November 13, 2021 Saturday Afternoon, New Hope NC Retreat Group B, Excerpt
Going Into Heavy Objects Rather Than Pushing Away
Aaron: My love to all of you, and specifically, I am addressing Q here. This question is read is from the Otter, so it may not have gotten it exactly.
“My intent is to go back to my breath. That being said, if there are things that are coming up that I know are weighing heavy on me, or I’m feeling that I want to be open to and have compassion for myself for, I’ll open myself up in the form of asking Aaron, Jesus, Mary, Joseph.”
So, let’s go back to that phrase. When you’re feeling something, when you’re meditating and there’s repetitively something that’s weighing heavily on you, you may not even know exactly what it is, may not be able to articulate, “Oh, it’s this experience or that physical sensation,” just, “weighing heavily.” Closing up; chakras perhaps not as open.
At that point, hold the intention to look more deeply at this weight. What is it that’s holding you? Where is the path to healing it, releasing it? What is helpful?
Then ask these beings that you trust—Yeshua, Mary, Joseph, myself, any others—to be there to support you. Step One. Just breathe a bit until you feel that energy with you.
Then begin to look. “I choose to see what is weighing heavily—this worry or that anger or this sadness, whatever it may be. I choose to look at it deeply.”
This is not to fix it. This is both to find, right there with what is holding you, what is no longer holding you. To find the innate spaciousness of your being.
It’s also to deepen into the wisdom it has arisen, it’s impermanent and it will go. Right there with this object that’s grabbing me, that’s pulling me down, is the negation of that object. It’s gone. There is the release of it.
It’s hard to go into these objects. It may be pain from something somebody said to you, or something that happened, or feeling powerless at something that’s coming up in your life. It’s basically something that’s uncomfortable.
The natural tendency is to want to avoid it. Instead of avoiding it, here, we are opening to it. “I choose to see this as it is, just to hold it.
“Here is sadness.” What is it like to hold sadness, or shame, or helplessness, and just be present with it? Not trying to push it away, not trying to do anything with it but bear witness to it.
And here is where the innate compassion and spaciousness of the heart can open to hold that object. Just being present with it until it dissolves.
Then you may come back to your primary object, or you may just rest in that spaciousness and emptiness.
Thank you. Does that sound like something you can try? (Yes…)
The experience is coming to you as a teacher. Start with noticing it. Feeling the contraction around it. And then, “Thank you, teacher.” (palms touching and with a gentle bow) That Buddha smile. “Thank you, teacher. I don’t want this, but I acknowledge that spiritually, karmically, it’s coming to me as a teacher. And I’m willing to get to know it and see it so I understand what it’s come to teach me. I accept it as a teacher. I open my heart to it.”
There is nothing to fix. When there is nothing to hold it in place anymore, it will go.
If it’s physical pain, it may not go but the relationship with it will change. If it’s an emotional pain, it will change and soften. There is nothing to fix, only to hold it in spaciousness and really get to know it. Instead of saying, “How do I fix it? How do I get rid of it or push it away?”— just presence.
Thank you. And you can do this; all of you can do this.
I’ll return the body to Barbara…