Month: September 2020

Posted on

Presence 14: I am flowing 

It’s been a JOURNEY the last few days, but guess what? I signed up for the Holden Qigong Teacher Certification Programme.

The Not this… This Instead! discernment tool was amazingly helpful. Partly because every time I did qigong, I felt ‘Yes this!’ so clearly – and that answered my question of the last session. I did masses of research and eventually was hovering over the ‘Order’ button before the $500 discount expiration deadline, and I got a notification. I looked at my phone and said to myself, ‘please let it be a sign!’   It was AP on our Whatsapp group, commenting on a pic I’d posted of L. wiped out from a session with her PT. A. wrote: “I don’t like it one bit. @L are you ok? What’s wrong with some gentle yoga? You want to get rough? How about Tai Chi?” Chi. That’s good enough for me. I signed up with a clear conscience. £2255. May I use this investment to bring blessings, healing and wellbeing to myself and to All. Amen.

And since starting the course (4 days ago – it’s all online, self-paced across a year), I’ve felt some inner balancing going on. The teaching is just perfect for me. It’s the theory of qigong which is perfect, as I’ve been practising it on and off since 2009. Lee Holden is so grounded and generous, and a good teacher. The principles of TCM (Trad Chinese Medicine) are being taught, and I’m so grateful to have these tools and practices for self-care, now and into my old age.

Can I visualise myself teaching qigong? Well, I’m used to teaching but these days only with my voice not my body! And on cerebral matters. When I imagined myself teaching, I suddenly felt myself back in the arena of doing ballet as a child and feeling the beauty of movement, and the exhilaration of being witnessed in heartfelt movement. Acting likewise. I have a 6-12 months to accustom myself to the idea of teaching qigong. And in fact, what REALLY clicked it for me was the idea of incorporating Qigong into School of Dialogue workshops. Get peace and balance in your body to be able to communicate with presence and in the parasympathetic state, and to be able to process the emotions of challenging conversations. Yes… THIS (INSTEAD)!

Also to say this, I’ve wanted to develop a daily qigong practice for years. Thank you, dear lockdown, for the precious opportunity you gave me to be able to develop routines, and to immerse myself in qigong. This teacher training would never ever have occurred to me had it not been for the extraordinary opportunities afforded to me by this precious time at home. And by Lee Holden’s subscription classes and incredible online teach training programme of 120 online teaching hours, 58 personal practice hours (eg with the video class subscription), 30 teaching hours (where we teach for free), 2 x 1:1’s with snr instructors, submission of demo video, monthly Q&As with Lee, lifetime access to resources…)

It’s time for my meditation and I haven’t let you speak..! I’m going to do a Holden Qigong mediation.. It’s called the Where Am I? Meditation. 

***Where Am I? Meditation. 10mins***

HQ Journal exercise:  Write about your experience of Qi. Think about how you feel it within and around your body.
It took time for me to relax and sense the qi in and around me, and then as Lee mentioned it activates ‘subtle whispers’ and the body’s innate intelligence to know how to work with the qi. My hands spontaneously rose up to offer radiance to my upper chest and lungs, and I felt myself unwind further. I could feel the wordless ‘conversation’ between my hands and my chest.. and my heart. It felt so wholesome, natural, beautiful. Good to be reminded we can come back to this connectedness with the qi field any time. I liked the idea that we are fish who don’t know they are in water – or humans who don’t know we’re in the qi/quantum field.

Your thoughts? Your insight? Your direction for today? It’s now Saturday..

This is Good Work. 

What shall I work with today?

Qi Gong is about Flow. Notice how you can flow. 

Ah, yes, I came across this concept in Noom of ‘satisficing’ – it’s a combo of satisfaction and sufficing. The opposite is ‘maximising’ – which is a tendency of mine, leading me to dash about at top speed and then keel over.

It made me think of the difference between gulping and sipping. Often, literally, I go for hours without drinking and then gulp a pint of water to make up for it. I’ve come to think my kidneys would much prefer me to sip across the day instead of gulping.

  • Satisfice vs maximise
  • Sip vs gulp
  • Flow vs dash/halt

Beautiful! We invite you to bring gentle flow to your day today, sipping and satisficing as you go. 

I have this sense of a historic woman of oriental origin taking tiny steps. Is that it?

Think more of a fish swimming in water – drifting, turning, being carried by the current, flowing with the stream. 

Got it. Thank you. Today I am flowing with the stream of live. I am carried by it, and I am relishing it’s movement.

I am flowing 

 

 

Posted on

Presence 13: I am working with {Not this… This Instead!}

I did get pretty quiet yesterday. You know, excluding carbs is a way of sensing my emotional charge. I have tended to use them as a sedating/controlling self-medication. While simultaneously sensing my interior messaging, my meta-sense, I felt pretty emotional. I also slowed down.

The writing of Glennon Doyle that I read yesterday has really stayed with me. Two aspects in particular

  1. Belief in The Unseen Order of Things (as basically being that which is heaven on Earth, vs the Seen Order of Things, which would have us believe that we’re all up the Creek). [Untamed . p64 – see beautiful extract, below] I so agree. As a new definition of faith this is just perfect. And if I can add my own interpretation, I think GD is alluding to the fact that women are attuned more naturally to this Unseen order. Which is why our masc governments, urgently wrestling with the ‘Seen’, do more harm than good… Womens’ meta-sense has been pooh-poohed for millenia, by men who have not the faculty to understand. More the shame. But the world is evolving, as our the new generation of young men, beautifully equipped with connection to their meta-sense…
  2. The sense of ‘Not this…’ and ‘This instead’ as being our guiding beacons, in discerning our ‘truest and most beautiful story of our lives’: ‘Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: “Not this.” “Not this” is a very important stage. But knowing what we do not want is not the same as knowing what we do want. So how can we get from Not this to This instead? How can we move from feeling discontent to creating new lives and new worlds? In other words: How can we begin to live from our imagination instead of our indoctrination?’ Untamed p67.

Please, dear heavens, let me remember this.

Let’s read The Presence Process…

TRADING RESULTS FOR CONSEQUENCES (End of Part 1 – attuning to the PP)

Extracts:

  • The invitation placed before us by The Presence Process is to learn through firsthand experience not to fear and resist the inevitable discomfort that arises from emotional processing, and not to react to emotional processing by behaving like “the world is ending.” Instead, we are invited to embrace the discomfort of emotional processing as a sign that we are having an authentic impact on the cause of our discomfort. The invitation is to willingly ride our inner dragon…
  • The Presence Process is the battleground of emotional warriors
  • When we use the mental body as a means of gauging the consequences of our attempts to make an authentic change in the quality of our experience, we enter another Catch 22: We ask for change. We are given the opportunity to change. We embrace the opportunity. We start feeling different. Then the mental body tells us that this strange feeling is “wrong.” We subsequently mentally interpret this strange feeling, which is actually the surfacing of our emotional signature, as a “gut feeling” or a “red flag” telling us we are headed in the wrong direction. By listening to these stories, we turn against that which is changing our experience, returning to what’s familiar and safe. Nothing is accomplished. We feel more frustrated and disillusioned than before. The mental body grows stronger, and we become disheartened. This is why it’s recommended we commit to completing The Presence Process no matter what. Take stock only upon completion of your journey through the process, not in the midst of it. Finish this process no matter what experience arises.

Thank you.

***15minMed*** [Next day]

I am deeply moved by {Not this… This Instead!}.

It is a door-opener for you, and for all, is it not? 

It certainly is. I wonder how best I can incorporate it into my days…

The starting point is self-compassion. When you receive the Not this… message with tender self-compassion, it is easy to root around for the This Instead! message that is the natural counterpart and companion to the  Not this... As Doyle says, ‘Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: “Not this.” Reaching This Instead! is the natural result of tuning into your meta-sense, which is your Knowing. Again, tenderness is key. In the PP extract above, Michael Brown recommends being aware of the ‘mental body’ which is very cagey about change, constantly firing ‘warning signals’. If you can discern between your mental body and your meta-sense, and follow your meta-sense (imagination, speaking to you of your turest and most beauitful version of your life) even when your mental body is firing off warning signals, you are on your way to your This Instead!.

This is such good stuff. Ok, a specific question, I am seeking to determine whether to do the Holden Qigong TCP. Can you help me use {Not this… This Instead!} to discern whether this is the right next step for me?

By all means. Tell us your {Not this…}

Ah. Well. The {Not this…} would be…

Let’s just work with it instead. <3

Exactly. Yes!

I am working with {Not this… This Instead!}

 

*******************************

Untamed (p64) – GD on faith as a belief in the Unseen Order of Things:

‘I have learned to live by faith, which does not mean that I live by a set of unwavering beliefs or dogma that men laid down ages ago to keep their power by controlling others. My faith has nothing to do with religion anymore. To me, living by faith is allowing the swelling and pressing inside me to direct my outward words and decisions. Because to me, God is not a being outside of me: God is the fire, the nudge, the warm liquid gold swelling and pressing inside me.

In fact, my favorite idea of faith is a belief in the unseen order of things.

There are two orders of things:

There is the seen order unfolding in front of us every day on our streets and in the news. In this visible order, violence reigns and children are shot in their schools and warmongers prosper and 1 percent of the world hoards half of all we have. We call this order of things reality. This is “the way things are.” It’s all we can see because it’s all we’ve ever seen. Yet something inside us rejects it. We know instinctively: This is not the intended order of things. This is not how things are meant to be. We know that there is a better, truer, wilder way.

That better way is the unseen order inside us. It is the vision we carry in our imagination about a truer, more beautiful world—one in which all children have enough to eat and we no longer kill each other and mothers do not have to cross deserts with their babies on their backs. This better idea is what Jews call shalom, Buddhists call nirvana, Christians call heaven, Muslims call salaam, and many agnostics call peace. It is not a place out there—not yet; it’s the hopeful swelling in here, pressing through our skin, insisting that it was all meant to be more beautiful than this. And it can be, if we refuse to wait T to die and “go to heaven” and instead find heaven inside us and give birth to it here and now. If we work to make the vision of the unseen order swelling inside us visible in our lives, homes, and nations, we will make reality more beautiful. On Earth as it is in heaven. In our material world as it is in our imagination.’

Posted on

Presence 12: I am acutely curious about the messages of my meta-sense

I caught an impulse to self-medicate early in the day. It was a spot of ‘screen distraction’ sedation before the working day began. I asked, ‘What do you really want to say, Voice?’, and ‘heard’:

“Everyone get out of my way!”

Which surprised me! And encouraged me. It is the very opposite to the passive ‘tending’ to the barriers arising. I liked the feisty spirit of it.

Let’s read.

***The Presence Process by Michael Brown p56-59***

Extracts:

  • The allopathic profession is magnificent for containing, controlling, and sedating physical, symptomatic trauma. For example, if we are in a car accident and physically injured, or if the symptoms of a diseased condition or addiction escalate to a point where living becomes unbearable, going to a medical specialist is necessary. They know how to mend bones and suture wounds. They know how to sedate and control physical, mental, and emotional symptoms to stabilize our situation. However, if we intend to integrate the causal charged emotion that unconsciously drives us to manifest experiences that physically, mentally, and emotionally debilitate us, a medical practitioner isn’t the person we approach. This is because their training instructs them to seek physical explanations for all states of disease. Their expertise is in treating effects, not in causality.
  • Journeying through The Presence Process for the first time instructs us in the art of responding to our charged emotion. We become our own self-sufficient support group.
  • The consequence of decreasing or halting our self-medicating behavior is that the charged emotion related to this behavior automatically arises into our awareness. We then consciously engage these felt-predicaments through breathing, use of the perceptual tools, and insights offered throughout this text. When we become aware of these emotional signatures, we develop the capacity to be with these uncomfortable felt-resonances without condition.

So my question to Self is: 

What emotional charge am I self-medicating, and how can I best use my Voice to meet the feelings and needs of that emotional charge?

In short: Self-Medication meets Voice?

Self-Medication meets Voice

Voice, meet your ‘Truest and Most Beautiful Story about your Life’. 

Ah, as indicated by Glennon Doyle in Untamed..

Ok. Shoot, Toots.

In we go first… 

***Med***

If you knew what you were capable of, you would be surprised. But that’s not the point. The point is this. There is scope for a role for you, in the story of your own life, which will give you joy and satisfaction. Not the kind of ‘Phew! I did it by the seat of my pants!’ relief you sometimes call joy and satisfaction, but something different. Something unique to you. Do you remember how creative you became in the height of your breakdown, when you’d bowed out of work, and were hanging on a hook above the perilous vacuum of your financial abyss? Well, while those conditions sure did illuminate your creativity, you don’t need such extreme difficulty anymore, to get into that level of connectedness. 

I was connected, wasn’t I? 

You always are. This is a dictation, right? Word by word. But you have to be in the right frame of mind. You have to have bored yourself into the ‘default’ mode of your brain. Abraham calls it ‘quietening your mind’. For you, it’s tolerating boredom and brain twitch… in order to access The Good Stuff. And then you have to just sit there like a bored stenographer and write. Well good, because it’s worth it. Especially when you listen for long enough, with full open curiosity. What we are going to tell you now, you’ll like. It’s this. You can be consciously connected all day long, if. you. choose. to. be. In other words, there are two streams of thought, and you can choose to sit in one groove or the other, all day long. 

Streams of Thought: 

Level 1 =

    • The Seen Order of Things (Glennon Doyle, Untamed p64ff)
    • Disconnected from Source / Inner Being (Abraham, passim)
    • Mind / Logic / Reason / Yang as sovereign ruler and ‘boss’
    • The world is violent, unfair, polarised and defined by suffering 

Level 2 = 

    • The Unseen Order of Things (Glennon Doyle, ibid)
    • Connected to Source / Inner Being (Abraham, passim)
    • Heart / Intuition / Wisdom / Yin as constant companion, mentor and guide
    • The world is defined by peace, unity, love and light: ‘On Earth as it is in heaven’ 

Your Level 2 state doesn’t need to be kept aside for morning Quiet Time and ‘Sunday prayers’. Level 2 can be your constant, default ‘default mode’. Can you see how this pandemic has allowed you to slide into a new modus operandi? You’ve only touched the surface of this so far.

There is so much more for you to discover. And as you discover, you will need to let certain (un/comfortable) things go – to make space for the coherent, and to honour the incoherence of the incoherent.

Does that make sense to you? If it does make ‘sense’, then you haven’t learnt the lesson yet! Because this is what we call ‘meta-sense’! Do you like that term? We thought you would. 

Yes! What is meta-sense, then?

Meta-sense is that which is sensed ‘above and beyond’ (aka meta) the physical senses; ‘above and beyond’ that which can be seen, felt and heard, and is deemed ‘common sense’. Meta-sense is that which is sensed by the intuition, the heart’s palpitations, the inner Knowing, the gut’s Voice. 

So consider these phrases: “Common sense tells us…” compared with “My Meta-sense tells me….”

The question is this. As a person who hears her Meta-sense loud and clear, will you be prepared to allow your Voice to express aloud what your Meta-sense tells it?

To be fair to me, I think I already do to a certain extent. It’s just I am ‘wise’ about shaping my words to adapt to the ears upon which my words are falling. There is no point in alienating someone just for lack of linguistic artistry.

… Silence… Come back. Tell me more.

The challenge is Truth. If your truth marks your marching orders (Doyle, p71, see below), are you marching to the orders of your Truth? 

I happily will!! Or unhappily, if it’s hard..! Tell me more.

***bored stenographer…***

Your wish is our command. Be it to the left or to the right of your current path, there is always a fraction more authenticity to be had. Reaching authenticity requires two phases: 1) dismantling the ’emotional charge’ as per the Presence Process and 2) developing acute curiosity towards what your gut tells you. As you dismantle emotional charge, you’ll reveal your gut-centred intuition, your meta-sense, at pace. As you peer in there, with acute curiosity, you’ll attune to it faster. Your dietary changes [low carb/low cal] are helpful, as you reduce inflammation and sluggishness. Your mission today is: acute curiosity towards the messages of your meta-sense. 

Got it. Ty.

I am acutely curious about the messages of my meta-sense

PS. The work of Glennon Doyle in Untamed is exceptional:

Posted on

Presence 11: I am attending to my impulses to self-medicate

I certainly have a twin-track response. However, my Aspieness means that tbh I’m masking much of the time, so it’s hard to discern between Pretence and Masking, and they have different foundations or causes. Whenever I checked in on “Authenticity?”, I often noted I was acting up, a little bit hyper with others. I guess it’s a form of Appeasement, but it’s emerging from a childlike aspect of me, so maybe it’s fuelled by unintegrated emotional charge.

I can definitely tell that if I cut out saying yes to anything that made my heart sink, I would have a great deal more energy.

Onwards…

Reading.

***The Presence Process by Michael Brown p51-55***

BEYOND ADDICTION AND AFFLICTION – Extracts:

  • In the context of The Presence Process, addictions and afflictions (chronic illness and disease) are the same. Both are outer manifestations of an unintegrated charge within the emotional body. Although we don’t discuss allergies specifically, they are considered in the same light as addictions and afflictions. An allergy is the polar opposite of an addiction. When we are addicted, we pull a specific experience toward us. When we are allergic, we repel a specific experience. The causes of both are an unintegrated charge.
  • The Presence Process demonstrates that addiction, whether to illegal drugs, alcohol, food, sex, gambling, or legal prescription medications, is self-medicating behavior that we manifest to sedate and control the charge within our emotional body. Without self-medicating, an addict inevitably manifests an affliction. When an affliction is successfully suppressed by ongoing prescription medication, the same condition manifests as addiction. Both conditions are manifestations of an unintegrated emotional charge.
  • Recovery – a way of living designed to constantly cover up charged emotion – leads to living in quiet desperation. Discovery – consciously embracing our charged emotional content through felt-perception, using it as raw material for emotional growth – leads to present moment awareness and Presence. As happens with medication, the need to attend endless support group meetings diminishes in proportion to the integration of charged emotion, until it ultimately ceases. Addiction isn’t a life-sentence. It’s an experience, and experiences change.

QUESTION: What can I learn about my addictions and afflictions?

***Med10mins with Insight Timer***

INSIGHTS ARISING:

I self-medicate – with food, weekend alcohol or screen distractions…
In order to cover up, sedate and control the acute-to-mild feelings of hate, anger, frustration or boredom that arise when…
I don’t use my Voice to communicate, negotiate or set boundaries

Well that saved me a few thousand pounds of therapy…

Your capacity to self-reflect is powerful! That is the power of Presence, and entering the parasympathetic state, within which your Inner Being can speak to you. 

So what’s the next step?

The next step today is to watch and track and lovingly observe the subtle signs associated with the impulse to self-medicate. If you can catch the impulse to self-medicate, then you have the opportunity to observe into the emotional charge beneath the impulse. 

So itching for a packet of crisps today will not just indicate ‘bad/greedy Me’ or ‘such hunger I may keel over’… but a clue to underlying emotional charge.

Exactly. So welcome the impulses to self-medicate! They are important clues as to your underlying weather system. Bring compassion and curiosity to those impulses. 

Ok, so today I am going to try to ‘catch’ the impulses to self-medicate, and not just tut them away, or give into them, or shame them… but listen to what emotional charge is beneath them. I could even practice using my Voice to address the feelings arising. I am on Day 3 of the Fast 800 diet (low carb/low cal diet of Michael Mosley; and yes, I’m still doing Noom – I’ve lost almost a stone and a half since Mid-March) – so the impulses to eat may be confused with those to self-medicate, but I think I can handle that.

I am catching and studying my impulses to self-medicate.

You could say you are ‘attending’ to them. You are interested in the feelings (emotional charge of ‘hate, anger, frustration and boredom’) and needs (to use your Voice to communicate, negotiate and set boundaries) associated with those felt impulses to sedation and control of the feelings. 

I am attending to my impulses to self-medicate

Note to self: Use the Voice instead of self-meds!!

Posted on

Presence 10: I am spotting my twin-track available responses: Pretence and Authenticity

Laying sandbags before the rain comes is such a brilliant image.

Keep practising this skill! It will bring you such peace. Keep practising. 

Ok. Ty. Shall we read?

***The Presence Process by Michael Brown p46+***

EMOTIONAL CHARGE – Extracts:

  • The main characteristic of charged emotion is that we perceive it as uncomfortable. This is because it’s trapped, blocked, sedated, and controlled energy. p46
  • 1. DRAMA: The first consequence of charged emotion is drama. Drama is reactive projection – whether physical, mental, or emotional – which we use to gain the attention from others that we don’t yet have the capacity to give ourselves.
  • The reshaping of spontaneous behavior is usually accomplished by parental use of words such as “stop” and “no.” [I mentioned the role of the word “No” in my childhood/adulthood just yesterday!] What isn’t apparent is that the energetic activity underlying spontaneous behavior never stops when interrupted by enforced discipline. It merely transforms into something else, becoming energetic resistance that manifests as calculated drama. Calculated drama is successful in that it makes us acceptable to the adult world, while in the same breath it renders our own authenticity unacceptable to us. This rejection of our inner being triggers energetic conflict, and this conflict is projected and reflected outwardly in the many acts we conjure up to gain attention and acceptance. [YES!!]
  • 2. SELF-MEDICATION – sedation and control: The second consequence of charged emotion is also a type of dramatic behavior that arises out of a reaction to inner discomfort.
  • SEDATION is a dysfunction of the feminine side and an attempt to numb our awareness of our emotional charge. For example, the habitual need and use of alcohol is intended to sedate discomfort. We are drowning out our authentic emotional state. The expression popularly used is “drowning our sorrows.”
  • CONTROL is a dysfunction of the masculine side and an attempt to gain power over discomfort – to overpower it. The habitual need and use of cigarettes is intended to control our emotional charge.
  • By not entertaining habitual or addictive behavior, we instantly discover the felt-identity of the charged emotion that lies beneath our habits and addictions. The felt-state that erupts from abstinence [YES!] reveals the nature and intensity of the charged emotion that’s driving our selfmedication.

It is now clear to me that the ‘automatons’ I described yesterday are the results of emotional charge. Equally I am and have been deeply prone to addictive behaviours. Let’s bring on the next stage of safely meeting the emotional charge in me.

It involves authenticity and self-attention and self-acceptance.

You’re on. I’m interested to see more of my emotional charge. Let’s go in.

***15minMed with Insight Timer***

Emotional Charge Arising: “The Original Heartbreak and Humiliation”

Dad, who had always loved me powerfully  as an baby/infant, seemingly ‘turning’ on me (= heartbreak, from age 5/6/7??) and telling me off in front of my mother and siblings (= humiliation, ditto). I felt the feelings so acutely. He had no idea. He was just unleashing his own childhood and emotional charge on me. But, heavens, talk about a fall from grace – from perfection to wretch in one fell swoop, repeatedly. Talk about the heartbreak of the first broken love relationship.

He turned on you. 

Yes, or so it appeared to me…

He turned on you, having previously loved you and made you feel accepted and lovable. And so you felt…

Questionable, unlovable, unacceptable…?

From an early age. 

The sense of acute shame I felt being told off in front of my family, every time.  And no one intervened…

You felt shameful. 

Yes. Shameful. Ashamed.

What do you say to this little girl now? 

“It was his shit not yours. He didn’t know how to parent with kindness. That was not your fault. He used rage and shame as a parenting tool. Poor show.”

How does saying that make you feel? 

Relieved. He did use rage and shame as a parenting tool, compensated for by adventures and story-telling. He appeared narcissistic at times… This was the core ‘wound’….

Why would someone act with narcissism? 

Because they are deeply afraid they are ‘questionable, unlovable, unacceptable, shameful’…?

And so what is the cure to break the intergenerational cycle of non-acceptance of self? 

Total, radical self-acceptance and authenticity.

I feel I can ‘self-accept’ but not yet be fully authentic… I do note how, when I stopped using nicotine to ‘CONTROL’ my emotional charge, the plumptons and self-harm automatons went wild. Similarly, when I stopped SEDATING myself, and drowning my sorrows, with alcohol.

You did a courageous thing in ceasing to use those drugs, and feeling the feelings. Are you able to see how strong you were and are? 

Somewhat.

You are a strong, courageous woman, to feel your feelings in an unmedicated format. 

Thank you. May I use the strength and courage to dismantle ye olde emotional charge in full.

A good intention! 

May The Original Heartbreak and Humiliation (The OHAH! 🙂 ) dissolve into the Renewed Whole-Hearted Authenticity.

Excellent work. Today, you can play with this: spot your twin-track responses available to you at any moment – Pretence and Authenticity. 

You don’t need to act or present the Authentic response yet. Just note down, on paper if you can, your twin-track responses. Become aware. Bring Love and Compassion to your Pretences as they are serving a protective purpose as long as you believe your Authentic response to be unacceptable… which will change in time as you work through the Presence Process. Amen to all this. You are playing with responsiveness. Wonderful! 

Brilliant. I will do this. Ty.

I am spotting my twin-track available responses: Pretence and Authenticity

 

 

Posted on

Presence 9: I am laying sandbags at my boundaries – before it rains

Well I certainly gave myself opportunity to see my old emotional patterning at play. The tendency to ‘run away’ or ‘put up and shut up’ made itself apparent. I sat and chuntered with a difficult situation, until at last I remembered the ‘flipside’ of my emotional patterning:

I can use my Voice to communicate, negotiate and set boundaries. 

And I did. And it was fine.

I guess I could see others’ patterns at play too. (My lovely cousins were there for lunch with my parents too.) We do all repeat recurring messaging about ourselves, over time. The content may change, but the ultimate message about ourselves is oft repeated. You could call it our personality, but I could start to see which aspects of us are inspired by our Universe and which by our Puny-verse. Interesting.

I guess the idea of evolving into emotional maturity is to see to it that the Universal inspirations outweigh the Puny-versal. We have to keep remembering to shift from the default emotional patterning (Puny-verse), to the flipside (Universe!).

Let’s read.

***The Presence Process by Michael Brown p43+***

EMOTIONAL IMPRINTING

  • Emotional imprinting is the term we use in The Presence Process to describe the unconscious passing on to us of our parents’ or caregivers’ unintegrated emotional condition. By the time we reach seven years of age, we are emotionally picking up where they left off. The unavoidable consequence of childhood is that we all receive this emotional baton from our parents so that we may take our part in the human race. Imprinting is an unfolding of a sacred agreement we have with each other. Imprinting is therefore not something done to us by our parents, or something we do to another when playing the role of parent. It’s an experience we enter together. p43
  • Our potential for our life experience is downloaded vibrationally during the last seven months of womb life, emotionally during the first seven years after birth, mentally between seven and fourteen years of age, and physically by the time we turn twenty-one. p43
  • Unless we are able to feel vibrations, we are unable to integrate them. By focusing our attention on integrating our emotional charge – by facilitating ourselves so we feel this energetic condition without condition – we reawaken and develop felt-perception. p44
  • Once we are no longer driven into compensatory experiences by charged emotion, our interaction with the emotional body is restored to its highest potential. In other words, we take charge of our experience by taking the charge out of it, which then enables us to live on purpose. p45

I’m still startled daily by the ‘automatic’ pop-up images of self-harm I experience. I’m in such a joyous, happy, safe, held and developed stage of my life, and yet still, the ‘cheese-wire’ garotting and ‘serated knife into the neck’ images still experience themselves through me. Usually on a daily basis. Similarly, the pre-intentional speech (‘plumptons’ as I call them) still occurs almost daily; and certainly daily in periods of stress. I’ve reduced stress considerably, and taken lockdown as an opportunity to rearrange life to be relatively stress-free, predictable, routinised and autism-friendly. And yet, the disturbing ‘automatic’ experiences continue. I am interested to see how and if the PP can help me integrate the emotions that are providing the impulse for these… ‘automatons‘, I shall call them.

Let’s meditate. I’m open to learning about the automatons in this meditation…

***10minMedwithInsightTimer***

In the perfect peace of pure meditation I can sense some … anger in there. Tell me more.

Anger is a sign of breached boundaries. This was a constant experience lived by your parents, and theirs, and theirs before. It has been a striking element of human life for generations that humans breach the boundaries of others. Your generation, and those following, are learning to define what it means to ‘respect the selfhood of the Other’. But your emotional imprinting is marked by ‘breached boundaries’. 

I allowed my boundaries to be breached, over time.

As were you imprinted to do. Your emotional imprinting was a Catch-22: “I’m angry because my boundaries have been breached; breach my boundaries.”

Yes! Also, I was always being told No, but wasn’t permitted to say No. That arose today.

That was a feature of those times. A double bluff situation for children. 

So…

So, today, the first day of September, the new school year, you are invited to go up ‘a grade’, and enter the arena of respecting your own boundaries. Practise that today, dear soul, as you start the new ‘year’. Notice when they are being breached – feel the feelings! Hear the ‘energy in motion’ and heed its protective message. Your boundaries are sacred. Respect them. 

I will endeavour today and each day to respect my boundaries. If a piece of work or a request will require so much effort that it might make me unwell – or stressed or even just exhausted – then I will stand up for my own boundaries.

The sandbags laid out by the villagers simply divert the water so it flows elsewhere. They are doing no harm to the water by diverting it. Lay out your own sandbags before the predicted rains come. 

Lovely image. Ty.

I am laying sandbags at my boundaries – before it rains

Posted on

Presence 8: I am observing emotional patterns

I pretty much spoke only to G. and AS yesterday, but I did notice how I use my Voice to make myself amenable, and unthreatening… :/ I also noticed myself squirming out of asking for what I really wanted… And at that moment, came back to express myself clearly. I found, as I settled into the state of self-love, various lively hopes and dreams appeared in my mind for mulling over during our hike.

And today… Let’s read.

***The Presence Process by Michael Brown p34***

THE PATHWAY OF AWARENESS AND SEVEN-YEAR CYCLE

THE PATHWAY OF AWARENESS

Extracts from the chapter: 

  • First a child cries, smiles, and coos, which is emotional. Next it learns to communicate in a variety of ways that eventually include speech, which is mental. Only then does it learn to walk, which is of course physical. The pathway of awareness is therefore from the emotional, through the mental, to the physical. p35
  • Part of entering into human experience is to be equipped with the perceptual capacity to “make everything matter.” We then become addicted to this capacity to the point that we are no longer aware of what our experience was like before everything “mattered” to us. This addiction is what enables us to perceptually enter into and have solid physical encounters with circumstances that are in reality pure vibration. We “stop the world” so we can move about in it. p36
  • Emotionally, each seven years we repeat the same cycle that was imprinted in our emotional body during our first seven-year experience. p38
  • Moving through The Presence Process also reveals that we died an emotional death when we were approaching seven years of age. [***See below!] This is the causal energetic death point from which we are invited to reawaken. Our repetitive emotional patterns are the dream that, on the surface of things, appears to be reality. As we learn to see beneath the surface of this dream state, we discover something startling: adults living in a mentally driven, physically transfixed, time-based paradigm are “dead children.” p39
  • On this journey, we consciously travel seemingly backwards along the pathway of awareness, deactivating the charged emotional impact the seven-year cycle has on our present experiences. p41
  • Unless we return along the pathway of awareness and bring peace to our child self, we remain unintegrated as adults. p41
  • By putting ourselves through The Presence Process, we gradually integrate the emotionally charged impact our first seven-year cycle has on the quality of our present experience. p42

[***AT: Woah!! Didn’t I mention yesterday the Drama Generator in me was the ‘young runaway’ aged about 7?!!! And I pinned it on the experience of trying to run away from home and realising… I couldn’t… and that my efforts to leave were teased. I (mis)learnt that I had to put up and shut up. In truth I was being in vited to learn to communicate, negotiate and set boundaries, but I had no role models of these behaviours at the time. ]

I’m going to meditate briefly. We’re off to see my father today. My question for today’s mediation is:

“How can I use today’s visit to my father to learn about my early self?”

***10minMed***

Answer: Observe the emotional patterns arising when I am with my father. Welcome them in the knowledge that they are ‘energy in motion’ and I am willing to let go of them, or integrate them. Right?

Today will be a valuable day. Not only will it be a precious time with your father, but it will be an educative time. Remember the phrase, ‘put up and shut up’ which your inner Drama Generator, your beloved inner child, offered up for you today. See how often you ‘put up and shut up’ instead of ‘communicate, negotiate or set boundaries’. See how being in the presence of your father triggers some of that early patterning. Welcome this! Welcome it all! 

Is there anything else I should consider?

Be open to suggestions. 

From them? From you?

From the Universe. And also, from the Puny-verse. 

What the heck is the Puny-verse?

It’s the tiny world captured by your old emotions. It paints itself as very large and all encompassing. 

So the suggestions from my Puny-verse – I should be open to them?

Be aware of all ‘suggestions’ that seem to underpin and validate reactive emotions. That is all. 

So, observe my emotional patterns and the seeming suggestions which stimulate them?

Yes. 

One last thing. How best can I bring love to my father today, and healing to all?

By bearing witness to his emotional patterns too. See which are stimulated by the Universe, and which are propelled from his Puny-verse. That will give compassion to you both, and help you understand the ’emotional imprinting’ we will be looking at next in the PP. 

Ok. So, observe his emotional patterns and mine, and see which are stimulated by the Universe and which by the Puny-verse (or frozen emotions?).

You can apply this to everyone today. It will be good learning. Focus simply on observing emotional patterns. This will be enough. Enjoy the practice, and bring your loving compassion with you too. 

Amen.

I am observing emotional patterns