Positivity = Higher Consciousness or High & Unconscious?
In some way or another, most of us are ultimately seeking peace, happiness, love, and freedom. What often first attracts us to ‘spirituality’ is experiencing a lack of these qualities in our lives. From an early age, we have experiences of the polarities of pleasure & pain, peace & disharmony, freedom & limitation, and happiness & unhappiness. After a lot of external seeking, with hopes of finding an inner solution to life’s challenges and disappointments, our spiritual search may eventually begin by turning inward.
I myself began practices of meditation in my mid-teens, hoping to find a way to experience joy and peace, despite the social, academic, and familial pressures and tensions I was wrestling with daily. I found that meditation was a quick way to quiet the mind, and I started feeling palpable results within a short period of time. Soon, within only a few minutes practice of meditation, I could feel the bliss I was longing for. In addition to a regular daily practice, if things ever weren’t going well during the day -- even while in the company of others – I could just check out and begin to meditate.
Was meditation actually ‘dealing’ with and ‘healing’ my problems? Well, no — since I wasn’t really facing my issues, and letting go of the emotional pain and wounds from my past. I wasn’t doing any processing of the post-traumatic stress I was carrying. Instead, through meditation I had found a rather quick way to shut-off the mind, disconnect, and go above & beyond my mental pain, in order to find a realm of peace and bliss. I am not at all discounting meditation and its many benefits. Eventually, with practice, I was even able to experience moments of the breathless state, where the mind experiences ecstatic union with the divine, and my meditations could last up to 8 hours per day. This gave me a glimpse of the Divine, and the love, light, and joy I wanted to live in constantly. Meditation opened the door to a deeper and more constant yearning for inner bliss and divine communion!
My biggest problem, however, was when I came out of meditation, the things which triggered me in life before were still able to trigger me again. Sometimes even more so, because I felt these things were robbing me of my hard-won mental peace! So I began trying more and more to avoid anything which could take away the sweet and peaceful state I wanted to live in. I became more isolated, meditating for longer and longer periods of time, and when I absolutely had to go back into the world, I fought hard to hold on to the post-meditative state of bliss.
In short, I tried to remain “HIGH” and “UNCONSCIOUS” -- disconnected from any negative emotions and tumult in my mind. Despite whatever was happening around me, I would repeat a mantra and try to keep my energy ‘high’, in an attempt to hold onto a desirable state of POSITIVITY and peace. In this way, I was actually subtly at war: trying not to “let anything get to me”; trying not to be brought down by anything that anyone did or said; trying to stay happy, even in the face of disappointments and un-fulfilled desires.
But in this war, it was very difficult to remain a winner. Each day, around every corner, and at any moment, new triggers presented themselves -- perhaps in the form of a difficult person, a trying situation, or some form of stress or challenge. I found my life rapidly shifting from experiencing bliss in isolation, with the extreme highs I could attain in meditation, to experiencing the unavoidable very depressing lows after exposure to what seemed to be a “toxic world”. Like a roller coaster, this war raged on for 16 years, throughout my teens into my early 30’s, and I often felt severely depressed and hopeless that it would ever end.
At age 31, I had the great fortune of meeting a tremendous Enlightened Spiritual Teacher by the name of Ammachi, “The Holy Mother.” She was visiting San Francisco on Her third US Summer Tour. To make a long story short, after returning to experience Her programs several years in a row, I sought and received Her permission to live at Her ashram in India. (For that wonderful story, please see the blog post, “Meeting My Mother”).
During my first several months in India, to my utter dismay, every time I would go up to receive a blessing from Her, She would always end up laughing at me out loud. The translator next to Her would explain each time that Amma was laughing saying, “Michael came to India for some peace & quiet and to meditate… Ha… Ha… Ha!” Each time rather quizzically, I would look back saying, “Yes Amma, I did,” and walk off wondering why She was laughing. This happened at least a half dozen times before I started getting the message that maybe my expectations of what spiritual life was were to be questioned.
The noise level at the ashram often wasn’t conducive to meditation, with all the construction constantly going on in the early days. At 4:30 am the temple across the way started playing cacophonous music with oboes, cymbals, and drums which sounded anything but spiritual. Other fellow students there were often rather raw to interact with – probably from hours of hard work put in, the hot and humid climate, a few too many mosquitos, and their emotional buttons being constantly pushed too. Amma described the ashram — by design — as a kind of “rock tumbler”. She said when you put rocks with a lot of sharp edges into a rock tumbler, add grout, and let the machine turn and turn, inside a lot of banging occurs and sparks fly, but after some time what you eventually get are all polished stones.
So ashram life was, in part, encouraging all the button pushing and triggers we all had been so neatly trying to avoid in our more comfortable former lifestyles in the West. It was part of a purification process! I felt Amma energetically helping me to face the shadow, instead of trying to constantly avoid and repress my emotional unhealed wounds. I was growing weary of the fight to desperately hold on to the light. High & Unconscious was definitely not going to cut it anymore. I had to learn to face and process through my unreleased past pain, which under these circumstances, was rearing its ugly head more and more.
Gradually, I learned to work with this pain, and deal with my mental disharmony, instead of just trying to rise above it through meditation. Through Amma’s grace, I started to develop intuitive techniques to help myself and others -- not only to relieve their physical pain as a chiropractic doctor, but also to relieve their emotional pain and suffering.
In my observation, the spiritual master lovingly and patiently works in two major ways: (1) to help bring up our unhealed wounds in order to increase our awareness and begin the healing process, and (2) to take away all the repressed past pain we’ve been carrying, to help us greatly lighten our burdens! Amma says that She will take away 90 % of our karma, which would be overwhelming to deal with on our own, but She will allow us to work through the remaining 10%, to develop awareness, clarity, and skillful means to be strong to meet life’s challenges.
So my path eventually changed from trying to be “High through Unconsciousness” into more of a journey toward “Higher Consciousness.” I was being uplifted through my master’s grace, receiving greater clarity about all that I was carrying, and help so much by lightening of my past emotional wounds.
WHY POSITIVE THINKING WON'T TAKE YOU FAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJXcZRVIMs
Presently, I now coach people to include methods for true “transformation” and purification through emotional processing, in addition to their practices of “transcendence” for finding bliss and peace. These two sets of practices work to help each other. Instead of the stagnation which happens through avoidance and denial, by truly facing and dealing with the new triggers each day which come our way, we are thus able to constantly grow in our ability to also stay positive and keep our energy high.
Trying to stay positive and maintain a high vibration in the midst of our home and work lives, helps us to attract all that is positive, to bring happiness to others, and to stay on track with our material and relationship goals. I suggest that 90% of our day we should try to stay positive, but we should devote at least 10% of the day to facing, feeling, “detoxing,” and processing through the shadow and emotional burdens which have come to our awareness by button pushing that day. This is similar to young children -- you actually never see a 3 or 4 year old trying to stay positive. Instead, whenever they are triggered, they know that venting and feeling their feelings is what is needed in order to feel good again. They immediately release all their pain, and within minutes they are back to feeling lighthearted, free, and joyful again.
Therefore, let’s grow beyond trying to maintain our ‘positivity’ through denial and repression — by polarizing ourselves in order to not feel anyting negative. Instead, let our ultimate goal be the true freedom and joy we find when we’ve fully vented and released all of our emotional pain. Perhaps Jesus’ words (Matthew 18:3), “Ye must become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven,” suggest that such openness and innocence gleaned from our ability to clearly face and let go of all our pain, is a path to true freedom.
