Guided Meditation • Visualization • Mindfulness

This month I was the subject of an interview by Mark Wilkinson for the December Issue of The Whole Person Calendar

Mark interviewed me about my latest CD “Guided Meditation for Relaxation and Inner Peace.”

In the interview, I give tips and insights into how we can find inner peace and balance no matter how busy our lives are….and most of us are busier than ever.

You can find the interview on page 46.

The December2011 issue features three brave and amazing women who are doing wonderful things to create peace and stability in their communities.

In The Whole Person Calendar you will also find everything metaphysical that is happening in Southern California.

I feel really honored to be a part of this amazing publication.

Thank You WPC!

Check it out and like me and The Whole Person Calendar on Facebook

This weekend I went to a fabulous workshop to experience “The Point Zero” painting method with Michele Cassou.  Michele’s revolutionary technique of process painting teaches us how to respond to the creative impulse within.  She says, “Creativity knows what you need, when you let it through, it gives you what you need.”  Love that!

I went to Michele’s workshop feeling open and excited.  The first day I painted flowers, trees, and a cow.  It was fun but far from earth shattering.  I noticed too that my energy level during that first day was really low.  I was hungry all day and I couldn’t wait to take a break.  When I asked Michele about it she said “Fatigue is not  uncommon.  What it represents is that we are fighting with our creativity, with our intuition.”

The next day when I arrived, I found myself painting trees, again.  Then I started to paint some mostly trite and uninspiring words, “God, Love, Sad…”  When I asked Michele if it was okay to the words she reminded me that we were to paint images.  I immediately felt at a loss.  She then suggested that I stay with the discomfort of not being able to use words to express myself.

I went back to the painting, wordless,  and had it in my mind to paint another flower when suddenly I stopped, my brush poised just above the paper.  In that moment I realized that because I didn’t know what to do I went right back to what I already knew how to do!  By doing what I already know, I wasn’t allowing the unknown to move through me.

This is exactly what we discuss in the journaling and meditation class.  Instead of paint however, we use a method called “Free Writing,” writing prompts, and guided meditations to move our awareness away from our conditioned/thinking mind.  Through writing and being still we exhaust everything we know about ourselves and the unknown Self emerges.

Connecting with the unknown Self, our source of creativity, is addicting.  Once you feel the newness, the insight, and the love moving through you, you want more of it. However, it doesn’t have to happen through the painting process or even the writing process.  My feeling is that any method that keeps your attention focused and in the present moment introduces you the great unknown Self.  It cannot help but to emerge through us.  As Michele says, “It’s just waiting to come through you.”

Namaste

During this weeks classes we discussed how we can move beyond our egos.  Some students, however, felt strongly that we need our egos.  The most common concerns were,  ego is necessary for human consciousness to evolve on this planet, without ego we would be too passive to create anything, ego is helpful in creating strong personal (and national) boundaries, and ego is what makes us unique individuals.

An argument can be made that without ego human consciousness would not have evolved as it is now.  However, the question is, is the ego useful to the continued evolvement of consciousness on this planet, and if not, can we let it go?

All of the hurt and dysfunction in our lives and the lives of others are the result of unchecked ego.

Your true nature is whole, perfect, and complete.  Ego is simply a condition that arises when humans are separate from their true, perfectly good, natures.

Ego is sustained by a wanting that can never be satiated. The ego wants love, power, and immortality.  The more divided we are from our true nature the more prevalent ego is in our lives.

We chase after love hoping to feed our emptiness.  We deny love to those whom we feel aren’t worthy of it.  Egoic love is conditional and conditional love is ephemeral and painful.

Poverty and hunger are the manifestations of the ego’s insatiable need for power.

Arguments and violent conflict in the home and between nations arise from our personal and collective need to be right, an extension of the need for power.

In the west we have an unhealthy denial of death, and as a result we are obsessed with youth and vitality and eschew the wisdom that comes with age.

The ego keeps us blind to the truth that we are an interdependent species; we thrive as individuals when we are harmonious in our communities.

Ego only serves me if I wish to continue to create suffering for myself and others.  Inner peace and ego are mutually exclusive. They cannot occupy the same space.

More next week

Shanti, Shalom, Salaam, Peace

—Read, “The New Earth,” by Eckhart Tolle

 

by Kris King

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down.
                —–Eckhart Tolle

I remember when I was first certain that I wanted to pursue my acting dreams while living in Springfield, IL. After driving back and forth to Chicago for auditions, it was clear to me that I needed to move to Los Angeles if I were to have a real shot at it. I sat with that knowing for at least a year before it hit me that time was not going to allow me to wait for a more favorable circumstance. At that point, it wasn’t what I needed to do that was an issue; it was how I will do it.

The major obstacle for human beings is the thinking mind. Alternatively, the human mind is the best tool ever given to you. If used in unison with the soul, the mind helps to create some of the grandest ideas, the most loving gestures, and numerous opportunities. The mind, unaccompanied, creates conflict, strife, and problems that can lead to the most erroneous behavior. In other words, when the mind plays the role of the sidekick to the superhero, the bad guys are captured and the town rejoices. However, when the mind starts acting as if it is the hero and feels that it doesn’t need any assistance, it will eventually self-destruct trying to save the town, ultimately taking the town down with it.

The problem seems to be that most people are trying to use their mind for the what as opposed to the how. To piggy back off my earlier example, when contemplating the move to Los Angeles, it was clear that I needed to move there, I just didn’t know how I was going to do it. So I explored a few different options. I thought about getting a loan. I even thought about saving up for a year or two, then moving. Until I eventually came to the obvious decision to sell my home and use the money to move and pay off some debt before I left. My mind made an assessment of what my options was, weeded out what wouldn’t work, leaving me with the best available option based on my circumstances. Two months later, I was in L.A.  

Your soul is all knowing. Your mind is all memory. If the mind is left unattended, all of your decisions will be made from past experiences. And can you blame it? The mind is trained to go into the storage room of any similar situation that you are currently in, see what you did in that situation, then act out a similar, if not an exact solution even if that solution didn’t work the last time. This is because it has no new data to work with. At least it seems this way.

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Every moment of everyday our internal guidance system, i.e. our intuition, is at work directing each of us towards experiencing and expressing our highest good.

Unfortunately, most of us second guess our intuitive impulses, mulling the various outcomes around in our heads for hours or even days in search of the right answer.

We mistrust our intuition, not because we don’t feel it, but because we have forgotten that everything we need for our desire to manifest is contained within the desire.

Instead we debate all of the pros and cons and loose time, energy and focus. More importantly we loose touch with the initial flame of our desire thus extinguishing it with our deliberation.

The habit of “second guessing” arises from our preoccupation with the outcome. Part of being here is to experience what happens along the way when we follow the spark of our desires.

Try This: When cooking dinner or getting dressed for work, follow your initial desire. In other words, if you have the desire to put cinnamon in the chili, try it. If you have the desire to wear a red tie or blouse to work, then do it.

Throughout your day, notice how often you stop to “deliberate” even the smallest desire and ask yourself, “Am I second guessing?” Then go back to the initial feeling of desire (if you can remember it) and follow it through. But Be Forewarned! There is a difference between being compulsive and being intuitive. I trust you’ll know the difference.

You never know when a small spark of desire to wear a red tie will turn into and even greater inspiration, or if simply wearing it makes you feel good that day.

Say this with me: “I hear, I trust, and I respond to my internal guidance system. It serves me well.”

P.S. Read, “The Alchemist,” by Paul Coelho. Find out what happens to a young man when he follows the spark of his desires.

Presently I’m teaching a series of classes based on the book, ”The Amazing Power of Your Emotions,” by Ester and Jerry Hicks.  During one of the class sessions, someone asked how the concept of karma relates to the Law of Attraction.  More specifically, she wanted to know how does all the baggage we carry with us from life time to life time (i.e.,  the typical Western view of karma) affect the idea that we can of think our way into better health, better relationships and more wealth.  In other words, what happens to all of our emotional and psychological and spiritual baggage? Do we just think it away?  Or does it continue to haunt and pester us no matter how positively we think?  This is such a fantastic question, one that will clarify the role our past has in creating a happy future. 

 Karma means action in Sanskrit.  Unfortunately, karma is often seen from a perspective that limits it to a kind of fate, ”my car was stolen because I must have stolen someone else’s vehicle in a previous lifetime…it’s my karma.” The Law of Attraction on the other hand, seems to discount the very popular notion that in order to understand the present and create a better future we need to delve into and understand our past. It appears then that The Law of Attraction is always leaning forward and our karma keeps us with one foot in the past.

Working with Our Karma 

Karma is the habitual ways  in which we view ourselves and the world; it is the unconscious modes of behavior that we have inherited.  Biologically we have  inherited many traits and habits, for example inheriting your Grandmother’s temperament as well as her eyes. We also ”…inherit the eyes that we are seen with,” as Dr. Stephen Cope discusses in his wonderful book, “Yoga and the Quest for the True Self.”  That is, in addition to our biological inheritance,  how we see ourselves and our world is determined by how we are seen by those closest to us and by how our society sees us also.  How many African American men have you heard say that when they walk past a woman she grabs hold of her purse? If a young black man is seen as a menace by society then that world view often times becomes a filter for how he sees himself and the world he lives in.  Contemplate how it would feel to walk by someone who  looked at you with fear and suspicion? Would you feel angry, indifferent, defiant? Or would you implode taking it all in allowing it mold your deepest feelings about who you are?  Then ask yourself what action (karma) would arise from those feelings, from that viewpoint, from an unconscious sense of self derived from an outsiders view of you?  Perhaps there is a situation in your life that is more personal and immediate, one that allows you to see that who you think you are, is really tied to the things that your mother or father has said about you and to you. The truth is, is that we all share in this reality and this is the basis for most of our personal and collective suffering, wrong view. 

Karma is also the energy that moves through us and like a magnet it attracts more of the same to us.  We call this aspect of karma, the Law of Cause and Effect, what comes around goes around, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  According to this law,  if we are silently or not so silently indifferent, we will, through our actions, attract that same indifference to us.  We will create for ourselves a world of apathy where nothing every moves, or breathes or lives. If on the other hand we are aware of our feelings of indifference and separation or whatever, then we become the master of our destiny…we now can exercise the supreme gift of choice.

Working with Our Karma and The Law of Attraction 

Choice is the energy that drives the use of the Law of Attraction.  Like karma, the Law of Attraction is often over simplified and misunderstood.  The Law of Attraction is not just positive thinking.   Positive thinking is meaningless if we do not understand the habitual patterns and beliefs (i.e., our karma) that motivate our thoughts and actions.  This is how these two concepts of the same reality, karma and The Law of Attraction, can work together.  If you desire better healthier relationships, then you need to become aware of how you feel and you behave in your relationships.  If you desire love and support, ask yourself, “Am I loving and supportive?  Or do I have a habit of undermining myself and others in my relationships through my neediness, my anger, my sense of unworthiness?”  The Law of Attraction tells us, that we must become what it is we desire.  The Law of Cause and Effect demands it since we can only attract what is like our view of ourselves.  How can we create peace through anger and resistance?  How can we attract love when we undermine or belittle ourselves or our loved ones.

 At the core of The Law of Attraction is action, we must become, we must do, we must create the container that will hold our desire.  If you desire to lose weight, you must eat more healthfully, exercise more regularly, and create a positive mental atmosphere about your sense of well-being now.  When you do this, your body takes over, it responds to your thoughts, intentions and actions.  You don’t tell the body how to shed the pounds, you just create the conditions for the intelligence of the body to take over.  It is the same with this Law of Attraction.  You must be the architect of the container to hold what it is you desire, then the intelligence of the Universal Body will take over… and your cup will overflow with all the good you can stand!

If you’re confused about all the different alternative therapies available today then this book is invaluable. In it Dr. Weil discusses all the various healing modalities from allopathic (Western) medicine to Naturopathy and Shamanism in a clear and objective manner allowing the reader to feel confident and informed about the plethora of alternative therapies on the market. Personally, I find that a lot of the information on the internet and elsewhere about conventional and alternative therapies to be biased, misleading and at times frightening, so I appreciate what feels like a balanced approach to health and wellbeing wherever I can find it.