As Above, So Below
WELCOME
Feel Your Way into Being
To investigate our embodied experience is to investigate the living present.
It is only when we go to the center of our souls that we enter the ‘eye of the storm’, the still-point of our existence.
In the rush to get an education, to make a career, create a family, obtain material success, to hurry, to do, to survive, we often don’t realize that in the midst of this modern-chaotic life that we lead every day, there exists another life, an unseen life that moves like a silent river beneath a city. A place where time stands still and we experience a softly euphoric sense of awakening, the feeling of breathing and falling in love in harmony with the universe.
Intuition
“Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life.”
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“When we come upon beautiful things they lift us… letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before.”
–Simone Weil
“Everything is determined…by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
–Albert Einstein
“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly then to live an imitation of someone else’s life with perfection.”
– Krishna, The Bhagavad Gita
Cult of Money, Myths & Idols
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.
“The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.
Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed — he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship.”
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Breaking the Cage
“There was a time in my life when I believed, without question, that there was only one way to God. Only one path to heaven. Only one door through which salvation was possible, and it just so happened that I had been told my group possessed the key.
It’s strange looking back now at how unquestioningly I accepted that narrative, how deeply it burrowed into my psyche as truth. Because when you’re raised inside a paradigm that says “we are the ones who are right,” it never feels like arrogance or tribalism. It feels like safety, certainty, and even virtue. You’re told it’s love to warn others of their error, and that any discomfort in doing so is a sign of courage. But beneath that surface narrative lives a very different reality: the programming of fear and control disguised as spiritual truth.
At the heart of that paradigm is one of the oldest psychological mechanisms humans have ever used: us versus them.
It’s a deeply unconscious pattern, born from the ego’s desire for certainty and belonging. If my group is right, then your group must be wrong. If my way leads to God, then your way must lead away from God. And if we’re honest, that binary thinking is rarely about truth. It’s about identity. It’s about building walls around the self so that we can feel chosen, safe, special, and saved.
The ultimate tool of this paradigm is fear, particularly the fear of the worst fate imaginable: eternal damnation.
When that fear is introduced, the stakes are raised beyond comprehension. The message is no longer “we believe our way is best,” but “every other way will cost you your soul forever.” This is how coercion is spiritualized by linking conformity not just to belonging in this life, but to salvation in the next.
One of the most revealing aspects of this conditioning is the demonization of the “other.” I remember being explicitly taught that all other religious traditions were not just wrong, but demonic, literally inspired by the devil to lead people astray.
As a child, that idea was terrifying. It wasn’t until I took the time to study those traditions with genuine curiosity and openness that the illusion began to dissolve. I discovered that nearly every spiritual lineage, across time and culture, contains both a fundamentalist branch and a mystical branch. The fundamentalist clings to dogma, hierarchy, and exclusion. The mystic, on the other hand, dissolves boundaries, transcends concepts, and points toward direct experience. As Meister Eckhart wrote, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics speak the same language.” That single sentence dismantled so much of what I had believed, because it revealed that the essence, the heartbeat, of every sincere path is not conflict, but communion.
When a group demonizes something different from itself—like another faith, ideology, or way of thinking—the hatred or fear they project isn’t really about that specific belief or tradition. It is typically a defense mechanism. The unfamiliar threatens the identity that the group has built, so rather than expanding to include new perspectives, it attacks them to preserve its own certainty. On a subconscious level, this is nothing more than group narcissism, a collective ego that must be superior in order to feel safe. History is littered with examples of this pattern: empires demonizing rival empires, religions declaring holy wars, ideologies branding dissenters as heretics. The script never really changes. The “other” is vilified, dehumanized, or labeled evil, not because they truly are, but because their existence reveals that ours is not the only way. And nothing is more threatening to a fragile identity than the possibility that it might not hold a monopoly on truth.
Over time, as I studied, questioned, and opened myself to direct experience, a startling realization emerged: the entire notion of “the path to God” is itself the great illusion. It is the carrot dangled before the seeker, the promise that keeps people on the treadmill of fear and striving. But what is God, if not infinite? And how can infinity be reached by a single road? The very premise is absurd. As Ram Dass once said, “If you’re already in Detroit, you don’t need to take a bus to get there.” The divine is not a destination but the ground we are already standing on. Separation is the illusion, the fundamental misconception upon which all of this programming is built. The idea that we are here and God is there, that we are broken and must be fixed, that we are lost and must be found, these are narratives that sustain the machinery of control, but they collapse the moment we realize that the essence we seek is already what we are.
The more I have released those narratives, the more I have come to see that truth is not owned by any group, claimed by any doctrine, or contained in any book. It is alive in the silence beneath thought, in the space between beliefs, in the shared humanity that transcends the language we use to describe it. The mystics of nearly every tradition have always known this. They whisper, each in their own tongue but from the same place of knowing, that there is nothing to seek and nowhere to go. The veil of separation is thin, and when it falls, the illusion of “one true path” falls with it. All that remains is the direct, unmediated reality of what has always been: the timeless presence of the divine, here and now, within and without, utterly inseparable from who we are.
And this realization, perhaps more than any other, has changed how I see people. Because if God is not somewhere else, if the divine is the essence of what we already are, then there is no longer any justification for exclusion. There is no ground for superiority, no reason to divide the world into “saved” and “unsaved.” The walls that once separated “us” from “them” dissolve into a single field of shared being. This is the birthplace of unconditional love, the kind that sees beyond belief systems and doctrines and identities. It is the love that Jesus spoke of when he said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” because in the truest sense, your neighbor is yourself. Unity consciousness is not an abstract spiritual idea; it is the felt recognition that every human being, regardless of what they believe, is an expression of the same infinite presence. To live from this understanding is to see the sacred in everyone. It is to embrace difference not as a threat but as another facet of the divine. It is to lay down the sword of judgment and pick up the mirror of compassion. And in that space, the whole notion of “one way” becomes irrelevant, because we finally see that there was never anywhere else to go, and there was never anyone else to become. There was only this, only us, only God, endlessly expressing itself in infinite form.”
– Logan Barone
Drifted In the Deeper Land
Most of society lives on surface talk — some offer below-the-surface medicine. It won’t be for everyone, but for the ones it is for, it will be life-changing. Feel your way into being, through the many voices on these pages. For the benefit and enjoyment of all beings.
“The desire to know your own soul will end all other desires.”
– Rumi
Freedom
“Do you read peoples minds?” He asked.
“No.” She replied. “I read their hearts and teach them how to fly.”
”I have not heard of a single Buddha, past or present, who has been enlightened by sacred prayers and scriptures.”
– Bassui
Artwork by Daniel Liévano
Carpe Diem
The concept of “carpe diem” is closely linked to courage because it involves overcoming fear and stepping outside one’s comfort zone, and the importance of focusing on the present moment, rather than dwelling on the past or worrying excessively about the future. Dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, can lead to anxiety and depression.
Focusing on the present moment is crucial for mental well-being, as it reduces stress, enhances happiness, and fosters a deeper connection with oneself and our surroundings.
“Beyond what we wish and what we fear may happen we have another life, as clear and free as a mountain stream.”
– Rumi
Profiles in Courage
“Courage” comes from the French word coeur, “heart.” Courage is a willingness to act from the heart, to let your heart lead the way, not knowing what will be required of you next, and if you can do it.
“Following your own star means isolation, not knowing where to go, having to find out a completely new way for yourself instead of just going on the trodden path everybody else runs along. That’s why there’s always been a tendency in humans to project the uniqueness and the greatness of their own inner self onto outer personalities and become the servants, the devoted servants, admirers, and imitators of outer personalities.
It is much easier to admire a great personality and become a pupil or follower of a guru or a religious prophet, or an admirer of a big, official personality. That is much easier than following your own star.”
-Marie-Louise von Franz
“The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.
– Terence McKenna
“What will they think of me, must be put aside for bliss.”
– Joseph Campbell
Those who don’t seem to fit into the world, are close to finding themselves.
– Hermann Hesse
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
– Carl Jung
Illusions of Ultimate Fulfillment
“The illusion of ultimate fulfillment” refers to the mistaken belief that achieving a specific goal, attaining a particular status, or possessing a certain material item will bring complete and lasting happiness, when in reality, the satisfaction is often fleeting and leaves one still searching for something more, often due to the influence of societal expectations and unrealistic desires.
The idea that happiness is in the next place, next job, next adventure, million dollar fortune, or even the next partner. Until we give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where we are.
Humans by their nature are unsatisfied, and consciousness—the ceaseless chatter within our heads—is the primary burden of humans. It’s a burden that animals, in their silent inner lives, do not have to carry. Humans cannot escape this burden, and the effort of struggling against it is in fact the cause of even greater suffering.
If you begin to free yourself from the cause of suffering, free the mind from the brutalities of personal ambition and success, from the craving for individual security, then there is truth, reality.
~ J. Krishnamurthi
Seeking (ultimate fulfillment)
The Dis-ease In Search of a Cure
It is part of the ego journey to conquer some things in the material world.
The ego needs to be crystallized to be dismantled. So, a crucial stage of life is the empowerment of the ego. It is for the ego to know it can handle life. That it can make money, it can conquer material things, that it is able to be recognized; it is a natural phase of the process of consciousness development. It is necessary to come to terms with this desire and to be able to let go of it and continue a grounded spiritual journey.
“The irony is that sometimes, you have to let go of feeling grounded for a while in order to really change—because the ‘ground’ you are used to belongs to your older reality.”
—Xavier Dagba
“The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of small humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound.”
— Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”
“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.”
― C.G. Jung
The Only Constant is Change
Do Not Nest in Any Experience or State
Wealth and happiness are not related to each other as cause and effect.
An attempt to secure happiness by securing wealth is as futile as it is absurd.
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul.
Story of Narcissus
The character of Narcissus is the origin of the term narcissism, a self-centered personality style. This quality in extreme contributes to the definition of narcissistic personality disorder, a psychiatric condition marked by grandiosity, excessive need for attention and admiration, and an inability to empathize.
“The ego’s death is the blossoming of bliss.”
– Ramana Maharshi
What, or Who am I?
“We may ask the question—“What am I?” or “Who am I?” or “Am I this thought?”—and the question, of course, originates in the mind. But once we’ve asked the question, it’s very important that we do not stay in the mind. We must turn our attention to the neck down. We have this whole beautiful thing called a body and this kinesthetic sense of being, and that’s where inquiry really happens.
…What is it like to feel in your being that you don’t know what you are? What’s it like when you look inside to find out who you are and you don’t find an entity called “you”? What does that open space feel like? Feel it in your body; let it register in the cells of your being. This is real spiritual inquiry. This transforms what might have been just an abstract thought in the mind into something that is very visceral, very kinesthetic, and very spiritually powerful.”
~ Adyashanti, from True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure Awareness
‘The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One- “That art thou.”
Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes into contact, is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.’
— Schopenhauer
“A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, gradually reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.”
~ Marion Woodman
Italian Alps
A Horse Appears in the Wild
Sensual Awareness
“We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge arrived at direct, by instinct and intuition, as we say, not by reason. Not until we can grasp a little of the working of the ancient mind can we appreciate the “magic” of the world they lived in. Men are far more fools today, for stripping themselves of their emotional and imaginative reactions, and feeling nothing. The price we pay is boredom and deadness. Our bald processes of thought no longer are life to us.”
— D.H. Lawrence
If You Wish to Know the Divine …
Feel the Wind on Your Face and the Warm Sun on Your Hand
“The true horror of existence is not the fear of death, but the fear of life. It is the fear of waking up each day to face the same struggles, the same disappointments, the same pain. It is the fear that nothing will ever change, that you are trapped in a cycle of suffering that you cannot escape. And in that fear, there is a desperation, a longing for something, anything, to break the monotony, to bring meaning to the endless repetition of days.”
— Albert Camus, The Fall
“It’s a great spiritual practice just to be connected to your senses. You go outside and you actually feel the cold or the warmth on your skin—you don’t just take quick note of it and then you’re off to the next abstract thought that floats through your brain, but you actually feel the cold or the warmth on your skin and you actually see what you’re looking at.”
~ Adyashanti, Perceiving from the Heart
We Will Never Become Happy
We Can Only BE Happy
Peace can exist only in the present moment.
It is ridiculous to say “Wait until I finish this, then I will be free to live in peace.” What is “this”? A diploma, a job, a house, the payment of a debt? If you think that way, peace will never come. There is always another “this” that will follow the present one. If you are not living in peace at this moment, you will never be able to. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise, there is only “the hope of peace some day.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
“Our society is very result-oriented, that’s why we are so competitive. That’s why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance. If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.”
“We are always looking ahead, aren’t we? And then the actual thing, the actual living, passes us by. We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach. We are imagining this mirage of happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment which will magically appear once this and this and this happens. But what’s happening right now is “it” and it’s the only “it” we have. The rest is just fabrication.”
Rishikesh, India 2013
Present Moment Experience
Being aware of our core can awaken a feeling of intimacy with all life. Present moment experience is physical and body-based, not intellectual or theoretical. If we are not in alignment with the moment, life is a struggle. It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our body that our true presence can awaken.
There is only the present moment, and in the moment there is only relating. How we relate, or rather how well we love, depends on how empty we are of ideas, concepts, expectations.
Reality exists in the here and now. This is the ultimate, complete and final truth of life. All beings exist in this present moment. When we lose contact with reality in the endless pursuit of “conceptual” happiness, we lose awareness of our inherent, primordial, natural state. Our mind wanders incessantly, but our body and senses are always in the present. To investigate our embodied experience is to investigate the living present.
The Highest Form of Intimacy is Truth
When we have nothing to hide, no one to impress, nothing to lose, no games left to play, no attachment to outcomes, real connection and intimacy happens.
Mutspitze – South Tyrol, Italy
Everything Changes
Everything is Connected; Pay Attention
“The miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh
“Nothing was. Nothing will be. Everything is.”
~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
“Happiness is that state of being which is time less. That timeless state can come only when there is a tremendous discontent – not the discontent that has found a channel through which it escapes, but the discontent that has no outlet, that has no escape, that is no longer seeking fulfillment. Only then, in that state of supreme discontent, can reality come into being. That reality is not to be bought, to be sold, to be repeated; it cannot be caught in books. It has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thoughts, in the fullness of love.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
“To be in love with what is now — that’s the way. That’s the only way. The rest is just the ego trying to survive.”
~ Adyashanti
Familiarity is Your Comfort Zone
There comes a time in your life when the life you have been living is over, and you have no clue who you are becoming.
~ Marion Woodman
“As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will not abandon it. Discovery cannot come as long as you cling to the familiar. It is only when you realize fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found. As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas; to know yourself as you are, give up all ideas. You cannot imagine the taste of pure water.
You can only discover it by abandoning all flavorings.”
~ Nisargdatta Maharaj
“What a lovely paradox that absolute aloneness reveals itself to be absolute intimacy with all things, an intimacy closer than unity or even oneness. Truly it cannot be put into words but must reveal itself from the very heart of aloneness.”
~ Adyashanti
Happiness is Love, Nothing Else
“The older I got and the more I tasted the little pleasures I found in my life, the more I realized where I had to look for the source of joys and life. I learned that to be loved is nothing, but to love everything, and more and more I meant to see that what makes our presence valuable and joyful is nothing else than our feelings and feelings. Somewhere on earth I saw something called “Happiness” it was made of emotions.
Money was nothing, power was nothing. You saw many who had both and were miserable. Beauty was nothing, you saw beautiful men and women who were miserable with all beauty. Health also did not weigh heavy; everyone was as healthy as they felt, some sick people flourished just before the end with the appetite for life, and some healthy people withered fearfully in fear of suffering. But happiness was everywhere, where a person had strong feelings and lived them, not expelled or raped, but nurtured and enjoyed. Beauty did not bless the one who possessed it, but the one who could love and adore it.
There were many feelings, it seems, but basically they were one. You can call anything feeling desire, or whatever. I call it love. Happiness is love, nothing else. If you can love, you are happy. Every movement of our soul, in which it feels itself and feels its life, is love. So happy is the one who can love a lot. But to love and desire is not quite the same. Love is wise desire; love does not want to have; it only wants to love. That’s why the philosopher was also happy, who weighed his love for the world in a web of thoughts, which always and always widened the world with his net of love. But I wasn’t a philosopher…
– Hermann Hesse
“The Heart is the only Reality. The mind is only a transient phase. To remain as one’s Self, Is to enter The Heart.”
~ Ramana Maharshi
Blessed Are the Pure in Heart
“The center of your heart, is where life begins.
The most beautiful place on earth.”
— Rumi
You don’t need religion to have morals.
If you can’t determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy, not religion.
Intimacy With All Things
“There is a place in the heart where everything meets. Go there if you want to find me.
Mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there. Are you there? Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon . . .Once you know the way the nature of attention will call you to return, again and again, and be saturated with knowing, ‘I belong here, I am at home here.”
~ Vijnaan Bhairav Tantra.
“A heart in love with beauty, never grows old.”
– Turkish Proverb
Beauty is simply reality, seen with the eyes of love.’
~ Rabindranath Tagore
Your Natural State
“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it?
Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!”
~ Anthony de Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality
Nonconceptual Awareness
“The state of not knowing is the most important state you can be in, because that opens you up to the deeper dimensions”
~Eckhart Tolle
“We live, on this side of the mystery, in the realm of the pairs of opposites: true and false, light and dark, good and evil, male and female and all that dualistic rational world view. One can have an intuition that is beyond good and evil, that goes beyond pairs of opposites — that’s the opening of this gateway into the mystery.”
~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
In the beginners mind, there are many possibilities.
Aligning With Gravity
“As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it.
As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.”
– Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind
Being Present
Bodhi is a Sanskrit word meaning “awakening”. Bodhi Body is not a path, philosophy or belief system. It is a body-based gathering together of the “highest truth” for the recognition and penetration of pure Being.
One of the good things about the pleasure of inhabiting the body — how we feel the body from within, what we now call proprioception, our sense of the body as we feel it from inside — is that it’s an inherent pleasure that doesn’t have many stories at all. If you do not disturb the basic process of life within you, joy is the natural outcome. Prior to seeking pleasure or fulfilling a need. Joy is not an achievement; joy is our natural state.
“The key is to just let go into this awake, alive presence. Don’t be concerned with transcending anything. Always remember that surrendering to the core of being is the Way. Go where the depth of silence takes you, to the very root of your existence. The more simple you keep the practice the more powerful it is.”
~ Adyashanti
By Dr. Alexander Lowen
An in-depth study of the human condition within modern culture.
Alexander Lowen challenges conventional thinking and contends that neurotic behavior stems from a fear of life, and represents the individual’s unconscious effort to overcome that fear. But one cannot do so. One can only suppress or deny it, at the cost of spontaneity and being at ease.
Lowen explains that being a person requires that one stop their frantic doing, and take time out to breathe and to feel. If one has the courage to accept and feel the pain and hurt, despair and sadness, and inner emptiness or anxiety in one’s life, one can heal trauma and gain pleasure, fulfillment, and joy….
Body Keeps Score
“Only by getting in touch with your body, by connecting viscerally with yourself, can you regain a sense of who you are, your priorities and values. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its reality.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score
Being & Doing
Being must be felt not thought.
“We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. But that is not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And that is what the world needs most.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
When you have a deep profound sense of being, you’re not worried about the meaning of your life.
― Adyashanti
Feminine Being
“The feminine is not interested in abstract theories and logical reasons.
Feminine wisdom comes out of the marrow of bone, out of the suffering of experience—the fish that comes out of the gut, not the bird out of the head. Like the primitive woman, the feminine makes the passover into maturity when it experiences itself as part of the cosmic rhythms of nature, at the same time looking straight at the reality of the here and now, the present that is instantaneously shifting. That truth is non-negotiable.”
~ Marion Woodman
Doing Masculine Mind
“What began as masculine values has degenerated into lust for control. Power has bludgeoned both our femininity and our masculinity. We all function with these two different energies. As health and growth depend on both dark and light, maturity depends on an inner balance between Yin and Yang, Shakti and Shiva, Being and Doing.
I prefer to call these energies femininity and masculinity because their biological images appear in dreams and their interaction or lack of interaction reveals harmony or chaos in the psyche. For me these words are not gender-bound. The task of releasing the feminine from the tyrannical power of the driven, crazed masculine is long and arduous. The process is just as difficult inside as it is outside. Observing it abstractly is one thing; experiencing it personally is quite another.”
~ Marion Woodman
James Kullander: What does feminine energy do for men that’s beneficial?
Marion Woodman: It brings them into relationship. It teaches them to honor the values of the body, the beauty of sexuality in a relationship. It’s the energy that emanates from the unconscious and fills a room without words…It’s life.
Avoiding Relationship?
We Think Too Much and Feel Too Little
“Have you noticed how angular and masculine so much communication is?
If you destroy the temple and the greatness of Woman, you reduce life to scandalous nonsense. Monotonous, aggressive exchanges, petty concerns, and rivalries, and all the rest of the nonsense of mind divorced from the realm of feeling…mankind is throwing it away with both hands.
Everything about Woman — in other words, everything about the domain of feeling and the senses, and pleasurable association with the feeling and sense domain— is corrupt at the present moment, and opposed…That which Woman is, that which she incarnates, that which her pattern is about, requires mankind to be integrated with it as the core of life…”
~ Adi Da Samraj
Sense your presence, the naked unveiled, unclothed beingness.
It is the spacious womb of all creation, all form.
– Ramana Maharshi
All houses are dark until the Mother wakes up.
~ Khalil Gibran
How Our Culture Makes Us Feel Lost
Play of Opposites
“Most human beings are living their whole lives from the pairs of opposites because it’s the only way they know. But when you discover that there is within you this place that is beyond the pairs of opposites, and that place, that state of awareness, is actually what you are, you start to realize you can live from that place.”
― Adyashanti
“Any energy that you deny becomes a demon for you. It becomes your inner tormenter. And you don’t get rid of your demons. You embrace them. Not indulge them, but embrace them. And if you embrace them in a way I am talking about, they no longer feel like demons. They are just energies that are available to you. They are just part of this whole spectrum of what it is to be conscious and alive and present. And everything becomes joined together back again. A mature emotional life is when all the different parts of yourself emotionally are joined back together. Nothing is put outside, nothing is denied, nothing is hidden. Nothing is unacknowledged. All brought together so that it can all come together.”
– Adyashanti, Spiritual Teacher
“If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Warrior & Yogi
Within each of us exists a warrior and a yogi. A warrior who will push through and overcome, who is determined, who will achieve, and a yogi, who is the most tenderhearted and compassionate being. The one that can let go, that can flow with what is. But it is the combination of these two that makes us uniquely human. We have the opportunity at any given moment, to select the behavior that is appropriate: a call for action, or a call for surrender.
The ideal is to integrate this dual nature into one, complete being.
“Imagination and willpower are the two poles of the mind. Imagination is female; willpower is masculine. The key to success lies in imagination and will come together in vibrant harmony.”
– Samael Aun Weor
Whole Body Being
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly then our whole life would change.
― The Buddha
Bodhi Body sessions are based on Rolfing ® Structural Integration, the work of Dr. Ida Rolf and influenced by the Craniosacral work of Dr. Andrew Still, and Polarity Therapy, the conscious health building system of Dr. Randolph Stone. Bodhi Body Biodynamic Structural Integration can create openings on emotional, physical and spiritual layers, depending on your intention; to support you with what is emerging for transformation.
Biodynamic Structural Integration
Dr. Ida Rolf had a vision of human potential that went beyond effective symptomatic pain relief and “good posture”. Better alignment was not an end in itself but a means of coming into a more personal and profound relationship with earth, spirit, self and other. Integrated as One, Complete, Being.
When two people have nothing to hide, no one to impress, nothing to lose, no games left to play, no attachment to outcomes …real connection and intimacy happens.
Journey of the Heart
“Passion is the spark of excitement we feel when we stand on the edge of the unknown. It arrives on the boundary where two different worlds rub up against each other — male and female, self and other, inner and outer, familiar patterns and unchartered possibilities.
So in following our passions all the way, we arrive at the boundary of life and death; here we feel the insignificance of our small self as we enter into the mystery from which we come and to which we must return.”
~ John Welwood, Journey of the Heart
The unknown, the mind of not “knowing”, is the true mind. It is not a blank, vacant or dull state, it is alive with the vividness and depth of Presence and Being fully here/now.
Truth is Where You Stand
No Where Else
If you are unable to find the Truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
“Wherever you are, enlightenment is there. And if you stand upright where you are, that is enlightenment. It means ‘accepting things as it is’, accepting yourself as you are.”
-Shunryu Suzuki
“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
Aligning With Gravity
Gravity Is Real
Man is an event on a line, connecting Heaven and Earth. Man organizes himself around the line so that he can be a more fully functioning Human Being.
When the body comes into alignment with gravity, it spontaneously heals itself.
~ Dr. Ida P. Rolf
Gravity
Feel Your Way into Being
A Dimension Deeper than Thought
Stress, it’s not in our head, it’s in our myofascial nervous system. Sympathetic/Parasympathetic nervous system homeostasis is our natural state. Feel your way into being by releasing stress patterning within your human form. The great wisdom dwells in the body, fully away from all thought. It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our body that our true presence can awaken.
Being Must Be Felt Not Thought
“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. …That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
~ Anthony de Mello, Awareness Quotes
Awakening the Intelligence of the Body
“The intelligence of the body attunes to wholeness. It resonates to the world around it. That is its true nature. Just as it is our true nature.
Our longing for embodiment, then, is a longing to grow into our fullest reality: to put to rest our divisions and liberate our stifled energies and to finally feel the self and the world in the wholeness of the moment. What we long for is a homecoming – coming home to the self, coming home to the present. And it’s crucial in our head-centric culture to understand that you can’t achieve that homecoming by grasping any idea; it is a tangible, physical journey that drops your thinking out of the head and lets it come to rest deep in your body.
When that happens, the energy of your being achieves coherence and attunes to the life of the present. You feel yourself embedded in an intelligence that guides and informs and clarifies – an intelligence that sings through your body not in a language of words, but in a language of sensational, borderless awareness.”
~ Philip Shepherd, Radical Wholeness
Joy is Our Natural State
NATURAL PRIMORDIAL PERFECTION
Sahaja is one of the four keywords of the Nath sampradaya along with Svecchachara, Sama, and Samarasa. Sahaja meditation and worship was prevalent in Tantric traditions common to Hinduism and Buddhism in Bengal as early as the 8th–9th centuries. The British Nath teacher Mahendranath wrote:
Man is born with an instinct for naturalness. He has never forgotten the days of his primordial perfection, except insomuch as the memory became buried under the artificial superstructure of civilization and its artificial concepts. Sahaja means natural… The tree grows according to Sahaja, natural and spontaneous in complete conformity with the Natural Law of the Universe. Nobody tells it what to do or how to grow. It has no swadharma or rules, duties and obligations incurred by birth. It has only svabhava – its own inborn self or essence – to guide it. Sahaja is that nature which, when established in oneself, brings the state of absolute freedom and peace.
The Last Achievement of Thought
“Take my soul to that place, where I may speak without words.”
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī
