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Spiritual development and sex are not that common to see in the same sentence. In fact a number of spiritual and religious schools of thought promote a celibate lifestyle or restrict sex and certain sexual acts altogether.
However spiritual awareness is as a crucial component in this aspect of personal development as it is in other areas. In fact, positive sexual experiences have a lot to do with spiritual awareness.
Your goals have something standing in front of them, blocking them. You. There is a chasm between planning and actuation that comes from Your Own Mind that can make this planning process become counter-productive, and this often results in procrastination.
Some of the best ideas I have had are results of writing them down "on the spot". If I plan to write an article later tonight there is a high chance that I won't finish it until tomorrow, and then tomorrow somehow the final version will get pushed back to later on in the week. Likewise, a number of people I know often plan to write something, to go to a meeting, or to call someone, and end up pushing that planned event back again and again right afterwards.
Is there a unique formula out there that can be used to find success, romance, love, and fulfilment? Or are these things found through sheer effort, goal-setting, or perhaps a certain flavour of luck? There is another alternative – Making Your Own Meaning out of the string of "coincidences" that occur in life.
Did you know that your emotions can act as a gateway to personal development? The times that people feel greatest anger or sadness are also the times that provide the greatest opportunities for compassion and understanding to be developed.
It is not emotions themselves that make people known as being honest or understanding, for example, but is how those emotions are used that makes all the difference.
No emotion is "bad" in itself. Some emotions are perceived as negative based on the social values and experiences that are attached to them. Some of this social conditioning tends to suggest that emotions like the ones below should be avoided, ignored, and resisted.
Sadness. Fear. Desperation. Anger, and so forth.
Instead of resisting these feelings you can choose to respond to them with awareness. Become aware of what the core essence of "anger" feels like, for example. Don't just encompass the anger or become one with it — instead become aware of the effect it has on you. If you become attached to anger, for example, this can often lead to an endless spiral of other emotions such as guilt that never leads to any real meaning. By becoming aware of the effect the emotion has you gain meaning and understanding into what brought it out in the first place.
Each emotion you have is not absolute — it is your habit of response that makes the effects of the emotion seem absolute. You have the choice to respond in more than one way, however. You can either reject and condemn the feeling, accept and own the feeling, or fail to acknowledge the feeling altogether.
It is one of these three responses that make up the most common attitudes that people have towards emotions.
A person who is experiencing intense fear might respond in one of the below ways:
However most of these responses tend to create a gap between the truth of the experience and the reaction to the emotion that attempts to escape that truth. The alternative is to ask yourself: where did this emotion come from… what caused it, and is it valid? Asking these questions helps to figure out what the emotion means rather than just responding to it.
Common emotional responses are often most acceptable with social standards, but that does not mean that those responses provide insight into self-awareness and awareness of others. To explain, we often make the distinction of "Tom was angry" or "Tom is an angry person" instead of asking the question of where this source of that anger lies.
To get to the source is to get to the meaning that our emotions are attempting to make known. Most emotions are just signals pointing towards a certain truth or understanding, but when we misinterpret them and attempt to give them our justification or denial their original intention becomes lost in a sea of confusion and misinterpretation.
Emotional awareness bridges the gap between the truth of an experience and the response blocking the truth. Most "anger problems" are not an excess of anger, but a bad habit that a person has formed to respond to their anger as something horrible that possesses them to act out. The same can be said for a magnitude of other 'problomatic' emotions.
Our strongest emotions are some of our greatest learning tools. However, misunderstanding them can lead to negative consequences.
Much of the experience we have of the world is based around thoughts and memories. Those thoughts tend to be centred on our senses – what we see, feel, and hear builds up a core image of the world as we perceive it. However this process often occurs on a subconscious level and it is seldom that we become aware of just how fluid the experience we have of life is. Using the power of conscious creation it is possible to re-arrange this core image of the world each one of us has.
Often in life there is a perceived burden to keep our attention active in either our thoughts, feelings, or actions. If we are not doing something with our hands then often our attention goes to thinking or feeling processes.
There is an incessant burden of 'processing' to be occupied. On some level the social environment trains us to be forever 'processing' something, instead of just being.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Happiness Trap (Russ Harris) is a book I read some time ago that talks about the limitations our own search for happiness can end up creating. In this article I would like to summarise a technique the book discusses in chapter 4: "The Great Storyteller", which introduces the idea that we tell ourselves stories about our own life that might not be accurate reflections of the truth.
Often when we forget something it becomes frustrating to remember that thing — whether it is where the car keys are, someone's name, or an item on a list. This article will discuss how to use the mind to locate these memories. These techniques are effective for both long-term and short-term memories.
Compare what the memories were most like in properties to something similar. Often the mind categorises similar items and concepts close together. Take some time to listen to a conversation some of your friends have, be observant and you'll pick up on some interesting things: Person 1: "let's have pizza for lunch". Person 2: "good idea, the prices are good at Pizza Place". Person 3: "Guess how much I paid for this new watch? I got it at discount"…
Our mind processes are associative in nature and memories relating to something similar can often be triggered when we focus on the similar items instead.
Retrogression involves playing a movie clip in your mind's eye to backtrack to the events that occurred before the event that has been forgotten.
Retrogression can also be used when we go to a particular place that we have been before to trigger related memories. You can use each of the senses, such as particular feelings, sensations, sounds and smells to regress to a previous event that is anchored in those same sensations.
Meditation can often help to calm the mind and to allow memories and thought processes to flow in a natural sequence. Often when we strain the mind and focused too much on remembering or on thinking about a particular thing our natural thought processes become disrupted.
Often it is difficult to find the time to learn about and to understand how to heal using our own inner power. However what I have noticed is that undertaking energetic-based healing does not take up more time than the right amount of time. It is just a matter of getting into the present moment rather than being overrun with chaotic thoughts and stresses of other tasks that need doing.
There is a method that can be used that allows the energetic centers to be activated in others through sensing them with our hands. This technique is useful for those who are starting with energetics and would like to experience energetic sensations firsthand.
it is possible to sense another presence in a room if a person is standing in front of you even if your five physical senses cannot determine this - if you cannot see or hear the person. You can begin to develop this sense further by placing your hand a few centimeters from a person's body. Notice how the energy around your hand changes.
By moving your hand slowly forward and back 2-3 centimeters you will begin to notice that the sensation changes. The closer your hand is to a person the more are you are pressing into their personal space (their aura). You are not touching them, but just letting your hand rest a few cms above their body.
To perform the healing have the person lie in his or her back and with your hand a few centimeters away from the body sweep your hand down slowly from their head to their feet. You should feel the energy resisting against your hand as you move it through the air inside the immediate inner-aura. Doing this process 11 times (five times down each leg and once down the middle of the body) can take less than a minute but will leave the person feeling more energized. There is no limit to how many times this can be done in one session.
In some practices it is often advised to wash your hands with salt after performing this technique, since some of the energetic knots and negative surface-energies can get scraped off the aura into your hand. For this reason after each sweep from the head to the feet it is a good idea to visualize the negative energies burning or dissipating.
Having a block in the flow of our creative energies can be frustrating and difficult to overcome when there is no explanation for where that creative potential went. Oftentimes we might experience a flow of ideas or concepts that we can use, and then that flow gets cut off and the ideas stop. How do we approach this problem when it happens?
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