Step 5:
Freedom from Personal Identity
The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination,
against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
—bell hooks
The inner psychospiritual freedom has already begun for you with the understanding of how your constricted self was constructed. Now the intention is to disengage from your self-absorbed personal identities so you can focus on your heart center energy frequency. This path to freedom allows you to embody, accept, and open to all the aspects of your separation without self-judgment. Now you will begin to disconnect from your separation. The objective on this path is to work your way back to the first energy frequency where you began in the Journey of Separation. Each stage has practices that will shift your perception so you can be present with reality as it actually is for you. The strange truth is that a practice doesn’t truly evoke reality because reality is always present in you; it never goes away. The nature of awareness is like space, but it is not physical space. This awareness of reality is what you will discover as you progress through the various steps I will lay out for you.
You will begin to change the reference point from constriction to expansion in which your daily experiences arise in you. Also, the research suggests the heart affects intelligence, physiology, emotions, and awareness. As you think of awareness, think of space as expansiveness because it is a container for birds, airplanes, bees, the wind, and so on to move, flow, and exist, but the awareness you can experience is beyond this physical concept. This space of awareness is like your breath. As long as you are aware of your breath, you are alive. This awareness of the expanded self is consistent, always there, nonbiased, unconditional, and non-conceptual. As I described earlier, this space awareness is the quality of consciousness in which you die. Hopefully, you can begin to understand the importance of shifting your perception to this different quality of expanded awareness. Remember, where you place your attention is who you are. As you place your attention on your expanded self, this deeper awareness will grow in you.
In this journey toward inner freedom we will explore how your heart generates a tremendous amount of power. The HeartMath Institute in California has done research and measurements of the electromagnetic energy that your heart can produce. They have also demonstrated how negative emotions alter your heart rhythm and effect your nervous system. What you will find is that your love for yourself and forgiveness is the core energy that removes feeling of being a victim and opens the door to inner freedom. The exercises and meditations of this chapter work with the power and grace of forgiveness as the key to releasing your constricted self.
The Power of Your Heart
To begin to experience this expanded self of awareness you will start by placing your attention on your heart. This is the first way to disengage the constricted self’s hold on you and to shift your perception to your expanded self. The heart generates an incredible amount of electromagnetic energy, five thousand times greater in strength than the electromagnetic field generated by the brain. It can be detected a number of feet away from your body in all directions and is an important carrier of information for you. The electromagnetic signals generated by the heart have the capacity to affect others around you. Over the years, scientists have experimented with different psychological and physiological measures of heart function. Heart rhythms reflect inner emotional states and stress. Focusing on the heart alters your emotional state via the neurological input from the heart to the brain.
The HeartMath Institute has the mission to create research, training, and technologies focused on bridging the connection between heart and mind and teaching people how to grow heart connections with others. The HeartMath Institute has conducted extensive research on heart-brain interactions, heart-rate variability and autonomic functions, emotional physiology and energetics, and a variety of other workplace and clinical research projects. The Institute has also conducted research on how the heart’s magnetic field radiates beyond the body and can affect other people. Their research has demonstrated that when you experience positive feeling states, the heart’s rhythms become more coherent and the interactions between “the brain and heart maintain a continuous two-way dialogue, each influencing the other’s functioning.” 61 Neurocardiology researchers view this as a “heart brain.” When this happens, the brain can modify cortical functions and influence your performance at many levels. This may help explain the increased mental clarity and heightened intuitive awareness individuals experience in this state of heart coherence.
The Power of Negative Emotions
It is clear that negative emotions lead to increased disorder in the heart’s rhythms and in the autonomic nervous system. Disorder adversely affects the rest of your body. In contrast, positive emotions create increased harmony and coherence in heart rhythms and improve balance in the nervous system. The health implications are easy to understand. Disharmony in the nervous system leads to inefficiency and increased stress on the heart and other organs while harmonious rhythms are more efficient and less stressful to the body’s systems. It is as though the heart is acting as if it has a mind of its own. Your heart profoundly influences the way you perceive and respond to the world.
From the HeartMath research, there is now a scientific basis to explain how and why the heart affects mental clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and personal effectiveness. Thus the heart is far more than a simple pump. Your heart is, in fact, a highly complex, self-organized information processing center with its own functional “brain” that communicates with and influences the cranial brain via the nervous system, hormonal system, and other pathways. This is why you will begin the shift of perception of the constricted self with the heart to balance disharmony or incoherence in the mind and the body. This powerful organ helps release the pathways of fear that separate you from your expanded self by the opening of your heart’s love.
Love Dissolves Victim Identity
The heart’s coherence of love opens the way to dismantling your many clinging victim self-identities. The victim hides under the cover of needing and wanting pleasure and establishing a justification for its position in the world. But beneath this cover is fear, anxiety of being unworthy, suffering, and creating pain. Attention from the heart energy reduces tension spent holding pain down and denying parts of yourself as unworthy and shameful. You are here to relax, open your heart, and extend outwardly with the eternal awareness of the expanded self, not to live in the false desires of the constricted self. This awareness of expanded self will be your focus as it dissolves the illusion of separateness and opens you to connectedness and freedom.
The Practice of Forgiveness
Hafiz, the thirteenth-century Sufi master, said, “Fear is the cheapest room in the house, I would like to see you in better living conditions.” 62 Forgiveness is what enables us to release the deepest fears of our life. From these fears, the constricted self continues to weave an energetic pattern, using the thoughts, experiences, attitudes, behaviors, and emotional projections you put on yourself and that others project onto you. These projections comprise your constricted self. Projections are mental images placed on you with picture-feelings of being a victim, being unworthy, being angry, or filled with terror, guilt, shame, and fear. Your constricted self is this woven pattern of inner and outer projections. As you’ve observed, you hide these projected feelings behind a mask of outward personality, as your Enneagram structures revealed to you. What exploration of the building process of your constricted self taught you, however, is that your personality is not who you really are!
Forgiveness is the energy of the heart that releases the binding structure of projections that have been woven together as your self-identity. The manner in which forgiveness releases the bindings of projections is by releasing the energy within the binding process itself. The bindings will naturally dissipate if not held together by your mind. If you release the projections, you allow the energy to dissipate and merge again into the vast energy of existence. Through forgiveness, the constricted self begins to dissolve and evaporate. This is what happens in the dying process when the mind/heart is attempting to dissolve all the projections woven into the tapestry of the constricted self that you created over a lifetime. Forgiveness practice is the means to begin to dissolve the woven tapestry of this self before you die. This is the beginning of waking up now!
Exercise: Working with Forgiveness
Take some time to review the beliefs about who you are and your self-identity. Narrow the review down to the following three elements.
• What form of your identity are you strongly holding on to for which you need to forgive yourself? You will know the right one because it will be a pattern of events that goes back throughout your life. You may have already done some forgiveness on yourself and this issue, but now is the time for a deeper release.
• Who is the key person in your life that shaped your victim identity and toward whom you hold anger, fear, or deep shame? It could be a parent, friend, spouse, colleague, or coworker. You know when you’ve picked the right person because you will feel it in your body. That person will be like a spider in a web that spins you out to other similar people with whom you have the same kind of feelings.
• What group(s) do you have negative attitudes, beliefs, or prejudices toward that affect your view of the world? The group could be political, religious, educational, the media, etc. Again you will know it by the physical reaction in your body. The feeling can run from mild dislike to outright hatred.
Each of these three elements is a focus point that, as you start the forgiveness process, will spread to different but similar beliefs, feelings, and reactions. Sit with each of these three areas and ask internally and intuitively what area in your life, what person, and what group become your starting point.
Remember, forgiveness is the surrendering process that begins the transformation and opening of your heart. This leads ultimately to awakening to the light of your own true nature.
So how do you forgive yourself, the other person, and groups?
The first step is to recognize that some form of forgiveness and inner reconciliation is needed for yourself and between you and others.
The second step is being objective about what and who is being forgiven. This requires being in a quiet place of receptivity and asking yourself to see clearly the situation without trying to sugarcoat the truth of the situation. The third step is a form of meditation. It is a repetitive set of simple phases you can use after you’ve identified what your forgiveness practice needs.
A friend and meditation teacher, Doug Kraft, suggests that there are three drivers that generate our need for forgiveness:
• When you do not fully understand a situation. This happens when you do not understand your impulsive need to build an identity to protect yourself. The desire to protect yourself blocks your heart from opening.
• When you are overcome by remorse and guilt. This reaction happens if you’ve harmed others or yourself when no harm actually resulted.
• When your behavior violates your values. This is when your inner shadow is in charge.
Kraft suggests that each of these three drivers—lack of understanding, reactions of remorse and guilt, and the violation of your values—leads you to four simple forgiveness meditation phrases. As with any meditation, as you repeat the phrases notice the feelings in your body. Let insight and new consciousness arise in you. This forgiveness practice is a healing of deep unconscious patterns that will open you to the great liberation and freedom you are seeking. When you are in the quiet, it is the expanded self that is saying these phrases to your constricted self. Take the people and issues you identified and place them in the appropriate phrases for you, for others, and for groups. In each parenthesis, place your name or that of the other person or group.
• I forgive (myself, the other, or group) for not understanding.
• I forgive (myself, the other, or group) for making mistakes.
• I forgive (myself, the other, or group) for hurting (myself, the other, or group).
• I forgive (myself, the other, or group) for not following (my, your, their) deepest values. Say the four statements first for yourself and then in turn do them for the other and for the group you’ve chosen. I did a meditation retreat at which I spent two days on the part for myself. It took that long to open the many aspects of myself that needed forgiveness.
When you are forgiving others, you may experience an inner turnaround such that you are looking into the eyes of the other and asking for their forgiveness. This was very powerful for me and broke open my heart. The phrases are the same but take on a new meaning and feeling. You keep repeating them until you can actually hear the person or group forgive you.
Please forgive me for not understanding you. Please forgive me for making mistakes with you. Please forgive me for hurting you.
Exercise: Forgiveness Meditation
Again, as with other meditations you’ve done before, please either pre-record this meditation in order to listen to it or have a partner or friend read and guide you through it. Where there is a (pause) indicated, give yourself time to experience the instructions at that point. (If you want to use the bonus video for this meditation go to Appendix D.)
In this meditation, you will experience forgiveness as a thought and as an energy form that is connected to a higher frequency of energy. The frequency acts like a laser beam that melts and dissolves your inner projections, such as shame. It also dissolves your constricted self’s negativity toward others when you act as being special or self-justifying and when you hurt others or yourself. Forgiveness can dissolve these energetic projections whether they are positive or negative projections of your self-identity. In this meditation, the way forgiveness works is that it raises the awareness of feeling and thought to a much higher frequency so that it becomes laser-like in its ability to project energy into a situation of feeling or thought. This forgiveness energy’s use of projected intention releases the bindings of your woven thoughts and feelings so an expansion of awareness naturally opens within you.
Let’s begin the meditation:
• Let yourself relax into a safe, quiet, comfortable place with your back straight but not rigid or lie on a bed or a mat.
• Close your eyes and imagine a green color at your heart. Notice the sounds in your environment.
• Recall the depth of your last meditation and take several deep breaths and relax into all parts of your body. (pause)
• What does the relaxation feel like inside you?
• Remember the feeling of deep relaxation when using your marker. Return to that place. As you move deeper into recalling the symbol, image, or word of your marker that you created in the first meditation, feel the tensions of your body letting go.
• Now take three deep breaths. As you take them, observe your breath. Is it shallow? Labored? What is the quality of your inhale and exhale? Does one seem easier or fuller? Is there a natural pause when your breath is full or empty? Feel the sensations of the belly, as well as the cool and warmth of your nostrils. (pause)
• If your inhale is pronounced are you holding your energy in too much? If you are, then lengthen the exhale. If the exhale is pronounced, you need to give away some of your energy. Don’t push yourself for not letting yourself receive. Sink deeper into your body and notice sensations. Move down into your inner ground of sensations. (pause)
• Put your hand over your heart, feel your heart beat. From your belly or womb, notice that breath and heartbeat never stop; feel this increase. Allow thoughts, feelings, or outside disturbances to float through without holding on to them.
• Again with your marker, let yourself relax and move down and in, down deep into your heart as if falling down like a leaf to the ground. Go down and in, down and in, deep inside yourself, moving toward your heart. (pause)
• As you move into this deeper state within, move through to your heart, right to the center of your chest. Feel a warmth, a caring of being inside yourself. Rest in the opening and sink deep into this warm, caring place.
• Let yourself continue to relax and be held in this caring connection. In this caring place you have no worries or concerns.
• Now place an intention, a feeling, a thought of acceptance to release that I am someone, that I have these identities that create pain, rejection, hurt, and anger within me. Notice your body and breathe into any tense areas that may have arisen. Let yourself relax and go even deeper into yourself.
• As you relax, the warmth gets deeper. As you relax, your breath merges into your heart. Notice and feel its warming, pulsating, and tingling sensations. (pause)
• As you feel the relaxation, be aware of the sensations moving from your heart center up through your body and moving up and out of the top of your head.
• At the top of your head, in the crown, the heart energy merges with a higher frequency. This frequency is always present and waiting for this pathway connection.
• This emergence of higher frequency energy begins a natural forgiveness and releasing of the projections and bindings that hold your identity pattern together.
• Notice as you forgive yourself from holding on to all your identities the energy expands out from all around you.
• As these patterns of your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and feelings dissolve, a quiet peace, tranquility, and a deepening awareness arises in you.
• Rest in this awareness and observe the difference in your thoughts and feelings as your patterns dissolve. (pause)
• Love energy is doing its work in you. Trust that this high frequency energy will dissolve what is needed at this time in your life.
• Now move your attention downward to your heart very gently.
• Continue to stay in the warmth of your heart connection as you come back to your breath and heartbeat as you integrate these memories of your past. (pause)
• Allow yourself to inhale and exhale, feeling the sensations of your belly and the air in your nostrils. Feel now the grounded sensations in your body as you rest in the gentle movement of your breath. (pause)
• Place your attention now on the sensation of moving gently upward until you reach your chest. Notice your breath slowly moving in and out. Follow your breath for just a few moments. Let yourself integrate what you learned from letting forgiveness release your identity patterns.
• Notice your hands in your lap. Notice how heavy and relaxed they are. Begin to wiggle or stretch your fingers and hands and move your body.
• With a big inhale and exhale of breath come back into the room.
• Remember as you return, that after you’ve entered the high-frequency state where you released the constricted self identify, you may have difficulty with a feeling of overwhelm or being lost. If you stay with an inner focus on the expanded energy you experienced, you will find a great release and freedom. Trust that as you continue to attune to the heart energy of forgiveness, you will dissolve your constricted identity and open to your natural awakening.
• Be gentle and loving to yourself and know that the energy source is guiding you.
• Trust also that there is your unique timing that brings you to full forgiveness and awakening
• Please write in your journal what you learned and experienced.