If you are comfortable with the basics of getting to a meditative state, you are ready to take a very big leap that will bring you to a higher level of awareness through self-inquiry. The next big step is to ask the question, What do I want? The way to do this is to settle into your meditation and then deliberately address this question to the universe. You can also address this question to a spiritual guide, your higher-self, god, or any place you have had experience retrieving information.

This should not be a question you force but should be arrived at by exploring your emotions before you begin your meditation. You are asking the universe to help you here so you must have a genuine desire for an answer. The universe responds to true desires that it can sense from your being state, so your desire to know must be genuine.

I want to bring your attention to an important aspect of our minds, our Imagination.

Sometimes we need to stop living in an external world and journey inward to a different world. That world is our personal evolutionary journey made possible by our creativity and enabled by the most noble of our mental assets, imagination.

Exploring a problem to find a solution, connecting experiences from our past to understand some new aspect of ourselves, expanding knowledge that becomes wisdom, this is our journey and requires assistance from our imagination.

Inventing something new from something old whether it is an idea that benefits all of society or just makes our lives richer in some small way, requires imagination. Using imagination in a unique meditative visualization to reach higher states of consciousness is among the highest and best use of it for seekers. The greatest observable outcome is using imagination to visualize an intention during meditation to manifest a thing we desire.

I have included nine quotes about imagination along with my comments to explore this subject further. Review and reflect on these to inspire, inform, and energize your meditation practice.

A Peak Meditation experience (PME) can sometimes be described by a more common term as a vision. One definition of a vision is something seen in a dream or trance with a supernatural appearance that usually conveys a revelation or a spiritual experience.

Peak Meditation Experiences are often spiritual in nature and can be life changing or profound in their teachings, like a near death experience. PME’s of this type, act like big downloads of data. The messaging might come in like a compressed computer file but takes time to unpack to get its full meaning. By unpack I mean reviewing the download over possibly several meditations, weeks, or months to understand its meaning for you.

If I had to share just ONE valuable tip that had the power to dramatically change your life for the better, my advice would be this: learn how to meditate. 

Meditation is one of the most powerful success tools available to you. Even a simple five-minute basic mindfulness meditation practice can boost your mental clarity, focus, and intuition, making it easier for you to remain calm in challenging situations and make better decisions in the present moment. 

I've Been Thinking...

The other morning I was watching a story on the news about a passenger who had to take over for his pilot midair after he suddenly became incapacitated. The young man had never flown a plane before, but luckily when he put on the headphones in the cockpit, an air traffic controller who also happened to be a flight instructor responded and navigated him to the closest airport.

Life is inherently full of ups and downs. Good times and hard ones. Things that go our way and others that don’t.

The desire to have certainty and to feel a sense of control is a natural human response to stress, challenges, and the unknown. But living a Spirit-led life means developing a relationship of trust with your higher power. And, inherent in a relationship of trust, is releasing control and surrendering to the flow of life. 

Meditation is essential to students of spirituality. To be still and know is one of our greatest assets in everyday life.

Whether experiencing meditation while sitting with soft music, or walking in meditation near water or at the beach, we are connecting to nature and to ourselves in these moments.

Meditation further develops our ability to see inwardly and to remain peaceful inside, regardless of outside circumstances. We draw from the wisdom that nothing can really happen to us, unless we allow it to happen through us.

Meditation is an amazing practice which clears the way for the “divine knowing” within all people. It creates a sacred space somewhere between what has happened and what is happening, allowing faith to reassure the spirit within. “All is well,” sings my soul.

Religion can be defined as a set of belief systems. The belief usually concerns one or more powers that guide the path of people throughout existence, explain how the world itself came into being, and lay out the proper "way" of living.

Are you breathing?

The Practice:
One breath at a time.

The world is a reflection of you because you are the universe.

Perhaps that seems like a bold statement.

I share it because I’m often asked, “How can I change the world?” The answer is for you to come home to the core and build circuits so that you perceive with clarity and a loving, compassionate, conscious presence everything happening in the world.

Have you ever experienced a time in your life where you felt deeply connected to Spirit? Where things seemed to just flow and you knew you were on the path of your highest good?

Throughout your life, your feeling of connectedness to Spirit and your spiritual journey may ebb and flow. For many of us, there are times when we feel a sense of Divine guidance and clarity about our spiritual path, and other times when we feel disconnected, or even lost. 

Human beings in general have been convinced that they are not capable in one area or more than one area. That programming and conditioning began when you were born. You were born into a family, a religion, a spirituality, a way of living, a community where the messaging, you are incapable, was continually reinforced.

The popularity of meditation has skyrocketed in the last decade – and with good reason! 

A regular meditation practice boasts seemingly endless benefits. It reduces stress, helps us stay balanced and grounded through life’s ups and downs, and is even associated with better health outcomes. And my personal favorite benefit of meditation – it helps us live a life that’s guided by Spirit and keeps us aligned to our highest good. 

If you’re looking ahead to 2022 and desiring a year that’s more easeful, happy, and inspired, why not dip your toes into a guided meditation practice? 

The great thing about meditation is that it is simple and accessible to everyone. If you’ve felt intimidated by meditation in the past or you’ve worried you wouldn’t be able to quiet your mind enough to do it, I’m going to show you an easy approach. 

Guided meditation is my absolute favorite kind of meditation for beginners. And really for anyone who wants to take their meditation practice to a deeper level! 

If God resides within the breath, what does it mean when you are “short of breath,” with inflammation in the lungs? That was my status, post chemo—another one of the side effects, which it takes 4–6 weeks to resolve. Meanwhile, my breathing was slower, my walking slower, everything slower. Was this God’s way of getting me to slow down (even though my life is not fast-paced)? Perhaps, the message here is “press the pause button on everything and just be in the stillness of the breath, in which God is ever-present.” Nothing is more important. “You’ve dropped all the pieces of your identity; now just rest in the absence of identification, the presence of divinity.” This is what I am hearing, what I am receiving. Another gift of this experience. Because when you find yourself struggling to breathe (as I did one night recently), you are awakened to the slender thread that holds you to life: one single breath at a time is your lifeline to aliveness. And to God.

What doesn’t change?

The Practice:
Find stillness.

Why?

Things keep changing. The clock ticks, the day unfolds, trees grow, leaves turn brown, hair turns gray, children grow up and leave home, attention skitters from this to that, the cookie is delicious but then it’s all gone, you’re mad about something for a while and then get over it, consciousness streams on and on and on.

Many changes are certainly good. Most people are glad to put middle school behind them. I’m still happy about shifting thirty years ago from single to married. Painkillers, flush toilets, and the internet seem like pretty good ideas. It’s lovely to watch grass waving in the wind or a river passing. Fundamentally, if there were no change, nothing could happen, reality would be frozen forever. I once asked my friend Tom what he thought God was and he said “possibility.”

Some experiences and moments in our lives seem to just stick to us like dirty gum on the bottom of our shoe. 

If you’ve ever had an ex you just couldn’t get over, a fight you couldn’t get out of your head, or an experience or resentment that has stayed with you for years, you know what I mean. 

Sometimes we become energetically tied to another person or a situation from our past, and we have to find a way to reclaim our energy and regain our sense of sovereignty. A cord cutting ritual is the perfect way to do just that. 

When you know you’re ready to release, but the old pain, old thoughts, or old patterns keep haunting your mind, and still feel real in your body, these rituals can offer you some freedom. They will help you bring your energy back to yourself and finally move on for good. 

Why we get stuck with old memories or resentments 

It’s natural that certain experiences or people stick with us and are hard to shake. Some relationships transform us and make us who we are, certain memories mark pivotal moments, and some experiences become part of the way we define ourselves. 

Meditation is often understood as learning how to “not think”, but many find that they quickly lose focus after just a few minutes (or seconds) of trying.

However, when done correctly and intentionally, meditation can have a great deal more power and potential than simply emptying your mind. The practice of meditation can change your energy, shift your frequency, and act as an empowering spiritual reset.

In this post, you’ll learn what your “frequency” is, how it influences your emotions, and what you can do to turn meditation into a life-changing practice that isn’t just about counting your breaths and closing your eyes.

As a result, you’ll learn how to raise your vibration more easily, more consistently, and with more control so you can welcome each day with more confidence, calm, and clarity!

Tapping into the truth has the power to not only transform you, but it will also transform the world. So many of you have a hard time with what’s going on in the world, and yet you participate in it. Your participation is at the level of your pain – emotional pain specifically. 

The illusion, or suffering, requires the recycling of emotional pain through the human experience. The very second you become aware of the fact that you are contributing unconsciously to the emotional pain in the world that is the root cause of suffering, you stop. Life then begins to show you where you still have this emotional pain in your vibrational system, specifically in your chakras. 

As you begin to give this emotional pain your attention in your awareness, when life happens, it begins to transform. However, the commitment you have to make in order for it to transform, is to think, move and act from peace.  

Meditation offers an array of benefits for your body, mind and spirit. Enthusiasts claim the practice can do anything from easing chronic pain to helping you touch divinity.

However, you need an appropriate location to spread out your mat. Here are five steps to creating a peaceful place for meditation.

1. Find a Quiet Place

It isn’t always easy to carve out a space to hear yourself think. The problem compounds if you share an apartment with noisy roommates or have several littles making nonstop pitter-patter with their little feet. However, you can get creative even in a studio by insulating an area to find your zen.

As with all things in duality, we have a very outward focused way of being as it relates to energy. You might say you feel a certain way because of “that person”. The truth is you don’t feel that way because of that person, you feel that way because you have an infinite power station inside of you that’s just been turned on. The switch just got flicked on and you are now generating your own energy, you are connected to your own energy. All of the biological phenomena required to facilitate the evolution of you, your brain, is now in flow. 

But what is that energy? It’s the sexual energy, the sacred creative potential of the universe and it’s ascending just as you are ascending. As that energy flows upward, it starts to nurture and nourish every chakra and eventually moves up to the top of the brain and activates all of the dormant centers in your brain. We’ve heard that we don’t use 97% of our brain, give or take, and guess what, you can now activate that 97% of your brain.