Your body and mind don’t know the difference between an experience and a thought. Your body is believing the thoughts—the same past experiences. The past programs your body, and you can’t create a new future based on past emotions.
We all have a certain emotional profile or pattern. What is your story? We say things like, “I’m this way because of this”…..or “I don’t deserve it”…..or “I’m not good enough”…”I always mess up”…”I’m such an imperfect person”….
We have a self-sabotage program that stops self-enquiry and the objective unwrapping
of the whole emotional package. That blocks any compassionate, intelligent unfolding of these emotional patterns. Whenever you say, I am this or that you are shaping your mind and body into a destiny.
We start to identify with emotions and take them as “self”. This self-identity can sit at the top of the emotions and act like a judge. Sealing them into an identity packet with a membrane that seals it all in.
The sense of self is the main part, but around the self, you get another layer which is
a kind of a superego self which says you shouldn’t feel like this or don’t bother with that. So, you get something that stops you from penetrating a particular pattern.
There is an original emotional quality – which may be conditioned or biased from the past- and a confused and unwholesome emotional state you form an identity around. Then, the identity can be something that stops any investigation into it. It dismisses it and says it doesn’t matter. The reference framework says things like “don’t make a big deal out of it” or “you can’t cope with it” or “don’t do anything about it” or it’s “silly anyway” and so on. There are different layers; the original feeling, the identity with the emotions and then the super self or the super ego around it.
We want to get past these self-layers into the core process itself because that’s direct. Then, the self-stuff falls away if the original emotional trigger is understood and released properly. Because this “I” can’t do it. This idea of myself. This identification with patterns cannot undo these patterns. It can only add more self onto it. Such as “I should be this way” and “I’ll deal with it if I meditate hard enough or long enough”, “I will get through it.” That doesn’t work.
But what we can call a core presence or a pure presence is an embodied presence or an embodied awareness. These are the terms that we can use to do it. Cultivating a core presence provides the security that the self longs for. But is trying to find it in the wrong places. By trying to cling to something outside itself for security. Even if those things provide no real security at all.
The core presence provides stability, which means the clinging is no longer necessary because the core presence provides the kind of balanced, happy, pleasant quality of being. The self-program doesn’t have to search for something to feel happy about because the core presence is happy. It’s not compressed, contracted, distorted or in pain, so why shouldn’t it be happy? It’s comfortable. So, once we can connect with an inner presence, the unhealthy clinging that begins to make a self out of these emotional programmes becomes redundant, stops, fades, and passes.
The mind is always looking for self-creation. It’s like when you finally sit down after you’ve got all your jobs down. There is a moment of satisfaction—a great sigh of relief. Then, within a few seconds, the mind is looking for something to worry about. It starts looking for something else to build a self around.
This habit of self-creation is the source of boredom. Instead of being driven by this compulsion, pause for a moment. Allow yourself to be here. Let the feeling arise. Feel where it is in the body. Observe and allow the energy to dissipate. Then we realise this is fine, just as it is, and we can relax into the moment. We allow ourselves to be with that spaciousness. We break that restless habit of self-creation. We realise that if we don’t create a self, then nothing is missing.
To the ego undefined being is disaster, death. Because it seems like I’m not anything, the ego mind will desperately find something to grab hold of. It wants to piece some kind of person together. Anything will do. You might find that when you practice letting go, the mind will throw up many distractions and diversions. Memories, a desire here and an aversion there. An old story or an important to-do programme. The mind is desperate for something to hold onto.
Keep practising, pausing, and relaxing in the moment rather than reacting compulsively on automatic pilot, allowing energies to move through and dissipate. Bring more awareness to your own system, which needs to be cared for. What does it need right now? Pause. Come back to the body. Does it need to find more ground, space, or breath? Feel the entirety. Then, once you’ve connected back to your presence, do things with fully embodied awareness if there are things to be done. This way, the whole of life becomes practice—the way of awakening.