07 Jul Does shorthand get you where you want to go?
There’s a shorthand we all do in life: we conceptualize what’s going on.
We’re doing it constantly. It’s a mental shorthand.
When something happens, our brain automatically scans past references to make sense of this new something. If there’s a fit we find it easier to make sense of it by creating a story about what’s happening based on past experiences…
…which makes it easy to MISS what is ALSO there, or what could be there, or might be there.
Now, I am NOT saying that we shouldn’t put words to experience, to name it. We need to do that. It’s part of how we build a self container.
By naming X we create a focus on what we’ve named which then takes a dominance in our experience.
It’s part of the process we use in training our body, mind and heart to open to the intensity of the life force that rages through us.
(Notice even when I use the word “rages” in this context…notice what that evokes or not…many of us have been scorched by rage…no wonder we may flinch on hearing it now)
How then to describe the intensity in each of us, the intensity of this force of life that moves in, through and around us?
How can language guide us to BE with this instead of reacting with dysregulation to the power and force that wishes to bring us home to ourselves?
My first response when the burbling, gurgling intensity begins in me is (frankly) to GET AWAY. Those first moments are almost always a wish to get away.
It’s only the years of schooling myself to create room, breathe, open, listen under the words that howl or the parts that present.
Those are the layers, the veils to pass through that can be seductive, urging us to linger there. Yet the wisdom traditions remind us that too much lingering, too much staying with the mental shorthand, the patterned story, will at some level reinforce the perceptual lens we’ve already formatted.
To clear that lens, to experience what is there, beaconing us to be more (…. not that was before was wrong … but … how to say this?…is it serving you now?)
Attuning to the souls presence requires a different way of experiencing what happens inside us and around us.
Perhaps the soul, the spirit of Love, needs to first clear concepts we’ve formed so we can attune to what’s beyond.
Which means we first train the body, mind heart to be with the layers of thoughts, feelings, sensations and parts so that we can then…
Grow in our capacity to surf intensity…
Relax in the Turbulence Training of Life…
Breathe, exhale as we’re Gifted with Grace…