Beneath our adaptations and survival based concepts which veil our naturalness is our individual essence.

The more one's body and psyche is disentangled from the conditioning of our childhood, from our collective unconscious and from cultural norms, the more our unique individual essence becomes apparent.

In essence we are each as distinct as a fingerprint, as one of my teachers would say we are spirit dancing a unique dance, yet on the level of skin we are all unified and the same.

Just as on one level each tree is unparalleled and separate, they are all in essence made of wood.

The individual essence is not in opposition to a unified state, but complementary as we are multidimensional beings.

In an integrated state of wholeness we leave no stone unturned, we learn to inhabit our humanity, our individuality and our unity. Not as a conceptual understanding but an experiential reality. 

Our individual essence is our birthright, it is the unique expression of the life force within us.

If you have followed these articles each week you will now have an understanding of trauma, adaptations and the conditioned reactivity that is implanted within us during our childhood.

These adaptations are a contortion of our essence, though the essence can never be lost, it can only be obscured.

Just like the clouds obscure the rays of the sun, but behind the clouds the sun remains untouched.
The clouds only apparently obscure the light.

Our spontaneous expression happens without preconceived ideas or agenda, the repressed pain within our body is the felt sense of contracting against our own naturalness.

A freeze response comes over our body, followed by the contortion of our expression. Feeling unsafe to be ourselves is at the core of this.

 The ancient Taoist perspective of wu wei is effortless living, non forcing, to go with the flow of things, to allow one to be exactly as one is.

Radical welcoming and unconditional acceptance of oneself is what brings harmony back to the body-mind and in turn harmony back into the external world.

The individual essence has been given names in ancient cultures such as the soul, spirit, atman and rūḥ.
It is effortless to be oneself, just like it is effortless to grow our hair or digest our food, it happens by itself.

We have all experienced this when we are in the presence of those we feel completely safe and comfortable to be as we are, to express freely whether that be to cry in agony, to laugh, to play, or to rest.

The effort is the attempt to control and manipulate one's self in order to maintain some kind of relational acceptance, which is a symptom of our conditioning that has its roots right down to our survival instinct.

As the layers of the ego’s adaptations begin to dissolve the experience of what we truly are begins to move to the foreground.

This is a natural result of the unwinding of stored somatic energy, paradoxically we gradually become “more” of what we already are.

In my view, the impulse to work through our trauma is not separate from the spiritual impulse, the process of negation, of transmutation, of integration, and removing all the obstacles we have to experience all dimensions of ourselves in an integrated way is the evolutionary impulse of life itself.

Governed by the same energy that moves the tides and makes a flower bloom. To move through and beyond the confines of the current state of human consciousness requires us to face the dormant and suppressed energies within ourselves, to experience them without running away or attempting to control them, this results in a natural transformation of our being.

The process is a return journey, a recognition of what is already here, without a goal to be “achieved”
To live fully here, experiencing whatever is happening just as it is.
At the core of the individual essence is the absolute reality, the source of life itself, which we all have the potential to experience directly.

Peace & Blessing,

Matt Kay

Co-Creator of Embodied Processing