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In part 1 of this post, I talked about fringe interests I have in the world of energy and detoxification. These spaces are definitely on many people’s radar, but in terms of depth and breadth amongst the general U.S. population, it still feels like early innings to me.
In this post, we’re going to expand on some additional personal interests that have not cracked the mainstream.
You’ll notice that there’s a lot of overlap in all these topics. Many of these these interests work together in the context of improved well-being and consciousness expansion.
Part 2:
Let’s dive in! And if you haven’t checked out part 1 yet, you can do that here.
Subconscious / Emotional Purification
Whether we want to be happier or healthier, all roads point to working on our consciousness.
Our personal histories and the ideas we’ve been exposed serve as backdrop for the creation of our thoughts, emotions, automatic compulsions (patterns), and potentially even the underpinnings of physical reality. Understanding how to excavate and reshape this subconscious inner territory has been the most enriching pursuit of the last 5 years of my life.
I’ve tried many different modalities that all point to 3 main focus areas: processing emotions, transforming patterns, and changing beliefs/concepts.
Emotions
Unprocessed emotions can wreak havoc on our lives. I never knew I was emotionally bypassing until I started working on my awareness. It became clear that so much of the garbage in my mind and eventually difficulty in my body all came back to emotional wounds that I was unknowingly carrying from just being.
One example was my anger. Somewhere in my upbringing I picked up the concept that anger was bad. If you were angry, it meant you were unadjusted and ungrateful. So I unconsciously developed a habit to bypass anger. Over the years this compounded without me realizing it. It would manifest more subtly as a general impatience and hyper-vigilance that pervaded all areas of life. Sometimes I’d feel like an instapot ready for steam to explore out of me when things didn’t go my way. The only times this would actually ever surface would be in environments that didn’t risk my social positionality like with my immediate family and girlfriend.
Emotional suppression also manifested in all sorts of ways in my body. I became incredibly tight. I lost my deep belly laugh. I started to have random health difficulties emerge such as digestion challenges despite a decade of maintaining a huberman-like exercise and diet regimen.
As I started to process many emotions I’d been carrying since I was a kid, I started to feel lighter both mentally and physically. Eventually, all the energy that had been resourced around keeping these emotions at bay could be redirected to higher purposes such as the creative intelligence of intuition which I now just see as a direct connection to Source. I even started to notice changes in my physicality as all the tightness released like getting my dimples back!
Patterns
Patterns are the compulsive, automatic responses that are generated from the imprints of life. The energy behind these mental constructs hijack our awareness and take us out of identifying as a loving awareness.
Ever feel blissed out from yoga or a meditation session, only to be triggered 20 minutes later by some inconsequential detail? This is because the events of life collided with some pattern in your consciousness.
Patterns impact our thoughts, interpretation of the world, and actions we take. These subtle forces can often be the drivers of our lives, yet until a certain depth of awareness is reached, you probably don’t know it. At least I didn’t. I think most humans have 100’s if not 1000’s of them.
An example pattern is the mental formation of “I’m not enough.” I’ve written about this before, but this idea was responsible for decades of intense ambition in my life. As far as I can tell, the imprint occurred when I was 5 years old due to a bully on my bus. It was then reinforced over many years by the events of life.
The easiest way I’ve found to discover your patterns, is to notice when you are disturbed or resisting anything. This is a pointing to a pattern which you can use processes like these to transform. The more I have been able to unbound the energy and install new information to reflect the natural state, the more I am able to rest as the loving awareness regardless of what life throws at me. It’s my observation that as we increasingly stabilize this state of being, the greater understanding and wisdom we receive.
Changing/Beliefs and Concepts
I think of our consciousness as just a massive information store. The contents of the information store drive our response to reality and what increasingly feels like the content of reality itself.
When I began to do this work, I realized I had unknowingly absorbed lots of unsupportive concepts. I remember one day realizing, “wow I’m just a ball of ideas and most of them are shitty.”
It became clear that the information in my consciousness was informing my meaning making of reality, life strategies, and self perceptions. For example, I noticed the idea of needing to grind to make a lot of money. Is this fundamentally true? No. It may be a common pattern and societal narrative, but there are obviously exceptions to the rule. What if this concept was erased and replaced with something like all the resources I need flow to me with ease? The more I worked on my awareness and deprogramming myself, the more I began to see how all these inherited concepts were driving my reality.
I also started to see how much this was impacting my health. I began to realize how my body was just an order taker from this information store like a robot. If we think something is bad for us, the body will respond in concert whether it is sun exposure, certain foods, etc. I know this is a jarring idea for some to get behind, but you can start to see beginnings of a deeper truth looking at the nocebo and placebo effects.
Obviously there are many biological processes and reactions that run without any information we’ve been exposed too. So I think it’s fair to say that the concepts in our consciousness have a major impact, but may not be the whole story when it comes to impacts on the physical body.
So does this mean you can just start doing whatever the hell you want with no consequences? No. My experience is that you’re kind of subject to the rules of the information in your consciousness which you may not even be aware of. So it’s not like someone can read this when they are identified as a mind-body with all their programs and just start being lazy hoping to effortlessly achieve wealth or eat like shit while maintaining perfect health. It doesn’t work that way.
It seems like the depth of awareness and our ability to locate the information and transform it dictates the level of agency we have here. This is how many yogis reportedly live off mostly breath, barely slept, and perform other feats deemed impossible according to “the rules”. They broke free of the limitations of the traditional humanhood narrative by shifting their identification and information in their consciousness. David Hawkins talks a lot about this in the context of health in his books.
For us non-saints, the challenge we face is that so much of what we have been conditioned to believe are concepts outside of our immediate awareness. This includes everything from ideas we have heard from authority figures as kids, big T and little t trauma, and cultural rhetoric.
The Work
The way we can create more agency in our lives is by working on our awareness so that we can begin to investigate, purify and reconstruct the information in our consciousness whether it’s unprocessed emotions, unsupportive patterns, or shitty concepts. There are many, many ways to do this and this process is a life-long endeavor.
A few fields that approach this from different entry points include:
The continued growth of contemplative practices like meditation, yoga, qigong, and anything that creates space between thoughts and awareness
Somatics - focuses information stored in the body
Emotional awareness and healing - i.e. Internal Family Systems, Emotion code, TRE, Patterns Work, Emotional Inquiry
Psycho-somatic health - the integration of what is going on in the psyche with our body
I think to really make progress here most people will need to take a multi-pronged approach, trying different things to see what works. I see all these modalities as tools that I can use and discard as I need depending upon whatever the emerging inner landscape calls for.
There is so much here and it feels like we are just scratching the surface as a broader society. I think anything effective in this broader space is poised to grow as many people are completely unaware of this work or just scratching the surface.
One thing I think a lot of people do not understand about spirituality is that in the pursuit of Divine union, the practical reconstruction of the consciousness is an inevitable byproduct. In this way, spirituality could be the healthiest, most liberating thing you could ever invest in. At least that is what I think.
The Body As A Reflection and Communication Instrument of Consciousness
Building upon everything in the part 1 on energy, healthcare, and the last section, one idea I have become a believer in is that the body is a manifestation of your consciousness.
Many things in our experience are totalities of consciousness. A totality means that something is simultaneously contained in an object while also being an expression of the whole thing. This is also part of the holographic principle where each part of a hologram contains the entirety of the hologram in itself.
A cool medicinal system that exemplifies this is Iridology which believes the patterns of your eyes express what is happening within your entire system. Some people believe the entire universe can be found in a single cell and vice versa.
Viewing the body as a reflection of consciousness means that when there is a malfunction in your system, the symptomatology may be pointing us to investigate something in your life or subconscious. I love this quote which captures this succinctly:
Our biography creates our biology
Let me be clear, for most people there are obviously some malfunctions in cellular health that occur in the physical body due to exposure/ingestion of toxins, nutritional deficiency, and physical injury. All I’m saying is there that is also more to the story and many ailments are rooted in something else.
When you set the strong intention to evolve your consciousness and start to view the body as almost a communication mechanism to go inward in order to heal and transform what keeps you in separation, an interesting shift happens; you begin to see that perhaps the highest objective of the body is to actually wake you up and bring you back to the realization of your divine nature. Maybe at a certain point it helped you get a six pack and girlfriend, but there is actually a much deeper purpose to why we’re here and what our bodies are for beyond having cool experiences.
There are components of this idea found in ancient medicine systems. For example, in Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, certain organs are associated with different emotions. So if our liver is malfunctioning, perhaps we need to investigate some anger we are holding.
I didn’t go seek out this belief. I came to it through my own healing experience when nothing else worked. Despite leading a pristine lifestyle for a lot of my life, I have gone through a ton of health shit in recent years. Most people would point to this as an example of why I am so off on all of this.
I used to wonder if something was wrong with me incessantly going to Dr.’s to try and fix myself I eventually learned that the experience of having an onslaught of health difficulties is actually quite common for people who have a rapid spiritual transformation, especially in the kundalini process. You are basically undergoing a massive purification process which happens both energetically and physically. The old system must be broken down and cleansed in order for a new one to get rebuilt. This may not happen to everyone, but it certainly happened to me.
What has been so interesting to me is how tightly many major revelations and emotional releases have occurred in concert with changes to symptomatology. A very simple example is this time I had a lingering laryngitis. At the onset, I went to an ENT and did everything they told me. I then went to a gastroenterologist because after failing to heal me, the ENT told me my throat discomfort was from GERD. I then did everything the gastro told me including cutting out coffee, alcohol, and anything acidic. Still unsuccessful, I went to additional doctors in both specialties trying all kinds of diets such as low-FODMAP, low histamine, carnivore, etc. This occurred over 6 month span. At one point, it got so bad that I had to see a speech pathologist because I was having trouble speaking.
One day a friend of mine asked me what was happening in my life when this all began. I looked at my calendar and remembered I was in New York City. I realized that during that trip I had told a lie to someone I was dating at the time that I felt really guilty about.
I decided to meditate and try to be with that feeling. During this session, I processed the guilt and forgave myself. The next day my throat felt normal again. After 6 months of throwing the medical intervention kitchen sink unsuccessfully, it was the recognition of the dishonesty and guilt that immediately healed that ailment.
This instance is just one of MANY examples that I have experienced that made it evident how consciousness was the primary mechanism driving the body. I am not the only person that has tuned into this phenomenon. Everyone from world-class scientists like Candace Pert and Bruce Lipton, to more emergent authors like Joe Dispenza and Gabor Mate are shouting from the rooftops about the mind-body connection.
Right now relatively few people are out there claiming that your physical ailments are actually primarily healing opportunities serving your evolution. The whole field of understanding is scattered and feels disorganized.
I think there will be more people who create very specific programs for people to make the connection between consciousness and targeted healing. Two books I have experimented with that attempt this are The Encyclopedia of Ailments and Diseases: How to Heal the Conflicted Feelings, Emotions, and Thoughts at the Root of Illness and Recall Healing’s Pyramid of Health. Books are not enough. I think we need practitioners and digitally native delivery methods to help people navigate these waters.
I hope people have an easier time than I did figuring all this out. Simultaneously, I know I also had to go through this in order to be able to serve in the way I am today.