Rosa Lewis

things about experience or what's around and it's just these sorts of different ways and modes and something clicks in when someone realizes that about themselves and validates their experience because before that it can be a kind of maybe like subtly leaving your own experience for something that happens rather than just living in it and from it and when you're living in it and from it it's more free to flow yeah

Yeah, and that's the reason why it has to be included, because it is not the fun bit, but it is an important bit.

What I mean by that is that, yeah, it's sort of pointing to that shadow work element and...

It's really that there is a lot in experience, in individual experience, in the collective, in the world that is hard to be with and intense and yeah, overwhelming.

And we would ideally want it to be another way.

either from like an individual perspective, we'd want it to be the way that I specifically want it to be, or equally like on a collective level, there's obviously things that are just like super inherently kind of sad and difficult.

And it's just about including that part of experience and not turning away and letting that be a part of what's here and letting that in to your system.

So that again, it's like coming out of the craving and aversion and

and coming into just a more kind of like a wholehearted welcoming of the full spectrum of experience.

And yeah, this bit can get super sort of like mystical in the way that it shows up.

And I think it's talked about in the stages of insight in Vipassana meditation as a way that

as you meditate and pay attention to experience you know you get these different phases and at some point you're just in a lot of fear and disgust and misery and that's just like part of what needs to flow through in order to come further out into equanimity but it also happens on this emotional level where it's almost like as you open the heart as you open yourself to more presence you're kind of opening to these more lovely beautiful parts of experience and that's

great but aperture is kind of going in all directions and so as more comes in more darkness is going to come in and it's giving space for that to flow through so that it can be processed it can be included it can be welcomed you can build the capacity to be with it and then you get this sense of like robustness and equanimity that can be present with a broader range of experiences.

Yeah.

And I think there's something about including it.

I mean, it's still painful and hard.

Part of including it is recognizing that it's kind of like, in my experience, there's no bypassing this completely.

But if you don't talk about it and people hit that territory, then it can make it worse because people feel on top of the struggle, people then put a layer on, which is I'm doing something wrong.

There's something wrong with me.

there's no way out of this, you then get this sort of extra layer of that this is bad.