Greater Than We Commonly Know

    If in our childhood, we sometimes sensed the presence of a powerful invisible guide, and perhaps were occasionally surprised by feeling exuberantly wonderful - despite challenging, far-from-ideal circumstances - then this mystery of the "greater than" will likely re-emerge in adulthood.

    "Greater than" is a subtle yet powerful sensation that can strike us with awe & wonder. Joanna Macy's quote points to this:
    “If this world is to be healed through human efforts,
    I am convinced it will be by ordinary people
    whose love for life is even greater than their fear."

    Fear is a universal defense mechanism to preserve one's own life & safety. When fear dominates ("egocentric / noisy ego," "left-brain dominance," "fight, flight, freeze reaction") the world is a dangerous place & all one's attention & energy is focused only on survival. This otherwise healthy brief reaction to transient danger is grossly distorted by severe past & ongoing trauma, as well as by conditions like narcissistic personality disorder. When lost in fear, we see a dangerous, chaotic, uncaring, perhaps even malicious world / god. To cope, many override fear with anger / disgust, bulldozing their way through life - at a cost: http://www.johnlovas.com/2022/04/very-different-now.html
    Today, even those who've not experienced severe trauma, tend to be spiritually illiterate - not having the knowledge nor even the language to consider or express what is most meaningful to them. By default they assume that science knows all, and that anything beyond science - religion / spirituality is "old-fashioned superstition," leaving them boxed-in, hopeless, cynical & paradoxically angry at a cartoon-like image of a "God" they don't believe in.
    Psychotherapy (with or without entheogens) and meditation / contemplative practices can be powerfully beneficial.

    Many years ago, I saw a patient in his 30s for severe chronic pain in his mouth. He was extremely angry & frustrated because severe chronic back pain, & more recently mouth pain prevented him from doing the work he loved. He wasn't even able to lift up his small children to play with them. He must surely have been terrified of being unable to support, or be of any practical use to his young family. I told him that his anger (due to fear, sadness & frustration) is perfectly justified & understandable, HOWEVER it's preventing him from healing. I advised him to learn to let go of his anger so he could heal & regain his life, & prescribed an ointment for him to apply to his mouth. A few weeks later he returned with marked reduction of the pain in his mouth AND his back. The clinician from his pain clinic phoned and asked me for the prescription I had given him because "it" had such a profound beneficial effect on his back, while months of potent narcotics had not reduced his back pain at all. Of course the topical agent for his mouth had nothing whatsoever to do with the remarkable pain reduction in his back. His letting go of anger was key, allowing him to face, deal with & come to terms with his underlying great fear & sadness directly, and then he was freed to live his life.

    When / if fear subsides, then our far more evolved true nature can surface ("allocentric/ecocentric," "quiet ego," "right-brain dominance," "tend & befriend instinct") and our concern & energies SHIFT to nurturing others & everything around us, creativity & joy. Our true nature sees profound interconnection between everything ("oneness"), and that "all shall be well." This perspective is totally incomprehensible to the fear-driven left-brain and therefore, to many people today - including psychologists, physicians & other health-care practitioners.

    "contemplative practices allow the egoic mind to drop of its own accord, and for you to experience something greater – that direct experience of the vastness of which we are a part." Rami Shapiro 2021 interview: https://batgap.com/rabbi-rami-shapiro/

    “There’s a great hue and cry now about ‘What is the meaning of life?’ And I think the Golden World is the meaning of life – that which supersedes one’s egocentric view of life - to find something that’s greater than I am; something that I can work for, outside my own egocentric structure. And I must safeguard my egocentric structure, in order to have a platform for that too. That’s the either and or that’s so difficult for the modern person.” Robert A. Johnson. “The Golden World. The Search for Meaning, Fulfillment, and Divine Beauty.” Sounds True, Audiobook, 2018.

    "The ecstatic experience involves escaping from the ‘I-ness.’ This requires that we break the boundaries of our separateness to experience a greater realm, a realm that taxes our finest poets and artists to convey. It is the most valuable experience any person can have. The beauty of the Golden World is that one sees a vastness, something so much greater than oneself that one is left speechless with awe, admiration, delight, and rapture.
    Very few people have the intelligence to surrender with dignity to forces greater than themselves. Most of us have to be hit in the head ... and thereby forced into a realization of the Golden World.
    ... when one has stopped trying to maneuver external reality so that it will work out as the ego desires. One turns authority over to something greater than oneself; the ego is sacrificed to the Self, the earthly world serves the heavenly world, and one learns, at last, to trust the slender threads.” Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998. EXCEPTIONALLY WORTHWHILE BOOK

    Balfour Mount, the Canadian surgeon who introduced palliative care in North America, studied existential suffering, & the experience of integrity & wholeness, in persons with life-threatening illness. He identified 4 types of 'healing connections' involving a sense of bonding to Self, others, the phenomenal world, & ultimate meaning. These situated participants in a context that was greater & more enduring than the self, thus leading to enhanced meaning and quality of life. (More recently, this phenomenon is referred to as "post-traumatic growth.") Balfour M. Mount, Patricia H. Boston, S. Robin Cohen. “Healing Connections: On Moving from Suffering to a Sense of Well-Being.” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 33; 4: 372-388, 2007.

    "Near Death Experiences (NDEs) often lead to a paradoxical decrease in devotion to any one religious tradition, despite a greater awareness of guidance by and connection to a higher power. ... Many experiencers describe adopting a form of nondenominational spirituality since their NDEs, in which all religious traditions are valued but no one religion is given precedence." Bruce Greyson. “After. A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond.” St. Martin’s, 2021.

    “The search for reason ends at the shore of the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. (ineffable means too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words)
    We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.
    Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance …” Abraham Joshua Heschel

    "There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe." Teilhard de Chardin

    Perhaps the most common & saddest example of needless suffering today is seen among the elderly, especially those with progressive diseases such as Parkinson's, dementia etc, who have nothing but a materialist / physicalist worldview, and see their situation as meaningless loss of control & suffering, or perhaps worse, the victim of a cruel creator. In this unfortunate situation, Dylan Thomas' famous words, "Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." may sound heroic, BUT there is infinitely wiser advice:
    "… in any situation in life, confronted by an outer threat or opportunity, you can notice yourself responding inwardly in one of two ways. Either you will brace, harden, & resist, or you will soften, open & yield. If you go with the former gesture, you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller self, with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the latter regardless of the outer conditions, you will remain in alignment with your innermost being, and through it, divine being can reach you. Spiritual practice at its no-frills simplest is a moment-by-moment learning not to do anything in a state of internal brace. Bracing is never worth the cost.
    This does not necessarily carry over into an outer state of surrender, or ‘rolling over & playing dead.’ On the contrary, interior surrender is often precisely what makes it possible to see a decisive action that must be taken and to do it with courage and strength. To ski down a hill or split a piece of wood, you first have to relax inwardly; only then can you exert the right force and timing. It’s exactly the same in the emotional world. Whether it’s a matter of holding your ground in a dispute with your boss, handling a rebellious teenager with tough love, or putting your life on the line for an ideal you believe in like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., action flows better when it flows from nonviolence, that is, from the place of relaxed, inner opening.
    ... surrender is an act of spiritual power because it opens the heart directly to the more subtle realms of spiritual Wisdom & energy. One hands oneself over, in the poet Dante’s beautiful image, into ‘the love that moves the stars and the sun.’ When the attitude of prompt surrender has become permanently ingrained in a person while still in bodily life, that person becomes a powerful servant of humanity – a saint, in the language of the Christian West – whose very being radiates blessing and spiritual strength." Cynthia Bourgeault. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart.” Jossey-Bass, 2003.

    “Most important of all, do everything you can to nurture your spiritual intelligence. It is your only genuine source of hope, direction, meaning, and comfort.” Thomas Moore

"Girl with Two Owls" by Lobsang Mendelez www.lobsangsecretart.com

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

 
 

PRACTICING The Heart of Mindfulness

      In one of Tara Brach's fine guided meditations, she suggests: “… with the out-breath, let go of any unnecessary holdings in the heart.” https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-loving-what-is/

 
     What a wonderful suggestion!

     Of course we all have protective armor of varying thickness around our hearts due to all the traumas we've been exposed to, perhaps even before birth. Even the process of being born is traumatic to the child, no matter how smoothly it goes. 

     So what are unnecessary holdings in the heart? If we've become resilient, balanced, mature adults, and have forgiven those who may have harmed us, and have learned to consciously face & accept even life's harsh realities, we likely will still continue to carry some habitual armoring in our body, but especially around our heart. This is now completely unnecessary, and something best to intentionally work on releasing.

     A much greater challenge is if we're continually traumatized in some manner, be it racism, sexism, domestic violence, homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment, etc, etc, etc. Even here though, armoring the heart is - somewhat like the "freeze instinct" - a necessary survival tactic of the very young, and for those not yet able to respond more maturely & effectively to trauma. An armored, frozen heart is not capable of vibrantly engaging in life. So even here, it is best to adapt more effective adult responses to end & mitigate the damaging effects of trauma AND intentionally work on releasing these holdings in the heart.

     An armored heart becomes such a natural part of us, that the suggestion to release the armor to some will sound completely insane - as if being asked to immediately become a heart organ-donor! And even if you've reached a point in your life when the idea of shedding defenses around your heart sounds appealing, even urgent, in real life, it's actually a slow, cautious process, mostly out of your direct control. The heart is, after all, our most vital organ!

     So even though we're hard-wired for self-preservation & conditioned to fear, at the same time, our life feels whole & meaningful only when we have open-hearted connection to ourselves, others, the world. So how can we resolve this potent pull in opposite directions?

•

     A meditation PRACTICE I've found beneficial is holding a beloved baby in my heart. It can be your own baby or grandchild, baby Buddha, baby Jesus, a puppy, kitten, baby bird - whoever feels closest for you. The key is to feel directly sharing the nurturing warmth, peace & protection of your heart with a tiny, beloved, helpless little innocent being. We are holding this beloved innocent & our own innocence together, in nurturing safety & unconditional love, so both are thriving in real time. Allow yourself to rest in the physical feel of nurturing & being nurtured, embodying our true nature.

• 

     Immediately after writing the above, I listened to an excellent interview in which Dorothy Hunt answered a question about desire - to have something or to get rid of something. "This awareness, this awake nature of ours, it’s moving from inside the thing that we’re trying to get rid of, rather than trying to get rid of it. We just let awareness come inside – it begins to liberate it from the inside. Whereas the mind tries to pry it open, or get rid of it. Awareness is like the sun that melts these frozen things. So much of what feels like a block is just some kind of frozen feeling, frozen experience that hasn’t been allowed to simply be. So when we allow our inner experience to be what it is – the Buddha once said, ‘Hold your anger as though it’s your only child’ – bringing that compassion, that embrace, that intimacy, bringing it close so we can see ‘What is this?’ instead of ‘How do I get rid of it?’ The mind wants to know, ‘How do I get rid of it?’ But this awake space, this awareness, has no judgment, it just shines the light on what is. And then we begin to see desire for what it is.”
        Dorothy Hunt interview: https://batgap.com/dorothy-hunt/

 

“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

      “Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.” Jack Kornfield

     “When we stop tensing against life, we open to an awareness that is immeasurably large and suffused with love.” Tara Brach

 

 

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

Guardedness, Appreciation, and Opening One's Heart & Life

     "Sometimes people with early childhood scarring complain that they are unable to feel their emotions. We all have emotions, but some of us have learned to ignore them and turn away. I often suggest that those who ignore their emotions awaken to their emotional life through tenderness: looking around until something stirs their humanity, then resting their gaze quietly upon that. When they begin to experience a felt sense of beauty, they will also feel tender, open, and peaceful. Their emotions will begin to percolate through this process, and appreciation will arise within that tenderness. Appreciation is the quiet thank-you of the heart that opens across the landscape."

       Rodney Smith. Awakening. A Paradigm Shift of the Heart. Shambhala, Boston, 2014.

October on Lewis Lake, Nova Scotia, Canada

 

Armouring - discovery phase

     While we sometimes notice tightness in the neck, shoulders and back, our first multi-day meditation retreat will very clearly reveal just how armoured we are.

     “Wilhelm Reich was a student of Freud's who believed that the body plays an important role in an individual's expression. Crucial to his understanding of psychology is the concept of armoring which is basically the physical component of repression as understood by Freud.

     Armoring occurs when an impulse is halted at the muscular level. For example, it is natural for a child to cry when they are sad. However, a child who is punished for crying will find a way to inhibit this behavior. At first, this inhibition is conscious, and may include tensing the muscles of the eyes and face, holding the breath, or whatever else works that the child is capable of doing. Reich said that normally a child will cease the inhibition once the threat passes, but when a child is repeatedly subjected to the same kind of treatment, the inhibiting behavior becomes learned and integrated into the child's way of being, along with the accompanying muscular armoring. It becomes habitual and unconscious, and the person no longer notices they are ‘doing’ anything at all.

     Reich viewed the purpose of this armoring as protecting the child from perceived threats, but the cost is the diminished freedom that comes fighting against constant muscular contraction as well the energy that is required to maintain this state of contraction.

     You may be able to fight and win battles in a suit of armor, but when you're wearing one all of the time without knowing it, it becomes impossible to dance.”

http://nononsensepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/05/wilhelm-reich-armoring.html

Photo: Mike Ronesia   www.dpreview.com