Wow! Am speechless. I found Hawkins a long time ago. I often look to that emotional scale. Your work goes beyond it. It adds a layer of circle to it. Around it. Inside it. Your work gives a map to it. Goes deeper into archetypes and for me takes energy and gives it eyes and lips. You give energy a face. A face that gazes out to us. In to us. You give us a story. A journey. Beyond a scale. Veronika you show us how to walk the path. Thank you for your wisdom. Your incredible efforts- these articles are whole books! Thank you for your gifts! We showed up here on the stack at the same time. Your words help guide creativity to mine. You help me see beyond a self. Happy Birthday! Thank you for setting your gifts free! 🙏❤️
I came across Hawkins some years ago, can't remember exactly when... What I do remember is that I dismissed his 'Map of Consciousness' as too hierarchical and linear. An anthropocentric view of emotions (although I wouldn't have used the word back then, since I wasn't yet familiar with the terminology).
This was because I hadn't read the books by Hawkins himself! I glanced superficially at this map with erroneous interpretations by people who thought they knew what they were talking about, while having no clue (probably hadn't read his books either).
I only read the books in the past couple of weeks and was blown away. I realised that Hawkins understanding was the same as mine, but he had received his gift in parallel with the discovery of kinesiology, and this connection became the main focus (and people just interpreted the work in line with their own misunderstandings and wishful thinking)
I think my work has the power to make this all more accessible because I approach the topic more with a child's mind. Hawkins was already an 'expert' when he received his inspiration. He was working as a respected psychoanalyst. I had my subjective experience, little professional expertise, and asked irrational non-sensical questions...
Yes, these articles are chapters of a book. And they also have enough substance and potential to each grow into a whole book by themselves.
This is seminal work, I know, because I am exploring little known territory. Not because nobody has written or thought about this... On the contrary! Consciousness research is as ancient a topic as it is cutting edge. But contemporary interpretations are often still too much entangled and stuck in the anthropocentric paradigm. It is not easy to unstick ourselves from the old ways of thinking. THANK YOU for accepting the challenge 🤍 🙏 ✨
“The Inner Healer lives in the realm called Inner Ocean Reality, where everything is connected with everything else. She doesn’t perceive the darker emotions as separate from the brighter states of mind. They simply express the other end of the same spectrum, and a healthy equilibrium can only be achieved through the interplay of all vibrations.”
I wanted to quote so much back to you that I would just be sending you back your words.🤣 As you know, I am studying-exploring-applying your map in a space and pace that so enriches the messaging that I receive from my team — because your work is affirming, through its guidance, the reclamation of the sovereign self. So, for now I just want to express my deep gratitude for your depth of knowledge and wisdom. Thank you. 🙏 🌀 💚 🌊 🪶
Thank you so much, Simone, for your affirmings! your resonance! your work with your team!
This chapter has been particularly moving for me too, hard in some ways, easy in others, enriched by the reading of David Hawkins, and full of surprises, leaving me feeling dizzy with delight and healthy tired ~ just like I imagine to feel after a surf in the ocean (which I've never done, unfortunately)
Yes, I can feel the emotion re how you contextualise the childhood familial experience re the effects of negating emotions. My initial comment went down a path re the emotional volatility that was dominant in my childhood experience .... etc. Then I realised that isn't for here, and was coming off the back of what I posted today. I was pleased that when I read this post, I have enough of an embedded reading of your work, that I could go with your flow without rattling my head — too much 🤣 🙏. So grateful Veronika — get in the waves, and I will get back to Ch 19🤣 🙏 🌊. Thank you
oh, it's perfectly ok and perfect when this writing triggers memories of your own emotional childhood experiences! That's all you have, and yours to work with. In all our different experiences our inner struggles return surprisingly similar...
YES I am going to get into the ocean waves soon, with a longer stay on the coast scheduled in 2 weeks... so much looking forward to that briny embrace 🌊
Thank you Veronika. Yes, the triggering of the memories is fine — that is the root of the healing work with John and the team of course; supported by your offer. My comment was turning into an essay 🤦🏼♀️. Yes, the wounded child runs parallels with how the context and experience manifests as the unworthiness we spend a lifetime attempting to understand and resolve; including accepting the patterns we have repeated. Your work deeply resonates with my intrinsic motivation and disposition. 🙏
Enjoy your break. I am off to Vietnam for most of July, so looking forward to floating in warmer waters ... and the rest of it 🙌 🌏
Veronika, your rich reflections here read like the deepest of soul-mapping - layered with truth, pain and such astonishing clarity. It takes such real courage, I intuit, to name the ab-soul-ute heartbreak of “perfection” - how what looked ideal from the outside can leave a child (both inner and outer) starving for warmth, for affection, for proof that love doesn’t have to be earned. Recovering people pleaser here!
Wow! You name it all with such precision and tenderness.
And then you widen the lens, moving from the personal to the universal: the transmission of trauma, the calling of the Inner Healer, the necessity of holding space for all of our emotions, even those wild and most unwelcome ones. There’s such wisdom in your insistence that healing isn’t about discarding or bypassing, but staying present, listening and transforming.
That the spiralling path forward is slow, organic, embodied and wholly relational.
Oh, I love how your words pulse with the same energy you describe - the aliveness of the organism, the system, the mandala of faculties in motion. Thank you so much for articulating a Truth (yes, spelt with a capital) we so often forget: that love is both the soil and the sun for all deep growth.
I’ll be carrying this one with me on my summer travels.
This is a heavy suitcase to unpack. My partner and I had a very different upbringing than you did ~ emotions were given very free range, usually great anger. But I can see how the lack of would be frightening to a child. Rarely are these things handled with care, compassion and love. Instead we learn to live with shame and fear.
I do love this image you conjure of waves and oceans. It seems appropriate to seasons, changes, whims, and learning to navigate it all. And when you join fellow souls in deep relationships, learning to surf becomes that much more challenging, but rewarding.
Thank you so much for your resounding response, Lani! Isn't it surprising, how despite very different childhoods we can relate to each others' subjective experience? Whether the emotions are ranging freely, or entirely shut out, in both environments children can be left feeling emotionally abandoned... and end up living, or drowning, in shame and fear...
In my understanding, the only solution for the age-old suppression of human emotions and neglect of the human Instinct is to dive into the Inner Ocean, learn to surf those emotional waves, and bring back pearls of wisdom to the shore...
I had the good fortune to discover this work when my daughters were young teenagers. I started this practice with them too (adapted to their age of course) and although they didn't quite understand it at the time, and sometimes laughed it off, it has benefitted them more than any of us realised, and so they are now (as adults in their late 30s) deeply appreciative for the gift of this practice. It's a personal powertool! A secret weapon for self-empowerment. So useful in any relationship, including the relationship with ourselves.
Veronika! Your writing is so rich. I have to take it bite by bite...looking forward to coming back to this again for another. I found David R Hawkins work a few years ago and I put his Map of Consciousness on my refrigerator right at eye level for my kids. It has sparked many conversations and contemplations. So everything you are exploring here is resonating. I hope that as a family we are bringing our own states, and the interconnectedness of those states, into awareness, and that we might change our being-ness as a result. Bite by bite :-)
Wonderful! Thank you for sharing your resonance, Chelsea 💕 🙏
I remember conversations with my kids about issues around 'surfing the Inner Ocean' when they were young teenagers. Even if they didn't yet understand the exercises I was suggesting to them (to process the experience of heartache over falling out with a friend, for example) they brought so much trust and earnestness and the authenticity of youth into the work. The results were heartwarming and life affirming.
It's such a great gift to give your children! Mine are all grownup now, and they greatly appreciate their 'early training in self-compassion' as a tool for self-empowerment. It is also a wonderful 'super power' to have as a family.
'Bite by bite' as you say. Or 'the power of small steps' as Peter Levine calls it. xx
We might be vibrating on similar frequencies, Veronika, because I think often of human emotions and how much we humans fear them in ourselves and in other species. I wrote a brief post on this recently, about how we repress our emotions, thinking it affects our rational mind. This is particularly true in scientific fields.
Compassion and love has to be taught in some way, because we have through the centuries dulled our natural instincts. We have done so in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and shaped an objective reality that, in reality, makes us unwell, unhealthy. Fear. Shame. Guilt. Anger. are present in abundance. We can feel it.
Healing is used a lot, but we need to at first acknowledge that our Society is not well. A Society that is well will know that Love and Compassion are Essential for us to be in tunre and resonate with the natural realm, which is to say the authentic realm.
ps: there is a reason that some people have an "ability" to draw animals close to them. The non-human world has never lost that state of emotional instinct.
Thank you Perry! I fully agree with your assessment of the non-human world. Humanity went on this slippery and fatal trajectory by distancing humans from the 'savage beasts', declaring the Instinct as 'outdated' etc.
I just read your latest post on Nature... where you raise many important points, such as "The doorway to these qualities is humility".!!!
The flipside of the human urge towards superiority is of course the ubiquitous sense of inferiority, which always shimmers through the façade of grandeur and drives the denatured human further out of their own centre.
Science, at least, has been honest enough to admit its own false assumptions. (e.g. recognising that matter doesn't exist, and that objectivity is a nonstarter)
Compassion and love is something we all need to practice on ourselves, I believe, and the ability to love ourselves naturally also grows our capacity for loving all sentient beings and nature.
You had me at the first quote (one of my all-time favorite poems) and bat photo, but everything else was like a profusion of gleaming stars exploding in a night's sky, full of mystery, calling, and peace to be absorbed. I will be re-reading this over and over, thank you. <3
Thank you Stephanie! Yes, Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my all-time favourite poets too, and this poem is just beyond words...
I am delighted that my writing resonates so beautifully with your reading, thinking, and feeling into languages which are difficult to put into words 💗🙏 ✨
Yes yes yes! Your work is so validating to my own process of allowing, holding, including. And even doing those “ing’s” with an ounce of “wishing the uncomfortable emotions or sensations away” is enough to flatten the entire healing/integrating experience.
And I love this analogy! “Such a manoeuvre is equivalent to discarding persons who have failed to pass a grade and replacing them with more successful candidates. It leaves the immature inner creatures feeling abandoned and in greater despair than before!”
"even doing those “ing’s” with an ounce of “wishing the uncomfortable emotions or sensations away” is enough to flatten the entire healing/integrating experience." — Exactly!
The way we meet our uncomfortable emotions is essential. They get amplified either way. When we fight them, or even 'wish them away', we are adding insult to injury. When we embrace them, it's like giving a hug to a hurt being... which happens to be ourselves. And that is the healing/integrating experience in a nutshell.
I think Gary Snyder would agree with you there... he talks about chaos as a more complex kind of order, one that we perceive as 'chaotic' because it goes beyond our limited and linear sense of order. xx 💙 🙏 𓍢🌊
Wow! Am speechless. I found Hawkins a long time ago. I often look to that emotional scale. Your work goes beyond it. It adds a layer of circle to it. Around it. Inside it. Your work gives a map to it. Goes deeper into archetypes and for me takes energy and gives it eyes and lips. You give energy a face. A face that gazes out to us. In to us. You give us a story. A journey. Beyond a scale. Veronika you show us how to walk the path. Thank you for your wisdom. Your incredible efforts- these articles are whole books! Thank you for your gifts! We showed up here on the stack at the same time. Your words help guide creativity to mine. You help me see beyond a self. Happy Birthday! Thank you for setting your gifts free! 🙏❤️
I came across Hawkins some years ago, can't remember exactly when... What I do remember is that I dismissed his 'Map of Consciousness' as too hierarchical and linear. An anthropocentric view of emotions (although I wouldn't have used the word back then, since I wasn't yet familiar with the terminology).
This was because I hadn't read the books by Hawkins himself! I glanced superficially at this map with erroneous interpretations by people who thought they knew what they were talking about, while having no clue (probably hadn't read his books either).
I only read the books in the past couple of weeks and was blown away. I realised that Hawkins understanding was the same as mine, but he had received his gift in parallel with the discovery of kinesiology, and this connection became the main focus (and people just interpreted the work in line with their own misunderstandings and wishful thinking)
I think my work has the power to make this all more accessible because I approach the topic more with a child's mind. Hawkins was already an 'expert' when he received his inspiration. He was working as a respected psychoanalyst. I had my subjective experience, little professional expertise, and asked irrational non-sensical questions...
Yes, these articles are chapters of a book. And they also have enough substance and potential to each grow into a whole book by themselves.
This is seminal work, I know, because I am exploring little known territory. Not because nobody has written or thought about this... On the contrary! Consciousness research is as ancient a topic as it is cutting edge. But contemporary interpretations are often still too much entangled and stuck in the anthropocentric paradigm. It is not easy to unstick ourselves from the old ways of thinking. THANK YOU for accepting the challenge 🤍 🙏 ✨
Hi Veronika,
“The Inner Healer lives in the realm called Inner Ocean Reality, where everything is connected with everything else. She doesn’t perceive the darker emotions as separate from the brighter states of mind. They simply express the other end of the same spectrum, and a healthy equilibrium can only be achieved through the interplay of all vibrations.”
I wanted to quote so much back to you that I would just be sending you back your words.🤣 As you know, I am studying-exploring-applying your map in a space and pace that so enriches the messaging that I receive from my team — because your work is affirming, through its guidance, the reclamation of the sovereign self. So, for now I just want to express my deep gratitude for your depth of knowledge and wisdom. Thank you. 🙏 🌀 💚 🌊 🪶
Thank you so much, Simone, for your affirmings! your resonance! your work with your team!
This chapter has been particularly moving for me too, hard in some ways, easy in others, enriched by the reading of David Hawkins, and full of surprises, leaving me feeling dizzy with delight and healthy tired ~ just like I imagine to feel after a surf in the ocean (which I've never done, unfortunately)
Thank you for being here 💗🙏 ✨𓍢🌊 🪶
Yes, I can feel the emotion re how you contextualise the childhood familial experience re the effects of negating emotions. My initial comment went down a path re the emotional volatility that was dominant in my childhood experience .... etc. Then I realised that isn't for here, and was coming off the back of what I posted today. I was pleased that when I read this post, I have enough of an embedded reading of your work, that I could go with your flow without rattling my head — too much 🤣 🙏. So grateful Veronika — get in the waves, and I will get back to Ch 19🤣 🙏 🌊. Thank you
oh, it's perfectly ok and perfect when this writing triggers memories of your own emotional childhood experiences! That's all you have, and yours to work with. In all our different experiences our inner struggles return surprisingly similar...
YES I am going to get into the ocean waves soon, with a longer stay on the coast scheduled in 2 weeks... so much looking forward to that briny embrace 🌊
Thank you Veronika. Yes, the triggering of the memories is fine — that is the root of the healing work with John and the team of course; supported by your offer. My comment was turning into an essay 🤦🏼♀️. Yes, the wounded child runs parallels with how the context and experience manifests as the unworthiness we spend a lifetime attempting to understand and resolve; including accepting the patterns we have repeated. Your work deeply resonates with my intrinsic motivation and disposition. 🙏
Enjoy your break. I am off to Vietnam for most of July, so looking forward to floating in warmer waters ... and the rest of it 🙌 🌏
Sounds wonderful. Happy and safe travels my friend 🙌 🌏
I can recommend trying a surf 🏄♀️ 💙 🙏
Veronika, your rich reflections here read like the deepest of soul-mapping - layered with truth, pain and such astonishing clarity. It takes such real courage, I intuit, to name the ab-soul-ute heartbreak of “perfection” - how what looked ideal from the outside can leave a child (both inner and outer) starving for warmth, for affection, for proof that love doesn’t have to be earned. Recovering people pleaser here!
Wow! You name it all with such precision and tenderness.
And then you widen the lens, moving from the personal to the universal: the transmission of trauma, the calling of the Inner Healer, the necessity of holding space for all of our emotions, even those wild and most unwelcome ones. There’s such wisdom in your insistence that healing isn’t about discarding or bypassing, but staying present, listening and transforming.
That the spiralling path forward is slow, organic, embodied and wholly relational.
Oh, I love how your words pulse with the same energy you describe - the aliveness of the organism, the system, the mandala of faculties in motion. Thank you so much for articulating a Truth (yes, spelt with a capital) we so often forget: that love is both the soil and the sun for all deep growth.
I’ll be carrying this one with me on my summer travels.
This is a heavy suitcase to unpack. My partner and I had a very different upbringing than you did ~ emotions were given very free range, usually great anger. But I can see how the lack of would be frightening to a child. Rarely are these things handled with care, compassion and love. Instead we learn to live with shame and fear.
I do love this image you conjure of waves and oceans. It seems appropriate to seasons, changes, whims, and learning to navigate it all. And when you join fellow souls in deep relationships, learning to surf becomes that much more challenging, but rewarding.
Thank you, Veronika! 🙏💯💗
Thank you so much for your resounding response, Lani! Isn't it surprising, how despite very different childhoods we can relate to each others' subjective experience? Whether the emotions are ranging freely, or entirely shut out, in both environments children can be left feeling emotionally abandoned... and end up living, or drowning, in shame and fear...
In my understanding, the only solution for the age-old suppression of human emotions and neglect of the human Instinct is to dive into the Inner Ocean, learn to surf those emotional waves, and bring back pearls of wisdom to the shore...
I had the good fortune to discover this work when my daughters were young teenagers. I started this practice with them too (adapted to their age of course) and although they didn't quite understand it at the time, and sometimes laughed it off, it has benefitted them more than any of us realised, and so they are now (as adults in their late 30s) deeply appreciative for the gift of this practice. It's a personal powertool! A secret weapon for self-empowerment. So useful in any relationship, including the relationship with ourselves.
Veronika! Your writing is so rich. I have to take it bite by bite...looking forward to coming back to this again for another. I found David R Hawkins work a few years ago and I put his Map of Consciousness on my refrigerator right at eye level for my kids. It has sparked many conversations and contemplations. So everything you are exploring here is resonating. I hope that as a family we are bringing our own states, and the interconnectedness of those states, into awareness, and that we might change our being-ness as a result. Bite by bite :-)
Wonderful! Thank you for sharing your resonance, Chelsea 💕 🙏
I remember conversations with my kids about issues around 'surfing the Inner Ocean' when they were young teenagers. Even if they didn't yet understand the exercises I was suggesting to them (to process the experience of heartache over falling out with a friend, for example) they brought so much trust and earnestness and the authenticity of youth into the work. The results were heartwarming and life affirming.
It's such a great gift to give your children! Mine are all grownup now, and they greatly appreciate their 'early training in self-compassion' as a tool for self-empowerment. It is also a wonderful 'super power' to have as a family.
'Bite by bite' as you say. Or 'the power of small steps' as Peter Levine calls it. xx
We might be vibrating on similar frequencies, Veronika, because I think often of human emotions and how much we humans fear them in ourselves and in other species. I wrote a brief post on this recently, about how we repress our emotions, thinking it affects our rational mind. This is particularly true in scientific fields.
Compassion and love has to be taught in some way, because we have through the centuries dulled our natural instincts. We have done so in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and shaped an objective reality that, in reality, makes us unwell, unhealthy. Fear. Shame. Guilt. Anger. are present in abundance. We can feel it.
Healing is used a lot, but we need to at first acknowledge that our Society is not well. A Society that is well will know that Love and Compassion are Essential for us to be in tunre and resonate with the natural realm, which is to say the authentic realm.
ps: there is a reason that some people have an "ability" to draw animals close to them. The non-human world has never lost that state of emotional instinct.
Thank you Perry! I fully agree with your assessment of the non-human world. Humanity went on this slippery and fatal trajectory by distancing humans from the 'savage beasts', declaring the Instinct as 'outdated' etc.
I just read your latest post on Nature... where you raise many important points, such as "The doorway to these qualities is humility".!!!
The flipside of the human urge towards superiority is of course the ubiquitous sense of inferiority, which always shimmers through the façade of grandeur and drives the denatured human further out of their own centre.
Science, at least, has been honest enough to admit its own false assumptions. (e.g. recognising that matter doesn't exist, and that objectivity is a nonstarter)
Compassion and love is something we all need to practice on ourselves, I believe, and the ability to love ourselves naturally also grows our capacity for loving all sentient beings and nature.
You had me at the first quote (one of my all-time favorite poems) and bat photo, but everything else was like a profusion of gleaming stars exploding in a night's sky, full of mystery, calling, and peace to be absorbed. I will be re-reading this over and over, thank you. <3
Thank you Stephanie! Yes, Naomi Shihab Nye is one of my all-time favourite poets too, and this poem is just beyond words...
I am delighted that my writing resonates so beautifully with your reading, thinking, and feeling into languages which are difficult to put into words 💗🙏 ✨
Yes yes yes! Your work is so validating to my own process of allowing, holding, including. And even doing those “ing’s” with an ounce of “wishing the uncomfortable emotions or sensations away” is enough to flatten the entire healing/integrating experience.
And I love this analogy! “Such a manoeuvre is equivalent to discarding persons who have failed to pass a grade and replacing them with more successful candidates. It leaves the immature inner creatures feeling abandoned and in greater despair than before!”
Thank you so much for resonating 💙 🙏 𓍢🌊
"even doing those “ing’s” with an ounce of “wishing the uncomfortable emotions or sensations away” is enough to flatten the entire healing/integrating experience." — Exactly!
The way we meet our uncomfortable emotions is essential. They get amplified either way. When we fight them, or even 'wish them away', we are adding insult to injury. When we embrace them, it's like giving a hug to a hurt being... which happens to be ourselves. And that is the healing/integrating experience in a nutshell.
as always ... ever soooooo beauty full, precious beauty full you!
Thank you Christine 🙏 😊
I think nature is chaotic at times, Gary Snyder.
I think Gary Snyder would agree with you there... he talks about chaos as a more complex kind of order, one that we perceive as 'chaotic' because it goes beyond our limited and linear sense of order. xx 💙 🙏 𓍢🌊
The Soil of Sacred Living The Life of Unconditional Love
https://open.substack.com/pub/herbiesview/p/the-soil-of-the-sacred-living-a-life?r=5tot8z&utm_medium=ios