Spiritual growth, meditation, personal development
If you Google this you’ll find a few variations. It doesn’t seem to have one consistent meaning or practice. Here are a couple of versions that I like and find helpful.
This method combines an element of Qigong with mindfulness. I think if you have trouble with traditional meditation, the body involvement could be helpful.
Continue reading “Whole body breathing meditation”“Most people think that happiness is about gaining something, but it’s not. It’s all about getting rid of the darkness you accumulate.”
Carolyn Crane
What could you let go of that would make you happier?
Find the blocks in your thinking and conditioning that keep you in your current state, and work on letting go of them. The ego will try to make you feel that you shouldn’t let them go, that you need them. But consciousness doesn’t need them, they are only getting in the way.
A lot of self-help and pseudo-spiritual sources advocate the use of positive thinking and affirmations.
The usual flow is:
If you’ve ever tried to use this technique you have probably encountered mixed results. It’s just not that easy to transform a negative mindset to a positive one.
Continue reading “From Negative to Positive with Eckhart Tolle”Taken from God’s Slave is Free:
When you forget your own scheming,
happiness will come to you from your spiritual guide.
When you forget your self,
you are remembered by God.When you have become His slave,
only then are you set free.
Spotted on Facebook:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. ~ The Talmud
This one lands pretty well with me because I am often daunted by how screwed the world seems to be and how little I can do about it. In fact, that thought is paralyzing and keeps me from doing anything, and often, from allowing myself to take in the sadness of some things.
This quote reminds me that we have small opportunities each day to be, at the very least, kind to other people.
I’m becoming quite a fan of Rick Hanson. Combining neuroscience with mindfulness is a philosophical cocktail that I can get on board with 🙂
In this video he explains how simply focusing on a positive thought or experience for 15 seconds or more can help create beneficial pathways in the brain:
Something I’m experiencing in my life right now is a tension, or gap, between my life as it currently is, and my life as I would wish it to be. My life is fine, but there are a few things I’d like to change work-wise which I believe will give me more freedom. What I’m learning is that having ‘goals’ can be a bit of a minefield if you’re also trying to live a mindful, present life.
Goals, which are inherently future-centered, can make you painfully aware of the gap in reality between your current state and where you want to be. That can lead to feeling even more discontented with the current moment, which is no way to go about life! The trap is that you can end up feeling that you’ll only be happy when you’ve achieved x, y and z, and therefore, you stop being happy now.
For some people, discontent may be a motivator, but it doesn’t have to be. You can still achieve things and work toward different outcomes while remaining present, mindful, and at the very least, content. Continue reading “Do Goals Create A Painful Reality Gap?”
Tricycle.com is no doubt one of the absolute best online resources and supports for your spiritual practice. They have such a wealth of information available on the site and every day there is something new and insightful to read. The other day I came upon this article about evaluating your meditation practice. I realized that I evaluated mine in a vague sort of way, with no real direction or criteria, but Gil Fronsdal lays out some really specific ways to look at your practice, which are very helpful.
Our motivation can be to awaken and cultivate beautiful qualities of the heart and mind—love, peace, courage, compassion, insight, understanding, the pursuit of the truth and liberation. Developing these qualities does not need to be for oneself. Sometimes my primary motivation to practice has been not for my own sake but for other people. In fact, I believe that if you do it only for yourself, you are unlikely to sustain your motivation over many years. A significant way to fuel meditation practice is to do it with the wish that it will somehow benefit others as well as yourself.
There are long-term and short-term motivations. Experiences of realization may be worthy long-term goals, but in the short term it can be useful to have modest aims such as cultivating small but noticeable improvements in concentration, nondistraction, compassion, or patience, as well as small, immediate movements toward letting go and experiencing freedom. I have found there is a beautiful way in which practicing with immediate, realistic goals allows for a steady maturing into some of the more developed areas of meditation practice.
For me, happiness is a habit to be learned, an inner state to be actively cultivated. Actually ‘happiness’ is a loaded word for me. I prefer to think of contentment. Happiness sounds too grand and flowery, like something out of the movies, not real life.
For a long time I think I was under the impression that happiness meant that everything in your life was perfect. You had the right job, a comfortable amount of money, friends, a partner etc etc. So naturally, happiness felt like an elusive concept. Or like somehow I was doing it ‘wrong.’ Now I realize that perfection is not the goal, or the point. In fact if you stop looking for everything to be perfect I think you will find more contentment – a general ‘ok-ness’ with the way things are. Continue reading “Learning Happiness”
Nicely done animation set to an excerpt of Alan Watts, reminding us that life is less a journey with an Important Destination, than it is a piece of music, through which we should sing, dance and enjoy!
Eye-opening news which will of course delight both skeptics and believers. Skeptics will surely love to expound on the impossibility of such a concept, but believers will take delight in seeing how the accepted boundaries of science are slowly coming apart at the seams. The following is excerpted from Deepak Chopra’s post on Intent.com – link to full article at the bottom. Enjoy!
The scientific world went into spasms last week when a Nobel laureate announced that he had, in effect, teleported DNA. That was the sound bite, but of course the story was more complicated. A French team headed by Luc Montagnier, previously known for his work on HIV and AIDS, took two test tubes, one of which contained bacterial DNA, the other pure water. After the test tubes were surrounded by an electrical current, analysis showed that an imprint of the DNA was detectable in the water. The outrageousness of this claim echoes a finding from over a decade ago that water has memory.
…
Fact #1: Everything in existence is experienced through our consciousness, including subatomic particles and distant galaxies. The universe exists in our consciousness. There is no proof of an objective universe, which is taken on faith, as pure assumption. Fact #2: If there is a universe outside our consciousness, we can have no knowledge of it.You can perform thousands up thousands of experiments while still ignoring these two facts. But eventually there’s a limit, and when you reach it, you have to ask some key questions: Is the universe conscious? Is everything happening in the mind of God? Does the mind exist outside the brain? Once preposterous, these questions seem to hold the key to the future, in both physics and biology. There is much more to say on the subject, but for the moment, we can at least afford a smile at the notion that DNA can teleport itself and that water can remember things. Out of delight and imagination most of the world’s great ideas were born.
Read the full article by Deepak Chopra: Spirituality Is the New Science | Intent.com.
Lately on some of the blogs that I read, there’s been a lot of talk inspired by Amber Case’s TED talk entitled “We Are All Cyborgs Now”, which is truly fascinating.
The discussion has largely been around second selves ,digital personas and the like. I’m won’t rehash the whole topic except to summarize that clearly the importance of digital is ever expanding in our lives, and enabling whole new income streams, lifestyles and concepts of self. The thing that got me thinking was Everett Bogue’s use of the term ‘second self’. From reading his blog I know he’s an avid yogi, therefore presumably seeking oneness, so I’m wondering how the ‘second self’ concept fits in with that, or how he reconciles the two. After all the phrase has duality built right in. So perhaps it’s just semantics, or perhaps I’m missing his point in some way, but I can’t help but feel that a second self isn’t the answer. Most of us have a hard enough time uniting the one self we already have. Whatever we create is an extension of ourself but if we think of it as separate it seems problematic. Continue reading “Cyborgs, Second Selves, Oneness”