By: Marie Rose Phan-le / Source: Mind Body Green

For those who have seen my my documentary film, Talking Story, or read the accompanying book that chronicles my journey around the world to explore healing practices and spiritual traditions, they will often ask, “How can I have some of the experiences you’ve had, if I’m unable to travel to exotic places or meet a shaman?”

My first answer is, “Well, the intention of the film and book was to capture the healing transmissions and wisdom from the teachers and healers I met and share them, so you’ve already received some of what I have, which is a start.”

But, I know what the seeker truly hungers for is something more tangible to take into their day-to-day lives.

Most people are not in a position to leave their jobs, homes or families for an extended period of time, to do a spiritual walkabout.

I am blessed and I also made some extreme sacrifices to be able to do that, but the good news is that it’s not necessary to leave behind everything you know to connect with your soul and have spiritual experiences.

The trick is to take an external action that evokes an inward journey, so you can listen to your voice within, open your heart, and evoke a more expansive state of being.

Many people I’ve advised are surprised to learn that one of the quickest ways to the spirit is not through denying the physical body, but rather to engage its senses to create a pathway to presence.

So, the first step is to make a list of things that you know trigger a relaxation response or a pleasant sensual experience for you.

It could be simply shutting out the world and putting on your earbuds to listen to your favorite tunes or filling your home with the smells of cookies baking.

Make a list of five to 10 things — I suggest that you put them in order of easy to difficult, so that you have choices to reach for depending on how much time you have, or effort it will take to experience them.

For example, when I feel stressed or am in need of a quick spiritual injection, the first and easiest thing on my list is to take one conscious breath.

Now, it may take me several breaths to get present enough to take that one conscious breath, but it’s something I can do anytime, anywhere.

Something that may be of medium difficulty, because it requires me to set aside more time, is to soak in a bath with essential oils, or take a shower with scrubbing salts that awaken my skin and get my circulation going.

And things that may be most difficult include taking an excursion, whether it is a stroll on the beach, an overnight in the woods, or an unplugged-from-technology weekend in your own home.

The most adventurous way to take a “Spiritual Staycation” is to brave something you’ve never done before, such as trying a new coffee shop in your neighborhood, visiting a place of worship that is not of your spiritual tradition, attending a musical concert of a band you’ve never heard of, or taking a different route home.

Not only is this great to help build your brain’s plasticity, but because you will have to be alert to adjust to and take in the new experience, being out of your usual comfort zone will allow you to move through fear of the unknown and experience a new perspective, which is in essence the foundation of any spiritual experience.

If you need a little help getting started, here are 11 things you can do to take your own Spiritual Staycation:

1. Take one conscious breath
2. Sing along to your favorite recordings of sacred mantras, old school R&B tunes, or classic rock anthems
3. Make a stew — because I’m not good in the kitchen it takes all my presence and focused attention to chop and prepare the ingredients, and then I’m rewarded with the comforting smells of the simmering dish
4. Attend a yoga class — I’m particular to Kundalini yoga, which is done with eyes closed and requires an immense amount of inner focus, while chanting mantras and engaging in physical movements
5. Go to a place that allows you to tune into your spirit, such as A Sound Garden — or for me, a sculpture that sits on the banks of Lake Washington in Seattle whose steel tower structure makes the sounds of a cosmic orchestra when the wind brushes against it
6. Witnessing a sunset anywhere
7. Seeing an inspirational movie, such as Awake: The Life of Yogananda or Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
8. Browsing through a wonderful bookstore
9. Curling up with a good book like Mark Nepo’s The Endless Practice or Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth
10. Immersing yourself in water, whether it be in the tub, in the ocean, or a floatation tank
11. Visit a spiritual place — a Buddhist temple, a Catholic church, a sacred garden

 

By: Vironika Tugaleva / Source: Tiny Buddha

“Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.” ~Julius Charles Hare

In a few months it will be the two and a half year anniversary of my mental breakdown.

I don’t really celebrate the date, partially because I don’t know it—it’s not the sort of thing that you remember to mark on your calendar—and partially because my entire life since then has been a celebration of what I began to learn that night.

I began to learn about myself.

It’s been a wild ride of healing, helplessness, forgetting, and remembering. Many times, I felt like giving up and running back to drugs and alcohol, but I didn’t.

Many times, I felt like bottling my emotions or lashing them out onto the closest victim, but I didn’t. Many times, I felt disgusted by my reflection and compelled to stop eating again, just for a day or two, so I could feel the sick freedom of an empty stomach, but I didn’t.

I guess after you almost kill yourself, you just can’t go back to being the way you were. There’s something in your mind that says, “No, that didn’t work for ten years, and it won’t work now.”

Honestly, self-awareness saved my life, and I have no doubt that this simple, consistent practice is as essential as exercising and eating well. I like to dream sometimes about what the world would look like if we all committed to knowing ourselves, and it’s beautiful. It really is. We’re beautiful.

Without further ado, here are five life lessons I’ve learned from two years of healing my mind and reconnecting with myself.

1. Self-awareness is self-love.

About two weeks after I broke down, I was flipping through stacks of old journals, feverishly looking for patterns. What I found amazed me: epiphany after epiphany that I needed to love myself, to be my own best friend, to treat myself better.

Those epiphanies never translated into action until I was forced to look at my reflection, raw and real. When I saw her, I loved her immediately.

You cannot love someone you don’t know. In the end, that’s why so many people in our society don’t love themselves, or each other. Not because they don’t try, but because they don’t know themselves.

Once you find who you are—who you really are—self-love is not an option. And neither is unconditional human love, for that matter, because once you find that spark of magic inside of you that makes your heart beat, you find that magic in all of us.

2. Believing all your thoughts is a dangerous thing.

I used to believe everything I thought. For a while, my thoughts told me that I was fat and ugly. Believing them destroyed my confidence. Then, my thoughts told me I needed drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. Believing them destroyed my body.

One day, my thoughts told me to kill myself. Believing them was almost the last thing I ever did.

As human beings, we have this amazing capacity to conceptualize, analyze, and create stories in our heads. That capacity can be used to build spaceships and save the world. That same capacity can be used to harm ourselves and others.

It’s not that I don’t think toxic thoughts anymore. Sometimes, I still get anxious, fearful, and insecure thoughts just like anyone else. The difference is that I constantly observe and question what I think.

I make choices about what I believe is true. And that makes all the difference.

3. There is no quick fix (and you don’t want one anyway).

When I was in elementary school, I tried praying for a few months. I wasn’t sure if God existed, but I was willing to give it a try.

I said, “Dear God, please make me wake up tomorrow having lost forty pounds, with no pimples, and my stretch marks disappeared. If you do, I’ll start going to church. Okay, thanks. I mean… Amen.”

Needless to say, it never happened. About fifteen years later, I’m telling this story to someone and they point out how, if that did happen, my life would have been much worse.

Showing up to school suddenly forty pounds lighter is a sure-fire one-day ticket to being a “Freak” (much faster than just being forty pounds overweight).

I was amazed. How could I not have seen this?

Now I know; back then, I only wanted a quick fix because I wasn’t doing anything about my problems. We only crave miraculous, effortless change when we’re not helping real change happen.

I used to tell myself stories about how I didn’t want to change because it would hurt too much. Honestly, healing has hurt more than I can possibly relate, but you know what? It’s not the same pain.

The pain of enduring obstacles on a path that you’ve decided to walk is absolutely nothing like the pain of being trapped in a situation you have no plan to escape. Nothing hurts like helplessness and stagnation. That’s what we actually don’t want.

4. People who adored your mask probably won’t like your authentic self.

This just baffled me when it first happened. When I was self-destructive, rude, jaded, and fake, people couldn’t get enough. When I showed my vulnerable, inspiration-hungry, sparkly-eyed self, most of those same people recoiled in horror.

My first months of healing, I spent alone in an empty room watching TED talk after TED talk eating chocolate chips right out of the bag. I was alone, but somehow, I wasn’t lonely anymore.

Nothing is lonelier than being with people who don’t understand you. Those who love a person in a mask are wearing their own masks. They’re putting on a play for everyone to see—terrified of who they are underneath.

A person who chooses to be authentic around the masked will always be rejected, because the masked reject that part of themselves.

Don’t worry. There are authentic, open, loving people waiting to meet someone just like you in your raw, vulnerable state. They’re just waiting for you to get off that stage.

5. You are the world’s foremost expert on yourself.

For a long time, I was looking for someone to tell me exactly what to do. I’d read a book and it would have an inspiring idea, but then the implications of that idea would make me feel uncomfortable. Still, I’d try it on. After months of struggling, I realized it just wouldn’t fit.

This happened again and again.

I thought there was something wrong with me because other people’s frameworks didn’t fit me like a glove. It wasn’t until I started helping other people that I realized, they’re not supposed to.

Other people’s words can inspire us, inform us, and, at best, give us valuable frameworks within which to place our experiences. But how we fill in those gaps and connect those dots—that’s still up to us.

Self-discovery is supposed to be messy and confusing. You’re supposed to feel like no one has the answers for you, because they don’t. You have the answers. At most, you need a guide to help you find those answers, and even then, you always have the final say.

These five lessons all came to me as epiphanies at first, but I never stop learning them. These truths continue to come to me in different words and different forms, as I apply them to myself and others, as I forget them just to remember them again and again.

It’s not always sunshine and rainbows, but I always know there’s a way out of any darkness and I know that, even if I forget, everything is going to be okay. And that makes it all worth it.

By: Denise Conway / Source: Tiny Buddha

“We do not heal the past by dwelling there; we heal the past by living fully in the present.” –Marianne Williamson

As the last moments of my thirties are fading away, I’m preparing for the dawn of a new age, the age at which life is said to begin.

I’m like a butterfly preparing to break free from her chrysalis into the light, ready to spread her wings and feel what it is to be free—a freedom that has been born from six long months of deep introspection.

The catalyst for this journey of introspection was the breaking of my heart. Such a wonderful thing to experience at this stage in life, as without breaking it completely, it would never have opened.

It was hardened from many old wounds, scars from a turbulent past. It was shattered with such astounding glory that it felt as though I would remain forever broken. Forever disconnected from myself and the wonder that lives inside each and every one of us.

As I watched the pieces of my hardened heart crumble to dust, I found something buried deep within. A consciousness that I had never before felt or experienced, and yet felt very familiar. I stood in this new found consciousness and witnessed the feelings, the pain, the fear.

I witnessed them with great clarity as though I had been awakened for the first time. Thirty-nine years had passed since my birth and yet I stood in the wake of my heartache feeling like I had been awoken from the deepest life-long sleep.

Within a few days of this awakening, I found myself walking through the doors of a yoga studio that I had not visited before. Something about the ambiance made me feel like I had come home.

I paid for the next available class—Energize Yoga. This was a Kundalini yoga class, a style I had never tried before. The class involved a lot of breathing with rhythmic movement.

We all lay on our backs with legs and arms raised in the air. We were instructed to shake our legs and arms from side to side to the beat of some loud dance music which was getting faster and faster.

All the while we had to breathe out forcefully; this was difficult and made no sense to me.

After five minutes of this nonsense, the music stopped. We were instructed to put our legs and arms down and to laugh as hard as we could. It was easy to laugh, as what we had been doing seemed a little crazy; however, I was not prepared for the laughter and what it would bring.

The energy that spilled out of my body as my laugh got deeper was like the pulse of electricity straight from a socket, almost causing my core muscles to spasm. I laughed a loud bubbly laugh which came all the way from the very core of my being.

I left the studio with a monthly pass and a renewed enthusiasm for life. My heart was still broken, my senses still in shock, but the clarity of vision in my newly awakened state made it feel like I was watching the chaos as an observer rather than being consumed by it.

I could still feel panicked waves of desperation pulse through my body. Depressed at what had passed and anxious at what was yet to come, I could see clearly that there was fear deeply rooted in my soul.

The pain, the fear, the anxiety, it made me want to climb out of my own skin. To seek refuge in some external place as though my body were just an avatar. As I witnessed all these feelings and emotions wash over me in waves, I felt something was profoundly different.

I’d dealt with previous heartbreaks by suppressing the painful feelings or distracting myself with work, parties, and avoidance of time alone. This time was different. Instead of suppressing the feelings or distracting myself, I allowed myself to just be.

I still felt afraid. Afraid of living, afraid of dying, afraid of my pain, afraid of my emotions. On a cold morning in February, I decided to symbolically challenge my fears. I had a fear of height and of open water.

I travelled back to Ireland, and with the guidance and encouragement of two dear friends, I jumped from a pier into the icy cold waters of Carlingford bay. As I emerged from the icy cold waters, I again felt very alive.

I proved to myself that no fear is greater than the strength within. I knew then that I would be okay, maybe even better than okay. My life would never be the same again.

When my heart broke, I woke up and found myself. In losing a love that meant everything to me, I found that everything I need is within me and always has been.

I stopped looking outwardly for approval. I dove into myself. I dug up all that I had buried, every skeleton in my closet. I looked face-on at the parts of myself that I didn’t like. I opened every wound I had ever allowed myself to carry.

I walked myself through every negative memory and imagined I were back there in that day/time when the memory was my reality. For each and every situation I observed through my new found consciousness, I could clearly see my part.

I accepted responsibility for my part in all of these situations. I sat with every emotion that came my way, not judging or criticizing, just observing and allowing it to just be.

I cried when I needed to cry, laughed when I felt like laughing and felt more peaceful with each passing day.

I began meditation in April and found that it brought a calmness and sense of peace that was new to my experience. Epiphany after epiphany came to me as I learned about myself and my layers.

I continued to do yoga and meditation while working through the rainbow of emotions that made up my day. The flip-flopping between my past and my future slowed as I found myself becoming more present and living in the moment.

The more at peace I have become, the more I want to share what I have learned, as I believe everyone deserves to feel this peace.

1. Start with your breath.

A great way to become conscious when your mind starts to wander is to focus on your breath.

You can practice yogic pranayama exercises with the guidance of a good teacher but more basic than that, just stop and breathe! Deep calming breaths are proven to calm an anxious mind and have a positive impact on depression.

2. Observe your thoughts.

The mind is constantly full of thoughts. Attaching to negative thoughts creates suffering. Remember that just because you think something doesn’t mean that it’s true. Byron Katie’s four questions can be a helpful tool when dealing with negative thoughts.

3. Remember that you are not your emotions.

Regardless if how high or low you feel, the roller-coaster of emotions you feel is not you. You are much more than that.

Try to stop when you feel overwhelmed by emotion. Observe how your body feels. Are your shoulders tense? Is your breathing shallow? Come back to your breath. Breathe into the parts of the body where you feel the physical expression of the emotion.

4. Stay in your present reality.

The more present and mindful you can be, the less you will suffer. A good practice for mindfulness is to do regular things differently. Hold your toothbrush in the alternate hand. Drive a different route to work. Switch your knife with your fork. You get the idea!

When you stress over the past or worry about the future, stop! Breathe and come back to the present. Remember always that this too shall pass.

5. Validate yourself.

Don’t look to others for validation. Everything you need is inside you. Forgive yourself for your wrongdoings. Give yourself all the love you need. If you have difficulty with this, treat yourself as you would your dearest friend.

I was my own worst critic and harshest judge until I began to practice self-validation and self-love.

6. Be patient and persistent.

Healing your heart won’t happen overnight. We are creatures of habit; negative habits take time to break. Rewriting of neural pathways takes time. Your body and mind need time to adjust when you make changes.

When you feel like you have taken a step backwards, just breathe and reconnect with yourself. The duality that exists between the heart and the mind can be bridged once you remain conscious and aware. Persistence will keep you on the right track.

As I write this, I feel excited for the life ahead—ready for the highs and the lows, and willing to greet each situation from a conscious state in the present moment.

I am opening my heart to the world, a heart that has come back together from the dust, void of past scars. Ready to live, ready to love, ready to breathe!

By: Katrina Cavanough / Source: Wake Up World

We all wander through life searching for a higher purpose. We live with the same questions. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we meant to be doing? Am I living my best life?

Throughout my life I have pondered these questions. My experiences with over 400 deaths as a frontline social worker in a busy ER gave me the greatest insights and new understandings about death, dying and how the soul wishes to express itself in life.

Each life experience is an invitation to live as closely as possible to your soul’s true essence.

To help you to do that – this is what your soul wants you know…

1. You are OK just as you are.

The main goal of life is to not really change, grow or transform yourself. It is to be at peace with who you are at any given moment despite what you have done or not done; said or not said.

Transformation is a choice we all have, but from the soul’s perspective, it is not the greatest priority.

2. Your soul invites you to view yourself through a lens of understanding.

While the way we respond to events in our life holds significance to some of our happiness, more important are the thoughts you have toward yourself as you critique whether you handled your response to a situation well.

Too often we criticize ourselves for not handling a situation well. Thoughts such as, “Why on earth did I say that?“ or “I was just way too emotional for that situation” are some common examples.

Your soul is calling you to view yourself kindly and instead say to yourself, “I did the best I could at the time based on what I knew and my best was good enough”.

3. Your soul wants you to know that you are meant to feel deeply.

We are not here to brush over our experiences, but to experience our emotions and listen to our feelings as they guide us either closer to, or further from, what is best.

4. You are here to attune yourself with the good, the brightest, best and most delightful.

We are here to know the delights, feel the lightness and most of all, to know love, kindness, compassion and joy.

5. You are here to experience life. What that means is completely up to you.

It is not so much about what you experience, but the way you feel about yourself as you experience that matters most.

There are many of us who experience great success for example, but we don’t allow ourselves to actually feel and breathe in the bounty of what we have achieved. Instead we just tick that box and move forward to the next goal.

Life is not meant to be lived this way. We are here to immerse ourselves in each and every experience and feel the greatness of who we are as we live each day.

6. Your soul wants you to know stillness.

When we are still, we can truly listen. As we listen we open ourselves to understand and it is within the stillness that we can feel the greatest connection to our soul’s wisdom.

That is why meditation, being still in nature and finding a quiet moment for ourselves feels so appealing. They are opportunities to connect with who we truly are. Kind, compassionate, gentle and wise.

We just have to listen.