Feeling Our Way Back Home

     Under stress, we automatically rush to our head, quickly trying to figure out how to get rid of danger & find safety, security, comfort. Increasingly however, we're feeling stressed almost continuously. Not surprisingly, for most of us, our heads have become home - an unhappy home.
     Can you feel when your center of gravity is in your head? It's all thinking / self-talk / self-concern isn't it? Can you sense a heaviness between the ears, even a continuous mild headache, often with tightness in the jaw / neck / shoulder areas? While "in your head," you're disengaged from the here & now - "absent-minded", "spaced-out." Such inattentiveness creates the false impression of being uncaring, that you're ignoring & disrespecting people around you, and contributes to accidents - adding to our stress.
     So under stress, we habitually escape into our head, often making the situation worse. We easily recognize the feel of this in our head as well as in the rest of our body - trembling, increased heart rate, butterflies in our bellies etc. We feel tight, alone, isolated, disconnected, anxious & afraid. Such unbalanced thinking is clearly useless, harmful, and feels wrong. 
     Balanced thinking - intentionally planning a project, preparing a menu, designing a garden, solving a math problem etc - is being fully engaged, in a relaxed, sustained manner, with what we're doing, being & feeling at home both in our body and in the present moment.
     Full engagement means that our mind, heart & the rest of our body are working in harmony, in a relaxed, joyfully efficient manner! This feels good! "Flow" is one term used to describe the enjoyable state in which an activity is performed fully immersed in energized focus & full involvement. We feel spacious, intimately connected & engaged with life.
     When we care for a beloved young child, puppy or kitten, we joyfully hold them in love & safety. This is the easiest way of remembering the feel of fully engaging all of our intelligences: mind (reason); heart (emotions & connection to others & environment); and body (physical power & groundedness or connection to the earth / reality). It's a fascinating combination of nurturing, interconnectedness, power & groundedness - like a mother grizzly with her cub. Other examples of this felt sense: hugging a loved one or looking into their eyes (person or animal); doing work (or hobby) that we consider to be our calling; when we see, hear, or read about anything that deeply resonates or touches us.
     We ALL know this felt sense of intimacy with the present! We know & remember this! It's a matter of remembering to return home to our whole self and learn to trust that it's safe & infinitely more pleasant to live our authenticity.
     Mindfulness training very gently, very slowly, eases us back into trusting that it's safe to leave our disembodied stressed-out thought-world, and return to be grounded, at home in our balanced mind-heart-body.
     1) Learn to recognize the unpleasant feel of being in your head: stressful repetitive thoughts, often with the feel of stress in the rest of the body.
     2) Relax, allow, feel awareness descend from your head, down into the heart area. In the heart region, with infinitely patient practice, you will (sooner or later) feel warmth radiating in all directions, outside & within your body. No forcing, no impatience - patiently, gently, feel, sense your way along. This radiating warmth is the physical / energetic feel of your interconnectedness with others, the environment, life itself. This viscerally felt sense of connectedness is profoundly restorative & healthy (vs sad & unhealthy sense of isolation, "me against the world", loneliness).
     3) The warmth extends downward to include your belly, within which your "hara" resides. The hara is the energy center in the middle of the abdomen, 2 inches below the navel, deep along the body's vertical axis. This is your body's power center, from where meditators, martial artists, opera singers & weight-lifters cultivate & generate power, the point around which gymnasts & figure skaters twirl, etc. 
     Even if your abdominal area feels unsafe, the hara is in a protected place, deep within the vertical core of your body. Far from being vulnerable, it is your own power center, never harmed, always reliable. The hara connects & grounds or anchors us to our body, present-moment reality, sanity, stability, the earth.
     4) Keep noticing whenever you get lost in your head, and allow yourself repeatedly to sense your way back down to hang out in the heart & hara centers. See how it feels to perceive life from this balanced mind-heart-body perspective. 
     If this works better & feels healthier, saner & more joyous, then keep patiently, gently practicing - it just gets better & better, despite challenges along the way.

     "All profitable correction comes from a calm, peaceful mind.”  
                                                                                                                         St. Francis de Sales 


(Hurricane Dorian was barreling towards us as I wrote this blog. The eye of the storm was expected to, & did hit our small city a few hours later. It was raining, windy, and ~80,000 homes had already lost power. We were without power, landline, cable & internet for over 24hrs, many trees were downed, along with power lines. Many remained without power for up to a week.)

Chakras & Core Strength

     “We are heading into a new era, one in which humanity is being initiated into a higher state of being. That higher state is not a fairy-tale transformation that happens with the wave of a wand but a slow metamorphosis in how we understand the life force: how it is organized, how it flows through us, what it means, and how best to utilize it.
     One aspect of this initiation is to fully occupy our bodies and live in the center of our core – our sacred center – the vertical column of energy that rises from base to crown. This axis mundi, which Leadbeater calls the ‘axis of creation’ or ‘rod of Meru,’ is our personal connection between heaven and earth. In ancient myths, it is said that doomsday will approach as heaven and earth become disconnected. In a world where doomsday is precariously close, we are called to this core connection as a way of healing, not only ourselves, but also our fractured world in which spirituality and everyday life have become dangerously dissociated.
     The core is common to all living things – every blade of grass, every tree, every person’s vertical channel, including the core of our legs, arms, fingers, and toes. To come from our core is to occupy the most direct access to Source that we have: the Source within, aligned between heaven and earth.
     The chakras exist as sacred centers strung like jewels along the axis of our vertical core. When the chakras are aligned, we become that connection between heaven and earth. From this place we are capable of co-creating heaven on earth, from a place of consciousness, wisdom, sensitivity and compassion. Perhaps with this connection intact, we have a means to avert doomsday and continue the evolutionary experiment into its potential glory.
     Few people actually live in their core. Because it is the source of vital, divine energy, we learn at any cost to protect it as we grow up through the twists and turns of childhood. We create necessary defenses, but they come with a cost. Later, our vital life energy becomes more engaged with those defenses than with the precious core we were trying to protect! We no longer feel our aliveness, our vitality, our raison d’etre. The chakra system brings us back to our core.
     Leadbeater explains … the important link between vitality and health, how we are nourished by the light of the sun from above and the rising serpent power from the earth. It is the confluence of these two forces above and below that energizes and awakens the chakras. In a world where we remove ourselves from the earth and shield ourselves from the sun’s rays with walls and rooftops, spending the bulk of our time indoors, it is no wonder we are ailing. 
     The chakras come from the Tantric period of yoga philosophy, circa 500-1000CE. Tantric spirituality is a weaving of dualities: heaven and earth, masculine and feminine, inner and outer, mind and body. The emphasis is on incorporating everything rather than rejecting any one aspect of reality in favour of another. In this way, the chakras represent seven essential elements of our existence – not that the lower chakras are bad and the upper chakras are good, but that each level represents both light and shadow and must be balanced in order for us to be healthy, thriving individuals.
     The chakras represent a map for our healing, a profound formula for wholeness and a template for transformation. They describe the soul’s architecture, just as we study the bones, muscles, and organs of the body’s physical architecture, the chakras enable us to study the subtler energies of the soul. Like the human face, this architecture varies from person to person, yet it has elements common to all.
     The elements of the chakras – from bottom to top, earth, water, fire, air, sound, light, and thought – describe a spectrum of creation from the physical world to pure consciousness. The energies of the soul run both ways, in the rising current of liberation that comes about as matter transforms into subtler energies of consciousness, and in the descending current of manifestation that begins in thoughts or ideas and gains density as they progress downward into the manifested plane. The chakras are stepping stones along this pathway.
     As human beings we need to have both the upward and downward channels available. We need to be able to liberate from limiting or destructive patterns, which is a function of consciousness we call realization. To realize is to see with ‘real eyes,’ to see what is real, the energy behind the material representation.
     We also need to be able to manifest our visions into reality, to actualize our life purpose and take higher consciousness into its full outward expression to evolve the world around us. The chakra system is a map for that process. It is at best an integrative system, one that can bring us back into wholeness once again.” Anodea Judith PhD
       C.W. Leadbeater. “The Chakras. An Authoritative Edition of the Groundbreaking Classic.” Quest Books, 1997.

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.

Awareness of Awareness

"Be mindful of how you 'source' your Guidance.

How do you know what is 'right' for you?

Here are some experiments to explore this:
 
     • Wait until you are hungry and walk into your kitchen and open all the cupboards and refrigerator and stand there listening for, 'What food would most nourish me right now?' Be mindful of how this guidance comes to you - as images ... words ... feelings in your body ... clear knowing ... or in other ways ...

     • Before you get dressed for the day, stand in your room in your underwear ... and listen for how your Guidance comes to you for what to wear today ...
 
Does your guidance come through analysis ... intuition ... your body ... or some combination of these?

Then, expand this experiment to listening into how you listen for your Guidance in a myriad of other situations in your life, appreciating that Guidance comes through in different ways in different circumstances."

Joel & Michelle Levey    www.wisdomatwork.com

Wolfville, Nova Scotia

Our Human Body, The Universe, & Finding Home

     "In the Vajrayana traditions of Tibet, in the yoga traditions of India, in Taoist meditation in Taoist yoga, and elsewhere in world religions, the human body, and the totality of the universe, are equivalent realities, only in a different scale. To put it in another way, the human body (microcosm) is the reality of the totality of the universe (macrocosm), with all of the space, all of the eventfulness, all of the energy, all of the vast display, only happening in a different frame of reference, a different scale – the scale of the human body. 
     When we do somatic descent, it’s very important that we have this understanding. At the end of the day, the ultimate mysteries, the ultimate sacredness, the ultimate power, the ultimate immeasurable expanse of the universe is actually present in our human body. Now we can say that these are equivalent realities happening on a different scale, but there’s one way in which they’re not equivalent, and that is that we don’t have direct access to the infinity of the universe. But we do have access to the infinity of the universe in our body. So the external universe can only be known by observation, measurement, deduction, and we’re very reliant on scientific technologies to know about the universe in its most expansive extent. But within the human body, we are given the opportunity to experience those very same cosmic realities through direct experience, through the non-conceptual experience of our body. ...
     What we’re saying here is that when we breathe into the lower belly (hara or dan tien), and we discover the space – the empty, open, vast space – that is the source of our life, in our lower belly, we feel this is me. This is really me. And when we bring that energy up and we uncover it, discover it in the central channel, we feel this is my core. If I’ve been wondering my whole life who I am, and if I have been looking my whole life for my identity as a person, my ultimate identity that will be unshakable in the face of any storms and any onslaughts, we feel, we experience, that this is me. It’s probably one of the deepest experiences of human life. This is who I am. This is who I’ve always been. And we see that it’s indestructible, and it’s neither born, nor dies. 
     This experience of our eternal aspect, again it’s not abstract, and it’s not theoretical. It’s one of the most intimate, personal, affecting experiences you can ever have in your life. Once you discover that space in your own body, in your lower belly, and in your central channel, and you see for yourself, in terms of your own experience, that this is who you are. It gives you a different foundation for your living."

       Reginald A. Ray “Somatic Descent.” Sounds True, 2016. 
       www.soundstrue.com/store/somatic-descent.html

Courtesy of Buddha Doodles www.buddhadoodles.com

Somatic Meditation - Tension & Relaxation

      “The more we practice, the more sensitized we become and the more we notice. The process goes on without end and we always have more to discover, even if we are talking about a tiny area of our body.
     As we become more and more aware of the parts of our body, at a certain point we will notice something else: the tension in each part. The more we explore this, the more we begin to sense that our entire body is actually riddled with tension. We are talking here not about the natural, healthy tension that is part of our being human, but instead we are talking about neurotic tension, elective tension, superimposed tension – superimposed by our conscious orientation, our ego. Neurobiology tells us that this kind of pathological tension extends all the way down to the cellular level and is a contributing factor to ill health and disease.
     So why are we so tense? As we shall see later for ourselves, any naked, unfiltered experience is initially felt to be painful and problematic; without thinking, we try to withdraw from it, evade and get away from it. We do so by literally tensing up, and this tension is everywhere. Why is unfiltered experience painful? Because any new experience is perceived by the conscious ego as a threat. As William Blake observed, human experience in its primal, unprocessed form is infinite. This infinity runs against one of the ego’s primary functions, which is to meet the unexpected and, through subverting it into a convenient and safe interpretive framework, to limit and control it and finally, when carried to an extreme, to deny not only its significance but its very existence. When new meditators confess, ‘I feel like I am missing out on the experience of being alive,’ they speak the truth. 
     Tensing up is a way of avoiding the unadorned experience and the discomfort it brings ego, whether that discomfort is physical or psychological; tension is our way of closing down experience and shutting off awareness. It is the somatic expression of us holding on to our small ego concept, our restricted, left-brain identity. On the one hand, physically freezing and contracting in tension, and, on the other, psychologically shutting down and hanging on doggedly to our small sense of self are actually the same thing, just manifesting in these two different modes.” 

       Reginald A. Ray. "The Awakening Body. Somatic Meditation for Discovering Our Deepest Life." Shambhala, 2016.

Seeking Truth over the Illusion of Security

     “Let nothing come between you and the light.        Henry David Thoreau

     ... each person must free himself from prison – the prison of being a limited, corporeal, dying self.

     ... mystics don’t want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it."

       Huston Smith, Jeffery Paine. “Tales of Wonder. Adventures Chasing the Divine. An Autobiography.” HarperOne, NY, 2009.

Tuscan Rain

Mind-Body Stillness

     "If movement (during sitting meditation) becomes a habit, you will lose the chance to deepen your meditation practice. Calmness & tranquility of mind have their foundation in stillness of the body."

       Sayadaw U Pandita. "In This Very Life. The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha." Wisdom Publications, Boston, MA, 1992.

The Corner Garage, Venice, Italy

Qualities of the Body-Mind during Meditation

     "Our minds are bound up with our bodies, so we need to incorporate our bodies into meditative practice. In each session we will do this by first settling the body in its natural state ... 
     Be at ease. Be still. Be vigilant. These three qualities of the body are to be maintained throughout all meditation sessions."


       B. Alan Wallace. "The Attention Revolution. Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind." Wisdom, Boston, 2006.

Tiplea Remus, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Exploring the Mysteries of the Human Condition

      "Perhaps the most unique and important principle of the Buddha’s approach to the mind is the insight that the mysteries of the human condition are best explored in the dynamics of subjective experience as it unfolds in the present moment. 
     Buddhist theoretical psychology is a science of experience, in which the stream of consciousness itself, as it is presented to the attentive and carefully trained observer, is the field of investigation. ... adepts would go off into the forest alone, cross their legs, shut their eyes, and look very closely at what was going on. They would observe the various effects of fasting, breathing exercises, and other yogic disciplines on their experience, and they organized their observations and insights in formal teachings and systems of great subtlety and complexity. 
     It was a remarkably scientific endeavor in many ways, in which the human body and mind served as the laboratory for investigation. As such, the entire tradition is more of a descriptive phenomenology than a theory of mind. 
     The Buddha was not saying, 'This is what I theorize human experience to be.' Rather, his message (paraphrased) was, 'This is what I’ve seen in my personal experience.' And further, 'Don’t take my word for it; examine it for yourself, and you too can see exactly what I’m talking about.' 
     Much of what he points to does not require years in the wilderness to access, but is available to all of us in this very moment."

        Andrew Olendzki: "Buddhist Psychology", Chapter 1, in:
        Seth Robert Segall ed. "Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings", SUNY Press, 2003.

Anicca - Everything is Transient

     Corporality is transient, feeling is transient, perception is transient, mental formations are transient, consciousness is transient.       Buddha 

Prayer Wheel, Samish Island, WA

Human Maturation - Reconciling, Unifying, Transcending Perceived Opposites

     “Hara means nothing other than the physical embodiment of the original Life center in man.
     Man is originally endowed and invested with Hara. But when, as a rational being, he loses what is embodied in Hara it becomes his task to regain it. To rediscover the unity concealed in the contradictions through which he perceives life intellectually is the nerve of his existence. As a rational being he feels himself suspended between the opposite poles of heaven and earth, spirit and nature. This means first the dichotomy of unconscious nature and of the mind which urges him to ever-increasing consciousness; and second, the dichotomy of his time-space reality on this earth and the Divine beyond time and space. Man’s whole existence is influenced by the tormenting tension of these opposites and so he is forever in search of a life-form in which this tension will be resolved.
     What is man to do when he feels himself suspended between two opposing poles? He can surrender himself to the one or to the other and so, for a time disavow the contradiction; or he can seek a third way in which it will be resolved. The only right choice is the one which will not endanger the wholeness of his being. Since man in his wholeness must include both poles his salvation lies only in choosing the way which unifies them. For man is destined to manifest anew the unity of life within all the contradictions of his existence. The way to this unity is long. The integration of these two poles – the unconscious, and the conscious life of the mind, as well as between life in space time reality and the Reality beyond space time – constitutes the way to human maturity. Maturity is that condition in which man reaps the fruit of the union he has regained. The realization of this union means that he has found his true vital center. Basis, symbol, and proof of this is the presence of Hara.”

       Durckheim KG. “Hara – The vital center of man.” Inner Traditions, Rochester VT, 1975 (originally published 1956 - hence the masculine terminology).

Dale Chihuly   http://www.chihulygardenandglass.com/

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

WHO is afraid?

     "Even if (whatever we fear) is going to attack me, all that it can attack is that which is not me. All that it can harm is the body, the feelings, the perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. That is the only stuff that can get damaged, and that's not me, that's not self. That which knows of these cannot be touched."     Ajahn Chah
       Amaro Bikkhu "Small boat, great mountain." 2003
       www.amaravati.org/downloads/pdf/SmallBoat.pdf

     Staying with (acceptance of) the physical sensations of fear, AND witnessing it all objectively (a process Western psychology calls cognitive defusion) is how we "process" or work our way through the fear. We grow out from the clutches of fear (anxiety, chronic pain, etc). All that we fear, worry about, or are otherwise imprisoned by, thus "loose their solidity." We are no longer one with, identified with, or fused to these phantoms of the mind. We may remember "the story", but it's no longer "my drama," for the emotional charge has dissipated. We are free. Our mind-heart is relaxed, free, open. We come home to the stillness and silence - to that which knows.

Cognitive defusion information:
http://contextualpsychology.org/cognitive_defusion_deliteralization