Conscious communication

Part 3

Read part 1 here and part 2 here before reading part 3

Why is it helpful to meet our traumatic energetic inner-world thoughts and outer-world interactions with Presence? The Knowing of Presence reveals that our essential nature is not the transient arising of thoughts and their further manifestation in interactions. The movement to grasp a thought as ‘my thought’ is what creates suffering. Once we are invested in a separate self we become a slave to the sense of inadequacy of our identity. Our experience becomes solely the activity of seeking solace and recognition in the outer world to validate the inherent insecurity and suffering of a separate self.

How to meet Presence? Presence is that which is eternal; the unchanging. Knowing this we can undertake an investigation for ourselves. This investigation will return us to our innate Presence. Let’s go on an investigation together:

Sit comfortably in an upright position. Tune into your breathing. Bring all your attention to this rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Allow yourself to turn your attention from habitual thinking and take this moment to drop into the direct experience of breathing. Turn your attention to your sense of your body experience. Run your attention lightly over this experience of your body with a sense of quiet curiosity. Note the subtle inner experience of your heart beating. Feel for a moment the rhythm of your breathing along with the rhythm of your heartbeat. We can feel our heartbeat in the tingling of blood in our fingers. Tune in to this sensation and connect with it for a time. Notice that your body is fully supported in your chair or on the floor or bed. As you breath slowly and rhythmically allow your mind to engage in the following investigation:

Who am I? Am I my breathing? Who is noticing my breathing sensation? Am I my body? Who is noticing this body experience? Am I my job or my life-role? Are there moments when I am not my job or my life-role? Who experiences these activities? Bring up a memory of yourself as a small child and ask: am I this memory? Who is noticing this memory? Am I my thoughts? Who is hearing/seeing/experiencing my thoughts? See if you can pin down exactly who is the experiencer of these passing phenomena? If you can pin down this experiencer, who is it that has them pinned down? Sit now in the silence that remains. Drop all concepts, drop all sensations, become empty. Who is Present?

Repeating this practice and engaging with it sincerely will transform your life. This Presence that remains after all has fallen away is Us. We are One in and AS this Presence. This Presence does not need to be good enough for there is no question of worth. This Presence cannot be lonely for there is no true other. This Presence does not need to become powerful for it IS limitless power.

I find it so helpful to bless any inner or outer arising of what I experience as ‘difficult energy’ with this Presence. I know that if I am finding it difficult this is simply my resistance to it and I know this can shift into acceptance. All experiences arise and fall away in and as Presence. I know there is no small inadequate person who can’t deal with what arises and falls away in her attention as I have seen for myself the only true Attention is Presence.

Part 2

*If you haven’t read part 1 find it here

It is so helpful to understand that all our communication is essentially vibrational in nature. We focus our communication currently as a conceptual practice by using word symbols that represent vibrational meanings. We very often veil the truth by paying attention to only the transactional play of the word symbols. At the same time as we believe we are understanding or misunderstanding each other’s word symbols in a surface level conceptual semantic communication, what we are truthfully experiencing is an interplay of vibrational or energetic exchanges.

The key to welcoming the co-creation of nourishing interactions into our experience is understanding the principle of as within / so without. This principle demonstrates that our inner experience will be mirrored in our outer experience. When our inner repeating narratives contain the vibrations of lack, disempowerment and unworthiness we will attract outer experiences that compliment this narrative. When our inner energetic offerings are the vibrations of unity, joy, worthiness, kindness and creativity we attract this type of vibration into our experience. Understanding this principle rids us of the pain of blame, shame and guilt. We will come to a compassionate understanding of traumatic interactions when we see that I and my world are One.

It helps to think of music when considering vibrational communication. Generally, we know the difference between a discordant tone and a tone of harmony. Most of us prefer harmonious toning but have a concurrent addiction to discord. We are busy with disowning our own discordant offerings and will deflect the discord of others defensively or offensively until we come to realise that it is the mirror of our own. Our word symbols cannot effectively mask our vibrational offerings to each other. We unconsciously read each other’s energy and create misunderstanding through the activity of veiling our authenticity due to fear of vulnerability.

There is a great freedom in committing to the work of meeting our own inner experiences of difficult energy with Presence for when we have committed to this work of inner transformation, we become available to meet the difficult energy of others with Love-Presence rather than bypassing. Communication then becomes a shared song of life enriching offerings of Joy, creativity, evolution and expansion.

Laying down our own burdens in forgiveness helps us to see through the burdens of others and forgive them in turn.

Continued in part 3

Conscious communication

Part 1

We’ve all experienced the trauma of communication breakdown. Personally, I spent years with the sincere intention to bring love and authenticity to my interactions, only to find my interactions at times going pear shaped and turning into pain experiences. I’m very grateful to all these painful experiences in the learning arena of communication as each one has led me deeper into a passion to understand why we struggle to communicate and what we can do to transform our interactions into mutually expansive and nourishing acts of service to each other. All of us have experienced traumatic interactions and are familiar with what that looks like, but what is at the core of all painful interactions? It is separation consciousness. We are currently so immersed in separation consciousness that it permeates pretty much all our experience.  We have enmeshed ourselves in an experience of life that consists of concepts rather than reality. There is a beautiful opportunity available to us now to co-evolve beyond our mind-only approach to our Earth experience. When I say mind-only I am indicating that even our body experiences are largely filtered through our mind lens. Our bodies are innocent and are currently enslaved by the lack-oriented agendas of our mind-self. The nature of the mind is not inherently harmful, its true nature is one of service, but we are currently hijacked by a mind under the thrall of a group hypnosis that is damaging in the extreme. The core narrative of the hypnosis is that we are alone, abandoned, unworthy and vulnerable to enslavement, oppression and attack. This leads us to the pursuit of objects to soothe this core wounding. Objects are any trophy we believe we need to assert our specialness. These trophies serve to create a façade over our core traumas. We either consciously or unconsciously believe we are disempowered and that we need to fight to steal power from the Earth and from each other. The wonderful and life-changing news is that all this is an illusion. It is simply not true. What does it take to see through this illusion? It takes shifting our attention to the Truths that we are innately worthy, that we are all together in this and that our real Power is innate, eternal and incorruptible. We may be currently hypnotised by a sad story of loss and despair, but we can wake up and listen to the true story of Unity and Joy. This waking up doesn’t mean we bypass all our accumulated trauma; it takes loving work to bring Presence to transmute all our stories of pain. This excavation of trauma needs the support of the revelation that we are inherently Loved. When we are each dedicated to healing our pain together, we become available to stop the cycle of attack and defence that takes place between us when we are convinced that we are separate entities in a state of lack engaged in a fight for survival.

To be continued in part 2

A void dance

Us humans often appear to prefer comfortable misery over risking the unknown in order to birth change. It’s so funny how we long for change and yet also detest the process of it. We have looping thoughts about what we don’t like in our current experience and how we’d like it to be different, but when clues for how to change flow to us intuitively we have trouble perceiving them and if we start to experience some change in our situation we tend to clamp down on the known instead of opening up to the mystery of the process. We want insurance, guarantees, contracts and certainty before we’ll consider innovating. What makes us so fearful? It is our addiction to remaking the past as a result of our horror of the unknown.

But the only way out of fear is through. We must leap into the void in order to receive the gifts that dwell in the unlimited.

What if we have no reason to mistrust the unknown and every reason to mistrust our repeating loops of fearful and limited thinking? Remember those old maps that marked the unknown territory with the warning ‘here be dragons’? They never did turn up. It is vital to embark on a personal investigation into the unknown in order to expand into our own unlimited nature. It is the nothing that connects everything. All creative human endeavours require a willingness to not know at some stage of the project, for it is at that moment that the new is born.

The willingness to not know is our personal ticket to freedom and the moment when we become able to climb out of our self-made box.

There are some subtle but important things that come up in this practice that I’d like to touch on. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’? Personally, following this advice has often landed me in the poo. I’ll grant that these experiences of undesired results have led me to the insight that the real message for me is simply ‘feel the fear’ with the addendum ‘while in the state of Presence’ because this is the only way to transmute it into truth. ‘Do it anyway’ is simply an old idea that we must assert our will onto matter for ‘success’.  The process of being present to fear when it arises will provide a new vision, for the action needed may not be what was believed in when engrossed in the fearful state. We are waking up from the old way of asserting our will over matter, also known as ‘pushing shit uphill’.

When we dare to be open we will move with actions that are imbued with Connectedness. Moving from connectedness produces results that are in integrity to Source or LoveCompassionKindnessTruthJoyConnectionOnenessWholenessUnity.

Compassionate here-ing

Part 2

*Please read Part 1 of this post and the posts ‘symbol substitution’ part 1 here and part 2 here to complement this post

Blocking fear-hurt energy both within ourselves and with others is a form of energy resistance and results in nothing but an increase of fear-hurt energy. Imagine a dam across a water source, but imagine the water is seemingly an unending flow. The water builds and builds and eventually, inevitably, the dam will crack and break under the pressure of the water pressing against it. Resisting our difficult energies causes just this result. The ‘dam breaking’ is when we go into breakdown. We all have different sized dam functions when resisting energy and will judge each other (and therefore ourselves) on which is best. None of the dam types are best. Our best response is to allow energy to flow because flow is its nature. Breakdown always feels like a temporary relief to our built-up resistance to difficult energy, but we will soon set to work in the cycle of building up and sharing fear-hurt energy around and resisting it. We use the word trauma to describe built-up and entrenched resistance to fear-hurt energy. This is fear-hurt energy that we seem unable to integrate.

Good news! If we tune into our Centre or our Heart-of-Hearts, we find the capacity to allow any amount of fear-hurt energy to return to flow. Our Source is an order of magnitude of Love that we cannot fathom. Our Source IS Love-Freedom-Allowing. We can practice tuning in to our felt perception of our Centre and allowing resistance to difficult energy to clear. As we go through this process in our own inner experience it becomes apparent that we have a greater capacity for allowing the same energy in others. We can be with fear-hurt energy in a state of compassionate here-ing. This ‘being-with’ dissolves, transforms and integrates any and all difficult energy, and deepens our capacity and connection to our Source. We become living examples of Love in action. Punishment and shaming are part of the activity of resisting difficult energy. Hurt people will hurt others because attack is one way of acting out the misunderstanding of the communication of fear-hurt energy. Punishing and shaming people who increase the hurt in the world does not end the hurt, but only increases it.

What do we discover about all fear-hurt energy when we surrender it into our Love-Source? We discover fear-hurt energy is nothing but the turning away from our Love-Source because of notions of unworthiness. This is why it is the best antidote. When connected to our Centre it is Known that we are ALL innately Worthy because we are all innately Love.

Compassionate here-ing

Part 1

*Please read ‘symbol substitution’ part 1 here and part 2 here to complement the unique terms used in this post

When we rely solely on our past-accumulation-self-identity-symbol-system (or ‘small self’) to communicate we largely pass fear-hurt energy around and spend our time in reactivity. This is both exhausting and isolation increasing. The life expanding intention to live as Love rather than fear opens us up to our inner toolkit to communicate heart to heart with authenticity. The resource we have at hand is the skillful use of intuition or felt perception. This is the ability to read the energy behind a story shared with the assistance of non-judgemental Love-Presence rather than taking it personally while interpreting only symbol-system content. We can work with this skillful felt perception both with our own inner ‘dialogue’ and with others. I call this ‘compassionate here-ing’. It is a beautiful way to really feel listened to and to listen.

To clarify my use of the term skillful, for much of my life I have listened to others and myself using felt perception but have often misinterpreted the core meaning of this perception of difficult energy as that I was somehow unlovable or wrong or not good enough, (we often disparagingly call this ‘being a victim’). This painful response to fear/hurt energy is characteristic of the lens of the ‘small me’ and is what gives rise to the attack/defence cycle of communicating that most of us live with. My experience was to empathically feel the fear-hurt energy behind much of the ways people communicate on Earth and then have great difficulty not taking it personally in the negative. We all do this. Empathic types will tend to self-blame more often and de-sensitised types will more often choose to blame others as a form of self-protection; ‘Others are unlovable or wrong or not good enough’. Most of us do both. The dance of attack and counter-attack (we call this defense) ensues. Attempting to be helpful by labelling a person during an episode of this fear/hurt experience of unworthiness as ‘being a victim’ will be construed by that one as an attack and will not help them. This is because it increases, confirms and adds to the pain of the story being experienced. A person in a victim state will only be relieved of this state by the opportunity to call on non-judgemental-Love Presence to assist. This assistance can be welcomed using compassionate here-ing. In the same way, attempting to dispel the rage of a person in the midst of self-protection through attack by name-calling their actions will result only in an increase in their rage and pain. Responding with compassionate here-ing opens hearts to resolve difficult energy using non-judgemental Presence. This is ending the war.

We misunderstand each other and we bypass our own and other’s pain. We sometimes believe compassionate and loving listening means to offer a way of bypassing our feelings to the positive interpretation rather than the negative. This creates the experience of living on a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the poles, attempting to find balance. The Tao as a symbol shows us that it is not about favouring the positive or negative pole but by finding the divine balance of the flow of energy. When we self-bypass and bypass each other we don’t feel listened to. Why do we bypass? Because we fear the energy that is really being communicated and want to offer the other (and ourselves) a better feeling energy. This could be seen as an attempt to be loving, but it misses a very important step: the loving acceptance of what is. If we become lovingly Present to difficult energy, we receive the assistance of Unity-consciousness to balance the energy, rather than avoidant reactivity based on an underlying fear-separation motivation. We think trying to add positive energy will tip the scales out of the negative and this of course makes sense in terms of a scale metric, but our energy can more accurately be understood as a dynamic interplay of wholeness experienced in motion. I offer the use of the Tao as a helpful symbol of what I mean by balance here rather than using the metric of a scale or pendulum. We admonish each other and ourselves for openly sharing the honest urge to end the experience of fear-hurting-sharing as ‘whinging’ (but we still do it). Whinging is simply the experience of not being listened to both by our own self and by others, it is a type of energy resistance. I have been looking deeply into understanding whinging for some years and share here my insights.

Continued in part 2

Symbol substitution

Part 2, read part 1 here

All of us react rather than respond much of the time. It feels expansive and joyful and connecting to respond, because responsive data is the felt perception of the truth of our Unity. Reactive data is the dusty past. I experienced a good example of the difference between reaction and response recently. My housemate got an enormous TV for his birthday and offered his old small screen to my son. I have not had a TV since 2005, and the TV I had then was pretty much forced on me by a well-meaning relative who thought I didn’t have a TV because I couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t fathom the idea that I simply wouldn’t want a TV. So, part of the past accumulation story of ‘me’ is this identity as someone who does not have a TV. My son came to me and offered the small screen as one that could be used for the house in general if needed. I reacted grumpily to this as a perceived threat and enforced “no TV in the shared space!”. My son is highly attuned to understanding that aggressive reactionary behaviour is not the full truth and gently pointed out that he was not meaning to be threatening and that I could update my old ideas around screens if I wanted to. Beautifully after some time of adjusting I saw that I was indeed operating through mistaken identity past-data storytelling (in other words reacting) and I hugged him and expressed thanks both for his good intention to share, and for loving me enough to let me know when I’m reacting rather than responding. This was love rather than fear in action. We still didn’t keep the screen, but the important thing was that we expressed connection through love rather than fear and felt closer and more expanded and joyful as a result. I could also laugh at myself and enjoy this example of living what I write about. I felt the attack energy in my reaction and was able to use that as an opportunity to use my felt perception sense to understand the true loving intentions behind his words rather than construing meaning using only assumptions based on word symbols. My son is even more highly sensitive than myself, and very often translates energy felt in the present rather than solely the content of symbolic data based on the past. This made his childhood very challenging for him because he would readily perceive the fear energy behind what people were saying and feel hurt and confused by it and translate it as himself not being loveable. I had a similar empathic experience when I was younger. Through a dedication to communicate through love rather than fear I have come to be able to feel people’s emanations of fear energy now and to more often than not manage not to take it personally. This is actively learning compassion and I’m still learning this one. I’m very pleased to be learning it because it is an essential skill for navigating the Earth walk.

The true purpose of empathy is to communicate directly through our felt perception to co-understand authentic experience. When we live this, we become beings who communicate directly from heart to heart (or centre to centre). This is the One communicating love to Itself. I call this compassionate Here-ing.

Symbol substitution

Part 1.

We are a story telling species and we use symbol systems to tell our stories. We have become so habitually focused on our symbol systems that we overlook the true depth of our experiencing. We focus on the transactional play of words, images and memories of the past, but we ultimately experience our lives as out of balance because our greater senses are really picking up a whole spectrum of energetic experience beneath the symbol system at the same time as only consciously registering the data with our lower body+minds. Our mind function focuses on translating the symbols being received in experience and sharing the interpretations through the body experience. We think this is the sum of our experience, but we also have a greater contextual functioning being experienced, I’ll call the sensing of this greater context felt perception. We can also use the term intuition as a word-symbol to describe this felt perception. Empathic types are sensitive instruments for this felt perception of our greater context, but empaths can become drained by using their lower mind symbol- system function only to translate their felt perception. This can be called taking-it-personally.

For example, what response do you experience when I say the word-symbol ‘winter’? Just tune in to the spectrum of offerings the mind gives to translate this word symbol for a moment. There will likely be words, images, mental memories expressed as body experiences, mini movies; a combination of a story-telling spectrum of response to this word symbol. All these symbol interpretations are occurring in the now, but the content will be information sourced from the past. Different types among us will weigh more heavily on different types of interpretation through whatever their unique command of the five senses combination is. Highly sensitive types will also experience a sixth sensory translation and give this credence in their response data. What is the sixth sense? It can be called intuition- the sense that points us to the greater context or map of connection, or Oneness, or Truth. Not so sensitive types will also experience a translation of their greater context but will use their lower mind function to judge this translation as irrational or nonsensical. What do I mean by ‘lower mind’? The lower mind is the sum of the accumulation of the past and how it uses this past information to respond to the present. The lower mind includes any manifestations in the body as the body has the function of displaying or ‘proving’ the illusion of the results of the translations of the mind. The lower mind is fearful and interprets data through the lens of potential threats. This is a lower mind method based on the use of theoretical systems rather than direct felt connection. This data is all based on past perception. A fearful and separate lower mind largely thinks of this collection of past data as ‘myself’. This is a case of mistaken identity. Identifying solely with the data from the lower mind will give credence to the story that ‘myself’ is alone, separate, abandoned and therefore under threat. This ‘self’ will desire to mitigate perceived threats in whatever unique methods that this accumulation of past data determines is best. This gives rise to the habit of reacting rather than responding. Reacting is solely based on time-based past data and ignores data available from the eternal now. Responding incorporates data that is current.

Continued in part 2

Wholeness

Who am I?

I AM

That’s it! We are IT. The One. We are Love-Compassion-Kindness-Unity.

So, who is Bob? Or Jamal? Or Xiao? All One.

So, who’s this one who is not good enough? Who is this one who needs to get it? Who is this unlovable guilty one?

It’s a past time.

Really. It’s all past time. This guilty one is naught but an accumulation of dust. Dust is not inherently bad. We don’t dust things to rid them of badness. We dust to make clear, to make something that has become obscured become seen. The word ‘clean’ has the taste of judgement so it is not accurate for my purpose here. Clear just means see-able or seen through.

But what about the body? And our oh-so-unique thoughts? Doesn’t that make us different? Doesn’t that prove we are all separate selves trying to get along in a difficult place?

(click here to read my post on the game of winning and losing).

What if the sole purpose of the experience of a body and a mind is LOVE? What if the nature of Love has the innate purpose to share itself? And that’s IT?

(What I mean by Love here is Love-Compassion-Kindness-Unity. I don’t mean Valentines’ Day and broken hearts and weddings and divorces. If romance means seeing the beauty in something then I do mean that, but only if it means that.)

What if we threw ourselves out of the garden of Eden? The parable says we saw ourselves and were ashamed. It is only the sudden perception of shame being described here, there’s no actual crime. God is confabulated to be a judgemental jerk from the point of view of one who believes in their own guilt.

The Tao is a symbol of Unity. It simply demonstrates that if you focus singularly, the opposite of your focus is implied. The past time of being a ‘me’ is a focusing activity. It is a slowed down investigation, an experience of time for one who’s nature is timeless.

We do get addicted to pretending we are not Love, but this activity can end as soon as we determine that it must end. Our eternal nature is Unity, so the ceasing of the activity of playing the game of separation is a given.

We get consumed by the activity of acting out in the world to solve the erroneous idea that there is a self with a problem with the self. We attack ourselves and each other in the pursuit of making wrong become right. We create wrongness and rightness. This is fear. Fear is turning away from love. But Love cannot go anywhere. There is nowhere to go because nowhere just means Now Here. We are free to turn away from Love because Source-Unity-Oneness-Love is also Freedom. The moment we turn back all sense of time is re-known as Timelessness.

Our bodies and our minds are being experienced as a dream within the Mind of the One, The One is our inherent wholeness. When we cease the past time of creating time from the past, we see that what is is all there IS. No thing. Now Here. Whole. All One.

From Fear to Love

Part 2.

*If you haven’t read part one click this link

The monkey analogy from part 1 is a fun one, but what really is our mind function?

The mind function acts in concert with the body function to create an extremely believable Earth-suit total experience unit. The birth to-death experience is fully immersive; it is so immersive that we forget all about Our True Nature. Our true nature is like an ultimate light source that enables a 3D immersion projector to project an ‘image-experience’. This image-experience is interpreted by the mind+body function. This analogy seems good, but it will be even better for you if you can drop into the understanding that the light creates the image.

The immersive Earth-birth-to-death experience is one that our higher selves love to get amongst. When your true nature is everything-at-once-all-knowing-all-seeing it can be fun to slow things down and flip from ‘no-time’ into ‘time’. This no-time-knowing functions in the same sort of way that the nothing creates the context for the something; (see my blog post ‘living with spiritual integrity’ for more on that). Our Earth-suit experience looks a lot like a time experience from the perspective of the Earth-suit.

What do I mean by ‘higher self’? At the centre of each of us it is the same Centre, Our Heart-of-Hearts. This is the ALL-ONE-SOURCE-LOVE. When the One decides it would very much love the experience of ultimate creativity through many-ness, it manifests its crystal prism function and shimmers itself into a multitude of ‘souls’. Everything in creation has a higher ‘soul’, not just human beings. The soul is like the template. The soul is a fractal aspect of the One; It can only create itself from itself. Part of the soul experience is a concurrent opportunity to manifest into a slowed down vibration experience. This is the Earth-suit-birth-to-death experience. Our soul aspects are immortal and therefore an ever-present resource for the mind-body aspect to receive assistance from. No-one would go out into space without ground control! A perspective shift: your higher self is like ground control; the Earth walk is like the trip into space.

Where do I get all this info? From my Centre. You can access it too! We share the same Ultimate Centre. When you tune into your Centre (or Heart) you can verify information. This means to know what is true not from the basis of the dogma of an ideology, but from your greater knowing; your ‘connectedness’.

The spectrum of feeling experiences included in the Earth-suit range from fear to love. By fear I mean the furthest vibration from love. We experience this ‘furthest away’ vibration as states like despair and worthlessness. These experiences are hell on Earth. Our higher self knows that at any moment we can stop the experience of hell on Earth and turn the experience dial back to Love. They’ve got our back. They are existing in the state of Pure Love singing the Pure Love symphony for us to tune back into when our dial is turned way down. The trouble is that the despair/worthlessness experience is ultra-compelling from the perspective of the mind+body. We find it very, very difficult to tune back into Love. Why? Because we identify almost totally with the experience and forget that we are always and ever truly the experiencer.