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Poison is Nourishment

sensingradiance

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

There comes a point in our life when all strategies to avoid, repress and medicate our deepest existential fear come to fail. In whatever way this happens — usually through loss, failure or death — life brings us directly in touch with a sense of devastating inadequacy. This secret alchemical ground has waited here all along to be intimately discovered. You may have vaguely intuited its presence, but never really gave it much attention.


If it could speak, it might appear as a silent whisper: There is something about all this that is rather shocking. There is something about all this that is completely meaningless, and there is nothing I can do about it. The ‘I’ that I take myself to be is completely empty. It does not have any intrinsic existence — it does not have any value. There is something fundamentally wrong and shameful about ‘me’.


At the core of a sense of separate self shines an incomprehensible, impenetrable black hole. Psychologically, we experience this as the core wound of unworthiness. That is, if we ever allow ourselves to feel this terrifying absence at all. All our internal noise is nothing but a desperate attempt to distract ourselves from its intimidating silence. The conventional human life is a bizarre dance of hypnotic dissociation, in which the secret fear of being nothing and no one is systematically denied. 


If you are interested in awakening you start to eventually develop an irrational attraction towards this enigmatic void. You feel pulled towards the inner vacancy in a spiraling manner, until the relationship reaches a certain existential momentum. A fundamental gesture of surrender takes place.


What does this practically speaking mean? When you get triggered and the defense mechanisms that protect you from feeling the inner sense of deficiency activate, take a pause and soften into the experience. Instead of medicating the experience, simply stop and allow yourself to feel everything unguarded. Feel the raw texture of emotional reaction in the body, without blindly acting on it — see what it reveals. 


In this open spaciousness, something starts to naturally assimilate. The unwinding happens on its own accord, all you need to do is to relax into it. This may mean intuitive movement and breath, or just open stillness ... your body will know. Eventually a deeper intelligence in the system takes over. This is experienced as a release of control at the rudimentary level of our being.





Wrestling with the primal space


For me the first awakening happened after a highly difficult dark night, during which I had lost all hope for abiding nonduality. I was going through quite challenging attachment trauma work and had just re-started my therapy when something unexpected took place. At that moment, I was doing some intuitive somatic inquiry, and felt myself in a rather unguarded place. After years of depression and existential angst, as well as incapacity to find ways to alleviate the pain, I was exhausted.


I still don't know what exactly happened, but I ended up relaxing into the sense of "there is something wrong about me". Just like that. Whoops. Perfect relaxation. Luminous cessation. Strange unification. There was a sense of mysterious space, and sudden awareness of having all my life 'turned away' from this space. At that moment I turned towards it, and stepped into it. "I" never came back. It stepped into itself, and nothing has ever been the same.


There was a wordless sense of "Ah, interesting. I have been avoiding this unknown spaciousness because it was interpreted as something wrong, lacking, shameful. But it's not good or bad, it's not anything. It's nothing. It's utterly neutral." And the deeper the experience relaxed, the most obvious and familiar 'knowing' emerged. "Ah, this nothingness is full of presence. This simple openness is what I am. At the heart of shame, this pure innocence. How amazing." The recognition has been effortless ever since, but also deepened and clarified beyond comprehension.


Later on my journey I would encounter inadequacy again in various ways. The difference is that post-realization these type of feelings have nothing to stick to, they no longer feels personal, they can even open up into amazing nondual revelations. They no longer possess the power to obstruct basic clarity.


Even though the self construct is gone, the core wounds still surface from time to time. Nondual teachings rarely address this and can even be counter-helpful, as there can be an understanding: “Unworthiness is an illusion, I should not be experiencing this. Let me just clarify this perceptual error and abide in my true nature.” However, this fundamental contraction is rooted in our physiology and nervous system, and cannot be released just by insight. 


Instead of turning towards the experience and directly feeling the body, it can be tempting to transcend the confusion. With proper practice, we can become quite skillful at it. If we know how to access pure awareness and dis-identify from a disturbing experience, this can even be done with a certain amount of subtle arrogance. In this way practice can become a way to avoid and dissociate from uncomfortable sensations.


The unwillingness to fully inhabit the emotional body is what often impedes awakening from proceeding to deeper stages of realization. Melting old, rigidified conditioning in our system takes fierce dedication, and willingness to genuinely let go of one’s old world. The further awakening moves the more raw and unfiltered we experience the body, until all sense of solidity dissolves.





The alchemy of embodied liberation


Natural noninterference is a simple and powerful gesture to embody our true nature. When the way our true nature abides becomes clear, the way it functions can now be explored.


Like a leaf falling from a tree, the whole of reality is in ceaseless motion of relaxing into itself. If you keep relaxing in this manner you come to a point of spontaneous penetration. Vastness opens up at the core of sensation, and absorbs into itself. In this way, encountering distressing thoughts and emotions is like meeting an old friend: they self-liberate by doing nothing. Eventually this release becomes so seamless that there is no more awareness of it. 


“Do not condition your mind by trying to suppress your experience, apply an antidote, or mechanically transform it, but let your mind fall naturally into whatever condition you find it. This is the incontrovertible essence of what is ultimately meaningful.” (Longchenpa)


Liberation is ultimately nothing other than the loss of capacity to resist WHAT IS. Even resisting resistance ceases. There never was a problem to solve in the first place. The paradigm of problems ceases to arise. 


I think there is a time and place for assertive inquiry in which all beliefs are relentlessly examined. But at least in my own post-realization process, all tendencies to fix the experience needed to be released. Inquiry must culminate in total surrender.


All flavors of reality are fully present here. In my experience, 'nondually condemned' feelings/thoughts such as shame and unworthiness are collectively disowned psychic life forms that ask for unconditional love. When met with unconditional presence they reveal their true nature, and assimilate into the universal body of totality.


Paradoxically, when we fully inhabit our experience and let go of managing it in any particular manner, nothing is left undone. Everything is food for the naked immediacy. It may take a moment with more sticky sensations and thoughts, but anything that comes in contact with your true nature is liberated just by bathing in this primal openness.


When resistance and repression comes in contact with natural ease it does not necessarily feel comfortable, so don’t expect the process to always feel good. There can be friction, energetic blocks, and many moments of utter helplessness as you digest the roots of the conditioned identity. By allowing ourselves to fully experience the pain, we discover pure potency. Like a peacock, we discover our innate capacity to ecstatically transmute poison into the most vivid colors of dynamic compassion.





How do you practice this?


The key here is relaxed confidence in the self-liberating nature of phenomena. Stop all fabrication, fall into the unconditioned nature of any particular condition –– relax in its groundless embrace. 


What I’m really talking about here is letting go of all arguments with the way reality unfolds. I’m talking about letting go of an expectation that the experience is going to be this way or that way, letting go of all meaning that the mind wants to attach to the experience — especially all nondual meaning. I’m talking about abandoning the need to understand, abandoning the hope of resolution, or hope of anything whatsoever. Paradoxically, this utter hopelessness has an amazing fresh quality: you actually show up for the experience as it is.


When we start approaching reality in this way we begin to see how much we actually ignore, how much we project, how much we emphasize what is familiar and leave out what we don’t understand. We begin to see how much we are trying to manage the experience, make it into this or that so that it fits to our ideas about this or that. When we meet reality empty of knowing, doing and willing, unguarded and with open curiosity, we start to discover primordial aliveness. We start to discover true innocence. 


Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche says this in a wonderful way: “Instead of avoiding or manipulating poison, you host the poison. You bring naked awareness directly to the pain or poison, and discover that the true ground of being has never been poisoned. In so doing, the pain liberates by itself.”


Discover that which is always-already-surrendered in the experience. Explore sensations and thoughts like a peacock watching itself in a mirror, thoroughly fascinated, immersed in a spontaneous display of its own colorful feathers. Instead of resisting a fixation, let it play. Invite it more. Look at the nature of confusion more nakedly, more closely. This is liberation through bare attention.


Eventually, it all becomes exquisitely fluid, luminous, and radically intimate. There is just the vivid display of pure sensation. In effortless immersion, empty spontaneity explores itself. Be the uninhibited wisdom of its naked dance. In open noninterference, like a snake unwinding its own knots, the core wound of unworthiness finds its way to unravel. All there ever was is this magical illusion — unborn, sensual, self transforming space.





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