Chapter 2: Experiencing What Is To Get Where You Need To Go, Be Where You Are
“As long as you avoid experiencing whatever is calling out to be experienced, you will not heal. A part of you will be lost.”
“What is” consists of two components
1. “Experiencing what is”
- Set aside your beliefs about what should or shouldn’t be going on, about what you wish were going on, what you expected, what you were prepared for, what you interpret, and what you judge as acceptable.
- Distinction between what you actually experience and what you imagine.
- Experiencing vs. interpreting exercise
- “I notice, therefore I imagine” exercise.
- Be prepared to accept and welcome what’s real, even if it’s painful.
2. “What is”
- What actually happened, without interpretations or assumptions.
“You don’t experience an interpretation. You imagine an interpretation. And your interpretations are often a lot more painful than your actual experience.”
Take this into account
- Control patterns are aimed at staying on your comfort zone.
- Automatically responding (if your buttons are pushed, you react), keeps you in a known territory, you don’t have to change or risk. That’s a control pattern.
- Button: is a “belief gone mad”. It is a predisposition to feel hurt, slighted, or attacked when you imagine that your negative expectations have been fulfilled.
- Notice the reactions of your body. Identify how you feel when you are in different situations where your buttons are being pushed.
- “Our active minds have trouble being satisfied with just the facts. The mind likes to compare our present state with some wished for and unattainable state. It likes to aspire to being “better” (which is often a control pattern to avoid experiencing how you really are.)”
Experiencing What Is in a Nutshell
- Experiencing what is means allowing yourself to feel what you feel without inhibiting yourself shutting down.
- If you discover that you are inhibiting yourself, notice this. And if you feel pain about it, feel the pain. Allow the noticing of the pain to guide you to whatever shows up next in your awareness, and experience that.
- Eventually, by experiencing whatever comes up in your awareness, you will be able to confront your energy blocks, your control patterns, and your false beliefs and to move through them to a place of healing. If you cannot experience what is, it will be impossible to heal.
- Learn to make the crucial distinction between what you notice or experience and what you judge, assess, interpret, or believe. Don’t let your ego-mind take you on its trip!
- Experiencing what is requires that you be willing to step into the unknown. You cannot control where your experiencing will take you.
- Notice and report your sensations, your feelings, your thoughts, your judgments, and your self-talk. Share these honestly as a way to move past them to whatever calls your attention next.
- The object of experiencing and expressing is to keep yourself engaged in the flow of life, to experience yourself as a cocreative participant in this big evolutionary dance we call life. Doing so will help you avoid taking any one interaction too seriously.