Supporting Non-Duality and Awakening in Asheville and Beyond

WHAT FEELS REAL?

Version 2.1 | 8/01/2010

So often, what feels real to us

is manufactured by our inner relationship

with our sense of being overly vulnerable,

waiting to again be violated and victimized.

- Grief is a real emotion

- Rage is real emotion

These and other powerful emotions

and the circumstances that set them up,

create inner friction,

and suffering.

Sometimes the friction works on us like rough sandpaper,

sometimes like a tsunami coming at us,

and sometimes persisting like the brutal and agonizing life sentence of Prometheus.

Were we trained and enabled,

we could paint a psychic portrait

of our relationship with suffering.

This would open us to the stories and passive-aggressive

obsessive behavior patterns guarding and defending personality.

For me, the visual psychic portrait is often that of my child, around age six,

caught in confusion and surprise by the passive-aggressive

undertoe of currents thrust upon him.

Unable, in his youth to integrate these tidal currents, and with the

visceral sense of his world "not feeling safe", he exits the real,

seeking the safety of the mental fantasies and constructs of his mind.

Even today, more than fifty years passed, the deep groove of

assumed safety by-hiding-out-in-his-head can be recognized,

in his language, in his blanched coloring and in the heaviness in which

he carries himself.

The language spoken through the adult body carries the awareness

of the child still, fearfully, stuck in his head. The language lacks

any warmth or heart. It is the talking head, the disembodied mind,

speaking from the defensible (and yes delusional) stage of separation.

The language is all about justifying his position, caving into the

confusion, exiting reality and reactivating the patterns of blame and

shame.

This deeply grooved pattern has its own gravity and is aided by what

E. Tolle relates to as the "pain body". The fully empowered pain body

is indeed an entity to be reckonned with.

This brings forward two (or more) very important, interconnected questions.

1. How are we to consciously navigate and maintain a sense of awareness when the pain body flairs up?

2. When we are under stress, how can we begin to trace and follow where our consciousness goes, to

to try to "manage" the stress?

Mmmmm.

It would seem that our collective challenge is to unclench ourselves from our well-worn pathways that

funnel us into our disturbed and disrupted past, redirecting us out of the present moment.

If we can just begin seeing where we go and what we refer to when under stress, we will ultimately see that

we are really only the victims of our own habits (agreed, highly emotionally charged as they are).

Seeing this still alive trauma within us, without judgment, we can begin to lay down the cynic, the critic,

the judge and the executioner (the one who metes out punishment). We can, ultimately, dismiss the entire courtroom experience.

WHAT FEELS REAL?

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