life
Multi-Tasking Does Not Cultivate A Quality Life
I’m sure there has been a time in your life when you may have been too active on a hot summer, day without adequately hydrating, or juggling far too many tasks at once without taking a break. While you may have crossed the finish line, or pleased your boss by checking off all the tasks you completed, your sense of well-being was probably rock bottom, and your nerves frazzled. You possibly also questioned whether or not the best version of yourself showed up for life the next day.
Although many of us have found ways to multi-task our hectic lives, research is increasingly showing that effective multi-tasking is in fact a myth. Working on multiple projects at once doesn’t necessarily make us high achievers, or a successful super humans. Multitasking for most individuals merely replaces quality with quantity, and often leaves us feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from our deeper purpose.
As a spiritualist, I make it a practice not to judge how others achieve their everyday objectives and goals. But I do counsel many people who seem to have traded quantity for quality in their lives, and are missing out on the gift of savoring the sweet taste of personal achievement that is purposely focused and uninterrupted.
While old habits are tough to break, each of us has the innate capacity to build new processes within our mind. Psychological tools, such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for example, can be used to re-program the mind to think differently.
Metaphysics and New Thought spirituality also teaches that through positive thinking we can manifest healthier outcomes in all areas of our lives. Many indigenous peoples also have a long tradition of spiritual practices, such as vision quests, dream interpretation, divination, and rituals and ceremonies, to help seekers find their best path.
Guidelines For Spiritual Growth
Spirituality is a wide-ranging concept with many diverse perspectives. In essence it is the process through which our inner being seeks to relate to something bigger than ourselves. It is the search for the meaning and purpose of our human existence. Spirituality is about our soul or spirit, and the unseen realms, as opposed to material things and physical life. It is also the life-long pursuit of inner peace, unconditional love, and existential wisdom and understanding.
Many people believe that the secret to spiritual growth and development can only be found in a book, a lecture, dogmatic belief system, or some other product or service that will magically unlock the doors to spiritual insight, happiness, joy and fulfillment. However, spirituality is a unique, personal path that each of us can explore on our own, from within. The following guidelines may be helpful on your journey towards spiritual fulfillment.
Reflection
The first step in personal spiritual growth is reflecting on your life journey. To be spiritual is to be questioning and inquisitive. Spiritual growth is a process of constantly learning and improving. One must be willing to open yourself to personal and spiritual growth, and by doing this your world opens up and things become less scary.
Holding on to past events keeps us from experiencing new adventures, and the emotional baggage will only weigh you down. Accept your past mistakes and learn from them. Reflect on what changes need to happen for you to move forward.
We are all teachers. We are either teaching someone, or they are teaching us – both good and bad. Learn from your experiences and move on with life.
The Courage To Shed Our ‘Old Bark’
In recent readings, new romance has been indicated very strongly for one of my regular clients. This is a welcome new development, because for a long time, and to his annoyance, his readings tended to relate more to business than to affairs of the heart! He has been very open to new romance for a long time now, but it has been eluding him.
In many of his readings, his late father featured prominently and suggested that unresolved issues connected to his dad were actually impacting his self-worth. As a result, he also didn’t feel lovable or attractive enough to meet a life partner.
It seems strange though, that after reading for this gentleman for several years, he’d never mentioned his family. The subject only arose unprompted during the recent readings. This suggests that subconsciously he was ready to release that old baggage and to embrace positive change.
Because he was ready, we were discovering that it was important to now remove any deep-seated belief systems and blockages to his happiness, and for him to finally find a life partner who respected him, as opposed to the abusive relationships he’d known for years. I told him that he was like a tree shedding old bark!
This took me back years, to a time when I would help a former boyfriend, who was a horticulturist, with his seasonal work of pruning. He would climb the trees and prune those, and I learned to be quite the rose pruner at ground level.
A Symbol To Know The Unknowable
This morning, I ran into one of my friends in our little Spanish town, and we decided to grab a coffee and catch up. I was delighted at how she took an interest in my Om/Aum pendant. She commented on how I seemed to treat my pendant as something rather sacred, and with respect – an interesting observation! She loved the flow of the shapes, and asked if the pendant had any specific meaning.
I had to remove the pendant and study it closely to try and remember what I was taught years ago, in order to give her a brief description to the best of my ability. One by one I tried to connect with each swirl in the design and was surprised that I had remembered quite a lot of what my mentor had taught me. It was a long time ago, when we used the Om/Aum chant in our meditation sessions.
With my pendant on the table I began to explain the meaning of the dot at the top of the symbol, and recalled that this related to the silence after chanting Om/Aum. It represents the Enlightened Self, and is known as the transcendental state of Turiya. Continue reading
Poco A Poco
I thought today of how certain expressions tend to stick in our minds; thoughts which we adopt for a while, or even a lifetime. It can be the words of a famous writer we have read somewhere, an expression in a song, or even just the ideas of somebody we just had a brief conversation with.
Internationally renowned author and speaker, Wayne Dyer, once said, “You will never get everything done.” It’s a good feeling at the end of the day, to know that we’ve gotten through much on our ‘to-do list.’ But for me, I also gain some comfort from such as words of wisdom as Wayne Dyer’s, as well as the poem, Desiderata, which advises us to, “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste.” Continue reading
Life After Death
I remember going to my first funeral. We traveled a few states away to attend this. My mother’s uncle had passed and they felt it was okay I attend. I was pretty upset only a few years before, because I didn’t get to go to my grandpa’s funeral. I was in kindergarten and remember feeling left out in that I couldn’t say goodbye.
I remember it like it was yesterday, looking at the casket as he lay there, and his wife crying over him and his sisters, all aged of course, they must have been in their 60’s. Being a typical Italian family, they were in the back talking about his life and trying to make things right, and going over past negative arguments and trying to make sense of his passing, and trying to find peace in it.
I remember, while observing all of this chaos, thinking to myself that he is here; he is observing us and watching his funeral. I felt he was at the foot of his coffin. I could see a figure once I focused my eyes, and I realized he was in fact not dead – his energy was alive! Continue reading
From Scared to Sacred
We all have our journeys in life to travel, we all have our paths to walk and we all have our very own (we would like to think) demons to slay on our path to ‘enlightenment.’
From scared to sacred is but a tiny maneuver, the tiniest shift in your consciousness, which can allow the true and awesome power of the Sacred and the Divine to cut through the fear of the scared. It is as miniscule a shift as it is to change the spelling of the words themselves.
You may think it is impossible and you may think it is too hard to do, but in reality the easiest thing in this world to let go of is fear. It is all too easy to walk around coming from fear and feeling scared. Most people live their lives that way, as if it were the norm to do so. Well, it is not the norm. Continue reading