What I have encountered a lot of recently in my work with people and personally is the catch within the ‘positive thinking’, ‘the live your highest potential’ and ‘create your own reality- i.e. you are what you think’ paradigms that have been so dominant and pervasive (invasive) in our conditioning over the last how many years.

It’s been a necessary step for our evolution to wake up to the power of our minds and thoughts, however, it is only a step and not the goal and the way it’s being pushed on the net and media is only on a very surface level and in fact halting our process to go deeper into our own truth and heart.

What is being or can be lost in the process of ‘positive thinking’ is the ability to suffer ‘rightly’.

Let me explain.

The process of awakening is a process of seeing what is real and true. As we open up to our true nature, we realize that we are love, we are never separate from the whole and the divine, we are boundless, free, and everchanging. Many of us have experienced clear and pure glimpses of this natural state of being.

And such an experience is ecstatic and blissful! There is nothing better than the realization of the freedom of your spirit and consciousness, the vast expansion of the heart opening, and the love that permeates every little part of ourselves.

Being confronted by the parts of ourselves that feel the opposite from that can be very painful. The pain indeed sometimes unbearable to feel.

And yet the process of feeling it is the necessary step of our awakening.

However, what happens here is that the mind grabs hold onto the experienced and tries to relate to what is arising through the filter of the past. I have experienced myself as the One and All, I know from direct experience that I am not ‘unworthy’, ‘bad‘ etc… I know that I am not the stories that my mind tries to tell me. So WTF???

Of course, when we try to hold onto the ‘knowing’, there is a natural resistance to feeling fully our deepest and darkest corners of self.

This is where the distortions come in: if I create my own reality, if my thoughts determine what I am attracting into my life then there is a natural fear of allowing anything that is ‘negative’. And yet these fears/thoughts keep coming up and if we don’t stay present to it, what we are subconsciously doing is suppressing and running away from it. If I allow myself to feel this thought fully, I will get stuck in or attract it into my reality. NO!!!!

Resistance creates persistence. But sometimes it is even hard to recognize when we are in resistance. The sneaky mind of course has us all believing that for every condition there is a coping strategy, a thousand tools to create our own reality, be the masters of our destiny. Yet, what we are moving into is a completely new paradigm altogether. It is beyond the mind, and beyond its struggle for survival.

The sweetness and beauty that comes from being completely intimate and open to the pain of our creations and our delusions are so much more valuable and precious than any concept we could have about it. There is freedom in it that is beyond the descriptions of pain and pleasure.

For when we face our deepest fears we stop running, we become truly present and real. At this moment, in this beingness, we transcend the conflict of duality and find the courage of our hearts, whispering silently the truth that is always there and yet so easy to be missed.

There is a very fine line between collapsing ourselves into our emotions, getting drawn into the drama of our creations, and the seemingly empowering will power of our minds….Once we find this line, we allow the flow of mental and emotional energies to create a sense of wholeness.

The endless tyranny of thought and emotional pain ceases to affect us as we surrender to the moment. The more we cultivate the presence of the witness that is not detached but completely one with the experience of the NOW in whichever form it comes the easier it becomes to ride the waves and consequently feel more and more alive.

This aliveness is what helps us to listen to our inner self for the guidance that we all crave.

This is why I come to appreciate bodywork, for in the reality of our physical existence there is not much room for distortions of the mind. As we work with the body the subtle movement of the mind becomes very obvious through observing where we hold our breath.

It takes us right out of our ideas about life to the direct experience of it and in the process helps us become more aware where in our daily lives we start contracting, where we stop the flow of energy.