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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I & She (not Me)
A definition of terms:
“I”: The vast, formless, conscious awareness that looks out of our eyes and permeates all forms. The ‘ground of being,’ ‘fundamental consciousness,’ ‘what’s looking’ or your ‘true nature.’
“She” (and “He”) : The body, including the energy body. The form—the unique shape that awareness sees and feels through. The hands and organs and heart and guts and blood and brain, etc.
“Me”: The separate self. The self concept. The illusory ‘me’ that lives in the body and has a story. The Doer. The Thinker. The apparently separate subject that’s having the experience. The one who is seemingly operating things.
