Four months ago I went to Bali thinking that I would do a lot of writing. I was planning to write a lot for this blog and about the body meditation practice. But once I got there I found that I had no energy for writing. I tried, but every time I started the writing was difficult and felt flat and inauthentic. I had to force it and once I realized I was forcing it I knew I had to stop. It felt as if there was a voice inside saying, “Stop! Stop and pay attention. I have something more important for you to pay attention to.” So I stopped and I paid attention.
What came to me was the most difficult stuff I have ever been with in my life. Layers of fear, anxiety and other emotional tension arose that I realize have been with me my whole life but until this moment, I had not had the capacity to be with. In the past I had always avoided this deep tension, distracted myself from it, or tried to bypass it through various spiritual practices. But now, after years of meditation and months of learning how to do the Following Life practice, learning how to actively follow and connect with anything and everything that life brings to awareness, I was ready to face these layers within myself. I had established a level of trust that if I did they could be healed and transformed.
So with the support of dear friends and the nurturing environment of Bali I Followed Life, I actively followed and connected with all the emotional tension that was coming up. I stayed with the intense fear and anxiety until I discovered that it was really just stuck energy. I realized that the tension was unconscious resistance to feeling the energy of the emotions that were there. When I connected with them, the resistance to began to release. Then, I actively followed the energy as it released and began to move through my body and appear in my mind as dream-like images. I didn’t try to analyze or figure out these images. I just stayed with them and followed them as they unfolded and as the energetic sensations shifted and moved through my body.
By doing this, the energy of the fear and anxiety was transformed. The energy moved and filled my being with enormous surges of bliss, joy and pleasure. I experienced a state of connectedness within myself greater than anything I had ever experienced before. I found that all this tension, which I once thought was my worst enemy, was in fact my best friend. It filled me with new life and liberated me to lead a fuller, freer, richer and happier life.
This is what I, and others, have come to call Following Life. It is about connecting with and actively following anything and everything that comes into our awareness without resisting it or avoiding it. It is about actively following life without using the mind to analyze or control it. By just connecting with and following everything that life brings to our awareness, life leads us to a life of ever greater freedom, love, connection, ease and fulfillment.
There’s a great analogy for Following Life in this way. It is that of a fire hose. The resistance, we could say, is like the nozzle of a fire hose that is just barely open. The life energy that is trying to come through the hose is like water. There is so much water trying to come through that it builds enormous pressure. The pressure of life is this energy building and trying to come through putting greater and greater tension on the nozzle. That tension is the tension we feel that creates fear, anxiety and all our darkest emotions.
Following Life, connecting with the resistance and then actively following the energy as it moves and flows through the body it is like opening the nozzle that releases all the pressure. As the water rushes through we experience greater levels of happiness, joy and pleasure. It’s that simple and that amazing.
Following Life
From these experiences I had in Bali and more I now feel that there is nothing more important to do than to Follow Life. By following life we get in sync with life, we heal and transform ourselves and we become life’s most powerful vehicles for healing and transforming the planet. We get in sync with life and become inner revolutionaries for the Revolution of Consciousness by becoming the change we seek in the world. We become the change and the world transforms around us.
Life is constantly asking us to connect with and actively follow everything that it brings to our awareness because awareness is the most powerful tool we have for transformation. Anything that comes to our awareness is coming because it is asking for our awareness to transform and whatever comes is coming because it is the thing that most needs our awareness right now. Everything that we connect with and actively follow heals, balances, evolves and expands. Our awareness allows all things to evolve from dense energy to more subtle.
Lets take your hand for example. What happens when you bring your awareness to your hand? What do you notice? You will probably first notice dense sensations, perhaps an ache in one of the joints. Maybe you notice heat or tingling. Whatever you notice, whatever the most predominant sensation is, stay with it, close your eyes and follow it. What happens?
By staying with the sensation and following it, not trying to do anything with it but follow it, you will notice it shifts. You may notice that the sensation moves, that the tingling or heat get more intense or that the pain intensifies. Stay with it. The energy that was pain, the tingling or the heat will become something else. The sensation will become more and more subtle. The pain may become tingling or the tingling or heat may become waves of very subtle sensation. The sensation in your hand may become so subtle that you won’t be aware that you even have a hand anymore. What you so clearly remembered as your hand will just be a bunch of subtle sensations in your awareness.
Now really Follow Life. If you can, lie down and close your eyes. Connect with and actively follow whatever physical sensations come into your awareness. Let your awareness go to the strongest sensation in your body. It will probably wander a bit at first, scanning multiple sensations, a pain here, an ache there, a twinge or a pulse of tingling. Just let your attention wander, actively following it, until it comes to rest on the most dominant sensation. Remember, the most dominant sensation will naturally draw your attention and be the thing that most wants your attention. Stay with the sensation until it shifts or moves on its own. Don’t try to do anything to it, make it go away or change it, just stay with it until it moves or changes on its own. It will. Staying it, your awareness may shift on its own to other parts of the body or bring up a thought, emotion or image. Stay with whatever comes without analyzing it. You are now entering the transformative process.
For example, lets say you lie down and the most dominant sensation that comes to your awareness is an ache in your lower back. If it’s the kind of pain that wants you to adjust your position, go ahead and adjust it but see if you can stay with the sensation, connect with it and follow it. The back pain may at first get more intense as it comes fully into your awareness but stay with it. This is the active part of Following Life. Stay with it until it shifts in the body or brings a thought, image or emotion. The first thought that may come to your mind might be, “I don’t want to feel this pain.” Stay with that thought without judging it, analyzing it or telling a story to yourself about it while staying with the physical sensation. Always stay with the physical sensation in your body.
Opening To The Intuitive Mind
Thoughts and images may also come to mind. The mind uses all kinds of thoughts and images to help us balance, heal and evolve. Like dreams, they may be very non-linear and non-rational. An image of your mother may come to mind or a car or a pink monkey flying in the sky. Colors, sounds, smells or even tastes may come to mind as well. The content doesn’t matter. Don’t take it literally; just follow it without analyzing or judging it. If you actively follow it, it will reveal it’s meaning to you.
After the thought “I don’t want to feel this pain” maybe an image of you as a small child comes to mind. Staying with the image it starts to change and evolve and take on a life of its own. It becomes like a dream or a vision. You see yourself walking in a field and there are people all around at a distance but you can’t get to them. You continue to walk and then up ahead you see someone menacing. It is a dark figure that you can’t make out. Then, it shifts to become a dark space where you can’t see anything. Stay with it.
An emotion might then arise. You feel afraid and a tightening in your chest. It is uncomfortable. Stay with it as much as you can. You’re doing the work. After some time that image of the small child comes back to your mind and now he/she is standing on the spot of discomfort on your chest. He/she tries to hand you something, it’s a red rocket. At first you don’t want to take it but the little child insists. You eventually take the rocket and as soon as you do, energy shoots up your spine where the low back pain was. You feel tons of energy surging through your body and it’s intense and amazing. After sometime that energy settles and you feel a huge sense of release in your low back where the pain was and your whole body feels energized.
It is important not to take these kinds of experiences literally but to take them seriously. By taking them seriously we can discover that everything that comes to our consciousness is trying to bring us back to a place of balance, to help us heal and to allow new life energy to flow through us.
This is also not about going into fantasies. When we go into fantasies we space out and lose contact with the sensations in the body. We get lost in the head. When we actively follow the imagery that comes to our awareness while staying connected with the sensations in the body we remain very conscious and grounded.
I have had many experiences like this, personally, with groups and in working one on one with people. Each time the experience is very different but each time some kind of emotional tension gets to come to the surface, reveal itself and move. Once it moves an evolution takes place. The evolution from dense to subtle. What was a very dense sensation, like the physical back pain, becomes a very subtle one of life energy.
When we follow life we are continuously evolving in this way, healing and balancing our life energy and opening to experience life with ever-greater freedom, happiness and fulfillment. As the tensions of life come up, are connected with, actively followed and released we relieve the underlying tension that creates illness and keeps us stuck in life. By following life you will notice that things get better in your life. Your relationships get better, your health gets better, your work gets better and you will get clearer and clearer in each moment and decision of life. You come into union with Life.
Also as we follow life the ego will begin to fall away. The ego is that part of the rational mind that wants to control life. It is the part with its own conditioned and inherited agenda that resists life anytime life doesn’t go its way. As we start to Follow Life the ego gets moved out of the driver’s seat over to the passenger’s seat. The ego isn’t destroyed, it becomes a servant of Life, comes into harmony with Life and in so doing gets rewarded with love, pleasure and fulfillment greater than anything it could possibly dream of, or create itself.
Following Life isn’t about making the ego let go. Only the ego tries to make the ego let go. Following Life is about connecting with and actively following all the tension that keeps the ego in existence. As that tension is released, the enormous amount of power that keeps the ego in existence is released and that energy is then freed that becomes the ever deeper levels of love, pleasure and fulfillment.
By Following Life we become the most powerful vehicles for healing and transforming the planet.
The more we follow life the greater our capacity grows as well. At first our capacity might not be that great. We have a lot of emotional tension in our system that needs our awareness. Then as we free those energies our capacity grows. We are able embrace ever subtler and deeper levels of fear and freedom, anxiety and rapture, pain and pleasure, sorrow and joy. It’s always about embracing more. Life is always trying to give us more.
As we heal, balance and transform the energies within ourselves we create more room to transform the emotional tension of the world. Just think about all the tension that is in the world right now. It is unprecedented. The centuries of living out of balance from Life have created an environmental and economic crisis that is bringing to the surface all our deepest fears and anxieties. Our political, educational and health systems which were also created living out of balance with life are becoming increasingly dysfunctional in their inability to cope with the worlds problems.
There is so much tension in the world right now that most people are overwhelmed and are just trying to cope because they don’t have the tools to connect with it, actively follow it and transform it. Coping is always OK when we are overwhelmed. What else can we do?
We cope by endless methods of distraction, avoidance, fantasy and addiction. Some people turn to drugs or TV, fundamentalist religion or irrational, right wing politics. Most people are addicted to the rational mind and use it endlessly to try to control their surroundings so they don’t have to feel their tension. Others try to spiritualize their way around it by seeking spiritual experiences or enlightenment. There is no enlightenment to be sought, only what is here in your awareness right now.
What would happen if we stopped trying so hard to change the world and just Followed Life? What would happen if we connected with and actively followed all the tension that we experience in the world? How healing would that be? We could heal all the tension that underlies every conflict and problem in the world. We would release such an enormous amount of energy that the world would be transformed beyond our wildest dreams.
When I was in Bali one of the most incredible experiences happened when I connected with some of the darkest tension within myself. One morning, I woke up feeling really down. It was a very familiar feeling, one that I have experienced many times. It is kind of general malaise that makes me feel powerless and uninspired. From that place thoughts arise like: “There is nothing worthwhile to do.” “What’s the point?” “I don’t want to move.” It is a very un-empowered place and very uncomfortable, one that I have spent most of my life avoiding.
Usually a voice would come up in me that would make me get up and get going. It would give me a strategy for some kind of motivation, like “you need to get up and do something to be happy or to make something of yourself or to do good in the world.” Most of my life I have used these strategies to get going and avoid this feeling and for most of my life they worked well. But now, in Bali, I was determined to just be with it. I wasn’t going to avoid it or cover it or use any of my strategies to rally through it.
I stayed with it and followed it. It got very intense. As I stayed with the feeling it grew in strength since I was finally allowing it to come to the fore. The feeling was terribly uncomfortable and I could feel it center in my solar plexus. It grew in strength to a feeling of dread but I just stayed with it. An image came into my mind of a grotesque man like figure. He had the shape of man but was blob-like with black, oily, scaly skin. He was disgusting and he was part of me. He was standing on my stomach where all the dread was and he had a living presence to him. I pleaded with him, “what do you want? I am listening to you. Do you want to tell me something?” He wanted nothing. He was insatiably unhappy and nothing could please him. I saw him wander around the house and out into the town searching for anything to make him satisfied and there was nothing. He came back onto my stomach and just made me stay with him, holding his hands.
It was awful. After about 20 minutes I had enough. It didn’t seem that there was anything I could do so I got up out of bed and went about my day. The man receded into the background of my daily routine. But he was still there. I realized that he had always been there, hidden for most of my life below the surface of my conscious mind, but still always there.
Later that day I had a phone conversation with my friend/mentor, Dan Emmons who’s been Following Life for a long time. I told him the story asking for his advice and what he told me is one of the most powerful things that I have ever heard in my life. When I told him that all the man wanted was for me to hold hands and stay with him, the last thing I wanted to do, he said “Great! Stay with him and he will become your BEST friend.”
I got it. I let go; or rather something let go in me. I realized how I had been resisting him and once I did the resistance ended. The next morning the feeling started to come back but this time the resistance was gone. Instead of the little man, a volcano of energy erupted from my solar plexus. The image in my mind was that of streams of golden yellow energy pouring out of my abdomen and filling my whole body. It was unbelievable, orgasmic-like and I just laid on my bed in bliss for a long time. It took a while for that energy to assimilate and it is still assimilating today but something major shifted for me in that moment. What was subtle resistance to life became an embrace of life and in that freedom my life changed. I am much more free and open and able to embrace life. I see it in the way I relate to other people, in my health and energy and in the work I do in the world and I see it in the way others relate to me. A big part of my ego was liberated.
Imagine now what can happen when just some of the tension in the world is liberated. I believe all of the world’s problems have been created because we haven’t had the tools to be with the tension within us. All the destructive things we do in the world are done to cope with this tension. From the fear and anxiety we feel to the existential longing, we seek to cope by seeking power and control over others, consuming things and keeping ourselves endlessly busy and distracted.
How much of what we do in the world is actually a way of keeping busy so we don’t have to feel what’s really going on inside us? I think a lot and it can be very subtle. When I got to Bali and I heard the voice to stop, I think this is what was going on. Before that I had been writing a lot but I see now how much of the writing was a way of coping. Even though I thought I was doing something good, and it did have some value, a lot of it was a way of avoiding what was really going on inside me. What I really needed to do was stop and Follow Life so I could transform all the subtle emotional tension that was still inside me.
Some people might think that its great to go out and try to improve the world even if what is really trying to get their attention is their own emotional tension. But by acting out from the tension rather than connecting with it they will actually get more out of balance, will likely end up not being very effective, will burn out and/or get sick. I have seen this so many times with many healers and activists.
A zen, spiritual teacher I like named Adyashanti once said in a workshop I attended, “When you act from separation you only create more separation, but when you act from a place of unity every action you take creates unity.”
When we Follow Life we come into a place of unity. As the ever more subtle layers of tension are transformed we come into a place of wholeness and unity, unity within ourselves and unity with the world. We become the change and the world changes around us. We become unity and every action comes from that unified, clear and effective place.
When we Follow Life, Life comes rushing to help us. Life wants us to come into unity and transform the world by connecting with the tension. That’s why life keeps bringing it to us. That is also why there is so much tension in the world today, because we have become so out of balance by not Following Life, that Life is now yelling at us to pay attention. If we pay attention, connect with and Follow Life, Life will hand us opportunities and solutions to the world’s problems greater than anything we could create on our own. I believe every great inventor, scientist, artist and athlete can already attest to this. They follow life by staying with, connecting and following the creative tension within themselves
So for me now, Following Life is what it is all about. I have experienced and seen enough that the choice is clear. To not Follow Life, to stay in my old patterns of resistance is too painful and the rewards for Following Life are too great even if it isn’t easy. I see that this is what the revolution of consciousness is really about. I want to be a revolutionary for Life by Following Life.
I will be so grateful for your feedback on this piece. I mean it to be a forum for further discussion and exploration. If you would be willing to share whatever comes up for you around what I have written it would be really helpful for me. Thank you, Charlie
Thank you for sharing your experiences, Charlie...still letting it all sink in but I can relate to a lot of what you describe, and I am inspired to keep going. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteOne more thing occurs to me, which you have already noted yourself. It is a little long for an article, and could be more bite sized for us that don't have that log attention span that you do!!
ReplyDeleteGreat work, and thank you deeply for sharing it.
Thank you, Charlie, for this article!
ReplyDeleteIt draws my attention in many ways.
First I can see your commitment to explore your own truth so clearly ~ and this warms my heart
as a fellow "traveler". Also, as you know, I feel Bali is such an awesome place with an energy that helps us to go inwards and makes things happen.
Bringing in Adyashantis wisdom to the situation
towards the end gives to yet another dimension.
What I'm left with at the end is the question:
what to do with this now? It brings up the next exploration of practices.
Charlie - You've articulated so much good stuff. The theme of Following Life resonates deeply & sweetly. Cultivating the constant presence of mind to 'just be with what is,' and moving energy through it, even if it hurts at first, is central to the transformations we go through to create a new life of ease and flow - as individuals, as couples & families, as a society, as a planet.
ReplyDeleteA greasy little man in the belly also appears in some ancient Tantric meditation practices. Just as you describe - ill-tempered, impossible to please, grumpy, dismal. In one such practice, we use the inner fire to burn the grease away and light up the ember within, til his figure is consumed in golden light... like your volcano!
Marsha Burack,
ReplyDeleteI really loved what you wrote. I too have been working with Dan for many years and I think you described the process and rewards so very well. It is a great article. I also love what Emily wrote about the tantric practice of the greasy little man in the belly and with awaremeness, the inner fire burns it away. I want to add one thing, I feel like some of my very big core wounds, not only take my awareness but patience, because they happen over time, as an almost truncated part of my personality develops, that can truly move into the new energy. That realization gives me some patience with the time this may take, and also to leave the timing to, in quotes, following life. I am so glad to read what you wrote. I have started a blog marshaburack.wordpress.com and also another one for body meditators. called bodymeditations.wordpress.com. If you would like to add anything I would be happy to give you the password to get on and I would love if you feel like doing that. I just started this for the community. You can write for the password at mburack@reikihealinginstitute.org
Grateful to have read this post.
ReplyDeleteHope to have the opportunity to meet you and discuss some of these points in the near future.
With Care,
Emilie