The Path is Everywhere: guide to healing developmental trauma

whitecoast

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
Hey all, I wanted to share about a book that was recommended to me by my therapist about healing developmental trauma, and how to heal and navigate the disturbances it can induce in one's thoughts, emotions, and well-being. The book is called The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You. It is written by Matt Licata, who has a PhD in psychotherapy and leans heavily on the the NARM (neuro-affective relational model) taught in HDT, polyvagal theory, and also wisdom from a number of spiritual traditions including esoteric western and eastern traditions (eg, alchemical metaphors, buddhism, tantra). The mysticism is there mostly for the power to poetically illustrate a given point. Metaphor is never shied away from in the book, and while sometimes I think it can be a bit heavy, I also understand the purpose behind it when it comes to really trying to get a concept or perspective through to someone who has experienced a lot of trauma. For those types of cases it's not a matter of reading one sentence and having the doors blown open (the best case scenario); sometimes a person needs to hear something in multiple ways (similar to the romance reading), with compassionate language, for it to sink in enough to hopefully sir something and initiate the process of integration. Similar to reading a lot of romance novels. :P

I read HDT a few years ago, and it was highly educational, but was of a mostly clinical description on how to apply it as a therapist to a patient. The style of TPIE is such that it's a guided journey the author is taking you on, inviting us to step into and and get in touch with the damaged parts of ourselves, and how to sustain and nourish that contact we make with our dissociated parts of ourselves without shutting down or retreating further. There are many books about healing from trauma that have been mentioned on this forum. This book itself is light on theory (much of which has been covered elsewhere), but I found it excels simply in the advice and emotional support given when it comes to engaging with a certain question or issue of relation, self-regulation, developmental wounding, how to hold oneself together in the middle ground between repressing or identifying with an emotion, and so on.

There is a lot of striving to validate where feelings come from, in the sense of appreciating their original and purely adaptive function of protecting you from further fragmentation due to an overwhelming stress. In spite of this though there are always qualifications for such an exploration to be grounded in morally correct behavior and acting, as the Buddhists say, "skillfully" (e.g. no venting to strangers in nontherapeutic contexts or acting without consideration of other people's needs).

One issue that is discussed in the book is how to avoid certain traps known as "spiritual bypass," where people shore up an identity of being spiritual as a way to avoid examining the discomforting feelings and emotions we can have brought up at irregular times, or to disparage ourselves for not "having everything together" or not being farther along in our path of genuine integration or spiritual growth than our story tells us we should be. This is seen as just another form of self-aggression and self-abandonment where an individual is again setting up a narrative to separate them from the raw deeper feelings by another degree. The protective function this has, to keep the process slow and steady, is another aspect to be honored and appreciated in and of itself, according to the author, which makes a lot of sense to me just in my own explorations of prevebal trauma and the like.

The title of the book is premised on the conviction that every encounter you have with negative emotions—heck, emotions of any kind—is an opportunity to become more deeply acquainted with yourself, in such a way that you can embrace and give space to it such that it will no longer overwhelm you or control your actions; these emotions can find their proper place within you when held properly. The subtitle of “Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You” refers to the life force and power we all have, and from which we can become estranged from due to splitting and dissociation. The book is an invitation to a journey into the self, the whole of our self—not just the known parts of us—and to become acquainted with and loving to the whole of us, that we can bring more of ourselves to bear in the service of others and creating a new world.

There are quite a few different topics and favorite quotes that I want to share.

Chapter 1, "Into the Holding Environment," is about holding space for either others or yourself, where you create a container for someone to open up more to the more traumatic or vulnerable feelings people commonly suppress due to being in an unsafe environment. Every therapist worth their salt should be able to provide a space of this nature. As the author points out, we also have to learn to create this holding space for ourselves also.

There is a primordial longing wired into us as infants to be seen: for our subjective experience to be held, mirrored, and validated by another. In an environment of empathic attunement, we are able to rest in the mystery of who and what we are. Grounded in this environment, it is safe to explore unstructured states of being and engage courageously and skillfully with the world around us. We can take risks in relationship, choose at times to lead with our vulnerability, and explore deeply in the realization that we are both separate and connected. We can flow with our separateness and then change course and fully embrace our nature as utterly interconnected. We can move between these realms seamlessly and with our hearts open. In this sense, love is an alive field of presence in which our subjectivity can unfold into more integrated levels of organization.

From this perspective, “I love you” equals “I allow you.” I allow you to have your own experience—to organize and make meaning in the way that you do—and I will offer you my presence and warmth even if I do not understand you or agree with your perception or conclusions. Even if your being yourself triggers within me surges of emotion, vulnerability, and unmetabolized feeling, my vow is to allow you to be what you are. While I will not allow you to abuse me or to act violently or break the agreements and boundaries we have established, I will allow your inner experience to be what it is. Even if I cannot allow your behavior, I will not demand that the flow of feeling or emotion within you be reorganized to fit my own preferences, hopes, or fears.
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Additionally, we can give ourselves these same qualities of good contact and attuned space. In many ways, this is one of the essences of true meditation: to meet our immediate experience exactly as it is, in a warm but provocative, curious, and intimate embrace, without any agenda that it be shifted, transformed, changed, or healed. As we deepen in our practice, we come to discover that what we already are—as warm, open awareness itself—is in fact the ultimate holding environment. We do not become our true nature in time, or produce it by way of process or struggle. Rather, we train ourselves to recognize, open into, and participate in it, in ever deepening and more creative ways. In this way, we discover that we are already held and do not need to seek this holding by way of any external form, or through any inner process in time. In other words, it has already happened.
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Turning... [to] the broken and the dark (within) may never feel safe, but we must discover if this is still a requirement as it was when we were young children. There is no right or wrong answer here and you cannot take anyone else’s word for it: you must see for yourself. Don’t assume you know what is most true as your conditioned history is sure to be there to greet you as you begin this inquiry. With curiosity, courage, patience, and compassion, you can slowly drop underneath your history and into the unprecedented aliveness of the here and now, into the body and the felt sense of the situation, where new information and new data may be found.

In this inquiry, you may discover that while safety is a perfectly valid experience and one that you naturally prefer, perhaps it isn’t safety that you are ultimately after. What if the demand to always feel safe was not actually in support of the deepest longing within you, and was instead an unconscious defense against the aliveness you were sent here to know and embody? What if the demand for safety is a remnant of the past and holding you back from the life of intimacy, connection, and gratitude that you so genuinely long for?
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When you are stripped of unexamined concepts of safety and the known—and of your demand that the movement of love conform to your hopes, fears, and the way you thought it would all turn out—you will be shown what you are....When the known crumbles away, all that remains is your burning heart. There is nothing more alive than that. There is nothing more sacred than that. There is nothing safer than that.
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When you are triggered and your emotional world is crashing down on you, experiment with shifting your awareness out of the interpretations of what is happening and into your body, into the life that is surging within you. Your interpretations, while also important to explore, arise from what you already know. They have a way of keeping you wedded to your conditioned history and out of the fresh, spontaneous wisdom of the here and now. You may find that your belly, your heart, and your throat are alive with important data, if you will explore them with warmth and awareness, opening the gates to previously hidden guidance that is attempting to reach you. While the narrative is vivid, colorful, and convincingly compelling, it is an act of self-love to slow down and return to immediacy. The storyline will be waiting for you at a later moment, when you have come back online and can engage it with grounded presence and fresh vision.
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Often we will say, “I’m fully in my body. I’m in pure, direct contact with the raw feelings and sensations of anger, sadness, hopelessness, and shame. Don’t tell me I’m not feeling all that! I’ve been sad for so long! The shame has been there my entire life.” But if you pause, slow way down, and get curious about the actuality of your experience in the present (rather than in your interpretations of it), you may discover that often what you are in touch with is a subtle narrative you have wrapped around your immediate experience that is now orbiting around the aliveness. There is nothing inherently wrong, problematic, or “unspiritual” about the narrative. It is just one degree removed from the transformative fires of the here and now, and usually an expression of our past, conditioned history.
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Emotional pain has been pathologized in our world, along with tenderness, heartbreak, grief, and any sort of state of feeling down. We doubt ourselves and question our very being, afraid to trust in the purity and integrity of our experience as it is.

But emotional pain is not pathological. Grief is not a condition to be diagnosed and treated. Feeling down and blue and a bit hopeless is not a disease that needs to be cured by consumption, whether that consumption is of material goods or new inner states. A broken heart is pure and complete on its own, filled with integrity, intelligence, and life. It need not be mended nor transformed into something else. It is the vehicle by which the poetry of your life will flow.

To stay embodied with waves of grief, confusion, rage, fear, exhaustion, hopelessness, and doubt … to provide sanctuary and safe passage for the pieces of a broken world … to dissolve once and for all the trance of self-abandonment … this invitation is one that is radical and nonconventional by its nature, appearing now for your consideration.

To infuse the entire spectrum with breath, life, awareness, and holding will liberate an eruption of skillful energy and help us to find meaning, to bear the unbearable, and to truly be there for others when they are suffering. (this resonated very deeply with me). And to be warriors in the world at those times when we are needed most.

Chapter 2, "Crucible of the Broken," teaches about reconsidering how one reacts to the approach of disturbing emotions or feelings which may be unconscious or about to erupt into fuller awareness. The author challenges readers to try not to see the existence of negative emotions in themselves as inherently bad. They can instead become our teachers, and can instead be seen as signs or forerunners to increasing depths of awareness and emotional aliveness. In the section on sadness the author comments:

The presence of sadness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It does not mean anything about who you are or your inherent value as a person, or that you have “failed” or lost your way. It means you are alive.... Go ahead. Be sad. But be sad fully. Set aside the resistance to this movement within you and allow it to express itself, share its secrets, and bestow its gifts upon a world that has forgotten the purity of the broken. Love is full spectrum and will unleash all of its children here, including sadness, to awaken itself in form. It is an act of profound kindness to turn into the open, achy caverns of the heart and seed them with holding.

Dare to see that the presence of sadness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It does not mean that you have done life and relationships wrong, or that you are lacking in faith, trust, or gratitude. It doesn’t mean you have forgotten a “secret,” need to meditate better, become more adept at staying in the present moment, or that you are unlovable or beyond redemption.... Sadness is not something you need to fix, cure, or transform. It need not be healed, but held. You need not shift sadness into some “higher” state or apply teachings so it will yield into something else, for it is complete and pure on its own. You need not pathologize your sadness or fall into the spell of a world that has abandoned the wisdom buried inside the broken pieces. Stay close to your sadness and surround it with curiosity, presence, and warmth. With the fire of awareness and with the ally of your breath, descend underneath the story of the sadness and into the crucible of the body where the sadness essence dwells and makes its luminous home. Go on a journey into the core of the feelings, sensations, and images and into the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held.

Similar sections exist for aloneness, melancholy, and also anxiety, shared in part below because you can replace anxiety with virtually any type of negative emotion linked with trauma:

From this non-shaming and compassionate holding space, you can inquire as to whether the disquiet, shakiness, and unsurety—though misunderstood and dismissed in our modern world—are in reality forerunners of breakthrough, special representatives of the sacred death-rebirth cycle. As part of your contemplation, you can explore whether the freedom and aliveness you are so genuinely longing for will ever be found in transforming, replacing, or even healing this tender vulnerability in the core of your being. Or whether your deepest yearnings will be met by way of entering into relationship with it. By opening your heart to it. By daring to practicing intimacy with it. By no longer apologizing for it.
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As you deepen in your inquiry and train yourself for short periods of time to stay with the feelings and sensations that are moving within you, you may discover that there is no ongoing, solid, continuous thing called “anxiety” that is happening to you from the outside... It is important to remember that the word “anxiety” is a concept, and as with all concepts is one step removed from the actuality of your lived, embodied experience. Underneath the very loaded word, in a given moment of here-and-now experience, the concept “anxiety” overlays a unique, alive, unprecedented arrangement of physical sensation, emotion/feeling tone, and conceptual narrative, at times accompanied and fueled by mental, visual imagery as well as an impulse to take action. Becoming aware of what is actually happening at each of these levels of experience, one at a time, can help you approach what is happening in a bite-sized way rather than feeling you need to confront the anxiety all at once, as if it were an enemy you are being called to go to war with.
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Once you connect in a very direct way with what is actually happening within you—instead of primarily with your interpretation of what is happening and the habitual conclusions you have come to about what it all means—you may sense that continuing to claim you are “suffering from anxiety” is a subtle form of self-abandonment, and even self-violence....Yes, the symptoms of anxiety can be disturbing and can be quite icky... The question is this: Are these feelings accurate representations of the deepest truth of your situation, in the here and now? This is not an inquiry to take lightly, but one to make slowly, over time, with curiosity and an open heart, so you can see for yourself what is most true—now. Not what was true when you were a young child.
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It is easy to dismiss waves of anxiety, angst, and apprehension, to conclude that their presence is clear evidence that something is wrong. While it is perfectly natural to want to take some sort of action to calm the storm, we don’t want to do so at the expense of our own growth and evolution. Before we rush to quell the symptoms, we can practice attuning to what is arising to be met. We can practice holding, containing, tolerating, and opening into it in a given moment of time. In this way we may come to discover that our freedom—even our “healing”—is not dependent upon making these symptoms go away, but upon befriending them, getting curious about them, and investigating our actual experience as it unfolds from moment to moment. The project of “fixing me” is birthed and the unending war of self-improvement waged from unexamined emotional conclusions about what intense and disturbing feelings mean about who you are as a person at the deepest levels. Many have discovered how exhausting the journey of self-improvement has become and are aching for deep rest, an ancient sort of relaxing into their lives as they are, which is not dependent upon first “fixing” our emotions or replacing one experience with another. The notion that you can be free within the experience of anxiety can be boggling to the mind, but the body and the heart know this truth, that your freedom is not dependent upon the appearance or disappearance of any particular psychological, emotional, and somatic phenomena.


What I also liked about this chapter was a section called "At the Edge of a Cliff," which talks about both the concerns people can have about opening the proverbial Pandora's Box of unmet and unprocessed feelings and trauma, and about an overzealous desire to dig through to the bottom of one's unconscious as fast as possible to get on with the personal project of spiritual evolution:

To set aside the ways you have come to defend yourself against the tenderness and depth of what you are would require that you first return your conscious awareness directly to those parts you have disowned at an earlier time. All of the feelings, emotions, images, fantasies, complexes, personas, and the entirety of the shadow in all its forms: the fears of intimacy, the anxiety around death, the panic of abandonment—all of it. Most have spent their lives organizing their experience around minimizing or altogether avoiding contact with this material, a strategy that makes sense from the perspective of maintaining a kind of homeostasis and status quo. The question, however, is whether the status quo is really going to cut it for you. Or whether you are called to something else.

It is important to see that these organizing principles are not the expression of some neurotic, intrapsychic conflict but are relational strategies rooted in regulating what would otherwise be an avalanche of overwhelming anxiety. While we all may have some hope that we are ready and willing to release these strategies all at once, it doesn’t really work like that. The wholesale dismantling of our defensive organization is not recommended. In fact, to do so is often more an expression of self-aggression and fear than it is of wisdom and kindness, as it is only the ego that feels the need to storm its own castle and tear itself down.

The chapter wraps up with some broader discussion of the notion of psychological death and rebirth; in learning to separate our narratives from our emotions we can see the validity in the emotion but falseness in the narrative (especially an outdated one), and in this space of "context collapse" the importance of experiencing the uncertainty there as not problematic inherently but rather something that over time will be reborn with greater understanding.

[W]hat if this lowliness were a legitimate experience, a messenger of some sort that is trying to break through an old dream, an outdated image, a worn-out narrative about yourself and something you thought was so important? What if in the totality of what you are, a wave of “unhappiness” is just as authentic and genuine as a wave of “happiness,” laying the ground for something new and unexpected to emerge? In a way that the mind might find crazy or even dangerous, what if we were to dare to see that even a moment of depression is valid and an attempt of psyche to communicate? Love not only takes form as flow, sweetness, and so-called “positive” feelings, but at times as the activity of death and deflation, reorienting old vision so rebirth can occur.

During these times of psychic transition and reorganization, what we conceive of as the purpose of our life begins to crumble and fall apart, and the rug is pulled away.
What is the new reference point around which we’ll organize? Where are the identities we were once able to rest in and find meaning? As if this dissolution isn’t enough on its own, nothing has arrived to replace the old with something new. We are between worlds, without the past to lean into but also without any future that we can look to for solid ground and inspiration. We are in the realm of Hermes, guide of the liminal and the dead, and in the undefined space between it all. Yes, it can be disorienting and bewildering in this place, but has something gone wrong? Is death wrong? Must we scramble urgently to replace it with “life”? Does any of this make any sense on the path of the heart?
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It is difficult but possible to befriend waves of numbness and depression as carriers of a certain kind of life, though theirs is a signature that does not conform to conventional ideas about who you are and what you’re doing here. Depth, meaning, and information are often buried in these experiences, but you must open in new ways to receive this level of guidance. These visitors come not as obstacles but as invitations for you to slow down and provide safe passage to something that needs to die within you, so that you may lay the groundwork for new forms of love to emerge, be reborn, and flourish. It takes a tremendous amount of courage, curiosity, and self-care to go into this material and open to it, for it is not what is normally presented as what is required on the path of healing and inner work. But love is not only peaceful, calming, and creative. At times is wrathful, dark, and destructive. In fact, it is everything, and a partial love is never going to do. For you are wired for something immense.

Licata has some comments about the word "integration," with respect to re-integrating fragmented parts of ourselves.

Often what is meant by “integrating” or “healing” trauma (loosely defined here as any experience characterized by unbearable or overwhelming affect) is that one day we will “get over it,” “transcend” it, meditate or “manifest” it away, or otherwise purge it from what we are. In my clinical experience (in sitting in the fire alongside many courageous men and women with the most heartbreaking histories), this view of trauma is in large part inaccurate, aggressive, misguided, and at times even dangerous and violent. There are some things that happen to us that we will never “get over,” nor would this even be an appropriate goal or lens to use in approaching the sacredness of the human temple.
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But if what we mean by “integration” is discovering a place inside us where we can hold and contain our experience, make sense of what happened in new ways, and discover deeper meaning, then these concepts can come alive again. Slowly, over time, guided by new levels of kindness, clear-seeing, and multileveled awareness, we can begin to bear that which has been unbearable and provide sanctuary and safe passage for the shards of the broken world to reorganize. As we train ourselves to re-inhabit our bodies even in the face of profoundly disturbing cognitions, feelings, and sensations, we can begin to weave a more integrated narrative of our lives, reauthoring the sacred story of who we are, our purpose here, and what is most important to us. We can gather the pieces into a coherent whole and begin to trust in the validity of our experience again. The goal, then, is not some fixed state where we have successfully purged an aspect of our self-experience from what we are, as if it were some wretched foreign substance, but rather to find a larger home for it within us. Slowly, we can allow what has become frozen and solidified to thaw and become flexible. Ultimately, it is love, in the most resplendent sense of the word, that will soften the wounds of the body and the heart, for they will never unwind in an environment of self-aggression. It’s just not safe or majestic enough there.

(The idea of "letting go" is covered a bit later on as well).

Chapter 4, "Wholeness and the Spiritual Journey," has several sections. The first talks about the phenomenon of spiritual bypass, which is a term coined by John Welwood several decades ago to describe the use of spiritual pursuit as a psychological defense mechanism:

As with any significant activity that offers the promise of depth and meaning, engagement with spirituality can provide a very rich pathway into the unfolding of the sacred world and the endless dimensions of the human heart. It can also be used to avoid emotional pain, to protect us from the demands of intimacy, to provide a buffer against unresolved feelings, and to keep at bay the very alive, untamed landscape of our vulnerability in all its forms. This observation is not meant to suggest that we turn from our most sacred beliefs and practices, but rather that we engage them with eyes wide open. There are an infinite number of ways ego can co-opt even the most revered teachings to fortify itself in the attempt to remedy early developmental failure, unresolved attachment wounding, the pain of chronic misattunement, and unmetabolized trauma of all kinds. Believing we are becoming more intimate with our experience, we may be surprised to discover that we are in fact unconsciously distancing ourselves from the aliveness we so deeply long for....

As with any form of avoidance of negative emotion, what's advised is to approach it with openness and curiosity, and not with a sense of condemnation and urgency that works contrary to proper integration (as described earlier):

For many of us spiritual seekers, the ultimate letting go, what we really need to let go of, is the “ego” itself. The ego has become the bad girl and boy of spirituality, hiding inside the cracks and crevices, ready to surge at any time in a way that is very nonspiritual, mucking up everything with its selfish, ignorant, and pathological activity... Making use of spirituality to avoid certain aspects of ourselves is not “bad,” pathological, or inherently problematic. Nor do we need to diminish, critique, or practice aggression toward it, making use of our inquiry to reenact early dynamics of judging and shaming our organizational strategies.We do not engage in avoidant behavior because there is something wrong with us but because we are alive, sensitive, and doing our best to take care of ourselves using the tools we have at our disposal. Like any defensive behavior, the activity serves a function and can be respected as such. And then from a clear, spacious, non-shaming seeing, these subtleties can be explored with compassion, care, and open curiosity—fueled by the longing to know what is most true. As we inquire with our hearts open, we can see what feelings and aspects of ourselves our beliefs and practices may be inadvertently helping us avoid, and investigate whether we are ready to turn back toward them and provide a home for their metabolization and integration. No shame, no blame, no self-aggression. Just more awareness, presence, and kindness. No urgency to dismantle our defensive organization or “get enlightened” overnight or resolve it all on the heels of an insightful weekend retreat. Just grounded, open-hearted curiosity and inquiry, inspired by the love of truth.

Another section called "A most sacred story" talks about narratives and how they shape in fundamental ways how we engage with our emotional and unconscious content. It also addresses how some new age or psychotherapeutic practices (especially those somatically centered) over-emphazie "letting go of your story," and how a more balanced approach is needed: "a light touch, resting in the unresolvable, rich middle territory between denial and fusion."

The goal of this work is not to “get rid of your story” but to have a more flexible relationship with it. At times you can wear it as an ornament and at other times you can set it down for a while, allowing it to rest from a long journey, picking it up again only if it is helpful in connecting with others and in opening into the mystery.
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Allow yourself to come close to the narrative of your life. What story are you telling? It is both wise and kind to know the stories that are surging under the surface and discover whether they are yours or belong to another. Are you living your own life or someone else’s? Take a moment, and see. There’s no need to be afraid. You will not be tainted, or lose your way, or fall from grace, or lose your powerful “nondual” realization. The invitation is to move toward the story you have been telling, to get really clear on the lens through which you organize your experience, for it is only in the knowing the story you are telling that you will be able to make a conscious decision as to whether you would like to tell a different one.... Of course the greatest story of all is that you no longer have a story, that you have “transcended” all stories and that there is “no one here any longer” to tell a story. You are welcome to tell this story as well! But perhaps you will be willing to see that it too is only partial, like all stories. In this very moment, you can finally call off the war with your stories... It is all too common in contemporary spirituality to be anti-story, to devalue any sort of narrative about one’s experience, as if engaging at the level of story is something to apologize for, evidence that we’re missing the mark and getting caught up in “drama” and “the ego.” Often when I speak with people about what is going on for them, they will preface their report with something like, “Well, I mean, not to get into my story or anything, but …” As if it were something to be ashamed of to have a story, to have a way to organize and make meaning of their experience.

One of my favorite sections of the book, called "Love has no Opposite," challenges the (in my opinion pernicious) idea that fear is the opposite of love.

Fear is merely a temporary wave in the nervous system, longing to be met, integrated, and metabolized in the wholeness that you are, as are all forms that appear in the mystery of the inner landscape. It is not an enemy against whom you fight imaginary spiritual battles. You can call off the war and set aside the conditioning of a spirituality of aggression once you see how much unnecessary suffering such fictional wars generate. Apprehended with an open heart, fear is revealed to be a unique form of aliveness that seeks the light of your presence, which could never, ever be blemished by the temporary movement of fear. By abandoning fear and concluding that its presence is evidence that something has gone wrong and you have failed, you inadvertently keep alive the ancient pathways of self-abandonment and self-violence. Love is not opposed to fear but wishes to embrace it, enter into intimacy with it, and provide room for its essence to unfold and illuminate. There is no need for you to fear fear any longer. In this very moment, you can call off the war with your experience, holding whatever arises within your body and your heart as an invitation into wholeness. When fear is fully met and safe passage is provided, it reveals itself, like all form, as none other than love in disguise. You need no longer practice a spirituality of exclusion and aggression. Fear is not the opposite of love, for love has no opposite.

On the pressure to "let go," and the ways it can serve a maladaptive purpose that isn't attuned with our inner experience and the proper processing that needs to be done to truly let go of something:

We are often admonished (and admonish others) to “get over it,” as if our past traumas, surging emotions, addictive behaviors, and organizing narratives are something we can just “choose” to “get over” one sunny afternoon. If we will allow ourselves to get curious about this, we can explore whether this demand to “let go” is serving us, and if so, to what end. And as we look even deeper, we may see that in large part the demand to “let go” has its origin in early childhood, where this was often a subtle (or not so subtle) message from the attachment figures around us: “Just get over it.” “Stop crying.” “Stop being so sad. You should be grateful for all you’ve been given.” “Don’t you dare be angry with me.”
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It is important to note that I’m not talking about an external behavior that is abusive, harmful, or unskillful toward yourself or another. Yes, please let go of these. Rather, I’m speaking about the relationship with your inner world of beliefs, images, fantasies, meanings, hopes, fears, emotions, feelings, and bodily sensations—the entire landscape of your internal world and subjective experience. This is an interesting inquiry and one that you must enter into without any preconceived notions about what you might find. As with all of the inquiries and invitations in this book, it is important to approach these experiments with a fresh and spontaneous heart and mind. Not as the expert, but as the beginner. Dare to see as clearly as you can what is most true, even if it does not conform to what you’d like to be true, what you’ve been told is true, or what you should arrive at if you conduct the inquiry in the “right” way. From this open and inquisitive place you can then explore whether it is the wisest, most compassionate, or most skillful course of action to “let go,” your intention for doing so, the implications of taking such an action, and what that process might actually look like in real time.

What would it mean, for example, in your actual, present experience to “let go” of fear, a limiting narrative of abandonment, a wave of nauseous anxiety in the belly, a contraction or racing in the heart, constriction in the throat—or heartbreak, confusion, grief, or rage? Is this the deepest invitation you are receiving? To “let go”? Why? Do you believe that “letting go” of parts of yourself is going to make you happy? Fulfilled? At peace? Whole? Become passionately curious and interested in knowing your motivations for this, and what is truly driving the demand to “let go.” Is it coming from love? From fear? From wisdom? From avoidance? From unresolved feelings of unworthiness? From the fragmented self-narrative that something is wrong with you as you are? These are not questions to take lightly but to spend time and care with, discovering in the fire of our own direct experience what is most true. Does “letting go” truly get rid of something or does it bury it and keep it alive in more subtle forms, and in fact lead us to organize our experience around it? Is it “letting go” that is most helpful or is it something more whole, more integrative, less aggressive that we’re longing for? Is the offending material simply a cosmic error that must be eradicated through spiritual process, or is it an invitation, a form of intelligence and counsel, that carries with it hidden wisdom and guidance to be integrated? Please do not take my word for any of this. Make the embodied journey and see for yourself.

By way of this inquiry we may discover that we need not “let go” of any inner experience, but that it will “let go” of us when we meet it with loving presence and the energies of non-abandonment. It will release its hold on us when infused with breath, awareness, embodiment, and life. Further, it will “let go” of us when we have received its revelation and when we are no longer in need of the function it provides. In the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, it is the nature of all phenomena to “self-liberate” upon a meeting with naked awareness. When we are able to stay with what arises in the field of consciousness in an embodied way, wrapping it in a cloak of warmth and loving presence, we may become astonished to discover that it takes care of itself without any effort, striving, or struggle of our own. “Taking care of ” doesn’t mean that the experience we do not like will go away and be replaced by alternative experiences that we like better, or think we should be experiencing, or have been told by others are the “right” ones to be having. “Taking care of ” refers to the inherent great natural perfection of things as they are, and the reality that the forms arising in awareness are no different from the ground of awareness itself; that they are in fact made of the same luminous and alchemical substance. And even that unique configuration we call “ego” comprises these same strands of awareness, radiant and vast, and will reveal its nature when we meet it in direct embrace.

A section called "closer to the wound" speaks more to the reasoning and wisdom of dissociating from the body in certain contexts in early development, and the types of dilemmas one can struggle with when they begin to see the first inklings of how one's wounds limit oneself and the possibility of overcoming or integrating those wounds.

As young children, it was an act of intelligence and creativity to split off, dissociate, and disconnect from material we were not developmentally capable of digesting and metabolizing on our own, including the dysregulating and traumatic feelings and narratives that arose in the face of misattunement, neglect, and empathic failure of all kinds. As infants and young children, we were wired to do everything possible to maintain the ties to those critical figures around us, even if that connection was misattuned, less than healthy, or even dangerous. A shaky, tentative, and even potentially harmful connection is more regulating than none at all in the little nervous system of a helpless infant.
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As adults, we can see the remnants of this need to receive mirroring, empathy, and presence from others, even when a part of us knows that a particular relationship no longer truly serves our deepest longings. To allow ourselves to inquire into this, in a way that is non-pathologizing and non-shaming, can provide some very important data.
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As we engage over time in these strategies of denial and acting out—both pathways being oriented toward self-abandonment and turning away from our vulnerability and the emotional landscape altogether—we might find ourselves wondering why we are not feeling alive, why our experience is flat or numb, why we aren’t able to step in and take risks in our relationships or our vocation, and why things just aren’t flowing the way we’d like. There may not be any specific thing we can point to that is “wrong” in our lives, but we are still quite convinced that something is off, something is missing, something important is out of place. We sense that there is something deeper, something more meaningful, some more intimate way of being, but nevertheless it remains just out of reach. Though usually occurring underneath the radar of conscious awareness, the deeply embedded sense that we are not loved or lovable as we are infuses and colors our perception and interactions with others. This coagulation of energy has a way of perpetuating itself and eating at us from the inside, sure to emerge at some point (usually at the most inopportune times) in behavior that is passive-aggressive, avoidant, critical, or anxious. Even though all of this is seething underneath the status quo of everything being “okay,” a deeper part of us senses that only in intimate and direct contact with our vulnerability and unprocessed somatic feelings will we know this aliveness firsthand. And only then will we be able to take a risk, be spontaneous, and embody new levels of wisdom, compassion, and creativity in our lives, especially in our relationships with others.

Below is a later section in Chapter 4 I also loved, in the vein of "love has no opposite," which talks about how even the negative emotions we can have time to time are themselves are also just a means for love or the higher self (referred to throughout the book as The Beloved) to make itself known to you.

As you continue along the way, yes, sometimes your problems will be solved, sometimes the symptoms will go away, sometimes the feelings you like will replace the ones you’d prefer be banished into the dark wood. But your inquiry is no longer oriented around replacement. It is far too wild, unprecedented, and creative for all that. As a pure expression of your love of the truth, it is full spectrum. For your longing will never be satisfied by that which is partial.

Love has brought you to this very place that you are now, as it continues its journey to know itself, through you and as you—by way of your perception, emotions, feelings, and imagination; and by the signs and symbols that it places along your path. Not so that you can fix something that is broken, or even “heal” in any conventional sense, but so that you can connect more deeply with your longing, to more clearly hear the call of the beloved within you, and become more and more transparent the feast of the offering that has been laid out before you: To be fully alive to and to fully participate in the mystery as it makes its way into the world of time and space.

No longer oriented in how to get from “here to there,” but endlessly fascinated with how it is that love wishes to infuse “here” with its qualities. The path is endless. You are endless. Your heart is endless. And love will continue to reveal this endlessness to you, in ways that are at times peaceful, sweet, and soaked in pure joy. At other times, as wrathful, disturbing, and awash with the transmutation of the dark.

{continued below}
 
Later into Chapter 5, which discusses a lot of the above more in the sense of internal family systems, there is this reiteration:

It is no secret that our culture is one of acquisitiveness: “Please, somehow, give me more. What is here now is most definitely not enough. I know there is some divine glorious reality waiting for me where angels are singing, harps are playing, perfect soul mates are appearing, fulfilling and easy spiritual careers are presenting themselves, all of my dreams are manifesting abundantly, and above all I am experiencing only high, spiritual states of consciousness, safe from the unknown devastatingly creative aspect of love.” But love will never conform to our hopes, dreams, and worn-out images. Thank god. It is too wild, too creative, and too outrageous for that. [Love's] refusal to conform in this way is its greatest gift, the reorganizing deflation that naturally emerges when our personas and fantasies begin to crumble, only to be replaced by… well, nothing, other than an unbearable longing for aliveness, to finally participate in the sacred world that is always already here.

What hits home for me strongly is the fundamental conviction that truth and the true reality is fundamentally a safe and sacred place, and even though we may rely on ego defenses to maintain equilibrium and a sense of felt safety due to trauma or programming, it in a way can also be bent to serve one's liberation and embrace the "holiness of true existence," so to speak. There is an inherently strong STO signal in these approaches to introspection.

Chapter 6 "The Sacred Middle" talks further about making inroads into peeling back layers of defenses as well. The metaphor of internal family systems is also made use of here.

First, to be met with your presence. To be received and held as valid, worthy of your curiosity, openness, and attention. You don’t have to pretend to “like” the feeling, or even to “accept” it, but you honor it as the way reality is appearing in this moment because you know that arguing with what is, is the root essence of your emotional suffering... In ways the mind may never be able to come to terms with, it is possible to accept your nonacceptance and to open to your closedness. This is an art that you can learn.

The goal in this work is not to always be accepting, open, or loving, but rather to be in direct, embodied, and compassionate contact with whatever is appearing as valid and worthy of inquiry. You can call off the war with nonacceptance, nonforgiving, and a closed heart. Open to your closed heart and allow it safe passage and it will reveal its essence as pure life itself. The mind may struggle with this as an idea, but at the level of direct perception, it is something you can discover inside by way of intuition and nonconceptual revelation.

The despairing one, the raging one, the unworthy one, and the abandoned one—though they can be quite intense and even disturbing, they are not obstacles on your path. They are not working against you... Rather than coming as enemies to foil your unfolding, they just want to be heard, felt, and re-parented, and finally allowed back inside the palace, which until now they have not felt safe enough to enter. But there is intelligence in the chaos, wisdom in the mess, and raw life in the disturbance.... Each of the visitors is a carrier of sacred data, but their revelation is released only into a field of kindness, and it is the abandonment of them that reinforces their centrality in your inner circuitry.... If you do not take care of them consciously, they have no other recourse than to communicate by way of the unconscious, including through symptoms, emotional and physical challenges, dreams, images, fantasies, and the unfolding of the shadow in interpersonal relationships.... Pull back slightly [from identification with your feelings] and enter into relationship with your feelings. Separate a bit from them, but not so much that you dissociate and disembody. You may discover that there is so much space around your experience. Commune with your inner world without being engulfed by it. Practicing intimacy while not fusing is a holy art that you can learn. You are the warm, open field of awareness where all feelings and emotions can come into being for a short while, dance within you, and then dissolve back into the vast, spacious ground from which they arose. Find the sacred middle and rest there, between the old, worn pathways of denial and fusion. This is where the great process of metabolization by love will unfold.

Lacata stresses further that our psyches pendulate between the extremes of "holding it together" and "falling apart," where we can undergo periods of disintegration and reorganization and reintegration (this ties in a lot of Dabrowski's work in fact). The best place to inhabit is the middle ground between these two, where the negative traps of either state are less likely to affect one.

Further exploration of this middle ground are in sections "Intimacy of the Contradictions," "Today May Not Be a Day for Answers," and "Love is Not Synonymous with Feelings of Safety." As you can tell by the titles, these are sections devoted to heading off other defensive strategies that can keep us further away from our experiences, whether it's the drive to get to some intellectual closure about a narrative we're trying to develop to explain or rationalize some of the different and sometimes contradictory feelings we can have. The latter section ultimately is about the necessity of vulnerability in love, and how from the perspective of a brain that's over-activated by perceptions of threat can sometimes view this opening up as a threat to the well-being of the person, rather than the path to greater aliveness and intimacy and contact with the life within and surrounding us.

From the perspective of exhaustion and confusion, it is intelligent to seek relief from the uncertainty and replace the groundlessness with something more stable. Honor the call to safe passage and something to hold on to. You need not pathologize the longing for solid ground from which to take your next step. It is an act of kindness to care for yourself in whatever ways you can. From the perspective of raw, reorganizing love, groundlessness and aliveness are one. For there is no intimacy without embodiment to your vulnerability in all its forms. Here, there is nothing to hold on to, nothing to “heal,” and nothing to transform. The urgent requirement for an “improved” moment has fallen away into the vastness.
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You have a sense that some sort of veil is parting, but what is coming next has not yet been given. At times it feels so alive in the unknown, but at other times it is disorienting and even irritating and there is a subtle (or not so subtle) burning for resolution. Rather than struggle against the uncertainty, give yourself permission to enter it. There is a refuge here, though it is hidden and may not be accessible via ordinary means. We don’t live in a world that honors the wisdom in confusion and doubt, but it is up to you to bring this revelation into the collective, not only for your benefit, but for the benefit of all sentient life. Stay close to what is here now, even if what is here is flat, numb, confused, and devoid of hope. For these are special allies of the path and operate outside conventional awareness. The unseen is always alive around you, taking form as signs, symbols, and guidance for the journey ahead. But the timeline is not of the known, and is crafted of the stars. Your disappointment, your despair, and the ones representing the death of old dreams: the uncommon helpers have arrived, along with the more conventional aides of joy, clarity, contentment, and hope to midwife the mystery and reveal that you are right on track. Listen carefully to the invitation as it arrives in a thundering silence: today may not be a day for answers but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question.
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We want love to feel safe, but love is not oriented around any particular feeling. It is just too wild for that. As a field of immense creativity, love will make use of any feeling state, including that of “unsafe,” to introduce us to the full spectrum of what it means to be an awake, alive, unprecedented human being, with a heart that is sometimes open, sometimes closed, sometimes in one piece, and sometimes shattered. As the rich ground in which all feelings come and go, it is the way of love to transform everything it comes in contact with, for this is its nature. This activity is not oriented in the preservation of the status quo or the maintenance of the conventional, but in bringing forth new forms of itself into the world of time and space. At times, this can be disorienting. Perhaps our deepest longing is not for consistent feelings of safety, security, and certainty, but to live from wholeness, in intimate communion with the full-spectrum nature of what it means to be an attuned, sensitive human being. To live in and as the totality of what we are, which very organically contains, infuses, and transmutes the opposites of safe and unsafe, self and other, known and unknown.

Unusually, the book also had a section about death, the fact that tomorrow is never guaranteed, and entreated the reader to fully acknowledge and moreso embody that wisdom. I quoted at length in the afterlife thread since I thought it was more applicable there (still, good section to really sit with):

Descriptions of the "afterlife"

Chapter Seven, "Encoding New Circuitry" is about just that, chiefly through the aid of a holding space or relational field that serves as a container for disorienting emotions to be experienced in such a way that it is possible to reprogram the narratives surrounding them, and in doing so become less able to be unilaterally influenced by a given emotion.

The Power of the Relational Field

Our expectations in relationship—our willingness to allow another to matter, whether it is safe to assert a boundary or need, fears around being loved as we are, the excitement and terror in leading with our vulnerability—originated in a young nervous system longing for mirroring and connection. The strategies we developed to protect us from inevitable failures in empathic attunement arose creatively to prevent overwhelm and fragmentation in a developing little heart and brain.... Seen from this perspective, the limiting organization is not happening to us from the outside—and is not actually a matter of the past at all—but is something we keep alive in the present.

Our neural pathways are tender, open, and responsive, lighting up as we seek attuned, right-brain-to-right-brain resonance with those around us. We want to feel felt, to have our subjective experience held and mirrored, and to have the space to explore unstructured states of being. We long to rest in the mystery of what we are without having to worry about being abandoned or neglected in the midst of the adventure of self-discovery. While the encoding of shame, unworthiness, and abandonment is deeply embedded, it can be reorganized. It may feel incredibly entrenched but it is not as solid as it appears. Even if your early environment was one of consistent empathic failure, developmental trauma, and insecure attachment, it is never too late. The wild realities of neuroplasticity and the courage of the human heart are unstoppable, erupting forces of restructuring and creativity.
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Of course there are times in our lives when such a relational container is not immediately available, or is inconsistently so. Can we do this work on our own or can we not? Is self-regulation possible or is it a myth? Can we enter into the imaginal realm and commune with an unseen “other?” Can God, Goddess, angel, or another divine being serve as an effective attachment figure? How does all this work, anyway? These are the great mysteries at the intersection of modern developmental neuroscience and the contemplative way. Let us not rush to any conclusions, but go slowly, rooted in the radical ground of beginner’s mind, as exploring psychonauts on an uncharted adventure in consciousness, and see what we discover in the further reaches of our own bodies and psyches. Yes, it is true that, relatively, we are wired to rest in a relational field; however, the qualities of empathy, presence, and attunement are wild and alive within us, embedded organically into what we are, and can be accessed, uncovered, and embodied. In many ways, this is what the spiritual journey is about, to fully and experientially participate in what we are as pure, limitless awareness itself. In fact, our true nature is the ultimate holding environment and with training, practice, and the bravery of the warrior’s heart, we can begin to rest in this awareness as our psychic center of gravity. It is here where we move beyond conventional psychological (or neurobiological) understanding and into a more subtle realm of experience.

Encoding New Circuitry

When you are triggered and the feelings are just too much, it is very likely that your core narrative—what you believe about yourself, others, and the world—is nearby. It is circling around you, not to harm or work against you but as an invitation to inquiry, and to new levels of integration. This archaic patterning is yearning to be reauthored but first needs to hear that you no longer need its protection and are ready to meet those parts of yourself that have heretofore remained outside awareness. In ways that seem counterintuitive, the old, restricting narratives are and have always been trying to help you and, in their own limited ways, keep you out of dysregulation, disintegration, and emotional flooding. But a deeper call is emerging, one that is no longer oriented in mere protection and safety but into the sacred, into that world of aliveness that you sense is so near.

In a moment of intensity and disturbance, become curious about the story you are telling, about the perceptual lens through which you are seeing yourself and the world. This narrative arose when you were a young child, long ago, in the attempt to make sense of an environment lacking in empathic, attuned, right-brain-to-right-brain connection. Step back just a bit and communicate to the narrative that you are calling off the war. It’s over. You are stepping off the battlefield and putting down your sword. As a warrior of the heart, you are choosing to join forces as an act of self-love. Ask the narrative to reveal and clarify itself, not in a way that throws you off center into emotional overwhelm but in a way you can stay with and understand: how it is trying to protect you, why it has come, and what it needs from you. Hold it near and honor it for all it has done, and with a boundaried kindness let it know that it is time for an update.

Then, with capacities you did not have as the narrative was formed, you can begin the journey of encoding new circuitry, of laying down a new pathway. With presence, compassion, and all the wisdom you have gathered until now, you can begin to weave a new story, one that is more current, accurate, integrated, and whole: one that represents your real-time, here-and-now, adult-level capacities rather than a reenactment of a little one longing for connection that was never quite enough. This new story will arise out of the slow, spacious, wisdom-filled domain of the prefrontal cortex, replacing the urgent, restless reactivity of an overactive amygdala, which, after all, was only trying to protect you according to its own nature and abilities.
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Become committed to seeing exactly how you leave the fire of emotion and return to the conditioned narrative, the unique ways you seek relief from the somatic aliveness by way of fueling the old storyline or engaging in unconscious behavior. How does this process work for you? What is it like? What is usually happening just before you disembody? What feelings are there that you have deemed totally invalid and unworkable, as harbingers of overwhelm and danger? In this realization of how this dissociation works for you, rather than falling into the archaic loop of shame and blame and self-attack, recognize this as a moment of pure grace, as an invitation from beyond to come home. With your breath and sacred life energy, come back into your body for a second or two; you can always return to the storyline in a few moments, for it too is holy in its own way and is best approached from a soothed, calm place, after you have attended to the disturbing feelings that have been longing for just one moment of your loving attention for so long.

This idea of focusing on seating oneself more strongly in the body for very short periods is primarily for those who have overwhelming feelings. Most people and their traumas can take more than that, but titrating slowly has a lot of advantages (as Peter Levine has said) when it comes to preventing us from swinging between extremes in a more disorganizing fashion. In either case, the more time we spend in this space of discomfort in a holding environment where the emotion can be felt and contained without dissociating, the more we become aware of the space between stimulus and response, and thus become more free to act and choose our path.

The next time you are triggered and caught in a looping narrative about what is wrong with you, how wretched you are, or how life has failed you, slow down and make contact with the felt sense in your body. Drop under the very compelling storyline for just a moment and locate the burning in your heart, your belly, and your throat. Train yourself, with kindness and gentle friendliness, to notice that holy moment that opens between your awareness of the feeling and the impulse to act, the habitual tendency to either deny what is there or to urgently seek relief from it through fueling a storyline or engaging addictive behavior. It is hot and sticky here, claustrophobic and restless, and filled with opportunity and even magic. Becoming familiar with this space that Frankl describes is one of the most significant and life-changing realizations on the journey of wholeness. There is so much power and freedom in this middle place if you will take the time to familiarize yourself with it and explore the implications of its invitation. But it does take practice. And courage. And the deep commitment to care for yourself in new ways.

As the visitors surge in a sensitive nervous system, they appear alongside a doorway. While the doorway may appear to flash open and closed, it is actually always open, though at times it can seem hidden. On one side of the door is the old circuitry of self-aggression and abandonment. It is the path well traveled, and the grooves here are deep. By denying or dissociating from what has appeared—or acting out toward others or in toward yourself with shame and judgment—you reenact the ways your vulnerability was met as a young child in your family of origin. While of course there were moments of attunement and responsiveness, our culture does not have an inspiring track record when it comes to holding intensity and energies that cannot easily be controlled. The spin is back to numbness and safety as quickly as possible, regardless of the consequences of closing down to the majesty of what we are as sensitive and embodied human beings.
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On the other side (of the door) is the new pathway of slowness, empathy, attunement, and kindness. Of meeting, containing, and metabolizing the dysregulating narrative, emotional intensity, and body-based raw sensation using capacities you once did not have. Not as a goal to further shame yourself for not perfecting, but as an intention, an aspiration, a lifelong practice to open into. And to return to over and over again. No matter how things are flowing for you at the time you read this, you can start exactly where you are, afresh in this moment. There is only this moment. In my experience, we open into the sticky, pregnant, raw vulnerability in stages; we can’t just go straight to “loving” our fear, rage, grief, sadness, and hopelessness. Many hear that they must accept and love everything that arises in their experience and end up using this teaching as a way to attack themselves when they inevitably “fail” yet again, not devoted or pure or spiritual enough to do the right thing. But in the attempt to end run our humanity and get to safe ground as quickly as possible, we end up bypassing some of the very rich, messy, holy material along the way, which is filled with life and sacred data.

As we learn to recognize and tolerate the very difficult and disturbing feelings and sensations, for very short periods of time at first, we can slowly continue our journey with them. From tolerating to containing them within the self field, and discovering in a deeply embodied way that we can hold a lot more than we originally thought, we realize that this material is not attacking us from the outside; it is not arising to harm us but to reveal the path of integration. As we deepen in our inquiry, we can slowly begin to say “yes” to even the most disturbing feelings, to accept that they are here and that the most loving, wise, and kind approach is to allow them to be here, to call off the war and acknowledge that this is the way reality is appearing in a given moment. Not a “yes” that we “like” the feelings or hope they will stay, but a “yes” that is grounded in the deep knowing that arguing with reality is the root cause of nearly all of our emotional struggle.
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When you find yourself pulled into the extremes of denying or repressing what has come on the one hand or fusing (identifying) with it on the other, fueling the ancient story that something is wrong with you … the invitation is into slowness, into rest, into a primordial sort of opening into the middle. Nothing need be understood, shifted, transformed, or healed … for now. The invitation is into holding, not healing … for it is from the ground of this embodied, intimate, naked embrace with what you are that all healing will organically emerge.

The chapter ends with a section called "Beyond Broken and Whole."

Is it a problem that sadness has come, that we are feeling intense fear or anxiety in the face of an argument with our partner, or that we are feeling rage, confusion, loneliness, or despair? Do we need to take immediate action? Have we checked to see if these are actually problems we need to fix? What would our lives be like if we were unconditionally committed to the truth of our experience, whatever it is? If in the face of such challenges we became increasingly present, and most of all, curious?
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Love does not refer to a sweet warm feeling (though of course it could include that), but to the often fiery, uncompromising, and relentless willingness to turn toward whatever is arising, to not dissociate from it, and to cultivate friendliness toward ourselves and our experience. This is what we mean here by love. This sort of love is not passive but is on fire. The willingness to stand on and shout out from the rooftops, with the sun and the moon and the stars as our witnesses, that we will no longer abandon what is happening within us and that we will no longer pathologize pain, sensitivity, feeling, and vulnerability. With these and other seen and unseen forces by our side, we grant ourselves a cosmic sort of permission to stop trying to hold it all together, to maintain a particular image of ourselves, and to reject our immediate experience, as we likely had to do in our early environments to ensure our own survival. We make the commitment to lay down a new pathway, one organized around turning toward ourselves—and staying close—during times when we need ourselves more than ever. Underneath what appears as a longing for relief is often a much more primordial and sacred longing: for the warmth of our own presence.

{continued below}
 
Chapter Eight deals more with human relationships, about being loving and compassionate without being a doormat, about the inherent holiness of having and asserting one's needs as a human being in interpersonal relationships, and about holding space for others in ways that genuinely serve their highest interests.

The qualities of empathy, attunement, and kindness are not passive and yielding, nor are they consistently sweet and peaceful. At times they take on wrathful forms. But they always remain grounded in compassion: not a weak and compliant compassion but one that is on fire, burning with the virtues of skillful action.... The attributes of empathic resonance are hardwired in us, even if they are obscured by misattuned relational experiences and our subsequent ways of organizing those experiences in a tender, developing nervous system. Despite these obscurations, the qualities of our true nature are available at all times, although they are not always reachable by conventional means.

In the tantric tradition, there are four pathways for relating to unresolved energy: pacifying, enriching, magnetizing, and destroying. Pure, transformative compassion will make use of each of these energies at different times in order to unfold and express potent configurations of wisdom, compassion, and skillful means. In this way, love—or what you are as pure, luminous awareness itself—does not have a bias; it is ready to employ each of these energies equally in order to accomplish its mission. True compassion is not always soft, capitulating, and surrendering; at times it is ferocious, wild, and untamed. But this ferocity emerges from a wide-open heart and a longing to dissolve suffering in all its forms, for both self and other.

While perhaps appearing "compassionate" on the outside, being an emotional doormat usually involves reenacting early, unconscious dynamics. We learned that devaluing ourselves, often in very suble ways, was the best route to get our needs met, to fit in, and to maintain an often precarious tie to an inconsistently available attachment figure. When we were young children, this was intelligent and served to keep us connected to the source of the only love we knew. These strategies are not errors or mistakes but are simply out of date ad no longer fully in service to an adult longing for mature intimacy, connection, and aliveness.
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Is it "Unspiritual" to Have a Need?

Many I speak with have come to the conclusion that it is not okay for them to have a need. Or that having a need is a reflection of weakness, or that they’ve failed or haven’t grown enough spiritually. “Shouldn’t I be able to take care of myself?” “If I were healed or fully awakened, I wouldn’t need anything from anyone, would I?” “My guru doesn’t have any needs … does he?” “Needs are bad, right?” “I can just do it myself.” “If I don’t really ‘have’ a self, I shouldn’t have any needs … right?” “If I was fully able to stay in the present moment, I’d be free of needs … right?” And so forth. When we dig in under the surface, we may discover a fair amount of confusion in this area. It can be subtle, though, and requires that we look carefully and stay committed to whatever we find in our inquiry, whether it conforms to our ideas and images of ourselves … or not.

It is really pretty understandable. For many of us as young children in our families of origin, expressing a need was usually not very safe, often met with painful neglect, rejection, or even aggression and abuse. We learned that having a need was the fast path to feelings of hopelessness and disappointment, watching helplessly as attunement, contact, and affection were removed from the field around us.... To adults interested in spirituality and the inner life, this core belief (of not having needs because we learned from our parents we are unworthy of having needs) finds validation in teachings that (overtly or otherwise) support the notion that having a need means lack of progress on the path, evidence of not having enough faith or trust, too much attachment, being caught in a "low vibration," not understanding the teachings on "no-self," and so forth. The shame and blame continue, but with the flowery spiritual language replacing the voices... (yet all while sounding surprisingly just like Mom and Dad). The teaching on selflessness that form the core of certain contemplative teachings, for example (and are commonly misunderstood, in my opinion), represent a very pure expression of our absolute nature and are powerful medicine. But for those not ready for their radical implications—and especially those struggling with complexes rooted in shame and unworthiness—even these most subtle and precious teachings may inadvertently promote this limiting organization and not be the most effective skillful means for specific practitioners at specific times.

Let's just cut right to the chase: there is nothing wrong with having a need. It's not a sing that something is wrong with you, that you are neurotically dependent or that you have failed to understand the more subtle teachings of the path. It's so human, really, to have some yearning in the heart, some longing for connection, to be met, to be seen, to be heard, to be touched, to be held... We can honor the reality that we are both independent and dependent and that we are both separate and connected simultaneously....

Into the Fire

It is so natural to want to help others, especially when they are suffering, hurt, confused, or experiencing profound sadness. But in order to most skillfully be present for another, we may be asked to set aside they very deeply rooted tendencies to fix, change, or "heal" them, at least for a moment, and attune to whether something else is being asked of us. The invitation at these times is to walk into the fire that is their present reality, exactly as it has been given, and remain close to their experience as it unfolds, staying open to the intelligence of their process even if it activates our own inner family of previously abandoned feelings, emotions, and unmet longing... We will be asked, at least temporarily, to set aside our diagnosis and evaluation and dare to see them as whole, rather than someone who is depressed, hopeless, confused, "lost in their ego," falling apart, a total mess, stuck in traumatic response or a "low vibration," bipolar, passive-aggressive, schizophrenic, or even insane. This is not to say there is no room for diagnostic engagement. But for one moment, before all that, see them as the raging and unique expression of spirit that they are.

What I liked about the "Into the Fire" section is that it underscores that in a Work setting, where a group of people are doing their best to help raise one another up, different things may be needed for a person at different times. Sometimes a person has the peace and perspective and bandwidth to ask for objective feedback and go into "fixing" mode; whereas at other times if a person is going through a particularly triggering experience they may need to be supported in being heard and seen in a holding environment or relational field where their own awareness can increase and process their experience more intelligibly with the support of a loving or compassionate other there. For this reason mirror is best handled by experts who can gauge a person's tolerance for confronting more unsavoury aspects of their psyche they may have trouble seeing.

There's some overlap here with some pop culture stereotypes of how men and women talk out problems. Often the stereotype goes that women are sharing for support and just to be heard, and the man, not really engaging or attuning to their emotional distress, instead goes into problem solving mode with all these logistical solutions, when the woman is not really asking for or needing that. 🙃

Later on Licata also discusses how interpersonal drama can often serve more as a distractive function to turn away from mutual limping along in a holding pattern of mutual misattunement that maintains the status quo of internal and interpersonal dysfunction. In the deepest recesses of our nervous system there is a longing to be seen by another, and understood, and overcoming emotional barriers we may have to attuning more deeply to one another can be what makes or breaks a relationship.

We all have ways of engaging with and even catalyzing drama in our interpersonal relationships. If we look carefully, we may discover that the drama often serves some sort of distractive function. As it captures our attention and provides an exit ramp away from some really vulnerable feelings, we can find ourselves at times feeding conflict and making use of shame, blame, and complaint to escape messy human emotion and feeling. During such times, especially if we have a partner who is ready and willing to join us in the movement toward distraction, it can appear that we are moving toward one another and stepping more deeply into the aliveness of the emotional world while in actuality we are moving away.... The energies of complaint resentment, blame, and drama can, without out conscious knowing, provide a defense against the inherent openness of the relational field and just how raw and exposed we are when we step into this environment with another. Unmet feelings, unmetabolized sensations, and previously disavowed emotions lie just under the surface, longing for holding and integration, awaiting the right time to arise for a moment of our attention... Of course, much of this activity occurs beneath the level of conscious awareness. We may continue to remain quite convinced that we are stepping all the way in, leading with our vulnerability, and not holding anything back, all the while remaining at least partly out of touch with the previously sequestered, survival-level material lurking under the surface. It is a great act of kindness to do this work—not only for ourselves but for everyone we come into contact with...

The Longing to Be Seen

To whatever degree we have not psychologically, emotionally, and somatically metabolized unmet feelings of abandonment, loneliness, grief, shame, and rage, we can count on our partners to continue to offer this opportunity to us in a seemingly endless number of ways. This can be excruciating, but we might come to see this invitation as the unique gift of the beloved, his or her fiercely compassionate summons into the crucible of intimacy, vulnerability, and healing....

The notion that a "good" or "healthy" relationship is one where we are consistently seen and "met" by our partners is fascinating and spans multiple levels of inquiry (somatic, psychological, emotional, and neurobiological). As infants, we come to know who we are through having our experience mirrored back to us. Through consistent and attuned contact to our developing subjectivity, we are able to acquire a sense of confidence, trust, and cohesion in our sense of self and our place in the world. While we carry forward this longing for mirroring into our adult lives, we may discover that is is not possible for another to fully provide this function for us, and the (often subtle and unconscious) expectation that they do is quite a burden to place upon them. As long as we rely on our partners to mirror back to us our essential lovability and self-worth, we will not be able to fully open to them; it is just too risky because we have given them so much importance in our own psychic development. Nor will we be able to see and love them as subjects in their own right—not merely objects and functions in ours—or enter all the way into the shaky territory that radical, transforming intimacy will always require. If we take this dependency to the extreme, of course, we end up in the very complicated territory of codependency and the profound pain it can ensnare us in.

May we make the revolutionary commitment to offering a true holding environment—for ourselves, our lovers, and our fellow travelers—and above all else to practicing a wild and uncompromising kindness as we walk the path of love together. For it is a radical and astonishing path that will demand everything from us, but offers fruit that is worthy of our deepest gratitude and awe.

The last chapter is called "The Invitation of True Intimacy." The first section of this chapter deals with the irony of how so many of us want a deep intimate relationship with another, but very often what we need is to enter into deeper intimacy with ourselves, and appreciate and be there for ourselves and the parts of ourselves that are dissociated and scattered due to trauma and an insufficient holding environment in which we could build resiliency and self-regulation. This to Licata is where the groundwork for successful intimate relationships with others is; abandoning this level of work just sets other intimate relationships for dysfunction as people collaborate to structure their relationship around mutual avoidance of one another's "sore spots," which ironically keeps them both from developing a much deeper intimacy and attunement.

...it is the degree ot which you are able to take responsibility for your own vulnerability and core emotional wounding that you will release your partner(s) from this burden, which is not theirs to carry. As long as there is a subtle (or not so subtle) expectation that your intimate partner's role is to enact the archetype of the "good other" that was missing earlier developmental times, you will not truly be able to love them or harness the incredibly transformational energy of intimacy and relationship.
....
One of the most evocative ways [unconscious material can emerge in our lives in less-than-conscious ways] is in the area of intimacy and attraction to certain people. For example, if we observe carefully, we may discover that we tend to attract—and be attracted to—those who either express or reject those qualities or aspects that we have disconnected from in ourselves. The psyche longs for reunion with what we have previously split off from and will look out into the relational world for a match.... As long as we are looking to our partners to fulfill those functions that were not offered to us as young children, it will be difficult to come into a fulfilling, loving relationship that is not riddled with the pain of projection...

The Unwanted Lover

It is so natural to long for deep relationship with another, for a fellow traveler with whom we can explore the mysteries of intimacy. Someone you can walk together with into the uncharted lands of the body, the heart, and the psyche, unsure where the journey will lead but driven by passionate curiosity and the love of truth.

"I want to share the burning," you call out! The tenderness, the shakiness, the joy, and the aliveness of what it means to enter into partnership with the holy other.... In response to this primordial cry, alas, the "other" appears. Sadness rushes quickly onto the scene: "But when will you practice intimacy with me?" Loneliness is next, pleading for a moment of your undistracted attention. Anger, despair, grief, self-loathing, confusion, jealousy, fear, and shame: "We as well! Please do not abandon us! Please do not forget and relegate us to the dark, cold forest. We are here, now, and longing to share our essence. We have arrived. Your prayer for true intimacy has been answered!"

Um... ah, okay, but this is not what you expected. This response simply does not conform to your fantasies of the way you thought it would be. Where is the soul mate? The twin flame? The "good other" comes to remove the existential flatness, the unbearable loneliness, the penetrating emptiness. Out of your genuine yearning for communion, the ancient companions will always respond, though in ways that may remain bewildering to a mind bent on resolution, certainty, and finding a safe landing place that is free from vulnerability, heartbreak, and disillusion. But it is important to remember that these ones come not as enemies but as true lovers, seeking just one moment of your presence, your compassionate communion, and the light of your holding and care. While they remember the ways in which they have been rejected in the past, they continue to come nonetheless, never giving up, never losing faith in the undivided condition of your true nature.

As you go deeper with this inquiry, you will encounter a profound truth along the way: you will never be able to be more intimate with another than you are with the unwanted lovers within. If you have not provided shelter for the unmet within you, how will you ever contain the wholeness of the beloved?

A Devastating Act of Love

... It is no secret that intimate relationship is one of the great amplifiers of the unlived life. We can count on our partners to relentlessly illuminate everything that is longing for wholeness within us. Not because they have some agenda to do so but simply by the nature of the crucible that forms when we allow another to truly matter to us.

We come to our relationships with an already-existing pattern that formed long ago, crafted of both personal and collective material. While this template can be updated and longs for reorganization into more integrated forms, until reconfiguration it has a way of coloring our perception. It functions like a time machine: when activated, it is as if we have left the "here and now," crossed the liminal, and found ourselves back in the "there and then." Aspects of ourselves are aching to come out of the shadows and into the warmth of holding awareness, not to harm but as forerunners of wholeness. There is nothing like a close relationship to remind us of the orphaned emotions, feelings, and vulnerable parts that have lost their way in the tangle of cognitive and somatic pathways. They are exhausted from a long voyage to reach us, but they have not given up. The reminder of this truth can at times be agonizing, as the beloved may seem to have extraordinary powers to open the raw, tender, and naked dimensions of our being....

Please be kind to your partners in response to the inevitable conflict that will arise as you make this journey together. Learning how to harness the energy of conflict and to engage it directly, skillfully, and with an open heart is essential on the path of intimacy and requires the encoding of new circuitry. The transformative art of rupture and repair is quite profound, revealing that relationships of endless depth and meaning are not free of conflict but flourish where conflict is embraced as a path, as a unique and transmutative vessel of purification, love, and healing...

...Yes, this love that you long for involves tremendous risk and at times requires unbearable sort of exposure and an uncompromising willingness to move into some pretty shaky, vulnerable, and uncertain territory.... Acknowledging this potential and what is truly being asked of us on this path, let us remove the burden from our partners to metabolize our unresolved feelings for us, taking such good care of ourselves that we release them from this sacred work, which is ours to engage. Perhaps there is no greater act of love, to retrieve this task from those we have given it to—for ourselves, others, and a world that has forgotten the holy path of intimacy and what it truly offers.

It is important to remember that our partners are neither the "good" nor the "bad" parent that we never had (or had too much of) but will regularly evoke these archetypes to unleash the activity of integration. At times we may feel overwhelmed, impinged upon, smothered, and trapped; in the next moment abandoned, rejected, misattuned to, and forgotten. The beloved is at work, spinning and swirling his or her tools of wholeness, doing what he or she must to reach us and remind us of how vast we are.
...
You long to be seen, to be held, and to be loved as you are, but please know that the implications of this are immense. They are cosmic in proportion. To allow yourself to be embraced in this way, a part of you must die. Everything you thought you weren't must be surrendered. You have no choice but to let go of the stories and deep convictions of the unlovable one, the broken one, the unhealed one, the imperfect one, the flawed one, and the lonely one. You will no longer be able to lean into these ones to keep you safe and secure on the sidelines, and out of the raw fragility of your own vulnerability. But who will you be without these familiar companions?

In this warm, provocative, and unprecedented territory, the beloved will ceaselessly remind you that your heart is at risk of breaking open in any moment, and perhaps never being put back together again—at least not in the same way. But in your willingness to fall apart, to let love reorganize your hopes, your fears, and your dreams, he or she will also reveal that you were never "together" to begin with. You are much more majestic than all of this. You are that open, spacious presence in which "together" and "apart" dance with one another, weaving the relative world into being with your open, tender heart as your offering.

Lacata explains what he means by the beloved below. It is another favorite section of mine:

The beloved is what reveals to you the inside of your own heart. He can appear as an intimate partner, which is one of his most evocative forms, but he would never limit himself to this expression. Her essence is taking shape as your longing and as the sunrise on a new spring day, as the nectar in the blooming lilies... he is also weaved into the darkness, alive in your sadness, wild and dancing in the core of your loneliness, and... despair. Your eternal friend, the beloved will use the entirety of the phenomenal world to find you and will never ever give up on you, even when you have given up on yourself. She is equally prepared to take the form of duality, multiplicity, and separation in order to come alive inside you, for she has no bias toward one mode of being or another.... As you come to know the forms of the beloved in your own life, the question of whether she is "outside, "inside," or simply the "you" that you have forgotten... these fall away, for the beloved has no interest in your resolving her mystery but only fully participating in it.... As you become more and more willing to provide a home and sanctuary for the entirety of your emotions, feelings, and inner experience—and practice compassion and kindness to whatever appears—the beloved will come alive within you... And even if you are unable to accept the way you are, "stay in the now," or maintain a consistent state of "high vibration" or spiritual bliss, the beloved is equally there, resting and moving within you. She will take form as the past, the future, a "low vibration," and the dark night of the soul if that is how she must reach you. For when you are able to offer safe passage for the dark and the light, you will become a clear vessel for love and its activity here. Is is then that you will know her, and she will know you, and you will dance together into eternity.

I almost wish to capitalize it, Beloved, since I feel like it’s talking about a beneficent Face of God almost…

Anyway thanks for reading to the end. 🌸 If any of that resonated with you, I couldn't recommend reading the book in full more highly.
 
Thank you for the post, the author seems to have throughly explain many phenomenon that comes about in human development and found ways to analyze it within ourselves. Sounds much like The Work and self awakening, which should correlate with objective truths. Working out much of the contradictions we carry around, knowingly or not. I like the part that we face death of lies within, to grow further/reborn. The body does that cell by cell, and our minds do that night by night. Imo, GOD is Everything, so it would surmise we are beyond beloved and eternally damned. We are so much unique, but also the same templates everywhere; each deeply entangled in a perfect story of individuals and whole.
 
Thank you, whitecoast, for sharing this! I've been in a bit of a rut one trying to figure out how to "see" in a different perspective than my own that I'm so used to. I will definitely be mulling this over for a while...
 

How to Raise Your Emotional & Spiritual Vibration

The time has come for us to raise our vibrational forces! Read about these powerful ways to manifest your own positivity, light, and love.
A vibration is a state of being, the atmosphere, or the energetic quality of a person, place, thought, or thing. Much of reading “vibes” is intuitive—you can tell a person’s energy when they walk into a room, for example.
While some people draw you closer, others make you want to keep your distance. You see a depressing and violent news story, you get a heavy feeling in your gut. You witness a puppy cuddling with an infant, and you feel a warmth inside.

“As you think, you vibrate. As you vibrate, you attract.
Abraham-Hicks

You have heard time and again that whatever you offer out into the world will return back to you, as dictated by the Law of Attraction. Like attracts like. This law of the universe says that you are responsible for your life, and can manifest change according to how you direct your thoughts and emotions.

“Everything in life is vibration.” –Albert Einstein
Everything in the universe is made up of molecules vibrating at different speeds. This includes trees, bodies, rocks, animals, thoughts, and emotions. Human vibrations are composed of everything from physical matter to the way you communicate the thoughts you think. In simple terms, some molecules vibrate faster and some vibrate slower; there are higher vibrations and lower vibrations.

When you are vibrating at a higher level, you feel lighter, happier, and more at ease, whereas lower vibrations feel heavy, dark, and confused. Almost all spiritual traditions point the way toward higher realms of consciousness, and scientific studies (like that of consciousness research and spirituality author Dr. David Hawkins) have even quantified the vibrations of different states of being to create a scale of consciousness.

How are you vibrating right now? How about the world? The following are 12 ways you can help raise your vibration frequency.
1. Gratitude

Gratitude is one of the quickest ways to amp up your vibration. Try it right now—stop reading and look around the room. Turn your attention to what you are thankful for in this moment (there is always something). It might be your purring feline, the beautiful weather, or the fact that you were blessed with another day on this earth. As life coach Tony Robbins said, “You can't feel fear or anger while feeling gratitude at the same time.” Therefore, when you feel yourself experiencing a low energy emotion, see if you can shift your attention to gratitude. Make gratitude a habit, and it will transform your outlook on life as you start to experience a spiritual awareness and appreciation for the little things.

2. Love
Call to mind someone who is easy to love, and hold that person in your heart. Visualize him or her sitting in front of you and notice how you feel. A feeling of expansion, lightness, and happiness will take over your being, and that right there is the shift you are looking for. Love is one of the highest vibrating states of being (the fourth highest level on the Hawkins’ scale of consciousness) and has the power to pull you out of even the deepest of ditches. Attune your heart to love and your energy will start to soar.


3. Generosity
Anytime you get stingy or greedy with anything (love, attention, money), it lowers your vibration and it feels bad. In fact, anytime you attach your happiness to something outside of yourself, it leaves you feeling the opposite of how you want to feel. The antidote is to be generous. Whatever you want more of in your life, offer it out to someone or something else. Feeling poor? Give a little money to charity. Feeling lonely? Make an effort to make a stranger smile. Don’t have enough time? Give your time to a good cause.

4. Meditation and Breathwork
Dr. Hawkins’ research was based on the idea that the more “true” something is, the higher its level of consciousness (or vibration). Therefore, when you train yourself to be present with the moment you are in, you resonate more harmoniously with the truth. The past and the future are only in your mind; the only truth is now. Meditating and breathing mindfully also calms your nervous system, improves your mood, and brings about greater feelings of peace—all high-vibe qualities that will benefit your state of being. This spiritual practice helps to raise your vibration level fast so that you can enjoy those benefits without delay.

5. Forgiveness
According to Abraham-Hicks’ emotional guidance scale, blame is a low energy. Out of 22 emotions (arranged from highest vibration at number 1 to lowest at 22), blame is number 15. If you can work toward forgiveness, you will release yourself of this lower energy that can weigh on you like a bowling ball, and up the scale you will go.
From the epic Indian poem, the Mahabharata:
One should forgive under any injury. It has been said that the continuation of the species is due to man being forgiving. Forgiving is holiness; by forgiveness, the universe is held together. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty. Forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is quiet of mind. Forgiveness and gentleness are the qualities of the self-possessed. They represent eternal virtue.

6. Eat High-Vibe Food (The sessions indicated the opposite of the consumption of animal proteins)
Everything you consume is prana, or life force energy. If you eat a lot of “dead” energy (in the form of meat, fried, or processed food), you will lower your vibration. By eating nutrient-dense, prana-rich foods, like local and organic fruits and vegetables, your body literally absorbs these things, making you more light, vibrant, and alive. High-vibration food makes a person’s vibration higher.

7. Reduce or Eliminate Alcohol and Toxins from Your Body
While it can temporarily feel good, alcohol is a depressant and lowers a person’s vibration. If you want to be clear, spiritually connected, and have a healthy outlook on life, chances are that eliminating toxins from your body would be a good place to start. Rather than numbing out, adopt a more healthful and holistic way of life and see if you don’t feel more energetically abundant.

8. Think Positive Thoughts
What you think about, you become, and each thought you think creates your future. If the thoughts you think are pessimistic, overtly anxious, or in any way negative, you will likely find what you are looking for. Just as gratitude draws more of the same into your life, so too does impatience, jealousy, and unworthiness. This negative energy can leave you feeling heavy and burdened. Be diligent about what thoughts you give your attention to, since it can take only 17 seconds for a thought to attract another one like it and activate the Law of Attraction. Push away negative energy and choose positive thoughts, for they are the key to positive change.

9. Consume High-Vibe Music, TV, Books, and Movies
Prana is not limited to the food you eat, but includes everything you consume. Be sure your entertainment is of high vibration and leaves you feeling uplifted rather than depleted. Does social media make you feel energetic or insecure? Does that violent action film actually enhance your mood or does it contribute to your anxiety? Does the music you listen to include violent or low-vibration lyrics? How might changing the soundtrack of your daily commute from death metal to mantras contribute to the course of your day? Be as selective about your media intake as you are about the quality of the food you eat, and you will find newfound energy in your day.

10. Surround Yourself with Beauty
While you are at it, be sure your home and work environments reflect beauty, passion, and enthusiasm for life. The right lighting can have a significant impact on your productivity and your mood. Hang art that inspires you. Use colors that calm and rejuvenate you. Reduce clutter and create more space for clarity. Your surroundings have a big effect on how you feel on the inside and live your life.

11. Go for a Walk Outside
A double-whammy for raising your vibration—get some exercise in the great outdoors. Get the sun on your face while you get your heart pumping. Take a break from the constant buzz of electricity and technology and reconnect with Mother Nature. Even a few minutes spent mindfully outdoors can completely shift your mood, which is why going for a walk around the block when you’re having a mental block or a lover’s quarrel can be so beneficial.

12. Be Sure Your Relationships Are Vibing High
Finally, surround yourself with people who lift you up, rather than drag you down. Spend time only with people who make you feel better about yourself, people who believe in you, and are interested in resonating at a high frequency just like you are.
It can be tempting to succumb to a feeling of helplessness with regard to the future of the planet and all its inhabitants. But channeling your efforts into raising your energetic frequency is one of the best gifts you can give the world. When you lift yourself up, you bring others with you. This is the only way you can contribute to raising the collective consciousness of the world.
 

How to Raise Your Emotional & Spiritual Vibration

The time has come for us to raise our vibrational forces! Read about these powerful ways to manifest your own positivity, light, and love.
A vibration is a state of being, the atmosphere, or the energetic quality of a person, place, thought, or thing. Much of reading “vibes” is intuitive—you can tell a person’s energy when they walk into a room, for example.
While some people draw you closer, others make you want to keep your distance. You see a depressing and violent news story, you get a heavy feeling in your gut. You witness a puppy cuddling with an infant, and you feel a warmth inside.




You have heard time and again that whatever you offer out into the world will return back to you, as dictated by the Law of Attraction. Like attracts like. This law of the universe says that you are responsible for your life, and can manifest change according to how you direct your thoughts and emotions.

“Everything in life is vibration.” –Albert Einstein
Everything in the universe is made up of molecules vibrating at different speeds. This includes trees, bodies, rocks, animals, thoughts, and emotions. Human vibrations are composed of everything from physical matter to the way you communicate the thoughts you think. In simple terms, some molecules vibrate faster and some vibrate slower; there are higher vibrations and lower vibrations.

When you are vibrating at a higher level, you feel lighter, happier, and more at ease, whereas lower vibrations feel heavy, dark, and confused. Almost all spiritual traditions point the way toward higher realms of consciousness, and scientific studies (like that of consciousness research and spirituality author Dr. David Hawkins) have even quantified the vibrations of different states of being to create a scale of consciousness.

How are you vibrating right now? How about the world? The following are 12 ways you can help raise your vibration frequency.
1. Gratitude

Gratitude is one of the quickest ways to amp up your vibration. Try it right now—stop reading and look around the room. Turn your attention to what you are thankful for in this moment (there is always something). It might be your purring feline, the beautiful weather, or the fact that you were blessed with another day on this earth. As life coach Tony Robbins said, “You can't feel fear or anger while feeling gratitude at the same time.” Therefore, when you feel yourself experiencing a low energy emotion, see if you can shift your attention to gratitude. Make gratitude a habit, and it will transform your outlook on life as you start to experience a spiritual awareness and appreciation for the little things.

2. Love
Call to mind someone who is easy to love, and hold that person in your heart. Visualize him or her sitting in front of you and notice how you feel. A feeling of expansion, lightness, and happiness will take over your being, and that right there is the shift you are looking for. Love is one of the highest vibrating states of being (the fourth highest level on the Hawkins’ scale of consciousness) and has the power to pull you out of even the deepest of ditches. Attune your heart to love and your energy will start to soar.


3. Generosity
Anytime you get stingy or greedy with anything (love, attention, money), it lowers your vibration and it feels bad. In fact, anytime you attach your happiness to something outside of yourself, it leaves you feeling the opposite of how you want to feel. The antidote is to be generous. Whatever you want more of in your life, offer it out to someone or something else. Feeling poor? Give a little money to charity. Feeling lonely? Make an effort to make a stranger smile. Don’t have enough time? Give your time to a good cause.

4. Meditation and Breathwork
Dr. Hawkins’ research was based on the idea that the more “true” something is, the higher its level of consciousness (or vibration). Therefore, when you train yourself to be present with the moment you are in, you resonate more harmoniously with the truth. The past and the future are only in your mind; the only truth is now. Meditating and breathing mindfully also calms your nervous system, improves your mood, and brings about greater feelings of peace—all high-vibe qualities that will benefit your state of being. This spiritual practice helps to raise your vibration level fast so that you can enjoy those benefits without delay.

5. Forgiveness
According to Abraham-Hicks’ emotional guidance scale, blame is a low energy. Out of 22 emotions (arranged from highest vibration at number 1 to lowest at 22), blame is number 15. If you can work toward forgiveness, you will release yourself of this lower energy that can weigh on you like a bowling ball, and up the scale you will go.
From the epic Indian poem, the Mahabharata:
One should forgive under any injury. It has been said that the continuation of the species is due to man being forgiving. Forgiving is holiness; by forgiveness, the universe is held together. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty. Forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is quiet of mind. Forgiveness and gentleness are the qualities of the self-possessed. They represent eternal virtue.

6. Eat High-Vibe Food (The sessions indicated the opposite of the consumption of animal proteins)
Everything you consume is prana, or life force energy. If you eat a lot of “dead” energy (in the form of meat, fried, or processed food), you will lower your vibration. By eating nutrient-dense, prana-rich foods, like local and organic fruits and vegetables, your body literally absorbs these things, making you more light, vibrant, and alive. High-vibration food makes a person’s vibration higher.

7. Reduce or Eliminate Alcohol and Toxins from Your Body
While it can temporarily feel good, alcohol is a depressant and lowers a person’s vibration. If you want to be clear, spiritually connected, and have a healthy outlook on life, chances are that eliminating toxins from your body would be a good place to start. Rather than numbing out, adopt a more healthful and holistic way of life and see if you don’t feel more energetically abundant.

8. Think Positive Thoughts
What you think about, you become, and each thought you think creates your future. If the thoughts you think are pessimistic, overtly anxious, or in any way negative, you will likely find what you are looking for. Just as gratitude draws more of the same into your life, so too does impatience, jealousy, and unworthiness. This negative energy can leave you feeling heavy and burdened. Be diligent about what thoughts you give your attention to, since it can take only 17 seconds for a thought to attract another one like it and activate the Law of Attraction. Push away negative energy and choose positive thoughts, for they are the key to positive change.

9. Consume High-Vibe Music, TV, Books, and Movies
Prana is not limited to the food you eat, but includes everything you consume. Be sure your entertainment is of high vibration and leaves you feeling uplifted rather than depleted. Does social media make you feel energetic or insecure? Does that violent action film actually enhance your mood or does it contribute to your anxiety? Does the music you listen to include violent or low-vibration lyrics? How might changing the soundtrack of your daily commute from death metal to mantras contribute to the course of your day? Be as selective about your media intake as you are about the quality of the food you eat, and you will find newfound energy in your day.

10. Surround Yourself with Beauty
While you are at it, be sure your home and work environments reflect beauty, passion, and enthusiasm for life. The right lighting can have a significant impact on your productivity and your mood. Hang art that inspires you. Use colors that calm and rejuvenate you. Reduce clutter and create more space for clarity. Your surroundings have a big effect on how you feel on the inside and live your life.

11. Go for a Walk Outside
A double-whammy for raising your vibration—get some exercise in the great outdoors. Get the sun on your face while you get your heart pumping. Take a break from the constant buzz of electricity and technology and reconnect with Mother Nature. Even a few minutes spent mindfully outdoors can completely shift your mood, which is why going for a walk around the block when you’re having a mental block or a lover’s quarrel can be so beneficial.

12. Be Sure Your Relationships Are Vibing High
Finally, surround yourself with people who lift you up, rather than drag you down. Spend time only with people who make you feel better about yourself, people who believe in you, and are interested in resonating at a high frequency just like you are.
It can be tempting to succumb to a feeling of helplessness with regard to the future of the planet and all its inhabitants. But channeling your efforts into raising your energetic frequency is one of the best gifts you can give the world. When you lift yourself up, you bring others with you. This is the only way you can contribute to raising the collective consciousness of the world.
I agree with everything, however, a good steak with a good glass of quality red wine feels wonderful to me.:-D
 
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