I Am More Than My Physical Body
Intuition, Belief and Moving Beyond Perceived Limitation
By Donna Barton. Reprinted with permission of the author from the “Working With I Am the Word” Blog
I had no interest in psychic abilities until 2017. A life shock brought me to my first-ever psychic reading. After that, I found a mentor. Soon I began to see psychic development as part of my spiritual development.
“Now we will not speak of psychic abilities as if they are something mystical, because they are not. They are simply an amplification of what you are already doing without the limitations that you have placed there in your agreement with cultural availability to expected norms, or through a self-identification of limitation, which says, “I am not allowed, “Because it doesn’t have to be so, I don’t believe it can be so.” ~ “The Book of Love and Creation,” Paul Selig.
To rescue the word ‘psychic’ from any bias, it derives from the Greek ‘psykhikos’ “pertaining to the human soul.”
Psychic development is like learning to ride a bike — natural and fun. But when you learn to ride a bike, you’re supported by social approval or perceived normalcy. This can be lacking in psychic development. It’s beyond the known and normal, outside our cultural comfort zone.
As part of my development, I attended consciousness exploration programs at the Monroe Institute in Virginia. Before that, I’d had experiences of non-ordinary consciousness that left me a bit ‘between worlds’ and wishing for the company of like-minded others. At Monroe, the atmosphere was rich with science and metaphysics. Psychic development in a social context was not only fun, it was validating and healing. This affirmation, key to all their programs, still hangs on my wall.
I am more than my physical body. Because I am more than physical matter, I can perceive that which is greater than the physical world.
Therefore, I deeply desire: to expand, to experience, to know, to understand, to control, and to use such greater energies and energy systems as may be beneficial and constructive to me and to those who follow me.
Also, I deeply desire the help and cooperation, the assistance, the understanding of those individuals whose wisdom, development and experience are equal to or greater than my own.
I ask for their guidance and protection from any influence or any source that might provide me with less than my stated desires.
Many of us don’t know what that means — to sense or know ourselves as energy. We are in a culture that self-references as matter. Real yoga goes to the intersection between sensation of body and the sensation of space, taking back aberrant sensory data.
Aberrant data? Yes, where — sensation — the five senses — have been obscured or hijacked by thought patterns or belief. That’s why Neil deGrasse Tyson points to the senses distorting realty: “Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.”
In fact, as sensory data is freed from inherited thought patterns such as “I am this physical body,” we open to body-intelligence or intuition. This is what Einstein meant with, “No idea is conceived in our mind independent of our five senses [i.e., no idea is divinely inspired].” Our senses hold great potential.
Real yoga enriches sensory awareness. Yoga frees the senses from attachments that cause thoughts of anxiety, fear, and worry. As the mind is freed, the yoga siddhis (aka ‘yoga superpowers’) open up.
The belief that we’re finite (physical) contributes to feelings of lack and powerlessness. We experience life as happening to us rather than through us, which promotes more powerlessness and limitation.
The development of our psychic senses is like learning to trust (and thus heal) the subtle, sensitive parts of ourselves. Aspects of our soul are afraid. They’re afraid because they’re lost in an (incompleted) experience of trauma or conditioning. Trauma is a catch-all word to describe suppression of energy in order to fit in or survive. Re-knowing these aspects is part of psychic development.
We are energy. We are energy walking around as matter steeped in old beliefs of its limitations. Fear is a signal to us from a deep part of ourselves. We were once burned at the stake. Thrown in lakes. Gas-lighted. All those past lives are also in this Now moment. With us. As us.
As we connect with our energetic identity, something in us relaxes. Yes, quantum physics has informed us that we’re not matter. Our brains understand. But our bodies carry old fear-based beliefs. We’ve had lifetimes of gas-lighting. Psychic development is a form of inner yoga that supports us in sensing ourselves in a new way.
We’ve built a world of effort and force. We are witness to an epidemic of anxiety and fear.
What if we build a world that reflects the power of sensing our shared being?
There’s something in us and throughout us that wants our attention, our love; but our body inherits a fear of it. Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen spoke often of viriditas. She described it like a greening within. Viriditas is like photosynthesis; the readiness of plants to receive the sun and to transform it into energy and life. She saw connection between the physical world and divine Presence that translates into inner energy, the soul and seed of everything. She said it calls us to, “become who you are; become all that you are.”
Science writer Kim Stanley Robinson describes vriditas as “The … whorl, curving inward to infinity … the driving force of the cosmos.”
His description is a vortex. A vortex is energy. Energy is the heart of matter.
I am more than my physical body …
Originally published at https://www.monroeinstitute.org.
