25 - Integration - Relaxing into your Awakening

Perhaps one of the most important and overlooked aspects of awakening is integration of the old personality from the inside out.  Receiving and relaxing into Happiness is crucial.  The traumatized part of our personality was created while we were experiencing separation and alienation.  Those files have to be updated with the very simple approach discussed in this podcast.  Though powerful, these podcasts are not to be considered psychotherapy.  Please find a good therapist if you would like one.

These podcasts are meant to supplement your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. They are a compilation of what I have found to be the most helpful over the last 50 years on my path of awakening. I feel these podcasts are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last.  Though they, also, all stand on their own.  Since we are each a bit different, if anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy.  If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support.  You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together. I trust you're doing well. Today I'd like us to look at relaxation and receiving. Pretty much the same thing. This is perhaps one of the most important and underappreciated, underutilized aspects of full awakening and I think deserves a lot of attention. Let's talk about it. Some of the ways we've talked about letting go and transformation in your awakening in previous podcasts have been to see is to be free, seeing clearly. When I can see that it's a rope and not a cobra, my mind can relax, I can let go, and so many troubles are solved. So seeing clearly is very important. That's part of the benefits of podcasts like these where we can discuss and start to contemplate what's going on so that we can see clearly in our lives. The second part of second way of letting go is awareness is curative and we've talked about that. We've talked about coherence therapy in a prior podcast where the mind or the being will dissolve the lesser truth within us. So that's why it's good to meditate because that part of us that's aware and is free from any problems or troubles is aware of our thoughts, is aware of our emotions, doesn't get involved but simply observes and in that observing we're coming from a whole place and therefore all of the disjointed thoughts and feelings and emotions can dissolve and our personality can be re-informed by the whole light of our being. A deeper integration can occur. Coherence therapy. The third thing that we talked about is when you don't get involved in thoughts and emotions and just watch them and let them unwind, they release their own energy. They unwind like a rubber band and after a while, although it's tumultuous at first, that rubber band just unwinds, unwinds, spins, spins, spins and then it becomes loose and limp and relaxed because it's got a lot of pent up old energy and delusions from our past way of looking at things. So that's an important way of releasing. Don't get involved, watch and let everything spin. Which brings us to our fourth and maybe most important way, I don't really want to say most important but at least equally important way of awakening and integrating and that's relaxation and receiving. What do I mean by that? Well, let's think about what happens in relaxation. You're tense, you're blocking, you're holding tension and then somebody gives you a massage or you hear good music or you walk in nature and you open. You release the tension, the separation, the part of you that's blocking and isn't that really the point of integration and awakening? To integrate through our body by releasing the separation, by opening up, by receiving? Yes, that's the point. The body and mind is going to receive one way or the other. That's what it's designed to do as a piece of machinery to receive and to accomplish tasks and receive the benefits of an accomplished task. So it's going to receive either from a delusional place or a clear healthy place. It can receive by drinking a bottle of wine and receiving good feelings from that source or it could receive from drinking beingness from your being. It's going to receive from the bottle or from the being or from some other artificial place if it's not from your being. So receiving is going to happen and it has happened all through your life. That's why people get addicted to pleasure and they get so addicted to pleasure that they don't receive from their being. Maybe they watch tv all the time and they're receiving from the stories on tv or they get lost in their thoughts which are also illusions just like tv, little shows that we play in our head. As in a prior podcast I mentioned that Thomas Jefferson said that thoughts were hallucinations and they really are. We can hallucinate or think in productive ways, picture an engineering solution or picture something that we want to accomplish or create a picture of the future that we would like to desire and shine the power of our being through that image and let consciousness and life form around that beautiful image. We can use these hallucinations very productively as they're meant to be used or we can hallucinate unconsciously and that's often what we do. So we're going to receive one way or the other. Let's talk about how to receive in a way that will support our awakening and be very healthy and deepening for us. I'll give you an example. As a psychotherapist I've often worked with people that have had difficult past, difficult childhoods or different things that have happened in their life that have been very difficult and one thing I noticed early on is that it's not quite enough usually for somebody simply to talk about it although that's helpful. At some point we need to pause for them to just take a breath and I ask that part of them that they've uncovered, I ask the traumatized part of them, does it feel better or worse to find out that you're not getting beat up right now or you're not being abused right now, that you're safe in my office and we're talking and sometimes they're a little bit bewildered and they take a moment they might take in a breath and then they say yes it does feel better. I keep my questions very simple yes or no questions and you can do this with yourself. Does it feel better or worse? Then they say yes it feels better so I say then soak that up for a moment. It's like and I tell them this it's like taking in one drop in a dry sponge, one drop of water and just let it go into your sponge because you've been cut off from yourself that's why you're having panic attacks or so many different other symptoms. Now that we have both uncovered this part of you this traumatized part and that traumatized part you are noticing it's safe here now you can update your files because you've been existing in life feeling that it's unsafe but now you're noticing that it is safe so take a breath and just soak up that safety take a drop of it do the best you can and soak it up and then I ask does that feel better or worse and they go better and I go great soak up some more and they do and when that happens the whole personality releases and begins to relax and begins to integrate. One of the things that I noticed early on in my awakening process was this aspect of awakening is often overlooked in spiritual discussions or practices or groups. I remember talking to Francis Lucille about it a very clear and good teacher of mine 20 years ago and I had discovered the soaking up aspect because of my psychotherapy practice and I noticed when I included that with good teachings and practices I opened up and started to integrate my awakening much much more quickly than I would have otherwise. What do I mean about all this? Well if you think about it what happens in awakening is just as in meditation you're aware you're aware of your thoughts and your emotions but your thoughts and emotions don't have updated files just like that client in my psychotherapy office didn't have an updated file that person believed one part of them believed that they were stuck in the past 40 years ago and they were still cringing as if they were being attacked deep inside and therefore they were having panic attacks but in fact they were safe and by getting in touch with that part that was all tight and tense inviting them to notice that they were safe now and to receive that good feeling to really take it in it was like getting an emotional massage in a way they released and relaxed and in that sense they updated their files they noticed I'm okay today it's fine well in meditation as I was beginning to say that part of you that's aware is aware of your thoughts and feelings and they don't have updated files they've been informed from a time when they did not realize that you are awareness and you don't have any problems you are infinite not just as a philosophy but you notice it you feel it that's why you sit still and you rest with yourself you're aware of your awareness and then you let your thoughts and emotions be informed by that that's what we do in coherence therapy right so we don't just want to notice that we are awareness that we are being and that everything is all right we want to do the second step and receive it soak it up like a dry sponge let your thoughts and emotions receive it take a moment and let them feel good even if everything isn't sorted out yet completely they can just take in that it's okay your awareness and everything is okay they can begin to soak it up like a dry sponge I mentioned in a prior podcast that existence comes in and out of being maybe a million times a second I can actually see it like a strobe light and perhaps you can too and if you don't now you will soon enough as you become clearer but existence everything in creation is created fresh a million times a second it comes in and out it breathes in and it soaks up from beingness it is formed from beingness it's like a breath goes in and out creation goes in and out of beingness it knows how to receive very fully and very deeply that's a metaphor and I think more than a metaphor because it's the actual foundation of existence of what's going on inside of us coming in and out of existence and we flow in and out of our beingness the part of us that's aware that we're so in tune with at first through meditation and then all the time as we've discussed in prior podcasts so this receiving soaking up is very important after a time you start to integrate much more quickly because just like that client in my office you open up you receive and you reorient you're no longer informed from separation your personality is no longer informed from a point of separation but rather from wholeness from being you're no longer forming your thoughts and actions and emotions from an underlying place of feeling that you're cut off and have separation anxiety feelings of abandonment and anger and discontent instead everything is beginning to be formed from being so that part of you that already has been formed and does feel hurt fear and discontent ah you can relax and you can ask it very simple questions does that feel better or worse and you wait there might be a long pause it might be days because this personality of ours sometimes is a little bit stunned and it takes a moment to thaw out but eventually it will ask you don't push let it actually tell you you can ask as many times as you want but be gentle and loving and eventually it'll say yeah it feels better and then you say soak it up you invite it to soak it up and feel how good that feels as this ripples through your personality integration happens more quickly and fully and as you go through the day you start to notice that you're soaking up the energy all around you the energy of being that actually creates the trees and nature and the birds and everything the wall the chair you become one with everything and you soak up the good energy from it and other podcasts i've said you can feel the light coming from the ground and you do you soak it up you soak it up you take it in and that integrates you until you're a ball of radiance short of doing this what happens is you can have an awakening but just like the person in my psychotherapy office this other part of them deep inside your personality doesn't get it and it's suffering even though you're fully awake it's a disconnect in my first major awakening experience i was quite puzzled because i felt one with everything but i had never suffered so much in my life i was quite depressed often i felt very anxious because my personality had not had a chance to soak it up yet and nobody knew what was going on nobody could tell me i i asked so many people and i told them i'm suffering i'm suffering nobody had an answer because nobody even knew how to handle it in india they don't know how to handle this for the most part i mean how can you handle something if your personality and the world and creation is counted as maya an illusion if it doesn't exist you don't develop tools to handle it and so there's many problems with that and we'll talk about that in another podcast it's enough for today right you've got the idea okay keep up the good work and i look forward to talking to you soon take care bye