Freeing Ourselves

“Why is it so hard to let that which is, be? To let people like you when they like you, let them dislike you when they dislike you, let health come when it will, to let go when it will depart? All teachings exist in the answer to that question.” Michael Singer

The spiritual slogan “It happened for a purpose” can feel punitive and shaming, like we deserved something bad. People ask “Why me?” “What did I do to deserve this?” I prefer a more neutral perspective and inquiry.

“It happened” and now:

• What is my relationship with it?

• How can I support myself in accepting this?

• How can I resource myself to open space to feel what I feel about it?

• What can I learn from this experience?

• How can I grow?

• How can I use this to be free?

Michael Singer is known for bringing ancient yoga wisdom to light in our modern world. How do we actually work with these concepts in our own life?

He speaks about the futility of arguing with 13.5 billion years of evolution, yet we do. We want life to be a certain way and we tend to double down when it’s not.

Most of us have a narrow range of what we find acceptable. We go through difficulty and times of grief and we add to our suffering by needing life to be different from what it is. Staying locked in a struggle against reality is one of the ways we avoid feeling and letting it in. Some things really hurt.

It doesn’t make logical sense that we argue with reality. I got laid off at my job because they are downsizing. My friend died. I can’t afford to eat as well with rising grocery prices. These are facts.

We influence our experience in life through our actions and much of life is out of our personal control. We’re going to explore freeing ourselves over the next weeks as we move through the longer nights into the new year.

“Your mind will not let you accept life as it is. Your mind talks about a lot of things and most of the things it talks about are things that bother it, or it thinks can hurt it, or it thinks it will go wrong, and it's just in there constantly talking.” Michael Singer

Our nervous system generates most of the content of our mind. We’re always trying to figure out what’s happening, and how to protect ourselves and stay alive. This makes sense. A lot of my work involves understanding this and building a stronger, more resilient nervous system.

We need to stop arguing with life. We’re not going to win.

We need a stronger more resilient nervous system so we can better tolerate life. Instead of being activated into a fight response when someone ignores us or is rude, we have a sense of our own worth. We don’t like the experience, but we don’t take it so personally. We have done enough inner work that someone else’s rudeness doesn’t trigger core deficiency beliefs in us.

Through a practice of somatic mindfulness, we notice sooner and we know how to come back into self-regulation. When we are “back”, we can be there for ourselves. We feel what is here. We have access to our wisdom and deeper knowing.

Our nervous system has a negativity bias (notices danger more) and tries to alert us through  generating alarming thoughts in our mind. It gets our attention with intense energy and urgency.

When we are overwhelmed or have a more easily disturbed nervous system, everything sets us off. We hold our breath (a signal of danger) causing us to tighten up and brace ourselves. We worry and are absorbed in catastrophic thinking. There are ways to work with this tendency.

From Michael Singer: Listen to his talk here.

Consciousness shifts between life and mind. Like kids talking in a movie theatre, it's tremendously distracting. While that is going on, you can't experience life. The mind gets pulled back to whatever is the most noisy and the most energetic. 

Normally the mind pulls you out of life constantly. The yogi should not fight with life, should not fight with the mind. Notice honestly that this is what's going on. At what point does it stop? Never. You start to catch on that this is its nature.

You're not supposed to stop your mind. You're supposed to sit in the state of witness consciousness. This is the only place to sit, to notice, oh, there's my mind. It's doing its mind thing. It's exceptionally weird today. It's a little quieter than normal.

As we observe our thoughts, we can feel discouraged witnessing the chaos, confusion, compulsion, ruminating, worry, negativity, inner critic, outer critic, and a general dissatisfaction with life.

Knowing that most of this type of noisy thought is generated by our nervous system wanting us to be safe, we can lean into somatic mindfulness. We can do practices to experience the safety of the present moment. We can expand the parameters of safety to allow for taking more risks, and engaging with life as it is.

This is safe enough for me as the more resourced adult that I am now.

Join our Sunday free community class to co-regulate and explore with other like minded people. Details here.

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