Life is Asking YOU to WAKE UP
All you need to do now is learn how to listen...
To survive in our world, it is not at all necessary to access subtle energy or learn how to listen to the quieter currents of connection and flow. Our food is grown on farms and predictably delivered to stores for us to buy. We wear clothes that are made in factories. We have continuous shelter accessible at all times. We carry endless access to information in our pockets. The loud world of ease and distraction is right there, always with us. Modern life supplies our most basic needs with convenience. We don’t have any need to connect to subtle energy. Or is there a disconnected outcome from the life at our fingertips?
Let me take this further. Plenty of people have fulfilling lives without a direct line into anything but the concrete reality of work, money, and stuff. We can talk about the problems of the world in a detached kind of way without really being worried that our own bubble of contentedness is at risk. Most people will live their lives never connecting to more than the ease of the life that is offered.
I understand that for many people the modern life is it. If it’s not, there are psych drugs to help a person out. Add in some talk therapy or maybe a few bouts of intense emotional release and that’s all the support needed for a good enough life. If you are reading this, perhaps it is time to WAKE UP. There’s more out there than what you think.
When I talk about waking up, I’m not talking about seeking that good enough life. I’m not interested in the formulaic techniques that abound to fix what’s broken. When I write about transcending the mental, I’m talking about you creating your own unique meaningful and thriving life. I know that being enlivened, feeling more embodied pleasure, and having a deeply rooted sense of interconnection with reality are the natural side effects of learning to listen to the quieter currents in the universe.
For those who have a contentedness with life but still feel like more is needed, it’s time to find a current of quiet in life. For those who want more from life but can’t seem to find that more in anything modern life is offering, it’s time to go beyond ease to find the quiet self.
Growing into life is the ultimate gift we can give ourself.
When we only listen to loud stimulation in life, we are training the inherent feedback system of the universe to respond with intensity. This results in greater suffering. If we train our body to primarily give us only loud feedback, it communicates with us using disease and sickness or addiction and ecstasy. Loud stimulation in relationships means the relationships are dramatic, chaotic, abusive, or have extreme ups and downs. Then we have our relationship to divine feedback from the unknown. The divine loudly gets attention by providing extreme hurdles or with a sense that life is coming at us in too many directions at once.
Transcending the loud means listening to the quiet.
We have to retrain our bodies, minds, and perspective to shift into subtle energy awareness. When the quiet feedback is heard, our being can receive what we need for our soul to grow without intensity, chaos, or drama.
Stay With Me Here
Many people have a lot of reasons why this cultivation wouldn’t work for them. The loud of the world is so easy to get caught up in. It’s dramatic. It’s interesting. It requires no real work. It is SO comfortable. Cultivating a relationship to the embodied subtle and quiet not only sounds like work. It is work. And honestly, it is not at all blingy. That’s why no one is telling you how important it is. In our world, it is easier to sell quick fixes than lifestyle changes. Entering the realm of the quiet requires actual change.
My Story
When I first got the call to come into my body and listen, I received it the way most of us do - through disease and pain. I had recurring infections. My body was literally attacking its joints. I suffered a major back injury. My body only new how to speak to me in the loud. To treat the pain and sickness, I took antibiotics, pain killers, muscle relaxors, and anti-inflammatories. There was nothing subtle in this clashing of loud and loud, feel and subdue, hurt and fix.
Lucky for me, the lack of practical medical answers to my healing crisis created an opening into passion and purpose. To heal, I needed to immediately start to retrain my body. Treatment meant learning, not just fixing. I started with diet, nutritional supplements, and chiropractic adjustments. Over time, I got strong enough to fast and cleanse. Later I would enter into the subtle through treatments such as acupuncture, herbs, naturopathy, flower essences, Tai Chi, yoga, and energy healing (to name a few). All of these modalities did more to change me into a thriving and healthy person. If I had kept on band-aiding symptoms, the pharmaceuticals would have transformed me into a dependent and pain ridden cripple.
My change in lifestyle created my understanding around how our body talks through our treatment of it. I transcended disease and came out of it thriving.
The unexpected result of healing my body with subtle energy modalities was that my body began to talk to me through them. Acupuncture made it so that imbalances and imminent sickness were felt earlier through my meridians. I could feel exposure to a sickness, then track it entering my body and deepening. I could choose to treat it early or ignore it and suffer the consequences.
I went from feeling out of control in my body to having choice within my own body. I had to cultivate a relationship to listening to my body and trusting what it had to say. Once I could talk to my body, it responded to the treatment forms I chose to focus on - acupuncture, nutrition, and energy healing.
I have not been on antibiotics since I was 18. None of my children ever needed antibiotics for a cold or infection. I never had Tylenol in my home for fevers. I treated my own pain from a broken leg with flower essences. This isn’t me being crazy. My body literally changed when I started listening. I learned how to respond to the body sooner and listen to the body’s responses to the treatment I chose. Going into the realm of quiet literally slowed everything down and changed my relationship to, well, everything.
Using The Quiet to Unstick
We all have a tendency to get stuck. Often blocks pile up so we go from perhaps noticing a recurring pattern or consciously avoiding a dynamic into creating a narrative around why the pattern is occurring and then justifying our avoidance. When we hard wire thoughts into a justified action, we create a stuck that is likely at some point to get loud and cause suffering.
Subtle energy practices move stuck energy without the need to consciously justify or logically understand anything.
When moving subtle energy, there is no need to understand a process to let it go. Consciously engaging in subtle energy creates flow. A relationship to tools that unstick or unblock without the need to consciously check in invites flow. When we trust energy to flow through us and not just around us, we feel the sensation of stuck as an energetic sink. Rather than let this stickiness get caught up in the mind, a relationship to listening to the body and trusting subtle energy just let’s go. No recycling, no reusing, no getting caught up in the drama. No sticking.
Can you imagine how much of your own suffering is the result of not having a practice that invites effortless letting go?
Addiction to positive states of mind can keep us from embracing more mellow subtle energy states of pleasure. We can so easily get completely stuck in positive states of mind and the expectations we hold towards them. Wanting a positive state to stay for as long as possible and getting attached to how that state feels is another form of stuck. This is why addictions are so alluring - the state of being that is entered through the addiction is predictable. We want the same experience instead of being open to somethign new.
Subtle energy practices cultivate a relationship to subtle pleasure in the body.
Life is not about grandiose states of pleasure but rather a felt sense of choice to embrace what is present and let it in. The stuck sense of body changes to let more positive sensations in and those become interesting to the cultivated sense of listening that has developed.
Hard vs Soft Emotional Processing
Let me talk for a moment about processing emotions in a hard way versus a soft way. Hard emotions are the way most of us know how to process emotions. The loop goes from feeling an emotion to needing to understand what it is about and creating a story. This makes the emotion hard and set in our psyche. We then process emotionally with the thought leading and don’t open into anything but thoughts that back up the narrative.
Soft emotions occur when we let go of the thought processes about emotions and their ego identity. We let the emotion speak to us as it gently releases. We go from a known sense of emotion to an unknown sense of emotion that softness the experience of it and lets something new in.
Many subtle energy practices release emotion naturally and in this process we learn how to have soft emotions. Thoughts can be put aside and emotions can be a separate aspect of our being that flows into a more complex understanding of our truest self. We have to trust emotions as messenger, as sensate experiencer, and as a communication link between self and subtle body to allow soft emotions to process as they are. Distrust will pop us into the land of thoughts, rationalizing emotion and putting it in a box that will not allow it to transform itself or our self.
Why Wake Up?
I need to be clear that listening to quiet currents in life does not prevent bad things from happening. All it does is change our relationship to what comes our way. There are always going to be places inside us that are avoiding the quiet and need the loud to wake up.
As we form a relationship to quiet listening, willingness to listen becomes part of the self. This is when everything changes.
Hard times and bad experiences shift into trusted invitations to awaken. Life is embraced, not fought.
Off the top of my head, here are some benefits of learning to listen:
Changes in Life and Body
Connection to Interconnectedness
Healthy Routines
Embodiment Follows
Sense of Choice
Empowerment
Perspective During Hard Times
When The Loud Arises, Listening is Possible
Cultivation of Trust and Surrender
Eros with Life
Ability to Embody Connected Ecstasy
There is a sense of shift that happens when the flow of subtle energy becomes a possibility. Suddenly life is not just happening to us, we are happening to it.
When something bad, negative, or unwanted comes our way there is space to ask what is needed, be curious, and learn. There is an understanding that the deeper self needs access to more life force and the process that is being gone through is in service of support, not hurt. Negative roles of victim, martyr, sufferer, etc don’t sit right with subtle energy. They feel dense and heavy and separate. They can’t be sustained. Negative feelings exist in everyone but it is easier to let them transmute with softness instead of harshly getting attached to them when flowing with subtle energy and quiet listening is cultivated.
Activities To Access The Subtle Energy of Quiet Listening
Finding, listening to, and having regular access to subtle energy requires a practice…or five…or ten. The world is too loud nowadays to simply meditate for 10 minutes a day and be able to tap into subtle energy. Nothing about life is subtle right now.
Seeking quiet listening and subtle energy awareness requires cultivation. Eventually we make a shift from the practices being practices to the practices simply being the self.
Many ancient and wise traditions for embodiment already exist. There is no need to make new ones up. We can trust ancient wisdom to show us the way. These include:
Yoga
Tai Chi
Qi Gong
Meditation
Breathwork
Acupuncture
Energy Healing
BioGeometric Integration or Network Styles of Chiropractic
Homeopathy
Flower Essences
Plant Medicine
Craniosacral Therapy
Bowen Therapy
Myofascial Release Massage
Here’s something to remember. Any embodied action can be done with attention and focus on listening to subtle energy. We just need to choose to listen to what is around us: sensing energy, sinking into sensation and senses, and embracing flow. Accessing subtle energy has to be done with intention and attention. Any practice that has an innate ability to access subtle energy will not work for those people going through the motions of them without paying attention to the intent behind the practice.
Every single day, multiple moments in that day invite us to cultivate a relationship to the senses. Consistent opening into the awareness of listening and sensing subtle energy is simply a matter of choice. Choosing to pay attention to more than thoughts or loud experiences eventually becomes easier over time.
To listen, the key components are intention and attention. Think about the moments in life that invite listening:
Walking
Slowing Down
Noticing
Paying Attention
Breathing Different
Moving Different
Active Listening
Making Music
Cooking
Gardening
Hunting and/or Gathering
Writing
Dancing
Art
Playing
Creating
Fire Watching
Story Telling
I suggest that your own personal cultivation practices be spider-like and have multiple legs.
Some cultivation practices need to be worked at. Find ones that you enjoy that also change your self in some way. Find a practice that keeps your body toned and in shape, to stretch the mind a bit by challenging what it knows. Find a practice that changes the sense of self and creates a connection to the emotional body. Find practices that interest you, that you can get lost in.
BUT…
We need balance. Work and play. Self and other.
I suggest that you find practices you want to embrace rigidly and also ones you want to play with. I also suggest you find practices to do alone and also with others. I suggest finding a healing modality or two to work with when life provides you with a challenge that needs support. This will also mean that your body can communicate in the language of the healing modality to tell you when there is an imbalance or need for healing.
My own practices towards listening and subtle energy are kind of like stone soup. I have a ton of tools and am constantly changing what I utilize according to circumstances and reality. It’s fun to create new subtle energy awareness through various tools instead of rigidly getting attached to just one way of being.
Imagine a world where the quiet subtle energy of life is felt by more people. Imagine the interconnectedness that can come from silently experiencing life. We can create what we need in this life. We just have to slow down and make the choice to do it. What’s stopping you?
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