Licia AugustaWe have many inroads to understanding ourselves. One inroad is the Tree of Life. The tree I am speaking of is a metaphor, however this metaphoric tree is not outside yourself. It is a doorway or a tool into your own being.
How do you make choices? Have you studied the intersections of your own choice points? The Tree of Life is a tool to help you discover this crucial skill of understanding your own psychology.
Of course your rootstock or the way your ancestors made choices will effect the way you make choices. So let’s start at the base of your own tree, at your birth. Can you map all the significant choice points in your life and how you grew? Did you start down a path only later to prune it because it did not match the external?
There are many ways to look at the Tree of Life, and I will be exploring this territory in a series of primaltalks and blogs. However, in this blog I would like to write about the intersection of mystery with our own being.
What if we see our nervous system as a tree, or the way we reach out from our core to interact with the mystery that surrounds us? It is this tree, this communication system, that will both expand and limit our perceptions. How much have you pruned this system? How much have you reduced your perceptions to what you are accustomed to?
Let me tell you a story, a story that set me moving towards my current understanding of perception. It is a simple story. However it contains doorways within doorways. So please don’t ignore its potential.
When my stepson Ryan was about 10 years old he asked, “If we don’t have any senses, are we alive?” I paused. I thought and thought some more. “I have no idea,” I finally had to admit. And yet this seemingly simple question set me on a journey of exploration for many years to come.
A few years later I taught a class about our senses. I was specifically teaching about our sense of equilibrium when I asked the students to take part in a particular exercise. To heighten an awareness of gravity, I asked the students to stalk through the jungle and enter a pool of water. I asked them to feel how the water’s buoyancy changed their awareness of weight. Without waiting for further instruction one of the students stripped down to her underwear and plunged into the water unaware that her attire would become transparent. The student was Judy, our instructor emeritus at wildernessFusion, and although this story may seem superfluous, it’s actually necessary to our exploration. Where was her awareness at that moment? What were her perceptions of the exercise and how did she translate it into being?
If we expand our senses to include the spirit realm, how are we doing this? What part of our sensory being are we using to sense this relational realm? If we can sense the void, which of the branches in the Tree of Life are we embodying? Can we sense vision, soul, Creation itself?
Let me tell you a secret. In healing 1, all we are doing is helping the students turn their instruments of awareness back on so that they can begin the journey into simplicity. I just had a new h1 student ask, “How come others in my class can feel energy, warmth, color, etc. but I cannot?” I replied, “What are you doing in your life to feel more? Can you taste the earth notes in a glass of wine? Have you trained yourself to taste the fruit? Or are your choices based on shutting these things out?”
So how many senses do you have? I can tell you that science has opened a new debate. Do we have 5, 10, 12, 20 or more senses? I have a more fundamental or primal question for you. How much do you want to sense or perceive? How much time do you spend refining your senses and perceptions? If you perceived more, what would happen to your sense of self? What would happen to your sense of choice?
Ready to be live?
