“We may successfully sedate and control the effects of the unintegrated childhood debris that leaks into our adult experiences for many years, but sooner or later this energetic charge rears up and we find ourselves in a crisis. Thankfully it isn’t necessary to manifest a crisis before we agree to attend to our unintegrated childhood debris – although sometimes a crisis is exactly what’s required for the unintegrated aspect of our child self to gain our attention. Nevertheless, the moment we turn inward and attend to our child self, our physical, mental, and emotional states of discomfort begin to be integrated. Once our child self comes to peace, so do we. It’s this simple and powerful. If we aren’t experiencing peace right now, it’s because an aspect of our child self is still unintegrated. There’s nowhere else to look, and there’s no other response but to consistently and unconditionally feel the resonance of this unintegrated aspect of our experience.” The Presence Process, p171.
I am coming to realise that the Child in me loves to me delighted. And maybe she put her Childlike Delight away at some point… To be fair to my adult self, I do look for delight, mirth and laughter wherever I can. I’m not generally sombre… And I use warmth and laughter in my work at any given opportunity.
Yet, from time to time (ok, every month – like now), the bottom falls out of my Mirth Container. Yesterday, in the Listening Space workshop, I realised the weight of ‘perplexity’ upon me – and ‘saw’ also how I could ‘shove it’. 🙂
[Yesterday continued] I had a cry about generalised fears of dying… This morning, I woke with an anxiety attack at 4.30am and didn’t get back to sleep. So, let’s examine.
Eckhart Tolle talks about the ‘painbody’ being readily accessible to women during PMS/PMDD. He talks about the painbody here – and how you contain ‘it with your presence’ (very much a la TPP):
And here below is Michael Brown articulating something very similar, and pulling it back, as he does, to a causal root of the painbody as springing from unintegrated childhood experiences. The response is the same as Tolle’s: be with the discomfort – bring presence:
“During these moments of distraction, we may feel irritable, annoyed, anxious, and confused—in other words, full of fear, anger, and grief. These are moments in which we are being called upon to attend to the unintegrated aspects of our child self. When we are in such an uncomfortable moment, we strive to remind our adult self that the discomfort we are feeling has nothing to do with what’s happening now, although it’s clearly reflected in the felt resonance of this moment. This discomfort is a call for assistance from an unintegrated childlike aspect of our self that’s still struggling with experiences it can’t digest. How do we respond to this call? The answer is simple. It requires unconditional, continuously wielded felt-perception. We direct our capacity for feeling to the felt-resonance of our uncomfortable emotional state and be with it without condition.” TPP p171-2
And this morning, lying in bed, did you use continuous conscious breathing to respond to your anxiety?
I did. And I did a bunch of Matt Kahn “I love yous” too.
So you did the Work.
I did… But I still didn’t get back to sleep. I was aware that today I am going out for lunch with a dear friend – first time seeing eachother in 20+years, and v unusual for me to take an afternoon off (with work pressures etc). All this was whirring round my head and body.
Thanks for telling us of your Resistance.
Ha! My delight! 😉 Erm, so…? Thoughts?
Let’s go back to TPP: “How do we respond to this call? The answer is simple. It requires unconditional, continuously wielded felt-perception. We direct our capacity for feeling to the felt-resonance of our uncomfortable emotional state and be with it without condition.” TPP p172 Remember this? Remember Tolle’s words. The work really is to BE with the uncomfortable emotional state, using our felt-perception, or felt-resonance. No words or narrative here. Just curious observation.
Is the idea that in looking at something we dissolve it? But doesn’t this contract the idea of magnifying things by placing our attention on them. In other words, am I focussing on my delight or my discomfort? Help me get clear here.
The body is a mighty messenger. If it’s bringing you discomfort, it’s to inform you. If it’s bringing you delight, it’s to inform you. All information is Good Data. The idea is not to get hooked and carried along by intrusive thoughts that sustain and add momentum to the unwanted.
Instead….
We defuse, disempower, disengage the unwanted by turning upstream… from where we are. We don’t pretend to be upstream. We note where we are with curiosity (“Ah, I have a felt-perception of fear/anger/grief… How interesting. Thanks for the data.”) and then look upstream. What is the next thought or feeling that brings relief?
So you might say: “Well, at least I’ve noticed the feeling. I can breathe into it. I know that ‘feeling is healing’. I’m clearly healing a good chunk today! That was amusing… I like the feeling of mirth. I might as well have a laugh while I’m waiting for this discomfort to pass. Got nothing else more important to do. Why ‘nothing else more important’? Because I matter to me. Yeah. I’m important to me, and if I’m having feelings of ‘suffering’ it’s time to unleash my own magnificent compassion on me. What do I need right now, I wonder?”
Beautiful.
This all starts, as Tolle says, with catching the FELT-PERCEPTION early on. So today, our work for you is this: CATCH your FELT-PERCEPTION across the day. As you practice doing this, with an “Ah… I sense it…” and no ‘reaction’, you well get ever more proficient at doing this work. So listen, observe, check in. Can you set a timer to go off every hour to prompt you to do a quick scan of your FELT-PERCEPTION? We’re ‘shouting’ because we want this term to settle in you. It’s really powerful this embodiment work, and it goes perfectly with your qigong practice. Develop your awareness of your ENERGY BODY, and then learn to apply unconditional responses (vs reaction or suppression) and you will be adding years of wellbeing to your life.
Wow. That’s quite a powerful statement.
You’ve been mulling over the phrase ‘Peace Begins Within’. We love it. Be assured that this peace arises out of the heated crucible of healing, integrating, being with discomfort. So never shy away from this discomfort. It’s speaking to you, via FELT-PERCEPTION. So learn your body’s language of FELT-PERCEPTION. It will be a door opened to a whole inner landscape of self-knowledge.
Beautiful. I love it. Help me to work with this today and every day!
I am scanning my FELT-PERCEPTION