Sunday’s Focus:

The practices in Layer Six, Week Two were Center – Off Center (Mental) and Global Grounding. Revisit one or both and feel for how you experience them differently. If you only have time for one, I suggest Global Grounding.

Sunday’s Concepts

This is the last of the review, as you work through it try to somatically connect with the content. Try to feel the sensations and influence being presented. Sense, in your body, the foundational nature of the content.

Layer Six, Week Two – Concepts

In previous layers, we talked about bodies, components, and the myriad of ways you can become unbalanced. The reason you don’t dissolve into a blubbering, dysfunctional mess is because consciousness and collaboration exist at every level of each of the five bodies and all seven components.

Some of the collaboration is straight forward; the physical body displaying strength or endurance. Chopping wood takes on a life of its own. Some collaboration is more convoluted like endurance, strength, flexibility, and focus coming together to help you tolerate high levels of intimacy.

The consciousness in each of the bodies and components might be a bit harder to fathom. Have you ever felt like your stomach has a mind of its own? When you feel determined, does determination feel like it is somehow disconnected from the rest of you?

Physical Body:

At the cellular level, each cell reacts as an individual. It has a primary intention, to survive and a secondary intention to work in conjunction with its neighbors. First and foremost, the cell is checking to confirm that it is internally safe and fed. Once that is established, the cell assesses its environment near to far and then, if all feels safe, expands its energy in ever widening spheres looking for safety verification and potential fuel delivery.

The cell’s secondary intention is to work. As it expands its sensing mechanisms, the cell begins communicating back up the line. The cell waits, listens, and feels for a signal to do its job.

So, the cell has a consciousness. The cell the tissue is a part of also has a consciousness, as does the next larger structure and the next, all the way up to the whole organism. Generally, our individual liver cells work together to ensure their existence, the continued existence of our liver, and the on-going health of our body.

One of the intentions of your body is to ensure that other, similar, bodies survive and thrive. We want our friends and family to be healthy. That shared consciousness leads to survival, success, and improvements of the group.

The shared consciousness progression is self, family, group, community, religion (if applicable), ethnicity, country, and, of course, global. So, in essence, the inherent desire of one of your liver cells to be healthy will affect the entire planet.

And remember, we started at the cellular level, but the progression goes toward the smaller too. There are gazillions of parts and levels that make up a single cell and all of them collaborate to survive and thrive and to ensure the continued survival of the cell.

Mental Body

When you give birth to a thought, that thought takes on a life of its own. It may only live a moment but it lives. If you feed it, it will continue to exist. If you don’t feed it, it will atrophy and die.

You may feed it by combining it with another thought. When two thoughts come together, they give life to a new thought that individuates. Two thoughts become three. The third may consume one or both of the first two.

Thoughts are an expression of energy. The energy you give to your thoughts creates potential. Thoughts influence your internal and external environments. They exist as completely as a butterfly, giraffe, or submarine.

Emotional Body:

As we have discussed before, emotions are the label you give to your energy configurations. You feel something, or really a bunch of somethings, and your subconscious mind assigns a label. As that label is attached to your sensations, the emotion(s) comes into existence. Before the label, that specific emotion in that specific time didn’t exist. You brought it to life by connecting those momentary energy configurations (sensations) under one name. When you assign a label, your body reconfigures itself to co-exist with the label.

The same thing happens in your environment. The energy, things, and people around you begin to reconfigure when you project your emotions into and onto the space around you. As you change, your environment changes. Your local environment influences your non-local environment.

So, you influence your immediate environment which influences the next biggest environment until what you do, how you feel, and the labeling of your energy has global emotional implications.

Energetic Body:

That global or planetary consciousness has a comfort zone and its intention is to maintain its continued existence, to grow, feed itself, and thrive. That desire influences each layer and level of organization smaller than it … down to you and your individual cells. 

Environmental Body:

When you emotionally collaborate with someone, it changes the nature of your relationship forever. And the new nature will have a life of its own. It will be different than everything else. It will be singular … until it changes by interaction with something else. Each time you collaborate with a person or group, you increase the potential of that relationship and the consciousness of the collaboration.

The underlying energy that drives the universe is expansion. Thoughts give way to more thoughts. Emotions combine and contrast to form new emotions. Opportunities multiply into new opportunities. Experiences lead to other experiences. The accumulation of data is expansion.

Let’s talk about the components.

Each of the components each has a consciousness too. When you are focused, Focused exists as a configuration, outside of, and a part of everything else. Combinations of bodies and components also combine to form individuated consciousness. Mental focus exists outside of and as a part of all other things.

When you are mentally focused on solving a problem, you are creating a relationship between the unresolved issue, the potential solution of the problem, your mental body, and the component of focus. Your other bodies and all the other components will also play a part and become part of that relationship. Your emotional body will create a fear/benefit potential, your physical body will help determine the action viability, and all the other components will add their flavor.

This amazing network of communication and collaboration that happens instantaneously between every cell, every thought, every emotion, and every interaction ensures some semblance of basic balance because everything shares the same foundational intention. We are drawn to collaborate because from the smallest and largest structure, the intention is to survive and thrive.

So, you might be asking yourself, why don’t we constantly expand, grow, thrive? Why do we kill, harm, pollute? Why do unkindness, intolerance, and hate exist?

Your subconscious mind is always trying to limit, constrain, and moderate. Its goal is to create habits, to repeat your actions, movements, and decisions because your subconscious mind assumes that if you have survived it once, you can survive it again. The unknown, doing anything for the first time, going past your previous limits, or adding a new complexity doesn’t have a track record.

Feel into the times you have been less than kind and you will always find some sort of fear

Monday’s Focus

Choose one or more of Monday’s concepts and focus on its import and influence throughout your day. See if you can identify its existence in everything you do.

Monday’s Concepts

As a wrap-up, let’s review the underlying principals presented in the first half dozen layers.

Energy – The consciousness of change. The combustion of the past and the birth of the moment. The awakening of opportunity. Life. Nature. Transformation. Movement.

Resistance – The energy you spend trying to make right now into something that it is not. Fear of potential, possibility, and opportunity.

Subconscious Mind – The primal, undeveloped, part of your psyche whose primary goal is to keep you in a state of fear, doing what is familiar, and limiting your exposure to change and growth. The binary brain (black and white, yes and no, safe and unsafe, wanted and unwanted).

Discomfort – Discomfort is interesting because there are several varieties. Non-typical discomfort would be anything that disrupts your normal patterns. Typical discomfort would be the familiar things that are part of your normal patterns. Typical discomfort usually serves as a distraction and is rarely growth inducing. Stress, overwhelm, recurring pain (like tension headaches) are examples of typical discomfort. Compressive discomfort would be anything that limits your ability to move, think, feel, or experience. It is brought on as a reaction to intimacy or expansion. Expansive discomfort or healthy discomfort is almost always growth inducing. It happens when you explore your edges, the boundaries of your known universe. Any injury, physical, mental, emotional, energetic, or relational is the result of unhealthy discomfort. Sometimes unhealthy discomfort is what lies beyond healthy discomfort. Overuse injuries happen because discomfort is pushed beyond what is healthy.

Energy Configurations – The state of your being. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, and every flavor of relationship will have a configuration. As you express your thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, and some aspect of your relationships the configuration will change. As the energy changes (expands, contracts, stagnates, divides, or is expended), the configuration changes. All configurations are in a constant state of transition. Your subconscious mind tries to forestall, limit, and inhibit those transitions. That is really all your subconscious mind does, it tries to keep things from changing … and things always change. That subconscious battle is what precludes growth, happiness, fulfillment, intimacy, and enlightenment.

Tuesday’s Focus

Choose one or more of Tuesday’s concepts and focus on its import and influence throughout your day. See if you can identify its existence in everything you do.

Tuesday’s Concepts

Flow, Effortlessness, and Fluidity – Flow is energy moving, changing its configuration. Effortlessness is energy moving without resistance. Fluidity is the feeling of effortless flow. Your subconscious mind is deathly afraid of fluidity. It creates resistance as a way to curtail, limit, reduce, or stop the fluid transition from one energy configuration to another.

Communication – The co-mingling of energies. Unification. Multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. The coalescence and compounding of consciousness. You communicate to increase or decrease the rate, degree, and amount of change. Most oral communication is used to verbalize resistance and as a way to limit change. Transparent communication happens when you are clear (pun intended) about what you fear and what you are trying to limit. Most communication is not transparent, it seeks to hide the fear and obfuscate the demand to limit. Most communication reduces intimacy, expansion, and growth. The key is to learn to be transparent and to figure out ways to speak that encourage growth, intimacy, and expansion.

Sensation – The way change feels. Energy moving. The re-configuring of configurations. Birth and death. Transition, transformation, and conflagration. As you increase your ability to feel, there won’t be enough labels to assign. Your sensations will be felt as infinite movements of energy.

Habits, Compensations, and Beliefs – Failures of your conscious mind to override your subconscious mind. Short cycles of function/dysfunction, expansion/contraction, and movement/stagnation. If you didn’t have a subconscious mind, you wouldn’t have any habits, good or bad. You would exist in a constant state of opportunity maximization. Your subconscious mind loves habit, compensations, and beliefs because they always take you back to where you started, to someplace familiar and limiting. They create patterns your subconscious mind uses to distract you.

Personality – Your current collection of habits, compensations, and beliefs. Your typical and recurring energy configurations. Your personality is the outward display of your subconscious mind, its reactions, and its limiting behaviors. Without a subconscious mind, you wouldn’t have a personality, you would be in a constant state of flux, fluidly changing to optimize your experience.

Wednesday’s Focus

Choose one or more of Wednesday’s concepts and focus on its import and influence throughout your day. See if you can identify its existence in everything you do.

Wednesday’s Concepts

Distraction and Diffusion – You get distracted from your conscious movements, decisions, and intentions by your subconscious mind. Distractions diffuse vitality. Your subconscious mind is always looking for ways to diffuse, bleed off, any energy it feels is excessive in any of your bodies or components. All distractions diffuse and all diffusions are distractions.

Labels – Almost every label (I say almost because there might be an exception, but I can’t think of any) is manufactured by your subconscious mind as a way to limit opportunities and potential. Furthermore, your labels give your systems something to conform to. You aren’t your labels until you create the label and then your subconscious mind uses the label as a template to change the configurations of your bodies and components. You get angry by allowing your subconscious mind to limit your expression, potential, and opportunity for change.

Stress – A label your subconscious mind creates as a way to curtail expansion. Once created, stress, becomes a repository your subconscious mind uses to store energy it feels is in excess of typical levels. Make no mistake, stress doesn’t exist until your mind creates the label. Before the label, it is accumulating energy.

Projection – The tactic your subconscious mind uses to bring a future fear into the present moment as a way to limit energy movement, expansion, and growth. All projections are distraction, diffusion, and robbers of momentum. Judgments, condemnations, comparisons, and criticisms are all projections. They all constrain potential and ignore all opportunities that fall outside of their preexisting limits. Your subconscious mind uses projections to fit things into familiar boxes.

Trigger(s) – Signposts your subconscious mind grabs onto as you drive past. Anything that elicits a reaction, distraction, or diffusion. Your subconscious mind creates triggers as a way to make your mediocrity more efficient. Being triggered is a choice born of habit and subjugation (of your subconscious mind).

Pre-Trigger State – The fullness before the distraction, diffusion, or reaction. Every single time before you are triggered, you are in a pre-trigger state. Growth happens when you tolerate the discomfort of the pre-trigger state until your systems (bodies and components) adapt.

Thursday’s Focus

Choose one or more of Thursday’s concepts and focus on its import and influence throughout your day. See if you can identify its existence in everything you do.

Thursday’s Concepts

Reaction – Unconscious action brought on by a trigger. Energy expenditure with a very low return on investment.

Compensation – Post-trigger energy configuration. After every reaction, you reconfigure yourself to match some familiar and habitual label, belief, or pattern. What you do after you allow yourself to be distracted.

Resistant Configurations – Your current and habitual moods and reactions. The aspects of your personality that limit change. Your level of opposition as it contrasts to your degree of receptivity.

Images and Beliefs – Your default preferences and judgments. Your imbalance pre-sets. Assumptive truths that serve to constrict current perceptions to familiar labels.

Demands – Your subconscious mandates that the world conform to your fears. Energetic funnels that co-opt reason and opportunity into familiar patterns of mediocrity and habit. The walls of your limiting boxes.

Bias, Preference, and Prejudice – Your fictional comfort zones that form the roots of your dysfunctions. The walls of the boxes your subconscious mind creates to limit your vision, range, and opportunity for expansion, creation, and change. The defaults and predispositions your subconscious mind places in front of every other option.

Behaviors – What you do as a result of your beliefs, demands and biases. The consequences that result from the limited aspects of your personality.

Value – The fictional benefit your subconscious assigns. The static energy drain of your biases. The degree of comfort or projected amount something or someone will meet your demands or soothe your fears.

Attachment – The adhesive quality of your fears and the energy required to maintain the existence of those fears. Energy equal to the projected suffering of some future loss. How you mitigate the potential for change. When you are grasping onto something, it makes it that much harder to grasp something new (better). You are attached to the degree you fear losing something.

Friday’s Focus

Choose one or more of Friday’s concepts and focus on its import and influence throughout your day. See if you can identify its existence in everything you do.

Friday’s Concepts

Responsibility – The ability to decide and the capability to respond. The conscious decisions you make to identify, evaluate, and embrace opportunity.

Distraction – Your subconscious mind’s primary tool to derail your expansion and momentum. Anything that lowers focus, intimacy, fulfillment, benefit, and presence. The internal, external and relational habitual reactions you use to lower productivity and efficiency.

Internal Authority – Energetic sovereignty. Coming to the realization that your world is determined by the decisions you make and the actions you take. The fountain that spews determination, intention, persistence.

Balance – The optimal energy configuration in every moment. A fluid state that is centered, focused, energized, intimate, and present. Equality between the bodies and the components.

Health – Optimal Balance in each of your bodies and all of the components.

Fatigue – When your resistance to healthy adaptation overwhelms your capacity to rejuvenate.

Dysfunction – Movement from one imbalanced state to another imbalanced state.  The expedient cycling of potential away from health and balance. Any non-beneficial energy configuration.

Distancing – Any action or reaction that results in less energy, intimacy, or collaboration. Mental, energetic, and emotional compensations that lower, inhibit, or prevent presence.

Saturday’s Focus

Choose one or more of Saturday’s concepts and focus on its import and influence throughout your day. See if you can identify its existence in everything you do.

Saturday’s Concepts

And finally, a review of the components:

Focus – Intentional and structured movement. A combination of agility, accuracy, and clarity. Lack of distraction, diffusion, and distancing. The ability to harness your energy in a specific direction(s) for an extended period of time.

Stability – Centered, connected, patient, and unified acceptance. Unwavering allowance without demand or expectation.

Speed – Purposeful technique with momentum. Efficient movement with minimal distractions in an intentional trajectory.

Strength – Power without submission to distraction. The accessible capacity (force) of your persistence. The energetic expression of passion.

Flexibility – The range and elasticity of your ability to be non-oppositional, non-judgmental, and free from attachment. Tolerance for discomfort and expansion. Your ability to withstand discomfort without compensating.

Endurance – Collaborative energy flowing in a targeted trajectory. The ability to maintain healthy discomfort over the course of an action or event.

Rejuvenation – Opportunistic revitalization. Environmental metabolization. Beneficial energetic conversion. Absorption and transmutation.

Centered – The state of being when balance exists in each of your bodies and all seven components.

That’s it! Hopefully, you were able to get through this without too much confusion or consternation. Next week we will begin discovering the art and science of empathy.