Inner Fire 2010 Arcylic on Paper by Shiloh SophiaToday’s podcast is an exploration of becoming conscious about the illusions.
* Exploring George Orwell’s famous 4 fingers
* Gaslighting ourselves and not trusting ourselves
Accusation of the other ‘side’
* Exhausting rabbit-holing to find Truth
* Do not drink the divide and conquer koolade
* Hearts and braings changing right now
* A Centers of Knowing Coherence practice for discernment
This podcast is complimentary - yet if you choose to contribute, be welcome.
In Orwell's novel-made movie, 1984, there is a famous and devastating scene. Winston is being tortured by O'Brien, who holds up four fingers and demands that there are five. He wants Winston to distrust himself and go with the party's version of the truth, not just agree to it, but actually see it as so. "O'Brien says, Look at my hand, Winston. Right now, you see, indeed, four fingers held up to you. But as you can see, O'Brien uncovers his thumb, showing all five fingers. I have, in fact, five fingers. That is the essence of the party. Winston, you think you know the truth by seeing things with your senses. But as you can see, your senses can disappoint you. The party knows everything is everything. The party knows that there are five fingers here even if you only see four of them. The party knows the truth that you cannot see from the place you are standing at because you are weak alone. The party is strong and omniscient and therefore if the party says that two and two equals three or five it will always be right. You by yourself cannot know the truth." As each one of us experiences our own reckoning in relationship to our lives and in relationship to how we experience the nation, especially those of us in the United States, I want to invite us to continue to question what we see and think. It's curious for me how personal so much of this feels in relationship to experiences I've had in my life where I haven't been able to trust people and then end up not trusting myself.Some of them are the people I have loved the most. And in the end, it was my own hand showing the fingers to myself through just trusting my own experience over a longer period of time. Now, with the increase of AI easily showing us things that are not true, It can be very hard to believe our eyes.We are going to need other tools for discernment than we've needed before, really. I'm going to share a heart-brain coherence process with you very briefly to support with discernment. The images that AI are showing us makes me think about those Renaissance paintings where the patron would have the artist paint themselves into the scene, painting the patron inm and that those with the biggest purse strings and influence are defining the images of our times. When I offer art history tours, it is a very different tour indeed. I used to go on this tour with Jonathan and myself and our community to the Uffizi in Florence, and Elisabetta, our tour guide, would hand me the mic to give the alt history of what we're actually seeing. One of the changes that we need to make is how we're relating to the material. Because one of the challenges with truth right now is the exhaustion caused by rabbit-holing in order to discern the source so that we can figure out if something is true or not. And there goes another 15 minutes, and there goes another 15 minutes, and there goes our mood, and the algorithms, they got us. At the end, we still don't know if what we see is true, and perhaps we give in to overwhelm. One thing might upset me and another person something totally else, and we each act like the other person's concern is the distraction from what's really happening. And our critical thinking has been used in a sometimes productive and often nonproductive way, but the end result may be weary, irritated, and feeling unsafe, and deciding not to post after all. Can't we just find the truth with a capital T?It's hard to find right now. This process that we are experiencing is fundamentally changing our brains. We are also being changed in our hearts as more fear and distrust of the others around us in our lives and in the larger collective spaces increases exponentially.Divide and Conquer is here to stay for a while, so we need to not go for it. Do not go. Drink that Kool-Aid of divide and conquer. Discernment, choice, but not divide and not conquer. Because then they've got us right where they want us, fighting with each other instead of with them.Yet there is also more compassion that's happening. So the hearts are also opening because we're considering the impacts on other people's lives. People who never defended Mexicans, trans, and women are suddenly becoming more visible. We could go into all the different ways that this time is changing us and our voices.If you look back in my posts on my Tea with the Muse Substack you'll find that I've been talking about these topics for a long time. These are not new that I am suddently speaking about it. I'm just speaking about it more specifically in regarding what's happening here. But I've been talking about consciousness raising and discernment for my entire 30-year journey as a creative and someone who guides community. What I find really curious is that each side, quote, if you think of it that way, really thinks the other side is holding up the false number of fingers. Really, really, really think about this. We have rarely accused each other of the same illusionary experience and metaphor, even if the content that those hands are pointing to is different. Whose hand is it? We can begin to distrust the thoughts and feelings that we're having. In times like these, we question them and then are sometimes gaslit by others for our feelings and thoughts.We can just stop treating other people who don't agree with us as if they're just stupid. That would be helpful. Disagree, but leave the shame part out of it. The marketing propaganda from, quote, both parties is sickening. Sickening. Even as I'm making this message, I'm getting texts on my phone number from both parties about what's happening. Really.Without the heart-brain coherence pattern operating soundly within us, we become dysregulated in our nervous system. This is a real thing, y'all, not some new age idea. Our brain and our heart are communicating all the time. When we become conscious of it, we can collaborate with the process of coherence,which is always the right place to make a decision from. For those who know me, I think they can attest to a degree of severity that I carry forward. Yes, I am a wild, free woman who dances and houses with the moon and paints outrageous paintings.But I have a severity because I am deeply disturbed about the state of the world, and I have been since I was a young child, like so many of you. This disturbance about how I felt about the systems of the world was originally part of the inspiration to be of service when I was a teenager and became a rebel. I wanted to know how I could help. Now my inspiration is I'm just in love with the practices, culture, and community we have co-created called Musea. Musea, by the way, means museum in the plural or many muses. It acknowledges that we have people all over the world who are connected through creativity. Now I work from joy instead of disturbance while keeping my eye on the disturbance. The initial disturbance of how things are showed me how to become stronger towards what I care about. To be courageous at the root of courageous core, the heart.I want to invite you to spend time nurturing yourself and your heart and your brain every single day. When you are confused with something and something that needs discernment or you feel challenged, try this connection with your centers of knowing. This is about creating heart coherence.Creating Coherence in Centers of KnowingConsider physically touching each place that I'm about to mention lightly with your hands as you visualize the connection between each place. I like to see a golden ribbon of light between each area, each center of knowing. 1. Begin with connecting with yourself, capital S self, about whatever it is you're navigating.2. Ask your heart how it feels and what it perceives. The heart has the strongest electromagnetic field of the body. And the heart perceives in the field around you. 3. Travel next in your imagination to your brain and ask how it feels and what it perceives. Listen. 4. And then go back through your heart, landing in your gut,and ask how it feels and what it perceives. Listen. 5. And then when you're ready, travel to your groin region, front and back and all around the pelvic area, and ask, what do you feel and perceive? 6. And then I like to travel back up to the heart after listening. Check in on the topic. Was there agreement between those centers of knowing or disagreement? Was there coherence? And what is the decision now? In Intentional Creativity we might now take to the dance floor of the drawing board or the canvas, which is what I'm about to do on this Valentine's Day. If you check those centers of knowing and there are conflicting experiences, there is work of discovery to be done. Especially if it's just one area, then you can focus there, meditate, and see why there's disharmony. But in general, I try not to act until I get agreement from all centers. That way, I can have a clear voice, a true heart, and a pure mind experience in my decision-making and my discernment.If you would practice this even before you go online and even before you read articles and follow rabbit holes and watch YouTubes and anything else, you would be approaching this material from a very different place than what you'reencountering in the social media and news world and on your phone. I also recommend that you, before you engage, sort of open the file of engagement. And then close it when you are done looking. Don't just leave the portal open or the tab open.Close it energetically so these files are not running in the background all the time. I've made some of the hardest choices of my life through checking these areas for confirmation or lack thereof. It gives me courage. Regardless of all the challenging things, we are evolving and growing. And I believe we are becoming more conscious and more compassionate.I am seeing this time as an evolution. And we have a long way to go. That's why we need practices. I invite you to pay attention to whose hand is holding up the fingers and telling you how many there are. Can we do that? Some say that George Orwell was an optimist.Sometimes the one holding up the elusive hand is in our own minds. Isn't there so much richness here to explore in this wild becoming? I choose to see it as a wild becoming to wholeness. This is my choice, my conscious choice. Enter flow state and soak in as much beauty as possible as often as possible.And I'm sending big love as a wave out into the lives of those tuning in. And I too am tuning in to you with much loveShiloh Sophia
Photo by Jonathan McCloud
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