I occurs to me more and more lately that we all have depths that so often we do not ever fully know, depths that are longing to make themselves known. I just started to read Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process and he explains that the deepest most organic part of us is our felt sense which we live out of purely during the first months and 7 years of life, which slowly gets impacted by our conditioning over time. He explains how we hit critical crisis points in development of the emotional and mental body through the next two 7 years cycles, but all of our deepest issues and resonances are laid down in the first 7 years and it is these that we play out increasingly unconsciously in later life.
The Presence Process he goes on to describe is a process of learning to return home to the depths of ourselves. As he explains all of our hungers for outward things we develop later form out of far earlier longings and impulses, often actively thwarted by the environment. He explains how we learn over time to react out of this earlier conditioning to be either attracted or repulsed to people or things and how we can turn that reactivity around to become an ability to respond which rests on us learning to connect inwardly with our breath which will connect us to the felt sense and to earlier emotions, anger, pain or fear which lives in our depths and which we often cover over.
He also explains that recovery actually has nothing at all to do with healing or connecting to our depths, he explains it as a re(again) covering over of the true conditions of what affects us. Self help groups can actually keep us addicted and a prisoner if we believe for example that an addiction is something we are, rather than a behaviour we acquired to deal with tough circumstance. Addictions of all kinds are a way of running from feeling something deeper that makes us feel uncomfortable, which exist in our very being, body and cells as a vibrational charge of emotion and the feeling of this, the presence with this is the way through and in and out of what is driving us.
I am so grateful to have finally received my copy of this book. I worked with the breathing this morning to connect to my inner child which had been triggered by relatives we had never met coming and staying for just one day, from that one incident I unpacked so much grief and loss from the past not only in my own family but in my father’s family as well and the relative who visited was the eldest son of my father’s sister’s daughter and my father was the oldest of those siblings.
It seems to me that we live with great depths both inside of us and all around us. We live in a world peopled with others in various states of consciousness. These days as my own awareness and consciousness grows I am seeing more and more. I am recognising that the best and most powerful place to be is at home with myself, trying each day to connect deeply to my being and heart. It is deep within here that I find all the answers for my life. I remember when I first got sober in 1993 being given by a new sobriety friend this beautiful quote by Rumi.
The truth is not purchased by travelling to amazing places
Until you have kept your wanting still
You will not cross over into infinity
I was not entirely sure of what was meant by it at the time, but it is a quote that runs over and over in my mind from time to time. I am not saying that travelling or going out from ourselves is in any way wrong but it seems to me that often people try to get away as a kind of escape from the day to day of a life lived fully consciously and with a feeling of inner abundance. Really our abundance has nothing much to do with money or outer power but rests in our ability to be conscious of and make peace with circumstances, often those we had so little control over. Over time though with enough presence we can learn more about how and why we have been affected. We can make friends with our inner depths and not be drowned by them. They can instead become a deep ocean that we can swim in from time to time.
Emerging From The Dark Night 