Page 21 - An Awakening Journey Sampler

become frozen in a position that any move would inflict a shock of pain

that there was the strong possibility of passing out, gives you a good in-

sight to what's happening in your body. This is a great lesson in truly lov-
ing yourself and wanting the best for your physical body rather than

abusing it, you become ever watchful and not going down any route that

could release pain and diminish your standard of life.

This attitude does not stop the pain as that still remains. I view it the

same as thought, it arises but it's not who I am so don't connect with it,

it's just happening now and not anything personal. I am not deluded

enough that I don't expect that there are not going to be times when the

pain is so severe that egoic stuff won't try and jump back in, that's hap-

pened on many occasions when it's severe but then the personal connec-

tion drops and by not feeding the fear, it certainly lessens the intensity.

One of the challenges I found was stopping my thoughts from directing

me into the fear, that this present episode of agony will not cease and can

often move from this with a period of meditation, focusing on my
breath, it's going to be hit and miss but any distraction will help the re-

lease from fear.

Awakening seems like it opens and closes without any help from us. So I

have stopped being upset with myself when I slip back into reality as the
Oneness connection is still there we just don't know it.

Dealing with incessant pain, I learned to use my energy wisely over the

years and found that I wasted a lot of it carrying all the jobs I needed to

do on my shoulders at once and not focusing on each one separately and
feeling less pressure. Under pressure dissipates lots of energy and

discovered that as I was working through the awakening paintings that I

was becoming more and more aware of being in a point of stillness. This

stillness was even present when doing mundane cleaning, the very name

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