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Since I was a kid, I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that I was my favorite. Like, of all the humans in the world, I wanted to be me. It wasn’t arrogant or egoic, it just felt true—I wanted to be this girl, this woman. Alongside this realization, since childhood, have also been massive feelings of not good enough, unworthiness, and even the idea that ‘I am the worst person in the world, just human trash.’
These ‘painbody’ thoughts have often overshadowed the deeper truth—the natural love of myself—but the love remained there, underneath the pain.
It’s not a self esteem thing. Or any kind of positive attitude or affirmation. It’s a very real inner knowing, deep in the bones, that this Being is who I want to be. I wouldn’t trade her in for any other human, if given the chance.
And I find this to be true for everyone. I’ve tested it out with several friends and most of my clients over the years—clients who have been deeply depressed, suicidal even, and convinced of their self hating thoughts. But underneath their stories, when asked if they would trade, they always said no. I want to be me, they said.
Body desires are real. Painbody ‘desires’ are not. But only recently have I been able to grasp what the tangible, embodied desire is when a painbody is active. For instance, if my ‘doer’ (based in unworthiness) is active, and I’m ‘achieving’ a lot in a day out of effort, I can see that all that doing isn’t what my body actually wants. I get depleted, frustrated, things get glitchy—all signs I’m out of what is true/delicious/real.
At this point in my healing, I’m usually able to stop the madness of the painbody’s wants; I stop, bring awareness to the situation.. just be. I wait for something effortless to emerge. It breaks the pattern of the painbody and leaves room for something real. But where is my desire in this process? I don’t often know..
If delicious yes/desire is the default movement of all things under God—if it’s always operating, in some capacity—then there must be a desire present, even when a painbody is active. But this has felt elusive to me, finding what my body wants in those moments of being triggered, of painbody being active.
What I realized is what the body wants in those moments of active painbody is physical touch, physical attention. The body itself wants to be held in loving arms. The painbody is the wounded kid who believes he’s unworthy or unloveable, and is looking for worth or loveabilty in success or approval—something disembodied and abstract. But what his body wants in that moment is to be physically seen, to be felt/touched.
Of the many streams of information that came in, one had to do with a new story on Earth. I could see that there has been an old story—a story of separation, of light vs dark, good vs bad, and generally a win-loss set up. This set up is in every human domain—money/finance, schooling, sports, relationship.. you name it. A chess board is a good metaphor (and, to be honest, a real life reflection) of the set up—two sides engaging in an elaborate game to win the others’ pieces. A war, a fight, and with a zero sum (only one winner).
I could also see that there are tons of people on earth that are ‘awakening.’ This can be a sticky word, but for this essay I want to define it as waking up from the dream of fear on this planet—the dream of separation/us vs them/survival of the fittest/zero sum. This dream is nothing but a story, an idea, a play, a game, a program/code. But once a writer scribes a code or a story, it’s ‘out there’ and it gets played out over and over again.. until someone writes the new code.
The reality of Life is that there is infinite possibility and potential. But we need a wider view on the programs we’ve been living out, in order to have the freedom to change them, to write new code.
So ‘awakening’ can be like Neo waking up out of the matrix, but instead of continuing to fight the folks inside the matrix, imagine him pausing, closing his eyes, and peacefully connecting with Source/vast potential/insight, and listening for the kind of world he wants to create (lol, I know).
He puts his energy there, not back into the matrix from whence he came.
The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in Western science (I.e. Where does awareness come from?) is only a ‘problem’ because we’ve had the whole thing upside down. We’ve thought that there is matter/brain first, and awareness/consciousness arises out of the brain. But it’s the other way around—awareness comes first, and the material world arises out of it.
Awareness is this primary thing—this essential nature—behind everything (including rocks and lizards and plants and computers…everything), and it has all of this inherent support—these built-in tools—for the body, the human being.
We just haven’t noticed. We’ve overlooked awareness like we overlook the space in the room or the ground under our feet—those utterly supportive, essential elements of life.
Let’s tap into Awareness right now, looking together at what is ‘built in’ to this Ground of Being…that which sees the mind but is not the mind.. Look right now and notice what its’ qualities are. Take some minutes..
There is a deep cultural belief that the path to getting what we want requires sacrifice—some kind of cost or payment. There is a pound of flesh, a penance, blood spilled, a compromise, or hard work involved. Embedded in this belief is that the sacrifice is worth it because of how you feel, or what you gain, when you get there—the thing is worth the cost of admission.
This bedrock belief is everywhere, in everyone. How many times have I heard some version of:
It sucks getting to the gym, but I feel great after.
I don’t want to sit down and do my homework or emails or pay my bills, but it’s worth it to have it done.
Eating salads (or whatever “health” food trend) is a drag, but I feel better when I do.
Marriage is work. Relationships are work. But we work on it and it’s worth it.
These long hours are worth it. My retirement will be the reward.
Work first. Then play.
We need to sacrifice for the greater good.
I have to do _____. Then I can do _____.
A little effort goes a long way.
Compromise is necessary.
I can feel the pull of these statements, the convincing quality. I’m writing this blog and I STILL almost believe them.
But the sacrifice idea isn’t, ultimately, true. Or at least, it’s not the truest thing. The truest thing is that Life does not require your bloodshed, or any real cost to your Being. It will most certainly cost you your story—your limited and distorted ideas about yourself and life—but it does not require an actual, physical, tangible cost in the way we imagine.
Later, I was talking to a friend about how the word ‘tool’ also implies something separate from us that we pick up and apply.. and how that doesn’t quite describe Kiran’s tools (check out her book Tools for Sanity), because the tools are already here, already inside of us, occurring with no action on our part.
Most fundamentally, the tools are a noticing of what Life is already made of, of what is already happening—right in front of our eyes—that had previously gone unnoticed.
After these chats I realized again how much I love the word already because it describes the essence of reality, of what IS. Truth, clarity, fulfillment, love, peace, information, innovation, solutions, insights etc—these things are already right here. The word ‘already’ helps to cut the legs out from under the doer, the seeker, the achiever—i.e. the various separate selves—from heading out to get something, do something.
For a chronic doer like me, this realization is an immense relief.
The lack of separation in reality is not a new observation. It’s ancient knowledge. It’s got names like Shiva. Oneness. The Great Mother. Nonduality. Ultimate Reality. True Nature. Ubuntu. God. The Tao. The ‘I Am.’ Every mystic tradition of every religion talks of this Oneness.
It is built into the stories of our indigenous ancestors, the world over. There is a Navajo saying, “If you kill the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for rain,” pointing out the invisible link between prairie dogs tunnels and weather/soil health. Truly, there are endless parables and lessons along these lines, as it is an essential truth. Check out a couple videos of African folk tales on the subject here.
But somehow, somewhere, the vast majority of humans on Earth hooked into a paradigm of separation. Of us and the world, us & God.
Instead of seeing differentiation in life, we saw division.
I can’t imagine in the history of all things, a more colossal mistake.
Divination tools, astrology and tarot tend to be my favorites in the ‘spiritual’ category. I’m a big fan. I follow several spiritual people on Instagram. Tarot card readers on YouTube. I’ve got four oracle decks and Dolores Cannon books and Reiki runes and votive candles and archangel cards and spirit animals and tarot symbols tattooed on my arm(!) I burn sage and palo santo and I clear my energy regularly.
I am a FAN.
But I want people to know there is much more at the ‘spiritual’ table.
I looked up a few definitions of spirituality. Most of them include a ‘belief of something larger than one’s self.' The spiritual books I found were wide ranging—from Buddhist and Taoist classics to ‘The Secret’ and Gabrielle Bernstein. They included books on topics from my list above, as well as energy healing and ancient/indigenous nature religions, past lives, crystals, yoga, tantra, modern Christianity, astrology, re-wilding and magic.
Spiritual stuff is, in my experience, a bit like candy. Or at least, not the whole meal. Spiritual experiences are the amuse bouches, snacks, dessert plates and palate cleansers of a meal. They greatly add to the experience, but they are not the main dish.
So much of our current self help & wellness tools, medical & psychological interventions, spiritual practices, dating advice, business/financial coaching etc are, in their essence, big old system hacks. They are attempting to hack our programming—to tweak our physical, psychological, or financial systems to work better, to get us more.
And that’s cool.
Tweaks and hacks and new angles are great. Essential, even. Hackers are brilliant—they shake things up and help us see things differently. And we need that. Perhaps we especially need that now, in this topsy turvy world.
But hacks aren’t always sustainable; they don’t necessarily garner long term gains in and of themselves. Moreover, the tweaks aren’t necessarily in our favor—they are sometimes tricks, for another’s gain. Plus, a hack might not take you out of a corrupted system—many are the equivalent of rearranging deck furniture on a sinking ship.
So often, society’s ‘party line’ is completely backward, isn’t it? And we kinda know it.
We sense the Orwellian quality of, let’s say, our food system. Or our money system. Or our military-industrial-complex-mess-of-a-system. Here’s a few examples of recent party lines we’ve lived by, vs the realities we’ve later discovered (buried under the advertising for the party line).
Party line: GMOs are good; we can feed more people.
Truth: GMOs (& the pesticides used with them) increase soil toxicity and depletion, yielding less food & much more disease.
Party Line (a silly personal one here): Acne is caused by too much oil on the skin, so we should dry the skin out.
When a fear card is played it sounds abstract, hard to follow, and often dramatic. It might feel pressured and urgent (eg. Bush selling the Iraq war), or kind of hazy and hyped-up (Obama’s Hope). It might feel exciting, like a high. Or it might be syrupy sweet—like a cheap wine that leaves you with a headache. There can be a kind-of religious fervor (eg. evangelical self-help gurus & angry mobs) or a checked-out quality (eg. flat recitations of verse in church).
Fear doesn’t have solution in it. It isn’t built for that; it’s built as a zero-sum game—to zero out the identified enemy. So it stays in place. It often talks a lot. Frankly, a lot of therapy does this—lots of processing & ’coping mechanisms,’ but not much forward movement.
When truth is played it will sound clear, precise, non-personal, non-dramatic, and light. It will simply feel true—you already knew it. You won’t need to ‘try and understand’ what someone is saying.
I’ve sat with Ganesh in my office for many years now. I’ve read his body language, contemplated the ‘gestalt’ of him. It seems to me Hindu & Buddhist gods & goddesses (along with all religious & spiritual symbols) hold multiple layers of meaning and, I believe, are meant to be contemplated—allowing the image to speak to us personally. These images represent energetic and informational fields we can personally interact with. For instance, one of my favorite Christian symbols is the sacred heart of Jesus (& the immaculate heart of Mary). For me, this image invokes the felt sense of heart awakening, including the real, physical pain that is often the gateway to it—the knife or crown of thorns piercing the human heart, causing it to burst into flames (and flowers!).
There is a flywheel underfoot. It is nature’s rhythm and pulse. It is God’s divine orchestra.
And you are less than a hair’s breadth away from it.
You just have to scooch …every so slightly …out of those old, rusty rhythms of your life. Move just to the left of those grooves—those ideas about what keeps your life in order. Maybe it’s a pattern in a relationship or at work, a meditation or workout regimen, a particular coffee in the morning (like me!). These are the controlled, mechanized aspects of your life.
We go for what is meaningful, versus what is true in our bodies, what is deep in our bones.
Meaning is in the land of the separate self. It exists in a mental landscape, in the story of me. But we are not this mental self. We are not a concept.
Meaning is conceptual, not actual. It isn’t here, on planet earth.
I do a lot of inquiry with clients—we question thoughts or drop words out of our vocabulary. I often ask this question, with regard to meaning (a variation of Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’):
‘If nothing that ever happened—nothing you did or didn’t do, nothing you’ve ever thought, felt or experienced—had any meaning whatsoever, what remains?’
I usually get a smile or a surprised look. Maybe a moment of panic. But then the client tastes a bit of freedom and says something like, “God, I don’t know!” And we just hang out in ‘I don’t know.’ We sit and feel. We see what arises. Invariably, something true (and utterly practical) comes up…
Giraffe on a Farm
I was talking with a client this morning—a successful lawyer here in Chicago, who is considering leaving his career. We’ve unpacked multiple limiting beliefs in our work together over the years, most all of them connected with deep wounding/subtle trauma in childhood--conditioning from home & school that implied he is a 'doing it wrong', undeserving, not good enough, etc. (Sound familiar?) And so he picked a career (as many of us do) that would (subconsciously) prove his worthiness, earn him approval...and stop the pain of unworthiness.
But success driven by pain is no success. No amount of success can heal the untrue thought, the wound of unworthiness.
Today, a new aspect of his ‘undeserving’ belief reared its' ugly head—that my client should be ‘grateful’ for what he has—he leads a comfortable, privileged life. He’s got ‘nothing to complain about.’ Someone even suggested a gratitude list.
This particular kind of conditioning—that hooks into scarcity mentality (that my win is your loss, that there are only so many gifts, or privileges, to go around)--well, it makes me want to throw myself off a cliff.
I’ve never much liked the word ‘intention.’
Like…
‘What are your intentions for this week/month/year?’ ‘Let’s set our intention for this meeting.’ ‘My intention is to be loving to my family this holiday.’
Blech.
But I’ve felt like an asshole for not liking the word, because it is such a part of psychology, spirituality and self help.
I’ve been reflecting on my dislike. Here is the crux of why I think we should toss this word out: The word ‘intention’ is mental. It’s not embodied.
And therefore it is a movement of fear.
Pain’s got a bad reputation, no?
The worst, maybe.
No one wants this dude at the party; he’s the thief of pleasure, joy, & peace—not welcome to hang out, even for a little while.
But let’s—just for the length of this blog post—let’s consider that this bad reputation may be unfair. And let’s notice that we haven’t really found out for ourselves. We’ve just assumed pain was no good.
This process, along with caterpillars turning into butterflies and frogs regrowing legs (and a billion other mysteries in our biological reality) doesn’t make sense from a materialist worldview—the worldview that says things are separate, operate themselves, and are disconnected from the rest of Life, with one DNA packet code per separate, solid life form.
But major internal change—this kind of smoltification process—including completely new shapes & operating systems, is more the norm than the exception in Nature. And it is actually the norm for us humans (though we are taught the materialist worldview—that we are nouns instead of verbs).
It is the natural process of evolution—a radical transformation in which our whole Being alters, finding a much bigger space to occupy, as we drop old constrictions (limiting beliefs) in our system. And this evolutionary process is built into us, just like the salmon.
But it takes some healing, some time in the brackish waters—letting go of old patterns, old internal systems…eating some salt, as it were.
If we look around here on earth, it seems totally reasonable that there should be another, aspirational world. I mean, what a mess this place is. It sure can’t be heaven. It can’t be right. It very obviously needs fixing. An ideal (better) world seems a good idea. It could be pretty depressing to think that this is all there is.
However, once the concept of two worlds is accepted, it logically follows that the path of mental, emotional, & spiritual development means to (somehow) gain access to this other realm—to earn our way to spiritual or secular heaven—to this perfect, peaceful, balanced state of ‘bliss’ or ‘mindfulness,’ promised to us by the many honorees of this other world (priests, shamans, psychologists etc).
I see the idea of two worlds as causing so much of our confusion and heartache—so much searching & self violence. To spill the beans: I am profoundly averse to the idea of two worlds.
