Over the last 3 days I saw Good Machines deploying their Goodliness in the form of:
- Generosity and hospitality – in people’s gardens – pandemic style
- Extremely dedicated work for their employers
- Putting their families first..
- Sharing their skills and talents, unpaid.
- Putting valuable materials on the internet open source..
- Going the extra mile..
Ok, so interestingly… now I am on Week 5 of The Presence Project, and it’s raised some really pertinent points about our ‘helping others’ … to the expense of helping ourselves, essentially. Is this a facet of our ‘Goodliness’ we should take care to scrutinise?
First of all, I was surprised and moved by the week’s ACIM-esque Response:
WEEK 5
Our Conscious Response for the Next Seven Days is:
“I AM INNOCENT”
Beautiful! <3
Secondly… look at this exquisitely articulated thinking on ‘helping others’ and ‘integrating our childhood’:
“The intent to re-establish an unconditionally attentive relationship with our child self awakens the emotional capacities required for us to become our own parent. Connecting with our child self calls us to step onto the pathway of self-nurturing and inner guidance – a pathway paved by displaying compassion toward ourselves. This pathway enables us to overcome the unintegrated imprints we still unconsciously share with our parents. Each effort we make to re-establish an unconditionally attentive relationship with our child self is rewarded with increased Presence and present moment awareness. The child within us is born innocent and simultaneously helpless. Because of its helplessness, it trustingly gives its allegiance to its parents. As a consequence, the vulnerable child becomes imprinted with experiences that are less than loving – not because the parents are intentionally unloving, but because parents are only able to offer the same quality of unconditional attention to a child that they received during their childhood. As the child becomes an adult, it’s confronted daily with manifestations of the uncomfortable energetic imprinting it received through interaction with its parents. As an adult, it identifies with the outer physical, mental, and emotional manifestations of these uncomfortable experiences to the point that it comes to believe “I am fearful, angry, and sad,” as opposed to “this is a manifestation of fear, anger, and grief received through imprinting. It isn’t what I am.” Our identification with the manifestation of uncomfortable imprinting causes us to forget that we entered our life experience in a state of innocence. By identifying with our experience – with our imprinted state, instead of with the Presence we authentically are – we lose awareness of our innocence. By identifying with our outer projections – with the manifestation in our current adult experience of the imprinting we received in childhood – we mistakenly base our identity on what we perceive as “our faults.” By aligning ourselves with these outwardly manifesting “faults,” we lose our awareness of and capacity for inner sensibility – our capacity for inner sense, or innocence. We aren’t the faults that manifest through our experience. We were born innocent because Presence, which is our inner sense, is innocent. As adults, many of us then attempt to overcome our perceived faultiness through being helpful to others. However, when it comes to knowing how to nurture ourselves, we are at a loss. We may even feel a sense of guilt whenever we attempt to do anything authentic and loving for ourselves.” TPP pp164-5
This is such valuable insight. And it causes me to seek to refine my notion of Goodliness again. When are we acting as Good Machines out of:
- attempting ‘to overcome our perceived faultiness through being helpful to others’ and omitting self-nurturing because of that same and when is it out of…
- the fun, the satisfaction, the connectedness, the flow that we might experience in the doing of the Goodliness? And do we know to ‘stop when the fun stops’?
Accumulate some Present Moment Awareness and we can talk about this…
Gotcha.
***Med***
Well that was lovely.
Accumulating PMA [Present Moment Awareness] is one of the kindest things you can do for yourself. Being too busy (helping others, or reacting to life) to do your meditation practice is a simple indicator that it’s time to turn your Goodliness on yourself a little more.
Yes. And it really helps to learn more about this style of meditation (ie in TPP) which is sincerely about being able to be aware of what’s in our body and in our presence. And it suggests we can develop a relationship with Presence by… getting present. What is Presence?
Presence is the same as ‘Infinite Intelligence’ accessed through the felt-perception of your ‘Inner Being’ – to use Abraham Hicks language. Or you could call it the Holy Spirit, if you wanted to. Or you could call it the voice of karma. Or you could call it simply the silence and wisdom available to you the second you turn off the mind’s chatter.
Why do we loop away for it most of the time?
That imprinting that MBrown talks about above – it leads us away from ourselves. The mind would have you believe it’s own (charged, imprinting, fearful) messaging, and thus it disrupts your relationship with your authentic self, especially until all those imprintings and charged emotions are fully integrated.
Meditation practise is simply the wearing down of the noisy mind by constant, repeated refusing to jump to its tune?
Perhaps… Or, you could say: the Universe provides this rich, delicious experience called Present Moment Awareness, and as a special reward for living on this planet for a while, you learn to get better and better and closer access to it over time.
Ha. Nice. Less confrontational than my version. It’s like a gift… a reward scheme… a loyalty card… for life lived. If we want to sign up.
And as you believe more in your own worthiness, perfection and faultlessness via placing unconditional attention upon yourself, you more readily slide in to a relaxed relationship with PMA.
It’s like how I never used to drink water… And then as the years went by I found, it didn’t taste so bad… and that I felt better hydrated… and that I felt even better if I sipped water across the day instead of glugging it back at the very end of the day….
Yes. ‘Sipping water across the day’ is an excellent analogy for developing an ‘appetite’ for Present Moment Awareness.
Lovely. This really lands for me. I’ll take this with me… Ty.
‘I am developing an ‘appetite’ for Present Moment Awareness’ might become, developing a ‘taste‘ for PMA.
Yes. Gentler. Thank you.
I am developing a taste for Present Moment Awareness #SippingWaterAcrossTheDay #GoodlinessToSelfviaPMA