One of the curious questions a teacher or healer may ask you is “Where are you?” Where do you experience yourself as being? This can be a big clue to our stage of development, but it can also be a clue to the state of our nervous system.
Where is your attention? What are you feeling? What are you believing? This can suggest if you’re in Ventral vagal (Connected and calm), Sympathetic (fight/ flight, anger, fear), or Dorsal high tone (shutdown, emotions suppressed) states of the nervous system.
For example, if your mind ruminates about the past a lot, that indicates being in an unresolved sympathetic stress response. The general tone can point to the style. But often one emotion is used to protect us from another, deeper wounding. Like anger covering unresolved childhood fear.
If your legs are restless, unresolved flight response. If you have trouble saying No, unresolved fawn response.
Being neutral about what you’re feeling can be witnessing: the clue there is where we’re experiencing the body-mind from. The ego is generally in the head (because of identification with the sensory content of the mind), but the witness is not.
If we’re in the head and not feeling, that’s a major flag for disassociation. We’re not feeling because we’re in a dorsal shutdown mode. We can feel fine because we’re not feeling much of anything. This is a way of coping, but it can become entrenched if it gets sustained, then entangled with the identity. But it’s not a healthy state long-term. That suppressed emotional load is still burbling away in there, affecting our thinking, doing, and health.
Unexpectedly, it’s possible to awaken when we’re still emotionally shut down, because they happen on two different levels of being. We have to be clear enough for the Self to be seen by itself through this physiology. But we remain very much human.
However, if we’re shut down emotionally, we will not have a God Consciousness (GC) stage and awakening heart. It’s too defended still. And even if we have GC, that doesn’t mean we’re free of trauma, as that’s primarily physical (somatic), not on the level of the heart.
The combinations of possibilities are endless.
If we have a sustained awakening, then the ‘where are you’ answer is everywhere. There is a focal point of experience here (jiva), but we experience from and as infinite being, the Self, Atman.
And in Unity, we also become the world as well. We’re infinite presence, in and of everything, looking mainly through this perspective, this body-mind.
Meantime, when we experience ourselves as this body-mind, we can maximize quality of life by gradually processing our reactivity and impressions. Then those no longer influence our behaviour and perception.
Life does not need to be a struggle. When we work to unload our past, we can enjoy what is here already.
Davidya
This is a good article to reflect on
Right – just be careful it’s not used to self-judge. This article just gives some examples. It’s a starting point for reflection, but it takes somatic awareness to recognize our personal dynamics. And those are natural adaptations, ways of coping with life circumstances that may have outlived their usefulness. Or we can now learn better skills.
This is a timely post, I’ve been having deeper reflections pop up throughout my day and occasionally impressions showing up in meditation. Seeing my pride in particular spiritual pride and witnessing the emotions and how it effects my relationships has been very revealing. Enjoying the journey and not rushing to be “done” is interesting and joyful.
Hi Reggie
Yes, noticing, but not judging. Allowing whatever to be there. And if it’s not founded on your deeper nature, it gets seen through and falls away or resolves.
And yes, no done. It’s the journey.
Great article David.
Living awake remains a delicate balancing act, as the body-mind complex here still has tons of karma to churn through. Trauma still surfaces from the body time to time to be addressed.
Fortunately, all the challenging karma was already experienced during childhood and early adulthood.
Hi Stephen
Weeeellll… yes, as the karma clears, life becomes smoother. Being awake means we’re less likely to find it difficult or get caught up in it. But we can still have some big ones lurking in there, like my medical journey a few years ago. They often show up unexpectedly. Not that we should live in dread, but it’s easier if you don’t think anything is done. 🙂
I just recently found almost like a physical spot right in the middle of my head which has been a hiding place for some negativity and resistance. Awareness could be wide open, but that place seemingly situated in the head was like a blind spot.
Also there’s just this overall negativity that’s been in the feeling of the body itself so long that to some extent it’s always just felt like “well this is what existing feels like”. It’s clearing but slowly. Looking back though, I’m at a totally different place today compared to where I was about 3 years ago when I had my awakening.
Hi Olli!
Yep – theres some very potent spots in there that can get shadowed or crusted over. It may also be related to the 3rd eye, so literal blind spot. Key is becoming aware of them so the attention can clear that.
Sometimes, that negativity is even ancestral, passed down for generations. As we peel that off, things can open and flow much more smoothly.
And yes, it’s common to recognize more rapid progress post-awakening. In retrospect, of course. 🙂 Sometimes that happens periodically though – not always consistently.