By Darlene Rollins: The Art of Soul Whispering Blog | March 09, 2011 at 06:37 PM EST |
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These writings are somewhat sequential so you might want to start at the bottom. Yet one of the reasons I am writing this blog is because I can't make these teachings into a neat linear product. The radically different nature of of our relationship to ourselves and the world that we are being asked to learn here on earth now, covers a vast territory,
and each new question or disharmony in life reveals another facet looking at it through this lens I am sharing. It seems to me it must be analogous to the everyday natural phenomenon of a caterpillar who becomes a butterfly. So this is a fairy story for those caterpillars who are inside the chrysalis
Since we are always creating stories, I would like to suggest a more life giving story. I recognize that it too is just a story, and so has no more ultimate reality than our painful stories, but I have found this story to be a useful bridge.
Here is the Soul's story of who you are and what your life is about. You are a spark of God made from God and in God's likeness, being of the same substance of God. (I define God as Source, Love, Void, All, One, Creator within and beyond Creation.) (Ultimately there is only one and not two, but stories require a twoness and the oneness cannot really be spoken, only pointed to. So consider this story a pointer and a bridge between our negative stories and No Story.
Each being is a spark of awareness, of consciousness which is of God. God's nature is awareness, This is ultimately who we are, and our own nature. This is not the personality you think is you, but this is your very being, your natural unconditioned state which is always present and is always present to God.
This is the ground of each one's being and yet we do not identify with this most basic self behind all selves. It recedes into the background because it is the background. We are each a space of awareness. We keep forgetting we are the space and keep getting involved in all the content, all the happenings within awareness. We must wake up inside the dream.
Until then we are identified with a constructed self and story created by a particular interpretation of our experience. Notice how that interpretation carries with it "meaning", a story, a slant or spin that is not neutral; that has emotional energy with it and creates effects within the body/mind.
This is one way that I can tell whether a story is life giving or not. Stories that are life giving, ie. from the Tree of life are without judgment. Stories that are not life giving always make me feel bad.
Christ says, by their fruits shall ye know them. I think this applies especially to the fruits of our thoughts, or our stories. The fruits are felt within our bodies as suffering; constriction, contraction, numbness, heaviness, and darkness when there is judgment.
Our minds are story tellers, and they always will be. That is their nature, so waking up is not about stopping or controlling our thoughts or stories. It is about knowing that whatever story you construct, is just that, a story, a perspective, an interpretation that is being made from events and experiences which in all honesty, arise out of mystery. Things befall us. Phenomenologically, life happens to us. Sometimes it follows the story we want it to follow and the outer efforts we make, but often it takes unexpected turns.
When this happens, our minds go into high gear. What is the meaning of this? What can I do to get it all back on track? This is a problem because....
Actually in that moment, we are being invited to pause and just be, in that state of presence prior to judgment, prior to story. We are being invited into not knowing and no story. We are being invited into just feeling what arises inside of us in response to the unexpected turn. We do not do this easily, but it is the purpose of this work to help us create this pause so we can shift into Being, being the healing container that holds all the stories and all the suffering that arises within us.
The difficulty here, is that we generally yet unconsciously refuse that invitation. The inner truth is we do not want to feel what is arising inside of us. In fact we have spent our life trying to avoid feeling these feelings. It seems that these particular feelings trap us and we are very afraid of these feelings.
We haven't been able to feel these feelings, because they never had a container. So instead of just re-traumatizing ourselves, I have found that we can and must first create an experience of presence which is ultimately Presence with/in ourselves. Then we can feel our fears and risk being present to our pain again.
This pain, the real pain can be felt and released if we are willing to be with it. To cocoon it so to speak with our awareness and compassion for the suffering. Often the perception is cleared as the awareness of the misconception dawns in consciousness in concert with the felt pain. The trick here is to feel the pain without the story, because the story tempts us into identification with this painful belief instead of awareness of it. This seduces us back into the stories with their familiar hell realms.
Adding what the Guide calls hard pain on top of the real or "soft" pain of our difficult circumstances, we choose a story that assumes there is a problem. There must be something wrong. What is it and How can I change it. The mind wants to know and doesn't want to know. So it creates a story that it believes about what is wrong, often on fairly flimsy evidence and usually it is all projection anyway, stemming from the unheld pain from an earlier trauma of a similar nature. Unconsciously the pain body is still trying to work this through and it uses our everyday experiences, especially when they resonate back to the childhood. The hard pain comes in with the subsequent judgement. We will in this paradigm inevitably judge ourselves or someone else, usually both, even whole races or cultures. The mind wants to discern, which is within its domain, but it is tangled up in the snake. Almost instantaneously we have an awareness and then a judgement.
Examine this judgement for yourselves and notice what is really going on with this habit.
Judgement is an act of separation pure and simple and it is separation that is at the heart of the negative pain bodies. They believe that separation will protect them from something unpleasant, This defense is actually an attack. We separate from others, but most crucially we separate and judge ourselves and our pain bodies. We try to eradicate them, we invalidate them and then we get mad at others for doing the same. So initially it is important to really focus on ones' relationship to oneself. Begin to get conscious of how you treat yourself. Not just physically eating healthy exercising, but how you speak to yourself inside yourself. Do you realize that you are always talking to yourself? So we need to stop talking all together, creating a gap in the mind stream and we need to become aware of how we are talking to ourselves.
It is happening now that the spell is being broken and we seem to be sinking or rising (really both) into our real nature at least periodically and learning to ground it. There are two things needed to do this. In addition to listening to our inner voices, we also have to learn to recognize and drop the story. Don't try to drop the story, that takes us back into the loop. Just come to your senses and as the saying goes your mind will get lost.
As Eckhart Tolle teaches, this will put a gap in the mind stream and bring you into the present and into your body. The breath is a wonderful focus for this. But it can be anything sensory, your outer world or your inner energy body. Nature is especially great for just Being With.