What is it like for you to expand your practice into daily life?
I am asking contributors to focus on personal experiences in the discussion groups, in order to begin creating a specific support for expanding our daily practice into this particular aspect. The opportunity for wider-ranging responses is provided in the comments section of the articles. Please reserve this forum for your own personal inquiry, so that together, we can begin to shape this as a vehicle for our mutual support. As this site develops, and contributors like yourself make your voice known, our support is expected to evolve into more tangible and immediate means.
There are three groups, so that we can distinguish the separate methods we must use to notice, recognize, acknowledge and integrate the very different processes within each of our three aspects of consciousness. The discussions will naturally overlap, as the larger influence of each branch is explored. Each one, however, is a forum for one of three approaches toward healing and completing:
- Deduction- to engage the intellect in meta-analysis, and self-reflection for the purpose of integrating the expression of our limits with distinctions about ourselves that we hold dear
- Intuition- to engage the heart in active listening for the purpose of integrating emotional safety and authentic expression into our social connections
- Delivery- to engage Soma- the wholeness of physical being, in opening to a pre-determined, practiced course of action, for the purpose of a deeper immersion bringing spontaneity to the performance
Each avenue leads to wellness and centering, because all roads lead to the present moment. They are different, however, because our separate journeys have yielded different areas of empowerment afforded by our beliefs, habits of holding in different parts of our anatomy, habits of defense and control in different areas of social life, and unique skill-sets that allow us to navigate portions of the physical world. Each of us has certain strengths and other weaknesses. By working our challenges from a pathway that acknowledges those strengths and weaknesses, we can proceed from a place that is most accessible to rebalancing. It is our hope that reading and contributing to each group will make it easier to determine one’s own special course of continuing personal development.
To help decide which group discussion is most appropriate for your sharing, you could start by asking yourself if the experience you are relating comes from a belief, a feeling or a sensation. Are you experiencing a conflict between events as they have come to be, and how you believe they should be? Are you experiencing a conflict in relationship, between how another voices themselves to you, and how you feel connection is missed? Are you experiencing a conflict between your faculty for doing, and how it seems that your accomplishments should feed you? Although they start from very different contexts, each group’s discussion will naturally expand beyond the stated domain. The standpoint from which events are experienced however, will be unique to one aspect, and use a specific set of terms.
Cognitive Attention– this gathering is for those who wish to share experiences that are attention-based, reflective processes. Examples include: introspective dialog, self-reflection on values, and internal watching meditation. In this forum we discuss healing and actualizing through processes engaged by the deduction aspect of human consciousness, such as meta-cognition, self-remembering, and personal meaning.
Social Connection– this gathering is for those who wish to share their experiences that are intuition-based, and relationship-oriented. Examples include: emotional processing, encounter groups, and forgiveness meditation. In this forum we discuss healing and actualizing through processes engaged by the intuition aspect of human consciousness, such as boundary expression, active listening, and felt-sense re-connection.
Somatic Entrainment– this gathering is for those who wish to share their experiences that are motion-based, sequential processes, leading into immersion in the flow state. Examples include: spontaneous play, chanting, dance, and Yoga. In this forum, we discuss healing and actualizing through processes engaged by this aspect of human consciousness, such as breath work, endurance training, and the honing of posture, balance and grace.
An introductory summary of the three aspects can be found here: The Vision.