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.

When I first heard the diagnosis “breast cancer,” I was lost in shock and fear. How could this happen in my life? To me?! After a few days, I gradually was able to re-center in the peace within me, to remember that everything that happens in my life is part of a soul plan that I was part of designing before my birth. Nothing is a coincidence, and everything is connected to everything else. I am one soul in one lifetime on one planet. Yet I am also part of the entire fabric of being in the universe. Sometimes it takes loss or crisis in our lives to fully realize this. When things fall away or apart, the long view becomes more visible.

At some point, we need to get to a place where we realize how magical life is. It takes your breath away. This morning I saw the sunrise and in that moment nothing else mattered. It was one of those WOW moments. My life wasn’t being questioned, no part of my existence was in the balance, I was just one with the sunrise, the emerging sunlight. It felt so good to be free of the cognitive burden of needing to understand or to figure it out.  

In that sunrise, everything just makes sense. I want to live my remaining days in the wow, to remain in the wow of being human. 

To live in the wow has been very challenging for so many of you. It’s time to align with this being human thing, so fully that there is no longer a need to understand it. We weave a story that we need to weave in order to reconcile the fact we are on a blue planet, spinning in an infinite universe.

We generally define ourselves by appearance, personality, dress, role, the car we drive, relationships, etc... However, all of this can change in an instant!  Our sense of self can be influenced by what people say, the situations around us and the problems we face. What is it then that defines who we are, and do we really know anything about ourselves?

Much of our insecurity in the world is a result of limiting beliefs which we hold. During this pandemic we are being stretched to go beyond our labels and identities, which for many, have been a distraction from the recognition of the real essence of the self. We are now internally searching more than ever for spiritual meaning and truth.

As human beings, we have a compartmentalized hierarchical relationship with ourselves. That means that certain aspects of ourselves are okay and other aspects of us are not. 

In the context of evolution, by virtue that you are a human being, you are here to be all of it. You can’t make the choice to be human and then fundamentally disregard fifty percent of the human equation. It defeats the purpose of why you came in the first place. It would be like going to Disney World and hating Mickey Mouse!!