Our Mind, Emotions & Body

    It can be terribly frustrating to suffer from debilitating physical symptoms, for which one physician after another fails to find a cause or effective treatment. Though each clinician might strongly suspect that the cause is primarily psychological, they'll suggest more tests & more referrals to avoid angry outbursts, "Are you saying, 'it's all in my head?!'" and to rule out the progressively diminishing possibility that everyone might have overlooked a rare physical cause.
    Some sufferers (& clinicians) do gradually come to see the problem in a broader perspective. This clearly requires that their narrow, exclusive focus on their most glaring pain / discomfort opens up, so they see themselves holistically. Below is imho Helen Hamilton's exceptionally wise perspective:

    “When we are ... trying to find a belief that is reflecting as this body condition, illness, this dys-ease in the harmony of the body is a reflection of some idea that we’re holding onto, that we haven’t seen or looked at clearly. And of course you know that I’m just kind of saying that to put it into context because our body is trying to tell us, having to tell us, something that perhaps we haven’t looked at emotionally. Something that we haven’t looked at deep enough emotionally. So if we have a strong emotion – fear, or guilt, or unworthiness, even self-hatred – and we haven’t been able to feel that emotion for whatever reason. Maybe it didn’t feel safe to feel it, or we were told it was wrong, or whatever – we were in a situation when it was generated where we couldn’t feel it. Finding the beliefs is going to be looking at the emotions. What emotions do you feel on a regular basis that are reflecting as the body condition?
    Because every karmic pattern shows up 3 ways simultaneously as:
        1) thoughts – the unconscious beliefs, and as an
        2) emotion – a more gross manifestation than a thought, and then
        3) physically – somewhere in your body.

    So have a look at the negative emotions you feel. And mind will say, ‘You feel this emotion because you have this thing going on in your body.’ But in truth, that is separation – the emotion caused by what’s happening to the body. So if it’s life-threatening, there’s probably some fear there, and mind will say, ‘I’m scared because this thing is happening to my body.’ But in the truth, I’m scared because I think I’m a separate being, I’m in danger. And that’s reflecting. This belief is not allowing the fullness of the life-force to flow through the body, and it looks like illness & disease. And the more constricted the life-force is, the more severe the illness or disease will appear to be.
    So first of all, having a look at the negative emotions that you feel, and then working that back to the beliefs. My website has a list of emotions & hidden beliefs behind them, as a suggestion to go with, using the contemplation technique : “Emotions & their Stories”: https://www.helenhamilton.org/uploads/4/0/0/9/4009977/emotions_and_hidden_beliefs_6.pdf

    And still even, if you look at the body itself – a second way to look at this – the body is a very literal metaphor for what’s going on inside of us. So autoimmune disease is where your body is kind of attacking itself (as far as I know – my understanding might be limited here), the immune system is attacking tissues & systems that it shouldn’t be, so something is out of sync, there’s an attack going on inside. And this is symbolic of something happening deeper inside, where you’re attacking yourself, where you are criticizing yourself, where you’re hating yourself even if you look deep enough. And I know as I say this, most of us will say, ‘Well I don’t hate myself. It’s not that deep. I don’t have any such feelings I’m aware of.’ And that’s why the body’s having to show us, because we haven’t really seen it.
    It was astonishing to me that even after several deep seeings (awakening experiences), when I actually looked at what was going on because my life wasn’t still flowing – I finally dug out this kind of intense self-hatred, this self-loathing inside – that was still there after many seeings, experiencing peace & joy. But my life wasn’t flowing, so there must have been some belief stopping the energy moving down through the energy centers of the body and out into the greater manifestation.
    So looking at the metaphor - self attacking self - why would you be doing that on some level? Can you admit that that must be going on at some level and be willing to see that? Now others, especially this far along the path of awakening, want to see that, because we value love & truth & honesty. It doesn’t feel right & we don’t really want to look inside to find some kind of self-hatred still going on. We might not even believe. ‘Well I’m obviously not the egoic structure, I’ve seen what I really am.’ But that seeing, sometimes doesn’t penetrate deeply enough yet to undo this mechanism.
    It’s very rare that someone will have a seeing (awakening experience) powerful enough in one go to obliterate all these egoic structures that are still working. We only hear about the ones that do. But most of us still have to go in and look at these patterns underneath. So just listening to yourself when you talk, are you unknowingly criticizing yourself, diminishing yourself? How do you really feel about yourself? How you feel about your body too is a reflection of how you feel about you. How you feel about your abilities, & your mind, and all of that is a reflection of how you feel about you.
    For me, I had very negative feelings about my body. I had to admit eventually, that’s how I actually feel about myself. My body is just innocently reflecting to me – it doesn’t have any other choice about what I’m thinking & feeling, on a deep unconscious level of course. And that’s why it’s having to show us, because we can’t see it any other way.

    So I hope that gives you some direction to go with that. Have a go applying what I’ve said here. Do write back if you need to kind of fine-tune that. And my gut feeling is that it’s about some kind of self-hatred going on inside. And not blaming yourself for that, because that just adds to it. Each one of us has been functioning from mind’s perspective, and mind is taking a snapshot of our life looking at who he thinks we are, comparing it with where he thinks we want to be, need to be. When I get to this point in the future, I’ll be good enough, I’ll like myself, I’ll love myself. And it can never kind of arrive at that point there, because this one, where it thinks we’re starting from, is deeply flawed. We are not this separate being that mind thinks we are. So how can we ever go from here to there if the starting reference point is completely untrue? But mind thinks it’s true, so it keeps trying & failing to be this better person, more awakened, better father, better wife, better career, … all these things it’s trying to get to, whatever that is for you, where I’ll finally be happy & I’ll like myself. So recognizing it’s not your fault, not any of our fault. We have these deep feelings about ourselves and that is a natural byproduct of using the mind to try to navigate through our life to try to find happiness. That’s the only tool we had till now, so we can let go of the blame in that.”
    Helen Hamilton. “Awareness recognising awareness.” from the excellent video below:

Never Left Home

     Bruce Springsteen expressed it nicely, "everybody's got a hungry heart." It goes by many other names: "an itch we can't scratch," "ordinary unhappiness," "lack," "seeker," "neediness," "greed," "inferiority complex," "imposter syndrome," "low self-esteem," "desperation," etc. And unless cynicism & resignation have set in, we strive heroically to fill the bottomless hole in our heart with: work, food, shopping, sex, drugs, travel, and all sorts of experiences including spirituality: prayer, meditation & rituals including sweat lodges, entheogenic plant medicines like ayahuasca etc. But too often, we just "can't get no satisfaction."
     Non-dual methods offer a surprisingly direct approach to "re-cognizing" how we're far less needy than we can imagine. Two teachers have particularly impressed me with the clarity of their teaching: "Sailor Bob" Donaldson and John Wheeler.
     I highly recommend listening to their 90min talk - youtube video bottom of this page. The initial (Bob's) portion has poor audio, so the text below will help:

     “I don’t teach you anything, and we don’t tell you anything. What we do is point toward, and ask you to look to where we’re pointing to, to see for yourself, because there’s nothing that you’re going to get, nothing that anybody can give you. We’re talking about non-duality or the nonconceptual present awareness, just this, nothing else. And we talk in concepts. So again, anybody new needs to realize that the concepts themselves are not the introduction, nor recognition of this. And you also realize that if you came from some conceptual point of view, you can pull apart what we recite quite easily – whatever we say, because it’s all conceptual.
     So we ask you to learn, if you haven’t learned already, to listen. And when we talk about listening, we’re not saying ‘head-to-head’ - taking what we say into your head, trying to analyze it. So let it wash in, in what we call, ‘heart-to-heart.’ We’re not talking about your physical heart or anything in your body. I’m talking about using the word ‘heart’ as the core of beingness or you can use the symbol of spirit if you like. When we talk about ‘heart-to-heart’ – you know what heart-to-hear is already. How many times when you heard somebody that you’ve really felt close to, heard what they were saying and you realized, ‘My heart opened up to them’? When we talk about heart-to-heart then there is natural communication.
     When it’s 'head-to-head,' you’ve got to put your concepts against the things spoken, and nothing’s going to penetrate. But if it’s heart-to-heart, there’s an openness there, and that’s communication. And it mightn’t be in the words, because the words are concepts. There might be a natural resonance there – a natural recognition of your innate true nature.
     Here we don’t say, ‘it’s only for the few,’ which you’ll hear elsewhere, ‘you have to do this & that, and it will take time & years to get there & understand it.’ In this space, everybody’s right in everybody’s natural state if you like to open yourself and drop some of the conceptual beliefs you’ve held & kept there that have become the blockages that stopped you." Sailor Bob Adamson 

     "In the beginning you might hear a few pointers to essentially get you looking in the right direction. You’ll hear many different types of pointers. If I start sharing my experience or my understanding, I might come out with a certain set of pointers & concepts as how I would frame what is the essence of what Bob was pointing to. I often come back to the basic pointer that you hear quite a lot that, there is this nature of reality or truth that is accessible to us, and if we are curious to where that resides, or how we would look at that, or where we would find that. We also often hear something to the effect that, ‘that is what you are,’ or ‘that’s already what you are.’ So this natural state or reality get’s pointed to, but in a practical way, when you want to notice that, or want to recognize that as an actual direct recognition, where you look for that, where you access that is pointed to be exactly, precisely where you are, because your natural being, your natural state is that reality that’s being talked about. So that’s a way of using pointers, & some words & concepts to try to get us simply to look in the right direction and notice something in our experience.
     Now once we have a grasp of that, or basic sense of that, then the concepts & the pointers can fall away, and we’re just in the immediate recognition of something that’s not a concept, that is present in our experience. That’s really what this is about. Not so much about what the concept or the word is, or how it’s stated or who says it or anything like that, it’s actually something that’s being pointed to. It’s important to keep that in mind in any of these teachings & pointers, so we can go immediately into noticing what is the nature of what is present in our experience here right now, that isn’t framed by any concept. There’s clearly something here. Each one of us is present, existing, aware, alive, conscious. Whatever that is, whatever that reality is, if you notice that you’ll see that it’s not word, or an object, or a pointer. It’s not even a teaching. There’s really no particular teaching or school of thought that really can capture that, or own that, or kind of have the rights to that so to speak. But still that natural being, that knowing the essence of what we are, is actually present for all of us, even right now in this moment. And I think what we find is that, at the end of the day, as we’re looking at this, resonating with it, that that’s what you recognize at the end in terms of where the pointers are pointing to. So I would say just to encourage you to pause the concept, pause the question, pause the mind trying to grasp some particular understanding, and just simply relax & notice something very simple & available which can be pointed to.
     So I could call it ‘the fact of your being’ or ‘that innate conscious presence that’s here right now, that’s at the root of all of our natural functioning & seeing & knowing & thinking’ and that’s there prior to any description, word, or label. Once you get that, once you resonate with that, and once you realize that that’s what we can notice, that that’s what really being pointed to, it just goes to an immediate re-cognition, an immediate looking & seeing that in direct experience.
     It’s quite interesting because what you’ll find, is that a lot of those pointers that are used, turn out to be someone attempting to describe what your natural being is. So just to give a flavor of a few things that I would say, and encourage you to also notice right now that there is that effortless, natural given reality of your being here right now. And that’s not an attainment, and it’s not even an awakening, it’s not a liberation or some kind of spiritual state. It’s actually simpler and prior to that. And in looking at that, and recognizing what that is, you’ll find that it’s not troubled by questions & problems. It’s not divided from anything. It’s not searching for anything. It’s not limited or defective or anything like that. So the amazing thing about this is when you follow that pointer and you actually examine in your experience to just simply be curious about what is the nature of what we are here, you immediately come face to face with this obvious, undeniable fact of your true nature, and it is already having all of those characteristics we might have been searching for.
     So that can allow us to appreciate some of these pointers, but always knowing that the pointer is not what it is. But in seeing that distinction, you can appreciate the pointers, you can enjoy the pointers, and you can be at a meeting like this and hear this being pointed to and following the pointers, but simultaneously actually directly recognizing, as it’s being discussed, that reality of who you are. And the beauty of it is it starts right now in our direct experience, if we care to recognize what’s being pointed to. And this is something that people I think miss, is that what you find is that we’re not really talking about attainment. It’s not a particular experience. It’s not a particular moment. It’s not a shift. It’s not a penny dropping. Nothing particular needs to happen, which is I think in spirituality we often subtly pick up that kind of idea that, ‘When’s it going to happen?’ ‘When am I going to be there?’ ‘Somebody got it and somebody didn’t get it.’ And subtly the mind is just kind of projecting into the future, imagining there’s something that’s going to happen to me and then ‘this’ will be the case.
     And it turns out, which is a wonderful understanding, that that’s not the case actually. Even the most rarefied, absolute teachings that you hear, also turn out to be a little bit too complicated. So we often hear ‘awakening.’ And it seems like so and so got something at a certain time. So that would lead us to feel like maybe that could happen to me, or something like that. But that’s all conceptual. That’s all in the imaginary, conceptual picture in the mind, because if you actually look in direct experience, that awake, conscious aware presence is actually already functioning. It’s already completely clear and evident. So there we were waiting for awakening, waiting for the shift or something to happen, not actually noticing that the awakeness or the awareness or that reality was actually there without even needing the shift or the awakening. In seeing it like this, the whole structure of spirituality concepts just glides out of the picture, because you realize you don’t need anything what you already are. All those natural qualities are given by default in what’s already present.
     This is the kind of thing that Bob pointed out to me, and that he shares. And I was able to listen to what he was saying, and just check it out and find the simplicity of the truth of the meaning of those pointers. But at no time was there some exotic awakening or shift or moment or something like that because it’s too complicated. Then those age-old pointers about ‘you are that’ and ‘your mind is the Buddha’ and ‘this is who we are’ – we recognize that, well this is what they’re trying to say, that you already are the truth of what you are, that you are that. And at that point, the need for the pointers, or the need to understand what it is and where it is and all that – that whole thing is no longer necessary for who we are because there’s that direct recognition for ourselves of the truth of what we are. It’s a simple appreciation & recognizing of something that, as was pointed out to me once, that one of the keys to it was that it’s so incredibly simple, so totally basic, and in a way so clear, so obvious that often we’ve just stepped over it and missed the essence of it. So you hear a lot of these pointers today and if you really follow what’s being said, it’s pointing back again & again & again & again in various different ways to that same basic message. And you don’t need a lot of pointers, or a lot of meetings, or a lot of time, or a lot of chewing over it, because all of that is still missing the simplicity of it. Just one meeting like this, or a discussion or heart-to-heart talk, or hearing just one direct pointer that resonates can in itself be quite sufficient, quite enough for us to notice that. So that’s just one attempt to try to share this." John Wheeler