Awareness is a magician in the role of healing, through physical, emotional and mental affliction. This is the case whether it’s our awareness or the awareness of a beloved.
When we have an unexplained pain in the thigh, our habitual response can be to ignore it. We ignore it and also the area around it. At a certain stage, the pain gets stronger, and then we can think about nothing else. The pain in our thigh is more important than the starvation of continents. We have to ‘get rid’ of the pain. In the shadow lands of health and disease, a creepy suspicion emerges that the pain is showing that we’re not ‘OK’. It’s our fault. It’s because we’re guilty, and the punishment is here. Some will try to hide it, ashamed of the pain. If others knew about the thigh pain, then…
If there was a pill to instantly remove the pain from our leg, many of us would take it. The problem is that this drug would need to desensitize the whole area, in order to stop the pain. When the whole area is desensitized, we would no longer feel it if a wasp landed there and stung us. The leg looses its protection of sensitivity.
We go to a doctor. The doctor brings his consciousness, together with a lot of learning, towards the pain and towards the leg, She inquires about the nature of the pain. She assesses the leg in the context of its history (traumatic encounters with misplaced tables) and its inter-relatedness to the whole system of the body – the muscular, the vascular, the biochemistry of the blood and cells (it’s a good doctor). She runs tests. Even before any treatment, the leg feels better.
According to neuroscientists, emotional pain registers in the brain in precisely the same manner as physical pain. For example, the pain of rejection lights up the same areas in the brain that signify physical pain. (Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations With Physical Pain, by Ethan F. Kross, Marc G. Berman, Walter Mischel, Edward E. Smith and Tor D. Wager; published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). That is, social dynamics that ignite early wounds of rejection and broken attachment from our parents, can register in the brain like a major physical battlefield.
Yet ignorance of emotional pain and the consensual repression of areas of suffering such a grief, anxiety and especially anger, are practically endemic in our society. And yes, we have pills to try and take the pain away, many of which to desensitize the parts of the whole sentient system, before we get to the fall-out of other side-effects. Much of this so-called medication creates such a blanket over the natural psychic order of suffering, living, human, that in the end it’s impossible to distinguish what’s beneath the plaster-cast of chemicals. Often the drive to ‘keep the system quiet’ is so strong that the symptoms of withdrawal from the drug are taken by medical professionals as proof of the underlying insanity. It’s a horrific epidemic of fear of pain breeding fear of fear of fear, with a touch of medical threat to keep the plate spinning.
This ignorance of feelings and emotions is to a large degree internalized. We reflexively prohibit the open-field, clear experience of emotional discomfort or fluid feelings such as grief or despair. We have a tendency to freeze them out of any right to exist – in ourselves and others. Our drug is distraction – thinking thoughts, getting ‘stuff’, ‘being someone’ to others, creating and recreating a self image in a dance between survival (avoiding pain) and embellishing whatever temporary sense of safety we can grasp.
We partly do this, because we believe that our personal feelings and emotions are immaterial – less significant even than that pain in the thigh. Centuries of conditioning through mechanistic science has hypnotized us into believing that what can’t be physically seen, doesn’t exist. This leaves at the layer of the bone, but cuts out the whole biochemistry of the body. This biochemistry is material. It moves between mind, heart and body, seeking resolution of dissonant phenomena through release or containment. If emotional energy cannot transform through a natural circulation of release, and this is repeated as a pattern, the system will bring it into the physical, to seek attention there.
This is doctor’s magic. Not the drugs, but the attention. Attention is consciousness, which by nature is impersonal. Conscious awareness around areas of pain brings a subtle relaxation which allows an unfolding of the layers of pain – the causal story that is alive within it. This is true physically, but also emotionally and mentally. The energy will move through the whole, seeking harmony. The pure presence of conscious awareness is an invitation into that harmony.
Consciousness is increasingly viewed by science as energy. On the quantum scale, the observer participant directly effects the outcome of the experiment, presenting the well known phenomena of matter appearing as a particle (when measured) or a wave (when unmeasured), or of particles being simultaneously ‘here’ and not ‘here’, depending on the observer participant. As Einstein famously said, ‘energy is all there is’, and the pure energy of unconditioned consciousness has a resonance with the conditions of suffering.
Does ice melt by our injecting water into it? That doesn’t work. Ice is made of water. Ice melts by dissolving bit by bit, from the inside out, into the water that surrounds it, out of which it’s formed.”
Many readers of I AM HERE have been introduced to the scientific research beyond epigenetics and the healing power of the work with inherited trauma – states of stress of emotional affliction passed on to us through an inherited chemical tag on our genes. The healing power of consciousness in this process work is directly resonating harmony with the stress factor that is reflected by the epigenetic tag. Bringing our conscious awareness to a background sense of doom, or dread of betrayal, can initiate a whole healing process that is able to literally lift the chemical tag. Remember, the dimensions we are working in are so tiny (yet the effects so all pervasive on the form), that living resonance is a key to unfolding the physical, emotional and mental stories that surround us. This resonance is allowed through the presence of unconditioned awareness.
Yet the magic deepens. What is actually happening is not that we are bringing awareness into the form of affliction. We are actually bringing the form home into boundless, unconditioned expanse of living awareness. Does ice melt by our injecting water into it? That doesn’t work. Ice is made of water. Ice melts by dissolving bit by bit, from the inside out, into the water that surrounds it.
Awareness costs nothing. We don’t need an authority to prescribe it. Its presence is enough to allow life to heal itself, through the most direct routes. All we have to do is allow it, without assumption, agenda or expectation. This is the deeper, healing meaning of ‘Let it Be’.
