The constant permutations of reality can get uncomfortable, to say the least, in proportion to how adamantly we cling to the familiar. What we cling to is completely arbitrary, by the way. The more you think about the more you'll realize that every tradition is the product of its times, just as our times are birthing other traditions. Think of a father or a grandfather wearing the same style of shoes or dress for their entire lives. There's nothing inherently wrong with groping for certainly, unless it limits your life experience.
We're indoctrinated into rhythms that repeat, the same yet different. Sea waves, seasons, moons, classes, etc. And through those experiences, we eventually learn that “The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change ", as Heraclitus put it. Most people don't fathom it as a visceral reality. They sort of intellectually waft around it, still blindly clinging to the things they refuse to change.
It is liberating to know that countless cells are dying and being reborn every second; that we are literally showing up to a new moment, and certainly a new year, with a body that is mostly new. And yet we think we are one way because we showed up that way in the past. Or maybe someone told us we were one way, though we've never set foot in that way of being, and we take it on as part of our identity.
Free yourself.
We are Stories (a meditation on transcending the stories that keep us stuck)
We are walking constellations of stories. Most of these stories are inaccurate, misunderstood, or the opposite of what is real. They are woven into our cells, our tissues, our organs. They reflect in our voice, our words, our actions, our posture. Our entire life becomes the 'singing of a familiar song.' We sing it in various keys, and in various styles, however it is the same song.
Over the years, I've learned to see the stories that people carry in their bodies. This is not esoteric knowledge. It just requires tuning into another layer of reality. The collapse that is indicative of the early childhood trauma, the anger toward the father, the sexual betrayal, the broken heart. At a glance these things can be seen.
Case Study: Healing Feminine Wounds: Reclaiming Trust in the Masculine
As an intellectual practice, forgiveness is a slippery concept.
The mouth lies constantly. The mind convinces itself of outrageous fictions. It doesn't matter how scandalous or absurd the story is when mind is the judge, jury, and executioner. It's a rigged game.
The body never lies. A skilled practitioner can see and touch issues that the client isn’t even aware of, and guide them into that awareness. It’s like holding up a mirror to the vast, ineffable ‘self.’
Our goal isn’t to merely reconnect the leg. Reconnecting the leg awakens the pelvis and all of the digestive and sexual organs. Our goal is awakening; enhancing aliveness. Our goal is expanding intimacy, and deepening love.
Later that night, she goes home and makes love to her partner in an embodied way, for the first time in her life. As she relays it to me, her eyes are ablaze. She hadn’t known what was possible before. Now she’s opened a whole new frontier… the waning art of rising to the touch with a fullness, and touching in the same way.
In a world full of vacant stares, empty promises, and detached bodies, the final frontier isn’t the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space… it’s the body, and the consciousness trickling or surging through us all in this and every moment.
Disease Burrows in the Unknown Places; the 'cure' Is to Radically Increase Presence; Healing.
Disease burrows in the unknown places. It’s a fiction that relies on other fictions; a fragmentation that requires seeing only pieces, at the expense of the whole.
The ‘cure’ for this fiction is always to flood the darkness with light, and to fill the unknown with presence.
Where you are most ‘absent,’ that is where a disease is most likely to take root. (Most people are most ‘absent’ in their lower half, and particularly in the pelvic / gut region, the seat of most disease).
First, stand where you are. (Then, step forward).
First, stand where you are.
This is easier said than done. Somatically, there are pieces of us scattered in the past. We sit in quiet meditation, and a steady refrain begins to play softly under our awareness. Something about our mother or about our origins. Residual pain from an old injury flares up, and tugs our knee back into the fifth grade. If we breathed just a little deeper, we'd notice that fragment of the heart we broke twenty years ago, that hasn't quite been mended.
I approach every issue in the same way: Discover and resolve whatever is Incomplete
People come to me with a business challenge, or a creative blockage, or a chronic relationship pattern. I watch their language, mannerisms, and posture as they tell their story, and within a few minutes, the origin of the challenge reveals itself. The right knee is clenching. What an interesting choice of words. They could have chosen any word, and they chose 'battle' to explain their condition. A wave of emotion fluttered through the room when they mentioned their partner, and they swallowed it. I saw exactly where it went. Did they notice that?
Transformational Anatomy - The Abdomen
The body is a conduit for life force. This FLOW is hampered by tightening the abdomen. We learn, in our culture, to tighten our abdomen to fit into some programmed, artificial concepts of beauty. We also learn it through the unnatural postures we engage in regularly (sitting, for instance, and standing in certain footwear). We also may tighten the abdomen so as not to feel our deepest fears; our core wounds.
Gaps in Awareness (and how to fill them)
In day to day living, we are largely unconscious. We often behave mechanically, going from pattern to pattern automatically, moving through our days and lives. We live in the liminal spaces, looking forward to life events, or back with nostalgia on the past.
Here are some practical tips for bringing awareness back, using the body as a springboard. (Hint: this has nothing to do with meditation).
Holistic Postural Analysis
'We are all different. Still, standing in the way that the body was designed to stand becomes effortless. Living around our discomfort, (as our adapted posture is usually a way to avoid pain), is taxing to the entire system. Muscles suffer; bones suffer; organs suffer; we suffer. We drain our energy into a black hole, rather than pour it into creative expression, leadership, love... the building of dreams.
Standing in flow is a way to stand with whatever is, and to face it head on. I say we meet life with our whole body; nothing tucked away; nothing twisting to deflect; nothing collapsing so as not to feel.
Here are a few guidelines...
Deepening your Healing Practice
Faith is critical during this process, because healing happens outside of linear time. We weave in and out of childhood as though time didn't exist, welcoming back old abandoned pieces. Most of the tools we learn for measuring and quantifying in life do not apply here.
How do you measure the healing of the heart and soul?
How do you compare one moment to another, in a constellation where 'change is the one constant?'
The flowing forward calls upon an inner knowing; on following an inner compass that is uniquely your own.
Radically Enhancing Aliveness
A radical enhancement of aliveness occurs in the realm of being itself. It means we move through a blockage foundational enough to shift the entire system. In this context, present moment awareness increases; vulnerability increases; vitality increases; joy increases; access to emotion increases; courage increases; leadership increases. In this matrix, life improves exponentially, because all pieces of life are transformed via the new way of being that is brought into the equation. More present moment awareness increases focus and effectiveness, so productivity increases, and quantifiable success increases; the increases in vulnerability and emotional intelligence means that relationships improve... usually, by leaps and bounds.
The 3 Levels of Communication (Sharing from the personality versus sharing from the essence)
To understand the levels of sharing, it is important to understand the difference between the personality and the essence. A human being is a constellation of stories, from the micro to the macro; each story dependent upon countless others. The whole of this constellation makes up the 'personality.' Most attempts at transformation occur at the level of the personality. Shifting any story moves the whole. Living from the ground of personality has limitations, regardless of how it has been redesigned, retrofitted, orchestrated.
The essence, on the other hand, existed before the adoption of any of the stories. We generally touch upon it only in fleeting moments, during transcendental experiences.
Enlightenment is simply the act of moving from living from the ground of personality, to living from the ground of essence.
Before enlightenment, we can rehearse this shift in any and every interaction. The superficial levels of sharing occur from the ground of the personality. The personality is acutely aware of itself, and what it is putting forward. It is a show, designed to keep pace with some notion of what we think we 'should' be.
How do you move forward without backsliding? Give the body the opportunity to catch up with the mind.
The body becomes the tangible expression of the unconscious. Once you can hone into and locate where in the body these beliefs are manifesting, and how, they can be revealed, adjusted, shifted, and moved. Sometimes they are revelation and the adjustment occur at the same time; sometimes they are staggered.
There are certain practices you can engage in that ensure that the unconscious beliefs shift with the body, even if you don't know what these beliefs are. Vipassana is one example, as are certain therapies with a somatic component. Most of them only skim the surface, unfortunately, though they plant the seed of eventual deepening.
Invite whatever is happening into the dance
Orchestrating Breakthroughs (part 1)
Your Body Remembers
Every Posture Tells a Story; Finding your most Empowered Self through Standing Work
Your destiny may or may not be written in the stars, but your history is written in your posture. Broken hearts, dashed dreams, lost innocence. Cues to every one of those relics of the human experience are bound up in your posture somewhere. We can see them.
A client was carrying her lost father in her left shoulder. Her father used to take her by the arm to cross the street, and the muscle was still holding on, years after his death. It manifested as an asymmetrical gait and shoulder pain. It was the physical manifestation of an inability to commit to a man. As we released it, through a gentle tug, her life transformed. She was married soon after, and her shoulder pain vanished. We wouldn't have known it was there, without this gentle tug that changed her life.
Hearts that are broken either armor up and puff out, or lean back and shrink, to avoid further pain. I sometimes touch a heart and feel an ocean of sadness. The way to clear that is to pass through the ocean, not to try to bypass it. It doesn’t have to burst through all at once… it can trickle out. But most of these postural cues have to do with unresolved or incomplete past experiences.
When the heart falls back, the body compensates. Usually, the pelvis falls forward. If you think of what it may mean to lead life from the pelvic center… what comes to mind? One pattern that I notice is that when people lead with the pelvis, their relationships tend to begin on a sexual note, and accessing vulnerability is sometimes a challenge. Lasting relationships are a challenge. A simple correction of the posture often has dramatic impact on these types of patterns. Sometimes after a few adjustments, a client will come back and tell me that they’ve met someone way outside of their usual pattern.
The feet turn out and the arches collapse when stability is lost in early childhood. Perhaps the connection to the original homeland was lost, or the world reared it’s head and turned out to be an unsafe place. People associate this with a genetic predisposition to a certain structure. (eg. I have my mother’s feet). We’ll get into why that is disempowering in another post. It is not genetic, though it can accompany a learned worldview. (I see the world as my mother saw it, and my body reacts accordingly). Lifting arches is a simple practice, and as the body relearns to stand, the bones shift and adjust.
Knees turned in slightly often refer to a sexual trauma; the body is unconsciously guarding the core. From this position, it is difficult to be fully open to new love (though possible to be open to disconnected sexual encounters). Sometimes the sexual trauma did not involve touch, but just something as subtle as a word, a gesture, or a look from someone.
When any of these pieces of the equation move, the entire constellation moves. Meaning, adjust the feet, and the pelvis, head, and heart will need adjustment. For convenience, I refer to the 3 body centers, head, heart, and gut. They are physical and energetic.
The head often falls forward during walking, and the gaze falls to the ground. This can symbolize the disconnection from the body, and encourage an ego-based way of viewing the world. It is the absent-minded professor, roaming the halls, living life theoretically rather than experientially. Tuck the chin in slightly. Let the eyes look into the distance… the future, while walking, and the patterns shift. Living beings come into view again. The heart engages.
Sometimes, we don’t know what message our posture is sending until someone tells us, but it is sending out a message that people are picking up on. If you’re standing in a collapsed way, chances are you’re negating your own actions and your own message. Leadership suffers. Intimacy suffers.
Correction of the posture often reveals the history. It brings what was unconscious to consciousness. A little caveat: what most people consider ‘correct’ posture is anatomically inaccurate and unsustainable.
So what is an empowered posture? It is a way of standing so that the life force can flow freely, and directed as desired, toward effective, meaningful action.
A few tips:
The feet are parallel. The knees are soft and unlocked. The toes are spread out on the earth. The knees are centered along the leg. The spine maintains its natural curve. The pelvis, heart, and head, imagined as 3 spheres, align when viewed from the side. There is general symmetry, right to left. The head floats over the heart. The muscles are relaxed. There is no effort required to stand in the way we were designed to stand. We are fluid beings, not a precarious stack of solid bones.
Discover your empowered posture; dramatically enhance the quality of your life.
Be courageous enough to meet the moment with your whole body. Find the places you have been hiding or ‘leaning out’, and reveal yourself and lean in.
Evolutionary leap, delivered.
Steven Budden
#dlseed #buddenenterprises #buddenprocess #enlightenmentguaranteed
Amplifying Effectiveness; Purifying your Creation Cycle
Most people are incapable of effective action, not because of a lack of talent, ability, or motivation. They are incapable of effective action because they live entirely in reaction to unresolved life events.
Improving the world and your quality of your life requires effective action, so I’m going to analyze and break down what effective action is, and how evolution occurs during the unraveling of personal patterns, and how my original approach supports this.
Before effective action can be taken, information must be gathered, so that a far-reaching strategy can be formulated. The most important information arises out of stillness, or ‘not doing.’ In this way, ‘not doing’ becomes an integral component of directed, effective action.
Examples of action in terms of re-action abound. One example is attempting to make money because you were poor in the past. This is not the purest state of wealth creation, because it is essentially a reaction to poverty (a state which has probably long sense passed). There are other components that may figure in, such as living differently from the father figure, or seeking redemption on his behalf.
Muscling through these types of patterns via non-effective action, against the gravity of the situation, I call ‘forced action’. It can ‘get things done’, however there are drawbacks. It is less efficient energetically, because there is a lot of friction, as the gears of unresolved events and unreconcilable unconscious beliefs grind against one another. Only a fraction of the energy you are investing actually makes its way into the project. The rest is lost. Spending energy in this way is not sustainable, and illness or failure inevitably follow. This is why building wealth at the expense of vitality is us not sustainable, and therefore cannot be considered success, regardless of qualitative measures.
Forced action is diluted action. The multiplicity of objectives are illogical, and often at odds with one another. As an example, I desire more money to compensate for childhood poverty patterns. I also want to deepen my relationship with my father, and abandoning his poverty mentality and anger at economic systems, which we’ve bonded over in the past, via conversations and rants, may distance us. So I try to keep a foot in both pools. A ‘cleaner’ motive (arising out of the core) increases the efficacy of action (sometimes by redirecting the energy entirely to something more aligned). In this case, making money to fulfill your personal vision for you self, to enhance your evolution, support your family, etc.
Another consideration, perhaps the most important, is the fulfillment (or lack of fulfillment) that follows action. Somewhere along the line of translating intention into reality, we need to discern exactly where the intention comes from, and whether it is from a clean source. Otherwise, we are not creating OUR reality: we are either pushing against a reality we don’t believe in (intuitively or programmed), or creating the reality that we think someone else may approve of (a parent or mentor, for instance).
Effective action in the direction of our vision is ultimately more fulfilling, as the vision manifests, because the intention was aligned, so the result is pleasing to witness. It is less fulfilling to look out on our creation and to realize it was not our intention at all, but the adopted intention of another individual or a even a culture. We come out weary, for having ‘pushed so hard’ against the thing we were against.
What is the solution?
Resolving the past, and completing the incomplete loops is foundational in powerful creative cycles. I have found that the most effective way to discover and complete these loops is through precise, physical touch, guided by intuition and powerful questions. A once skeptical client recently called my approach a ‘panacea’ that positively impacted every area of her life; creativity, career clarity, relation to husband and children, clarity of communication.
An example of an Effective Creation Cycle
- Phase 1. - Seed (Non-linear. May come in the form of inspiration, or intention to support oneself or another)
- Phase 2. - Information gathering from 2 sources. Unconscious and Conscious sources. The unconscious gathering comes from ‘not doing’.
- Phase 3. - Strategizing (including analysis if the seed and resources, to see if implementation aligns with core values).
- Phase 4. - Effective Action, energy efficient and focused, so that minimal effort is needed to impact the strategy. Dandelion spore metaphor comes in useful.
- Phase 5. Calibration to adjust tactics to Increase effectiveness. or adjust strategy.
- Loops back to prior phases, or a new seed.
Where does the Budden strategy fit in?
The Budden Strategy, this sweeping out of residual energy linked to unresolved past events, involves the foray into pure subjectivity, and the personal witnessing of the constellations of systems, sensations, and stories that are making up the current moment. What is incomplete is discovered, through touch, and completed, through verbal and emotional processing. This process clears the way for greater objectivity along the cycle of creation. Every phase along the cycle of creation is dramatically amplified, by the improved ability to direct and efficiently use energy.
In other words, when we touch on a point on the body, and process whatever memory or emotion arises, it clears the channel, brings what was unconscious to consciousness (enlightenment). In the wake of these clearings, life changes, because what is between you and your essence falls away. You are no longer living entirely in reaction to anger about a past slight; you are living for your true purpose.
In truth,
Steven Budden