Step 6:
Freedom from the Mental Self
Old power is replaced by being the observer of awareness
from a place of space not thinking.
—kathleen dowling singh
The next step is for you to disconnect from the “chief” that thinks it is in control, your mental self. The power of the thinking mind controls and separates you from your body, sensations, and feelings. Its power is to take the driver seat and control your intention to direct, plan, and set goals. The script that controls you every day is written and directed by your thinking mind. Your mind does not allow for an energy flow to let go or allow things to orchestrate themselves in a natural process. Everything is thought through and composed by the constricted mind, both conscious and unconscious. The constricted self’s need to control is driven by fear, desire, and survival. Your sense of survival thinks you need your mind to figure out everything in order to stay in control.
In this step of confronting your mind, you come face-to-face with the behavior of wanting life to be the way you want it, no matter the impact on others or even yourself. Your mind attempts to control the force of your life, others, and the world. The chatter in your mind can become so intense that you are often overcome and dismayed by the tight grip it has on you. If you try to let go of this tight grip of your mind, there is an immediate challenge to the mind’s authority that fills you with fear. This tightness from fear competes, drives, and creates an emotional and behavioral imbalance in you. The imbalance can be marked by believing you are better than others, that you have more than others, and that in every way you control your own life. Or it runs the opposite direction with your mind telling you “I can’t control myself or others” or “I have nothing to show for my life.” Your control one way or the other is so convincing that it is difficult to see clearly what is really happening to you. Everything around you seems so real. Your will focuses energy on your desires, wants, and fears and repeats them in your mind until the brain forms a comprehensive neuronal circuitry pattern that runs on its own without you needing to even think about it. The neuronal pattern is a strong fire-type energy that, with the repetition of focused attention, develops the personal power behavior of the constricted self. This is a familiar performance you see in you and in others.
This chapter will show you ways to relax and open your heart to find freedom and release from the mental pattern that constricts you. The two keys is to expand beyond being “someone” to become “everything.” But the importance of this chapter is to experience the expansion that gratitude brings to you. Gratitude increases the neuronal pathways that generate joy, happiness, freedom, and contentment. Finally, in this chapter I provide to you a number of gratitude practices that will enrich you daily and then finish this chapter with a gratitude meditation that you can practice many times to release the constriction of your mind and heart.
Releasing the Mental Pattern
At this step in your journey, your goal is to release the grip of this repeated pattern so that you can relax into the awareness of the expanded self. When this pattern of the mental constricted self is not in control, your heart can open. As it opens, you become more aware of the expanded self. You begin to be more conscious of not being so contained. You are more expanded in your body and you include more heart expression in your life. Love plus awareness expands you to raise your consciousness so that there is not just “me” in the world. This expansive realization shouts out clearly, “I am not the doer. There is something more powerful than me running my show.” The awareness of the expanded self then begins to discover its potential. This potential can manifest in many ways, including prosperity.
Your Potential Expansion
The release of your potential moves your energy frequency into being more alive with greater awareness, but it does not become dominating or controlling. This extension of alive energy will take you out of your habits, break through conformity, and open you to more individuality and greater authenticity. But most of all, it releases your wanting and your desire to be “someone” and have “everything” because you already are someone and truly have everything as an expanded self. You have value and worth in being who you are. The adjustment of your attention is focused back in your body and not focused in your mind or outward into the world. You allow the world to pass by without judgment or bias. Therefore, you don’t become attached to it.
One of my teachers would say, “Your mind is not your friend, so stay out of the world.” The idea for you to evolve and live an expanded life is not to stay attached to your outer world of mental constructs. The expanded self is the new reference point, not your mind clinging to the old patterns. As you focus your consciousness on the expanded awareness of love, the love energy is then used for your further evolution. The practice that unfolds the process of unifying the mind and body toward your dynamic evolution of expansion is gratitude.
The Frequency of Gratitude
The energy of gratitude shatters the illusion of reality. Gratitude penetrates and throws open to the light of day what you think is running the world. Gratitude is an energy that alters how you perceive the world. Gratitude is the unification of the mind/body awareness so that it is available for a fuller, more conscious, and deliberate expression of you.
When you don’t live from a place of gratitude, you contract into a narrow focus. That contraction moves you toward desire and wanting what actually can’t fulfill you. When this happens, the flow and magic of existence shut down. With gratitude, you open naturally to the magic. You will also be aware and alert when desire and wanting sneak into your life as a substitute for the authentic flow of your existence. The integration of your awareness with gratitude stimulates aliveness in you as a living organism.
Gratitude shapes your life into a rhythm and harmony that expands you into all of life’s experiences. Gratitude lightens up every person and event you encounter. When gratitude is present, you are patient. Gratitude reveals the gifts in everything you experience. It slows you down to see, feel, and experience depth and clarity and have an understanding of any person, event, or experience you encounter.
Gratitude is an important teaching gift for emerging from the illusion of your mental existence. Gratitude opens you to experience reality as it actually is, not as it may appear in your mental construct. In this respect, gratitude is “magic” because it shows you that love holds both the positive and negative, the dark and the light, the male and the female, the earth and the sky. Gratitude weaves opposites together to reveal how the illusionary force holds everything together.
Gratitude Increases the Energy of the Heart
Gratitude increases the vibration and energy of the heart center and increases the pulsation of the nervous system as neurons fire off in new patterns that generate joy, happiness, freedom, and inner contentment. Gratitude catalyzes the field of energy in a person by radiating a higher frequency of light photons within the body. The greater the gratitude the more your mind becomes illuminated, the mind chatter dies away, and clarity of awareness of your expanded self continually opens. When you live in a constant state of gratitude, you are awake to the light of who you truly are.
Gratitude Practices
Brother David Steindl-Rast, a true ambassador of gratitude, says, “There are degrees of grateful wakefulness. Our intellect, our will, our emotions must wake up. Let us take a closer look at this process of awakening. It is the growth process of gratefulness.” 63 The transformational reality of gratitude is that it opens the door of awareness and awakening within us. Gratitude is the key transformer of reality perception. In the perception of reality, nothing needs to change in your life for you to feel fulfilled, complete, and at peace. Everything that you feel, see, and understand becomes transformed into beauty, clarity, and a more holistic and integrated reality that continues to grow and expand into every area of your life. Awareness with gratitude is the gift of the integrated mind/body. This is the first expanded level of consciousness in your entry into transpersonal realms.
If there is only one practice that you do, giving gratitude for everything would be the doorway to freedom. It will sharpen what you resist by being grateful for those daily experiences for which you don’t naturally feel grateful. You may be surprised at what you experience.
First Gratitude Practice
This is a simple practice that keeps gratitude at the forefront of your consciousness. This practice will slow down the awareness and sharpen your observation and insight.
• Make a list of all the things you are grateful for.
• Make another list of all the things you are not grateful for.
• Keep adding to the lists for a few days.
• Say the words “thank you” for both the positive and negative people, situations, and events you experience.
• A few days later, touch your heart area when you say “thank you” for both positive and negative events. The physical touch and feeling will begin to open the love doorway wider and wider.
• Soon become aware of any feelings of lightness and sensations of warmth associated with the positive and the negative experiences you listed.
• Keep this practice going until you begin to feel and see the light in all things through this lens of gratitude. In reality, there is no positive or negative. There is only one thing for which you will be grateful: all the experiences that make up your life!
Second Gratitude Practice
• Make a list of all the things, people, events, situations, and experiences in your life that have supported, inspired, and motivated you over the past three to five years.
• As you write and review the list, feel in your heart center gratitude for each one of them.
Third Gratitude Practice
• When you take a walk, name and acknowledge the trees, clouds, animals, flowers, people, etc., that you see. As you name them, place a hand over your heart area and feel the gratitude in your heart.
• At every meal, thank the food and all the people and beings that are nourishing your body to stay alive.
Fourth Gratitude Practice
• Make a list of the key positive and key negative people in your life. Thank both for being your teachers.
• List key family and friends and every day feel gratitude that they are part of your life.
Fifth Gratitude Practice
Be grateful daily as you see expressions of the four elements.
Water: Rain, facet water, pond, river, stream, etc.
Earth: Rock, dirt, the land you walk on, mountains, etc.
Fire: Flames, wood burning, the sun, candles, etc.
Air: The wind, breeze smells, breathing in your lungs, etc.
• Be grateful for your experience of nature’s manifest forms and the spirits that embody them: the sounds of birds and animals, sunsets and full moons, snowstorms and fierce winds, forest fires and calm waters, and on and on.
Exercise: Gratitude Meditation
Your awareness expands as gratitude increases within you in this meditation. Naturally, there is a new energy vitality in and coherence between the mind, the body, and the heart. Gratitude is the jewel that every being at all levels of existence comes to finally experience, as it is the doorway to the expansion of the love that is at the heart of all existence. The nature of gratitude is more than a concept. It is one of the Universal Principles that begins and extends the expanded perception of awareness. Gratitude is what opens you toward full realization of freedom.
Again, as with other exercises 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.)
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 yellow color filling your belly area. Notice the sounds in your environment. (pause)
• 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. Recall how you created your marker as a symbol, an image, or a word and you felt your marker at a particular place on your body. Return to that inner feeling of relaxation spreading through your body. (pause)
• As you move deeper into recalling the symbol, image, or word of your marker 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, notice sensations. Move down into your inner ground of sensations. (pause)
• Put your hand over your belly; feel your breath move in and out. From your belly or womb, notice that breath and heartbeat never stops. Allow thoughts, feelings, or outside disturbances to float through you 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 belly. (pause)
• As you move into this deeper state within, move through to your heart, and then down into your belly. Feel a yellow 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. (pause)
• Move through any tension to be deeper within your belly; deep into the center of your warm, glowing yellow belly.
• Feel a warmth and light opening into an expansion of gratitude. Let your gratitude be for this deep relaxation and caring of being inside yourself. (pause)
• Let your caring awareness for yourself be fully open. Be aware now of your efforts in trying to control your life. Trying to control your behavior, emotions, and thoughts.
• And trying to control others in your life. (pause)
• Feel grateful for all your trying.
• What would it be like if you let it go of all your trying? What happens in your life?
• What trait or behavior do you have that you do not like? Do you identify yourself as that trait or behavior?
• Whatever you perceive in yourself feel grateful for who you are. (pause)
• Imagine now the feeling of yourself to be a beautiful bouquet of flowers. You release the tie around the bouquet and the flowers fall outward in a beautiful circle of expansion of the bouquet. Let yourself be that bouquet opening into gratitude, into expansive love for yourself, and opening far and wide for everything in your life. (pause)
• Begin now to slowly return to an awareness of your body and the room, but stay in the warmth of your connection to gratitude as you come back to your breath and heartbeat knowing who you truly are in deep beauty and caring for yourself.
• Allow yourself to inhale and exhale, feeling the sensations of your breath in your belly and your nostrils. Feel grounded in your body, just resting in this place of gratitude for yourself. (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 feeling gratitude for who you are.
• 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.
• As you relax and feel the experience of this meditation, trust that as you continue to attune to the belly energy of gratitude you will dissolve your constricted identity more and more, opening to your natural awakening.
• Be gentle and loving to yourself and know that a higher energy source is guiding you.
• Trust also that there is your unique timing that brings you to a full state of gratitude.
• Please write in your journal what you learned and experienced.
63. David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), 10.