Love Down to the Bones

Intimacy with self

LOVE DOWN TO THE BONES

From where we view ourselves

For a moment notice how you view yourself. Reflect on how you feel about your being. Recognize any positive, negative or neutral tendencies or assumptions. Notice the lenses, thoughts and beliefs that inform your self view. Often this type of conscious self sight is neglected because we’ve created preconditioned views, which we have formed an identity of self around. While in the background of our mind we are aware of this identity, in some ways it is also elusive to us. Because it is so intimate to us we don’t always see it.

As an analogy it would be like putting an object too close to your face. It becomes harder and harder to see it. If you merge with it completely than there is no way to recognize it. How we view ourselves is often like this. So close to us that it is hard for us to see even though there is a vague awareness of an identity we know ourselves as. This challenge in seeing ourselves clearly creates a seemingly solid or fixed sense of self that is not within our reach to know or change.

Just like if we wanted to see the entirely of a mountain we would have to stand back some distance from it, so to in order to get a larger view of ourselves we have to zoom out. We need to create distance between our fixated or assumed ideas about ourselves and our awareness, rather than having them fused into one.

How is this done?

One of the most reliable methods is stillness. The more still the mind is, the more we can see what is filled within it. If our mind is busy and moving from thing to thing to thing, it is hard to focus on anything other than the movement. But when you can amplify the background stillness and bring it more into the foreground, then the movement goes to the background. When we are not consumed by the movement, we can see more of the whole terrain that our mind contains. This creates spaciousness in our awareness from our presumed identity. With this spaciousness we see more obviously the lenses which we view ourselves through.

Why does seeing how we see ourselves matter?

It matters because most of us don’t see ourselves clearly. We view through layers of societal and cultural conditioning, which aren’t necessarily true. This equates to living as a false view of ourselves, meaning we operate from a distorted or inaccurate identity. While this identity might seem very true to us, that is only due to the view which we see ourselves through. With awareness we can unblock and change the filters we see through, thus enabling us to come into alignment with who and what we really are. However without zooming out we won’t be able to see and therefore will live a misleading story about the nature of our true identity.

SEEING THROUGH THE EYES OF THE HEART

Intimacy with self

As we begin to see more clearly we might notice that there is a range of perspectives from where we view. Some filters we see through may be down right negative. Beliefs we have that view ourselves as ugly, incompetent, incapable, uncaring, stupid, not important and so on, may be present. These views lead to low energy state within our body leading to breakdown of tissues and provide a relatively unsatisfactory experience of life. Other filters might be more neutral where were we don’t see ourselves as negative, but we don’t see ourselves in a positive light either. We might not think of ourselves as ugly, but also not as beautiful. We might not feel incapable, but we we don’t see ourselves as brilliant. We might not feel uncaring, but we don’t feel overly passionate either. These views lead to a neutral energy state. Tissues in our body aren’t necessarily breaking down, but there isn’t much of a surplus either. We have enough to get by and not much more. Life is good enough, but it isn’t quite as magical, amazing and overflowing as we would desire. I would say the vast majority of humans experience this state of being as their baseline.

What might it be like to see and feel ourselves through a positive lens?

One thing to clarify here, this isn’t about positive thinking or adopting a positive mindset. While those things can be helpful as a bridge into seeing your true identity, often people don’t get that far. Their positive mindset stays as a concept rather than a felt experience of knowing their purity down to their bones. How I actually prefer to frame this is seeing one’s self through the eyes of the heart rather than seeing one’s self positively. But because people have an association with the positive/negative terminology I use it here.

As an experiment, for a moment see if you can grok what it would be like to see yourself through the eyes of the heart. Some words to describe seeing one’s self through the lens of the heart would be unconditional, beautiful, wise, full, abundant, invaluable, precious and pure. See and feel what that is like to identify as those words. Can you allow them to land into your body? Can you feel them penetrate deep within the tissues all the way down to the solidness of your bones? If those words, in association with you as an identity can’t go that deep in, notice if they can get to the skin layer, or to the muscles just below. Some words might be easier than others to fully let in. Some might not enter at all. Just notice. This isn’t about judgment, it is about self-awareness and creating an invitation for you to experience yourself differently within your body.

When we see and feel ourselves from the perspective of heart we come into alignment with the truth of our being. We see ourselves as we are rather than how we’ve been conditioned to believe we are. A body that feels love, not just love “out there” as a subtle frequency, but as love deep within, is full of vitality. This doesn’t mean it never has an ache or pain, but it does mean that it experiences sensations quite differently. From this view of ourselves we see that everything the body experiences is an opportunity for us to feel and see ourselves with increasing clarity. All sensation becomes information rather than problems or parts of ourselves to fix.

Love down to the bones is radical.

When we know it we radiate immense light through our being. It’s hard for others not to feel it, even if they are blind to their truth nature hidden under layers of false perspectives. What I am pointing to here is full intimacy and inclusivity with ourselves. Without this we can only fractionally see and experience intimacy with others. While we might be able to project love onto them, we won’t be able to share the fullness of ourselves with the fullness of them because we don’t yet know it.

There isn’t anything that tangibly stands in the way of seeing yourself through the eyes of the heart. There is nothing but layers of unexamined nonphysical beliefs and perceptions that cloud the view. By accessing stillness, and then doing the work on what you see there, more and more you are able to allow your perspectives of yourself to come into alignment with the truth of you. While it often doesn’t happen overnight, it can and does happen. With conviction and persistence anything is possible.

Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, DC, MSAc, L.Ac

Network Spinal Chiropractor & Heart Coherence Specialist at the Sanctuary for Heart Magic, a Mentor for Heart-Led Healers at Soul Luminaries & the Writer of The Everyday Divine.

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