Discovering the Red Essence: Igniting Strength and Aliveness in Your Spiritual Journey

There are many essential qualities which help us on our journey. Each quality is a kind of messenger from the unconditioned. Each essential quality has a way of touching the soul in a way to help it to be more flexible and open to presence. The red essence brings the quality of spiritual strength and aliveness. This quality can help us to find the boldness to move forward in our spiritual practice.

Embodying the Courageous Spirit of "I Can”

Strength is associated with the color red and the spirit of “I can”. I can do this thing which is before me. It allows us to go and seek that which we love, to connect with our true nature and gives us the energy and courage to make the journey.

Our jobs, and upbringing and society in general work against being truly ourselves. Along the way we have all made the compromises to get along. There are places which we don’t see and when we discover more, we need this aspect of strength to push through the veils to find our truest nature.

We all know that the spiritual path is a solo path in some basic way. We have friends along the way who help, such as here today, and that is very important, but ultimately it is going to be your individual work which can set you free. That is why this quality is so important.

Overcoming Obstacles with Courage and Strength

You won’t have the boldness to push into something new and possibly uncomfortable. Most of us now are familiar with the way that our habit energy and the influence of the world conspire to keep us in a rather limited place.

Spiritual Courage means that you are willing to risk it, to take a chance. You are willing to make the uncomfortable choice, even not knowing what is going to happen. When we work with our challenges, in our practice, we have to have to be willing to not know. For some, it takes a lot of courage and boldness to go forward, not knowing where it will lead.

In spiritual practice, we never actually know. And we might fail. Maybe our friends won’t like what we are trying to do. But our courage allows us to think bigger and allow more of a chance. It allows us to live fully inhabiting our life.

Embracing the Expansive Energy

Strength is associated with the color red in our path. It is associated with a feeling of aliveness and expansion. It could be like a small fire in your heart or belly, or a huge expansive force beyond your body.

When we are in touch with it, we feel the energy of it. We might feel it energetically coursing through our body. With your inner eye, you might notice a volcano in your belly, or flowing of lava.

And when we are in touch with our essential qualities in general, we feel a relaxation and usually a sense of openness and centeredness. The quality has its own intelligence and will be appropriate to the situation. Strength might be powerful or light depending on the situation.

How Family History impacts Spiritual Strength

One of the common barriers to contacting your own strength is how it was expressed in your family. And this includes how anger was expressed. You will have a history which influences this for you.  

In your family, it may have been one person who exhibited the strength. Maybe your mother was strong and your father was not. Or vice versa. Or maybe it was dangerous to be strong. Maybe there were nay-sayers, which kept you from making the bold choices.

Another common twist with strength is how anger was expressed in your family. Anger is often considered the way that strength is expressed though the small egoic self. It is way that you might express strength through the veil of personality.

So, if the strength was expressed mixed with anger, it was problematic for you. Maybe it was dangerous. If there was a person who had a lot of anger and rage in them, then you may have made a vow never to be like that. In that way you may have cut yourself off from your anger but also your strength. It’s likely that you might feel small in your life in some ways

The Fire Within: Overcoming Anger and Emotional Obstacles

If you block vitality, or energy, or expansion, or passion, any one of those will block red. But also if you block your anger, you block red. Just feeling the anger does not necessarily liberate red because there are a lot of people who go around yelling, and screaming and they don't necessarily have true strength. We know that people who are usually angry and aggressive are usually seen to be strong. And they like themselves to be that way because they take it to be strength. So anger is like strength—more at the emotional level, and it is used as strength, but it is a strength that is more defensive, let's say. And it’s a kind of expression which creates chaos not harmony.

People who don't allow themselves to feel angry, who don't feel comfortable with anger usually don't have much red—don't have much strength and that is experienced as a lack of ego strength.

But if you really feel your anger and experience your anger without resistance, without judgment, it will often turn to red. So one of the main ways, at least on the surface, it is blocked is through the blockage of anger. We explore this in our inquiries in groups or privately. We spend time with our anger, feeling it, exploring it in the safety of our practices. As with all of our negative emotions, we feel them, without acting on them in order to see more.  As we learn more about it, we come more in contact with the aliveness of our soul—our true strength. In time, our lives will be impacted.

Discovering Your Strength Through Guided Inquiry

Our guided inquiry around strength will help to both tease out the history and also the felt sense of connection (or lack of) with the Red. As we explore, we spend time with the quality and the barriers. As we inquire, the false starts to drop away and we feel more the truth of who we are. When we spend time with the self-images of a small child who feels small, we see through those self-images and we can feel the aliveness and excitement of the strength essence which gives us courage to fully express our heart’s desire in life.

As we engage in guided inquiry and deepen our connection with the Red essence, we naturally begin to embody a greater sense of courage, resilience, and personal power. We become more capable of expressing our heart's desires and living a life that is aligned with our authentic selves. Through this spiritual journey, we discover that true strength comes not from external sources or aggressive displays of power, but from a deep inner connection to the vital, life-affirming energy that flows through us all.

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