This topic is about as complex as it is to experience life as a human being.
Let's start from the beginning. You were born a perfect, innocent, pure bundle of love that brought light and joy to all those around you. Your smiles and cooing invoked great delight for the people who loved you even before they got to meet you. From inside your mother's womb otherwise known as the 'baby room', you could hear and feel the energy of your surroundings.
Conception gives birth to your spirit which begins to grow into human form so that you can come into being. And with this transformation is an ability for awareness. Consciousness is sensory awareness of the body, the self, and the world.
A fetus can be aware of the body through perceiving pain, reacting to touch, smell, sound, and showing facial expressions in response to external stimuli.
Science relates consciousness to neuronal features in the brain with the capacity for introspection and expressing one's mental state verbally or nonverbally.
Spirituality relates consciousness with becoming a sentient being, one who perceives and feels things. This awareness is what allows us to exist with purpose and experience a sense of freedom we all innately crave and long for.
Earlier this year, my godfather and I truly connected for the first time as adults over a long phone call. Our paths have not crossed for many years due to him living in Florida, being highly focused on work, and dedicated to his family life. There is also quite a bit of an age gap between us. He reached out to congratulate me on my marriage and in the midst of our conversation, he mentioned a book that he said had changed his entire life and perspective on reality – The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer.
As a slow reader, I take time getting through books because I like to ingest and digest information. To my surprise, each chapter of this book unpeels a new layer of awareness that in some ways I have known and experienced, but haven't put words to.
The best part of the Untethered Soul is the discovery of the heart and the substantial role it plays in our lives.
In the chapter called 'the secrets of the spiritual heart', we learn that that heart governs the course of our lives through the energy shifts and variations that take place.
Singer says, “The heart is one of our most powerful energy centers through which energy focuses, distributes, and flows. The way that the heart controls our energy flow is by opening and closing. Similar to a valve, the heart can either allow the flow of energy to pass through or restrict the flow of energy from passing through. When our heart closes, it becomes blocked by stored, unfinished energy patterns from our past.
Understanding your heart as a sort of energy thermometer that opens when you feel calm & safe or closes when you feel fearful & insecure, is a useful tool available at all times. The essential piece to remember is to focus on your heart by placing your hand on it whenever you sense a change in your energy flow. Practice centered consciousness by being aware enough in the moment to ask yourself questions that can help you get clarity so that you can return to your regular state of calm & safety.
The questions to ask yourself with curiosity while hand on beating heart are:
'what am I feeling?', 'what is happening to me right now?', 'why am I feeling this way?', 'how do I let this go after I understand what this is?'
And by let this go, 'how do I allow this energy to pass through and become unblocked so that I can open my heart and allow energy to flow again?
This is a powerful practice because you are learning the process of setting yourself free from suffering. Free from fearing the energy of your emotions and free from the torment of your psyche (mind/thoughts). When you experience a shift in your energy, you are checking in with your source- the heart rather than your servant- the mind.
Have you ever heard that your mind makes a good servant, but a terrible master?
Let's loop back to where we started on consciousness- sensory awareness of the body, the self, and the world. Our senses are in charge of converting information and making impressions in our mind. Singer says, 'if the energy patterns that come into our psyche create disturbance, we will resist them, not allow them to pass, and energy patterns get blocked within us.'
So you see impressions are made and released, then processed freely just as long as they do not disturb our psyche.
Long ago when we wanted to escape in our minds because feeling sensations and emotions in our body was too painful, we made an unconscious decision to give our mind all of the power. We told ourselves to stay in our mind and make it in charge of getting us what we want and ensuring we are ‘safe’ from pain.
Because we are a society that leans heavily on the mind while all too often disregarding the heart, we are trapped by our incessant thinking about our psychological well-being because our psyche is fragile and easily perturbed.
The light at the end of the spiraling tunnel is to bravely choose conscious awareness of our heart and senses that live in our body so that we can discover the amazing truth that we actually don't have to put up with, or protect our psyche.
When our mind is bothered by an impression, we use awareness to stop and witness the disturbance, but instead of entertaining the nuisance in our head, we redirect our focused energy to our heart center. This way we process what we are experiencing by acknowledging the shift in our body temperature and the heat in our heart which pain creates. This burning sensation is called the fire of yoga.
We feel it and then we let go because we know that each time we allow ourselves to feel pain, our pain is being purified by our heart.
We no longer have to be codependent on our mind. We don't have to think all of the time. And when our mind is thinking, we don't have to give our attention to it. We don't have to believe the stories it tells us.
When we understand that we are human beings made up of pure consciousness, we can become the observer of our thoughts and feelings, the observer who notices everything through a lens of conscious awareness.
Singer says, 'the overall system of perception is meant to take things in, allow you to experience them, and then let them pass through so that you're fully present in the moment. Experiences are gifts being given to you and as they come in, you are learning and growing. Your heart and mind are expanding and you are being touched at a very deep level.'
By acknowledging that our heart reigns, we are set free to be and live a different kind of reality. We enter the gateway to freedom and liberation. We transform into an untethered soul, the same way we began and came into being.
“The prerequisite to true freedom is to decide that you do not want to suffer anymore. You must decide that you want to enjoy your life and that there is no reason for stress, inner pain, or fear.”
“One of the essential requirements for true spiritual growth and deep personal transformation is coming to peace with pain. No expansion or evolution can take place without change, and periods of change are not always comfortable. ”