Introduction
to Body, Heart, Mind, Soul
Body
Part one of two in Introduction
My teaching is about awakening to the full spectrum of experience. My work focuses on choosing connection and inclusion, of your own experience and others, and finding wholeness and truth in the full range of human and cosmic experience.
The body, heart, mind, soul framework is a way of understanding the multi-dimensionality of your immediate experience. It’s an invitation to connect with the full spectrum of your being. Practicing with it involves learning to meet experience with courage, compassion, clarity and joy; for the benefit of yourself, the people you love and humanity.
One of the strongest threads you will find running throughout my work is that facing your challenges, vulnerabilities and darkness with a strong and open heart can create clarity and a greater capacity for truth and love. It will also help you in opening to the depths of experience.
Body, Heart, Mind, Soul
Body, heart, mind, soul is a framework that describes the multi-dimensionality of life and experience.
In spirituality, people sometimes have a tendency to either grab hold of one aspect of experience and make that the ultimate truth or to check out into a super-position where the truth is unknowable. The body, heart, mind, soul framework opens the possibility for the truth to be both precise and flexible.
Each of the body, the heart, the mind and the soul is an entirely different aspect of experience that will bring different elements to the fore and depending which one is your primary mode in any given moment will change what experience feels like.
The content on this website takes you through connecting to the different aspects of your experience. Everyone is unique and how this manifests will be different for everyone.
It’s important to engage with all of them at some point in your path, because otherwise you will have big shadows. Whether you prefer to do deep dives into each one one at a time, or cultivate a more balanced practice is up to you.
This approach is about following your eros, awakening to truth, healing your trauma and taking your natural shape in the world.
Navigation
Body, heart, mind and soul behave like a fractal, where every element exists inside every other element endlessly.
This website is organised to emulate that fractal. The sections of the website – practice guides, poetry, writing and the whole being awakening framework – are linked to the body, the heart, the mind and the soul, and then within each of these sections there is a body, heart, mind and soul page. Some pages go another layer deeper and have body, heart, mind and soul sections.
If you are interested in paying attention to the meta-pattern as you explore the content you will find these symbols throughout the site to help orient you.
What Are the Body, the Heart, the Mind and the Soul?
Body, Heart, Mind, Soul is a framework that emerged during a multi-year period of spiritual revelation.
It was shown to me that there are basic building blocks or underlying currents that run through the Universe. These aspects of Universal experience are continuously emerging, interplaying and interdependent in ways that are extremely profound and complex, while at the same time being breathtakingly simple.
The pattern of four echoes through many other models and systems in a way that is resonant with Body, Heart, Mind and Soul.
To understand each of the aspects the best way is to practice so that you can experience them first hand. Feeling these different fibres of the Universe within you gives you a direct understanding of them, rather than being stuck in the mind’s ideas of what they are.
To give you a taste, here is a very short description of what each of them entails:
- Body: being direct experience in the present moment
- Heart: feeling the full spectrum of experience
- Mind: open, spacious clear-seeing that includes the ephemerality and fluidity of experience
- Soul: recognising and embracing your unique experience and expression
As your practice develops and deepens you may start to experience the non-dual versions of these aspects of the Universe:
- Form: feeling embedded in the flow of life itself in both the physical and energetic realms
- Relationship: knowing the interdependent nature of all things
- Consciousness: experiencing the ocean of intelligence that permeates everything
- Cosmos: being connected to cosmic emergence
A good sign that you are really connecting to these things is that you start to feel more real, alive, open and grounded. Towards the end of the path, you will start to be able to see and feel the divine or sacred quality in everyone and everything around you.
A real awakening will permeate into how you live your everyday life, what you understand reality to be and how you treat yourself and others, rather than just be something you talk about.
Each of the descriptions above are highly distilled and simplified versions of what you are cultivating and getting in touch with. Each aspect is a vastly complex topic that covers an entire strand of the Universe, each of which could easily be an entire book. In addition to this there is the way in which they are fractal, interdependent and non-dual in nature.
Most of this website is dedicated to explicating different aspects of the Body, Heart, Mind and Soul. It introduces the richness, the depth and the fractal nature of these strands.
I have shared this content in order to explain the perspectives I have developed from the journey I’ve been on and to help other people discover their own truth and find their place in the cosmos.
I will be sharing more about the transcendental themes of Form, Relationship, Consciousness and Cosmos in the book I am currently writing, “Being Buddha Nature”. You can also hear more about my experience of being Buddha nature in this interview series.
Donate
All my content is available for free. If you have found it useful, please consider donating the cost of a book through Paypal (£10 – 20). I really appreciate your support.