u/thefirstlogosislove

Hello, I wanted to share a list of meditation recordings that have helped me over the years. First of all I'm not affiliated with the person making them -- it's all from one channel. I just seek to use my time productively and want to do a good thing. Also all the videos are de-monetized so there is no gain anywhere other than enriching people's lives.

The reason I wanted to share these, besides helping others, is that it documents my own inner journey.

Spirituality used to be something that existed outside me and was something other people did. It had nothing to do with me. But like most people my life sucked and I was willing to try anything to make it better, including meditation. I first started with the Headspace app and then discovered this meditation channel.

I put my own descriptions as headers for the playlist so, hopefully, it speaks for itself. If you have any questions, just ask. But the videos tend to cluster around several personalities and spiritualities.

Pure consciousness / self realization / self enquiry

• Annamalai Swami (3) - Direct Pointers and Teachings for Meditation - Ramana Maharshi - Advaita
• How to Practice Self-Enquiry ~ (based on Ramana Maharshi's teachings)

Luminous awareness / your luminous nature / buddha mind (dzogchen beginner)

• The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva (Part 1) ~ The Heart of Enlightenment ~ Ati Yoga
• Lama Shabkar - A Guided Meditation on Examining the "Mind" - Dzogchen

Original purity / luminous recognition / luminous knowing / naked awareness (dzogchen non-beginner)

• Longchenpa ~ Three Statements That Strike the Vital Point (Commentary Garab Dorje) ~ Dzogchen
• Padmasambhava ~ Self Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness ~ Dzogchen
• Padmasambhava - Vital Points for Awakening (Part 1) - Dzogchen

Ultimate truth / ultimate reality / there-is-just-witnessing-there-is-no-doer (post-self realization)

• A Meditation and Teaching on Suffering - Atmananda Krishna Menon - Advaita
• Nisargadatta ~ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 ~ Advaita (Non-Duality)

Stabilizing actively-continually in self realization / non-difference / non-separatedness / bhedabheda (post-self realization)

• Siddharameshwar Maharaj ~ Forget Illusion! ~ Nisargadatta's Guru - Advaita
• Siddharameshwar Maharaj ~ FEARLESSNESS ~ Nisargadatta's Guru - Advaita Vedanta

Saturated Silence / non-physical silence / non-mental silence / there-is-hearing

• The Cloud of Unknowing ~ Christian Mysticism
• J. Krishnamurti ~ What is Meditation?

The unborn self / the self-less self / the swarupa of consciousness itself / only that in you which is already god can see that which is god

• Ibn 'Arabi/Balyani - "Know Yourself" - Selected Excerpts for Meditation - Sufi Mystics
• Ramakant Maharaj - Reality has Nothing to do with Words - Nisargadatta

What is god? / the Divine Friend / the Beloved / the Lord of Hosts / the Lord of the Mansion

• Hakim Sanai ~ The Walled Garden of Truth ~ Sufi Mystics
• Brother Lawrence ~ The Practice of Presence ~ Christian Mystics

Love is the greatest power in the world / lift the veil that obscures the heart

• Kabir ~ The Divine Presence of Truth ~ Sufi Mysticism - Hindu Bhakti
• "Hafiz" ~ A Thousand Stringed Instrument ~ Sufi Mystics

What is the meaning of life?

• Kabir (video) ~ The Bird on this Body Tree ~ Art by Kathryn Oliver

Let there be peace / peace of the self / peace of pure consciousness / expansive metaphysical peace which is not peace as a mental state

• Annamalai Swami ~ The Peace of Shanti ~ Advaita
• Atmananda Krishna Menon ~ Mind as No Mind ~ Advaita

Having-no-self-identity-whatsoever / no-selfness / anatta

• Longchenpa ~ Freeing Afflictive Emotions ~ Dzogchen
• The Residual Conceit 'I am' ~ Khemakasutta ~ Pali Buddhist Teachings

Dissolving the "I AM" (awareness of existence / awareness that you are existing right now) to reach True Being or Pure Being

• Nisargadatta ~ Pure Awareness ~ Advaita

Kindness as a practice

• Ocean of Bliss ~ Swami Sivananda ~ Yoga Vedanta

Follow the inner guru / there is only one master and that is the inner master / merge yourself into the path of the sacred presence, the god presence within

• Father Thomas Keating ~ 𝐂𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫 ~ Christian Mystics
• Annamalai Swami (4) - Direct Pointers and Teachings for Meditation - Ramana Maharshi - Advaita
• Nisargadatta ~ The True Guru

Hello,

Recently I made a post sharing my frustration that no amount of spiritual realization was clearing out a shock trauma I had experienced 1.5 years ago. (And this is in addition to having already a dysregulated nervous system from a dysfunctional childhood.)

Spiritual realizations were helping me grow deeper into myself and could temporarily supersede the underlying emotional wound located in the animal domain. But at the end of the day, when I would lay down to go to bed and feel into myself, my heart was still racing and my breath was inwardly very labored. And this was persisting for 1+ years in addition to emotional effects such as hypervigilance like mistaking a kitten for a lion.

In hindsight when I made my earlier post there was actually two things happening. One was the content inquiry, if spiritual realization doesn't heal emotional wounds then what does? And there was the reason for posting which I wasn't too cognizant about at the time which is that I was in physical pain due to a physical health issue and thus seeking distraction online.

So going online to a spiritual subforum to ask for somatic-healing techniques is a bit like going to a sexuality subforum and asking for physical therapy advice. You might get what you're looking for, you might not get what you're looking for.

Fortunately for me, I received several high-quality replies and one in particular addressed my content question of how to heal emotional wounds? The answer being somatic healing or somatic feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLVXq5vRA2o

My spiritual journey began a few years ago after being on the path of my emotional recovery or trauma recovery journey. I was a avid member of a support group called ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families) and while that program helped me immensely on many levels and helped in many life-changing ways. It didn't fully address one of my main issues that brought me into the program or was an obstacle in my everyday life: terror or fear in the heart.

The short version of ACA is that "the answer is love." And they're correct. The answer is love (in most cases) and this can be experienced on many levels up to the point of experiencing a divine or compassionate love for all sentient beings -- except my terror was still there. Some of it was cleared through emotional work but the more work I did the worse it got not the better it got. And this eventually led me to spirituality.

I won't fully chronicle my spiritual journey for you but it somehow started with the contemplative christian and Meister Eckhart and wedding yourself to non-mental non-physical silence and to nature. From there I discovered the recent spiritual giant Nisargadatta Maharaj. And those two for a long time were enough to satiate my spiritual needs as I felt like going beyond them felt both unnecessary and unproductive; anytime I came across most spiritual practitioners or lineages I was never impressed. I always felt like what most people pointed to was "below" what I was interested in or had experienced in my own inner journeys.

Anyway, this eventually -- as well as for other reasons -- led me to putting ACA on the backburner. I knew it was important. I could sense the importance of what I colorfully describe as the "embodied feminine" or "feminine spirituality" -- that is, intimacy, vulnerability, human connection, and perhaps most important of all, feeling-your-feelings. There's a difference between thinking about your feelings in your head and entering your body in an embodied way and feeling your feelings in the physical presence of other physical human beings. It can't be captured in words, it can only be pointed to.

Anyway, as you might imagine, this set of conditions of meditating too much and trying to resolve everything with the pure spiritual alone led to what the ACA program calls "spiritual bypass".

So now I will give you a very quick and incomplete gist of what the ACA program is about.

What is ACA?

It is a 12-step program. The original and famous program is Alcoholics Anonymous. You attend physical in-person meetings. Someone reads a script, and people go around the room sharing for usually 3-minutes which is timed. That's it. And before the sharing there's usually a reading. Anyone and everyone is welcome to attend unless it's some kind of more limited meeting for example "women-only", et cetera.

Outside the meetings you're encouraged to read the literature and work what's called the 12-steps which is a series of inventories and activities (such as making amends to people) that are designed to orient you towards a more sane and healthier way of life: living sober.

ACA is modeled on this paradigm but rather than treating alcoholism it addresses deep-seated emotional wounds and what is called family dysfunction.

What is family dysfunction?

The ACA program, to me, has several thought-streams merged into it. There is trauma-focused recovery such as body-meditation, there is also what is in emotional-recovery circles is called "parts-works" where you embody emotional spheres of yourself and develop a human connection with yourself or with parts of yourself. It sounds strange or weird at first until you realize there is a whole psychic life inside of you. And this psychic life persists whether or not you are cognizant of it.

Thus while you may consciously feel one way. You may inwardly or in your psychic life feel another way or feel several other ways. You are encouraged to mine through and develop an emotional countenance of yourself.

Exploring yourself leads to the realization that one has emotional defenses.

What are emotional defenses?

The ACA program gets its name from the term "adult child" or adult-children. The idea is that one may be physically an adult but experience the world in an infantile or emotionally-hampered way. Thus in talking to a 45-year-old physical adult male you may think you're talking to an adult male and they may talk to you about adult-activities but behind the seat of the driving wheel is an internal kid making kid decisions using adult-world variables. This inner kid making adult decisions persists in all areas of ordinary life. For example, money decisions such as impulsive purchases or treating sexual activities as a dissociation mechanism versus as a medium of union between two consenting adults. The list of "emotional intoxication" mechanics and activities is neverending and includes but is not limited to drug-use.

What is the lynchpin or originating source of emotional defenses?

I will quote an ACA passage that describes well one of the core issues of ACA.

>By working Step Five we are challenging the three main rules entrenched in our souls as a result of growing up in a dysfunctional home. The rules are: “don’t talk, don’t trust, and don’t feel.” Growing up in a dysfunctional family meant not trusting what you were seeing or what your parents said. Abuse was often minimized or blamed on another cause, which resulted in the child not trusting his or her perceptions.

>The “don’t talk” rule has its origins in homes where children were often told to “shut up” or “be quiet” whenever they attempted to speak or express a thought. Others were ignored under the “don’t talk” rule and therefore stopped talking. The “don’t talk” rule also means the family does not talk about things that are important such as feelings or spirituality. The rule is also a method of keeping sick family secrets.

>The “don’t feel” rule of dysfunctional homes often means that feelings were unimportant or too scary to address. Before recovery, we could be accused of being too sensitive or being immature if we expressed feelings in a dysfunctional home. To avoid such ridicule, we usually shut down our emotions. The “don’t feel” rule is the rule that underlies our ability to stuff feelings such as fear. Some of us lived in constant fear of being ridiculed, teased, or battered by an abusive parent. By the time we reach recovery, many of us are numb from living with fear. We cannot call the feeling of fear into focus, but it is there, driving our hypervigilance.

>In Step Five, we talk about what happened, and we trust another person to hear us without judgment. We feel the feelings that come up with the help of our ACA support group and a sponsor or counselor.

>In Step Five, we finally get to talk about what matters rather than denying or filtering what happened. This is a critical step for any adult child hoping to face the effects of a dysfunctional upbringing and to continue to grow in the ACA program.

>We know that breaking dysfunctional family rules does not come easy for adult children. These rules are similar to the survival traits we used to live through our childhoods. We learned to trust these rules and use them in our daily lives; however, the rules have outlived their usefulness. They are strangling our lives and our relationships. We have to find another way to live with feelings, trust, and voice.

How do you know if you are an adult child or belong to ACA?

Adult children share one principle thing in common. It is what the emotional-recovery program calls "survival traits". Survival traits or fear-based traits are emotional-behavior patterns that children developed to mitigate and make-do with a dysfunctional environment. The core thing to understand is that these emotional-patterns create an emotional-false-self which is different from the emotional-authentic-true-self that you are. Here is a fictitious example to get the point across: you are tired after a longday of work which started with a morning exercise. Someone in the evening calls you and asks you run a non-life-threatening errand for them. You do not want to do so. You know someone else can do this errand. You falsely say "yes" you will do it even though you inwardly do not want to. You have one or several superficial reasons for rationalizing say "yes" such as you want to be seen as a reliable person or you are afraid of saying "no." The term for this is called people-pleasing. You are responding from an emotional-false-self. You do not check-in with yourself to see if it was something you really wanted to do; and, if you did know you didn't want to do it but then did it anyway, you then inwardly went against your own emotional-self and acted from the survival traits.

There is a list of such emotional-false-self traits. If you can identify with one or more of these survival traits you should consider attending an in-person ACA meeting or digital/phone meeting. Chances are you will probably identify with all of them.

One of the things you learn experientially in ACA is that you are not actually unique but there are hundreds of thousands of people having similar emotional experiences to yours.

https://adultchildren.org/laundry-list/

What is a spiritual bypass?

A spiritual bypass is when you access higher levels of Impersonal Reality without dealing with the animal-nature of your emotional wounds. Here is a quote:

>"While some spiritual experiences are miraculous, breathtaking, and bring a sense of awe, they do not equal recovery by themselves. ACA members have had spiritual experiences that bring dramatic visions and powerful dreams. In some instances, the experience transports the person to another dimension of timelessness and pure love. The body ceases to exist in this place of higher consciousness and bliss. Spiritual experiences of this nature help us to confirm our belief in a Divine Creator, but the experience does not exempt us from doing the work of recovery. We must still work all of the Twelve Steps to address the effects of growing up in an unhealthy family. We must attend ACA meetings and give back what was given to us. We must be willing to give service and to help out at our ACA support group. We can know that we have experienced something dramatic and otherworldly while we keep our feet on the ground and live one day at a time.

>ACA members who focus primarily on seeking a spiritual awakening without working on the effects of family dysfunction are often involved in a spiritual bypass. A spiritual bypass means that the person is attempting to avoid the pain that can come with working through the trauma and neglect from childhood. In some cases, the person attempts to jump ahead in the recovery process without going through the entire process. This path invariably fails or leads to dissatisfying results. If one does succeed in having a spiritual experience, but avoids program work, the person can still remain mired in addictiveness or problematic relationships. The spiritual experience may bring some forms of enlightenment; however, the person can cling to old ways of living without embracing ACA recovery. Through arrogance and fear, the person appears to work a program that has little resemblance to the ACA program. At the same time, compulsions and addictiveness continue. A spiritual experience without grounded program work can produce an unhealthy ego. With an inflated ego, the person can use the spiritual experience as a shield against suggestions to work a full program."

How can you attend an ACA meeting?

ACA meetings a worldwide. You can attend in-person meetings but there are also digital-videochat meetings on the platform Zoom as well as phone meetings you can dial into. I personally recommend in-person meetings because there is something that cannot be pinned down in words about the physical experience. Digital and phone meetings are a strong supplement. I recommend you try several different in-person meetings as sometimes a meeting might differ in quality or attendanceship. Meetings are decentralized which means anyone can start one.

https://adultchildren.org/meeting-search/

The quotes are from the main fellowship text, commonly called "The Big Redbook". The main fellowship text includes the reading material for a smaller text called the "12 steps workbook" but the latter workbook has practice questions you fill out while the main fellowship text does not.

https://adultchildren.org/aca-fellowship-text/

The main fellowship text has an ACA material called "The Identity Papers" spread throughout it. It is collated into one pamphlet by the same name. I recommend reading that as it describes a lot of the main ACA issues in a few short but powerful passages.

https://shop.adultchildren.org/products/e-booklet-identity?_pos=3&_sid=84031ef33&_ss=r

There are also free pamphlets you can dig around at here:

https://adultchildren.org/literature/free-literature/

What does ACA have to do with spirituality?

My first spiritual experience started around the time I discovered the ACA program and that was my "body-awakening". I discovered I had a body and I could inhabit my body in a feeling way.

Also ACA encourages you to search out for and develop a connection with a "loving higher power of your own understanding". I think this if practiced earnestly can lead to the realization or discovery of one's own inner guru. The god presence within.

***

"The self shines all the time, if you can't see it because your mind has obscured it or fragmented it, you have to control your vision. You have to stop observing with the eye of the mind. Because that [eye of the mind] can only see what the mind projects in front of it. If you want to see with the eye of the self, switch the projector of the mind off. The infinite eye of the self will then reveal to you that all is one and indivisible." - Annamalai Swami