Is that the real question? Or would it be smarter to ask
Who to be?
Being is always here, in a way we always ARE.
But where we are, and what and who do we identify with, makes a huge difference in the experience and quality of life.
To discover being is a revolution, it enables us to leave the prison of our personality or ego and live out in the open sky.
Even though being is universal, our experience of it is very personal.
If I have to describe mine, I would say that it a sense of vertical alignment, where the head, heart and belly centre are aligned in a vertical way. Connected to heaven and earth.
It is also means that I am fully present inside this body, inside every cell of it.
At the same time it brings an expansiveness, a spaciousness in a horizontal way. The mind is empty and quiet.
And may be the most important aspect of all is that the sense of separation is not here. This sense of “I” and “other”, this sense of loneliness and isolation is not here.
My sense of being an orphan of the universe disappears and is replaced by a deep experience of everything having the same nature and therefore it brings a deep sense of belonging.
Who to be?
Being is always here, in a way we always ARE.
But where we are, and what and who do we identify with, makes a huge difference in the experience and quality of life.
To discover being is a revolution, it enables us to leave the prison of our personality or ego and live out in the open sky.
Even though being is universal, our experience of it is very personal.
If I have to describe mine, I would say that it a sense of vertical alignment, where the head, heart and belly centre are aligned in a vertical way. Connected to heaven and earth.
It is also means that I am fully present inside this body, inside every cell of it.
At the same time it brings an expansiveness, a spaciousness in a horizontal way. The mind is empty and quiet.
And may be the most important aspect of all is that the sense of separation is not here. This sense of “I” and “other”, this sense of loneliness and isolation is not here.
My sense of being an orphan of the universe disappears and is replaced by a deep experience of everything having the same nature and therefore it brings a deep sense of belonging.
My first experiences of being came in meditation.
Over time as my being muscles became stronger, the experience of being became present in my day-to-day activities.
When I stay connected to being, life is easy, everything flows, whatever happens, happens. I meet life as it comes without resistance. When there is no sense of separation there is nothing to resist!!!
There is connectedness. So there is a natural responding to whatever life brings.
Now what happens to most of us, and it certainly happens to me, is that in our daily life we move in and out of being. Many masters have spoken of the inertia of the mind, of the habit of identifying again and again with that sense of separate self, also called ego or personality.
We all have our particular area’s where we shift more easily back from being into personality.
For example, for me, issues around relating or money or stress can pull me out.
Let me describe what happens in stress.
I don’t have a very good sense of time management, so I often plan too many things in one day.
When I notice all of a sudden that I can’t do everything that is on the list, I can jump back into my personality. In an instant the whole system contracts back into a very small place that I call “I” and I am separate. In this case, separate from time. I have to conquer time. I start to rush.
In that contraction the mind gets very activated and starts to take back its central place in the system.
This is actually a big characteristic: that the mind, who just before, in the experience of being, was a good servant to me, a great help in managing my daily life, bringing the practicalities together for me, now has shifted back to being the one who runs my life.
All of a sudden I am not guided anymore by a vertical alignment but I am guided by thoughts, and their driven-ness. There is a lot of thinking involved. And then if I am lucky, the tension reminds me that I have left being.
When that happens, it is usually followed by a natural movement of sinking back into the body, and a discharge of the superfluous energy of stress, followed by deep sighs or even yawning and I am resting back in myself and can continue my daily activities in a connected way.
At first, when I noticed that I was out of being, I took a full stop and sat down for a moment if that was possible to come back.
I gave the system a moment time to reconnect and to discharge the surplus energy and re-align itself and re-balance it self.
After some time that stop became an internal one.
But then there are bigger events that pull me out of being in a more profound way.
For example about a year ago my relationship ended abruptly which provoked such a pain in the heart and such an acute sense of separation that I regularly jumped right out of being.
In that moment the pain was so overwhelming that I was flipping back and forth many, many times in the day from identifying completely with the painful place (which is identification with a much younger part of me, that feels left and alone, without mother or father and with an unbearable sense of loneliness) to coming back to being.
I would get completely lost in that identification and then remember again and come back to being.
Remembering happens more or less always in that same way:
This sense of sinking back into the body and spaciousness, away from identification with thought, memory and emotion. Not those these will go away instantly but the identification does.
The deeper my attachment is to a certain pain or thought, the stronger the contraction in the body and the more time it takes to come back to a sense in the body of relaxation and expansiveness.
In fact the pain around my lost relationship was not dissolved for weeks or even months. More specifically it would dissolve and regroup because of the attachment to particular beliefs based on childhood experiences.
Still it was often experienced in oneness.
When “I” am present, as a being and not as a personality, I can hold the pain like a mother holds a child and in that embrace they melt together as one.
It is then as if am holding a particular structure that I can experience as a wounded ness in my soul. I can use the picture of the universe as the archetypal mother, the principle of motherhood of lovingly holding that sense of separateness.
So that is an experience of being that is not just blissful and expansive but an experience that contains both as one. It holds the dissolving into being and at the same time the sense of separateness as one. And in that way this sense of separateness can melt, transform or dissolve, often in its own time.
For example the sense of separation from my partner took several months because the attachment was very strong. So it took a lot of holding in being for that to dissolve and melt.
What is beautiful in such processes is, that because of the beingness, even though I experienced a lot of pain in the separation, I could understand it as a part of the ego structure that had its right place, it was seen for what it is. A pain based on experiences in the childhood, that created a certain structure and a certain sense of reality that is not reality.
Reality is that which is here right now, which has no history. So when I know what reality is, I can hold the deepest pains of desolation, desperation, loneliness and this may be sounds like no big deal but in fact this is a huge difference to when the experience of being is not present.
When the experience of being is not present then I have a hard time holding these places without trying to manipulate them, trying to heal them, make them go away, do something, pushing them this way or that way. Because when we meet an unbearable feeling and we identify with it, it becomes impossible to stay with it just because it is so unbearable. We try to do whatever we can to make it go away, just like we learned to do in the childhood.
In fact any kind of relating can pull me out of being.
Within my personality structure I learned to please.
As a child I learned to please and give up feeling what I feel. And this mechanism still comes into play in relating today. It is such an automatic mechanical movement.
If I identify with the mechanism the pleasing takes over.
If I stay present however, connected to being, the mechanism appears, it starts to pull and push and I have a choice now, to follow it or not.
Sometimes the structures are so overwhelming that coming back to arms and legs is a great help. The most easy and direct way that I know off to keep coming back to presence and being.
Again and again.
Always with that deep, deep sigh of relief, of knowing what is real, of being home.
It took me a while to recognize what is real because there are two kinds of realities.
There is the experiential reality and the existential one.
When I refer to reality I mean the existential reality. That which is always here.
The experience of pain is also real as experience but it is not existential (not always here) and as that it has only a temporary reality.
It is an experience based on a story, so existentially it is not real. When I let go of the story the pain disappears. And again it is not so easy to let go of the story because our whole identity is based on it. It has created not just a story, but this story has also created a belief and the belief in turn creates a structure in the body. Often a tight structure.
A true experience of being for me is impossible without a full presence in the body because that is where the old structures of personality live that needs to be melted and dissolved.
It is quite easy to experience being when leaving the body, transcending the body.
From a good teacher, I learned to sense arms and legs at all time to keep me rooted in the body and in reality.
I like to conclude by sharing that meditation.
(While walking, sitting, cooking, working, singing or watching TV sense you arms and your legs from within without trying to change anything and without valuing what you are finding. Sensing them just as they factually, physically feel. (Hot, cold, flowing, stuck, frozen, etc). This is a very powerful practice the heal the fundamental split between the inner and the outer. If you add looking and keep 55 % of the energy in the sensing of the arms and legs and only 45 % into the looking you become very anchored in the here and now.)
Rani has been on the path of inner transformation since 1976.
For more than 30 years she has been sharing her experience in workshops and retreats.
Over time as my being muscles became stronger, the experience of being became present in my day-to-day activities.
When I stay connected to being, life is easy, everything flows, whatever happens, happens. I meet life as it comes without resistance. When there is no sense of separation there is nothing to resist!!!
There is connectedness. So there is a natural responding to whatever life brings.
Now what happens to most of us, and it certainly happens to me, is that in our daily life we move in and out of being. Many masters have spoken of the inertia of the mind, of the habit of identifying again and again with that sense of separate self, also called ego or personality.
We all have our particular area’s where we shift more easily back from being into personality.
For example, for me, issues around relating or money or stress can pull me out.
Let me describe what happens in stress.
I don’t have a very good sense of time management, so I often plan too many things in one day.
When I notice all of a sudden that I can’t do everything that is on the list, I can jump back into my personality. In an instant the whole system contracts back into a very small place that I call “I” and I am separate. In this case, separate from time. I have to conquer time. I start to rush.
In that contraction the mind gets very activated and starts to take back its central place in the system.
This is actually a big characteristic: that the mind, who just before, in the experience of being, was a good servant to me, a great help in managing my daily life, bringing the practicalities together for me, now has shifted back to being the one who runs my life.
All of a sudden I am not guided anymore by a vertical alignment but I am guided by thoughts, and their driven-ness. There is a lot of thinking involved. And then if I am lucky, the tension reminds me that I have left being.
When that happens, it is usually followed by a natural movement of sinking back into the body, and a discharge of the superfluous energy of stress, followed by deep sighs or even yawning and I am resting back in myself and can continue my daily activities in a connected way.
At first, when I noticed that I was out of being, I took a full stop and sat down for a moment if that was possible to come back.
I gave the system a moment time to reconnect and to discharge the surplus energy and re-align itself and re-balance it self.
After some time that stop became an internal one.
But then there are bigger events that pull me out of being in a more profound way.
For example about a year ago my relationship ended abruptly which provoked such a pain in the heart and such an acute sense of separation that I regularly jumped right out of being.
In that moment the pain was so overwhelming that I was flipping back and forth many, many times in the day from identifying completely with the painful place (which is identification with a much younger part of me, that feels left and alone, without mother or father and with an unbearable sense of loneliness) to coming back to being.
I would get completely lost in that identification and then remember again and come back to being.
Remembering happens more or less always in that same way:
This sense of sinking back into the body and spaciousness, away from identification with thought, memory and emotion. Not those these will go away instantly but the identification does.
The deeper my attachment is to a certain pain or thought, the stronger the contraction in the body and the more time it takes to come back to a sense in the body of relaxation and expansiveness.
In fact the pain around my lost relationship was not dissolved for weeks or even months. More specifically it would dissolve and regroup because of the attachment to particular beliefs based on childhood experiences.
Still it was often experienced in oneness.
When “I” am present, as a being and not as a personality, I can hold the pain like a mother holds a child and in that embrace they melt together as one.
It is then as if am holding a particular structure that I can experience as a wounded ness in my soul. I can use the picture of the universe as the archetypal mother, the principle of motherhood of lovingly holding that sense of separateness.
So that is an experience of being that is not just blissful and expansive but an experience that contains both as one. It holds the dissolving into being and at the same time the sense of separateness as one. And in that way this sense of separateness can melt, transform or dissolve, often in its own time.
For example the sense of separation from my partner took several months because the attachment was very strong. So it took a lot of holding in being for that to dissolve and melt.
What is beautiful in such processes is, that because of the beingness, even though I experienced a lot of pain in the separation, I could understand it as a part of the ego structure that had its right place, it was seen for what it is. A pain based on experiences in the childhood, that created a certain structure and a certain sense of reality that is not reality.
Reality is that which is here right now, which has no history. So when I know what reality is, I can hold the deepest pains of desolation, desperation, loneliness and this may be sounds like no big deal but in fact this is a huge difference to when the experience of being is not present.
When the experience of being is not present then I have a hard time holding these places without trying to manipulate them, trying to heal them, make them go away, do something, pushing them this way or that way. Because when we meet an unbearable feeling and we identify with it, it becomes impossible to stay with it just because it is so unbearable. We try to do whatever we can to make it go away, just like we learned to do in the childhood.
In fact any kind of relating can pull me out of being.
Within my personality structure I learned to please.
As a child I learned to please and give up feeling what I feel. And this mechanism still comes into play in relating today. It is such an automatic mechanical movement.
If I identify with the mechanism the pleasing takes over.
If I stay present however, connected to being, the mechanism appears, it starts to pull and push and I have a choice now, to follow it or not.
Sometimes the structures are so overwhelming that coming back to arms and legs is a great help. The most easy and direct way that I know off to keep coming back to presence and being.
Again and again.
Always with that deep, deep sigh of relief, of knowing what is real, of being home.
It took me a while to recognize what is real because there are two kinds of realities.
There is the experiential reality and the existential one.
When I refer to reality I mean the existential reality. That which is always here.
The experience of pain is also real as experience but it is not existential (not always here) and as that it has only a temporary reality.
It is an experience based on a story, so existentially it is not real. When I let go of the story the pain disappears. And again it is not so easy to let go of the story because our whole identity is based on it. It has created not just a story, but this story has also created a belief and the belief in turn creates a structure in the body. Often a tight structure.
A true experience of being for me is impossible without a full presence in the body because that is where the old structures of personality live that needs to be melted and dissolved.
It is quite easy to experience being when leaving the body, transcending the body.
From a good teacher, I learned to sense arms and legs at all time to keep me rooted in the body and in reality.
I like to conclude by sharing that meditation.
(While walking, sitting, cooking, working, singing or watching TV sense you arms and your legs from within without trying to change anything and without valuing what you are finding. Sensing them just as they factually, physically feel. (Hot, cold, flowing, stuck, frozen, etc). This is a very powerful practice the heal the fundamental split between the inner and the outer. If you add looking and keep 55 % of the energy in the sensing of the arms and legs and only 45 % into the looking you become very anchored in the here and now.)
Rani has been on the path of inner transformation since 1976.
For more than 30 years she has been sharing her experience in workshops and retreats.
