Playing Small Does Not Serve the World

    One of the world's foremost experts in PTSD wrote: “If you feel safe & loved, your brain (is) specialized in exploration, play, & cooperation; if you are frightened & unwanted, it (is) specialized in managing feelings of fear & abandonment." Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015.

    We immediately (incorrectly) assume that we're in the first "normal" group, and only a few war veterans & perhaps some severely traumatized first responders fit in the second "damaged" group. What proportion of your day do you feel anxious, needy, alone, uncomfortable COMPARED TO feeling light-hearted, carefree, adventurous, excitedly participating in group adventures? We can EITHER be afraid (hurt child) OR loving (wise elder) - our two basic 'ways of being' or 'operating systems,' - only ONE of which can be running at a time.

    Van Der Kolk writes that all of us have been exposed to a wide variety of traumas. The degree to which traumas have impacted our lives will clearly show by our dominant attitudes & moods. In Westernized societies like ours, I suspect very few of us grow up retaining a young child's innocent trust, feeling safe & loved, playing care-free and exploring the world with an open-hearted attitude towards all. 

    So most of us have endured sufficient direct & secondary trauma to have developed defenses against further injury: physical defenses - contracted, tight, stiff, tender muscles; emotional defenses - walled-off hardened heart, cynicism, suspiciousness, pessimism, fatalism, nihilism, anger, disgust; & mental defenses - left-hemisphere dominant, self-centered, narcissism, materialism. 

    Many of us are locked into this very constricted bleak worldview, so much so that it forms a sense of a very small 'self.' We're so emotionally bonded to this small sense of 'self' that when we're shown that we're so much more, it just makes us angrily defensive. This dark worldview draws our attention to, & magnifies everything that confirms, and away from, & trivializes anything that contradicts our dark, small worldview & self-concept.  

    As Anais Nin & others have said, we see things as we are. Our ego / left-hemisphere craves 'being right,' consistency & certainty, even if that means being stuck in misery. So it's incredibly easy to get stuck in despair & disgust - one just needs to become a CNN news junky. 

 

    It’s essential to remember that our disgust about past & ongoing human atrocities, no matter how justified our anger may feel, is nothing more than transient thoughts & emotions that are best “held lightly” with huge helpings of self-compassion & compassion for ALL. 

    One way to make some sense of this: A wise elder may disapprove of & be deeply saddened by her grandchild's criminal behavior, BUT nevertheless holds the child in safety & unconditional love (instead of hatred & vengeance) trusting that nurturing will bring about even his evolution (instead of giving up on a 'hopeless case' & 'throwing away the keys'). Our justice & prison system clearly need to evolve.

 

    “So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance & everything is perfect, complete, whole.” Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998.

 

    With practice, we can all gradually grow out of the fearful hurt child "fight, flight, freeze reaction" phase of life, and remember to mature back into, & re-assume our true nature the wise loving elder "tend & befriend" & "nurturing" phase. We progressively widen our circle of intimacy & nurturing, which happens naturally as we remember to reconnect with our true nature.

    And the practice boils down to simply noticing when we're once again in a dark place (mentally, emotionally, physically - usually in some combination), and 'sense' our way back to the light by 'deeply listening' (metaphorically speaking) for that within us that is always there, but is very, very subtle, with the characteristics of silence, stillness & peace. So effective meditation is very different than most of us imagined when we started.

    “As we sit quietly without any intention to change things or to have any particular experience we will begin to feel a sense of relaxation that deepens into a peaceful state as we progress. By letting go of wanting peace we begin to see that it is already here. It will be seen in time that all our attempts to get something simply clouds our awareness of what is already here.” Helen Hamilton. “Dissolving the Ego.” Balboa Press, 2021.

    There are excellent current guides to help us shift from chronic existential angst, frozen in anxiety, dread, sadness, hopelessness & meaninglessness into the process of awakening to our true nature. They all have many free youtube videos, as well as books & trainings programs:

    Helen Hamilton : www.helenhamilton.org

    Louise Kay : www.louisekay.net

    Eckhart Tolle : eckharttolle.com

    Adyashanti : adyashanti.opengatesangha.org

    Judith Blackstone : realizationprocess.org

    Stephan Bodian : www.stephanbodian.org

    Dorothy Hunt : www.dorothyhunt.org

    Mooji : mooji.org

 
    Be prepared to meet resistance to attempting this all-important shift, because our dominant ego/left-hemisphere interprets it as an attack on our life! Much like when we were kids & someone called us a "bad name" & we felt as if we'd been seriously physically wounded. Especially at a "mature" stage in life, psychological rigidity tends to dominate - “Can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” BUT if we're interested in maturing / evolving, we know that we have to learn to become psychological flexible. 

    Be very kind & patient with yourself, as when teaching a 2-year old child or a 2-month old puppy. When training yourself, as with little children & puppies, our primary responsibility is to hold the 'student' in safety & unconditional love. 'Success' is the student feeling safe & loved, regardless of whether learning seems to be occurring at all, slowly or quickly. As per the top of the page, the absolute essential conditions for exploration, play, & cooperation are feeling safe & loved.

 

“In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
There is an infinite array of choices.
One alone brings happiness -
To love what is.” Dorothy Hunt 

 

COLIBRI, art by Martina Hoffman

Artist website: www.martinahoffmann.com

 
 

Body-Based Meditation

     By bringing felt awareness into the vertical core of our physical body - breathing awareness into specific spots within & inhabiting our vertical core - can help restore our balance, vitality, health & wholeness.

     “Each part of the internal space of our body has a palpable, distinctive quality. We can feel the quality of intelligence when we inhabit our head. We can experience the quality of our love in our chest, even when we are not actively loving someone or something. We can feel the quality of sexuality and gender within our pelvis. Our personal strength or power has a quality that naturally arises as we inhabit our midsection. And we can even experience the quality of our voice, our potential speak, when we inhabit our throat.
      The emergence of these qualities as we inhabit our body is a potent element of our experience of aliveness. It is also a major aspect of our recovery from trauma. 

      By inhabiting your body, you CAN :
• recover the internal sources of strength & enjoyment that the traumas in your life have injured. 
• gain the expression and feel of your own presence so that you are not intimidated by the presence of others.
• feel safe to be open to life, to be receptive.
• take back the power of agency that may have been lost when you were overpowered by other people or by devastating events.
• become resilient to abrasive sensory stimuli & painful interactions with other people.
• feel grounded, rooted to the earth, so you are not easily unsettled. • even feel appreciation & compassion for yourself so the responses of your heart and the insights of your own mind are pleasurable.”
         Judith Blackstone. “Trauma and the Unbound Body. The Healing Power of Fundamental Consciousness.” Sounds True, 2018.

Standing on our Own Two Feet?

     “It seems that we are all, to some extent, still struggling to achieve an individual identity, and to love others without loss of ourselves. By individual identity I mean the ability to perceive the world directly with our own senses, to understand our experience with our mind, to feel that we inhabit our own body, to be able to surrender to the spontaneity of our own creativity and sexual passion, and to know that to a great extent, we can create the life circumstances of our own choice. In the therapeutic setting, we have come to recognize that the path toward this separate identity is fraught with taboos and obstacles of many kinds. It is a state of advanced psychological health and maturity. I can safely say that by age three, almost all of us have experienced some wound that will impede our progress toward this goal even as adults.
     From birth, we are trying to become fully ourselves in the context of our love for our parents. If childhood development were solely a matter of separation, there would not be nearly the degree of conflict and pain, and binding of pain in our body, as there is in this delicate balancing act between our deepening self-awareness, and our intensifying love for our parents. It is almost always for love that we give up (bind) those parts of our self that do not meet our parents’ acceptance. And it is almost always for the sake of autonomy that we close ourselves off from our parents’ love, by closing our own heart, when that love does not include the recognition and sanction of our separate identity.
     For the adult, individuation is a progression from a state of being merged with other people to a state of increasing independence and capacity to love. The merged state is a dependence upon the responses of others in order to feel good, safe, strong, and complete. There is an inability to use one’s own senses and understanding, or to perceive and think for oneself. There is a sense of never being truly alone with oneself, and not being able to experience one’s own sensations, feelings and thoughts clearly. … in situations of uncertainty, infants will look toward the mother to read her face for its affective content, essentially to see what they should feel, to get a second appraisal to help resolve their uncertainty. This looking toward others to see what one should feel or think remains in the adult who has not yet discovered his or her separate identity.
     Some people defend against this incomplete, dependent feeling by withdrawing from contact with other people. They are afraid of being overwhelmed, or feeling consumed by others, because they have so little felt sense of their own existence. Others become ‘addicted’ to love, searching desperately for anyone who will merge with them and help them feel alive.” 

       Judith Blackstone. “The Enlightenment Process. A Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening.” Paragon House, 2008.

     See "Nurturing Nonpartisan Human Maturation":
  http://www.johnlovas.com/2018/10/nurturing-nonpartisan-human-maturation.html

Towards our True Self

     “The false self is an amalgam of images, concepts, defensive attitudes, and bound childhood pain that we may mistake for our identity. Rather than having a felt sense of our (true, essential self), we have an imagined idea of who we are. All of us, to some extent, are caught up in this ‘dream’ of ourselves; to be entirely without self-images or defenses is an ideal, which we can approach.
      The false self is a constriction of our whole being, including our mental and emotional functioning, and our physical body. This constriction creates gaps in our ability to experience life, which are ‘filled in’ with false images, compensatory attitudes, and inaccurate beliefs about ourselves and our environment. These false images, attitudes, and beliefs, although unconscious or barely conscious, influence all of our life choices. The bound emotional pain in our body also colors or ‘haunts’ all of our experience. To some extent, we all suffer from a narcissistic wound, from a deficit in our self-love and self-knowledge. Most people compensate for this deficit with artificial postures meant to create a stronger, more functional, and more lovable self. It is this ‘false self’ that gradually dissolves as we become enlightened. 

     Our true, or essential, sense of self matures with the realization of fundamental consciousness (‘enlightenment’). We come to know ourselves as boundless, pervasive, pure consciousness. At the same time, we develop an experience of our individual being within this vast space. This is a felt sense of the internal depth of our own form, along with the movement of our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.
     Our individual form is experienced as entirely permeable and transparent, unified with the world around us. But the unity of enlightenment is not a state of fusion. It does not mean that we lose our internal contact and become merged with the life around us. Although we can see and feel, to some extent, the internal life of the beings around us, we do not confuse our own self with them. Although we may have great empathy for other life, we cannot perceive the environment from someone else’s perspective, or think their thoughts, or decide to move across the room in someone else’s body. This is the mysterious paradox of enlightened experience: we become unified with our environment, and more fully our own unique self, at the same time.”
       Judith Blackstone. “The Enlightenment Process. A Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening.” Paragon House, 2008.

“You have to leave the city of your comfort
and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
What you’ll discover will be wonderful.
What you’ll discover is yourself.”                                              Alan Alda


“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. ... If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”                              Clarissa Pinkola Estés

"If one completes the journey to one's own heart,
one will find oneself
in the heart of everyone else."                                             Father Thomas Keating 

 

Enlightenment?

     The culmination of normal, healthy human maturation has been referred to as awakening or enlightenment. A sadly common impediment to healthy maturation is dissociation, which we apparently all do, to some degree.

     “Although enlightenment is no more mysterious than many other human experiences, such as our ability to love or to create, it is more rare. It only occurs as we reach a particular degree of sensitivity or openness to life. … many people are capable, with some practice, of … the realization, or unveiling, of a subtle dimension of consciousness pervading our own being and everything around us as a unified whole. It is the experience of the luminous transparency of ourselves and our environment, and the fullness and vividness of being the occurs with it.

      Meditation practices show that there is a potentially spontaneous process toward complete enlightenment. Just by sitting and doing nothing but breathing, the body and mind unwind toward the balance and openness of fundamental consciousness. … this spontaneous process is impeded by the bound childhood pain and psychological defenses that we hold in our bodies, (but) this binding can be released.” 
       Judith Blackstone. “The Enlightenment Process. A Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening.” Paragon House, 2008.

     "Although dissociation may originally have been a way of staying in relationship, what is most crucially at issue in dissociatively based psychopathology is the collapse of relationality – both interpersonal and intrapersonal (or interstate). Dissociation, as a state of being divided and as a chronic process, is ultimately a barrier to relationality, both within and between selves.
     Because self-states exist in relation to significant others and to other parts of self, they have different agendas. This divided agency, which results in the experience of being pulled in different directions (and, in cases of more extreme dissociation, of being taken over) is ultimately weakening and fatiguing. Another consequence is that because the dissociative system is one that seems to have worked, reliance on dissociation and the attachment of parts of the self to each other may at times be greater than reliance on or attachment to any real human being outside the system. One severely dissociative patient explained to me that because her life had been so unbearably painful, dissociation was a ‘magic formula,’ the only thing she had ever had to rely on. It had always been there for her, and, at that time, she wasn’t about to give it up. Although this is an extreme example, I believe that this patient’s dilemma of an addictive proprietorship over her dissociative solutions is one she shares with most of us. The way we do this and how much we do it may differ, but I think we do it all the same.” 
       Elizabeth F. Howell. “The Dissociative Mind.” Routledge, 2008.

     “There may be fear involved in releasing the psychological defenses that obscure our realization of fundamental consciousness (awakening), because (psychological defenses) have given us a sense of safety and power. We may think that we will cease to exist without them. But we do not cease to exist. The process of releasing our defenses and opening to fundamental consciousness reaps an unmistakable deepening of all our human qualities, such as our ability to love, to think, and to experience pleasure. We have a felt sense of coming to life – of becoming fully born – within our body.”

       Judith Blackstone. “The Enlightenment Process. A Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening.” Paragon House, 2008.

www.awakeningartsacademy.com

Awakening to Wholeness

     Adyashanti, Reginald A. Ray, and others emphasize that our mind alone, even when combined with our heart, is not sufficient to fully awaken. Our physical, embodied, earthly manifestation is not an terrible mistake or accident. Our body has a central role in this mystery of life. We are to awaken in every dimension of our being: mind, heart and body.

     “Our bodies know that they belong to life; it’s our minds that make our lives so homeless.” John O’Donohue

     “As we are able to inhabit the body, our abstract sense of self is replaced with an actual experience of ourselves, with an experience of the essential qualities of our being. We can say that this is a qualitative sense of self, rather than a narrative sense of self. The qualities of our being – the actual feel of our intelligence, love, power, and gender – are always there within the body. When we experience these qualities, we feel real.”
     Judith Blackstone. “Belonging Here. A Guide for the Spiritually Sensitive Person.” Sounds True, 2012.

Energy and Mindfulness - Part Two

     Meditation practice (like life in general?) has a tendency to overemphasize practitioners' strengths and further neglect their weaknesses. So it's very easy & common to become progressively more unbalanced. Yet what we're really after, is bringing our own mind, heart & body in harmony with others & the universe - harmonizing the personal with the transpersonal - ideally in a tangibly practical way. Indeed, Adyashanti teaches the importance of awakening at all three levels: head, heart & gut. These correlate with 3 key chakras. A practical, approachable technique is taught by Judith Blackstone: “The Realization Process." Sounds True https://www.soundstrue.com/store/the-realization-process-2436.html

      Judith Blackstone developed the Realization Process, a method of embodied nondual realization and psychological and relational healing. In the Realization Process, the radical openness of nonduality is based on deep contact with the internal space of one’s body. In this way, we discover an authentic, quality-rich experience of our individual being at the same time as we transcend our individuality. We realize ourselves as unified consciousness, pervading everywhere. 
     Below, a small part of her interview by Rick Archer of Buddha At The Gaspump: https://batgap.com/judith-blackstone/

     “I’m making a distinction in this work between matter, energy, and this pervasive space. It’s a distinction in the way we can experience ourselves. 
     So we can experience ourselves as physical matter, and when we do that we feel pretty separate from everything. 
     We can experience ourselves as energy, and most sensitive people do grow up experiencing themselves as energy – as that kind of streaming & pulsing & vibrating. And we can meditate in our energy system, and that will become even more fluid & expanded and so forth. 
     Now we can also attune to ourselves in an even more subtle level than energy, and that’s this pervasive stillness. And that pervasive stillness pervades the body and the environment as a whole. And that means that we then find ourselves in our body as a whole – it’s a dimension of unity, so we experience our whole internal space as a unity. 
     Now when we get there, when we know ourselves as Fundamental Consciousness (it has a lot of different names), then we get to an even more subtle level of our energy system – a very, very fine vibration that seems to be actually inseparable from the stillness, so that we experience the stillness, this radiance from the stillness at the same time. 
     The Japanese philosopher, Yasuo Yuasa, described how the internal space of the body becomes radiant coherence, as it’s pervaded by the transcendent. That means we become whole within ourselves, at the same time as we become one with everything else. It means we don’t have to eradicate our self-experience. We don’t disappear. In fact we become juicier. We become more present, and more aware of ourselves as even as an individual, but not in an abstract way, in an experienced way.” Judith Blackstone

     And this, from one of my favorite books of all time:
     “Samadhi can be conceptualized as the free flow of vital energy both within the body and between the body and the universe.

     Apart from the normal communication between people through language and action there is another quite different sort of mutual influence. It is that of the rhythm of the Original strength which permeates all human beings and all Nature. Through it every individual thing in essence and, as it were, underground is connected with every other. If then one who is further removed from the working of the Primordial Force is close to one who lives more in accord with it, the rhythm of the Primordial Force will certainly be transmitted from the one to the other. The latter without knowing it exerts a good influence on the other.”
     Sayama MK. “Samadhi. Self-development in Zen, Swordsmanship, and Psychotherapy.” State University of New York Press, 1986.

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