Making Faces

...Or Hanging Out With Your Cells

Try this for a moment. Using your impeccable cellular memory, close your eyes and arrange your face into a scared expression, an angry one, even hating. Don’t get caught up in your mind’s idea of some sort of story that should go with the expression. Just wear it like you were trying on something to see if it fits. Use just your cellular memory. No-one is watching.

Focus your attention on the way that each arrangement of cells makes you feel.

Now arrange your face into the cellular expression that is your closest approximation of loving. Loving a sunset, loving a place, loving a person, anything you can retrieve from memory that has to do with the act of loving. Feel how that feels. Turn up the corners of your mouth very slightly, just the shadow of a smile. Now slowly widen your mouth, expand. Feel what a grin feels like, undistracted, from the inside.

Arrange your face the way it remembers how to be when you feel good about yourself, when you absolutely love yourself. If you feel stymied by this, remember the warm way you feel about something simple that you love and turn it towards yourself as though it were a light. Be very aware of the quietly exquisite sensation of each and every one of your cells radiating love at you. Move casually from the cellular arrangement of loving yourself to that associated with hating yourself, between anger and joy and fear. Wear all these cellular arrangements like masks. Feel yourself slide from state to state.

Now wear the face that adores you, adores everything. Sit there and bask in in it for awhile. Wear as often as you like, it’s yours.

Responsibility and Freedom

We experience freedom in direct proportion to our ability to take responsibility for ourselves. The true meaning of responsibility is a beautiful one. It is the capacity to respond appropriately in each moment. We can only do this when we see clearly and we cannot see clearly until we understand how we work. It is a radical way to live. We are on the spot each moment. We can't afford to numb ourselves.

Energy therapy gives us back to ourselves. It is the beginning of an extraordinary love affair. We learn who we really are. It is like coming home. When you begin to see yourself clearly it is easier to care for yourself. When you care for yourself it becomes possible to care, really care, for others. Its how we make a better world, its how we fall in love.

How Are You, Really?

How are you? We are routinely asked this question several times a day but have you ever noticed how seldom we really know the answer. How can we begin to look after ourselves if we don’t even know how we are actually feeling. This level of self-alienation is considered perfectly normal.

I am not suggesting we unburden ourselves to everyone who asks us this question as a casual greeting. I am suggesting that every time someone asks the question you check in with yourself. See if you actually know how you are.

If we don’t know how we truly are most of the time how can we expect to function authentically or, for that matter, effectively.

Energy therapy reconnects you to yourself. You gradually become more aware of who you are and how you are feeling. You begin to trust that this noticing, this paying attention, provides a reliable guide for how to be in the world in a way that is true.

The French have a word for it: ennui. We sometimes call it irritable, impatient, dissatisfied, but ennui is more than that. Many of us wander around in a cloud of ennui, vaguely aware that we seem out of sync with everything and everyone.

Energy therapy provides a way to reach beneath the surface to what lies below. Often irritation is a disguise for sadness, even grief. Anger is the same. The reverse is also true; we can be weeping when what we are really feeling is angry. We cannot tend to ourselves, extend compassion, if we don’t realize this. We cannot know how to respond appropriately to our world without this essential information.

This process gives us back to ourselves. It is the beginning of an extraordinary love affair. We learn who we really are. It is like coming home. When you begin to really see yourself it is easier to care for yourself. When you care for yourself it becomes possible to care, really care, for others. Its how we make a better world, it’s how we fall in love.

www.boulderenergytherapy.com

Dropping the Noise

Here are some other differences between the capricious capacities of the mind and the power of wisdom.

Stop for a minute and listen to yourself. If the sound that you hear is cacophonous, deafening, clamorous. If it makes you clench your teeth. If it makes you react like you are facing a tiger on your path, then you are listening to the mind.

Try this experiment for just one second. Stop everything, just for a moment. All the worries all the concerns, let them go. Just drop the noise. You can always pick it up later. Now, suddenly, everything goes quiet. It is like dying. It is like giving up and letting go.

This is wisdom. It is the opposite of giving up. It is what it feels like to really live. It is the correct read on what is happening. Listen to it. It is calm, it is peaceful, it is unthreatened – remarkably powerful and unperturbed. You can always go back to the noise and the tension but try not to forget that this is what really lies behind the sound and the fury. This is the real seat of power, this is the departure point for any real advance. This is the place that all creativity comes from. This is who you are. 

Whenever you want to, you can be that person -- the one you really are. The one you have never stopped being. That which persists long after all the noise of this world has died. Whenever you get tired of all the noise and all the betrayal and all the fear in the world of the mind -- the land where The Mind is king -- you can always come home to what is real…and rest there.

The Audacity Of Wisdom

It is up to you to tame the mind, to call it’s bluff, to not believe everything it tells you. Use it appropriately but with a certain healthy skepticism. It has power, but YOU have the ultimate control. Not as a servant of the mind, but as its master. But you can’t master the mind using the tactics of the mind. You have to be wise. This often means doing the opposite of what the mind is suggesting. You let go when the mind is screeching at you that you will surely die!

This is how you housetrain this instrument – the mind, the bronco – that you have been given. If you don’t house train it, it will mess all over your house 

The mind is really a conservative, it is a bit of a Nazi. When important things come up to be processed it tells you it is time to be afraid. It tells you that your life, as you know it, is in danger. It tells you to clench up, clamp down, resist and contract. The mind is primitive in this way.

Real wisdom is gritty and uncompromising in its ability to recognize what is really going on.  Where the mind will be screeching and advocating a police-state of control, wisdom is suggesting you take a deep breath and relax. The mind says this is a wicked gamble, too much of a crazy risk. The mind speaks in these absolutes. 

Wisdom is audacious, radical and liberating. Wisdom is about freedom and peace. When you learn the way of wisdom you will not lose the knife-edge of the intellect. On the contrary you will be able to use the instrument of the mind appropriately and to its fullest capacity.

www.boulderenergytherapy.com

On Anxiety....And The Possibility Of Peace: Part 2

Blocked energy presents itself in your system for clearing much like a fruit ripe to be plucked. It appears because it is time for it to be there. We don’t recognize it as such. We tend to panic and attempt to wrestle it to the ground and hold it there. See above. We use up a lot of our personal energy doing this. This is unfortunate because it is not the enemy, however frightening it may seem. Think of the numerous, archetypal tales of the dragon in the forest.

The appropriate thing to do is to welcome it. Bruised, damaged energy requires welcoming in order to clear it and restore health. This gives us back the parts of us that have gone into retreat during traumatic times in the past. When the energy block is cleared there is more of us present, more of our talents, more of our intelligence, more creativity and more emotional capacity to participate.

When ‘nasties’ rise up we need to react counter-intuitively, or seemingly so. Our mind tells us to resist for all we are worth. It is wrong, but we’ll never know that unless we challenge it by actually doing what seems to expose us. If we don’t do this, the mind becomes preoccupied with the demons within, imagining that every ounce of strength is needed to hold them down. The mind believes it is under attack. It takes on a siege mentality.

It is important to see the mind for what it is: a powerful instrument always useful when used appropriately but never the last word. Wisdom is the last word and where wisdom comes from is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t matter what theories you hold about its origins, what matters is that it can be relied on to release you from the jaws of incipient madness because it knows something that the mind cannot fathom. It’s reference is a larger one. Wisdom works from the big picture. The mind is only a part of this big picture.

So locate the epicenter of the anxiety within your body – to the best of your ability – and, instead of wrestling with it and holding it down – breathe in and relax your hold. See what happens. Your mind will tell you that to release this hold will result in almost instant annihilation. It will tell you, in a high-pitched voice, that you will surely be overcome. It tells you that this is much too big for you to handle. Ignore it.

The mind cannot be the authority on it’s own source. It’s basically out of line. The mind is the bucking bronco, You, the big YOU, and your wisdom are the rider.

www.boulderenergytherapy.com