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The meditation featured in Undo is called natural meditation. Simply put, this natural meditation is sitting still and feeling the sensations in your body. By feeling the feelings that are inside of you and letting them be without judgement or bias you release any accumulated stress and come to accept yourself exactly as you are, however you are. Burdened by misinformation and misguidance in today’s online world, being able to do so is not easy and that’s where Undo steps in to guide you in your journey.
This approach to meditation awakens you to a clear and common sense understanding of how you function, how your thoughts and feelings affect your health, your relationships and your ability to function adequately and effectively in all areas of life. Understanding all this is the basis for navigating your life effortlessly.
Natural meditation is not about a state of mind or something to attain. It’s about establishing a solid felt sense of yourself in the body. From this solid basis it is remarkable how well you are able to function in daily life.
Traditional approaches to meditation try to make you be something or someone other than what you are. Their ideas and goals of improving upon yourself simply reflect the superficial and narrow view that you are insufficient as you are. But that is their trap, and that is not what Undo is about. We aim to restore the unique individual that you are.
Mindfulness is a technique-based meditation practice derived from tradition. It is based in the Buddhist philosophy and is therefore also part of the Buddhist religious practice.
Before using mindfulness techniques in your meditation consider this: mindfulness is a technique of applying a thought process in an attempt at mimicking interconnectedness. Interconnectedness already exists organically as live sensations within our body, between our senses and the world around us. Mindfulness is thinking about what is already and only known through our senses. It’s essentially thinking about the obvious.
Once you apply mindfulness, you imply and imagine a disconnection and then set out to reconnect this imagined disconnection. It’s a thought-based process, which causes a division between the technique and whatever you apply it to or meditate on.
Techniques and mindfulness will never achieve what is already the natural function of you which is what natural meditation does.
The natural meditation used in Undo goes deeper beneath the superficiality of thinking into the felt sense of yourself in your body. There is no imaginary thought-based self as the meditator just the whole integrated sense of meditation.
This unique meditation is not religious, technique based or philosophical. It is not an idea or a product of beliefs or thought. It is a tangible, experiential, straight forward and a common-sense, discovery based understanding of how we function. It’s an understanding of how our thoughts and feelings affect our health, our relationships and our ability to function in all areas of life.
Undo natural meditation is an original approach and in sync with modern times. Traditional and technique meditations were invented thousands of years ago, our lives are very different now. An age-old approach to life now is impractical, they also prevent integration within yourself physically, and this inhibits the evolution of your individuality.
Mindfulness itself is derived from traditional, technique-based religion. It is part of the Buddhist philosophy. It’s essentially thinking about the obvious. The problem with technique-based approaches is that they are thought-based and with repetition become hypnotic, which removes you from the deeper living sense of you in the body and can cause a numbing disassociation, a state of superiority, detachment or aloofness.
Although mindfulness is an attempt to close the gap between what we think, feel and do in action, it’s practice actually keeps the idea that there is a gap, going. The solution is to understand that the gap is not really there. Also to try to close an imaginary gap, force is required to imagine you are closing the gap and this has effects. Mindfulness (like all techniques to meditate) is based in an incomplete understanding of it’s actual effects. This misunderstanding and unintentional cause of disassociating from raw reality of life is a tendency of all dogma and spirituality.
To go deeper, in your meditation you need to learn how to physically sense and feel your sense of being alive as you are, however that feels for you. Feeling your physical sense of self beneath the surface of your thinking is all natural meditation is. But it takes understanding to be able to do it.
The point at which the body and mind are interconnected is where and how the unresolved and unconscious becomes conscious and resolvable. When you’re just sitting there, physically still, feeling all that there is to feel beneath thinking, immersed in this depth in your body, is what enables recovery from the effects of life and makes you one. This fullness of sensing becomes your experience and thinking fades into insignificance.
The only way to get depth is to go beneath any thinking (eg. Techniques and dogma) into the felt sensations within the body. It’s easy to do once you know how and we’ve had a lot of success from this approach, so we know that it works.
The common problem with other meditations is that they are technique-based approaches. That is, they are thought-based constructs, so they are removed from the real living experience of you. Used in repetition they become hypnotic like techniques such as mantra or chanting.
Other practises of altering your state through repetitive techniques are:
Natural meditation is much like when you just feel the warm water in a relaxing hot bath without thinking about it. Techniques are becoming preoccupied with thinking about the relaxing feeling of your bath. So natural meditation is more like the soothing feeling of the bath before you start thinking about it.
Natural meditation is a lot deeper than another other type of meditation, and therefore can be challenging for some people. However the people who do stick with it, find it to be the most fulfilling and rewarding thing they ever do in their lives.
We have found that natural meditation tends to attract people who:
If you find you don’t relate to any of the above points that’s fine, we encourage you to take a look at Undo and try out natural meditation. You never know, it might be exactly what you’re looking for.
Natural meditation is not about a state of mind or trying to feel better or be better. It is about establishing a sold sense of yourself in your body on a daily basis. From this solid sense you will find you are able to navigate and live your life a lot more affectively.
Based on the down to earth, practical understanding of Undo you will learn how simple it is to take care of the essential aspects of your life that are crucial to your overall wellbeing. When you grasp this approach to yourself it is amazing how keen you are to apply it to your life, especially because it actually works. Once you comprehend it you will wonder why no one has ever taught you this before.
Undo’s natural meditation is very straightforward and makes complete sense. It’s very powerful and anyone can learn it quickly. All you need to do is sit physically still and just be with yourself as you are.
The difficulty that may arise is in you recognising when you are resisting or reacting to any aspect or sensation or pain in yourself. It requires understanding to stop trying to be different or to stop imposing expectations on what you are and that takes time to learn. But the more you experience the powerful benefits of this type of meditation the less you will resist yourself as you are and the more at ease you will be. You then begin to deepen your meditation and anchor your sense of self without even trying.
You can meditate at anytime of the day or night.
If you meditate in the morning you will find you are clearer for the upcoming day, you will settle into a sense of yourself that will help you deal with disturbances or problems throughout the day. By the end of the day you will be less affected and having been less distracted will also find you’ll have more energy too.
If you meditate at the end of the day you will be able to release any stress or disturbances accumulated from the day and it may also help you rest and sleep better.
If you can’t sleep at night it is good to sit up and meditate until you are tired and then you will more easily go to sleep.
Ideally in as quiet and comfortable place as you can find (nature is nice) but life isn’t always ideal. You can meditate in a public place, even if you are waiting for a train or bus it can still be a place to meditate. If you need to you can meditate at work, at your desk (removing any distractions) or in a room where you can be left alone.
You can meditate however you feel comfortable. Most people meditate cross-legged on a firm but soft cushion, mat or folded blanket, with a smaller cushion under their bottom. Depending on how flexible you are you may not need this. You can support your knees with more cushions if your legs aren’t flexible or you are uncomfortable. Be honest in your choices to ensure you are not avoiding feeling the pains or discomfort in your body.
If you can’t cross your legs then sit upright on a comfortable chair. Generally you should meditate with a fairly straight back, but don’t be too strict about holding yourself tight or rigid.
You can also kneel to meditate. Kneel on a carpet, rug or large cushion, place a small supportively dense cushion under your bottom and sit back with your feet angled out so they are not under the bulk of your weight. Sit upright and place your hands in a position that is comfortable for you.
You can meditate whilst lying down but at the start your meditation won’t be as deep. It is easy to fall asleep if you are tired and lying down so we suggest you sit up in a self-supported position. Then whatever accumulations or stresses you are holding more easily activate and release from within you.
It is not necessary to have your palms facing up or your fingers and thumb in a mudra position. Place your hands on your knees or lap or wherever they are comfortable.
Then close your eyes and feel your body. Don’t try to stop your thinking, you won’t, just let your thoughts go on in the background like a buzzing mosquito not paying them any special attention.
As often as you like. We suggest everyday, and most people who notice the improvements meditation makes to their life want to make time to meditate. They will usually sit first thing in the morning before daily activity begins to prepare them for the day or last thing at night to wind down and digest the day and then they go to sleep more easily and sleep more deeply.
Meditation gives you a chance to slow down enough to actually feel the sense of yourself fully, exactly as you are in that moment, on that day. So take whatever time it takes, however long it takes you to get back to the deeper sense of you. The longer you sit the more in tune you will be with yourself. It’s better to sit every day for less time than longer and less often.
If you are a beginner try starting with 15 minutes, then progress onto 30, 45 and 60 minutes. If you find yourself wanting to meditate for longer on some days then do so.
Breathe normally. There is no special way to breathe or no need to focus on your breath, but please breathe otherwise you will die and if they find out you died whilst Undoing then we might be in trouble.
We advise against it. Natural meditation is about coming back to the feeling of you in the body and just staying with that, however that feels in that moment without any distraction.
When you’re just staying with these feelings, you are enabling yourself to resolve and dissolve them. This allows you to release any tensions or stresses that have built up in your body. However music will distract you from these feelings inside your body. It doesn’t allow you to just be quiet with yourself in that moment or just allow yourself to really feel and so therefore heal whatever it is you’re going through.
Generally meditation is done with eyes closed but sometimes it feels right to have your eyes open whilst you are meditating. If you can have your eyes open and not be distracted by thinking about what your eyes see then that is fine. Keeping your eyes open when sleepy or fatigued can help you stay alert but once you can really feel your fatigue you won’t tend to lose focus and will find relief in feeling it.
Absolutely. In fact we encourage you to do this once you feel confident enough. We also encourage you to go with how you’re feeling each day, sometimes you will want to use guidance and some days you will not.
You should meditate because you want to. Once you begin to see and understand the changes and benefits meditations brings to your life, you will find you are naturally drawn to meditate each day.
Pain arising during natural meditation is common and normal. Don’t worry or panic, this pain is healing pain. It is not harming you in any way. Any form of pain that arises when meditating, is an expression of what’s buried deep within your body.
A lot of the traumatic experiences we have in life (whether they are big or small) can leave an effect within our body if they are not fully healed. When we sit physically still, as we do during meditation, we are allowing those experiences to reveal themselves. And each experience may express itself as different pains throughout your body. Just stay physically still with these feelings, and don’t try to work out what they are, where they came from or try to get rid of them. They are healing you, not harming you. They will resolve in their own time, if you give them the time to heal in meditation.
All types of feelings will arise in you during your meditation, and they won’t always be the same feelings each time you meditate. These feelings may be related to whatever you are healing from past or present traumas and pains, or what you are processing in your life and meditation that day.
The key is to not react to these feelings, if you do this it will blow them out of perspective. Instead just simply be with how you are feeling, let any thoughts about these feelings fade into the background and just feel. As you feel these feelings without reaction, they will resolve. Once you get use to just feelings these feelings, any fear or resistance you have to feeling them will drop away and you will begin to know more about yourself than ever before. This is quite a nice feeling actually.
Once you have an understanding of natural meditation you will realise that your thoughts are not actually a problem. They are usually just the off-gassing of whatever you a processing in meditation that day. Focusing on trying to get rid of them, or getting annoyed at yourself for thinking is just getting caught up in the thoughts. Instead, just come back to the feeling behind the thoughts and staying with that, allow your thoughts to fade into the background. If you find yourself getting caught up in them again that’s fine, just come back again to the feeling.
If you find yourself getting distracted during your meditation it’s more than likely something you’re processing. Whatever your distraction is, it’s actually part of your meditation process for that day. So allow itt to go on whilst you include and sink further into the physical sensations in your body.
The more you meditate and attune to yourself this way the more you will begin to notice how on different days you feel different sensations. Distraction is just a mental action to keep you from the deeper feelings behind that.
Depending on what you’re going through that day or what is processing inside of you, will determine your desire to mediate. On the days you find yourself not wanting to meditate, this is when it is important for you to sit still and meditate, even if it is just for 30 minutes to burn through the resistance.
Most of the time the resistance will be a disturbance you don’t want to feel or get in touch with. The habitual response to a disturbance is to avoid it, but by not taking any notice of your resistant thoughts and still meditating whilst you’re disturbed, will make you feel better in yourself regardless of the disturbance going on. Meditating while you’re disturbed will allow the disturbance to burn out much more quickly than if you try to avoid the feeling. Meditation in this approach is healing you not harming you.
If you can’t sit still during your meditation, this can indicate that you are too shallow and caught in the thought-based surface of yourself. Come back to your body and feel the area that wants to move. Just feel it and don’t move and this will take you deeper into yourself. If you do move don’t worry, just keep coming back to the urge as many times as you need to and eventually feeling the urge to move will burn it out.
Usually you are just tired, but quite often your tiredness can be an avoidance of the pain.
However, tiredness is a feeling and just like any feeling it can be felt while meditating. You can meditate and feel the feeling of tiredness wherever it is in your body. Best to do this while you are sitting up and if it helps keep your eyes open.
When you meditate it is a good idea to remove any distractions around you like music, TV, devices or other people. It’s not always necessary and you can meditate with distraction in the background, just allow these distractions to become part of your meditation. But if you can find a quiet place it will allow your meditation to deepen.
If you do get interrupted, don’t react and stress out about it, it is not a problem, simply resume your meditation from where you left off.
Natural meditation is very helpful for people who have a mental illness. Undo’s approach to meditation is very simple and effective and we see the body and the mind as the same thing.
With our approach you will notice many changes in your mental and physical illness and pain, some of them will be rapid. If you find yourself feeling uncomfortable with the changes going on in your meditation try to stay with those feelings. These feelings will not be harming you in any way. These feelings will pass, but may take some time depending on how deeply they are lodged in your body. If it becomes too difficult then stop meditating for a while and get back to it later.
There are many things in our lives that we can distract ourselves with and technology is just one of them. It is no more distracting or harmful than anything else. It all depends on how and why you use it. If you let technology distract you or use it to avoid reality then it will have a destructive effect in your life.
However, you can also use it beneficially. You have a choice if you do or do not want to be distracted. It is your choice how or when you use it.
You can minimize any ongoing opposing effect by removing all other incoming distractions. When you give yourself the time and space to meditate turn off all other notifications, noises and distractions on your device. Make it your personal time and make your device fit with that.
The use of technology won’t oppose what you are wanting to get from meditation if you simply see it for what it is… the transference of information.
The benefits of meditation are vast… and they unique to every individual.
You will notice and feel the changes within yourself when you star natural meditation. You don’t need a scientist or so-called expert to analyse or explain how or why those changes have happened, you will feel them and know them, for and from yourself.
Common benefits, apart from your thinking being more clear and sharp. You’ll recover a new sense of wellbeing. Natural meditation helps you return to a more natural state, reconnects you with reality as it is rather than how it seems when you are under influences. This understanding causes you to approach your life very differently, it helps you resolve your stress rather than push it aside and accumulate it internally.
Your ability to deal and respond to your life problems, release their effects and move on with your life will amaze you and others.
Your body’s capacity for healing both minor and major illness, injuries, ward off allergies and stabilise the ongoing effects of our modern environment will improve massively.
This following list is not exhaustive as every person is individual but it covers some of the benefits of regular meditation:
See our blog on the benefits of meditation for more information!
On the surface Undo may look like other meditation apps but it isn’t. Using an wholistic approach to the body. We offer a complete package to healing.
The Undo app was created as a response to the deteriorating quality of meditation in the market today. As experts in the field of meditation and healing we can confidently say that currently there isn’t any other meditation available that is not technique or religious based. Our mission is to set a higher standard in the industry, to revolutionise meditation and health. We’re building a long-term solution for users that is proven and works.
Undo is about waking you up, not putting you to sleep. We inspire critical thought and explain the complexity of the mind using straight forward language that resonates and makes complete sense. We show users how to integrate and reconnect with themselves through the process of healing their pain or trauma.
Undo’s main Differences:
The Undo difference makes you feel like all your loose ends and unanswered questions are completed, like the final, missing piece of the puzzle has been found and set in place.
The approach is based on Matthew Zoltan’s – Undo’s author. Developed over 35+ years of working with 1000s of people, helping them discover natural meditation and helping them develop their skills for a successful life, to heal physically and mentally. Through this process Matthew discovered an approach to life that is based on the physical sensory experience of every human body and is therefore addresses all common human needs. It is not just an idea to take on and apply to your life. It provides an essential education, otherwise commonly missing from our lives, teaching you how to solve your own problems and recover yourself along the way.
‘The slower you take it, the faster it will take you.’
The Core Chapters have been written to build one upon the next, so we encourage you to complete them in sequence. Each one addresses a key common reason why you have trouble coping with the various difficulties you face. This is the essential education on how to fully live your life, and how you can solve your own problems along the way, that until now has been unavailable.
This is not the type of information to learn swiftly and then apply. You’ll miss its deeper meaning if you skim over it too quickly. The content is timeless. If you take it in slowly, it will take you deeper into understanding you, uncovering an amazing part of you yet unknown to you.
The app is free to download. Once downloaded and after you login you will have access to two Core Chapters, four afflictions, four body connect meditations and daily aphorisms forever.
When you pay (subscribe) you’ll have access to the entire app, which includes 14 Core Chapters made up of five stages, the Body Tension Translator where you can discover the underlying thinking or behaviour of a particular body part or illness, blogs and videos.
The default once subscribing is to auto-renew. Subscriptions are automatically debited each month or year after activation until you decide to cancel.
You may disable the auto-renew feature for the Undo app within the iTunes or Googleplay Store.
If you would like to request a refund, please email us at accts@undoapp.com
Yes. If you purchased a monthly or annual subscription through the iTunes or Googleplay Store, you may disable the auto-renew feature for the Undo app within those stores.
Monthly subscriptions are automatically debited each month from the day of activation until you decide to cancel. You can cancel your monthly subscription at anytime and your access will continue until the date that your subscription was due to be renewed. You will not get a refund on the money already paid for the month you are using.
Yearly subscriptions automatically renew in the following year on the same day of activation unless cancelled. You can cancel your yearly subscription at anytime and your access will continue until the date that your subscription was due to be renewed. You will not get a refund on the money already paid for the year you are using. If you really really want one then drop us a line and state your reason to request a refund at accts@undoapp.com we are human/e!
This guide provides step-by-step instructions to permanently delete your account from the Undo mobile meditation app. Please note that account deletion is irreversible and will result in the permanent loss of all data and progress associated with your account.
1) Ensure You’re Logged In:
2) Access Your Profile:
3) Navigate to Settings:
4) Go to Account Information:
5) Initiate Account Deletion:
6) Confirm Deletion:
7) Completion:
The observer is another thought. A thought about the thought you think you are observing. But there is no observer. This is an illusion introduced by traditional meditation beliefs. You will not recognise and therefore seem to be observing a thought about an elephant when the observer/observing is made up of thoughts about a dog.
To observe, thought splits itself in two. The observed (1) is the projection of the observer (2). The observer is the act of thinking the very thoughts your thinking projects.
Who is observing? There is no one there. All this thinking is not even there. This is a game of imaging. The observer is not a person or an organ. The observer is thinking, which is an activity produced from the body’s sensations. They are the origins of what expresses as thought. There is no such object, organ or thing as a mind. What we call mind is only the activity of the body thinking. The activity of thinking as it forms. And then, as this is only an image of information felt and known to and in the body, it dissipates even as it forms. This activity begins as a specific sensation of felt information, a vibration or pattern in the molecules of the body part from where it originates, which forms into further expression of those sensations as thoughts and then words which then may form into further expression as our actions.
For an example of the confusion over this: The Buddhist technique of observing the space of a mind is an illusion caused by having the belief and idea there is a mind, that is empty space, and the projection of that knowledge and of what they therefore expect or imagine is there to observe, is what they then imagine they observe.
So the observer is the idea and believed thoughts or imagining that the mind exists as empty space and that idea is projected as the image or observed space they then continue to OBSERVE (into imagined existence). But there is no empty space inside you and without the observer being MADE UP OF the idea or knowledge that there is, then NO PROJECTION from this observer can be experienced. The observer goes unnoticed, as it is both the activity of what it then projects as well as the thought or idea that it projects. Conversely, without the idea making up the observer then nothing is observable. It’s another delusion. You cannot observe a thought, you imagine you can… and the above is how we do it.
It’s funny how the simplest question can stimulate such a lot for me to say. None of what I present is from study of other people’s work. When I was young, I had an idea (from nowhere in particular) that I wanted to see if I could know everything from inside myself. It took me years to understand what I was embarking on and living this way soon revealed it’s not that we have all this knowledge mysteriously stored inside us (or anywhere else) – it’s our natural sensory response each moment and in each situation that is stimulated into a live responding understanding from inside the body of us. This I have found occurs afresh with the stimulation of live demands.
I never wanted to learn from others as I felt this would taint my own unique potential to know life as it occurred (and navigate its problems) in a new way. (I saw the need for new ways as the old ways were clearly not helping people.) I took the most basic course in my profession as a natural therapist and quickly dumped all but the bits that worked (a bit), leaving very little to work with. All my work and things I talk about on YouTube and in my meditation app has come out from inside of me in response to both mine and other people’s needs along the way. Consequently, I have constantly found solutions that actually work.
And so I have never studied non-dualism or any other buzz concept. (After 7 years as a monk, I only learnt one useful thing from that: to see through all these words by seeing into the common underlying themes being repeated and regurgitated over and over again.) After seeing through the con of one tradition, I could then see the same con in all traditions, just being packaged differently. So I have no attraction for these. But yes, you could say my discoveries do include a non-dualistic theme, but not in the superficial sense of “all being consciousness”. As soon as we describe existence or try to capture it in a word, it is no longer what we started with. For example, ‘awareness’, ‘consciousness’ or ‘non-duality’ are more empty words, just more thought, more imagined duality, more ways to divide from existing, because none of these can capture what they presume to, but in fact, by describing existence and going on about it, we put ourselves right back in a dual state of disconnection from whatever it is into thoughts or ideas to describe it.
From a process of unintentionally negating all conceptualisations on life, for me life or existing has reduced itself all back to what we actually have and know as a lived experience (before and beneath thinking and within the body). I find my live self functioning automatically and perpetually negating all these separative dissections and descriptions of ourselves, of reality.
This seems to constantly reveal for me the many ways in which thought, thinking, spirituality, science, materialism are just providing different ways to perceive the same things or the same existence. Each of these views provide a different confusion about the very same thing. What a lot of nonsense these differences seem to me.
All these differences are to me the delusions or imaginings of thought, separating us from the same whole thing, of our own lived existence, which is clearly not known or knowable through any thinking, but is known in a different way altogether, in ourselves existing, however we are. I think you may enjoy my app Undo. This will take you through the very same process of unlearning so you can continue to get it all from your body’s own natural intelligence. Thanks for a great comment. For further insight and support with your healing you can download my app here.
Matthew
A living organism. The living, breathing, sensorially intelligent body of you.
You were born sensing and feeling, and in this way knowing your parents, your environment, and so on. You were born able to do every other complex function the body performs within itself, so complex, automatic, and intelligent that even when you were later taught to think, thought could never know or duplicate the lived experience of any feeling. How do you know you are cold? Only because you feel it. You cannot think that feeling. It is a bodily response and a knowing that happens before thought describes it. That felt sensation is also the way we know we exist, and in what condition we exist.
Thinking cannot even understand how the body heals a simple cut, which is why we cannot think that into happening, nor duplicate it through thinking. But the body knows how to do this. The body knows in a different way from thinking. It knows all about itself in and as the live, sensed experience of itself. Everything else the body does naturally requires a vast natural intelligence that no amount of thinking has captured or fully understood.
All of that we are born with, and later we are taught to think. Only then can we describe what the body already knows.
It was thought that caused you to ask your question, “What am I?”, because thought cannot know. The answer is only known as the living sensations of you, the body living.
A good question to ask, though it exposes how, as usual, thought does not know the answer to that most basic question. Thought is not a natural part of what we are. It is only a mechanical function learned later.
The observer is another thought. A thought about the thought you think you are observing. But there is no observer. This is an illusion introduced by traditional meditation beliefs. You will not recognise and therefore seem to be observing a thought about an elephant when the observer/observing is made up of thoughts about a dog.
To observe, thought splits itself in two. The observed (1) is the projection of the observer (2). The observer is the act of thinking the very thoughts your thinking projects.
Who is observing? There is no one there. All this thinking is not even there. This is a game of imaging. The observer is not a person or an organ. The observer is thinking, which is an activity produced from the body’s sensations. They are the origins of what expresses as thought. There is no such object, organ or thing as a mind. What we call mind is only the activity of the body thinking. The activity of thinking as it forms. And then, as this is only an image of information felt and known to and in the body, it dissipates even as it forms. This activity begins as a specific sensation of felt information, a vibration or pattern in the molecules of the body part from where it originates, which forms into further expression of those sensations as thoughts and then words which then may form into further expression as our actions.
For an example of the confusion over this: The Buddhist technique of observing the space of a mind is an illusion caused by having the belief and idea there is a mind, that is empty space, and the projection of that knowledge and of what they therefore expect or imagine is there to observe, is what they then imagine they observe.
So the observer is the idea and believed thoughts or imagining that the mind exists as empty space and that idea is projected as the image or observed space they then continue to OBSERVE (into imagined existence). But there is no empty space inside you and without the observer being MADE UP OF the idea or knowledge that there is, then NO PROJECTION from this observer can be experienced. The observer goes unnoticed, as it is both the activity of what it then projects as well as the thought or idea that it projects. Conversely, without the idea making up the observer then nothing is observable. It’s another delusion. You cannot observe a thought, you imagine you can… and the above is how we do it. Do you have more questions on this?
According to the upside-down view invented as spirituality, the body is the product of thought.
But if you investigate again without the influence of any view, starting afresh, your own lived experience and the history of your own life will show you were born as a living creature… later you were TAUGHT to think. You had to be taught because the complex language of thinking is not a natural part of any organism. But sensation, feeling and knowing as a sense of yourself and life (before thinking becomes involved) is a natural part of every animal born as a continuation of life preceding it.
Notice how even the sensations of cold or hunger or felt desire all begin as a sensation, and then thoughts describing cold/hunger etc. or thoughts driven by that felt desire form OUT OF sensation in the body. (Felt sensations precede thinking)
The body can be known (without thought) and only as a sensation and therefore as a part of the natural world, but only IMAGINED or theorised, as the spiritualist view of being the creation of thought.
You can investigate this for yourself and discover for and from being yourself as a knowing sense beyond just believing and theorising, beyond any set view of either the materialist or spiritualist.
Stick with what you know though… and drop what you only believe or have learned and believed from others. Discover what YOU know. To do this, you first need to discern between what YOU know as your own direct and lived knowing and what you only believe… and THINK you know.
Let me know how you go with this.
Here’s an interesting exercise for you. Have you noticed how being aware, either of what is outside of you (or of something), or when just aware (not of something), how both are predominantly head-centred? Then notice how when expanding awareness beyond your own physical existence (beyond your skin), it is again primarily head-centred and how that ‘awareness’ is projected from (or emanating from) there. Now drop deeper into the felt sensations of your existence, as it is “felt” and in that way “known” equally throughout the whole body of you (rather than 1. “being aware” and 2. “of the sensations of the body”), just being the sensations that are not separate from “being” and are not separate from your “live physical existence”.
So being, sensations, and body are not known separately but are known all together and all at once, as the living knowing itself. Because without thinking, there is no way to divide and distinguish one from the other. Can you see that the idea there are three and not one is only imagined and is only a thought-induced experience? Whilst in our actual lived experience, beneath and without thinking, in the lived experiential knowing of the organism or of the life we are, there is only being.
“Being” for us ‘is’ immediate sensing, which is how we, as a body, know we exist, because the body which is alive is knowing itself existing, is ‘known’ to itself, as live sensations, as simply being. In sensorily ‘being’, or live physical sensation, there is no thought recognition or awareness separate from being, or ‘aware of’ some state of being.
So why is it that awareness is primarily head-centred? Why is it that when aware of an object or something outside your skin, it is again head-centred? And why is it that expanding awareness beyond your own physical existence is again anchored primarily in, and emanating from, the head area? Because awareness is a wordless thought. Awareness is a thought that also projects the idea of expansive awareness, causing the thought-induced experience of expanded awareness. So is that real, or is that merely the projections of the idea of awareness? Is that projected expanded experience then merely the fulfilment of our desire and pursuit for, and belief in, life beyond the body? The eternal life of an all-important me? (We need to be careful of our fears, desires and imaginings, driving our thinking from the purely mechanical into the imaginative.)
Awareness is another thought, an entire concept, idea or belief, contained in one word. Projection of awareness is merely a mental act and another attempt of the imagination to produce an experience to back up what we want to be true. Life outside the body. (I am simply saying imagination is not knowing, and when we want to but cannot know, we can imagine thought-induced experiences of what we wish were true.) But whilst the only immediate lived experience we have is of existing exactly as we are, any thoughts about that are mental duplications of that.
I would suggest awareness is merely thought’s duplication and projected experience of all we actually have and all we can know, which is the live sensations of the body existing. So awareness is the symbolic representation of living sensation.
Even if there is more, we have no other way than sensation to know ourselves, ‘the living’. For imagining is not knowing, yet we can induce a FEELING that’s like knowing through repetitive, imaginative thinking.
I hope this read is enjoyable and stimulating for you. MZ
You have experientially discovered a flaw in the traditional meditation of OBSERVING THOUGHTS. I will try to explain why it is impossible and what you can do to get out of this trap. Really taking in what I am about to explain is the first step in breaking free of this trap of thinking you are thinking. Understanding the illusion negates the illusion. So please take your time to re-read this.
*Observing thought is a fancy way of thinking about thinking. It is the PRACTICE of thinking about thinking… literally. Do you need to practise this or get free of this? Clearly the latter.
The observer is (and has to be) a thought about the thought you observe. They have to be the same thought, only repeated. What’s happening when you are recognising a thought about a dog? To do this, you are thinking a thought about a dog… To recognise what you are thinking about, you rethink it to yourself. And on and on it goes. You are therefore perpetuating thought by observing thought and you get stuck there. This practice is having the opposite effect to what you want, which you have been discovering. You are not doing this practice wrong; the practice itself is flawed.
*THE THOUGHT YOU OBSERVE REPLACES THE THOUGHT YOU FIRST CALL THE OBSERVER. As that first thought disappears and you repeat and replace it WITH A NEW OBSERVER WHICH AGAIN DUPLICATES/PROJECTS ITSELF AS THE NEXT THOUGHT YOU OBSERVE. You WILL NOTICE YOU CANNOT pin down a thought… and what do you use when you try to… but a duplicate of the very thought you are trying to pin down.
But a thought disappears in the same moment it first appears.
*Another flaw of this practice is: BY observing, you are keeping the imagined experience of the I, or me, or a self, or of a thinker who thinks, going. This phenomenon is all made of thoughts about thoughts. This is all part of why this technique keeps you trapped in the shallows of thinking about thinking… on and on and on. This is NOT MEDITATION but trying to meditate, and only results in more thinking, which is why it is so unfulfilling.
*The observer is the same thought splitting itself into two by projecting itself and thinking about itself. The original conjured thought appears and disappears in the same instant. A single thought does not appear long enough to be observed. So it duplicates as a thought about the thought you just had.
*You have joined the word “being” with “observing” in your comment above. Observing is thinking. Being is not. So they are not the same. Nor do you need to observe when just being.
So the solution is to only concern yourself with the felt sensations and other feelings inside your body, and you can include sensing in this as sensing is also a real happening or that which is happening without you doing anything. And ignore the CONTENTS of any thinking and even the very images of “talking to yourself” (words) of thinking. Both these are imaginings. Neither actually exists which is why, as all images do, thoughts disappear as they appear. Thoughts are only emanations of and images forming from the deeper sensations of all you know in the body of you. As you said… where the hell does all this thinking keep coming from? It is a purging or off-gassing from the body of you as you/it processes what the body is finished with. So there is no benefit in thinking about or giving any attention to this purge of memory/information held as tension in the body. The more you keep going into the feeling/sensations of the existence of the body of you, stronger this sensory existence of what you really are will become for you and the less and less will thoughts have a hold or effect on you. A thought is an image only. Images do not actually exist. Treat them as such and in time you won’t even notice them. And what happens to an image unnoticed… it’s not there. If you download my app and work your way through that… it will take you through a process of negating the various traps of beliefs, ideas, thoughts etc. that traditions and life may have imposed on you. Good luck.
I too have found the Buddhist view of meditation to be deeply entrenched in thought and thought-based techniques. Unfortunately this prevents meditation itself from naturally occurring.
For example, mindfulness or vipassana are an entrapment in a thought process, once removed from the immediacy of the obvious, once removed from the living sense and sensations of existing. The immediate sense of existing is there, in the body before any thinking “about that” occurs. Mindfulness and vipassana are both entrapments in the “thinking about” or “awareness of” the actual living experience. Mindfulness or vipassana are not yet meditation nor can they become so.
Why? To be “mindful” or aware of anything taints the experience of whatever one is mindful of, preventing the immediate (non-dual) felt knowing of the living fact of one’s existence from being experientially known as it is. That existential felt sense exists as and in the body, before any thought or mindfulness is added to that “(living fact)”, and distorts that.
First there is the felt sensation and life of the body, and then Buddhists instruct us to “be mindful of that”.
Why? You (we all) already know it as an immediate physical sensation. So why then “be mindful of” that and create a separation from that which we already sense as a living fact. The body breathes and knowing that, is in the feeling of that breathing. Not separate to it, in mindfulness of it. Why add a second disconnection of being mindful of that, “already obvious immediate happening.”
You may also notice how being mindful of the obvious and already sensed fact, is a game of thought… there is “no one there” to be mindful, there is only the object, and then being mindful of it is to add a mentally imagined construct that is mindfulness. In fact, once you are mindful of “the object” you only know the tainted interpretation of it caused in being mindful/by your mental recognition of it.
So mindfulness is itself where users of such techniques get caught in a game of being mindful of the projected taint or biased view of the object (or activity), and not able to know the object the only way you can, … as it is, when just being the object itself (with no imagined division of a mind or mindfulness imagined to be). This entrapment in the game of thinking is a mistake of Buddhist indoctrination that only keeps the imagined separation between WHAT we are (an organism) and WHO we imagine we are (the activity of thinking called being mindful) going. It is the same with vipassana. What is scanning other than more thought about what exists as felt sensations already, known as that immediate felt sense of existing as we are.
Is knowing ourselves (pronoun) as we are (pronoun) even possible once mentally aware of it. Buddhist techniques to meditate don’t really result in meditation but result in maintaining thinking about meditation. These techniques keep the separation from what we are going and have the effect of maintaining the thought-based illusion of the “imagined one” that is mindful, interacting with the projected views or imaginings of that, (imagined mindful one) and never connecting with the obvious and real, which is already known as and in the ordinary and immediate living sense, known as the body itself knows itself.
If we drop all this and keep it simple, and simply don’t overlook the immediate and the obvious and ordinary in search of the extraordinary, we realise we already are it or have it in a very natural unavoidable way…
Buddhism is a complex indoctrination that keeps people once removed from the obvious and accessible fact of one’s own non-dual factual existence, as simple and unimportant as that may be.
I of course realise there are many Buddhist techniques and complex theories that essentially hide the obvious and I also agree that older teachings were probably quite different. But we have no way and no need to know the facts of this or any other cult theories on life. All we have to see is the way, how these many teachings that remain now are antiquated interpretations. Whatever was lost in old teachings was lost in the first act of hearing them and repeating them. So nothing of real value is lost in losing old teachings. We have all we need in our own felt sense within the body of us. And more views on this mostly muddy the waters more so. I have found we have our own natural ability for a real sense of knowing as a living organism that flows and is brought out of us in the living process of stimulation and response to that, as we live. There we have the living intelligence (rather than the accumulated antiquated knowledge of the past). We just need to learn to listen/feel the knowing of this reality of being, aware of thought’s biased reactionary interpretations. I haven’t seen how reality can be captured in a teaching, or in any words and once the teacher utters a word the first listener reinterprets according to their own bias or preferences and so the original is lost the very first time it is shared.
Knowing this there is only one thing to do… as there has always been …. Learn to listen to yourself, to the body sense of knowing that is untainted by all this thinking and be bold and honest enough to face up to what you already know and accept what isn’t known or knowable rather than making stuff up…. What we can know and have in the living experience of simply being you is all we need isn’t it? Whether you like it or not is the only problem of bias that determines your tainted thought-based experience of these and the search for solutions to discomforts when the answer to discomforts is to feel these to their own natural end. I’ve found that dropping reactionary biases and any divisive views is all that healing is. The more these drop the easier we find it to be exactly as we are and fine with that.
To feel as a whole I have found has many significantly different effects than “observing” (Goenka-tradition). I find feeling as a whole removes the separate activity of an observer (self), enabling the felt immediacy of our lived experience of simply existing.
So if pain (for example) becomes stronger in one or more areas, pain (or any sensation), I find is only truly experienced “as it is” when felt in the body, as a part of the whole of what we are, and before the potential bias of thought or intention distorts our experiential and immediate sense of that.
As the ‘observer self’ is a thought construct, an idea itself, ‘observing’ rather than ‘immediate feeling’ tends to make being with and knowing any pain as it actually is more difficult. So I have found the separative or dual effect of observing what we are, rather than just being what and how we are, tends to inhibit healing and self-understanding.
Also, ‘without’ deliberate focusing on/concentrating on/awareness of (which is all the activity of thought, or activity of an observer) we enable a ‘whole’ ‘body sense’, within which the various sensations of pain etc. are automatically included and resolving.
What we call observing, I find is really a mental activity, a recognition of what is then observed. This is a dual activity that maintains the illusion of an ‘observer self’. That activity, imagined to be the observer observing, also tends to add isolation and exaggeration to the immediate reality of any actual discomforts it observes, and this causes a struggle with being in that particular condition or sensation, and even a suffering of it.
Alternatively, feeling the feeling or sensation, from within the sensation/condition itself, being a part of the sensation, rather than acting as though you are something separate from it, as the observer of it, will eventually or immediately alleviate the effects of any bias of exaggeration or interpretation, from previously established associations with or about that, revealing the lived experience of ourselves, just as it is.
Feeling as a whole, which you already mentioned, reveals the subtle though significant difference between ‘feeling as a whole’ and observing or scanning body parts or sensations. Thought can only perceive/observe/recognise one part at a time whilst only feeling/sensation embraces the whole living experience of existing at once. Thought observing cannot know the living as it is. Only the felt sensations of the body itself can contain, and in that immediate sense, know all that – or so I have found. They are incomparable. Thinking/observing is no match for the vast intelligent capacity of the wholeness of knowing that is contained in simply feeling as a whole.
Although, theoretically, observing is supposed to be without judgement or intention, I do not think this is so. Why are we observing? Why not just be as we are, all inclusive of whatever is happening? Why divide what is whole and occurring naturally within us, into observer and observed?
I would say the absence of this “observer self” is really just the absence of, nothing more than, the ‘activity’ of bias or intention, to learn, to change or achieve something, to ‘become’ different, through observing, and so observing is inherently judging and biased.
Whereas the absence of any deliberate observing, allows whatever is coming to life, in and from the body, to be included in an immediate sense of knowing, which is not mental, and therefore not partial, but is our whole living experience of ‘existing’, happening at once. And so the absence of deliberate observing disables any separation, from or within, the natural flow of whatever is coming to life within the embodiment of being you.
When this determines your meditation, any self-generating biased associations and discomforts are naturally included as part of the whole of whatever is happening, no matter how uncomfortable. This whole, all inclusive, unchosen, lived experience is immediate, undivided, and because the presence and effects of any bias is included and allowed, it naturally integrates and dissolves in its own time. No intention or effort to change anything is required, because this natural self-correcting, healing integration, is self-determined in the body, or so I have found. The unforced outcome of this natural process is to know our living body-selves as we are.
To apply awareness or concentration throughout the body (scanning etc.) is a deliberate and mental act of mentalising a body part. Even if we aren’t consciously labelling or scanning I have discovered, this is just another thought process and so is ‘once removed’ from the ‘direct living experience’ of what we scan. One other problem with this is, concentration on a part in pain exaggerates that pain beyond how it is naturally, making it overwhelming to simply be in or with pain when meditating.
Therefore, I would say, to observe is a mental state, it is thinking, noticing, recognising, aware of, watching, concentrating on, and so on. And that all of these are divided states, where there is an additional imaginary ‘someone’, an observer, that is nothing more than, the mental activity of thoughts about thoughts, or thoughts about body sensations (an endless stream of consciousness if you like).
And because thought or thinking itself, is once removed from what is observed or focused on, and because thought is biased, its very nature prevents it from ever knowing our living experience as it actually is. This is essentially why we cannot know or understand ourselves that way. I have found, thinking (observing) is only useful for the mechanical.
Though to feel is a physical sensation, it is without bias, there is no ‘someone’ who feels, there is only feeling itself, life itself, just the immediate sensation of being itself.
To venture further into this, and more, you can download my meditation app here.
Matthew
Is ‘to be aware’ mental or physical? It is mental. Is mental awareness an existing object, is it alive in its own right, or is it a momentary state? You can be aware or unaware. So it is a state, a condition. To be ‘conscious of’ is also a state. Aware of awareness is the same as conscious of consciousness. These, consciousness or awareness, are not that which exist. These are states in which we exist. Awareness is simply a wordless thought, a mental state. So awareness is another thought, a thought-induced state. An idea. Awareness of awareness is awareness splitting itself in two and being aware of itself. Just like observing a thought is the thought splitting itself. The observer is the same thoughts that the observer is observing. The observer is only ‘the state’ of observing, not a living being in itself.
Ordinarily, to be aware of something is determined by the thing. Otherwise you cannot be aware of it. To be aware without something, you are just aware, but you do not then make a thing out of being aware, project that imagining, and imagine there is an actual live thing called awareness to be aware of. That, duplicating your state, and then objectifying it and projecting it, and then interacting with it as a real form of life, is delusional overthinking.
These are the tricks of thinking, the tricks of awareness. Being aware of awareness, or conscious of being conscious is objectifying and imagining these to be forms of the living, when they are only activities of the living. Then we have come up with ‘we are awareness’ or ‘we are consciousness’. But is there a consciousness or awareness that exists in its own right, or are these just a state in which we can be?
Awareness is another thought. Awareness or thought do not exist in their own right. They are only an activity. They are unalive. Being aware is attractive to someone in pain because there is no live feeling or volatility in it; there is a detachment, a deadening of life and of being alive and/or in pain.
As it is with any word. The word does not contain the living sense of that which it thinks on or describes. You can experiment and discover this for yourself. Feel/notice how the word ‘sad’ does not contain the live feeling of being sad, just as being ‘aware of sadness’ disengages you from the live feeling of sadness. Awareness and thinking are variations on ‘one and the same activity’ and cannot capture or contain life or the living sense of being alive. They are not alive.
Now the revealing question is: Is the body aware? Or is the body existing in an immediate sense of itself? Is there a choice in there being ‘alive’ sensations in a living body? Can you switch sensation (life) on and off at will? You cannot. The sensations of being alive are there as long as you are alive.
‘So-called’ awareness is a thought duplication, a copy or mimicking, based on the live sensations of the body. Whether you think on, or are aware of, or whether you recognise the presence of live sensations or not, if you are alive, sensation is there. And the ‘living body’ functions by the immediacy of ongoing sensations that indicate its own aliveness and needs. Sensations are the living interaction and flow of living information on which the body functions. Awareness is a separation from this automatic self-evident life of the body. Awareness is the origin of duality. Awareness/wordless thinking is how we disconnect from the immediacy of what is felt or sensed, ‘and in that way’, is known as the life or life flow of ourselves.
This is why I say, ‘only the body can meditate’. Only the body is present. Only the body is grounded as a part of the natural world. Awareness of awareness is just another spiritual gimmick being rehashed and promoted in the world of meditation these days. It is another way to dissociate from the reality of being you, rather than integrate that reality.
So rather than meditating in the ‘once removed’ mental state of being aware of awareness, I encourage you to drop deeper than this, into the immediate felt sensations that are naturally generating, and naturally evident, in the live embodiment of ‘all’ it is to be you, in body of you. Then you will find your meditation takes on a life of its own, determined by whatever you actually need, and unique to you. I have nothing against being aware of awareness. But just know what it is and take care not to imagine that awareness is alive in itself. Like all thought, it is an activity or emanation of the living body.
If you really want to take this further, I have a 14-chapter meditation app that will take you through an educational and experiential discovery process, to deepen your self-understanding and meditation, and make meditation easy and clear. Download from our website undoapp.com. There are also lots of interesting videos on my YouTube channel.
The mind being outside the body is just an idea. Ideas are not known as our own lived experience, only conceptualised and believed or disbelieved. This idea is only experienced as an imagining, as a thought-induced projection of the idea itself.
Consider this: Sensations or feelings in the body are loaded with information (qualia). These sensations form into thought descriptions of that information (quantum). Thinking (un-alive words we think or images we imagine) is a reduction of the massive living information of sensation or feeling that precedes our un-alive thought expression. This is why we can never capture the life of a feeling in a word or thought. (The word ‘sad’ cannot contain the feeling of sadness which is required to KNOW sadness. Without the feeling in the body, there is no way to know sadness. You have to feel it to know it.) So thought does not and cannot contain knowing or the understanding of anything deeper than the purely mechanical.
It only describes what is known as the sensations in the body, which precedes thinking. Thought is a massive reduction of what we try to convey about life and the living, and only the living knows its own existence and only because it/we can feel it as the sensations of us. So we do not KNOW anything through thought. Thought can only be used to describe what is already known to us as a lived experience.
Because you and most others have not understood how the body produces thought, and that sensation is the origin of thinking, you have gone along with the idea that there is a mind… whether inside or outside the body. BUT, as it is the body that thinks, what will we do with a mind, what’s it for? It is not needed.
You cannot find a mind; you only have other people’s knowledge which you have learned and believed from others, that there is a mind. And you can only experience your belief, your knowledge, your thoughts ABOUT a mind, but you will never find a mind. Not inside or outside. If it only appears to exist when you think about it, then it doesn’t really exist. It is only the product of thinking, imagining. If it exists whether you think about it or not, then it exists in its own right.
I hope this is helpful in your investigations. Be careful of your mental conclusions. Repeating other people’s words and ideas is not what it means to know or understand anything. It would help you to get more grounded in the reality of your living body. Discover the depths of that before you venture outside of that. And you will have more chance of discerning delusions from reality. You can download my app, the study of that will provide a foundation in reality from which you can begin to know for and from yourself.
What we ‘imagine’ is not really there, is it? Mental imagery is imagination. If I imagine (think about or picture or visualise) my pet dog, it is possible I will feel physical sensations of joy.
If I then hear my dog was just run over, I will have physical sensations of panic, fear, etc. If in the next instant I find out my dog is okay… my physical sensations completely change. These are thought-induced physical experiences. The physical feeling is a real sensation, isn’t it? You know it is because you are the one feeling it. It can even be measured, such as increased heart rate or breathing etc. But was the ’cause’ of these physical feelings true or real, or does the cause (imagination, imagery) even exist? It does not. Whether the imagined itself is true or false, the outcome of making you feel something physically is the same. The imagery is not really there. That’s why we call it imagery, imagination. The tree you visualise/imagine in your head does not mean you have a tree in your head. Nothing is in your head. And the image of a tree is not an actual tree. This is why beliefs and techniques of meditation are so delusional. When we use these, they cause a physical sensation aligned with the belief or with the intention of the programming of a technique. How do we discover what is really there? What we really are? How we really are? We have to go deeper beneath thinking, imagining, believing and repeating techniques, deeper into the real sensations inside and of the body of us. There we know we are cold or hot or sad or happy or hungry and so on. And feeling any of these sensations is the ONLY way we can know these real live things. Thinking can’t do that.
A way for this physical pain to leave is for you to delve deeper into how upset, distressed, and ultimately hurt you feel – these feelings are actually hidden within your physical pain. Feeling into these depths will gradually soften you towards yourself. You need to soften towards yourself, starting with softening towards the feeling of your pain, understanding that it’s actually a hurt part of you, not something separate from you. It is you at this point in time, and that part of you needs to be felt and embraced as it is, not rejected or denied.
Rejection and denial will only compound the pain. By allowing the pain as it is, sitting still with it in your body, and softening towards how you really feel in and about yourself, you’ll allow those deeper feelings to gradually find their way to the surface. You may find yourself purging deeper sadness and hurt.
You can do this through meditation, just simply sitting with that pain. I have a meditation app, which will help you understand this pain on a deeper level and allow you to soften towards yourself.
Make sure you check out the chapter on “The Significance of Pain” within my app Undo, as this understanding will help you with what I’m suggesting. Don’t expect it to be easy, but it will be helpful. In a couple of weeks of using the app, let me know how you’re doing.
Your condition suggests a deeper underlying trauma is held in your body. Your lack of relief from the medical approach is not unusual and indicates the physician was unable to help with a deeper cause. This does not mean the deeper cause is not there or cannot be uncovered or even resolved.
That said, I agree with your change of approach from trying to cure this to learning to accept and live with this aspect of you as it is.
Was there a significant disruption 7 years ago? Are you in pain and in which part of your body is the pain?
Feel the distress or pain of this as a sensation in your body by sitting still and just being inside the sensation of that wherever it is in your body for increasing periods of time, 10 mins, 20 mins, 1 hr… it will take the time it takes for you to truly settle into just the felt sensations of pain or distress in this condition and as you do you may feel a new sense of acceptance. The more you do this over time you may begin to feel relief in being okay with this aspect of you. Don’t think about it… however… notice what random memories or random thoughts that come out of your condition and back to you during or after sitting with this. This part, of memories is not important but depending on where you are at if you are ready for this to happen it will help. Don’t need to believe or disbelieve what comes, just accept it and continue to feel the pain or disturbance of your condition in this way. Over time this will either break down your resistances and fears of being this way or soothe and reduce the pain. This healing process is also a discovery and developmental process of all about ourselves.
If you’re comfortable you can email through the details of your condition… in which part of your body the pain is and what your debilitation is, I can do a talk on my channel that will help you with this approach and understanding.
I also have a podcast I did on pain:
Sounds like chronic pain. Meaning you and the doctors can’t find a reason for it. That’s because the reason and cause is trauma. Memories held in your body are coming to life and causing pain, here and there, whenever they are triggered.
These pains are your body trying to heal itself. The PAIN is not your enemy, this pain is there to reveal and heal your traumas, and so please stop fighting them and start feeling them as they are whenever they show up from deep inside of your body.
To do this you will need to understand what it really is to feel, and exactly how to just feel. Please download my Natural meditation and healing app Undo.
Study and use that every day if you can, and in three months tell me how you are. I expect you will be A LOT better by then. There are also 3 podcasts with a chap called Adrian (in my app) that will inform you specifically on chronic pain which will open your eyes. You can also have private sessions with me online when you are ready. You can email my team about this at enquiries@mattzoltan.com, or get more information about them here
https://quietretreats.co/mentoring/
Start with my app. Check out the chapter on “the significance of pain”.
But then start from the beginning and work your way through the whole app. It is designed to take you through a whole healing process. Let me or my team know how you get on. A meditation retreat with me will also enable you to heal trauma, taking it to the next level.
Good luck
MZ
Pressure, pressure, pressure. Your blood pressure may also be a bit high. However, that too comes back to pressure. Expecting a lot of yourself could be a long-term habit or behaviour of yours. Maybe so long that at first you don’t see this as true for you. If so, don’t just fob this off but read it again over the next few days. Give it time to sink in and to reach where you are secretly, just like this.
That area (around the anus) is significant. This is the last letting go of the old, of those behaviours or attitudes which serve you no more. Those behaviours that are now reaching bursting point… let’s hope not… but seriously, you could back off on yourself a bit, couldn’t you? Does beating yourself up, or driving yourself or forcing yourself in any area, exercise, work, relationships etc., actually help you? Is it necessary? Isn’t it more important to live a little, to ease off a bit? Have you tried another way? Being more patient, understanding or more gentle with yourself? If you haven’t, then you may not know that driving so hard ISN’T really helping. It may look as though it is but try easing up on yourself – over past guilts or unachieved expectations – and see what inner disturbance easing up on yourself brings up for you. It may reveal the exact driving force/feeling or buried pain that is actually driving these forceful unrelenting behaviours you mostly apply to yourself. If so, when you feel that drive, don’t act it out, stay with the pressure of it inside you instead, and feel that pressure each time it comes up. That will eventually enable it to process and change over time. That may be enough to slow you down and to feel and heal from self-imposed pressures. Or it might take you deeper into unexpected traumas from past hurts. If so you will need some support. You could download my meditation and healing app for longer-term guidance through this period of healing, or you can book a one-to-one sessions with me, if you want some direct help with this. Hope that was helpful. MZ
The trouble with drugs is they further suppress these VERY NATURAL FEELINGS. THESE FEELINGS ARE THE NATURAL EFFECTS FROM WHATEVER YOU HAVE BEEN THROUGH. NOW YOU NEED TO FEEL THOSE TO HEAL THOSE. However, it is not necessary to stop drugs in order to start healing. Start with feeling however you find yourself feeling, and rather than thinking about how bad you feel, just feel the sensations of that where they are in whatever part of your body you can feel them. As you progress from this, at some point you will need to get off the drugs, but you may need a doctor’s help with that, depending on the drugs.
To learn how to begin this new approach to your healing, you will need to study my meditation app.
As I said: You feel these ways for very good reason. To heal these conditions you will need to go deeper. Drugs disconnect and numb you to those depths which I suspect you have already numbed and suppressed throughout your life.
Numbing and suppressing a part of your life experience and a part of yourself is a way to maintain a disconnect between parts of yourself. Bipolar is a duality… schizophrenia is a duality… psychosis is different ways your suppressed pain explodes or enacts out into your life (another duality). These are also a cry for help from an underlying suppressed pain persona or traumas in you. That is also YOU in there. YOU in pain.
Where in you do these traumas exist? They are felt and known as the way you feel, and the way you feel in there is known inside the BODY OF YOU. Although the symptoms show as mental states, this is not truly a mental state, but a physical distress known and felt within your body.
Feel into where you actually feel it. This will show you where, in which part of your body, it is held within the body of you. Trauma suppression results in loss of COGNITIVE memory but you won’t have succeeded in suppressing FELT memory.
So you are experiencing these “mental symptoms” due to underlying extreme feelings of distress, terror, rage, and a feeling of something being wrong, which you just can’t get to.
You need to go to the pain, but at first you will only touch or feel the surface of it… that is the tip of the iceberg. You will then need to go deeper OR let your pain take you deeper into the body of you. You need to learn how to feel your pain and distress rather than think about it or try to get rid of it. It’s not going anywhere. You have to heal it, not get rid of it or suppress it.
The other option is you could possibly come on one of my meditation retreats. My RETREATS will be the most cost-effective and give your healing a massive kick-start. My next 10-day retreat begins July 14 in South Western Australia. I would not advise doing just any meditation retreat because you will NEED someone with real understanding to guide you through the healing process of a meditation retreat.
I also provide one-to-one sessions over Zoom or in person. Go to my website [matzoltan.com] for an appointment and go here for my app. Hope to hear from you. Healing trauma has been a huge part of my work for many decades. On my undo website, you can read my white paper on trauma to get more confidence for working with me. At the very least, use my app and really commit to studying that from beginning to end. Good luck, Matthew
Yes, this is very sad. I feel for you.
You seem as though you have avoided getting close to people. You feel weary and withdrawn to some extent. But what seems to be having the worst effect on your health is your disconnect from both aspects of yourself and also from physical areas of yourself. Before you can comfortably connect with others, you will need to reconnect with these throughout yourself. Only as you feel more comfortable within yourself can you expect yourself to feel more comfortable with other people.
Although there is real damage that is not healing, that damage is not unrelated to your deeper trauma, which is also not really healing, I presume.
You are one whole being. You cannot truly separate your deep old trauma from your current physical condition. This is actually fortunate because it means you can now begin to recover by starting with those aspects of you that can definitely heal. That is your felt presence of trauma. Then you will feel more able to deal with the physical breakdown of your body and be more able to live with it until it improves. Also, the stress on your body from your felt presence of trauma is massive. So as you heal your trauma, your body will have less and less stress, and every function of your body will begin to work better.
To heal your trauma, you can start with your most obvious symptom of depression.
In your case, the full cause will be only partially known to you, if at all. Your sadness is a pure feeling of your pain, and your depression is a tainted mixture of: 1) this feeling and 2) your mental reactions to how you are. Feeling the sadness where it exists in your chest, throat, head and eyes (for you), the feeling of that will take you deeper into what lies within you that is needing to be healed.
To do this, you will need to deeply understand the difference between feeling and emotion. You will need to learn how to truly JUST FEEL without thinking about or complaining to yourself about your feelings. You will learn this from my Natural meditation and healing app.
You are deeply sad for very good reason, some probably unknown to you. Learning how to feel that sadness will take you deeper into healing that and whatever is causing it.
Depression is caused by how we think about our sadness or any other condition we don’t like. Depression is NOT truly feeling. It is emotion, which is a mixture of feeling and mental reaction to ourselves in pain. You will learn all about this in the 3rd chapter of my app. You will also learn how to resolve the mental and physical stress and weakness held in your connective tissue (in the BTT section) to support further recovery. Also, make sure you watch my talk on depression on my YouTube channel.
Even if you don’t believe your body can heal itself or that healing your trauma is a priority to healing your physical decline, you need to heal your trauma to begin dealing with the rest of your life. Unhealed trauma makes life feel really hard or overwhelming. If you use my app for at least 3 months consistently, the success you get from that will empower you to keep healing. Please do this for yourself, just for 3 solid months and then see the improvement. Then go for another 3.
I am truly sorry for your awful dilemma. This is why I made my app. To teach people like you how to heal themselves.
MZ
I assume you had surgery. There will be trauma in that part of your body from the surgery. Surgeons do not understand that the body is still alive and feeling even when the person is unconscious from drugs. Therefore, the body still feels and remembers EVERYTHING. This feeling is how the body remembers. To recover fully from surgery, you will have to feel the distress and pain in that area. To help you do this, please look up the Body Tension Translator area in my app Undo, and then look up the body parts where you feel most pain. Study that and use the specific meditation to help you get more deeply in touch with the inside of that part of your body.
For now, I will suggest what else you can do.
Feel into this area of your body for the most subtle deeper feeling of distress. This is the tip of the iceberg, the tip of what lies deeper within this sensation. Stay with that, knowing that THAT subtle sensation is what you need to be with for what is in the depths of that to begin showing itself. This may indicate more to be uncovered, and feeling this more subtle distress will help suppressed trauma to emerge in time. So that’s one thing you can do.
The second thing you can try doing is for healing the feeling you already have, which is of pain or distress, or maybe both.
Now it feels like… “over the edge”…. It is natural that you feel madness or panic or alone with “nowhere to turn for help”. Feeling some anger, some hopelessness, some suicidal moments.
You are NOT wrong or mad or imagining anything. This is how trauma can feel.
If you had stomach pain or trouble before GB removal, this suggests there was already significant distress (probably suppressed) and stored/held in your upper stomach. Then the GB removal would have triggered this deeper trauma already held in there, causing the ailment and need for GB removal.
Although your need may have been more to contact and heal suppressed trauma in there, you now have it fully active and need support with how you are now.
You currently have an activated healing process which has been five long years of suffering for you. However it got to this, it is there and real now. You could also see a really sensitive healer using deep massage into the area to help you feel into it to support the feeling healing process. It sounds like it’s a little stuck.
If you can find no physical damage or blockage, then it is memory held in that area. Feeling that should be quite disturbing. When you sit with it for longer periods of just feeling it, expect disturbance to increase before it decreases. Treat this disturbance and pain as felt memory releasing from this area. It may only be from the GB removal, or it might begin to reveal older feelings and forgotten fears or undigested experiences that terrified or enraged you, or both.
As this has been going on for five years already, it would be easier for me to help you directly in a one-to-one session, either over internet or in person if you are in Western Australia. As long as we can have eye contact, I am able to then tune in directly and guide you into contact with whatever pain is within this.
Otherwise use my meditation app, Undo to continue with your healing and let me know how you are going from time to time.
I can’t do or see more until I have further contact with you. Good luck
We humans have a distorted relationship with pain. There is pain that indicates harm which occurs at the time we are hurt. We naturally resist this 1st stage of pain. The second stage is the pain that remains after being hurt. That pain now indicates healing. It is important to understand these 2 stages of pain. The presence of this 2nd stage of ‘healing pain’ still hurts or disturbs us but it is not harmful, it is healing us.
Resisting this pain or distress will usually happen, but our resistance is what makes our pain ‘too much’. It is important to feel your resistance to any pain, just feel it not think about it or try to overcome it, and don’t see resistance as something wrong to get over. It is ‘a part’ of what is healing from when you were harmed.
Feeling the resistance ‘as sensations in your body’ will dissipate the resistance (the fight or struggle to be rid of pain) and as any resistance is dissipating, so you are dropping deeper into feeling the purely healing pain. Then although pain is still there, the ‘suffering’ of the pain is only equal to our resistance to it.
When pain becomes too much to sit with after a while, this indicates a resistant-felt-association has come up with the pain ‘as part of the pain’, OR has developed ‘in mental reaction to the pain.’ The form resistance commonly takes is, of you trying to achieve something, like, “trying” to stay with the pain, or resolve it, as a goal or achievement. Once your meditation becomes a ‘striving’ to stay with the pain, you have ‘subtly or obviously’ got stuck in striving to resolve it.
Pain is NOT our enemy to get rid of, it’s there to heal us. Feel into the presence of striving, to realise how you have begun to strive to achieve healing of it. Then relax with it, as it is purely felt in your body. If it’s still too much just have a walk. (It is more important to drop striving by walking, than to remain stuck in striving by continuing to sit still.) As all memories are held in our pain, so any hidden trauma or pain, is also held and felt and re-enacted, as however we reacted at the time we were harmed. Therefore healing pain by sitting with it, for prolonged periods, takes a lot of maturing as a meditator and a lot of experiential understanding of healing many pains along the way.
Please use my meditation app. Using that you will deepen your understanding of, reactions to pain, of how to truly feel (not a common ability) and you can look up ‘the significance of Pain’, one of the 14 chapters in my app to correct or improve your relationship with pain.
The root chakra and leg energy may be a bit blocked. The blockages will dissipate as you heal whatever is held in these areas. Don’t try to move energy or open chakras. You never need to do this. That is too forceful and is too goal orientated. This will happen automatically and of its own volition as you heal what pain or trauma / memory is blocking you here, because it is your pain that is blocking it. Healing your pain will take you far deeper than messing around on the surface with chakras. The condition of your chakras is a symptom of deeper pains remembered within your body. There is a saying, “don’t put the cart before the horse” that applies here. Also you can visit my retreat website for info on my deep meditation retreats.
Thank you for your significant questions.
MZ
Our bones are our core structural support, and long-term feelings of lacking essential support can lead to a deterioration of this very structure. It’s easy to underestimate the effects of stress on our body. And even easier to disregard the effects of continuous or long-term stress on our physical structure from bones to blood. Just consider the immediate effects on your gut or stomach when you see something that “turns” your stomach. Now consider that being a consistent and long-term disturbance in a person’s life, where their stomach feels constantly stressed. This would of course lead to gut and stomach issues.
So with your knee for example, I would say your poor knee may be plagued with an underlying confusion of where to turn, of which way to go, of where to get help, or of stubbornness born out of fear of being flexible, for fear of being taken advantage of or left unsupported (probably by your mother… left knee)… and the justifiable underlying anger from when you have been, and the conflict with allowing yourself to feel this way when you do. And as this is your left knee, inflexibility towards a woman (yourself or others) may be there due to past experiences making you overly conscious or suspicious… for good reason.
If any of this rings a bell for you, then noticing these feelings when they are there, and feeling them in your body, or feeling what your knee pain and the lack of support it gives you causes you to feel, is taking your healing to the level of causation. This is where to begin your healing journey and using the app, including the BTT section, will guide you further through your time of healing. If your body is so damaged that you doubt you can recover, then you still need to learn to live with yourself as you are. So again, using my app will guide you and open you up to an approach to your condition that will make living with yourself as you are more palatable. So 2 things. Begin your healing from an inside-out approach of natural meditation and use what you will learn in Undo app… you will learn or discover how to feel your discomfort without so much reaction to it, to reduce the pain and distress you are currently experiencing. You will also activate the potential healing from within your own body, that can truly make a difference, to both your living with this condition, and uncovering the deeper or hidden effects from your life that may have contributed to this condition, so that you may benefit and develop from these.
I am also available for private sessions online, where I will be able to guide you into what I will sense as underlying your condition to speed up your discoveries and healing. I hope this was a little helpful and once you have the Undo app you can join our monthly online sessions where you can ask me whatever you wish to. MZ
Yes, you can. 1/ At first you may not be fully sensitive to the distress or memory held in this area. Spend time just feeling the physical sensations and any tensions within this area. This will be an important part of your ‘body-based’ meditation, to get you more in touch with this area. Not by visualising (which is mental) but by purely feeling however it feels in this area, just feeling your physical body sense of yourself in here. (Use my Undo app to learn all about this and more. Only on our website…undo natural meditation.) 2/ Then as your sensitivity of and in this area gradually increases, over time you may begin to feel sadness, heartache, pressure or constrictions, none of which you should be concerned with or frightened or worried by. This type of thing happens in meditation when something is healing from deeper within you. If such sensations occur, even memories of loss or times when you have been hurt by life may come back to you also. Any mental memories are just releasing from your body, as are any felt memories that come, only as feelings. You don’t need to think too much over these, the most important part is to allow yourself to just feel whatever comes. This will decrease tension from the area which will enhance its function. 3/ As this progresses over days, weeks or months of meditating, you may also find yourself naturally gravitating away from foods, behaviours or environments that harm you and towards those that support you. This is because as you heal in this natural way, from the inside out, from reattuning to the feelings of your own presence and needs, these will automatically drive/guide you in a healthier direction.
So ‘feeling’ a heart issue or the area where your heart is, leads to release of harboured pains and tension (felt body memories) that lie at the heart/core of your heart condition. It also leads to greater physical sensitivity of how you are going in that area day to day, moment to moment. That sensitivity makes you more physically and mentally intelligent about this part of yourself and its needs. It will become more clear when to rest, when you can push it, when you need to back off, all of which needs to be known to you naturally, in how you feel, as you live out each day of your life. This knowing what you need because you feel it, is bodily intelligence. All this increases natural healing and at the least you learn from yourself how to live with the condition you are in without harming yourself more.
You can look up ‘heart chest and lungs’ in the Body Tension Translator section of the Undo meditation app. This will inform you of the mental-physical connection about this area and the guided meditations for each of these three areas will be specifically applicable for you.
When a nerve is damaged it usually becomes more sensitive, even hypersensitive. The medical theory on tinnitus is also a brain-to-ear problem where the brain misregisters the hearing. So the sounds of tinnitus occur. Although there are many ways to damage a nerve/nerves, drugs, a hit to the head, etc., what we are left with is nerve damage. Can the body heal this damage? I have found the body can heal almost anything, but some damage is more complex, both purely mechanically/physically, and also at the underlying level of tensions/restrictions caused and maintained by destructive attitudes or behaviour, or due to trauma.
Often an area is then more susceptible to damage due to shock or trauma, again, held in the form of tensions in those areas. A reduction of energy flow or nutrient to an area, or a blockage (increased restriction held in the tissue from shock or trauma) can take a longer time to heal.
Although the drugs caused the final damage to your nerves, you could look to underlying past experiences that were harmful or disturbing for you, via the sense of hearing. What violence or aggressions were you forced to hear/listen to throughout your developmental years as a child? Were you hit around the head or ears? Any head or brain injury or traumas? Any operations in the head area? What if there were these injuries but you don’t remember? For the purpose of potentially healing yourself, when you think about the drugs damaging you, what is the disturbance this causes you to feel? You need to feel this for it to dissipate over time. Then you can also revisit or become more aware of the more subtle feelings of distress that can be felt along with the physical sensations of the tinnitus sounds in your ears – You do this by ‘feeling’ any distress this still causes you, as or in the sensation of it, wherever that is felt. Your distress over this may also be present in areas of your torso. This torso distress is worth including in what you are feeling. You can also casually/gently consider any above listed or other memories from your life, related to hearing or head injury, and if any feelings remain with those extra memories, you will feel those, in how you may still feel from those. Feeling those to heal those you will gradually resolve those remaining felt effects within you. It is not necessary to identify what feeling is with what memory. It is enough to feel whatever you feel from any memory to put you in touch with the general remaining effects and heal those.
Can you learn to live with this damage?
As you just sit quietly with this sound in your ears, you can also include feeling your presence/existence throughout the rest of your body, allowing the sound to be in the background…Let your thinking about it, or any complaining about it, fall into the background as you go deeper into only the felt knowing, as the sensation it is or the sound that is just there, as a part of being you now.
To heal yourself of being distressed and reactionary to the sounds in your ears, allow any distress to be felt whenever it surfaces. To relieve yourself of mentally distressing over it, as soon as you remember to, come back to only the physical sensation/sound of it. Feel into the distress itself. Always do this whenever you are at odds with this to resolve your conflict with this and to finally be okay with this sound.
This nerve damage is also revealing your inner hearing, of the sounds of your insides of your body, which are not normally heard. Now your nerve damage has made these sounds noticeable to you. You may also listen inwardly for the sound of your blood pumping/swooshing through your body. It’s quite a pleasant sound, only heard when you are very quiet and just listening within.
When you are more tired out or have eaten a lot of salt, the sounds in there may also increase, and when rested, they may decrease.
I have had this sound in my ears since a massive change in my body about 40 years ago when I was a monk. It also coincided with an increase in natural body/animal clairvoyance and I just put it down to that. If you have been healing and increasing in sensitivity lately this may be a small part of what’s going on. But it may simply be nerve damage in both of us, from different causes. Either way, you can learn to be okay with it and as I am, I simply don’t think about it, although I have heard it now for 40 odd years as a normal part of my existence.
I hope that is helpful. You can use Undo to learn to increase your ability for living with yourself however you are and with however you change into the future.
So specifically your arteries are accumulating cholesterol and fat. The arteries themselves are NOT hardening, and so these are healthy enough. It’s just the plaque (fats/cholesterol) possibly narrowing the internal space of the arteries and inhibiting blood flow. There’s no pain as such but there may be symptoms from low oxygen affecting breath, muscle fatigue or soreness, slower muscle recovery from exercise, or you may have more advanced symptoms.
The most important pain you may be overlooking (and that you will be feeling) in having this condition, is what you can feel in what it is bringing up for you emotionally, in how you are mentally reacting to this, and to how it may have changed your life. There may be no pain in the arteries but there seems to be panic, fear, and maybe dread and ‘thinking about’ your condition according to what doctors say, rather than finding another way with this.
The stress you have regarding the apparent incurability of your condition and the shortening of your life span will either be exacerbated through incorrect thinking, or alternatively, resolved from your body through correctly ‘feeling’ using Natural Meditation. Through my Natural meditation and self-healing app you will learn intellectually and experientially a very different understanding and approach to your health and to yourself as a whole.
Doctors are often fear mongers because they have a very narrow mechanical understanding of health and how the body really works. And they understand a lot less than most of us have been brainwashed into believing.
Natural meditation will be perfect for you as it is both a direct tuning back into the many conditions and sensations as they are throughout your body and will help you recognise and process the most harmful symptoms you may be overlooking, which are any conclusive mental reactions to your life ending up at this point…for now.
Listening to your body means to be guided by all your symptoms and feelings. As all your symptoms will be having a slowing down effect on you, listen to that and slow down, because that’s what your body (‘you’) needs you to do. Slow down with yourself by allowing yourself to be in this condition for now. Even if you don’t want to. You could, and NEED TO learn to be with your life more, as it is, rather than push for more, or try to be different or make it better.
Feel any urge to want to go harder. Your situation is probably forcing you to do less through the slowing of your blood flow and oxygen supply. That may be a dramatic change for you. If you FEEL the drive and urge in you without acting on it, that feeling of frustration or inadequacy or sorrow (or whatever it feels like) will take you deeper into a healing and calming down of those drives and enable you to be more at ease with yourself and your life as it is for you now.
You’ll eventually discover a greater ease with being yourself that you may never have had or felt before. You may WANT to live full on as before, but can’t any more. So be careful not to turn that full on approach against yourself or your current condition by thinking about the future or regretting the past. When you go there mentally, feel the underlying fear over your future or your felt regret over your past and give those feelings a chance to change in you. Feeling this will take the driving force out of harmful overthinking.
Give your body a chance to adjust and recover and for you to adjust to living at a different intensity to how you have been throughout your life. I would assume the demands of your life from outside and from yourself inside have felt intense for you. You need to respond to these deeper feelings as well as to your purely physical symptoms by slowing down, (they are both saying, slow down) and settling more into how you feel and are now. If you do this your health will improve, your life experience will expand, and I expect your life span to be only mildly affected or not affected at all. Worrying about death or the possible limiting of your life span is understandable, but also useless. Better to concern yourself with the life you have and are.
The symptoms of your illness are what helped me understand the underlying overlooked behaviours mentioned here, that will have contributed to your health. This doesn’t mean you are at fault or that your body is wrong for developing an ailment. It’s an opportunity to go deeper into understanding your whole self, beyond what the doctors can tell you. Respond to what your body is presenting as a result of the particular stresses and unresolved pain from your life.
Please start with studying and experiencing my app. If you do, what you will discover in that, and what you will develop in you from doing my app, will give you a whole new direction and way of living that will help you stabilise in yourself and your life as that is now. I am also personally available online for one-to-one sessions if you feel a need. I have also run natural meditation retreats for nearly 4 decades now.
MZ
Be careful of making your sitting a goal-orientated meditation. Sitting for the simple need to be yourself, exactly as you are, will allow your body to heal in its own way, which is determined by the intelligence of the body and not by our desire or thinking. When you find yourself striving for a result, or to stay with your pain, there are two main things to do at this point. First, feel any resistance you have with being the way you are at that point. Feeling the resistance will process the resistance and enable “what” you are unintentionally resisting to arise or be felt. Second, if you feel the resistance and it continues as a struggle, then get up and have a slow walk or a bit of movement and then sit down again to be still again. This breaks the trap of striving and struggling to get somewhere and allows you to settle with however you are again.
When you say listen into it, I assume you mean feel into it. Feeling is listening to the body of you. The physical pain also harbours mental pain and anguish. Notice how you begin to feel within or about yourself when the pain just continues. You are allowed to feel upset, you are allowed to be upset. But try to remember however you are feeling during these sits is coming out with the pain. It’s easy to think you are just producing resistance, or effort, or striving, or frustration, etc., but I encourage you to be receptive to whatever is happening and whatever you are feeling by seeing everything as what is coming out of your body and not what you think you are adding from your thinking/attitude. It’s all a purging and it’s easy to overlook this fact that what is happening is already what you need and that will take you deeper and further with your meditation.
Get my meditation app if you haven’t already and join in on the live session with me that app users can come to. Then you can discuss whatever you need to directly with me.
MZ
May I suggest you look up this neck issue for deeper insight on our app, look it up in the Body Tension Translator section by clicking the body image at the bottom of the screen.
This neck and SI condition implies you are holding stress from conflict with someone who is either close to you or who has significant influence in your life. You will probably find the discomfort you feel, when you are more in touch with this area of your body, is not only painful, but as you stay with it, this will reveal the same or similar disturbance you have in one or another relationship in your life. This can even suggest you may have some difficulty with forming close meaningful relationships, or if you have one, with really connecting.
Consider for a moment, who in your life do you find disturbing, upsetting, frustrating, challenging, annoying…or is it yourself you are critical of or unsatisfied with. The disturbance in this relationship (with yourself or another), for you, will probably feel just like you feel in or about your neck issue. Whenever that body/neck issue becomes more obvious during meditation, the underlying feelings (not just the physical discomfort) but some personal distress you are hiding/holding in the neck, is beginning to activate and disturb you. You may not realise your disturbance at first, but it will be this coming up that is causing you to distract mentally and to avoid going there.
To go there, you just need to feel your avoidance or resistance to going there. As the resistance softens, through being with it, feeling it, this becomes your way into the deeper feelings held in your neck.
Let your thinking or distraction go on. You don’t need to be concerned over that. That will settle down on its own. You mainly need to be concerned with what’s going on inside your neck area. Just stay with the anchor of your bodily sensations which your thinking is distracting from. Don’t fight the distraction. Let it be there in the background, whilst you patiently keep coming back to the feeling in your body/neck. Stay physically still, feel any urge to move, squirm or distract, but remain as still as you can.
Give your deeper pain/distress in your neck time to reveal itself, to come back to life from within your neck. You may also feel distress in your thymus (sternum/central chest area). If so, it too is part of the same stress. Just feel it, as it is, and get to know exactly how it feels, simply by feeling into it in either spot.
This will take you deeper into a resolving of the distress that you are having in a relationship/relationships, and as this distress/pain/tension dissipates from your neck you will find something begins to improve in your ability to relate, or decrease your fear of conflict. This may be a simple or small thing but I suspect it will be quite a significant step for you.
When healing, you are feeling whatever physical sensations are going on in that healing process. As this takes you deeper into what pain or disturbances are held as body memory, often the underlying trauma or shock is happened upon or activated. This is coming out of the totality of the felt sensations in a particular area or process going on. As this more significant type of sensation is re-activated during your healing or meditation, we may mentally react to such feelings, or SEEM to. This “reaction” is not always your additional mental reaction added to it today but is generally a part of what is coming out of and a part of the pain or distress you are activating by being still and receptive to what’s inside. So what seems to be a trigger TOWARDS your arising pain/healing is in fact part of the entire memory held as sensation in your body fully activating and purging. If you can understand that this is coming out with different intensities, activating from within you as you heal, you can more easily ride it out, knowing this which seems a trigger is actually part of what’s purging from whatever sensations you are processing. IF you actually react against what’s coming out in this, then you are mentally resisting what feels too frightening or shocking, then still the main most important component when triggered is still that which is triggered is still coming out from within you, from within the sensations of your body. Either way you just need to ride it out, take less or no notice of your mental reaction and drop back into the feelings driving mental reactions or triggered, and give the WHOLE process time to happen. Let any triggers be part of your total experience within your body sensations and just let the body take care of it all. These bodies have been naturally healing themselves for millions of years (a long long time anyway) and know how to. For the body, healing whether physical or psychological is the same. It all heals in feeling the underlying sensations behind any level or expression of pain healing itself.
Please read my white paper on trauma for some insight. I have had unprecedented success with this natural process for many thousands of people having suffered childhood sexual abuse and have worked in this area for about 30 years. I understand what is required to heal this.
The main reason mainstream and most alternative therapy doesn’t work well, or at all, is they lack understanding of how all memories, whether mentally remembered or suppressed, are held as tensions and feelings in the related areas of the body and are therefore accessed and processed right there.
Once cognitive or mental memories are suppressed, any memory of trauma is then only known to you in ‘how you feel’ within the body of you. Fortunately felt memory remains known and accessible. Feeling that in however it now feels to be you when in distress, enables the healing of your trauma to occur over time.
Almost all therapists do not yet truly understand that mental memory (thought) is driven by deeper underlying sensations/feelings (not emotions) in the body… and that therefore, you cannot heal dissociated trauma with mind-based therapy. Your mental condition is only a symptom of the pain and distress you hold and feel in your body.
Healing does not occur at the symptomatic level. It occurs when you are in touch with the source, which is readily accessible and known experientially as the ‘felt effect’ of your pain and distress. After a time of feeling to heal, the ‘felt’ memory becomes less charged with pain, leaving you more able to recover and accept the mental facts of the events and move on.
To feel the way it feels inside your own body will be extremely distressful a lot of the time. Learning how to truly feel (not emotionalise) is important. You will learn that from my Undo app. But with this particular trauma (childhood sexual abuse), there will usually be a split in yourself between who you know yourself to be and the hidden you, who you do not know. ‘This is real trauma’. Where the events are so horrific that to survive you split yourself into two parts. The hidden part that knows and feels only the effects of the horror of what has been done to you, and the dissociated oblivious part of you that struggles through daily life. Being with the felt presence of this deeper frightened and frightening part of you is how you will begin to reconnect and reintegrate these two parts.
The natural meditation of the body is the only meditation that enables dissociative traumas to heal. This is because healing needs to happen of its own accord from the inside. You don’t know what’s hidden in there, you only know how it feels in there and you need to continue to feel it whenever it shows up. Unlike all other meditations, Natural meditation is not a concept or technique to improve towards a new and improved you, and you do not impose others’ ideals on yourself from the outside. It is only being receptive to whatever reveals itself, from within the body and feelings of you… so that that can heal, naturally…..leaving you whole again.
Due to the complexity and extreme pain of such a trauma, you really need very specific help through your healing of this. I would like the opportunity to guide you through this. The first and least costly step would be to download my Undo app and study that. Secondly, you can make an appointment for one-on-one with me….online or in person. Thirdly, you can attend a meditation retreat with me, once you are ready for this. Beware of your avoidance or denial or hopelessness if they come up. These are what makes you give up on your pain and your healing. Other than these stopping you continuing, I can definitely guide you to healing this over time. I hope to hear from you, and anyone else who may be suffering a similar fate.
Warm regards, Matthew Zoltan.
I do not think you are really re-traumatising, though it may feel like it. You are not harming yourself by what you are doing now. You just don’t have the full horror of what there is yet to be remembered. Not yet. You are getting many tastes of it and that is confusing. I will do my best to clarify it all.
When you begin to feel a lifelong trauma (beginning 2 years ago) you cannot know how bad it feels inside you. This is because whenever you were being hurt, you disconnected and did not feel how bad it really was.
Then from then until now, to live your life, you have managed to stay disconnected from how bad it really felt for you, each time you were hurt.
You will have withdrawn and dulled down the pain or even completely blocked any feeling or awareness of it by mentally disconnecting during and after the many events. You do this both during the event of being hurt, and after the event is over.
So now healing your trauma is truly jumping into the part of you where you have managed to stay disconnected from. As this hidden part of you in pain resurfaces, the felt sensations of that in your body scream back at you from inside your body. That’s also the shaking you feel. That shaking presence of you will have been deeply suppressed and unnoticed until 2 years ago when you said it began. That is when it made it to the surface more, so that you could begin to heal in there. Although you may have felt it at times, but not so strong and not so continuously.
The fear, despair and feeling so unsafe “in your own body” are all ways in which your trauma actually exists inside of you. So now you are in contact with it you will feel it ‘as it is.’ This is how it is now currently activating within you, in all these ways.
The person YOU ARE TODAY is not where the enormous fear starts. It starts and is coming from inside of you. The traumatised boy inside you is terrified and is shaking in terror and shock. I expect that shaking is either an underlying tremor or a very physical shaking of your body, doing this shaking on its own. This means it’s coming out from inside you.
It’s important to see both the fear and the mental reactions as all being part of what is coming out from inside your trauma. Even the mental reactions (any thoughts about this when it is happening) are part of what is coming OUT OF YOU. So let it all happen, whilst doing your best to not judge or view these reactions as you doing it wrong now. The body tremors, the terrible fear felt and the thoughts that come amongst all this is your body PURGING trauma, suppressed memories and pain.
That fear you say your mind is so full of is really the huge amount of fear that your body has been full of since childhood trauma.
THAT mind full of fear is okay. It’s allowed to be full of fear for now. Try not to be so ‘frightened of the fear.’
See it as what it really is. It’s the child’s fear of life from when you were being hurt. It’s not fear of your life now. Although it will make you more nervous in life during this healing process. That’s okay too. You can live with that. Just try not to react to what is happening on these 3 levels in you now…1) shaking, 2) feelings of terror, 3) the thoughts that come with all this purging out of you.
Try to contain the shaking as it happens inside your body. Meaning, let it happen but stay sitting as still as you can without too much force. Sit in meditation without over-controlling the shaking, yet hold it close inside of you as if you are giving it the containment vessel of your body to process within and the permission to be happening.
The fear you feel needs to be felt without panicking over it being so strong. When it becomes extreme where it seems to be overwhelming you…UNDERSTAND THIS AS the feeling of overwhelment you need to feel in order to heal THAT as well. You were overwhelmed as a child and that harmed part of you needs to be received, allowed as it is when this happens. See that NOTHING in your life right now is the cause, so unknown harms in your buried past must be the cause.
REMEMBER you are NOT being harmed now…sitting alone and meditating with your pain…you are feeling the effects of PAST harm healing within you. You can do that, can’t you? Just to be here for yourself to heal itself of the old old hurts.
When you rest you are allowing your already activated healing process to happen naturally and on its own. You will tire of this at times but I encourage you to reconsider this happening. This healing is all your body is interested in doing. This has clearly been your time to heal for last 2 years now. Now you just need guidance in your approach whenever it seems too much. OR you can take yourself out for a walk and forget about life for a while as you wander along enjoying the walking of your own body.
The ultimate support I can offer is for you to come on a meditation healing retreat with me. I have one in Western Australia for 10 days from July 14. This may be too soon for you.
I assume you are using my meditation app Undo, if not, please download that app and study it daily throughout this healing. It’s not just on trauma. It’s a guidance and a practical education on all fundamental parts of living with ourselves as we are in all parts of life including healing our pain.
Any unexplained pain or confusions or recurring illnesses which no one can help you with will be due to your underlying trauma.
The shaking in your body is the body’s way of releasing traumatic memory patterns from where they are held in your body. So everything you describe to be happening is very good but very hard to live through, until you understand more and experience more progress from being with your pain rather than avoiding it. Keep going. There is nothing else you can do but get better at living with yourself as you are and as you heal, you will.
I hope that was helpful.
This indicates deeper trauma and a significant time to fully heal is needed.
But you can begin with; every time you feel these ways, get out of your head/thinking and into your body, by finding where you feel it the most, and feel it in that part of your body. You will probably feel it the most in your diaphragm (stomach area), lungs (chest) and throat.
Continue to feel the presence of this way of feeling, whenever it is there in your body or whenever it is triggered by life.
Remind yourself, you know this is about your past hurtful childhood and not about the facts of your life right now.
Be careful to NOT mentally connect these feelings with anything in your life now, for doing that will make your life now SEEM far worse than it really is, as well as distract you from the true source of your pain being your childhood.
I think you know these feelings are only connected to events as a child, which you may not fully remember.
Feeling these is how you will begin healing these ‘felt’ and ‘painful effects’ of your childhood. Eventually, in time, you can fully uncover and heal these effects.
But for now at least, you can live with them without connecting them so much with your life now and tainting your experience of your life now.
I am also available for private sessions online, you can email my team about this at [enquiries@mattzoltan.com], or get more information about them here.
If you don’t give up and do your best not to avoid your pain, you will heal it.
MZ
As an embodied being, we have a unique self-generated and core sense of our self that is simply what we are. The nature of what we are, is further known to us as and in the living felt sense of the body of us. This is determined biologically. So the body of us is both self-determined and self-evident to itself, meaning, we are self-evident to ourselves in that we feel ourselves existing.
Although we are the biological product of our parents, which often determines looks and mannerisms, these mannerisms do not harbour harmful psychological conditionings or distortions. These distortions are learned or copied from others, but are not inherently intrinsically our own. (Not part of our biology. We are not born this way. We learn to be as our parents train us to be.) I would confidently say this is why the biological being we are, senses and naturally resists and repels these unnatural or distorted influences.
Which is why any felt presence or automatic re-enactment of these learned family behaviours, causes us distress with ourselves, and are what we are at odds with and suffer from in ourselves. I would even say the distress they cause the ‘body of us,’ is the primary cause of our physical and mental health problems.
Our learned persona, or who we think we are, on the other hand, is made up of the memories of others (family) mental and verbal input and influences, and therefore this memory-based persona part, has little or no resilience to the unnatural or distorted behaviours of our families. Only the felt sense of what we are as our body, is at odds with, and feels distress from their influences.
Whether you have been affected by narcissistic parents or some other type, the presence of those influences will exist and be known, as and in your felt disturbances with yourself, and as your associated physical and mental ailments. These harmful effects of influences are also known to you/us as the feelings or disturbances that drive our unwanted harmful behaviours and exist as our distress and trauma, only felt and known in our bodies. And so we can only truly heal these effects by feeling the disturbing presence of these in our bodies, and through ‘feeling’ these rather than acting on these or overthinking about these. We then need to leave the healing of all this up to our natural healing power of our bodies to process, at the feeling level.
The abusive nature of your parents’ inability to see and relate to you in your own right, in response to your needs, is a mental illness really. Mental illnesses are states we get caught up in to the extent that we cannot see live reality existing beyond the distress caused by our distorted or damaged state. Therefore with narcissism you need to be careful of what they have taught you, playing out in your reactions to yourself or life now. These reactions will only distort your current self-view. It’s best to feel the presence of reactions and let your body resolve them rather than re-enacting these hurts all over again.
That will be easier said than done so you will probably need help with this and so I suggest you study my (https://undoapp.com) available exclusively on our website. This will guide and support your healing process and if you need more help again, I am available online or in person in Australia, for one-to-one sessions.
Take your time to read through this and it may take a couple of reads to sink in.
Before I respond to your question, make sure you watch my YouTube video on depression, as this goes into more detail.
There are two important things to understand about your depression. Firstly, you may be absolutely correct that it’s just a mind-based nonsense, but it’s important to make sure. Mind-based nonsense will be generated by the way in which you are thinking about yourself or your life, and this can take you down and generate feelings of so-called depression. These are thought-induced feelings; therefore, they are nonsense. All you have to do with these is come back to the feeling itself and only be in that feeling. The thinking comes to an end, and as the thinking itself is generating that feeling, the feeling too will come to an end.
However, this is depression that is caused from the outside in; in other words, your thinking, which is the outside, causing feeling on the inside.
The other more serious and true depression is when it’s generated from the inside out—that is, the depression itself is a feeling that arises within you for no particular reason; you are not generating that with your thinking.
The deeper depressions are arising from within you, arising from trauma or deeply suppressed painful or harmful events in your life. A trauma will always exist unknown on the cognitive level and only known as the feeling of its presence within you. However, when we have no knowledge of why we are feeling this way, we tend to connect the feeling with life around us and find a reason in life or about ourselves to explain the depressed feeling. So we must be careful with such feelings that arise for no known reason within us, to not connect these feelings with our life today; these deeper depressions are from our life in the past. Generally, people will have a bit of both going on, and so it’s important to understand these two types of depression. Essentially, they are both dealt with in the same way. The thought-induced depression caused by our thinking will disappear quite rapidly when you feel into the mind-based feeling. This is again because the thinking drops away as you go deeper into the feeling, and the feeling will come to an end.
Whereas the deeper depression that is arising out of unresolved issues or traumas of our past, although the way to resolve these is the same—which is to feel the sensation of depression and be careful not to connect the sensation with something in your life today—in this way, be careful not to create a story out of your life today to explain why you feel the way you do on the inside. This can be tricky; therefore, you must rely on just coming back to the feeling of depression in your body. With these trauma-based depressions, although the approach is the same, and that is to feel it, the resolution of that depression will definitely not be so rapid. It can take a long time and will ultimately bring about a recovery of whatever it is you have forgotten about or suppressed, so this is a more timely process.
Your comment ‘I was feeling down and then it all went back to normal’ could have been either, because the thing about suppressed traumas is as you go deeper, you’ll start to get in touch with them more. The more you continue down this path, the deeper you’ll go into yourself and the more you’ll feel of what is within you. And the more you will heal it. And the thing about mind-based nonsense is that it can be caused by a variety of external situations that you may be in reaction to. To resolve this, see these external situations as inevitable facts of the world we live in and not something you yourself can change. The only thing you can do is accept them as they are, which doesn’t mean you like them, but stop causing yourself pain by complaining internally about them. Accepting the facts on the outside will free you from such depression, and accepting the facts of how you are on the inside will enable you to go deeper into the healing of it.
i’d encourage you to download my meditation app Undo, so that you can take this further and deeper for yourself.
This is a very important question. Please study my meditation app Undo, I have devoted an entire chapter (there are 14 chapters) to explaining the many differences between feeling and emotion.
THE PROBLEM: Emotion is a self-replicating distress for the body which we get stuck in. This is because the thoughts or story of what we are emotional over is mixed with the pure feeling. So emotion is a mix of a feeling with the story or mental reaction to a fact in our life, causing exaggeration of the feeling, prolonging an unwanted feeling beyond its natural duration. Emotion is also a mental reaction to feelings, preventing the actual feeling of feelings and thus preventing their natural dissipation or processing.
THE RESOLUTION: Go deeper beneath whatever you are thinking, which is part of your disturbance, into the feeling or sensations in your body. Depending on how emotional you have become, you may not always be able to drop your story, your mental distress and just feel. Understand, your mental story is often a complaint against a raw fact of life or the way the fact makes you feel. The force/exaggeration of emotion, or ‘the distress felt’, makes it hard or impossible to accept a fact at first.
So you need to feel the distress in your body, underlying any thinking/story. Just feeling that for a while will reduce its intensity, enabling you to more easily accept a fact and continue to feel and process those feelings.
Remember, emotion IS NOT feeling. It is a mix of feeling and mental reaction, preventing the natural processing of such pain. Beneath the thinking are the felt sensations (pure, though free feelings). Go deeper into these true feelings in your body and you will process any disturbance held there. In there is where we heal, not in our thinking.
Most people do not know what it really means to feel. So they get stuck in emotionalised feelings. So they can’t heal and move on. This is a very important understanding to acquire. Then you will always be able to process emotion… guaranteed.
Make sure you study this in my app, also study the chapter on REACTIONS to get the full picture of understanding.
Nice idea, but the good is subjective and only a part of all we need to learn to navigate in life. Deeper within you are all the feelings that manifest as your thoughts, words and actions, and they become the world of your life. In there you are neither good nor bad. You/we are all just whatever we are in there, and although some aspects FEEL good and some FEEL bad at first, going deeper into the actual sensation, beneath our judgements or beliefs and views on that, we are able to discover both the good and the bad as just different ways in which we feel. WHY we feel different ways is that each way of feeling tells us, informs us, of differences within our condition. Knowing these differences is essential. Only then can we know what we need, to either take proper/better care of or respond to as our need. Like hunger. It feels bad after a long time without food. But it only feels informative when the food is available. Same with sadness or rage… as long as we feel these feelings as they are, without mentally reacting to them, they too provide information that our body is sensing. Then when we understand what our sensing body is telling us, the reason for that feeling makes sense. But if we prematurely condemn a so-called bad feeling, then we suppress or override what it is telling us and self-ignorance prevails.
In my meditation app Undo, you will learn how to re-attune with and be guided by the so-called good or bad feelings to discover the deeper significance of both.
Then the hope to bring the good experiences into your life is expanded too, willingly including and benefitting from, being informed by the so-called bad as much as the good. This cancels out good and bad as wrong or right, revealing how these are just the variations that are inevitable and necessary for a wholesome, fulfilling life.
The thing is, we need to go deeper beneath our self-harming limited views on this to discover another way. Please challenge your aversion to ‘the bad’ by studying my app. It will really help you move beyond many common though potentially harmful beliefs and views, improving experience of life as a whole. Thanks for your comment… very good one.
It will really help you move beyond many common though potentially harmful beliefs and views, improving experience of life as a whole. Thanks for your comment…very good one.
Oh dear. Maybe we can help this dilemma. So what is more harmful. The harm you cause yourself by feeling guilty or the harm to the animals many humans eat. Is it ideal for you to eat only veg? Are you healthy on that diet? You are not. Its not even your choice. You choose to eat meat rather than do harm to yourself only eating veg. So why then do even greater more consistent harm to yourself by the thoughts of guilt you feed yourself with. Supporting animal husbandry may just be a way of compounding your guilt. Why? How? Because guilt is driving that action. Meat is helping you and guilt is harming you…possibly even more than startving yourself is. Please be careful with ideals. Your life is your own. I would wish you be more careful with the thoughts that harm you …including the ideals around meat that are harming you. Then you may find …in time… you body gets stronger and you are able to live of produce of your animal loving choice. But honestly, I for one dont know what is right or wrong. But I do know the ideas of right and wrong cause people all over the world to critisise themselves and attack others. You are obviously a very sensitive (intelligent ) person. Here my 2cents worth on this. Enjoy your next meal and live free of those guilty thoughts.
One other thing is: whatever triggers guilt, and whatever you connect your guilt with, when you feel any guilt, DON’T immediately connect it with something you are conscious of, like eating meat.
The feeling of guilt may be originating deeper and older than whatever you are doing now. So when guilt is triggered, go more into the feeling of that in your body. Without searching for or assuming a reason for it, just feel it as you meditate. Guilt is rarely an unfamiliar feeling in a person who struggles with it in their life now.
Do you have a tendency to please others, or do you easily feel you are wrong, or self-doubting, or easily feel a need to defend yourself?
If so, read on!
Whatever you hear or learn about being a good human being, don’t just take it on, especially don’t compare or judge yourself for not living up to any moralistic, religious or spiritual ideals… hoping to find what’s wrong with you and improve upon that. Willingness to take these on may only be coming from a searching (springing from pain) to feel better within, and doing so may harm you… at the very least, make you feel ‘not good enough’. Rather than fix your pain, it’s best to feel it within your body and let your body heal itself naturally of this pain.
If you use ideas or impose better ways to be upon yourself, this is a trap and a distraction from your deeper personal felt condition.
‘THEY’/OTHERS don’t know you or your deeper condition.
ONLY YOU CAN KNOW THAT because only you can feel that and therefore heal that. You only need to respond to the underlying feeling of wanting to be or feel better… by recognising that it is there and feeling into that whenever it comes up or whenever you have time to… just sit in the pure feeling of it, without trying to change it or make it better. This will take you deeper into any hurt in there that needs to be felt as it is. Guilt may be how it starts but as you return to this feeling over and over, to only feel it, NOT find reasons for it, this will take you deeper into the source of this feeling and it may reveal some forgotten harm in there. I assume you have my app. If not, use that to take this further.
Body scanning is a conscious deliberate focusing. Focusing is an action of thought or mental awareness. Body scanning is a doing which is applied from the outside in. Feeling or sensing is a happening, already happening from within, and here I am introducing the already ongoing automatic happening of our introspective or purely sensory existence beneath thinking, from within the body.
Once at this depth, the somatic healing effect is enabled and the interfering addition of intentional mental scanning has dropped away. Mental scanning actually prevents this depth in meditation from naturally occurring.
There is a very significant difference between body scanning and just BEING in your own self-evident sensory depths. Scanning is once removed from the ongoing life of us just happening of its own volition. Deliberate thinking or scanning is separating from this lived experience of the body of you. Thinking also taints this lived experience, inhibiting the free flow of the natural or somatic healing already ongoing within every living organism.
My understanding of somatic healing is the need to support yet leave the body being of us to its own devices. Hope I have not misread your use of these words. Your question reveals important distinctions… thank you.
What you can’t remove or change you have to learn to live with. MENTALLY reacting to what’s happening outside of you is harming yourself on the inside. Your primary responsibility is to stop harming yourself. You will stop harming yourself if you stop mental reaction (which is unintentionally aggressive and harmful to you and others) and go beneath mental reaction into the NATURAL disturbance felt in your body. We can and have to live with outward facts and inwardly felt disturbances. You really need to STOP all this thinking about WHY and HOW we harm animals etc. to stop being harmful inside and to yourself. I will guarantee your reaction over animals or others being harmed is because the harm to them is triggering suppressed or avoided trauma held in your own body. You need to stop avoiding that in your justified mental reactions and come back to the overwhelming distressful feeling of what it’s like deep inside of you.
You should use my meditation app, Undo, to learn thoroughly how to do that.
Once you get in touch with your own deeper trauma/pain you will begin to relieve yourself and as that relief continues, your mental reaction to our world will decrease. Right now your mental reaction will be massively exaggerated as you are using harm to animals to avoid your own pain and your own responsibility to the animal you are. Do that first and then how harm to others feels will still be felt at times but will be tolerable and NOT overwhelming.
Exactly! So you have discovered for yourself that the reason we even seek to improve or enlighten ourselves is that we simply don’t like how we’re feeling. And yet how we are feeling is all about us. So ironically, you’re also correct in that seeking enlightenment is just a form of escapism, and anything you do to improve yourself is moving away from what is driving you to improve. Directly, what is driving you to improve is what you need to go into the depth of and what you need to heal—and there you have it.
As you continue to watch this video, I will be explaining how enlightenment is not a goal to achieve but a puzzle to unravel, and that puzzle is that whatever you do to try and improve yourself is only confirming that there is something wrong with you. When you realise this, you realise there is nothing you can do or should do, and when you do nothing but stay as you are—allowing yourself to be exactly as you are, feeling into yourself exactly as you are—then something can happen of its own volition. So just try letting your body take care of any distress by feeling it as it is in your body, rather than trying to do anything about it with your thinking, and this is where natural meditation becomes essential.
Id encourage you to download my meditation app Undo, so that you can take this further and deeper for yourself.
Yes, this is a common hope in any sincere person, wanting to change something about themselves when they have the sincerity to recognise harmful thoughts or behaviours coming from them. However, the subtle problem with this is that guilt is criticism and judgement of yourself which actually makes you feel worse about yourself. So guilt itself is a wrong and harmful action. It is also tending to be conclusive about yourself and therefore can entrap you, preventing the driving force behind the thoughts and actions that you don’t want from dissolving. Guilt makes it about ourselves, this is the crucial problem.
It’s not about ourselves only, it’s more about the effect we have on others. When you admit and feel the effect you have on another person, you are concerned for the pain you’ve caused them and you have empathy and concern for them. Unlike guilt, this is fully inclusive of them. The combination of your sensitivity to their hurt and your empathy for them will likely bring forward a completely different action from within you of showing them kindness, concern and support.
Just feeling empathy for the other person changes you at the deeper level of your own pain that causes harmful actions. Feeling guilty confirms that you are this way and can’t be any other way, keeping you caught up in ‘all about me’.
The deeper softer absence of judgement inherent in empathy (notice the difference between guilt’s harsh criticism and empathy’s softness) means that when you harm another and feel guilty, you’re actually harming yourself. You cannot end harm to another with harm to yourself. You have to end the harm inside and outside.
By feeling that softer care and empathy, this removes the deeper driving force of your pain that causes insensitive and harmful actions. You become sensitive to where harmful actions originate, which promotes healing, while staying primarily focused on your concern for that person and the harm caused. Empathy transforms us at the origin of the problem, ensuring an end to that particular harm. Guilt is a thought-induced punishment, whereas empathy is a feeling and connection with the hurt caused, bringing greater understanding of yourself, the other person, and the significance of the action. Ultimately this regaining of sensitivity is the only true self-correction, not the self-attack and self-concern of guilt.
You may be overthinking this. Self-love to improve, as opposed to calling yourself stupid out of anger, are actually opposites of one another. You only have self-love to improve out of criticism of the way you are, which is in place to deal with the anger at yourself for not being the way you should be. This superficial attempt at change is unnecessary, harmful and confusing. Self-love doesn’t help us develop what we need to develop, and anger doesn’t help us stop what we’re doing.
To develop what we need to develop is not improving who we are; it’s just what happens throughout our life.
We can learn from our parents to stop soiling our nappy because it’s natural for a baby to soil its nappy and for an older child not to. That does not mean that the older child is an improvement on the baby – it’s just a natural process of growing up. To suggest that the older child is an improvement is saying that the baby is wrong for being the way it is. Essentially, there is nothing wrong with the way we are; we need to look deeper into the way we are, however we are, in order to understand the significance of the way we are at that point in life.
If we have been harmed or traumatised in our life, we will have harmful actions come out of that. The significance is to bring us back to the harmful driving forces of our trauma. Now being angry with that or loving that are both superficial and disconnected from the trauma; they are opposites. We feel the need to love ourselves only because we are harmful to ourselves and feel the need to be loved.
To accept ourselves as we are is not some spiritual or psychological achievement; it’s an admission to the facts of life and how we are. Without the addition of loving or hating it, but just admitting the fact of how we are and feeling the driving force within us behind harmful actions, we are now attending to the driving force of our own hurt and pain which does not require judgement or anger, nor does it require our efforts to change it. Our pain simply needs to be felt as it is, to be processed and heal within us. Loving it or hating it is irrelevant; both of these feelings will occur during the processing of any pain but are not important. The pain is, and feeling it to its end, simply because it is a fact, and that is our need.
This is not about accepting our non-acceptance. Acceptance is a new-age concept; what happens when we don’t accept something and we impose the ideas of acceptance on it, we have created another form of suppression and we’re lying to ourselves. Only by feeling both what we accept and, more importantly, that which we don’t accept, and the feeling of our non-acceptance of it with the process of that which we are not accepting in ourselves, are obviously difficult feelings to be with. But that is the point. We have to be with the fact of the difficult feelings simply because they are a part of what it is to be us, and feeling the pain or disturbance of them, both in acceptance or non-acceptance, is what will heal us.
That’s very well put. I would only add, there will be times when you will simply have to allow any mental/emotional/spiritual noise to SEEM to be there, as it is a part of what is purging from your body. Harmful pain as it is firstly happening to us (on the way in) is suffered. Once the damage is done there is still pain, but this pain is not indicating harm happening now. This pain is indicating the healing phase of pain. ‘Healing pain’ is not in itself suffering, but is a relief to finally feel the purely felt pain as it is, without the exaggeration of our reactionary fears of it. (see the chapter in our undo app titled “the significance of pain”)
However, the remaining felt memory of initial harm, held in the body, holds our fears of pain and that drives our automatic mental reaction and resistance to pain. That reaction or felt resistances turn/change the ‘relief’ of feeling pain into the ‘suffering’ of pain. So suffering is this initial mix of our healing pain and our unconscious unresolved, felt or mental reaction to pain.
This mix has been clogging up our body and determining our suffering and confusion for a long time. If you can allow these, be with these, understanding these are simply a purge of what you the body has finished with, and even expect distress as these release and purge, from wherever these are stuck inside the body of you/us, you will process both your long-term resistances to pain and the pain itself. That’s the correct approach to healing your mental and physical pain which enables the suffering of pain to drop away as it heals.
Beware of giving any thoughts, reactions or fear of pain attention or importance. Don’t take these too seriously. They are what’s purging from and leaving your system as you meditate and heal.
Mental hallucinations and confusions about ourselves and the world cause us to experience ourselves or the world according to those hallucinations, beliefs, biases, and unresolved personal pain. Remember, all thoughts are images. Images are only images which aren’t really there, are they? The more you ignore the CONTENT of these images, the less you will be affected or influenced by these. Then as your meditation continues to mature over time, you will come to realise that there is only importance in the immediate felt experience of bodily sensations.
The depth of your comment suggests you are already studying my meditation app Undo.
If not, you will get heaps from that. It’s ONLY available on our website…undo natural meditation…enjoy.
As long as you try to resolve distress, you will keep distress going. Eventually you will discover there is no solution. There is no solution because there is nothing wrong with stress. Stress is an alert, felt naturally in your body, to warn you of something wrong, either outside or inside, which you are overlooking, and which needs your attention. That you are overlooking or ignoring something is the problem, not the ‘stress alert’ to that, felt in your body. Stress is not something to resolve, your mental reaction to it is. That reaction is thinking. And that thinking turns natural stress alerts into exaggerated mentalised distress.
When you discover there is no solution, and why you shouldn’t have one, you stop trying to resolve stress and you listen to it, are guided by it. Which means, you stop thinking about distress, stop trying to fix or change it through thinking. Then you have only one option remaining or left to do. You have to return to the deeper feeling of stress inside your body, and without trying to resolve it, you just be it, feel it. Once you are truly feeling stress, you calm down into the felt sense of it, being guided by it to be alert to what is happening inside you, or out there in life, that you need to know about, to be safe, healthy, and harm-free. So stress as a body sensation is an alert. Your mental reaction to it is a misunderstanding of what stress really is for. This mental reaction is the distress itself. Come back to the stress felt in your body and live alerted by that for a while. MZ
Accepting the fact is on the mental level only. Beneath that lies the feeling level. If you try to connect that mental factual acceptance to your feelings of unfinished loss or grief, you may discover a felt resistance to the fact is still there.
Until you have felt the deeper feelings of loss to their end, your acceptance of the fact of lost loved ones is incomplete and your grief is not yet at an end.
We cannot get over and move on from the effects of life on the purely mental level. That’s too shallow. Healing a loss requires firstly our mental recognition of a fact, then that is followed by the way “the finality of that fact” leaves us feeling.
The feeling of grief is a sensation, mostly in our chest and lungs.
Whenever you find yourself “thinking about whoever you have lost,” and therefore become mentally tormented by their absence, it is important to feel deeper into these sensations in your lungs and chest area, where your felt memory of them remains in you.
Whenever you are thinking about them, “these thoughts” are caused or driven by the underlying and unresolved loss you still feel. That loss is felt in your body, mostly in your chest, lungs, and throat area. Feeling this as it is in there will enable the grieving processing of the feelings you still suffer.
Whenever you go back into thinking about who you have lost, remember to feel deeper into these feelings to heal them.
Thinking about them is a type of avoidance from what you need to be feeling but don’t want to feel. You don’t mean to do this but most people don’t realise these two levels of grief… the first more superficial stage of mental recognition of the finality of the fact, and the second deeper healing part, of feeling your resistance to the fact to its end.
Once you heal from grief, you can still think about these people, but the felt content of loss and loneliness is replaced with a renewed sense of just being you again, and so it doesn’t distress you that they are gone. Regaining your own full sense of yourself is needed to live out a new life without them, and what I have said here is how you can do this.
Loneliness is wanting others you can’t have which hurts, whilst aloneness is being filled with only yourself again. That fullness is a fulfilment that is not dependent on others to complete you, and that results from fully healing from loss, and recovering that full experience of yourself without them. You can download my meditation app and work your way through that. That will give you directional support for this healing part of your life. It is exclusively on our website… undo natural meditation.
MZ
The active meditations 8 of Chapter 3 on FEELING in my app will be very helpful as a guided processing of all that grief. Download Undo to access a massive learning curve.
Apart from that… our time spent in close relations with others naturally makes our own body resonate with them as the person they are to us. So it’s like you can actually bring up the feeling of them in your own system whenever you think about them. This feeling of them is also our knowing them deeply and intimately. It’s like they become a part of what it is or feels like to be ourselves. When you lose someone, the GRIEVING PROCESS is one of feeling their remaining remembered presence existing throughout and mingled with your own existence as the living feeling body.
You need to feel their presence (or your felt memory of them) as it remains for now inside you. Feeling that will gradually purge the feel of them (which is just the vibration of your own cells having resonated with them for some time) from you, leaving you more and more relieved. Eventually, you will return to just being yourself, without their felt presence within you. This is what grief is. Their felt presence is literally purging, dying within you so you may feel like something is dying inside for a while. But it will end with you being entirely yourself again.
A very important thing is to ACCEPT THE FACT that they are no longer alive. They are gone. Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, they are no longer in your life. They are gone and you are without them. Any spiritual beliefs of reincarnation etc. will only hinder and disconnect you from the feeling of your loss, so don’t buy into that at all. Stay with your pain but study the chapter in my app on PAIN to show you the right way to process and heal your pain.
One other thing is whoever has died, if they have harmed you in any way or drawn you into their pain during your time together, they will be the ones (ironically) that are the hardest to let go of. Come back to the fact of ‘they are not here’ and I am alone with the pain they caused me. Even if you don’t know they have caused you pain, the ones you are most distressed over and can’t easily let go of is generally because of there being deeper… even unknown pain or hurt from them. You will know this in how distressed and unresolved you feel in their dying.
You can also have one-to-one sessions online with me. Contact my staff for an appointment via my webpage… [quietretreat.co] I am extremely good at helping people heal such things.
The love you mentioned losing touch with is NOT INCORRECT. That has to fall away to get to truer, deeper feeling important for you to have in there. But make sure the rage, anxiety, anger etc. is allowed at a feeling of what has remained unresolved for years, or it may just be your reaction to a natural occurrence in life. You don’t really need them, you really need to be here for you, but you may need some help with that… hope to speak with you soon.
Inherent within the way you were trained to please others in your upbringing is the underlying worry and concern of offending them. Both of these attitudes or behaviours will be causing you to discount or overlook yourself, and preventing you from presenting what is true about you at the times you need to. This creates an imbalance in relationships with other people where you’re unable to express your needs and have them respond to them. Recognise that other people’s reactions to your behaviours are actually based on their expectations of you, not on your behaviours. Therefore, being straightforward or honest, saying what YOU really have to say rather than putting pleasing others first, is quite a challenge to your conditioning or training and to the relationships you have with people who also have this expectation of you. However, to break down or reduce their dependency, which they have on your pleasing them, and on that determining how they then ‘feel and respond’ to you, is very important. In time this will establish a more honest relationship with less emotional dependency on one another.
The other thing to understand is that other people’s expectations on how you should behave is a form of manipulation of you, not a caring of you, but more of a demand on you to make them happy. When you don’t, this change in you being more honest can challenge and annoy them at first.
But if you don’t continue to conform to their demands or expectations, you are literally giving them a chance to grow; you’re putting them back on the driving forces of selfishness in them that’s expecting you to do that. So although it may be quite challenging and scary, in the longer run it’ll be freeing for everyone involved. These relationships will improve because of your being true to yourself rather than inevitably deteriorating.
When you say “it feels like someone there trying to make sure we can’t”, I think you mean someone inside of her that is getting in the way. If you mean something like this, then it’s very necessary to talk to her for sure. If she seems defensive, start with saying how you want to help her and understand her better. That talking about what is troubling you about her is because you love her, not because you don’t like her. You just want to be able to talk more about where she feels bad in herself or unconfident or what she doesn’t like in herself.
HOPE I’M ON TRACK HERE
When she gets to the point where she doesn’t want to keep talking, ask her if the talking is making her feel bad, wrong or scared in any way.
Ask her to feel that in her body without judging that, just getting in touch with that. Then you try to encourage her to stay with the pain or distress in that whilst you are right there being there for her.
Even try to just hold her when she gets upset.
This is a lot to ask of you, but if she can get to feel her underlying sadness or pain or insecure feelings, you can tell her this will help her feel relief from these.
I would encourage you both to use my meditation and healing app to help you understand how to do this together.
Good luck
It would be good if you can heal this without surgery. 12 hours is a long time. If you end up in surgery I can guide you through the healing of any effects of this. However… Shame is typically held in our mid back. It can also be held locally, in the area of your body you feel any embarrassment or shame about. Even the more obvious, of feeling embarrassed or shame to show your face, will be part of your healing, to just feel the truth of feeling this way. Feeling overwhelmed… you don’t need to push it, meaning, sitting with what you are in touch with as resistance or pain, as you said, is the correct approach and is a part of this healing. Sit as much as you can or want to. As you progress and feel more of your resistance to this, you may find yourself putting off meditation/sitting still. This may be in the form of little distractions, which you may not realise, is the deeper underlying pain activating, under the surface of what you are usually aware of. If this starts to occur you can just stick to a scheduled time for sitting still with yourself.
As you heal more of your resistance to this, so you will be less overwhelmed when you feel into the shame etc. This is because your resistance is partly made up of your underlying fears and unknown associations to the core pain, and so as all this processes through feeling it, you will be more able to feel the core pain as it is, without the overwhelming effects of these felt reactions, exaggerating that core pain. So both the unknown content of your resistance and the core pain itself, is important for your healing. Your feelings of shame I expect, have been induced by others’ treatment of you initially, which you may not remember… and you have continued to feel this way for no particular reason of your own doings. So when feeling the shame or other pain, remember it’s coming out of you, both as the ailments on your face and as such deeper feelings coming out of your body. Be careful not to find reason in your life now to feel shame etc., and to remain kindly receptive to shameful feelings without judging yourself or doubting yourself for feeling this way. Let me know how you go. Sorry for such a late response. MZ
Struggling to speak up, set boundaries, fear of rejection all indicate trauma. Trauma causes dissociation from your sense of yourself in and as the body. The ability to ‘feel’ is ‘only’ in the body, (e.g. Thinking the word sad is not the same as feeling sad…the word is mental the feeling is physical). Overthinking is driven by underlying disturbance held in your body as a way to ‘not feel it’. Therefore being with (feeling) any uncomfortable sensation will gradually resolve that driving force behind your thinking.
Distraction from what and how you feel, and from sensations of your body, is what weakens our ‘sense’ of self. The way to recover a strong sense of self, is by staying with the feelings of yourself, already existing as the felt sense of you, as the body.
Whenever thinking troubles you, don’t worry about your thinking or its content. Just feel any underlying disturbance, feeling or any sensation in your body and give that sensation time to sort itself out. Being with any uncomfortable sensation will gradually resolve that, which is the driving force behind your thinking. Being with any and every sensation in the body of you, will strengthen your real sense of self. This approach will both heal the felt disturbance driving your thinking, and as it does, will simultaneously strengthen your sense of self. As this strengthens your ability to feel deeper into yourself will increase. Continuing this same approach then enables any suppression of felt trauma to begin healing also. YouTube talks on trauma will be up soon.
No, it’s not your fault. For all of us, it’s our own unresolved, often unknown conditions or past experiences or beliefs or fears or many other biases that are only known to us when we are triggered into reacting to someone or something in our life now.
Reactions in us, when triggered, begin as a felt disturbance, then become our reactionary thinking or annoyance with the other person. When we don’t understand how this happens and why it happens, we usually end up in conflict with ourselves or with others.
It is not wrong that you react. It’s normal. It’s just easier when you understand that often your problem with another begins with a problem with how you already are inside yourself.
In close relationships we push each other into deeper feelings than other distant relationships can. So we are pushed to feel what’s inside which we have ignored because we don’t like the feeling of it. That is the deeper feeling of a part of ourselves. It’s not really caused by your husband but it is brought to life by him.
The more you understand this internal process, the more power you will discover you have over how others or the world out there affects you.
If you could download my meditation app, go to the chapter on ‘reactions’ and listen to or read through that. It’s too much to explain here. So please do this one thing for yourself and I guarantee your relationships will make much more sense to you.
Thank you for the compliment!
Naturally, we are annoyed or disturbed with ourselves when we, for example, postpone things and create unpleasant circumstances in our lives. Correcting the mechanical problem by doing our best not to postpone things (i.e., not miss schedules and deadlines) is perfectly fine to do; however, this tends to be a never-ending battle. What we’re missing here is the driving force of the feeling that we don’t understand — that which causes us to postpone or do whatever it is we wish to do. The driving force of these misunderstood feelings will tend to continue no matter how many times we try to correct our behaviour on the mechanical level. It’s the consequences of these feelings that annoy us, and that we therefore wish to do something about; however, that’s only the surface level or the outcome of the deeper underlying cause. The deeper underlying cause is that misunderstood feeling that overcomes or overwhelms us, determining our unwanted actions.
In order to get to the bottom of those feelings and for those feelings that drive us to come to an end, it is important to accept and feel them as they are out of an interest to understand them. For this approach, it is important to understand that just because you know something has to change, the level on which it is a problem (i.e., your behaviours) is not the level on which it changes. It needs to change on the level of what is driving that behaviour, which is a feeling that you generally do not understand other than in how it feels and how it makes you act — but you do not understand why it makes you act that way; you do not understand the feeling itself.
This is the inevitable problem that we all face when trying to change something on the surface level, which is our behaviours: we discover no matter how often we try or, in fact, do change them, we end up re-enacting those behaviours again because we haven’t resolved the underlying urge or feeling causing them. So essentially, there is nothing we can do directly about the behaviour; we need to go deeper into the feeling that drives the behaviour, which means we need to experience that feeling in ourselves as it actually is. This means we cannot try to get rid of it because clearly all that happens is you suppress it, and again you find yourself being driven by that feeling to perform those same behaviours. So what do we do?
It’s essential to change our approach from that of trying to change the way we are, on either the mechanical level of behaviour or the deeper level of the feeling driving that. Anything we do to change that won’t work in the long run. So when you feel that urge to act out a behaviour, if you stop yourself from acting on that behaviour even for a few minutes and notice the disturbance inside of you that is driving it when you don’t act out that behaviour, this tends to put you in touch with the urge to do so. Each time you stay with the urge to perform the behaviour without acting on it, this will enable the urge you feel to burn out. Over time that urge will completely come to an end. Once that urge is no longer there to drive the unwanted behaviours, your behaviours will naturally change.
This is essentially what accepting yourself as you are really means; it doesn’t mean you like it, it simply means that we realise that there’s nothing we can do to change it because anything that we try to do will only suppress the driving urge or modify the behaviour so that same behaviour will return later on. For something to really change – that means to process and heal within us – we need to get in touch with the feeling of that as it is, regardless of whether we like it or not.
i’d encourage you to download my meditation app Undo, so that you can take this further and deeper for yourself.
Bad breath can be a result of unresolved anger.
The deeper disturbance you feel in your body, mostly through your throat, chest, and stomach, is often composed of anger. This anger may be triggered by external factors, but it’s more likely caused by internal issues you’re not aware of. This can disrupt your body’s chemistry, particularly in your gut, leading to sensations that you can feel from your gut through your chest and the back of your throat, resulting in bad breath.
Additionally, consider the embarrassment or other feelings that your bad breath might cause. Ask yourself if these feelings reflect how you truly feel about yourself on a deeper level.
To begin resolving this issue, instead of dwelling on or discussing things that upset you, try to explore the deeper feelings that these external upsets are causing in these physical areas. For guidance on this process, you can refer to the chapter on ‘Reactions’ within my app. This information will help you understand and resolve these issues.
Let me know if you have any further questions.
Copying ‘mechanical abilities’ such as music, art, or being taught to speak a language or run better is all about what we ‘do’. In fact, copying mechanical abilities is helpful, and using thought for purely mechanical purposes is exactly what thought is for and, in fact, is all it CAN do. But this is not about what we ‘are.’ We ADD to ourselves what we learn to do, but we have to DISCOVER from within ourselves who or what we authentically are.
So there is no harm in adding mechanical practical abilities. But there is harm in indoctrinating ourselves with others’ beliefs or ideas on who we should be, on how we should behave, or what we should think.
There is harm in losing yourself in others’ opinions and beliefs. We really need to find our own sense of self. There are two layers here: the thinking (mechanical) life which you are referring to, and the deeper organic sense of self that is only known inside the feeling living body of you. You cannot find that deeper sense by imitating others because they are not you. Only you are you and you can only find that YOU beneath the influence of others, not under their influence. But you need to come back into your body in order to begin to understand the deeper feeling of what being uniquely you really is. If you want to take this understanding further, you can download my app, which will take you on this journey into what you really are beneath all the influences of others.
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