Being yourself for a living happens on five levels of awareness. Mastering these strata and aligning them elevates you to a league of your own.
Body
The first is your body. Honour and thank it. Your physicality is not to be renounced, neglected or exploited. It carries ancient wisdom and hums with health when you inhabit it with gratitude and grace.
It keeps you grounded and balanced, not to mention alive. There’s nourishing it, working it, resting it, hearing it and enjoying it, which amounts to being one with it.
The body is a quick way to find the present and a solid way to stay in it. Your flesh and bones are here now, so occupy them. Plus, the other levels are reflected in the physical. It’s a spiritual thing.
The body includes the aura and energy centres, which you can manage with growing awareness. Also, trauma is stored physically, and it can hold us hostage. Psychosomatic work heals and liberates.
Mind
The second level is your mind. Although more abstract, the mind is still physical, just at an adjacent frequency. If you doubt that it’s corporeal, consider how weighty it can be to carry around. We live too heavily in our heads.
Thinking is the interface between the formless and form. It is a creative tool when worked with from higher awareness, otherwise a device for external control by culture and corruption.
It either serves or enslaves you, and disidentification from thinking is a turning point in your awakening. Mastering the mind means detachment from it, and focus comes from freedom.
Heart
The third level is the heart, which is closer to your core, a deeper and higher form of consciousness and a portal to the real you. While the mind oscillates, the heart knows, and your job is to stay in tune with that.
The heart loves, and it also rages. It is the core of courage and the foundation of feeling, without which life has no juice or joy. With it, every experience is enriching. Your capacity for intensity is your capacity for vitality and resonance.
Feel emotions fully while you watch. Social attunement is prudent, but inner repression brings problems, so authenticity is an art. Behind it you need a wholesome relationship with the energy that makes life visceral. Hold space for both the highs and the lows.
The heart loves, and it also rages. It is the core of courage and the foundation of feeling, without which life has no juice or joy. With it, every experience is enriching. Your capacity for intensity is your capacity for vitality and resonance.
Soul
Deeper still is the fourth level, your soul. Here you still have a separate self, but you are at the base of it and on the brink of transcendence. The soul is stirring and spirited, and its story speaks in archetypes and symbols.
It moves in the realm of dreams, quests and ordeals where you forge yourself in the furnace of life and career. Vocations call, actions speak and service leadership ensues. Lessons are tested and ripened, and the community evolves.
Every individual is born with an inner myth to live out in service of the tribe on the ultimate hero’s journey, which is always one of saving the world. Ancestral voices are in it, as is the enormous onus to take things up.
Awareness
The fifth level is awareness itself, the timeless being or transcendent consciousness. This is beyond it all, what you could call the true self, and yet not a self but simply presence perceiving.
It is pure mystery and quantum power. While everything rotates on the other levels, the witness looks on in supreme integration and limitless potential.
You access it through meditation and creativity. Or finding the zone during exercise. Or in nature, with children, and around animals. Or from shocking experiences that wake you up. Or in illness. These are tools to find and be yourself.
Once you become familiar with your being, you can return to it at will whenever you notice you’ve drifted off or become entangled in identification. You can also use experiences on the other levels as leverage into it.
All five strata need awareness in their own right and then alignment, which is a function of surrender, instinct and emerging intelligence. You master the dimensions, and you become a clear channel for the beyond to flow into form.
You stay present and effortlessly affect transformation while singular brilliance shines through you.
• Wheeler helps people around the world be themselves for a living through talks, consulting projects and books.
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