About Feel Your Life Force & Deep Embodyment™
THE INSPIRATION
This website was inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s teaching on being present through inner body awareness. Two million copies of Tolle’s book, The Power of Now, have sold worldwide, and it’s been translated into over fifty languages. Tolle’s insights on the mind’s relationship to awareness have helped so many because of the skillful way he uses language that bypasses both spiritual and psychological jargon. This allows his readers to intuitively grasp an elusive but fundamental truth: You are not your mind, though the mind works relentlessly trying to persuade you that you are.
Tolle shows how the mind hijacks your identity by projecting thoughts backward into past memories and forward into imagined futures. These thought projections largely abandon the sensations of your body, which only exists and can be felt in the present moment. This may be why Tolle’s favorite method for occupying the present moment is to feel your inner spaciousness. Here’s some excerpts from The Power of Now on inner space awareness. Oddly, many who say that they greatly benefited from Tolle’s book don’t remember his emphasis on inner space. I do, because it changed my life.
THE CATALYST
My name is David Henderson. My profession is valuing high-end homes in San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County where I live. Appraising in these two very complex markets is always a challenge. But my real passion and second profession is design and invention. Over the last thirty years I’ve developed designs that include: a new type of geodesic dome for SipSmart; an advancement of their subtle energy field effect technology for Clarus; and an invention for Sharper Image that made their newsletter’s cover. I’m currently a design consultant for the startup, Informa.
About twenty-five years ago, I had a prolonged mid-January flu with a terrible hacking cough. I was taking massive amounts of Ambien to sleep, unaware of its now well-known side effects. The Ambien caused me to sleepwalk, and the persistent hacking cough made me feel quite disconnected from my body. After a few weeks, I recovered from the flu, but I still suffered with this strange disconnection. So, when a friend gave me The Power of Now, I homed in on Tolle’s suggestion that the best way to stay grounded and embodied in the present moment is to bring your awareness into your inner space.
THE PROBLEM
I tried Tolle’s suggestion… it didn’t work. Actually, it did, but only very briefly. Almost instantly, I felt pushed back out of my body. It took me weeks to figure out which way I was being pushed, and by what. One day, as I struggled to hold my awareness inside, I felt what was pushing. It seemed too wispy and transitory to have that much power, but it did. It was thinking itself that was projecting my awareness forward to the front surface of my head and torso. Why? I realized later that this is where the mind pushes my thought-based identity and sense of self in order to interface with the world.
Tolle simply says to place awareness inside inner space. But that wasn’t enough to anchor me there. I knew why he hadn’t offered a structured technique. Tolle, and other teachers of presence, suggest that structured techniques promote the belief, conscious or not, that nothing in the present moment is as good as what could be obtained in the future if you just keep practicing. This belief can thrust awareness away from the present and into an imagined future. This made sense to me, but I ignored it. I wanted to feel my inner space and it seemed that a technique was the way to get back in there.
So, I tried two respected meditation techniques. The first muffled thoughts with a mentally-repeated mantra. This worked, but my awareness never left my head. The second focused awareness on my breath as it moved my nostrils and sternum. This allowed my awareness to drop, but only to the very front surface of my body… the same location where my awareness was already projected by thought. Both techniques slowed thinking, and many have used them to shift consciousness. Yet as useful as they are, they didn’t target the energy I had felt within. But what had I felt? I went online to learn.
THE SOLUTION
Some biologists theorize that living forms develop around a torus-shaped biofield. This shape can be seen in an apple’s cross section, where the torus shape surrounds a stabilizing stem. In some non-living torus forms, like hurricanes and tornados, there’s a relatively calm center “eye.” Do humans contain anything similar? I found that after about ten cell divisions the human embryo has a similar central tube. This doesn’t prove that a torus-shaped, human biofield exists. But it prompted me to use this theory as a starting point in designing a technique that could stabilize my inner awareness.
This embryo’s egg-shaped phase develops into the head and torso. Strangely, the organs start to develop long before the limbs “sprout” from the embryo. Maybe the limbs are secondary… critical, but a peripheral part of a human biofield, which would likely be denser in the head and torso. After a few trials, it became clear that ignoring the limbs actually made feeling inner energy much easier. So, as I took a single structured breath, I focused on feeling my awareness move through an imagined tube from the base of my torso to the top of my head. This stabilized my awareness a little longer.
Yet, thoughts kept nudging the imagined tube forward. So, I identified a few easy-to-feel, anatomical “landmarks” for the tube to pass through. This anchored the tube and stabilized my awareness. The technique worked. In fact, it worked so well that after a few sessions it morphed. As I practiced, the internal energy grew stronger and more perceptible, and I realized that I didn’t need the structured breathing and guided imagery. The energetic sensation itself anchored my awareness. And in doing so, the technique solved the “practice versus presence” paradox by eliminated the need for itself.
Months later, the technique surprised me once more. As I felt deeply into my inner space, the “I” that had been me my entire life took a backseat to a growing energetic identity that filled my entire head and torso. These days, as I become this field of energy, thinking isn’t much of a problem. Thoughts arise at times, but they feel dry and distant compared to the energetic texture of my inner space. So, it’s natural and almost automatic to shift my awareness back to my inner energy. Am I feeling the theorical, torus-shaped biofield? Maybe. Whatever it is, it feels like the life force that animates me.
This technique is similar to traditional meditation because it reduces thought, but only as a byproduct. Yet, it’s different because it’s easily used out in the world to reduce stress. It’s also different because it directs awareness to the real goal of the technique… embodiment. Recently, I was surprised again. I began dropping into deep embodiment without even thinking about the technique. I’d find myself in a deep energetic identity spontaneously. This can last minutes, or hours. The few thoughts that do arise seem outside me. When it happens, this byproduct feels like what Tolle describes as presence.
THE INVITATION
Tolle has no credentials as an expert on embodiment, or even presence. In fact, he was on the verge of suicide the night a strange event radically changed the course of his life. Here’s a description of that event (Reading Sample, pages 3-6). So, his teachings aren’t based on any credentials; their value is self-evident. In a similar way, the technique offered here isn’t based on past tradition or any authority. The design considerations above are presented to be judged on their merits. But the only way to truly evaluate the technique’s design is to accept this site’s invitation to feel your life force.
As I developed the technique, I researched online for references on how thinking projects awareness. When I found nothing, I realized that I had to share what I was learning. Later, as I taught others it became clear that the technique was not enough. I had to explain why it was needed from a fresh perspective. This is because the technique solves a problem that few of us know we have: In trying to be you, the mind hijacks your identity by projecting awareness away from the energetic center of your being. This site is offered to help you reclaim the inner body awareness that’s your birthright.