The Ins and Outs

Many years ago I worked with a spiritual guide who introduced me to focusing.  Especially if I was feeling a strong emotion, she would ask me to find the sensation in the body and we would hold space for it together as I tracked and reported my experience.  It was amazingly powerful.  I learned to move from being totally captured by the experience of sadness, or anger or judgement to being half a step outside, observing.  From that point of observation, there could be a kind of calm and compassionate curiosity and sometimes a deep unraveling of patterns of thought and behavior.

What was going on here?  I could see the movement from the center of emotion to something larger, the witness consciousness that somehow stood outside of the storm.  Focusing felt like a magic trick to shrink the emotion to be inside of my awareness instead of my entire attention trapped in the center of the emotion.  Once attention moved to some larger place, the practice was to focus on the sensations from the outside.  Sometimes the sensation itself moved, hid, intensified or shifted.  Sometimes the sensation would yield an image or some other kind of information that helped adjust the way I held space for it or freed up some energy and emotion, releasing through the body.

This spring as I explored something like this from a different angle. I was able to see that getting triggered was something like falling into a portal that transported you back to a time of wounding that wasn’t fully processed.  Energy healers talk about this as loops of energy that get stuck places in the body.  However, these loops now appear to me more like a sphere of trapped energy.  Certain conditions happening now can time warp us back into the center of these spheres where we are trapped in repeating loops of thought, behavior, feeling and sensation.  This spring something cracked open enough that I could see through the walls of this trap to something larger, something more like the ground. That whole experience was something akin to being captured by an emotion and there was a trick or a key to get out.  Whereas, shifting attention using focusing was a way out into something larger, seeing the crack and something more real outside of the place I was trapped did something similar here.  Throughout the summer I have been noticing when familiar old thoughts are running through my mind.  As soon as I notice, I have been using my five senses to be right in this moment and not slide back into some old dark hole.  When I can hold my attention in the space of now and feel whatever the thought is attached to, I get interesting insights or a release of energy.  Sound familiar?

If pain, especially ongoing or unresolved pain, creates a kind of gap or space in our experience of life, then it makes sense that connecting to something larger, something more primal and real, something that includes everything that got split off before, would be a connection point for healing.  This is session 3 of Reclaiming Oneness.  We will explore antidotes to those spaces of separation that look and feel real from their insides, but become opportunities and invitations to wholeness from a lager vantage.  We start Wednesday September 4^th, 2024.  More information and sign up contact me or go to GrowSoul.com.