growth
Living Life – A Message From My Guides
Are you living the life of your dreams? Are you happy or content most of the time? Do you face challenges with confidence, or perhaps dread? Do you compare yourself with others and feel sad, miserable, or even angry at their success? Regardless of whether you feel as though you are at the bottom of the barrel, or soaring among the clouds, there is always room for improvement, and it is never too late to get started.
One of the biggest errors in judgment is all-or-nothing thinking. You do not need to drop everything in your life and start with a blank slate. Not only would that be impossible, it would be totally impractical. Your life so far is a culmination of all your experiences, education, career opportunities and family interactions, and cannot be wiped away like a chalkboard. Instead, you can, and should, start by making course corrections and taking baby steps in the right direction.
Set your intention first. Visualize the end result. Begin the process of redesigning your life gently and allow the universe to conspire in your favor over time. Whether you choose to go back to school, read a book, take a course, attend a conference, learn online or join a group, do something that makes you feel happy and fulfilled. Do it because you want to, not because you have to.
Set realistic goals and deadlines. If you are juggling a family or career or both, be sensible in your expectations of yourself. Things take time and if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well. Do not expect overnight results. Life is not a success-only journey, however, each setback holds a series of invaluable lessons. Deal with each issue, learn from the experience and move on with confidence. Continue reading
How To Live A More Spiritually Aware Life
To lead a more spiritual, and therefore a happier and more fulfilled life, you do not need to develop a passion for incense, or hire a guru to assist you in going through some form of spiritual awakening. Instead, you may be comfortable with more down to earth approach.
Firstly, it is important to recognize that religion and spirituality are not necessarily the same things. Religion is just one form of spiritual practice. Spirituality itself is something that comes from within the individual.
Spiritual awareness is a sustained belief that there is much more to life than meets the eye, something greater than yourself, even though you have no evidence for it. Hold onto this belief or feeling, as it is very, very real!
One of the best ways to get in touch with your spirituality is to spend time in nature. It does not matter whether you live, in a town, city, or rural area, connecting with nature is imperative, as it will help to bring a sense of peace to your overworked mind, and it will uplift your spirit with its rejuvenating power. By doing so, it will assist with your spiritual development.
To become more spiritually aware it is also important to learn to control your inner dialogue. Becoming a more spiritual person involves monitoring your inner voice and making sure that your self-talk is healthy. Meditation can be particularly helpful in this respect, as well as recognizing any negative thought patterns or false beliefs that you may have.
How to Experience More Love In Your Life
Over the many years of doing readings, I have found that the number one inquiry people have is about love. This has given me the unique privilege to see love from spirit’s perspective. In the process I have found certain common themes related to love, as well as insights into how to experience more love in our lives. So, here are three spiritual laws that can increase your capacity to experience love.
Karma And Love
Karma is a principle found in nearly every spiritual tradition. It is expressed in many ways. You may have heard the phrase, “You reap what you sow,” for example, which can also be summed up as reciprocity. Simply put, whatever you give out comes back to you multiplied.
When discussing karma, it is important to understand that it is not punitive. Karma is not meant to be a punishment, but instead an education mechanism for the soul. Whatever we give out comes back multiplied. The multiplication aspect of karma is simply to teach us the behaviors that do work, and the behaviors that do not work in life.
It is also best, when discussing karma, to focus on the present moment rather than the long ago past. You cannot change the choices you made three lifetimes ago, and you also cannot change your behaviors ten years ago. But you can change your behaviors today, in this moment. This is where karma is a powerful tool.
Choosing A Spiritual Path With Heart
There are many blind choices we make when we are too young or inexperienced to make the best decisions for ourselves. We are born into a family, or raised in a culture, for example, with its unique traditions and beliefs, or lack thereof, and we are usually quite susceptible in our youth to these influences.
In the process of becoming an adult, the questioning of such beliefs and traditions leads us towards who we will become, to discovering what truly resonates with us, and what does not. But this is something we may have taken lightly in our youth, and therefore needs to be looked over several times in our life to find out with real sincerity what is truly calling us.
It is possible that being born in a traditional Christian home, for example, we felt constrained and limited, even small and powerless, ultimately causing us to reject all dogmatic religion. For someone else, brought up maybe in an atheist home, the search for God or faith may bring a profound sense of empowerment and life purpose that nurtures their life. It all depends on us as individuals, and how we process our own reality.
Carlos Castaneda writes in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, “Before you embark on any path ask the question: does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him.”
Our Spiritual Contracts
Before we come into this lifetime, we design a soul contract. We choose a family that we want to be born to and we plan specific things that we want to accomplish, such as career, relationships, children, and so on. The contract is about our spiritual self and therefore also includes those things that we need to overcome and learn from.
Some of the more important things in your contract may come as a surprise, because often they are those things you do not want to do! This is usually a sure way of knowing that something is contractual. The things we prefer to do, or have done, we’ve already mastered, but the challenges and obstacles offer us opportunity to overcome our fears and anxieties, to step forward and learn more, to grow spiritually.
Some contracts are also much longer than others. Some of us remain here for a long time, while others do not. I doubt anyone knows for sure, but for the time that we are here, we must make every effort to learn and grow from every life experience.
This is also why some of us attract the wrong people, and constantly get into the wrong relationships? In these cases it is often your soul contract trying to teach you to speak up for yourself and claim your self-worth.
When old souls come in, usually nothing bothers them. They tend to take things with a grain of salt. However, when new souls come in, they are often very excited about so many things and can’t seem to get enough done.
Learning To Love Yourself
Sadly, my inner-critic began speaking to me at a relatively young age and continued to do so well into my 20s and beyond. Personally, I feel this played a large part in me losing my job at the age of 24, during the 1980s recession. It was a time in which work was so hard to find, and when I finally did, even more negative self-talk began to have an effect on my life.
With no job and no money, I felt worthless, stupid, disliked, and that I had no potential whatsoever. Most fortunately, however, I proved myself to be wrong and later found, from experience, that the way to a happier, more confident and fulfilled life was by learning to slay that inner critic and start loving myself. Furthermore, you can too! Here’s how.
Firstly, remember that you do have a choice. Which one will you listen to: your inner critic or your inner guide? I remember the time when I told my family I was going to start working in the spiritual field. Yes, they laughed and said to me that it would never work out for me, and I that I could not do it.
Sadly, this boosted my inner critic once again, but at this particular time in my life, circumstances and the need for a more fulfilling job made me look at things from a different perspective.
Step Back And Let The Magic Happen
Have you been wanting something to happen in your life for so long and so strongly – like a proposal from your boyfriend or to purchase a new home – but you feel like it will never happen? You may want to consider the possibility that the Universe is throwing up blocks on these goals because it is not the right time for it to manifest. Never give up on your dreams.
If you think about your goal or wish as a puzzle, it becomes clear that the full picture cannot emerge until all of the pieces are in place. When the divine timing is right, you will be amazed at how perfectly and easily these pieces do fall into place!
Spending your energy on trying to control the process of manifesting can become very exhausting. You become stressed and anxious, wondering when you will ever be on the other side of achieving your goal. It is human nature to visualize your end result, which is a good way to continue the manifestation process, but be sure not to become too obsessive, or try to rush the process against what the Universe is delivering to you.
Slowing down and handing over control to the Universe can actually help your manifesting efforts. This not only align you better with what you are aiming to attract, but often also enables something to appear that’s even more rewarding than what you were initially hoping to manifest.