Grounded Spirituality

"The primary cause of our unhappiness is not our thoughts. The monkey mind is not the source of our anxiety. It’s a symptom of it. Forget the monkey mind. The mind is not the enemy—unhealed pain is. Men have been blaming the mind for their neuroses for centuries, while deftly avoiding that which sources its maladies—somatic constrictions, and unprocessed emotions stored in the body itself. It’s like losing your keys somewhere in the house, and looking for them in the car. Useless, useless, useless.
Until they stop blaming the mind—and recognize that its neuroses stem from the unresolved emotional body—there will be no liberation. Shifting out of unhappiness is not a cerebral process—that’s just another ineffective band-aid. It is a visceral full-body experience. It’s the “monkey heart” that’s the issue: the state of inner turbulence and agitation that emanates from an unclear heart. The more repressed your emotional body, the more repetitive your thoughts.
Flooded with unhealed emotions and unexpressed truths, the monkey heart jumps from tree-top to tree-top, emoting without grounding, dancing in its confusion. Often misinterpreted as a monkey mind, the monkey heart is reflected in repetitive thinking, perpetual anxiety, and negative imaginings. All of which are emanating from the emotional body.
Bottom line is that you cannot heal and resolve your emotional material with your mind. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues. Your emotional material does not evaporate because you watch it. I have known many who could watch and name their patterns and issues—as if they were scientists, researching their own consciousness—but nothing fundamentally changed, because they refused to come back down into their bodies and move their feelings through to transformation. It’s safe up there, above the fray, witnessing the heartache without actually engaging it. Yes, you may be able to get so skilled at a witnessing consciousness that you can overpower your triggers. But that’s not presence. Real presence comes through the open heart.
The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyse them, not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love. You want to live a holy life? Heal your heart. That’s the best meditation of all." - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

The path of the spiritual warrior is not soft and sweet. It is not artificially blissful and feigned forging. It is not fearful of divisiveness. It is not afraid of its own shadow. It is not afraid of losing popularity when it speaks its truth. It will be bear around the bush where directness is required. It has no regard for vested interests that cause suffering. It is benevolent and it is fiery and it is cuttingly honest in its efforts to liberate itself and humanity from the egoic ties that blind. Shunning strong opinions in the name of spirituality is actually anti spiritual. Spirituality that is only folate soft is a recipe for disaster, allowing all manner of manioouation to run amok. Real spirituality is a quest for truth, in all its forms. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

One of the hallmarks of the ungrounded spiritual movement is this statement: “There is only THIS moment.” It is often made by spiritual teachers who are dissociating from their unresolved history- self-avoidance masquerading as enlightenment. We can understand the value of this way of thinking- it calls us out of our worry mind, our habitual consciousness- and reminds us to be here, now. But it doesn’t work- at least not for very long. Because “this moment” actually includes and encompasses every moment before. The past is not behind us, as many of us wish it was- it is deep within us, encoded in our cells, somatized as memory and unresolved trauma. It fully informs our lens on reality. In most cases, the “power of now” is just a dissociative construct. Because most of us are still influenced, and ruled by, the power of “then.” The answer is not to pretend we are present, when all we have done is fled or momentarily suspended our past. That’s not true presence. That's not true healing. The answer is to own, embody and resolve the “then”, so that our experience of the moment both honors our history and recognizes the ways our moment is informed by our past. It is to recognize that past and present are intrinsic to each other. The mystery begins with our history. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality