The 13 Patterns of Spiritual Awakening: The Theory of One and Two

Welcome to the Form of Emptiness. My name is Scott Kalin. We will be talking about the 13 patterns that make up a large part of the theory of the one and two, my theory of spiritual evolution. As with the other recordings, I'll also be drinking some tea, doing some traditional Chinese gong fu tea ceremony.

And I'll be talking about the patterns and also talking about spirituality. I'll probably talk a little bit about psychology as I've been a practicing attachment and trauma therapist for over 15 years. With these patterns, it might be helpful to look at the website, the Form of Emptiness website, and look specifically at the theory page, which goes over all of the current aspects of the Theory of One and Two. I've mentioned it earlier, but the theory is still in development.

It's relatively new. I just have been creating it over the last six months. So it does, it will take, it's still evolving. So yeah, you can follow along on the web page or maybe talk also about the three-dimensional blender model titled Liquid Armature that also is available on the webpage.

Just rinsing some Bulong Shang Puer aged, I think it's 2010 from The Essence of Tea. It's just kind of an interesting story. I got this silver kettle I got about maybe 10 or 12 years ago, and I actually got it from one of the people, one of the persons that started The Essence of Tea, and then also from another tea, big tea guy that also has his own tea business, so they're two different tea businesses. Yeah, I can put a note of it somewhere.

Okay, and if I'm looking down at all, I'm just gonna check my phone because I have the names of the patterns here, so I need to take a quick look at that. Okay, so the Theory of One and Two is my own theory of psychological maturation and spiritual evolution combined into one unified theory. Often I've found that often I've found that really good, authentic spiritual teachers, such as one of my main teachers, Adyashanti, but other great teachers such as Nisa Gardada Maharaj or even Shinryu Suzuki and the Zen lineage are very helpful, are very good at speaking truth and speaking from truth.

However, rarely, for whatever reason, they tend to not have put all the teachings into a more accessible, repeatable, practical theory. So, my goal and intention as stepping into this role as a spiritual teacher and when with the Theory of One and Two and also with the Liquid Armature is to create a highly repeatable, simplified, just the essential things someone needs to learn and master so that they can fully awaken on all three levels of their being and step into their own personal transmission and calling and live from the ground of being in their own personal power and transmission and express applied true love to the world.

My one thing Adyashanti said to me, not to me, I guess, but he said on a retreat, so I was on the retreat, but he said, He said, one of the most difficult things for a human to do is to do one simple thing with any sort of consistency. It resonated, which was the most difficult thing for someone to do is do a simple thing with any sort of consistency. And I took that and I recognized that every that that was true for me specifically that I would often be more interested in complex things than simple things, especially on the spiritual path.

And I decided that wasn't helpful for my own spiritual progress. And so I, anytime a teaching or something Adyashanti would say would resonate really deeply with me, especially if I was on retreat, I would internalize that and then make a note of that and then begin to re-realize that throughout my day-to-day life and integrate that and really focus on taking those specific teachings that resonated with me and implementing them with a high level of discipline throughout my day-to-day life off of retreat. And so now in the Theory of One and Two, what I've done is, I've taken a number of those practices.

Some of them, like I said, were from Adyashanti. Some are from Sharon Landreth. Some I made up on my own. Some are from traditional Tibetan Buddhism.

Some are from Advaita Vedanta or Hinduism or Taoism or Tantra. So it's a bit of a, I don't know what to worry, but just kind of a mix of things. But that's really, really what how the one and two is Theory of One and Two is made. And right now, what I'm teaching is basically the cycle, the spiritual aspect of it, but there's a whole psychological piece to it that I'm not currently teaching, but I will be teaching at some point.

It is contained in the Liquid Armature itself, but it is not largely described in the Theory of One and Two as of yet, but it will be. It's already there. It just needs to be fully written out and put into words. Great.

So the first pattern of the 13 patterns that we'll talk about is called the reordering. The reordering, I recognize reordering in a number of different ways. Basically, after stepping into abiding awakening, most of my experience of the self has fallen away. Most thinking is quieted.

You know, it's definitely an attachment. I still get triggered. I'm not claiming that I'm perfect or don't piss off people or, you know, upset my wife or upset my kids or anything like that or fall into bad habits. There's definitely the case.

That's all true. But with fully awakening on all three levels and stepping into what I call abiding awakening, or maybe we commonly refer to it as more like enlightenment or something like that. There is this, you've seen through the story of separation to such a depth in so many times in so many ways you've gotten stuck and unstuck so many times. You've grasped for the shiny object and let go of the shiny object so many times.

You've pushed away the pain and then felt the pain so many times that part of you will never believe the story of separation anymore. Part of you has become, has returned to before experience, has returned to spirit or the wholeness or the ground of being that births all of experience. And part of you never, once you've returned there on such a depth and with so much of you, then it's as if even when you get triggered, you never fully forget. You never fully leave that depth, and there's always a way back home because you realize you've never left.

So that's kind of a description of abiding awakening. I also should mention it's not an end point, it's a beginning. If anything, it's an ongoing process, it's an ever-evolving, deepening, creative, evolutionary process. So there's no end point, and there's no, yeah, there's no levels or anything like that.

Good. So the so anyway, so looking at my life, looking at what the last 15 years have been like after letting go of that existential grasping in the gut, I recognize that, you know, what I'm doing, or if I'm doing something at all, you know, often with abiding awakening or my experience of life is that nothing is happening. I'm not doing anything. Things are just kind of happening.

Life is happening. I'm not controlling or actively doing very much at all. There's very little sense of a self, little thinking. Things kind of just flow.

But that being said, like I said, that's not always the case. So when it's not the case, when it's not easy, when life is more difficult, when I do have contraction or get triggered or activated or have a strong emotion or whatever it is, or get upset with my child or whatever it is. Then what I tend to do is this one thing which is called which I've named the reordering and it's basically about accurate value and within the system. So what the reordering to explain the reordering in the simplest way is if we find ourselves contracted around an object of awareness such as anger, say we're contracted around the feeling of say heat and anger in my chest and I'm contracted around that and then I recognize that I'm contracted once I recognize there's a gap and a gap is born between what's looking and the object of perception the anger so there's me there's a gap and then there's anger right that's the first step and then once we recognize that we're separate and we're not merged from it then we can kind of relax a little bit and then we widen that gap it gets bigger our focus our sphere of awareness gets larger and now we are entering into a relationship with the bodily sensation of anger right and there's that relationship occurs in the gap the space between where we're looking from or what we are what's looking and the anger itself right and then once that happens for me what I just do is I recognize that everything, that the relationship is the alive field that everything arises in and dies into.

And once I recognize that both the object of my awareness and the source of my awareness, where I'm looking from, both arise out of the alive field, which is what I ultimately am, I immediately let go of the attachment to both what is looking or where I'm looking from and the anger sensation and fully embrace the alive field, what I truly am. And then I have now valued the alive field first and secondary valued the two objects of perception. I'm not going to the alive field and then ignoring the anger or ignoring where I'm looking from, but rather I am seeing that from the perspective of the alive field, both the anger and what's looking are the same thing.

They're just more, it's just the alive field taking another form. And so then we have reordered the system. Before I was putting the object of awareness first and the field second, causing me to feel separation. And now I've revalued it and valued the alive field first and the object second, returning me to wholeness while still holding my humanness.

Once you do that, then you spontaneously surrender and shift out of the contraction. So that's the reordering. That's basically what I've found that I do all the time after my kind of final major awakening experience. And yeah, that is a key point in the Theory of One and Two.

And I highly recommend you work on that and learn how to do that. It is, in some ways, an end point. Not that there's an end point, but if there was like what is the hardest thing to do in the Theory of One and Two, it would be that. And also what is the simplest thing to do, it would be that.

But often we need to master other patterns in the Theory of One and Two to be able to do the reordering. Okay, so the second pattern is titled Authentic Relationship. It comes from classical Buddhist teachings. Basically, the classical pointer, don't push away, don't pull close, right?

Instead, just allow everything to be as it is. And so it's very important for a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons that I find is with people on the spiritual path and also people on a more psychological healing path, the student is always has this kind of this unconscious mentality, often unconscious, but this mentality that if they just heal enough, if they just have enough awakening experiences, if they have enough peak experiences, if they have enough experiences of heart opening, then they will be free from suffering and they'll never return to the false self and life will kind of be roses and candy and, you know, no suffering, right?

And that's just a confusion and a wrong perspective. If that was the case, life would be extremely boring. It is the suffering, it is the contraction, it is the grit, it is the unpredictability of life, the inability to control life that makes it so exciting and alluring and interesting and attractive. And without that complexity, without that unknown, without that hardship, life would very rapidly become boring and flat.

So all of these patterns, the goal is to master them, meaning identify them verbally, which is what we're doing now, and then see them on every level of reality. And what I mean by every level of reality, I define reality into multiple levels. So if we're looking at reality, I start with spirit. Spirit is before experience.

It can't be experience. You can be spirit. You can look from spirit, but you can't look at spirit. So spirit, that's the most true thing.

And as we get farther from spirit, the authenticity or the truth of that thing becomes less, decreases. Or another way to think about it is the truth of it is no longer independent. It is only real when it is dependent on other things, right? So, which is another Buddhist concept.

So the first level is spirit, and then your transmission, or I call personal transmission. That is what is born when your spirit enters your body and your humanness connects with your spirit. And then what is formed is your transmission. And that is what builds up all of life and all of your experience is built out of your transmission.

So it is like the gold atom in the gold bar, or it is the drop of ocean, drop of water in the ocean. All of the ocean is water, but it can create many things like a wave or a river or anything like that. So, personal transmission, and then, which is also another one of the patterns is living from your personal transmission, and then subtle energy, and then gross energy or large energy, and then body sensations, and then emotions, and then thoughts, both word thoughts and picture thoughts, and then the external world. So, those are the kind of main levels of reality that I refer to in my teachings.

It's important that everybody learns them and can refer to them because we need to, when I say master a concept, what I mean is you need to master the concept or master the pattern on every level. So, if I say to someone, hey, for you to be able to grieve in a healthy way, you need to not repress or avoid your anger. You need to have a positive, a neutral to positive relationship with your anger. You need to master your relationship with anger, right?

Authentic relationship, what we're talking about. That means that you have to fully embrace it on every one of those levels, from the external world to the emotional world, to the somatic body sensation world, to the gross energy, to the subtle energy, and ultimately to your transmission. Right? If you have transformed your relationship with anger to such a degree that when it arises, you are seeing it on every one of those levels, and you're valuing the transmission level and the subtle and gross energy level much more than all the other levels, right?

So, if you're putting 80% of your value or attention on those lower levels of the expression of anger, the anger will immediately regulate and transform into decisive clarity and wisdom because it will immediately disentangle. It's not a bypassing. I'm not talking about spiritual bypassing. You still feel it on the emotion level, but you're not, there's no resistance.

You're fully. It's not even, I'm not resisting this anger. It's I love this anger. This anger is me.

This is a very important part of me. There's so much to teach me. I want to feel it. I want to learn it.

I want to experience it fully. Right? It changes the relationship with anger. So when you, so I kind of coming full circle back to what I was talking about.

So the recommended goal I have for students is to not chase peak experiences, or more healings, or more releases, or anything like that, but rather refine the quality of your relationship with your experience. The only thing that you can change or have the ability to affect in life is your relationship with the thing. You can't change the thing. I can't change my anger, but I can change my relationship with anger, and that in turn will most likely change my anger.

Right? So, thus, the most important thing to focus on is the relationship with whatever we're experiencing. So, authentic relationship is all about finding for every experience that we're having, finding what is the authentic relationship for it. And so, partially it has to do with the quality of the space between you and the thing, and also the amount of space.

And so, you can change the quality by being more excited, or curious, or positive about it, or interested, and you can change the distance by getting closer to it or farther from it. So, that's how you change your relationship with something, right? You can change how positive you are, or how negative you are, or you could change how close you are or how far. So, when you enter into authentic relationship with a body sensation, with a thought, with a situation, whatever it is, you will feel there's this like it feels as a very specific feeling.

It's kind of like I've described it before, like throwing a frisbee, and when you throw it at that perfect release and perfect power, or when you play tennis and you hit the tennis ball in just the right way, it's like called like the sweet spot, right? Or there's this feeling, and that feeling can be repeated, and that feeling can be valued. And so, when you enter into an authentic relationship with something, you'll feel it. It's like, don't push, don't pull, be grounded in what you are while still valuing the thing that you're relating to.

And when you do all those at once, just the right proportion, you feel this like letting go, like, oh, release, relaxation, letting go, like this wave, right? And that feeling has a gross energy, it has a subtle energy, and it has a personal transmission aspect. All three. And so, we want to feel it on all three of those levels of reality and then value those three feeling, those three levels, and how it feels, and reinforce that over and over and over again.

And what will happen is if you reinforce these very specific experiences, especially on the energetic level and the level of transmission, then you are teaching your unconscious mind to operate in a new way. And that way is to value and look for that sweet spot feeling that feeling of release and letting go. And you will begin to naturally do that on your own without efforting or without trying. Okay, that wraps up authentic relationship.

The third pattern that we will go over is titled Holding Paradox Birth Wisdom. And this pattern developed out of an intuitive kind of realization I had about six months ago where I was kind of thinking about things for spiritual teaching. And I just, I was kind of thinking, like, what is the definition of wisdom? And I decided that it came to me spontaneously that the definition of wisdom is the ability to hold multiple paradoxes at once without collapsing any of the paradoxes.

And then wisdom is born out of the holding of paradox, right? So, and so then I began to realize that that is what I've been doing for the last 15 years in my life and with this whole journey of spiritual awakening and speaking for my own intuitive truth and power. And I found that all of that, all of the intuitive wisdom and the channeling and what we talk about that is so valuable. One thing that I was very interested in on the spiritual path was learning how to have my own authentic truth and speak for my own truth because it was not accessible to me before I went through this process of spiritual awakening.

But you realize is that being human in spirit at the same time is a profound paradox. We are both a finite human being with a finite amount of energy and a finite life force, and we're also spirit with infinite potential, infinite energy, and infinite force at the same time, right? And, you know, I see this is how my mind works. I see a lot of connections.

So, for example, like this kind of connects to my my kind of final awakening. Not that there's a final awakening, but my last major awakening experience on the level of the gut, which was when I experienced my when my spirit entered my human form in the womb, and it felt like it was this infinite potential in a very small, limited space. So, it's once again a paradox. And so, what I find is when you can hold paradox, right?

So, say you're holding that paradox, which is kind of the core paradox, which is I'm both human, finite human, and I'm infinite spirit at the same time. When you hold both without grasping and with authentic relationship, like we just described, then intuitive wisdom is born in the space between the two poles of the paradox, right? You have humanness, you have spirit, and then wisdom is born in that space. First, the space is tension, and like it feels like there's a pulling, like how can they both exist at the same time?

And then something shifts, and we release and let go of that, and then the tension shifts from tension to freedom and power. And it goes from tension and confinement to freedom and power. And then intuitive intuition is born. And just so I get the names of the patterns right, pattern number four is cultivating unconditional love.

Some of the patterns are more complex, some of the patterns are more simple. Like I said in one of the last videos, one of the most difficult things is to do the simple thing with any consistency or consistency or, you know, regularity. That is the case with a lot of these patterns. I've tried to find the simplest, the simplest, most essential patterns or things to learn so that we can focus on what's helpful and not focus and ignore what's not helpful.

So cultivating unconditional love or unconditional self-love. Unconditional self-love, I apologize. Cultivating unconditional self-love is a very important aspect on the path of spiritual evolution and awakening and healing. Also, an important aspect on human maturation and human healing.

When I started on the spiritual path after my first awakening and after I stopped running from my awakening, which was about seven years of running from the emptiness that I encountered during my prolonged first awakening experience, which lasted about four months, it's very intense. I'll probably tell you about it at some point, but I don't want to digress so early in the recording tonight. Though you never know, it could happen sooner than later, I would imagine. But yes, when I started on the spiritual path more enthusiastically moving towards God, so to speak, one of the key things was the cultivation of unconditional love, specifically unconditional self-love.

And this follows kind of just the standard Buddhist or Tibetan Buddhist or mindfulness-based stress reduction, which was inspired or taken from Buddhism by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who's a huge has been a big influence on my life and my own spiritual path. So, yeah, so basically, the method is to basically just practice. Most of these patterns have to be practiced in one form or another. This is specifically just a practice one.

Basically, what it means is first we need to figure out, find what unconditional self-love, or what self-love feels like in the body. This can be difficult depending on your childhood experiences, how you were raised, your childhood trauma, things like that, your story of suffering, your story of not enoughness. So, loving-kindness practice, which I'll go over briefly here, and I'll have guided meditations either on the website or in the user area or on YouTube or all of the above eventually that go over this too. But basically, the idea is we need to figure out how self-love feels in the body, and then we need to feel that and give energy, focus, and attention to that over and over again until it becomes a robust tool, a weapon, a sword that we can cut through our own delusion, our own attachments, our own false seeing, our own shame, and unhealthy, addictive behaviors.

It's the fire when cultivated and valued and strengthened that burns away all of the attachments and all of the false stories and all of the lies and all of the traumas that we've accumulated throughout our life and from past lives. It is immensely important. It is one of the most important things of all the things in my theory, but also in all of the human life, world, whatever. It's the natural state of the heart center.

It is the natural frequency of the energy in the heart center. It is not something that needs to be created or made. However, if we have repressed it, covered it up, not valued it, avoided it for long periods of time, most of our life in some cases, that's how I was, then it's difficult to find it. When I first started doing loving-kindness practice, loving-kindness practice is a relatively simple practice.

The way I do it and the way I teach it is similar to Jon Kabat-Zinn in mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is where I first learned it, or Sharon Salzberg, or Matthew Ricard, or some of these teachers have extensive writing on it. But basically, we are saying positive statements kind of about ourself. And then, as we say it, we are connecting with a feeling of openness, lightness, warmth, and support in the chest. And then we are resting in the chest, in that warmth, in that openness, in that supportiveness of the chest.

And we are cultivating that. Now, when I say cultivating, this is where words fall short. You know, with my teachings, spirituality in general, true spirituality, it's very common that we get to places where words fall short. Words just don't answer, can't really explain the complexities or intricacies of life.

And so, it's just something to be aware of. So, when I say we're cultivating self-love, like I said in the previous videos about authentic relationship, we can only change, we can only affect our relationship. We cannot affect the thing. So, we cannot affect love.

Unconditional love is always there, is how it is. We can affect our relationship to unconditional love. That we can affect. So, when I say cultivate unconditional love, what I really mean is cultivate a very authentic, highly valued, embracing, sensitive relationship towards unconditional love.

And when you do that, that will increase your experience and conscious awareness of unconditional love at all times. And it will feel to you or whoever it is that there's more unconditional self-love. But really, there isn't any more. You're just more aware of it.

If that makes sense. And that's how everything works. And all of spirituality, humanness, the model, the theory. It all works like that, if that makes sense.

Right. Rumi said, Do not seek love. Seek the walls that stop you from being love or feeling love or something like that, right? Same principle.

So, very simply, and we'll have a longer one because I don't want to take too much time here. It would be something like this: May I feel happy. May I feel free? May I feel loved?

May I feel connected? May I feel whole. May I feel in tune? May I feel alive?

May I feel at home? After you say the words, you know, we're not trying to create a feeling, but hopefully, if it works, you have a feeling in your chest of openness, warmth, expansiveness moving out and up and bigger. To me, it feels like a blooming or an exploding of fire or a red-orange flower or something like that. So, when I first did the practice, I felt no sense of openness or warmth in my chest at all.

I was very disheartened. And then it took me over 30 days of doing the practice every day before I felt even the littlest whisper of some lightness. And then probably another 30 days before I felt any warmth at all. And then I just kept doing it for years, for like two years, for three years, four days a week, three days a week, five days a week every day.

Don't remember exactly how much, but 20 to 30 minutes every day for a couple years. You can imagine that tiny little trickle of warmth after two months becomes this raging ball of fire, white, yellow, orange fire that's burning away all of. Oh my goodness, I apologize. Sorry, I don't usually move the handle on the Japanese silver kettle as you're not supposed to, but I guess I was supposed to tonight.

But, anyways, it's burning away all of the, I forget what they say in Buddhism, but all of the attachments, the delusions, the knots, any inaccurate sense of value. Right. And then eventually you get to a point where you don't have to say the phrases and you can just kind of think. I don't know what you think, but something.

And then you feel it. Or, like, I look at myself. I can see myself on the monitor right now. I'm videoing myself.

And I think, I like myself. I look at myself and I kind of smile. I'm like, oh, he looks kind of nice. I kind of like him.

Yeah, he looks good. I never would have thought that before I did the practice. I never thought that. I rarely looked in the mirror.

And when I did, I didn't like what I saw. And now it's just like naturally, like, oh, yeah, hmm, that's nice. Right? So, once you develop that capacity of unconditional self-love, then that capacity goes around throughout your body, and you shine that capacity like a light or a fire into all of the rest of your body, all the places that you don't like, all the emotions that you've rejected, all the failures, and the losses, and the stories of not enoughness and being bad and all these things.

You direct it in there, and then it begins to heal all of the broken pieces that it, all of the knots and the confusion, all the twists and the ties, all those disentangle and then disintegrate and return as kind of primordial energy, your transmission, right? Your own personal transmission, that energy, it returns to your lower dantian, to the bowl and the pelvis, right? To your soul. And as it does that, it also creates this.

I don't know if it creates it, but I guess it reinforces or it amplifies the interconnectedness within the body, which is super important. Because what you find when you're not very conscious, as a lot of people are before they go through this process of spiritual evolution and spiritual awakening and spiritual evolution, and what I found too, as I over-steep this lube, is that my body had taken on all of the divisions of my mind. And so I had a wall between my head and neck and my shoulders that stopped me from feeling my body.

I had a wall between my intuitive somatic gut awareness and my heart so that they weren't communicating. And so they were all separated and chopped up into or sealed off into blocks. And what happens is, say, if I begin to cultivate that unconditional self-love and then I'm shining that down into my abdomen, it's both deconstructing the wall that's separating my abdomen from my heart and at the same time creating a pathway for them to communicate. In the same way with shining that unconditional love into your mind, my mind had become this horrible villain that kept me up at night and made me worry and tripped me up when I'd ask girls out on dates and whatever, all this stuff, or make me do bad on tests because I was too anxious.

And so that unconditional love, when it's really powerful and it shines into the mind, it does the same thing. It breaks up that wall of tension in the neck and shoulders, and then it retells the story. And it changes the valence, the valuing and the judgment that we have on the thinking, mind, and the thoughts from negative to neutral to positive. And that's really what needs to happen: is all of these valences that we've created, all these values that we've created on these hard things, on these uncomfortable things, on these negative things, need to be transformed to neutral and then most likely to positive.

And then they can be dropped, right? But if you go and you just try to drop the attachment while there's still a strong momentum of a negative attachment, meaning we have a negative story about it, what happens is the negative story keeps its momentum and then we're not any better. So often what we need to do is actually create a positive attachment or a positive judgment to counteract the negative. So we add a new pattern, a positive pattern in there, and then they kind of fight each other a little bit.

And that causes the momentum of the negative one to go down. And then once that falls away, you can feel it in your body. like, oh, it's quite easy now. I don't need to have this positive pattern.

And since that's a newly created positive pattern, you can let that go very easily. And now you have no patterns, and it's just your natural state of being, which naturally embraces whatever arises. Also, tea is still very good, even oversteep. Resting as the source of longing.

Very important pattern. Also, both simple and complex at the same time. This one may be a little bit more complex, which is interesting. And a little bit more water here.

So, resting this source of longing is one of the main techniques that I teach with the guided meditations. And also, similar to the unconditional love, one of the main techniques I recommend people put a lot of practice into to learn. And it's both simple and complex. I will have a guided meditation for this one.

I don't have it yet, but I may have it soon. I'm hoping to work on it in the next couple days. We will see. Hopefully, it will be released soon.

Like all these things, if you sign up for the email list and then you get a login and you can be in the free user area of my website that I've made, you will be notified of new videos and be able to access any free videos or also any videos that you decide to purchase. Right. So, resting as the source of longing. Good.

Resting the source of longing and then the old name, which I probably will be changing, actually, just to be transparent. But the original name I gave it was Chief Hope, but I don't think I'll be keeping that name, but that's okay. Probably something more along the lines of true desire. Could be true desire is the name I'm playing with right now, True Desire.

So might be that, but might not be. Or Tr true Longing, maybe True Longing. I'm not sure. We'll see.

Anyways, so the way it works is it's kind of a tantra. Sorry, burner is very hot. It's kind of a taunt, comes out of tantric Buddhism or Dzogchen Buddhism, which is the same thing. And so the idea is the basic idea is that, at least for me and many people I work with, is that the third chakra, the chakra of wanting, right?

The third chakra goes, what do I want? I want this. I want this. I want this.

You know, that's how we know what we want, is our connection with our third chakra. And most people, a lot of people, especially spiritual people and people I work with, have little to no ability to know what they truly want outside of what society or their parents or their friends want for them. Meaning all of their wanting and their motivation and their desire is either consciously or unconsciously attached to the desire to be loved, accepted, or not shunned or not shamed by their peers or their parents. So then they've lost connection with their own autonomous desire.

So this also stems from an Adyashanti teaching. I was on retreat, and he said something, I think it was like he was talking about Christian, some sort of Christian philosophy or Christian beliefs or something. And he said something like, in the Bible, it says, only the single-hearted can enter the kingdom of heaven. And then also something like Nisargadatta would say something along the lines of, the only thing that is needed is to be earnest.

Earnestness will take you all the way. And I resonated with that because I felt in my life that I've been earnest. That if I had been one way, one word other than intense, which also would fit, would be earnest. And then there is a certain interest with it, which is if you are fully yourself, even if you don't know how to do it, eventually you will be yourself.

Maybe not right away, maybe it will take many years, but there's a certain, then that's where that earnestness takes you. So along those lines, though, only the single-hearted will enter the kingdom of heaven. To me, sorry, we're in the middle of a 90-degree heat wave in Spain, and I've got lights and a burner and no AC on because I can't have the AC with the mic because the mic's too sensitive and blah blah blah, you know. Anywho, so what I took from that was that the longing, our longing, is fractured.

And that if we can find a way to unify our longing into one longing, then we will enter the kingdom of heaven. And this is a teaching. It's not just that Adyashanti taught, I think, specifically on this at times. I don't really remember because he changed his teachings very often.

But I do remember him teaching about this. And I thought that was very meaningful. And so I created this practice called Chief Hope, which will have a new name soon. Something like authentic desire, authentic longing, true desire, something like that.

Anyways, and so basically, the general idea is the key to longing is longing takes you up and then out of your body. And what we need to do is we need to follow that energetic movement back to its source. So when I have a longing, like I long for this fancy boat I saw her on the water the other day, right? I want that boat.

When we feel our energy go out of our body, we notice it and then we fall. Literally, it's a physical thing. We follow it into our eyes, down our neck, down our chest, down our abdomen, to our third chakra or lower dantian area. And then we rest as the longing there.

And then what we do is once we do that, then we begin to feed all the longings back into that longing, right? And it's a whole practice. And basically, the general, what you want to do is first we want to identify what is it that you really want, right? Ask yourself, what do I want?

What do I truly want? And another way to think about it is, what do I want that if I got this one thing, it would give me everything else that I want, right? So say if I wanted that boat that I talked about earlier, then what I really want is the experience of freedom and enjoyment and excitement and connection and fullness in my abdomen and chest while riding that boat on the ocean. That's what I actually want.

I don't want the boat. I don't really care about the boat. I don't really want the bills. I don't want the maintenance.

I don't want to have to find a place to park it, right? I don't want any of those things. What I actually want is just that feeling on the boat or maybe with my family on the boat or whatever it is, my friends or my partner, but that's what I want. And so that's actually not the boat, right?

So there's no need to go outside of yourself to get that want. What you really want is freedom, wholeness, fullness, right? So instead of thinking, I want the boat, we figure out what is the essence of the wanting. And the essence of the wanting is, I want to feel whole.

I want to be free. I want to suffer less. I want to be connected with all things. Something like that, right?

Some of the different chief hopes I had were, I want to suffer. I don't want to suffer, or I want to suffer less. I want to feel at home in my body. I want to feel connected with all things.

I want to feel emotionally, or I want to feel intimate with all things. I want to feel intimate with the 10,000 things, things like that. And so, what we find is that each time that we have a desire or a wanting, and then we allow our awareness or attention to follow that out of our body, we fractured our attention and we fractured our longing. And then we've given away our power in suggesting that somehow an external thing will cause us to have internal fullness or internal satiation or internal joy.

And that's just not true. The inner experience is largely dependent on us, on our viewpoint, on how we relate to things, not on the external world. If it's too dependent on the external world, then we are bound to suffer because we have no control over the external world. It is highly variable.

So, I'm not going to go over the whole practice now because it's somewhat long, but basically, it's a practice of identifying a single statement that is as good as you can, one sentence, what you want, the wanting that's within all the other wanting. And then it's just practicing. Every time you notice the longing or any sort of longing, you return your awareness to the source of your longing. And just like with the cultivation of unconditional self-love, we're cultivating authentic, pure longing, right?

And so, what happens is that longing, the more that we sit with it over months and months and months, you know, these things, unconditional love, resting as a source of longing are not simple. They're simple, but they're not easy things. They need to be done for a long time, right? I mean, somewhat long, like if you were to do it three to five days a week for 15 to 20 minutes a day for a year, imagine what that could be like.

How would your longing be? Right? How would it feel? Right?

For me, doing that practice so much now because I've done all these practices, I don't need to do a lot of practices anymore. I do very little. I do some meditation and a lot of self-care, but not a lot of practices anymore. I used to do a ton.

But what it means is I always know what I want. Regardless of the pressure, regardless of the societal pressure, the social pressure, my sleep deprivation, you know, not feeling good. I always know what I want. It's very, very clear to me.

And it's very deeply ingrained in my soul and my humanness. Because I have high, I put a huge amount of time and attention and value into identifying that and then cultivating it and then honoring it, right? So then if you're going through your life and you go to do a decision and it makes that fire, that longing in the depths of you smaller, you know that that doesn't serve you, right? And so then what you find, and this is kind of goes into another pattern, but what you find is when you truly cultivate that your own longing, authentic longing, or chief hope, or true longing, maybe true longing is good.

True longing, I think, is good. Maybe I'll use that true longing. When you cultivate your true longing, right, that becomes your calling. And the calling is the manifestation or your personal transmission in action.

Meaning, when your personal transmission, which is what we truly are, is acting, it acts as your calling. And that is directly related to that longing. You see, they're all very interconnected. If you look at the Liquid Armature model, it's all in there, right?

There's the temple spire, which is your personal transmission. There's the central channel, which is the atoms from the personal transmission moving into the spire, into the central channel and moving up. And then there is the Manjushri sword, which is the action of your personal transmission, which is your calling in the lived world. And in all of that, is, that is all made possible by a high valuing and cultivation of your true longing.

Okay, that is the pattern definition or explanation. Okay, and that transitions nicely into the next one. Living from transmission is the next one. Okay, so and yeah, so what do we say?

Let me a second. Give me a second to do my tea stuff real quick. Let me get this water going. This tea is excellent, by the way.

I wish you could be by here and I could serve you a cup. Sometimes I think this would all just be so much easier if I was just handing out tea to everyone. And I think maybe when we do some in-person retreats, if people are interested and we go that route, I will be making tea. I hope to be making tea on those retreats, depending on if people are interested and the logistics of it all, but that would be fun.

Excuse me, it's a little bit hot in here still. Okay. Okay, so the next pattern is living from transmission. Good, living from transmission.

So I just was talking about it in the last video, so if you haven't, if you're not watching them consecutively, then I apologize, but you can kind of dig around and find them. I'm sure it's all in the website. It should be on the website in the theory. So this is living from your transmission or personal transmission.

I've described it in other ones, but I'll describe it a little bit here. So your transmission. Your transmission is so this is this is kind of a larger so based so in the Liquid Armature blender model that I created if you look at the model at the base of the model there is a pool and that pool represents spirit or the spiritual world and the liquid is spirit and then there's a ball that kind of emerges from the pool like like a drop and it's like a ball that's spirit entering your own human form that occurs when you're in the womb at least that's I mean that's my claim I can't prove it by any means but it's just something that came to me intuitively when I was in the middle of a very large shift in the I've mentioned it before but in one of my final awakening experiences where I let go of the existential grasping in the gut that existential grasping in the gut is formed when spirit enters your human body it is the first experience of spirit in the human body in utero, and it is this experience of immensity, of massive potential and size in a very small, finite human body, which causes a huge amount of constriction and pain, which causes the first experience of separation from the whole, which begins the development of the separate self.

That separation from the whole causes the line of energy, which is or the line. If what we are is a line, begin as a line, and then we have spirit comes into the body, and then it starts as a wave, it goes down, and then we're born, and then it's another huge contraction, and then it's another wave. So we have an S wave, and then it begins to loop on itself, and it makes a spiral. And that spiral is the basis for the Liquid Armature shape.

It's also what I see when I have my internal world. I see all that, and what I saw during the awakening experience, also, it's what I've seen on meditation retreats or in peak experiences, different peak experiences. So, when spirit comes into contact with the human form, what is created is your transmission. Everybody has their own unique energetic transmission.

It has a frequency to it, it has a shape, it has a pattern, it probably has colors. I'm not sure everybody's is different, but it is unique to you. It is made of spirit, but it is a manifestation of humanness in the human body, so it has both, right? It is quite literally the paradox of being human and spirit at the same time as you become more and more conscious and as you the different levels in your body awaken, so your mind awakens, and your heart awakens, and your gut awakens, and you're cultivating that, and you're burning up all of the attachments and the false beliefs and the unresolved emotions and the repressed emotions are all resolving and returning to the source of your being.

What you find is that as that lower dantian fills, that is refilling or enlivening your personal transmission. Most likely, like everything else, it's not changing it, it's just changing our awareness. When then our experience is when we have more awareness of something, as if it feels as if there is more transmission. Really, we're just becoming more sensitive to it, and we are just valuing it more.

So, as you do the resting as the source of longing, as you're cultivating unconditional self-love and cultivating your true longing or true desire, I don't know which one to call it. Whichever one it is, right? Then, what is born is consistent access to your personal transmission. It is the most authentic experience of what you truly are.

What we actually are, what everyone actually is, is before experience, right? So in Zen, they go, what is your face before you were born? It's a classic pointer, right? It means, what are you before you experience you?

Right? You can't look at it because you can only look from it. But you can look at your own transmission. Your own personal transmission, you can look at, and you can get very good at feeling it.

And you can create a very harmonious, embracing, high-valuing relationship with your personal transmission. This is very, very important. I would say it's one of the things that has improved my quality of life as a human the most because once I got a hold of this, once I kind of got a sense of it, I was like, oh my God, this is it. This is what I need.

My whole life, I had gone through life and I would look inside and there was nothing there. And I would go around and meet other people and it was as if there was something in them, but there wasn't anything in me. Now, was there actually something in them? Probably not.

I don't really know. But what I do know is there was nothing in me. And so what happened is I would get easily pushed around by social dynamics, what people wanted from me. I was a big people pleaser, so I would get pushed around by that: fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, all those things.

And it was because I didn't have any sense of a healthy sense of transmission or personal transmission inside of me, right? And so once I began, once this began to appear in my body and I began to get a hold of it and feel it, I was like, oh, this is me. This is Scott. This is Scott-ness, suchness.

This is my frequency. This is my energy. This is my baseline me-ness. And then it just began to settle and almost becomes a shape, kind of like in the Liquid Armature.

I have it as a temple spire, but something like that, almost like a mountain. And it's always there. And it's you know, good times, bad times, tired, not tired. It's always there.

And what you find is that when you get very, very sensitive to it and you get very good at feeling it, and it's a little tricky, I should say, as an aside, because it's like anything in the spiritual path. If you try too hard, if you look too close, it disappears. That's how everything is in the spiritual path, right? But once you get the hang of it, it's kind of like you're kind of looking over here, but you're also looking out of the side of your eye over here at it, you know, like, and then you kind of feel it.

You're like, oh, there it is. I'm looking here, but I can feel it here, right? You get really good at that. You can get really good at that.

In spirituality, you need to get good at that. That's probably something we should, I should have a whole teaching on that because I completely forgot that as a skill, but that was definitely something I had to learn. But regardless, you begin to really get familiar and understand the texture and the pattern and the frequency and the energy of your own transmission. And then what you find is everywhere you look, whether it's outside your body or in your head or a thought or an emotion or a pain or a triumph or a joy or sadness, is it's you.

You're like, that's me. That's my transmission. That's my energetic signature. That's my frequency.

That's the pattern. It is literally the gold atom that builds all of you is that. And it's the key to everything. Because once you become very familiar with your own transmission, you won't be fooled anymore because you recognize you see yourself in everything inside and outside.

And then that you don't get tricked into thinking that you're giving away your power because it's all you. So how could you give it away? Right? It always leads you back to yourself.

Everything leads you back to yourself. Even when it doesn't, it does. So that's personal transmission. And so actually, there's a second point to it.

So once you, and this is also part of the teaching, but once you've identified your personal transmission, specifically the buildup of it or the density of it in your abdomen, then you want to live from your transmission, quite literally having 70-80% of your energy and awareness in your lower abdomen at all times. And then your rest of your awareness is in your chest and a little bit in your head just when you need it. And so then what happens, and you don't have any awareness or energy outside your body. And so then what happens is you stay grounded.

You have a ballast, right, in your body. And then another thing you can do is you move your attachment from being attached to the story of yourself in your mind, and instead being attached to your own transmission, the own energetic signature, the manifestation of your transmission, the experience of your transmission. It's before energy, it's kind of like there's energy, too. It's energy and before energy at the same time.

It's hard to put into words. But you can attach to that. So then what happens is if you're in flow state or awake or whatever you want to call it, then you know you're not attached or you're not aware of any attachment, one or the other. But often when we're not in flow state, then we kind of reattach.

But if you reattach in a flexible, very loose kind of way to your own transmission, it's much more honest than attaching to a story or attaching to the traumatic self or attaching to an unresolved emotion or pain, right? So that's its own lecture. Okay, great. Thank you.

Welcome to the Form of Emptiness. My name is Scott Kalin, and today we are talking about the Theory of One and Two, specifically the 13 patterns of the Theory of One and Two. And I think we're currently on pattern number seven: befriending emotions. As per usual, I'll be making tea in a traditional Chinese gong fu tea ceremony as I do this video.

Today, I'm making a what is it, Tangku Maofeng from China it's from the company called The Sweetest Dew, I think is the name of the company through Unearthed Teas, if you're interested in where the tea comes from. Okay, good. So, this pattern, befriending emotions, is an important pattern for spiritual path and also an important pattern for the path of psychological healing. Both paths.

I haven't really got into too much the where the where the path of psychological healing and maturation connects with the path of spiritual evolution. So we can get into that a little bit now. It's somewhat complex. One way to think about the self, and there'll be more videos on this because this is quite complex, is that before somebody has healed and they're stuck in what you call their childhood trauma or their traumatic self, traumatized self.

One way to think about that is if your soul or spirit is like a light shining into your body, and the self is a mirror at the bottom, almost like a mirror in your lower abdomen, say by your perineum or your lower dantian. If that mirror is shattered into seven pieces, that's what it's like to be attached to your childhood story of suffering, your traumatic self. And quite literally, it's as if you have five to seven separate selves, all broken in similar but different ways or complementary ways. We can, you know, that's a different topic.

And so the key to going from on the spiritual path to going from I've got it, I've lost it, right? Which is a common experience in spirituality where somebody will have an extended experience of awakeness or flow or peak. I don't know what the word is, but where you're basically not attached or very loosely attached to your separate self. And then something will happen, they will get activated, and then they will fall back into separation and attachment to the traumatic self, right?

Which then creates this experience of, I got it, I lost it. The benefit of psychological and emotional healing is that fractured circular mirror that I described that's been fractured into, say, five, seven, nine pieces, can be healed and fused back into, say, three pieces. And once you get that fractured mirror to three pieces, what happens is the number of fractured cells that you can attach to when you go unconscious and get triggered is drops to three from seven. And it's much easier to maintain a level of awakening or awakeness when there's only three different cells you could attach to versus five to seven is very difficult.

So that's often why people struggle to maintain awakening, even though they've had very deep awakening experiences. And so the techniques that are helpful for people that aren't necessarily interested in awakening, that are just helpful for psychological healing or emotional healing, are also helpful for the process of spiritual healing and spiritual awakening because of what I just said and a lot of other reasons to be honest. Also, specifically, we haven't gone into it too much yet, but if you look at the rules of the Theory of One and Two, what you find is that there are specific rules, and one of the rules is that everything, all things in life, are relationship.

Everything is relationship. So that's one rule. And then another rule is all relationships are governed or go through the cycle of birth, life, death, emptiness, rebirth. So all relationships are experienced or depicted by the cycle of life.

And so what that means is that not only are we always in a relationship or in many relationships or multiple relationships, but those relationships are constantly being born and constantly dying all the time, which means that we're constantly needing to grieve the loss of those relationships and then prepare ourselves for the birth of the next relationship over and over again, all the time on multiple levels, on micro levels and macro levels, quite literally, many, many times all at the same time. And so that's why the process, processing emotion and the grieving cycle, and having a healthy relationship with the grieving cycle and mastery of the grieving cycle, and a healthy relationship with the emotions of the grieving cycle is so important so that you can do that work and keep up with the evolving nature of being human.

And then, on top of that, if you want to go far on the spiritual path, like I have and that I recommend you do, you will be constantly creating and destroying identities much quicker than the normal human will. And so, what that means is that need to grieve the loss of those old identities and then the building of new ones and then the loss of those is exponentially more. And as you get more conscious, more energy goes into your lower dantian, which then gets pushed through your whole energetic system, which then returns to your lower dantian, meaning there's more energy moving through your body.

So, like in the Liquid Armature model, that gold atoms that move through the wooden armature is the depiction of that energy that amplifies and intensifies as you get more conscious and more awake. So, what that means is every time you lose a self or you go through a cycle of grief, it's actually more intense, not less, because there's more energy moving through that cycle. So, these are all reasons why getting really good at being human, specifically the emotion part, is so important. Good.

So, back to the topic at hand, the pattern, befriending emotions. Befriending emotions is super important for a lot of the reasons I just gave, but even more reasons. So, and what I mean by this is that most people, not everyone, but most people, especially people that I work with, have a negative relationship with their emotions, specifically the emotions of the grieving cycle. So, the emotions of the grieving cycle are fear, shame, anger, sadness, emptiness.

Those are the negative emotions of the grieving cycle, the contracting emotions. And then the emotions of rebirth, which are after the grieving cycle, are awe, belonging, love, and joy. So, it's important that we have a neutral or positive relationship with all the emotions, both positive and negative, of the grieving cycle. At the beginning, it's most important that we have a good relationship with the negative emotions, but then as we begin to get more proficient at the grieving cycle, then we need to have a good relationship with the positive ones also.

Since most people have struggle with emotional repression or just a negative having a negative relationship with the emotions of the grieving cycle, that means that when the emotion arises, they have an automatic aversion or pushing away or repression of that emotion. And what that does to the emotion, say you have the emotion of anger arising, and then you have that negative relationship with anger, then that amplifies the anger and it intensifies the anger because the anger doesn't want to be repressed. It's like if you have water moving through a hose and you put your thumb on half the hose and it shoots out even more intense, the other half.

It doesn't stop the water from moving. It just makes the water more kinetic and more frenetic and more chaotic and more intense. And that's what the repression does. So we both need to learn to not repress our emotions or unrepress our emotions.

And then once they're unrepressed, we need to befriend our emotions. And so the way to befriend our emotions is we want to encourage the experiencing and the feeling of our emotions in a relatively neutral or safe environment. Specifically, like the guided meditation I teach, where you have a safe point in your body and then you're relating to something from that safe point. That's a good way to learn to befriend emotion.

You can learn to change your relationship to emotion by first befriending it and moving from the safe place towards the emotional intensity, the part of the emotion you're scared of, and then back again. And then also then bringing in the unconditional self-love that we talked about in the previous patterns, and then bringing that into the relationship with the emotion, right? So, if there's where you're looking from, and then here's the emotion of anger, and then having the unconditional self-love be the space between the two, the relationship, then you're beginning to change that relationship with sadness or with anger, whatever the emotion is.

And what we want to do is, since you're starting out with a negative relationship or a negative pattern that goes against the emotion, we want to start with, we want to add a positive pattern to fight that initially. And so, initially, you're going to be fighting the negative emotional pattern with a positive pattern. and not feeding the negative pattern, and once you stop feeding the negative pattern and have a positive pattern, the momentum of that negative aversion or negative pattern towards the emotion will dwindle and die, and then the positive pattern will take over, and then you can let go of the positive pattern and just have your innate relationship with the emotion.

And we need to do this for all the emotions, not just the ones in the grieving cycle, but all the emotions, but specifically the ones in the grieving cycle are important. And also, we need to do it on every level of reality. So, when I say befriending emotions, what I mean is: say if we take the emotion of sadness, what is sadness on a personal transmission level? What is sadness on a subtle energy level?

What is sadness on a gross energy level? What is sadness on a body sensation or somatic level? What is sadness on an emotional level? What is sadness on a thinking level?

Both picture thoughts and word thoughts and memories are included in that. And then, what is sadness on an external level, like outside of yourself? And so, we need to be able to befriend sadness on all of those levels and all the intensities that the sadness can be. And then, what you find is once you've done that, and once you have this uninhibited, this just basic yes to the emotion as it's forming, as it's arising in the lower abdomen, right?

Emotions tend to form very early in the body, low in the body, in the lower abdomen, and then all of a sudden they come up and we notice them in the head or the chest or in our jaw or something. That's long past the genesis of the emotion. The emotion actually is beginning very early in the body at a low point in the body. And so, we want to have this yes and this sensitivity and this valuing of the emotion so that once it just begins to arise, we're right there with it, going, yes, you are here, this is me, we are one, we are the same.

What do you have to teach me? This is so interesting, so exciting. And then, what you find is that it expresses it and you get that information that you need, and then it dissolves away, and the emotion actually ends up being not too big. And so, an emotion that would get in the past that was unattended to, that would become a seven out of ten or an eight out of ten of sadness because you just didn't notice it as if you didn't care, becomes only like a three out of ten because you're following it from its birth and you track it from a one to a two to a three, and then it just goes, okay, that was it, and then it goes back into the ground of being good.

So, that is the seventh pattern. Okay, and then the eighth pattern, pattern seven, eight, and nine are all about befriending emotion and the grieving cycle, so they all kind of go together. Pattern eight is mastering the grieving cycle. So the grieving cycle is you know, an often talked about psychological concept.

There's a lot of theories about it. People have their own theories or definitions of it. I have my own theory of the grieving cycle that I've created from my own work, my own practice. um, my own experience of grieving.

I think I should maybe be helpful to mention here. So I went to my first retreat without a Shanti. This was right after my second awakening, major awakening experience, two weeks after my second awakening experience. And, you know, we don't have to go into too much detail, but basically, I was on the second day there, and he said you can walk around and look at all the beautiful gardens and all the pretty plants and the ocean and the sand.

And it was in Asilimar, if you're familiar with that retreat center in California. It's by Monterey, California. It's very pretty. by the golf, the famous golf course there.

Or you can stop where you are and you can go deep inside and become aware of what you don't want to be aware of. I had had an awake, my second awakening, which involved a huge heart-opening experience two weeks prior. then basically just walking around and kind of la la blissed out, totally content. Everything was shiny and bright and super vivid for the last two weeks.

Literally, the night before, I'd been looking at the little stopping and looking at all the flowers that I, you know, weren't used to seeing since I'm from Wisconsin. I was in California, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, he's talking to me. That's interesting.

I was like, okay, so I went out after lunch and I went behind the cafeteria. There was like this little area with like benches, this deck area by the trash cans where all the staff went to smoke cigarettes. And I just went and sat there and meditated. And I just said to the, you know, to my body and to the universe, I was like, okay, I'm ready to see what I'm scared to see.

You know, what do I know that I don't want to know? And then I became aware of what I've been running from for the past seven years, which was my experience of emptiness from my first awakening. And that experience of emptiness was coupled with my best friend having a severe mental health illness that, you know, it's kind of put it, uh, it was very heartbreaking for me and very upsetting. And so I started crying.

And then I cried that whole retreat, almost the whole retreat. Well, pretty much the whole retreat, as much as I could cry hours and hours every day, four or five, six hours a day. And then I got off that retreat and then I continued to cry. And I cried probably on average two to three hours a day for about three years.

And yeah, a ton of crying. I was doing a bunch of therapy at the time. I was doing about two, one and a half, two hour and a half sessions a week with my therapist, Kathleen Levenick, who was very helpful for me. I was doing a bunch of retreats, so I was doing a bunch of meditation.

I was meditating, you know, kind of crazy hours. I was meditating weekdays, I'd meditate like five, six, seven hours a day. Weekends, I would meditate like 12 hours a day, sometimes more than that. And then I would work, you know, but that was about it.

I worked at, that was when I was working with Giulio Tononi in his consciousness laboratory, and I was working with Richie Davidson in his meditation laboratory. It was for his, the new Venture Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, which is now um, it's a lot bigger than it was. I was just the first, I was working on the first research study that they had when they were formed. So I just, I mentioned this because crying and grieving for me is very, very important, has always been very important.

And I can't strongly recommend enough the importance of grieving in the process of psychological healing, but also the process of spiritual evolution. And that it's often undervalued, underspoken of, or completely avoided in spiritual communities. And I think it's unfortunate because we talk about how we're so courageous and that we are so willing to look where no one else looks, but we're not even willing to grieve the losses that we've been through. We're so scared of our own emotions, our own sadness, our own darkness that we run from it through grasping for more and better and cooler spiritual experiences.

And it's just not the way. That is not the way. So I am a big proponent in grieving and crying. I think it's very healing.

And I think it's one of the big issues in society: is this villainization and making crying and making grieving a bad thing. My experience after grieving so much is that it's one of the best things that can happen because the grieving sets you free. It frees you from all the old identities and the old stories and the old pain and the old losses and the old versions of yourself. I couldn't be who I am today without grieving.

I couldn't let my wife evolve in the way she needs to evolve from going from us being married before having kids to now being married and having kids. She's changed who she is so many times. And every time I must grieve the old identity that I have of her to make room for the new identity of her. So, the grieving is so helpful in so many ways.

And I strongly recommend people learn how to grieve. And that's what this pattern is about. It's the pattern, I think it's called going from inhibited grieving to healthy grieving. And yes, so it starts with befriending your emotions, specifically the negative emotions in the grieving cycle, and eventually the positive emotions in the rebirth cycle are helpful too.

And then it has to do with increasing your capacity to hold and handle the emotions of the grieving cycle, right? And then it's just about practicing, right? So, you know, if you work with a therapist, if you work, if you choose to work with me one-on-one, I could walk you through some of this. I do work with people one-on-one.

I currently am still working as a therapist and pivoting into becoming a spiritual teacher. I do offer both. Eventually, probably I will stop the therapy piece, but that doesn't mean I can't give some coaching on how to shift your grieving, how you grieve from inhibited grieving to healthy grieving. It's actually a really big topic, so I'm probably can't go into it too much today.

We'll probably have, well, we'll definitely have more talks about it as it's very important. But basically, what happens is if you have a strong negative relationship with one or more emotions in the grieving cycle, such as anger, which a lot of people have a negative relationship with anger, what happens is when your body naturally goes to grieve, which it will do, the body just naturally grieves, it will get to the anger piece, and then you will avoid the anger and go into an addictive pattern of behavior and do some sort of addictive behavior, whether it's scroll on your phone or you know, drink tea or smoke cigarettes or marijuana or you know, think too much or worry too much or all the things.

All the ways we could be addicted. You know, a different topic is addiction in modern society as it is so prevalent, but and then you'll you won't grieve. And then what the consequences of that is that you continue to accumulate unprocessed, unresolved emotional and somatic pain from your past losses in your somatic and physical body. And then that becomes, it turns into progressive illnesses, such as pain, anxiety, mental health illnesses, chronic illnesses, things like that.

I'm not suggesting that all illnesses are due to unresolved grief or unprocessed emotions by any means, definitely not. However, it makes those illnesses and processes worse. It makes pain worse. It makes anxiety worse.

It makes issues worse. It makes all these issues worse. So, yeah, so when we, so the other main point about inhibited grieving is that if we don't grieve the losses related to our life, we won't learn the lessons that are embedded in the losses. And then we will repeat the same patterns that lead to the same losses over and over again because the universe is gracious and gives us infinite opportunities to learn the same lesson.

And it doesn't allow us to go to the next lesson until we've learned this lesson. And so if we don't grieve in a healthy way, we can't fully learn and integrate the teachings and the lessons that our life and the universe are providing. And then we will kind of just keep circling and repeating the same patterns over and over. I did that for years, so I haven't been very familiar with that.

So another good reason to learn to grieve in a healthy way. Like I said, it's kind of a complicated topic, but one thing is you want to practice moving through the emotions in the grieving cycle. And one thing to consider, the grieving cycle that I have laid out goes fear, shame, anger, sadness, emptiness. And then the positive emotions.

Between each layer is fear. So it goes fear, fear of shame, shame, fear of anger, anger, fear of sadness, sadness, fear of emptiness, emptiness, relief. Right? And then everybody navigates the grieving cycle kind of particular or as individually to themselves.

For example, the way that I go through the grieving cycle may not be the way you go through, meaning I might go anger, sad, shame, anger, sad, anger, sad, emptiness, relief. And someone else might go, shame, anger, shame, anger, sad, right? So there's going to be kind of a different rhythm to it or order. And so it's important that you get to know your own rhythm or order.

So, but like I said, it's kind of a complex topic. So I'll kind of leave it at that. Okay, the ninth pattern is titled Letting Your Heart Break. And this is also related to the last two patterns: the mastering the grieving cycle pattern and the befriending emotions pattern.

So, letting your heart break is speaking very specifically to a common issue that people have in the process of grieving, in the process of feeling sadness. And what happens is we allow ourselves to feel sadness up into a point. So, our sadness is filling our heart, and it's as if, oh, I feel more sad. Sad is sadness at a six out of ten, seven out of ten, eight out of ten.

Because I'm feeling that it's like my heart is in pain, like it hurts, and it's also like feeling like it's going to burst, or ripping, or tearing, or squeezing. But it's as if there's something inside that's like pushing against an external force that's holding it in. And there's this conflict of like back and forth where it's like and then it's like no, and it's like no. And so, the energy in the heart is trying to like burst open and like expand.

And the patterning and the limitations of the heart is like, No, it's too much. It's going to kill me. It's going to destroy me. I can't take it.

It's too scary, whatever. And it's fighting it, right? So, that is where we need to learn to allow and let our heart break. And so, what we can do with that, and this is a technique I teach and recommend you learn.

It's somewhat simple, is you imagine that there's two hands holding your heart, and those hands are that tension that's fighting the heartbreak. And instead of fighting it, you just very gently go, oh, and you just allow your hands to open and relax, and then go down. And then the heart breaks open and cracks open, and it's like this energy, this liquid pours out of it and down the sides. And then there's this kind of this relief, right?

As you, as the heart, the intensity of the heart and the pain and the sadness peaks. And then, as that happens, the self, the false self, dies. The story dies. And so that's why we fight that is because we're afraid of that death, that little death, they call it, and that dies.

And then that can move us into the emptiness and the relief portion. And so it's all about valuing that intensification piece, that scariness piece, that feeling of inner conflict, that feeling of like you're right on the edge of the known, and you can feel the old self dying, but it's like fighting, and there's this like pain and this love bursting through the cracks of the heart. And you're like, yes, this is it. This is what I want.

This is valuable. Yes, you embrace that and it just breaks open and releases. And so when we value these key moments, these very specific energetic patterns, which is what all these 13 patterns are, they all have an energetic and a signature and a signature in the level of transmission. Both when we value that and we become sensitive to that and we say, oh, that is so important.

Look, that gives me what I want. That helps me transform much more rapidly, which is what I want, which is an alignment with my true longing, right? Then that intensifies and speeds up the whole process of spiritual evolution, right? So that's the general idea with all these patterns.

If you can master these 13 patterns and they all work together synchronistically, it rapidly intensifies the process and the speed of spiritual evolution. Pattern 10, seeing the pattern beneath the story. So seeing the pattern beneath the story is both a pattern and an important skill to master from both psychological healing perspective and spiritual healing perspective. Often people come to me and they say, I've worked on so many of my patterns.

I don't know why they keep coming back. Why do I have to keep doing this? It doesn't make any sense to me. And I tell them, because you have not gotten to the root of the pattern.

How much you work on a pattern when it's in its superficial expression is of very little importance or consequence. How much you become familiar with the root of the pattern is very important. That's all that really matters. And there's not really that many patterns, unhealthy patterns of behavior.

I'm not quite sure how many, but I would probably say like five patterns, seven patterns, maybe less. But they take on all different expressions throughout our life. So a common example. Sorry, before I go into examples.

So, as we talked about before, when with how I view the world and how I view reality, I look at reality as having multiple layers of reality. And so, there's the layer of spirit or the spiritual layer or before experience, and then there's personal transmission, and then there's subtle energy, gross energy, bodily sensations or somatic awareness energy, emotions, thoughts, both picture thoughts and word thoughts and memories, and then the external world, right? So, when we work with a pattern, we need to make sure that our insight and our awareness penetrates to the subtle energetic layer and the transmit, eventually the personal transmission layer.

So, we need to get the body sensations are very important, the gross energy, the subtle energy, and then the personal transmission is very important. And we need to find the source of the pattern. So, if you do a pattern, say, I don't know, it would be a pattern, like avoiding, so people pleasing and avoiding anger because you are worried that if you upset someone, then they will abandon you, which is a super common pattern that people have. If you do that pattern, then you do that, say, in your day-to-day relationships, and say you work on that with your current partner, and you wonder why working with that with your current partner doesn't fix the pattern, right?

It's because you need to identify where did you learn that pattern in early childhood, most likely from one of your parents, or a sibling, or a relative, or someone that's important to you, right? And then we need to directly come into contact with the memory, if you can, of where you learned it, and then also the body sensations and the unfelt emotions related to that pattern, if that makes sense. So, for example, so if as a child your father never expressed anger and allowed other people to take advantage of him and didn't know what he wanted, and so he just took on the wants and needs of others or the environment or the system he was currently in, then he has strongly encouraged you as the child to develop that same people-pleasing, avoidance of anger pattern of behavior.

And so, it's all one pattern, but it encompasses a number of things, such as avoidance of anger, people-pleasing, fear of abandonment, right? So, or it might be multiple patterns. I guess it depends how you define it, but combined into one, right? So, that is that's a very common pattern that people have that has its own emotions with it, it has its own thoughts with it, it has its own body sensations with it, and it has its own energetic signature to it, right?

So, for example, if you someone's in an abusive relationship, which this pattern relates to, and say it with the same talking about the same thing, this dad, if he's people-pleasing, what he's doing, he's focusing all of his awareness and energy on the other person that he's trying to please, and he's not focusing any awareness or energy on himself. And at the same time, that person who he's trying to please is focusing all their awareness and energy on themselves. So, the energetic pattern, right, is one of energetic abandonment of the self and energetic over focus or idealization of the other person or fixation, right?

So, that's the energetic signature of that pattern. So, the key to healing that is to become familiar with all the different layers specifically rated to the early childhood formative events, and most importantly, become aware of and connected with the energetic, the somatic, the energetic, and the transmission level of it. Because that's what allows you to master it and really change it. These patterns are learned in very early childhood, and they are strongly reinforced.

So, if we only work with the external adult manifestation of them, we will be wasting energy and never fully transform them. Ultimately, what we find and what the Theory of One and Two claims is that all patterns are related, and all suffering is related to separation from the whole of and forgetting that we are interconnected with the whole or we are one with the whole. And specifically, all suffering comes from self-abandonment. Now, that isn't to say that other types of suffering aren't real, right?

And that is kind of a controversial viewpoint, I guess. But ultimately, we have the choice to abandon ourself, or to not abandon ourself, regardless of the current external environment. And I just want to say, though, I hear how that sounds, and I want to say that that does not excuse the behavior of other people who are hurtful or abusive. And I'm not at all trying to blame people that have been traumatized.

I have been a trauma therapist for 15 years, so I'm very familiar with the process of trauma and the process of healing trauma. This is Baozheng. People understand Taiwanese oolong. Okay, so that is done.

And then let's move on to the next pattern. The next pattern is pattern 11 is integrating realizations. So integrating realizations is also an important thing to master, an important pattern to master, a healthy pattern. I guess we should delineate that I'm talking about healthy patterns and unhealthy patterns sometimes.

So what we're talking about now is healthy patterns. Patterns are very helpful and can be unhelpful, but ideally, if we can master these healthy patterns, then when as we get more and more conscious and more and more awake, these healthy patterns will supplant the unhealthy ones and go into our subconscious. And though it takes a lot of effort during the process of learning and forming these patterns, once we master them and they go into our subconscious, it takes very little effort. And then we only have to be able to do the pattern when we get into very difficult life circumstances or our life changes dramatically, like we have a child or something else, you know, get married or buy a house or move to a different country, whatever it might be, change careers.

I have to say that this tea, this baozheng, is sometimes when you make tea and you do these tea journeys, you get the perfect tea for the perfect moment in the tea journey. And this, I have to say, was is the perfect tea for this moment. It's nice and refreshing and cooling in the hot Spanish summer. Okay, so integrating realizations.

One of the large problems I see in online spiritual communities and on social media is that many people are having spiritual realizations, awakening experiences, whether it's through psychedelics or retreats or all different reasons through their own suffering or whatnot. And then, but they don't actually integrate that realization. So what happens is they have the realization and then they grab it with their hand and hold it up like a trophy or a flag and say, look, look at me. I had this realization.

You should do this too. This is the truth. This is the truth. This is the truth.

And it's just not the case. The realization is only true as it's being realized. And then after that moment, it no longer is true. So you may realize it again, and then that may make it true again.

But the minute we realize something, then it dissipates. Meaning, truth is contextual. What is real is before experience or before words. We can't put the truth into words, no matter how profound a person could be or the realization is, the awareness is.

It's like saying, How could I put the color and taste of this Baojang into words? I can't. But I can drink it, and that could be more closer to the truth than the words to taste. So what is the key?

The key is integrating the realizations. So, once we have a realization, that's the easy part. And then we have to integrate it. What happens is the universe will come and test us.

It will give us life circumstances or difficult situations that will trigger us or activate us and give us an opportunity to re-realize that same realization within the everyday scope of life. And so, when we're tested, that's a very good thing. And when that happens, we want to be like, Yes, this is good. I'm getting tested.

Not, oh, I'm so upset. I lost my awakened, high-frequency, energetic state, blah, blah, blah. Right? That's we can, we don't need to go there right now, but that's a whole different thing.

Regardless. So, anyways, so the universe is always helping us to integrate our realizations. And so, it's important to balance as best you can having spiritual realizations or psychological realizations with integrating them energetically and emotionally. And the way to integrate them is through healthy grieving, like I've described in the other patterns, and to make sure that you're keeping up with the grieving cycle and not accumulating unconscious, unresolved emotions and somatic pain related to those unresolved emotions.

If we, If we accumulate too much unresolved, unconscious emotional baggage, then it will slow down the process of spiritual evolution and we will not be able to maintain the awakened state for long periods of time. So, it's best if you can balance spiritual awakening and spiritual realizations with emotional processing and energetic and somatic integration. Great. All right, on to the next one.

We are getting closer. Okay, the next pattern, healthy pattern, is rigid to flexible attachment. So basically, I'm not a big fan. Well, I've said before, I'm an attachment trauma.

I am an attachment therapist, a trauma therapist, somatic therapist, all kind of together. Right, so a lot of experience with attachment, attachment theory, all these things. I'm not a big fan on the characterization of attachment as attachment styles. I've never felt those to be particularly accurate or valid.

They seem like kind of an over gross overgeneralization. So just for the record. But that being said, the quality of attachment that we have is very, very important. Meaning, somebody that has a lot of early childhood attachment trauma, say for example, say if a person, you know, say if their mother passed away when they were in the first five years of life, that's pretty considered like a very significant attachment trauma.

What that almost always does is it causes rigid attachment, meaning you have the rules that you learn from your parents, right? And then those go into your unconscious mind. And then we're always using those rules to try to figure out how to navigate the world and how to predict the world and how to be in relationship. That's the blueprint, right?

So when we get older and we mature, we have the potential to differentiate. And when we say we're differentiating or actualizing, right, is another word, we're differing, we're differentiating, we're becoming different from the rules that we learn from our parents, right? So we're recognizing those rules, deciding if they serve us, destroying them if they don't, and then making new rules. That's the process of differentiation.

That's a classic psychological process that I recommend everybody do. It's very important, but we're not really talking about that too much today. But so what happens when you have early childhood attachment trauma is you have the rule and then you have your attachment to the rule. It's quite literally how close are you to the rule or how closely do you follow that rule?

People that have rigid attachment, usually due to early childhood trauma or instability or could be transgenerational trauma, they very closely follow the rule. And if they don't follow it right, then they switch from being a good kid to a bad kid, right? Their story of suffering goes from good to bad or bad to good. And so that's called rigid attachment.

And so most people have rigid attachment. There's probably, I don't know, maybe 20% of the population has flexible attachment because their childhood went well. It's not that common, but it happens. So if you have that, great.

But if not, then I recommend you learn how to switch or move from rigid attachment to flexible attachment. And the reason for this is that it allows for you to have much more ability to not grasp for control in your day-to-day life and not beat yourself up or blame yourself when things go outside of your plan or outside of your control. And so this is an important thing to develop over time. A lot of spirituality works on breaking attachment or getting rid of attachment or destroying the ego.

And though that is important, right, we do want to decrease the intensity of the attachment, which is what happens when we destroy attachment. We don't really ever destroy the attachment necessarily. The attachment's kind of there, but how much we feed it, how much we believe it, how much it controls us is malleable. But then once we're able to loosen the attachment, right, and this comes from differentiation, but once we're able to loosen it and go from rigid to flexible, then I recommend you take your new skill, which is flexible attachment, and you use it to begin to choose what you attach to.

So for example, when I'm in a flow state or high, you know, enlightened or abiding or awakening or whatever you want to call it, I'm not attached to anything. Or maybe I'm attached to the self, but it's so faint I can't tell. I don't know. It doesn't really matter to me.

Probably I'm still attached. Probably there's always a little attachment, but it doesn't really matter. Right? However, as far as I know, nobody that I know and the spiritual teachers I know are not always maintaining that heightened flow state.

That doesn't seem like the human body would tolerate that. And so there's lots of times, more than the other times, where you're not. And in those times, sometimes the sense of attachment to the self or the self is very faint, and sometimes it's strong. And it does not matter too much if it's strong or faint.

It matters if you believe it, if the self, if you believe the self, right? And so, but sorry, I'm digressing. So, but with flexible attachment, what I recommend you do is switch your baseline attachment from the false self to your own personal transmission, your own energetic transmission. And when you can do that, then when you come out of a flow state or when you are having a difficult time because you've been activated or something was triggering, you can return to your own sense of personal transmission and groundedness and suchness and wholeness.

And now we're on to the next pattern, which is applied true love, the 13th pattern. So, applied true love is my term. It may change eventually. I'm not sure how much I like it, but it's what I've got now.

It is my term for the expression of of somebody who's awakened or highly awakened or on the path, but kind of farther on the path, not that there is distance, but it's my term for the expression of your own personal transmission and your own calling in relationship and within the world. So, applied true love is when somebody has reached a certain level of consciousness, awareness, that they are able to maintain the flow state or maintain an embodiment of their own transmission and not be overly attached or distracted by the self, false self.

And then they're able to both be in their own body and their own transmission and also have their awareness open to connecting with another person who is also in their transmission. And then what happens is what I call applied true love. And that is where both people are aware of themselves and the other. And then a third thing is born, which is the relationship.

It's kind of like building a tower out of blocks together. One person puts one, another person puts another, one person takes it away, then they put two, one person takes away, one puts three, and you all of a sudden have built this third thing, and that is the relationship as it's building. So it requires the ability to hold paradox, it requires the ability of all the other patterns that I've described to do this. And it is the most authentic and truest expression of a person's calling.

And it is the goal for me and also for, I think, my students in the Form of Emptiness for all of us to reach. All right, which is all of us continue the never-ending process of getting better and more creative and more expressive of our ability to have applied true love. All right, that's all 13 patterns. Thank you for joining me.

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