Day 57/366 days Towards Self-Mastery. Mood: willing to be uncertain.
When it comes to conversations about spirituality, you will completely lose my interest. In part, this is why I find the New Age so damned frustrating. So much emphasis on spirituality and fantasy and magic as an explanation for the things about life that we know little of.
It's okay to not know. It's okay to not have an explanation for the things we don't understand. Spirituality seems to me to be a way of explaining the unexplainable. I'm not up for it.
My interest lies more in allowing the unknown and delighting in the explanations that eventually emerge from the sciences.
Today's inspiration is to commit to your spiritual awakening
So for those of you that do spirituality, this is your time.
For those who don't, maybe you have a preference for simply being curious about the meaning of life, the way life works and for the mysteries that seem unfathomable.
For us, the challenge for today is about leaning into the unknown, the mysteries that we see glimpses of from time to time, trusting that we don't know everything, and getting comfortable with that uncertainty.
I came to understand spirituality as another word for the mysteries of the universe, mysteries that I prefer to understand from a physics or scientific perspective.
For me a spiritual awakening is waking up to the fact that we are conditioned into every aspect of life. Every breathing moment has been prescribed. The how, what, where, when, and why we live our lives is under scrutiny if we deviate from mainstream thinking. And deviating from mainstream thinking is waking up.
When this conditioning became obvious to me, it didn't feel spiritual. I was angry. I felt cheated of my own unique life experience. Already steeped in a dogmatic religion of someone else's choosing, I wasn't about to replace it with some other form of spirituality.
Learning about energy and information, our body's energy system and how it connects at the atomic level with the energy of the cosmos, connecting us to all things, opened me to an understanding of how transfer of information is faster than the speed of light. It explained how remote healing and intuitive practices actually work. We can thank Rupert Sheldrake, Nassim Haramein and Bruce Lipton for their amazing work in these fields.
Meditation practice taught me to feel into my biology and experience the intricate nuances of my body's experience with my emotional life. Learning to understand and feel into the first movements of my nervous system towards the fear response was informative.
Feeling into parts of my body that held tension from past experiences, and that released as emotions accompanied by bubbles of energy informed my understanding of the mechanics of energy in the body.
Learning to manage this by adjusting my biology, using the tools of stillness, breath, focus and thought to down regulate my nervous system response has taught me how to manage my reactions and responses and leave fear out of the picture. Or if I experience fear, to understand it cognitively before it overwhelms me.
Realising that emotions are the body's response to stimuli, and that each emotion is actually a different frequency that we have given a name to, anger, fear, worry, grief, sadness, equipped me to be curious with emotions and their associations. Love, being the most desirable frequency as it feels the very best in our body.
Figuring out how others are receptive to what I am feeling, and how I can be mindful of my impact on others by being aware of my energetic offering into the environment. This phenomena has been named by Dr. Stephen Porges of Polyvagal Theory fame, neuroception.
Noticing how the environment in which I live and thrive changes, and how my response changes to changing conditions of the environment has been explained by Field Theory.
Developing and experiencing an understanding of the creation process that each of us is capable of when we overcome our deepest fears that we are well and truly conditioned to, brings me an understanding of the realm of the mysterious creator that spirituality covets. Stephen Hawkins speaks to this concept, along with others.
When all is said and done, I have no problem with people subscribing to spirituality. It's important that you follow what brings you peace. For me it's about remaining curious, being willing to be uncertain, and to remain open to exploring and discovering what else is possible. As Nassim Haramein recently suggested, I'm becoming an engineer of The Field.
Go well. Wake up!
366 days Towards Self-Mastery
When I considered my New Year's intentions for 2020 I had just one: To allow my heart to love what it loved...and let it lead me. (If not now, then when?)
I've spent months working on integrating my life. To live life more fully with my home life, my interests, my work, my responsibilities, all coming together, all connected. I want to give each the attention that they desire and need, and still have time and energy for the others. That means living and working from the heart.
As I was clearing out my bookshelf over the Christmas break I discovered Simple Abundance. I set it aside to explore it on New Year's Day as I lazed through another delicious day of nothingness. Sarah, the author, says this book is about living in grace. Living in grace I realised, is about Self-Mastery.
My thirst for understanding the human condition has driven me all my life, and hand-in-hand with self-mastery it has been a life-long goal. And seeing as I love to write, that living in grace is about self-mastery, and I love a bit of a challenge, then if I am truly going to let my heart lead, I really don't have any other choice. So scary as it feels, I'm starting out on a daily mission of leaning into the suggestions of this daybook and making a daily post to keep me accountable. If not now, then when?
I'm Josie. You can find out a little more about me here.
Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy: by Sarah Ban Breathnach.
This book is written for the Australian and NZ market because it refers to seasonal changes. It's available on Amazon here if you'd like to follow along.