Namaste Publishing: Compassionate Eye RSS Feed

If You Feel You Need an Identity, You Invite Pain into Your Life

David Robert Ord — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:55:26 +0000

We’ve all been taught it’s important to know who we are. How can we ever amount to anything if we don’t discover our identity?

So, who are you as a person? Are you sure you really know? Have you pinned your identity down?

It’s commonly said by those who are on a spiritual journey, “Look inside for answers.” There’s certainly a truth to the idea that our answers come from within.

However, if we look inside ourselves seeking something specific we can call our identity, what do we find? Peering deeply into ourselves, can we locate something we can identify as “myself”?

When we look inside ourselves, we don’t find anything tangible we can put our finger on and say, “There I am! That’s me.” Instead there’s just infinite awareness.

This is because we are each unique expressions of consciousness, a presence that makes itself known as us.

There’s nothing definitive to which we can point, like thrusting a butterfly net into the air, catching a butterfly, and saying, “I’ve got you!” We can thrust our net into our inner being as often and as deeply as we wish, but we never capture who we are.

Like searching for ourselves in the world around us, going within with the intention of “finding ourselves” is an equally futile search.

What if it’s not necessary to know who we are in the sense of having an identity? What if having an identity, instead of enhancing our life, limits us?

The moment we define ourselves, we put ourselves in a box of our own imagining, operating from an idea of ourselves that’s largely a construct of what others have told us about ourselves over the years.

Any such identity we define for ourselves restricts us to only a tiny fraction of the infinite awareness of which we are an expression.

Whenever we attach ourselves to an egoic interpretation of who we are, we set ourselves up for disappointment, which results in suffering.

If our identity is that of a football player or a tennis star, what happens when we can no longer play? We are going to feel like a has-been, with life passing us by.

With our identity riding entirely on what we once were, which recedes ever into the past until hardly anyone remembers us anymore, who are we now?

Identity is a product of thought and has nothing to do with who we really are.

Though our ego likes to define itself, put boundaries around itself, feel secure in how it imagines itself, who we are needs no definition. Life is simply something to be experienced and enjoyed.

An identity has nothing to do with our true self; it’s just a fad of the ego.

There are roles we fulfill at various times in our life, but none of these are our identity. They are a particular articulation of an aspect of ourselves in which we engage for a time, which doesn’t begin to capture who we are.

*Editor's note: The Compassionate Eye appears several days a week. Eckhart Tolle's second books The Power of Now, Stillness Speaks, and A New Earth speak about being “present” in our life. Now Michael Brown, author of The Presence Process (in book form, downloadable audio, and as a downloadable ebook) shows us precisely how to become present in Alchemy of the Heart. To go more deeply into living in the present moment in an ongoing state of consciousness, especially as it relates to being true to ourselves in our relationships with others, also join us in the daily blog Consciousness Rising.

Increase Your Divine Consciousness

David Robert Ord — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:18:08 +0000

The divine presence works through all the circumstances of our lives—all the people and events—to open our eyes to the beautiful people we really are.

How could we be otherwise, when we have come entirely from the divine?

The only thing missing is our ability to see this, which is a function of having sufficient consciousness.

Consciousness is an evolving, emerging state of being.

It isn’t a given, and it isn’t something God can wave a magic wand to instantaneously create.

We must live our way into it, learning how to be conscious one step at a time.

Little by little, the divine consciousness that's the source of the universe must be incarnated in our material existence by trial and error, in the same way an infant learns to crawl, to stand, and then to walk.

It’s a process and it can be painful. This is what St Paul was referring to when he said that “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope.” It’s this painful state of futility encapsulated in the evolutionary process.

The consciousness that is our essential being knows how to weave the circumstances of our lives in the most amazingly skillful and synchronous ways, giving us maximum opportunity, again and again, to awaken to the realization that the life we have been living has been largely unconscious.

We are being brought back to our original divine essence, only now at a conscious level instead of as a mere potential, so that we can take charge of our destiny both individually and as a species.

Alchemy of the Heart is all about how this transformation happens in our lives, as we learn to actively participate in the process.

*Editor's note: Eckhart Tolle's second books The Power of Now, Stillness Speaks, and A New Earth speak about being “present” in our life. Now Michael Brown shows us precisely how to become present in Alchemy of the Heart. To go more deeply into living in the present moment in an ongoing state of consciousness, especially as it relates to being true to ourselves in our relationships with others, also join us in the Namaste author's blog Consciousness Rising.

A Webinar Today--Free

David Robert Ord — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:46:18 +0000

Whether your goal is crafting a new business strategy, running longer distances, scoring higher, setting a speed record or composing a new song, there are a few basic requirements for winning: physical prowess, mental attitude and energy.

Let’s say you have the physical prowess and mental attitude nailed. Maybe you’ve even reached your goals and have leveled out. You want to set the bar higher. Now, all you need is the “juice.” Some 40,000 people have learned just how much more powerful they can be when their brain is working in balance and harmony.

In this webinar, Lee Gerdes will show you how Brainwave Optimization™ will allow you to see exactly how your brainwaves are functioning - and what you can do to take full advantage of more “brainpower” than ever before.

To Register:
https://brainstatewebinars.webex.com
password: brainstate (all lowercase)
Login will be accepted within 30 mins of start time.
For faster login you should pre-register for the webinar.

To Teleconference:
To receive a call back, provide your phone number when you join the event, or call the number below and enter the access code.

Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 1-877-669-3239
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): +1-408-600-3600
Global call-in numbers: click here
Toll-free dialing restrictions: click here
Access code: 665 011 123

Winning: How to Bring Your Whole Brain to Life

David Robert Ord — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:40:28 +0000

Tips from Lee Gerdes, CEO of BrainState Technologies

Not everyone is able to access Brainwave Optimization when they need it, so here are five ways you can clear your mind and amp up your mental and physical capabilities in preparation to win that game or make that sale:

Breathe in while slowly counting to five. Then, push the air out with your diaphragm, contracting your stomach while slowly counting to five.
Slightly rub your thumb and index finger(s) together softly; in a light touch you can barely feel.
Touch the tongue to the roof of your mouth just above the roots of your front teeth. This is a “chi” practices that works to reverse your flow of energy.
Think about something you enjoy doing and envision in full detail the colors, temperature, feelings, and other sensations associated with that activity.
Imagine that you have already achieved your desired result and invite in all the thoughts, feelings and visuals that come with your success.

- Lee Gerdes, author of Limitless You: The Infinite Possibilities of a Balanced Brain

Lee will be featured in a webinar on Thursday, January 26. You can learn more about it here.

What Feelings of "Abandonment" Are Really About

David Robert Ord — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:48:54 +0000

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

It's quite surprising to discover how many adults experience a feeling of abandonment in their adult lives. It's a common occurrence.

Dr David Schnarch is his outstanding book for therapists Constructing the Sexual Crucible: An Integration of Sexual and Marital Therapy, likens an adult feeling abandoned to a six-foot man imagining he's going to drown in three feet of water as the waves wash over him, when all he needs to do is stand up.

Our true self can never be abandoned because there is no solitary self that's separate from everyone and everything else. Since we are all expressions of a oneness, how can we ever really be abandoned?

The feeling of abandonment is an illusion of the ego, part of what Eckhart Tolle calls our pain-body. Or what Michael Brown in The Presence Process and Alchemy of the Heart speaks of as an "emotional charge."

Some counselors will urge you to explore feelings of abandonment, digging into what happened to you in childhood to cause you to feel abandoned. This can be an endless search.

There is another way, which is simply to use the present feelings to our advantage. We do this by sitting with them. Michael calls this containment.

Containment is neither denying what we are experiencing nor wallowing in it.

The pain-body loves to wallow in misery. But this miserable-feeling person isn't who we actually are. We are inherently joyous, hidden beneath the pain-body with its fortress of emotional charges.

Whenever you feel isolated, lonely, or abandoned, simply sit with the feeling and observe it. Don't identify with it! Don't make it about you, who you are, and the story of your life. Just notice it.

Now, what in you is doing the observing, the noticing? This is your true self—and you'll notice that it's not a part of the emotional charge you are labeling "abandonment."

Of course not, because who you really are can never be abandoned. It's just a question of the real you—the part that observes—standing tall, recognizing the emotional charge of abandonment for precisely what it is...not really you at all, just a learned pattern of thinking and emoting.

Emotional Containment Is Neither Denying Nor Venting. It's Being Real

David Robert Ord — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:14:42 +0000

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

When we grow up restricting our enjoyment, we end up plodding through our days with a kind of deadness.

Yet probably very few of us, if any, grow up without doing this.

As we join an adult world, which majors largely in the mediocre, life becomes mundane.

To speak of life as mundane doesn't mean we don't achieve what people generally consider "success," such as making money, acquiring material possessions, and climbing the social ladder.

We frequently see examples in the news of people who are considered highly successful, perhaps even world-famous, whose actual experience of life is a state of mediocrity. Not much excites them, delights them, or fulfills them.

From movie stars to musicians, sports heroes, socialites, and politicians, there are countless examples of people who "have it all," yet who are bored and whose hearts are empty.

No small number engage in self-destructive practices such as taking drugs, while some take their own life at the pinnacle of their seeming success.

Although we may have shut down much of the sense of wonder and excitement we knew as children, settling for a mediocre existence, we still have our childhood zest inside us—we just can't access it.

The energy we would normally invest in life doesn't disappear but simply becomes blocked.

So often if things are going along smoothly, yet we can't feel the natural enjoyment of our true being because it's been shut down for years or even decades, we tend to do things that furnish us with a semblance of being alive—things that provide us with a pseudo aliveness.

Or we may observe others doing things to make themselves feel alive, as in the phenomenon of reality television shows. In this way we engage vicariously in a pseudo “aliveness.”

The norm in many lives is drama. It’s the way we put a little zip in our day, spicing things up, breaking the monotony of everyday existence. However, though for a time drama gives us a shot of excitement to alleviate the dull dreariness in which so many of us exist, it ultimately leaves us with an icky feeling.

It's the consistent discipline to sit ourselves down and feel instead of either venting or stuffing our emotional charge that dissolves the pain-body for most of us.

At the heart of this practice that has the potential to vastly increase our consciousness is the choice not to lock horns with a person or a situation, but to be alone for a short time if possible.

Neither denying nor venting, we feel.

In The Presence Process, Michael calls this "containment." Containment is how we become spiritually mature. Learning to be real again as we were as a young child, yet to contain our feelings instead of denying or venting them, is what Alchemy of the Heart is all about.

How Emotional Imprinting Drives Our Behavior Throughout Life

David Robert Ord — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:14:48 +0000

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

Do you find yourself repeating negative patterns of behavior? Not just in the present, but over a period of years.

You find yourself attracted to the wrong kind of person. You get yourself into jobs that aren't really you. Or you keep repeating a pattern of financial problems.

And all of this despite your best efforts to change your life for the better.

No matter how much you work on positive thinking, meditating, and exercising your will, the pattern of behavior continues to occur.

The reason repetitive behavior occurs is that we have all been emotionally imprinted.

This imprinting took place when we were children—and even before we were born, while still in the womb—setting up cycles of repetitive behavior.

Michael tells us that "an imprinted experience becomes an unseen causal point of the repetitious nature of many of the uncomfortable aspects of our life experience."

He adds:

Imprinting is the answer to the question, "Why does this keep happening to me?"

In the next blog, we'll begin looking at a specific kind of imprinting. We'll look at how it occurred and the effect it has on us—and how we can integrate it, so that the energy becomes available for our everyday empowerment.

The precise form of imprinting we'll look at, as an example of how imprinting works, is abandonment—in this case going all the way back to the eighth month in the womb.

Feelings of abandonment are incredibly common. They can also become wonderfully empowering, so that we never feel lonely and abandoned again.

Are YOU Really Running Your Life?

David Robert Ord — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:09:32 +0000

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

How in charge are you of your life?

Asked differently, to what degree does your life run you instead of you running it?

It really doesn't matter how well intentioned we are, how strong our will, or how positive our thoughts.

If there are unresolved emotions beneath all of this effort, the effect will be like termites in the basement.

When we enter the world, our first seven years are focused primarily on emotional exchanges. These exchanges imprint us with emotional experiences that to a large measure remain unresolved.

As time progresses, this unresolved emotion builds into what becomes a powerful charge.

This charge is what really directs our life—despite all our intentions, determination, and positive thinking.

We can fairly easily reprogram our thinking. Various techniques are available for this purpose. But the result will be limited by what's happening deep within us at the emotional level.

For example, think of a young girl who has excelled in elementary school. She is a star student. Entering her teens, she meets a boy who becomes what she describes as her "life." Her grades and interest in school plummet.

An emotional charge—in this case felt as a neediness—will win out every time in the end.

Emotional wholeness is the critical factor in terms of directing our lives along a meaningful path, as the insightful book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman shows so clearly.

As long as there is unresolved emotion from our early days, all of our other efforts to "make something of ourselves" will either fail, fall short, or ultimately prove unfulfilling.

As long as our emotional energy doesn't flow freely throughout our being, we are crippling ourselves.

The remedy lies in the kind of emotional processing explained in Alchemy of the Heart and detailed in The Presence Process.

When we engage in sustained emotional processing, trapped emotional energy becomes freed up, so that we're no longer driven by an emotional charge.

Our choices are now what determine our course in life.

We run our life.

What's REALLY Running Your Life? The Surprising Answer: IMPRINTING

David Robert Ord — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:16:58 +0000

Insight from Michael Brown’s Alchemy of the Heart

During the first twenty-one years of our life, we are in process of "growing up." At twenty-one, we celebrate our "coming of age."

We have by now passed through three cycles of seven years, totaling twenty-one years.

In our first seven-year cycle, we developed emotionally.

In the second set of seven years, we developed mentally—the period when we entered into serious schooling.

This was followed by a third set of seven years in which we matured physically, attaining our height, physique, and sexual maturation.

Michael Brown describes these as years of "imprinting." The term as used in Alchemy of the Heart means the transfer of energetic information. He explains:

Imprinting is like tattooing. It may also be thought of as the downloading of consequences into the emotional, mental, and physical components of our human experience, or the grounding into this life of karma from previous life experiences.

It's not important how we conceive of imprinting, only that we realize it happens.

We don't have to believe in previous lives, for example—only to begin to awaken to the fact that we have been greatly influenced by our background.

Michael explains that imprinting begins even in the womb, as we are influenced by our mother's experiences. The chemicals in her blood as a result of her emotional state, beliefs and values, and physical activities are just one example.

During the first seven years of life, imprinting takes the form of felt impressions. These will overrule our best intentions to improve our life in later years, unless we integrate the emotion involved.

Similarly, the second seven years, from seven through fourteen years of age, consist of the imprinting of mental impressions.

We develop beliefs, concepts, values—a mental framework for our life.

Most of these are borrowed from others, or formed in reaction to others. They rarely emerge from within our own authentic being.

The thing about our beliefs, concepts, and values is that this mental framework only changes in later years to the degree that we mature emotionally, which requires processing our unprocessed emotions from the early years.

Only as we face up to our emotional baggage from the first seven years will our mental state evolve. This is why many adults hold quite facile, even childish, beliefs about life.

It's also why they keep on repeating the same mistakes in life, like picking romantic partners who again and again prove to be the wrong choice.

The crucial insight is this, as Michael expresses it:

From the age of twenty-one onward, our life experience is overshadowed and underlined by this imprinted pattern—and remains so until we awaken to it and consciously interact with it.

Alchemy of the Heart is all about how we go about integrating our patterns, so that we at last become free to make intelligent choices rather than simply repeating the same-old, same-old.

No Need to Create Further Pain for Ourselves

David Robert Ord — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:42:38 +0000

In his teaching of The Presence Process and Alchemy of the Heart, Michael Brown exhorts us from time to time, “Don’t push the river.”

What might not be immediately apparent is that there’s more than one way to push the river.

It isn’t only by getting involved in doing that doesn’t come from being that we can push the river.

We can also push it in the opposite direction by doing things that are harmful to ourselves or to others—or by resisting the call to engage in emotional integration.

The point was made recently that whatever may have happened to us in life, the hurt we perceive is trapped energy that can become fuel for living a more fulfilling life.

In other words, nothing from our past is irredeemable. Anything can be turned to our benefit.

But it’s also true that we can make life extremely difficult for ourselves, not to mention exceedingly painful, by not responding to our inner voice when it asks us to move forward in a particular area of our life.

In order to have sufficient emotional fuel to live fully, it isn’t necessary to push the river and thereby make things worse for ourselves.

As St Paul put it, we aren’t smart if we “sin that grace may abound.”

Yes, all the ways we are untrue to ourselves can be integrated. But why put ourselves through additional suffering?

Often the way the future goes for us—whether we keep on repeating patterns—turns on a single decision that either generates more pain or integrates pain.

Emotional processing—integrating trapped emotional energy from our early days of life so that it becomes available to us now—is a tremendously important and rewarding endeavor. It should be engaged in as soon as we are capable.

Integrating unfinished emotional business isn’t, however, necessarily a panacea when it comes to immediate results in terms of feeling good.

Depending on what we’ve been through, it can take years—or a lifetime—to integrate some of the energy that’s trapped and causes us pain.

The lesson in this is that we can choose not to cause ourselves additional pain, and the sooner we respond to the urge within us to face our pain, the better.

No one outside of ourselves is controlling this. We are responsible, not fate.

This is why we are wise to take responsibility now for the change that’s so very much to our advantage.

Life does have a wonderful ability to facilitate emotional integration when we allow it to simply flow. It does know how to guide us into fullness of being.

But when we push the river, in either direction, we undermine what life is inviting us to accomplish.