Subtle Self I

(The opening volley): emotions, chemistry, coherence

This morning at pre-dawn I sat in the window nook overlooking the valley ringed with mountains, and lit two candles. As I bent down to light the second, I noticed the waning crescent moon still high in the sky. The deep indigo light in the east, glowing. Twice in the past month, the book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron came to my attention - in particular the practice of sitting down first thing no matter what, and writing three pages with absolutely no censorship whatsoever. It is meant to be a stream of consciousness, an unfiltered pour of the mind onto the page. In the instructions, she says that even if you sit down and write three pages of “I don’t know what to write,” the practice is working its magic.

After I finished my pages, I put my long coat and walked outside - to see the moon and dawn that still hadn’t quite broken. There were coyotes howling, and I thought how utterly archetypal it was: sagebrush, coyotes, the moon, dawn. And this valley, coming to life slowly in the blue-green light.

Now there is an orange glow, I have a pot of broth on the stove, the fireplace is on, the candles are still lit.

Subtle Self Part 1

The Opening Volley

[This is a mind-body-life continuum essay.]

One of the biggest misconceptions about who we are, is that emotions are our accurate responses to life - when in fact - our emotions are the accurate inner feedback of how much vital force we are allowing via our current mental focus - which may be fixed upon something that is happening in our life. We can also experience emotional feedback as we focus upon imagined potentials, possibilities, ideas, things that have little or nothing to do with our direct life experience. Putting it simply, we focus, think and our emotions arise in response to what we are thinking. Oh sure, it can seem like we are angry because that person did that thing, but we are experiencing anger because of how we are focusing upon that person and the thing they did. It may seem like we are joyful because of something that is occurring in our life, but we are experiencing joy because how we are focusing and thinking about what is occurring to us.

From this standpoint, our human habit of saying that someone or something made us feel something is actually completely false. No one, ultimately, has the power to make anyone feel anything. Sure, we commonly give our emotional steering wheel¹ to other people or situations, but it’s an illusion that is normalized within our cultures and society at large. This is incredibly disempowering. In reality, the woven tapestry of the mind-body-life continuum, it is all an inside job. And like it or not, we have the ability to choose.

I say would we technically have the ability to choose, because yes we are each naturally endowed with the free will to choose our focus. This is one of the most incredible things about being human, and an inherent function of who we are as embodied consciousness. We focus. We actually can’t help it. We may do it habitually and haphazardly, but every second of every waking moment we are focusing on something. And - we have the ability to develop the capacity to focus skillfully and deliberately. This is where mastery comes from.

The how and why of thoughts and emotions being interrelated is a point of crucial importance. If we understand the process by which our emotions are arising, it makes it easier to interact with them in a liberating manner, rather than being driven by them - which in the short and long run is to be driven by our unexamined habits and beliefs.

A whole body look at thoughts + emotions:

• Our life-force is vibrational, manifesting electrically in the body.

• Mental focus and subsequent thought activity is vibrational, manifesting electrically in the body.

• In the body, electrical activity is the precursor to chemical activity.

• When we focus and think, this frequency may or may not be in resonance with the frequency of our life force (this will be the main subject of Part 2).

• When the frequency of our current mental focus is in resonance with the frequency our life force, the life force is allowed to flow fully. In this allowing, we experience coherence, meaning that there is whole body order, organization, and communication. This coherence stimulates specific chemical cascades and expressions in the body, leading to wellness, well-being, thriving.

• When the frequency of our current mental focus is out of resonance with the frequency our life force, the life force is resisted to a degree. As resistance increases, we experience greater levels of incoherence, meaning that there is a diminishment of order, organization, and communication. This incoherence stimulates specific chemical cascades and expressions in the body, leading to disorder, dis-harmony, dis-ease.

We have the free will to focus, which means we can focus ourselves into wellness or into dis-ease. The number one carcinogen is stress, and stress originates on the level of focus. In the Vitalist tradition, from which I received my training as an herbalist, it is held that we have to create the inner environment that allows for external perturbations (in the form of toxins, viruses, bacteria, environmental stressors, etc.) to actually have a place to take root, proliferate, and cause symptoms or disease in the first place. Just because there is a virus wiling around, doesn’t mean anything about whether we’re going to experience an issue with it. I spoke with a natural health practitioner some years ago, and she told me that she had seen many cases of people with Lyme’s disease in their bodies, without having any manifesting symptoms or physical complications. We all know by know that cancer cells are common within our bodies - it’s only when the balance tips towards incoherence as a chronic pattern that we see the dominance of health change towards dis-ease. The life force is incredibly powerful, so a little allowing goes a long way, and a lot of resistance is needed to begin a detrimental cascade.

The amazing thing about our whole body field, is that we can feel whether we are in coherence or incoherence, in allowing or resistance. Therefore it is actually quite simple² to guide ourselves towards greater wellness (or diminished well-being for that matter.) This is because the chemical cascade, the hormonal expression in our body, is palpable. We call this somatic experience (the sensory feeling) of our chemistry, emotions. By paying attention to our current emotional state, we can literally feel whether our current mental focus is allowing our life force to flow fully, or is restricting it in some way. In basic terms: coherence and allowing feels good, incoherence and resistance don’t feel good.

News Flash: we are hardwired to feel good. Wellness and feeling good literally go hand in hand. True allowing of wellness cannot occur without changes on the emotional level of our being. If our emotions change, our focus has changed, our level of coherence and allowing has changed, our chemical expression has changed, our vibrational expression has changed.

The beauty of the whole body, is that if we somehow miss the message that our emotions are sending us, they simply get louder. And the chemical cascade influences a whole host of physiological responses, including gene up-regulation or down-regulation. Thus, our emotions and physical bodies become a very clear read-out of what we are doing on the more subtle levels of our being. And, our dominant levels of coherence or incoherence are not just manifesting physically in our body, they are also manifesting physically in our life experience. There are two main reasons for this.

1. We use our body to participate in our life - our thoughts, emotions, moods, and physical health determine to a very large extent what kind of words we say and actions we take (as well as determining how open our perception/perspective is). This is turn is the butterfly effect with regards to the quality of our interpersonal relationships, the choices we make, the places we go, the things we do, the things we see.

2. The resonance of our whole body does not exist in a vacuum - the vibration of who we are, who we are being in any given moment of time, emanates from us. Each of our major organ systems is an electromagnetic oscillator, our heart being the largest at over 60 times greater in amplitude than that of the brain. There is a literal vibrational atmosphere that surrounds us, that emanates from us, and this atmosphere interacts (harmonizes) with other vibrational, electromagnetic fields.

I spent a number of years in India learning to meditate with the Buddhists, and what I learned in contrasting that scope of experience with my studies and practice of mind-body science - is that it is much, much, easier to guide emotions, than it is to guide thoughts themselves. It is also much easier to be aware of our emotions, the relative feeling content of our vibration, than it is to keep track of our mental focus from the realm of thoughts themselves. The primary reason for this, is that we have the capacity to try thinking thoughts that we don’t actually feel or believe. The crux of the whole body and its vibrational nature, is that our emotions do not lie to us - they are giving us an accurate, personalized read-out of what we are doing in the present moment with our focus, and by extension our whole body wellness and well-being.

This is a topic I am really passionate about, because I see how much leverage is available to each of us if we were to come into an updated view of our emotions. There are always things that we want for our physical bodies and our lives - and we have strong habits of reaching for things in the physical in order to make those changes happen. The fascinating part about the quantum mind-body-life continuum, is that almost all the leverage exists on the more subtle dimensions of our being - and when we bring those deeper levels of who we are into coherence, our unfolding life experience takes on greater qualities of ease, flow, and ultimately wellness, well-being, thriving and joy - which are vibrational aspects of our essential vital life-force, the flow of our consciousness into this time-space reality.

First things first: paying attention to emotional patterns throughout the day, mood trends, and coming to a personal conclusion of what one’s basic, natural state of well-being feels like.

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A more poetic version of this conversation:

1. My husband Victor came up with the term “emotional steering wheel.” I like this phrase, because it gives a tangible sense that our ability to turn (focus) any which way is truly in our hands.

2. Simple is not always easy.