Post six of fourteen, in section About Awakening
Practice is about getting insight into the nature of yourself or of experience. You are essentially using tools and practices to open up to new parts of experience.
Depending on what sort of person you are, what sort of culture you exist in, and your life story, you will naturally be open to some parts of experience and closed to others. Practice should help you open and heal new parts of yourself and become a healthier, fuller expression of your being for the benefit of yourself, others, and the world.
Aspects of Experience
The four parts of you – Body, Heart, Mind, and Soul – could be described as corresponding to different aspects of experience:
- Body: doing
- Heart: feeling
- Mind: seeing
- Soul: being
The parts interact with each other very closely, and when you are closed to one part of experience, it also affects the others – you end up offsetting the balance of a closed part by overcompensating with another part.
Imagine that this image is a drawing of a set of scales seen from above. When one part of the diagram is out of whack, it causes all the other parts to go off balance.
Imbalance
The opposite ends of the scales tend to affect each other most strongly. For example, here are some common ways in which most people are out of balance:
1. Overthinking: There are underlying emotions or feelings that aren’t being felt
2. Overwhelmed with emotion: There is something that hasn’t been understood yet
3. Overentitlement: You don’t have the resources or capacity to do what needs to be done
4. Overdoing/overachieving: Something isn’t allowed to just be as it is
Space
As well as these four, there is also the surrounding space you allow yourself to operate in, which affects how these things manifest.
Closed and Unsafe
When you are closed and don’t feel safe, then things going wrong or being out of control will be incredibly stressful for you and others.
Open and Safe
When you are open, safe, and in a space of allowing and gratitude, this gives more room for things to flow freely; even when you are out of balance, you can stay connected to the idea that this can be part of the process of growing and learning.
Thriving, Not Squashing
It is important that when you are practicing or doing healing work, like therapy, the goal is not to squash the part of you that is overactive. That part is overactive for a reason; it is a behaviour that you have learned in order to keep yourself safe and functioning.
Instead, you are opening to and connecting with the part of yourself that is inactive or underdeveloped.
This starts by you being able to be vulnerable and honest about the things you find challenging.
It’s a continuous process of refinement. There are many layers to how you operate, and different situations will bring out different strengths and weaknesses. Starting by seeing these weaker or more oppressed parts as opportunities for growth is one of the most empowering things you can do.
This can help you start the process where you are building capacity and resilience in the system to be able to meet each moment and connect more openly and sincerely with what is happening now.
Antidotes
These are some practices that are antidotes for welcoming the parts of you that are shut down or repressed in some way.
Here I have shared links to my practice guides and given an example of the Buddhist practice and therapeutic modalities that help open these aspects.
1. Balancing overthinking by opening to feeling
Traditional practice: Brahma Viharas (Buddhist heart practices)
Therapeutic modality: Internal Family Systems Therapy
What the practices do: Open up a way of connecting with your heart space and feeling your emotions
2. Balancing emotional overwhelm by gaining perspective & clarity
Traditional practice: Theravadan Buddhist Vipassana
Therapeutic modality: Talk therapies
What the practices do: Give people the tools to see the bigger picture. The three characteristics, for example, are a doorway to getting a perspective that is bigger than yourself, which can give you clarity on the true nature of reality and allows you to be less attached to your own emotions
3. Balancing overentitlement by increasing your sense of empowerment
Traditional practice: Tantric Buddhism
Therapeutic modality: Somatic Experiencing
What the practices do: Visualisation exercises, meditations and energy work allows people to reclaim their embodied power, while embodied practices get people out of their ideas of themselves and the world and into what is actually happening
4. Balancing overdoing by allowing yourselves to be with no expectations
Traditional practice: Zen
Therapeutic modality: Shadow work
What the practices do: Zen allows people to be open to just being exactly as they are without feeling the need to do anything to justify their existence, while shadow work allows people to connect to the parts of themselves that they have learned they are not allowed to be
Eco-System
What is worth recognising, and that is often failed to be recognised in spiritual practice, is that people are an eco-system. Humans are not an on and off system, built on a series of 0s and 1s where you can flip a switch and suddenly everything is different. As you awaken and grow, you will need to respond to your changing inner world with different practices.
Everyone is also part of a wider eco-system. A human is one node in a greater network, and often the reason that people feel out of balance is not just personal but also collective.
A human can be beautifully balanced but be in a very toxic environment, and this will make them feel like they are going crazy.
Equally, someone being out of balance catalyses change and causes growth. You can see this through how society changes and grows as a whole and also through the individuals in society who experience huge amounts of discomfort and imbalance in order to bring about more balance and harmony in the world as a whole.
It is often the biggest overthinkers, overfeelers, overachievers, and visionaries who change the world. Something to them feels so far out of whack that they have to do something about it – for example, great poets who are so subsumed with intense emotion they have to write about it in order to get some perspective on life. This is then shared with wider society as a whole, which allows people to connect with their own emotions and inner worlds better. Approaching practice as a way to learn to be more whole and present as a way of being helpful for the world can be very beneficial for making practice flow more smoothly.
Teaching Spiritual Practice
If the objective is to teach people to open to new parts of themselves that are oppressed or shut down, there are different ways to achieve this.
One is by teaching a specific practice that you know has worked for you and others. You can share the information required for people to be able to replicate this. If it is simple and easy enough for people to understand, this has the benefit of being able to reach a lot of people really fast.
There are moments in people’s development when they can be taught in this largely impersonal and structured way.
An example of this is large Goenka-style retreats. These retreats work by creating a very structured environment that is designed to help people connect to a certain aspect of their being. For example, with Goenka, they are teaching everyone vipassana meditation. This will benefit some people, not work for others, and for some people it will affect them negatively, depending on what that person needs in that moment.
Another approach to teaching is more personalised, and it involves being able to meet people where they are, sense where there might be an imbalance, and creatively offer a way for them to open up to a new way of being. When people need to understand and connect with themselves better, it can be a delicate topic that requires a huge amount of care, refinement, patience, humility, and grace to facilitate.
This style of teaching is about welcoming the whole of a person or group of people and feeling into the specifics of what wants to be brought back into balance with each individual or in the group dynamic. To be able to teach like this, you have to truly embody what it is you are teaching. It can’t be things you have learned intellectually; it must be something that you have integrated into who you are through all the different aspects of your being so that your behaviour, emotional responses, and ideas all feel aligned around what it is you are communicating to someone and how you are holding the space for them to be.
This approach to teaching holds an enormous amount of potential to help people awaken, and it also takes a lot of resources and genuine commitment from practitioners to be able to do it.