It is not about feeling more

Amongst everything I speak about, the most crucial element is definitely the Stillness from which we experience the world, and it is not about feeling more. It is so simple that no technique can get you to experience it, as a technique will only take you away from it. This no-thing is the center from which the action starts, the action itself and the space in which the action occurs.

That is what I share when I “teach” meditation to someone, or when I work as an osteopath. That is also what I try to share when I write these words on this blog and I would like to thank people who reached out to me after reading my crazy thoughts.

Most of my readers are osteopaths, and most of them are more interested in what I call synaesthesia and empathy, which is how I can sometimes feel my patient’s pain or emotions for example. I started to speak about it here and here. And little by little, I realised that I could gather more information about my patients and my environment.

Disclaimer: This article refers to some elements that might question concepts on which our life is usually based. I do not advise anybody to follow that path, but it is mine. Still, this questioning might not be adequate for people who need psychological support.

It is not about feeling more (sorry guys)

Most people want to feel more. Most of the things we do are about becoming more. More performant, more powerful, more more more. I do not think this is going to help anybody and might actually end up preventing you from feeling anything. So as always, out of experience, I would like to share something a bit different with you.

For one to gather more information, the first thing would be to realise that we all live our life based on some ideas that can be discussed. For some very practical reasons, we represent ourselves as separated from others. That is actually part of our evolution and we acquire that when we were still very young. From a body point of view, that idea serves a purpose: it is about survival. Of course, if your life is based on that data, you will need to reconnect to people, to patients, to your environment. In other words, we have an idea or a feeling of separateness, and from there we are trying to rebuild a connection.

No labels

If you start to experience the world instead of labeling it, you might come to the realisation that this idea can be questioned. And instead of becoming more, I would invite you to dare to become less. Or to realise that you don’t need to become anything. If your walls become less opaque, you might start seeing through them, and experience that, as there was no separation to start with, then there is no need to become more connected. Question what you call your body, what you call your identity. Question everything that creates a separation. Try to experience and see that for years you have never left home and people are selling you trainings for you to go back home. We buy those trainings only because we start everyday with the idea that we are lost outside.

Another thing that seems quite important for me, is the fact that the world we experience is created by our brain. What you call the couch in your living room, the smell of miso soup, your cat, your patient, and even your body, is given shape and texture by yourself. In order to create all that, your brain gathers much more information than you are aware of. I will rephrase that: you already have the information you are looking for. Why is that important? It annihilates your goal of gathering more information as you already have the information. It is about listening and feeling.

A different direction (sorry again)

When I started to speak out about the information I can sometimes gather, I have been offered to protect myself with many new age “techniques”. Creating a wall of energy around my body, grounding myself more etc. I have even been told about how people supposedly got cancer because they absord other’s energy (true story). I would almost laugh if those advices did not come from colleagues and job is to support people. What a weird way to support people, isn’t it? Bringing more separation to a wrongly fragmented world and bragging about the fact that osteopathy is about wholeness and about how holistic it is.

I advised you not to be grounded or centred and I advised you to do nothing. Once again, I might disappoint you by telling you to become less and to listen. I would advise you to become the space in which the information appears. Or more precisely, to realise that you already are that space in which “things” happen. Most of us believe that they are a soul in a body, most of us even talk about a connection between the body and the mind. What about forgetting all that and just experiencing? Feeling the space, feeling things, feeling your environment. Feeling the plant, feeling the cat, feeling the anatomy, feeling your patient, instead of naming those things.

Now I would like to point out something. People who think themselves as separated from the rest of the world might tell you that you need to protect yourself. They might even tell you that you are absorbing people’s energy, so people see the world from outside in. But that is not the way I experience the world. And I think that is also one of the reasons why I might sometimes be able to gather more information than most people. I do not gather information from outside in. I gather information on their way from the point zero to their way through my body and my mental creation of the world. And I almost wrote from the inside to the outside, but nothing is inside or outside.

I start from Silence and let things appear, dance, and disappear in it. This is yoga. You start from that space, initiate a movement very slowly until you feel that this space shrinks a little or even disappear. You take a step back, feel the space and start again. When applied to osteopathy, this is what I call holding space for the patient. The technique I use does not aim at relaxing you, it starts from that space and dies in that space.

It’s about who/what/where feels, and about the action of feeling

This is a full inversion of how you experience life. From there, many things might be felt. Pain, tensions, emotions, thoughts, past memories, images… but it does not really matter. If you study biodynamic osteopathy, you might experience tides or rythms. But tides do not serve the purpose of bringing you back to that stillness. What matters is no-thing. Later this year, I will certainly start sharing all that through one-on-one guided meditations. No techniques, just a support for people to learn how to swim in deep waters. I really look forward to it.

Just like Rollin Becker, an osteopath, once told another osteopath “Shut up with your energy. It comes from somewhere else and that is with that somewhere else that I invite you to work”, I invite you to work from, with and toward that. I actually teach how to “do” that through meditation. And the idea is not about feeling more.

Take care.

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