“Be here now”…”staying present”…”grounding into body” — new age catch-phrases that can leave us going ‘Yeah, sure, ok …so what are we doing after lunch?’ New-ageisms sound too pat nowadays, and we want something more concrete, some applicable awareness that can help us heal our lives.
Try this one on for size — we are safe, invulnerably safe, if we stay put in our current moment, breathing, doing, being…whatever we are doing and being. There is no danger in the moment! We can’ t be hurt if we are in our bodies, fully. When we jump ahead of ourselves, when we spin future pictures based on assumptions, judgments, plans, and pictures of various sorts, we are by definition out of the moment and generating fear, or excitement. It’s either “going to be so good” or “going to be so bad”.
When fear is generated by the passing pictures, it is not often processed. And this is how we set ourselves up for “reversals”, experiences that set us back. By generating more fear that is not then processed, we put ourselves in danger, without even realizing it. Unprocessed fear and the judgments that accompany it have a tendency to attract the very experience feared. We can avoid fear generation by staying as present as possible, refusing to go down the ratholes of the pretty or scary visions. And of course, when we do feel afraid, it is vital to feel and organically express the fear, not technique or rationalize it away.
How to return to the moment when I’ve left it? Just do it. Just come back, accepting that I left for awhile, and express the fear generated by the dangerous experience of having left the safety of my fully embodied moment. Excitement can be expressed too…judging fear or excitement wrong or bad to exist or express is not healing and dealing. “I release the judgment that my fear is wrong to be.” Verbal, out-loud releasing of judgments is crucial to assisting myself to stay present. Which, by the way, is not the same as blocking out all thoughts — it means having the “loving discipline” to bother noticing what feels like truth to incorporate into the moment, and what feels like a distraction that pulls me out of my body. Practicing being able to tell those two types of thoughts apart can assist in learning to tell the difference.
My fear has been that if I allowed myself to stay completely present, letting the pictures of future possibilities roll by unexplored, that I would constantly get blindsided and unprepared for incoming situations. But, what does “prepared” really mean? Armed to the teeth with expectations of how I am going to handle the situation that has not yet come to pass? That behaviour only locks the future into the past. I can’t allow magic, epiphany and serendipity into my new moments if I have already decided how I will respond and act ahead of time. When I do that, I miss the impact of the new experience and my organic response to it.
How will I make informed decisions without considering all the angles in advance? Ask for inner guidance and accept that I have the power to KNOW what to do when the right time comes for acting and responding. Taking full responsibility for my experiences, including my old imprints of victimization and perpetration, means accepting and getting comfortable with my ability to respond. Response-ability generates acceptance, which generates a greater sense of comfort with myself, which generates an increasing ease with staying present in my body, which generates trust and safety instead of more fear and danger.
“When the moment for decision comes, the choice will be obvious.”
Found you through the New Heart website. Thanks for sharing your process, it’s invaluable.
Hi Peter, I still need to fully digest what you’ve written here, so far I resonate with it. I am wondering how, (if?) this relates to the whole “Creative Visualisation” blurb, you know, to imagine and visualise what you want to manifest. There are elements of that which are definitely not being in the now, being dissatisfied with the now even. And yet it does not feel wrong to allow my desire to give me pictures of what she needs. I am somewhat confused and still trying to put some parts of Spirit polarised information I took in in the 90’s into their right place.
Oh yes, and I would appreciate to hear your thoughts on this!
Hi Gabrielle, thanks for writing…I fully believe in allowing desire its right place in presenting me pictures of what I would like to have more or less of. There is no way I am espousing cutting off or rising above desire here…desire is intrinsic to our emotional bodies, it’s a natural expression of the desire to evolve. Desire and staying present I think can go hand in hand.
Regarding creative visualization…hmmm, it’s not really what I was reaching for here, and I think it’s a different animal. CV almost seems like trying to forge desire instead of allowing it to enter awareness naturally. I personally have not practiced it much. Perhaps that is how spiritpolar desire operates, to spin up the picture and focus on it…my desire tends to be much more emotionally based, coming in feelings, which are sometimes organically attached to pictures, but not pictures I am intentionally cultivating, if that makes sense in terms of the distinction.
I may find myself focusing on the pictures that arise naturally, but only if it’s happening w/o my pushing or holding it in place. It’s not because I sat down to do so.
Re being dissatisfied with the now…there’s nearly always (always?) emotions in that place of dissatisfaction, and when I can process/express those, I find pictures of what I really want flowing into that previously compressed area, like water filling a cup that got emptied. As I write, I’m getting perhaps that CV is an attempt to push through, past, or over the compressed emotions in that “disatisfied” place, superimposing a more satisfactory picture. But it just doesn’t feel like an organic, “right time” process to me to do that, which is why I suppose that I haven’t practiced it…it doesn’t seem to be something I’m drawn to do.
Hi Peter, Thanks for the response to my question. I like what you wrote and it feels useful to me. Gabrielle.