A Sudden Roar!
"There’s a tiger up ahead!" the Thinker says, and already you can feel the claws!
Your heart is pounding to imagine it. You’ve gone into fear.
Panic is a situation of steadily narrowing alternatives. The world is closing in.
Here’s one game plan to create some breathing space --- and fast. To get the body free from fear.
1. Living Two Times at Once
Fear makes us small. The body feels constricted, all bottled up. Life in a tiny bubble world of thought, past and future bound, and all around the timeless sea.
And it should feel tight --- since you're living two times at once. On a trip to "What's Not Happening" in your thoughts. The body feels the effects of both.
It's easy for me to say, "Stop thinking. Come back to now, to What IS Happening." Or to advise, "Death is a hoax you need not fear." But now's not the time to discuss philosophy.
Let's just get you free!
2. All Chained Up
Thinking occurs in the left side of your brain. There the Thinker lives, tending a dungeon where you are in chains, being tortured with dire pictures that pose a threat.
The Thinker may mean you well --- it’s all for your own good perhaps, from the Thinker’s point of view. (I can present a case for that.) Or the Thinker may be part of a grandiose scheme to keep you from your "original wisdom state." (There's a case for that as well.)
In any case, how does the Thinker deserve so much control? Time to be free of it!
Let’s not argue about the tiger, whether it’s real or not. That’s just rattling the chains. Later that comes easier, with the increased clarity being in the moment brings.
Let’s just get you out of there. Send in the whole
3. First the Subtle Way
They send me in first, instead. I open my bag of tools. Take out my keys to loose the chains.
I'll need to distract the Thinker first, in order to get close enough. And I could use your help with that.
I need you to entertain a fantasy. One of your favorites. A pleasant memory perhaps. Something sexy always works. You’ve got a pocket full of them — if you can just — reach — for — one.
The fantasy is a form of thinking, too, of course. Not free of the problem. But it will create some space.
Do it now. I’ll wait.
There. Heart slower, somewhat. I can proceed.
4. Release from the Chains
First Key to release the chains of thought:
Make a fist with your left hand. Squeeze. Now let go. Feel the release?
Now do it with the right hand. Squeeze. Release.
Now we’re going to accomplish a similar release with the entire Body-mind.
Your body’s energy field goes out like a bubble, quite a distance all around. Twenty feet, at least. You may not feel it now, but trust that it is so.
Close your eyes. As you inhale imagine the bubble of your energy squeezing, a bubble getting smaller inward, pressing toward your spine. Then as you exhale it expands again. Repeat six times.
Try it from side to side, then bring the top and bottom in.
Let it focus different places inside of you as it comes in. Up and down, from base of spine, belly, heart, neck, head. Experiment.
After a short while of this your whole body-mind will experience what your hand did when you made a fist and let it go. It will feel release.
You will experience some moments without thought. That is our goal. Let the experience widen. One of the chains is off.
5. Second chain
Imagine energy spiraling clockwise around you. Like flower petals round a stem.
The energy builds into a clockwise funnel that reaches to the Sun and deep to the center of the Earth.
The energy of Earth and Sun travel the funnel to meet in you. As you breathe in they join and as you exhale they mix and explode, sending a burst of energy throughout the body and on beyond.
Experiment with their meeting various places in you, up and down.
As an alternative: Let the energies meet and resist each other, like two similar magnetic poles, both north or both south. Feel the resistance of their dance, wherever you have them meet in you, before they return to their place again.
It is hard for the Thinker to keep you confined while this takes place. Enjoy the silence that expands.
The chains are off!
6. Escape
Thought made you small, confined to a "Special Somewhere." But the absence of thought releases you from time, to return you to the "Everywhere" that is your true home.
There is the great door, the Here and Now. Gate to the Everywhere. And you're out!
A portal opens to the gardens, trees, flowers, fountains, grass. And beyond that the stars. No boundaries.
Now up into the castle where we'll clean you up a bit. You are escaping Time. And it's left a mess. The castle’s spa is high in a majestic tree. Here we'll remove the Thinker’s goo.
Imagine a pendulum. Let it swing from ear to ear. From your left ear to your right and back again. Go at your own pace. Feel each ear as it rests on it.
It swings as you breathe perhaps; it's up to you. You might feel the actual ear, or you may not. Let your attention hover until you feel the general area.
Here’s why the pendulum works: The Thinker’s dungeon is on the left side of the brain (castle). Going from ear to ear keeps it off balance. Seismic activity that confuses it.
Linger at each ear. See how each one feels.
Soon a space opens wide. Wider and wider as you allow. Where no future, no past, no hurrying prevail. Outside the bubble to the sky.
You've left the realm of Time. And with it the need for words. For now, let words stay far behind.
7. Noises from Below
As you relax you may hear the Thinker down below, going urgently in search of you. Sending out thoughts to lure you back.
Shut out all thought! At the first sign of words inside your head, verbiage of any sort — swing ear to ear a time or two, then settle in again.
Anything involving thought. Anything resembling syllables! Even instructions to yourself! At least for now.
Thinking has its place. For planning. For sleuthing. For logic, as in a game of chess. But for that one must be free of time.
Be attentive, whether any thought is taking you downwards, toward the dungeon far below.
Come to the spa again, often as you wish. You can exercise the pendulum or the spirit’s fist, squeeze and release. Or have the sun and earth meet to dance in you.
You're free of time's bubble. Here in presence you have the power to meet whatever the moment brings onto your path. From your new vantage point you may consider the tiger now.
And the problem may have changed a bit.
8. Change the Agenda
It may be the Thinker has its own agenda for how to take care of you. Put in place for your survival's sake long ago — by you, when you looked like this:
Perhaps now it’s time to make a change.
Please join our story to find out how that agenda may have come to be, at:
Please let me know if it works for you: rumistories@yahoo
Just published: The Alchemy of Feelings: Reclaiming the Inner Life From Mental Cruelty by James Saint Cloud.
