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As a young adult I often stayed at the beautiful Marin Headlands hostel just north of San Francisco. I was there one weekend while a large group of missionaries was passing through. We were all sharing the same kitchen space and I was chopping some broccoli when a cute young woman around my age approached me. We started talking and I thought it was going well. I have always enjoyed conversing about spirituality and religion, even with people of different beliefs than my own.
At the time I was immersed in learning about Advaita – nondualism – which was blowing my mind. Nondual philosophy asserts that, although we perceive many things that may feel separate, in reality everything is an expression of a single Oneness experiencing itself in infinite ways.
Some people call this Oneness God or Goddess or Source or Divine or Dao. What’s important isn’t the name but the experience of this connection, and how it redefines how we see reality.
I had in my suitcase a book called Aghora in which an eccentric spiritual teacher explains that since everything is God, both sex and eating are simply acts of “putting God into God.” So, when this missionary woman asked me what I was doing, I guess I thought I was being clever by replying, “Oh, just chopping up some God.”
She was clearly taken aback, so I explained that if the whole universe is an expression of one God, then broccoli was of course included, and therefore I was chopping up some God to put into God (myself). She was speechless for a moment, then said – a bit louder than was called for, I thought – “God is not broccoli!” and walked away.
There were several lessons for me in this story, starting with (1) nobody likes a smug person pushing their buttons, and (2) if you truly want to make a difference in the world you need to meet people where they are. But aside from my social failure, maybe the most important lesson was that there’s often a huge difference between the description of an experience and the experience itself. In other words, to understand something intellectually tells us nothing of how we’d be affected by experiencing it.
In lectures, I used to explain how physics seems to “prove” nondualism, hoping that even the nonspiritual types in the class would be won over. I’d point out that while each of us feels we’re separate from everyone else in the classroom, we and the world around us are all just different configurations of the same fundamental stuff – subatomic particles or even more fundamental fluctuations of energy. It’s a powerful idea, but I doubt it’s caused many people to conduct themselves differently towards their neighbors.
For me and most people I know, life changes have come through direct experiences of this Oneness in non-ordinary states of consciousness facilitated mainly by meditation, yoga, ritual, self-inquiry, immersion in nature, music, acupuncture, art, pain, dance, conscious breathing, interpersonal connection, and entheogenic substances. Ordinary reality (even with impressive-yet-unactualized spiritual concepts) appears random and soulless by comparison.
I didn’t have the chance to ask, “If God is not broccoli, what is broccoli?” We tend to draw vague, subjective lines around life and then deem one side worthy of our reverence and the other unworthy, but the abolition of such lines isn’t automatically liberating. I’ve seen people, myself included, latch onto the idea that everything is Divine and then fall into nihilism. Because, if it’s all God, why try? Why care? Why choose one path over any other?
This kind of thinking is a sure sign that we’re operating from a mental concept and not actually experiencing what it represents. It would be similar to take a psychedelic mushroom and hold it between your teeth, telling yourself, “So this is what psychedelic mushrooms are all about. Meh.”
Your homework is to determine whether or not broccoli is God. Since “God” is a spiritual concept, it can’t really be assessed in ordinary reality. Everyday thinking needs to fall away. You can get there using any of the approaches I mentioned above.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes on nondualism from Tantra scholar Christopher Wallis in Tantra Illuminated (slightly abridged for space):
“Since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of the one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience by definition is an experience of God… If we propose that some things are more God than others, like concentrated orange juice versus watered-down orange juice, then we must propose the existence of something that is not God that waters down divinity. But no such thing can be found, at least in this philosophy, because 1) the definition of God here is the unbounded Light of Consciousness, 2) everything that is known to exist is an object of experience, and 3) every experience is by definition pervaded by consciousness. Therefore, this – whatever is happening right now – is as God as it gets. Now, if you are in a miserable or banal life situation, you may be disappointed by this announcement. But notice I said, ‘This is as God as it gets,’ not, ‘This is as free as it gets.’ Freedom means actually experiencing the divinity in each moment.”
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One of the most basic ways to grow the spiritual dimension of your life is to consciously invite Spirit into whatever you’re doing. It’s like there’s a friend who’s been hanging out in the background while you eat and work and exercise, and you’re saying, “Oh, I forgot you were there. Would you like to join me?”
Doing so doesn’t require any particular spiritual or religious orientation. Even if you’re an atheist, you can probably still conceive of a Highest Self – an aspect of you that, in a way, is more You than any of the various personalities, thought patterns, or styles you’ve had throughout your life. It’s a stable, enduring, virtuous witness to everything you’ve been and done.
Our ability to sense this presence, whatever we choose to call it, waxes and wanes. Same with the degree to which we let it guide us. As these factors increase (more awareness and willingness to be guided), we experience a corresponding increase in trust, an expanded perspective, and less overwhelm. The feeling of being small and helpless in a big scary world diminishes.
If you haven’t done this much (or at all) it can feel at first like you’re hanging out with an imaginary friend. Is this real? Are they still in the room? It’s especially common if this is a dimension you’ve barely tuned in to. You’re used to giving most of your attention to relatively tangible and superficial planes of existence – media and culture, your possessions, your body, your thoughts and emotions. Over time the sense of opening to something bigger and subtler becomes more palpable. Simply remembering and intending to invite this Consciousness into more of your experiences makes a difference.
To get started, you could just try quieting your mind for a moment and saying hello. Hello, Source. Hello, Highest Self. Hello, Divine Light. Then be still and see if you notice anything. I believe we are that Source experiencing itself as a human being. There is no true separation, only the veil of the mind (which can be quite obscure). Your Highest Self wants to be perceived and known and consciously channeled.
Here are some other possible invitations:
Come on this hike with me. Help me notice what I usually miss.
Show me what I need to see for my healing and evolution.
Let me stay present and accepting through this event.
Let’s experience the act of eating delicious food together.
Let me see this through the eyes of my Highest Self / Spirit / God / Unconditional Love / Awareness.
But it’s not just the pleasant things that are worth inviting Spirit into. . .
I let you into my fear so that you may share it, illuminate it, transform it.
Come into my pain; please be with me in this suffering.
I invite you into my grief, as this, too, is part of the human experience.
Enter this crazy situation with me, Highest Self, and give me perspective.
Join me, Divine Light, in my depression, and hold me.
These painful states inevitably change when we open them to the spiritual dimension. It’s the simplest thing to do, yet sometimes the hardest to remember. This message is for me as much as it is for you.
Be well,
Peter
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Last week I wrote about giving away our power, and how it’s more common and subtle than we might think. We looked at some of the many ways people give their power to other people, and explored why doing so is more of a burden than a gift. In short, when we give our power to another, both parties are usually unaware of the transfer. The result is that the giver treats the recipient as being responsible for their own (the giver’s) happiness, stability, or whatever else they subconsciously traded for.
It’s not unusual for relationships to involve a two-way power trade, with both members acting powerless and blaming the other. For this reason, it’s important to not only reclaim your own power but to also give others back their power.
Because the trauma of scarcity is so deeply woven into our history, we tend to feel that more of anything is better. Thus, we may be reluctant to give someone back their power, and/or we may feel that it’s unkind to take back our power from someone we love (especially our children). So, let me reiterate something I said last time: each individual’s personal power is theirs alone. It doesn’t benefit others to give them your power and it doesn’t benefit you to have theirs. If anything, it makes the relationship unclean. Taking back your power will never weaken the other party; it just promotes greater freedom for both of you.
Here are some practical steps for reclaiming your power (and letting others do the same). If you have our workbook, Freedom, you’ll find it very helpful during this process.
1. Don't look to others to define your self-worth. Your worth is your worth – one incredible human life – the same as everyone else. It has nothing to do with your abilities, acquisitions, or looks.
2. Practice being okay with having different views, tastes, and choices than your peers and loved ones.
3. Practice letting go of wanting to be liked or approved of by everyone. Yes, it can be uncomfortable. Feel into that discomfort without letting it push you to give away your power.
4. Establish healthy boundaries. Don’t automatically say yes. Don’t get sucked into drama. Find your center.
5. Forgive. One of the biggest power suckers is resentment. Forgive others and forgive yourself (including for having given away your power). It’s not usually a single act but an ongoing commitment to keep forgiving.
6. Know your needs and values. Beneath every conflict there is a need/value.
7. Don't try to fix people. If you have trouble with this, consider this: Are you absolutely certain that you know what’s best for them? Have you asked them if they want your hep?
8. Learn to help, care, and love without giving away your power.
9. Be responsible for the story you tell yourself about life and your place in it.
10. Discover the identities you’ve taken on (victim, helper, life of the party, supermom, etc.), and evaluate whether they serve you.
11. When you’re angry or upset about something someone did or said, and/or if you find yourself thinking obsessively about them (positively or negatively), always check in: have you given them your power?
Now for the woo-woo part, which is just as important:
12. Learn what power loss and entanglement feel like. Learn what it feels like to be clean with your power. As you become increasingly familiar with the difference, you’ll know when repair is in order. This is easier said than done, but becomes increasingly clear when you practice the steps above and the following ceremony. Again, routinely doing a somatic practice like what we teach in Freedom is a great way to hone your sensitivity and familiarity with the felt sense of your power.
As a general guideline, when your power is entangled with another’s, you’re likely to feel something other than good and solid in yourself when you’re with them or thinking about them. You may feel a certain neediness toward them, as if you’re less than whole. You may feel overly affected by whatever they say and do. You may feel destabilized by them. You may feel tired. You may feel self-conscious. You may experience the idea of them as an irritant in your system.
13. Perform a ceremony of taking back your power and giving others theirs. It can be quick and easy. Imagine a pipe or tube connecting you and them. First you’re going to take back your power. Say or intend something like this: “Show me any fragments of my power that are in their energetic field.” And imagine these bits of power light up, like a bunch of fireflies (or however else they naturally appear to you).
Next, say or intend something like, “I’m sorry for giving you my power without your consent. I release you.” Then call your power back to you. Unlatch from the other person in all the places you’re hooked on. Imagine there’s a filter in the middle of the tube connecting the two of you, and the filter’s purpose is to only let what’s yours pass through to you. With each inhale, imagine you’re drawing back your power, pulling it out of them and into yourself. With each exhale, imagine that you’re re-incorporating this power within yourself and consolidating it into the central axis of your body. Do this for a few breaths until it feels complete.
Step two is to return anything of theirs that you’re carrying around. Ask for their energy to show itself and to unlatch from you. Then imagine the filter is reversed so that it only lets their energy pass through to them, without allowing any of your power to leave. As you relax and open yourself, imagine with each exhale that you are giving them back everything that’s theirs. Imagine With each inhale, imagine your own power is drawn toward the central axis of your head, neck, and torso, becoming a bright, strong column of light. Exhale again, releasing their energy back to them, and continue until you feel complete.
How do you feel? It’s not uncommon to notice that you feel instantly calmer and clearer when things are set straight in this way. Next time we’ll talk about the other form of power sacrifice I mentioned in the previous article (ignoring, denying, or failing to recognize our own power and agency).
Be well,
Peter
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As a young adult I often stayed at the beautiful Marin Headlands hostel just north of San Francisco. I was there one weekend while a large group of missionaries was passing through. We were all sharing the same kitchen space and I was chopping some broccoli when a cute young woman around my age approached me. We started talking and I thought it was going well. I have always enjoyed conversing about spirituality and religion, even with people of different beliefs than my own.
At the time I was immersed in learning about Advaita – nondualism – which was blowing my mind. Nondual philosophy asserts that, although we perceive many things that may feel separate, in reality everything is an expression of a single Oneness experiencing itself in infinite ways.
Some people call this Oneness God or Goddess or Source or Divine or Dao. What’s important isn’t the name but the experience of this connection, and how it redefines how we see reality.
I had in my suitcase a book called Aghora in which an eccentric spiritual teacher explains that since everything is God, both sex and eating are simply acts of “putting God into God.” So, when this missionary woman asked me what I was doing, I guess I thought I was being clever by replying, “Oh, just chopping up some God.”
She was clearly taken aback, so I explained that if the whole universe is an expression of one God, then broccoli was of course included, and therefore I was chopping up some God to put into God (myself). She was speechless for a moment, then said – a bit louder than was called for, I thought – “God is not broccoli!” and walked away.
There were several lessons for me in this story, starting with (1) nobody likes a smug person pushing their buttons, and (2) if you truly want to make a difference in the world you need to meet people where they are. But aside from my social failure, maybe the most important lesson was that there’s often a huge difference between the description of an experience and the experience itself. In other words, to understand something intellectually tells us nothing of how we’d be affected by experiencing it.
In lectures, I used to explain how physics seems to “prove” nondualism, hoping that even the nonspiritual types in the class would be won over. I’d point out that while each of us feels we’re separate from everyone else in the classroom, we and the world around us are all just different configurations of the same fundamental stuff – subatomic particles or even more fundamental fluctuations of energy. It’s a powerful idea, but I doubt it’s caused many people to conduct themselves differently towards their neighbors.
For me and most people I know, life changes have come through direct experiences of this Oneness in non-ordinary states of consciousness facilitated mainly by meditation, yoga, ritual, self-inquiry, immersion in nature, music, acupuncture, art, pain, dance, conscious breathing, interpersonal connection, and entheogenic substances. Ordinary reality (even with impressive-yet-unactualized spiritual concepts) appears random and soulless by comparison.
I didn’t have the chance to ask, “If God is not broccoli, what is broccoli?” We tend to draw vague, subjective lines around life and then deem one side worthy of our reverence and the other unworthy, but the abolition of such lines isn’t automatically liberating. I’ve seen people, myself included, latch onto the idea that everything is Divine and then fall into nihilism. Because, if it’s all God, why try? Why care? Why choose one path over any other?
This kind of thinking is a sure sign that we’re operating from a mental concept and not actually experiencing what it represents. It would be similar to take a psychedelic mushroom and hold it between your teeth, telling yourself, “So this is what psychedelic mushrooms are all about. Meh.”
Your homework is to determine whether or not broccoli is God. Since “God” is a spiritual concept, it can’t really be assessed in ordinary reality. Everyday thinking needs to fall away. You can get there using any of the approaches I mentioned above.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes on nondualism from Tantra scholar Christopher Wallis in Tantra Illuminated (slightly abridged for space):
“Since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of the one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience by definition is an experience of God… If we propose that some things are more God than others, like concentrated orange juice versus watered-down orange juice, then we must propose the existence of something that is not God that waters down divinity. But no such thing can be found, at least in this philosophy, because 1) the definition of God here is the unbounded Light of Consciousness, 2) everything that is known to exist is an object of experience, and 3) every experience is by definition pervaded by consciousness. Therefore, this – whatever is happening right now – is as God as it gets. Now, if you are in a miserable or banal life situation, you may be disappointed by this announcement. But notice I said, ‘This is as God as it gets,’ not, ‘This is as free as it gets.’ Freedom means actually experiencing the divinity in each moment.”
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