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Body in Love - Descending to Ascend
Are you in or out? Going up or down?

Many spiritual books talk about "ascension" and many teachers talk about "transcending" things like our minds, bodies, and worldly problems. The basic idea is that we came down here into our physical lives from spirit on high where everything was groovy. This world is at best a big school-house; at worst a vale of tears, a place of untold suffering. And we learn that this is a place where you can get drawn in and trapped in cycles of suffering, as expressed in the Buddhist idea of the wheel of karma and the modern neurological discoveries of biochemical "loops" that get formed in our nervous systems that are so difficult to break that they cause us to be powerlessly addicted to booze or our own compulsive thoughts.

Yes! I've noticed some truth to these ideas. How about you? They are hard to dispute and even quite comforting when you go through a dark night of the soul, as I did recently. It feels good to know that it won't last forever, that there is another place - heaven, higher planes, satori, enlightenment (or whatever) where pain and suffering are a mere memory. Yet if things were really this simple the path to freedom would just be suicide or its spiritual equivalent: total, complete, absolute denial of the body, emotions and desires. Have you tried this path? I have! I was a renunciate monk for most of my twenties and I can save you the trouble of going through it yourself (but feel free, of course...).

What I basically, and very painfully, learned was that what goes up must come down. However much I tried to get out of my body, mind and emotions, they wouldn't get out of me. And in the end I realized that my attempts to get out were not really spiritual. They were just neurotic symptoms of my psychological pain, which I was not going to be able to avoid by the up-and-out method. Twenty-five years later, I'm still feeling the effects of my transcendent phase; my body is still not happy that I acquired such a deep habit of overriding it, and continually provides me with uncomfortable reminders, like a wife whose husband had a long affair and even though he is now trying to rebuild the marriage, she keeps harping on about how much she was hurt, and trying to make him feel it. It turns out that telling her that she is suffering from "woundology" or that she needs to--"just get with the program, we're healing now, okay?"-- doesn't work.

Because apparently my body and her close friend my emotional body (also known as the mid or limbic or mammalian or emotional brain) will not be bought off so cheaply! They want the full attention of me, the spirit or conscious awareness that abandoned them for so long. I tried for years to give them this attention, yet sometimes I found that this just made things worse. By focusing on my body when it's in pain, I would sometimes find the pain dissolving. Yet at other times my physical difficulties seemed to be strengthened by my focus, as though I was widening the neural pathways of pain perception from footpaths into freeways.

I tried loving my body, but how do you love your body? There are obvious ways like eating, exercising, sleeping and playing well, or getting massages. Did those. But my cranky disgruntled body seemed to require something deeper from me. What is it? What do you want, body darling? Over the years my body has disclosed in vulnerable moments what it really wants:

"I want you to realize that I am pure love, and that, far from being a problem, I am a doorway to the divine, as grand and real as any idol or mental-spiritual principle you worship." My body has communicated to me that I cannot get there without her. "Dying won't work," she tells me. "Your soul didn't incarnate to get out of here, but to get all the way in. You have a mission: find the key to the divine that is uniquely held by matter, especially your own unique matrix of matter: Me! Your body. A body that lives in love."

Could it be that all--or at least most--physical and emotional difficulties are the result of our spirit abandoning our matter? "Matter" comes from the same latin root as the word "mother," and spirit is generally thought of as masculine: Dad! Do we have an inner marital conflict?

There is evidence that the body lives in love like a healthy natural animal, and that it is merely our thinking that overlays the patterns of distress we call physical and emotional disease. Scientists have found that cells extracted from very ill or dying patients can thrive for months in a test tube once they get away from the environment of fear or stress that they were bathed in within the person's body. It is as though they are away at a health spa - even though you wouldn't think of a test tube that way!

People with Multiple Personality Disorder have testable illnesses such as diabetes in one persona, and not in another--yet all their "selves" inhabit the same body! A full-trance medium I used to know was very short-sighted, but when he left his body to be replaced by angelic spirits channeling through, they would remove his glasses and they could read perfectly. He could never believe this when he woke up and people told him about it.  

So: If it wasn't the body that had the vision problems, what was it? A pattern created by something other than love, by long unconscious habits of spirit and matter living out of love, out of communion, co-existing like cranky spouses living a life of resistant separation, even though they are two sides of the same divine soul presence. I have found that I don't need to analyze these habits and patterns much. I just need to re-establish the communion between spirit and body, and keep reconnecting them again and again over time, until they start to get it on as a new way of being.

Soulwavework (like its parent, Motherwavework), is based on a methodology that brings the higher spirit or mind into direct communion with the body and especially with the nervous system. The soulwave techniques for doing this are many, including wave-breathing™ and many other breath doorways, body-waving™, the Meltdown™, and more. Most people who take soulwave trainings experience dramatic or gentle openings into the ecstasy and aliveness that this communion can create, even when it is only practiced for an hour or so. Yet habits are habits: we are deeply entrained to leave our bodies, and many of us have not even fully incarnated yet. To make things worse, unless we live in the woods offline, our modern world is by no means designed to make this inner communion easy; we live in a high-speed, virtual reality a lot of the time, racing to keep up.

The new spirituality on this planet has to be integral; it has to include everything. We've been to the other extremes and gotten the t-shirt, but many of us are ready for a new experiment. We need some time to allow a new sacred marriage to take place within us, in which our attention can actually fall in love with our inner felt self. This is really different from sitting still for long periods of time "watching" one's thoughts. That may have value, but the soulwave process is different. Soulwave is not about watching; it's about being with; the real thing; an actual joining of energies that are supposed to be united and have been separate for too long. Once this starts to happen, we need time to develop the relationship, and create some new habits of inner communion rather than self-abandonment. This can also be translated like this: we need to get out of stress for enough time, and with sufficiently skillful means, to create some new neurological and attentional habits that will keep us out of stress in the future.

The Soulwave 4: LIGHTWAVE BODY training is designed as a weeklong initiation into a new reality: the discovery of your body as a doorway to ecstasy and enlightenment. You will finally have the time to get back to yourself in an atmosphere of deep, luscious, physical safety and intense, fertile life energy. Don't come just to swim with dolphins, although you may; don't come just for the healing experience of an unconditionally loving group, although you will have it. Come if you are ready to be in your body in love!