Sometimes we may think that we are living in the moment and yet still not feel very light nor expansive inside. Being fixated and even mindful is not the panacea that it is marketed as. it is watered down Buddhism at best. We can block out the background distraction but the world still turns and distraction will be there once you stop being mindful on any object of attention! . Yet after all our mindfulness, something remains that we cannot quite cognize and it can weigh heavy, a dull feeling of self that demands distraction the moment you cease a meditation, even whilst in the moment it hovers about ready to dive bomb our sensibilities.
I don’t think the marketing of mindfulness takes this into account. This is what Sigmund Freud termed free floating anxiety, a nameless formless panic or terror that wells up from the depths, form nowhere. What Sigmund Freud ignored regarding ( The Body ) Wilhelm Reich perceived. That the body stores shocks and events, pre verbal, locking into us immense energy that could be activated for our benefit was a stroke of genius still not take as seriously as it could.
Working with the body can soothe brain chemistry, CNS and allow for an arising an acknowledgement of pain so that the very pain itself becomes a seed for our own personal development.
This is not and easy path and it is not fast, but it is steady and worthwhile and it brings results and confidence in its wake. Accepting that suffering is part of life and taking it as it comes bit by bit and working gradually with it, you could release that which has been stored and neglected. So screw the ego and rational thought for the body will do what is requested with intelligent active practice.
The Ego Body: 360 degrees of feeling continued.
The body is a totality of our lived experience because we firmly believe in our identity to the body and that we somehow own it. That this is it, we are what we are taught to believe and what happens to us defines our worthlessness or worth. More people feel like this than is accepted by society. Our feelings and emotional responses appear at least to be a sum total of our whole existence to date, if ignored, rejected, then in doing so the potential for movement and change evaporates.
Any belief that we are powerless is fatalistic and deeply masochistic in nature whether we have awareness of negative self talk or experience the embedded unaware belief that numbs us. Feelings of helplessness are programmed into the body via the nervous system, creating an addiction to all types of negative thinking that leads to emotional highs and lows.
As time goes by the events and experiences that shape us must not be underestimated. Intense feelings and thoughts are absorbed into the deep ecology of the human form and unconsciously shape our lives, it then can appear to us that events are happening externally to us by outside forces, when they really are self perpetuated, albeit unconsciously. This is a deception.
Inner conflict often goes totally unacknowledged due largely due to the fragmentation of our attention. The goals we aspire too are not always in accord with the desire and wishes of others or of the life proscribed by our educators and teachers.
Living a life that requires confirmation of a sense of worthiness from any source whatsoever whether it be from religion, family, friends, peers or society in general is a mere construct and arguably completely neurotic in origin. ( This does not mean that you can behave unethically, that is harm others ) The non reciprocal, competitive acquisition of power and control over others is a bench mark of success in the age of Artificial Intelligence. You may not be able to change directly events but you can change your inner response and in be internally free of inner negative association leading later to better outcomes and choices.
Human interaction is a battle ground of well defined and defended ego structures that we build to defend our sense of self against the games that are played out in our culture. These structures become so habitual that all of our experience whether good or bad leaves an imprint in the mind stream and the body.
We are conditioned from birth to live at the expense of others, mostly in non co-operation and in direct competition with every other being we encounter, living at the expense of self and others. We mainly operate because of financial reward and the promise of security.
This escape via external distraction the from the reality of the inner life of feeling, or avoiding inner life of feeling, ( avoiding some thoughts whilst embracing others ) developing a fantasy life, lying to oneself, incrementally produces a slow internal death, a draining of energy, money, self realisation and health. Ever think that we behave like zombies ? A person who denies their own inner feeling will have no trouble at all being cruel to another human being.
It is proven by physics that the human body is a manifestation of elements that are mainly made up of the space element and atoms ( so we are not made up of a nothing kind of space ) yet apparently we are 99.9999999% empty space, as is everything in the Universe.
We could be viewed as a diaphanous concoction of space and frequency with a perceived solidity run through with electrified consciousness.
But that is too fantastic and idea to be able to live by, because to ignore our experience would be to take a punch thinking that the fist will pass through that space and that we really live in that dimension. This idea of the atomic nature of ourselves is viewed by people with powerful machines to measure such things. We are not living that idea tough, we are mainly the space element and certainly we will struggle to integrate such an idea in our everyday interactions. Surely we cannot live in such a reality divorced from the world we experience.
Even as we directly perceive that we exist in one way ( seemingly solidly ) and can also accept the science that informs us that we are atoms vibrating at a frequency that only appears solid, is all very interesting! This all sounds impressive, but how can you deal with illness, poverty, anger, jealousy no job, bullying and all number of events. This will not feel like empty space. We don’t feel that spacious when the shit hits the fan and we are in some pain. So the empty space idea is nor very practical to deal with our day to day interactions. This is not really a recipe for life. Yet at the level of a highly trained mind this notion may be very helpful in letting go of conditioned responses to the solid world.
How we are really living is more basic and immediate than that, we could attempt to wake up our inner life, a visceral, felt, sensed, directly experienced and more connected to the world life. We must deal with the concrete appearance of outer circumstances and our relationship to the world. Our inner thoughts taint the outer world and the prejudice we have clouds our perceptions. To loosen up would be a healthy objective.
We can free up personal life force energy that is blocked, suppressed, repressed or stagnated and harness that same energy rather that it being wasted and frozen within us. Rather than deny feeling, painful events and circumstance we can accept, forgive, live through, breathe and move so what seems solid and permanent and unchanging can loosen up. Create a bit of flexibility in our body. The issues we live with could then be seen as simply self induced limitation rather than the imposition of others. There is a real and genuine courage that can arise from accepting the experience our bodies are going through.
Accepting pain and depression, anxiety and elation need not be a problem, instead it can be a blessing, because it is the key to freeing up your energy, harnessing it for what you want to achieve. Living an internally aware life.
It is of possible to inhabit your body with less restriction, by resting well, aligning the body, calming and regulating your breathing, naturally and therefore recognising what is happening in your internal environment and realise that you and everyone else erroneously believe that happiness is a state that is bequeathed from outside.
We are not alone:
Billions of others go through the exact same pains and more. It is not an easy path to take to develop a practice which aims at balance for your body, mind and energy. This is mainly I think due to an epidemic of distraction and addiction and meaningless exercise and meaningless ideologies.
It is not events that shape us, but our thoughts about the events. So when something happens to us in the relative sense we have 3 ways we can go with our thinking. We can like an event, dislike an event or be ( neutral ) regarding and event.
Potentially then we all have the tools to really regulate egocentric and egotistical ideas that we have developed over time which absorb much time and energy. We therefore can self actualise the normally unconscious processes that restrict our awareness of how we are really interacting with the external world. It is from this perception that we can witness the utter meaningless of external focusing on happiness of things, external objects and the negatively conditioned thinking of others.
What goes for normality is far from our natural state of being.
To misinterpret or ignore the body will only negate the foundation of your existence, stifle any real happiness. Such a happiness that can only arise internally and spontaneously by being comfortable in your own skin. This is predicated by developing of a relaxed attitude to yourself in the first instance.
It really can help a person to nurture a curiosity about the life of the body and mind where you can really hone your perceptions and see, feel and know how much the body influences our mind and emotions through conditioned responses. Cultivating a sense of peace within your body is a wonderful investment and cheaper than health insurance.
Practices that calm you and help you integrate with your energy can only benefit you and be of benefit also to others you come into contact with.
I am of the belief that everyone walks around with their fair share of trauma. Trauma is not all out there for everyone to see and it is often slowly developed over time and rerouted in various activity to alleviate the rising tensions within us. Exercise can be a great way to redirect the blocked energy of trauma but does little to dissolve the cause of the trauma.
Trauma is not always a massive external shock experience. Our ability to deal with a traumatic event has to do with our flexibility or lack of flexibility. physical, energetic and emotional and mental.
Something has to yield under pressure for if the pressure we endure is too great we know that the body for example will become injured, maybe permanently, in an emotional level too we can break. It is the feeling of helplessness and our self identification with events that can break our spirit. So the strengthening of self identity appears not to be the mechanism to heal, instead the opposite being the case that by the relaxing of self identity, the unshackling of self identity creates the space where we can begin to heal trauma.
Our self defence in life is to bluff, impress upon others, convince, coerce and manipulate the world to the way we think it should be so that we bring comfort and security. This is in direct conflict with the incoming stresses we all face daily, where wanting bigger and better is the new religion of the masses. The more you think you have the greater potential you have to really break when the external fortress you have built begins to crumble.
Not all is lost though. Accumulated trauma perceived at the body level can be gradually dissolved and in doing so one gains access to energy that has been suppressed. The release of this blocked energy of course gives a feeling of possibility rather than helplessness. The root of anxiety is taking ourselves so seriously that we create more defences against an uncomfortable world. Protecting your ego is the worse strategy for total health. To put it another way, we maintain a constant fear and concomitant defence based on a past experience and this highjacks our life force. We shore up our ego and create new battlements of a castle walls of ego, we remain inside this fortress and this effectively robs us the ability to move, change course or experience life in open way and life affirming way or let go of trauma that has imprinted brain activity.
The ego can be viewed as defence against feeling, shame, guilt, negative self affirmation. The ego being a self created fantasy, self actuated, created in defence of who you think and feel we are is a lived construct, a fantasy. What a relief.
Left unsupervised the ego will collect unhappiness and send you the bill.
Copyright (2018) C R Chappell
360 degrees of Feeling
The Ego ‘s fight for Survival
The embodiment of an ego within felt sense experience of a being denies the freedom to live freely in space. This book is a commentary on the battle of personal defences against conscious and unconscious processes that harm the internal and external environment and how to approach a personal practice to liberate oneself from its grip