Welcome to Doorways to Freedom
This series of 28 innovative daily experiments will transform the way you live anytime, anywhere!
The great advantage of this new series is that it is composed of open-eye experiments you can do anytime, anywhere. They are meant to be repeated as often as you want and can, no matter what you might be doing (except for driving!). These “glimpses” of your true nature are powerful doorways to awakening to your true self: open hearted awake awareness. Each one a different door to inner freedom because every individual is unique – we are all different.
It is important that you find what works for YOU
Experiment with these many ways to access that deeper dimension of life that allows you to gain perspective and objectivity about your daily concerns.
Transform your challenges into opportunities
At MICH, we consider dis-ease in all its forms to be an opportunity to evolve – to grow to greater wholeness and well-being. Each experiment is designed to transform whatever challenge you face into an awakening to new found freedom. You will discover that these apparent obstacles and mental prisons can be quickly and easily dissipated.
How the Doorways work
Thinking makes a great servant but a terrible master. One of the most fulfilling aspects of being a MICH practitioner is that we get to be in a state of awakened awareness while we work. We are sharing this important part of our training with you because we know that by doing these experiments every day, for 28 consecutive days, you will reprogram the way your brain operates, so that you can use thought as it is meant to be: as a tool when you need it.
There are 28 experiments in all, which are divided into 4 themes:
Inner chatter, Time, False Self and Emotions.
You will first receive an introduction to the theme of the Doorway for that week, along with an explanation of the experiment for that day. Every day for the 6 days that follow, you will receive a new experiment based on the same theme. So, it’s a good idea to listen to the week’s introduction before going on to the daily experiments that follow.
The reprogramming process takes 28 days
Even though awake awareness is ever present and the ground of our being, it is easily overlooked and overshadowed. This 28 day process will allow your true self, that ever present witness of awareness, to shine through, and for you to feel the reality of that perspective so that you can disidentify with the little self, your preoccupations, judgment and incessant thinking, and just BE.
How to prepare and make the most of the process
It is important to start a journal. Recording your experiences for a few minutes at the end of the day not only reinforces your learning, it helps you determine what works best for YOU. It also creates a priceless resource of personalized reminders of how to get back into the awareness groove whenever you get caught up in hectic activity and stress.
How to Prepare before entering Doorway 1
Take a few moments now, to consider your motives and expectations and establish your commitment to the process.
In your journal, which can be electronic or paper, answer the following:
- What do I hope to have as an outcome of this process?
- When do I plan to read or listen to the instructions for the day. (We strongly suggest that it is the first thing you do!)
- How can I make sure that I keep consistent and stick to the program?
Listen to the Intro audio below
Join our special Facebook Group to discuss, ask, and share anything about your experience.
Invite a friend
Consider doing this process with a friend so that you can motivate each other, and/or share your progress. Share the sign up link with friends who also want to engage in a journey of self awareness and discovery.
Access the Doorways
Important Reminder: Re-read the Doorway Intro before entering Part A, B, C etc...
Freedom from Inner Chatter
95 percent of chronic disease is caused by stress, and the biggest culprit in stress related chronic disease is inner chatter
Inner chatter is like an ever-hungry wolf, constantly clamoring for your attention. It has all the characteristics of the big bad wolf of fairy tales. A wolf that dresses itself up, disguises itself so as to gobble you up whole. It will gobble up all your energy and kidnap you into a non-ending spiral of thinking and emotions. It is cunning and will use any device to pull us out of the NOW and into our internal chatter and stories. When you choose to feed that wolf, you will find yourself devoured by incessant thinking, a running commentary that interjects itself into every experience. It pulls you in by its many disguises: worry, concern, judgement, responsibility, emotional hurts (real or imagined), interpretations, and feelings of injustice. You become self-absorbed and disappear into your own navel.
The wolf of awareness
According to legend, we are born with two wolves, the wolf I just described and the wolf of awareness. The wolf of awareness has the energy of the wolf that comes out of homeopathic provings of Lac Lupinum (wolf’s milk). These provings are double-blind, in that neither the person running the proving nor the participants know what they are taking. But when they repeatedly take the remedy, they will share a common energetic experience that describes the pure energy of the remedy source, in this case, the wolf.
The Lac Lupinum provers felt inspired by wisdom and inspired to share wisdom, especially silent wisdom that comes from seeing the “big” picture. Also common in wolf provings are feelings of deep compassion, loving care and concern for others. Provings bring out the unique characteristics of the remedy source. Unlike most mammals, all the members of the wolf pack are deeply involved with the care, protection and feeding of the young. The adults play extensively with the pups – tossing and tumbling with them and enduring endless, sharp-toothed baby nips.
The wolf remedy, Lac Lupinum, proved curative for a man suffering from long term, chronic depression, and psychotic episodes. He had been prescribed many different types of psychiatric drugs, to no avail.
I based my prescription on the many dimensions that matched Lac Lupinum including his dynamic, energetic movement that we explored together: one of transmitting wisdom, and protecting others. For example, the few times that he found regular work, he was always defending his colleagues, protecting them from what he perceived as unfair rules and working conditions. He longed to be a father so that he could transmit wisdom, and guide his children towards spiritually rich lives. This remedy, based on who he is, in his uniqueness and wholeness is what allowed his body-mind to heal.
This is how you need to see the other wolf, the awareness wolf: as being compassionate, wise, and protective. When you choose to feed the wolf of awareness, you find yourself in a state of wisdom and compassion.
Open eye experiment 1A: Feeding awareness
Every time you let yourself engage in thinking about yourself (about your “me”) you feed your inner chatter. Thoughts centered on your sense of self, on your me, will form a continuous, never-ending commentary if you let them. This ”ego wolf” cannot be satisfied. The more you engage in these thoughts, the more there will be.
Today’s exercise involves realizing that verbal thought is just one kind of brain activity. Just notice that there are many things happening in your brain right now: sounds, sights, sensations. These are wordless experiences, non-verbal thoughts, or pure awareness. No words are needed in direct experience and no words are there.
Notice all the aspects of awareness that are not thought-based. None of the following experiences needs commentary. Bring these to the foreground, and ignore the chatter as if it were someone else’s radio playing in the background – something that does not need your attention. Here are the steps to follow for today.
- First, let awareness focus on the sensations in your nostrils of the air as it moves in with each breath,
- Let awareness expand to also feel the rising and falling of your shoulder blades as they glide upwards with the in-breath and slide gently down with the exhalation.
- Allow awareness to probe the silence of the gap between breaths and the spark that begins each breath.
- Let awareness expand into the pure action of seeing. Allow seeing to be a pure and passive act
- Now allow awareness expand to hearing as a passive act
- Move awareness around your whole body in a full circle, starting in the front of your body and moving to the sides. And then behind you so that you feel and perceive from a 360-degree panoramic awareness
- Feel yourself floating in a sea of awareness.
- Notice what happens to your breath and your tension
Let nonverbal awareness expand and take over your brain and then let it take up your entire being. The chatter might be there, but don’t focus on the verbal thoughts or on their content. Focus instead on the field of awareness that these thoughts and everything else is happening in. Awareness is the silence that holds all sound, the empty space that holds all forms, the darkness that holds all light, the eternity that holds every moment. Experience from this field of awareness. Experience its silence and expansiveness. Feed your wise wolf of awareness.
The important takeaway
Verbal thinking is only ONE function of thought, one aspect of experience. Engaging in it runs the danger of getting totally swallowed up and controlled by it. Encourage the other aspects of awareness to come to the forefront and you will find that you have less mental chatter.
Sometimes the challenge of inner chatter is its many voices. If you pull back and become aware of it, you will notice all manner of inner monologue, commentary and dialogue. Maybe you have a narrator who comments on your activities, or describes step by step what you are doing, or an inner critic, or perhaps a doubter that has to second guess everything you do. You might have 2 of the voices having a conversation or even arguing with each other.
Open eye experiment 1B: The Voices of Inner chatter
Today’s experiment is for you to notice and give names to those inner voices. Notice as well, which one you choose as yourself, your “me”. Notice how sometimes you might identify with the commentator, other times with the inner judge, the prosecutor or the defendant, and other times with the doubter.
It is also possible to have conversations in your head with people you know: ascribing a voice to them, or imagining that you are talking to them.
Every time you notice a voice, focus on who or what is aware of that voice. Focus on the silent awareness which is holding that voice.
For fun, list all your voices of today in your journal.
Make special note of the ones you identify with most.
The important takeaway
What you call “me” could be any voice in your head. Voices that are just a bunch of random thoughts. Awareness is the theatre in which all this is being heard. Awareness, your true self, is none of these thoughts, it is the silent background that hears everything.
Yesterday, as your inner sub personalities argued, debated, and pleaded with each other, did you notice the push-pull and tension that happened in these inner conversations? Imagine how much energy goes into all that mental activity, and how much stress is created by it. It is you fighting with yourself, and it is a fight to the death… of you! This has a really negative effect on your immune system, and makes you much more susceptible to disease. These exercises are the best thing to strengthen your vitality and immunity.
Open eye experiment 1C: The Emotions of Inner Chatter
Today’s exercise is noticing the tensions and emotions that occur as a result of the random inner conversations between the imagined voices in your head. Recognize that your body is addicted to this energy – the energy of tension and emotion created by thought.
Invite awareness to catch you every time emotions are stirred by inner talk. Then open up awareness to include all the non-verbal thoughts we talked about in day 1 of this Doorway.
Notice what happens to that tension when even just for a moment, you focus on your breath, the movement of your shoulder blades, and the gap between breaths.
Then expand into seeing, hearing, and being aware of the space all around you, the silence that holds all sound, the empty space that holds all forms, the darkness that holds all light, the eternity that holds every moment.
The important take away
Fear, anger, despair, self-hatred, depression and anxiety are created by random chatter and consolidate into an embodied feeling of “me” from what is just a bunch of opinion’s, points of view and random thoughts in the stream of consciousness.
You might still be finding it difficult to disengage from these inner conversations, and for good reason! Research has shown that our bodies produce dopamine with mental talk, but that less dopamine is created each time, requiring MORE inner chatter in order to get our fix of dopamine. Once we allow inner chatter to operate, we become addicted to it, and always need more of it.
Open eye experiment 1D: Shifting to pure hearing
So let’s try another experiment: Start by noticing what it’s like listening to yourself and speaking to yourself in your head.
Consciously talk to yourself internally by saying to yourself: “Thinking is inner talk and inner hearing.” FEEL what it’s like to experience thinking as inner talk and inner hearing.
Try to be the inner hearing and just LISTEN to your thoughts.
Silently say to yourself “I am thinking this thought”, then listen to thought as inner hearing.
Then wait and you’ll hear the next thought “spoken” in your mind.
Focus on the hearer as a silent witness, a background of awareness. Let these spoken thoughts become just another sound in the field of awareness, experience the entire field of awareness that contains all sounds, all seeing, all feeling, all experience.
Let nonverbal awareness expand and take over your brain and then let it take up your entire being. Experience from this field of awareness. Experience its silence and expansiveness. Feed your wise wolf of awareness.
The important takeaway
Making thoughts into the sensation of inner sounds, helps you to take a step back from getting engaged into them and be aware of awareness as their witness, and the witness of everything.
Every time you identify with a voice in your head, you feed your ego wolf. Today, let’s try an experiment to stop contributing to the inner talker.
Today’s exercise involves telling yourself : “I am going to stop talking to myself in a moment and move to the space of hearing that the thoughts are happening in.” And follow it with: “I am going to hear background chatter but I’ll become disinterested a what the chatter is saying and instead my interest will be in the space of awareness that is who I am.”
Open eye experiment 1E: Stop identifying with a voice in your head
Choose not to talk to yourself in your head for a while, instead just listen to the background buzz as though it’s a foreign language. Don’t try to understand that inner chatter, or be interested in the meaning, words or sentences you hear. Instead, be much more interested in thought-free awareness.
Expand into the awareness that is everywhere, into the sea of awareness all around you as well as within you. Experience this sea of awareness as containing everything in you, everything around you, the whole sky, the whole universe. You are that awareness.
The important take away
By catching yourself as the “talker” you stop feeding the process, and, without your contribution to it, the process loses energy and dies down, especially if you lose interest in it’s content.
If you can hear inner chatter, that means that it is a sensation. Inner self talk is the movement of mental sensations. This doorway is to treat thought just like you do your other sensations.
Open eye experiment 1F: Thought as a sensation
- Focus all your attention in this moment on your left foot.
- Bring your awareness to the sensations in your left foot.
- Do you feel a lot of sensations? Name them in your journal.
Note that a minute ago you weren’t aware of any sensations, you didn’t even notice your left foot. So where are these sensations really happening?
It is only when you focussed on the sensations in your foot that you became aware of them, but notice too that there are a whole slew of them, and that they become pretty incessant. This is exactly what happens when you give attention to your thoughts – they multiply and stay around.
Focus again on the sensations in your left foot, until you can feel as many as possible. Then focus on the mental sensations in your head, and let all the chatter be experienced as mental sensations. Don’t be interested in the meaning, words or sentences you hear in your head. Experience thoughts as sensations.
Allow your focus to expand to all the sensations within and around you – the sensation of air on your skin, of your body being breathed, of sounds, and of sights.
In the process, your chattering thoughts will shift into being mental sensations.
The important takeaway
We have come full circle in this doorway. We began by using sensations to distract us from thought, now that we have explored inner chatter in different ways, we see that it, too, is just a sensation, and can be treated like any other. Try Doorway 1A again and see if your experience is different.
Our story is the most superficial layer of experience. In MICH case taking, we are not interested in the story, it is not about the content. Instead, we focus on the sensations and the perspective of the individual. We want to explore their inner canvas.
Open eye experiment 1G: The art of Awareness
Next time you see an abstract painting, look at it without any interpretation, just feel it, notice the colors and patterns. Then look out at the world the same way, as a field of colors and patterns.
Any painting, abstract or not, and no matter what the subject, is a blank canvas with paint.
Experience awareness as the blank canvas. It is also the paint that takes on so many colors and shapes, and creates the sense of objects and people, but the reality is that it is blank canvas and paint.
The important takeaway
Remain in the truth that reality is the blank canvas of awareness, on which the colors and shapes formed by energy patterns and waves create all of experience.
Freedom from Emotions
When things are in flux, we grip and hold on in apprehension. Fear imprisons and paralyzes us. Fear of the unknown causes us to project outcomes, imagine scenarios, and create disease-causing anxiety and tension. Fear, and all emotional reactions also play havoc with our immune system and make us much more susceptible to disease.
When things are in flux, we grip and hold on in apprehension. Fear imprisons and paralyzes us. Fear of the unknown causes us to project outcomes, imagine scenarios, and create disease-causing anxiety and tension. Fear, and all emotional reactions also play havoc with our immune system and make us much more susceptible to disease.
But, emotions also provide important signals and play a vital role in our human experience. We don’t want to transcend emotions, we want to remain sensitive without shutting down, but we also don’t want to get lost in the vicious cycle of thoughts and emotions, mixed in with worry, dissatisfaction or resentment. We just want to untie them from our stories, so that they can just flow through, float away and not get stuck or amplified. This is where awareness is our friend.
Awareness expresses itself in many forms, including emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we can relate and empathize. And, it also includes the ability to distinguish between emotions related to the present and those that are reactions to something in the past, those associated with our story, dissatisfaction, desires and ego wolf.
The majority of our emotional triggers happen when our brain interprets that our image, or idea, or concept of self, our ego wolf is somehow being threatened or criticized.
That is when biochemical reactions, programmed responses are set off automatically, creating an emotional surge. However, within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of the emotion has completely disappeared from your blood and the automatic response is over. If however, you remain stuck in your emotion after those 90 seconds have passed, that’s because you have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.
One of the actions of a well-chosen homeopathic remedy is that it provides a bigger window of time between the trigger and the reaction. This helps us bring awareness to the second we are triggered. We then have the opportunity to let the reaction dissipate naturally and not continue to amplify. Over time, we become less triggered by imagined threats to our sense of self. This has a substantial positive impact on our health and wellbeing.
The problem lies in identifying with our emotions. Even when we speak we have the tendency to say, “I am sad”, “I am angry”, and not just, “I feel sad or angry”.
In today’s experiment we are going to observe our emotions, inquire and learn about them, and recognize that they are something we feel and experience, not who we are.
Open eye experiment 2A
- How do you know when you are in a bad mood or emotional reaction?
- What does it feel like? What sensations in your body tell you that you are in this bad mood?
- Where do you feel it inside you? What are all the signs that are particular to this kind of mood?
- What color is it?
- What shape is it?
- Keep describing it until you can picture an object with texture, shape, size and color.
- Now that it is no longer “you”, play with it – see if you can make it larger or smaller, if you can change its color, its texture.
- Try moving it around to different parts of you.
- What does it feed on?
- Which thoughts make it grow?
- What thoughts couldn’t you think if you wanted to keep the bad mood going?
- What if there were no thoughts and no story associated with this mood, what would happen to it?
- What would be left?
Now, ask yourself who noticed the bad mood, who is picturing it, who is aware of its sensations? Is it the same awareness that is aware of your breath, the sky, clouds, trees, and sun?
The important takeaway
There is an automatic part of emotional reactions that you cannot control, but there is a moment of choice, where you can either choose to identify with it, indulge it, feed it and get stuck in it, or just let it be, disidentify with it by making it an object, a shape and letting it dissipate naturally.
The problem with indulging and feeding emotions is that the energy of the emotion takes over, and you find yourself in what feels like a black hole.
Picture your current fear, problem, source of anxiety, anger, or disappointment as one black spot with your eyeball glued to it so closely that you see nothing but black. You can get lost in this blackness, believing that is all there is and allow it to pull you in and hold you there.
By stepping back and opening your field of awareness, you see the much bigger white board on which this black dot sits. And the more you expand your awareness, the smaller the dot becomes, and the bigger the white space around it becomes, until finally, you’re barely able to see the dot on the immense white background of awareness.
Awareness is always there and contains everything but we can also limit awareness down to a small point. Anxiety, obsession and overwhelm are examples of overly restricted awareness. Studies show that by expanding into awareness, the parietal lobe of the brain is calmed, reducing fear and fight or flight responses to life.
Open eye experiment 2B: Expanding into the background of awareness
Conscious and unconscious fears influence our decisions and run our lives. How can we know that if there is unconscious fear running us? The answer is tension.
Notice the tension that is keeping you ”glued to the black dot”. Find the areas of tension in your body – see how many you can find. As you find them, imagine light flowing through those areas.
Relax the muscles all around your eyes, and just allow your breath to release the tension in those muscles. Soften your gaze. Rest back as the light comes to your eyes.
Instead of looking with narrow, tunnel vision, create a diffused view, like a soft focused camera. Feel what it is like to receive light. Allow seeing to be the PASSIVE activity that it really is. Light enters our eyes and images are formed without any effort on our part. You do not go out to see something like your hands go out to pick something up. Take a moment to allow your eyes to settle in their sockets and experience seeing as receiving. Become aware of how seeing just happens on its own.
Now open up your vision
Soften your eyes and become aware of the light coming from the right and left periphery. In order to open your gaze to include as much as you can of your full peripheral vision, extend your arms out to each side of you, and point your index fingers. Try to see both index fingers together, at the same time. Move them a bit and try to expand your peripheral vision.
Now point one arm upwards towards the sky in front of you, and let the other arm and finger point downwards. Adjust your arms until both fingers are again within your sight. Try playing with the space between your arms so that you increase your vertical vision as well.
Every time you go for a walk, practice seeing in this broader fuller way. See how much you can see peripherally – both vertically and horizontally (but not while crossing the street).
Over 30 years ago, this exercise helped me go from serious myopia (over 9 diopters in both eyes) to only 4.5 over the period of a year or two, and it continued to improve.
The important takeaway
Opening up your view physically, opens up your psychological perspective as well. You become less focussed on dark comments and the “dark” things in your life, and experience the bright broad field of awareness all around you.
Anxiety attacks are another example of a programmed response.
If you suffer from periodic or chronic anxiety attacks, you need to practice this exercise a lot – every day. This exercise will reduce their occurrence and intensity. The technique you will learn today was tested by the armed forces in combat. It is a proven method. You can also make an appointment with a MICH holistic practitioner. We have helped hundreds of people free themselves from this paralyzing affliction with homeopathy.
Open eye experiment 2C: The Square Breathing Technique
Draw a square with equal sides using arrows. On a small piece of paper or cardboard, start on the left side and draw an up arrow, then draw an arrow pointing to the right to make the top, then an arrow pointing down for the left side, and finally an arrow pointing to the right to make the bottom of the square.
Practice breathing through your nose by following the arrows, starting with the left one. Breathe in with the up arrow, then pause along the top, then breathe out gently through your mouth with the down arrow, and pause along the bottom.
The key to this technique is the equal time of each of the 4 parts of breathing: For example : breathe in, counting to 3, pause, count to a count of 3, breathe out count 3, pause count 3. It can be a count of 2 as well.
Try not to be slumped, make sure your belly has space, and become aware of how much of your body is involved in your breathing: your shoulder blades, chest expanding and contracting, pelvis moving forward and backward, belly filling out. The muscles between your ribs contract and your diaphragm contracts and pulls down, pulling air into your lungs, and making your belly swell out.
After a couple of minutes of counting, let the square become a circle, a never ending circle happening on its own, like a wave.
Focus on the pauses, and experience the pauses as the silence and empty space of awareness. Imagine gently falling into that space and notice how the spark of breath naturally begins in that pause after the out-breath. And how the out-breath just happens on its own. Become aware of BEING BREATHED. Become aware of the universal energy that keeps you alive.
The important takeaway
The breath is our most important ally when dealing with anxiety. When anxiety becomes chronic, it is a conditioned response and needs daily attention to de-program it.
We saw in part B how fear takes over when we are too close and have lost sight of the bigger picture. When we are too close, false evidence appears real – we do not see things as they really are. Anxiety and anxiety attacks have the same basis, and today we will learn to use Gratitude as a way to go from the false perceptions that stir up our deepest fears to the reality that we are alive, and life is wonderful.
The power of gratitude lies NOT in thinking about gratefulness or listing things and people we should be grateful for. The true power is the experience of gratitude as a feeling. It must be fully experienced and felt in your body, not just thought about.
On a card or small piece of paper, write down something that might spark a feeling of gratitude in you: a pet, a teacher, a loved one, a book, your phone, chocolate, your shoes, car, bed, mate, child, parent – anything that will spark that feeling. Write it down and keep it handy in your wallet or purse. Get into the FEELING of Gratitude and feel what it feels like. Let it take over your whole body, every single cell. Today’s exercise will help you do that.
Open eye experiment 2D: Going from false fear to real gratitude
If you can, gently bring your palms together, but without any tension, very gently and loosely.
Relax your shoulders to allow the energy to flow from your heart into your hands.
Connect the base of your thumbs with the middle of your chest, at your sternum, the heart energy point.
- Relax your eyes.
- Relax your jaw.
- Now exhale to relieve all your stress and tension.
- Think of something or someone that sparks gratitude in you.
- FEEL gratitude – even for a second of two.
- Feel gratefulness being breathed in as you inhale and gratefulness spreading through your body as you exhale.
- Breathe it into every cell, imagine it like light permeating every cell and organ.
- FEEL the full-body experience of gratitude.
The important takeaway
Now for your challenge: how many times can you get yourself to FEEL the gratitude flowing through you today? How much of your day can be experienced in the state of gratitude?
Start with every bite of food, every drop of water, tea or coffee, every ray of sunlight or raindrop, every breath filled with gratitude — everything in your life, every person in your life, every opportunity in your life.
We can be restricted from experiencing life fully if the brain is imprinted by trauma from loss, abuse, fear, violence and tragedy. We can be subject to uncontrollable emotional reactions to anything that could symbolize or represent that past event.
We can try using psychological techniques to intellectually understand the history and causes of emotional issues, but they are not enough to fully resolve trauma.
Spiritual techniques and mindful witnessing of the emotions of traumatic incidents can be helpful, but they, too, are not enough.
These feelings must be felt at a deeper level, beyond the story, beyond interpretation. The key to unlocking trauma is to go beyond the psychological, through the emotional, and into an energetic experience of sensations and energy. The energy of the trauma lies in our unconscious cellular memory, and the only medicine that can address something that deep is homeopathy. No matter how old or in what form the trauma occurred, it can be, and should be uprooted energetically.
Today we will learn how to prevent a single incident from turning into trauma and resentment that could last for years. We can and should curtail the vicious cycle of secondary feelings of hurt and anger stemming from one incident.
Open eye experiment 2E : Going beyond trauma
This is a deep feeling exercise that should be done with a real emotion. See if one comes up today, or if you can pull out an unpleasant emotion from your recent memory.
As soon as you realize that you are triggered, bring your awareness to the bottom of your feet, the sensations in your feet, and imagine roots being sent down deep into the center of the earth. With every in-breath, imagine the earth’s warm energy coming up through those roots and into your body, full of love, nurturing you, relaxing you and protecting you.
Stay with the experience of the emotion until you feel it completely.
Then take a breath and acknowledge your awareness of the emotion by saying to yourself, “I feel …”
Become aware that you are not the emotion (sadness, anger or another emotion), you are just feeling emotion.
Observe the awareness of feeling the emotion.
Observe the awareness of feeling, like all the feelings that come and go.
Now, observe the awareness of allowing the feeling to be there.
Awareness and emotion are not separate.
Notice the energy of your emotions.
How do you know you are feeling that emotion? What are the physical signs? The images, thoughts and sensations?
What is the feeling in your body right now?
Become aware of all the sensations, and how your body is feeling.
Allow all the sensations to be without analysis or story or words
Just raw pure sensations, as sensations, without any story attached.
Leave the story behind.
Just be with your body, with the discomfort.
Feel the movement of it, the energy of the emotion.
How fast or slow is it, what does that energy want to do?
What gestures could you make that would express how that energy wants to move, what it wants to do? just the energy, just the movement.
Just allow whatever you are experiencing right now to be fully experienced as a movement, action, images – preferably referencing things in nature rather than people.
Recognize that the whole experience: the story, emotions, interpretations, images and sensations all came from that energy. That emotions are just energy.
Awareness is energy, awareness, energy and emotion are not separate
Feel awareness around and within, permeating the emotion fully but without identifying with it. It is not you, it is just an energy.
The Important Takeaway
Emotions are only energy in motion (e-motion). By allowing awareness to permeate them, but not identify with them, or reject them or want to change them, just letting them flow through, like all of life flows through.
Sometimes painful emotions wash over us and demand our attention, pull our focus in, and take us over.
If we can allow awareness to peek in, we can surrender the wave of emotion to awareness and allow the wave to pass through. In today’s exercise we use awareness to awaken us from the emotional sense of self defined by emotional experiences in our past, and any emotional attachments that contribute to separateness.
Open eye experiment 2F: Surrendering to the Spiritual Heart
We often feel emotions in our chest, heart or solar plexus. We feel emotions in what can be called our emotional heart. Picture your physical heart being surrounded by a bigger energetic emotional heart, and both of them surrounded by an infinite and interconnected, spiritual, universal heart. Imagine your physical and your emotional hearts letting go and relaxing into the embrace of the spiritual heart, being held by your spiritual heart.
Just for a few seconds, don’t try to fix your emotion or make it go away, just try to feel where in your body that emotion is taking place. When you locate the area, get curious, slow down and watch, make space for it. Emotions don’t need to be analysed. Even negative emotions just want to be noticed. When emotions are acknowledged, identified, seen, brought to awareness. and allowed to be how they are, they just pass through.
Now, offer your emotions up to your spiritual heart. Visualize the emotions flowing out of the emotional heart into the spiritual heart and into the infinite space it occupies.
The important takeaway
Don’t resist, control, repress or engage in emotions, nor attach any stories to them. Treat them as if they were a wave passing through you.
Anger is the most important emotion on our spiritual path and growth. Anger is the energy we feel when we need to expand, when we do not have enough vital space to evolve. The word “anger” comes from an Indo-European root meaning “tight, painful,” and the ancestor of the words anguish and angina. Angina can be one of the symptoms when we try to repress anger or when we misdirect it.
The energy of anger is essential vital energy, which is wasted when we get “mad at” someone or something, and especially if we tie it to a story about not being respected, being taken advantage of, or any other story. When anger arises, we need to use this vital energy to help us expand and evolve. Today’s experiment is about how to do that.
At MICH, we have used homeopathy to support homeless women and women in shelters who have suffered abuse. This exercise is part of the holistic treatment that has helped them transform their lives and create an energetic wall of protection. Don’t underestimate its power!
Open eye experiment 2G: Expanding and evolving with anger
At the next opportunity you have where you feel anger rising, immediately bring your awareness to where you feel anger in your body. Try to visualize it as much as possible: the color, the shape, the temperature. Often anger is experienced as hot, red lava in our belly or chest or head.
Now, visualize that hot lava (or whatever you see) flowing upwards and through the top of your head, with your breath, and flowing into the space around your body, forming an “egg” of energy around you. Keep breathing the anger out from your body, like a toothpaste tube, into that egg and let the egg expand to contain all of it, all around your body, until you cannot feel it in your body anymore. Try to feel the diameter of that egg expanding, see how far out it feels from your skin.
Do this exercise every single time you get mad.
The important takeaway
ANGER is vital energy that you need to expand, grow and thrive. Don’t throw it away by getting mad at yourself, someone else or something else. Treat anger as an opportunity to engage energetically with your vital force.
Freedom from Time
Time is Change and Change is Uncertain
This week’s series of Doorways is about time. So, what exactly is time? Time, according to physics, is the measurement of the durations of events and the intervals between them: in other words, the speed at which events go by. That means, the more we try to do, the faster we go, and the more we experience time as going by faster. It’s a catch 22, one that you are probably very familiar with.
The Hurrier I Go, the Behinder I Get
Life and being alive require constant adaptation, evolution and change. The physical world around us is in constant flux, going where it needs to go, doing what it needs to do, none of which can be predicted beforehand. The very nature of the physical world is uncertainty.
We work hard at constructing societies built on belief systems designed to make us feel secure, and push uncertainty to the background. These structures are useful to an extent. But, where we get lost, is when we imagine that uncertainty can be totally replaced with control, and when we delude ourselves into thinking that uncertainty is not a natural part of life.
We create belief systems and stories that usually have something to do with an imagined safe and perfect future. We are experts at fabricating a false sense of security by creating a virtual reality disconnected from life.
Our inability to accept life’s uncertainty is also what leads us to engage in hectic activity that serves to cover up our inner turmoil, our inner fear and discomfort around the unknown. If we stop, even for a moment, we experience that discomfort and we are moved to be busy again so that we don’t feel it. We even justify this busy-ness by deluding ourselves into believing that this hectic pace of getting things done is what is going to secure our future.
We try to address uncertainty by imagining we can create a secure future
The scientist, doctor, financier or charismatic leader who pretends to “know” outcomes induces momentary security in us, but when things don’t turn out quite the way he or she said, we should realize that no one “knows” anything about the future, or much about life.
Philip E. Tetlock studied over 30,000 predictions made by specialists and found that their predictions were no better than random guesses. However, some predictors were better than others, and they shared a common attribute. No, it wasn’t education, training, intelligence, background or culture. The best forecasters were those who embraced the reality of uncertainty.
Today’s exercise is designed to help you to embrace insecurity, and uncertainty, and open up to the infinite potential that is within your reach.
Open eye experiment 3A: Embracing uncertainty
Today’s exercise is really simple: set the intent to catch yourself every time you are thinking about the future, or trying to know or predict.
Remind yourself that the future is always uncertain, and no one can predict it. And that whatever will happen, will be dealt with, when it does. Worrying about it now is not going to change the outcome. You are just adding worrying to your load. You’re doubling your suffering!
Embrace your feelings of uncertainty.
Allow yourself to become quiet.
Allow uncertainty to be, just acknowledge and accept it.
Most importantly, realize that every time you catch yourself, it is not ordinary everyday thought that is catching itself. It is not even “you” as your ego self catching yourself, it is awareness peeking through. Awareness will peek in as often as you allow it. Awareness is always there, ever present, always watching, hearing, seeing, always aware.
Pull back and let yourself FALL into the infinitely deep, infinitely broad awareness that includes your thoughts, and all your sensations, your sights and every sound. When you shift out of thinking into that broader awareness, you will feel yourself expand and relax, and your breath slow down, as well as time. Allow yourself to rest in the present moment (which is always here).
When you shift your attention from the contents of your thoughts, which are always changing (and therefore elicit the experience of time speeding by) to the infinite field of awareness in you and around you, time stands still. You experience the NOW not as a moment but as an eternal flow.
And you will find that you can access much more efficient solutions, and infinite potential, from a place of presence and peace, from which everything is possible.
The important takeaway
That which has noticed your experience your whole life from the time you were born has never changed. It will never change. Awareness is eternal, always there and will always be there. It is the one thing, the one presence, that you can be certain about.
Time and suffering start with non-acceptance
We often imagine that our suffering is caused by what is happening. Yes, there may very well be something happening that is causing us pain. Pain is an inevitable part of life, but suffering is optional.
We create suffering by not accepting how things are. Suffering is the idea that things should be somehow different than what they are, and that’s when we bring in time, to hold our plan to change things.
Byron Katie was asked the question “How can you tell if what is happening should be happening?” Her answer was: “Because that’s what’s happening.”
Whatever is happening, should be happening. Once you have accepted reality, that what is, is what is, only then can you calmly proceed to an appropriate response. For example, the role of viruses is to maintain equilibrium in the ecosystem by reducing the numbers of an over-dominant species that has become too destructive.
What then could be our response towards an epidemic, if we were to accept that one fundamental reality of life?
When we try to fight reality, we misdirect our life force. If we do not accept what is, we create tension, tightness, resistance. We generate emotions that stimulate the forebrain to try to solve the problem by engaging the imagination, creating future scenarios and storytelling which, in turn, trigger the flight or fight survival response. This then stresses our nervous system, causes inflammation and cytokine storms and totally disrupts our immune system response.
An example of how damaging that can be is the case of a woman who presented with severe arthritis which crippled her hands to the point of not being able to paint, which she loved to do. Our exploration revealed that she was always trying to control life, trying to foresee, plan and make everything turn out how she thought things should be.
She was unable to seize the opportunities that the unpredictable holds. She would resist whatever was happening with obsessive worry and “what if’s”. “What if’s” are the playground of the forebrain and always lead to increased inner stress, whether or not we are aware of it. This state of anticipatory anxiety was monopolizing her vital force and keeping her in fight or flight mode, creating exaggerated inflammatory responses, which turned out to be the cause of her arthritis. I found a remedy that had the same themes of Providence which she strove to possess, and which made her unable to surrender to the wisdom of the moment. Her remedy brought her immediate relief from her obsessiveness, and within 3 months, her arthritic symptoms began to dissipate to the point where she could return to art.
So try to do the wise thing before your stress becomes your disease, and tell yourself the truth – you can’t control life. So step back and let go. Today’s exercise will show you how.
Open eye experiment 3B: Relax, Accept, Aware
Step 1: Relax. Try to catch yourself rushing, hurrying, worrying or trying to control, and take a deep breath and relax. Allow the breath to go through your whole body. Notice the areas of internal tension, clutching, or resistance.
Step 2: Accept. Allow what is to be as it is, without wanting to change things, the situation, other people, your thoughts, your feelings, or their thoughts, their feelings, and their opinions. Tell yourself: “This is what is happening and what should be happening.”
Step 3: Aware. Turn your attention to the background of awareness in which all experience appears. Shift into that wonderfully expanded mode of being, the infinite field of awareness and the infinite potential it holds.
The idea is to do all three at once, together, but you might have to start off by doing it in three steps so that you can practice each one individually.
The important takeaway
We can reduce suffering and disease just by accepting what is, letting go of our resistance to what is happening and inviting awareness to be our guide.
Thinking is NOT Time Travel
When your thoughts of the past begin to take over, when you start thinking, mulling, or rehashing the past, remind yourself of this: Thinking is NOT time travel. You can’t change the past with thinking, or by rehashing memories or regrets. Rehashing changes nothing. You might try to convince yourself that by going over past events you might find out how to prevent them in the future, but that is justifying what is a very destructive habit.
Even if it is a positive memory, it is important to let it go. Attachment to precious moments in our lives can be as limiting as the attachment to bad memories. A ritual in many traditions, involves throwing an effigy, usually a note we have written, about the best moments of our lives into the fire so that we can have a new best moment. Otherwise, everything pales in comparison to the one event, the highlight that memory glorifies beyond proportion. Memory cannot be trusted to be objective, it is always colored according to what we are feeling in that moment. So don’t believe your memories.
And, let go of the present, too, while you’re at it. Depression is being stuck in a moment in time: as if there were no past nor a different future. The NOW is not a moment in time, it is an ever changing flow. Nothing stays the same. So whatever is happening now will eventually end.
Open eye experiment 3C : Forgiving means handing over
If you find that there is a memory that haunts you, or that there is something you regret, or feel guilty about that happened in the past, realize that you can’t go back and change it.
Clearly identify whatever you think “shouldn’t have been”, and feel it sitting in your emotional heart.
Now imagine that event sifting out of your emotional heart and into the immense, universal spiritual heart that surrounds it.
Hand the memory over to the spiritual heart, allowing it to dissipate into infinite space and potential. Forgive yourself by giving up your guilt. Hand it over to the wisdom, and infinite unconditional love of the spiritual heart.
The important takeaway
It is impossible for anyone who has not forgiven themselves for everything they have done to be able to forgive others. And, anyone who has forgiven themselves and everyone else for everything they have done cannot help but love unconditionally and be love itself.
We are conditioned to see ourselves, and everything else, as existing within a container of time: past, present and future … until we question that assumption. When we loosen our conditioning, and bring awareness to time, a veil lifts, the vividness of life appears, and the clarity of pure experience is revealed.
Try to imagine the past without thought, every kind of thought: no words, no image based thoughts, no movies, no story. Now ask yourself, does the past exist without thought? Does time exist without thought? Does the “me” exist without time and a past?
Today’s exercise is about unhooking from time by dis-identifying from thoughts and letting awareness be who you are. Recognize that thoughts and thought created time are not needed to experience life and they get in the way of being fully alive.
Open eye experiment 3D: The Conscious Shift
Acknowledge that awareness has just caught you lost in thought, or thinking about the past or future. Bring your focus to the edge of your nostrils and experience the awareness of the air passing into your nose.
While focussed on the sensations of air passing into your nose, experience inner awareness as the primary source of experience. Feel the awareness inside your nose, inside this part of your body, rather than in your mind. Experience awareness right at the edge of your nostrils.
Now imagine that awareness is hitching a ride on the in-breath, following it into your neck.
Imagine awareness moving like an invisible globe to your neck, and experience your neck FROM THE INSIDE.
Then let it ride or drop below your neck, to your chest, and experience your chest FROM THE INSIDE.
Feel the inner body presence of thought free awareness.
Allow awareness from within your body to open up to the space all around your body.
Become aware of open space and then notice that open space is aware. You are in a sea of awareness, it is all around you, a silent, boundless, and timeless witnessing space. Notice the difference in your breathing and how you feel in your body.
Witness the contents of your body and mind from awareness. Imagine that you are seeing yourself from above your head, or from in front of you, so that the awareness that knows itself as formless, will now also know itself as form. Awareness remains boundless yet it includes your body, your energy, thoughts, feelings and sensations.
You are not your past, nor your thoughts, you are timeless awareness.
The important takeaway
Timeless Awareness is the essence of reality, it is who you really are, who we all are, and what everything is. Allow yourself to expand to the timelessness and infinity of the reality that is all around you, in which your body is immersed.
We all go about our activities at our own rhythm, or so we think. Our fast paced, thought-based, preoccupied, stressed lifestyle has sped our lives up and affected our relationship to our natural innate rhythm. This experiment is to help you reconnect to a more natural, human rhythm that will shift your awareness and slow down time.
Our lives are artificially sped up, which distorts our relationship to time, but this simple exercise puts things back into perspective.
Today’s experiment is simple but has a profound affect on our state of mind, actually on our whole body-mind state.
Open eye experiment 3E: Shifting speeds
When you find yourself rushing, talking or driving fast, or feeling impatient, catch yourself and go 15% slower.
Make the conscious effort of speaking, walking, driving or eating 15% more slowly than what you were just doing. Notice the shift in your body and mind.
The important takeaway
Time is useful as a measurement tool for activities like running, or making appointments, and structuring our activities, but holds no other reality or meaning. Our experience of time is relative and related to the state we are in. Our days can be filled with many timeless moments if we allow awareness in.
Physics tells us that space and time are intricately related; they are two interconnected dimensions. When you change your relationship to space, your relationship to time also changes.
There is a buddhist practice that involves going to a place with a wide open vista and becoming interested in looking at the open space. First you notice the open space in front of you, then within you then behind you. Then you experience yourself as that open sky. We will do something similar.
Open eye experiment 3F: Change your space and change your relationship to time
Try to encounter open sky at least once today, or tonight. It is good for your health and well being to make a point of seeing open sky at least once a day. Even prisoners in prison get this opportunity! So talk to your inner jailer!
When you do, fully experience the feeling of open sky.
Experience the “seeing” of the open sky. How seeing is happening.
Then let the sky come into your head.
Imagine that open sky descending into your skull, so that your head is open sky.
Let your throat be open sky.
Now let it come into the heart.
So that you feel you have a heart like the sky.
See if you can experience your whole self as that open sky.
Do this as often as you can today and every day of the awakening process. Notice when you do, there is a shift. With this shift, time slows down, and you feel more expanded.
The important takeaway
Seeing open sky is like coming home. Open sky is the essence of the presence that exists in our hearts. When we experience from the heart, time stands still, and the moment is eternal.
Allowing awareness to be your container decouples your identification with a boundary limited physical body and allows you to experience your true boundless nature. Today’s exercise has been one of my favorites for at least a quarter of a century, ever since I read the book : “On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious” by Douglas E. Harding. This experiment was one of the most powerful tools in helping me to shift out of my “me”.
Open eye experiment 3G: Having no Head
If you had never seen a mirror, your experience of yourself would be of your nose, a bit of your cheeks, your arms, torso, legs and feet. You would have never seen your head or face, so as far as your experience, as far as you would know, you could very well not have a head.
So for today, pretend mirrors never existed, and go about your day with the idea that you have no head: that what is behind your nose is empty space: the empty space of awareness. Be that empty space eternally watching and discovering.
Be the witness of what your arms, hands, legs and body are doing – as if they don’t really belong to you. You are just observing and watching what they seem to be doing automatically.
The important takeaway
When we feel ourselves to be space, especially our heads, it slows the activity of our Forebrain and all of the “what ifs” that our forebrain imagines in the future. It is all the “what ifs” that cause the worst kind of stress. See how wonderful life is when that isn’t happening.
Conscious Evolution Towards our Full Potential
For the sake of all life, all living beings and the Earth itself, Homo sapiens sapiens MUST take its next crucial step towards maturity through conscious evolution. We need to know and experience awareness as our true nature, as the ground of all beings and all existence.
We must recognize the container of awareness that includes and is inherent in all dimensions of consciousness including thought, but is itself, not lost or identified with any part, any thought, or any thinking process.
When we do, we can fulfill our purpose and mission: to allow awareness to become aware of itself.
Awareness is formless, without any content, yet knowing. As David Bohm discovered, even electrons, the smallest unit of matter, seem conscious, seem to “know”. Awareness is the original “I”, the oneness or ground of everything that exists. Awareness is the basis of an infinite quantum field from which individual particles and waves appear, as well as all types of consciousness and all patterns of experience – physical, emotional, energetic and thought.
Every thing including thought is a wave on the ocean of awareness, made of awareness and never separate from Awareness.
Awareness is inherent within thinking consciousness, too, but thinking can get caught in a loop of thoughts, get caught up in the stream of consciousness and become ignorant of its own root in awareness, and imagine that it is the real “I”. This is the ego wolf: a mistaken identity, a counterfeit version of the underlying true I of awareness.
This ego wolf proclaims itself to be the owner of “my body”, it co-opts the programs designed to preserve the physical body and the natural physical drives of seeking, possessing and consuming to serve itself.
The ego wolf, always on red alert for anything that might potentially threaten its thought-created persona, distorts and misinterprets situations and sends physical survival strategies into high gear. This releases a flood of chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol which creates a sense of immediate physical danger and reinforces the sense of there actually being a real psychological “I” that needs to be protected, maintain control, avoid criticism, judgment and being “wrong” or wronged.
Since this self is not a real entity, its cravings, protection, and feelings of fear and dissatisfaction can never be satiated or resolved. So, the ego wolf always feels as though something is missing, something is wrong. This creates internal, unconscious stress that keeps dangerous cytokines remain at high levels, and leads to dysfunction in the immune system, high levels of inflammation and ultimately disease.
That perpetual state of lack inherent in the ego wolf is what Hahnemann, the father of modern homeopathy, called “Psora”: the source of all diseases, which can be effectively uprooted with homeopathy.
In summary, the root of our chronic pain and the suffering we feel and cause lies in our mistaken identity. We need to learn to allow the false sense of self to sink down into the true self and realize that that is who we really are.
Open eye Experiment 4A: Who would you be without your story?
Have you ever examined the times you felt upset, worried, stressed, anxious, guilt-ridden, frustrated, sad, disappointed, or angry? At some point of the inquiry into what upset you, you will hear yourself say something like one of following: “I didn’t feel heard, respected, taken seriously” or “I don’t deserve that treatment, it’s unfair”, or “I feel rejected, abandoned, unloved, unprotected, unsupported, victimized…” or “I am not good enough, I’m a loser, a failure, ugly, unattractive, stupid, a misfit”.
How many times have you heard yourself say something similar? Most likely, it would not have been the first time you felt that way or said that.
If a familiar phrase arises, you can be sure that there is a strong element of interpretation and story making at play. If you allow your mind to do that, you will find yourself in a spiral downwards.
Today, you will find out how to catch your mind and bring yourself back to inner peace.
I am
Use a blank page of your journal or visualize a whiteboard just with the words “I am … “ written on it.
Experience this I am as who you are: “I”ness emerging from infinite space. The “I am” that is the ground of all being.
You can also do this on an electronic device, just type “I am…”
Think of an end to this sentence and, write it, visualize it being written, or type it.
Such as: “I am…” and put your occupation, for example.
Then erase it, erase the end of the sentence, leaving only “I am…” or backspace back to the “I am”.
Try putting your sex, or any other self description.
Then erase it, erase the end of the sentence, leaving only “I am …”
Repeat with any adjective you would use for yourself.
Then erase it.
Think of an end to this sentence by remembering a recent “story”, and visualize it being written or type it.
Now erase the end.
Stay with “I am”, and catch yourself anytime you describe yourself in any other way.
The important takeaway
Any and every word you use to describe yourself is false. You are not a concept, not a thing, not an adjective, you are isness itself without description, without words.
Awareness forms all patterns of experience, it informs all forms. This “information” is what creates the integrity of every expression, and the coherence of everything in existence. It is the one unifying intelligence, and the one “I” that looks through every soul.
Today’s exercise is about using our ability to shift into awareness so as to experience every soul. Doing this when taking someone’s case shifts the MICH practitioner out of the me-you, subject-object duality state into one of pure awareness that is no longer identified with one’s personal experience(s) and point of view.
Open eye experiment 4B: Looking out through others’ eyes
Shift into awareness, who you really are: the clear, empty, fresh, knowing that is bigger and more spacious than your body or personality. Allow yourself to experience awareness inside your body, your chest and heart and all of your cells.
Let go of all concepts, images, borders, and edges and expand into the infinite awareness that surrounds your body and permeates your body.
Be borderless and infinite, the universe looking at itself through your eyes, its eyes!
Pure seeing without words, just awareness, seeing.
Ask: What is looking out your eyes? What is receiving those sensory perceptions?
Feel the infinite awareness looking out your eyes at the world.
Now, look at another person. It could be anyone, someone walking along the street or sitting on their balcony.
Get a sense of awareness becoming aware of them.
Follow the gaze of that one person. What would they be seeing right now? What are they seeing from their viewpoint? Imagine what it is like to be that person’s mind looking out at the world. Just stay there in that mode and feel what it must be like to see what they see, to experience what they are experiencing.
Now imagine the same awareness looking out your eyes to be looking out through their eyes.
Infinite awareness looking through their eyes.
Say to yourself “What is looking out their eyes is exactly the same as what is looking out my eyes.”
One intelligence, one soul, looking out all eyes.
We are all the same “I” looking out all eyes.
The important takeaway
Awake awareness is universal. The same awareness is within every living being. Know yourself to be that awareness.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is stuck in an arrested stage of development that begins at the age of 2 or so, when a child begins to identify with the body and other objects, claiming them as “mine”. This stage of ego development might very well be a necessary, healthy stage to distinguish the individual and develop its unique expression, but the human being is not fully mature until thought discovers awareness as its root. In the awakened human, all our actions, all ego functions are experienced as originating in awareness.
All our concepts of “me” and “mine”, and every “me” thought just adds to the powerful floodwaters of the stream of consciousness that takes us over and carries us towards division, dissatisfaction, greed, selfishness, destruction and cruelty.
On the other hand, every moment spent in awareness slows the flood and cleans the stream.
Every time you step into awareness, you do so for the sake of all beings on earth and the planet as a whole. Awakening can only happen through the heart, as an act of love offered up to awareness to end all suffering on earth.
In any case, you cannot do this practice for “your” enlightenment, that would defeat the purpose, you would just be supporting the concept of a spiritual “me” another false self, layered on top of awareness. Remind yourself that the only real “I” is awareness, and that is who you are, right now, in this moment.
Awakening is not something that happens in time, in the future. Time is mind, is thought, and the false self.
In today’s exercise, we address suffering by opening up to awareness. Make everything you do, including this exercise, into an offering to your spiritual heart. Offer it up with devotion to the well being of all beings.
Open eye experiment 4C: Taking the Next Necessary Step of Evolution
Everything is birthed from awareness and needs to return to that potent emptiness to replenish itself. Everything has a still point, a silent pause. There is a pause between every thought, a still point between every heartbeat and between each breath. It is in that pause that the breath enters that dark emptiness, and is rekindled with potential, with life.
Allow your breath to carry awareness to your heart.
Allow awareness to expand into your spiritual heart, and its infinite interconnectedness that holds all beings, and all of life.
Bring to mind any suffering that stirs feelings of empathy or compassion in you.
Breathe in suffering.
Breathe out that suffering into and through your spiritual heart into the infinity of awareness.
Notice the pause as your breath settles back into silent, empty, timeless awareness where all suffering is healed.
Allow the in-breath to arise naturally from awareness, and embrace all of life on earth, all beings and all suffering.
Do this as often as you can today, and especially when you read or see unnecessary cruelty, ignorance and all other forms of suffering.
Important Takeaway
Every time you rest your awareness in that empty space, you slow down the stream of consciousness and help all of humanity be free of the ego wolf, the false “me”. Every time you do any of these Doorway experiments, let it be for the benefit of all beings, hold them in your heart as an act of love.
The next time you get “upset,” ask yourself who got hurt. The good me? The innocent me? The nice me? The responsible, hard-working me? The me that is usually right? The me with the answers and solutions?
But also, the next time you feel high about yourself, see what concept of self was associated with that. Chances are it’s the same one. We feel on top of the world if our thoughts interpret that we are what we want ourselves to be, and we feel lower than low if we are seen to be failing at that concept of self.
Living this way leads to emotional instability, dissatisfaction, and moodiness. We create deep-seated stress when we try to live up to the expectations we have created in ourselves or others around our persona. It also leads to a distortion of reality, distortions in our relationships, including the relationship with our self – because it is based on a lie: the lie that you are that concept.
An important part of the therapeutic process is discovering what we are identified with: how we define ourselves. The well-chosen homeopathic remedy helps people disidentify from this false identity and from the striving that causes stress as they try to live up to the sometimes unconscious perfection they have set for themselves.
Open eye experiment 4D: Letting go of self-esteem, expectations, perfectionism, control and other ego wolf trips and traps
For one day, notice every time that you judge anyone or anything, or yourself. Let awareness catch the thoughts that compare and judge.
Remind yourself that any and every concept you have of yourself and others keeps you identified with the false self and creates a false separation from awareness.
If awareness catches you judging, focus on your breath, then on the sensations associated with the air passing into your nostrils.
Hitch a ride with the in-breath to go into your throat then into your chest.
Settle your focus in your spiritual heart, the energetic center connected to all there is, all that exists.
Experience the sights, sounds and sensations around you and within you from the infinite and boundless wisdom.
Become aware of the awake awareness that resides there.
Allow yourself to sink into the wordless awareness in which all this is happening.
The effortless seeing, the effortless hearing.
Instead of focussing on judgment, see what you can offer up to the spiritual heart. Set the intent that every act is an offering to the spiritual heart rather than something to appease your ego wolf.
The important takeaway
Allow every act you do today and every day to come from the spiritual heart and be an offering to the spiritual heart.
We commonly feel as if there is a little “me“ sitting in the middle of our skull, looking out through our eyes. A bit like the wizard in the wizard of Oz, sitting in a control center and looking through two holes in our head at the world.
Not only is that not true about seeing, but we also erroneously assume that this mistaken “seer” is the thinker and the doer.
Firstly, seeing is a process of awareness that happens on the screen of awareness. It is not limited to a physical spot in our head, but also inhabits the space behind us and around us.
Secondly, there is no thinker. Any time we think we had an insight, idea or solution that came from “MY” intelligence or “MY” thinking process, whether we are right or wrong, there will be a feeling of being a fraud, an imposter. This “Fraud syndrome” is actually very justified.
That’s because thought is NOT the source of intelligence.
Thought is a secondary artifact of awareness, nothing more.
It is NOT thought, NOT the thought-based self, NOT the ego wolf who has insights
All insights, all true intelligence and wisdom come from who we really are: awareness.
Today’s experiment is the solution to that ever-present fraud syndrome.
Open eye experiment 4E: Awareness, the Source of all Intelligence
Imagine for a moment that behind that place in your head from where you feel you are looking out at the world is the bigger screen of awareness, the field of awareness.
Shift your focus from the object you are seeing to the process of seeing happening in awareness.
Imagine a blank screen behind your head, on which impressions and images are created and formed.
Allow yourself to rest back until you experience awareness behind and within that is effortlessly taking in the world without your help.
Notice how every thought, every feeling, every sensation, sight and sound arises within this vast quiet space of presence which is the eternal now.
Totally quiet.
The quietness of eternal now.
A quiet intelligence, all-knowing, all-seeing.
Surrender to it.
Now let go all at once of the seer, the thinker and the doer.
Let go of the controller, the spiritual self, the good self, as easily as if you were dropping a ball from your hand, all at once.
Rest in the totally still and quiet awareness.
The now and always present condition of no self, no past, no future.
Just rest in that ever-present selfless condition as you go about your day.
Engage in what you are doing as awareness, allowing yourself to settle back into awareness rather than rushing to meet everything with thought.
The important takeaway
Your thinking process is utterly incapable of anything insightful or creative. Awareness, the source of everything, is the true and only source of creativity and intelligence. Awakening resides in the fact that awareness is the only real source of all thinking and doing.
I hope that you have seen how much energy the ego wolf devours. The ego wolf is high maintenance. It requires a constant onslaught of self-oriented ideas, self judgments, condemnation, inner chatter and endless self narratives.
It takes a lot of energy because it’s not really who you are, so it has to keep perpetuating its structure by being supported by thought. We have done it for so long, and so consistently, that this effort is internalized and habitual, so it feels natural. It is only when the ego wolf falls away that we see how much energy it took to keep it in the center of our thought process, and feeling of self.
But the ego wolf won’t drop away if you try to get rid of it. Our will comes from our ego, so when we try hard to get rid of it, we are actually sustaining it. In other words, THE ONLY THING THAT TRIES TO GET RID OF YOUR EGO IS YOUR EGO. Dropping the ego wolf is not something we do, it is something we ALLOW to happen.
If we truly surrender and let go of thought as the knower and recognize that the only true knowing emerges from awareness, then we are effortlessly allowing the ego wolf to fall out of the center of consciousness.
Today’s experiment is a life changer. If you were to do this simple exercise every morning before you start your day while you’re brushing your teeth or taking your shower you will find that you live a very different life. So try it out today and see what changes.
Open eye experiment 4F: Allowing awareness to dissolve the knower
The tension that you feel anywhere and everywhere in your body is where your ego or will is armoring itself against the flow of life.
As you allow your breath to release your tension, drop your will and all forms of egocentric effort at the same time.
Allow your body to relax: from the top of your head right down to the bottom of your feet.
Then all at once, relax twice as much, releasing with a big sigh.
Then release your whole body from will twice as much again.
Now focus on the awareness of the air coming into your nostrils.
Allow that awareness to move into your body so that you feel your body from the inside and feel the awareness that is in every cell.
Then expand your focus to the awareness that is all around you, the sea of awareness in which you live.
Feel it through all of you, the body, the mind, the subtle senses, the space around you.
It could be subtle, don’t force anything, just let this evoke whatever it does.
Experience how the waves of energy in this sea of awareness come together at the spiritual heart.
Sink into that heart.
Call upon the willingness of the heart: ask “Let me relax and let go, loosen the attachment to my thought based self”.
Let the heart soften the subtle strands of holding.
Be inwardly still.
Notice the stillness that is already there.
The quietness already there.
Feel it and sense it.
Let it be known and felt throughout all of you.
Let this still quiet presence see through your eyes.
Look out through your eyes through that presence.
And let it hear through your ears and feel through your senses.
Know yourself as this state of ungraspable freedom and peace, even if it is very brief, just a moment, that’s fine, this is the return to your ground of being. These moments are always there, can be accessed at any time and as often as you want.
As thoughts arise during the day, follow the thoughts, emotions and reactions back to their source, the emptiness from which they arise, and into which they dissolve.
The important takeaway
Dropping the ego wolf is not something we do, it is something we allow to happen as we discover that all thoughts, all thinking, all intelligence have their roots in awareness.
When we begin to admit that we are awareness embodied, and learn how to remain grounded in the awareness inherent within our physical form, we discover our natural qualities of courage, compassion, and acceptance which help us to grow relationally, ethically, and emotionally.
This spiritual maturity dissolves the stories of being unlovable, of shame, guilt, inferiority, superiority, and dissatisfaction, so that they are no longer convincing. We feel love and sensitivity towards others and ourselves because we’re not overwhelmed by our vulnerability. Instead, we rest in the fearless support that comes from our ground of being.
We no longer are limited to only feeling like a separate individual physical person, instead, we can experience ourselves as a wave within an ocean of interconnectedness, inseparable from that ocean.
To know awareness as your essential nature is to see that all phenomena share the same essential nature as you do. This naturally leads to the realization of our unity with all people and all creation so that we feel a spontaneous, compassionate motivation. Unfolding happens by itself. We learn to do by being.
The difficulty is that we can’t see awareness because we are looking from awareness, but we can allow awareness to see itself within us.
Open eye experiment 4G: Awareness seeing you as itself
Start by ever so slightly shifting your sense of you to the I that is the witness of all your experiences. Be the witness, the vast spaciousness in which all of this is occurring. Shift your sense of you to the witness of all your experiences, to the spacious awareness that contains them all.
Be empty of your will, of self, of knowledge, of effort, be as you were before you were born.
Find that ground where you are the unborn and unformed source of your own being and the being of all created things.
Let go of all concepts, boundaries, and knowledge.
Imagine you were born yesterday.
Eternally new, eternally curious, eternally discovering.
You are borderless, infinite, the universe looking at itself through your eyes.
The eyes and ears of eternity.
The same awareness that is seeing the world around you, is also aware of the awareness within.
Awareness looking out at the world can also turn around and look back through the apparent looker to find itself.
Awareness looking towards the screen of awareness behind your head.
Let awareness be curious and aware of itself.
Allow awareness to be curious about you as a point of awareness, an expression of itself.
Allow awareness to be interested and aware of itself.
Awareness resting back to become the seeing and the seen.
Infinite, soft, spacious, and pervasive.
Allow it to know itself just as it is aware of arising experiences.
Awareness seeing what the next thought will be.
Awareness interested in the space through which thoughts move.
Awareness seeing what is aware of space and moving thoughts.
Notice that in true seeing, there is nothing to see, only embodied presence.
Let all your actions today and every day be witnessed as the emergence of awareness through movement and life: watching the doing, knowing that all action, seeing and doing is coming from awareness.
The Important Takeaway
The most meaningful experience for a homo sapiens sapiens (one who knows who knows) is to allow awareness to know itself through our human body-mind.
The only final and valid answer to the question: “Who am I?”, is found by waking up to the totality of our true nature.