Guided by aliveness

  Form is emptiness, emptiness is form Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness All things and phenomena are marked by emptiness they are neither appearing nor disappearing, neither pure nor impure, neither increasing nor decreasing. (...) There is no ignorance and no end of ignorance, there is no aging and death and no end of aging and death, there is no suffering and there is no end of suffering.

  "The eye in which I see God, it is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and the eye of God, there is one eye and one vision and one realization and one love", the famous christian mystic Meister Eckehart says in one of his sermons. Eckehart (1260-1328) was a german catholic Dominican theologian and philosopher, and an important church leader. Toward the end of his life he was convicted of heresy by the pope, because of his mystical approach to christianity.    Eckehart was one of the first to preach to the congregations in the vernacular language, not in latin, and his message was new and innovative. He was highly learned and a renowned theologian, and he  brought in his mystical experiences and realizations in a very radical way in his preaching. The central theme of his sermons is the presence of God in the soul of man: "Something is given in the soul that is so deeply related to God that it is one, and not united, with Him." God is not something outside of...

  The archetype of the Self is at the core of jungian psychology. Carl Jung wrote about it in many of his books, and it is a complex and dynamic concept. In the book The Self in Jungian psychology - Theory and clinical practice , Leslie Stein defines it as a preexistent center of the psyche containing the entirety of all that is known and unknown. He says the Self is an organizing principle that brings us home to ourselves in moments when we are confused or disoriented, a guiding pattern of wholeness in the unconscious. It contains within it all the opposites and is also the place to reconcile those opposites. To Jung it is necessary that the ego (the self which is constructed socially and over time), establishes a conscious relationship and communication with the archetypal forces in the unconscious. The living and conscious connection between ego and Self is is to Jung necessary to bring purpose, meaning and feeling into life. Knowing who we really are is to Jung the process of i...

  I started meditating when I was 17 years old. I remember I wanted to explore why I sometimes chose an action which didnt feel aligned with my inner truth. At the time the only form of meditation which was available was a norwegian-based method, ACEM-meditation. It is a non-directive meditation, which allows thoughts to come and go of their own accord, while a meditation sound is effortlessly repeated in the mind.  Nondirective meditation facilitates the stimulus-independent, task-unrelated, spontaneous activity of the mind. Its focus is not to empty the mind of thoughts, but to bring relaxation and cultivate a free mental attitude and the acceptance of mind wandering and spontaneous thoughts. The thoughts, feelings, images, and sensations that pass through the mind of their own accord are not seen as disturbances, but as important resources. Research has shown that during nondirective meditation, the activity of the brain`s default mode network (also known as the resting sta...

  In Rosen Method Bodywork, and in other mind-body connecting practices, the clients/participants sometimes will encounter difficult emotions when being present in body. One possible reason for that is trauma, because trauma often will lead to disconnection from the body: "Trauma, because of the associated nervous system hyperarousal and the resulting systemic dysregulation, keeps us from being present in our bodies. The tendency for traumatized individuals is to disconnect from the body by becoming overly cognitive or by numbing bodily experience, or both." the psychologist Laurence Heller writes in the book Healing developmental trauma. How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship ( p. xxvii). The psychologist Peter Levine says something similar in his book In an unspoken voice. How the body releases trauma and restores goodness : "Trauma survivors are so frightened of their bodily sensations that they recoil from feeling them...

  We suffer from perceptual oblivion: We have forgotten how to really notice ourselves and the world. The modern world, with emphasis on the written word, have created a deep rift in our experience, a detachment from bodily perception, our animal senses. And this has led to our current predicament and a world moving towards apocalyptic changes. This, in short, is the diagnosis in the philosopher David Abrams book Becoming animal. An earthly cosmology  (2010).   Abrams medicine in this situation is a fresh perception, a new way of thinking enacted as much by the body as by the mind, an expanding new vision of our planet and ourselves which is animistic and participatory, and which simultaneously includes scientific perspectives on nature. "It is a perception that honors the immeasurable otherness of things, the way any earthborn presence exceeds the calculations we perform upon it - the manner in which each stone, each gust of wind, each termit-ridden log or gliding s...

  The philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his book A secular age (2007) about the disenchantment (from Webers entzauberung ) of the modern western world. To Taylor the disenchanted world is a place where the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spirituality in the cosmos, is in the human mind, while the enchanted world of our ancestors was a place of spirits and demons. The enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross the porous boundary of our selves and shape our lives, psychic and physical.  In the disenchanted world the boundaries around us are experienced and understood as firmer. The sharpe boundaries between inner and outer implies that thought, meaning, purpose, are only in our minds, not out there in the world. Taylor calls this the buffered self. He writes: "The buffered self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it." The buffered self can be autonomous and even disengaged from whatever is outside the boundary, while the ...