2012 has been and gone, and many are wondering what the fuss was about. Yet many people have experienced subtle shifts and changes, and are on the verge of breaking through to something new. If you can feel this, then likely it is true for you, and you are on your way to engaging your life purpose on a new level and contributing to creating new innovative initiatives and an alternate reality on planet earth. 2013 is an important year for setting these changes in motion, and each person counts.
Leaving the path behind and finding your own…
Yoga, meditation, silent retreats, fasts, detoxes, crystals, reiki, angels, past lives etc. The list of options is endless, and many become a personal religion. For what? In order to… What exactly? Be healthier? Happier? Earn more money? Receive inner guidance? Find our purpose? Sometimes we lose sight of why we embarked on these activites in the first place. Maybe we didn’t feel great, and wanted to still the mind, feel better, or heal a pain or sickness, or have better relationships. But somewhere along the way being a spiritual seeker can become an identity for the ego that helps it feel more secure, more established, more solid – just as the office job or family role might have been before… except now you are someone who believes in and studies angesl…and then there are seemingly endless versions of therapies, bodywork, techniques, changing your beliefs, each of which claim to be the holy grail. People learn different aspects of awareness and embodiment from different practices at different times, so in a way they are helpful. But there is more…
Awakening…
Some people dont just want to get fixed, they want to awaken. Some even think awakening will fix them! Maybe they will be peaceful at last, and free of suffering… They earnestly pursue vipassana silent meditations, hang our with their enlightened guru on endless seminars and still, despite gathering vast amounts of knowledge and practices, nothing fundamental changes. Even after five years of eating raw. The thing, whatever it is, still eludes them. How do they know? Becasue they’re still seeking. So what is it? What is this elusive thing that these people are after, and how do you get it?
Who am I?
Well, the tricky thing is, the part of us that wants it is the same part that prevents us from having it. Or seen another way, the seeking activity of the ego, even though it is oh so spiritual, is exactly the thing that keeps us stuck. Seeking, wanting, is a mind activity. Its just another identity as a spiritual person. You still think you are that personality. Until there is no mind, no identification with thought patterns, there is no awakening. To find it, you have to just give up, just be here in this moment. And there it is. Right there inside you. Just where it was all along. In plain English, this is the same wisdom that is at the basis of every religion, spiritual teaching, writing and practice. The gurus are the ones who have stopped looking on the outside and been brave enough to find it alone on the inside.
Seeing is believing
And yet… many of these practices like bodywork and yoga can be extremely useful tools. Although your thinking mind cannot be fixed, they are tools to help you see it for what it is and not allow it to run the show. Seeing the workings of your mind from the inside is something only you can do. No one can do it for you. If you use whichever of these practices attract you to increase your present moment awareness of sensation in the body, they can slowly enhance your overall ability to be aware. Detoxing and specialised nutrition can raise your body’s energetic state and increase awareness. As your awareness increases, you can use it to see through your habitual behavioral patterns, layer by layer. This is the real agenda beneath most spiritual practices, yet it often gets lost along the way. Each layer that you can observe dispassionately, without needing to fix or change it, will lose it’s power to take you over and make you think it is you. It is not. You are the awareness that is observing, quietly peacefully and utterly content with the way things are in the present momentum. This is rarely pointed out in yoga or other classes, because there is often so much concern with the body or other aspects of physical life that we miss the important bit – that we are not the body, we are not the emotions, we are not our personality. What we are is the life that animates us and all other life on the planet. Taken to its logical conclusion, the point of a yoga class is to open your energy centres and connect you internally with your awareness to the point that you can sense this connection with the others in the class and the plants outside, and let go of thinking you are a separate individual… If you’ve recently been to a yoga class that took you there, then please tell all your friends… How would you know? After such an experience your life would change fundamentally because you would drop your personal identity. You would be at peace on a very deep level… And by the way, you can awaken without ever having done yoga, or eating raw. There are no prerequisites in that sense.
Observing the robot within
What’s amazing is that so much of our daily experience is automatic and robotic that we don’t even realize it’s coming from the mind’s repetitive patterns. Many people are very negative about life without realising, and always expect bad things or constantly complain. The fastest way to realize what your’re doing and shift your awareness is to sit with a practitioner who is present and can convey this experience of peace and disidentification to you. Once you have felt the experience of being peaceful, and it has really sunk in, you will begin to recognize all the other things that are created by the mind much more clearly.
You will see for yourself that nothing about you is broken, nothing needs to be fixed. You don’t necessarily need to learn any more or change. You will realize the pointlessness of endless talking bout your family history – though this is of course a necessary phase that many people need to go through for themselves, before they realize they are not Jenny or Philip or Sam, and the past experience and emotion has been felt and integrated. No matter what level you reach in bending backwards in yoga, nothing guarantees peace. Except if somewhere along the way you begin to accept how you are right now and to just surrender to this moment. Then a space can open, where the mind is quiet or silent, and you can experience your connection with the whole of life. This is maybe the background to many of the therpeutic practices, but watch the mind’s tendency to want to get fixed or get better, because that’s not it. There is no end to what can be wrong, there is always something. The point is to become aware enough to leave the fascination with all of that altogether and stop engaging at that level. The physical emotional human aspect is only part of who you are. It is only when we step away from all that and lean back and let go into our true nature as life itself that the seeking ends.
Oops, i am nothing
Many people find it really hard to handle experiencing themselves as space, as non-judgemental and indifferent life itself, as nothingness. Of not being anyone. It can be frightening, but we get used to it, and we can dip in and out of it initially, as we let go gradually of our old idea of self. Of course, its really shocking that after all this seeking, what we find is that there was actually nothing to fix or find. When we see we are not our names, or our family story, or our occupational role, or our past or our bodies there is in fact nothing left. Yet this nothing is life itself, it animates everything in us, around us, under and above us. It is undeniable in when experienced directly. We are life. We don’t need personalities to live and assert themselves at the expense of others, to gain power over them. Our bodies know how to live without thought. They just carry on, even when the mind has let go.
A simple question: do you feel that if people had to think in order to breathe, digest, pump blood etc that many people would still be alive? I think its unlikely. They’d forget, or get stressed and do it wrong. Our thinking minds could never fathom the complexity and sheer volume of information necessary to regulate the chemical, hormonal and nervous systems in our bodies. It all just happens without “us” as we identify ourselves, taken care of by LIFE. To think that our little individual personalities could possibly have any effect on the overall course of events is a delusion. It is a way of trying to make ourselves feel strong and important. We are not. We are tiny parts of a whole living system on planet earth. That doesn’t mean we can’t be incredibly influential and powerful as individuals. But only if our actions are aligned with life itself. That is, they arise from that peaceful expanded place beyond or underneath the little me.
Disidentifying from “me”
How can we find this place in our everyday lives? Having a craniosacral session is one way to still the mind and sink into that deep space. Craniosacral uses the universal intelligence or presence, the nothing-not-me to build up the core reservoir of energy in the body so it can move and open up our central channel and open blockages, in a similar way to yoga, but on a much deeper and more subtle level. This can help us to learn to be able to observe our own psyche from the inside. Ultimately it’s about where you put your focus, and what you identify with. At some point it’s necessary to shift away from thinking you are a particular person or role, to feeling and experiencing yourself as the pure awareness that is observing and having your human experience. And also everyone elses! To do that at some point you have to let go. Whether it’s your partner, work, home or whole life, it will happen how and when it’s meant to. Whatever last familiar aspect of your old self you are hanging onto will invite you to step away. When you do so, you won’t die, and your life won’t end. There may be some sadness and release of anger for a while, as your energy stops holding and opens up to your natural vibrant state of aliveness. You may also experience loosening or release in your neck and cranial base. And then your external life may take on a new form, or you go back to your old life but with a changed perspective and attitude. You will be peaceful and free, no longer influenced by others and events outside you in your fundamental peace.
Awakening intensive sessions
My work has evolved over the last two years to a very fine tuned accelerated process for peeling away layers of conditioning in the mind and holding in the body. Old emotions, memories and sicknesses surface and clear. Depending mainly on your willingness and readiness, not on previous work, in three to four sessions you can be taken through your individual process of letting go of who you were, layer by layer. This is a very intense process and can be literally mind-blowing, or sometimes just a gentle relief. Sometimes it only takes one session, which can be by skype too. I doesn’t seem to make much difference when you are ready to do it. I sometimes use craniosacral bodywork to work on the deeper levels of unconscious holding in the body that contain keys to personality structures so that they can unravel and fall away. People’s lives open and begin to blossom creatively. That is what happens when you recognize your own habitual patterns and let them go. When you step into the unknown anything is possible… Anything. Letting go is much easier than holding on, but it takes more courage. Maybe reading this article has already given you every thing you need for the shift to happen. If you feel you almost get it but not quite, and you get a shiver or a sense of excitement reading this, please get in touch. I offer these intensives by skype or in person.
I wish you a happy new year and much enjoyment being yourself…
If you found this article interesting, you might want to read my ebook: the Survival Guide to Awakening which details aspects of the process and how to deal with arising emotions and practical aspects…
All rights reserved. Mia Watson, January 13th 2012
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