Category: Teachings

States & Stations and Optimizing Your Gifts
Objective reality calls forth from the soul what’s needed in the moment

Essence calls to essence. Objective reality calls forth what is needed. If compassion is needed, compassion arises into the situation via the agency of a body/mind according to the clarity and capacity available.

We experience spiritual states when qualities and dimensions of true nature arise in more fullness or purity than our normal day to day experience. These “peak experiences” are thought by some to be mental states, but those familiar with essence recognize them as substantial beyond the realm of mind and body energies.

For some time, our experience with states is often linked with psychodynamic work which “clears” our conduit or, using our ball-of-string example, opens up more space in the psyche.

When our work with our ball of string, our footings and our scaffolding has created more consistent space in our psyche, spiritual states arise more and more often, responding to what’s needed in the moment.

When particular states are available as needed, we refer to that availability as a station. This doesn’t mean you can make this happen. It has nothing to do with you in that way. Relating to it in that manner is an indication that self is claiming spiritual experience and agency.

People usually don’t walk around in particular states all the time. Reality is dynamic, its expression is always manifesting in new and different ways. An open, available consciousness reflects this, kind of like a kaleidoscope.

A station isn’t 24/7 compassion. A station is when compassion is needed, it arises without interference from the past. Orienting toward an open consciousness instead of a static ultimate state embraces the dynamic nature of reality and allows true nature to reveal and optimize our potential in a reality of infinite possibilities.

One of the main guidelines is to know oneself. The moment you know yourself, you always recognize it. Then, if this is not present you can ask what is stopping it. By understanding what is stopping you, you become yourself again. When all the issues and beliefs and images that block this experience are removed by understanding, then it is not just a state you experience, but a station. A station means that a quality of essence is present whenever there is a need. When you are yourself as a station, you are no longer being guided, you have matured. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Two

A station does not mean you are free and clear of reactivity and the world of object relations. You can still get triggered and react with anger or some other emotion, but the reactivity will pass more swiftly, the essential state will emerge a little more fully and there will be less “holding on” to the after-effects of events in time – both good and bad.

A station is not a destination, it’s capacity and availability.

Optimizing Your Gifts and Talents

One definition of humility is: an objective assessment of your strengths and weaknesses.

Take a few minutes for an objective assessment of your experience and relationships with essential qualities.
- - Which essential qualities are most available to you?
    
    Which essential qualities are least available to you?
Assessing this can be subtle and tricky. In the early stages of working with essential qualities, there’s a certain amount of idealization or preference based on ego deficiency or personality “needs.”

The assessment should objectively reflect which qualities seem to arise more easily and readily in day-to-day life. Which qualities seem to be associated with the need for less psychodynamic work?

Each of us have easier access to some qualities, or perhaps, less disconnect. Sometimes we don’t see it, or we may discount it because they don’t take a lot of work or we think it’s normal and everyone has access to this. People may say we have a talent or gift for…

Each essential quality contains all qualities.

You may have a capacity for clarity and not recognize its connection to the essential realm. It’s been there your whole life. It helped you excel in certain subjects at school and plays a big part in your success.

It may have never occurred to you that this is an essential aspect of the soul until you read about it. When this is brought to your attention, and you recognize the validity of it, and you work with it a bit – you can acknowledge and own it, yeah, I seem to have maintained a connection to clarity more than say strength.

Essential strength or essential will may be qualities that are more difficult for you. Perhaps you have spent many years working on these qualities, but they still seem more problematic – anger issues, procrastination, whatever.

Has it ever occurred to you that essential clarity contains essential strength and essential will – and the entire treasure chest of essence? If you spend a little time exploring those qualities you seem most connected to, you will discover access to the qualities you feel least connected to. It’s like having a backdoor into computer code you’ve written.

With clarity you can initiate action because the situation is clear to you. You may find beliefs and history and habits in the way of taking action, but if you recognize the strength in clarity, strength will arise more fully bringing its capacities with it.

Clarity has a steadfastness. It’s not wishy washy, it’s steady – right there in your head center and vision. If you stay with the phenomenology of steadiness, other areas of your body will begin to resonate with it.

Before long, you may experience it in your belly. This steadfastness may not align with your beliefs about will. You may need to spend some time checking it out, see how it influences you.

I always encourage people I work with to be the “lab rat” in their life. When new capacities present themselves, take them out for a test drive. Put the pedal to the metal, see what’s possible.

Sometimes essential qualities arise together and seem to combine in response to certain situations. I remember a situation where compassion arose in response to someone experiencing deep pain, but the black also arose.

It took a moment for me to recognize why the black was arising. Part of the person’s situation was they were lying to themselves and this was adding to their pain and interfering with the action of compassion.

What was needed was “fierce compassion,” the capacity to cut through the lies and the power to be with the truth – all co-emergent with loving kindness. Pointing out the truth was the kindest action I could take in service to the person’s soul.

Up Next

Object Relations: The Power Behind the Throne
September 11
Object Relations: Trauma & Healing
Healing is a deep-rooted longing

Understanding healing is important. When it comes to psychological, emotional, and trauma healing, the self is the barrier to healing.

Fundamental questions are:
- Who is it that needs healing?
- What is healing?
Healing: the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.

The etymology of heal is literally “to make whole”

Etymology of integrate “make whole,” from integer “whole, complete,” figuratively, “untainted, upright,” literally “untouched”

We tend to think the wounding will be healed, the little one, me, will be healed, but that is impossible because the wounding is part of object relation, part of the identity with the whole unit.

The more intense the affect in an object relation, the more difficult it is to work through. Early trauma is some of the most difficult for this reason because the trauma keeps retraumatizing us, turning the bonding agent into superglue.

When we’ve been abused, traumatized, or wounded deeply, there is a deep longing to be healed. Healing will eventually lead us to the point where we must face the ultimate challenge of healing.

Let’s use this again to help illustrate the situation more clearly:

For the wounding to heal, for the scab to disappear, the whole unit, who you take yourself to be has to disappear. For complete healing, the wounded one has to dissolve. You, as the self, can’t and won’t be around for total healing – it’s not possible, that subjectivity disappears.

As long as you’re there, the identification with the history remains intact which means the existential wounding is still there because the very existence of the object relation cannot be separated from the affect, the wounding.

This can be challenging to understand – yes, we’ve been abused, that history will not change, it happened.

The pain and suffering we carry is body/mind memory being held in dynamic stasis via identification. As long as we hold onto the wounded one, we will not be healed.

What’s in the Way of Healing?
- Identification (the self, the inner child)
- Fear, Pain & Suffering
- Misunderstanding
Inner is Outer

One of the big misunderstandings in healing and spiritual work involves the concept of inner. When we begin to “work on ourselves,” our attention is directed inward – into the body, into the psyche.

This is appropriate, useful and of great value, but, at some point, we become aware that this “inner” is outer, too. It is easy to be aware of the object relations, you/other dynamic, at play in most inner work.

There is an observer, usually with the self inserted in it, observing and exploring the wounding, pain, trauma, suffering, healing process, etc.

What is the inner of the observer? The comparative mind can’t answer this. There is no comparison. We can articulate the effects and affects of awareness and knowing, the “inner of the inner,” but these are not it.

We can’t get there because we are there – we are the thereness, the isness, the inner of the inner. The isness has no head, no eyes to turn around and look at itself. If we attempt to do this, we’ll just twist our head off!

AND, since that isness is everywhere, there is no “where” to turn around to.

BUT, allowing the conundrum of this into awareness produces a very useful affect and a very useful effect.
- Affect = frustration
- Effect = sensitivity
The usefulness of sensitivity is self-evident.

Why is frustration useful?

Because it exposes the futility of ego activity. It challenges one of the main foundation footings of the self. One of the biggest jokes in this whole situation, when seen from the other side is – the self is a masochist. Its whole existence is, literally, self-torture.

I know, where’s the joke? It’s all so serious, really – it is. It is extremely painful – to the self – a nonexistent entity, but all of this still affects the heart/body/mind/soul – a tortured psyche.

Hanging on to pain and suffering is the way the self perpetuates self. All of that pleasure seeking of the self is the suffering! You need to get deep into the weeds with the support of sensitivity and frustration.

It’s possible that you’re frustrated or reactive in just reading this. Halleluja! You’re on your way! Be open, be sensitive to the frustration.

Frustration is nothing more than resisting the rivet-popping process that shakes the whole structure of self apart. Using your sensitivity, it’s easy to experience the resistance, the glue, the rivets, the knots holding it all together. And the futility of not being able to do anything about it.

Why resist
The unraveling
Of the great ruin
Your life
Has made of you?
God has sent His
Wrecking-crew of angels
To renovate
The dog house you call home
Into an exquisite palace
Crystal fountains
Jeweled domes
Diamond spires
Walls of Divine transparency
Why resist?
This Architect’s plan
Always includes
The razing of
Existing structures (jh)

Trauma – For those working with trauma and, for the most part, all of us, this is not something to rush into. First we need to develop resiliency and consciously work to expand our range of energetic tolerance through a titration process.

Resiliency

It’s a little mind-boggling that we first need a strong enough, secure enough ego-self before it can successfully collapse. But, how can it collapse if it’s not first constructed? And, the construction is very much needed for the evolution of the soul.

Some people’s structures simply collapse, and depending on their uniqueness, they may awaken and remain awakened or the experience can be more problematic because a tug-of-war develops between the self and reality.

I want to emphasize this point again:

In my opinion, the notion of a true or real self is an invaluable gift to the ego-self. The ego-self is a camouflage magician when it comes to hiding in plain sight as a real self. The concept of a real self is a gift that keeps on giving right up to the body’s last breath.

Forget about a real self, that motivation is not needed. To the best of my recollection, with very few exceptions, every mention of a real self I’ve heard is coming from an ego-self.

Hanging on to that concept does more harm than good. It contributes more to suffering than to the process of awakening.

This is where working with object relations serves us.

Working with object relations is like having mini-collapses, a little piece of the structure falls apart and the structure readjusts itself to compensate. This process includes experience of not-knowing, space and disorientation.

But, as all of that happens, surprisingly, you don’t die, you don’t lose your mind, at least not permanently, and in the emptiness — awareness (what you really are).

Working with object relations builds resilience in the psyche, experientially educates us as to what we are and what we’re not – all of which leads to more trust and capacity to allow true nature to have its way with us.

UNDERSTANDING THE REALITY OF THE THEORY OF HOLES EVENTUALLY BRINGS US TO THIS RECOGNITION:

What is pain?

Really. Have you ever given this question serious time and attention? I’m talking about a year, maybe two or more. We’re talking about emotional and psychological pain not the sore thumb from being hit with a hammer.

Eventually, working with issues, whether traumatic or not, lead us to recognizing that the inner child and the self cannot be separated from the wounding. The wounding is part and parcel of the identification. It is the dissolution of these structures that is the healing.

Working with the inner child may, at first, feel like an integration – and this is useful, but in the end it is the dissolution of the mental images that frees what’s frozen, returning us to wholeness – untaintedness.

I’m not a trauma expert and I’m not giving advice on how to work with trauma. I’m simply pointing to where work on trauma and all other psychodynamic issues lead us.

Knowing this can help support our unfoldment toward wholeness. It certainly assists with disidentification.

The trauma work I’m familiar with incorporates several elements of essential work:
- Presence – I notice more and more therapeutic approaches emphasize the importance of presence at the outset of working with clients. Some of these processes and techniques lack potency due to a lack of understanding of the essential nature of individual consciousness and presence.
- Space – Space is crucial to the process of disidentification and the detachment needed to support healing and wholeness. Many therapists see space as a result of effective process, but they miss the more complete understanding that space is not only a result, but the dynamism that dissolves inner structures.
- Compassion – All inner work is challenging, sometimes painfully so. Children hold themselves responsible for all the crap that happened to them. Two very, very big challenges for most of us:
  - Returning to innocence
  - Experiencing that others actually care about us
- Love/The Stupa – Love melts boundaries. Love is the essential quality that relaxes the ego for dissolution to happen. Love is what flows into the nervous system thawing the frozenness, melting the tenacity.
More than anything else, self-love is allowing love to have its way with you. Sounds easy. It’s a bitch for many of us! The conviction of our unworthiness and our misplaced accountability are two of the most formidable defenses of the ego. Remember, the superego’s genesis is love, but with time and frustration this turns into self-hatred.

The melting of the lies, the rending of these most-dear beliefs lead to what is referred to as “the ruin of the heart.” Oh, the anguish! The ocean of tears!

The rebirth of ecstasy!

Up Next

Moving from States to Stations
September 10
How Object Relations Control Relating

What’s Happening?

It depends on what you look at obviously
But even more it depends on the way that you see
Bruce Cockburn, Child of the Wind

We have been using this to illustrate and assist us in our discussion of object relations. But, this, like most two-dimensional illustrations, does not accurately reflect the situation. So, let’s delve into this perspective from two different perspectives!

The Way that You See

If we adjust the alignment of the three components, we get a better understanding of what’s happening.

The “bigger” person in this image is actually the small one (child) in the horizontal representation of an object relation. The “small” one in this image is the big other, but it is perceived through the mental perspective of the child. In the child’s mind, the other is huge.

The double arrow is actually a looping dynamic where what is perceived causes a reaction which in turn, reinforces the belief about the other and the relationship, which perpetuates the reaction and so on and so on…

Imagine the figure above is a lens in a pair of glasses. The lens includes the sense of me, the sense of the other and the constellation of affect and energy. We spend most of our lives wearing these lenses, not as glasses, not as the lens in our eyeball, but as a filter in the data stream of mental processing.

The Way We Relate

If we look at this from the perspective of any normal interaction in the world we get something like this:

All the arrows are looping dynamics. So, the normal state of affairs (relating) involves two people with “triggered” object relations relating to each other as figments of imagination – mental representations from the past.

The internal sense of the relationship, then, is like an ice cream cone.

The cone represents the container or footing involved (rejecting, frustrating, good), the scoops represent the psychic constellation (thoughts, beliefs, ideas, history…) and the flavor is the affective nuclei. All together, they give your relating in the present, the “full-bodied” experience of the past – the faces have changed, but it’s the same old story.

The Same Old Story

The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart ever hungers
while mind hunts the game

A heart once young as grass in the spring
dries with the lessons a harsh world can bring
Childhood’s innocence ran through the fields
and suffered the trauma that judgment yields
As you grew up and followed directions
spontaneity died from others’ inspections

The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart ever hungers
while mind hunts the game

Now that you’re molded like a lump of old clay
your insides turn brittle as you bake day by day
Your face is chiseled in a permanent frown
once green pastures have faded to brown
The body’s a sieve full of old holes
and life a collection of meaningless roles

The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart ever hungers
while mind hunts the game

When life is a cup emptied by grief
the heart is readied for famine relief
A single tear falls on parched desert ground
prompted by childhood’s shocking rebound
Pain is a flood like rains in the spring
swelling the heart as new life they bring

The story’s the same
The story’s the same
The heart never hungers
while mining its claim (JH)

The Fly in the Ointment

The irritant, the pest in all of this is “the self,” that pesky sense of familiarity that keeps buzzing around in the room of experience – what is happening. Here’s a snapshot of a small segment from the timeline of life:

The colors represent different stages in life or streams of experience with specific object relations which are blocking or distorting particular essential qualities. They are the strings in your tangled ball of a psyche.

Each frame of experience contains that pesky sense of self and because each frame contains the pest, we believe it is part of the picture, but the picture is created in the moment, it’s what is actually happening.

The fly is inserted so fast it seems like it’s part of what’s arising, but it’s not. What is part of what is arising is the a sense of the phenomenology of the body, the mental processes, the energies and affects. The mental process connects all the historical flies, the memory of that fly in every frame is what creates a sense of self through time.

You see? It’s created. The mind is taking the sense of familiarity and connecting (comparing it) to the billion trillion frames in your story, adding it to the story of a self as an asserted actual entity.

Up Next

Object Relations: Trauma & Healing

September 10
Orienting the Work in Time

Time has no moments

The journey isn’t moving forward in time – dynamic forces at work can be interpreted by the mind as movement – explore these forces

Prior to me asking this question, where are you?

There are millions of words written and spoken about being in the NOW. People aspire to be in the moment. The moment is magical according to some.

Think about it: a point in time is related to as a place because the self is inserting itself into that time, making it a place on the time map.

When we’re projecting the past into the present or future, we’re doing so in the moment. So, where’s the magic? It’s confusing because you’ve never been anywhere else except in the moment!

According to some, like Adyashanti, the real trick is that the mind can obscure our perception of reality. As he and others say, It’s not about getting somewhere, it’s about exploring what’s blocking our perception of reality right NOW in this moment.

One hurdle is pleasure.

We all know about the ego and its enslavement to the pain/pleasure principle. On one side of the coin the issue is that Being is inherently pleasurable. On the other side, the issue is separation from Being is suffering.

So, when Being is obscured, pain and suffering color the consciousness. The ego-self wants to fix it by getting what’s missing, to get there, to get into the moment with that pleasurable, suffering-free experience.

“Getting” (seeking) is the foundational orientation of the self. It’s future oriented. All of its hopes, dreams and desires are out there in the future, but all of that wishing and dreaming is happening in the moment.

For a moment let’s entertain the self’s orientation and explore just how confused it is about reality and the journey.

Here is the timeline of your life:

To the self, enlightenment is located in time somewhere between where you are and the end of time and it needs to get there, to get it. But, the enlightened say, “Enlightenment is exactly where you are right now, in this moment.”

Here’s a more accurate illustration of the self’s position on the timeline of your life and its relationship to reality.

The green field is Being or awareness or consciousness. It underlies and permeates your entire existence. In fact, it’s all Being, through and through. It has no extension in time, it has always been and always will be. It’s pure, complete, perfect and timeless.

The dots after birth represent the period in time where your body existed, but your “self” did not. The sense of you developed. It takes five to seven years after birth. It’s a process.

Once the self is constructed, it inserts itself into all of your (body/Being) experience claiming that it has always been in your life and has had something to do with everything in your life, your entire history is its claim. It believes it makes choices, thinks, takes action, etc.

These things happen, but not from or by the self. It claims ownership in a nano, nano, nano, nano second after the event. It’s so fast, it’s pretty much instantaneous. So fast, the mind can’t register it. Neuroscience is validating this.

We believe the self is needed to function in the world. It’s not and you’re living proof of that because you (body/Being) did just fine for several years without the self. Our beliefs and convictions on the necessity of the self for functioning are misunderstandings and ignorance of what’s really going on.

Invest some sincerity and impeccability in this exercise:

Pull out some old photos of you from 5-years-old back to birth. Spend some time with each and allow memories and stories to come forward. Be with the sense of yourself as you ponder them. Feel the feelings, sensations and energies. Observe the thoughts and felt sense of being in that time.

What’s your earliest memory? Can you feel the familiar sense of “you” in your past? How far back in your life as you look at the pictures can you get a sense of “you”? 5? 4? 3? 2? 1?

When you look at those baby pictures, do you get a connected sense of you at that moment that extends forward in time to now?

Here’s the point – you, the self, didn’t exist back then. The closer you get to five or six, the more you, the self, wafts into and out of existence, but it’s not stable until six or so.

That two-year-old toddling around, eating, speaking the first words, sleeping, crying, doing all the things we do at two is pretty much doing it all without the self and it’s all happening in a developmentally appropriate way. The self will assert that it’s needed to mature, develop potential and function. This is true to some extent, but it’s a lease situation not a purchase. It’s time to terminate the lease agreement.

The point is that, if anything, enlightenment in terms of “getting” it from the self’s orientation is not in the future, it’s in the past prior to the self. The self is heading in the wrong direction! Talk about confused!

Working with object relations and psychodynamics is a regressive process. It peels the onion, removing the layers history, beliefs and identifications. This process can feel like going back in time to a priori, but is really a process that allows what is present, but obscured to emerge into consciousness.

What psychodynamics allow us to do is study what we’re not. As an orientation or process, this allows us to get off the treadmill to the future and bring our attention and awareness to our immediate experience. Of course, the self will want to coopt the study of what we’re not to “get something out of it” and continue moving toward the future, but we can pull the treadmill out from under the self by exploring that very thing.

If we hear and understand Adyashanti’s, Tolle’s, Almaas’s, and others’ message, it serves us better to get off the treadmill and explore the moment we’re always in.

The Power of Object Relations

This is where working with object relations really rewards us because doing so is one of the most elegant and efficient means of “rending the veils.” We could spend ten, twenty, thirty years or more meditating to pierce what’s in the way or we could avail ourselves of psychodynamic spiritual technology that can do so in days or weeks.

This is not to say embodied enlightenment will arise in short order, but one can experience and embody presence and spiritual states as part of a process of working through conditioning, which produces positive effects in our day-to-day life.

At first, the effects and affect of essence and essential qualities arising in the body/mind are “my” experience, as the claiming is that fast. It takes some time before we recognize experience as happening in the soul and see the body/mind as the agency of perception, extension and expression.

Again, the string we need to work with is right here, right now because the nature of reality is continuous revelation.

Here’s the core issue with the self and enlightenment:

Self cannot get out of self.

It’s really simple. Every action of self reinforces self. How then, can self get out of self?

When you’re meditating, if you’re orienting toward some goal, or preference, or the future – that is the self meditating. This is how meditation begins for everyone.

Speaking of meditation, what is successful meditation? Being in the NOW? Being full of presence? Some spiritual state? NO, successful meditation is coming back, coming back, coming back… The circuits are being rewired, the smaller pile of sand is growing bigger – more on this later. In thirty minutes of meditation, if you come back once, a hundred times or are gone, gone, gone – that is successful meditation. Putting your butt in the chair is 80%.

The self can explore self, can get curious about experience. What we really are – awareness – evolves, unfolds, disidentifies without getting anything. It emerges from the background into the foreground via space and curiosity as it is – awareness.

Self is self-referencing. It lives in a house of one-way mirrors where it only sees itself, everything reflected in self-centeredness. Self cannot see reality, but reality, self-aware awareness, can see self – it is the seeing, not the seer or the seen.

Here’s an exercise that works better the older you are:

Have you ever looked in the mirror and had a moment of: geez, I don’t feel that old? This is an experience of timeless awareness, what you really are, being aware of itself. It has nothing to do with memory – check it out!

Play around with it. Keep your vision loose. Split your attention 20/80 between the mirror and the seeing, not the seer and the seen. See if the sense of timeless awareness moves more forward into consciousness. Relax, grasping at it, shoos it away.

Up Next…

How Object Relations Control Relating

September 9
Beyond Individual Object Relations
Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

Working on object relations one at a time will never end. Our intent is to work with them enough so we develop our understanding, skills, and capacities to engage ego structures and personality segments which are built with object relations as the main building blocks.

Working in this way addresses many, many blocks at a time.

Three ways of working on personality segments and structures:
1. Work on the footings: Recognize and experience the rejection or frustration as you explore. Each footing contains many, many experiential building-blocks with a common element: frustration, rejection, fulfillment. In keeping with our examples, working with object relations contributes to the degradation of the entire footing. Once this concept is grasped, you can actually recognize the process in your psyche.
  
  Working on the affect, the bonding agent, loosens the foundation where one pylon of the scaffolding of the self rests. As that support is undermined, the scaffolding compensates by redistributing the load-bearing to other pylons. This may lead to a sense of ruts and cycles unless you notice that the entire structure has shifted and what you’re interacting with has changed.
  
  Working with rejection and frustration will bring into consciousness the real state of affairs – the soul is disconnected, so to speak, from its true nature and ego activity will never be able to replace or recreate the real. Landing in the reality of this shakes the whole structure loose.
1. Incorporate knowledge of the theory of holes and essential qualities into object relations work. You notice the balls of string are multicolored. This represents the individual uniqueness of our ball and its relationship to our developmental history with essential qualities.
  
  WHY? Essential qualities are part and parcel of the soul’s experience. Part of the flow of the soul is the continual effulgence of the essential qualities arising to inform and support the moment-to-moment experience of the soul.
  
  In the Diamond Approach, we work with essential qualities and the specific psychodynamics associated with our personal loss of conscious connection to them. This is where we get our first experiences of working consciously with object relations.
  
  Understanding the relationships between object relations and essential qualities helps to optimize work with our psyche.
  
  The scaffolding of the self is an attempt to recreate or imitate the wisdom and function of specific essential aspects of the soul. With time, you’ll be able to recognize and work with large sections of the structure (represented by the red section in the image below), or ball of string by identifying the ego activity attempting to replace the missing aspect.
  
  Working with object relations reveals how easy it is for the psychodynamic work to “lead” to spiritual states which can result in a couple of challenges:
- The dualistic mind will associate this with cause & effect and organize a theory or strategy of how “use” and “do” with this insight.
- One can develop a dependency or need for psychodynamic work that in turn makes experiencing spiritual states dependent on psychodynamic work.
Working on sections involves:
- Recognize the specific ego activity and its function
  - Let’s use getting angry since our ball has so much red in it.
- Allow the whole psychic constellation associated with it to come forward into consciousness. Imagine a crisp, blue sky. You’re feeling fresh, open and alive. You get angry. Familiar thought patterns and tensions associated with being angry arise. Your affective state changes the look and feel of the clear, crisp sky, your orientation to the future, and more. This is the constellation, the whole shebang. Suddenly, it’s like a cloud all around you, infusing you.
  
  If you catch the change quick enough, you can shift back to before the shift and then shift back into the constellation. If you keep playing with this, you’ll discover amazing insights.
1. There’s a concept in psychology that can serve us here. Another way the mind organizes and stores experience is through affective nuclei. Think of this type of organization like a big set of filing cabinets. Every experience involving anger is thrown into the anger drawer and I mean “thrown” in. It’s not neat and tidy, it’s emotions! It’s messy like the ball of string because any particular interaction in our life might produce a stream of cards to be filed: irritation to anger to hurt to sad to…
  
  The concept of affective nuclei helps explain the phenomena of being triggered and dumping a whole drawer of history into the present situation.
With the information shared thus far, we can employ three-pronged awareness in loosening our ball of string. Included in our awareness are:
1. Current object relation in play
2. Which pillar it rests on
3. The affective nuclei
Our goal is not to get rid of the object relation, the footing or the affective nuclei and we certainly can’t change history. What we do is bring the secret ingredients and let them work the magic – presence and space.

We bring the space through open and open-ended inquiry. It’s an orientation, a curiosity about the bug in front of you. The more we’re open, the more awareness of space comes forward in consciousness. Even when we’re addressing incredibly resistant knots, openness does the work, not us. It may feel like we’re working our ass off to remain open, to get through resistance, denial, subterfuge, distraction and the like, but loosening the knot is actually done by the action of space (read The Void, A. H. Almaas) .

The more capacity we have (expansion of our energetic comfort zone), the more interest we have in space rather than what’s in the space, the greater the invitation for the optimizing force.

Affect is more fundamental to how the mind organizes experience than thoughts, concepts and ideas. Affect gives meaning to the phrase: it’s not your experience that’s important, it’s the experience of your experience that’s important.

Affect and sensation dominated our early experience. When you see a frustrated angry toddler, you witness an organism in its entirety displaying frustration and anger – all body/mind systems are flushed, energized and discharging at full capacity. There is no internal mediating force holding the expression in check.

Opening up and following our affect will lead us down the rabbit-hole to the full impact of the experience on our psyche. Trying to stay ahead of the experience intellectually simply adds to the mess or at least impedes the unraveling.

Being is constantly revealing itself via the soul, the individual consciousness. The soul isn’t worried about the unfoldment. It’s not trying to figure out or prepare for what’s next. It’s in the flow, it is the flow. Every moment is infused with knowledge, goodness and awe, not concerns and anxiety.

In the rabbit-hole is where we find the difficult knots, the ones we can’t pry loose. All we can do is bring the space and allow space to work its magic and shake all hell loose.

Up Next..

Orienting the Work in Time
September 7
Optimizing Your Work with Object Relations

What is an Object Relation?

Psychoanalysis definition: a theory describing the relationship felt or the emotional energy directed by the self or ego toward a chosen object.

Simply put, it’s a way the mind perceives, interprets and organizes information – there’s me, there is the other (person, idea, thought, memory, object, etc.) and there is the affective energy that connects me to the other, defining the relationship.

These defined relationships, object relations, begin developing early in life, prior to the capacities for abstract thought and self-reflection. Rudimentary, significant object relations are formed early in our experience and then the mind, interpreting and understanding our stream of experience, for the most part, is simply comparing what’s happening in the moment to something familiar from the past – projecting the past onto the present.

As we develop the capacity for abstract thought and imagining ourselves in events, the mental comparative processes used to ‘understand’ experience begins to usurp experiential exploration as the foundation for the process of understanding. One could see it as a type of mental shorthand to save us time and energy. This is reflected in conversation as well with the ubiquitous use of the word “like” in U. S. culture.

Object relations are the internal building blocks of self-identity.

Let’s talk about the celebrity in this drama – YOU.

The Self

Self – one’s cognitive and affective representation of one’s own identity

Drop the concept of true/false self for a while and simply associate the term self with your historical familiar sense of you.

Though we all have this “sense of self,” it, in fact, does not exist as anything more than a composite of memories, in short it is nothing more than a memory aggregate incorporated into present experience.

We’re going to explore the state of affairs we find ourselves in after normal ego development and a few decades of living. We’ll be looking at this from a view of process and we’ll be using some simple concepts to enhance understanding.

Unraveling

All of us have probably had the experience of untangling string and knots. It takes patience and stick-to-itiveness – perseverance. In addressing this ball of knotted history and identity we are going to need PATIENCE and STICK-to-ITIVENESS!

I don’t know about you, but there were times, in frustration, I said – to hell with it – and got out the scissors, but that won’t work in this situation because psychologically trying to cut the string is really just weaving another thread into the existing mess.

Frustration just pulls on a thread tightening the knots and adding more tension to the entire ball. Most of us have experience with a knot or two that was unmovable – think of that in terms of psychic knots and the amount of resistance and constriction it takes to maintain certain knots.

This is the beauty of understanding object relations – when you understand the process and the simple secret of unwinding the mess, it helps to support perseverance and patience. And, though challenges remain, a sense of joy and aliveness arise in our process.

Here is one of the secrets of engaging this process optimally:

Anyone who has untangled a ball of string knows that as you untangle each section or length of string, no matter how small, more space arises in the mess making progress easier and easier.

Often the first hurdle is finding an end to start with and that’s one of the beauties of object relations, you can start right where you are because the end of the most appropriate string is right here in this moment – in your present experience, even if your present experience is “nothing.”

Here is another powerful secret: as progress is made, give more and more attention to the space than to the mess of string. From experience, you may know that when the tangled mess includes more space, you can almost shake the rest of it free.

The power of space is something we will come back to, but let’s move on to our next illustration.

Constructing the Self

The Linchpin of an Object Relation

Maintaining Structural Integrity

Each of us has a range of energy/tension that helps define us. If it gets dialed-down or amped-up, we go to work consciously or unconsciously to get back into our comfort zone. This comfort zone is a big factor in the inner-child structure which we will discuss later.

But, it’s also a huge biological factor in regards to homeostasis and the charge/discharge regulation of our body.

So, we can’t get around working with affect and energy which can be challenging when our radio station is broadcasting doom and gloom and take shelter 24/7.

Another helpful hint:

In service of patience and perseverance, assume that your involvement with object relations is never going to end. Our normal mind is a comparative mind and affect is part of its filing system. The organizing system is not the problem, identifying with the content, the object relations is the problem.

You can’t stop the mind from doing what it does – interpreting what is perceived and taking action in terms of how it relates to the body (organ of perception) and this dimension of experience.

Up next…

Beyond Single Object Relations: Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

August 29

Category: Teachings

States & Stations and Optimizing Your Gifts

Objective reality calls forth from the soul what’s needed in the moment

Optimizing Your Gifts and Talents

Each essential quality contains all qualities.

Up Next

Object Relations: Trauma & Healing

Healing is a deep-rooted longing

Inner is Outer

Why is frustration useful?

Resiliency

UNDERSTANDING THE REALITY OF THE THEORY OF HOLES EVENTUALLY BRINGS US TO THIS RECOGNITION:

What is pain?

Up Next

How Object Relations Control Relating

What’s Happening?

The Way that You See

The Way We Relate

The Same Old Story

The Fly in the Ointment

Up Next

Orienting the Work in Time

Time has no moments

One hurdle is pleasure.

Invest some sincerity and impeccability in this exercise:

The Power of Object Relations

Here’s the core issue with the self and enlightenment:

Here’s an exercise that works better the older you are:

Up Next…

Beyond Individual Object Relations

Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

Up Next..

Optimizing Your Work with Object Relations

What is an Object Relation?

The Self

Unraveling

Here is one of the secrets of engaging this process optimally:

Constructing the Self

The Linchpin of an Object Relation

Maintaining Structural Integrity

Up next…