I love many quotes of Rumi’s. I love reading him. So much love and tenderness in his writing. So much imagery that serve as open and wide doorways to our heart where Truth waits for us.
One of my many favorites of Rumi’s quotes is this one (although I’ve since been reminded that this is actually from A Course in Miracles):
Your task is not to seek Love but merely to seek and find all the barriers you have built against it.
The profoundly simple truth in this eluded me for a while. To be honest, I was reluctant to believe it thinking it was not enough to just ‘seek and find’ but to also ‘do’ something about it. That was, until I realized the power of Mindfulness Meditation and the way it works.
But before I get into that, I want to focus on his words. Notice, he doesn’t say that we should REMOVE the barriers to love but MERELY to seek and FIND them.
If you practice Mindfulness, you practice being present to whatever arises in your consciousness in a non-judgmental, story-free way. And in that sheer AWARENESS, CHANGE is spontaneous. Healing is spontaneous.
I am talking about change on all levels of our being – mental, emotional and physical. The mind (software), brain (hardware) and body (output) are in constant communication with each other. Most of that communication is non-verbal.
When you see a snake, you don’t have to think or consciously say: That is a snake. I am scared of it. I must run away. Instead, the fear response in your brain and body are immediately triggered and you act instinctively to avoid it. Your heart beats faster, your chest might start pounding or feel tight, your body momentarily freezes before it launches into escape. Meanwhile, blood flow to your abdominal organs decreases as more blood is pumped into your muscles.
When you enter a room, you don’t consciously think: I am not comfortable here. Rather, if you are attentive, you’ll notice various sensations in your body. Perhaps a heaviness in your chest or a burning in your shoulders or face or a dampness in your palms…
Where do you feel the unpleasantness of a thought, idea or memory if not in your body?
These are very real, visceral and instant changes that are happening in your body independent of the cognitive interpretations of your mind. They are instinctive and the result of information flow that is unconscious and instinctual. It is only later – seconds or minutes – that the mind catches up with what has happened in the body and constructs some subjective meaning from it, correctly or otherwise. Sometimes, that may never happen. You might never know why or even what happened beyond knowing how you felt at the time.
We are so programmed to dismiss such body reactions and instantly focus instead on constructing a story or embellishing a pre-existing one around them. We want to put an intellectual frame around a physical experience because we’ve been conditioned to give the intellect primacy. As I’ve said in another post,
We assume that our emotional pain must be handled intellectually, using our powers of reasoning to control, understand or manage it. We persist with this approach despite its abject lack of success.
Hence the call to be present, to be here and now – to be in direct contact with what is rather than drown in subjective interpretation/story.
But what has all this got to do with Rumi’s quote?
Love is our natural, original, all-encompassing and ever creative state. You can neither add to it, take away from it or go beyond it. You can, however, engage in activities such as habitual thinking (including judging, attaching, resisting and denying) that shield you from your natural state, that give you the illusion that love is missing or being withheld from you. Love is ever present and as long as you are present, you will always be (and experience) love.
When you give yourself permission to be present by simply noticing you allow all those barriers against love to fall away.
The very noticing (finding) of the barriers you have against Love is the removal of those barriers.
This is what happens in Mindfulness Meditation. You notice whatever arises in your consciousness – thoughts, images, sounds, sensations. You merely NOTICE without judging, without reacting, without getting into story. You merely NOTICE. Sooner or later, that thought dissipates, that sensation dissipates.
The barriers you have against Love always express as unpleasant, discomforting sensations. You don’t have to give them a name. You just have to notice them and in the noticing, they dissipate.
Sheer Awareness has the power to shatter all illusions – those barriers and resistances that we have built against Love.
Of course, later on, with the support (not the dominanation) of intellectual inquiry and understanding, you can enhance your ability to be the Love that you truly are. That happens by giving yourself permission to experience whatever there is to experience – to intend and allow yourself to be unconditional, to intend and allow yourself to not demand, to intend and allow yourself to be kind, to intend and allow yourself to be open and accepting….And it is from this state of Love that you want any action to arise.
But you must understand that emotions, which are felt in our body, are our first line of defense or reaction, our primary barriers to love. It is only after the body has responded that the mind puts meaning around it. Our beliefs, judgments, demands and expectations are our secondary barriers to Love.
The primary barriers which we have against love and which are active in our body, must be met at the level of the body with Awareness. No amount of intellectualizing is going to shatter these ‘barriers’/sensations which arise in our body (which Candice Pert, a neuroscientist, asserts is our subconscious mind).
I do want to qualify what I’ve just said. Rather than ‘barriers’, we can look at the physiological reactions in our body as useful feedback, so that, rather than try to hurry them away, deny or suppress them, or distract ourselves from them, we simply stay with them. In that open spaciousness of witnessing, we are both allowing the energy of those emotions (emotion – energy in motion) freedom to move and holding ourselves in a state of readiness to receive whatever insight the experience has to offer us.
The philosopher, Eugene Gendlin, who practiced psychotherapy having studied with the renowned psychologist Carl Rogers, wrote about and worked extensively with body awareness or ‘focus’. Prompted by the persistent ineffectiveness of traditional psychotherapy models (especially talk therapy models), he espoused the need for attention to the body and what can be ‘felt sensed’ in the body. He especially stressed the need to accept this without trying to impose any learned interpretive framework on it.
There is a lot more that can be said about Candace Pert and Eugene Gendlin but I would encourage you to look into their work. Meanwhile, it may seem that the simplicity of tuning into the body couldn’t possibly offer us any kind of breakthrough, insight or healing. If so, let’s consider why we might find ourselves thinking this way:
We’ve been so programmed to ‘find and FIX’ built on the belief that we are flawed and in constant need of fixing. That is the Ego’s relentless refrain. But what we’re trying to fix are just shadows, illusions, misperceptions, when, if instead, we trained our focus on the truth, on WHAT IS without the judgment, the story, the demands, the expectations, that sheer Awareness shatters the illusions (wrong perceptions), the ‘barriers’ to love.
As we bring Mindfulness to the many events in life, we will come to see that our habitual and mostly unconscious reactions to these events are first and foremost our attempt to get rid of the discomfort/pain that we feel in our body, what Eckhart Tolle refers to as our ‘pain body’. But because we have been so strongly conditioned to give primacy to the intellect, we ignore the body while we feverishly search for meaning, defense and rationale with our thinking.
In fact, thinking gets in the way of information flow simply because thinking is filled with interpretations of past experiences while information is flowing right here and now, that is until we get in its way.
I am not saying that thinking is useless. It is extremely useful if we know how and when to use it. Imagination, for instance, which is an integrated mind-body experience, can be wonderfully useful as Einstein understood:
Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions
and again
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge
Einstein was said to have imagined riding on a ray of light, imagery that was instrumental in the formulation of his theories on relativity.
Thinking in the form of imagining beyond the given, beyond the obvious, beyond the dogma, beyond conventional ‘wisdom’, can be extremely beneficial because it is an integrative process involving all levels of consciousness – mind, body and what we might call ‘spirit’ or non-physical.
Thinking in an analytical and meditative way, known as ‘contemplation‘ in Western spirituality or ‘analytical meditation‘ in Buddhist practices is also extremely beneficial. It uses the reasoning faculty of the mind to meditatively/mindfully navigate a process of enquiry, attending to responses that arise intuitively, permitting questions that also arise intuitively and spontaneously rather than prescriptively.
Love is the state of being free
Thinking that engages and reinforces the ruminating mind and its habitual reactions in the body, however, is unhelpful. It simply strengthens the barriers that we have imposed on love which is really the state of being free.
In ‘seeking and finding’ the barriers to Love, by engaging in the practice of Mindfulness, of sheer Awareness, in which information can once again flow freely, the illusory barriers and resistances to Love are shattered spontaneously and effortlessly by Awareness.
REFLECTION
(See the Call to Action before you start this)
What is something about you or your circumstances that you have been grappling with for a long time and don’t seem to be making (enough) progress in? Reflect on how you have spoken about this to others as well as the internal dialogue you engage in.
CALL TO ACTION
As you’re doing the reflection above, get still and let your attention go into your body. Notice sensations within. You might find more intense or obvious sensations in certain parts of your body. Simply notice. Stay with them as long as you can. Be gentle with yourself. Don’t force. Allow. Make a note of what you felt (it’s okay if you don’t have a word for it) and any insights you may have had. Repeat this at other times.
HEALING STATEMENT
My body offers me information and activates insight and wisdom
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