beliefs
Creating Space For Divine Love
Love has a life of its own. In its true, pure form and spiritual essence, love is a transcendent energy emanating from God – the supreme loving and lovable Source. When love descends from this uppermost divine realm of origin and takes seed in our heart, we can know it is an act, and element of grace that we receive.
When the seed of love is planted in our heart, it is to be watered, nurtured, cultivated, and protected with our life and soul. Love needs space to grow, and nourishment to flourish. It is the quality of consciousness that creates this space and atmosphere for love to thrive.
When tending to the garden of the heart, we must first examine and prepare the foundation. Just as flowering plants would struggle to grow in dry soil, so too will love not readily emerge from a hardened heart. It requires softness, flexibility and receptivity. Love, likewise, needs a base that is rich in qualities to give. Soil stripped of nutrients does not foster growth, nor does a heart that is deplete of a generous, giving spirit.
Furthermore, there are weeds of unwanted things that must be removed to allow for love to expand. Lust, anger, greed, selfishness has no place in the garden of love. Love in its genuine spiritual essence will not take root in an atmosphere surrounded by manipulation, anger, resentment or narcissism.
Again, love has a life of its own. It cannot be pushed or pulled, or ‘gamed’ into being. To truly experience its pure divine scent and flavor, the heart must be open, soft, receptive, giving, honest, respectful, and devoted to the supreme, eternal, transcendent, loving Source.
Open-Minded Curiosity Is The Key To A Happy, Healthy Life
A client asked the other day how I keep my immunity up during these challenging times, and if there is anything special one can do to stay mentally healthy. My answer was simple. You simply need to keep an open mind, and have passion for life.
Working with spirit has taught me over the years to live my life wholeheartedly, with daily gratitude, and with an open mind and a healthy curiosity. I am always eager to learn and experience new things. We are not meant to be constantly stuck in a rut, nor spend our lives in mediocre stagnation.
Just the other day, a friend told me that she thought I am the most imaginative and adventurous person she has ever met. I am always so optimistic and upbeat, she said, and she gets energy from me just by spending time with me.
She has also witnessed how positive things happen in my life through my spiritual practices. For example, I use certain crystals, visualizations and affirmations to bring about real change in my life – not only for myself, but also for others.
The more we are open-minded to explore new horizons, and learn new things, the more we allow positive, creative new energies to enter our reality, empowering us to achieve things that we otherwise wouldn’t – especially when we just sit around doing nothing.
Finding Your Spiritual Center In A Chaotic World
If you were to ask me how I see the world we currently live in, my honest response would be that we seem to be in a state of mass confusion. There is much misinformation, upheaval, conflicting reports, fake news and conspiracy theories these days. And most of us seem to be struggling trying to find our balance amid all this chaos.
Herein lies the problem: how do we reconcile what we are being told by so many contradictory sources, when it conflicts with our own personal beliefs, thoughts and feelings? Do we trust ourselves enough from our inner guidance system, to assess what is right and true for us, even if it does not match the opinions of others?
Are you the type of individual that will always follow the agenda set out before you, even though at times it leaves you with feelings of doubt? Or perhaps you are a person who makes your choices strictly led by your own beliefs, intuition and spiritual awareness?
The only reasonable approach to any threatening situation at hand is to pay more attention to what you are honestly thinking, and how you are feeling, and how you choose to deal with trying events, rather than obsessing about what may, or may not happen.
It would make things much simpler if we could simply hide away in some cave for a while, or live on a desert island, until all the turmoil blows over. However, here is the catch, if these troublesome circumstances and events in current affairs finally find a way to resolve themselves, how do we prepare for the next time?
Meditation Is For Everyone
Meditation can easily be a part of your daily life. It is a simple spiritual practice. What is difficult is to change one’s habits.
There are many variants of meditation, some of which you probably know and may have tried. If so, you may have discovered that the difficulties many of us face, when attempting to adopt meditation as a spiritual practice, are usually not related to the meditation itself. More often we are ‘fighting’ with our own minds. We are competing within, for the control, or the freedom of our mind.
Our enemies in this context are short-term rewards: leisure activities, such as watching TV, browsing social media, snacking, or anything that helps our neurons remain lazy. In these activities, attention is scattered and unfocused.
The mind thus learns to be ‘random.’ One could compare this state of mind to the behavior of a wild monkey. This restlessness has no practical purpose – it is just ‘noise.’ And it is happening all the time. We may feel we are actually doing something, but we are just passing the time.
Meditation puts a stop to this unnecessary mental activity. Although in meditation, one does not actively seek to stop thinking, one tries to generate the conditions in which thought is reduced, and the mind now merely observes whatever is happening: an idea, a feeling, a sensation. It is all just observed.
Harmonizing The Energy Flow Of Money
When I was younger, I never thought of money as being spiritual or metaphysical in any way. I never considered the possibility that our financial prosperity, or lack thereof, may be somehow connected to our thoughts, feelings and beliefs about it. Even after studying business, and working as an accountant for many years, I never saw the correlation. It wasn’t until I began to explore the spiritual aspect of my life, that I became aware of this link.
I became the sole income provider in my home, after my divorce. At this time, I began to look more deeply into my beliefs and associations with money. If you personally relate to my experience during those difficult days, you will also understand what it feels like to be totally overwhelmed when you are experiencing many new obstacles in your life to financial security and cash flow.
Fortunately, there has always been a logical and practical part of myself that kicks in when I’m faced with big challenges and difficult choices, especially around financial decisions. This instinctive part of me is a natural default from my years as an accountant and mortgage finance consultant.
When my inner accountant comes out, I look at the logical side of things and rationally reason my decisions. Then, on other occasions, the spiritually aware, intuitive part of me knows that if I am overly stressed and worried about money, I block my own energy flow from the Source of all things abundant. I have often also seen that my creative process and artwork doesn’t flow freely when I become too worried about finances – I just paint ‘mud.’
So, how do we find balance between our logical, human need for material security, and the intuitive, spiritual aspect of our soul that finds it easy to trust the unknown? How do we find that balance?
What To Believe When You Come Undone
So much of the typical human belief system is actually in direct opposition to the concepts of spiritual law. Let’s take the idiom “Life is too short,” for example. This saying is used to essentially suggest or convince oneself or another that we don’t live long…so just live for the now and just do what’s desirable regardless of the consequences. Well, wrong!
The soul’s journey is quite a long one. We reincarnate through many centuries of lifetimes, until our souls have completely evolved, returning to each new life with lessons to learn based on beliefs, karma and decisions made in our prior lives.
For example, a slave master born might return in his next life as a slave, to face his karma and endure what it’s like to be treated as such, and ultimately understand why it’s wrong. So, in reality, life is ‘too long.’ Every action has a reaction – an energetic effect. Thus, we need to be cognizant and conscientious of all that we say and do in this life, and not just engage or divulge in whatever we please, because of a physically limited life span.
That same theory of misunderstandings and contradictions between spiritual concepts and human beliefs, more detrimentally applies to life struggles and emotional well-being. How many times have you prematurely mourned a relationship…then wound up reuniting with your partner? Or maybe you lost your favorite job and felt hopelessly valueless and depleted, foreseeing eternal darkness, only to find your dream job shortly after? Moments, days, weeks, months, years, where you either take on a defeatist attitude, and suffer, or become a control freak and try to take matters into your own hands. Thinking you are, but not trusting that you are not, the wizard behind the curtain?
Escaping Karma
Karma is often one of the most misunderstood spiritual experiences that we have as humans. People will often use the word ‘karma’ to represent something punitive, or to point out that another person will “get what’s coming to them.”
But looking at karma through the lens of retribution is almost the opposite of the reason why karma actually exists. In fact, when we hold a perspective about karma that is punitive, we tend to create some sticky karma for ourselves in the process.
Karma is in truth an expression of the self-correcting Universe, reflecting its intelligent, loving design. The goal of karma is to expand a person’s awareness of love, joy, and serenity. Karma simply means that whatever we give out, comes back to us multiplied.
The concept of “karma is going to get that person,” is often directly associated with personal vendetta. Therefore, so many spiritual teachers throughout history talked about forgiveness and loving our enemies. When we focus on karma “getting” the other person, we tend to bring about harsh justice for ourselves.
It is also important to understand that the karma that other people experience is not proportional to how offended we are. The goal of karma is not to ‘make’ other people feel the way that we felt when we were offended.