The word seems innocuous enough, but when you find yourself using it in the context of your spiritual work (and I promise to come up with a better term than this), it’s a cue to stop and take notice. Your Personal Mind App (PMA) may be piloting the plane.
Consider the example of fear.
Le’ts say you are experiencing a lot of change in your life. Things that you always took for granted as being solid and real are shifting about like quicksand. You feel fear, or apprehension. Not just about the outcome, but about the whole process.
What happens: First, there is the feeling (pure energy in the body). Then, a very basic part of your program names it. Fear. Your PMA scoops it up and takes ownership: “I am afraid!” So we go from a powerful energy arising in your body that is named and then owned. This happens in the space of a second, so you may never be aware of it.
Next, your mechanical mind, the one that chatters at you day and night, starts talking to you about it. This is where all kinds of convoluted ideas get injected into your experience, including should — which is more accurately shouldn’t, because when you say you should, you are in many cases saying you shouldn’t be doing, thinking or feeling something that you are. So something is happening in the moment and you are saying it shouldn’t be happening. You feel fear and you judge that trust is better than fear, so you’re going to ride the raft of should from fear to trust.
The problem is, the level of mind you are dealing with, the one that takes ownership and chatters at you, isn’t built to trust or love.
It’s designed to be in control, to take ownership of experience, to deconstruct the whole into parts and to stay alive.
Everything I’ve just said is really not important. It’s not necessary to understand it in order to do what’s really important and useful, and that is: know the difference between the mind working to structure experience and clear, open observation.
Mind structuring: There is a feeling of constriction, of tightness. You feel your consciousness literally in your head. Your mind closes in on the experience and starts taking it apart, judging aspects of it, comparing it to other experiences, stuff you’ve read, what you should and shouldn’t be doing. The whole affair is an act of constriction.
Observation: The nervous system relaxes as you expand your awareness to include all aspects of your current, real lived experience. You become larger so that you can hold it, with enough space to be apart from it, viewing it, not in it trying to get out of it. As you give room to the feeling or experience, it may change and unpack itself, showing you even more of what’s beneath and within it.
You then expand more and more as necessary until, in this example, the fear, is allowed to be just as it is, as large as it is, in whatever fashion it is. It has plenty of room and there is no struggle against it and no getting caught in it. It is there, as it is. You are fully there with the experience, but you haven’t taken ownership of it. Since you don’t own it, you also don’t need to deny it and you don’t need to necessarily do anything about it.
There is enough room for you and it to be there. Personally, I experience my pelvic region become like a giant hollow bowl and my energy body expands from there out of the back of my body and my consciousness is not lodged in my head, but is expanded outward, like a giant halo from the base of my spine that expands out several feet to above the top of my head. You may feel it differently, but it is a physical, visceral feeling of expansion. There is also no mental narration that takes place.
Interesting things happen after this. Not that you need them to or expect them to.
The fear may resolve itself. Or it may tell you or show you things. Sometimes this is a very peaceful experience, but sometimes you may be bawling or having some other physical reaction.
The energy is moving through you. No matter how messy things seem, you can still remain in observation/expansion mode as this happens.
Can you notice the difference in feeling between these two states? They feel entirely different in the body. When you notice you are doing a boa constrictor move, can you switch into observer mode, and expand?
In the expansion/observation mode, there is no one telling you what should or shouldn’t happen, and yet, what needs to happen does.
You can practice this by picking a topic or memory that brings up a powerful feeling and just noticing in your body what it’s like to hold it with both methods: first with the PMA owning the feeling and constricting around it and then switch to the open observation mode and see what that feels like. Get to know the way you feel in the body when you are doing one or the other.
This is not just about feelings, but also relates to being in the “analyzing” mode. There are times where analysis is appropriate and helpful, but those of us who tend toward being analytical pull that tool out reflexively. We don’t even realize it is a tool, because it so dominates our mental experience. When you are analyzing, try to notice the difference between the way that feels and the way open observation feels.
