Tag: #FELT-PERCEPTION

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Presence 35: I am reading the Room #VibrationalAwareness

Scanning for FELT-PERCEPTION yesterday:

I set myself various reminders on my phone and checked in to my body as/when I could across the day. It took about 20 seconds each time: eyes closed, both hands on chest… waiting for a word or two to come forward to sum up the ‘flavour’ of the resonance inside. I know MB suggests that felt-perception is non-verbal, but I needed to find a phrase to know that I’d arrived inside my body. And the results were both poignant and fun.

These were some of my FELT-PERCEPTION phrases:

      • 8am: Chalk and cheese
      • 10am: Cranky-panky
      • 10.22am: Poised and practical
      • 9.30pm: Safe and sound
      • 10pm: There’s too much soul in my body [<3]
      • Today, now: On the precipice, looking down

This is really valuable work. Especially for those of us with a tendency to dissociate out of our bodies. I was reminded by my music therapist friend yesterday, how much of our wellbeing work is simply about coming back into the body – sometimes after a sojourn away from it of many years. For this reason, I’m so grateful to have developed this amazing daily qigong and walking routine during this pandemic year.

And it’s a step towards improving our Inner Parenting as well. I like this next passage from The Presence Process. It describes a technique of using the FELT-PERCEPTION as a route back to the moment when our child self originally felt that feeling we’re troubled by now, and then ‘attending’ to that child unconditionally, thus nurturing our Inner Parent qualities. I did similar working on the Inner Child workbook (c2013) and in therapy with Philippa this year – it’s good stuff. Maybe I will try it today:

When we encounter the causal points of energy that isn’t freely in motion – which we may conceptually call emotional states such as fear, anger, and grief – our intent to be with these by wielding felt-perception is akin to taking the unintegrated aspect of our child self in our arms and unconditionally loving and comforting it. Because some of us are wired slightly differently, we may find it beneficial to actually imagine such a scenario. For example, when we experience an emotional state such as anger, it can be self-facilitating to close our eyes and imagine our self as a child of seven years or younger standing in front of us as we are now, feeling the way we feel. We may then visualize ourselves picking this child up and being with it as it moves through its anger. We don’t attempt to alter the child’s experience in any way because its experience is valid and required. We simply be with it unconditionally. Through this visualized nurturing of our child self, we activate the qualities of our inner parent. A comforting resonance of consistency arises whenever we commit to attending to our child self in this way. (p172, The Presence Process by Michael Brown)

Let’s do our meditation using this technique.

*****SilentMED17mins******

Wow… Well in that meditation I tried the technique above. I sensed the FELT-PERCEPTION of ‘On the precipice, looking down‘ again and decided to be with it. It settled on a description of ‘Horror – Out of Body.‘ Ok… Let’s go back to Child Me sensing Horror and leaping Out of Body. Yes, we’re in the kitchen of my childhood home. My much-adored, and -feared, Dad unleashing his fury on – or merely ‘in the presence of’ probably – my Mum and a very young me. Me, just so shocked and afraid that I step out of my body; while my Mum remains impassive, taut, patient. I invited my Inner Parent to enter the scenario – basically a version of me now.

Initially, Inner Parent Me scooped Child Me up in my arms and carried her out of the house and off down the lane… but then I realised I’d eventually have to put Child Me back in the house, and she now really wanted anything but that.

So I rewound the scenario. I went into the kitchen again and:

      1. I put a golden, egg-shaped qi shield over Child Me, so that she felt – and was – completely safe in her body. None of the fury could touch her.
      2. I put my arm round my Mum and kissed her head, and comforted her.
      3. I squared up to my Dad (who in this scenario is some 5 or 10 years younger than I am now, and full of feisty bullish energy and emotional dysregulation) and I shoved him (just like in my drawing I posted yesterday!), with both hands to his chest, again and again until he backed out of the kitchen door in to the garden. Thereupon, I told him to go and put his face in the stream at the bottom of the garden and stay there til he’d calmed down – and never to bring that kind of fury into the presence of his children again.

I then felt relief. Resolution. And popped naturally out of meditation…

Good work. 

Yes. It is!

Tell us about yesterday. 

Man…. It was huge. Beautiful. In short, I saw my dear friend (AK) for lunch, for the first time in 20+ years. She’s now an amazing, powerful, compassionate autism specialist and she set up her own consultancy business this summer, supporting young autistic people into work and education provisions. I hadn’t told her about my own diagnosis before, and did so over lunch – filling her in on a potted history of the last 20-30 years and how my autism has manifested in my life, and the impact it has had. Everything tumbled out with such force… It was just so good to talk to someone who had more than a 4% understanding of autism. And I so wanted her to have insight into my (hidden, costly, trauma-touched) journey, for the benefit of her clients. And to give impetus to her wonderful drive to make workplaces more autism-friendly…. And to share some of my profound learnings and invaluable techniques for self-care… My heart is still very full today. (And then, I had tea with my beloved LV, who took me through her lecture on programming she’d just given – my oh my – she’s such a genius! Man, my daughters continue to blow me away, every day.)

I’ve spoken a lot this morning and have used our time up. Maybe we pick up tomorrow?

This has been beautiful and important to witness today. All is well. Carry on with the FELT-PERCEPTION scanning, and we’ll pick up tomorrow.

***

Day Notes:

  1. Time with my lovely Dad, recording a new lecutre for YouTube – and actually ‘shoving’ him back with ease when he tried to rearrange our appointment at the last minute – and finding benefit for us both in my practising holding my boundaries around him. We have a beautiful relationship now. He really has been the person to teach me to value myself and boundary myself.
  2. Listening to this MB/TPP video on my walk – man, he’s got such awesome insight. Michael Brown: the immensely enlightened guru you’ve never heard of.
    1. We all have 3 stories: Bad, Good, Legend (When we jump off the Ledge-End)
    2. I’m accompanied by a troop of aspects of myself of all ages. [Hence why DoDs is plural?]
    3. Vibrational awareness…

*******

This morning, I came to look for the MB video above and ended up watching all of this video, on the Bruderhof community, with this sense of connection. It’s an intentional (“radical Christian”) community. A community.

Care to go in and check out your Felt-Perception around this notion of Community? 

Yes…. “It takes a village” is what I sense. I’m very fortunate to have had an experience of community. A few in fact. Let’s start with boarding school – I loved the community, the company, the constant presence of friends and peers…. But it lacked… guidance, values, safe boundaries. So then I was incredibly blessed to experience the Baha’i community, from university to early thirties. My twenties were defined by living within an international community of souls, for whom ‘unity’ was the purpose, goal and watchword. It required so much honesty and open-heartedness. And that village of souls helped bring up my girls, in ways I am so endlessly grateful for.

Talk to me about the learning here?

Yesterday you began to ponder on the phrase of MB’s – but also Abraham-Hicks – ‘vibrational awareness’. This is precisely where the practice of Felt-Perception is leading you. As you learn to use your body more as a barometer, an emotional GPS, an intuitive reader… you increase your vibrational awareness. 

This sounds good. Tell me more?

Vibrational Awareness is the portal to true discernment. 

Woah.

True discernment arises from our resting in vibrational awareness for most  of the day. A key aspect of that communal Bruderhof living that was only obliquely referred to is this:

    • communal living simplifies and reduces daily decision-making
    • decision-making puts us in the cognitive sphere
    • too much decision-making drains us and locks us in cognition
    • reducing decision-making allows more space and time to be out of the cognitive sphere
    • the alternative to the cognitive sphere is the perceived sphere 
    • the perceived sphere is aligned to our vibrational awareness
    • cognitive awareness is time-based and linear (left brained)
    • perceived/vibrational awareness is multidimensional (right-brained) 
    • the transcendent / creative / infinite is multidimensional
    • reducing decision-making allows us to dip more into the multidimensional
    • the more we dip into the multidimensional the more we understand its language

And presumably, being in a group of people who are centring their lives around dipping into the multidimensional (while also pooling their decisional needs) creates a collective … hum? pull? power?

Exactly. Just like in your early qigong classes, with the right combination of genuine heart focus, you created a palpable and healing qi field. 

When our beautiful RB came to qigong, in the midst of her chemo, my God… The focus, the selflessness, the intentionality of our group… We were one healing mind… and we all were recreated by it. RB was the teacher of us all. She was the catalyst for some of the deepest learning I’ve been blessed to receive.

I have space in my heart for community. At the moment my beautiful intentional community exists with G. We are truly learning and practising together. Yet, I still live in ways that plug fully into the cognitive sphere, and I get drained. I wonder if there’s another way.

Maybe your Vibrational Awareness will answer that most creative of questions. 

“I wonder if there’s another way” is a mantra to live by. In short, the answer is always “yes”. If the cognitive approach is the default ‘way’, there is always the perceived approach to be explored. 

If you can catch it! It’s like trying to catch a fish. You’ve got to stand still by the pond and wait.

Exactly. You have to stop, and align your vibrational awareness to the frequency of the pond, and therefore the fish. You can’t come along with linear thinking and expect the multidimensional pond to ‘speak’ to you. You have first to learn to commune with What Is. The ‘world’ suggests that the individual is what is! Vibrational awareness – or intentional living – says:

‘I’ am a reader of the Room. The Room is sublime. It is worth reading. I must attune myself to the Room to see into it and to read it. In reading the Room I will enter the multidimensional realm. And at that moment I will leave my self behind. I am ready to dispense with my I-ness, for the greater This-ness. 

Beautiful. I really like the notion of ‘reading the Room’ as an analogy for fomenting vibrational awareness.

Think of yourself when you were a child, playing. There was no ‘decision-making’ to be done (your parents had removed that burden). Instead you could be fully present to the room (or sandpit, or garden, or treehouse) in which you were playing. You became alight with the awareness of all possibilities – all the more so because of your beautiful sensory wiring. You thought life would always be like that – or that adult life would be More of That. You were horrified when it wasn’t (exception: theatre). [As Hannah in the Bruderhof documentary said of her experience of leaving the community and living in London… she didn’t think she would see the purpose of living if that (materially-based living) was ‘all there was’ etc etc] But here’s the thing. This vibrational awareness has always been available to you. And you have accessed it (writing, praying, meditating, loving your children)… You may not have believed that it was respectable (or safe) for an adult to immerse in that awareness. Well, this is the year, and the time, and the epoch of turning. It’s time to turn from the linear to the multidimensional. And how do you do that? You start by prioritising ‘reading the Room’ with your vibrational awareness. 

When you SWITCH TASK (which we’ve been practising for a few years now), you START by reading the Room with your senses, your felt-perception. You note what you read – and even write it down. Only THEN do you address the task cognitively, asking your 3D mind to chip in. 

This makes so much sense. Let me try this today. I am so grateful for our conversations. Thank you.

As MB said of himself, you are accompanied at all times by all the versions of you across ‘time’. So we speak to you as older versions of yourself with Knowledge+, but we are merely you. All of us. 

Ty. <3

<3 u. 

I am reading the Room #VibrationalAwareness

Day Notes: 

What I see = Cognition / Linear / Time-based / Past&Future / Mind / 3D / Analogue

What I perceive/sense = Awareness / Multidimensional / Timeless / Now / Heart / 5D / Digital

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Presence 34: I am scanning my FELT-PERCEPTION

“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