Working with Impressions –
Full and Open Perception and Deep Reception of the External World
- Nourishment of Who and What We Most Truly Are
- The Substance and Energy to Feed, Grow and Empower both our Inner Development and Higher Quality Engagement with the Outer World
- Plugging into Nature as a Wisdom Teaching
Life and Nature are a source of help. There is an energy of contact with life that we can receive. Great Nature is a power that is a vehicle of Wisdom and to be open to Her is a very deep thing. It is totally different from having an emotional reaction to a piece of scenery. It is standing in the presence of Her and allowing oneself to become part of Her Wisdom. How this is done is very interesting. It depends on the exercise of gratitude. Our part is to be grateful for what we have received: it is this that enables us to receive: it is the truly enabling part that we have to play in the whole action.
—JG Bennett
This dimension of work brings into the picture the third pole of Self-Remembering – perception and reception of the external world – in addition to the other two, the outside and above pole of Self-Observation and Consciousness, and the in and down pole of body sensing and Being. Self-Remembering is a crucial component of this dimension of work – full and deep reception of impressions and transformation of the full range of energies that could come from them cannot occur without it.
Open and full perception and deep reception of impressions should be a component of everything you do. Make sure you don’t get so absorbed in the utilitarian dimension and aspects of what you are doing that you essentially tune them out, or get completely cut off from them because you are self-absorbed or daydreaming. Be attentive to and really take in the vibrancy and presence of the world of impressions as a fully present body and being, instead of it just being in the background but not really fully there for you. In order to do this you must constantly effort to self-remember, fully cognizant of all of what that entails – to never lose touch with either the whole of yourself or the nourishment and support available from whatever environment you are in, and to at least periodically and more emphatically look at and take it in deeply.
A sample of some impressions focuses to use throughout the day in working with this dimension:
Ways to bring the potency of both your Being and Consciousness to the perception and reception of the world:
1. Looking at things and taking them in from the standpoint of being separate and outside of time in the upright stance, particularly by body sensing your back and looking outward from there.
2. Actively linking and using simultaneously your senses, particularly seeing, in conjunction with your chest and/or with your depths.
Generalized focuses to help snap you out of the spell of viewing the world and our relationship to it atomistically as a bunch of isolated parts separated from each other
1. Paying attention to the vastness of space and the sky.
2. Not flattening things but seeing them with space as foreground and background in a three-dimensional way.
3. Being aware of either or both the ground or the sky in order to connect to the ways all things are on a continuum.
Touch the earth, love the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and the dawn seen over the ocean from the beach. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.
—Henry Beston
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul.Psalm 23
