than 20, you are wise to practice in order to heal the five-year-old child in you. Otherwise, when you get married, you’ll transmit the wounded child through your children. Before getting married, practice in order to heal the little child in you. Otherwise, you will transmit the wounded child in you to your son and to your daughter. That would not be very nice. And if you have already transmitted your wounded child to him or to her, it’s not too late. You have to practice now to heal the little child in you and help your son or your daughter to heal the wounded little child that you have transmitted to him or to her and you both as father and son, father and daughter, you can practice together and heal the wounded child in you and in him or in her. If you as a mother, you can practice if you can practice together with your daughter or your son. You can heal both the wounded child in you and in your mother.

This is a very important practice. You have to realize that this is a very important, urgent practice and, if you can succeed in doing that, communication between you and him and her will be restored and better understanding will be possible and you’ll improve the quality of happiness in your life and in his or her life. It’s very important. You are in here, you are in him. You have transmitted yourself entirely to him or to her. Your son is a continuation of you. Your daughter is a continuation of you. Your son is you. Your daughter is you. And they will carry you far into the future. And if you have the time to endow her, then love him with compassion and understanding, she will profit from that and she will make the future better for herself and for her children and the future generations.

In fact, we are continued by our children and you have to offer them the best in terms of thinking, in terms of speech and in terms of physical action. A painter or a musician, a composer, when they create a piece of art, they always sign their name. You also. You produce in your little life, the thinking, the speech and the action, if you’re thinking is the right thinking that is a good work of art. It bears always your name. And I think it means the thinking that goes along with understanding and compassion. And if you can produce a thought that is in the direction of right thinking, that is the product that is your continuation. You cannot refuse to sign your name because that’s your product. And looking into your thinking, whether it is right or wrong, now we see you. Your signature is in it.

That is why in our daily lives, you have to be careful to produce thoughts that are on the line of right thinking, the kind of thinking that goes along with insight, understanding and compassion, and you have an opportunity to produce right thinking in every moment of your life that will bear your signatures that is your future, you transmit them to your children and to the world. Everything you say is also a product of your person, whether your speech is a right speech or a wrong speech. It bears your signature. What you say may cause a lot of anger, a lot of despair, a lot of pessimism and that bears your signature. It’s not good to produce a work like that. That is why, with mindfulness, you may like to produce only the kind of speech that is called right speech, the kind of speech that goes along with understanding, compassion, joy and forgiveness. And with the practice of mindfulness, at every moment you can produce right speech, loving speech, that will bear your signature. That is what you handed down to your children and to the world. That is your continuation.

And then the third kind of product is physical action. Whatever you do that can protect life, that can help people to suffer less, that express your comprehension, your compassion, will bear your own signature. That is a good continuation of you, of yours, transmitted to your children and to the world. Let us be mindful not to produce any act that has the nature of violence, hatred, fear and discrimination because these acts will bear also your signature. You cannot deny that it’s not your product because it has really come from you. Your child, whether that is a boy or a girl, it is a young piece of art, your product. You produce yourself, you produce your own future and that is why mindfulness help us to know whether we are producing the right thing for the future and that what we produce is us, is our continuation.

I am sure that the children enjoy a pebble meditation. I hope they continue today and it’s my desire to see them practice pebble meditation when they go home and they can share the practice of freshness, solidity and freedom with their friends at home and at school. You might like to talk to your teachers about your practice of flower-ness, freshness and solidity and freedom and calm. I count on you. I have many students who are very young of whom I am very proud. And today, please, go deeper in the practice of looking deeply into the five-year-old child within yourself, within your father and your mother.

Thank you. 

Disarming the Inner Voice by Dropping the Pronouns

The holiday period can be confronting. Obligated to ‘enjoy’ ourselves, we can find ourselves in a raw state of exactly the opposite. Family time can confront us with loneliness; revelry can bring forward the dark spaces beyond the reach of merriment; the spirit of gratitude can shed light on all those areas inside ourselves where we might feel disappointed in life.

In the midst of entanglement and the intertwined social fields of projection, there is a simple trick that can bring great insight. The voice inside our heads loves to structure feelings and emotions with statements and beliefs. In this, it divides us, again and again, from our environment. For example, it might be repeating: “Nobody wants me”; or, (seeming to come from the outside), “I’m going to kill you.” These negative mantras can be intoxicating and perhaps even annoying, so try this out, to deepen through the film of mind into some insight into the heart.

When we are able to remove the pronouns: “I, You, They, We, She, He, Everybody, Nobody” from the voice in the head, we are left with the energetic soul of the thought – the fuel that lights the flame. For example, “She hates me”, becomes just: “hate”. Naming hate as hate has the effect of opening compassion. There is nothing that needs to be defended anymore, it’s just a stinging kind of suffering in the system. The thought: “You’re killing me.” becomes just “killing” – an unanchored phenomena of suffering. Violence – as a resonance between us as one humanity. The thought “Nobody Loves me”, robbed of pronouns, leaves just love. Let the love be alive where it can only live, in the heart of all you are.

The ability to  hold space for areas of suffering is a tremendous gift to ourselves and others. Beyond identification, and the arbitrary, mental allocation of suffering as “yours” and “mine”, there is energy in contraction, awaiting release. It is the very dispossession that robs it of mercy. Awareness is a tremendous healer, but she can only do her work when we disarm the thinking processes that launch the language of violence into the gap of separation between one person and the next.

Pain is pain. Hatred is hatred. Killing is killing. Love is love. It never needed to be allocated or shared out – especially not by a wounded set of neural networks running old problems of survival that are no longer relevant to the miraculous, pulsating present moment.

Sentient Sourcing – Healing Inherited Trauma. London April 8, 2017

Sentient Sourcing – Healing Inherited Trauma

With Spiritual Psychologists Bart ten Berge and Georgi Y. Johnson

London Art Therapy Center, Kings Cross, London

Saturday April 8, 2017

9:30 am – 5:30 pm

“When we release the illusion of a separate self, the release of the voltage of energy trapped within our field becomes a service to the whole – with tremendous reward.”

– Georgi Y. Johnson

That sudden depression, this irrational anxiety, a pervading dread of betrayal or abandonment, a sense of unconditional guilt, that has been there for as long as you can remember. Repeating, uncaused sentences in the back chambers of our thoughts – “they’ll lock me up”, “I don’t belong here”, “I want to kill myself”.

“Our ancestors are still alive in every cell of our body. They are not dead.”

Thích Nhat Hạnh

A central premise in Nondual Therapy is that the barrier between our ‘private’ thoughts, feelings and states, and the collective, is far more porous than we have been taught to believe. The energy of the thoughts and feelings that form us is embedded all the way down to the cellular level of our bodies, and it effects our experience of freedom, love and peace in our lives, with a potential to distort our perception, direction and ability to express into the world.

This one day intensive workshop is designed to offer the tools of sentient sourcing. Deepening and expandi

Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson

ng layers of mindfulness towards both thoughts and feelings – how it feels to be ‘you’. Working with sentient sourcing, Bart and Georgi will offer exercises to experience and identify core states of stress and survival that could have been inherited through the traumas and/or lived experience of our ancestors. As these feelings become sourced, they become conscious and the opportunity emerges to release subtle layers of identification with states of suffering. The effect is liberating, often with the reward of hidden qualities that have been repressed and that are released through the process of nondual realization.

Bart ten Berge and Georgi Y. Johnson are part of the International School of Spiritual Psychology (ISSP) based in the Netherlands. In conjunction with the movement’s vision of bridging allopathic and alternative wisdom through energy healing and inner growth, they are pioneering the field of Nondual Therapy – a paradigm shift in care for the individual as an inextricable part of the whole. For a list of background resources, see below.

A number of slots for private sessions with Georgi and/or Bart are available at the Center at discounted rates for participants on the evenings of Friday 7th and Saturday 8th April. To book a session, contact info@iamhere.life

Venue:

London Art Therapy Centre, Kings Cross, London

Pioneer House, 46 Britannia St., London WC1X 9JH

Tel: 020 34899192

Cost:

$220  – Standard full day training

$180  – Students, low income & participants of i-Exist 2017 Retreat in Glastonbury*

Select


Standard $220.00 USDStudents/ Low Income $180.00 USD

*a number of scholarships are available, please apply to info@iamhere.life

 

 

Resources and Background Reading

It didn’t start with you, Mark Wolynn (Book)

The Breadcrumb Trail of Inherited Family Trauma

The Parents we Never Knew: Adoption & Family Trauma

Set my People Free: Nonduality and the Epigenetics of Trauma

An Introduction to Nondual Therapy

Nondual Therapy Playlist on YouTube

 

 

The Art of Suffering – I AM HERE Zoom Meditation 26/01/17

The next online meeting is on 26/01/17

Find the time in your area!

The Art of Suffering

An opportunity to meet up online in community and to meditate together. Togetherness within the intention to come to peace is a powerful support in opening the channel to the inner, unchanging source so that through us, it can be expressed into the world. 

A short talk is followed by a guided meditation of 30 minutes, after which there will be some time for questions.

If you have a question you want to be answered during the meeting, please feel free to send it up front to Georgi at info@iamhere.life.

Zoom is a user-friendly platform. After you register, you will be given a link which will download a small app to your computer. You have the option to be seen through your camera, or you can turn the camera off. We advice participants to mute their microphones during the session, except when sharing after the meditation.

The event is free, but a quick and easy prior registration is needed to enter the Zoom Room.

Register here

Find the time in your area!

 

Previous I AM HERE ZOOMS
 October 2016

 September 2016

March 2016

I AM HERE ZOOM takes place once a month at varying times so that everyone around the world gets a chance to take part. Sign up to the I AM HERE Newsletter for notification of the next online event, on contact us at info@iamhere.life