Chapter 82 Where is Your Awareness? - from my book Changes

Chapter 82

Where is Your Awareness?

Put your hand on your cheek.

Is you hand warmer or colder than your cheek?

How do you know?

Try it.

I realized one day that when I put my hand on my cheek, I could feel warmth and coolness, but which was feeling the warmth and which was feeling the coolness?

In order to know what your cheek is feeling, you must put your point of awareness in your cheek to see what your cheek is feeling.

To know what your hand is feeling, you have to put your point of awareness in your hand.

This point of awareness is where the focus is.

The fact that we can send our point of awareness anywhere in our body is pretty cool.

We can also send our awareness outside of ourselves to pay attention to our surroundings, yet we still feel everything within our own bodies.

One of the exercises Malcolm Ringwalt gave us, during a class, was to take some time to lay down somewhere outdoors and shut our eyes.  Then pay attention to what we hear, feel on our skin, smell, taste on the air, and anything we notice from outside our bodies.  Then to notice where in our bodies we are experiencing what we are hearing, feeling, smelling, etc.  All this to realize that everything we are aware of outside our bodies is being experienced within our bodies.

This is one of the exercises that I cherish because doing this exercise helped me understand how my body is like a receiver of information, similar to how a nerve in a body receives information and transmits that information to our understanding.

The reverse is also true, we can, through the use of our bodies, through our thoughts, feelings, and actions large or small, send out messages to the world around us; to other receivers that exist in this greater “body” we live within.  These receivers may be people, animals, plants, minerals, even the earth itself as a whole, and likely even the universe and beyond.

We are receivers and we are transmitters.

In paying attention to what we are actively receiving or actively transmitting, we are being present.

What about when we focus our attention on our past experiences?

What about when we focus our attention on future expectations?

During those times, we are no longer focusing our attention on the now, or being present in the now, we are instead focusing our attention on the past or the future.

I think of these as time dimensions.  Even though these time dimensions “happened” in the past or will happen in the future, we get to experience them within our bodies in the present.  But when doing to, we are not really in the present, but putting our awareness into a different time experience.

I wonder if this is akin to time travel.

I’ve heard of therapists leading patients into their past to help their patients overcome traumas of the past; to be able to experience past events from a safer perspective; maybe even doing things to minimize the trauma of the past by changing the memory somewhat.

Tom Brown Jr taught us a bit about this kind of meditation.

I love how healing this kind of time travel can be.

There are many ways of approaching this kind of healing, and I admit I have not tried very many of them, but tapping is one I have tried and find fascinating.

Briefly, in tapping, you think of an event and let yourself relive it in your mind, while at the same time you tap certain points on your body while saying something along the lines of “Even though I _______________, I am still _______________.

There are many variations on what to say while doing the tapping exercise based on what is needed.

I will not try to expand on this myself since it is not something I have studied.

If you want to search for more information on tapping, you could use these sentences in the search bar on your computer:  “what are the sentences people say while doing the tapping exercise?” Or, “What is tapping and how is it used for healing emotional pain or trauma?”