The Human Challenge:
Spirit dwelling in a survival suit
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What veils our loving nature are instinctive, conditioned, and rationalized preoccupations with survival-linked insecurities within our selves and and other human beings. From very early in life, we invest enormous life energy in developing, maintaining, and protecting various reflexive patterns and reactive strategies to help ensure survival of species, group and individual.
As a result a primitive bodily “feeling” of self develops unconsciously, largely in reference to formative survival struggles in very early life, prior to development of higher level cognition. All ensuing growth and development incorporate and build upon childhood relationships to perceived or real threats and insecurities. For this reason, patterned behaviors and emotional reactivity to insecurity, worthlessness, and disconnection tend to form our personal identities. We remain firmly identified with these self perceptions until their influences on our internal reality are uncovered, felt, acknowledged, and valued as manifestations of the will to survive. Regularly accessing and processing the stored material from a grounded, present time, compassionate perspective clears space inside for expanded awareness, shifts in personal reality, and, over time, remodeling of the mind. This means that personal fulfillment, wholeness, and self-liberation result from regularly sensing and exploring one's limiting fears and insecurities and, in each moment, choosing to step beyond them into what is being experienced here and now. Thus, the practice of objective, compassionate, body-centered self inquiry, alone or with others, is transformative. The Resource section of this site offers references and slide shows (Body-Centered Self Inquiry, A Body Path to Healing, I Simply Am ...not who I think I am and Discovering Life Before Death) that support this transformative approach. |