Presence, Reflection, Acknowledgement & Acceptance

Presence, Reflection, Acknowledgement & Acceptance

by | Jan 31, 2019 | Articles

Many of us lacked an accepting, acknowledging and attuned presence in our early upbringing.

I call this this type of experience, “benign neglect” and it is incredibly common place in the majority of clients that I see and it leaves invisible scars that show up later in life as being out of sorts, disassociated, depressed, ill and getting trapped in self defeating and relational trauma loops.

It can lead to self loathing, emptiness and addictions as we desperately seek to fill this void handed down to us.

Yet it is in the main intangible and goes below the radar of what causes most people to go from one relationship / healing modality to another and still not get to the roots of what plagues them because a training in this type of space holding is rare and subtle.

More often than not these roots go back generations or past lives and it takes a specialist space holder to pull these frequencies and patterns out without getting enmeshed. I am so grateful to my gestalt psychotherapy training for imbueing me with this clarity and my Other trainings with Chung Fu and Mas Sajady that have deepened and held me with so much grace and awareness.

This form of absence of parental presence tends to cause untold damage as the developing child within us can’t sense its own innate beauty and wholeness in its imperfections and emotional loss and instead feels shame, lack, inferiority and dis-ease where it should have developed an embodied sense of goodness, emotions and healthy knowing of boundaries of self and other.

For this self honouring builds within us a healthy physical container in which we can house and connect with Source and feel that brilliance that is the essence of divinity itself that resides within us all.

We all need this level of clean reflection to see what is holding us back that has become so habituated and yet is somehow not actually “us”.

In my radio show and post last week I discuss this phenomenon known as an insufficient narcissistic supply – check out the passage below that absolutely nails what we all need and melt back into your soul.

“There is a primordial longing wired into us as infants to be seen, for our experience to be held, mirrored, and validated by another. In an environment of embodied attunement, we are able to rest in the mystery of being. We can explore unstructured states of consciousness and enter courageously into the dark and into the light. In this sense, love is an alive field of presence in which experience can unfold into greater levels of integration and cohesion.

From this perspective, “I love you” = “I allow you.” I allow you to have your own experience, to organize and make meaning of the world in the way that you do, and I will surround you with presence and with warmth even if I do not understand you. Even if by being yourself I am triggered with surges of previously unmet vulnerability and unmetabolized feeling, I allow you to be what you are. While I will not allow you to abuse me or to act violently or break the agreements and boundaries we have established, I will allow your inner experience to be what it is. While I may turn from you in the external world, I will not turn my heart off. Because I love you.

Many have heard of the term ‘holding environment,’ introduced by the great British analyst Donald Winnicott, to describe this field of presence. We can see that any good holding environment is made up of the essential qualities of contact and space. Through making close, embodied contact with another as they are – and by offering an attuned home in which their experience can unfold – we become vehicles of love in action. We care so much and are willing to take the risk of coming so close. We enter into intimate contact with another and their experience as it is, but not so close that we lose perspective and become emotionally fused with it. In this sacred middle territory we offer the gift of our attuned presence.

Simultaneously, we infuse the other with the sacred offering of pure space. For space is our true nature. By resting in the organic space of being, we seed them with cosmic trust that their experience is valid, that we do not need them to be different, to change, to become ‘awakened,’ to be in a ‘high vibration,’ or to ‘heal’ in order for us to love them. We will no longer place the burden upon them to take care of our unlived lives and unmet emotions for us, and we will honor their unique process and journey, by being there for them if (and only if) we are needed.

While not talked about as much, we can provide this same contact and space to ourselves. In any here and now moment, we can discover that our nature as awareness itself is in fact the ultimate holding environment. While as an infant we depended upon another to provide this environment for us, in which we could rest in primordial beingness, it is actually here at all times. While we deeply appreciate the ways in which the ‘other’ can remind us of this, it is here now, pouring out of the unseen and soaking into every cell and strand of our DNA. With eyes and a heart wide open… just look and you will feel it surrounding you… right now.

While we may not always understand our experience – and while it may never conform to our ideas, hopes, and dreams about the life we were ‘meant to live’ – we can come to trust that it is unfolding according to a unique blueprint which is emerging out of the unseen hand of love.”

quote from Matt Liccata’s Facebook writings

An Ode To Anger

An Ode To Anger

by | Jan 29, 2019 | Articles, Uncategorized

You are beauty and pragmatism personified – fire and brimstone in free flow – primal life force is unleashed when you show.

So blessed are we who dare to know you – to feel you course through our veins with wild abandon.

Yet so many supress, bury, constrict and constrain you.

Throttling the life force out of themselves in the process. A habit so embedded, most rarely notice you. They are exhausted. Wrestling you takes its toll in silent daily woe.

Fearing to let you run free and unabated, they assume would leave a trail of ruin and devastation.

If only people realised you were the secret vigilante, a defender of personal boundaries and self sovreignity, the protector from predators who live in the shadows.

You are essential to survival – you warn of trickery, mindfuckery and deceit…you enable us to move away from danger and let us know when someone untrustworthy is afoot.

In intimacy, given the space…you reveal your deeper allies; grief, distress and upset. When held safely, you shed tears that cleanse and can be the harbinger of profound vulnerability and wisdom, that bond us deeply.

You are an enigma only known to the few.

When your fire is held and directed appropriately, your heat can warm the hearth of intimacy and provide deep succour to souls hungering for truth.

You contain clues to past hurts, betrayals and traumas that when expressed can release aeons of pain, illness and disassociation.

You are a messenger from the God within. You hold the charge of life inside you. Often coded, enshrouded in confusion, you remain a mystery.

Yet so quick are we to misunderstand, villify and ostracise you.

There is so much desire to minimise you and malign you – mock you – belittle you – ‘therap’ you – denigrate you – negate you – spiritualise you – project all sorts of crap on to you.

You are so often deemed as negative by new agers and psychobabblers – why does everyone try and rid themselves of you – bury you – desensitise and medicate themselves until they can’t feel you.

You always appear with a purpose on purpose – a messenger of the soul on fire – intimately connecting us to our vitality, libido and well-being.

You are the key that often opens the dungeons where we have long abandoned our inner children, teaching us of our (ancestral) patterns of self-compromise, disempowerment, neglect, family shame and unfinished business.

So often the victim of blame, gaslighting and neglect, you have been terribly treated and misused.

You can deliver thunderbolts of truth that ‘out’ those with false and disingenuine agendas.

You are rarely welcome.

You don’t care because you don’t give a shit about status, status quo or consensus when your inner sanctuary is being intruded upon.

You seek justice. Truth. Equality. Respect. Healthy individuation.

Aho anger. Now it is time to honour and welcome you.

David Stone 29.01.19  

The New Age Empathy Trap

The New Age Empathy Trap

by | Jan 19, 2019 | Articles

There is a bogus new age notion that you can’t feel other people’s feelings. There is talk that there’s no such thing as projection and that everything you sense is yours ~ a reflection of you and your unconscious emerging. So if you are in pain. It’s always yours. If you are angry, feeling grief, it can never be someone else’s who you’ve picked up on and are holding…

B U L L S H I T

This is another form of gaslighting, of (new age) people taking half baked truths, and making them apply to their popular psychology teachings, modalities and completely dismissing the mechanics of the universe.

I trained as a gestalt psychotherapist, before my psychic, soul healing and quantum embodiment trainings. I studied, projection, transference, counter-transference, introjects, confluence and so on. All the ways, emotions become unclear between two people or intrapsychically within oneself and one’s own sense of self.

Field theory is a psychological theory (more precisely: Topological and vector psychology) which examines patterns of interaction between the individual and the total field, or environment. The concept first made its appearance in psychology with roots to the holistic perspective of Gestalt theories through the gestalt psychologist Kirt Lewin.

In a nutshell – we supress many of our feelings and we are also born into environments where much information is supressed through the generations and we are born with it in our DNA, we absorb it in vitro or in early childhood and we assume this to be us and our way of life.

So it’s difficult to actually pinpoint when something is ours, and when we project and when we have absorbed someone else’s stuff and are processing this.

Many people are acutely empathic and absorbant and pick up on these energies around others and to some extent this is how psychics work, feeling these energies and discarnate beings on the other side of the veil.

Some of us will inadvertently absorb another’s pain, grief or anger. We may or may not spot this and help the other to express or emote it and it clears and everyone feels better.

At other times, we become anchors for others to feel or worse still we are dumping grounds where they come, wipe their feet on the door mat, leave their muck and depart lighter while we take the brunt and feel heavier.

We must take responsibility too for any rescuing, martyrdom and misunderstanding around healing and boundaries in these scenarios too.

A narcissistic way of seeing this would be to point the finger in these situations and say it is ALL the other’s stuff…(gaslighting) this is because a narcissist has to some extent, either in totality (clinical definition) or partially cut themselves off from their authentic self and their inner world where their pain hides.

Their authentic self actually merges into the field where other more receptive people absorb and feel it because they too don’t have a defined sense of self either.

The narcissist can act out their fantasy of who they are, while their true inner world goes elsewhere with in the field. A narcissist however needs a container and a feed to sustain themselves because they have cut themselves off from their own source…their emotions.

So they will replace this externally and find an absorbant person with poor discernment and charm them or worse still, teach them new age concepts, that what they are feeling is theirs. In this way, the narcissist has a host who they can predate upon. Firstly to absorb their gunk, secondly to feed off the life force of the ‘victim’.

The ‘victim’ gains a sense of purpose from and also inadvertently feeds upon the emotions in the field (not their own), because ironically they have also been buried under misconceptions of their true identity, their true feelings and are not able to differentiate between the two.

They are often codependent needing to support others or absorb their feelings to feel useful and needed. This is also the faulty imprint for romantic relationships once the passion has worn off a little and these patterns emerge.

Yet neither is actually to blame. Because it comes down to physics. We have one person who’s sense of identity comes from taking on another’s stuff and another who’s identity comes from giving their stuff to another. So two sides of the same coin, in effect. Victim and perpetrator.

Not quite symbiotic though as the narcissist tends to suck the victim dry, so more parasitic, but with some mutual benefits in the earlier parts, or with people with mild narcissistic tendencies, these things can work quite well together in a mergy co-dependent sort of way where there’s mutual dysfunction.

The difference with a narcissist is that they push their stuff on to the field. You may sense it, but often can’t stop yourself from acting it out. Then they tell you – you are the angry, emotional, teary one, and make you wrong for it. This is the crazy making part of it all. This is the essence of gaslighting.

You end up emoting another’s feelings, then confuse this as you, act it out, try and give it back and then get condemned as the crazy one.

Narcissists thrive on a merged and ill defined field with poor interpersonal boundaries – many people who are traumatised have these qualities and are often found in the new age where tribe vibe feel good tendencies create the perfect breeding ground for this dynamic to flourish.

The perfect way to counter this is to start to define yourself. Get to know your breathing patterns especially under stress and triggers as well as tracking the physical edges and boundaries of your body during meditation, ritual and group process. This way, you begin to own yourself, your personal energy field, your body and take responsibility for your cocreations in each given moment.

If you’d like to discuss clearing these patterns in more detail get in touch

www.embodiedsoulawakening.com

Self Love Is An Inside Job

Self Love Is An Inside Job

by | Sep 15, 2018 | Articles

Self Love Is An Inside Job

Seeking “love” and “being loved” by another can be a deceptive drug.

Whether in intimacy, friendships, families or even training/skills groups etc – the desire to connect and belong can be so alluring that it overrides our wisdom to know what is healthy, natural and even destructive for ourselves.

By always coming back to ourself for this ultimate love, we maintain our equilibrium through the practices of making love an inside job.

It ALWAYS starts with us first and travels out through clear agreements, boundaries and honouring oneself and another.

We can develop strong muscles to draw away from those situations which just don’t feed us or which do but at a COST and move instead towards others that reflect these inner practices of self loving.

A crisis point can arise where the core wound starts to get stimulated in this process and there is an interim period of noticing the core wound is not going to kill us and we can choose to breathe through it and bring self love in instead of our delusion of seeking love outside of ourselves.

This tendency sometimes originates from a time when we split off from our true connection to Source / Creator / Divine Love and created a separate identity or a mask to protect our fragile ego structure from a shocking event or trauma.

As we transform relationships and situations by being willing to actualise these potent and poky energies as they rise up, we start to see each situation more clearly for what it is.

We can then equip ourselves with the power of conscious choice.

We may share our vulnerability or speak our truth or set clearer boundaries and see if the other can meet us in our basic requirements and we in theirs.

This starts to become the norm after a while and fades into the background eventually as we clear past patterns and build a new momentum towards healthy relationships where old dysfunctional patterns no longer persist.

Depending on the extent of false selves, ancestral/family distortions and self deceptions that have been layered down, we can progressively burn off all these deposits by literally staying present and embracing our breath, bodies and bones.

As we fully embody and arrive in the life we are living and bring this  purifying presence and conscious choice back into everything that unfolds, the dramas die down, stability forms and a new life emerges ~ usually when we least expect it!

www.embodiedsoulawakening.com

Truly, Madly, Deeply

Truly, Madly, Deeply

by | Sep 11, 2018 | Articles

Can you truly, madly, deeply be there for yourself, when noone else can…? Are you ready to take up the mantle of ‘keeper and guardian’ of the flame of your original innocence (inner~sense)?

Of late, I have witnessed several of my clients as well as my own experience of this growing realisation that, ultimately, we are the ones who must be there for ourselves, when all else falls away.

There will always comes a time, when we feel let down, abandoned or betrayed by another’s actions, and we are left to our own devices.

Sitting in this profound place of ‘aloneness’, and meeting whatever pain, hurt and anguish shows up, literally builds our resilience to enter these places within that rage like forrest fires

Rather than spilling this burning energy onto another, blaming them for having caused it, there comes a time, when we dare to step closer to the epicentre of our suffering and instead turn inwards and confront it.

This literally triggers a profound purging process.

In meeting head on, the full wrath of our deepest longing ~ a miracle begins to spread throughout our entire being.

The masks, manipulative acts and false ego structures all of which have protected us from our core wounds, start to melt in the intense heat within.

Some we were born into, others we developed, nonetheless, all must go, as these fires rip through us, leaving no place unsinged.

The idealisation that another can give us those things we didn’t receive as children also dissolves back from where it came.

That which is true, eternal and free remains incombustible. All that is false and fake drops away.

As we burn off all the layers of toxic unconsciousness, co-dependency and victimhood, the more revitalised we become.

Our fierce and primal innocence emerges intact from these wild fires of our once fettered souls.

Ironically, we have spent entire life times seeking succour outside ourselves, only to find this ally, we always sought, was always right here within.

Where wild infernos once laid waste to entire landscapes, a sacred flame now burns gently in the sanctuary of our heart.

This passion, now harnessed, feeds our soul, accompanies our inner child and guides us on our way home.

David Stone 17.01.18

DON’T BE TOO F%$KING NICE

DON’T BE TOO F%$KING NICE

by | Sep 3, 2018 | Articles

When you are too nice, saccharin sweet, smiley, conciliatory, overly diplomatic or kind, especially when the situation doesn’t warrant it, you erode your true self.

When you find yourself saying “let’s agree to differ” whether inwardly or outwardly, when in fact, you feel a simmering cauldron of emotions, you dishonour yourself.

When you don’t take the time to get clear, and say it how it really is for you, and you instead find yourself slipping into compromise by couching your anger or disappointment with a compliment, removing the passion and vigour of what you truly meant to say, then you are literally cutting off the oxygen that feeds the flames of the creative, sexual, life affirming furnace that burns at the centre of your soul.

When you are not truthful to yourself, you are in reality not being truthful with or honouring the other person.

In fact, you are not only disrespecting yourself, but you are disrespecting the other, because your failure to be real, 100% YOU and honest, speak up, be clear and open and even set clear boundaries denies you both a leap in consciousness!

This is because when you dare to include those edgy places in your relationships, you open a doorway inside of yourself to access the raw power of SOURCE that breathes life, not only into you but also into your relationships.

If you silence yourself or allow another to guilt trip or gaslight you into submission, to undermine your truth and your experience, then you will find yourself transported to Stepford, frozen behind the polite walls of conventional servitude, chained into a life of predictable responses and nicey nicey masks.

So next time you find yourself thinking “excuse me while I throw up because your attitude stinks” to maintain the peace or to be loveable, and you smile like a plastic angel, don’t be at all surprised if the outside world keeps kicking your ass and throwing spanners in your way to entice the REAL you to show up.

For each spanner is in fact, the benign workings of our loving Universe, as it attempts to coax us back into our POWER.

Each spanner is really a life line, an invitation for you to step into the awesome beauty of your raw UNFILTERED feelings, so that you can access your salacious humanity, which family/society has conveniently conditioned out of you as too much, bad, dirty, inappropriate or antisocial.

In these precious moments after feeling into, emoting (and sometimes expressing) annoyance, anger, upset, grief, disappointment etc you may come to experience the absolute liberation that becomes available with authenticity and honouring your inner Source.

We may get to see our projections clearer as we hear out the other, but one thing is for sure; we come to realise, that what we believed to be monstrous, disgusting and loathsome, either in ourselves or in the other, was only ever, the very essence of our/their inner beauty waiting to emerge, meet the light and transform.

David Stone – Embodied Soul Awakening

One of the laws of the ancient alchemists is – as within – so without – as above – so below. Hence Gandi said “be the change you want to see in the world” and so if you’re swallowing your indignation and smiling when you really need to lose it, get cross, express consternation or even set a boundary, then you really gotta stopping being too f%$king nice and start growling.

When I fail to set clear boundaries with others and even myself, a part of me dies a little each time.

As my inner child turns deeper and deeper inwards from such miniscule betrayals, my life force withdraws in equal increments until one day, I find myself apathetic, tired and drained of raison d’être.

As the vacuum of minor betrayals build, including insults from the world mirroring my own self betrayals, I can’t help but notice an arising grief, and a sense of self abandonment – my failure to safeguard my precious inner sanctum, casts a throwback to ancestral traumas of invasions long gone, temples ransacked by rampaging marauders, altars destroyed, homes burnt down, holy men slain, soldiers massacred and women folk raped.

So may be smiling like my life depended on it, goes back to some inevitable ancestral roots, where our DNA recorded the consequences of being overpowered by another’s or indeed our own stampeding and murderous rage.

Furthermore, when we are very small, and we don’t conform to our caregivers’ expectations or their mirroring, we face losing our Source of love…a fate worse than death to the infant’s mind…as we depended on our carers for nurturing, food, clothing, warmth, affection and housing. Each time, we were shamed, scolded or reprimanded or had love withdrawn for being difficult or unpleasant, it left an indelible scar of rejection on our psyches that if we dared to be true, we may have lost access to the love essential to our survival.

So when a part of you is not accepted or mirrored at such a young and tender age, especially if you are expressing indignation or fury when your boundaries are transgressed or you are neglected, then you are likely to have needed to suppress these feelings in order to remain in connection with your caregiver. To have felt such intense emotions, without the self and environmental support to process them would have been too overwhelming for your delicate emerging neural pathways. Instead, your nervous system has a default, to suppress these memories into the collective unconscious for safe keeping, rather than force you to experience annihilation.

So now we can see the roots of why we end up being too f%$king nice… being so helpless, defenseless and vulnerable, leads to inescapable feelings of obligation to another where we automatically begin to hide our less than smiley tendencies. It didn’t matter whether we had our boundaries transgressed, we had to stay connected in order to survive.

So next time you are too f%$king nice, notice just what it does to you…

Is it as if someone has thrown a bucket of cold water over you, extinguishing the flames of ardour that burnt bright.

Each little compromise, a paper cut, until a gaping wound appears with no apparent origin

So next time you are too f%$king nice

Don’t sit there and meditate it away

Don’t eat 2 bars of chocolate and munch it onto your hips

Don’t drink, gamble or wank it away

Don’t just whine to a friend how disempowered you feel and leave it at that

Don’t turn it all inwards on yourself and get depressed

PAUSE A MOMENT

Check in with your body, breathe and make contact with your life force and feel your pulse…

There it is…POUNDING AWAY…like a burglar fleeing the police

Like a bull charging the bullfighter, stampeding, eyes bulging, straining to pierce him fatally with horns lowered, ready for the kill…

Let that passionate beast rip through your awareness

Breathe

Let it flow into your arteries and bring life force back into your body

We’ve been taught to suppress our rage

SO STOP AND OBSERVE YOUR HABITUAL ACTIONS

Learn to be with your pain, and memories long subdued

Watch for the innocence that cries out for you to take action

Speak up

Say your truth

It may come out all clumsy, tearful or even like spitting barbs

So perhaps journal it out first if it’s too hot to handle

Rehearse it in the mirror

Record it on your phone

Scream it into a towel or a pillow

Tantrum like a 2 year old

And release the charge of generations long gone

Whose failure to discharge their own furies, left you an unexploded WW2 bomb

So it’s a time for an armistice

But first we must learn to get in touch with these memories and exorcise those demons safely

Only to find that they are in fact our most cherished orphans returned after a life time running with the wolves…

If you’d like to explore your wolf within, please message me here or email me at soul@soulpreneur.co.uk to arrange a free 30 minute skype consultation.

*Embodied Soul Awakening* Reclaim Your Inner Magic* Trauma, Ancestral Pattern & Time Line Clearing *Success Repatterning

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