Prayer

Dear God ❤️

I ask that you send, tremendous Love and Light into the hearts of us, your ever striving children and that this Light, and your eternal Love may alleviate our stress and fears during this time —and always.

May you fill our hearts with the consistent inner knowing that we are loved, guided and protected always.

May we deeply know that everything always has and always will work out for us because we walk in the Grace of a Loving God and we are forever surrounded by angels of Light that hold us and lift us up.

May the same be true for our whole human family now, and always. God, we ask that your deep abiding peace of the Now fill our hearts in this moment like a radiant light, spreading from our beautiful Hearts to the rest of our bodies, calming our nervous system and grounding us into our earthly lives.

We are safe, we are eternal Love in earthly bodies, God is within us, the Light of God is within us now, the Light of Love fills us now, the peace of God is within us now.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

All is well. All is well. All is well.

Goodness here, Grace here, Miracles here. We open our hearts fully to the love of God.

We allow complete and profound healing now.

It is done. So be it and so it is.

Amen.

So be it and so it is. Amen.

Ghosts From the Past Rising to The Surface

I first recalled the memory of the old hospital building during a breathwork session when I was 19. Not that I hadn't heard stories of how I spent extended periods there at age 4 and again at 5.

During my breathing session, I felt the whole experience inside my body.

The night I had blood in my stools. Walking down the endless winding staircase from the apartment where we lived in Copenhagen with my mom.

The hospital was cold, hollow and half empty; the snow was flying outside in the dark. My mom disappeared and I was put into a white bed by a nurse. I remember her back when she left the room. Her long thick braid against her crisp white uniform.

She told me I could call her if I got scared, she said her name was Mona. I woke up freezing cold in the night in my solo room with very high ceilings. I was frightened and called out, Mona, Mona, Monaaahh...light on in the hallway and steps approaching. But Mona didn't enter; a gruff nurse came in her place and told me to be quiet.

As I was breathing deep and fast, I was flooded by these repressed memories. I cried and cried like a little kid from this overwhelming loneliness and fear deep inside my body. I curled up into a tight fetal pose, sobbed so violently that I broke little blood vessels all over my face. When I was all done and quiet again, I had tiny red dots covering my face.

The following hospital days are a blur, and what do I know about what they were doing to me? I know; it included drinking contrast fluid so they could see my insides on X-rays. Well, my breathworker, a nurse, deciphered that for me. The glass they told me to drink thick white chalky tasting fluid from seemed as big as my head, it was hard to get down. They had to keep pushing me to drink up, drink up, and then I went into the X-ray machine.

Needles. I had blood drawn all the time it seemed. I don’t remember my mom there but sometimes my dad would be there and then I would sit in his lap when my blood was drawn. The hospital must have been cold because, as I remember, he was always wearing his sheepskin coat, soft suede on the outside, and curly fur on the inside; it smelled like a wet animal.

My breathing session didn't do away with that primordial fear; it's still in there and has often shown up in my relationships. But over the years, I have learned to hold myself through it better and better.

Not perfectly sometimes, I still think it's someone else's fault if I feel lonely and abandoned. But I have the tender awareness of what happened to me, which, in the grand scheme of bad things that happen to kids, is not so bad. Yet it felt really awful in my body.

A recent coaching client had a similar experience of being left to cry; it was still in her body and showed up in her love life.

That's how tender we are as children; the neglect that is so commonplace mares us for life, but the good news is that in realizing and feeling these old wounds, we can gradually learn to stay close to ourselves again, to come back inside our bodies with presence and tend to the pain and the fear the way we would have wished our caretakers would have.

We slowly start to realize that our own full Presence is Love. Is God. As we love and hold ourselves through the arising pain, we reconnect to the Divine Presence inside, and slowly it grows and slowly we fill ourselves with the Light of our own Divine Being.

That painful wound that has caused so much pain and shame and drama becomes the very portal into a self-holding and self-love that brings us closer to our own creator. To True unconditional Love. To God.

When I was living in Copenhagen for a little while again after 25 years abroad. I did a some googling and, lo and behold found one of the retired nurses who had worked at the hospital in the 70s.

I invited her over for lunch and she told me that she had been so young when she worked there, in her early 20s. The head nurses had instructed them sternly on not giving the little kids affection and compassion. Don’t hug and hold them: you don't want these kids to become needy, do you?

I wonder if they realize now that becoming needy and codependent is how most kids respond to early neglect.

In case you are wondering if our Breathe Release it, All practice goes to that depth. The answer is no. We don't breathe as long or as hard in Breathe Release it All as one would do in a Rebirthing breathwork session -- so the releases are much more gentle and gradual.

The Breathe Release it All practice is a fantastic tool for accessing the body's energy field and illuminating what wants to be felt and released gently. We teach the method in classes and retreats.

Try Breathe Release Practice HERE

Danish Hygge Tip #6: clean your home

Not in that boring, oh, no, I have to clean my house way. But with love. I start small. The way I might lovingly care for a plant, the way I would carefully apply color to a painting or brush a child's hair.

I start with one corner. Imbue it with my presence. My full attention and care. I move things out of the way and clean underneath them and decide what I really want to keep. Maybe it's time to let some things go. Perhaps they have outlived their purpose and no longer contribute in a useful or beautiful way to my living space. When I clean and organize my space, it starts to sparkle with my Spirit energy. Clutter is stagnant and heavy. Could you break it up?

Do you also find that you want to keep going back to look at an organizing project? It feels good to be in the energy of a newly organized space. Alive and bright. It’s like you have spiritualized a little portion of your domain.

Because cleaning tends to overwhelm me, I divide my space into sections when I clean. The space to the left of the sink. Just that. Could you make that perfect? Clear, clean, and organized. Feel that. Then scrub I scrub my sink. So nice. Maybe that's all I want to do today. Or the space to the immediate right of the sink could also use a little sparkle. I make it manageable. Whatever I do will make me feel better and inspire me to do more. Momentum.

I might polish a window. Just one. See how much more Light pours in and how bright it feels. A home can be a welcoming sanctuary when thoroughly imbued with attention and our Spirit's Presence. It grounds me. Deeply. Into the moment. The simplicity of scrubbing, polishing, and wiping. I want to let it be an act of love. Even if no one else is around to see the sparkly efforts of my labor, I do it for myself. For love and gratitude of the home.

It feels like I’m pulling Spirit in and through me and into the world. It makes me will feel more sparkly and clear as well.

If you read this far, you may be wondering what I am wearing on my head. It's a tea cozy. It fits over a tea pot and keeps it nice and warm for a long time. This particular tea cozy is from the 1970s. It was in my home growing up, and on cold mornings, it was nice to stick this on your head to warm your ears.

The Kingdom Lies Within Surrounded by a Mote Full of Sadness

My smartphone. The nifty little tool that has become my constant companion with its sweet promise of keeping me connected to everything and everyone I ever met. Yet, more often than not, it insulates or isolates me from the very part of myself that needs me most desperately. My contracted, wounded self that can only ever truly heal through my own loving presence and awareness. Yes, that unwelcome part of me that feels anxious, unloved, and devoid of meaning -- that’s the portal to freedom, and my phone and every other distraction is like a watchdog that makes sure I don’t see this doorway to liberation that, as it turns out, is right there within me. 

The first time I realized I was addicted to my iPhone was at a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Along with everyone else, I had turned in my phone, keys, and wallet when I arrived. We weren’t allowed books or journals, and for the duration of the retreat, we weren’t allowed to talk to each other or even look at one another. Boom. There. Just me. In my own company. For ten days.

Initially, it seemed like a relief. A soothing silence. No obligations. No demands. Just meditate, eat, and sleep. Repeat. Then the anxieties started to appear. The emotional discomfort. The loneliness. Oh, the terrible loneliness. The sadness. The grief. On the third day, during lunch, I found myself lying on my bottom bunk in fetal pose, staring at the wall, so sad and no one to turn to. No one to hold me or soothe me. All alone and so, so, so wanting to pick up my phone and call a friend. Or at least text a friend who would surely tell me something to the effect of: you are not alone, the world is full of Love, and God loves you, remember? You always say that? Right now, the angels and guides are around you to heal you and guide your way. Then I would not feel so terribly alone and meaningless anymore.

Or, short of talking to a friend, there would be Facebook. Oh, sweet Facebook. Where I would scroll and scroll my awareness into someone else’s life and woes, and then I would mercifully forget my own miserable rendition. Within seconds I would be free of being with me, and instead, I would be with a friend or an acquaintance, learning the details of what they were having for dinner -- which would surely be more interesting than the meager cup of tea and fruit that was our retreat dinner. Then I would forget all about the piercing pain in my heart, the anxious fear in my gut, and the aching doubt that my life really means anything. Or I could get lost and outraged by the terrible news of the world, or look at old pictures and let myself journey to happier times when I wasn’t balled up on a dumb bunk bed, alone, feeling sadness and despair rise like a dark tide with no promise of ever subsiding again. 

Curled up into this utter smallness, I realized how much I had come to rely on my phone to help my ego short-circuit something that wanted to happen within; an invitation to be suspended fully in the void, the scary portal where the ego dissolves (a less scary word than dies) and you realize, I am not kidding, you realize for real, that you are all of it. I mean, all of it. You are all the worst villains that ever lived, as well as all the victims and everyone else too. That’s such a crazy concept to the ego that it/we just don’t want to know because it would change everything. Everything. When I hate you, I hate myself. When I love you, I love myself. 

This we want so badly not to know that we would rather escape endlessly by being present to something else, someone else, just not to my own self and my own pain, and then I cried. I bawled. No, not out of longing for my iPhone, but out of longing for God to love me and reveal to me my own Divinity within me. But nothing was revealed; it was just me, in pain, alone, in the barest of rooms, missing one of the few daily retreat meals, and I bawled, sobbed until snot and tears were soaking my sheet, and no one brought me a Kleenex. 

I did make it back to the meditation hall for the next hour-long session. Pounding cry-headache, puffy eyes, stuffy nose. I hate it when I can’t breathe through my nose, but as I began noticing my breath slowing down and I started yet another body scan, a quiet peace crept in, and I wasn’t alone. There were other struggling souls seated in rows all around me. Some were quietly sniffling as well. Slowly, my own awareness, which is my Divinity, started illuminating my body's energy field. Part by part. Patiently my awareness loved me back into wholeness. The loneliness and the fear didn’t evaporate, but it was held. By me. My strong, steady Presence was there with those tender parts in me that don’t believe she’s loved and that her life has meaning, and like a sobbing child, these parts began to calm down. The petrified and fearful energies within me started to relax and give into the blanket of steady Love that I was providing by simply being there and not running off into cyberland or down memory lane.

Over the course of this ten-day retreat, I experienced myself as pure, radiant, orgasmic love energy imbuing and embracing every corner of my Being. I know without a doubt that radiant Divine energy is my true nature and that only my distracted, tormented mind with all its fluctuations stands in the way of me, any of us, experiencing this all the time. The distractions are many and oh-so clever. Some are disguised as very noble pursuits: I have to be there for my kids, my friends, and students, develop my business, clean my house, sort through stuff, get rid of stuff, buy stuff -- or even run off to a yoga class, the noblest distraction of all of course.

But then there is that less noble distraction that’s closer than close. All the time. In your pocket, your purse, or right next to your bed when you sleep. The smartphone. Always there beckoning for attention with the promise of something exciting for you: a text from that special someone, yay, I matter! A growing number of likes on my recent post. Yay, I matter! An actual phone call, yay, I really, really matter. And then, of course, also the text you didn’t want. Oh, no, I don’t matter! Or the text that never came, Oh, now I know, I really, really don’t matter! And we pick it up, again and again, to check for something, anything to signal a change for the better, and so we are steadily whipped around and interrupted and sidetracked again and again from what we intended to do. 

I recently read that if you pick up your phone within the first hour of awakening, you are likely to be 30% less productive for the rest of the day and that Americans pick up their phones every 10 minutes on average. So I decided to put this to the test. Notice when I pick up my phone, which is constantly! Terrible. So I started turning my phone off—all the way. Not look at it in the morning before my meditation, writing, and tea. I had to get an old-fashioned analog alarm clock for my bed stand. On Ebay, I got the same alarm clock I had as a teenager in Denmark. I know, a bit nostalgic and shoppy of me. Now, when I do have my phone on, the sound is off. I will look at it when I want to and check what I need to take care of. It’s hard. Still. People expect us to be right there—all the time. Well, I am just not. Not anymore. I am right here with me and what I need to get done.

I want to be conscious of where my time goes, and I want to be conscious of my numbing agents. Because I don’t drink, it’s easy to think that I don’t numb out when my heart aches, but I do, and my iPhone is absolutely a numbing agent, and when I pick it up, instead of feeling what is moving inside of me, I miss an opportunity to be with a part of me that needs me. It’s like being a pretty bad, neglectful parent to myself. 

I have come to see it that way. My Divine, Present Awareness is my True Self (I know I love to capitalize these wonderful words) and that True Self can heal through the power of Love because it IS Love. Whatever within me doesn’t yet trust that I am safe and loved and ok as I am, a stumbling work in progress, flawed and human; that sad, scared part of me needs my Presence. But it’s not very pleasant to feel sad, lonely, and scared. It’s pretty awful -- especially if we don’t believe that anyone is coming for us. Then the mission becomes one of finding a bad babysitter who will hush the baby so we don’t have to deal with it. Enter the smartphone. A really bad babysitter. A good instrument for taking care of business and communicating and even indulging in Facebook but not a substitute for really good, loving parenting of yourself. 

When we don’t source the Deep Present Love from within, our Love essence that genuinely has our back, we will look for it outside of ourselves. And be disappointed. Ouch. Over and over. It’s the nature of it. No one can be a lasting substitute for our own Divine connection. Anitya, anitya; means impermanence, impermanence. When we stop reaching outside ourselves for something impermanent to rescue us, we are left with one option: total surrender to the Divine within. 

Direct the Love in Your Heart to the Places that Hurt

Try this when you are hurting.

Take a deep breath into your heart space, filling your chest cavity with luminous Light.

On the out breath direct the Light directly into the part of you that hurts, feels contracted, hides. You might add words; on the in breath: through Divine Love, on the out breath: I heal and release the pain, the fear.

BREATHE RELEASE IT ALL

I remember my first breathwork session in Copenhagen in 1991. It was a practice called "Rebirthing." It brought some very old memories of early hospitalization to the surface, manifesting as a deep fear of abandonment and digestive issues.

It was my first fundamental understanding of how the body stores all unprocessed feelings. Around that time, I also learned to meditate in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I was initiated into the so-called Ngondro practice. The second step of the training was to visualize cleansing nectar flowing through my body. I was told that this practice would gradually clear my mind of all the imprints or patterns that manifested as repeated negative experiences.

The concept that the mind is reflected in the body and vice versa was a new paradigm. It soon became apparent that alcohol was impeding my access to the information or feeling vibrations that were stored in my body and that if I wanted to release the contracted energy that housed unprocessed feelings, I would have to be very judicious about anything that numbs my capacity to feel the emotions that live in my body.

Over the years, I kept going back to Breath Guides, both in Europe and in the US, and it continues to amaze me how much my body can store and how much of what I have experienced is at least partially 'undigested' and needs multiple rounds of feel-it-to-heal-it before I can feel light and free again.

Eventually, I started working with my breath, my prana, my life force, my Spirit power more consistently until breath practice was incorporated as a solid, twice-daily practice. Doing it daily doesn't necessarily mean it's easier or that I have magically cleared the entire energy field of my body. But it is a very effective way of catching what is in the process of contracting or stagnating energetically -- and continuing to be willing and self-loving enough to penetrate the deeper layers of fear and hurt that still remain.

During a Breathe Release it All retreat or workshop, you will learn everything we know about clearing your body of the contractions that show up as anxiety and painful, repeated dynamics in relationships.

Anything that has yet to be acknowledged in the body's energy field will find a way to make itself known. So much better to catch the contracted patterns before they manifest as more pain in our outer experience.

Everything is an inside job. When we heal on the inside, we gradually heal our lives on the outside.

Get out from under your numbing agents

Any dependence you might have; on sweets, shopping, alcohol, nicotine -- or even your own emotional drama all takes a toll on your physical well-being. You become unfocused, drained, sluggish, and downright blue. ​

Until we heal emotionally, we use these numbing strategies to help us not feel the pesky anxiety we lack practical tools for.

We mask, we cope, we cover up.

Or we make it someone else's fault that we feel anxious and unfocused. Then the mission becomes to change someone else. This is just another distraction from the real issue.

We can judge these numbing behaviors all day long.

We can shame ourselves, but the truth is that any use of any soothing agent is understandable because the alternative is to feel the fear and tension we are trying to mask. Without tools, that is just way too uncomfortable because we haven't learned what to do with these tight emotions.

This is where the Heal What Hurts Journey comes into the picture. The Heal What Hurts practice is an effective way to address what is really happening inside of you when you pour yourself another glass of wine or shop for one more of that thing you don't need.

When you go through this journey, you learn the life-saving skill of addressing the samskaras that cause the triggered state in the first place.

You become proficient in guiding divine love into the wounded knots that cause addictive behaviors. Your relationships improve because you no longer look to the other person to soothe your inner state. Being in you becomes a soothing experience in and of itself. For real.

You will no longer need that extra cocktail or chocolate bar. Now your body can heal. Now your focus returns.

Your body will find its natural state of glowing health. Your mind will become laser sharp. You finally emerge from the thick fog and become clear in your thinking and life choices.

You become free to be all that you are meant to be.

I urge you to consider learning these skills and teaching others.

Love,

Maria

PS Respond to this post if you would like to schedule a 10-conversation with Maria about this journey and ensure this is the right time for you to embark on this course of yogic healing.

An Emotional Trigger is an Opportunity for Healing

When your partner does that thing that makes your stomach flip and sends your heart into your throat, you are in treacherous territory.

In yoga, we say that a samskara has been activated.

Your survival mechanisms have kicked in. You are now seeing the world through a sticky filter plastered with old hurts and fears.

Don’t get me wrong. What’s happening may not be great, and your partner may be a total jerk—it’s possible. But when a samskara is at play, you do not see clearly, and chances are you are about to star in a nerve-wracking repeat movie—the one where it never ends well for the hero, you. So, understandably, you are feeling terrified.

You must navigate the next few moments with great care.

By the next few moments, I mean the next 90 seconds. That is about how much time you have to catch yourself before you are in full-blown trigger mode, and there is little to nothing you can do to make it back to the shore of sanity.

If you do find yourself emotionally flooded, your best bet is to remove yourself from the whole mess.

But chances are your super powerful, trigger-driven ego will want to dive in and get muddy—really muddy. There is an almost addictive quality to the sparring of two self-righteous egos—defending, attacking, dodging, proving, and retaliating.

Think of two bulldog lawyers going at each other in a courtroom with the sole aim of making themselves feel big and the other one small—the smaller, the better.

Try not to sink into this dynamic.

It’s so painful, and no one wins. But forgive yourself if it happens, though. It’s what human egos do. Just look around the world—more than anything, please know that there is hope.

If you learn to notice the early, subtle signals that you are emotionally triggered then you do have a choice about stepping out of the impending blowout, a repetition of an old painful story.

You really do have a choice here. Claim it:

>> You don’t have to play out the whole, predictable, painful story with your partner yet again.

>> You don’t have to put your nervous system through the life-draining cycle of adrenaline and cortisol rushing through your body.

>> You can teach yourself to notice that first flutter of a trigger in the energy field of your body by consistently paying attention to your sweet inner landscape.

>> You can contain the drama and hold yourself through it.

But if you are not finely attuned to your own body, you will miss the first signs that you are scared. You may not sense that you are suddenly breathing a little faster, and your stomach feels full of angst.

The 90 seconds will fly by, and you can no longer stop what’s about to happen.

Mindfulness isn’t just about creating peace inside; it’s also about noticing when you are about to feel anything but peaceful.

It’s about being aware of the early changes in your energy and aligning yourself with a deep, still presence within. Your higher self is more than capable of holding your wounded pieces when they act up if you stay grounded in your breath, in your body, in your spirit-self. It’s a practice—it’s a new way of living.

You have to learn to stay with the energy knots of your samskaras when they are activated and getting ready to attack and defend. Remember, those pieces of you are fighting for your survival. Those pieces do not feel loved, they don’t feel safe, and they are pretty sure they don’t belong and never will.

Next time you feel the early flutters of being triggered or see it coming in your partner, do this as best you can:

1. Breathe: Notice your breath and keep it deep and slow. Relax the belly so your breath can get in. Notice the feeling of your breath inside your nose. Inside the right nostril, inside the left. Breathe deeper than you think you can.

2. Be in your body: Feel your body in great detail. Notice where your feet are. Notice the ground below. Notice your hands. Let your jaw relax, drop a little open even. Notice the flutter in your gut, your heart, your throat. Be with it. Surround it with your awareness. Get grounded inside your own body.

3. Eye gazing: Have you noticed that when you or your partner is triggered, you avoid eye contact? When we gaze into each other’s eyes for even mere seconds, we call each other back into our spirit-guided selves. Our storytelling egos avoid that. Ask your partner to look you in the eyes. Neither of you will want to. Do it anyway. The trigger story will lose its grip on the two of you, and your spirits will remind you why you are together.

When you are in a trigger-driven blowout, you are experiencing an ego-produced drama.

This dramatic play will collapse the moment you or your partner reconnects to your spirit-self. It can’t survive unless you both participate; it takes two to tango. If just one of you stops, it stops.

Our villain projections, often accompanied by phrases like “you always” and “you never,” can’t stand up to the recognition of the other person’s humanity.

Our samskara-infused egos don’t hold complexity well and like to tell dramatic stories that have no grey zones, “You are always late, and you never help me,” or, “You never support me, and you always tear me down.”

When your spirit-self is back in the driver’s seat, it may sound more like this, “Sometimes you are late, and it hurts, and I get scared. But other times I am late, and for that, I am so sorry.”

When you find that ability to stay loving and present with yourself—and even with the other, when the trigger process has been set in motion—you are approaching emotional liberation.

Yes, chances are you will slip up now and then, and the kind of situation that has triggered you for a lifetime will still give you butterflies. You will probably still slip into at least a mini-version of what used to become a full-blown drama. The deepest samskaras haven’t necessarily disappeared, but you have learned to hold them differently.

Now, it is important to remember that there are truly unhealthy relationships where you continuously trigger each other at the deepest level, which seems to be the only purpose of the relationship.

At some point, you might have to decide that the relationship has helped you see some really important things about yourself, but it might not be the one that you continue to use as your vehicle for growth.

It is important to differentiate between relationships in which you are growing—coevolving with your partner and abusive relationships that tear you down and keep you in a constant state of stress.

There are triggers in all relationships, and learning to avoid the blowout is an essential life skill, but if the relationship is so toxic that you can’t take a deep breath, it may be time to walk away.

Are you willing to take responsibility for loving yourself enough to hold the places that hurt but also understand that the story born out of that hurt has played out enough?

It’s time to say stop and step out of the drama.

If, however, your relationship teaches you to hold yourself and the other in greater and greater love and presence is may be worth fighting for.

How to Stop Emotional Triggers from Draining our Energy & Complicating our Relationships.

One moment you are fine, and the next, your chest is tight and your breathing shallow.

Like you just ran too fast, and you are trying to catch your breath. Only you didn’t move at all. You were just sitting there when someone did that something that always triggers a cascade of physiological symptoms.

What the hell just happened?

More often than not: nothing super terrible actually happened except in the energy field of your body. Something within you was reminded of some similar incident, probably old, that was never resolved.

Something that scared you.

Something that made you feel like you were small (which you probably were) and not safe, not loved, and didn’t belong. Pretty much the most awful vibrational feeling inside a human body and experienced by all of us but rarely talked about.

Because who wants to be a needy trembling child in an adult body?

No one does.

So we numb out that embarrassing little voice that screams for safety, holding, and reassurance. And every one of us has our personal, habitual way of dealing with being emotionally triggered:

>> Lash out: make that other person understand that they must change immediately and forever, so we never have to feel that feeling again.

>> Numb out: Cocktails? Food? Electronics? Porn?

>> Check out: I am shutting down, not feeling this, walking away.

Either way—a lot of outs.

But the only way to heal these tender places within is to come in—deeply in.

Back into those hollow places in the energy field of our bodies, in which we abandoned ourselves when we were defenseless against the apparent messaging that we were not important and not safe.

Why would I want to be with that me when the other children, my parents, my siblings didn’t want to be with that me? Clearly, that me is not lovable and should be stowed away, never to be heard from again.

But as long as these places within, in Yoga we call them Samskaras, remain abandoned and rejected, they cast a spell on us and on our relationships. As long as they remain unconscious and unhealed: we are not free.

We live with low-grade (or not so low-grade) anxiety because we never know when we might be triggered and feel, yet again like we are not safe, not loved, and don’t belong.

But Samskaras are not that easy to talk about and even more challenging to feel because they generally belong in the category of what we adamantly don’t like about ourselves—and each other, for that matter.

They act like energetic landmines that go off when triggered, and then we quickly try to move on and hope they never embarrass us again—but they always do.

A Samskara is like a deep scratch on the film (of our mind) that we project out into the world, and they become an integral part of how we experience life. They are essentially like a speck on the lens that is projected onto the silver screen of our lives. We are hypnotized into believing that the movie is coming at us and not emanating from us for better and worse.

Short of living in isolation from human interaction, chances are someone will step on this tender wound again—and again. Ouch. And as we become better observers of our own lives and patterns, we might even notice how cleverly we attract just the sort of person and situation that will shine a light on what we need to heal within.

By triggering us—ouch again.

But there is another way. We don’t have to live in an endless cycle of compulsive repetition of a painful story, and the healing medicine is readily at our disposal. At everyone’s disposal because it is the essence of who we are.

What it takes is courage. The word courage comes from the French word ceur, which means heart (which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like cure).

It takes the courage to love what hurts the most. How do we do that?

We become present. We stop shoving the pained places into the deepest basement of our subconscious. We do the opposite.

We welcome the triggered moment because that is when the basement door is cracked open, and we have the opportunity to shine a light on what wounded piece of us lives in there.

For example, he says that thing, she texts that thing, or worse, he doesn’t text back. They are not there. I am alone, and no one loves me, and my gut is in knots.

That moment—at that moment, breathe and be with the energy field of your body. Feel into it. Deeply. Notice the intricate sensation of the triggered state.

Where do you feel it?

In the tummy? The heart? The throat?

Notice. Be willing, be courageous to be with that place in your scared body.

Don’t lash out. Don’t numb out. Don’t check out—just breathe.

Be here with you and the feeling precisely as it shows up.

The vibration of fear? Loneliness? Despair? Sadness?

Be with it. Does the emotional vibration have a shape? Color? Density?

How old is this feeling? It is not the first time you have felt this. Feel back into time.

Let this energy knot tell you its story. Let your Samskara show you other times when this feeling was overwhelming.

Let images, feelings, and memories arise naturally. Maybe you will discover another time when this feeling was flooding you.

Be with that part of you—that younger you who felt this way.

This little version needs you so much. Be with yourself the way the world, your caretakers, and your friends could not. Just be with the pain. Hold it with as much presence as you can muster for as long as you can tolerate the emotional discomfort—then release.

That’s good for now. This place inside you has received a dose of your loving presence. The healing has begun, and the present-day situation that triggered you just then has likely lost a bit of its charge.

Breathe. Tears are ok. Be with you.

This is the courageous work of self-love and presence.

This is your transformation.

Now no one can ever make you feel alone again because you have got your back from now on. Your mighty, loving, compassionate presence is with you now and will never leave you.

Presence is to notice, be aware, be here. Be here for you the way no one else fully can or ever will.

This willingness to be present with you is your direct link to the source itself.

From now on, it will be better—just breathe.

LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW YOU CAN HEAL YOUR EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS WITH A COURSE IN FREEDOM

You Never Fall In Love With The Wrong Person

You fall in love with the person who is your energetic match, that perfect someone who embodies the best and the worst of what is familiar to you. If there is pain buried within you (and there is), you will be drawn to just the person or situation that will bring that pain to the surface. You do this because you are wise. You want to heal what hurts.

It really is just the way the saying goes: you cannot heal what you cannot feel. That doesn’t mean that you stick around for abuse of any kind, but it does mean that you own why you were drawn to this person or that situation in the first place.

You own what uncomfortable or downright scary feelings are brought to the surface in your dynamic with this person. Because that moment of feeling emotionally triggered is a holy opportunity to heal something that is stuck and frozen in your energy system.

Unfortunately, we are all so entrenched in duality that we immediately go to work trying to heal what hurts inside by attempting to hand someone else a manual for how they must treat us — how they must change so we don’t have to feel this inner pain. The manual is often a very far cry from who they naturally are. This becomes a life-sucking endeavor and more often that not it ends in a feeling of defeat and despair — both for you and for the person you are trying to change.

Until you wake up.

Until the day you realize that the wound this person poked at with their behavior is old. Very old. Very tender and very much in need of love and attention. But not their attention and love. Your attention and love. Well, okay, it’s very nice if they want to participate in the healing, holding and loving.

But your healing cannot depend on someone else’s willingness to love you and change for you.

To heal what hurts depends solely on your willingness to love you. To be present with what hurts within you. To identify what is really happening inside when you are triggered and let the messenger off the hook as soon as possible so you can get to work on the real issue. The frozen, pained place within you that contracted into what we in yoga call a negative samskara: an energetic groove that plays out a painful script in your life, again and again.

You must learn to differentiate between the current messenger (the person who triggers you today) and the original culprit (the person or situation that hurt you ages ago) and the Divine Spirit within you, the eternal you, that is completely intact and has the love power to heal the soul wound so it need not play out with anyone ever again.

This is how you really heal what hurts. This is true emotional freedom. This gives you choice. You will no longer be compulsively attracted to people and circumstances that play out in predictable and painful ways. You will own the moment of being triggered. You will learn to feel the energetic location of the trigger and you will learn to stay present and non-reactive.

If you resonate with the above, you are not alone. While it may not be in romantic relationships that everyone feels triggered, I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t have more than a few negative samskaras left that get activated under the RIGHT conditions, creating inner and outer life-sucking drama.

If you are ready to do the liberating work of melting your triggers then listen to my podcast about the nature of emotional triggers in romantic relationships. [https://www.mariatoso.com/heal-what-hurts-podcast-1]

And know that I am here. I deeply understand the pain and frustration that these unconscious scripts have caused in your life. In your closest relationships. The pain can be so deep it doesn’t seem worth entering into and yet, until you hold these holy places with your powerful presence and love, they will not budge. They will not magically heal on their own. You may change partners, friends and geographical locations, but as long as this energy knot is unresolved within you, it will find a way to show itself until you turn inward instead of outward.

In my decades of pursuing the healing and releasing of my samskaras, I encountered numerous practices and techniques, but most didn’t produce lasting results so I had to find my own way to truly feel, soften and release the energy knots that were wreaking havoc on my life.

The result is my gentle, yet laser-sharp 8-step program: The Heal what Hurts Method. Students and clients who have completed this process learn to identify the energetic location of their triggers, the script they contain, and how they can avoid playing out a painful story yet again. Students report feeling so much less reactive and vulnerable in their intimate relationships. Far more free to choose wisely. Much less compelled by unconscious drives to repeat the negative script yet again.

You really can change the painful dynamics of your relationships. But it’s an inside job that only you can do. Healing your emotional triggers is the most profound inner work you will ever do and it will impact every single area of your life.

I invite you to begin the life-changing process of The Heal what Hurts Method. Don’t put your nervous system through another painful, emotional drama.

You hold the key to that deep sense of love and belonging that you and every human being long for, you just have to learn how to turn it.

CLICK HERE to learn more about upcoming Heal what Hurts Courses now called A Course in Emotional Freedom. .

Hygge is presence and intention and we need it more than ever

Hyg·ge /ˈh(y)o͞oɡə,ˈho͝oɡə/ The word is Danish and regarded as defining of my culture which is, yes, Danish. Hygge is used as both an adjective and a verb. For example, an event or a place can be “hyggeligt” or people can 'hygge' together. Hygge defines a special, warm, kind quality of coziness, presence and comfortable conviviality that gives everyone present a feeling of belonging and safety.

As a native Dane,  I want to tell you in more detail what it is and why it might be the key to why Danes consistently rank as the happiest people in the world. I am convinced it’s because they know how to hygge and they do it a lot — and when they don’t, they really, really miss it, very quickly.

So what is this elusive quality that is so healing and so nurturing? Well, hygge has become a buzz word in the US and most of what I hear called hygge (no, you can’t call a moisturizer hyggelig), is not really it. So why is it so hard to get the concept across? It’s such a deeply ingrained part of a people, this Nordic tribe that makes it through a very long and dark winter by huddling around fireplaces and short of that, candles, many, many candles. But it’s more than that. It’s an attitude of realness and presence, genuine caring and empathy and a concern for the welfare of all and just a little less of an emphasis on the promotion of self. The ultimate expression of this is of course our political system that doesn’t allow anyone to go hungry, or without medical care and education. But in the day to day it’s expressed as this quality named Hygge, it’s like an energy that permeates the tribe and the cities and countrysides. Like it’s all created first and foremost for people, not for economic growth. The beauty of the landscapes, the care for the old buildings and the cobblestones that divide the sidewalks. 

Allow me to share some hygge practices with you and show you how you might bring more hygge into your daily life and relationships...

Tip #1. Be present, relaxed and real. So what do I mean by that? It's a gaze. Not a flirty gaze or a stare, it's how you look at someone else, like you mean it, like you matter to me. I want to know you and I am interested in who you are and what you think. I am not going to talk over you with my own story, or quietly plan what I am going to say when you shut up. I am going to give you my full and complete presence. Which is the greatest gift we have to give each other. The I am here. I am right here and I am listening to and feeling you. I am not worried about my phone messages or my work or anything but the people I am hygge'ing with right here, right now.

Tip #2: Create spaces dedicated for hygge'ing. Lighting is important. Low light, not harsh overhead light. Candles. Must have candles. Splurge and get beeswax or economize and get Ikea's white tapers. Don't get scented candles -- that will destroy the hygge vibe instantly. Plants. Love your plants so they put good vibes into your hygge nooks. Get fresh flowers in the spring. Lilacs.  Start by making your kitchen eating area the coziest ever. Everyone can sit. No bad chairs. No TV or radio blaring. Just conversation and food cooking slowly. Help chop something. Let it sizzle, let the scent fill the room and ask questions. Like you really want to know another person whether it's a family member, an old friend or a new friend. Like we are the most interesting, amazing miracle to each other, right here.

Tip #3: Take long walks outside. Dress for the weather. Be outside anyway. Breathe in fresh air, the sea, the woods, lakes, mountains whatever is the nature near you. Find it and take it in. Let the fresh air and many, many miles of walking tire you out and then comes the reward, the indoor hygge. The candles, the warm tea, the fresh baked buns or bread. Good butter. From pasture fed cows. Did you know that all cows must be on pasture in the summer in Denmark. So when you buy non-organic milk (which hardly anyone buys anymore), it's from pasture fed cows. Isn't that hyggeligt? Not stuffing cows in barns never to see the sun for as long as the live. But I digress, we just got back from the long walk outside. Now, it's time to rest your tired body in front of the fire, if you have a fireplace, otherwise candles. Many candles preferably. Something nourishing to eat, homemade, baked, made with love and patience and ready for you the guest, because I am so excited you are here and I want to know you and I want you to know me. How are you? What is going on and how does that make you feel?

Tip#4: Have dinner together. Set the table really nicely. Use real glasses, never plastic. Get glasses at a second hand store if you want to save money, don't buy plastic. No matter how many guests you have. Get real glasses and wash it up, together, later, while you chat and drop in and be present with each other. Set the table with nice plates, silverware, flowers, make it pretty, maybe pine cones from your walk, or funny shaped rocks from the beach that the kids picked up and brought home in pockets full of sand. Put some thought into who sits where. Why are these people at your house, who do you think they would each really like to sit next to. Direct the seating arrangement like it matters. Tell people what you cooked and why. You put thought into it or maybe it's a potluck that's hyggeligt too; love and care went into this food. Eat slowly and allow the conversation to be just as much a part of the nourishing meal as the food itself. If you are the host, make sure everyone is heard, be interested in all your guests. As a guest, be so very interested, who is this person that my host sat me next to. Can my getting to know them be more important than me impressing them with who I am? Low lights. Candles, candles, candles. And time. No one is in a hurry. This is the meal. This is our time together and we are here to laugh, talk, discuss, sometimes we even debate politics and such and it's ok that we don't agree. It's just politics. It's not the end of the world and there is so much less polarizing but more of an elegant fencing type of thing going on; who can recall more historic, cultural, economic facts...ok, now the hygge is leaving the room, don't get too intense in your political debating. Return to taking an interest in each other, the soft side of life. How are you, what's really going on? Relax and laugh, you are not here to ‘entertain’, you are here to be together. When we are together and feel safe with each other, we relax deep inside. We digest our food better and we become less self-conscious. We may even forget about our own neurosis for a while because we are immersed in togetherness and total emotional and physical safety. That’s hygge and we can give that to each other and ourselves. 

Turn off your phone and feel yourself

Your smartphone. The nifty little tool that has become your constant companion with its sweet promise of keeping you connected to everything and everyone you ever met. Yet more often than not, it ends up insulating or isolating you from the very part of yourself that needs you most desperately. Your contracted, wounded self that can only ever truly heal through your own loving presence and awareness. Yes, that unwelcome part of you that feels really anxious, unloved and devoid of meaning -- that’s the portal to freedom and your phone and every other distraction is like a watchdog that makes sure you don’t see this doorway to liberation that is right there within you. 

The first time I realized I was addicted to my iPhone was at a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Along with everyone else, I had turned in my phone, keys and wallet when I arrived. We weren’t allowed books or journals and for the duration of the retreat we weren’t allowed to talk to each other or even look at one another. Boom. There. Just me. In my own company. For ten days.

Initially it seemed like a relief. A soothing silence. No obligations. No demands. Just meditate, eat and sleep. Repeat. Then the anxieties started to appear. The emotional discomfort. The loneliness. Oh, the terrible loneliness. The sadness. The grief. On the third day, during lunch, I found myself lying on my bottom bunk in fetal pose, staring at the wall, so sad and no one to turn to. No one to hold me or soothe me. All alone and so, so, so wanting to pick up my phone and call a friend. Or at least text a friend who would surely tell me something to the effect of: you are not alone, the world is full of love and God loves you, remember? You always say that? The angels and guides are around you right now, to heal you and guide your way. Then I would not feel so terribly alone and meaningless anymore.

Or short talking to a friend, there would be Facebook. Oh sweet Facebook. Where I would scroll and scroll my awareness into someone else’s life and woes and then I would mercifully forget my own miserable rendition. Within seconds I would be free of being with me and instead I would be with a friend or an acquaintance, learn the details of what he or she was having for dinner -- which would surely be more than the meager cup of tea and fruit we got. Then I would forget all about the piercing pain in my heart and the anxious fear in my gut and the aching doubt that my life really means anything at all. Or I could get lost and outraged by the terrlble news of the world, or look at old pictures and let myself journey to happier times when I wasn’t balled up on a dumb bunk bed, alone, feeling sadness and despair rise up like a dark tide with no promise of ever subsiding again. 

Curled up into this utter smallness, I realized how much I had come to rely on my phone to help my ego short circuit something that really wanted to happen within; an invitation to be suspended fully in the void, the scary portal where the ego dissolves (a less scary word than dies) and you realize, I am not kidding, you realize for real, that you are all of it. I mean, all of it. You are all the worst villains that ever lived as well as all the victims and everyone else too. That’s such a crazy concept to the ego that it/we just don’t want to know. Because it would change everything. Everything. When I hate you, I hate myself. When I love you, I love myself. 

This we want so badly not to know that we would rather escape endlessly by being present to something else, someone else, just not to my own self and my own pain and then I cried. I bawled. No, not out of longing for my iPhone, out of longing for God to love me and reveal to me my own Divinity, within me. But nothing was revealed, it was just me, in pain, alone, in the barest of rooms, missing one of the few daily retreat meals and I bawled, sobbed until snot and tears were soaking my sheet and no one brought me a Kleenex. 

I did make it back to the meditation hall for the next hour-long session. Pounding cry-headache, puffy eyes, stuffy nose. I hate it when I can’t breathe through my nose but as I began noticing my breath slowing down and I started yet another body-scan, a quiet peace crept in and I wasn’t alone. There were other struggling souls seated in rows all around me. Some were quietly sniffling as well. Slowly, slowly my own awareness which is my Divinity started illuminating the energy field of my body. Part by part. Patiently my awareness loved me back into wholeness. The loneliness and the fear didn’t evaporate but it was held. By me. My strong, steady Presence was there with those tender parts in me that don’t believe she’s loved and that her life has meaning and like a sobbing child, these parts began to calm down. The petrified and fearful energies within me started to relax and give into the blanket of steady love that I was providing by simply being there and not running off into cyberland or down memory lane.

Over the course of this ten-day retreat, I experienced myself as pure, radiant, orgasmic love energy imbuing and embracing every corner of my Being. I know without a doubt that radiant Divine energy is my true nature and that only my distracted, tormented mind with all its fluctuations stands in the way of me, any of us, experiencing this all the time. The distractions are many and oh so clever. Some are disguised as very noble pursuits: I have to be there for my kids, my friends and students, develop my business, clean my house, sort through stuff, get rid of stuff, buy stuff -- or even running off to a yoga class, the noblest distraction of all of course.

But then there is that less noble distraction that’s closer than close. All the time. In your pocket or your purse or right next to your bed when you sleep. The smartphone. Always there beckoning for attention with the promise of something really interesting for you: a text from that special someone, yay I matter! A growing number of likes on my recent post. Yay, I matter! An actual phone call, yay, I really, really matter. And then of course also the text that you didn’t want. Oh, no, I don’t matter! Or the text that never came, Oh, now I know, I really, really don’t matter! And we pick it up, again and again to check for something, anything to signal a change for the better and so we are steadily whipped around and interrupted and side tracked again and again from what we were really intending to do. 

I recently read that if you pick up your phone within the first hour of awakening, you are likely to be 30% less productive for the rest of the day and that Americans pick up their phones every 10 minutes on average. So I decided to put this to the test. Really notice when I pick up my phone. Which is constantly! Terrible. So I started turning my phone off. All the way. Not look at it in the morning before my meditation, writing, tea. I had to get an old fashioned analog alarm clock for my bed stand. On Ebay I got the same alarm clock I had as a teenager in Denmark. I know, a bit nostalgic and shoppy of me. Now, when I do have my phone on, the sound is off. I will look at it when I want to and check what I need to take care of. It’s hard. Still. People expect us to be right there. All the time. Well I am just not. Not anymore.  I am right here. With me and what I need to get done.

I really want to be conscious of where my time goes and I want to be conscious of my numbing agents. Because I don’t drink it’s easy to think that I don’t numb out when my heart aches but I do and my iPhone is absolutely a numbing agent and when I pick it up instead of feeling what is moving inside of me, I really miss an opportunity to be with a part of me that really needs me. It’s like being a pretty bad, neglectful parent to myself. 

I have really come to see it that way. My Divine, Present Awareness is my True Self (I know I just love to capitalize these wonderful words) and that True Self can heal through the power of Love because it IS love. Whatever within me doesn’t yet trust that I am safe and loved and ok as I am; a stumbling work in progress, flawed and human, that sad, scared part of me needs my Presence. But it’s not very pleasant to feel sad, lonely and scared. It’s pretty awful -- especially if we don’t believe that anyone is coming for us. Then the mission really becomes one of finding a bad babysitter who will hush the baby so we don’t have to deal with it. Enter the smartphone. A really bad babysitter. A good instrument for taking care of business and communicating and even indulging in Facebook but not a substitute for really good, loving parenting of yourself. 

When we don’t source the Deep Present Love from within, our Love essence that truly has our back, we will look for it outside of ourselves. And be disappointed. Ouch. Over and over. It’s the nature of it. No one can be a lasting substitute for our own Divine connection. Anitya, anitya; means: impermanence, impermanence. When we stop reaching outside ourselves for something impermanent to rescue us, we are left with one option: total surrender to the Divine within. 

What feelings do you silence with alcohol?

30 years ago I decided not to drink alcohol. I was 19 and still lived in my native Denmark. I wasn’t addicted but I was becoming a Yogi. I noticed that alcohol was a pretty extreme interference with my meditation practice. My precious intuitive capacities that I had taken for granted since early childhood shut down with the use of alcohol. I never had an external teacher suggest I not drink, in fact several of my early Buddhist teachers did drink on occasion. But my inner voice told me that I am someone who cannot mix alcohol with a genuine spiritual practice.

This was an unusual decision back in 1989. I received a lot of flack from friends and family for saying no to alcohol which is a pretty ingrained part of Danish socializing. People assumed I must be in recovery. Which is fine but not true. Later in life I even had a swami tell me to just go ahead and twirl a glass of wine at dinner parties so as not to draw attention to my not drinking. I found that advice in-authentic.

Now, 30 years later things are finally shifting. Many friends and students of mine are starting to speak up about the negative impact of alcohol on their spiritual practice, their bodies and their capacity to deal with feelings and emotions. I never tell my students not to drink but I do tell them to pay attention. Pay attention when that urge to have a cocktail arises. What is going on within you? What are the feelings or maybe anxieties that are arising that you don’t want to embrace and process? In my experience, the very thing that I want to avoid feeling, is the sacred portal into a deeper relationship with myself. A profound sense of unconditional love and compassion for self which is ultimately the only way to heal the unpleasant feelings that live as stagnant energy within.

This weekend I will start my ninth cohort of teacher training students. This will be a subject that will be discussed. To notice and witness all the intricate ways that we use to run away from how we truly feel. When we cannot embrace ourselves with unconditional love, we cannot hope that someone else will embrace us with unconditional love. But although I don't think it's helpful to be preachy (I truly believe that the decision to say goodbye to alcohol is a deeply personal one), I do encourage anyone who will listen to wait. Wait 5 minutes, maybe 10 from the moment the urge to drink (or numb out in some other way) arises until you have that drink. There is magic in that moment. It's a doorway and if you become still and feel yourself, listen to yourself, something deeply vulnerable is likely trying to speak to you. Asking for your attention. Begging for your embrace. Are you perhaps a little bit scared or anxious? Are you angry or sad? Could it be that you are emotionally uncomfortable in some way? Let that be ok, if even for a just a little tiny bit. Hold and honor that place in yourself. Be with that place in yourself. Love that not cool, not confident, not self-assured part of yourself with deep compassion.

Then ask yourself: if a small child came to me and felt these feelings would I embrace this child with love and compassion or would I tell them to have a drink so as not to feel?

Allowing feelings to be felt — so they can be healed, is the doorway to true, lasting healing. Join me for a yoga teacher training that will address feelings at the root level which is the only real way to find peace within — then help others make the sacred journey into self-love and self-compassion.

Copyright © 2013 www.mariatoso.com

https://www.mariatoso.com/guided-meditations

Heal your emotional triggers, heal your nervous system, heal your relationships

"Your deepest wounds, and we all have them, show up as unpleasant vibrations or feelings in your body when triggered by an external event or person. Someone says or does something and you feel your body tremble, your breathing become shallow and your chest tighten. This is a clue. A strong bodily reaction points directly to an old emotional wound that has been triggered. Stop. Listen. Feel. This is a holy moment where you have direct access to the encapsulated and stagnant energy that needs so desperately to be felt, softened and released."

By Maria Toso

Imagine this. You are going along just fine, feeling peaceful and grounded when suddenly someone in your life says or does that terrible thing that sends you into an emotional tailspin. You feel an immediate tightness in your throat, chest, or belly. Your breath feels short, your heart rate goes up. Within minutes you have elevated cortisol and adrenaline in your blood. To use a modern term: you are triggered. Your sympathetic nervous system is activated; your body is in reaction and soon the rest of you will be too. You lash out in self-protection, say things you wish you hadn’t, you attempt to make your inside feel better by fixing the other person so that he or she understands that they must never do that terrible thing again. Sound familiar?

If you are like me and most of my students, this is not an uncommon scenario. You may well wonder, perhaps even with some shame: how is it possible with my ability to stay peaceful and grounded in so many other areas of my life that I experience such visceral reactivity in these particular situations. If this has happened once too many in your life and any attempts at numbing or distracting yourself away from that deeply unpleasant triggered feeling haven’t worked that well, you may be at the point of realizing that changing the other person’s behavior or having your version of a numbing cocktail is at best a temporary fix.

These deep memory grooves within that are activated again and again are not new to mankind. As early as 400 A.D, they were described in the Yoga Sutras, are called samskaras. Unlike the more superficial thought patterns that we can learn to still through meditative practices, samskaras are more stubborn, deeper imprints on our psyche, or citta as it’s called in the Yoga Sutras.

Yoga Sutra 3.18 lays it out: “Samskara saksat karanat purvajati jnanam.” Through sustained focus and meditation on our patterns, habits, and conditioning, we gain knowledge and understanding of our past and how we can change the samskaras or patterns that aren’t serving us to live more freely and fully.”

You may now have the inkling that this very unpleasant internal feeling lives in the energy field of your very own body, is always in there, just waiting to be activated — again and again. You may also begin to suspect that you mysteriously draw to you, exactly the sort of person or situation that will activate for you this energetic knot. Some ancient and wise part of you may even feel deeply that you are here to heal that very injury. That you are here to go deep within and study your inner script, to find that painful groove that has played out its script so many times in your outer life.

When you are not merely observing an unpleasant situation and choosing to calmly correct someone else or excuse yourself. When you are reacting in a very physical way, the blocked energy within your body’s energy field has been activated by a situation that in some way reminds your psyche of a similar dynamic that caused you stress when you were likely too young to handle it or didn’t have the choice to remove yourself from the situation. Young children are like unfiltered sponges that absorb the energy patterns around them without the capacity to separate themselves out from a situation that they are raised in for example.

Yet, some part of you may already know that who you truly are, is the peaceful, steady Light within (in Sanskrit purusa). The Light that presently ensouls your physical body, the Light that patiently observes the fluctuations of your mind and all the weather changes that make up your worldly life.

But we must respect and empathize with the fact that while in the human form, most of us tend to painfully forget our true nature as peaceful Light and we to come to identify ever more strongly with the thoughts and feelings that have programmed our heart-mind over time and before we know it they play out much like a movie being projected out into the world. We come to buy into the illusion that life is randomly coming toward us without any prompting or programming from within us.

In reality our thoughts, feelings, memories, wounds, habits or downright traumas are like an intricate script that is played out in how you perceive your life circumstances; and you we interpret the behavior and intentions of others. Coming to grips with the importance of managing our thoughts and feelings is crucial if we want to stop the futile blaming of external circumstances for our ever changing mood. The practice of stilling the heart-mind, realigning with our inner Light of Awareness and thus remembering who we really are, is the true practice of yoga. Only when we quiet down the constant fluctuation of the mind, the mental chatter can we begin to recognize where the deep wounds/samskaras lie within, and only then can we recognize how these samskaras are constantly projected out onto the people closest to us, not to hurt us but to show us where we have energetic blockages that need attention. Only then can true healing begin.

Your divine nature is expressed as pure Presence, as simple radiant Being. It is only this magical force, the true you, that has the power to heal the deep wounds that lie within and that causes pain and disruption in your relationships. While the triggered feeling may well feel completely overwhelming at times, it is no match for the powerful loving presence that you can shower it with when you are ready to stop any and all attempts to dull or numb the unpleasant feeling of anxiety, stress, sadness in your body. The unpleasant feeling or vibration of a deep-seated fear, anxiety or sadness is the root cause of most addictions known to man. Because we have not been taught healthy, effective ways to deal with the intense feeling of stress and anxiety in the body, we do what the whole word does, we reach for alcohol, drugs, cell-phones, sugar, shopping, sex – anything really that distracts us from the unpleasant vibrations in the body. This often leads to dependency or downright addiction to a substance or activity. But this can only hope to be a temporary distraction from the wounded place within that was trying to call your attention, trying to be heard and ultimately healed.

The healthier, more sustainable way to address the painful encounters and triggers is a process of great patience and gentleness, through which you can begin to clear out and mindfully cultivate the content of your heart-mind, as well as heal the deep wounds that play out as painful encounters in the exterior world. You really can learn to pull the projections back inside where you will find the true source of your pain: the stagnant or blocked places in the energy field of the body. When you embrace these inner, often very uncomfortable, places with pure presence and empathy, they will gradually soften and cease to show up as unpleasant outer encounters that produce the triggered reactions and subsequent drama.

This is not a fast-fix process. While the more superficial ripples of the mind may be easy to quiet down, healing the deeper grooves will likely be an ongoing process. A process of taking ever more responsibility for the reactivity that may appear to be caused by external forces but really is an activation of your samskaras. You must call upon your own willingness and capacity to feel deeply into the energy field of the body. That means truly feeling into the unpleasant vibrations and greeting these uncomfortable sensations of anxiety, fear, anger, sadness much the way you might greet, acknowledge and even embrace a small scared child with all your heart, all your love, all your presence.

Only the ongoing application of your own steady presence, acceptance and unconditional love can ever hope to heal these deep wounds that we all carry around in the depth of our psyche. Heal what Hurts Practice is a method for the gradual and gentle discovery of where your samskaras lie hidden in your energy body, what scripts they run and how they continuously play out in your life story. Only then can you begin the sacred work of healing these wounds that have tripped you up again and again and the healer is your own unconditional loving Presence. Like a healthy loving parent that holds a hurting child in deep, healing love. This process can be embarked on by anyone willing to look inward for healing, instead of blaming outer conditions or people. It’s a process of taking your power back and embracing your wounded self the way your caretakers failed to do when you were too young to know that you were being failed.

Copyright © 2013 www.mariatoso.com

Maria Toso, E-RYT 500 BIO
Maria has been practicing and guiding yoga and meditation since 1990. She is the founder and owner of Breath of Life Yoga School in St. Paul where she teaches Yoga Teacher Trainings and Heal what Hurts Practice. Maria is on the faculty at Saint Paul College where she also trains students to become certified yoga teachers.

 To schedule a private Heal what Hurts Session on Skype with Maria Toso - CLICK HERE

Anxiety is your very own Portal to Peace

I have written of this topic before but it deserves more love and more attention and more presence. Because it is so painful and so debilitating. Anxiety. That icky cocktail of equal parts dread, nervous tension, fear, doom, sadness, grief or some other unwelcome vibration that most of us will find a way to avoid dealing with (or at least blame someone else for). This “argh!”-feeling is the root of just about any addiction or distraction known to man.

Personally, I thought I was beyond avoiding or numbing my anxiety because I stopped drinking alcohol shortly after taking up meditation in 1989 — but a 10-day vipassana retreat showed me otherwise. The urge to ‘check my cell-phone’, eat something sweet, eat anything, call a girl-friend, snuggle with my boy-friend, read a book, write in my journal, do busy yoga, go for a walk. Do something! Anything! Other than feeling anxious was, there is no good word but I will approximate it by saying: excruciating.

We were instructed to arrive empty handed; bring no books, no journals, turn in your mobile phones, car keys (just in case you’d find yourself wanting to escape at midnight to eat something, and yes, I did find myself wanting to do just that). We were to observe complete silence and not even look at each other. In other words, we were left completely alone with ourselves and that meant experiencing the raw emotion of anything and everything that we had escaped feeling, most of us for a very long time.

So there it was. Surfacing. Anxiety. Subtle at first. Then louder and louder. More and more shrill and terrible. Until I caved in and was left to do one thing and one thing only. Feel it. Oh Lord, don’t make me do this: Yes. Feel it. Be with it. Don’t run. Stay. Be with it. Be with it. Be with it.

Feel the magnitude of being human. The excruciating condition of a Spirit being locked into the oh-so-real illusion of being cut-off and alone. Scared by all the life experiences of feeling un-loved. Un-wanted. Of being abandoned. Of failing to live up to some perceived something that would earn some acceptance and not rejection. And one by one, we all crumbled and the sobs and wails could be heard in the meditation hall, in the dormitory, in the court yard. Some students ended up leaving and those of us that stayed, wept and sobbed and because we had cleverly been set up in such a way that we could not escape these feelings, we had to simply be with ourselves. Just be.

It sounds horrible and it really was. But eventually, we all got it. That being present with the un-welcome feelings soothed them and eventually they did transform and were replaced by a deep abiding peace that seemed to illuminate each and every cell of the body in a fantastic, orgasmic, ringing, joyous, I am going to explode with the sheer Light of my own being feeling. We experienced in a very physical way that the very presence of our own Presence was the healer of these feelings that we had all stuffed into the farthest corners of our being.

At the end of 10 days, when the group could finally meet, look at each other and talk, we were overtaken with exuberance. Such love and relief — and also, I know now, a naive assumption that we were somehow healed and had now released the grief forever, entered a state of Light, and would henceforth walk with peace.

But that is not the case for me or anyone I have talked to. In fact, this 10-day practice was only the beginning of realizing the powerful, necessary, but not at all easy, process of ‘applying presence and empathy’ to the old wounds and the persistent stories that course through our story-telling mind as some outer circumstance or villain repeatedly activate our own special cocktail of disomfort (to put it mildly), or over-the-top reactivity and drama to put it bluntly.

The practice of being present with anxiety doesn’t get easier. Sitting with what arises and hurts will possibly never be pleasant. But we can, and as meditators we do, stretch our capacity to do so anyway. Just like we would not lock a scared child in the basement; we hold it — we hold ourselves. Just sitting there. I am here. I am here. I am here. I am not going anywhere. I am with you. Maybe no one else will ever be with you this way but you will be with you this way and that’s enough. Your Light, your Loving Presence is all it takes. When you do this work. You are an alchemist. You are transforming the dark, unconcsious, wounded, dreaded, oppressed feelings into Golden Light — and so the wounds become the very portal into the Light we have always longed for.

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Copyright © 2019 www.mariatoso.com

Everyone is a work in progress -- no one loves perfectly

Forgiveness is what's up for me. Not for the first time obviously. But again. Just like I am not done cleaning my house because I just cleaned my house. I will have to keep cleaning my house as long as I live in it. Much like Sisyphus having to roll the immense rock up the tall moutain. Only to find the rock at the bottom of the moutain the nex day. Like that. Groundhog day. Forgiving. Over and over until every judgment and disappointment, expectation and resentment is so saturated with deep loving presence that I am un-offendable. That I can no more judge my brother or sister's trespasses than I would judge my children for throwing an ureasonable fit. 

My partner and I have started doing Stephen Levine's forgiveneness meditation for couples. It's 20 minutes and involves eye gazing and inward recitation of Stephen's words of forgiveness toward the other, as well as asking to be forgiven by the other. Within minutes of sitting down down the first time, we had tears streaming down our faces. When you call upon your capacity for forgiveness, you also call forth all the unfinished business. The anger and sadness festering right below the surface. So there we were. Asking for mercy. Asking to be let into each other's hearts. Fully and wholly. Holy. Witnessing the other person's eyes go hard, then soft, then wet. Enduring the deeply uncomfortable vibrations of past events, actions and words in the body. 

Stephen Levine says that forgiving is not about endorsing someone's actions. It's about forgiving and thereby recognizing their essential Self. Their True essence. As Divinity embodied. Ok, those are my words. But I think that is what he is saying. Gazing into the other person's eyes and seeing your Self. Seeing and feeling the Deep Love that resides at the bottom of the well. Always. Even when the storm on the surface of the waters is raging so fiercely it's nearly impossible to trust that true deep peace is still the Essence and that the storm is only weather. Passing through. 

So of course. True to form. The Universe. God. Love. Now shows me, with a vengeance, how much I have yet to forgive the imperfection of my fellow travelers -- perfectly and painfully mirroring my own imperfection. Now leaves me feeling let down and unloved alone and small. Forgiveness is loving in spite of, not because of. Loving as we would love to be loved. Just because we are. Loved when we are bad. Loved when we are good. Loved when we are nobody. Loved when we are somebody. Loved for our Light and Loved when darkness rages through us and we are barely recognizable. 

My teacher likes to remind me that we are all a 'work in progress'. That no one is perfect and no one on earth has perfected the art of loving. That indeed we are all here to meet and transform or is it transcend? Or is it integrate? Our Shadow. Our irrational fears, murkiest mess, least likable levels of consciousness. 

When we say Namaste at the end of a modern yoga class, we tell our students that it means something to the effect of the Light in me sees the Light in you. But do we? Are we really making that the practice? To see the Light even while keeping a keen eye out for the darkness that lurks around in every human being as well. My teacher tells me that we must learn to dance with the darkness which doesn't mean endorsing it but seeing it, relating to it, recognizing it in ourselves and in each other while simultanously fighting tooth and nail to keep the Divine connection open. I forgive you because I see your True Essence. I see that you are Love incarnate. I see that you are also infected with Darkness and Fear, just like I am infected with Darkness and Fear. 

In Stephen Levine's words:

“I forgive you for whatever you may have done that caused me pain, intentionally or unintentionally, through your actions, through your words, even through your thoughts, through whatever you did.
Through whatever you didn’t do.
However the pain came to me through you, I forgive you.
I forgive you.
It is so painful to put someone out of your heart.
Let go of that pain.
Let them be touched for this moment at least with the warmth of your forgiveness.
I forgive you. I forgive you.” 

- Stephen Levine

Or really -- maybe an even better quote originating a little closer to home. This one from my son, Julian when he was 9. He was partipating in a soccer tournament in Denmark. Trying his best to get by in Danish when two boys mocked him for mispronouncing something:

"Mama, two boys teased me for my Danish. But I decided to forgive the one boy because his arm was in a cast and then I decided to forgive the other boy because it's just easier to forgive than to stay mad."

- Julian Toso, 2011

 Copyright © 2013 www.mariatoso.com

Stand up to your powerful painbody that pretends so well to be you

Here is what I am learning through the tough love lessons of my teacher and through my deep love relationship with my partner: You have to want to starve your painbody and not feed it and you have to want to do that with all your heart and all your will and all your discipline. You must learn to separate your True Self out from the painbody taking over and filling you with darkness. Dark thoughts that you will never be loved, never be happy, don't belong, aren't good enough. Imposter thoughts that pose as Truth, pose as you. But absolutey is not you.

It was writer, Eckhart Tolle who first coined the phrase, "the painbody" in his book the Power of the Now. He describes it as our own self-destructive habit patterns; a powerful unconscious force with the sole purpose of continuing the negative pattern and to bring us pain because the painbody feeds on pain. Tolle describes the painbody as a ‘psychic parasite’ that possesses you and causes you suffering. Everyone has a painbody to greater or lesser extent and you actually want to have someone come along and trigger it so you can begin the painful and prolonged process of extracating yourself from it's power over you. 

“The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.” - Eckhart Tolle

How do you know the painbody has taken control of you? For me it often looks something like this: I cleverly seek out a relationship, person, event that will predictably trigger me (my Wiser Self knows that this is not to hurt me but to bring awareness to my painbody, to reveal it so that it may be known for what it is (a dark shadow) and for what it isn't (my True Self).

It might happen in the beginning of an argument; I react and I say that thing I know very well is not going to make things better. The Wiser Witness within me may even ask: why am I saying this? I know very well where this will lead. It will lead to a deeper conflict and it will hurt us both but somehow, the reactive words still come out of my mouth anyway and the argument goes down a predictable and painful path. 

"People and situations do not cause you pain.
Your thoughts and emotions about them do.
You can change those reactions.
This is the key to freedom."

- Ram Giri

To schedule a private Heal what Hurts Session on Skype with Maria Toso - CLICK HERE

All is Well - the antidote to the dark alleys of the mind

I have a teacher. She lives in the mountains of Montana and when I first heard her name, I did what we do these days, I googled her. To find her website. Her spiel. Her approach. But I came up empty. This woman, apparently, needs not advertise but is solely word of mouth and by introduction and even then, she doesn't always get back to people for a long time. Not because she is rude. She just manages all her own mail and she gets a lot of mail. So sometimes messages get lost in the shuffle and friends that I have introduced to her are left wondering if she is choosing not to see them for some esoteric reason. But for the most part it's really just been a matter of pushing and insisting until you get to speak with her on the phone. She does her sessions over the phone. 

The first time I talked to her, she gently started speaking my deepest fears, she gave voice to the uncertainty, the angst, the despair. It was like someone had written the most eloquent, tender poem, just for me, hitting me deeply and profoundly and painfully. Tears were streaming down my cheeks for an hour straight, snot was running out of my nose -- I was turning myself inside out and everything that had been bottled up was released and cascaded to the surface. It was excruciating because it was the Truth beneath the Truth and the fear behind the fear. Really, she shit we don't want to acknowledge for fear it will swallow us up and leave us incapacitated for ever and ever. 

In the days that followed my first session, I was hit by fatigue so profound that at one point, I fell asleep outside on my porch in the middle of the day for 4.5 hours. With my cat on top of me (I know because my daughter thought it was so unusual that she took a picture). That's not normal for me. I emailed my teacher and she assured me that when we are 'over ripe' for release, it can be very exhausting. Indeed. I was exhausted for the better part of the week to follow. Then I continued the work. The work of naming what resides in the shadowy reaches of my soul and bringing it into awareness; not to wallow in it mind you but to name it, release it and speak a new Truth through the power of the Word. Speaking, Commanding, Creating something new into being. 

With each session another layer is revealed. She assures me that she is simply helping me give voice to what my soul is ready to work with. I believe it because it always feels so right on. Dead on. Bull's Eye. Lately we have been working on monitoring where I allow my mind to go. How my thoughts weave and wander and tells stories to the point that my whole nervous system is engaged, complete with adrenaline and jaw clenching -- all from the impact of my own little thoughts. My teacher says there are dark beings that feed on our negative emotions and if we allow them to fester for much more than 5 seconds then they've 'got us' and it's very heard to stop the negative spiral of despair, anger, jealousy or some other dark state of mind. My boyfriend who has long been a student of Carlos Castaneda's book says that Don Juan says the very same thing. So for a couple of weeks now, my task has been a new level of witnessing, no I would say monitoring or even guarding, what I allow to occupy my mind. It's shocking frankly, to realize the habitual extent to which, I take certain dark turns and start walking down very unpleasant alleys: imagining unpleasant arguments, or worst case scenarios, what I would do if or if or if...you know, just to be prepared if all that I fear really happens -- and before I know it it, all that I really fear IS happening, right there inside of me and my whole body is in reaction. I am no longer present to my life here and now or to the lovelies that occupy it -- in fact, I may be slightly suspicious of the lovelies that occupy it because in my dark imaginings they are no longer so lovely and I can't really trust them, now can I? 

The antidote that my teacher has given me is this simple sentence: All is well. Or more specifically, "“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” First uttered by Julian of Norwich in the 14th century. Here is what I can say about my progress so far. It's amazing. My dark thoughts were somewhat unconscious -- and certainly very secret -- until my teacher bluntly pointed them out and made me aware of just how damaging it is for the mind to entertain dark scenarios. What got my attention was especially her bit about dark, demonic beings feeding on my miserable states of mind. Yuck. Somehow that has made my hyper aware of what my mind is up to. For only a few weeks now, I have been nipping the dark thoughts in the bud and showered them with the antidote de jour: All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well....or simply, all is well. All is well. Isn't it lovely to say. Say it out loud now: All is well. I feel my body relax, my breath deepen and somehow my thoughts are redirected to all the ways in which all things really are well. Really are well. 

Today I talked with a special someone in my life who likes her privacy. She experiences people's vibe in colors. She told me I am lighter -- that the darker blue that made me appear sunken at times had evaporated, that the whole color field has lightened up. I believe it. I feel it. I don't want to be too exuberant about it. Like my teacher said, you will be tested. I already feel that. The things that normally start a stream of fear seem to come at me with a suspicious frequency. I picture myself riding a fearless horse though the dark woods with dementors coming at me and me repeating the magic spell: All shall be well, all shall be well, all shall be well. If you try it too, I would love to hear your experiences. 

When meditation is hard and hurts...

The media abound with stories of how meditation will cure everything from high crime and low grades in challenged school districts to the common fear and anxiety we all struggle with. It's proven to improve your ability to concentrate and even aid in the healing of physical ailments. You have likely seen cute pictures of inner city elementary school kids in lotus pose in lieu of time-outs and images of beautiful people with blissful yoga expressions might well lead you to believe that if only you could meditate, you too would experience instant bliss and higher awareness.

It's easy to understand why it is thoroughly disappointing and downright disconcerting when all you experience when sitting in meditation is a nervous shortness of breath and a significant rise in anxiety. 

If that's happening to you when you practice meditation, you are not alone. As a trainer of aspiring yoga teachers, I am a stickler about having them implement a meditation practice throughout the training and the reports I am getting back from a number of students, are not as rosy and excited as you might think. In some cases, my students experienced such severe increase in anxiety that they have to temporarily quit their practice and they struggle to understand how a 20 minutes practice can be so challenging.

Indeed, the single most difficult yoga teacher training program requirement for my students to implement is not the acrobatic poses like forearm stand or handstand -- no, it is sitting down to do their daily meditation. It takes much less time than the average asana practice and with the right support it's not all that physically challenging (they are even told they can use a chair if necessary) -- so why does the touted yogic meditation bliss elude a fair amount of students when they first embark on a meditation path?

My best answer is that meditation is in part the art of becoming quiet and attuned to what is truly happening in the inner environment and in a culture where being extroverted and busy in the world is celebrated from an early age, chances are there has not been a lot of quiet introspection happening along the way. So, whatever feelings and experiences have been stuffed into the back of the closet so to speak, often for years, and years, and years, will suddenly become visible. Or in my teacher, William Prottengeier's words, when the water of the mind becomes still, you will suddenly see the old gunky tires and all the other junk that you have stored at the bottom of the lake. 

When the surface of the mind becomes still and the inner landscape becomes visible, it might well cause some sadness or even fear, 'what is wrong with me that I am not experiencing deep happiness from meditation?' -- and then it's understandable that you might hurry up and try to ruffle the surface of the mind with a distraction of some kind. In my teacher training program, we call it your 'netflix'ing' -- which can indeed be Netflix and ice-cream but might also be anything from drugs and alcohol, to shopping and social media to something as innocent as engaging in outer chatter and busyness with other people instead of sitting in stillness with yourself. Netflix'ing works, then you no longer have to deal with the awareness of what shadowy objects, experiences, habits and emotions lay at the bottom of your mind lake -- and all is seemingly well again. 

Of course, the yogic path is to stay the course. Dive in. Inspect the old tire and address it instead of ignoring that it's there because ignoring the presence of pain that is crying out for healing is ultimately a lot of work and presents its own set of problems. Any kind of 'netflixing' designed to distract yourself from the presence of inner pain and discomfort will ultimately have its own detrimental effects on body and mind.

What you can do when meditation is anything but blissful:

1. SEEK HELP. If the anxiety that arises is overwhelming you, the wisest course of action is to seek professional help. I don't think I know a single serious meditator that hasn't gone through a significant amount of counseling. One student experienced such serious anxiety and nightmares after a sincere attempt at developing a meditation practice that she nearly dropped out of the program. At that point, we have to realize that whatever 'old tires' have become visible, they are just too big and scary for one little person to deal with. So get help but stay the course of clearing out the lake of your mind. Because once you know what's down there, it will become all the harder and take all the more netflixing to keep it covered up. 
2. SHARE YOUR FEELINGS. If the anxiety is mild but definitely there, know that it's normal. Speak up. Share your pain. You are not alone. All serious yogis have to go through this declutter work. It's not comfortable but once you have taken the first steps, it's a lot more work to stay stagnant than to move forward. 
3. MEDITATE IN GROUPS. Many meditation centers offer meditation sessions paired with sharing and discussions and other community building activities. Here you might find more experienced meditators that will be happy to mentor your through the initial phases of finding your meditation groove. 
4. PRAY. This is a loaded word so let me just suggest that you try it out for size; find inner trust that Spirit, The Divine, God is with you and that Divine Grace will help you through the rough patches. Surrender to The Divine process of becoming free from the inner obstacles that are operating beyond your conscious awareness. Ishvara Pranidhana is sanskrit for complete surrender to the Divine Will. When Meditation becomes painful for me, I shift my intention from sitting with what is, to praying to transform what hurts. I pray for help. Just like that, Help me! Please help me! I feel small and inadequate and what I am feeling is overwhelming and sad. Please help me....
5. NETFLIX. Whatever that means for you. Step away from the meditation cushion. Soothe yourself. It's OK. You are hurting and it's too much. Go to bed with Netflix or go out to a party. You have the choice not to feel this anymore today. But come back to it again when you feel a bit stronger. 

In my early days with Tibetan Buddhist meditation in the late 80's, I remember hearing something to this effect: 'Before enlightenment, meditate to find out who you are.  After enlightenment, meditate because you know what you are.' If I had known 26 years ago that at age 45 I would still be in the process of finding out who I am, I might have given up. But here I am, still at it. Some days, meditation is a truly blissful experience of oneness, every cell in my body sings with joy and aliveness and beauty radiates back at me  everywhere I look. I rest in the sea of pure awareness and my body seems completely porous and the world around me is inside of me. Other days, I tremble and suffer. My gut is fraught with anxiety. My loneliness is profound and emotional pain nearly chokes me. I want to scream and run away. Sometimes I do. I do my version of netflixing; I eat sweets and I immerse myself in other people's problems so I don't have to feel my own;  then I see a somatic experience practitioner who makes me feel my pain even more deeply so I can release it and then I meditate again.

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Sinking into the silence of the pause...

Today, I will courageously stay a little longer in the pauses. I will just linger and be. I will let my gaze be held and held some more by the tree that catches my eye, and I will stop and really pay attention to the way the Light is playing with the shadows on the path before me. I will slow way down even if it's just another Twin Cities Tuesday, and I will drink in the moment through all my senses.

What sounds surround me, what smells, how does the autumn air feel on my skin, how does my breath move in my body, what is really going on inside right now? Where in my body are all my feelings felt, could I name these feelings, can I hear what I really need? Can I ask for it? Who do I ask for it?  Why is my tongue so tight against the roof of my mouth and what makes me pull my left shoulder forward just a touch? 

I was born and raised in Copenhagen, a city that is highly residential, with an abundance of majestic apartment buildings from the 18th and 19th century, mostly with out elevators but with beautiful landings between the floors. Landings with intricately carved little benches and stools, and stain glass windows that project juicy colors on the walls and open just a crack to let fresh air in to the stairwell -- and often well cared for plants in heavy pots.

I remember walking up these endless steep stairs as a small child, right foot first on every step, and often finding a little old lady with a scarf around her head, just sitting there on one of these landings. Taking a tangible pause from the climb up to the 5th floor, grocery bags on the floor beside her.

There was a peacefulness and gentle sense of her full being just being right there in that moment, on that landing, between the third and fourth floor. Breathing, sometimes sighing audibly, and patiently taking the time that it takes for the energy to arise within -- the energy to keep moving and doing and going up. 

As I move through my own story, trying to understand and trust this intricate tapestry of what? Self-created projections, destiny, unexpected twists and turns, my responsibility, my lessons, my repeated lessons, and my once more repeated lessons and then what to do about it all...I have found again and again that it is in the deliberately drawn out pauses that I understand just a little bit more...and only to the extent that I stop and really feel and acknowledge the feelings that are moving within -- especially the ones that are heavy and murky and that make me weep and sigh audibly...

Life in my childhood Europe was slower it seems, at least in hindsight, the cafes on the streets were crowded not with people isolated on laptops but with people being deeply engaged in each other, leaning in, touching arms, throwing back heads in laughter and sinking their heads into their hands, frowning foreheads and nodding in agreement...and then the silence, the not talking, the silence that you can only be comfortable with when you really trust each other and know that just being together in stillness is also something, lingering into the pause between words and actions....

So, today I will not do so much outer work -- I will be quiet and pensive and be really slow about it all. I will be with all of me. The sad longing. The losses and regrets. The bewildered not-understanding and the optimism that inevitably bubbles up around the grief. And then the beauty that surrounds it all, penetrates even the most head hanging moments.