coordinates: Somehow I’m managing to wear my standard uniform of a cashmere sweater and shorts even in humid Austin, Tay-hass.
Yesterday we covered the triad of the heart of aliveness – care, truth, and depth. It takes real pro-level skill to discern the territory of the heart – whether someone is telling the truth or lying, caring or acting out of a twist of co-dependence, or feeling the depth of their feelings or just the shallowness.
Today we cover the body of aliveness, which are of a totally different flavor than the heart. The body awareness holds skills such as roller skating, singing, cooking a yummy meal, dancing… these are things you can’t fake being good at. Even to those who cannot do that thing, it is obvious whether you can or cannot.
Purity
Purity can get a sort of bad rap in a culture whose addictions suffuse and subsume nearly everyone. Social media, porn, shopping, watching, alcohol, cheese – you name it, we’re addicted to it. It can seem utterly out of reach to the extent that it becomes a mockery. Certainly, I do not wish to be bricked up in a small cell such as the anchorites of nunnerys did, but they did have a point. Julian of Norwich wrote some of the most gorgeous ecstatic love poetry to the divine one could ever ask for.
shadow: judgment – Your purity darkens to bitter anger at others who do not attain your standards. Think SNL’s infamous church lady. No one wants to be the church lady. Worse though, judgment caves in on itself as an egoic dark similacrum of real purity, hurting you and the ones around you.
Exercise: Imagine there are two different parts living within you. One is the confessor, the other is the priest or priestess receiving the confession. Get a journal and confess to yourself. Let your inner bad girl or boy grab the pen and scribble down the darkest, juiciest fruits of your imagination for five minutes. The priest or priestess receives it with infinite love and grace. There is no penance, or if there is… make it a fun and naughty self-spanking of sorts.
Protection
Think of the helpful energy protection more like the energy of an observant golden retriever than a maltreated German shepherd. True power in this sort of iconic energy of protector cannot be faked. It emanates without a single bark.
The proverb “trust in Allah but tied up your camel” describes this well. It’s a very good thing to protect that which you require.
shadow: exhaustion – The instinct to protect those and that which we love over-rotates into having to protect everyone. The entire weight of the world’s salvation does not, indeed, rest on your shoulders. Trust that there is a limit to your power and thusly, your responsibility. That’s a good thing.
Exercise: Imagine a soap bubble of swirling colors encircling you. Connect a little pipe and spigot which will allow all the gunky brown, black, and gray stinky ick to exit your being. Start from the top of your head. Once that’s clear, work your way down to the next section of your body until all the gunk is piped out. After your whole body is clear, remove the pipe and simply float in that soap bubble for some stolen sweet moments.
Peace
Again, we see that our third passageway back to aliveness cannot be faked. Not even a child in nappies mistakes anxiety for peace.
shadow: peace keeping – There’s a vast difference between being a peace keeping and peace making. Let’s imagine your lover wants one thing, your boss wants another, and your best friend a third thing entirely. Wat DO?!
Notice there’s no mention in that list of what you want. There is no way out of this snare without sinking down into your own luscious desires. You are not here to split the proverbial baby in two, you are here to do what is correct.
Exercise: Feel through to the core of the matter. Unlike the previous exercise which was designed to calm down, this is to wake up.
Where is your anger?
What’s it’s quality in the body?
You may have to dig deep to find this disallowed emotion. Bizarrely, when this kind of anger is your background radiation, meaning it’s your everyday experience, it can be wildly hard to actually touch it. It’s sort of a cloud that’s ever present but out of reach. For now, just see if you can notice what shape the cloud is.
Can you tell which situation you’re angry about? Journal the angry voice inside you for five minutes. You need not act on anything, so go as far out as you can.
If you’d like to have 100 days of support coming back into your aliveness and are a man or non-binary, please do hit reply and say hello. We open the doors TOMORROW with our first neural reprogramming sound meditation.