How to Meld with the Environment I Feel Averse To?

The final weekly theme of our October four week immersion is: Become Every Room We Enter.

Someone asked, 

“Any advice on how to meld with the environment I feel averse to? Cultivate acceptance, equanimity and open to feel including this averse feeling inside me?”

First of all, Life is hard.  I get that.  Things come up, difficult situations, tragedies, etc.  And we meet and deal with those things when they happen.  Life can be very challenging. Sometimes people get hit by buses. Sometimes bad things happen. This is not a post saying that we will never have challenging situations or emotions. And of course some rooms are horrific and we’d never want to enter them. And sometimes it is best to avoid situations. 

That said, we can find a place within us, a fundamental place which is not bothered by anything.  We must touch the source of all things, and in that we will realize a place that does not suffer.  We must discover this in our practice.

And… even if we do this, even if we’ve had a great transformation, we could all use some work!  We’ve all got our hang ups. We’re all still ripening and refining and letting go.  But having touched this true place, we will have an indestructible faith in life which will help us to work with all of the details. 

I’m quite interested in the notion of creativity these days.  What does it mean to be deeply creative?  I mean, there are people doing creative things like dance or painting or music or writing, and admire these greatly.  Actually I would more likely enjoy reading an interview with a dancer or a painter than a spiritual person.  That’s just how I am wired. It’s what gets me going.  But what is it to be creative with our every moment existence?  What would it be for our body and our awareness to be a state of creativity?  What would that look like?  And more importantly, what would it feel like?  

We’ve all had moments when we felt good.  We felt open and alive and inspired.  And we’ve had times when we felt bad.  Many of us just don’t ever feel good if we are honest with ourselves.  And what does this actually feel like?  

I’m trying to get us interested in perceiving what is like when we feel open and good, and then when we close down and don’t feel good. What is the difference?  I mean, when we are open, in our felt sense experience, maybe a door is open, maybe life feels fluid and alive.  We feel a sense of transparency, of a green light.  Joy. Relief. And then when we close down, we feel something close down. Something tighten or constrict, or narrow.  Our very experience had a different felt sense quality.  And we can begin to dialogue with that very relationship of tightening and opening. We can change our relationship from one of vagueness and being a slave to those unconscious feelings, or we can wake up our ability to meet and soften the edge of our awareness and become the situation.

So when we enter a room or a situation and it is disagreeable, what does that disagreeable aspect feel like in our experience? Maybe we get tight somewhere in our mid back or throat or wherever. Or our entire being seems to be at war with the present circumstance. And could we switch that red light in our system to a green light, or feel into it and meld that hard line of feeling?  Often it is just a general softening. A permission to feel. A permission to be buoyed up by the present shining event.  We are much more like amoeba floating in this sea of Qi than solid objects banging into life.  We can allow this through our experience.  Situations may be difficult, but the Eternal Grace of each moment will not go away.  We must touch this.

Our relationship to our experience must become a creative act. Our moment to moment experience can become a creative exploration in opening doors, of making friends with reality. In this creative life, nothing is solid. Where we are solid, solid in our awareness, we are blocking life. What would it be like to live a life where nothing is solid?

I am not saying that we need to be nice to everyone or to like every room we enter, but we can have the ability to meld with and become each room, and that can be a felt sense creative melding we develop and cultivate. It can become second nature. And the most interesting aspect is that it is trying to happen. At every moment, our system is trying to harmonize with everything around it. Our bodies, our energy fields are seeking homeostasis with everything around them constantly. The universe is guiding us to open up to life at all times.  If we’ve touched this true place, we will know this with every cell, and then we can spend a long time actualizing this in our lives, living this most creative life. 

And then if we do run into real conflict, we can act appropriately. We can be free to choose how to respond, and not be such a slave to circumstance.  

Maybe we are afraid that if we are open, if we let go of control, then we will be swept up in manipulations or we’ll be vulnerable to attack. Or maybe we are afraid that we are no good. That we are unworthy.  Or that the universe is not on our side.  So we’ve got to control and manipulate and strategize.  But our true nature is bright.  The more we let go of our manipulations, we will naturally feel this brighter and brighter, unfiltered. Joy and love will be unbound. We’ll meet life in a sense of play and merging. And if we can bring this light into circumstances which are difficult for ourselves, difficult for others, then we will be helpful in unimaginable ways. We’ll actualize a life of true faith.

No one is perfect. I certainly am not. I’m trying to get you profoundly interested in feeling into your experience.  And as we do this, gifts will begin to naturally show up. As we meet life, meld with it, we’ll feel people, situations, our field of interacting with life will widen.  A functioning samadhi will be a matter of course. Life will be much more close. We won’t be blindsided by life, but meet it in a fresh way.  And it will just feel like being real. Please find out for yourself.  Find the place of no need to seek the truth outside of yourself.