The Yoga of Feelings!

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The Yoga of Feelings!
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The great benefits of Yoga and meditation are
being embraced in our culture now. As we adopt
and create technologies and spiritual disciplines
to achieve mind/body/spirit integration, I want
to suggest an approach I call the Yoga of
feelings.
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Yoga is a spirituality of uniting, as in yoking,
and healing as in making whole.  The Yoga of
feelings is is a sacred alchemy for working w ith
the split energies that comprise our life force.
  We have many splits within us, largely created
by our attempts to run or fight with our feelings
and emotional states.
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Even those who have had the direct mystical
experience of oneness with all life, can still
find areas within that are split, trapped in
duality and not awake.  Bringing this new
consciousness into our daily life, is known to
take 3-15 years.
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We do not awaken overnight and most of us could
benefit from a practice that works with our
feelings and emotions.  It was my own need for
this that led me to develop this approach based
on contemporary and ancient spiritual
understanding of this realm of our humanness.
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First I want to distinguish between emotions and
feelings.  Feelings are pretty basic and natural
to us as biological creatures.  They are our
spontaneous flow, the internal weather of our
energetic system, always changing, in open
awareness of the moment, arising out of contact
with it.
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They are usually feelings of life and joy,
sadness and grief, fear or aggression.On the
other hand our emotions are feeling states that
are aroused in us in reaction to our thoughts and
our interpretation of events and experience,
which is largely determined by our programing and
history.
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There are patterned dynamics connected with
past trauma.  Emotions have a past or future hook
and morph into greed, distrust, control,
judgements, impatience, blame, hopelessness,
depression, ridgidity, contempt.  
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These emotions create a lot of pain in our
feeling body, but the pain is not real, it comes
from our particular interpretation or spin we
give to events.  We make a story out of our
experience.  Here we are again, back in this all
too familiar place blaming someone else,
ourselves, god or the devil. 
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It is the all too familiar drama that seems to
permeate a certain aspect of our existence.  The
spin we give is usually the ego angling for
specialness in some way. Even if it is to be
special in misery. 
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In the Yoga of feelings, even this is met in
awareness, held in compassion, and the real need
illuminated and provided.  The distortion,
confusion and pain, forgiven in the light of
clarity.  A new fresh moment is born free of the
past.  
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So as you can see here, the heart of the Yoga of
feelings is compassionate presence that can be
with the pain.  You will experience for yourself
that this can set you free.  I have developed a
variable but basic 4 part system to help us
dis-identify with our drama and pain-bodies,
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so we can shift identity to our compassionate
presence to be present to these all
dis-harmonious feelings and negative emotional
states. Not only does this release the pain,
through this we free our feelings of joy,
gratitude and oneness.
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This approach is what I am calling the Yoga of
Feelings.  It works with the bodies including
physical releasing, and emotional expression, but
begins with a pain state, which we hold in
awareness and focus on the inner sensory
experience of this distress.  
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When we are present, without the interpretations
of the mind, or the mind trying to figure out
what is wrong, these very energies we are
attending to in consciousness, inform us and
provide the awareness that we are seeking.
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Our deepening presence and attention to energetic
disturbances creates a healing container into
which we consciously call the light, the life
force, the higher wisdom we are seeking as we
hold the troubling pattern.  
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This is when it gets really interesting.  Staying
present within the sensory reality of our inner
experience, we will actually receive in various
ways a true illumination of the pain.  We make
the connections with the past, and with our own
self-judgement.
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We receive the blessing of another presence with
us in presence that holds us as we hold
ourselves.  We ground ourselves into the Divine
Presence through presencing ourselves and all our
feelings. http//earthwalkways.com/