Overcome Physical Problems through Open Attention

We all know of the intimate correlation between mind, emotions and physical illness. Can resolving emotional stress help you overcome physical pain? And if so, how is it done?

Jane’s hip was hurting a great deal. She had gone to the chiropractor with little results and in the middle of the night the pain woke her up. That’s when she tried Open Attention, one of the Skills for Awakening.

Open Attention guides you to do the opposite of what you would normally do. Normally you would do anything to get rid of the pain. When pain arises, the mind is conditioned to jump into fight or flight mode. But what is the effect of that? You contract around the pain and it gets worse. It’s hard to stress yourself healthy.

That is why we need to approach healing with a healthy dose of wisdom and caring. Although the healthcare system is constantly involved in one war or another we need to ask this: when you fight a war against something that is a part of you, who is going to win that war? Not you.

So when war doesn’t work, then what?  Then it helps to realize that the symptom is not an enemy or a threat, but a part of you that needs help. This is a significant paradigm shift that allows for a completely different and very promising approach. You open to that part of you and pay attention. Thus begins a positive way of healing.

So Jane brought her attention to her hip. There was a burning sensation on the left side. Several times her mind tried to escape the feeling, but she persisted. After a while she became aware of a subtle sensation of nausea in her abdomen. What could that be about?

She switched her focus to the nausea. For a while the feeling in her belly continued to evade her attention, and again she persisted. Realizing the nausea, though subtle, was a powerful and important feeling, Jane became very still. She wanted to get to the bottom of this.

Assisted by that stillness and her determination to heal this part of her, she came into a highly focused state of mind. She evoked the power of unconditional love in her heart (through a process called HeartSourcing) and directed it into the nausea. When her mind and heart was concentrated on the sensation she realized that this was the way she had felt at times of great fear.

As soon as she realized it was fear, it began to dissolve. She did not know what had caused the fear, but she clearly experienced it evaporating. After a short while she noticed that both fear and nausea were gone. Her attention went back to the pain in her hip and that too had greatly decreased. After that she went back to sleep.

When Jane woke up the next morning, the discomfort in her hip had almost completely disappeared. She went to exercise as usual, with no side-effects. The improvement was stable.

How did this come about? Open Attention ends the unconscious rejection, the ‘war’ we wage against the symptom. It replaces this unconscious hostile attitude with an attitude of conscious openness and kindness. This can allow us to find hidden emotions that underlie the symptom, which dissolve through the simple application of awareness. This is the power of self-love in action.

Sadhana (spiritual practice) is the way to seek wholeness on all possible levels of our being. In the process of we are ‘plowing’ the unconscious mind to unearth the hidden obstacles that lie hidden there. They are known as the five kleshas: ignorance of the Self, egoism, attachment, aversion, and fear of death.

As these afflictions come to light one by one, we are able to transmute them into their opposites:

• awareness of the Self,
• ego transcendence,
• non-attachment and clarity of mind,
• acceptance of reality and unconditional love,
• and fearlessness.

The deep-seated fear Jane discovered was some manifestation of these kleshas. It was unimportant for her to find out its origin. What matters is that she brought awareness into the unconscious (the pain, nausea and fear). Like light shining into darkness, it dissolved the fear.

Such healing is part of the profound process of spiritual transformation. Once we have entered the path to enlightenment, the inner obstacles rise up in various ways so we can recognize and resolve them. This is the key to freedom.

Whether you are facing physical challenges, relationship problems, or pain related to your mind and emotions, you may be dealing with manifestations of inner obstructions that cannot be resolved permanently by conventional means.

In my experience most medical or psychological treatments are based on the rejection of symptoms without trying to understand their subtle message. This can produce only a temporary improvement. The deeper emotional cause remains untouched and manifests sooner or later in another symptom. To reach a lasting resolution requires that we free the deeper cause, and that demands a spiritually conscious approach.

I invite you to experience the practice of Open Attention and HeartSourcing through a guided meditation with devotional chant by Krishna Das CD “Living with an Open Heart”. Audio samples and downloads available in iTunes!

For more information go to our website: Skills for Awakening

with love,

Ram Giri

How does it start? Some day you have an experience and your world shifts. Suddenly – or gradually – you come to realize that Spirit is true, that there is a dimension of grace you can enter. At that moment God steps out of a book and becomes a real presence for you (even though you may not relate to a God, which is fine.)

The result is: You have entered spiritual life.

This experience can be a moment of deep inner peace, of being fully alive in the here and now; it may be an experience of emotional harmony or a great opening of the Heart. These are the kinds of decisive experiences after which your life may never be quite the same.

Then we go on a journey. We lose the experience and want it again. A yearning has been awakened. What can we do?

We learn about spiritual practice. We sit still for hours, turn our bodies into pretzels, make pilgrimages to teachers or shrines and especially read lots of books. It is all good.

And where do we end up when we finally arrive where we are going?

We end up once more in deep inner peace, being fully alive in the here and now; we feel again that emotional harmony or that great opening of the Heart.

We return to where we began, in grace, in the breath-taking presence of Being or God. Inside ourselves. In the core.

We end up where it all began – wiser, much more solid, our mind peaceful, our Heart vibrant, big and alive.

The journey is a cycle from you to you, from now to now. You get lost in the middle, even while trying to find yourself. You want to shorten the time it takes to get back to what you are seeking. You are confusing yourself by your seeking.

There are 10,000 things to do while trying to get back to that place of pure grace. Most go in circles. Which are the few that take you straight back to yourself? Which ones dissolve the internal tensions that keep you in internal exile from grace? Which ones can nurture you so deeply you get the stamina to face your own demons – and not in 10 life times, but now?

This journey is not a walk in the park, you may have noticed. It is the greatest adventure bar none open to human beings.

On this road you will have to face any terror your mind can dream up and overcome every habitual pain and confusion.

And the payoff is eternal life. No cheap goal by anyone’s standards.

So again the question: what can take you there? What can give you the access to the pure essence of this highest goal?

Perhaps not surprisingly it is the pursuit of the experiences that began it all. The experiences you will be established in when you have arrived, when you have crossed the ocean of confusion and pain to the other shore of divine bliss.

The essential practices are to step directly into the Promised Land. To stop the 10,000 distractions – and yes, even those that are labeled ‘spiritual practice’ – and enter the Heart, which in its unlimited richness is always waiting for you to come home.

Always waiting. Still waiting. YOU are in there, still waiting.

And I know, so many will read these words and not understand. So let me say it again:

Your Heart is available to you this moment. It is as far from you as the Now. It is the central core of space, as the Now is the core of time. The core contains everything. Why not return to that core in you now?

Oh no, so many say, “I have to continue my sadhana, my spiritual practice” and they wind their legs around their ears and sit their bottoms flat and read the 20^th book that tells them the same thing they cannot hear: It’s inside you now!

So go there! But you can’t. Your thoughts and emotions get in the way. You follow them rather than your hidden instinct that says “Stop it all. Stop. Listen to what he is saying. Let it come in. Maybe there is something to this…”

There are 3 skills you need: Clear the mind quickly and effectively. Bring your confused emotions to harmony. And drink from your Heart the Essence of love that you are secretly aching to feel.

It is the best kept secret in the world. It is secret because we keep it secret from ourselves. We have become lost in a trance state. Somehow we can say the words and believe them; “It’s all inside.” And still we don’t look. Still we don’t become still enough to feel the ravishing Heart Essence. Still we are lost.

I sit with people and I see myself in them, the way I was: tense, the body shifting, the mind not at rest. There is no space for peace to get in. There is no rest in pure love.

Not yet.

But if you want it, stop. Stop now. Make a huge foolish decision to love yourself absolutely! It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.

The first and last and most important of all questions you can ask is “Who am I?”

The answer to this question will put enlightenment in the palm of your hand.

But it’s a trick question. It doesn’t have an answer that can be told. You have to BE the answer to know. And you already are that answer.

Here is one way to look at it:

The core of your being is the spiritual Heart. It is where the above and the below, the left and right, the male and female in you meet and are one. It is the point of balance and harmony.

The experience of the Heart is unconditional love, profound peace, unlimited energy (shakti) and the supreme intelligence that can heal mind, body and soul.

To live with an open Heart is happiness itself and although we are confused a lot of the time, everyone seeks this elusive state of a deep happiness that can last.

We seek it everywhere where it cannot be found. We look everywhere but where it actually already is: in our Heart.

There, in the very core of your being, it waits patiently until you notice.

So why is it so hard to find?

Because the Heart is obstructed by the ‘10,000 things’ of the world, by constant distractions, desires and aversions and by confusion.

This is perplexing, but if you look closely, you can see that the 10,000 things you stress over are really just two things.

The true cause of stress and confusion are your stressful thoughts and emotions.

So when you know how to free yourself of these two things, you have the key to a masterful life. You have the key to true happiness

It actually is this simple! The wisdom of the ages boils down to this: If you have the skills to

• Free yourself of stressful thoughts,
• Release negative emotions, and
• Nurture yourself deeply from the Source in the Heart…

… then you know the secret of true health and happiness.

Using the Skills allows you to enjoy real and rapid improvement. This is not a temporary state of comfort that ends in pain again, but lasting and true freedom.

Still, awakening (or enlightenment) is an experience of grace. We cannot ‘engineer’ it, no matter how hard we try or how skillful we are. Grace comes from surrender and not from an act of will. Awakening comes when we stop fighting against reality as it is, when we find peace in the here and now.

In that surrender to your reality you increasingly become who you really are. You become clear and in that clarity you will find the best path.

The best path leads to you. It leads to your ability to find in your Heart the grace of this moment, the wholeness that is in you, waiting for you to notice.

Because we are asleep to it, it is when we are shaken by hardship that we have a great chance to awaken. When we make it a habit to awaken ourselves, we do no longer have to wait for hardship to shake us. This can help us avoid hardship.

I wish you the peace of knowing that you do live in a universe that is above all a loving place, where even hardship can lead you to grace.

]]> http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/blog/spiritual-anatomy-the-secret-of-your-happiness/feed 0 http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/blog/can-the-body-heal-itself-of-cancer-2 http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/blog/can-the-body-heal-itself-of-cancer-2#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:52:37 +0000 Ram Giri http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/?p=192

This is a question many are debating, but it’s not a question for me. I have experienced it. I know. There is no doubt in my mind and the more I speak to other cancer survivors, the more stories I hear: Yes, definitely the body has the ability to free itself of cancer. It’s abilities are amazing.

When I was 23 I was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease, a deadly cancer that was untreatable at the time. I got a second opinion, and a third, and everyone said the same. I walked around under a death sentence. If you’ve been there yourself, you know how I felt… It was a very dark moment.

And then, suddenly one day, standing in the middle of a city, I had a deep internal spiritual experience. It gave me not hope, but the unshakable certainty that I was not going to die from this cancer. A great wave of profound unconditional love flooded my heart, which had been burdened almost to breaking by this threat to my life. And my heart opened again. And at that instant all the fear and stress and terror left and never came back.

I was at ease. The mind became peaceful again, and my emotions came into balance and harmony.

And right after that moment of freedom a prayer arose in me. I prayed from the bottom of my heart that one day I would be able to share with others this love, this life-giving, exhilarating, all-embracing love. It arose from within me. It was all around me. I was bathed in it and it didn’t depend on anyone, so no one could take it away.

That is the pure divine love every single one of us carries our hearts. It is the fundamental essence of who we are, and it is available at all times in the very core of our being, the ‘Heart cave’ in the middle of our chest.

This pure universal love in us is the most healing force in creation.

I knew it, I had experienced it, and my cancer melted away. It was an experience of grace which to this day I do not understand completely, but I know it was real. I am here after all, am I not? That’s quite real to me.

I knew then that I had work to do. It was a long journey to find the answer to my prayer. After 35 years of study and practice I began to share what I had found: the best and quickest ways we can discover this gift of healing and love in us.

No, I am not promising miracles. I am promising that you can free yourself of what burdens you, what shuts down your heart and what obstructs the healing in you.

And it is clear to me now that we can do it. We can open to this love in us. It is here. It is not out there as we have always assumed. It is here in the depth of our hearts from where it can heal us. And we can remove the stressful thoughts and emotions that obstruct it! And no, you don’t have to have cancer to do this.

This amazing way of freeing yourself of stress, fear and pain and of opening to universal love, is now at your finger tips in a wonderful online course. For 6 weeks you will get daily HeartSourcing meditations that train you systematically to live more and more out of your heart. And you will learn to unburden your heart with skills, that for me are nothing less than miraculous.

I sat in a cave in the Himalayas, meditating. And I noticed I couldn’t escape from myself. I brought all my ‘stuff’ with me into that cave, my stressful thoughts and emotions, and they just kept recycling. Meditation is great, I still do it every day, but I found it is slow compared to the new skills that we are gifted with now.

So if you want to clear your mind, live happily with your emotions and create the best internal environment to heal whatever is wrong with your body, this is as good as it gets. I know my prayer was heard. And I know there is a way we can live in love, in a solid way, as a lasting state, not a momentary glimpse that vanishes again all too soon.

This, and life itself, is the blessing I received and I would love to share with you as much of it as I possibly can.

……………..

To sign up for a FREE 10 day trial of the Course: “Complete Wellness and Deep Healing”…

….please go to BecomingWhole.com -  I’ll see you there!

This is a question many are debating, but it’s not a question for me. I have experienced it. I know. There is no doubt in my mind and the more I speak to other cancer survivors, the more stories I hear: Yes, definitely the body has the ability to free itself of cancer. It’s abilities are amazing.

When I was 23 I was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease, a deadly cancer that was untreatable at the time. I got a second opinion, and a third, and everyone said the same. I walked around under a death sentence. If you’ve been there yourself, you know how I felt… It was a very dark moment.

And then, suddenly one day, standing in the middle of a city, I had a deep internal spiritual experience. It gave me not hope, but the unshakable certainty that I was not going to die from this cancer. A great wave of profound unconditional love flooded my heart, which had been burdened almost to breaking by this threat to my life. And my heart opened again. And at that instant all the fear and stress and terror left and never came back.

I was at ease. The mind became peaceful again, and my emotions came into balance and harmony.

And right after that moment of freedom a prayer arose in me. I prayed from the bottom of my heart that one day I would be able to share with others this love, this life-giving, exhilarating, all-embracing love. It arose from within me. It was all around me. I was bathed in it and it didn’t depend on anyone, so no one could take it away.

That is the pure divine love every single one of us carries our hearts. It is the fundamental essence of who we are, and it is available at all times in the very core of our being, the ‘Heart cave’ in the middle of our chest.

This pure universal love in us is the most healing force in creation.

I knew it, I had experienced it, and my cancer melted away. It was an experience of grace which to this day I do not understand completely, but I know it was real. I am here after all, am I not? That’s quite real to me.

I knew then that I had work to do. It was a long journey to find the answer to my prayer. After 35 years of study and practice I began to share what I had found: the best and quickest ways we can discover this gift of healing and love in us.

No, I am not promising miracles. I am promising that you can free yourself of what burdens you, what shuts down your heart and what obstructs the healing in you.

And it is clear to me now that we can do it. We can open to this love in us. It is here. It is not out there as we have always assumed. It is here in the depth of our hearts from where it can heal us. And we can remove the stressful thoughts and emotions that obstruct it! And no, you don’t have to have cancer to do this.

This amazing way of freeing yourself of stress, fear and pain and of opening to universal love, is now at your finger tips in a wonderful online course. For 6 weeks you will get daily HeartSourcing meditations that train you systematically to live more and more out of your heart. And you will learn to unburden your heart with skills, that for me are nothing less than miraculous.

I sat in a cave in the Himalayas, meditating. And I noticed I couldn’t escape from myself. I brought all my ‘stuff’ with me into that cave, my stressful thoughts and emotions, and they just kept recycling. Meditation is great, I still do it every day, but I found it is slow compared to the new skills that we are gifted with now.

So if you want to clear your mind, live happily with your emotions and create the best internal environment to heal whatever is wrong with your body, this is as good as it gets. I know my prayer was heard. And I know there is a way we can live in love, in a solid way, as a lasting state, not a momentary glimpse that vanishes again all too soon.

This, and life itself, is the blessing I received and I would love to share with you as much of it as I possibly can.

….

PS: If you want to find out more about the Course: “Complete Wellness and Deep Healing; How to heal your life through the power of love” please go to BecomingWhole.com.