The Nature of Exposure

My mind is at it
My heart is in it
My spirit is throughout it

What is it? It is right now; it is right this moment. The product of this moment is directly dependent on us. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, right now. Not the pains and the scars of yesterday, or the dreams and fears of tomorrow.

It's easy to expose ourselves physically, we do that by getting out of bed. To expose ourselves mentally, emotionally and spiritually is something no one eagerly signs up to do. We mistake the raw nature of exposure with pain.

Look beyond the feeling of this moment, not just for yourself but for others as well. It is through both ourselves and others that can broaden the power and potency of transformation.

Without exposure, we cannot help ourselves. With exposure, we can free ourselves of the weight that holds back our transformative potential.

Experiencing Emotional Pain

• All feelings are already within us; they are part of the experience of us.
• All of our thoughts and actions generate responses and reactions, from us as well as our environment and others.
• All of our responses and reactions are already within us. These perpetuate the cycle of cause and effect, never having a beginning or an end.

We really do experience emotional pain. Instead of experiencing it, we often avoid it instead. And, we should not just experience emotional pain, we should explore it. It’s a vital source of vivid information about our life, our world and our role in it. All of our emotions are important tools to understanding and navigating our life.

We’ve trained our mind to avoid experiencing life in a present, open way. Our emotions are a guide to our internal responses and reactions. When emotions are too intense, the mind tries to compartmentalize the emotions through avoidance and attachment: avoiding the more intense, darker emotions, attaching to the easier, lighter emotions. The mental attachment to the easier, lighter emotions blocks out the intense, darker ones. This process moves us out of being present and aware.

Some people like to see the best in others. Others don’t see others as the human beings that they are. Both of these strategies are examples of avoidance and attachment. Both strategies block presence and awareness. Without presence and awareness, we cannot see, let alone navigate this life.

Awakening in the Darkness

Slowly, I opened my eyes. Each time they flutter open, the eyes sting from the blinding lights of the world outside of this body and this mind.

We must do this slowly, with care, with awareness, with patience. We are awakening in the darkness that is our ignorance.

The light of the world is bright. The light of the world can break through the darkness of our ignorance.

The light of the world is our mind shining back at us. It is only through our mind that we can become aware of the world. It is only through our mind that we step back into it.

Living as if the Solutions are Here and Now

We all have problems that require real solutions. Sometimes, the problems are so daunting, so looming that any hope of solving these problems appears out of our reach and our control. Worse, we may not even imagine a solution could ever exist for some problems we experience.

There is another option: live life as if the solutions are living within us right here and right now.

Truly, any problems we experience begin and end in the mind. The mind observes the problem. The mind also holds the solution. Anything that starts in the mind also ends in the mind.

We may have no conscious idea of what a solution would look or feel like. However, if we act as if there is a solution and that we hold that solution within our life and our mind, we are creating the solution in our present. The actual solution may be obscured, but it is there; we have it inside of us, right here, right now.

Leaving Our Self-Created Box

Our environment constantly attempts to place us in the box that some call “I”. This box is a limiting box. The big box your self-created box is found within could be called your city, your town, your state, your country, even this planet. That box is one built upon ignorance of true reality.

Everything has always been here and will always be. It just looks so different; it just feels so different. The difference is simply our mind attempting to rationalize what we are from the rest of what is: a completely understandable approach. Embrace this approach, with a curiosity that, perhaps, it is mistaken.

This does not mean we ignore our reality, or our seeming separateness from others, or other things. It does mean that we honor our present understanding and open ourselves to a more whole understanding.

If we examine an organism, or even a simple object, we can see it with our own eyes, and also realize our eyes do not allow for complete understanding. We do not see the organs within, the blood that pulses through the heart, the nerves that lead up to the brain, sending signals to the rest of the body. Yet, these organs, this blood, those nerves exist.

We can look at a painting. A painting is a fabrication involving matters and energies placed on a canvas or in a space. It is meant to be a representation of some thing, some one, some of what we may not know how to describe in any other way but with matter and our energy. It gives the illusion of three-dimensional living and that those three-dimensions not actually exist within the painting itself. The mind expands the two-dimensions of the painting and allows it to expand into our three-dimensional understanding of our world and our life. Yet, the painting is inanimate, is nearly two-dimensional, yet we see depth, height, length where none actually exists in our reality.

Examine a photograph. A nearly perfect representation of a paused moment of time. There are so many aspects that are eclipsed in a photo. The camera. The picture-taker. The entire background and backdrop. A picture ignores all the moments, all the matter, all the energy that feeds into that one, paused moment of time. The picture is not perfect. Neither is our memory. A picture, like memory, ignores what’s outside the lines, or behind the lines.

Learning to leave our self-created box takes concerted effort, extreme patience and a never ending supply of attempting understanding. The box is an illusion that we believe is true. Simply, open your mind and awareness to other possibilities, to other potentials.