Waking Up
In my work with clients, I’m passionate about the flow of life energy and how we humans learn to resist this life force in us.
I am endlessly in awe at how the meeting of resisted energy by a clear awareness in an openhearted, present body can wake us up to being here fully and bring us back to life. By reconnecting to the physical ground of our own bodies, we come back to our longing. How can we feel we belong if we are not being our longing?
Right now it could be said that things in the world are looking grim. Maybe we don’t want to feel powerless, frightened, ashamed or enraged. But what if the very pain we think we don’t want to be in is our memory of a forgotten current of wholeness? What if our helplessness and despair are the voltage of the longing that informs us about what is required of us next? What if this long wave of nature has all the wisdom that the short wave of our thinking minds is just not designed to find?
Maybe we can claim defeat, rather than admit it. Maybe a new way of being is claiming defeat over one that is just no longer our best tool. Maybe being defeated is real. Maybe it’s ok. It doesn’t mean we have to collapse, fight or turn away.
Our first bonds
In our early formative years, we are not a ‘self’; our experience is of the bond we have with those looking after us. The wave state of this bond is our felt identity. It’s oxytocin or at least complete dependence.
When bonds break
When very ordinary events cause this bond to break or weaken, the fight/flight/freeze mechanism is Nature’s brilliant way of providing a trip switch to protect the immature human system during its development into adulthood. We suspend our subjective identification with our nature and instead start to identify as a separate object, not realising we have created this identity in our own minds.
Our minds create this short circuit by splitting into perceiver and perception. As we do, we too become a perception in our minds, which makes us a ‘thing’, an object. Where was the concept of self before this first shock of separateness? If our self as an ‘it’ comes from nowhere, surely there is a way back from being an object to being a subjective experience of wholeness once more. And what if this is not a movement back, what if this is the way forward? Isn’t this splitting and reuniting at a higher level how everything grows? Think of the DNA strand – joining as a wave, splitting into observer and particle, reintegrating into a wave state and so on.
We limit our end of the energetic circuit that proved itself shocking by bracing, collapsing, contracting or disconnecting. This muscular action of fight, flight and freeze that becomes habituated and the concept of a self keep each other in place. We wouldn’t believe the story about ourselves if we didn’t feel separate and we feel separate because we are in these unconscious muscular habits designed to limit our identification with the circuit of life itself. We may have strong feelings, but if our needs are not validated we stop seeing our feelings simply as needs – as information to guide our choices. We start falling into familiar roles in predictable dramas that become the life we recognise and come to expect. We start living in a movie we have produced and directed ourselves.
Too much form versus not enough.
If we collapse or disconnect, we are likely to experience ourselves as powerless, because we are giving up our form. We might feel fearful or ashamed. We might blame ourselves for being weak and blame others for being dominant. This often indicates a resistance to the feeling of anger.
If we rigidify or densify, we are likely to experience others as frustrating and unsatisfying. We might have an inflated sense of our own power and might feel angry with others for being weak in relation to us. This often indicates a lack of tolerance for our own sense of weakness or feelings of powerlessness.
As in any closed system (which is what a short circuit is), any lack of form will be compensated for somewhere else in the system by too much form. Even though everyone has an overall balance, some people identify with the part of them that is over-formed, while others will identify as under-formed. This comes down to many factors relating to inheritance, cultural influence and conditioning.
Some people have a story about being superior, others inferior, but both stories indicate a separation from our identification with our nature and therefore Nature. We only fear being perceived as nobody because we are being No Body.
The sense of insufficiency (even if you’re superior, you’re separate) is true. We have actually become insufficient, in terms of no longer identifying with the ‘wave’ or bond or circuit of love. We just haven’t become inferior. All nature grows by transcending its current state then, when the new, more evolved state is stable, the previous state is re-included.
This temporary short circuit isn’t much fun. We project the movie we made up and fight the people we’ve cast in the leading roles. Then we try and find someone who will love our unlovable selves. Good luck with trusting THAT person.
So all this is obviously superb organic engineering, because if we remembered that we’d created, shaped and hated this movie all on our own, we wouldn’t believe it.
Then we’d have to face being broken and unlovable.
Exactly. Bring your average human a drama any day.
So we can wake up, instead
So the ‘a-ha!’ kind of waking up is the obviously easy way to see through this evolutionary feature. But what if you can’t just wake up like The Power of Now guy?
What if however long you sit on your cushion, you still see yourself as someone unlovable who should be working on feeling more grateful?
And what if you do wake up, but you still do weird things? What if the top-down approach of seeing through the movie is only half the journey?
What if there is a whole bodily shindig going on that needs re-wiring, alongside this revelation that you never were unlovable, just temporarily offline for essential engineering works or a new release? And a SERIOUS upgrade at that…
This is where therapy comes in. Your experience is always here. You’ve only gotta listen. You’re feeling what you’re feeling because you’re feeling it. If you weren’t feeling it, you wouldn’t be feeling it.
A therapist listening shows you how to listen to what you’ve been most ignoring.
It can also be hard to receive feedback from family and friends so impartial and non-judgemental honesty from a therapist can really help. The job of a therapist is to provide a safe space for you to build this conscious adult form that is completely fearless when it comes to experience. Where on the Richter scale is the seismic activity a seismograph is not designed to register?
It’s all a completely normal, evolutionarily appropriate short circuit that got us to here.
Now we know all that stuff we think about ourselves is just a thought we made up, we can slowly start to wake up, stretching and yawning back into conscious embodiment as the power of our unfiltered experience comes back on.
And, yes, at first it can be a bit uncomfortable.
You start to notice that – eek – there’s someone alive in here.
Well thankfully, this Someone is doing every conceivable thing to get your attention. Opening your eyes is one thing, but you also have to open your heart and trust your gut.
You can start to trust your body and your experience and see that this emotional energy you’ve been resisting is your very being.
It IS the way to freedom, NOT the enemy, as you may have thought.
Then you realise that believing you’re unlovable just seems a bit old-fashioned.