Stephen:  You certainly don’t have to be feeling some other way to move within yourself. As you talk about this high, can you describe to me what it feels like in a bodily sense?

Participant:  In a bodily sense, it’s almost like a fluttery feeling. Like I can’t really catch my breath. I can’t sit still. I’ve got to twiddle my thumbs or chew gum. I’ve got to do something.

Stephen:  Is that uncomfortable or comfortable?

Participant:  Well it’s comfortable in the sense that it’s a nice distraction. I don’t know what it would be like to sit still.

Stephen:  What is the risk in sitting still?

Participant:  I feel like I would explode or something.

Stephen:  That’s interesting because there’s obviously a lot of energy pulsating through your body. You are also having trouble letting it come into the body in a full way. You are actually depleting it through the itchy activity. We all tend to do that but it would be useful to let that energy rise so that you can really be fed by it. In a sense, you are knocking the energy out at a lower level than it would naturally go to. It is seeking to feed you and then to create. Instead of letting that happen, static is being discharged in various places through restless movement and distractions. If you could really take in the charge and get it moving up, there is great power in it. Thoughts become clearer. Actions become bolder, and so on. The circuitry is filled.

Participant:  Even if that energy is coming from kind of an addictive place?

Stephen:  How do you know it’s coming from kind of an addictive place?

Participant:  Because it’s just external circumstances that caused it.

Stephen:  Because things are going well?

Participant:  Yeah.

Stephen:  Whether it is because circumstances are going well or for some other reason, the fact is, you are having a bodily experience. Energy is pulsating in you. You are shuttering it  -  that is  -  dampening it and then letting it free in very short cycles. It doesn’t matter what the cause of it is. You are having an experience with energy that feels like a kind of high. When you say addictive, I guess you mean that you have let external circumstances make you happy.

Participant:  Yes.

Stephen:  That may only be partially true, though. You have let yourself become open because things are going well. As a result of this opening, a movement can occur. You want the movement, but you also distrust it. To label all this addictive is to misunderstand the deeper nature of what’s going on. There may certainly be truth in what you are saying, but it may not be an overall truth. There is something else happening besides the mind’s addictive patterns. You are having a movement of creative energies. It may be that the mind is glueing those energies onto the outside in an addictive way. But ultimately you have to learn how to get that energy to charge you, to strengthen you so that the mind’s patterns can be broken. Do your follow me? I don’t want to lose you.

Participant:  I guess I follow you. I guess I’ve learned over the past years to look at things as either good or bad. Do you know what I mean?

Stephen:  Exactly. And that’s a mental trap, it’s an interpretive trap. You don’t really know. You know only what you are telling yourself. The only way you can really know something is to observe it without prejudice. You can’t know it on the basis of judgement. I don’t mean to throw out something that is meaningful to you. In the process of growth, however, we must look at the way we are defining our life experience. The addiction can only cease when, on a deep, subtle level, you stop starving yourself. People starve themselves because they do not know how to deal with basic life energy as it passes through the body. If a person is suppressing her life energy or depleting it in various ways she is going to feel a lot of emptiness, a lot of hunger in that sense. The mind interprets that hunger as a need for something on the outside. As we learn how to use the current of energy passing through in a deeply nurturing way, some of that starvation ends. So does the addiction. Dealing with the starvation requires that we dismantle the present interpretation and that we come to the body and all its subtle aspects in a healing way.

Participant:  What do you mean by life energy?

Stephen:  We do not live by bread alone. What sustains the human being is not simply the food we eat. There are energies streaming into a human being which are subtler than the energies we derive from food. There are currents of energy pouring toward and into your body all the time. The creative faculties are dependent on how we take these currents into ourselves. Feelings are conscious experiences of energy. They seem like emotions, but very personalized, because the mind begins to evaluate them in distinctly clutching ways. When we loosen up the domination of the mind’s clutch, the emotions become various movements of energy in the body. They are unique movements, but they are not loaded with personal meaning. How we deal with these feelings is critical to our sense of well being here on the earth. All this may sound wild to you or it may sound great. In either case it’s interesting to explore. Most of us perceive the body to be a container. We sit inside that container and try to survive. We conceive of ourselves to be some thoughts, beliefs, memories, and feelings. As we gain a deeper view, we ca experience the body as a kind of membrane which constantly receiving and giving currents of energy. These energies make up our feeling life, our creative life and our relationship with each other. We’ve all been taught very little about what to do with these energies. Your agitation or nervousness is a steam coming off of these energies instead of letting them flood you.

Participant:  How would I let them flood me? By just sitting still?

Stephen:  Not necessarily. First it is important for you to observe this  -  that you take a clear look at what’s going on. It is important to observe your experience right now in physical terms. Watch the way you tighten and loosen. When the energy builds up and is blocked off, there is a push to do things, to move. Without becoming passive, but for periods of time, it is good to breathe with it, allow it, without doing anything about it. Such an activity makes you stronger. The energies in the body seek to arise and expand. They feed you. You are in a struggle with that expansion and therefore the nourishing cannot take place.

Participant:  It sounds so simple, but it doesn’t take into account that you are not always going to be on your own side. What about the time when you are against yourself, like a sabotage?

Stephen:  Yes, it is very simple. It’s also not easy. There is a huge distinction there. So many of us have the habit of turning against ourselves over and over again. You can only begin to break the habit of sabotage when you have some consciousness, that is, when you are not sabotaging. The habit is self hate and the self care work is oriented toward breaking that. The habit gets broken by catching ourselves when the self hatred begins and looking for the bodily experience underneath. We stay with that and breathe. The thoughts may run wild, we may even give in to them, but when we are ready, we just come back to the body. If we do enter into a cycle of self hate, it must not be treated as a failure, but as part of a long term process that has an ebb and flow. There is a significant choice here. Each of us has been taught to treat the evolutionary process in a primitive way. And now, we are learning how to be delicate with what is actually going on. It takes time. At first we wait for those moments when we are conscious of entering into the habitual cycle, and we begin to transcend it. Later it becomes more automatic.

Participant:  I’m feeling sort of panicky right now. Everything on the outside I wanted is working out, but now it doesn’t feel like enough. It’s scary.

Stephen:  It isn’t enough. You are right. It’s great and good for you, but in and of itself, there is no real fulfillment.

Participant:  Now I feel so shallow and superficial for being happy about my success.

Stephen:  Now that is sabotage. That’s an attack on yourself. You have every right to feel happy about it. It is one of the joys of life to see things work out. It’s lovely to feel good when you have an achievement. It is even lovelier to stay at ease and open when things don’t seem to be working out, to stay caring. But you see, if you can’t do it when something “good” is happening, it is very difficult to do it when something “bad” is happening.

Participant:  I kind of bounce back and forth between the happiness and something else  -  a kind of low. I know it helps to just go with it, but also I’m afraid if I do that, then I will really get stuck in it forever. Yet  -  you say just sit with it.

Stephen:  At first we sit with it. Later we can live and go about our activities being open to ourselves in this way. It certainly doesn’t mean that we always have to sit. There a many times when a person can feel sad or even angry and go about their daily activities in a simple way.

Participant:  Not trying to change anything.

Stephen:  Exactly. The whole body is in a continual pulsation. You breathe, your heart beats, the blood moves through the veins. On gross and subtle levels there is constant movement. Digestion is a movement. Elimination is a movement. All life is movement and rhythm. Feelings are also movements. When we have a hypnotic suggestion attached to a feeling and we use the body to tighten down on the feeling because we have assigned it a particular label, movement is arrested. Something is held back that seeks movement and flow. The journey is to get the feeling moving again. We breathe with it. We allow it. We attend to it. We don’t get stuck in the interpretation and we certainly don’t try to change it or make it a better feeling. It will change on its own. Do you still feel unsettled?

Participant:  No I don’t. I feel okay. I feel that what we talk about here addresses core things but not in terms of the dynamics  -  inner child or anything like that. This is about the most basic things. Nothing could get any closer. Nothing else gets me closer.

Stephen:  It is so intimate that it doesn’t seem to have a content anymore in the usual sense. It’s not about your childhood or anything like that. It’s about your relationship to life itself.

Copyright 1993 Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz. All Rights Reserved.

The goals of the world are complex.  The goal of our spiritual

search is really quite simple:  It is to recognize what it means

to be one.  This recognition reveals that our experience on earth

is shared.  Nobody is alone.  Even our fear is a shared fear.  Our

guilt is a shared guilt.  Our longing to be home is a shared

longing.  Our release from the belief that we are wedded to this

body as our only home will be a release we all share.

As we deepen our quest to realize oneness, we discover that the

moment we are in is the only moment which exists.  Therefore

it is impossible to have an argument with it.  To argue with

ourselves, at any point in time, is to mistrust all that is.  To

do that is also to pretend that we are somewhere else.

We are here.  We are with our feelings, and our approach to these

feelings can be so open that it feels like we have never had

them before.  We give up all the names.  We give up all the

descriptions.  We give up all the frames through which we view

our inner life, and move into ourselves as if we were nothing

but mystery.

To not understand the meaning of anything can bring us profound

joy.  Fear comes from the meaning we ascribe to what we see, and

therefore letting go of the meaning releases us from fear.

We have an inner life and we interpret it.  Our interpretation

is not fact.  We see a world around us.  We have relationships

and friends.  We sometimes have difficulties with the people we

see.  Yet our experience of these outward events is an

interpretation and not truth.  What we have come to think of

ourselves  –  what we are in this world, our sense of failure or

success  ‑-  is not real. It is an interpretation based on the past.

There is a beautiful wisdom which arises from experiencing the

innocence of our own self without the veil of interpretation.

“I am what I am and I need know nothing else.” 

Let us accept for one moment the dignity of our experience

here on this earth.  Even though it is often veiled and obscured

in many ways, the dignity of our quest and of our past is as

intact now as it always will be.

Let us notice how we have made a great demand on ourselves to be

a certain way, to live up to some expectation, and to grasp at

ideals we cannot touch.  Notice the way we hunt ourselves down so

many trails.  Sometimes we fret and obsess around what we think

we should have done or where we think we should be.

It is an uplifting practice to spend a few moments in silence

and let all of this disappear.  We are here and the burden we

feel is made up.  It is a story, a description.  The various

threads of that description have been picked up in a

multiplicity of ways.  In the end, it doesn’t matter where they

came from.  It only matters that the veil of truth about who we

are exists.  But that veil is not an enemy and there is nothing in it to

resist.  Our only work is to know that it is a veil, and very slowly

and gracefully to push that veil aside. “It’s okay to be who I 

am.  I don’t have to make any demands.  I think sometimes I have 

to be someone else.  When I think this way, it becomes a demand 

which can never be satisfied and it hurts.  The gap between what 

I feel and what I think I should feel sometimes seems very 

great.” 

In that gap there is pain.  Our appeal as human beings is made to

the Power of Light that we may be allowed to have an experience

of Grace in which we realize that Love does not condemn.

Therefore there need be no despair about where we are or where

we think we’ve been.

Let’s consider for a moment our sense that we are alone.  It is

an undercurrent experience for all of us on this earth.  Let’s

consider this loneliness for a moment without regret.  Let us

explore what it means to feel that we must live this life on

our own, that we are autonomous, and that in the end there is

nothing to rely on.  Let us examine what it means to feel alone,

to perceive a changing world which seems to threaten us as we

feel forced to carry on alone.  We experience within a tone of

having to make it on our own, and on the outside we see a world

that never stays the same.

Let us allow this experience of loneliness to rest inside of us

as part of the river which moves through the human soul.  “I am 

alone.  I must rely on what I perceive myself to be and on the 

few other frail beings around me.  Everything changes.  Therefore

everything I see becomes a form of vengeance.  I am afraid.” 

Let’s not make this experience an enemy or feel there’s

something wrong with having it.  We need to simply recognize that

this experience is part of what we feel as human beings on this

earth, in this huge and open space we see around us as we look

into the stars and ponder the meaning of our journey.  When we

are quiet in our exploration, we notice also that mixed with the

experience of believing we have to make it on our own, we feel a

kind of grief interwoven with a longing for something else.

Be assured as we come to these feelings that they are safe and

dignified.  They speak of strength, not humiliation.  We feel

alone.  We feel fear in our loneliness, and a grief mixed with

the desire for something outside of this experience, something

we can trust as safe.  We want something that radiates love and

never ceases to exist.  There is a longing in the heart which is

deeper than the loneliness.  At the same time, we find within

ourselves a great question mark as we pass through our lives.

There is a question about our lives.  “Can it be that there is 

something beyond this experience of change, something which 

loves and cares and can be depended on?  Can it be?  If it can, 

what is the purpose of all my concerns, all my fears, and all my 

need to defend or hold on?  Is there something I can really trust 

beyond what I can see?  If there isn’t, I must be afraid of my 

own experience.  I must be cautious about my inner life.  I must 

be afraid of my secret dreams.  I must hold on to those things 

which seem safe, and struggle with them when they appear to 

change.  I must use this world as it seems to want to use me.  If 

there is nothing else, if this is all that exists, then those 

who seem to attack me can really hurt.  I must respond with an 

attack in return.” 

These are the questions we face as human beings.  “Is this 

experience of change a threat?  If it is, how is it possible for 

me to ever feel that I am safe and loved?  How is it possible for 

me to ever live without regret?  If change is all that exists, 

then my life becomes a race in which I cannot keep up.” 

This feeling that nothing else exists makes us weary and fills

us with a kind of smothered rage.  Let’s imagine that there is

something we can trust, something that is only Love and is not

involved or affected by our confusion.  Let us imagine for a

moment something does exist that can never be affected by what

will change, and never goes away.  Let’s imagine for a moment

that there is something invisible that can be relied on,

something that is safe for eternity and will never disagree

with what we are or what we think we’ve done -‑  that no matter

what we do or say, there is something which will never go away.

Let us feel for a moment the truth of this idea and what it does

to our experience in the world.  Let us imagine even more deeply

that although there is this silent, deep ocean of Love and trust

that is available to us, in our present state we can’t see our

way to fully trust what is invisible and always in a state of

rest.

Let us feel the possibility that an intermediary exists between

the great ocean of unaffected silence and us as beings trapped

for a moment in the corridor of time.  Let’s imagine there is a

Brother/Sister who knows us, loves us, and cares for us just the

way we are.  Its only purpose is to lead us as individuals away

from the nagging belief that life is a threat and into the ocean

of Love from whence we came.

Let us imagine that this intermediary is the central link on the

great chain of our destiny, not a chain that binds but a chain

that leads away from bondage and into freedom and peace.  Let us

imagine everything we once saw as a threat becoming a tool which

will help us overcome our loneliness when we accept the Love of

this intermediary.  Let us imagine that our experience is not a

weight we must carry on our long journey through shadows.

Let us begin to feel that we are not alone.  There is a Companion

with us at all times.  This Companion perceives no gradations and

feels equal to us in every way.  It sees no forms as better or

worse that any other.  At the same moment It respects that we do

see gradations and forms as if some were better than others.

This Brother/Sister is lovingly aware of our attachment to form

as salvation and yearns to gently turn us away from such a

painful belief.  Let us know that such compassion exists for us

here, right now, and that we don’t have to be afraid.

It doesn’t matter what name we give to this Companion who

blesses and heals.  This Being has come to the earth and has

been given ten thousand names, and all that matters is that we

accept the gift of Its Love and allow ourselves to have our

thirst quenched forever.  This ancient Being sings a very simple

song from the cradle of our heart, “Everything you feel is holy. 

Everything you are is holy. You have just misunderstood. Your 

misunderstanding is not a sin. It is not something you must 

fight against. It is the very place you can begin to find the 

truth, and it is therefore safe.” 

There is great dignity in even entertaining the possibility that

such a configuration of visible and invisible entities exist.

Yet the question remains, how do we escape the belief in bondage

that we share?  We begin exactly where we are.  We begin exactly

with who we are.  We begin with our feelings as they are and not

as we think they should be.  We take the scars of our past and

gently put the healing hand against them, letting them open

again briefly so they may be closed without a trace.  We let this

sense of separation become an honest experience, and in that

honesty comes the recognition that we are longing for God and

for God’s Grace here on earth, knowing it will come and that we

don’t have to be afraid.

Let us look upon the community of human beings who live on the

earth.  Let us feel for one moment that despite all the apparent

differences, all the various forms and multiplicity of meanings

that have been ascribed to what can be seen, there isn’t anyone

who isn’t longing to know that they are safe.  This safety comes

from a Love that will not end.  Let us understand that this

longing for safety is equal in everyone.  So is the grief that

comes from the belief in our separation from God.

Sometimes people come into our lives who reveal for us this

grief.  We can be grateful to them, even though a part of us does

not seek to feel that grief.  We can look back on our lives, or

look on our life as it is right now, and be grateful for

everything that is, because everything that is can become a

guidepost on the journey Home and not a cross we have to carry

with us everywhere we go.

Our feelings, our sense of shame, our pain, our difficult

relationships, our friendships, our joys, our glad and rejoicing

heart, our open arms, everything we are right now, everything we

want to conceal from others or ourselves is a torch that lights

the way to strength and peace.  Everything restores our faith and

trust.  In such a light we can sit with friends and say, “Thank 

you for everything that is. Thank you for what I am. Thank you 

for what I feel. Thank you for those who come into my life. 

Thank you for my fear. Thank you for my loneliness.”  As we say

this “thank you,” we can softly hear the voice of the Being

who is always so near saying,  “I love you.  I love you.  I care.” 

Participant: I’ve been distracted this morning because of certain

troubles I’m having.  I’m grateful to be here but it’s been

difficult.

Stephen:  One of the important recognitions we can have when

we’re feeling troubled, and it might take time, is that the

trouble is going on inside of us.  This is very beautiful and can

be very comforting, even though there might be a tendency to

believe that it is more dignified to think that the trouble is

somewhere else.  We can easily lead ourselves into the belief

that if the circumstance weren’t going on, we wouldn’t feel

troubled.  When we recognize the trouble to be inside of us, it

is a recognition of our power.  We are not slaves to what is

going on out there.  The feeling of being troubled is on the

inside.  It only seems to be related to what is going on out

there.

The second important recognition in our growing understanding

is seeing the difference between what we feel on the inside and

how we describe those feelings.  Distinguishing between them

is another step in our return to warmth.

We are feeling troubled.  First, we think the pain is being

caused by something out there.  Next, we see the pain is going on

inside of us.  We are confused;  the situation is not confused.

Soon we recognize that what is causing the pain are the names we

have been calling a feeling we don’t understand.

We don’t really know what the feeling is, but an inner

description tells us that the feeling suggests we are troubled.

This description is often veiled.  We can’t always tell the

difference between it and the feeling itself.  But there is a

difference.

We sometimes confuse an interpretation which is glued onto the

feeling with the feeling itself.  Often the feeling as it arises

has a habitual set of words attached to it.  The feeling and the

robe it wears arise together.  We recognize certain feelings to

be the same, because not only are we familiar with the feeling

itself, but we are even more familiar with the words that

accompany it.  We think the feeling and the description are the

same.  We call this feeling “being troubled.”  “I know I am 

troubled because I’ve had this feeling and these words before 

and I have accepted an interpretation as fact.” 

Part of the inner work is shifting from our desire for

projection to a knowledge that feelings are inside of us and

what we are telling ourselves about them is not always correct.

Another step is to allow ourselves to experience the feeling

without words.  This experience is a prayer.  When we come to

our feeling as it is without our habitual descriptions, we

discover what it is we are longing for.  We learn also that our

description was trite in comparison to the feeling.  We want to

know that we are safe and that there’s something we can rely on

other than circumstance.

Traveling the road back involves the willingness to give up what

we thought was keeping us safe in order to find what safety

actually is.  To do that we must recognize that as egos we think

it is safer to pretend the feeling is directly related to the

circumstance than it is to something inside of us.  We think it

is safer to describe the feeling than to experience it as it is.

It is safer to call the feeling names than it is to turn it into

a prayer, because we believe there is nothing on the other side

of the feeling.

There is also a fear inside that if we allow ourselves to come

to the feeling, it will get out of hand.  It will become

something other than what we want it to be.  This relationship to

feelings seems to be keeping us safe, but actually it represents

a web of difficulties.  Part of us believes that those

difficulties and the attendant pain are worth the price.  It seem

too difficult to trust an invisible Friend who will guide us

through the shadow space into Light.

Honesty means giving up the projection and the explanation, and

coming to the feeling as it is.  This is how to ask for help.

The guarantee we have, if we are to believe the torch bearers

from ancient times, is that our true prayers are always

answered.  We don’t have to be afraid to make the journey because

we don’t make it alone.  When we come to what we think we have

been afraid of, we find instead a great river of warmth.

When we recognize the problem to be a longing for God, then we

can return it to truth instead of to a vague and shadowy

experience that seems to command.  This kind of process is worth

pursuing because it’s not ideological.  It leads us back to where

we want to be.  Such an approach excludes only one thing  ‑-

despair.  The rest of our lives is accepted and used as part of

its own process.

KD: I have been told that there is a part of me that is in

constant communication with God.  I’ve been thinking about that

all week.  Is it really possible that I am in communication with

God?

Stephen: Is it possible we have been misconstruing our inner

life in such a way that we don’t recognize that we are in

constant communication with God, and that our descriptions make

it appear to be something else?

KD: Maybe my confusion is that I’m thinking of words.

Stephen: It certainly doesn’t have to be words.  In fact, words

usually get in the way.

GG: During the meditation today when you said to open your eyes,

I felt a tremendous reluctance to do so.

Stephen: When we get honest like this and sit in silence as a

group, we can began to understand what it means to communicate

without words.  The phrase “Voice for God” is easily

misunderstood to mean something verbal.  It is not necessarily

verbal communication.  Our understanding of the Voice for God

can be on a much subtler level than words.  This Voice can come

as a sense of warmth or as a sense of knowingness from outside

the ego frame.

We can recognize how many of our inner feelings are the Voice

for God.  Our descriptions have been pushing these communications

away.  Even our anger, our jealousy, our sadness are mysteries.

What we’ve called knowledge often springs from the words we’ve

used to surround our experience, and not from what is there.

There is a clean, raw experience which can exist inside of us

with no descriptors attached.  From this raw experience we can

learn how closely allied we are to what is beyond this world, and

how deeply our descriptions have engaged us to the world’s

demands.  If we allow those descriptions to disappear for a

while, we will immediately come close to an experience outside

of time.  We will soon come to an awareness that much of our

inner life borders on what we may call the Divine.

Our inner feelings are the borderland between ego experience and

spiritual reality.  We keep ourselves on this side by looking at

these divine echoes in trivialized ways.  When we allow ourselves

to drop trite descriptions, we can learn how feelings themselves

form the gate between what is limitless and what is contained.

Our desire to attach names to our inner experience is the

impulse to perpetuate the autonomy of the ego stance and not to

move beyond.  The communication has always been there; it’s just

that we’ve been shouting so loud we couldn’t hear.

The reason ego feels such a need to defend is that the walls of

its kingdom are very frail.  They are maintained at the expense

of everything real.  Beyond that, to defend against everything

is exhausting.  We go to sleep at night and all of this

rationality ends.  Another kind of world emerges in our minds, a

world less bound and more merged with the life of the soul

within.  Our dream life at night is experienced as a reality in

the same way that the life of projection is experienced during

the day.

Wisdom is born of staying conscious and letting our attachments

disappear.  Through this consciousness we are enabled to enter

into a relationship with ourselves which allows us to walk in

the borderland between what is unseen and what has been

revealed.  We’ve been in communication with God all along; it

only seemed as if we had been caught in something else.  To run

from our feelings is to run from our link with the kingdom of

mystery.

TY: I have this fear which I know has been with me all my life.

If I go to my feelings in the way you described, then I’ll never

be able to come back to this world.  I’ll never be able to be

this person again.  It seems like a step off into space.

Stephen: It is. It’s true, on one level, that you won’t be able

to be this person again.  The natural result of not having to be

this person is that you won’t ever have to defend.  Life will

be a lot easier.  On the other hand, the person that you are now

will be recognizable, there will just be more there to see.

Once we felt we had to defend, and from that we felt emptiness.

Now we are willing to plunge, to take this step of trust, and

we find ourselves being filled up.  Trust is the stepping stone.

We respect our need to do this kind of work a little bit at

a time.  Big plunges sometimes get forced on us, but if we

proceed in a respectful way our steps will be graceful.

copyright 1993 Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz

 We want this to be an experience for everybody of simply allowing the natural self-loving innocence to arise in a gentle way – nothing  more or less than that.  We are not trying to get people to believe in anything or to agree with us in any particular way; but rather, we  want to unfold, gently and naturally, a genuine experience that is very simple, pure and elegant in its effect on our day-to-day lives.

Just allow the attention to be with the breathing, with the front of the body.  It is a very, very simple experience.  Instead of fixing the attention on thought, which is the ordinary mode of experience, we allow the attention  to unfold into the body.  We allow it to permeate the body.

We gather here this morning to share a very simple experience, not a mystical experience, not a philosophical experience, not an idea, not even a change of beliefs.  We come here rather to find something within ourselves so simple, so quiet, so serene that we often miss it.

What I may say may seem to contradict the prevailing point of view, or even may, on some level, seem to contradict what we call common sense.  As we allow ourselves to open into this as an experience – and not as a technique, an idea or a philosophy – we will recognize its exquisite simplicity, its genuine beauty.  It transcends what we call common sense.  It transcends what we might call our philosophical point of view.

Our only motive and our only goal is to come to an experience of utter self respect.  Then we can recognize the changing conditions – existing on the outside and on the surface of the inside – to be that which flows and not that which determines our identity.  We are here to have a very simple experience, even if only briefly, where we discover that the truth in us is innocent.

By innocent, I mean, completely free from the veil of darkness, completely free from the effects of the past.  This innocence is our identity in the truest sense.  Our belief in another identity, which is fixed and caught in the web of guilt, is a misunderstanding.  From this misunderstanding, we need to very gently and respectfully free ourselves.

We come to this pure innocence.  We come to this simple state of graceful relationship with ourselves and with the world.  It is possible, from this state, to create in ways that are not manipulative and that don’t arise from the fear of not surviving.

My emphasis, to a very large extent, is on the body.  I don’t want this to be misunderstood.  When I refer to the body, I am not referring simply to the visible apparatus we see each day.  I am not referring only to the gross anatomy.  I am referring also to that which fills the body and surrounds the body and remains, for the most part, unseen.  This something we call our Presence.

The deep Presence, the deep Individuality, the wave of unique Love that we are, can be felt through the body, can be experienced in the body.  We may make the discovery today, as we sit together like this, that the body, is perfectly designed to express the Presence which is unseen and can only be felt.

We have been taught in many ways to counter the capacity of the body to feel, to receive and to express.  We have been indoctrinated to believe that life takes place through the mind.  The mind, as we know it, has nothing to do with the truth of our innocence or the actuality of our experience.  It is a very limited container filled with contradictions, regrets, memories, concerns and worries.  The mind, as we know it, sees itself as a pocket of something caught inside a physical body.  It is constantly seeking various forms of artificial power in order to maintain itself.  The mind, as we know it, is the arena where psychology operates.

The body, as I am describing it here, is the arena where spirituality takes place.  Ultimately, as we awaken, we will experience as a kind of simple melting in the body, the true possibility of this life:  A marvelous encounter with warmth and intimacy, the blessing of self-love, a deep appreciation for each other.  The mind will be free and clear and open.

We are here to turn toward ourselves, because we recognize that the way we turn toward ourselves is exactly the way we turn toward each other.  It is not possible to achieve the kind of brotherhood and sisterhood all sincere human beings seek to achieve without an understanding of how to bring that brotherhood and that sisterhood to ourselves.  Without knowing what it means to experience the truth of self-love, there can be no creative act, there can be no depth of relationship, there can be no strength of character and there can be no forgiveness.

Yet, most of the time when we speak of things like forgiveness or self-love, we are speaking of a way to pin an idea onto ourselves.  Self-love and forgiveness are not ideas.  They are not concepts.  They are not techniques.  They are not even beliefs.  We can only understand this as we have contact with the actuality of the body and as we allow the attention to be released from the fantasies of the mind.

Self-love is not an idea.  It is not a series of words.  It is not a belief we bring to ourselves.  It is a truth.  Therefore, it doesn’t need to be cluttered with the trappings of ideology.  Self-love is, in fact, a natural state.  In a very real sense, we don’t even have to work to achieve it.  It isn’t the result of psychological manipulation or psychological insight.  It is the moment that the insights, the manipulations, the ways we think about ourselves, the ways we strive to get over something, are suddenly dropped.  We come to what might at first appear to be a kind of sadness on the inside, a kind of softness.

If we stay with it, if we allow it, if we bring ourselves and our attention deep into the body, this sadness, this softness will transform itself into the most lovely and exotic flower imaginable.  That flower is our gift.  It is the way we have come to express love to each other in unique ways.  This is our life.  This is our purpose.  This, ultimately, is our strength – not philosophy, not points of view, not beliefs, but the truth.

The truth is an experience occurring, without conditions, in the great, sensitive and delicate membrane of the human body, particularly in the heart and the area around the heart.  We are so beautiful.  Sometimes, it is so difficult to see this.  We are so graceful.  We are so innocent.  We are so mysterious.  We are so exotic.  Sometimes, we think of ourselves as being dark, filled with shortcomings, out of control, difficult, without purpose.  All this absorption in what is wrong is the result of what the mind carries – the conflict in the container mind.  It is not the result of some observation of the truth.

If we look at our lives, and if we look at ourselves, we can see that this container mind, this babbling brook of voices, is always pretending to be the authority on reality even when it continually contradicts itself.  “I can’t do this.  I am no good. There is something wrong with me.  I will never make it” or even, “I am good. I will make it. There is nothing wrong with me.”  All these statements are a babbling of ideas, a babbling of limitations, a babbling of regrets.

Yet, waiting on the inside, in the simplest and most precious way, something is there that can be felt.  It doesn’t have to be addressed as an intellectual abstraction, but it can be felt, realized and recognized.  When it is felt, when it is recognized, we remember suddenly that the outside, the world conditions, the  changing frames of phenomena, are not what we are.  This outside does not determine our value.  It not a statement about our worth.  It does not say anything about us because we are perpetually, forever, innocent and filled with the possibility of love and creativity.  This is the truth.

What we see as conditions, what we see as phenomena is nothing more than an interpretation of something occurring out there that we don’t understand.  And we won’t understand.  All we can do with the outside is to bring it home.  We allow ourselves to become so warmly intimate with it, that it never appears to be the voice of what we are:  Worthy or unworthy, great or small, weak or strong.  That has already been determined.  It is without reservation.  Our lives and our feelings are pure.

This morning, we come to the body.  This is the most self-respecting, single act we can engage in as human beings.  We allow the attention to be with the body, particularly the front of the body.  We feel the way the body breathes.  We feel the way the body beats with the rhythmic beating of the heart.  We allow ourselves to experience the feelings existing in the front of the body.  We simply allow.  We breathe and we feel and we allow.  As we do this, we let the body relax.  We let the body be easy.  We breathe and we allow and we relax.

One of the greatest difficulties we face in life is that we have allowed the mind to determine our experience.  We continually see our experience in terms of the mind’s definitions.  So, we continually see our own inner life as a version of the past parading as a present reality.  There is something going on within us.  There is something occurring within us.  In truth, we don’t know precisely what it is, and we don’t have to.

This body and all that it represents is a radiation of divine energies.  It is a fountainhead where something sublime, pure and invisible is spread.  The body is a location, and the body is a radiator.  The central and most sensitive area of this radiating instrument, which is the body, is the front, particularly the solar plexus, the heart, the area around the heart.  It is here we feel loneliness and love.  It is here we feel warmth for one another.  And it is here, we contract and attempt to disappear when we believe the mind’s attacks.  It is here that we go through the biggest barricades, because it is here, in truth, where everything takes place.

If for a moment we could experience life as the body was designed to experience it, we would recognize that it is all occurring through the heart, through the front.  The mind is blurring what is occurring through its systematic attempt to inject its own descriptions into a wave of mysterious phenomena.  Nothing is real in the way we assume reality is taking place.  All our difficulties, all the strains, all the trials, all the fires we walk through on this earth are being filtered through the mind in such a way that we miss the mystery, power, beauty and grace of reality.

We allow the attention to be with the body.  And as we allow ourselves to feel through the body, to release from the grip, from the grapple, from the hook, from the fantasied strength of the container mind, we discover that it is all passing through us.  It is all waving through us:  Wave after wave of phenomena.  It is nothing other than conditioning that determines what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong.

Here we are.  Here we are, simple beings, innocent, open.  At times we are caught in the web of fear because we have been taught to believe what the mind dictates.  On this morning, in this simplicity with each other, as friends, we have come together to discover, if only for a moment, that our lives are innocent and pure.  Nothing is wrong.  When we think something is wrong and when we assume that to be reality, we have simply missed the great song of creation forever moving through us.  The whisper of the spiritual message is, “Come to what is simple.  Stay with what is simple.  Keep it very clean.  Be easy with yourself.  Allow and know that everything will change.”

The problem with the container mind, as we know it, is that it assumes reality – the world of form and phenomena – to be something happening to us, something separate in a very distinct way in which we are its victims.  Therefore, it is obsessively involved with the issue of control, with the concern for strategy, with the idea of survival as its fundamental guidepost.  In this obsession, in this fantasied picture of what is real, something is missed, something is overlooked that is of great significance:  We are not victims of what we see around us.

It is possible in a very real way to effect what we are calling external reality – not to manipulate it, but to effect it.  This is done by our allowing the great warmth of the innocent being, of the innocent presence – which is the truth of our existence – to touch what we are calling the reality around us.  It is beautiful.  It is delicate.  And it requires a certain amount of understanding before it can occur.

The primary step in creatively impacting what we are calling external reality – making an art of our lives – is to begin the process of understanding what it means to fully accept our feelings.  This does not mean we fully accept the beliefs about our feelings because we have done that already.  In truth – and this is a very radical statement and a very beautiful one – feelings are not about anything.  They don’t mean anything in the ordinary sense of the word.  They are waves of energy.  They are radiating impulses moving through the body seeking intimate contact with what is around them.

Emotions mean something.  Emotions are these waves of energy being beaten up by a series of beliefs that have arisen from the past.  To accept feelings does not mean to accept emotions.  To accept emotions means to accept the belief that is strangling the feeling.  To accept feelings means to transcend what we are believing about ourselves and to come to that which is without definition, without a statement about what it means.

There is something very beautiful about the strongest of feelings because they give us the greatest of opportunities to understand what I am speaking about this morning:  A rage, a guilt, a loneliness, a grief.  They get so great sometimes that they start to break out of their own shell, their own defined boundaries.  If we allow ourselves to move into these experiences in an open way, without the container of false information we use to cover up the reality, then something can happen for us – even though the mind may shout:

“It is dangerous – don’t do it.“

We can make contact with the Presence that is us in an open way through those so-called feelings we don’t want to have.  There is something marvelous in being a human being.  Everything is a door.  Every experience is an invitation.  Everything is a possibility.  There is something we do deliberately to those openings, to those doors, to those invitations, that makes them look like something is wrong; and what we do takes place in the mind.

Let’s allow ourselves to come to this body, to this innocent openness, to these feelings, without the definitions.  In this way, we can witness what seemed wrong, what seemed separating and cold, what seemed to be our shortcoming, our weakness, as a kind of beautiful fire burning in the heart as the beginning of love, which is creativity.

Everything we feel – even what we don’t want to feel, even what we have devalued ourselves as being what is wrong with us – is an entry into the presence of innocence, into the presence of love, into the vibrating Christ that is, and always will be, our identity, without birth, without death, forever.  Everything we don’t want, everything we are afraid to look at, is nothing more than the pulsation of our own innocence seeking to express through a body and a mind that has been closed to that expression.

When we allow ourselves to open into that Presence, that endless identity – whether it be at first in the form of anger or sadness or joy – we are doing something sacred.  We are doing something holy.  We are doing something pure.  Ultimately, we are paving the way to create.

The task of an individual seeking to know what it means to create on this earth is, first and foremost, to discover the bounty of life as it is and not as the fantasy life taught to us.  Our responsibility is to find the bounty and grace of life as it is, to go to our experience and to cease judging it.  This means to find it, to allow it, to be with it, to open to it.  As we open to the beauty of our internal flow, to the waves of energy, there is a transformation into a sense of warmth that we recognize to be for and about ourselves.  And we recognize, in time, that this sense of warmth is for and about everything and everyone.

Anger is constricted compassion.  Guilt is distorted compassion.  Sadness is the presence of love seeking expression in a certain way, at a certain moment, through certain conditions in the body and the mind.  The sadness, the anger and the grief are all love’s bounty pressing against the mortal frame.  We need to say,yes, to all this so that we may fulfill the purpose given to us to create, to share, to serve and to love.

What we used to call our emotions, what we used to call our hate, what we used to call our weaknesses begins to melt into warmth.  We can then begin the second stage of this process which involves bringing into this warmth what seems to be troubling us on the outside.  This is not a belief.  It is not a fantasy.  It does not take place in the head.  It takes place in the heart.  The heart also has a kind of distinct imagination.  But it is not the imagination of fantasy.  It is not the imagination of the past.  It is the illuminated imagination of the creative act.

We can bring into this illuminated imagination, into this heart, what is troubling us on the outside.  We allow it to sit simply in the warmth of our own innocence, doing nothing to it.  We neither fight nor attempt not to fight.  We just sit and allow and feel and breathe.  We know what is troubling us is innocence being judged.  We breathe with it, and we take it to ourselves.

We know inside, in the clearest way, that whatever the circumstance is, some great portion of it is nothing more than the shadow of our own evaluation being cast on the dove, the love, the light.  When we allow the shadow of our own evaluation to be dissolved, we find suddenly that what was once a darkness is now a shining light, a moment of truth.  We find that this shadow was a great portion of what we thought was our problem.

We are the way we were created.  We have not changed.  This is not only a truth to be brought into us in a practical, philosophical way, but it a truth that we can know, that we can feel, that we can share.

The difficulty is that it is easier for the egotistical mechanism, the container mind, to make ideas rather than to allow understandings to come as living truths.  An idea cannot set us free.  Only a living truth can set us free.

So let us breathe.  Let us feel.  Let us allow.  Let us know something about ourselves in a simple, open and innocent way.

All we can say about psychology, all we can say about insight, all we can say about self-change has nothing in the end to do with what we are looking for here today.  What we are looking for is so simple and so intimate that it does not require anything mental to be rearranged in order to find it.  We don’t have to get better.  We don’t have to improve ourselves.  We don’t have to stop the neuroses.  We don’t have to do anything to know what we are.

We only need, in the simplest way, to understand where a prayer takes place and what it means to really pray.  A prayer is a body recognition, a felt experience of love and the electricity of love being there in the midst of changing conditions.  A prayer is not some words.  A prayer is a living experience where we remember our innocence, and we respect our longing for that innocence.

Let us allow.  Let us be together.  Come to the body.  Let the body relax.  One may begin to sense in silence that the body does not represent the outward circumference of anything.  It isn’t as if we are in the body.  That is an egotistical interpretation.  We are in the body; we are around the body.  The body, too, is love.  What troubles us is beautiful.  What challenges us is beautiful if we understand how to take it that way.

Breathe and allow.  Breathe and allow.  There are times for each of us when something troubling seems to be in our lives.  There are times for each of us when there is a vision, a dream, a possibility.  In either case, we treat them exactly the same:  With great respect and without manipulation.  We do this whether it be a perplexity or whether it be a dream; that is, something we want to create.  We bring that vision into our heart – not into the container mind, but into the heart – as a tone, a feeling, a sense.  We sit with it and we breathe, nothing else.

We allow ourselves to fill love with love’s expression.  We just sit, and we allow.  We let the body relax so that we can experience each other just this way, not as distinct forms of flesh, but as that Presence, as that electric force, as that wave, as that Christ.  If something hurts us, if we feel within us a pain, a sorrow, a rage, a loneliness, let us go to it in the simplest conceivable way – not as a refrain of beliefs and ideas, not as if something is wrong, but with a simple, Yes, a simple signal of respect.  We feel it.  We allow it.

This too is the Presence.  This too is the truth.  I simply don’t know what it means.  I don’t need to, because as I come to it, I am safe in the knowledge that it will become a warmth and a fire and then a blaze.  And I will create.

Copyright 1993 Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz. All Rights Reserved.

The mind only has power when it is at first purged of all the clutter. There is a period of time in each day when it is a necessity to move toward that experience in which the mind is free of the constant clamp of interpretation. When we find ourselves free of that interpretive valve which thinking represents, we can discover a very great creative power within ourselves which is unlike the creative power of thought but involves the tool of thought to some extent.

Ancient people knew the power of the ceremonial exercise in which the wrapping of thought was released into the energy of devotion so that a new form could manifest in the physical plane which was oriented toward love and purpose and not toward distraction, difficulty and conflict. So we can sit like this morning and understand ourselves to be involved in a particular form of an ancient ceremony common to all the spiritual activities of mankind. It is the recognition and it brings the recognition of where power really lies and how we can become a vehicle through which the power of the Love blessing is transformed into form, transformation, transfiguration.

Something on the outside appears to be a symbol of conflict. I can renew and rejoice within myself with the understanding that if this form needs to be changed, it can be changed from within me through a traditional process of returning to the power to which this form originally came. This creative activity in which the power of love is given the opportunity to transform physical reality requires a great deal of the individual who is attempting to make use of it. It requires a very deep willingness to disengage from all the wants, needs, expectations and interpretive thoughts that we use to enclose reality so that it looks a certain way.

In order to do this, it requires to some degree that we recognize and admit to ourselves that we are constantly coercing reality to look like our conflicts. This honesty moment in which we recognize and in that sense confess to ourselves and perhaps to someone else that we are coercing our lives to appear like the past, to appear like a habitually past oriented pattern is a repentance step, is an honesty step in which the glue of the past begins to lose some of its strength.

If we are to learn the power of the ancient co-creative act, we must be willing to acknowledge and to understand completely within ourselves the ways in which we are attempting to make the present physical experience look like a version of the past; that is, a version of our conflict. To do this often means that we will need the support of ourselves and also someone else to look at our experience in such a way that we are willing to acknowledge the trap that we have put ourselves in, and also to look at that trap without condemnation or criticism.

What a noble undertaking to be honest with ourselves in an absolutely forthright and direct way but to not allow that honesty to carry with it the burden of assault, condemnation, judgment or criticism. A pure honesty is without the sense of judgment. A true honest confession in the deepest sense of the word does not include self hatred. We look to the ways in which we have been brutalizing ourselves and others in absolute, dignified honesty because we want to live in love and self respect and not because there is some urge to hate ourselves.

For many the first repentance, that is, the first honest appraisal, the first evaluation that we must make, is to look at the way in which we have hated ourselves and to be willing to give that up. Self hate is neither a spiritual path nor is it a method of co-creation. It is a place in which power and energy are drained. If we want to discover power, if we want to engage in the co-creative act, self-hatred must be confessed, released and the inner life must be renewed under the blanket of warmth and compassion and understanding.

I have hated myself. I have condemned myself. I have been consistently attacking through the instrument of thought. I am committing myself to something else. I don’t want to hate myself. I do not want to condemn myself. I do not want to live as if there were enemies in my home base. So I look to that self hate and I repent of it. I release it. I breathe and I allow myself to know that this self hate is not a feeling. It is an ingrained habit of thought which rides along with certain feelings but is not the feeling itself.

If we can take this in, we may also be able to say, praise God that there is no such feeling as self hate. There is a delicate feeling which is being called self hate. There is a feeling I don’t understand, and there is a wrap around of interpretive mechanisms which have been confused with the feeling itself. There is no self hate on the feeling level. There is self hate on the level of thought. I give that up, or I begin a commitment to giving that up.

There is great power in the human instrument. It is being defused and limited by this intervening mechanism of superficial thought. We can only let this go by coming to the body, by coming to the feelings, by coming to the heart and by allowing. We breathe and if these thoughts start to parade across the screen of the mind again, we breathe and allow and move deeper into ourselves. When we find ourselves with a mental experience which is free from the dominance and the oppression of heavy content; we find ourselves in an internal physical experience which is relaxed and a heart which is beginning to feel the reverberation of love, then we can begin to create. We can begin to manifest forms. We can transform present situations into experiences which are reflective of the great love act and are not reflective of endless conflict.

It is important to recognize and to know that the commitment that this requires is much, much greater than simply deciding “this is what I want” and then going out and manifesting it, because the, “this is what I want” is so colored with the conflict that exists and is causing the current situation to be the way it is. “This is what I want” is not enough. If I am to discover what it means to be creative in the truest sense of the word, I have to devote a period of time to creating a harmony within the bodily instrument which puts into an axis relationship: the thinking mechanism cleared, the physical body relaxed and the heart open to the warmth of love. These three experiences allowed to work in a harmonic relationship to one another creates the vehicle through which the power of the co-creative impulse can become so aligned with the world of physical form that it can have an intense and miraculous effect on that world.

If I want to transform this physical environment, I must be able to respect and live in the delicate, ecological, internal experience which is my inheritance as a human being. This is the discipline which is prior to the co-creative act: aligning the body, the heart matrix, the passage way, the love center and the mind in such a way that the love vibration, the tone of love, is free to pass through the instrument and to become active in the realm of form. The reason the love impulse can become active in the realm of form is because we do not live as the ego presumes with an outside distinct from an inside. We live rather in psycho-physical environment in which the outside can be understood to be a dream like extension of what we are calling the inside.

One can become very literal and mathematical about this. It is not a good idea to do so. When the ego intellect becomes entangled in mathematical and literal attempts to figure out why the outside looks as it does based on what’s going on the inside, we are operating in the realm of mystery as if the mystery can be known through abstractions. The psycho-physical experience which is the experience of life in the human form cannot be understood in literal ways. We cannot attempt to analyze outside predicaments in such a way that we can literally understand internal predicaments.

We must be willing to turn toward the great poetic mystery which all ancient people lived in and understood. This ancient ceremonial understanding is always based on the mysterious relationship between our internal and external experience. There is a relationship. It is true that the outside is a dream like extension of the inside, but how that works and why is beyond the capacity of the intellect to ever understand. Yet if we work internally to align the power centers in such a way that they are clear of self hatred and other self limiting clutter, we can begin to become an active vehicle for creation. We can begin to understand the ways in which the conflicted outside can become an open space in which the creative act is portrayed in the realm of physical experience. This is a beautiful possibility. It is the outward side of prayer. The inward side of prayer is I come to recognize the wholeness and the completeness of everything within myself that I had once thought was fragmented, foreign, different, wrong, weak, neurotic. I come to see that all of these words simply obstruct the primal energy experience.

There is one great source. It is love. Love in its active form is creativity. Activated love is creativity. When I return my internal experience to that love, to that wholeness, to that lack of foreignness, then there is a creative surge. If I have worked with myself to align the body and the heart passageway, which is the place through which this creativity can become a conscious surge, and the thoughts, so that the thoughts aren’t simply a rattle of clutter, then I have made the vessel capable of creating forms in the world at large. This co-creation is the outward manifestation of prayer. It is the reflection of the internal event in which the domination of limits is thrown off and the wisdom of love pours in.

If our intention is to solve the so called dilemmas of the psycho-physical realm, to overcome the predicaments that seem to exist on the outside and to release ourselves from the nagging bondage of limits on the inside, we must begin to partake in an internal experience in which we free ourselves from the patterns of thought. We align ourselves in the heart with love. We relax the nervous system. We let the surge of creative love pour through us. When it does pour through us in that way, it will bring with it an image, an understanding faint perhaps at first, of what it is that needs to be done. Our role in relationship to that which needs to be done is not to figure out the perplexity of how, nor is it to figure out the details of when; but rather, it is to sustain that vision in such a way that it continues to be fed by its central nourishment which is activated love–creativity. This feeding takes place in the solar plexus, in the heart and in the area around the heart.

If I am feeling in my life an apparent lack of creative direction, then I must go to that lack and be with it and acknowledge it and breathe with it. I must make it my discipline to throw off all vestiges of self attack in relationship to this sense of lack. I must over time allow this lack to become the tool through which I align the body and the heart center and the mind. As this alignment takes place, I understand that this lack is nothing but a coerced form of love, a disguise of love. It becomes warmth. It becomes possibilities. It becomes direction. I allow that direction to manifest as an image, however faint, or a vision within my heart which it is my duty to sustain. In sustaining it, it naturally begins to manifest.

All is life current. Nothing exists but various modifications of life current. My role as a human being is to transmit life current in a unique way. One of the effects of a clarified transmission is that clear and compatible forms manifest. If conflicted forms do manifest, we simply return to the cycle of self respect, self love, clarification and the alignment of those centers within the body and the mind which are perfect transmitters of the unique creativity which is ours.

It is possible to be free, but freedom is an act of devotion, surrender and return to the only freedom there is which is eternity. God is eternal love without form. This world is the love act. It is active love. We are the conduit or one of the conduits between the all merciful, non-content absolute love and the realm of form. Here is where all possibilities emerge. I am an agent of the miraculous. I am entitled to miracles. I am not this body. This body is an instrument in which I live and express. Its expressions are the co-creative journey. My work on this earth is to remain clear, to stay in the heart and to allow this great energy to pass through my instrument in an unobstructed way.

What is the altar? What is the altar at which I pray? It is the difficulties that I am having turned into the warmth of creative love through honesty, true and guilt free repentance and the alignment of the centers in the physical instrument. To truly repent, I must repent of my guilt as well.

Let us feel the body and breathe. Let us feel the body and allow. There is nothing wrong. For each of us there is a vision. To find the vision requires clarity. This clarity is not a clarity only of thought. It is the clarity of the heart feeling. There is nothing to reject. There is nothing foreign. There is nothing to be dislodged. Nature does not work that way. Everything is transformed, translated; nothing is thrown away.

Is there someone who has a thought, a question, a feeling that they would like to express?

DAWN: I feel your love. What is coming from you is coming right into me. I’m feeling it. My whole chest is warm. There is a lightness, warm, peaceful, loving feeling.

STEPHEN: This experience, our sitting here like this is a transmission. It’s a transmission. The words are the vehicle to some extent on which this transmission takes place. Since they are directed outwardly, they carry the deep love energy that has come into this room and then is offered to everyone who sits here.

It is very important to know that the transmission is a teaching device to reveal the capacity of every single human being to receive this transmission in a direct way with others or on their own. My role as transmitter in these circles is a temporary teaching role. It is important in the sense that one can have here a very direct experience of what is possible for us to receive as we continue our journey on the earth. So when I hear you express this, I hear you offering a tribute to yourself. I am clear enough this morning to receive, to take into myself, the love impulse. I can feel it throughout my body; and therefore, I will be able to offer it to someone else. Thank you very much. I could feel in your words the truthfulness of your experience.

In the particular way in which I am using language, the word “Christ” is a mysterious word and is unrelated to the institution of Christianity. The word “Christ” as I use it in these circles represents the love impulse, the evolutionary creative impulse as it seeks to join with the human instrument. Jesus received the Christ as we sit in this circle to receive the Christ. When we use words such as the “Second Coming,” we are not referring to the second coming of an individual linked to an institution but rather the second coming of this Christ impulse in a clear way. This time the receiving of it is going to be in through the One Being, the One Body as the One Blessing. Each of us will partake.

We are preparing ourselves here and elsewhere to receive that Second Coming, to receive that vibration of creative love in the clearest way and to become a vehicle in ourselves for a particular kind of transmission to take place.

Copyright 1993 Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz. All Rights Reserved.

The deepest understanding

We have our eyes closed because it is easier to listen to what we are on the inside and to listen to the tone in which these words are spoken. They are not spoken in a tone suggesting they are philosophically correct or conceptually right for everyone. Rather, there is no intervention. There is gentleness. There is easiness. There is a space for each person to experience his or her own uniqueness and a space also for us to celebrate our commonality. The beauty of gentleness, as opposed to intervention, is that it allows room for uniqueness; and it allows room for unutterable commonality. Both exist here. Our circle represents us in our uniqueness and our individuality on the outside. The space on the inside is our commonality. Whenever anyone decides, for whatever reason, to bring something of themselves into the common space, it is healed because it is recognized to be everyone else at the same time.

We are here to honor everything we experience, including our difficulties. We are here to honor our difficulties; we are here to honor our joys. What a great relief this is. We are not here to propose the idea that because we have difficulties, because we experience pain, because there is confusion or guilt or anger, this excludes us from also being spiritual human beings, that this in some way demerits us or degrades us. We are here to recognize that on the other side of every difficult ego experience, on the other side of every guilt we may feel, on the other side of every anger, on the other side of our loneliness is a deep calling out to a Wisdom which is there, which we have.

As we begin to see this, and as we begin to feel it in a very clear way, we can begin also to recognize in those difficult feelings, in that pain, in those problems, the Wisdom itself. It is not outside the pain. It is right there with it. What is causing us to be so restrictive within ourselves when these feelings arise is not the feelings as they are, but the feelings as we interpret them. This is a bountiful and abundant understanding about who we are and what we are capable of becoming and where the Wisdom lies. The Wisdom doesn’t lie in a book. The Wisdom doesn’t lie in a particular teaching or in another person. The Wisdom lies where we are at any given moment. It does not lie in some abstract way which suggests, if only we saw beyond where we are in some fundamental way, we would have Wisdom. But rather, the Wisdom is where we are right now. The Wisdom is in us. It exists as part of our most painful feelings, as well as part of our most released and joyous feelings.

This is a radical re-evaluation of our inner life. It is a beautiful re-evaluation of so much of our interpretations. So much of the way we look at ourselves has to do with a fundamental belief that either we have done wrong, or we are wrong in some cosmic way. There is a fundamental belief in an undercurrent of sin in our experience on this earth. That shadowy picture is an interpreter, a lens, a translator. It seeks so much of the time only to affirm itself. This is particularly true when we take a look inside of ourselves and see that there are things we think we don’t want to feel, things we don’t like, things we think are not pure enough for the spiritual quest.

The greatest understanding we can ever come to as human beings is a response to ourselves that embraces and does not reject. How interesting it is sometimes that this is the most difficult response we can ever summon from within ourselves. Sometimes it seems like too big a medicine to ingest. What I am and where I am and what I am feeling is the Wisdom I need. The only gap between truly knowing that and living an experience that feels barren and trapped is my interpretation.

Even deeper than this is the understanding that we are not alone. Much of our inner turmoil and much of our difficulties and pain is a calling out for a heart felt recognition that there is a Presence. There is no need for loneliness. There is Love. This Love abides fundamentally, and It abides in an uninterrupted way. It exists both in time and outside of time as well.

When we are perfectly honest with ourselves – and this means an honesty that has in its undercurrent a feeling of compassion – we can recognize how deeply it is we yearn to feel a Love that does not change. We want so much to experience something outside the boundaries of time that is safe. We want deeply to be loved and in love. We project this deep yearning onto the things and experiences of this world. This is why our relationships can become so very, very difficult, because they are made up of a projection of an intense longing for God’s Love, for God’s Grace.

A projection of that longing onto a human face, onto a human body always results in a feeling that either we are going to be betrayed or we have been betrayed. It is inevitable. My brother, my sister, my father, my mother, my daughter, my son, my friend can be there for me in a certain way. They can support me. They can offer me love. But they cannot extend to me the Grace that transcends boundaries. Only the compassionate Presence, only the power of Love as a Being, only God’s messenger can do this for me, or for any of us. When we speak of God’s messenger, we are not speaking here of some ideological presentation or some purely religious articulation. We are speaking of a deep, deep experience which leads us to trust – trusting it and trusting ourselves in relationship to it.

How much time do we spend not trusting who we are? How much time do we spend questioning our feelings and hoping that they don’t appear again or that they don’t exist at all? How many of our difficulties are based on the belief that there is nothing to trust, that there is betrayal, that the answer to betrayal is control – making things happen a certain way? Whenever we do that, there is tension, there is pain, and ultimately, there is loneliness, because our life is too big to control. This life experience rolls on. It is immense. It is ever-changing. It is unpredictable. It is difficult. It is mysterious.

To think we can control this life is monstrously painful. To attempt to control makes the body enter into a relationship with itself that can become unbearably tense as long as it continues to try. It bears a burden of summoning an energy to control what is beyond the ability of a mortal to control. Yet when the ego hears the word “surrender,” it trembles. How can I surrender? Doesn’t that mean that I am going to have to face some terrible, terrible danger? We can feel this inside of ourselves. Somehow, on some level, trying to control feels much safer than surrendering.

Surrendering is far more frightening to the human being – at least in the ego experience – than is the attempt to do what is impossible. It is impossible to control, and we know that. So much of our life is made up of trying to get control over what inevitably passes out of our control. Yet sometimes, we long so deeply to surrender, to let go in a fundamental way, to be at ease with our own inner life and with the world around us. There is an urge for that. Sometimes we can’t believe that we can trust that step, that we can let go enough to see whether there is something to trust, and furthermore, let go enough to perceive that all of our attempts to control simply bring us into an experience in which we are trying to use dust to quench our thirst. It hurts. It doesn’t solve the basic problem. It perpetuates it.

In the desire to control, we can feel the great manacles of earth boundaries and life boundaries and the belief that the body is all there is. In the desire to surrender, in the yearning to surrender, we can feel how it is to be outside of boundaries, to be outside of time. This is the only way in which we are ever going to find freedom and release. In the end, it is only freedom and only release we want, even though we sometimes think it is something in this world. Beyond this world lies the great dignity of wanting freedom and release. There is great dignity in being a human being yearning for truth. There is great dignity in even misinterpreting our feelings. There is great dignity in being who we are. In our struggle to try to control, lies the pointlessness of trying to live according to who we think we should be, the pointlessness of living in a fantasy.

I am who I am. I am feeling what I am feeling. I accept there is within this, deep Wisdom. Sometimes I don’t see it. There is the barren body the ego sees, and there is the Wisdom body Spirit sees. There are the barren feelings the ego sees, and there are the Wisdom feelings Spirit sees. There are the difficult and barren experiences we see each day or some days, and there are the Wisdom teaching experiences Spirit sees. They are the same experience seen in radically different ways. To make the purpose of our spiritual search to either change our internal or external experience is to misunderstand where it is we will find Wisdom and Grace and Peace. We will find it where we are and not where we think we should be.

This is my classroom: this is where the Master waits, in my heart and in my life as it is now. It is here, in my heart and in my life the way it is now, that I can learn to pray. And I do not pray to an ideological God, to a God speaking of sinfulness and disgrace, to a God reckoning with my pain. I pray to a transcendent God whose only blessing is Love, forever and forever.

We can’t run away from our lives. We can feel the impulse to run away. We know in the ego interpretation, there is a very subtle belief that one can run away, that one can actually find a place in this universe to hide. When we think in quietness, when we think in a moment of safety, where there are friends, we come to a double-edged understanding. We come to the deep understanding that we cannot run away from our life. We cannot run away from what we feel. We cannot run away from who we are. One side of that understanding is, “Oh, my God, it is so frightening because I am trapped.” The other side is, “I must face my life.” When I face it, I will find in my life the Wisdom and the Peace I thought was not there. Rather than it being a threat, it becomes a door to Grace. This is what we hope to achieve anyway by trying to run away, but we know we can’t. Where is there to hide? Where is there anywhere on this earth something that does not change? Where could we go to step outside of boundaries, to step outside of time, to step away from feelings existing inside of us? There is no place to go. There is no place to hide. So here we are. To face that deeply and compassionately and honestly, is a reckoning, is a learning, is a journey of immense value.

I cannot run from my beliefs. They are with me wherever I go. I will see them in whatever I see. Even if I close the door and sit alone in the darkness forever, I will experience myself. Remember that beautiful line from Hamlet, “I could be bound in a nutshell and consider myself the king of infinite space if it were not for these bad dreams.” Here I am. Here I am. Do I greet myself as if I mattered, compassionately; or do I greet myself as if somehow there was something inside of me which speaks of disgrace. Am I a sinner? Have I sinned? Is my inner life some shadowy tangle of feelings I shouldn’t feel? Or is my inner life, along with my outer life, a place where the Master waits to teach the great art of release from bondage to boundaries and limitations?

If we believe in this spiritual Presence, this divine Teacher, this compassionate Presence, where is it? Is it outside of my feelings? Is it outside of my life circumstance? Is it outside of my thoughts? Is it outside of my day to day experience? Here is a suggestion that it is not outside of those. It is in them. It is of them. Everywhere we turn we can find this Presence. Everything we feel has the potential of this Presence. Everything we are is an echo of this Presence.

Am I ready for Love is a beautiful question we can ask ourselves. Am I ready for Love? Do I want this Love now in an honest way? Do I want to see the hard edges of my difficulties dissolve? Do I want to turn my pain away from a description suggesting something is wrong? Do we want to live life without blame and without remorse? Here I am. There is nothing else but here I am. This is where I must start my pilgrimage. Is this life anything other than a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage in some mysterious place, a pilgrimage to the holy land, a pilgrimage toward Light. The Light first is experienced as coming from within us.

Let us know this about ourselves: we are the Light; we are the Peace that created us; our prayers and our feelings are One. We can put down in some fundamental way, everything we think we knew and accept the openness and accept the feeling tones existing within us as something different than what we have been taught to think of them. So let’s invite this Presence into the room. Let’s invite It into our bodies. Let’s invite It into our hearts and into our thoughts. We do this, not because we are lacking or because there is something wrong, but because our wanting is a dignified wanting. We want a joyousness and an openness and a Peace surpassing all understanding. We want God’s Love, and we want the messenger of Love to be with us in a conscious way, always. We want to feel we don’t have to control, and we don’t have to press against our own life. We want to feel life isn’t a series of betrayals, but beneath it is some enduring substance that never dies and is never born. What is alive within us never dies. It can never be threatened. It can never be torn apart. What is alive within us is forever.

Allow the attention to be with the body. Breathe with the body. Just allow yourself to feel the rhythmic process of breathing. Be easy and breathe and feel the body. Just let yourself be filled with warmth and easiness. There is nothing to hold onto. Whatever is within us, whatever feelings, whatever sense of being tense or held back, just allow to be there. Be easy with it. Breathe with it. Let yourself accept. This is who I am. I don’t need to please. I don’t need to live up to some standard. On the other side, there is a need to be caressed, to caress myself in the highest sense, to nurture this being, to take care, to respect, to treat my feeling life as if it mattered, to treat my thirst as if it were not a calling for dust, but for holy water, to feel worthiness in living.

Yes, there are problems, and sometimes it seems these problems humiliate us. Understand in quietness that the sense of humiliation is an interpretive frame and nothing else. We just don’t know. We just don’t know. Sometimes it feels as if we are pressed against a wall, and we don’t know where to turn. It is in that moment, in that sense of helplessness, that this Being of Love can come and undertake, with our willingness, a radical re-evaluation of who we are and what our purpose is and what the meaning of our feelings are.

Just breathe and relax. Let this relaxation and this easiness move into the heart and the solar plexus. As your attention moves there, just allow the breathing to be rhythmic and easy. Allow yourself to feel the beating of the heart. If there is restlessness, if there is uneasiness as you do this, rather than respond to it reactively, mechanically, as if it was the call to do something and do it quickly, just allow it to be there. Take a look at it in a different way. There is a learning in this. There is a learning in our responses. There is a learning in our feeling life. If it feels peaceful and easy, allow that to be there. We are worthy of it. We are worthy of Peace. We are worthy of looking at our feelings, even restlessness or uneasiness, in a quiet, kind, and thoughtful way.

We are not machines. This earth and this life is not some engineering diagram. It is the art of Light, and we are the expression of the artist. We are Light, even if it doesn’t look that way. The looking is the lens we wear. The perception is the lens we wear. The experience with another person, if it is an experience of pain, is the projection we make. Let me recognize this projection. Let me recognize also the great beauty and dignity in bringing the feeling home again, letting it be where it belongs on the inside and not onto everything passing my way. Let me recognize the difference between what is happening on the outside and the feelings I am having on the inside. Let me recognize, even more subtly, that the way I am describing my feelings to myself and the feelings themselves are two different things. There are feelings, and there are my description of those feelings. A great Peace comes when we can separate the two.

Come to the body. Come to the heart. Allow yourself to relax and to feel. Just allow yourself to be easy. Sit here in an easy way, rejecting nothing within. Notice the body as a boundary. Notice the feelings as a river moving within that boundary. The body is its banks. The river is the feeling life moving within the banks. Yes, there is grief. Yes, there is Love. Yes, there is prayer and prayerfulness. We are deep human beings. We are sacred vessels. We are not meant to be treated unkindly, from ourselves to ourselves. We are meant to be respectful, to take care, and to transform the barrenness that we feel into Wisdom. This is who I am, and it is worthy of self-respect. It is worthy of care.

Now for a moment just notice, with the eyes closed, the presence of everyone else in this room. Notice how feeling the commonality and feeling the unity does not negate our uniqueness, our individuality. I am here. I can feel myself as here. There is a space within and around us which represents our commonality, the sphere of commonality we share as human beings. We bring our uniqueness into this common space, and there is always healing. When we bring our pain to a friend and that friend accepts the pain and assists us in support, then we can feel the virtue of bringing our pain into the common space – the power of it. Our pain in the common space is a shared pain. Therefore, it is not owned in some terrible way. It is not owned as if it were manacled onto us. The pain in the common space is the way in which the pain goes away. Let’s just allow ourselves to be with our feelings. Let’s just allow ourselves to respect. There is pain. There is joy. There is uniqueness. There is commonality. We are here to embrace the Wisdom.

Copyright 1993 Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz. All Rights Reserved.

One of the viewpoints about ourselves which is commonly held, but often not examined, is that we are caught inside our bodies looking out. The identity is perceived to be strings of thought, memory, emotion, desire, ideas, beliefs along with a vague sense that something holds all these things together – an unseen consistency. The body, from this viewpoint, is the circumference, the outer outline of a person who lives within. It is a capsule, a container, a box which holds a mix of things we identify as self.
Often the one who dwells within the body looking out senses danger all around. There is a powerful urge to survive. The identity within the body schemes, plots and plans for its own good. The outside is unsafe, a constant nagging threat to what is within. And yet it seems as if there is something “out there” that we want, something from the threat itself that we need.
This self grapples with the conflict between its apparent need for something outside itself and the fear that that something seems to breed. It is overwhelmed at times by the chaos, the unfairness, the lack, the uncertainty it sees everywhere. And it is obsessed at the same time by a sense of need for something, somewhere that will satisfy. Such a divison can give rise to a high degree of conflict.
And it is certainly true, from a certain angle, that we do live in a universe which has little or no respect for the individual. People come and go. Everyone is finally forgotten. Even the great and famous are reduced to dust. Time passes. The body ages and dies. Some have accients, sickness, tragedies of various sorts and yet life goes on. We know so little about what comes next. Every successive hour is a mystery.
Yet in looking at the Universe, the Solar System, our Earth, there seems to be a kind of poetic order to things. The stars keep a predictable course, the tides come in and out at regular intervals, the moon passes through its phases. Human Beings are born and die in the same ways they have for so long. From the biggest to the smallest there are patterns of order that we can perceive and describe.
The contrast between the uncertainty of our individual lives and the obvious order at both minute and immense levels is stark and startling indeed. We are up against something that cannot be comprehended. It does not seem as if we are that important in the scheme of things. And yet we  often experience an intense urge to live. It sometimes even seems as if our lives are guided in some enigmatic way by an intelligent force that we do not understand.

Copyright 1993 All Rights Reserved Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz

JC: I’m having a conflict experiencing my life spiritually.

The resistance to it is just fantastic.

 

Stephen: Let me ask you this. Are you feeling internally some

pressure to believe something you don’t want to believe? Are you

feeling internally now some pressure to adhere to “I know I only

have one problem and it’s already been solved,” and yet at the

same time saying to yourself, “I really don’t believe that;

there really are a multitude of things I have to deal with”?

Is there some kind of pressure? Are you feeling a sense that

you’re not living up to a spiritual understanding and that you

mustn’t feel that there are a multiplicity of problems? Is there

a conflict on that level? Is all of this talk getting in the way

a little bit? Is there an uncertainty about what you should be

dealing with and what you shouldn’t be dealing with?

JC: Yes, lots of uncertainty.

Stephen: When we get down to this level, we don’t want to make

this work a pressure to look at ourselves in one particular way.

I don’t want you to feel that there’s a better way to look at

your life than the way you are looking at it right now.

JC: I feel I must be doing something wrong. I’m making decisions

and I don’t know. I really do believe that I don’t know what`s

in my own best interest. I know that, and yet I’m feeling

pressured to make all kinds of decisions and changes. I feel

desperate to make these changes. I feel driven. I’ve got to do

these things. I have to jump out there and I don’t know. If I’m

not seeking inner guidance then how can I make any decisions?

I’m so conflicted inside. All this pressure is based on ideas

and plans I once had. I should be doing what I love to do. I

know it’s going to be hard but I have to do it. I’ve got to.

I’ve got to. I’ve got to.

Where I am is just not right. Nothing seems right in my life at

all ‑ my relationships, my job. Everything seems to be wrong.

Stephen: There is another voice in you that I can hear while you

talk. This voice and the part of you it represents is throwing

its own dice on the table. It says, “It isn’t spiritual to have

all this conflict. The way I’m approaching life isn’t the

spiritual way to approach it.” This sense of not approaching our

inner turmoil spiritually enough is getting thrown into the pot.

It doesn’t solve anything, but rather adds one more twist to the

uncertainty and confusion.

JC: Yes. and I’m very pissed off about that. I feel so much

resistance. I just can’t even make a decision. I can’t meditate.

I can’t relax or go inward. There’s so much resistance.

Stephen: So much resistance to what?

JC: To being peaceful with myself.

Stephen: You mean there’s a tremendous urge to take sides.

JC: Yes. There’s a need to settle onto something which feels

like the right thing.

Stephen: You’re saying, “I’ve got to know what it is and if I

don’t know what the real thing is, I’m in trouble. I can’t relax

until I know what the right thing is.”

JC: That’s right. That’s so right.

Stephen: It’s important now to follow just exactly what you’re

saying and not to make any claims on it, not to throw any

philosophy at it. It’s just the two of us and these friends who

are exploring with us as a group. As this conflict rages, you

most certainly believe in its validity. It’s the truth for you

when it hits. What the voices are saying is real. “There’s a

problem. It’s got to be solved. The way to solve it is to do

this, this, this and then that.” When it speaks you believe it.

Isn’t that right?

JC: Yes.

Stephen: If this weren’t true, there wouldn’t be a conflict. It

also must be that, since it’s tearing you apart, there’s another

voice telling you something radically different than the voice

which seems to be pressuring you in such a strong way. If this

weren’t the case, you would just do what you want to do and be

done with it. But you feel paralyzed. There’s a voice which is

stopping you from doing what you want. What is it saying?

JC: It’s saying that I’ve done this kind of thing before and

other people suffer because of what I do. I better not do it

again.

Stephen: Let’s stop right there. For instance?

JC: If I left my job, the children I work with would be upset

and hurt. Everyone would suffer. My own family would suffer. If

I end my relationship with the person I’m living with, then he

would suffer and so would the children. If I follow my passion

to commit my life to the career I want, then there’s going to be

a time in which everything falls apart.

The only time I ever felt happy was in a particular career, so

then I threw it out. I was an actress before the children were

born and it’s the only thing that really made sense. Then I gave

it up for various reasons, but now I can’t figure out why I gave

it up. Most aspects of it I love and can do well. But another

voice is saying, “How do you know you have any talent for this?

This is selfish and unrealistic. You won’t survive. Nobody can

make a penny in acting.” I want money but I never have any money

and I hate myself for not having any money. Therefore if I go

into acting I won’t have anything except acting, which is what I

love.

Stephen: There are a lot of demands.

JC: Yes, there are.

Stephen: There are the two major voices which are contradictory.

One says you’ve got to do this and the other says you can’t.

JC: But if I don’t do one or the other fast, I’m going to stay

in an awful place for a long time to come.

Stephen: It’s a stale place, isn’t it?

JC: Yes, it’s static. It is very stagnant. It really is a bad

place.

Stephen: What does that mean?

JC: It’s a stuck place.

Stephen: I don’t want to throw anything at you. Let’s be clear

about this. Since you’re here, let’s work together but please

don’t feel I’m trying to get you to see it in any particular

way. Is it a stuck place “out there” or “in here”? Is it

something you’re feeling, or is it something that’s going on? Is

your life stuck on the outside or do you feel stuck on the

inside?

JC: Both.

Stephen: The outside is reflecting the stuck on the inside. But

you don’t always know that. The voice that’s telling you to

become an actress is telling that if you did that the problem

of being stuck would be solved. Isn’t that what it’s saying?

JC: Yes. It’s saying that if I became an actress there wouldn’t

be so much blocking of the creative movement within myself.

Stephen: Now one voice says, “I should go out and do that, I can

do it.” And another voice says, “How do you know?” And there’s a

kind of undercurrent third voice which says, “You’ve already

failed, it’s too late.”

JC: Yes, that’s right. Exactly right.

Stephen: It says, “You’re done. You’ve already blown it. You’ve

got to do it but you can’t.”

JC: Oh, my God. There’s a chorus inside.

Stephen: And listen to yet another voice in the chorus. It

overrides them all. This voice says, “How can I ever know which

is right? Each one of them is making such a distinct demand.”

JC: I have this going on constantly, day after day, every hour

of the day. I am not an easy person to live with because I just

can’t stop thinking about this. It’s an obsession.

Stephen: It’s become an obsession, yes. And a thread of the

obsession is related to your belief that if you do become an

actress, you’re going to hurt somebody. Number two is, you’re

going to fail. Number three is, you must do it now. Number four

is, you’ve already failed. And number five is, how do you know

which one of the proceeding statements is correct? All of this

exists at the same time.

JC: Now there’s a new one that I can’t quite get ahold of that

says, “Go ahead, go out and fail. Go ahead, it’s good to fail.

At least you’ll have tried. At least you’ll have done something.

Who cares, anyway?” But that’s a real hard one to be aware of.

Stephen: It is difficult to deal with this kind of inner

experience because every one of those voices is right and you

know that. There’s not one of them that’s clearly wrong. Every

one of them has its own level of being right. Every one of them

has a level of common sense to it. So you could buy in to any

one of them at any given time.

JC: That’s what I do.

Stephen: You buy into one for several hours and it brings you

some comfort. Which one brings you the most comfort?

JC: This is my greatest comfort: I go back to my job, after

vacation, and I tell my employer that I have to leave. But I

wouldn’t really know how to say this to her without sounding

crazy. Then I go home and start writing. I wouldn’t know what to

write about but I start writing. I have to go back to what I

know, something I feel I can be passionate about.

Stephen: There’s no argument with your desires. On the other

hand, the dynamics of your inner life have not been constructed

to satisfy any desire. The desire to do what you love to do has

become part of your harassment of yourself and isn’t really part

of the solution, even though it’s a true feeling. You want to

express. You want to be more truthful with yourself. You want to

be passionate about your life. As all of this conflicting

obsession goes on, the desire to be true to yourself becomes

part of an attack.

JC: I know. I know. If I gave up my job and went back to acting,

I’d still feel all of this.

Stephen: The fantasy of quitting your job after vacation

relieves the anxiety temporarily, even though another part of

you knows you’re not going to quit. That’s what hurts. You think

about this as if it were going to happen in order to appease the

anxiety and the turmoil it’s springing from. It appeases the

anxiety for a while but there’s another lurking feeling which

suggests you can’t do it. “I won’t do it. Why am I kidding

myself?” This is the way the obsession is allowed to revel in

itself. Every part knows every other part. It feels like the

most enormous trap you could set for yourself. There’s no way

out because you know exactly what you’re going to fall back on.

You know your own fall‑backs. You know when you’re fantasizing.

This insight in no way demeans your desire to express more of

who you are.

We’re looking at the snare you’re in. “Everything on the outside

is stale. I’m afraid about that staleness because my life does

not feel passionate or real. It doesn’t feel like there’s

movement toward anything. Yet if I make that movement, it’s

a wheel on which somebody gets hurt. Somebody gets run over by

my passionate response to life. I fantasize for a while about

doing what I want to do and at the same time I feel discouraged

because I know I’m going to go back to the job I have.”

The fantasy appeases the anxiety until you realize that you will

go back to exactly where you are now. Are you really going back

at the end of this vacation?

JC: God, I probably will just go back.

Stephen: That’s not okay, is it?

JC: No.

Stephen: Just like it’s not okay not to go back.

JC: Just like it’s not okay to have the relationship I’m in. I

have a whole fantasy about that. I would love to have a

relationship with someone who wants to communicate, who wants to

be together with a family. I want a lot when it comes to that.

Right now it feels like emptiness. I’ve replicated my parents’

relationship in my own life. My children pick up on all of this

even when I pretend it’s not there. I feel resentment on both

sides. I don’t feel any dignity about this. I feel a lot of

pressure right now about my children. I want to do right by them

and I’m not. It won’t help them to stay in the relationship and

it will hurt them to get out of it.

Stephen: This is called hell.

JC: Hell. How long can I go on with this?

Stephen: The hell is made worse because you feel there’s no

solution. This is where it really becomes hell. You have this

difficult relationship, you have your children that are

suffering because of it, you have a job you don’t want, you have

dreams you can’t fulfill, and every decision you make is wrong.

This is what you’re telling yourself.

JC: Right, right. And I’m getting sick, physically sick.

Stephen: It’s only logical that you would. That’s the next step.

What do you want? I’m not asking about a job. I want to know

what you want.

JC: Part of my problem is I feel I’m withholding. Everything

would work if only I’d do more spiritual work on myself.

Stephen: Here comes another element in the attack. You’ve blown

this one too. So that’s not really what you want. I ask you

once again, what do you want?

JC: I want to be doing something creative and making money. I

want to be alone with the girls for a while and then let the

relationship go. I don’t know, I really don’t want that.

Stephen: That’s not what you really want. Isn’t that right?

It’s part of the conflict. Let’s go back to the question

again. What do you want? Let’s find an answer that has no angry

attack looped onto it. What do you want?

JC: I want to be, I don’t know. I hear the words independent,

creative.

Stephen: You don’t really believe that, do you? Big doubt comes

up when you say that about whether you can become independently

creative.

JC: Why can’t I answer the question? Maybe I don’t understand

it.

Stephen: Do you think there’s a right or wrong answer to it?

JC: Yes, I feel probably that nothing I could say right now is

right. I mean everything seems so vague. I want to work

creatively. Well, I don’t really know. That has an attack on it

too. I would be happy if I could be independent of, no,

centered, not dependent on somebody else to give me what I want.

Stephen: Who are you dependent on to give you what you want?

JC: I want a lot of things from my husband which I’m not

getting. This leads me to believe I’m dependent on him. I’d like

to be only looking to myself, just centered, just full within

myself. Then some of these problems would disappear.

Stephen: Let me ask you a question. Let’s say your life didn’t

change at all. Let’s say tomorrow you woke up and everything on

the outside was exactly the same, but you didn’t have this

conflict. What would that mean?

JC: I don’t want that.

Stephen: This is interesting. Let’s go with it. You wake up

tomorrow and you don’t have this conflict. Then you say to me,

“I don’t want that.” Here we are at a big one. Here is a very

important moment as we follow this path. You wake up tomorrow,

life hasn’t changed, but you don’t have the conflict. And then

you say, “I don’t want that.” Now why don’t you want that?

JC: Because I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore. I

want to be doing something.

Stephen: We’re playing a little game. You wake up tomorrow …

JC: And there’s no conflict.

Stephen: . . . and there’s no conflict. Then I hear you saying,

“Then I’m really trapped.”

JC: Yes, right. This is what happens when I meditate all the

time. When I really stay with the spiritual path, I feel like

everything’s going to stay the same because everything’s sort of

okay.

Stephen: That’s not good? Let’s just examine this without value

judgments. You are saying that you believe that this conflict is

going to solve the problem for you, isn’t that right? If you

didn’t have the conflict, you would just be passive about the

dilemma. You believe the conflict is really doing it for you.

It’s solving the problem, isn’t it?

JC: That’s absolutely right.

Stephen: If we were in a court of law, would the evidence fall

on that side? Is the conflict solving the problem?

JC: No.

Stephen: Yet I hear you saying that if you didn’t have the

conflict you would really be in trouble. You’d be stuck with

something you don’t want, which is the same as saying, “I really

want the conflict because I’m afraid that without it I’m in

trouble.”

JC: My God, that’s right. I’m recreating my childhood. I keep

thinking this is the way it has to be, just like it was.

Stephen: Including this conflict.

JC: That’s what I made, the conflict.

Stephen: You were saying something a little different than that

earlier. Before, you were saying that the relationship with your

husband is responsible for your conflict. Now you’re saying

something a little different. You’re saying you don’t know

what’s going on “out there,” but that the conflict is a pattern

from the past. Is the pattern from the past represented by your

husband, or by your internal conflict? This is a very deep

question.

JC: I think the pattern is the conflict.

Stephen: Okay. That’s something quite different, but you must

see that you are arguing for the conflict. Please understand

that there is no problem here with doing this. We’re just

looking at it. There is a side of you that says, “If I didn’t

have this conflict, which is a pattern from my past, I would be

in trouble because I would like where I am in my life and I

don’t want to like where I am.”

JC: That’s right. That wouldn’t be living.

Stephen: Then you said, “When I’m feeling really spiritual I

think everything’s okay and I don’t want to think everything’s

okay.”

JC: That’s a huge conflict.

Stephen: Because, “If I think everything’s okay then I’m stuck

with something that’s not okay. I’m just thinking it’s okay.”

JC: Right.

Stephen: I hear the other conflict too. It goes something like

this: “If I think that everything’s okay then I’m in trouble

because then nothing is going to change.”

JC: Right.

Stephen: What you’re saying to me when you come right down to it

is this talk about acceptance is actually an argument for being

passive.

JC: I think that’s true, yes. My whole mode is to fight. I do

things that are very impulsive.

Stephen: In an attempt to solve an anxiety.

JC: Yes.

Stephen: When you do them impulsively, they don’t really solve

the anxiety. Do they?

JC: No. That’s the whole point. I don’t really want to solve

this conflict.

Stephen: It’s clear that you don’t because you’ve made some very

strong statements about how important it is for you to have it.

You’ve made a statement that there is great danger on the other

side of this conflict. You are avoiding the danger by having the

conflict.

JC: Yes.

Stephen: One side of you, let’s call it side A, believes if you

accept your life you’re in real trouble because you’ve turned

passive. Side B believes that if you suddenly throw everything

aside and move in a new direction, you’re going to hurt too many

people. Both side A and side B force you to stay with the

conflict.

JC: Right.

Stephen: In other words, side A is dangerous because it leads to

passivity and side B is dangerous because it’s hurtful to

others. This is your argument for keeping the conflict. What you

need now is to hear that the group is moving with you. We know

it’s raw. We know it hurts, but we’re with you in this. You need

to know that you’re not doing anything to the group.

JC: I can’t believe I’m bringing my whole life and putting it

out here. I haven’t allowed anybody else time to share tonight.

I feel so selfish.

BL: You’re not separate from us. This isn’t yours. It’s ours.

Stephen: One of the ways we use these patterns is to isolate, to

make ourselves feel that we don’t fit in. If you had a cut on

your hand you wouldn’t feel embarrassed about asking for some

attention. We’re here for a couple of hours. Nobody’s life is

being deranged because we’re looking at you and not at

ourselves, or because we’re looking at ourselves in you. Nobody

is suffering because of this discussion.

DS: My life is being enhanced because you’re being vulnerable. I

would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you I’m uncomfortable

with what you’re saying, because it’s shining lights in places

in me that I haven’t really looked at.

MG: You’re saying things that I couldn’t express about myself.

It is very helpful.

RO: You are speaking straight to me.

JC: I can’t believe that.

ML: Unless you can speak truthfully in a group like this there’s

no reason for us to be together. My conflict is pressure and I

feel it in just the way you feel what you’re taking about

tonight.

Stephen: It’s important to recognize when this kind of inner

experience is kept in such a way that it knows no friends, it

becomes a resentment against everyone else, particularly in a

group that meets again and again. If you’re not going to air it,

it’s going to become a resentment, because it’s what you use to

keep yourself apart anyway. It’s going to be harder and harder

for you to feel the kinship of all of us if you don’t allow

yourself to run this through. That’s why I commend you deeply for

doing it. This sharing is in the interest of friendship. It’s

not pushing people away. It’s pulling us together again. At

first it’s uncomfortable because you’re in a very raw spot. Part

of the rawness comes from your uncertainty about what you

believe. This is perfectly okay. You’re not so sure you want an

approach that says, “It’s okay.” I don’t want to hand you that

approach as if you had to believe it, because then it becomes a

lie.

When “it’s okay” becomes just another way to argue, then it

serves no purpose whatsoever. If “it’s okay” becomes a method of

dismissing the nitty‑gritty working through of a personal

obstacle, then it is simply another cliche and leads to

triviality.

JC: That’s why I heard you. That’s why I went to your retreats.

In the past I’ve used affirmations to suppress guilt.

Affirmations just haven’t worked for me. I make them into

suppressions.

Stephen: It’s a lie to say “it’s okay” when it simply doesn’t

feel okay.

JC: I understand that. I’m trying to release the negativity, but

I get so confused about all this spiritual stuff that I drop it.

I say to myself, “I’m not going to do the affirmations. I’m not

going to look at the book. I’m not going to search for spiritual

explanations.” Then I begin to get so angry that I become like a

volcano.

Stephen: The difficulty of a conversation like this is the

recognition that it’s not about what you should or should not

do. What you do is your business. We are talking about an

internal experience. It’s interesting to note that when you drop

the books and the affirmations, you get angry.

JC: Wait just one minute. I know that you didn’t say don’t do

affirmations. I recognize that this was my decision. I just knew

that what you were saying about using affirmations to suppress

feelings was true.

Stephen: When you put it all aside though, you got angry.

JC: I lost control.

Stephen: This suggests one of two things. Either the books, the

metaphysics and the affirmations were healing the anger, or they

were suppressing it.

JC: I was suppressing the anger.

Stephen: The evidence certainly seems to point to that. The

minute you put them aside, you started feeling angry. What you

recognized at our last retreat was that spirituality has more to

do with honesty than it does with pretending or suppressing.

It’s far better to be angry than it is to pretend that you’re

not angry, because when you pretend that you’re not angry you

don’t learn anything.

JC: Yet when I stop pretending I’m not angry, I often hurt

people. What is the balance? How do I have the anger and still

be gentle with myself and others?

Stephen: You said earlier that everyone knows when you’re angry

whether you express it or not.

JC: That’s right.

Stephen: So what difference does it make at that point? If

you’re angry, and you’re pretending that you’re not, the show

is only for you. It’s not for anybody else. Everybody else can

feel your anger on some level.

JC: This is hard for me. I want to think that I’m not an angry

person. I’m always apologizing to my children. I want them to

know that my anger is something I’m learning about and that it

doesn’t reflect on who they are.

Stephen: That’s a beautiful thing to say to them.

JC: Maybe it’s too much to say to a child.

Stephen: Do you see what you’re doing now? You’re saying, “I

cannot win.” There’s the pattern that comes from the past. You

can’t ever win. Whatever you do is wrong. Everything you think

is up for doubt.

JC: That is fundamentally my experience of myself.

Stephen: The conflict is always trying to solve itself. It is

simply speaking to itself. It’s making an argument for its own

existence. It speaks only in its own context. Any real solution

must be outside of the context of the conflict.

Whenever such a transcendent solution is suggested, you think

you’ve really got a problem. You think, “Right now I really

don’t have a problem, just these supposedly helpful voices

within me. But if I step outside the confines of these voices,

then I’ve really got a problem. I’m either passive or I’m

hurting someone else.”

Let’s look at the way in which you perceive life from

the perspective of the conflict. When you do what you want to do, it

hurts people. When you accept where you are, you hurt yourself.

JC: Right. Oh, my God.

Stephen: The conflict suggests that the answer to itself is to

stay in the conflict.

JC: I see that very clearly now.

Copyright 1993: Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz. All Rights Reserved.

 

Stephen: Be easy with yourself for a moment. I want to take you on a journey. I want you to see something in a way that you have not seen it before. Are you ready?

SL: Yes.

Stephen: In order for us to travel together like this, you must

be willing to stay very much in the place where the breathing

and the beating of the heart meet. I want you to be so very

honest that you will tell me when you are not there.

We find ourselves now on a road. Just allow yourself to be on

that road, but always in the place where the breathing meets the

beating of the heart. We are walking along a road and we don’t

know where we are. All we know is we feel that by continuing to

walk along this road, we will find something at the end of great

value. Our fear is that we may be walking in the wrong direction

or that this is not the right road at all. Are you with me on

this?

SL: Yes.

Stephen: We are walking on a road and we are yearning to find

where the road ends because we know in that place we will find

something we are searching for. Yet it is still unclear

whether we are walking the right way or whether this is the right

road.

So, we walk. Either we walk quickly or our pace is slow.

Sometimes we stop in thought to wonder whether the road is the

one on which we want to go. We pass through towns and we meet

people along the way. And of each of them we ask simply whether

this is the road that leads to the clearing where we know that

we will feel ourselves to be at home. Most of the time, the

question either has not been stated clearly enough or those we

ask do not know.

Sometimes we meet someone on the road who wants to travel with

us for quite some distance and across some great span of time.

While we are with them, we sometimes engage in a kind of

argument which we think is about our comfort, our clothes, or the

way we feel. But really we are simply asking each other if this

is the right road or if we are proceeding in the right direction.

We don’t always know that this is the nature of our argument.

Sometimes it feels as if we’ve been on the road so long that we

think it is our home and that the journey is all there is. We

wonder why we live in such a lonely place. Yet we continue to

move on. Sometimes we decide to turn around and go the other

way. When this doesn’t feel right, we turn again in our

original direction. This is our journey down the road.

Now you are on this road and there is a kind of song you sing

that speaks of how you feel. The song is, “I am alone. I feel so

all alone. I am afraid.” You sing this song as you walk along

the road. Sometimes as you come into a village where you find

others, you restrain yourself. You hold back. You find yourself

feeling that you do not want to involve anyone else in what you

think is your own pain and yours alone. You think that if you

were able to appear easy going about your lonely travels,

despite your uncertainty about the goal, that you would get a

more honest answer from those with whom you speak. You sometimes

feel that if you could but please the people you ask, they would

tell you something they are not revealing to you now. You feel

also that if someone needs you, then you will not feel so

lonely. You believe the way to please them is to bring them

everything they seem to need so that you, in effect, become a

messenger for their happiness. It also seems to you that this

approach never works. Are you still with me on this road?

SL: Yes.

Stephen: “I try so hard to please them. I try so hard to get

them to like me. Yet I seem continually to run up against their

anger.” Think on this. We’re looking at something that is not an

objective fact. We’re looking at the way your unconscious flow

is working with you. “I don’t understand why, in trying so hard

to please them, they seem to find me difficult. They are not

always at peace with me. In fact, they seem sometimes to be

annoyed with me. I don’t understand this because I’ve tried so

hard to be just what they want me to be. Why is it since I try

so hard to get them to need me, they seem sometimes to want to

push me away?”

Such a predicament is painful and confusing. There is a part of

you that feels a need to restrain yourself, to put some kind of

brace on what you need, what you believe and what you perceive

yourself to be. Perhaps such a brace would stop them from

pushing you away. Maybe then they wouldn’t get angry. Maybe then

they would see it your way and help you along. This is part of

the way in which we end up dealing with those we need as we

travel down this road.

You are with someone now on the road and you are also in the

fog. You’ve come to a valley and the fog has settled there. You

don’t know when the fog will lift or how to get out. But you do

know somehow that you would feel better if you knew that the

person traveling with you would not leave and would continue to

need you as much as you need her. Are you with me still?

SL: Yes.

Stephen: You feel that if you cling to her she will push you

away and yet you feel the need to cling. You feel that if you

let her know how much you think you need her, she will betray

you. You continue to feel a need for her anyway.

Another thought arises which appears like this: “If I restrain

myself enough and pretend to be the one who has no needs, she

will love me. Not that I don’t feel those needs, not that I

don’t want to cling, not that I am not afraid. If I pretend that

I feel none of these things, then perhaps she will be willing to

bring me the answer to those needs. This is the way I think I

can undo the fear I feel while walking through the fog, in the

valley, on a road which is unclear.” Can you feel that?

SL: Yes.

Stephen: So we continue to walk. We continue to travel. “If I

can only prove that I am something else then I will be loved. If

I prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet, then I will find

love. If I could only be the person I should be and not the

person I feel I am, then others will like me. I feel this

especially about the woman who travels with me now.”

None of this really seems to work. You find yourself committed

to the idea that your restraint is the way to find love. You are

building a facade around something which doesn’t exist. Your

neediness is what you feel. Yet you are afraid to express that

neediness because you know on some level that the neediness will

be betrayed. You think that in being something else for her, she

will love you and in some circuitous way the need will be

fulfilled. You get your need fulfilled by pretending you don’t

have the need.

Such an inner approach creates a sense of vagueness about your

feeling life. You feel distant from it, because you feel forced

to present a picture to those who come your way of a person who

is clear and clean. You are dealing with a belief which suggests

that if you pretend you don’t have the needs you do, the needs

that are hidden will be fulfilled in some backward sense. They

will give you the love you want because you aren’t the way you

are. You need to know that in this process you will not find

what it is you want so deeply. You want to know that she is

there for you despite your need for her. You want to put down

this burden, this facade that you have created, in the hopes of

fulfilling the need. It hurts to live inside a photograph of

yourself because it presses against something raw.

I feel in you that great need. I feel you needing so much and so

deeply. I feel the way in which you need to pretend. I feel the

way in which this pretense takes you away from what is real on

the inside.

Here is a picture of the way in which lonely men operate. Here

is a way in which sensitive men are forced to betray themselves

in this most difficult world. “I am a sensitive man. I am a man

with needs. I am a man who feels pain. I am a man who longs for

love and yet I feel I can’t bring those needs forward because

they will be rejected by those around me. In order to have those

needs met, I place a photograph on top of what’s real and live

through it. It hurts to do this.

“Sometimes I even believe that I’ve become the photograph, until

one day at some raw moment the whole way in which the photograph

is being used to suppress the real man becomes so clear and

hurts so much that all I want to do is run away.”

You want to cling to her and hold on to her. You want her to say,

“I will never leave you.” You are afraid to ask her. You’re

afraid there’s something unworthy and undignified about such a

stance. You walk along the road sometimes wondering if you are

going anywhere.

You are so open to this now. You are ready now to be for

yourself what you are, and not what you think you should be. You

are ready to be there for yourself. Try to think about how

something small and thin can suppress something great and deep.

The way in which you want to run should be respected and

understood. Be with this emptiness for a moment or two.

You are going to continue on our journey. You are going up a hill.

It is dark. Only now you are completely alone. There is no one

with you. Nothing on which to cling. It is cold. It is night.

You are tired.

You are carrying something on your back as you proceed up the

hill. You begin to recognize that you have been carrying it for

a long time. You are walking up this hill, carrying a sack on

your back in the dark. You are cold, lonely, weary and afraid.

It seems at this moment that you have left everything behind

that you once had clung to and you don’t know which way to turn.

Just as you come to the crest of the hill you can see a ray of

light. You can feel in your heart a stirring of hope. You stop

for a moment at the crest, just before the top, and you feel

within yourself a great longing not to have these needs, not to

be afraid, not to feel isolated and alone.

You have walked almost all the way up the hill. On the other

side is light. You are so tired that you have decided to sit and

rest. Inside is a deep yearning to know that you are safe.

There is a man alone sitting on a hill just before it crests.

There is a rising sun. There is still the dark. There is a hint

of warmth. There is the cold. Here is a man who waits.

You rise and walk a little further to the top. You know that on

the other side is something you want. Just before you, however,

is a gate. I want you to stand in front of this gate and

experience the yearning which exists to pass to the other side.

Allow yourself to feel this yearning. Let go of the self hate.

Let go of the labels. Let go of the facade and allow yourself to

wait at the gate.

You discover, as you wait here, as you wait here for the God of

Love, that there is a guard. Someone stands at the gate. There is

a guard at the gate and I want you now to describe to me who

guards this gate.

SL: It looks like me.

Stephen: How do you look?

SL: I look lovely.

Stephen: Can you feel that deeply?

SL: Yes.

Stephen: Does it make you afraid to want to love you so much?

SL: It makes me want to hug me.

Stephen: Now go to this guard and embrace him. “Why are you

holding me back?” you ask. “Because I am so afraid,” you answer.

“I want Love so badly it makes me afraid.”

Be easy with your breathing. Breathe deeply. I want you to

listen now in a way you have never listened to any voice before.

I want you to recognize that the voice you are about to hear is

coming through you. “My dear, kind friend. My dear, kind and

sensitive friend. My dear, kind, gentle, sensitive friend. My

dear, kind, soft, gentle, sensitive friend who sometimes feels

so lost that he needs to defend. My dear, sweet heart, I love

you. Accept this please. It is the only gift I will ever give.

It is the only gift you will ever want. My dear friend who

dwells in Light, listen to the way you rattle in the dark. I

love you. All this softness, all this sensitivity is still a

man. All this need and all this greed is still a man. All this

gentleness, all this sensitivity, all this willingness to be

open, is still a man. It is beautiful to be who you are now,

because I love you, my gentle, gentle friend. My angry, gentle

friend. My lonely, gentle friend.”

There will be moments over the next several weeks when you will

feel an intense desire to be alone. It is important to respect

this so our work together can continue in silence. You will also

experience some grief, a sense of being aware of what you wanted

so badly to hide. Allow yourself to feel that grief. It is a

mourning for the guard who has passed away. It is a way in which

you wait at a gate which has no guard. You are waiting in the

warm dawn. You are waiting at the open gate.

SL: This is such an affirmation of the workings of Spirit. I don’t

know otherwise how to explain how you knew what I was feeling

from the few words that I said, right down to the relationship.

Stephen: The journey was impossible without your traveling. We

are all here ready to experience the Second Coming and to

understand the Second Coming as an internal experience in which

we find the Presence of Love and turn away from despair. In this

new advent we hear, “In your honesty, I’ll be there.”

Our work is to keep the prayer honest and to learn what it means

to be resurrected. We certainly know what it means to be

crucified. Now let us know what it means to be resurrected and

to ascend. “God is the Light indwelling in my heart. His

messenger is my Friend.”

Copyright 1993 Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz.

All Rights Reserved.

What really is anger, in terms of compassionate self-care?

I think that in terms of the understanding the foundation of this work we’re calling Compassionate Self-Care, nothing could be more radical or more disruptive of a particular point of view than the relationship that we take toward our emotional life, and then, in the relationship that we take toward something like anger. For most people, the entry into an emotion is the entry into a particular conglomeration of vague elements – thoughts, past associations, uncomfortable body feelings, the desire for revenge, the experience of being hurt, vulnerability, tight defense. When there’s anger inside a human being, there is what might be called a synthesis of various elements that appear to be one thing but are really more than one thing. Rarely, if ever, is anger thought to be an overlay that obscures a deeper experience. When we discover what that deeper experience actually is, it turns out to be something we long for, something we actually want. In most spiritual work, anger is considered to be that which you overcome, that which you don’t have, that which you are struggling against. And rarely is anger thought to be something that is actually a part of, and crucial to, spiritual work.

In certain psychological understandings, it is considered good to express your anger, to get the anger out. And the relationship that we take to anger in Compassionate Self-Care is quite different.  Because we’re saying here, in a most considerate way, that what you assume to be anger – that which you should get out or express – is very different than what it appears to be on the surface. And working with anger, coming to anger, is one of the most profoundly important tasks that we can take on as human beings, as pilgrims, as those who are seeking ways to recover from our sense of separation and to find some contact or communion with that which is greater than our own loneliness.

In this work, in the process of Compassionate Self-Care, we make a radical statement that can’t be grasped at a conceptual level but can result in a real understanding or a real transformation. The statement that all emotions are the same, that all emotions are merely interpretations of various energetic fluctuations occurring in the human body, is a statement that demands deep and contemplative consideration in order for it to do its work. But this is one of the underpinnings of our work: All emotions arise from a unified field; all emotions are the felt experience of energy in the body. All emotions, when reduced, deconstructed, followed down into their essential core, are springing from an ocean of unified energy and are being experienced in a multitude of ways in our body, for a multitude of reasons. Anger is no exception to this. We might assume anger to be something very different than what is being described here. We might assume anger to be the result of a circumstance or a childhood problem or a dilemma. We might assume anger to be justified, or not justified. We might assume anger to be fine, morally right, part of the human condition. Or we might assume anger to be not justified, unspiritual, something that we are seeking to overcome as a result of our spiritual work. In the understandings of Compassionate Self-Care, in a sense, we don’t say any of the above. Anger is not “justified”; anger is not “not justified”. Anger is not “right”; anger is not “wrong”. Anger is, in a sense, not what we think it is. And the journey toward understanding anger is not the journey of moral evaluations. It is not the journey of psychological insight. It is not the journey of justification or of analysis. It is the journey of entry -  going toward the anger – and disbanding those evaluative, cognitive, associative, mental judgements that we are so absorbed by.

It is in these judgements we find ourselves caught. It is here we make ourselves right or wrong for feeling something in the body. Anger has nothing to do with right or wrong. The behavior that anger evokes may be appropriate or inappropriate. It may be supportive to another person or not supportive. But the behavior that arises from our particular interpretation of an energetic movement in the body is different from the internal experience itself. Anger is not right; anger is not wrong. Anger is simply not what we think it is. Anger is a movement of something in the body. And more often than not that particular movement has a kind of passion associated with it. There is a surge inside that anger. There is a real movement that takes place within the body when we are angry. The beauty of anger, in terms of our spiritual work, is that if we allow ourselves to take the plunge, there is a very recognizable physical component to anger. And it is something that can be found by turning our attention to the body. We can find anger at the physical level.

It is also very easy to find anger at the mental level. And because there is such passion in anger, because there is such fierceness to it at times, it is one of those experiences where it can become easy, at least on a certain level, to discover the difference between our associations, our input, our evaluations, our blame, our fantasies, and the actuality of the physical tone of the anger itself. We can use anger as a way to look toward ourselves and notice the difference between what we’re telling ourselves is going on and the physical experience itself. It is interesting to note that as we turn our attention toward the physical side of anger and allow ourselves to be with that anger openly, giving it an enormous permission, that at first we may feel that there is something hard about the anger. If we stay with that hardness – not judging it, not trying to change it, not smothering it with mental judgement, but just staying with it openly, – the passage may open in which we find ourselves leaving behind the hardness and coming to something which  feels almost exactly the opposite of hardness.

The journey through anger involves turning the attention to the physical component, the physical side of the anger – finding it, locating it, breathing with it, integrating it into the breath. We respectfully notice the tremendous mental demand that seems to be inherent to the anger itself but we don’t necessarily clutch to that demand or believe it. At the same time we don’t argue with the mental story or make it wrong.

Compassionate Self-Care in all of its aspects is a respectful entry into both our interpretations and into the actuality of our physical relationship to all forms of energy. Anger is an energy, but it is also an energy that is being tied up by tremendous personal concerns and associations, dogmas and beliefs about what this energy means and what has caused it to be present. And underlying all conflicted relationships to anger is the assumption that there is something about it that’s not right. Many of us have been taught, particularly out of various religious backgrounds but also out of various nonreligious and psychological backgrounds, that anger is something that we have to overcome.

In our Compassionate Self-Care work we are taking a different path. This is not toward overcoming it; this is toward entering it at more honest levels. The difference in many respects between Compassionate Self-Care and what might be termed a understanding, is that in a typical self-help work, the emphasis is on accepting the interpretation but, say, making it right instead of wrong; or, overcoming it instead of being enslaved by it.

In this work the journey is to find the core of something through learning what it means to embrace at deeper and deeper levels that which we have been attempting to reject. And we do this through the attention. So we turn toward the anger. In this sense we respect the anger at both the physical level and also at the level in which the story is taking place. There’s no rejection here; there’s no assault. The assault is in every case counterproductive. And it is helpful if we at least carry with us the beacon inspiration that this is not a psychological failure, this is not a problem, this is not a wrongness on my part; this is a profound spiritual experience which I’ve judged in a peculiar way. Then we can begin to get some sense of how to enter into it, how to transcend the evaluations.

The behavior which arises from anger is a result not of something that we would call the organic, physical experience itself, but rather the way in which we are so afraid of that organic experience that we clamp down on it. As a result of the clamp down, there might be a fierce response, a fierce behavior. We might end up feeling remorse or guilt about our behavior. We might end up feeling a sadness that we weren’t able to be more understanding, when in fact we want to be.

And the beauty of our Compassionate Self-Care process is that if we behave in a way that seems hurtful to another human being and we end up in an experience of guilt, remorse or sadness, then all we can do at that point is to come to our remorse and our guilt and our sadness with the same respect, with the same integrated movement of the breath that we came to or might have come to the anger in the first place. There is no moment in the Compassionate Self-Care process where there is failure. There’s no place where we have lost it, where suddenly now we are irrevocably wrong, where we didn’t live up to something. Whenever we’re in a situation where we assume that we’ve failed, then we can come to that and find in that the same energies that we might have found in our anger or in anything else.

We come to the breath; we come to the physical experience of the anger; and we turn to that. And what we are likely to find in the beginning is a tug of war between the desire to blame ourselves or someone else and our actual physical experience. In all likelihood, coming to the physical experience of anger will at first be uncomfortable. There will be such a draw toward the mental side, toward making sense of it, toward getting it out onto somebody else, that we may have to spend time watching that. We have to spend time being with that, completely respecting that, before we can find what lies underneath -  what is deep down in there, what is the core of anger.

If we find ourselves, to some degree, able to begin transcending or at least disengaging from the mental side, we are in all likelihood going to discover what I was speaking about before, which is a tightness or a hardness in the body. And we may assume this is the core of anger, a hardness. The work then involves allowing ourselves to explore, through the attention, the hardness – allowing ourselves to attend to the hardness, the tightness, the wall, and to just be with it. Notice where it is in the body. Notice its contour. Notice its shape, its size. Notice its location. The emphasis here is on making the experience of anger physical and not moral; bringing the experience of anger into the present; not allowing it to be dominated by the past; coming to the hardness in the body; breathing with it; softening and opening to it; and embracing it through the attention.

As a result of doing this over time, it is likely that we are going to discover that the tightness is not where the anger ends. The anger is in a sense only marginally about tightness. The tightness has come because we are attempting to protect ourself against something within that we have been taught for one reason or another is quite dangerous to allow ourself to feel in an undefended way. The tightness also comes because we are taking our own fear about something that has been evoked within us by a particular circumstance and pretending or fantasizing that that danger has to do with the circumstance and not with what’s been evoked within us. The tightness defends us against our fantasy, our interpretation, and the tightness defends us against this something that is rising up from somewhere, which we have been taught to make into something else.

If we stay with the tightness, if we stay with the body, if we stay with ourselves in an open way, it is inevitable that in this anger, a certain kind of floor is going to be opened. A hard floor, something that we thought was solid before, something that we assumed to be the dead end of the anger itself, is pulled away. And underneath, an incredible vulnerability, a very deep hurt, a sense of woundedness, a wanting, a calling for something, an almost childlike longing, a childlike call. This hurt that at the surface may seem to be caused by whatever circumstance was involved in the first place, in actuality seems much more ancient than that, much deeper, much more longterm than any particular circumstance could possibly evoke. Allowing ourselves to be with the hardness for awhile, allowing ourselves to transcend -  through the breath and through our attention to the body – the incredible demand of thought and all its interpretations, brings us down into an incredible hurt, a longing, a rawness -brings us down into what might be called an ancient wound.

We don’t want the ancient wound, at one level of our existence. We’ve been taught that coming to undefended hurt is a weak act. We’ve been taught that coming to undefended hurt is in fact a danger to ourselves – that if we open into ourselves and our aching and our longing in an undefended way, we are going to be sucked out of this world. We are going to be turned away from the things of the world that are real. We’re not going to be able to function.  And we have built a life, so many of us, around turning away from undefended states, and particularly turning away from a relationship to vulnerability, to hurt, to wound, to ache, to longing, which in reality is only giving permission to an experience like that to exist, to arise within us.

We are following a path here. And we are offering the outline of a path, not in the sense in which we say this is emphatically what will be discovered, but rather painting a broad brushstroke of a possible journey which is not conceptual but is entirely experiential. I am angry. My first step is an incredible okay to this anger. My second step is turning toward the body through my attention, and a willingness to view or to witness on equal terms my mental interpretation, my cacophony of conflict, my confusion – but to keep allowing the attention gently to be with the physical side of this until we reach a point at which we have integrated something which is going on in the body with the natural rhythmic movement of the breath.

And then we may notice a hardness. And the hardness isn’t right or wrong. It doesn’t have a meaning. It doesn’t need a reason, an insight, an analytical construction. It is what it is, and we stay with it. It’s a kind of floor. It’s the bottom, but it’s not the real bottom. It’s only the bottom that we propose. It’s only the bottom that we assume. We notice this, but we keep physicalizing it – where is it, what does it feel like. None of this has to be articulated. This isn’t a matter of thought; it’s a matter of attentive observation. Breathing and attending, allowing and attending, opening to, not fighting against.

Anger isn’t a moral problem; it is only a moral problem at the level of behavior. And the behavior is only a result of a particular interpretation. Anger is something else. And the journey with anger is the journey toward an experience of ourselves in a completely different way – toward an opening and not toward an overcoming or a judgement.

How often it is in the human scheme that the emphasis is on making ourselves wrong. How frightening it is to be here on this earth, to feel alone anyway,  to feel encapsulated in the body, to know that we want something but not to be sure how we can get it or what it is we can get – and then to slap ourselves back and forth with wrongness, “I am wrong, I am not up to something, I am weak, I am scared of myself.” Of course in that scenario it is understandable why we would then be magnetized by making somebody else wrong, making the situation wrong, hating them, hating us, hating this, hating that. And all of the time, lurking underneath this wildness of mind is some deep and innocent aching that we are really afraid to face, that we have been taught not to face. We can look at this in ourselves, how

stubborn this is, how deeply frightening it is, to be afraid of ourselves and at the same time to make ourselves wrong; to long for something and to make the longing wrong; to be angry at something and to judge the anger as if it indicated where we are in some spiritual, moral sense, and to make that wrong.

And all this is in the context of an unbelievable sense that we’re alone here. There’s nobody to turn to; there’s nothing really to turn to. How stark, how frightening. This is not what spirituality is about. It is never about moral evaluations. It is never about whipping loneliness. It is never about choking off our longing, or hating the ache, or driving a knife into the wound -  the ancient wound. Spirituality is about respect, first and foremost. And if that respect takes the form for a long period of time of simply allowing ourselves to be angry at the level we’re experiencing it, then so be it. But there is more. But that more can only come as a result of the great stroke of saying yes to who we are and where we find ourselves at a given moment in time.

This spiritual journey is not a test. It is not a series of examinations that we go through in which we are judged better or worse than someone else by some fantasized standards. We don’t know where we are. We don’t have to know, and we can’t know. Because all the judgements that we make are not based on the way in which the Being of Love views our existence here. Rather it is based on some encapsulated, isolated, separated illusion that is in the place of a true spirituality. A true spirituality does not judge, does not evaluate. Because it knows, as a living truth, that love and love alone is real, and that love and love alone lies at the core of any feeling experience that we could have as human beings – whether that experience is anger, rage and fear, or whether that experience is grief and sadness and longing for friendship. It’s all the same. These evaluative conditions are the illusions of mind.

The only way that the journey to the love within the anger can be made is by an absolute, unconditional respect for every aspect of anger. Wherever we find ourselves, it’s okay. We come to this tightness, and we breathe with it. And the tightness, in a sense, the hardness, is an evolutionary signpost that we have reached a crucial point in our journey because we have come to something physical. And we stay with the physicality of the anger, which now takes the form of a hardness. And we breathe with it, and we integrate it.

Over time, and in a way that is unique to each one of us, that hardness breaks, and we ache. The hardness breaks and we ache. The assault on ourselves and someone else dissipates, and we are longing. We are hurt. We are vulnerable. Longing, hurt, and vulnerability are always deep friends, are always together, always in the heart of things – honest and clear and true.

Compassionate Self-Care work gives us a glimpse of how our life has been built upon various fantasized ways of avoiding the basic human condition – which is that we are praying all the time. And that prayer comes out of a true longing and a true ache. And that ache is there because we have been ripped away, at least on a perceptual level, from the great and endless love for which we long, the great and endless safety that the heart yearns for. We will ache as long as we feel isolated. We will ache for as long as we feel alone here. And until we learn deeply what it means to respect that ache, we are going to get angry whenever a situation evokes it. We are going to get angry whenever someone in some way pulls apart the scab of our defense and gives us the chance to experience for a moment the fact of our longing for God, our longing for trust, and our fear that it’s not there and that we have been betrayed fundamentally as human beings.

Every anger, when we come right down to it, is a defense against the prayer. It is a defense against the longing of the heart for an experience in which there isn’t an “other;” there isn’t a loneliness; there isn’t an isolation and a separation. Underneath the hardness of anger is the  ancient aching wound, the longing for love. And the work of Compassionate Self-Care is a way in which we allow ourselves to drop off the story, to drop off the hardness, and to come to that ache so that our anger is now understood to be the deep and mighty prayer of a being lost for a moment in the great illusion of time and space, waiting for love’s presence to be felt in fullness.

But what is so beautiful about the ache and the longing and the hurt at the heart of anger, is that it is not something that we overcome. We don’t say, “Oh, yes, this is an ache, and now I must heal the ache; oh, this is a wound, and now in some way I must overcome the wound.” Back there is nothing more than the endless refrain of mind.

When we hit the ache and are conscious of the wounding, our work is to stay physical again with this – to breathe it, to allow it, not to inflict names on it, not to find some intricate and sophisticated analysis, but to be with it. “I ache, I hurt, I long, I wait.” And in so doing, some other profound transformation can begin to occur, something extraordinary. And that is the recognition that our wound is a passageway, an opening, a corridor, if you will. The prayer is a physical reality. It is not a series of words in the mind. The prayer to God is an experience of the passageway which unites us with the Almighty, the All, the Forever, the Eternal One.

The hurt is the prayer; the prayer is the passage; the passage is a kind of space through a subtle realm. This space is like a very, very subtle invisible umbilical cord which unites us to the One who gives grace. This umbilical cord is injured, physically injured, and it is it that hurts, and it is this that aches. And the work of attention, the work of self-care, the work of the breath, the work of the revelation of our great desire for God, the physical revelation, is a work in which the breath and the attention heal the wounds in the passageway that links us to forever, to the love that we so want as human beings.

We are united inextricably to love, and we are fed by love. But the passage of love through the passageway sometimes aches and hurts because it has been so wounded by our separated state, our separated past and the events that appear to take place in separation on this earth. Breathing with the ache in love’s passageway is the work of Compassionate Self-Care. This is honesty.  This is truly honesty. Nothing else matters. Love comes; love passes through. Sometimes it hurts; and sometimes it doesn’t. But whether it hurts or whether it doesn’t, it’s all the same.

The prayer of anger is the prayer to grace. It is the prayer for grace, the prayer in which we heal the place in which love’s gift is given to the body, the body that is briefly lost in space and time. We trace it back up. There is the great reservoir of love, of the unconditional and absolute, the blessing of love forever. And there is this beautiful visibility, this body, which in the end is nothing more than the solidification of that love, but that appears like something else. And there is a marvelous passageway, for the most part unseen, an umbilical cord between this form in space and time and that eternity. In truth, no separation exists; in perception we must talk about these separations so that we may understand the bridge, so that the work can become grounded in the actuality of our experience. This cord, this link, this passageway is wounded. And therefore, the passage of love sometimes hurts. On the human side we long for love, and we long inside the hurt of the broken passageway.

At another level, we have been taught to be afraid of all of our aching, of all of the symptoms of our perceptual separation. We have been taught to avoid prayer. We have been taught to look instead toward things that occur and to blame those things for our pain, and to blame ourselves as well – to make moral evaluations rather than to come down into the heart of the heart of our life here, and to recognize that in this life we are either praying or the prayer is being answered. There is nothing else.

And we come up another level out of our ache, and we see that sometimes a closed door is put upon that ache. The body tenses, tightens down. And it is at this point that we begin to call ourselves anger. Aching, longing, receiving love in a hurtful way, a hardness, a tightening, a fear of the vulnerability – and then on top of that an intense, sometimes wild story line, which proposes that somebody’s wrong somewhere along the line. And then on top of that, in the most painful way, a series of whips and snares and judgements and evaluations which categorize the whole scenario as something that is wrong or weak or unspiritual about us or someone else.

We can see in this how Compassionate Self-Care is a deconstruction of a complexity and the return to an utter simplicity. That journey can not be made unless the central element within that journey is self-respect and nonviolence. We come to the body, we breathe, we physicalize our anger, we accept that anger on the level at which it appears, but we keep traveling down. We keep moving toward that which we have been taught to fear. “I want love, I want God’s grace, I want to trust, I don’t want to be separate. I don’t want to hate or be hated. I want to be clear. I want to be reunited with that which is forever dear and holds me dear. I want communion and reunion. I want love.”

I breathe with the body. I breathe with the rhythms of the body. I say yes to what is, and I know that prayer is indeed a bodily experience and not an experience where we enter into a string of thoughts.  It is an honest encounter with our ache. It is an honest encounter with our hurt, an honest encounter with our longing. And in this sense, it is forgiveness itself, because lack of forgiveness is only based on mental interpretation. And forgiveness – the prayer of the body – is based on no interpretation at all. We feel it, we accept it, we come into it, we allow it, we embrace it. And in so doing, the fierce conditioning of the past is put aside. And the honesty of the present, the unsentimental honesty, is allowed to rise.

Holy, holy, holy; everything I feel is holy. My anger is a holy vehicle. My anger is a prayer. My anger is the force of life itself in a wounded passageway. I want my anger. I want my life.
Copyright 1993: Estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz. All Rights Reserved.

The following expressions about the human body, about the mind, about the energetic impulse of evolution, are not meant to be taken in as information.  We don’t need to think about them as if we were in an ordinary classroom.  We take our time.  We sit with them.  We allow.  We move.  We stay easy and we don’t push to get anything or to understand in a literal way. This work can only be effective to the degree that we are willing to absorb the understandings given in openness and that we recognize it to be an appreciation of the human event and not a criticism.

This life is, on one level, very simple.  It is also exquisitely complex.  There is nothing contradictory in this because our consciousness, our awareness, is great enough to embrace both the complexity and the simplicity as one.  And in order to understand how to do this for others, for everything, we must first understand how to do this for ourselves.

The commitment to self-care is the commitment to non-violence, non-intervention, complete acceptance.  The commitment to self-care is the commitment to ecological interdependence as a way of life.  It is a commitment to the understanding that nothing is unrelated to anything else.  Everything is embracing.

Self-care is the commitment to compassion and the recognition that compassion for others can not come from coercion of ourselves.  It must come from compassion to ourselves.  It must come from a genuine support for life and not a hatred for it.  And, yet, if there is a hatred, we wait.  We ground it by bringing it to the body, we allow it and we breathe — only to discover that even in what we had previously called hate, there is warmth, there is grace, there is easiness.

To bring ourselves into a life that is harmonious, enriched and creative, it is necessary that we learn to beat the sword into plowshares, to end the violent interference with the beautiful purpose of the body.  We learn how to live in this complexity with our simple breathing, our simple feelings, our simple attention, and how to share with others the care that we bring to ourselves.

1

Let’s allow the attention to be with the breathing.

Simply shift the attention from thinking to breathing.

And let this movement of attention be very simple, natural and physical.

Notice the breathing and the beating of the heart.

Be very easy with this.

If there is any other experience occurring in the body,

Just allow it to be there.

It is not important

To create complex or detailed analyses about what is occurring in the body.

It is important, however, to be with ourselves openly and gently.

We shift the attention from thought to body

And suddenly we have given ourselves a certain kind of permission.

We let ourselves breathe and the body relaxes.

The purpose of sitting in this way is not to get over anything or to fix ourselves.

We do not sit to triumph over neurosis, shortcomings, or difficulties.

We stay with the body and with the breathing,

Knowing that whatever is occurring in the body is okay.

We come to it openly.

We let go of the label, the description, the analysis, the implications.

We let go of its future, its past and its meaning.

We cease whipping it, beating it, saying things to it, about it, for it or against it.

We simply allow.

There is no push to get anything, to go anywhere.

There is no pressure to be anything or to find anything.

There is nothing to look up to or down at.

There is only our experience as it is.

And in this context, our experience is as innocent as anything could be.

We stay with the body and with our breathing.

And we let the attention be with the front of the body in particular.

We allow ourselves to be attentive to the beating of the heart and the breathing.

Whatever may be happening elsewhere during this process,

Whatever circumstances we may be facing in our lives,

Whatever past we may have had,

Whatever future seems to be unfolding,

Our emphasis is on warmly and gently bringing the attention to where we are now.

Our feelings do not mean what we think they mean.

Our feelings don’t have a meaning right now.

They are what they are.

It is vital that we allow our feelings to be.

We stay openly aware.

We permit.  We breathe.

We wait to see what unfolds.

We wait and stay easy.

And perhaps, as we experience our feelings in this way,

We may have the deep and organic recognition that there is nothing wrong.

There never has been anything wrong.

It is just that we have been so oriented

Towards imposing our descriptions and labels

Onto the innocence of the bodily experience

That we have become lost in a web of false meaning.

Here there is only the breathing.

There is only the beating of the heart.

There is only an experience in the body.

The rest of it is made up.

All of the problems and all of the solutions,

All of the ways in which we characterize ourselves,

All of the thoughts we have had about what this life means,

All of the dreams, and all of the associations,

All of the ways in which we strategize, whip ourselves, twist and then insist

That we be something other than what is here right now, is all made up.

We come to the body and breathe.

We let the body relax, so gently, so evenly, so openly

That it seems we are moving in a warm stream, carrying us into

A different kind of softness, a very precious innocence

Which is the truth about our lives.

2

We allow what is going on inside of us or outside of us

To exist for a little while as it is –

Quietly, openly and without regret.

We bring our attention to the body in a simple way

And we appreciate wordlessly,

Whatever we find there.

There is nothing wrong

Except our own speculations.

In the quietness of our attention to the body,

We breathe.

We may notice our thoughts.

Thoughts come and go.

We notice that

Thinking and breathing are two different things.

When the attention is on the breathing,

There is a sense of being here, of presence.

When the attention is riveted to thought,

There occurs an immediate dislocation.

We are disconnected,

Off balance

Ungrounded

Even a little afraid.

Part of the reason that we shift our attention

From thought to the breathing,

Is so that we can sense, to one degree or another,

The possibility of releasing ourselves from an assumption about identity,

Which always leads to loneliness.

We live as if there were a little person inside the body,

Figuring, analyzing, being frightened,

Trying to make sense of things in a certain conceptual way,

Looking out at friends, lovers, enemies,

And not knowing quite how to dissolve the nagging sense that we’re alone.

The assumption that

The physical body represents the outward circumference of the identity,

And the real person is somewhere inside,

Always leads to loneliness.

When we begin to recognize that there is a greater identity,

Which extends far beyond the boundaries of the body,

Then we can begin to know

How to meet each other,

How to have relationship,

And how to find another person in a way that truly satisfies.

When, for even a few moments,

A human being can know that the identity, the individuality

Does not end at the extremities of the flesh,

Does not end at the circumference of the body,

There arises, inevitably,

There arises a sense of compassion for ourselves,

Because we have lived another way for so long.

It is so lonely to be trapped inside the body, so forlorn.

It seems so dangerous and fraught with difficulties.

Yet, there is another experience.

And it doesn’t require a particular technique or level of development to have it.

It only requires that we understand what the attention is,

How innocently open it can be,

And how to offer it to the body in such a way that

It doesn’t give dominance to the veil of interpretive thought.

If we give ourselves permission

To have a few conscious moments outside of the fantasy

Outside of our preoccupations with what we have concocted in the mind;

We may begin to notice, subtly at first, and then perhaps more dramatically

That the body is not a container.

It is not a jail cell.

It is not a wrap of bandages around a poor loneliness inside.

It is rather a visibility, a marker, a point in time and space

Which gives an indication that something more beautiful, more profound and

More far-reaching in its possibilities, is going on.

3

The body is a marker.

And around this marker is a matrix of subtle energies

Which can not usually be seen by the naked eye.

This matrix of energy accompanies the body as it moves through space and time.

It is always there.

It may not always seem as if this matrix of energy even exists

Because the so-called personal life

Feels so tightly bound by the outlines of the physical form.

The body is surrounded by a field.

The body is surrounded by a kind of space which is more than just emptiness or air.

Wherever we are, wherever anyone else is,

There is this field, this kind of radiance which surrounds the body.

There are times, when we sense that such a field exists

And then there are times when we don’t.

If we were able to have a very clear experience of the field that surrounds the body

We would discover that it is made up of very subtle filaments, delicate emanations

Rays, if you will, which function as conduits or passageways,

Through which something is received and out of which something is given.

The body dwells within an arc of rays

Which have an exquisite ecological function to receive something

And to give something away.

The giving and receiving rays are the same.

They are like passageways through which energy moves toward us and through which

Energy passes away.

And the giving and receiving of these energies takes place in one cycle,

Just like breathing.

The process of giving and receiving is the same.

It is happening in the same filament.

Receiving is the energies coming toward the body, the physical membrane,

And giving is those energies transformed,

And then returned along the same passageways.

When we begin to get some sense of this,

We can understand something exotic and beautiful about human relationship.

Relationship does not take place

As a result of someone getting to know someone else via information.

What we can actually know

About each other in an informational sense is severely limited.

If we assume a person to be nothing more than a kind of computer

In which is stored an array of information,

And that if we had all of those bytes out of storage and onto our disk,

We would know them  –

We have fallen into a complete fallacy.

Real relationship is occurring body to body and is felt.

It is not an informational exchange.

Information often just gets in the way.

4

If we open ourselves to

An honest appraisal of the way we tend to operate in the world,

We can see that naming something from the human viewpoint

Is the same as knowing something.

And if we consider such a viewpoint for a while,

We can see how false it is.

Because we have named something and because we have deep associations

Between the name and the phenomenon that is being named

Doesn’t mean that there is understanding, that there is real knowledge.

Because we call something a tree, or a star

Only has the effect of robbing those things of their inherent mystery.

So it is with the feelings.

Because we can say that we’re angry or guilty or afraid

Because we can delineate or describe our feelings,

Does not mean that we understand what those feelings mean, what they are.

It only means that we’ve named them

That we have ingrained associations with those feelings.

Such associations are not knowledge.

They are conditioning.

They indicate that a kind of hypnotism has taken place.

The way the mind will conceptualize about feelings,

The stars, the sky at night, the sea, each other

Is not a sign of knowledge.

But rather an attempt to distance ourselves from the fact

That we do not really know what anything means.

Everything we see and feel and touch is a perpetual and awesome mystery.

We do not own our feelings.

The way we label, define, describe, and attempt to organize our feelings

Is the urge to ownership.

But we don’t own our feelings;

We receive them.

In the front of the body,

Particularly the solar plexus, the heart and the area around the heart,

We can become aware of a kind of retina, a kind of membrane,

That is capable of receiving energetic waves from somewhere.

The front of the body is a membrane,

A perceptual organ which receives and gives in one cycle.

We breathe in the front of the body.

And the breath is a living symbol

Of our relationship to the unseen energies of universal existence.

Emotions, as they are commonly understood,

Are the minds attempt, to own the feeling life.

Emotions are a particular interweaving of possessive thought with feeling.

This interweaving is often so complete

That it appears as if the thought and the feeling are the same.

We assume that the thought content thread is the same as the feeling thread.

Feelings can be removed from the grasp of ownership.

When this is done, we discover that what we thought we were feeling,

Is not really what we were feeling at all.

Emotions are a kind of congestion in which an energy is being received in the body,

And then becomes dominated by the net of thought.

They pressure each other.

The energies are trying to expand into greater openness,

And the thoughts are trying to contract into ownership.

The emotional life is nothing more than an attempt to own something

That is no more our own than the breeze, the trees, and the sky.

We are receiving feelings.

They are moving through us all of the time.

The body in its nobility, in its delicacy, in its extraordinary capacity to perceive,

Is enabling us to have a conscious experience of invisible energies

As they impact the physical form.

There is this extraordinary location, the physical body,

And there is an evolutionary cosmic event

Which is invisibly taking place and can be felt, experienced and played with

Only when the body is open to receive what is occurring

In ways that aren’t coerced and dominated by the personalizing pressure of thought.

Feelings are being received by the body.

Thought is dominating that receiving process as if it owned them.

We assume the feelings in the body to be ours.

We assume that we own the feelings

And that there is no distinction between a feeling and an emotion.

But, feelings are far more delicate, more interesting, and wiser, than emotions.

We have a feeling life which is being gifted to us which is being given to us

As a result of evolutionary energies impacting on the human form.

We can learn what it means in a very practical way

To live with these energies, to so listen to them,

That we can follow the direction

They are giving us rather than imposing one of our own.

We want to be in touch with these energies.

We want to feel our lives as part of a process which includes

That which is upholding and evolving the entire universe.

5

When we experience emotional pain, it is vital to understand

That it is part of a movement toward growth.

And that our task is to rhythmically cooperate with that movement, even if it hurts.

And so we come to the pain and we allow that pain to be integrated into the breathing.

The purpose of the pain is not to create a sense of wrongness.

It is not to make up an idea that we have failed or that someone has failed us,

But rather, it is to open the door to a conscious participation

With the energetic effects of evolutionary forces

As they pour from the cosmos into us.

The filaments, the spiraling threads which surround the body,

Have been wounded, crushed and hurt.

To heal a crushed filament, to heal the bodies relationship to energy,

Requires that we attend to the place which hurts

And let that hurt go through as many changes as is necessary.

To attend to the hurt requires that we cease giving it a meaning.

Whatever seems to be the cause,

Whatever seems to be the reason for our longing weak or strong,

It can be understood in the light of evolutionary purpose.

We come to the pain

And we allow the pain to be part of the breathing.

We breathe and we allow.

It’s as simple as that.

We locate with our attention

Where the pain is and we stay with it.

We do not distract ourselves with meaning

But if the meaning comes, if the mind begins to shroud the body experience

With its assertion of understanding, with its doubt,

We simply remain open, not fighting.

We stay with the breathing.

We stay with the beating of the heart.

We let the feeling be physical.

We ground it deeply in the body.

We open to it.

We do not run.

We do not hide.

We do not move away from

The tone of the experience into a fantasized prediction about it.

It is important to hurt.

It is good to hurt.

It is not necessarily what we think we want.

But it is the urge forward

The urge to expand

The urge to embrace and create.

It is a signal of our greatness and our high purpose here on the earth.

We should never question our right to hurt.

But we need to question why it is that we think we hurt

And how it is that we have been taught to deal with ourselves when we hurt.

Our pain is an inflammation in a passageway.

It is profoundly important.

It does not represent

A form of weakness, a shortcoming, or some kind of wrongness within us.

It is a blessed evolutionary signal.

6

Self care is the way in which we drop the conclusions of the mind.

It is the way in which we drop the doubt of the mind.

It is the way in which we return to the elemental bodily state

And restore our relationship to

The energetic waves which are coming to us and through us all the time.

It is true that we sometimes hurt, that there is sometimes pain.

It is also true that there is a constant babble about that pain

And a series of beliefs about where it comes from and where it is going.

The mind is in an intense argument with the body.

It is always seeking to explain.

But it can’t, because that is not its purpose.

This inversion of the mind,

This turning away from the creative stillness, toward the tyranny of descriptive ideas

Is something which needs to be corrected in terms of evolutionary direction.

This correction can only be made softly, gently, patiently.

Self-care is a translation from the mind’s conditions to the energetic tone of evolution

As it is carving and working with the human body.

Self care involves conscious breathing

And conscious feeling.

The purpose of self-care is to attend to the body.

The purpose of self-care is to translate all experience into waves of warmth.

The purpose of self-care is

To restore the sense of innocence and to revive the creative act.

Self-care requires only that we be willing to face into that which has no meaning

And to allow it to occur.

Self-care involves bringing silence and acceptance

To our fear, to our loneliness, to our discomfort.

It is the Mother act.

It is the strength giver.

It has no concern for so-called circumstantial fact.

It is the blessing of the living, breathing being.

The energies move, expand, generate and regenerate, and they nourish.

When the filaments are crushed, broken, wounded, or

When they are simply undeveloped,

Not mature enough yet to bring through this blossoming energy

Then we hurt.

7

If we assume that this hurt is the signal

That there is a neurotic problem ahead,

If we assume that our task is to get comfortable again, quickly,

We have misunderstood how to utilize pain

How to restore balance, how to cooperate consciously with our lives.

We come to the pain

And we allow that pain to be part of the breathing.

We breathe and we allow.

It is as simple as that.

We locate through our attention where the pain is and we stay with it.

We do not distract ourselves with meaning.

And if the meaning comes,

If the mind begins to shroud the bodily experience, with its gloomy predictions,

With its assertions of understanding, with its doubt

Then we simply remain open, not fighting, but still with the body

We stay with the breathing,

We stay with the beating of the heart,

And we let the feeling be physical.

We ground it deeply, we open to it, we do not run, we do not hide,

We do not move away from

The tone of the experience into a fantasized prediction about it.

This takes a high degree of willingness.

This requires a kind of disciplinary self-respect that most of us are unused to.

It is the patient untangling of the knot.

It is, in a sense, the way to freedom.

But it is not the freedom that comes from escape but rather

The freedom that comes from deep appreciation and participation and love.

It is the freedom that arises as a result of self-respect.

It is the way in which we take wisdom in and allow it to bless the body.

It is the way in which we return to the creative innocence of our human existence.

It is important to hurt.

It is good to hurt.

It is not necessarily what we think we want

But states of total comfort are in the human condition only states of dullness.

The urge forward, the urge to expand, to embrace, to take yet another step

Is the signal of the greatness

We have been given as part of our life here on the earth.

And the holdback, the resistance, the tight fist, the drive to stop

Is the necessary friction for the great event of the creative human life to take place.

We should never question our right to hurt.

But we need to question why it is that we think we hurt

And how it is that we have been taught to deal with ourselves when we hurt.

It is also true that if the attention is brought to the pain in a simple way

That what we considered to be bad before, something to get over

Is now felt as a kind of impulse toward a particular direction,

Coming to what we had previously been running from.

This is an act of discipline which gives birth to great acts of courage.

It is nothing on the outside, really, that frightens us.

It is this pain on the inside and our ignorance, in terms of learning how to be with it

And to find the force that is behind it.

Those who have sat with their pain have made some marvelous discoveries.

One of those discoveries is that

What we had experienced as a kind of strangeness, as a kind of wrongness

Can be experienced as a wave of warmth.

This is an interesting discovery because so much of our experience

Is determined by the way in which we have let the mind indoctrinate.

It is not based on a comprehensive understanding

But rather on a limited, one-dimensional approach

Which misses so much of the profound beauty possible in our human experience.

As pain is felt

As we open to the energy and the way in which the energy is being held back,

We discover that there is within us and around us

A perpetual environment of warmth.

The body is warm and the energy which comes to it is warm.

Our experiences of closeness, of friendship, of easiness, are all warm experiences.

When the mind dabbles in the energy movement,

As it defines and describes the sense of warmth,

The experience of warmth is lost and

In its place is a barrenness, a coldness, a strangeness.

Coming to the feeling is coming to warmth.

The process of self-care is a process in which

That which is cold and foreign is translated into that which is warm and intimate.

8

Real discoveries about ourselves can only be made when we decide,

That it doesn’t mean anything to know something.

To know something, in terms of thought,

Only means inflicting the past on the mystery of the present.

Knowing something in that way is making crude

That which is very delicate and refined.

In order to come into contact with the greater body, the invisible energetic extensions

And to feel those energies and to know what those energies actually do,

Requires that we be open to ourselves in a way that we are not used to.

Our purpose is to reeducate ourselves about what our feelings are

And about the purpose of the body.

We do this by disengaging from the fierce stranglehold of thought

And the way it characterizes all experience according to the dictates of the past.

And then, making physical, grounding, every experience we have.

We ground every experience by not letting the habit-ridden force of thought

Be thrown at the delicacy of the body.

We ground each experience by recognizing it to be occurring in the body.

We breathe with the body, we allow and we bring life to whatever it is that’s occurring.

If we assume that we are merely a bundle of thoughts

And a perpetual movement from pain to pleasure,

Then we will inevitably feel very lonely here on this earth.

If we assume that we are caged in by the body, looking out,

Then we are going to feel a passion for escape,

A great desire to get out of the whole thing.

We are going to want  to explode because we recognize instinctively

How tight it is to be held back inside this frail and transitory container.

9

The visible, physical body is the heart of a much wider matrix of energies.

The heart of the heart of that matrix,

The most subtle and delicate place in the entire system,

Is the center of the front of the body.

This is the grounded space.

This is the radiant center.

It is here that relationship takes place.

This is where feelings are experienced, where love is felt.

This is where we create.

This is where we truly know.

This is where we transcend the fate, which conditioning has imposed.

Our pain and our hurt are profoundly important.

They do not represent

A form of weakness, a shortcoming, some kind of wrongness within us.

They are instead

The result of the way in which the filaments, which bring energy to the body,

Have been wounded and crushed.

When someone is having an apparent emotional difficulty,

And an attempt is made to offer information as a solution,

We are going to the place where the problem can’t be solved.

While new information is useful, it is ultimately not transformative.

What is transformative for a human being, is the repair

Of the membrane and the filaments associated with that membrane,

Which are responsible for our relationship to ourselves and to the universe itself.

The emotional difficulty only relates to thought because

We must get a little outside of thought

In order to heal the passageways of receiving and giving.

In this stepping out of thought,

We can see that emotions are

Dominated by stories that we have concocted to explain something

We are having trouble understanding.

The real process of healing these so-called emotional difficulties

Involves coming into a profound and balanced ecological relationship

To the pulsations of the great Silence and each other.

This is accomplished by repairing and offering assistance to

The membranes and filaments which have become damaged across the years.

What is so beautiful and inspiring in this is that

We not only have to capacity to do this for ourselves

But can assist others in doing it for themselves.

Copyright 1993 estate of Stephen Robbins Schwartz