Spiritual Embodiment & Alignment

Spiritual embodiment and alignment. What happens when a moment of clarity begins to change how life is lived? How might attention to the body open that door? An invitation to explore the capacity to notice, without immediately needing to change anything.

Transcript

Then my next question, Which I ask myself with these recordings. . . Is, Do I have an endpoint? Do I have a wish for the listener? For me, Simply getting to a place where we are not in stress is a very important first step where our vision begins to clear. Where we are not spinning and wondering who we are and what we're doing. Which doesn't necessarily mean that we know who we are. Which is an interesting point that I'm sure we'll get into later. And so when I sit and I feel into. . . Where are these going? What is something more of an ultimate outcome? That I wish. I would say that it is a combination of alignment. End. Spiritual embodiment. What do I mean by these things? Alignment. We can take a physical analogy for alignment. And imagine having a very straight stick, A dowel, Say a few feet long. And holding it, And having a brick standing tall side up, Standing on the table, And you take that dowel and you line it up, You align it so that the heel of your hand, The palm of your hand, Is on one end of the dowel, And straight across, Going straight into the side of the brick, Is the other end of the dowel near the top. Now in that situation, It would be extremely easy to bump the brick over. Now imagine you then took your hand, You set the brick up again, You put one end of the dowel against the top of the brick, And you took one step directly to your right. So you're still facing the same direction, But you're now offset from the brick a foot or two. You might still be able to knock the brick over, But it's a different type of challenge. It's quite inefficient. And there's all sorts of strange angles and wear on our system when we do that. Take another kind of analogy, You go to a job that there's no actual energy in you for. You don't particularly care about what you're being paid to do. And when you go to a job like that, You have to generate some kind of secondary motivation. Some sort of pressure in most cases. This can take many forms. Some people will threaten themselves. Some people will hype themselves up. Some people will listen to motivational talks. We get motivation, We get pressure, We get threatening. And again, All of these things put a type of wear on the system, A type of strain, There's a type of inefficiency in this. Now, If you take your same self. . . And you imagine doing what you most love to do, And it might be sitting on the couch. When you think about the complete lack of the need to generate some kind of secondary motivation, We could say that there's a type of alignment in you, Which creates a similar type of efficiency and clarity that happens as when we're pushing over the brakes. We could go on with this, But I think that that makes the point well enough. As an initial introduction. Now, Humans are much more complex than a stick and a brick, Or even making a living. We have relationships, We have a sense of self, We have sleep-wake digestion, We have how we move about a space, Our physical organization. If you watch somebody walking, Before you can recognize their face, You can identify who it is, Because our gaze to our style of organization of walking is so unique. We all learn how to walk. And so if you take all of the joints in the body involved with walking, The ankles, The joints in the feet, And the toes, And the knees, And the hips, And every joint through the spine, And the shoulders, And the head, And the jaw, And the elbows, And the whole body is involved in walking. And you look at that each of those joints at each moment in the walk is doing something that is affecting the entire walk. If you walk with very tight fists for a little while, You'll notice that it affects your walk. If you walk with one hand completely relaxed and you twiddle the finger on the other side, You'll notice that it affects your entire walk. And this gets very, Very subtle. And so we have physical alignment. We have the efficiency with which our entire system moves itself. When you go to a personal trainer, They teach you how to align your body so that your muscles and your joints and your bones work as well as possible to minimize injury and maximize the results. We have mental alignment. We've all heard somebody who, Their mind goes in every direction all at once, And they don't tend to get very far with that. It's much rarer, But some of us have met people who seem to be capable of simply directing their minds. And what can be done with the proper physical organization or the proper mental organization often appears superhuman. It's not actually superhuman, It's just that most of us are moving and organizing ourselves in profoundly inefficient ways. We go through social alignment, Emotional alignment, Professional alignment, Etc. , Etc. , Spiritual alignment, Which brings us to our next point. And that is spiritual embodiment. What the spiritual environment means to me today. There are experiences in life which do not succumb to explanations by physical world descriptions. Let's take the class of things called synchronicities. If at this point this is disturbing to you, Then I am probably not the channel for you. I am not interested in convincing anybody of anything, But for those of us who are curious about things or recognize such things. There are jumps in experience, Things that don't seem to progress linearly, But simply shift. Something new takes place. The example that's coming to mind, Which is quite fitting here, Is you sit in meditation for three years. Mostly annoyed and thinking about how much your hips hurt. And then you have a moment where it goes quiet. Something different happens that you wouldn't have been able to predict before you sat down that morning. Another example is, You have a grudge against somebody. For years, Decades sometimes. Maybe you try to work on it, Maybe you don't, Maybe you ignore it. But then you see the person. And you find yourself really enjoying their company. And the grudge seems to be gone. So, These moments where suddenly something is different. They happen all the time, If we're paying attention. Paying attention enough to notice them. And it's very easy to get very interested in these experiences and i believe that there's a There's a path here that can become. . . A little bit self-absorbed, A little bit disconnected. From other layers of experience. And I'm not proposing judgment against that, But from where I stand currently, It feels important to ground into something and to take these experiences, Perhaps it's an experience of oneness in some way. Profound togetherness and understanding and love. But then what happens if we go to the office on Monday? And we still treat people quite poorly. There's a peculiarity there. How is it that I can have this rich spiritual life of appreciating the oneness and the allness of the love of everything? And yet still wish bad things on my co-workers. And so that's where the embodiment comes in. It's how is it that we can take those experiences and infuse them through our various bodies, Energetic, Physical, Flesh, Fluid, Emotional body, Pain body, Depending on how you want to look at these things. So that that intelligence actually changes and updates the way we operate in the world. I think that this is where the rubber meets the road, So to speak. So that's one dimension of this. Another dimension of it is going the other way, Which is, What can I do in the exploration and appreciation of my body that feeds my spiritual development? A recent example of this is I was driving from Tennessee to Asheville, And I had been studying the mandible, The jaw, The lower jaw, Which is a single bone that floats, More or less, In soft connective tissue, Muscles, Ligaments, Tendons. And. . . Is quite easy to not notice. As the whole body is. You meet some people and I'm not sure that it's ever actually dawned on them that they seem to have a body. Based on how they move in the world and their overall lack of sensitivity to things body-related. So I'm driving four and a half, Maybe five and a half hours or so, And on that drive what do I do is I become my mandible. I become my jaw. And I don't bring in my usual mind into my jaw and try to analyze my jaw. I try to become my jaw. I try to let go of myself and do a transform and become my jaw. Now, If you become your jaw for a day, The day continues. I had the advantage of a rather monotonous drive. I was with my partner, So there was some conversation happening, And with that, The flow of different states and ideas and emotions coming through, Coming in and out of different degrees of connection, So a lot of variation, But simply sitting and driving. And I got to watch as my mandible went through many different experiences. At times, Jutting forward in frustration. At other times, Quivering and retracting in insecurity and a need to disappear, A fear, Fearfulness. At other times, An interesting state of it continually shifting as if it didn't know where home was, As if it was trying to find home. Sided with states that I was going through. And so it gave me a very interesting lens on my own states that I hadn't seen before. It awakened something that had been there, But I did not have the doorway in to actually appreciate it. Now, One of the themes here that I want to invite in, That we will be working with continually, Is that of just noticing. We live in a culture that is so performance-based and so doing-based and so knowledge-based. And this is one of the great things that I believe if we begin to loosen it up slightly will be a huge advantage to all of us. Is the capacity to notice something and not futz with it. And so I'm driving along and I'm noticing all these things about my jaw. And just the noticing after a few hours. . . Started having a massive impact on the rest of my body. My spine started to relax, The base of my skull started letting go, My pelvis started freeing up, My hip joints started freeing up, And I hadn't done anything. All that I had done is I had stepped into a doorway, A particular channel through the body, And a particular type of attention through that channel, And I stuck with it. So we have spiritual embodiment. We have the capacity to use spirituality to enflesh us with those developments so that our life and our conduct in the world evolves. We treat people better. We live more aligned. And we have the physical body as a way of developing our consciousness, Evolving our consciousness, Increasing our awareness. So we have spiritual embodiment. And alignment.