The LifeStream

Each of us grew from a tiny fertilised seed in our mother’s womb. Wisdom innate in that tiny cell, in your mother’s body and in how the universe works, enabled and directed the amazing journey of growth. That journey is perhaps the most incredible of any life form on our planet. From a very fundamental level of life your being moved from a single cell to a bundle of cells. Then it developed from being an aquatic creature toward forming a body capable of living in and breathing air. At birth you transformed from being fully immersed in water to breathing air and beginning independent life.

If, as we see with some plant growth, these changes were filmed and speeded up, we would witness an extraordinary process of growth and energy flow. In fact energy streams through your forming body, directed by innate wisdom. LifeStream is a name for innate wisdom and the activity and life-giving flow and the growth of body and mind it manifests.

In many ways your whole existence as an individual person occurs because your body is like a conduit through which energy flows and expresses in various ways. Air, water and food flow through you continuously, and without that flow you would not have conscious life.

Of course, the process of growth doesn’t end at birth. Level after level of growth unfolds as you mature. New abilities appear, such as walking and talking; although these are not innate. You learn to walk and you learn to talk, but you do not learn how to keep your heart beating, heal a wound, or maintain all the systems in your being. And because much adult change comes about from learning skills and abilities, you may feel that the process of LifeStream is no longer growing you. In fact you may completely forget how the process grew you, and how it maintains your existence in every moment. You might even have habits of eating, lifestyle and attitudes that constantly undermine its efficiency. Many people live in a way suggesting they believe health and illness can only be dealt with by external means such as medicines, doctors, and other health professionals. This is very evident in the practices surrounding childbirth. In many countries now childbirth is treated like an illness needing surgical or medical skill, rather than a natural process.

The teachings underlying the practice of LifeStream reminds us that life upholds our existence at all times. Even death is part of this natural process of change. In contrast with the lifestyle that believes everything comes from outside, LifeStream reminds us that even as adults the streaming life process has an enormous amount to offer us. But because we have developed a certain amount of self-determination, because we may have learned destructive habits of behaviour and response, we may have to learn how to cooperate once more with the life process innate in our body and mind.

Unfortunately I have learned by seeing so many dreams from people all over the world, that we are usually frightened of Life in us. This is very obvious when someone experiences sleep paralysis and the Life process takes over from the conscious self and personality; they experience terror. This is gradually overcome when we realise that our personality, although we think of it as our whole life and self, is only a tiny little thing and quite vulnerable.

What Give You Life?

Because awareness and a fuller relationship with what underlies your existence is basic to LifeStream, it is important to clarify how you relate to this or see it. To start with it is wonderfully helpful to clearly acknowledge that your conscious personality, thoughts, beliefs and way of life, may be out of touch with your deeper and life giving self.

This is not about a belief, such as a belief in God. You do not have to believe in your existence. You are convinced of it because you exist. So we are not looking for a new belief here, just a fuller acquaintance with your own existence. Therefore take time to consider what you think or feel underlies your life. Do you think of yourself as caused by chemical processes, biological activities, or maybe even mechanical and unconscious forces? Perhaps you believe that God created you. Whatever you believe, can you completely define how that came about? Another way of asking this question is to say do you know everything about what causes you to exist? For instance, although we now know a great deal about life processes in biological science, that science still recognises that life is a mystery. Can you take that attitude to your own origins? Can you accept that at the base of your being is a mystery you do not fully understand? If you can admit you do not fully know, can you let go of present convictions or beliefs and open to that mystery?

Try this simple approach to get closer to this. Sit quietly where you will not be disturbed for a minute or so. Close your eyes, become aware of your breathing, then put your hand under your clothes so you can feel your heart beating.

There you have it. The conscious you is touching and directly experiencing in a quiet moment how that mystery we call life is right there in every moment of your being spontaneously giving you exisence. You can feel it moving right under your hand. You know it is not your conscious will, knowledge or beliefs that are pulsing that beautiful movement. Right now life is breathing you and beating your heart. And that is just the very evident surface signs of what it is doing. Feel it! Do you really fully understand that? Isn’t that an amazing miracle and mystery? Wouldn’t it be wise and wonderful to get to know that mystery directly and more fully?

Infinite Potential

LifeStream, as an approach to that mystery, says we each have enourmous possibilities we have not tapped yet. If we look at the phenomenal range of life forms on this planet, and if we remember that as far as we know, this enormous variety all developed from the same bacteria and single cell creatures that were the origins of life on this planet, we can see that the process behind the variety has infinite possibilities. The variety could not have developed if there was not a potential for its appearance. The shaping influence of environment and its connection with evolution then played its part in directing or exploring the potential. Some of the latest findings in regard to the quantum level of the universe, and therefore of our being, suggest that at base the universe can be thought of as infinite potential.

Up until the arrival of self-awareness, any change in human beings was produced by evolutionary processes interacting with climate, environment and the ecological situation. With the arrival of self-awareness we could begin to work with our own inner potential. Human beings began to develop methods to change their condition physically, mentally and spiritually. Some cultures, particularly those of the East, gave enormous importance to this. However, most of us simply want to improve the quality of our life emotionally, our relationships, our health, or our creativity. These are all within the scope of what is possible with LifeStream.

So let us look at how it works, and how it can be done

Fundamentally LifeStream is about growth, about human potential. Particularly it is about the potential still unexpressed within us. Because it is about growth we can use the analogy of other things that we see around us that grow. For instance a plant or tree may attain a certain size, and in that sense its growth has finished. But then it can produce flowers, fruit and seeds. However, certain weather or soil conditions might inhibit either its growth or its ability to produce flowers and seeds.

Any seed, at its first stage of growth, still holds within it the potential for fuller growth. My experience of working with LifeStream is that every person I have worked with discovers they still have massive growth potential, no matter what age they are. The seed they grew from is not yet fully expressed – in fact may never be.

With ourselves the way we are reared in childhood, the way we are educated and the society into which we mature, involve many factors that can inhibit growth beyond what is seen as normal around us. One of the main factors of human growth is that we copy the behaviour of those who rear us, and we learn the worldview or ideas of those around us. But most of the people around us are often quite limited in their perceptions, their creativity or their ability to reach beyond their present state of growth. So one of the most important questions put to you in LifeStream is – How are you holding yourself back?

A dramatic and extreme example of this inhibited growth — or perhaps it is better to call it inhibited potential — can be seen in those babies reared by animals. Cases of such children have been recorded all over the world, where babies had been lost and female animals such as a wolf or bear have succoured the baby. In such cases the baby never developed into a human being, could not walk upright or speak, but exhibited all the characteristics of the animals they were reared with. Being ‘human’ is not innate – it is a learned skill. See: Animal Children. Becoming more than you are at the moment is not innate. It is a learned skill.

Being Reared a Human is Limiting

Being reared by other human beings therefore suggests we inherit the inhibiting factors and problems of other human beings. But because at the core of our life process an infinite potential dwells, we can open to and allow further growth. After all, do we wish to perpetuate the murderous tendencies we see expressed in two world wars and continuing national and local conflicts; in political, commercial and religious manipulation?

Sometimes this wisdom at our core, this infinite potential to change, expresses in very simple ways. Some years ago I was talking about how our body knows how to heal itself, and a man told me that he had suffered prolonged back pain. He said that while he was in a bar he was talking to a friend about his back problem and realised as he spoke that his body had started making a movement involving his hips. He continued practising this movement afterwards and his back pain was healed.

But the possibility of allowing our being to show us how to heal our physical ills is only one of the possibilities that LifeStream offers. Another man, K. P., on reading an article I had written about LifeStream, e-mailed me telling of his own experience. While meditating he had the urge to move spontaneously. When he allowed this it led to blissful and rapid movements that lasted for about ten minutes. He said that, “When I got up I found myself totally euphoric and able to see in “artistic mode” all the time. I have never felt better than that day. I was absolutely incandescent with joy; without really knowing why.”

K. P. told me that by the term artistic mode he meant the ability to see his surroundings in a way that he never previously experienced, enabling greater artistic expression. The joy he experienced is something that comes to many people who learn to open to their core self. Infinite potential means exactly what it says. There is no end to the wonders we can experience or the person we can become.

What Are You Really Capable of?

Lyle Watson, a scientist and biologist, in researching human potential for one of his books, was asked by a boy’s father in Italy to observe his four-year old son. In Watson’s presence the father rolled his son an ordinary tennis ball. A little while later the boy rolled it back. The ball was turned inside out without any cuts or damage to its surface. Watson then signed his name on another tennis ball and the boy repeated the change. Later Watson cut open the ball in front of witnesses, revealing his signature on the inside of the ball.

Thousands of such cases exist of children or adults doing what are seen as impossible actions by our present and outdated Newtonian and dualistic scientific understanding. To do what that child did, the boy would need to have been able to function in dimensions, or in ways, completely beyond what many people consider to be the real and only world of three dimensions in time and space. Fortunately the leading edge of science now begins to explain how such things may be possible. They are, in the end, not supernatural or impossible, but involve aspects of the universe around us that the worldview we were raised in completely denies. This is why it has been said earlier that being raised as a human being within a certain worldview is one of the great limitations inhibiting our potential and growth.

The case of the four-year old boy changing the condition of the tennis ball is an extreme case, but history and the present-day is full of people’s descriptions of their discovery of, entrance into, and exploration of, dimensions of experience that are beyond everyday three-dimensional sensory based life. This is often named the spiritual or psychic world. I am simply calling it human potential, and am not claiming we will all be able to turn tennis balls inside out by the end of the year.

What I do see in connection to LifeStream is that there is MORE in your nature that you can unfold when you learn to allow the streaming life that grew you from a seed to continue its unfolding. There is MORE when you learn to consciously cooperate with the mystery of life in you. Mostly we tend to block or interfere with its attempts to heal and unfold us.

But how do we allow the LifeStream?

There are many ways of doing this, some more profoundly affective than others. Here are some pointers.

Life is a mystery that as a species we try and try to learn the secrets of, but so far often fail to fully understand. You are an expression of that mystery. Therefore, although you may not intellectually understand the depths of what you are, nevertheless, you are that mystery discovering itself. By allowing the depths of your being to unfold, you move closer to knowing the mystery you are. You can take the first steps toward this by recognising that any beliefs you have about what you are, are incomplete. You do not know the full nature of your body, mind, or the universe, and therefore you do not know, even if you are very well educated, the full extent of what you are. To drop such preconceptions, opinions and beliefs is the first step. To stand before oneself naked of preconceptions is to begin the process of opening to your potential.

We can allow life to unfold us by recognising that our conscious identity has the tendency to believe it knows what it needs, what is true, and what is false. However, life on this planet has been around for millions of years and has a lot of unconscious information about how we are formed and what we are capable of.

Life expresses as movement, feelings, sexual drive, awareness, along with the other fundamentals such as absorption and excretion, self regulation (homeostasis), breathing and ability to respond. Life in the form of animals, without any self awareness, expresses in these ways. Recognising this shows us that it doesn’t take conscious will and self awareness to exist and live within the environment. In fact a fundamental of LifeStream is that to remain healthy physically and psychologically we need to let go of our conscious personality regularly and allow Life to move us in its own spontaneous way. When we sleep our conscious needs and desires are surrendered. But Life still maintains all our systems without our conscious help. At that time it creates dreams during which we move and even speak spontaneously without conscious volition. It is this deep core of self we need to open to often, allowing our infinite potential to express.

How do you open the door to ourown real self?

One way of describing it is to say that you become the dance partner who is led. You dance with life every day anyway, but usually you want to make the decisions about what steps to take, what way to twirl, when to finish. Opening the door to the streaming life means that you open your body, your mind and your feelings to being guided by your partner, who has led the dance from the very beginning – Life.

Let’s imagine it. Here I am as the dance instructor, and you are standing with your partner, Life. So, is your body ready to move? Are your feelings and thoughts ready to enter fully into the dance? Are there points of view that you are keeping hold of and will not surrender to the dance? Can you move and be uplifted and thrown down? Are you ready to dance the drama of love, the darkness of pain, the sunlight of discovery? The dance is always creative. So can you let go of what you already know, what you have already done, and the moves already made, and let Life move you wonderfully into the unknown?

Can you do that? Can you stand and drop your control and allow what arises spontaneously to flow through you? If you need help, see Arm Circling

What this means is that for a given length of time, about 30 to 60 minutes once a week, you allow your body, feelings, voice, sexuality and mind be moved spontaneously, as happens in dreams. The arm circling exercise helps to learn this. But for a full description of how this process is always active in you but seldom allowed conscious expression, see The Power that Heals.

Much of the time we edit or control what we allow ourselves to think or feel. Dropping this form of judgment, if only for short periods while you open to the mystery you are, is important. At first it may cause some concern because you are unblocking part of the flow, and it may start pushing out some of the attitudes, past experiences and habits that have been blocking your greater flow. Usually those things would have been cleansed in the normal LifeStream, but unconscious tensions and resistances prevent the healing. This is why we have to consciously take in hand the work of dropping our self-control for periods of time.

Animals, being the unselfconscious manifestation of how life expresses, when they are ill are spontaneously moved to seek or do things to help the healing process. Animals seek to survive, and learn in the process. Often they are informed by what we call intuition and instinct. But we have those possibilities also, but often muffle them by our conscious desires and thoughts. So open your mind and imagination to the mystery at your core. Let it unfold its wisdom to you intuitively or in images.

Opening to the LifeStream in this way starts the process during which you remember your origins. It is a time of letting the power that gives you Life flow more fully into awareness. It is a time you allow your potential and creativity to unfold. It is a time of cleansing and healing, equally as important as your daily wash. It is also a time when you open to allowing your hidden needs to be known and dealt with. In opening to the mystery you also become more conscious of being an integral part of the society and world you live in. You begin to feel your connection with the life of this planet and the universe that is the constant stage upon which you live your life.

Come to the mystery at least several times each week — or daily if you can. Lots of people believe they do this in their prayers or meditation. But in most cases what is happening is that they still hold on to the almost unconscious attitude that this means being still, not making a noise, controlling their thoughts and emotions, blocking their sexual feelings and bodily movements. So their meditations are actually a form of interfering with the real flow. See: Mind and Movement: Self Regulation.

That Much Power Needs Understanding

Opening to the mystery is a powerful thing to do. It brings real change and growth. Opening to that sort of power needs to be understood, and there are certain skills and attitudes that can be of great value.

For many people, opening in the ways described leads to a period of cleansing. Negative emotions, residues of past trauma, physical problems, are brought to the surface to be dispelled. This is not a comfortable process. But it is one of the ways life works in us. When we eat something poisonous our healing process can lead to vomiting the poison from our system. When we breathe in dust we sneeze. So when we are harbouring painful destructive emotions or memories our healing process tries to discharge them. It takes a while to learn how to allow this to happen without feeling anxious.

It is one of the big human frailties that we blame someone else, or other people, for our feelings or situation. Accepting personal responsibility for your own state of mind, feelings or situation, is a huge step toward positive change in your life. Of course this is a big generalisation. Workers who are exploited by employers and paid inadequate wages, while employers cream off most of the profits, may be seen as justified in blaming their situation on the bosses. However, by not blaming, the employee may still realise it is up to them to do something about the situation. That was how human rights were fought for.

Be in a learning relationship with the mystery at your core. Question what arises. Ask what is meant. Be like a detective following clues. Many of the deepest parts of your nature emerge in stages as they unfold. Often your core self expresses in symbolic experiences as do dreams. That is the language of the unconscious. Do not be satisfied with the symbols. Question them during the process until you arrive at insights that give you understanding of how what is experienced links with your everyday life and situation.

Your physical growth took years. Your personal spiritual growth also takes time. Processes of growth in nature develop structures and organs as they move towards something. The plant develops stem and leaves before it opens its flower. So your own inner growth may need to develop things before it can manifest certain parts of you. The mystery is beyond imagination in its enormity. Some people have called it the Hugeness. Sometimes courage and strength need to be developed before you can be healed of certain things, or experience other dimensions of yourself.

The mystery of life that you are is paradoxical. You can never pin it down to being this or that one thing. It is both very personal — in fact manifesting as your own unique personality — and it is at the same time completely impersonal. By all means learn and define what you learn, but never believe you have found the complete truth. Being paradoxical, whatever truth you arrive at you can be sure the opposite is also true. Holding rigidly to beliefs prevents further learning.

Learn self observation. With the non-blaming approach, examine the way you respond to people and events. See what is behind the response. Notice what habits you have, and where they stem from. Learn to observe the constant and subtle play of feelings, thoughts and imagery that takes place within you.

At one point in the New Testament it says, “Where two or three people are gathered together in my name, there I am.” Whatever you might interpret that to mean, it is observable that when we open to Life in the company of one or more people who are also approaching that mystery in the same way, it enormously increases the power of what you experience. Even if there is just one person with you who honours the process of LifeStream, it can make an enormous difference to the depth and power of what you meet within.

To follow through on this see http://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/the-arm-circling-meditation/ and - http://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/peoples-experiences-of-lifestream/ – http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/lifes-little-secrets/