notice about how I feel in my body.
Where is the tightness or tension?
-in my head
What's my breathing like?
-Increase
It is important to have no conclusion about any of this. Conclusion happens in the mind, not in the body. Suffering is not in the sensation itself but in our conclusions, our belief, the meaning we assign to the sensation. The suffering is not in the body. Each time you think you know something, consider that what thinks it know is conditioning. What we're looking for happens before knowing or understanding, before labels--just a tiny sensation, but one that initiates an avalanche of reactions. We need to sit, breath, and watch the sensations come into existence, we watch our conditioned reaction (thought, emotions, behavior), we breath, we watch the sensation pass away. Freedom.
It's helpful to remember that the body has no issues. All of our issues exist in the conditioned mine. But through paying attention to the body we can become conscious of the physical experience that link directly into conditioned patterns of behavior. The experience that will free us is the moment when we get it that he sensation that lies at the bottom of a condtioned reactions to life doesnt't mean what we assume it means. The reason we can't get to that realization is that we aer so caught up in ...so attached to.....so identified with OUR OWN PERSONAL STORY.
"I'm the way I am because my parents were/said/thought/ believed and did whatever to me and now I'm his way and I can't help myself"
NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The reason is" I am the way I am is that I was conditioned to avoid a feeling I had as a child, and now as an adult I am still avoiding a feeling I have never stopped to examine.
We suffer trying to avoid a feeling that is only a feeling and means nothing. We are controlled by fear of our feelings.
This emptiness I feel because I am not with someone is a thought, not a feeling. What I am trying to do is to close in on this fact that those sensation don't mean what I thought they meant. My familiar sensation result in a horrible discomfort. If I could associate "horrible discomfort" with sensation. The assumptions is " I feel bad with this emptiness, but as soon as it's filled, I 'll feel good....and you know that's not true. It is difficult to come up with words to describe the sensations without sliding into a story.
Our lives are being controlled by sensation in our bodies that we cannot explain and don't understand. When things don;t go my way.....like right now...EBAY and MTLG going down....i get a subtle discomfrot in my head, a slight tension or ache. My unconscious reaction is to do something else...i panic. Amazing to observe that I react so automatically to something so subtle with behavior I don't like I don't even make a conscious meaning connection.
Each moment that I am operating out of habit rather than conscious compassionate awareness is a moment where my voices dictating my life.
As I ponder the process by which I am unable to accept so much of like, I come to the conclusion that the degree to which I am unable to accept something is directly proportionally to the intenity of the uncomfortable sensation the something evokes or would evoke if I accepted. True, it is my attachment to my belief that fuels my inability to accept certain things as they are, but it is ulitmately the intensity of the physical feelings that anchors those beliefs and
bond me so strongly to them.
It's easy to feel acceptance when we feel all the right things. When we feel something we're "not supposed to fee", we want to push that feeling away. We try to get away from the unacceptable, and it all gets wrose. The energy we use to resist us of vitality. When we allow the feelins to be what they are, they pass through.. In life there is work to be done. Sometimes the work includes pain. When we resist, it's just like the force of friction, and the friction limits the amount of meaningful work we can do. When we accept, we are not giving in, instead we are no longer burning out our energy on friction and we are more able to make a difference in life. What we do may not make a difference we want, but we won't be wasting energy that could become love.
Looking at emotions connected with my behavior, I see shame, embarrassment, self-digust. What if i had none of these feelings about my behavior? Immediately a voice pops up, "Then you'd really crazy, If you didn't feel shame and embarrassment." You need this shame and
embarrassment to keep your desire for safety within reasonable bounds, to keep you safe." So, my assumption is that self-loathing keeps me safe...Hm....the first sensation that makes me feel I have to stop what i;m doing and check that I'm safe is a tingling in my upper chest.
This self-talk--indeed most self-talk---comes directly from childhood. In adults, it functions to maintain old, no-longer-useful-and perhaps-never-were-useful structure or habits. We are afraid not to believe them. We believe they are real and wise and helping us through life. When we bring conscious, compassionate awareness to our self-talk, we can see that its only function is to maintain old patterns by keeping us confused about who we relly are. (WE ARE NOT THOSE VOICES) When we react out of habit, egocentric karmic condtioning has us right where it wants us. When self-talk leaves us feeling defeated, we can know that we have givine our life over to self-hate, childhood conditioning.
To get love, a part of me has always tried to be "the right person". When I love that person inside me who has been working so hard to be the right person. Suffering ends when who i am is accepted and embraced in compassion. When I accept myself with compassion, its clear that how I am is not a problem. My old behavior were in reaction to beliefs, assumptions, confusion, self-hate and attempts to reject myself into being the right person I thought I should be.
I notice that so many people find it easier to observe other people's issue than their own. We're often oblivious to our energy. The reason is that we're looking out through the eyes of the conditioned aspect of ourselves that's running our lives at the moment, the aspect we're identifed with. From that perspective, our energy feels appropriate. We have no idea that someone tuning into our energy will know immediately our energy. We project our belief onto life. We see our projections and believe we are seeing life. Until we find the courage to look beyond our belief, we will live life inside our own projections, believing we are living in life as life is. Until the willingness to accept what is, we will not have the courage to go beyond our beliefs. We say.."that makes me uncomfortable" and believe discomfort is reason enough to leave, to reject, or to withdraw. Can you imagine what your life would be like if discomfort were ireelevant?
I'm afraid
I feel anxious
I'm nervous
I'm scary
For most people those simple sentence translate into:
-something is wrong
-i don't want this
-good- bye
What might happen if you sat still through the series of sensation labeled "fear" and proved to yourself that those sensations don't mean anything? What if I approach these sensation labeled nervous or anxious or scary as a call to attention rather than as a danger signal that means "I 'm outta here!" Ah what's this? Is there anything here that needs my attention? Let me stop what I'm doing and pay attention to know I am feeling"
Recognize that your issues is conditoned reaction.This is not "YOU". Remind yourself "This is not my real self, but a socially conditioned reaction. Practice being present when conditioned reactions arise, and instead of believing what conditioned mine tellls you...turn your attention to the breath.
Prove to yourself that the fact that life is not easy does not mean you are doing something wrong. Life is hard for conditioned human being because we want life to be other than it is. As we begin to wake up to our conditioning, life can feel even harder because we're beginning to see clearly the disparity between what we've been taught to believe and what is actually so.
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