How to find the Observer within us

From "The inwarders Podcast" serie n°8, available on all major podcast apps and providers. You can also listen via: https://www.theinwarders.com/podcast

In this new serie, “How to find the Observer within us?” I will share with you the most important step that helped me on my spiritual journey.

That step was to discover or shall I say re-discover the Observer within me. By Observer, I mean the Presence, also known as Self, Higher Self, Divine Presence, God’s Presence, I AM Presence or Being. This is not an exhaustive list and all those terms are valid. I gathered those different terms over the years in all the books I read in the field of spirituality. There might be some degrees by which those terms are not equivalent, but that’s not relevant here. So I will use any of those terms as equivalent. Feel free to pick and choose the one you feel most comfortable with.

What is essential to understand is that when I went inward, I became aware of a Presence within me and that’s what I will talk about today.

For many years, the spiritual books I read were referring to “Being” and I understood “Being” as my Ego or body/mind. No judgement here. I didn’t know better. But there was a confusion about who I was, right from the beginning of my journey. And I now know from experience I am not the story I have associated myself with over the years. I am the Observer, the Presence, or awareness of the life, the existence within me.

Why does is matters? Those books, self-help, self-discovery, psychology or spirituality, all of them told me to look at my Self, to become aware of the belief and realize how they were preventing me from moving forwards. So I did. But at my Ego level, I couldn’t find much. I could tell I wasn’t moving forward, and struggling to reach my goals, but I couldn’t tell why. The main reason is that I didn’t know about the Observer. I was only focusing on my thoughts. And when I was focusing on them from my Ego, they were mostly fine. So my thoughts were fine 0.01% of the time and I was unaware of my toxic thoughts 99.99% of the time…

In serie n°7, “Why what we identify with matters” I shared how my experience of splitting into, the Observer on one side, and what I was observing on the otherside, helped me greatly. I realized the toxic thoughts I had in my mind because I was able to observe them. And toxic thoughts are usually quickly followed by toxic feelings.

Again Why does is matters? It matters greatly to differentiate:

- I AM an incompetent, worthless, angry, victim, etc, individual

- From, I AM the Presence aware of the thoughts of incompetence, worthlessness, anger, victimhood, etc

I hope you see my point. It creates a distance. That distance allows us to heal.

If you think you are worthless, you create a life that matches that. That is why many books explain WHY we sabotage our lives but it was not clear to me, HOW we could undo that…until I found the Observer within me.

The distance between WHO WE ARE and the noise within our heads, is where the NETI NETI process Mikan speaks about in Serie 7 can start: I am not this, I am not that… this method I have learned from Rupert Spira who has a Vedic background.

Even if patterns and believes, that have been programmed within us from childhood are mainly positive, like, I am a very smart and talented person who succeed everything I do and everyone loves me….that will be definitively easier, but it is as untrue as the previous negative affirmations. And that is exactly why affirmations cannot be the solution for an everlasting happiness. Because the issue doesn’t come from the program, it comes from the identification.

I spent YEARS, to un-do destructive patterns and negative believes. So now, you can easily understand why I am sharing my experience today. It doesn’t have to take years to understand and un-do what makes us so unhappy. We just need to know the practical steps. And my wish is to help the inwarders to speed up that process so they can reach the safe haven of their Being. All it takes is our willingness to go inward and practical steps to follow.

Now, my own experience of understanding what the Observer within me was, happened by itself. After the very stressful life experience I could lose a child. The thoughts started to be so overwhelming, to distance from them often become a matter of life and death.

Eckhart Tolle talks about his experience dealing with depressive thoughts like he wasn’t worth living and he should finish his own life as it seemed like the only way to escape it. Luckily for him, he woke up by himself (and by waking up I mean awaken, became enlighten). And that’s lucky for us as well because he is an amazing teacher!

It is hard to repeat something that happened by chance. But there is a question that helped me to develop, to deepen my capacity to be aware of the Observer within me. It is one thing to find the Observer, it is another story to deepen our relationship with it….but I am getting ahead of the next serie on the subject.

The question is “who within us knows with certainty we are alive”. As Ruper Spira puts it, even the dumbest person we can find knows with certainty he is alive, he exists. But how does he know for sure? That is where the answer lies.

I used that question to help people to ‘locate” their Being and it works. I also used it myself to “feel” my own Presence when I couldn’t easily be aware of it at the very beginning. The main reason is that it is hard to locate it as it is very discrete. It has always been there, we tend to overlook it as it is so obvious….but we undermine, by far, the value of what that is. And in serie n°12, I will share with you, my own experience of deepening my awareness of Being and how that lead to meditation.

Contact Annabelle Foussier, "The inwarders Podcast" host, coach and author via www.theinwarders.com.

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