This is one in a series of posts with brief notes on healing, awakening, and personal things. These are more spontaneous and less comprehensive than the regular articles. Some may be made into a regular article in time.
AWAKENING DOESN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SPIRITUALITY OR RELIGION
There is some truth to that statement, although it’s not the whole picture.
Yes, awakening doesn’t require spirituality or religion.
It’s about finding what we already are in our own first-person experience.
When I explore what I am in my experience, I find I am ultimately capacity for the world as it appears to me. I am what my world, all my experiences, happen within and as. And there isn’t any “I” there even if I often use that word to make it sound a bit more conventional and approachable.
Even if there was no spirituality or religion, it would be this way and people would happen upon this discovery.
Life would still notice this aspect of itself through humans and perhaps other beings in the universe.
And awakening is also obviously connected with spirituality and religion.
Many aspects of spirituality and religion reflect this discovery, at least to some extent.
Some forms of spirituality and religion guide us to mimic living from this noticing.
And some elements within spirituality and religions are aimed at guiding us to notice it for ourselves.
IS GOD HE, SHE, IT, NEITHER?
In our patriarchal culture, people have traditionally used “he” when referring to God.
Why? Likely because it makes more sense in a patriarchal culture, and whether it’s intentional or not, it has also likely justified patriarchy.
No matter the reason, it does tend to limit our understanding of God.
Why not use a more rich and fluid way to talk about God?
Why not sometimes call God she and highlight the more feminine characteristics of God and existence?
Why not sometimes call God it and highlight our (imagined) third-person relationship with the divine?
Why not sometimes call God mystery and highlight the mystery inherent in the divine and existence?
Why not switch between all of these and more, and highlight the multifaceted and fluid nature of God, existence, and ourselves?
NAMING EMOTIONS
It can obviously be helpful to name emotions.
It helps with communication, both with others and ourselves.
And yet, we don’t need to go overboard with it. I find just a few general ones necessary.
What’s more important for me is to identify the stressful stories that create certain emotions.
Pinpointing these are helpful since it helps me explore them further, inquire into them, and find what’s more true for me.
With emotions, what’s most needed is to befriend them, allow them, feel them, find the stories behind them, and perhaps even notice their nature (which is the same as my nature).
ADRENAL FATIGUE?
I see several people talk about having “adrenal fatigue” on social media these days. If I ask how they know it’s adrenal fatigue and not just general fatigue, they usually don’t have an answer. And if I ask if they have taken a test they usually haven’t.
It’s often a self-diagnosis. It’s not supported by science. And to me, it seems to be just another fashionable label that people like to use without a good understanding. (It was created by a naturopath in 1998 and is not grounded in science.)
The main reason I am puzzled by the adrenal fatigue label is that there are innumerable possible causes to fatigue, only a few of which has to do with the adrenals.
Why do some jump on the “adrenal fatigue” label when they could just use the more general “fatigue”? I am not sure. Perhaps it sounds more scientific? (Although it’s self-labeling and pseudo-science which is not so impressive.) Perhaps it makes the fatigue sound more legitimate? Perhaps they want to join the community of people labeling themselves this way? Perhaps they don’t really know what it means, and use it because they have heard others use it?
MY FAVORITE EMBODIMENT PRACTICE?
In a social media group, someone asked about our favorite embodiment practice in 2021.
For me, it’s…
Inquiry into any stressful belief since these separate me from reality, including the wholeness of who and what I am.
MEDITATION ORIENTATIONS REFLECTED IN THE AURA
I usually don’t go around looking at people’s auras, but I did check the aura of someone yesterday.
It was relatively clear and bright around the head, and I could see that she has been engaging in some conscious work – likely some for of meditation. What was unusual in this aura was that the bright and conscious area didn’t go further out and tapered off relatively abruptly.
When people engage in meditation or similar types of practices, it’s usually conscious a bit further out and it may taper off more gradually. This tends to reflect a concern with community, all life, and – when it goes out indefinitely – all of existence.
I talked with someone who knows this person, and my sense seemed to be relatively accurate. She does engage in meditation and tai chi, and she does it for her own sake without too much concern for the larger whole.
There is nothing wrong in this. And yet, it does leave a lot out. Not just of life, but of who and what she is and we all are.
JANUARY 2, 2022
DREAMS: LOSS AND FEELING LOST
I used Vortex Healing to work on my lungs before falling asleep. (Optimizing the lungs as a whole, which also clears out issues impacting the lungs.) During the night, I had a restless series of dreams where I lost things and also felt lost. It was all about different types of loss.
When I woke up, I remembered that lungs has to do with sadness and grief in Chinese medicine, and loss does too. Maybe there is a connection there.
THE AURA REFLECTS HOW AWAKE SOMEONE’S SYSTEM IS
When I see people’s auras, I mostly see how awake their system is.
For instance, when I was a member of the Center for Sacred Sciences in Oregon, one of the veteran students was pronounced “awake” and made a teacher. (To me, that seems odd for two reasons. One is that awakening isn’t really binary but has a lot of grey zones. The other is that awakening, in itself, doesn’t qualify anyone to function as a teacher.)
I could see that there was awakeness in his system. It was relatively bright and conscious, and the conscious part did go out indefinitely. I could also see that a lot was semi-conscious or perhaps not even that. Over the next few weeks, I also see that the brightness and conscious clarity dimmed in his aura.
Some weeks after that, he announced that the awakening wasn’t as stable as he had thought and would step down as a teacher. Which shows honesty and integrity, and perhaps even courage.
ANYTHING VERY HEALTHY TENDS TO BE NOT SO HEALTHY IN THE LONG RUN
A friend of mine told me she had a kind of “crash” after a period of very rigorous “healthy” eating.
In my experience, anything too rigorous – whether it’s eating or an ideology or anything else – tends to not be so healthy in the long run.
Life is more fluid, inclusive, and messy than that.
So why not embrace some of that fluidity, inclusivity, and messiness?
That’s often more healthy than any rigorous health regime that we try to do for a long period of time.
There are obviously exceptions – depending on the person, situation, and so on.
And sometimes, we need our own experience of this. We need to see what happens when we try something, including being very rigorous in a particular way with our diet.
MAKING IT PERSONAL
I usually don’t engage in discussions with conspiracy folks, but the couple of times I have, I have asked questions that are more personal.
For instance, for vaccine and pandemic conspiracies that require just about all doctors, health care officials, researchers, and so on to be in on it: How many of the doctors and researchers you personally know do you think would actually agree to join such a conspiracy?
They didn’t answer. And I assume the answer, in most cases, is that they don’t personally know doctors or researchers. That’s why they are able to, in their imagination, cast them in such a role.
In their mind, they dehumanize people with these types of jobs, and they are able to do so because they don’t know many or any personally. They don’t know they are people like themselves, with a conscience, who want to do good and help people.
For me, I can’t imagine any of the doctors and researchers I personally know actively joining this type of conspiracy.
JANUARY 5, 2022
ALL IS MATHEMATICS?
I talked with a mathematician and his partner, who said: All is mathematics.
It’s not completely wrong, but there are more accurate ways to say it.
For instance: A lot can be described with mathematics.
Perhaps not everything can be described with mathematics. For instance, even our most accurate and complex mathematical models can accurately predict how civilization will unfold over the next century, in a decade or year, or even tomorrow. (Asimov’s Foundation was clearly written from a much more simplistic deterministic assumption than what most of us operate from today after a few decades of chaos theories and more.)
And nothing IS mathematics, apart from mathematics itself.
Mathematics is an abstraction created by the mind to describe the world as we see it and as it reveals itself to us through our explorations.