From my book, Solving
for X, in Chapter 5 – Considerations, I’ve included some information about
how to use the body’s language to begin to understand the truth of a situation
or encounter we face. The body speaks a
language we are not taught to readily understand. We intuitively know but until we turn up the
volume a little bit on the wavelengths you are receiving, you won’t hear the
message or understand it when it comes to you.
We have so very much to consider if we are even remotely
interested in the patterns and themes that are messages to us from us about
what it is we are working on in this lifetime and attempting to discern our
life’s purpose. As you’re living the day
to day, you can’t really see the messages coming to you about your own lesson
plan until you know they are coming and learn to spot them as they occur. Nothing is truly ever hidden. It only seems to be. That’s part of the fun of this enigma of
living life. It’s like walking around in
a maze and all you see is this turn or that turn without at all having any
ability to grasp the whole of the experience you are having or potentially,
that which you are truly attempting to transcend in terms of lessons. There are several ways to get through the
maze such as trial and error, finding and trusting your internal intuitive
guidance system once you’ve learned its language or, you can rise above the
‘maze’ a little and begin to see the corridors, openings and dead ends with a
little more clarity.
I’m going to go into each of these three processes I
mentioned to give you an idea about how each works and how understanding them
can help you understand your messages, life plans and that which you most
intended to learn. Keep in mind that
these three processes can work in stages, separate and apart or jumbled
together. It doesn’t really matter the
order but that you recognize how they operate.
These are just a few ways that are most obvious and there can be more. But, let’s start with a few and see where
that takes us, shall we?
Trial and Error Process
As we are unconsciously aware of our existence, we move
through the trial and error process. In a way, going back to the Zombie
Apocalypse, we are living like zombies until we begin to understand a little
more about who and what we are as well as how life works. But, this trial and error process…it is about
helping to wake us up here in this beautiful dream of Life on Earth. As we work through this state, we keep trying
the same things, meeting the same kinds of people and trying to perform the
same activities over and over again with the same results. Before we realize it, we keep ending up with
the same challenges, the same disappointments or if you’re really in tune with
All that Is, perhaps you are humming right along perfectly successful in
life. The trial and error process is
likely how most of us operate unconsciously creating our lessons as we go.
This is an effective process so long as you at some point
learn to do one thing. That one thing is
learning to identify the patterns and themes emerging in your life and
discerning whether or not they are bringing you what you truly want and need or
if they just seem to keep bringing you the same unhealthy or unhelpful
things. I’m reminded of a quote
attributed to Albert Einstein that basically intimates that the definition of
insanity equates to the performance of the same activities over and over again
and expecting a different result. We do
this in life unconsciously in an almost zombie-like fashion until we begin to
understand what we’re doing and that perhaps, just isn’t working for us or,
well maybe, there is a reason.
My kids crack jokes about the Zombie Apocalypse which sends
the mind reeling through all the zombie movies that have ever been made. Ever wonder about those movies? I’ve watched them and always saw a less
gruesome parallel between the movies and waking life. But as I think about that
further and our Trial and Error Process of existing in life unconsciously
aware, I realize that for most of us our actions do represent the Zombie
Apocalypse. When we move through life
without thinking and just continue to act or react, we cannot become aware of
what we’re doing or why. I am not here
to judge the zombie-like experience and I use it here to make a point. Until we become aware in our consciousness of
what is happening around us, why it’s happening around us and that we are
actually creating it, we’re trapped a bit in a zombie-like state.
But, I did say that the trial and error process was not a
bad one and it isn’t. To make it work to
your advantage, you do at least at some point need to become at least a little
bit more awake enough to see the things that you’ve done over and over and
discern whether those actions and outcomes have brought you what you most
desired. If they did, great! If they did not, why not? How can you tell?
We have to start with pattern analysis. In my book Changing Perspectives, the Journey is the Destination, I devoted
nearly an entire chapter to pattern analysis.
I’ve excerpted a portion below to explain my meaning:
What I recommend to you is that you take a little walk back
in time to yesterday, last week, last month, last year, ten years ago, young
adulthood, childhood, etc. What patterns
exist over the span of your life that were repeated over time with negative
results?
Specifically, which of those repeating patterns fed negative
circumstances and thoughts in your life that manifested in undesirable
ways? If you’re not sure what I mean,
how is your relationship with your significant other, those in the past, your
friends and your family? Do those
relationships foster feelings of love, caring and reciprocal and unconditional
love? Are those relationships balanced
in such a way that you feel like your life is improved by other individuals or
do you feel like some of those individuals are dragging you down like wearing
cement shoes in the middle of the ocean or literally sucking the life right out
of your veins? That’s a sure fire way to
tell. Think about your past
relationships and even present ones; look for patterns. Once you find one or two or even more,
categorize them if you can. Write them
down. Talk to a friend. Go see a cleric, counselor or someone else
you know that could help you take an objective look at the negative patterns
that formed in your life that resulted in negative consequences for you. You want to understand those things that
helped to form a perspective that you find no longer serves you. (66)
Believe it or not, those
emerging patterns speak volumes about what parts of your life purpose are. Consider the maze analogy again. If you kept finding dead ends and just can’t
find the cheese, one way you could try to get yourself to the goal is by
remembering which paths lead to dead ends.
By identifying those, you can modify your trajectory, choose different
turns when different directions present themselves and then you may eventually
get to the prize! This doesn’t have to
be just one path that you take but can be part of all three of the methods I’m
going to share. This one could serve as
the beginning.
Intuitive Internal
Guidance System
Believe it or not, we all have an intuitive internal
guidance system. I’ve had some of my
clients tell me that they had not one ounce of intuition. I explained that as human beings we all have
intuition. Physics has proven through
study and other sciences soft or not have also studied that human beings must
have the ability to predict the future in order to survive. In fact, part of our biological and conscious
operating systems must rely on our ability to intuit or simulate the future
probabilities in order to preserve life and limb. When we learn how to understand this language
of body-mind-consciousness and how it is actually speaking to you every moment
of every day, you can begin to learn to rely on it to guide you as you move
through life.
This is much like a foreign language at first and it isn’t
an easy language to understand but it is a language like any other, say like
geometry, French, etc. Learning the
language is important if you wish to develop this guidance system further. And no, I’m not talking about becoming
psychic although I don’t discount that some individuals may very well be quite
psychic. Being an intuitive myself, I
see it more of an ability to quickly take in information readily within the
environment, filter it quickly through mental simulations and energy-body
feeling and then return with the most likely outcomes (otherwise read, keen
awareness). In this approach, which likely
not all will agree with, I posit that the consciousness we hold is much broader
than the limited aspects of brain-mind thinking and that from the metaphysical
level of the soul and spirit our consciousness can operate through energy,
vibration and feeling (again, do not read ‘emotion’) and provide us a mechanism
to test thoughts, experiences and concepts as either good or bad for us given
the lessons we intended to learn or the things we intended to transcend in this
life.
I am going to repeat a little exercise I included in one of
my other books, So It’s Over. Now What? to try to help you get more in
touch with how this Intuitive Guidance System works:
To understand how this
works . . . I have to teach you how to “feel” the difference between your neutral
state and the state where your body-mind-spirit is not neutral and picking up
on external sensory data not in alignment with your higher good. I will tell you this takes practice though
because normal anxiety can sometimes feel the same as what I’m going to
describe to you. Hopefully I can walk
you through how to tell the difference . . .
If you are not familiar
with meditative practice it is very simple and requires only a quiet place
where you can sit peacefully just noticing your breathing and your thoughts
with intent to calm the mind, body and soul.
You can research the Internet and find a number of good practices for
meditation. I’d like to teach you a
simple exercise that with practice, may help you become much more in tune with
how your body’s “feelings” communicate to you and translate into vital
information for you when you are engaged in human interactions. For this, you will need to engage in a
meditation:
Practice a meditative
session where you engage in cleansing breaths and progressive relaxation. This means that you take maybe five slow deep
in and out breaths and then continue breathing and relaxing each part of your
body from the top of your head down to your toes. Take as much time as you need to bring
yourself to a very relaxed and peaceful state.
As you do the above,
notice thoughts as they arise but don’t judge them. We’re not interested in thoughts at this
moment so there is no need to judge them.
Conserve your energy for feeling and I use the word as an action and not
an emotion. When you have achieved a
calm meditative state, I want you to place your focus on how your solar plexus
(also known as the solar plexus chakra energy space) feels. The desired state to begin this exercise is
one in which the solar plexus chakra feels calm and neutral. Now, imagine a moment where you felt very
happy. See the image in as much detail
as you can (sound, visuals, touch, taste, etc.) and feel the joy or happiness
of that moment. Now turn your attention
to your solar plexus area. Notice how
your solar plexus area feels.
Now, return to a calm
centered and peaceful state and just breathe.
I want you now to call to mind the last time you felt anxious. See the scene and the events surrounding it in
every detail you can possibly recall.
How does your solar plexus area feel now? Does it feel different than when you imagined
the happy moment? Just notice the
difference.
Return to a calm centered
and peaceful state and just breathe. I
want you now to call to mind the last time you were accused of something you
had nothing to do with. See the scene,
hear the words, allow the feelings of incredulousness to rise. Now notice how your solar plexus area feels?
When in a calm and
peaceful state, calling to mind a happy experience may give you a sense of joy
or quick and pleasant vibration in your solar plexus area. Calling to mind an anxious experience may
give you a sense of dread and an unpleasant inconsistent vibration in your
solar plexus area like maybe too many butterflies, maybe even a sinking feeling. Calling to mind an experience that left you
feeling incredulous may give you a sense of sinking, twisting dread in your
solar plexus area. This is the one you
want to pay attention to. If someone is
speaking to you and you are feeling that sinking uneven sense of twisting dread
vibration in your solar plexus, you are being manipulated or there is either a
lie you are being told or telling yourself about what or who you are
experiencing. Another way to think about
it is whenever you feel that sense of obligation to do something your heart
isn’t in, you’re likely being manipulated.
It may take some time to
be able to feel your body’s detection system but it does exist and if you learn
how to feel it and pay attention to it trusting it’s truth and learning to
differentiate how different experiences feel for you in that space or even
other places in your body, you will know when you are being manipulated even if
the other person is denying it. If you
are being manipulated for money, or being lied to or otherwise being used, your
body can sense it and it will start to trigger it’s systems for
self-preservation. The same is true if
you are lying to yourself about something, in denial about something or
engaging in behavior unhealthy for you.
Your body, mind, heart, soul and spirit never let you down. It’s just learning to understand the language
that takes patience and practice (just like learning math – yikes). It can be done. It’s important to avoid manipulations that
are harmful to your person, your emotions, your bank book, etc. You are equipped to protect yourself if you
can learn how to do it. (39)
Rise Above Approach
This approach is simple and can really make a lot of
difference either all by itself or used in combination with the other two processes
or methods noted above. This process
requires only that you seek to understand the truth of something but using pure
logic and maybe even reason. I will say
that this process is not as easy as it might seem and also takes quite a bit of
practice and quite honestly, patience.
When trying to understand messages and themes that are arising in your
life, you sometimes do have to put your focus on the outside world at least for
a moment but you must do so with the intent to understand. It will cost you something though. It will temporarily cost you the lowest level
of your egoic consciousness at least temporarily. Don’t worry, nothing of value is ever lost
when you temporarily set aside your egoic drives to achieve this or that.
To rise above something, you must literally
rise above it. Sometimes the ego sets
off these psychological urges to engage in something or with someone at the
same level of something or someone who is coming at you. When mired in this kind of ‘gravity’ you are
completely unable to rise above a situation to see, with clarity, what it is
that you are truly dealing with. In this
state you cannot truly see, hear or feel anything accurately. All you can feel are the egoic emotions that
are truly a very limited set of parameters from which to define interactions
based on your own thought processing systems.
There are more ways to see the truth than just relying on our past
experiences, assumptions, perceptions and emotions (even if all of these are a
natural function for us in physical form).
The process actually begins quite simply in that rather than
reacting to a situation before you and I would consider this method in terms of
understanding messages coming to you specifically from human to human
interactions, you stop and begin questioning whether your feelings are valid
AND why the other person may be acting as they are. The same is true of a situation you are
facing. You need to be able to quickly
determine whether or not your perceptions and reactions are valid. Some sample
questions, “Does your (insert relationship descriptor of a person here) really
hate you? Is the world really against
you? Do you really have bad luck or bad
karma?
Think back to the maze for a moment. If everywhere you turned you always seemed to
reach a dead end, you might quickly jump to the conclusion that there is no way
out. Given your recent experiences that
formed this perception, it’s understandable to see why you could jump to this
conclusion. The process of rising above
a situation requires that you stay away from an emotional state and instead
query the data to determine it’s validity and then try to understand the true
source of what may be happening.
Are you perceiving something personally or negatively that
may possibly not be intended that way (even if you could find 100 people that
might perceive the situation the same way as you)? How do you know? Are your assumptions valid? Do you have unconscious malware
running inside of your thought processes that are skewing your perceptions? How can you be sure? How would you know? You could shift your perception and assume
positive intent, alternate sources or you could validate whether what you
perceive as truth is actually true.
Rising Above a situation means that you actually take the time and make
the effort to rise above the situation through gaining knowledge, testing your
perceptions as if they were a scientific hypothesis and then potentially
altering your ‘potential’ conclusions and then your actions. Think again of the maze, if you realize that
there is a way out and you just haven’t found it yet through potentially a
series of wrong turns, you have arrived at your dead-end, you can go back,
retrace your steps, make different decisions and find the cheese! (45)
All of these processes described herein are designed to try
to show you different ways you can begin to discern the messages and road maps
showing up in the outside world without your conscious cognition entirely. When you can begin to learn how your own body
communicates with you, you can allow the body to help you know the Truth of a
matter or situation when the egoic mind is busy trying to run simulations based
merely on its perceptions alone (which won’t always tell you the truth). It’s important to test your perceptions and
beliefs about the various situations and people you encounter so that you might
begin to understand your life’s themes and purpose.
Rev. J.L. Harter, PhD, M.Msc., B.Msc., Author, Blogger, and Spiritual Counselor, Editor of the JMCC. See Bio section for more information.
© 2014 Rev. J.L. Harter, PhD, (photo and words)
