The category of Mind Body Soul (MBS) is standard in the publishing world. Through some kind of unquestioned consensus, we fell into a trap in which the human entity is divided into the three: the mind, the body, and the soul (of questionable existence, yet quite detachable from mind and body).
This three-way mental division is again reflected in the language of non-dualists: you must wake up that you are not your body, after that you must wake up that you are not your mind. In this, you will enter the dimension of pure, unattached consciousness, awareness, being (the words are individually undefined), which will prepare you for the grand finale of attempting to integrate this in your actual life.
What are we missing? And why do we miss it again and again?
Where is the human heart – with its agony, grief, joy, entanglement and ecstasy?
The missed element is in perception through pure awareness, which unlike consciousness (which affirms or rejects form in time and space), moves through, while merging and blending with whatever is arising energetically. Pure awareness attunes with a vibration of unconditional love, excluding nothing. Where it tries to exclude, it freezes, which is often where the human traveller becomes blocked and sent into a cycle of thinking-reparation or conscious rejection of the offending form. These blocks can be connected with sexual fears, the pain of rejection, or grief at the transience of self and physical life.
Energy healers and therapists (often in another field of dialogue and service from nonduality teachers), have a different focus in the world of inner growth. They see thought as energy, including belief systems.
Healers also sense/feel/see configurations of feeling and emotion as energy around and within a person. Working at the interface of pure perception with energy fields/blockages/trauma, they are able to support a process of liberation which makes the last stage of spiritual process (attempting to integrate finer levels of perception into daily life) more possible.
The rift between the two broad schools (healers and spiritual teachers) exposes a rift in communication.
When the word AWARENESS is freely interchanged with consciousness, then an undefined meta perspective is created, which falls into the broad category of being free of the limitations of our “stuff” (thoughts, feelings, emotions).
In this, a new duality is set up, between that stuff, and the elevated state of perception. It becomes an “either-or” scenario where the “stuff” which is individually with you at this point of time and space, is the underdog in a perceptive escapade.
Can you feel where love is dense and not free?
Can you feel the borders or limitations to the expansion of love? These energetic constraints – often created from old trauma or inherited beliefs – are precisely the areas that need to be allowed into the loving presence of self awareness.
True awareness, as differing from consciousness, is all about the felt sense and vibration.
How does it feel to be you right now, in this space? What is able to sense the atmosphere of your individual being, or the presence of ‘being’ of a family member, friend or loved animal?
In this dimension of felt sense, we are able to pass through the limitations of time and space. As we open the way to the purification of awareness through allowing ourselves to feel the miracle of being able to feel, the finer dimensions of love are revealed. The most effective way to liberate this awareness, is to release even the awareness itself, and to stand behind it’s expansion in perception through emptiness. Emptiness is that which allows awareness to freeze or expand. It is also that which allows the transformation of any energetic block or freeze. It is empty of rejection. Empty of inherent separation.
It is in the dimension of awareness that energetic blockages will send us spiralling down into addiction and up into circling thoughts and beliefs.
Also, here, we find the formulation of energetic “states”, such as a state of depression, or a state of bliss. Such states are formed when we choose a particular perspective as absolute – and all three layers of perception become filtered with their glow. A state can be witnessed when it is clear the individual needs to defend it, or persuade others of its absolute nature, or when they begin to “fake” it, as a state in real life is always sooner or later going to meet the areas where it is non-responsive.
There is no way around the energy happenings in the dimension of awareness – no escape route.
The method of healing must always involve the direct loving awareness and acceptance of energetic feeling sensations unhooked from any story.
We can consciously reject unpleasant feelings and throw them “away”. But there is no such place as ‘away’. We can pretend that if we don’t see or feel the unpleasant stuff, then it will cease to exist. But it won’t. This stuff will wait – decades if necessary, or even through generations of a family – to be transformed through loving awareness back into the whole.
We can not “transcend” our human grief, or “ignore” the pain of rejection or separation which is among us as we are here in manifold forms. We can only allow it, and in allowing it through the warm heat of loving awareness, allow also its transformation (from ice, to water, to cloud).
This is the junction where nonduality meets healing.
The two fields of inner growth begin to emerge in the area of non-dual therapy, where the benefit of unconditional, loving self-awareness increasingly reveals its power in supporting healing. Awareness – or the dimensions of the heart – are the central station of integration and healing – linking consciousness with emptiness, heaven and earth, and one human with another. Feeling awareness is also a central part of empathy and compassion.
When the heart is avoided according to a subtle agenda of avoiding pain, the results can be quite monstrous. Nihilism. Cynicism. Narcissism, cruelty and psychological stagnation – all hiding behind the mask of the enlightened “nobody”.
To allow the refinement and liberation of both consciousness and awareness, we need to allow perception through emptiness, releasing the final but perhaps one of the most draconian mental attachments – the attachment to perception itself.
