More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 21 - March 17, 2022
A more spacious perspective can enable us to recognize our habitual mood-producing thoughts and help free us fr...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
People with chronic depression and anxiety often keep up a steady and largely unconscious inner monologue of negative ideas.
A more effective cure for troublesome thoughts is perspective.
Refining and Integrating Our Breath and Energy
When we realize ourselves as fundamental consciousness, we know ourselves as the stillness pervading the forms of matter and pervading the movement of energy. We can then experience that energy moves through us without altering our basic identity.
The more we know ourselves as the stillness of fundamental consciousness, the more freely, deeply, and fluidly our energy moves. When we constrict our body, we bind not only the physical tissues of our body, but also the energetic aspect of our being.
PRACTICE Core Breath with Subtle Circuitry
Breath and energy system exercise.
PRACTICE Opening to the Upward Current of Energy
Conclusion
To live within the subtle vertical core of the body feels like the deepest contact that we can have with our individual being. It enables us to feel that we are alone with our experience, relatively free from the influences of others so we can know what we really think, feel, and perceive.
6 FREEING THE SENSES FROM TRAUMA
Much of our childhood trauma involved and impacted our senses, causing us to constrict them.
The emotions and memories held in our senses color the world that we perceive as adults.
Increasing Our Sensory Experience
Expanding Our Perception
Our constricted senses shrink our world. They separate us from the objects around us, but they also bring those objects closer to us than they really are.
As we heal from trauma, we live in a more spacious world.
This means that as we let go of the constrictions in our senses, we experience deeper perspective...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In Buddhism, this clarity has been called “suchness.” If we regard the cup on our desk, for example, with relatively unfettered senses, we are able to perceive the suchness, the “cupness” of the cup.
When we know ourselves as fundamental consciousness, perception becomes less effortful.
As fundamental consciousness, our senses also seem to function in a more unified manner. Experientially, this means that we have a single, multisensory perception of our surroundings that appears to emerge without our volitional effort.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said that “compassion is seeing through confusion.”
PRACTICE Perception as Fundamental Consciousness
Conclusion
7 RELATIONSHIPS ONENESS AND SEPARATENESS
Dissociation, as a state of being divided and as a chronic process, is ultimately a barrier to relationality, both within and between selves. ELIZABETH F. HOWELL
Fundamental Consciousness and Contact
we need to remain in contact with ourselves in order to actually experience oneness with another person.
It is interesting that the same ground of fundamental consciousness feels, to each of us, like the basis of our own individual being.
The Link Between Contact and Trauma
Balancing Inward and Outward Connection
These two types of relating—shutting people out or self-abandonment and merging with others—may continue to be our way of relating in our adult lives. Both relational patterns diminish our ability to love and to receive love.
Psychologists agree that secure attachment involves the ability to be both intimate and separate.
Margaret Mahler described the pinnacle of relational maturity as “object constancy”—the ability to be secure enough in our attachments that we can endure separation from our beloved and welcome them when they return.5 If attachment is not secure, the child (and immature adult) will slide into hopeless despair during a separation.
The healthy, resilient heart, however, will continue to love even during times of separation. But in order to be resilient to separation and loss, we need to be able to be alone without feeling abandoned.
We need to have enough internal connection with ourselves that we can enjoy our senses and our own thoughts and creativity, when we are alone, and yet be open enough to other people to enjoy their company when we are not alone.
PRACTICE Attuning to the Qualities Within the Body with a Partner
Healing Our Capacity for Contact
PRACTICE Core-to-Core Attunement with a Partner
Healing Our Capacity for Contact from Our Core
Healing Intimate Relationships
Healing Our Relationships with Groups
One of the most important shifts that occurs as we inhabit our body is that we become less self-conscious.
The more sensitive we are to the people around us, the more aware we will be of the way people respond to us.
We create what in popular parlance has been called a “false self,” a “personae,” or a social mask. But these masks keep slipping; they must be constantly monitored and also adjusted, and this doubting of the effectiveness of our mask contributes to our self-consciousness.
One of the most effective ways to overcome self-consciousness is to allow ourselves to be seen. To be transparent, receptive, and present to the gaze of the other person.
