Spiritual Embodiment Living the question 2012 Mickey Judkovics

Today, through such teachers as Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Mahara many spiritual seekers are aware of and work with the question Who am I? For those of us interested in spiritual embodiment another question, not as well known and equally as important is the question Where am I?. I personally have come to this understanding through two of my spiritual teachers, both leaving this world in the last few years. The first teacher was Roger Woolger who in observing me doing some some past life regression healing remarked. Look, Mickey, you are going in and out of your body. My next encounter with this idea came at the hands of David Grove and his Clean Language methodology. David came to his initial ideas though the generative question, "Where do people go when they dissociate? With this in mind he can up with the following intervention: Say inside. yourself I am several times. Now saying inside yourself, As I (Mickey) say the words I am where in my sense of Iness? My answer the first time I did this was that my sense of Iness was two inches in front of my eyes. Later I rationalized this strange phenomenon as I didnt want to be in my body where I felt terror, horror and rage and I didnt want to be too far way from my body where I couldnt protect it, if I had to. So this for me is the first problem of spiritual embodiment. The second problem is what I choose to call , the problem of deflection. Both of the out-ofbody problems, and the deflection problem have been clearly discussed in the Healing Practices section Thich Nhat Hanhs book called Reconciliation,. He calls this practice,

Dropping the Object. I n Dropping the Object practice Hahn addresses the being outof-body in the following way: Drop the story. Stop thinking and come back to the body and feelings. Stay with the energy in our bodies, let go of the thinking. By following the energy back into our body and feelings, (my emphasis) we can find the internal knots, and embrace them tenderly. We let go of the tension that is there. We allow the tension to unwind and release itself. We heal. This process is a little like learning how to ride a bicycle. You can sit on it, you can think about it and someone can push you a bit, but at a certain point, we have to stop thinking, we have to let go and we have to do it. Finally, we do it, we ride. "I got it, I got it!" I can ride! In this practice he also describes the problem of deflection and its healing as follows: Sometimes the energy in the body and feelings can seem impenetrable or overwhelming. In that case, we can touch the difficult feeling or situation for a short time, perhaps twenty seconds to a minute. Then we can open our eyes and rest our attention on something outside us for a few minutes-perhaps hook out the window at the natural world. Then when we're ready, we go back to be in touch with the feelings again. We can try going back and forth for a few rounds. Alternating our attention like this provides us a safe base outside, and gives us space inside. My own personal experience is that the second practice of healing areas of avoidance and numbness can be excruciatingly difficult. Hopefully with persistence and practice you will be able to achieve your goal of embodying a deep human compassionate spirituality.