Mindfulness – Part 2
What Stops Mindfulness?
Within the act of mindfulness you are observing yourself as well as what is outside of you. By observing yourself you are taking the opportunity to choose your reaction. You are aware of your feelings and your compassion takes you to a place of understanding how your response will affect others and create non-peace. You then have a choice of creating non-peace or peace. When you are not being mindful you are reacting from a place of your fear.
Reactive responses stop mindfulness. Reactive responses are the manifestation of your wounding. Your wounding stops you from harmonizing your fields of awareness to peace. Your work on the inner peace journey is to transmute the wounding that stops your insight and self compassion. You are called on this journey to recognize and transmute the wounding that stops you from opening your heart to compassionate grace. You are called to look at your thoughts and transmute what does not serve your Inner Peace Journey.
When you first begin the Inner Peace Journey work you may focus on practicing compassion for others. Your acts and feelings of compassion are incomplete if they do not reflect self compassion. Self compassion requires that you also be mindful of what stops self compassion. Mindfulness brings awareness to your pain and feelings. This state of awareness is calling you to transmute your wounding to allow for the flow of self compassion. A lack of self compassion will be reflected in your deflection to serving others or putting others first. Your lack of self-compassion has you hiding in your service. A lack of self compassion may be reflected in giving and giving until there is nothing left to give. A lack of self compassion is reflected in ignoring your pain or stuffing your feelings. Ignoring your pain and feelings will lead to even greater pain and disease. Your compassion toward others is negated by the lack of self-compassion for your self and stops mindfulness.
Practices
Exercise in knowing the Harmonizing factor in Everything
If you do not see the balance in everything, you have not yet achieved mindfulness mastery. This does not mean you are wearing Rose colored glasses, so to speak. This means you understand and know that in all things there is a state that balances the state you perceive, the two states exist in a state of harmony. I sat with that concept and squirmed. I tried to fit the element of positivity into a situation where chaos and pain existed. I could not see a single positive thing. Then, I shifted my vibration and saw it from another state of awareness. I saw the balancing side of a situation and how it served global humanity.
Question for you to answer: What is the harmonizing state in an act of violence? This may require you Breathe into Presence and be in stillness. Instructions for Breathing into Presence are in the Remen Q book and on peacealchemist.com. References will be in the script below the video.
Exercise in Harmonization
Pick a situation in the world. This event can be a world event or something close to you. Acknowledge the negative aspect of this event. Then ask in you inner voice what is the harmonizing state that also exists in this situation? If you don’t get an answer go into a light meditational state of awareness by Breathing into Presence and then sitting for a few minutes watching your breath in silence. Then ask the question again. When you acknowledged the harmonizing state you have harmonized the imbalance.
Exercises in Developing Mindfulness
These exercises may start as reflection and journaling. Then begin to integrate them into your daily life.
- Control your thoughts – 5 minutes daily focus on an object. Your observations should reflect feeling. Focus on higher level thoughts.
- Control of the will – act with intention: pause before you speak and ask is this reactive? Reactive means its coming from your wounding. (This is an opportunity to do some work to transmute the wounding.)
- Focus on emotional balance. This means moving out of duality into non-duality or peace. This means harmonizing.
- Develop a positive outlook on life. Watch your thoughts as you go through your day. Are you thoughts filled with negative ideas? If so, pause for a moment and ask how can I turn that around to be compassionate to myself and others.
- Keep an open mind. When you close your mind you are resisting. You are not allowing. You are not in harmony.
- Blend the prior 5 exercises and integrate into your life.
Getting Practical with Mindfulness
The following is an example where I use the feeling of hopelessness. You can substitute any other non-peace feeling.
With mindfulness you are witnessing your feelings and actions of hopelessness. You do not need to know the originating trauma. The source of this feeling could well be epigenetic in nature.
Hopelessness is born of emotional issues that you have been carrying unresolved for a long time – such as depression, grief, loss, chronic pain, and more. Do you hear yourself say or feel:
- I’m not allowed to feel happy?
- No one can help.
- Things will never get better.
- Nothing I do works.
- Nothing I do changes things.
- I am a failure.
- I am never going to get better.
- Something is always hurting.
- Pain is part of life.
Now observe yourself feeling hopelessness and allow yourself to witness how nothing works (for example). Using the Remen Q process, you can choose to transmute the feeling of hopelessness. I am by no means minimizing the feeling of hopelessness. The use of Remen Q, journaling, mindful awareness and meditation may be a process you can use to transmute the feeling of hopelessness.
Another example: while writing this material I was experiencing a pain in my left middle back. This pain has been with me for several weeks. I have just ignored it and continued on with my day. For this exercise I entered a state of mindfulness and moved my awareness to the painful spot. I asked “what am I holding in that spot”. I hear “resistance, resistance to being something else”. I heard next “Where in my life am I holding my breath? Where in my life am I not breathing? Where am I hanging on?” In this exercise I am mindful of all my senses to know what I am holding in this pain. Your body tells you what you are holding that is limiting you…what you are not mindful of.
Do you have a pain you are ignoring? If so move your mindful awareness into the pain and ask what I am holding in my pain? Then observe the response. What is it that you are not mindful of?
My 3 am Epiphany
I awoke at 3 am, a few weeks ago after my original mindfulness prompts, with an epiphany. Mindfulness is the connection to your creative nature in the higher vibrational realms, and reactiveness comes from your wounding and also creates. Reactive non-peace creates the vibrational frequencies that keep us in our emotional wounding and creates disease. Mindfulness is a state of higher vibrational creation. Mindfulness creates the vibrational frequencies of peace, peaceful creativity, understanding and joy.
In your quest for inner peace, you are transmuting your reality. You are becoming. You are transmuting not just the aspects you ‘know’; the physical, mental, and emotional bodies, but you are transmuting across dimensions. You have created who you are in those bodies and from those bodies. You bring emotions into form. Just as you bring joy through laughter and a light heart, you do the same with the lower emotions of guilt, shame, worthlessness, etc. The lower vibrational frequency emotions are slower, denser and create disease and dysfunction.
Do you realize how powerful you are? You create in the lower vibrations. But this creation keeps you from your essence, your authentic self. You are very good at creating in the lower vibrational frequencies; it’s in your human nature to do so. But you also have the power to create higher vibrational frequencies and higher states of awareness.
Your Experience of Mindfulness
As you go through your Inner Peace Journey your song will change. What do I mean by song? Every aspect of you has a different vibrational frequency and you can think of that as note in a song and all of those notes come together to make the unique you. You have a unique song. As you transmute the wounding you hold your song will change. And as your song changes so does how you perceive your inner and outer world. Your practice of mindfulness will change and your experience of mindfulness will change. In the beginning of our journey we know interconnectedness to be true but we don’t really have an experience of interconnectedness. With each transmutation you become more aware and integrated into the concept of the interconnectedness of all. That interconnectedness brings you to an experience of integrated knowing of all.
Closing
Thank you for listening to my video today. If you have any questions you can use the contact form.
Attribution: My writing is done by sitting with my journal and writing. I have read and studied many different philosphies over my 70+ years on this planet. Those readings are integral to my thinking and writing. I have long ago lost the names of authors and possibly lost the books. When possible I will ascribe attribution. The concept of mindfulness is integral to almost every philsophy I have studied. Mindfulness may have been called different things in different philophies but it is essential to learn and master on the Inner Peace Journey.
Remen Q is not a religion, medical practice or psychotherapy.