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by Storme Reeves | Sep 22, 2020 | What's New

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Article 005 Perception Filters

by Storme Reeves | Mar 27, 2019 | What's New

Is what you are viewing really the objective truth? How would you know?

Article 005 Storme Reeves

Over the last while i have been opening my awareness to inconsistencies, things that just don’t add up around the subject of relating to a man as a partner or in a relationship. Continually i would notice how when i talked to a good male friend of mine i would commonly have a different demeanour and air about me when relating to him specifically.  It’s not that i have been unkind and mean to him every time i interact with him as at different times i have felt quite open and accepting of him and how we relate. But i definitely have been gathering a growing awareness of how my patterns implicate and become entangled in key players in my life around me into their patterns and how it can be all so elusive. When you can jump out of it it is such a relief.

 The first practice i was employing was recognising that it is not anyone else’s and for that matter my good friends fault everytime i feel upset or everytime he does something which i have a judgement about which i then use to cement a suspicion that it really is his fault. The point is that it is not even about who did what or what role they played and therefore who is right and who is wrong.  I knew whilst doing this practice that there was something more for me to see but it was still remaining very illusive.

   The next step from this process was when i drew up on some butchers paper what i perceived to be my grand delusions on the subject matter of thinking that i need to have a father figure type with all that that entails for me in my life to feel happy, satisfied and completed in some way.

  So everytime my friend did something that did not fit into my storyline of what this figure should be like it would make me frustrated and i would need to have space from him to work out what was going on. This part of me which constantly would react in this way with variations would commonly experience strong intense feelings  whenever this pattern was triggered. After writing up my diagrams on the butchers paper i was able to have more clarity about how i would be when this was all in action. So my next daily practice was to be very mindful of when i saw it arising and be present and say to myself í don’t need to be ‘that person’ and the urges to react in a strong way would cessate. I did this for a few weeks and now it is no longer a big effort like it was at the start and i have created a new pathway and habit of taking internal space  before i respond to my environment or potential trigger..

  The next layer appeared just the other day where i could feel my energy levels dropping and i could detect myself falling into a familiar pattern linked in to the above components but i wasn’t really sure what it was about. As my friend does not in anyway depict what my picture of the ídeal father figure/partner is, i was experiencing once again some similar feelings of that nature, that it was somehow his fault that i felt this way-like he was not satisfying something in me that was obviously in distress.

 I still had the awareness and knowing of course that this was nothing really to do with him at all. The following morning i awoke from a dream where i was feeling comforted and relieved having a hug with an ex partner of mine. The feelings i had when waking were not particularly happy or peaceful but quite painful with a yearning and pining type of feeling attached. So i went into meditation for well over an hour to have a look around at what this was all about.

  In the meditation i could see myself like in the dream in that feeling which was like a compulsive feeling of absolutely needing to be embraced in the hug and having everything all taken care of. I then worked with this scenario to see how i would feel given different choice points from that setting.  Firstly i told myself to refrain from going into the embrace. The reactions from this were strong feelings of fear and it felt like i wouldn’t survive if i didn’t act on that compulsion. I then felt anger at myself that i had stopped the usual process from occurring therefore not getting to experience that temporary satiation from the compulsion.

    It may help to understand that when i am talking about the moving into the embrace scenario like the dream it is not a happy ending type of story-it depicts more a familiar part of myself that has experienced these sets of feelings, memories, associations and actions that keep me in a perpetual state of distress because although i can follow the compulsion im never satiated because I’m inside a perpetual trauma pattern, trying to help myself to get out of the trauma pattern. We cannot fix or change unhealthy habits, thoughts and feelings inside of the state that creates and feeds them. When working to change out of a pattern i find it very useful to visualize the typical scenarios with the feelings that go with it and then change what you would normally do and see what responses you get. This is like faking it until you make is kind of idea only we are trialing different actions to better understand our system and how it works to make more informed choices. Once we can understand our psychology within the pattern we can literally like in the movie the matrix, insert the girl in the red dress to change the program.

  The falling into my ex’s arms is a type of supplication where i move into feeling cared for and i can stay there and be looked after because i feel i cannot actually survive without this-it is a co dependent type of interaction. The other end of this if it were a duality- if it was on the upside of this expression it would be exhibited as a type of dominance and empowerment, i would have picked up the pieces and had the foresight to see i cannot exist in the codependent state and i now work to remedy it by gaining power, working hard to be successful in whatever I’m working on . I would also work to feel like i can exist independently.

    These expressions as i see them are two extremes due to partly being stuck in a pattern from conditioning and epigenetic inherited patterning and partly due to my societal conditioning of feeling like we need to operate through competition. I will only survive if i compete.

   The whole trauma pattern is 100% unable to include cooperation or collaboration with another person nor can i even put those ideas together and identify how to do this from within the pattern. So to elaborate even though the best part of me may have a desire to work cooperatively with my friend on a given project, if i have any of this trauma pattern operating i will find it impossible to work outside of the limitations of competition with him. Try as i might it is literally invisible to me because my perception of him from within the pattern is completely colored. Being inside this pattern works like a giant filter that makes every person i interact with specifically men to be tainted by the views and beliefs that are held within the pattern. Just think about this and what i am saying so we can digest it.

      Everything you view looks like, sounds like, smells like, feels like it does due to the multi layers of who you are, your belief systems, conditioning, generational inheritance, culture and so on. So our view of something or someone is rarely neutral and it is rarely also the view of another person, it is unique to you. Someone may have a similar experience and we think they have the same view as us but this is actually us experiencing entanglement. This is where you can  become entangled in another person’s views, beliefs and so on which may be similar to yours so that you then believe they are the same because this serves a purpose for our ego to reinforce that our position is right and if we have more people to support this then we have a false sense of security, stability and ground. This is the ever running complexity of our mind and how we can trick ourselves into trying to stay in situations that appear comfortable, with people that we feel comfortable with, avoiding the truth of matters and anything that may bring about change.

      So after trying to work through all of his on my own in meditation i decided to ask my friend to stay and be present and assist where needed whilst i went back into the meditation. He had already detected part of the source of the distress inside of me was linked to this competition.

It was an amazing experience where i saw myself trying to come from the scene in the dream through this giant whirlpool of energy, memories, attachments, people, places and so on all to do with this pattern. My whole being was very attached to this type of suffering and all of the memories to do with it, because it was so familiar i was reluctant to give it up, it felt like something comforting. Which of course i had just seen that it indeed is a cycle of trauma patterning and  it was not good to keep it. The session went for almost 2 hours where i went from spontaneously crying, seeing different faces from my past, to being very still and calm. On the other side of the whirlpool were figures of greatly developed beings like Mother Mary, Jesus, Buddha and some types of light beings, including my friends dad called Abdullah.

It was if they were helping to draw me through the attachments to this suffering closer and closer to them.  At the end of the whirlpool experience i saw the face of my mum and just like the other people who had presented before in this process i worked to release this filter from her that i was also holding to keep me in the pattern.

     For those who may think this quite a far fetched idea to have sensed these beings as a part of my processing. I always practice to to try and remain unattached to ideas, thoughts, feelings and experiences.  Subscribe to the idea that the more you can release limiting thoughts and beliefs the more you can open to all kinds of input, support and guidance.The resistance one might feel towards this kind of idea will be based in the ego and it will be judgements and prejudice. When working on myself and with clients i understand that each and everyone of us has our own contexts, belief systems, culture and conditioning which are the perfect settings from which to begin working from to evolve and grow, however it does not make one person’s context wrong or right over another.. The figures i sensed in my processing will be representing in my context what i believe to be true about their energies such as the overall energies of love, transformation and compassion which they all represent.

     At the end of the experience with the whirlpool i eventually made it to the other side and found all of these beings plus all of the people and faces i had seen in my processing and we were sitting in a circle. I could clearly see that all of the beliefs, ideas, thoughts, feelings and conditioning i have experienced in my life had created one giant filter in my perception in regards to specifically men but not limited to men. The filter was created of all of the points i have been writing about above. So using my friend as an example. When i would interact with him at anytime he would be viewed in a particular light that would reinforce my central delusion i wrote on the  butchers paper-which is ‘i need to have this ideal/father figure person’ for me to feel secure, safe and capable. So my friend would be viewed as all the things that the ideal figure is not, which would reinforce my suffering and then loop me back into the cycle of that particular suffering inside of the major delusion. This is how i know it is a delusion that needs to be seen and released as it keeps me in a cycle of suffering.

     The main approach and energy that the circle represented was like that of the sun. An energy of being able to absorb, observe and let go of reactivity. This is a place where cooperation can occur and competition cannot exist.

    After i finished the meditation i began my normal morning jobs and i went out to take my dog for a walk. As i was 20 metres up the street i noticed someone had smashed a beer bottle on the road. For your understanding i’ll share that this is a almost a pet hate of mine that people smash bottles in the bush and on the road and do not pick it up. My dog ended up being close to blood poisoning from an infection resulting from a severe cut in his toe from walking on a piece of broken glass. He had to have the toe removed which has affected his gait significantly affecting his quality of life. I often find myself having a gripe about this and i wish i could explain the impact this kind of negligence can have. However i am fully aware this is a pathway into blaming my environment for my own misfortunes which i am actively working to change.

   Anyway my new practice when i find litter and broken glass on my walks is to gratefully thank the person who has left it there as they have given me an opportunity to act responsibly and pick it up. This is also a practice in generating gratefulness. It is a challenging practice but ill get better at it. I was collecting the shards of glass from off the verge and the road when some of the neighbours were out in the garden. I was thinking to myself how i would manage the glass and that i may need to walk back home to put it in the bin, when i looked up to see my neighbour leaning  over the fence with his hands open for me to give him the glass to dispose of. This is not a coincidence but a direct expression of the opening of possibilities inside of myself to work cooperatively and to accept cooperation from my environment. This affirmed the work i had been doing in meditation and it was really a wonderful miracle and divine occurrence.

I hope this has helped in someway to assist with your own deeper insight into your own storylines.

Bye for now.

Love Storme

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