Tag: Untamed

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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!}

 

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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.’

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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: