Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Opening to the Flow of Reality that is Life
Continuation of Exploring a Kabbalistic View of Nothingness

Hesed-like Nature –
There’s nothing fixed about Reality. Reality is dynamic, constantly changing from moment to moment. Any identity structure, whether perceived as good or bad, is fixed. From this perspective, how can any identity structure be a part of true reality? The soul itself is dynamic, flowing, and can be experienced as such; however, these aspects of the soul cannot be experienced directly from within any fixed-structure of the personality.

Initiating the Opening – Expanding the Container
Possibly the most important step toward initiating even a crack of an opening is to recognize the contracted-state imposed by the identity-structure. Recognition is not easy when one is locked in place within an identity. Opening to ‘what is’ can be perceived as very scary at first, especially from the perspective of a contracted state, from within an identity-structure.

It’s ironic how an identity can make one experience a variety of negative emotions and feelings and yet the mere thought of exploring the experience feels threatening. Why? The negative emotions and feelings are familiar – known. Exploring them moves one into fear, fear that whatever will be experienced will be terrible, painful, and eternal. Now how does an identity know what will be? It doesn’t know.

Identities are comfortable with their miseries because at least the miseries are familiar territory.. The soul, by its very nature, is curious about experiencing whatever arises and exploring every aspect of the experience to see and feel whatever there is in the moment. The soul is naturally open, dynamic, constantly moving, changing, growing, flowing, developing. An identity is fixed, rigid, narrow, stuck, limited.

Approaches to Opening
All of the following approaches can be used to re-connect with personal consciousness – the soul. The order is not important. For example, one might use the 2nd approach first which can lead to revealing something about the 1st. In the moment that we practice these approaches, there’s a connection resulting in liberation from an identity, an identity that’s rooted in the past. In practicing these approaches, one is present to a direct experience in the present where healing takes place. Healing is about awakening into the present to whom we truly are. It does take practice. The more one practices, the more easily one can be present with ‘what is’ – with reality, life itself.

1. Recognize the contracted state through the feeling, the emotion. Name it.This first step can be enlightening in itself. An identity wants to be seen and understood, because it’s a part of us frozen in time that was not seen and understood. One can recognize the identity through paying attention to what one is experiencing (the feeling, emotion).

2. Ask open-ended questions with curiosity and wonder. Asking questions that are open-ended, like “how” or “what,” invites a full expression of what’s being experienced in the moment. Using beginning statements like: “It’s interesting that I feel a tightness in my chest . . . I wonder, what does this tightness look like from the inside?” Using consciousness itself, with all the creativity available in consciousness itself, invites realizations beyond anything an identity could imagine. Other questions or insights can arise while exploring from the inside of the feeling or emotion.

3. Locate where in the body the experience is taking place; describe it; let it unfold, change, move; and, describe in each moment what’s experienced. Embodying the experience in the present actually metabolizes the experience. Identity structures are really unmetabolized experiences.

To be continued . . .

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