14 May The Benefit of Neutrality
Hello and happy May!
I wouldn’t be able to do what I do, facilitate readings clearly and cleanly, without the benefit of neutrality. I thought it might be helpful to share what neutrality can do for you. So what is it?
When we have a recurring issue or “picture” that habitually gets us riled and causes us to lose our space, act or feel in unintended ways, then we have lost our neutrality. Neutrality in this sense could be looked at as balance. Imagine, for a moment, life as a bike ride. If person A feels like a 30 lb. weight sinking you on your left, and issue B feels like a sustained headwind, and event C seems like a jostling shot from out of the blue, then keeping steady on two wheels is going to be a task of great effort and struggle.
Through meditation, you can actively create a pocket of neutrality in the center of your head. A calm eye in the center of the storm. In observing your pictures from this vantage, ask yourself what the underlying issue is. See if you can own it – own that this is a picture that’s in your space, even and especially if it’s not your own.
In this way you start to become neutral around that picture. It may not all happen in one meditation, reading, yoga class, or therapy session. But a little ease is a beautiful thing and can become a catalyst for greater presence and openness in your life.
One might have pictures that being neutral is akin to being disinterested, disengaged, or uncaring. But neutrality as an energy level means something entirely different: a state in which there is an absence of judgement and no need to fix, control, or advise. It’s a presence and awareness in which you are giving yourself the right to be exactly who you are – now. When you can be neutral about yourself, it’s easier to give the people in your life that benefit in kind.
Neutrality helps us to own our space. It’s a state of consciousness in which we relinquish attachments to the outcomes of other people’s actions and our own. It’s an energy level that arrises quite naturally from meditation. And it’s a quality within ourselves that we can increase by observing and de-magnetizing our pictures.
When we are no longer “lit-up” by judgement and blame around a person or an issue, we cease to be powerlessly drawn to it – and all the connected things that are toxic for us. It’s the magnetic sway of our pictures that lead us to them. Once we can excavate a challenging core picture, we can de-energize it, reducing its power to pull us in.
We seem to have infinite capacity and desire to define the world around us, lumping most everything into positive and negative categories by wrote. But our ability to lay grids of definition over our field of view does nothing to organize the underlying reality of what we’re gridding. And that’s probably a good thing. Things just are – and as we increase our capacities to accept things the way they are, the more we can experience life from a place of ease. That is the powerful, resistance-less, superconductivity of neutrality.
I may not be the world’s most neutral man, but I’m worlds more neutral than I used to be and that’s thanks to meditation and to my reading practice. Each of my clients holds a unique inner wisdom previously unknown to me. In reflecting that wisdom back to them, I believe we are both transformed – towards lives of greater neutrality and fulfillment. So I am thankful to all of you for your gifts and I look forward to our next meeting!
Next time: letting go of efforting
