Awareness Of Essence

With Lesson 6 Awareness of Essence, following the brief opening meditation, we harvest our previous work to practice our essence. A dynamic model of awareness highlights the present moment as an opportunity to keep our emotions flowing. Our emotions come and go, while our essence remains. Includes the teaching story ’Tapping on my Shoulder’. We close the with spiritual practice “I Am Aware.”

Transcript

Lesson 6 Awareness of Essence We'll begin with our meditation.

Be like a smooth,

Round stone,

Sitting peacefully grounded in its place on the earth,

All its surface open and shining.

Let's use the foundation of the natural emotions as a platform to dive deeper into the practice of living our essence.

To do this,

We need awareness.

The crucial quality of awareness is the cornerstone of Gestalt Therapy,

Which Laura and Fritz Perls taught in the 60s.

The Gestalt Awareness cycle is a circle that represents our unconscious that contains all our natural emotions we have ever experienced.

We are hidden in the darkness of time and ignorance.

The thin slice out of the top of the circle represents the here and now,

What we are aware of in the present moment.

I teach this model so much that some students began calling it Jacob's pie.

This is a model of health.

The health is in the movement of our natural emotions,

One at a time,

Clockwise,

Around,

Into the present,

Into the light of awareness.

We are conscious of the emotion in the here and now.

When one feeling pops out into the slice at the top that represents the present moment,

We have the aha experience.

I know what I am feeling now.

Though our feelings might come up quickly,

One right after the other,

We have room for only one at a time.

This is helpful.

You can recognize it,

Identify it,

And express it.

According to Gestalt Therapy's model of health,

When a feeling is not known and expressed,

It becomes toxic.

When the feeling is known and expressed,

The need to know and express it drops away,

Back into the unconscious.

Thereby,

And this is the punchline,

We create space for the next feeling to come up into the awareness and be expressed.

Most of this feeling is inside unconscious,

While the expression,

The externalization,

Is outside,

Conscious,

As we put out into the world what was formerly locked away.

Because every feeling longs to be felt and expressed,

This movement to the slice of openness at the top,

The present,

Is natural,

Organic,

And inevitable.

In fact,

The movement of feelings can define health.

That is what feelings seek,

Every minute and over the years,

Movement and expression.

If it's not expressed as a natural emotion,

A feeling will find its way out as a physical symptom.

We now know that unexpressed grief may express as chronic coughing or colds,

The fluid of tears showing up inside the body.

Unexpressed anger sometimes manifests as heart disease.

An unrecognized need for love may come as a series of unhealthy love affairs.

Writers like Louise Hay,

Carolyn Mace,

And Joan Borashenko detail these possibilities.

Here's a story called Tapping on My Shoulder.

For me,

An unrecognized,

Unexpressed feeling is like a persistent hand tapping on my shoulder.

If I don't give the feeling what it wants,

Acknowledgement,

And expression,

The tapping gets more insistent.

The feeling pulls more and more of my attention away from the present moment.

If I ignore this feeling,

Over time it robs me of my ability to function in the present.

The unexpressed feeling eventually will become raucous and demanding and insist that I pay attention.

The tapping on my shoulder says,

Hey,

Remember me?

I'm your sadness about how your father treated you.

That's what the sadness or any emotion wants.

Attention,

Acknowledgement,

And expression.

Conscious expression.

Conscious means,

I know this is sadness.

If I don't say to the sadness,

Okay,

I hear you,

You're right,

I do feel sad about that,

The sadness will pounce on every natural loss I feel,

In this case about men and authority,

And grow larger and more insistent.

Eventually it will become a 2x4 club,

Whacking me on my head,

Emotionally,

Until I do pay attention.

Some people think they can simply channel their anger into physical activity such as sports or exercise.

But for healing to occur,

Consciousness is required.

We must be conscious that we have the feeling.

We may or may not know its cause,

That part is optional.

Darkness and externalization are not optional.

Often the most challenging and darkest times are when we feel stuck.

What is stuck is this movement into awareness and the subsequent expression of emotion.

When we have the courage to express the truth of what we feel,

That slice of present awareness at the top of the circle opens to receive the next feeling,

We can be responsive to whatever comes next.

We are back in the flow of our lives,

Our energy is no longer drained or blocked by a piece of unfinished business.

Instead of using energy to hold back our natural emotions,

All our energy is available in the present to express our authentic emotions,

Who we really are,

Our essence.

Another quality of health is the recognition that the process of awareness and movement is more important than the content of what we are aware of.

The expression is more important than what we express.

This goes against the messages from our reductionist ego-based culture,

Which wants to know the not only what the feeling is,

But also why we feel it.

The culture wants a rationale for the story,

A justification.

To try to satisfy the culture's obsession with exactly what the feeling is and why we feel it,

Propels us quickly up into our heads.

Our mind wants to fix the quote problem unquote,

To find a solution.

Our intellect tries to figure it out.

Here's a story about my own anger.

When my two-year-old son's mother and I were breaking up and she decided to take him out of state to live,

I was sad and angry.

My friends,

Sympathetic,

Understood my sadness but focused on what I could do to stay in touch with my son.

But I was full of anger and needed to express it.

I couldn't make definite plans to see my son unless and until I expressed my anger.

This dilemma got me to my first workshop with Kubler-Ross.

I found myself on the mattress with her,

Sitting beside me.

She encouraged me to express my natural anger and fear about losing touch with my little son.

I yelled and raged at my son's mother.

I could feel something changing.

Then,

Elizabeth said to me,

You're sad and angry about losing your son,

But you are also sad and angry about the little two-year-old boy you have inside you who was taught to suppress his natural emotions.

More tears and rage burst out of me.

I cried and I yelled.

Soon,

Memories from events early in my life came to me.

I learned that once I could express my sadness and anger about my present life,

I could follow the emotional thread back to express the old feelings too.

The cleaning and clearing that resulted allowed me to live more fully in the present,

Awake and aware of my feelings as they came up.

It was healing,

Though I felt vulnerable doing it,

To tell the story of my son and my own little boy inside me.

Though there are times to tell our stories,

That is,

How we came to feel a particular emotion,

The expression of the feeling itself is much more important.

This is because of the deep and restorative truth that we are not our story,

And no matter our story,

We are not our feeling about the story.

We are individuals feeling a feeling,

And as we become aware of it,

We can consciously move the feeling out of our unconscious,

Bring it around the circle and up into the sliver of present awareness.

Then we can grant its wish to be expressed.

Once I expressed my anger at my son's mother,

I could feel my love for him and even some compassion for his mother.

Reconnected to my love for my son,

I felt enormous relief.

I experienced a new compassion,

Even tenderness,

For my own deep emotional life,

And for that which underlies my natural emotions.

At the workshop,

I had the opportunity to express my changing feelings,

Grief,

Anger,

Sadness,

Love,

And I also had a glimpse into what doesn't change,

My spirit.

When we decide,

For whatever reason,

And good reasons exist short-term,

That we don't want to express the feeling,

We can let it move back into unconsciousness,

And there it sits,

Quiet for the moment.

But if it is not expressed,

Over time,

The feeling builds up.

The unexpressed feeling grows and becomes a toxic pool,

And sits there off to one side where it festers and drains energy from the present.

Remember,

The health of this model is in the movement.

The extraordinary and life-saving gift of living this model is that the present that slice out of the top keeps coming around again,

Over and over,

Moment to moment.

This I find very hopeful.

The recurring present offers us countless new opportunities for awareness,

And thus new opportunities to uncover our feelings and express what we need to express.

It's even easier than that.

Our feelings have a fierce energy that seeks to be released.

So it's a question of us joining a flow already in process.

The flow of our feelings moving around the circle and up to awareness is their natural motion.

It's what they long to do.

The longing and persistence of our feelings to express themselves gives us a profoundly healthy quality with which to live our lives.

This is a clearing and cleaning process.

As we become more and more aware,

Invite more and more feelings into expression,

The pathway to expression becomes scoured,

Cleansed,

And more open.

A lightness develops,

A confidence that we do not have to be stuck.

The stunning realization comes that it does not matter what the feeling is,

Which one of the many feelings of being human.

It matters only that we become aware of the feeling,

Keep it flowing,

And express it safely.

We are not what we feel,

But our feelings point the way to who we are,

Our essence.

While our feelings are the beginning expressions of our spirit,

It is our spirit that is the one constant foundation underneath all of this movement,

This constant feeling and expression of emotion.

Our feelings originate from and express our larger spirit,

Our essence,

Who we are at the most fundamental level.

We'll finish this class with a spiritual practice.

I am aware.

As you sit quietly,

Visualize a big circle with a slice out of the top.

In the body of the circle,

See your unconscious that contains your natural emotions.

See the thin slice of awareness at the very top of the circle,

Shining with light and openness,

Ready,

Available,

That invites your next awareness and expression.

Now imagine an endless flow of your emotions,

One at a time,

Moving around,

Up into that slice,

Having their time in the sun.

Then acknowledged and expressed,

They drop away,

Down into the soup of unconsciousness,

Thereby creating space for the expression of another essence over and over again,

Without end,

A stream of countless expressions of authentic feeling.

Rejoice in the flow.

Thank you.

I'll meet you next time for Lesson 7,

Living Our Essence,

Where we'll learn to free ourselves from outdated roles we play.

Reviews

Jacob - Dear Special Human Being. Great great help and effective - that session is. Thank you again. With deep love.
Orly. Israel

Wonderful honesty and wisdom as always, thank you Jacob 🙏🏼🌷🌿

💖thank you thank you💖

Inspiring stuff. Thank you.

Thank you for this insightful understanding of our essence.