Inconvenient, Necessary Messages from The Body

Pain is the inconvenient messenger of truth. And truth is always inconvenient because delusion is based on convenience. Convenience over what is good, convenience over what is right. Truth does not care. And so truth is always going to rustle some feathers. In fact, truth is really the most caring thing, right? Because if something is to be true, it must harmonize with everything else that exists. Truth would never be in conflict with anything else that is real, because that thing would also be true. So the truth is, in this infinite dance with itself, where everything is perfect and everything fits. And it's only our small perspective, which sees that and finds a problem. It's only the deluded viewer who sees chaos in that deeper order. So pain in the body is just like this. And in fact, it's not just pain in the body. It's pain that shows up in relationships. It's pain that shows up as we seek to move towards finding, to stop striving and to actually find ourselves and to just be ourselves in a career in how we create. Pain comes up everywhere where there is this threshold into embodied knowing. Anytime we are metabolizing an expanded perspective on life, we are being stretched out of the structures and the crusts which kept us small. It's going to be painful. But this is necessary. Pain is necessary. Your knee, it hurts. Necessary. In relationship, there's a rupture necessary. Your career, it feels meaningless, necessary. You drive into the city. A city you used to live in and love. And you come back 10 years later and it seems like the pits of hell necessary. Pain is not something to get beyond to fix, to push away, no matter where it arises. And so this is the issue that inner culture which cares more about convenience, which is more afraid of a small inconvenience in a moment of pause and reflection than it is of its own annihilation in the fire of delusion. In that type of culture there's no space for pain. And there's no support to hold it. And there's no support to hold the truth that it brings. And the sober perspectives which necessitate real meaningful change, not just words and talk. In a culture like that that prides itself upon appearances and illusions of stability and illusions of safety, rather than the true safety that comes from moment to moment encounters with reality, that kind of culture is going to need a medical system. It's going to need a taxation system. It's going to need all of these systems which are based on removing clear sightedness which are based on catering to the lowest amount of personal responsibility. These systems are necessary. I'm not saying they're wrong. Pills to numb necessary. Structures which withhold growth necessary. All necessary. But why are they still necessary? Buckminster Fuller said something along the lines of, "You don't fight the existing system, you create a new one which makes the existing one obsolete." And the same thing goes for human development when it comes to posture, body, strength, mobility, depending up new ranges of movement capacity. We need new structures and systems which make the old restrictions obsolete. We can't just fight against what's tight and what's painful. It's tight and painful because it's trying to send us a message. It's saying, "Hey, you're not ready." Or it's saying, "You are ready, but with more support." But we just kind of take objection to these feelings and sensations and signals. That is a microcosm of the greater view of life which is that we need these safeguards against truth when there are parts of us internally that we're not sure how to encounter and hold. When there's a truth within us that we know about ourselves and about life that we are turning from, avoiding with this preference for convenience over expansion, then that naturally reflects at the sociocultural level. It naturally reflects in the systems around us. We're going to have systems which simply resonate with the individual's inability to see the truth. We're going to have systems which actually cover up the truth because the individual does not want to see the truth about themselves. If everyone wanted the truth, if everyone wanted to be with pain, if everyone felt resourced to be with pain and was happy to sit there and metabolize the wisdom it brings rather than try to find the quick fix and move beyond it to go back to convenience, then our entire approach to healing and the medical system would be so different. So different. Our entire approach to living would be so different instead of just being so obsessed with keeping the wheels turning, keeping everyone looking good, seeming okay, making sure the government looks like they've done what was needed for their term and the next government will deal with the mess they've left until we take on something better of a way of dealing with life. Internally, that external is just going to reflect the same thing. And so your pain in your body, your pain in your relationships, your pain in general is just a way for you to practice a level of achievement, self-support, expansion, truth-telling and meeting the moment which can and will eventually ripple outward. And society may never change. The culture may never change. I mean, obviously everything changes, but culture and society are based on concepts and ideas and when they're preferring their delusions from the moment to moment change of reality, then it means they're not going to roll with nature. They're going to lock in and double down and get stricter and harder until there's a conflict. But for the people who are opening to deeper levels of truth, we will be able to encounter that hardness and that conflict and that resistance and all of the mess that comes with it with a higher level of skill too because we've met that within ourselves. The things don't change in the absence of conflict. The pain and resistance you feel in your body is a reflection of what hasn't been working. The pain and resistance you feel in relation to society in its direction and governments and world leaders to use incorrect terminology for what they are. That is just a reflection of the conflict that's happening outside. Conflict is conflict. Wherever it is, conflict is conflict. Stress is stress. Inside, outside, it doesn't matter. It's the same thing. So if you can harmonize with the conflict you feel in your own body, if you can harmonize with what external events bring up for you, then you will be able to deal with those external events without the charge and the difficulty of that. So when conflict does arise externally, for you, it is okay to meet the conflict and because you're okay with the conflict, not afraid of it, you can actually do something about it. It's people who are afraid of conflict. It's people who can't meet themselves. It's people who can't feel their emotions. It's people who can't feel pain. It's people who can't be polished and sanded and sometimes destroyed by the truth who end up doing the worst things. It's people who are afraid of seeing what's not right that do the worst wrong because they're trying to cover it up. Suppress, repress, distort, deny, pretend, be deluded, live in cognitive dissonance, ignore their body, ignore their partner. Anyone who is not meeting the moment as it is in the truth of what it is is going to experience that truth reflected back outside as a conflict which seems to be external to them. Anyone who's able to metabolize the truth of the conflict within is going to not see that same conflict outside. They're just going to see a practical situation to deal with. If we're struggling with these external systems, if we're raging on about the medical system, if we're raging on about, "Mama, mama, mama, mama, mama." It's because it represents something within us that we have not yet reconciled. If we had reconciled that thing within us, the external would just be a practicality. It would just be like, "What am I going to do about this to actually change it? What can I do to actually change it? What is the best use of my energy and attention and intention that's going to meaningfully change this?" My experience is that to meaningfully change anything in society at the outside world with other people and in relationships, I first have to look under my own nose. I have to not be throwing stones from glass houses. I have to not be a fucking hypocrite. So if I'm ignoring the pain in my body, if I'm not relating well to myself, if I'm not relating well to my partner, then who am I to tell the world how it needs to change? The level of personal responsibility and the level of coherence and attunement required within us to have the energy and stability to go and tackle external problems is vast. So many people are trying to tackle external problems with such futility, spending lifetimes, charging against systems that are never going to change because the person charging against them is coming from incoherence. The person charging against them wouldn't know how to fix them if they had all the resources in the world because the person charging against them doesn't know what fixed means, doesn't know what coherence feels like. So it's like the blind leading the blind. The people who are most concerned with trying to change the external world of the people who are most afraid of looking within and the people who look within the most deeply are the people who need less to change about the external world and in the neediness becoming completely discreated and in personal responsibility being taken, the world can actually change. And so it's by building a new system that the old one becomes obsolete. Now how does this relate once again to you dealing with your body, to pain in your body and to pain that you feel in your heart and in your muscular tension and in your lack of full breathing when you're conflicting with your partner to the pain that you feel is this very real visceral heartache when you're aware that each day you're waking up without the purpose that you so crave in your life. Because that's pain too. I don't want to talk about pain as if it's just something that happens to a back or to a shoulder or to a knee. Pain happens to the whole being. When there is pain in the body it's because the being is feeling it. You, me, us, the beings, we are feeling it. We can't look at our bodies as if they're these separate things. We can see them as relationships. I can see that there's there's eye awareness and then there is body and there is a relationship or way of perceiving my body. There's a way of feeling what it's feeling. But it's not separate. It's all part of life. It's all part of me. It's all part of nature. It's the one movement of life that I'm perceiving and body is just one word I'm giving to that movement of life. So how can I come into that? How can I meet what my body is bringing me? How can I meet the pain I'm feeling in my body which is a reflection or a dramatization of how I'm seeing the world? How can I meet the pain in my body? Whatever form it takes or the charge or the anxiety, whatever you want to describe it. It's all pain of some kind. How can I meet that to fully metabolize it and express it and let it be free. Let it be free to move how it needs to move and let it be free to stay if it needs to stay for a while while also knowing that it's there because of a perspective on the world as well as because of my body's actual physiological situation. All pain has these two aspects which are linked and yet operate in different planes. All pain has a resistance to what is. There's an element of resistance to what is. That's the suffering aspect of pain. That's the part where the reason we want to solve pain is because there's a resistance to what is. Pain is aversive. We want to move away from it because we want to move away from it. Often the pain has to follow us. Paradoxically when we no longer want to move away from pain, the pain then is being heard and met and received and then it no longer needs to follow us. If we move towards pain and we look deeply into pain and what it is and we see that a part of it is made up of resistance, we see that a part of pain is made up of us thinking it shouldn't be there, then we can actually begin to dissolve pain. So dissolving pain is only for those who are willing to go deeply into pain to understand it and to meet it. Disolving pain is not for those who would have it be pushed away without fully meeting it. So this is the paradox. It's only by going into what you fear that you can no longer fear it and it's only by running from your fear that your fear can grow. Pain or suffering is the same way if you go into your suffering, if you choose it, choose it as life's medicine for you, exposing the ways you've poisoned yourself or hurt yourself unknowingly. If you choose your suffering, if you choose your pain, then you remove any sense of conflict between awareness and sensation and in removing the conflict, where is the pain now? Where does the pain go if there's no conflict? If there's no conflict, at profound levels of depth, if this conflict is harmonised with and discreated, then pain actually ceases. It's quite amazing. In the same way that emotional pain can be discreated when we stop seeing a problem with how things are, physical pain exists on this spectrum where some of it may be inevitable, instructural and physiological. Some of it may just have to be felt. It's just there because of something that's happened. It broke a leg. It's going to hurt. Something's just happened. It's just an accurate representation of what's happening. Broken leg out. But that exists on a spectrum of like concrete pain to abstract pain. And that spectrum is up for debate. How much of that broken leg pain you feel is up for debate? Because so much of pain is perception. So much of the way the nervous system filters stimulus. So much of the way you unconsciously see your life and your conflicts is based on perception, not based on reality. In fact, you cannot. I cannot. We cannot. I salate our perception from reality and look at them as separate things. Perception is the filter that we don't know we have. Reality is the thing out there that we imagine is out there, but that we'll never know for sure because we only see it through our perception. And so this whole situation is fantastic. Fantastically complex and fantastically simple because on the one hand there's so much that it'll forever be beyond our knowing. And on the other hand, if we just accept that and stop trying to argue with that, then we know. So physical pain when you can be with it, when you can hold it well, begins to minimize. Emotional pain when you can be with it and hold it well begins to minimize. And when you can see physical and emotional pain for what they are, conflicts that don't have to be problems in themselves because conflict is a part of life, a part of the movement of life and a part of the way life updates the fabric so that it can be in higher coherence. When you see that and you're okay with that conflict, then the fixing energy goes away and pain can actually become something beautiful. Now people who see pain is beautiful and who know that deep down are not people who aren't in pain. The people who see pain is beautiful are the ones who have given up the prospect of ever getting away from it and have learned that it is something of a partner in life. Now that kind of person who can see pain is a beautiful partner in life and be in the fullness of it without ever expecting it to change becomes saintly and they become saintly because you can't hurt them where you can hurt them but you can't harm them and you can't use them to harm others. Someone who is capable of metabolizing immense amount of pain without turning against their own heart or the hearts of humanity, that someone is fucking Christ-like. If you think of the archetype of Christ, of being on the cross and the amount of pain of carrying his cross and wearing his crown of thorns and being stabbed in the side, being betrayed, if you think about that kind of being as someone who can metabolize immense amount of pain and still say forgive them for they know not what they do. What can you do to manipulate a man like that? What can you do to distort a woman's heart who is willing to feel at that level? What can you do to bend and break someone who will not be bent and broken by their own destruction? This is a level of transcendence via deep, deep, deep, deep, deep immersion in the suchness of humanity which only the tales of old speak of. And yet it is possible and it is in people who look low enough to see God in the mundane and the painful and those who seek to transcend pain to push it away to move away from it are those who seek to transcend truth. Where can you go that would transcend truth? What higher thing is there than truth? What higher thing is there than the beauty of truth? There is no transcending other than through deeper embodiment. Other than through deeper in touchness with the material reality of what life is. Now, Now that material reality of what life is, that is what it is, place, does not come from having our minds made up about what's happening. In fact, it is our idea of knowing. It's our intellectual ideas. If you get it, I know it. I get it. I've got it. That is what keeps us out of touch with embodiment and true knowing. True knowing is reserved to those who in each moment take another breath and unburden themselves of their knowledge, who with each breath unburden themselves of the illusions of wisdom and start again in each moment meeting life as it comes and life as it goes. True wisdom is for those who are willing to be fooled again and again by their past selves to realize that they've been fools, to realize they've been fooling themselves, a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise, a fool who realises his folly through persistence becomes wise, someone who doesn't want to acknowledge that they don't know because they're gripping onto this idea that they do know, they'll never fucking get there. Until pain gets them there, someone who thinks that they understand life and is prepared for every eventuality. Does not understand life. Life is prepared for by not understanding it. This is the paradox. This is why I teach standing practice. Life is prepared for by doing nothing and standing there. When I say do nothing and stand there, what I'm saying is you stand there and everything that comes up, you decide to unknow it and you recognize that it's not real knowledge. Anything you sense, anything you feel, anything that's happening, none of that is for you to claim knowledge. No experience you've ever had in your life ever is something for you to take and stick a flag in and say, "Mine, knowledge, I know. This is what happened. This is how it is. This is how it will be." Nothing you've experienced is stable. It is utterly and completely your present perspective which influences your future expectations and your past stories and memories. What the expectation change so to will the memory? Should the mode of presence change so to will both of those other things change? Life is so fluid and perception is so so fluid and so malleable that we never know. We never know. We don't know what's right and wrong. We don't know what's true and false. The only way to know is to accept we don't. The only way to know is to remain open, receptive and aware. That is the definition of the word "attuned" to be open, receptive and aware. I love this quote by Carl Rogers. I always say it. I'll say it till I'm blue in the face and I'm going to bastardize it till I'm blue in the face too. But in a nervous system which is open to experience, each stimulus flows through without any process of distortion or defensiveness. Knowing that life is able to be lived, that breath can be breathed, steps can be taken and we're feeling and experiencing that directly constantly unburdening ourselves of this delusion of knowing what's happening. We're actually meeting each moment as a newborn. When you think about the rate of development of a newborn and then you also think that that rate of development is based on a couple things, it gets interesting. Why could a newborn develop so quickly? Well the first thing is that there are blank canvas of sorts. Okay, maybe we bring things in calmically or maybe there's some other layers going on, but essentially a newborn doesn't even know how to be a human. They don't know anything. They're not yet conditioned other than through genetics, through what's been passed down in the DNA and through what's conditioning them in real time through the resonance of their mother and their environment and the fields of vibration that they're exposed to and the colors and lights and sounds and the shapes of consciousness that manifest through the body. The newborn is a blank slate thereabouts. And so a newborn is like a sponge. They sponge in everything. You look at them and there is no identity in the way of knowing. There is no identity in the way of knowing. A newborn can assimilate and metabolize life at the rate of the highest genius because a newborn doesn't know who they are or what they are. As soon as we get this idea of who and what we are, things start to slow down and rigidify. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that in your life? The Doudachin Laozi speaks of how death is the rigid, the rigid of the disciples of death and the supple of the disciples of life or something along those lines. And essentially it's speaking to this fact that the blank canvas is what allows the greatest amounts of change to happen and in harmonizing with and not resisting change by not being stuck in an identity, in harmonizing with the movement of life, the one movement, we gain access to life's infinite potential in intelligence because we're not claiming any of it. We're just being in touch with it in each moment. It's like rather than dating this wonderful girl and thinking, yeah, she's my girlfriend. I know her, oh wow, she's so hot. Oh my god, look at her breasts. Oh, look at her waist. Oh wow, her personality is so amazing. Rather than having that whole internal dialogue going around nonstop, like an intolerable fucking shitshow, I'm actually just able to be quiet and to look at her and to feel her and to breathe with her and to meet her. Now in which way do I know more of her beauty and in which way can I access more of her beauty and in which way can I harmonize with her wonderful feminine essence? Is it by knowing who she is and deciding what I think she is or is it by constantly unknowing, constantly unknowing, constantly unknowing? In what way am I going to connect more with the essence of life by knowing what it is or by forgetting what I am, forgetting what I am, forgetting what I am and then discovering it a new in each moment. And so this is genius. I've said this before, but genius comes from voidness. Genius comes from voidness. The reason that children operate with this genius level of learning, this massive rate of exposure and implementation is because of their voidness. And voidness is the childlike quality which we should all endeavour to know or remember. And the irony of that is that we need to let it go, but we need to first know what we're holding on to before we can let it go. Voidness means to let go of the identity. In Terence McKenna's words, give it to Carly, give it away, give it to the great mother of all things, the great black depth of unknown which sits beneath or known things. We sacrifice and offer our knowledge, we sacrifice and offer our identities, we sacrifice and offer our certainty to the great black mother who consumes all known things. And if we offer it up, then life doesn't have to strip it away. Life doesn't have to come so painfully to say, "Hey, you're deluding yourself, you're barking up the wrong tree, you're pretending to be something you're not, you're prioritizing your conceptual understanding of life over the meeting of life in the moment." So it's through this, giving it all away, it's giving this to Carly, it's the surrender to the great feminists, this like, "I don't know, it's through that that we know, it's through that that the substance of knowledge arises." And so in standing practice, it's a process of feeling the meditation through the body, not thinking the meditation through the psyche. We're not thinking about, "Oh, well, we're standing right now, we're all how spiritual, or how much am I unknowing the unknown, it's just stand, just stand." And you have to know what it is that you might grip onto. You have to know something in order to let it go. So I know that I'm holding muscular tension, well, I can let some of that go. I know that I'm holding onto a particular attitude to that practice, well, then I can let that go. If I don't realize that I'm bringing in a certain attitude to the practice of like, "Sturnness," if I don't realize that I'm clenching my brow and hands, then I can't let it go. Can I? So in order to release into profound presence, I need to first see what I'm gripping instead. And this is where the blind spots come in. And this is where life must be lived, I think, through relationship. And there is actually no other life than one of relationships, because relationships show us the things that we don't know that we're holding. In the same way that pain can show us the patterns that we don't know that we're living within, mastered by. When we're living at the effect of unconscious conditions and patterns, it's only the body's pain and the relationships pain that is able to show us those things so that we can see them first externally, and then recognize that that external has been caused by something that we're carrying internally. And so, only by seeing the pain in the relationship, in the body, that we can say, "Hum, what are the conditions that lead for this to be possible and how can I release those?" So this is where the process becomes relational. This is where we are not islands, we cannot know. ourselves fully in isolation. Everyone's looking for union, right? Everyone's looking for this unity, this cosmic unity, this marriage of yin and yang, this masculine feminine, this self and other. We all want to experience this like non-dualism. We want to experience a world where there's like me and you and we can dance together and where there's material things and spiritual things, and then we can see that they're both, but we want to have this like opposites, we want to have this tension, and then we want to have this merging and unification, like the moment of orgasm, like creation of life, like when two become one and it creates this third thing which we never could have imagined could be possible. It's like this, the mystery of creation and dissolution. So we all want that, but that comes through understanding the ways that we're playing into separateness. This is the beautiful paradox. Yes, we're having this experience of union and it all is what it is, and then there's a conflict, then there's pain, then there's an issue with someone else or something outside, and then oh wow, there's a moment of expansion to become aware of that pain. There's a continued expansion of resourcing ourselves and learning about the conditions that enable that pain to be there and why it's there and what the wisdom is and we stay with that. And then finally we metabolize the pain into a wisdom and into a realization of "Oh my goodness, as much as I felt like I was whole, as much as I felt like there was union, there's so much more wholeness in union which encompasses so much more separation." I thought that that was it. I thought that that was my life, but oh my god, there's so much more separateness to marry myself into. In fact, there's infinite separateness. In fact, there's infinite conflict. In fact, there's an infinite number of people who I will perceive as other. There's an infinite number of problems that I will perceive as unsolvable and wrong. And as I repeatedly become humbled, humbled, humbled, and both expanded and destroyed by those realizations, I can begin to laugh and I can begin to sincerely embrace that process of creation and destruction, which is always occurring and recognize that there's something beneath that which never dies. So of course, the body and the relationships of the way. Of course, duality is the way we need to explore the areas where there are conflict. But that path to union, which I choose, that path from union to union, via the conflict which expands union, even though it looks like fragmentation. The version that I like is one where I don't just numb. I don't just cover myself up with fucking chocolate oxytocin numbness and fucking wheaty candida until there's nothing left of a semblance of clear perception. And I'm just in this fog of yesterday and tomorrow to the point where I'm just this inert piece of floaty blu. Like at the moment, it's just my preferred thing to yes, flirt with that, have some chocolate, fever yeast, but at the same time to experience the rawness that comes from going without, going without a little bit. And so it's going without physically often, which helps us to go within. It's going without a little bit of food, going with a little less movement than we used to, a little less social contact, or a little less isolation, a little less, a little less of whatever it was that was our more. Some people eat more, sleep more, move more, fuck more, smoke more, talk more. Some people are silent more. Whatever it is that is your more, it's different for everyone. What happens when you do less? Now this is where the sensitivity grows. What happens when I'm more precise? If I'm trying to find some kind of clarity, if there's something that I would like to see more clearly than I need to kind of remove some noise, but I also can't make massive, massive adjustments in my life and swing from one end of the spectrum to the other. Go from total movement to total stillness to fully in a relationship and then fully out. It's like if I'm operating on these extremes then I'm just oscillating between the two aspects of the dual all the time and there's no spiraling into the marriage that happens when those aspects dissolve into one another. So can I cook my food a little bit more slowly? Can I walk a little bit more slowly? Can I walk a little bit faster? Can I speak a little bit more expressively? Can I speak a little bit less? Can I listen a little bit more deeply? And as I'm listening can I also be a little bit more present to my body rather than just with the person outside of me? So there's all these layers of sensitivity and nuance and coming into experience in slightly different ways and by working with these percentors, these little percentors, modulating, modulating, not throwing the baby out with the bath water, not hating ourselves, not hating the world, not urgently rushing to change, that's when we develop these subtle skills to be sensitive to life's movements and to attune to them and to be moved by life and to move in response to life and to dance with life and to realize that okay there's always something going on here, there's always a tension. How can I play with this tension of life? This tension of wanting to know but not knowing, this tension of grasping but knowing that there is something to release also after the grasping. This is an impossible thing to talk about and do it justice but this is the embodied art, the direct experiential science, the neuroscience and the mystery of being and it is something that we can explore through standing but not just through standing of course, standing is just a microcosm of life, standing is just like walking, standing is just like being still, standing is similar to sitting, in standing we're breathing, in standing we're sensing, in standing we're reacting to our reactions sometimes, we're having these emotions come up and then we're reacting to them and oh dear my emotions, oh dear my thoughts about my thoughts about my emotions, oh dear what I did yesterday, oh dear what I think about what I did yesterday, oh dear what I think about myself for thinking about what I did yesterday, so all of these things become visible and it's only once they become visible that they can be let go, so standing is just a place for them to become visible, however the thing about standing is that it can be done in infinite, infinite ways and so if someone says just stand and that's it, just stand there and do nothing, they're right that's what standing practice is but there are infinite ways to just stand and that's something that you won't understand until you do more standing. Now I endeavour to teach standing in a way which helps you to see what you can't see, helps direct your attention towards aspects of your experience where you're actually stuck and identified in clinging and living through concept rather than living through direct embrace of life. I hope you see the areas where you think that standing means this and standing means that and I help you let go of that let go of that let go of that and find a new standing, a new standing, a new standing, a new standing, a new standing, a new standing, a new standing, everything you think, everything you think you know about standing you don't know that about standing let's keep standing what what about now, what about when you release that and then when you release that what are you gripping on to now and what about when you release that and so it's just this process of meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting the moment until the idea of the moment dissolves completely and there is just something unnamable. Now that state is what I call heaven in the nerve. Now the nerve the nerve that beautiful web that flower the brain being the bud the nerve stemming down the spinal cord and out into the limbs being like the that's kind of what are they they're like the like the leaves the vessels like a river system like the way earth is cracked and opened with the sun like the way a fern grows all of these natural patterns like lightning you've seen the pictures you've seen the pictures comparing you know the corer of an apple to the toroidal field or magnetic field of of the earth to the magnetic field of a human in their heart and you've seen all of the repeating patterns and you've seen all of the themes of the way life grows you've seen how order and coherence doesn't look like a stack of matchsticks it looks like it looks like a pine tree it's a fractal it grows into complexity in every direction and yet it has an organizing principle that unifies it so that that is the nervous system it is a fractal it is a perception which begins as a seed and grows into a tree and then becomes so infinite in its potentialities and yet can be traced back to one fundamental pattern and so when we're working with the nervous system what we're working with is the way all of life is seen and processed and understood the way all of life is touched and metabolized when we are inhabiting the nervous system not the thought about it but when we are really like getting in touch with the quality of it we see that it is so open and malleable that it's like this it's like our story structure is enabling an internal experience which is limitless. How can a finite body contain such a limitless internal experience? Well, I don't know that it does. I don't actually know that the body does contain this infinite experience. I actually think that the body is just a finite concept within an infinite experience and that you think you are in the body, you think you are in the nervous system in the body, but it's actually just another picture like the tree you're looking at. But you're just so identified within and so enmeshed with that feeling that you experience life as the body. If you're identified something, you think that's what you are and if you think it's what you are, then you'll continue to experience life as if it's you. So there's something deep here. But heaven in the nerve means that when you're open to experience, come back to the color Roger's quote, in a nervous system that's open to experience, each stimulus is able to flow through freely without any process of distortion or defensiveness. The nervous system is where that experience is flowing through. And so in the nerve is both heaven and hell. The brain, the nervous system that offshoots from that brain, that's at least one part of the thing which unifies external and internal. It's one part of the thing which unifies subject and object, the unified field. You know the observer effect by looking at that thing, that thing is affected and the potential of that thing, which was a waveform, collapses into a particle which has a certain location in space, but that's dependent on the way that it's being observed. So that's the same thing with self and nervous system. When our perception of ourself and our body shifts and when we inhabit our body differently and when we un-grip some of the things that we think we know, the external world shows up differently for us. And in seeing the external world differently from how it was, the external world then responds to being seen differently. And in the response to being seen differently, we are affected differently by the external world. And in being affected differently, we see the external world even differently again. And so there's this constant, constant cycle. There's this orbit. There's this beautiful, beautiful microcosmic orbit which becomes a macro orbit. It's like as things change within me, things change within you and as things change within you and I see you and I see myself seeing you at all changes. So what a fucking trip, right? Now in standing still, all of this is playing out and in being quiet and in doing less and in there being less overt movement and in less overt speaking and in more listening and sensing and all of that, we become more and more attuned to just how subtle that process is of reality recreation that is happening through us. And in becoming so deeply attuned to that process and sensing beneath the movement of my shoulder and movement of the leaf and just sensing into something deeper which is like this co-erizing movement of my body and everything around it. In sensing so deeply and releasing all of these layers of identification of the things I think I know, my external world becomes me and my internal world becomes that and I become so permeable and I become so in touch with what's happening that my sense of self is now either gone and unnecessary or expanded to encompass the space around me. And so there is a very real experience of being less identified with a small version of self which is fixed in concepts and in certain sensations and more identified with all of what I could be experiencing. And I am identified with what I could be experiencing because I've let go of what I think I know. When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. Lao Tzu said that. Now Lao Tzu there is obviously talking, I mean it's fucking not that obvious, I haven't had the conversation with him myself. In fact whether he was a real man walking the earth, I don't know. I don't know anything. Of course, I don't know anything. But those words to me point to something. So when I disidentify with or discreate or dissolve or move beyond this fixated idea of what I think I am, I can actually then in my unknowing and in my dying to the moment, my total dying to the moment, I can then experience all potential realities that I could be in the unformed state before they become solid. And so this is what this is talking about is unknowing. If by observing something, it goes from wave to particle. And if for it to go from wave to particle, I have to identify it then by Aristotelian logic, if I unknow what I am looking at, then it goes from particle to wave. If I unknow what is looking, then I go from particle to wave. And if I'm unknowing, then I am opening into the field of potential. And if I am the field of potential that which I might be, not that which I thought I was, if I disidentify with what I thought I was and I recognize that what I am is paradoxically what I don't know, then I can see that the unknowing is actually my home and that the safest place to be in the universe is not to be me and not to be anything in particular. If I'm not me and I'm not anything in particular, if I identify as that which I do not know, if I identify that which is not me, then what does that mean? And what would that actually feel like? This is the part that you can think about until the cows come home, but you will not know until you stand for long enough. Stand for long enough. Now the wonderful thing about my brain or psyche or whatever it is that's driving this monologue and I don't know what it is, I don't know who it is, I don't know where it comes from, I don't know what's happening. The wonderful thing about it is that it's so conceptual, it's so heady, it's all words, it's all just words. However, I want you to consider the fact that in order for me to be able to express this in this way, I must have access to something to describe. In order for me to speak this clearly on a particular experiential phenomena, I must have had access to that experiential phenomena, otherwise where would the words be coming from? How would I know what to say and how to say it with such flow? Okay, I don't know where it's coming from, which means it's coming from the unknown. And if I identify as the unknown, then it's coming from me, but it's not coming from the me that I think I am. Anyway, so you can listen to all of this and be like, bro, you are rambling and ranting and you're exactly right. This is all words, ranting and rambling. However, to be able to speak about this stuff, I must have experienced something, right? But there must have been an experience of some kind or there must have been some place for this stuff to come from. It's all coming from voidness. We talked about this. The genius of a baby comes from the voidness of a baby. My flow, when I'm able to speak like this right now, which I'm not always able to, it comes from when I'm not here anymore and it's just happening. Now this state is something that I would love for you to experience as well. And this flow, this experience for me has not come from reading books. Obviously, I've read some books. Obviously, I can quote some things. But the knowing beneath those things is something which is digested and metabolized through direct intercourse with life through direct intercourse with life. Now just reading about sex help you to have better sex. Do you take sex advice from a virgin? No. No, of course you fucking don't, right? Sorry. So don't take advice from yourself unless you've stood still. Don't take advice from me either. Verify all of this from yourself. Always be skeptical. Confirm everything that you hear from me through direct experience with yourself. I don't give a fuck whether you think I'm a fucking loony or whether you think I'm the next coming of whoever. I honestly do not give a fuck because it doesn't mean anything to you until you stand still. This entire podcast, everything I'm saying can be summed up as literally go stand still. go stand still. And there's a deepening art to this which you can go into. Like the biomechanics of how you stand, if you consider that the structure of something physically affects its ability to hold electric charge or the structure of something affects the way gravity passes through it, the structure of something and its material and the quality of that material affects the way that energy can pass through it, then obviously it's clear that standing in a certain way with a certain skeletal alignment and certain awareness of the foot pressure and the skull, the way the skull sitting on the neck, the way the breath is happening and the way you're managing intra- abdominal pressure, the tension of your tissues, the way you're supporting yourself through the different diaphragms, the way your. Yeah, the way that your body is standing is going to affect some of the experiences that you have. And so there are ways of standing which seem to be more optimal for each person's body which can facilitate more of this sense of translucent. For example, like if you're standing with an arched back or there's a kink in your spine where there's a lot of force gathering in one spot, then there's a density, there's an energetic density there. You can consider it as just pure weightedness and mass gathering in one spot, but the increase of sensation coming from that spot reflects an energetic density in that spot. If you've got a lot of sensation in your lower back and if it's really hurting and if the skeleton is bunching the force there because of how you're aligned, then your attention is going to gravitate towards that density. If your attention's gravitating towards that density, then the pain of that, the discomfort of that, enables you an opportunity to be with the area that's dense and to dissolve some of that by fully meeting it. However, there's also this thing where like when you change the alignment of your spine, you're going to change the spaces that nerves can pass through and you're going to affect the neurological signaling that happens in the body. And so standing in a certain way with a certain cue that harmonizes your skeleton is going to help. It's going to help you feel clear. It's going to help you feel sensitive instead of just being completely bound by that pain in your spine. So yeah, you can deal with the pain at the somatic level and you can go into the pain or let's stuff we talked about earlier, but you can also change your structure so that you're not having to purely work with that pain. You can actually just experience your body as this continuous expansive sensation. And that comes from alignment and the way you're breathing and the way you're supporting your spine with your breath and the way you're releasing your hips and the way you're feet are pointing and where your weight is. And so like your organs and all of this, there is a biological material layer which is affecting the way consciousness organizes in your body and the way energy passes through your system. And that's why things like Qi Gong and Tai Chi and Negong and all of these things are so profoundly profoundly effective because they study the channels and they all have different names for different types of channel which have different purposes from the martial applications to the healing applications to the spiritual applications. But essentially it's all transfer of energy through a biological system and so you can work with the biological system and as you get to know that biological system, you then know what it is you're releasing. You can't let go of the body until you know what the body is. You have to know the body profoundly deeply to actually be able to release your sense of your body and have that come from grounded in touchness with reality rather than delusion and dissociation. Big big big big big difference between going into the body through the body and beyond the body versus just dissociating from the body. Dissociating from the body is going to cause more dissociation and fragmentation and denial of what is and confusion and ungroundedness and a separation of how you live from what you say and coming into and through the body is going to cause more of a coherence between who you are, what you say how you are and what the body is actually doing. So working with the body is essential in moving beyond the body just as working with pain is essential in moving beyond it just as working with relational conflict is important in moving beyond it just as understanding the structures and systems that society operates on and why they're necessary is important if you want to move beyond them otherwise you're fighting the existing system which Buckminster would not like. So there is a way of standing which I teach which goes through the bio mechanical through the subtle body through like semantics through the psyche through a meditative process of withdrawing identification from particular reference points after noticing those reference points so we attend to we attach to we focus on and then we merge with and release we go through the body scanning different layers and areas in order to do that and it results in a process of being deeply in touch with the body and yet also going through and beyond the body. That is how profound outcomes are achieved in the ability to release pain as it comes in to metabolize wisdom quickly and to open to more truth beauty and life and essentially fast track evolution within one lifetime so that we can comprehend and understand more of what is actually happening while also having the experience of being humbled by it and within the magical mystery of it we can actually operate at a higher level create at higher levels lead and love at higher levels with fully open nervous systems that aren't distorting the life that we're feeling we can operate in meaningfully more practical ways while simultaneously becoming the wave rather than the particle and actually letting go of the fixation which is preventing us from meeting life in the moment so the outcome of that is more fulfillment and also a higher level of functioning but that fulfillment and higher level of functioning comes from the opposite of what most people seem to be doing which is striving and gripping it actually comes from a profound surrender and an unbecoming and a letting go of everything you think you are and everything you think you know and we use movement and we use relational frameworks as a way to see the places where you're getting stuck so that you can get unstuck and it's this paradoxical thing of like realizing what you've always been which is the spiritual aspect realizing what you've always been but realizing it by studying all of the things that you're not at such depth that you fall in love with them and see the genius in it all so that's the journey that's the journey of coming into the body coming into life coming into relationships coming into pain coming into sensation coming into injury coming into stress coming into all of the shit that seems inconvenient the process of just coming into it the lion's gaze which doesn't just look at the ball that's being thrown but looks where it's being thrown from you peer into the vortex of the black a bis where everything's coming from and you actually start to learn that that's you in there throwing things at yourself to catch outside as a separate observer but what I'm trying to get across is that this process is fucking fun it's crazy and it's physical I'm talking about it because this is a podcast like I'm gonna talk what the fuck else am I gonna do it's like a it's like a I've just got some time today I want to talk some shit but like the reality of this process is that it is deeply deeply transformative and utterly life-changing and it's like opening a door to an entire new realm that's always been there and has always been yours but you've never fully inhabited and heaven in the nerve is when you're so open to yourself and your system and to life that you realize that this idea of heaven being somewhere that you can get to and climb your way to is just such a myth and that that's the distortion of this life that has you chasing things outside of yourself but when you come deeply inside wow but it's been in your end oh there but when you impregnate life and you intercourse with your own life by coming into your own body then what you realize is that all of these things that are being talked about are not instructions but descriptions all of the wonderful things you read in the Douda Jing all of the wonderful things you read in the Bible all of the wonderful things you read about in Buddhist texts all of these spiritual truisms they're not things to consume and digest and to blah blah blah they're all pointers to something which is not occurring on that level it's occurring on the level of nothingness and voidness which can be found through the material you have to work with the material and get so good in the material so in touch with your body and the nature that it is that once you pass through it you see that it is all waves and energy and then you can create and and and unify with that energy and be created and recreated through it but start with the body start with the body come into the standing stand put the link in the description there's a ten minute standing practice that you can use I'll put another link in there if you want to work together over a process of six to 12 months I'm not here to fix you I'm not here to sell you some bullshit. I'm not here to pretend that you're going to live this perfect life without pain. I'm here to tell you that that external stuff doesn't matter and that no matter what happens, you can still engage with this practice that feels so deeply, deeply fulfilling because it's about letting go of what you're not. It's a fulfillment via emptying, which means that you don't need to accumulate. It's different. So anyway, that's what I'm here to share. I don't, it's just what feels so natural and right for me in my lifetime. And so if it resonates with you, then it perhaps it's right for you at this stage too. And maybe one day it won't be. Maybe this stuff is all just a perspective. Maybe this stuff is all just a game to play in the game of life. But at the end of the day, that's all we're ever fucking doing. So you might as well do something that resonates with you and dive in super deep and discover something and make a physical, tangible and psychological, emotional transformation. Like you might as well see to what degree magic is actually real. You might as well see to what degree science is actually magic. You might as well see to what degree the body is actually made up purely of consciousness. And that's something you can discover. And there are technologies, somer technologies that have been alive for eons and perhaps are coming from a place beyond time. And I can share some of those with you. So if you keen for that, click that link and then otherwise, if you want something actionable to take away from this podcast, just go outside right now and stand still for half an hour with your knees slightly bent, your hips slightly bent and your spine upright. Now obviously I've given you a video which will give you better guidance than that. But if you just want to vibe right now and carry the vibe of this podcast into your life and enjoy the unknown and maybe you should actually do this before you know how to do it. Maybe you should do this before you watch my video and then afterwards you can watch my video and see what's different. Go outside, stand still for half an hour. That's it. Just do that. Just exist. Just go exist outside for half an hour. Take your shoes off, bend your knees, bend your hips upright, relax your body half an hour. And then send me an email to let me know how that felt. And of course, as always, if there's anything that you want me to talk about, if you want me to go on a fucking unhinged rant about something that you think would be entertaining or helpful or something that you're really struggling with, then just send me an email, [email protected] [email protected]. Alrighty. Thank you for listening and I think we're going to close the portal right now. I'm feeling a little bit fucking like I need to just go for a slow walk and ground a little bit after that. maybe do some standing of my own. Much love.