Turning Inside Out
Photo by Klaus Nielsen
One’s True Nature
Where am I experiencing this moment from? From my head and the thoughts it is thinking? From my heart and the emotions that it is feeling? From my body and the sensations that I’m aware of? Or from the one inch below the navel, the seat of my soul. This area has many names one being Hara in Japanese, meaning “ones true nature.” This is also called the Dantien in martial arts and Chinese medicine, meaning the “root of the tree of life.”
Body, mind, emotions
When I focus on the body, I feel sensations like hunger, heat, cold, discomfort and it prompts me to do something to tend to the body’s needs.
When I focus on the mind, I am listening to a stream of thoughts, ideating, planning, organizing, orchestrating. It is a useful servant but an incessant and unsatisfying master.
When I focus on the emotions within me, I feel a variety of feelings often at odds with one another. Excitement about new possibilities and anxiety about doing something different. Feeling the dissonance from thinking and understanding something and then actually bringing that into manifestation. Frustration with the distraction that comes up at mis-prioritizing and squandering time on insignificant things. Yet the heart level of being seems to hold key information needed to guide me. It is as if the world of the external and the world of the internal meet in this arena of the heart. The physical and mental create perceptions, and the heart feels the emotions of them. Yet the deeper Source of our being is beneath these clouds of emotion. The deeper knowing holds understanding of what it is we are to be doing, focusing on, spending our earthly time upon. It is through surrendering the physical, mental and emotional that we can go deeper into our inner knowing and awareness.
Deep, Inner Knowing
When I focus on the Hara, to my center of my belly, an entirely new experience arises within. What often happens when I focus here is a feeling of energy coming up from the base of the core of my body and connecting to the belly. It is a warm and welcomed feeling. It literally pulls me forward into drawing it up into this body, like a straw drawing up delightful energy within. It is very real. It is peaceful and yet enlivening. If allowed, the energy can move up into my heart and bring a greater sense of joy, love and peace. This deeper focus from within seems to reverse the flow of life, so instead of moving from the outer awareness, it is now moving from an inner centered source that is moving up and through this body. If allowed this energy becomes a well-spring moving through this body, heart and mind.
Moving from Outside-In to Inside-Out
This must be the shift of the energetic flow that is encoded within the second half of St. Francis of Assisi prayer.
Prayer of Saint Francis
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
The prayer seems to say, let all that is divine work its way up into me and then flow forth through me. May I turn my attention away from seeking satisfaction from the world around me, and allow this inner energy of aliveness to fill me to the point of overflowing. Let there be a shift from believing that the external will bring internal satisfaction—to allowing my inner Source of aliveness to fill and flow forth through me. May the fullness of this aliveness fill my heart and flow forth in the energy of love, kindness, forgiveness, hope, joy and more. May my mind be stilled and in service to this energy flowing up and into this body so that my being is life-giving to another.
My whole way of existing on this planet is moving away from an external-to-internal way of being, and moving toward an internal-fulfilling-aliveness-flowing-up-and-through into the world way of being.
I am truly being turned inside out.
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