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Everything is moving us to optimize our experience in being a human being. 

Optimizing our experience means you have to get in touch with what you need to figure out inside of you, getting in touch with what resonates with you and with what no longer resonates with you. For example, you don’t have to accept every invitation and go to everything everybody else is doing when you already know it’s not going to be in harmony with you, and you know it’s not aligned with who you really are. You know on a soul level that you are wasting time. For every moment, come into the acceptance of the moment. Our ancestors knew full well how to navigate our reality. 

We’ve complicated self-care and it doesn’t have to be complicated. You basically need to sweat, you need to hydrate, and you need to move to whatever degree you can. You need to provide yourself the fuel and support yourself in strengthening your foundation. There’s freedom in this. 

Sometimes what we're missing is the courage to express our vulnerability. We're unwilling to be vulnerable. Sometimes we’re hell bent on powering through things, needing to prove things, or needing to assert certain things in certain situations. At some point we have to embrace vulnerability, especially as empathic sensitive beings. This can be scary because you've put yourself out there before and you've articulated your fears and concerns only to be shut down or not be embraced or not be heard. And so I get that vulnerability is really hard. However, I've discovered that it's the only way to truly make it.  

The more you begin to embrace vulnerability, the more your energy, frequency and your gifts expand. This takes being willing to be honest about how you're doing it. Be willing to be honest about what you're going through. The more you can be honest about what you're dealing with and what you're going through, the less of an issue it is.

There are different aspects of the divine. There’s the manifest aspect, which is light, and it’s this reality. Everything in this manifest material world is the form of God. Once you begin to accept the form, you then access the formless nature of God, which is the void and it’s pure potential, pure space. 

In India, these two manifest forms of guides are categorized as Shiva and Shakti Shiva. The alpha, the masculine, is the formless Shakti. The creator. The omega is the form. When you have both together, you have the infinite. Everything outside of us, all of these deep esoteric truths and teachings, correspond to everything inside of us. 

Liberation is no longer offering any aspect of yourself. The more you are in a loving, inclusive relationship with yourself, the more the masculine and feminine aspects of who you are merge, and you become infinite.

The nonstop noise of the external world often keeps us from experiencing the quiet at the core of our being. There, a timeless eternal presence without sound or language awaits us, a connection to something greater than our individual, seemingly short lives. Outer distractions, both audio and visual, continuously surround us from our TVs, laptops, and cell phones and prevent a deeper relationship to all of life. Traffic sounds, machinery, and loud voices in nonstop conversation interrupt our peace of mind, even if we don’t consciously recognize the dissonance. Yet, something within each of us does know something is amiss and longs for an absence of sound within which we can feel calmer, more centered. How do we get there?

Recovery from addiction is a long road, but so is the process that led many people down the past of substance abuse in the first place. Any noble endeavor deserves time and care, and reclaiming your life from the drugs and alcohol governing your behaviors is no easy feat.

Meditation is a powerful tool for addiction recovery. Much like a gentle and well-trained therapist, it puts you in touch with your inner workings and lets you examine the beliefs, behaviors and patterns that lead to substance use. Here’s an in-depth look at how the process works and how you can get started with your practice.

How Meditation Works Hand in Hand With Therapy

Meditation and therapy complement each other in myriad ways. One form of treatment, dialectical behavioral therapy, directly incorporates mindfulness techniques into the modality.

It is common for elderly people to experience depression and anxiety. This can happen due to a mix of factors, like changes in the brain that come with aging, less social interaction and more isolation. Some elders may also feel anxious about their future or have feelings of guilt or regret from things they have done in the past or due to a past trauma. It can be hard to shake those feelings and move on which is why it is so important for seniors to stay connected with the spiritual aspects of their lives. Though there are various professional help available along with facilities like nursing homes or memory care to cure these mental health problems, some spiritual practices can be of additional help to keep them under control. This blog post will outline how elders can deal with these types of emotions better through spiritual practices. 

In the last Soul Inspirations article, I mentioned how you can find any answers you’re seeking by looking within to your soul. This week, I want to give you a meditation you can try to help you access this inner-wisdom anytime:

Find a safe, quiet and comfortable spot where you can sit with your feet planted firmly on the floor. Close your eyes and relax. Take a few deep breaths through your nose, exhaling slowly out of your mouth.

Now, bring your awareness to the bottom of your feet. Let your breath assist you in transferring this relaxing energy up through the bottom of your feet. Slowly work your way up to your calves, your thighs, your abdomen and your chest, directing this energy into these areas.

What seeds do you want to plant now?  You need to start telling the truth and to start having your  life be a reflection of where you are now. What’s your story? Because if your life is a reflection of where you are now and how you are now, then ultimately your future harvest is going to be a reflection of your consciousness. Do you see how it works? 

Your future harvest is going to be a reflection of your consciousness now, and this is where personal responsibility and accountability become important because there’s absolutely nothing that you can do about where you were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. You made those choices, you can’t go back and re-choose them. You needed to choose them. It’s a part of the unfolding of the divine world for your life. 

This is an insight into how transformation actually unfolds in every moment. So just in case you’re not good at math, don’t panic. 

When you introduce infinity into any equation, it becomes infinite. Why is this important? Because your soul is infinite. The parts of you that’s divine. The part of you that has God, is infinite and your presence exists outside of time. It exists outside of space. And so when we begin to have moments of transcendence, and we begin to have moments of experiencing who we are beyond the identity, beyond the body and the mind, and beyond the emotions, we begin to tap into the infinite within us. Once we have that experience, even for a moment, it begins to dissolve everything inside of us until eventually everything inside of us becomes infinite as well. 

So for example, if you’ve been coming to Call to  Calm, your relationship with your emotions, your thoughts, your body, and your reality has fundamentally shifted. Why is that? Because you’re no longer perceiving or experiencing your reality from a finite perspective or viewpoint. You’re now beginning to perceive and experience your reality from an infinite viewpoint, from an infinite perspective, meaning that you’re remembering I’m not these emotions,  I’m not these thoughts. I’m not this body. What I am is this infinite continuum, this infinite expression of energy.

I feel like we don’t acknowledge what it takes to truly make an impact in the world. And sometimes that’s the people around you, as much as this is an individual journey. This is a journey of awakening and a journey of evolving into who we are, the people around you are necessary as well, because God put them there. And, sometimes it takes a huge amount of vulnerability to realize that actually you wouldn’t do as well without those individuals.

And it’s not that you’re codependent, but it’s just that at some point you have to appreciate who played a part in getting you to where you are, how people contributed the time, how they put in the love, and how they put in the loyalty that they displayed.

I’ve been in this place of reflecting on how much of a role my wife Jan has played in me being who I am today and how, I don’t know who I would be in the absence of her presence in my life. 

Most of us wish we had more time in the day for the things that make us feel healthier and happier. It can be challenging to figure out where to squeeze in these things that we treat as “extras” — as wants more than needs. Consider this your official invitation to move anything that makes your experience of life better (aka self-care!) into the “needs” column. And while you ponder how to make that work globally in your life, I have an incredibly simple way for you to get started.

If you have 60 seconds, you have time to squeeze a mindfulness meditation into your day. Practicing mindfulness helps us go through our days with more calm, grounded energy and less reactivity when things get chaotic. It’s a beautiful, simple practice, and here’s the great thing: You can do this anytime, anywhere. 

Being out in nature might be most relaxing — and I highly recommend you make time in your life for that on a regular basis — but you can also do a mindfulness meditation at your desk in the middle of your workday, in traffic on the highway, or while making yourself dinner, just for example. 

Have you tried to meditate to calm the mind and instead, felt even more frustrated as thoughts whirled round and round…the desired stillness not even a glimmer on the distant horizon?

Maybe you’ve never meditated or even desired to meditate, but are interested in the idea of stilling the mind.  

When we are not identified as the thinking mind, we experience less pain. I am committed to providing sacred space for everyone to discover the distinctions between their true Essential Self and the false self—the thinking mind—that often runs our lives. 

When we get caught in life’s circumstances and it feels challenging to access that subtle frequency, that still, sacred space, the question often arises, “How do I get not identified as the mind?”

Whether through guided meditations, The Energy Codes® coursework, or BodyAwake® Yoga, when we dial into and experience the subtle frequency in and around our physical body, the thickness of the space around us becomes palpable. This is sacred space. It’s the more of who you are.

If you are currently grieving the loss of who you used to be, you need to know that you are not that person any more. When you can’t continue to have the same old conversations that you used to have, and you can’t continue to hang out with people that you really don’t resonate with, and you can’t continue to perpetuate situations or scenarios in your life that aren’t loving, you are outgrowing the created self. 

When you outgrow your created self and your identities, you begin to discover who you are beyond it all. There is a grieving process that happens as you begin to break free from the identity and the confines of the limited self. In this phase of transitioning away from the created self, it’s not that it needs to be healed, changed, fixed or improved, it’s just that you have outgrown it.  

We can learn to go quiet in the middle of what would ordinarily be a psychological riot going on within us. The frantic search for any answer – being suddenly caught up in a stream of thoughts and feelings trying to figure out what to do with some frustration – turning to those frantic answers, looking for them, is like turning on a fan and hoping to straighten out the papers on your desk.

We mustn’t be afraid to Go Quiet in those moments. In much the same way as we look out and see something beautiful, we can look interiorly and see that inside of us there is a scramble going on for some kind of security, and to know in that moment that it is not who we really are that’s afraid of what’s going on.

Here’s something that’s stunning. I remember the first time I heard it and what it did to me, and how my mind actually went quiet when I heard it. Listen to this idea.

Are you all over the place?

The Practice:
Rest in center.

Why?

Gravity and entropy are powerful processes in the natural world. Gravity draws things together, toward a center, while entropy scatters them into disorder. In much the same way, in our own lives, some things bring us to center, while others disturb and disperse us.

In terms of centering, be aware of your whole body as you take a long slow breath, or think of something you’re glad about. You’ll probably feel more at home in yourself, more drawn into your own core rather than feeling like Garfield the cartoon cat, spreadeagled up against a pane of glass.

In terms of feeling scattered, notice what it’s like to do multi-tasking, the mind drawn in several directions at once. Or what it’s like to open your email in-box and see twenty or more new ones calling to you. Walking down the street or through a mall, see how your attention moves out to various objects of desire: this attractive person, that shiny car, this pretty sweater, that cool new cell phone, and so on: for a few seconds at a time if not longer, you’re dispersed out and away from your calm, clear, autonomous center. And if you have any tendencies toward over-eating, -drinking, -sexing, -shopping, -etc., this dispersal gets more extreme.

Sometimes it seems as if life is random, crazy, a mistake of cosmic proportions. It isn’t. There is intent and purpose woven into the fabric of the universe. And your soul knows this. Your soul chose this lifetime for its own evolution, for humanity’s evolution. We humans are on a collective journey through diverse Earth experiences to integrate polarities and find our way back to balance, peace, and harmony. The soul is our guide.

The challenge for the soul-as-human is to reach peaceful harmony within a physical form with its complex emotions, thoughts, and anatomical circuitry. At times it can seem overwhelming. However, if you remind yourself that your soul chose the scenarios and experiences of your lifetime for its own growth and expansion, then perhaps you can come to acceptance and even gratitude. It’s not necessarily something that will make sense to the mind, but your heart naturally allows life to flow through it. If you remain centered in your heart, life will feel more whole and less fragmented.

“Our intuition is like a muscle, we must practice listening to it and trusting its wisdom. When you take the time to ask and keep listening for the answer, being at peace becomes easy.” — Lisa Prosen

Many people ask today,“How can my life be more magical?” and “How can I go from ordinary to extraordinary?”

Great thinkers have taught us that we either go through life learning and struggling, or we listen to our own intuition. Each of us has the innate ability to listen to our inner voice and receive guidance for direction, clarity or choices.

When we develop trust that our intuition works for us, we expand our active use of it.

When choosing meditation for yourself, it is worth succumbing to the first feeling - often the most beneficial technique, the most needed at a given moment, attracts as if it were calling a person.

Don't worry that any meditation technique will be perfect. Choose the one that is most comfortable for you at the moment.

There is no test that can tell you which meditation is best for you. All you can do is try out all the techniques and choose the one that suits you best. Meditation coaches and teachers also advise you to follow your heart. As naive as this may sound, the point is not to think long and analyze all the pros and cons of a particular type of meditation. Surrender to the first feeling - perhaps your mind will tell you what it needs at the moment.

Your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs create the landscape in your mind that you call “here.” The challenging element is that it’s not fixed. Even while you inhabit it, it is changing based on your perception. 

Your inner landscape reflects your feelings and the thoughts that are connected to them. 

Two people can encounter the same situation and have completely different reactions based on their own history and stories. For instance, one person sees a picture of the Eiffel Tower and feels excitement and romance because it’s where their partner proposed. Another sees the same picture and feels sick to their stomach because it reminds them of the trip to France that led to a romantic breakup. Same photo, two very different responses rooted in their own individual experiences. 

The ground beneath you, the atmosphere around you, and the energy within you can all shift in an instant as you react to what you perceive as happening in your life. 

Past or Present? It’s Hard to Tell…

The capacity to witness what is happening inside us with a non-judging attention allows us to respond to life from our full intelligence and heart. This talk looks at the role of witnessing in spiritual practice, and how we can cultivate this superpower in a way that reveals the light or spirit that lives through all beings.

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”

Mary Oliver