Layer Thirteen, Week Three – Sunday
- Read Week Three Concepts
- Watch videos and read description for Personality Attachment
- Review Releasing Resistance
- Do Movement – Personality Attachment
Watch the Personality Attachment video with an intention to let yourself absorb it without trying to completely digest it. Set aside 15 minutes, get comfortable, allow yourself to unwind, soften, and then watch.
From this point forward, our focus will change to a deeper, weekly, exploration of a specific movement, Kriya, or meditation. The objective is to increase your subtle awareness and ability to be present, intimate, empathetic, and kind. The concepts will help:
- Highlight the subtleties and energy movements you will experience,
- Help you become aware of the energetic consequences inside and outside of your body,
- Underscore the collaborative effects of the exercise between your bodies, components, and configurations.
Now, more than ever, progress to the next week only after you have experienced the movement in the ways I describe. My intention is to help create an evolutionary change in your energy system. You, version 2.0. With that in mind, let’s start. If you feel stuck, refer to the Reducing Resistance movement.
Watch the video again and see if you can identify where you have resistance, get confused, or disconnect. Pause and replay those areas and see if you can determine why.
The first meditation asks you to feel your attachment to your personality. You value your personality differently in different social settings, personal interactions, physical and emotional situations, and in the times when you are alone. The value you assign the different aspects of your personality changes depending on your current energy configuration. That value will have a ton of different, constantly changing, labels. You will have an attachment and corresponding value in each of your bodies, components, and energy configurations.
Underneath that value is judgment, labeling, comparison, conflict, association, reflection, projection, confidence, condemnation, acceptance, and rejection. Beneath those things are the collection of your habits, biases, predispositions, and fears. Under that is your essence.
The you that is you without resistance and without the projections of your fears is your essence. We will explore essence much more deeply in the coming weeks and months.
As you do the meditation today, be gentle. Bring a quality of softness and acceptance to yourself and the process. Smile, accept, be curious, and stay present.
The meditation asks you to feel that essence. As you progress, your awareness of your essence will get fuller. Your essence will begin to expand and your awareness of it will expand. The first few, or few dozen times, you do the meditation, you will feel your essence vaguely or will give it some previous label like love, happiness, fulfillment, etc. As you progress, the qualities you assign to your essence will change, become fuller and more pervasive.
Feel for the bump explained in the video description, it will follow only after you have experienced the upwelling described in the Reducing Resistance video.
Your awareness of essence might be likened to an iceberg. As you approach it, you see what lies above the waves. As you progress, you will become aware of what it feels like, its qualities, and what lies beneath.
Icebergs gradually become part of something much more vast. They melt into the ocean and evaporate into the atmosphere. They reconnect with the earth, sea, and sky before co-mingling with every other individuated essence. Icebergs become rain that waters plants, moisturizes dry skin, and gives a spark of life to seeds.
Feel your ability and potential to create pyramids (Wednesday’s Concepts). Find that place of softened strength and connect to your potential. Allow it to well up, to percolate and expand. Allow your pyramid potential to infuse your being.
As you connect to your essence, you will begin feeling the connection, relationship, and influence of your essence with things outside your body. You will feel your confluence and convergence. Your essence is a sphere that will expand beyond your current limits or scope of possibility. The ultimate capacity of your essence is currently impossible for your conscious mind to fathom … and it always will be.
If you build a pyramid, each time you add a level, it must be one stone more across and deep than the previous level. The first level will have one stone, the second will have four, the third will have nine, fourth will have 16, fifth 25, sixth 36, etc. The total stone count will grow from one to 5, to 14, 30, 55, 91, etc. By the time you get to 25 levels, you will have 5525 stones. At 50, 42,925. At 100 levels, the stone total increases to 338,350. You will have over a million stones by the time you reach the 144th level and over 5 million by level 247.
Now imagine if every day you added a level to the depth of your awareness of your essence. In a year, you would go from a depth of 1 to over 16 million. Seems unfathomable, doesn’t it? Well, if you kept that up for another year, the number would be 129 million.
Open yourself to the possibility that your awareness, capacity, and essence can grow at a similar rate.
Give yourself the opportunity to feel how awareness forks and branches. Feel how knowledge grows into intelligence. Feel how sensation becomes awareness and empathy. Feel your connections and interactions mature to transparency and intimacy.
Your challenge will be to accept that pyramid building is possible. If you look at each stone in a pyramid, it only connects with a small number of stones above, beside, or below it. Each stone doesn’t have to connect directly with every other stone in the pyramid.
The aspects of your life, energy, and environment will be influenced in the same way. As you gain awareness, that new awareness will influence the proximal awarenesses. If you come to understand yourself better, you will understand those around you better. As you feel your physical imbalances, you will be able to feel and empathize with the physical imbalances around you. As you recognize your connection to your physical imbalances and it will help you recognize the relationship others have with their physical imbalances. As you can discern the interactions, you will begin to feel how the energies are influenced. Internal empathy becomes external empathy.
Each new awareness adds another level to the pyramid. Each new empathy leads toward being a deeper, richer, and fuller empath.
See if you can begin to feel your transitions from general to specific to subtle. Feel how specific becomes general as you accept and allow it as a given and then begin to be curious.
As you can probably imagine or have experienced in the preceding layers, the pyramiding of your energy, awareness, and empathy can put you in a very uncomfortably expanded position.
Regular, persistent, and omnipresent expansion takes some getting used to. Your system will adapt but it will require your conscious awareness of the desire to diffuse or vent.
My trail running experiment has begun to bear fruit. I am getting faster, running longer, and my weekly mileage is increasing. On top of that, I am recovering quicker. The key seems to be my ability to identify the cues that reduce my effectiveness. As I got more familiar with running, I began to recognize some of the things that hampered my progress.
For instance, I stopped listening to audio books while I run. Listening took enough of my focus off my sensations that I would begin to slow down, change my cadence, and my form would degrade without my awareness. Listening also used up my mental endurance. My concentration on running would flounder.
I also picked a couple of physical cues to monitor while running, head and hip position. I found if I focused on those two things, generally, my form was good.
My awareness of form is pyramiding. First, general things, then specific things, then subtle things. As I habitualize proper head and hip position, I will have the capacity to explore the levels that lie beneath and then the levels that lie beneath those.
Become aware of the energy benefit as you move from general to specific to subtle. Can you feel the expansion of energy as you discover new potentials?
The movement from this week will translate to every aspect of your life. Identify the general, explore the specifics, and then discover the subtle. As you do, you will be adding a level to your pyramid. The subtle will become specific, and the specific, general.
Bring a sense of wonder to every action, reaction, and interaction and you will gain new levels to your awareness. If you allow it, you will be able to harvest energy from every action, reaction, and interaction.
As you gain energy, you give yourself the opportunity to add it to your reserves, to let it become a part of the cauldron of your essence. Awareness increases your capacity. Relationship, collaboration, intimacy, kindness, and affection increase your capacity. Increasing your capacity increases your essence. The more essence you have the more you will be able to influence your environment in beneficial ways. As you grow your capacity to feel, to experience your essence, you will grow your capacity to radiate that essence as an influencing energy.
People who light up a room when they enter do it by radiating their essence.
Be one of those people.
Personality Attachment
Step 1 – Find a comfortable seat, allow yourself to soften and settle until you feel an upwelling of energy. (Video referenced is Releasing Resistance from L8W4)
Step 2 – As you feel the burgeoning energy, question and feel into what your experience of life would be like without your current personality.
Step 3 – Feel into what aspects of your personality you are willing and unwilling to let go of, to change or alter. Focus on what is inherently you and what is just a habit. (Every reaction you have is a habit built upon a predisposition or a bias.)
Step 4 – Find your boundaries, the edges of your personality. Find the places where you limit your expressions and experiences of happiness, playfulness, fulfillment, gratitude, kindness, and understanding. Find the places where you lack tolerance, where you are quick to anger and reaction. Find where you begin to distance yourself.
Step 5 – As you identify your habits and disconnect them from what is inherently you, you will begin to feel something underneath. Let’s call that Essence.
* Your Essence is the cauldron that holds the depth and breadth of your experience of life mixed with all future potential. Your essence is your ability to absorb, manifest, realize, and experience. It is a feeling of a curious wondering, anticipation, and brilliance. It is more than the feelings of love, happiness, and playfulness. It will feel new, like compressed potential.
Step 6 – As you consciously connect to your Essence, the recognition will instantly change something within you. As you bring it into conscious awareness, it will blossom. It will feel like it bumps up in size. As it does, so will you.
Step 7 – One of the ways you can feel and tap into your Essence is to identify what it is not. Feel your limits, feel for what is outside of them. As you move well past your current limits, you will connect with your Essence.
Step 8 – Your Essence is deeper, fuller, and richer than what you are currently experiencing as your personality. The Essence you will experience with experience will be constantly changing into something with more depth and breadth.
Step 9 – Connecting with your Essence will happen more quickly if you identify and move past the limiting aspects of your personality. Allow for something new, unexpected, inconceivable, or profound. Soften the edges of your box, expand and explore. Allow yourself to have a fuller expression of who you are being.
Why it Matters – This Kriya is a way to introduce your conscious mind to the foundational energy that lies beneath your personality. Your Essence is your power source, it is the fountain from which your ideas, love, inspiration, and motivation flow. It is your soul’s power plant. As you consciously connect to it, you will gradually be able to tap into it at will and in increasingly greater degrees.
Everyday Usability – The bulk of your Essence lies outside of your current personality. Every day, in every action and interaction, challenge yourself to be fuller, richer, and warmer. Be more kind and loving, increase your empathy and intimacy. Soften your edges and feel for what lies outside of your current box.
Progression – Practice will lead to progression and an accelerating expansion of your potential and influence. This Kriya is the path to You, version 2.0.
Releasing Resistance
Step 1 – Identify and clarify a specific resistance you want to release. Put your intention into a sentence. This will be your Sankalpa.
Step 2 – Find a comfortable seat and verify that your posture is aligned and vertical. Stack your shoulders over your hips, your ears over your shoulders, and gently tuck your chin. Allow yourself to settle and soften.
Step 3 – Take a couple of deep, slow breaths and physically relax on the exhale. As your physical body relaxes, allow your mental and emotional bodies to entrain with that softening.
Step 4 – Your goal is to soften to a place this is euphoric and expansive, without resistance.
Step 5 – If you can’t feel yourself soften, if you don’t feel expansive and euphoric, continue to practice settling and softening. Come back and continue with this Kriya only after you are able to find that euphoric, expansive, and softened space.
Step 6 – After softening, bring to mind a current resistance that is limiting you in your life.
Step 7 – Let your eyes close or softly focus on a spot in front of you.
Step 8 – Bring your attention and focus on your specific resistance and then be curious where that resistance lives in your body.
Step 9 – Begin feeling for the answer.
Step 10 – Resistance has a physical presence in your body as tension. The fear that is the cause of your resistance has an emotional and mental energy as well.
Step 11 – If you can feel where it lives in your body, great, if not, acknowledge and accept that it does exist.
Step 12 – From your Hara Point, a couple of inches below our navel and just in front of your spine, begin to sense the energy of your Hara.
Step 13 – As you connect to your Hara Point, repeat your Sankalpa to set an intention to release your stated resistance.
Step 14 – Acknowledge and accept that your resistance doesn’t serve you, that it is not beneficial.
Step 15 – Allow the energy of your Hara to expand. As it connects with the energy of your resistance, it will absorb it. Your Hara will absorb and metabolize the energy of your resistance (fear configuration) as it envelops it. Once metabolized, that configuration will cease to exist.
Step 16 – Gently contract the muscles in your low belly and perineum. As you breathe, direct the energy of your breath to your low belly. If it is helpful, imagine your Hara energy as a light that is getting brighter and expanding.
Step 17 – Breathe with your diaphragm. Don’t allow your ribs to expand or your shoulders to lift. Keep your focus on your low belly and Hara Point.
Step 18 – As the energy expands, you will feel it get denser. If you can’t feel it, assume it is happening. Continue to allow and encourage it to expand. Continue to breathe into your low belly.
Step 19 – Allow it to expand until it is bigger than your body. Repeat your Sankalpa two or three times.
Step 20 – Allow the possibility that this will work. Allow the possibility to become a probability. Allow the probability to become a certainty.
Why it Matters – Statically held resistance is the single greatest impediment you face. By addressing the root cause of that resistance, you will end its limiting influence.
Everyday Usability – Make this a daily practice. Keep a mental check list of the resistances your feel and begin to eliminate them.
Progression – Next week, you will see a video on how to use this meditation to manifest your aspirations by removing the obstacles, drag, and resistances that are in your path.