You’ll need to give yourself patience and healing, like you broke your arm or something. You seem to see it fairly clearly which is good. Don’t try to be OK, but allow whatever you can. This is the route to healing. As you mention, being OK with not being OK.

Fear of pain will certainly arise. Allow that too as you can. What I found helped me a lot was culturing gratitude. Finding things to be grateful for each day. That then creates moments when you can really let go.

I also found that I could not stop loving them, so I generalized the feelings. Took them off the person and moved it to an idea of them. That’s all it ever was anyway.

The process can sometimes seem never-ending but the effort is worth it. Eventually you can come to a place of complete openness with an undefended heart. Lifes events will be but a breeze on the ocean of love. No person to take it personally. Relationship is just a flow. If it doesn’t work out, its just another experience.

Happy Birthday! Be sure to give yourself a reward. My birthday was never an automatic holiday…

The path of opening or awakening is one of allowing, accepting, releasing. Of gradually increasing clarity.

Pain may initially arise as a signal something is wrong. But if it continues or originates in our response to events, then it is arising in resistance. This is the opposite of allowing or accepting. Thus, teachers will suggest you look into it, see where it arises from. When you see it, you will be caught in the drama less and less.

Now, this doesn’t mean accepting what we are unwilling to. But that unwillingness will show us the resistance and allow us to see through it. The key point here is not what is right or wrong, it is about what just is.

In this context, accepting doesn’t mean being good with it. Good is just the other side of bad. What I refer to is stepping past that altogether. It’s about being OK with it as it is, being neutral.

True neutrality cannot happen until we have awoken, stopped associating with our ego sense of being other. As long as there is duality, there is one side or the other. But we can move towards that.

I’m not sure if I’ve addressed your question. Let me know if you’d like more…

While it may seem a little vague, you do describe it very well. no-mans land, the no-thing, the emptiness.

How that progresses for people varies a little. Some find a deepening of the sense of emptiness until it becomes a kind of completeness. Some find the emptiness becomes a kind of fullness. Same thing, just how it is experienced differs.

Note you used the word ‘ungraspable’ – great word for the ego mind. It likes to grasp. This is the habit of attachment in action.

Yes, nowhere to position. Yes, the ego looking to be the Self. Well put. Its not even so much that it must get clearer, although that helps. It’s really that you simply need to allow more deeply. You already are the ‘background’. It is only distant from the mind. When you can relax into it fully, you will become that.

Clear helps as you can see it more clearly and can establish it more easily. But it is not a barrier. There is no barrier.

You said-
‘At the same time, the Self is still seen through some values of illusion so it seems vague, distant, and the benefits may be uncertain.’

This is exactly what i have been struggling with.
Because of this distance and vagueness, there is the sense that there are three aspects to my being.
One is the very obvious mind, another one is the more subtle and ‘distant’ aspect of the background, and between these two points of reference moves the third aspect which seems to be attention.

The background aspect is so subtle and ungraspable, but in another sense totally obvious, that it feels like i am in some kind of no-mans land.

On the one hand, i see the mind for what it is and i realize it not to be me, but on the other hand the background has not yet become clear enough for me to fall back into it.
It feels like there is nowhere to position myself in the background aspect (haha,of course there isn’t)
So, it is the action of the ego trying to come along for the ride, trying to establish itself in the ‘beyond’.
At this point description has become increasingly difficult, i find myself repeating the same things in an attempt to express more and more subtle understandings.

Thankyou for your time.

Kris