Becoming Divinely Human
by CC Leigh

Chapter 5: Inseeing

Our Story: We became aware of the patterns of our conditioning that were once useful in supporting our survival but were now often seen to be unhealed “broken zones” keeping us separate, inauthentic, and unavailable for real intimacy and aliveness. We discovered how we could bring interested curiosity to our investigation of these conditioned “partial selves,” and welcome them to be as they are without trying to fix or change them. Lo and behold, when given conscious attention, they began to organically move toward greater wholeness and freedom.

Recognizing how you’re configured
There is tremendous value in learning how your inner territory operates, and the effects of your configuration on your life experience. Although you are not to blame for how you are wired, in this moment you can begin to be more aware of your patterns and core conditioning. When you see your patterns in a conscious, compassionate way—when you insee them—they lose some of their ability to control your behavior. Inseeing is the art of bringing conscious awareness and Presence to your inner process so it can organically move toward healing and integration, thus providing you greater freedom to act in ways that truly serve your best interests in the moment.

Most of your attitudes and patterns were formed in the past in response to your life circumstances and events. They represent who you have been. They are not your total self. Although your total self does include the conditioned aspects of your personality, you are always more than that, more than the sum of your parts, more than the limitations of your temperament. However, you might be experiencing some undue distress from unhealed, frozen aspects of your total self that are still viewing life from the perspective of, for example, a two-year old. The process of Inseeing, which will be explained later in this chapter, brings unconditional Presence to such parts in order to help them evolve toward greater wholeness—by helping them get current with who you are now as an adult.

Unseen patterns drive us unconsciously
The way most of us behave most of the time is quite automatic (even if we like to think we are acting from our own free will). The experiences of our early life left tracks in our psyche, and energy runs through these existing tracks more easily than it does in novel ways. Therefore, when we encounter a situation that reminds us of situations in the past (whether we consciously make the connection or not), our bio-computer overlays the template from the past onto the present and causes us to operate in pre-determined ways.

For example: Sue was raised in a home with an alcoholic mother who would at times fly off the handle and strike whichever child caught her attention. Sue learned that the best thing to do, at the first sign of anger or disapproval from her mother, was to get very still and quiet—in effect, to freeze up. Now as an adult, Sue works in a business setting with a boss who at times gets frustrated and angry. Although her boss never acts it out physically, Sue recognizes her boss’s clenched jaw as a sign of danger, and she freezes up in response, sometimes even trembling, and is unable to continue her work.

These conditioned reaction patterns lie below the threshold of your conscious awareness, like a shadow, waiting for the right combination of input to become activated. When they flare up, seemingly out of nowhere, you might find yourself saying, “I don’t know what came over me; I just wasn’t myself.”

Broken zones
A pattern of extreme reaction to a fairly innocent situation is a broken zone. Broken zones are places in our psyches that were wounded by traumatic events, and subsequently become hypersensitive and hyper-vigilant about anything resembling the original wounding. Broken zones always link to some event in the past when we were unable to avoid being hurt. If we were unable to fully experience that event at the time, due to lack of support, being too young to process it fully, or due to the sheer intensity of the experience, some of the shock becomes embedded in our energetic matrix. When life brings us a situation that reminds us of that trauma, it is like hitting a raw nerve with a dentist’s drill: our reaction can be far greater than the situation seems to warrant. We may lash out in anger, collapse in sorrow, freeze into immobility, or engage in distracting behaviors to override or numb the uncomfortable feelings.

Everyone has broken zones. They are very challenging to deal with because they remain hidden from us and others until someone stumbles over them. Then—voila—there they are, full blown and distrusting everyone and everything around them. When you are triggered in this fashion, it may seem impossible to do anything but helplessly watch as your emotions take control. However, by allowing yourself to feel the distress in your body more consciously, you will find that you can begin to explore the depth of the zone in a healing manner.

A broken zone is like a partial self, a repetitive reaction state that has an attitude, or an agenda, but doesn’t have the whole picture of your life as it is now. (The term “partial self” comes from the Treasure Maps to the Soul work of Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell.) Inseeing is more than simply an intellectual or emotional process: it uses the inherent wisdom of the body to gain important insights about the original injury and the decisions you made about life at that time. Over time (and with some skillful help) more of the trauma will be released, thus lessening the impact of the wound on your life now.

It’s important to understand that broken zones are formed by your instinct for survival and their existence is not a sign that you have done anything wrong. The problem with broken zones is that they interfere with living a spontaneous, joyful existence. By the time you have reached midlife, you may have accumulated so many prickly spots that you’re all too frequently reacting to perceived threats. And when you’re reacting, you are not really able to evaluate the situation as it actually is, or to be present with the people around you (much less to be intimate with them, because intimacy requires a sufficient degree of trust and relaxation to let other people in).

To recap: automatic reaction patterns have helped you to stay safe. While they may occasionally perform a similar function in your current life, they also interfere with your ability to be present and creatively respond to the situations and people you are encountering now. They interfere with your ability to be intimate, for whenever you perceive your loved ones through a lens that says they are a threat to you, you will shut down in an attempt to keep yourself safe. Most fundamentally, they rob you of freedom and satisfaction in life.

This dynamic, the threat-recognition-and-reaction patterning, is sometimes referred to as ego. And because it does interfere with your ability to be present and responsive in your current life, it is labeled as “bad,” and some spiritual teachers tell you that you should get rid of it (as if “it” was a single thing that could some- how be excised out of you).

But this patterning is extremely resistant to being removed, and for good reason. It actually does contribute to your survival.

Removing it would be like removing the anti-virus software from your computer. Sure, your programs might boot up faster, and you wouldn’t have to deal with those warning messages, but you would lose some essential safeguards. It would be foolish to remove the entire programming.
Broken zones won’t prevent your awakening
The existence of your core conditioning is not inherently wrong or bad, nor is it something that has to be eliminated in order to awaken to your divinely human nature.

That’s worth repeating: your conditioned response patterns— your ego, your broken zones, your shadow—are not inherently wrong or bad, and they do not need to be eliminated in order for you to awaken into your divinely human potential. They are part of you, and no less divine than any other aspect of what makes you tick.
However, though conditioning does not prevent a divinely human awakening, especially strong, neurotic, or obsessive conditioning can keep your attention so bound up in circular thinking or strong emotions that it gets in the way of doing the inquiry needed to clarify Consciousness (we’ll get into this more in the chapter on awakening). Learning to observe and be with your conditioning in a conscious way will make it easier to focus on awakening, and enhance the quality of your life as well.

Freeing up energy and attention
It is possible to bring a new level of understanding to these processes and thus free up energy and attention from the places it has been bound. In effect, you begin writing new code so that your bio-computer stops perceiving so many things as threats and has more energy for creativity. More and more, your essential self will be free to express itself in this life, and the freer you are, the more room or space there will be for your infinite divine nature to come alive and fully awaken.
About now you might be wondering, “Can we ever be completely free of these patterns? Can these broken zones be healed for good?” The answer to that is a qualified “yes.” You can encounter a pattern so fully, and feel it all the way to the very bottom, so that it completely unwinds itself and no longer shows up in response to any circumstances. More typically, however, a pattern will continue to exist as part of your programming, but when the energy or force that was bound up in it dissipates, it no longer drives your behavior. It’s somewhat like letting the air out of a balloon. It is still a balloon, but if you prick it it’s not going to explode.

You might also be wondering, “Is it necessary to go into therapy and re-experience all your past traumas in order to get free of this baggage?” Well, it depends. What it depends on is the nature and severity of the wounding you have incurred. While we all have broken zones, some of us received trauma so extreme that we got severely set back, and never learned some of the essential skills of human relating—such as being able to trust others.

For example, a person who was molested by someone they thought was safe may have lost ability to trust to such a degree that they now find themselves living an isolated existence, unable to feel relaxed and open with others. They have not learned how to distinguish real danger from more subtle threats, nor to distinguish whether someone’s loving approach is truly benign or has a violent agenda of sexual conquest. This degree of injury calls for extra support from very skillful helpers who can provide the steady safety and understanding that will lead to real and lasting healing.
The good news is that even people with severe traumas or neuroses can and do awaken to their divinely human nature. It is not necessary to undertake an exhaustive project of “fixing” oneself in order to awaken.

However, fulfilling the potential of such an awakening will require bringing conscious attention to the unconscious, or automatic, ways you behave, so that you can more fully express the awakening you’ve had. Embodied awakening is typically accompanied by a raw, unbuffered revisitation of painful limits and broken zones, and this encounter can be quite stark and challenging. Fortunately, there is an intelligence of Being that, in most cases, will protect you from the intensification that comes with awakening until your personality has enough resilience to handle the influx of higher frequencies. The awakened spirit itself then begins modifying your configurations—in a sense “rewriting your code”—so that you become ever-more able to live and creatively express that awakened spirit.
Whether before or after your divinely human awakening, and whether or not you feel that you have some severe psychological issues to deal with, it is highly desirable that you begin to study how your inner world operates so that you can befriend it and use it in an optimal way, rather than being at its mercy.

Body wisdom
Before I get into the specifics of how Inseeing works to create deep and lasting healing and wholeness, I want to introduce something that is very core to the entire project of embodied awakening, which is what we’re exploring here. The project is to become divinely human, rather than automatons whose personalities got formed early in life and then continued to operate on auto-pilot. It’s about taking the divine spark that lies fairly dormant in the hearts of all people and providing it with the right mixture of fuel and air so that it can flame into a life of creative expression.

At the very heart of this awakening process is the body. Not only the physical body (which many spiritual teachings say is at the other end of the spectrum from spirit), but the entire subtle energetic matrix of the body—that intelligent field that knows all about how to support life, growth, and healing, and holds the template for your most auspicious unfoldment in this life. Some call this total matrix the unconscious or subconscious, some call it Being, or, as I have somewhat humorously referred to it in this book, as the bio-computer whose programming we are seeking to upgrade for more optimal functioning. What’s important is to understand that when I say inner body, I am referring to a highly intelligent system that is constantly at work supporting all the functions that maintain life and permit experience here as a human being. This inner body is the other aspect of what we are that isn’t the thinking mind. It includes our emotions and intuitions plus all that is typically subconscious and hidden from view. This intelligence of the inner body can also be called body wisdom.

Due to the dominance of the thinking mind, most people perceive life primarily through their thoughts and mental evaluations. Although their bodies are also highly intelligent and constantly aware of everything they are encountering, most people have very limited awareness of what’s going on in their bodies, or how tuning into the body’s wisdom could really enhance their lives. The thinking mind has linear intelligence firing very quickly but it gives us only a small fraction of everything we could be aware of—a sort of Cliffs Notes version of the information that comes from our subconscious minds. On the other hand, the inner body has a more spherical intelligence which fires more slowly and is holistic, comprehensive, and rich with meaning. This body-consciousness, vaster than the linear mind, generates complex feeling states that can be used to access whole-being intelligence, once we reconnect the wiring that allows us to tap into it.
Many teachings point to our habit of identifying strongly with our thinking minds as THE problem that keeps us from being able to awaken into our divinity. However, the proposed solution of trying to somehow stop the mind from operating has proven impossible for most people to achieve, leading them to feel that they are failures and that awakening is out of their reach.

Now, however, there is an entirely different way of addressing this challenge that is becoming available to more and more people as modern western psychology experiments with various forms of body-centered psychotherapies. One of the recent discoveries is that by including the inner body’s wisdom, you can operate with much greater intelligence, empowerment, and freedom of choice, without needing to silence the mind. The surface mind can go right on with its surface, linear thinking, without unduly interfering with the operation of what we might call higher (embodied) consciousness.
It’s ironic. For centuries we have been told by our elders and spiritual teachers that the body was merely the repository of baser impulses and instincts, and that we should not trust it. In order to be more spiritual, we should actively do our best to screen it out of our awareness so that we could be more “pure.” But all along, our bodies have actually been the home of our greatest intelligence and also the very place where our divine spirit could come into harmony with all of our physical, emotional, and mental currents in order to bring our divine humanity to life. I invite you to test it out for yourself.
Learning to tune into and listen to the inner body’s wisdom is not difficult, once you get a sense of the framework and why this approach is so valuable. You may need to practice for awhile with someone who is skilled in helping you attune to your body’s communication and engage with it in a greenlighting manner. Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to do this on your own, or in partner relationship with others who are learning to use Inseeing in support of their own awakening process.

The Inseeing Process™
The process of Inseeing that I describe below is, in large part, derived from the brilliant system of Inner Relationship Focusing as developed by Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin. And the term “Inseeing” was used by the German poet Rilke to describe the experience of seeing into another living being so totally that it is as if you were standing in their center and understanding them from their own perspective. You insee their wholeness and divine perfection, in and of itself, without needing to change it in any way.

Not merely a means of experiencing others in a profound way, Inseeing is also a way of seeing into your own inner territory. As you enter into the various parts and come to understand them from within, their inherent perfection and wholeness is revealed. When you can be with your core conditioning in this manner, then relaxing, greenlighting, and self-compassion will really come alive for you in a way that will accelerate your awakening. The process of exploring your inner territory through Inseeing can be divided into eight steps:

I Identify something to work with—an issue, a problem, or some distress you’ve been feeling
N Notice how it feels in your body—the felt sense of it
S Speak what it feels like, and double-check that the words you’re using to describe it really fit
E Engage with it by saying hello or otherwise acknowledging that you’re aware of it
E Invite it to express how it’s feeling or what it wants (or doesn’t want)
I Receive any insights and let it know you’re hearing it
N See if it needs anything further from you right now— or wants you to do anything
G Express your gratitude for whatever came into your awareness

1) Identify
You identify something to explore when you notice that you are having a reaction, or are feeling concerned about something, or are wanting to get more clarity about a situation in your life. There might be some emotion stirring, or perhaps you notice that you are thinking obsessively, as if something has taken over your experience and there is some charge around it. The first step is to simply notice that something’s going on, and to take some time to give it some greenlighting attention.
Inseeing typically begins with pausing and taking a few moments to get in touch with how your body is feeling right now. You might do this by noticing the feeling of contact with the chair you are sitting on, and then the feeling of contact between your feet and whatever they are resting on. Then you might tune into the feeling of your calves, your thighs, your hips, your back— moving slowly through different parts and checking in with how they’re feeling right now. Then your shoulders, arms, hands— perhaps sensing that subtle feeling in the palms of your hands. Then check into the back of your neck, your scalp, your forehead and cheeks. Now take a full breath and notice any feeling of enlivenment that comes with that.
By tuning into the sensations of your physical body, you are opening yourself to the complex sensations being generated by your inner body as it registers and reflects the whole of your life situation as it is in this moment. You are also bringing forward the quality of Presence: that aspect of your whole being that is able to bring warm, interested curiosity to whatever’s arising.

2) Notice
Now begin to bring your attention inward, into the core of your body. Notice the feeling inside your throat, your chest, your stomach, and your belly. The core area of throat and torso is where it is typically easiest to get the felt sense of whatever’s wanting your attention—although a felt sense can appear anywhere in (or sometimes near) your body.
“Felt sense” is a term from Eugene Gendlin, the noted American philosopher and psychotherapist who first defined felt sense and developed the process of Focusing. A felt sense is the freshly arising holistic sense of a complex situation. Your body is continually generating feelings that correspond to your thoughts and emotions. For example, that fluttery sensation in your gut when someone close to you says “we need to talk.” Or perhaps your face flushes when you feel angry with someone. Or you feel a pain in the area of your heart when you think about a romantic relationship that went badly. There’s an endless variety of such physical expressions of psycho-emotional issues.

Emotions themselves have familiar feelings, too: sadness is often heavy, while anger is pressing, and fear is contracting. Sometimes the felt sense will come as an image or a metaphor or a memory of some incident from the past. For instance, you might get a sense of a snake coiling around in your belly, or a sword thrust through your heart. These are all examples of how the inner body-wisdom communicates with the thinking mind when given the opportunity.
By allowing yourself to feel the issue somewhere in your body, you begin the process of connecting your thinking mind with your body and opening the lines of communication between them. This is important because your body has a built-in healing mechanism, not only for the physical system but also for the psycho-emotional system. Eugene Gendlin, the founder of Focusing, said, “What is not seen and not felt remains the same, but what is seen and felt moves.” That is, it moves in the direction of healing and wholeness, or as he sometimes said, fresh air.

What’s “not seen and not felt” are all those imprints we acquired throughout our lives from incidents that we felt hurt by, that lie below the threshold of awareness. They live in the subtle, cellular memory, waiting to be reactivated by some triggering stimulus. And as such, they will repeat over and over again, unchanging, unless they are brought into conscious awareness and felt. No amount of thinking has the power to create this type of deep healing and release of trauma. It is simply insufficient to the task. You might think you know all about what is happening and why, but find yourself continuing to feel and react the same way every time the situation arises, without any fundamental shift—until you bring it to a higher level of consciousness by feeling it in the body with full awareness.

We typically respond to these uncomfortable physical feelings by trying to screen them out of our awareness. This is only natural since we were never taught how to listen to them in a way that would be healing and enlivening. Without that knowledge, to feel them is only to suffer them over and over, which almost no one would consciously choose to do. So instead we live with such things as frequent headaches, high blood pressure, back pain, or stomach aches. Our unheeded physical symptoms may well progress to illnesses, as our bodies shout louder and louder to get our attention. Of course, ignoring our body’s distress call is not the only cause of disease, but it is often one of the contributing factors.

3) Speak
At first, you may have only a vague, fuzzy, difficult-to- describe sense that somehow correlates with the whole situation you are exploring. This is normal. You notice that you’re feeling something there. Your body’s “thinking” happens at a slower pace than that of your mind—something like an image appearing out of fog—so it’s important to stay with the vague feeling for a while, allowing it to become gradually clearer.
A felt sense can be strong and vivid, or it can be as subtle as a shy animal hiding in the bushes. However it appears, as it becomes more distinct it is important to find a word, phrase, image, or metaphor that accurately represents what you are noticing—and speak it aloud. Say “I am sensing something in me that ” or “I am noticing something that (and fill in the blank).” This step helps make the link between your thinking mind and your body’s wisdom. Try on a description, and as you are attending inwardly you will notice that when you find the right descriptor something shifts slightly, as if your body is saying “yes, you got it!” to your thinking mind. If you don’t get that sense of “yes,” try again with another description until something clicks.

4) Engage
Once you’ve described it, the next thing to do is formally acknowledge it. It may seem strange to say hello to something that is, after all, a part of you, but this step helps to initiate an inner relationship with something in you that is trying to get your conscious attention. Before you can invite it to tell you more about itself, you need to make its acquaintance, so to speak. A good way to do this is to simply say hello. Or, if “hello” doesn’t feel right, an alternative is to inwardly acknowledge it: “I see you there.” This might feel uncomfortable if what’s showing up is something you don’t like about yourself, something you might rather ignore or tell to get lost, but that kind of treatment only leads to suppression, not to healing and growth. Acknowledging what is there is a very powerful step forward. If the issue at hand is amenable to your contact, you will feel some sort of a response to your greeting. It may brighten up, as if happy to be noticed, or the feeling of distress might become more acute. Whatever response comes, it is useful information and sets the stage for further investigation.

5) Express
Beyond feeling the issue as a physical sensation or an image or a metaphor, the next step of bringing it into full awareness is to hang out with it a bit and invite it to reveal what’s going on. A partial self is an aspect of who you are, formed in the past, that doesn’t yet have the whole picture. Maybe it’s concerned or afraid about something in your current life, and wants to prevent something bad from happening. Or maybe it wants to generate something creative and new. You might begin by sensing into it as if you could see things from its perspective, or discern what emotion it’s feeling. If you do sense a particular emotion, you might see if you get a sense of what’s causing it to feel that way.
Or you might invite it to tell you what’s going on with it. Rather than cross-examine it with direct questions, it’s usually better to see if it wants to tell you what’s up. Sometimes there will be a flood of information coming forth instantly, but other times there may be resistance to communicating and a need for greater trust to be developed first. Perhaps this one feels like it’s been ignored so many times that it doesn’t believe you will really listen, so it clams up. With a bit of patient attention from you, it might come around.
The important thing is to stay open and respectful, letting it know you are interested and available to listen. Let whatever happens be okay. What brings healing forward movement is to warmly be with the issue, without trying to fix it, control it, reason with it, or make it go away. Greenlight it as it is, and make sure you really listen to what it has to say. Even if it is telling you off!

6) Insights
Be sure to acknowledge that you are receiving whatever this partial self is communicating. This can be as simple as repeating back what you heard, such as, “Yes, I hear that you (fill in the blank). Would you like to tell me more?”
When you listen attentively to its concerns—when you GET it—this partial self can begin to relax. While partial selves don’t have the whole picture, nevertheless their information is important for your wellbeing. If you don’t listen to them, they tend to get agitated and send up louder and louder signals because they are hard-wired for your survival. They can get panicky and try to run the show if they don’t have anyone to report to, and they can become like horrible nags, or incessantly critical voices—until it’s no wonder you think that they have nothing of value to offer you.
However, when you do listen to them (which does not mean blindly obeying, but rather listening respectfully to their input), they can transform into powerful allies. They very often feel satisfied that they have done their job and are now content to step back and let you—the whole-being you—take the necessary appropriate actions.

7) Needs
It’s useful to see if this part needs or wants anything from you right now. There might be an action that it wants you to take—or not take. Or perhaps it would like a good-faith commitment from you to come and listen to it again soon, because it has more it wants to contribute.
Another way to invite creative input from a part is to ask it whether there is something it would enjoy. Whatever comes, be sure to acknowledge that you heard its request, and if it is something you’re willing to do, let it know that.

8) Gratitude
The very important final step is to express your gratitude to whatever came. Let it know you are happy that it was willing to communicate and that you will be open to future communication as well.

Try this: Inseeing
The next time you find yourself triggered by something, or feeling confused or upset, take a moment to pause and go within. Find a time when you can be alone and quiet. It’s useful to have a notebook with you to record any insights that come.

Then go through the steps of the Inseeing Process in order, inviting whatever is wanting attention to come forward as you listen closely to what it has to say. Find that place in you that is warm, patient, and curious to know more, and listen from there. Don’t assume that you “already know what it’s about.” Stay open to what might be new about the situation in this moment, because you may get surprised by some aspect you hadn’t heard before. Don’t worry about doing this perfectly—your intention to be a good listener to yourself is more important than the technique you use.
Make a note of any insights, and be sure to express your appreciation for whatever came.

The x-factor: Presence
There is something in you that is spacious enough to welcome all the different feelings, emotions, reactions, fears, and judgments that arise in you without being overwhelmed by them. We could call this something Presence.
“Presence” is a term for something that is ineffable and difficult to grasp with the mind, but is available to be noticed once you attune to it. Some might call it the Witness, and others might call it your soul or higher self. Whatever it is called, it is bigger than, and not limited by, the conditioned patterns of your mind and personality.

Presence is the state that enables you to be with whatever is in your awareness, knowing that what you are with is a part of you yet not all of who you are. Presence is that aspect of your nature that can be aware of your behavior while not losing touch with it in a personal way. Presence includes all the patterns of your personality, both your winning strategies and your broken zones, but is also more than the sum of the parts. It is more than thoughts and emotions, as well. Presence can be aware of anything that’s arising and can give it unconditional attention and warm curiosity. And it does that simply by acknowledging each quality or issue as it arises: “Oh, hello, I see you there.”

Presence is a quality that is available to everyone at least in latent form. It is Presence that makes Inseeing such a powerful practice for deep healing and transformation. In Chapter 6, I will discuss ways to cultivate Presence so that it becomes a more active part of your life.

The importance of inner work to divinely human awakening
At this point you may be wondering if tuning into potentially painful or unpleasant feeling states is really necessary for awakening. Isn’t enlightenment supposed to bring feelings of bliss, and freedom from suffering? And if you focus on unpleasant things, won’t that bring more of them into your life?
In response to those questions, I want to remind you that we are speaking here about embodied, divinely human awakenings— those that include all of what it is to be a person without trying to deny, escape, avoid, or override our very human ways of thinking and reacting. Embodied awakening is not easy—no one said it would be. And it won’t be easy, at first, to bring the repressed parts of your psyche into conscious view. We’ve all done and experienced things we’d rather forget, or things we feel ashamed of that we’d prefer to keep hidden from others—and hidden from ourselves, as well. But when we begin to allow these things to come to the attention of our conscious mind, where we can acknowledge them, and invite them to give us whatever gifts they have to offer, we liberate a powerful, natural process in us that moves the issue, and our lives, forward. Instead of remaining stuck in the tangled morass of our subconscious body-mind, the issue is brought into the fresh air of current reality where it can be transformed naturally and organically into something that can be a positive force in our lives. Our body-wisdom already knows how to do this, if we will follow the steps of Inseeing to cooperate with it rather than fighting against it.

Compassion
With greenlighting we acknowledge ourselves as we are—with our strengths, yes, but also with our weakness in the face of our conditioning and habits. No matter how much we might strive to be otherwise, we are all at times act in automatic, unconscious ways that are sometimes hurtful to others, or ourselves. We begin to see how much of our life energy is caught up in obsessively thinking about our problems, issues, fears, and sorrows, or how we dwell on our regrets about the past and concerns about the future. We learn how it’s impossible to avoid being conditioned in this way, and that it’s not our fault—we are innocent in this process. We begin to see how difficult it is to be here as a human being, with such a strong intellect that leaves us feeling so cut off from our spiritual nature. As we begin to accept our humanness, we begin to relax.

Beyond greenlighting is the final step of compassion. Compassion cannot be forced, but it naturally begins to arise when we really get that we could not have prevented the way we were created or the ways we have acted in the past. Compassion arises when we see how caught up we often are in our fixed patterns of behavior, and how unkind we have been to judge ourselves—as well as others—so harshly. Compassion is a quality of Presence that spontaneously arises when we let go of our self- hatred and begin to feel kindly toward ourselves, willing to see how we are truly doing the best we can.
As compassion begins to arise in our relationship with our various inner parts, we discover that we do not need to push away anything that is in us. Everything reveals itself to have a positive intention for our lives, even if it seems at first to be an obstruction to forward movement. We don’t have to force anything to change or be different, or give up its position. In the alchemy of deep listening, forward movement is the natural outcome, and it can show up in novel and surprising ways.

Learning the Inseeing Process
When first learning to use the Inseeing Process, it is most useful to have an Inseeing guide holding the space for you when you are

investigating an issue. It is not enough to know, intellectually, that attending to your felt senses is a good idea, and that you should be patient with yourself in the process. If you have not had this type of behavior modeled for you (and most of us have not) it will probably be just another empty concept. In the learning stage, a skilled listener is essential, one who can model for you how to be with the various aspects that begin showing up once you have invited them, and how to gently sense into what they want or need from you. And a skillful helper will also demonstrate how to be compassionate with yourself when you are feeling ashamed, or when you can’t greenlight something even though you wish you could.

Being with your inner process can get a bit complicated, which is another reason for enrolling a skilled assistant as you are learning. It is not uncommon for an issue to involve more than one partial self: for example, there may be a second part that has a reaction to the first part, or doesn’t want you to listen to that one. When that occurs, it’s most useful to shift your attention and say, “hello” to the new part, rather than trying to shut it out. Then proceed with the steps of the Inseeing Process, giving this new part an opportunity to say what it’s concerned about. Once it has had a chance to be expressed, it will most likely relax so you can return to the first part and continue from where you left off.

With complex issues, there may be several parts showing up with their respective agendas. Although you may wish to give attention to all of them, in any given session there may not be enough time to do that. Instead, if a new part comes in and tries to talk over the part you’re working with, you might imagine putting your arm around that part and telling it you will come back to it another time. Sometimes it takes several sessions to invite all the concerned parties, and hear what they want you to hear, in order to arrive in a place of resolution and fresh air.

To find helpers who incorporate this type of compassionate listening into their work with students and clients, visit www.divinelyhuman.com/inseeing.
As you gain experience, you will naturally find that you begin being with yourself in a way that is also very inviting and healing. Although it may seem complicated at first, the steps of the Inseeing Process are actually very organic and intuitive. They will quickly become second nature. When you are with your feelings in this way, you are able to feel them without being overwhelmed by them, because you know they are not the whole of who you are.
For now let it suffice to say that compassionately being with your feelings gives them room to evolve into their natural optimal functioning, and will give you access to vast reservoirs of body wisdom. Being able to bring Presence to all that you are will also lay the foundation for your complete and irrevocable awakening into your whole divinely human self.