I was inspired by the Midsummer Renaissance gathering I attended a month ago in London. I loved that so many people had come together with the intention of moving humanity forward into an age where we are expressing our unity as love individually, in the family, the community, in society and in our economical, agricultural and industrial structures.
I have read Andrew Cohen’s books but this was the first time that I had been part of the Enlighten Next community. My background is as a homeopath and a student of Byron Katie, Brandon Bays and Gangaji. Gangaji and Brandon Bays are both, like Cohen, teachers of the Ramana lineage and were identified by Poonjaji as his successors. As I see it, the difference between the teachings is that Cohen is inspiring a drive forward, beyond the personal to a collective: evolutionary progression. While coming from the ground of being this is an up and out direction. Gangaji and Bays talk in terms of deepening and expanding, they teach us to access enlightenment through the body, through opening to love. It seems to me that the two aspects are complementary: yang and yin, spirit and heart, expanding and deepening; and to take enlightenment forward now we need integrate the two aspects more fully.
To borrow from the model of Maslow, a culture needs to first have its physical needs of food, shelter and safety met before it has the energy to address its emotional needs. The baby boomer generation of the post-war West enjoyed relative stability and safety and was free to begin to contemplate its emotional pain. Acknowledgement and contemplation of this pain lead to a narcissistic, self-absorbed stage in our culture that fitted with the post-modern thinking of the time, but, on the plus side it lead to the development of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and the Jungian recognition of the collective conscious (1959) which form the basis of the next level of understanding.
Our appreciation of emotional pain has been evolving rapidly over the last 4 decades. Amongst many others, Toller (2001) described the pain body which holds the unconscious memories of events that occurred in the past but were too overwhelming to be fully processed at the time. Louise Hay (1988) and Brandon Bays (1999) describe how certain cues: sounds, smells or sights prompt a replay of bodily responses such as fear, anger or sadness that were appropriate in the memory but not necessarily to the present. The ego fears these responses as they are beyond its understanding and it tries to overcome them with the power of reason. Most of us are still at this evolutionary stage and the struggle to control emotions is a constant preoccupation of the ego and can cause intense and overwhelming angst.
Louise Hay recognised that suppressed pain from the past and the ego’s attempt to control our responses to it can eventually make us physically or mentally ill. Tools for healing our suppressed pain have been developing since then and in the 1990s an evolutionary leap occurred with the publication of The Journey by Brandon Bays, Loving What is by Byron Katie (2002) and Freedom and Resolve: The Living Edge of Surrender by Gangaji (1999). Each teaches a different approach and each introduces a wide audience to a fundamental shift in understanding. Gangaji invites us to turn towards our pain and explore it more deeply, accepting rather than fearing what we find. We learn that the pain is nothing to fear and by opening to it we release it and as we continue to explore ever deeper we find that in its heart is the opposite. So in the heart of fear we experience infinite safety, in the heart of grief is total acceptance and in the heart of anger is universal love.
Byron Katie teaches us to question the beliefs of our ego until we recognise that none of our thoughts are definite and that when we are free of judgement we can rest in acceptance, in non-personal awareness, in grace.
Brandon Bays brings together several psychotherapeutic tools which allow subconscious painful memories to become conscious. We can then turn towards the pain, find the freedom in the heart of it and then question the judgements that we adopted to protect ourselves from it.
There are now many, many other processes, interpretations and routes to releasing the legacy of pain from the body so we can be increasingly free from the ego’s struggle to control and be ever more conscious and present. This is necessarily a lengthy process as we not only carry our own pain but that of our forebears, and however enlightened or free our egos believe us to be we can rest assured that we all have blind spots and complete freedom is something to which most of us can merely aspire. We all carry unexamined judgements and fears which jolt us back into the ego from time to time. However, emotional freedom is something we can work towards alongside our quest for spiritual freedom: we can deepen as we extend.
So, access to love is through the emotional body, as we open deeper and deeper into the core of our being we find peace, stillness, acceptance and joy within and then recognise that all these extend beyond our individual selves and that we are boundless: we are one-ness. Unconscious emotional pain acts as a block to this opening and ours is the first generation to have ready access to tools that will allow us to heal. We can heal and open beyond the individual suffering to encompass universal suffering and hold it in acceptance and love. This is a yin state. From this can arise the yang of forward movement and expansion into a post-post modern culture that arises from the absolute, is ego free and has the confidence to define a new society that is congruent, compassionate and based on love www.clarewaltershealth.co.uk.
