Does the idea of getting needles inserted all over your body make you queasy? Let your tummy rest. Acupuncture is an ancient medicinal practice with thousands of years of proven benefits — it’s worth overcoming your fear.
What can you hope to achieve? What should you expect the first time you go for treatment? Here is your beginner’s guide to acupuncture and five of its health benefits.
You might have fallen in love with yoga after your first class. However, two years later, your routine feels a bit stale. What can you do to reignite your passion for your practice?
What do you need?
The Practice:
Kindness to you is kindness to me; kindness to me is kindness to you.
Why?
I usually describe a practice as something to do: get on your own side, see the being behind the eyes, take in the good, etc. This practice is different: it’s something to recognize. From this recognition, appropriate action will follow. Let me explain.
Some years ago, I was invited to give a keynote at a conference with the largest audience I’d ever faced. It was a big step up for me. Legendary psychologists were giving the other talks, and I feared I wouldn’t measure up. I was nervous. Real nervous.
I sat in the back waiting my turn, worrying about how people would see me. I thought about how to look impressive and get approval. My mind fixed on me, me, me. I was miserable.
What is compassion but drifting in the immensity of life with an open heart? We bump into and pass by so many torn and budding lives along the way. Some are like us, many are not—on the surface, but under it all, we remain the same ounce of spirit carried in skin and bone. One of our jobs, then, is to learn how to relate to the cascade of others that rise and fall around us. The practice of compassion is how we learn that we are each other. And the practice of expression is how the heart knows itself.
Early on in life, there is an initiation into the practice of compassion through the commonality of our experience with others. If I have suffered and healed from a broken heart, then when I witness your heart breaking, I can easily identify with what you’re going through. If you’ve lost your job and come into my life when I’m laid off, we can easily meet in our common struggle through adversity. If I’ve felt betrayed by a friend or loved one and I’m with you when you are betrayed, we can quickly form a bond that will help each other through. This sort of compassion, based on our common experience, is an ongoing apprenticeship that never ends.
Meditation has a built-in problem that needs solving, the problem of noncompliance. Countless people have taken up the practice, motivated by the benefits of meditation supported by literally thousands of studies. The first few sessions go well, which is encouraging, but it is only a matter of time before meditation becomes one more thing we don’t have time for.
Letting your meditation drop away seems to affect every kind of practice, no matter how simple, including mindfulness, mantra meditation, Buddhist Vipassana, and so on. Even sitting for 10 minutes following your breath, which is the simplest meditation of all, doesn’t manage to stick. The result is that the vast majority of people stop meditating and never go back, while a much smaller number meditate “when I feel I need it.”
On the dawn of a new world in 2020, with a knowing that the time is here, now, for us ALL as an entire civilization on Gaia comes online for an upgrade in the Golden Age and I find myself in practice for entering “gate 3”; my perceived last level of this game. Gate 3 in the book is called the No-Key-Gate; a keyless door made of Fantasian selenium that responds to the desires of those trying to pass through. Only those that don’t want to pass through, can. The more you desire, the more locked it remains.
So, how did Atreyu do it?
He was on a quest of a lifetime! But in the previous mirror-gate, he dropped his identity, he had no memory of past, he had no desires, he had only the present moment experience of being in pure joy. And so he passes through the final gate and he meets Uyulala, the voice of wisdom, in other words, he gains access to divine knowledge. Upgrade! Expansion!
The practice of loving-kindness began to teach me to balance the love in my life out a bit. Any time I was uncomfortable making the loving aspiration towards myself, I knew that I'd be shifting focus shortly onto others, and that helped me through it.
We all mentally beat ourselves up from time to time. You know how it goes: "I can't believe I was that stupid," or "I'm too fat or thin," or "I'll never be good enough for him or her" and so forth.
Some of us, however, have deeper levels of self-denigration that have taken us to even darker places in our lives, which may stem from any number of reasons. Maybe we were abused growing up, picked on in school, abused drugs or alcohol or were sexually assaulted. Whatever the reason, it is that much more difficult for us to find a semblance of love and acceptance for ourselves than that of the average person, to which I was reminded of a few days ago while talking with a friend.
As we sat on my floor brainstorming ideas for a project, she asked me out of left field to name five things I like about myself. Well, after beginning to squirm a bit and struggling to come up with anything I said, "I'm compassionate" and "I'll help others whenever I can."
She was not impressed with my response and replied, "Yeah, those are nice, but they're more about helping others than about what you like about you," and damn, she was totally right. I have always been of the giving personality type rather than receiving, and like any good giver, it's often very difficult to receive on any level, whether material, emotional or physical.
Now, what I would have done here in the past is mentally beat myself up for not being able to name five things because, well, that's what a lot of us with low self-esteem and who are givers do. This time however, I didn't.
While I may have not done a stellar job at accomplishing her requested task, it did help me to realize I have come a long way in my process. I was able to tell her, "Yeah, I'm struggling with this, and I'm really fucking uncomfortable with it, but I know the qualities are in here somewhere," and today, I can honestly say I do know that, which is a realization I attribute much of to the practice of loving-kindness.
Formal spiritual practice is the very fundament for anyone who truly desires to consciously grow and unfold. It is through this formal practice that we make ourselves increasingly open and available to catch insights as to that which is true and real. That we may release and let go of the small and limiting beliefs and perceptions that keep us from going further. That keep us at the level of consciousness that we presently are at.
However we must never forget to use the moments in between to build spiritual muscles as much as we can. It is in those moments in between the formal practice that we are really strengthening those muscles.
Like Eckhart Tolle reminds us, it is one thing to have a regular practice of formal meditation, lets say in the morning. And a totally different other to maintain that level of presence throughout the day.
In other words, formal meditation, although beautiful and powerful, is not enough. Formal praying, although powerful and magnificent, is not enough. The same with forgiveness, visioning and surrendering. But it is what we do in between those moments of formal practice that truly builds those spiritual muscles we need.
Being a yoga enthusiast, if you likely toyed with the idea of unearthing the deeper layers of yoga through the intense and vigorous study or want to be a yoga teacher yourself, then you must be ready for yoga training. Explore the blog and know if you are ready for a yoga teacher training.
Yoga is the practice of the body, mind, and soul, an inward journey that makes us connect with the true ‘self’. The holistic practice was developed thousands of years ago in the lap of Himalayas, and today it has become the trendiest workout regime amongst the fitness freaks. Many of the yoga aspirants aspire to be an eminent practitioner and a yoga teacher themselves.
If you're contemplating with the idea of deepening the learning of ancient art of life through vigorous and intense training, then yoga teacher training is surely for you. Goals for undergoing yoga teacher training improve the home practice, allow you to have a better understanding of the holistic art and enhance your love and passion towards it. Yoga training even makes an entire career shift by transforming you into a full-time and refined yoga teacher.
In spite of being deeply involved with yoga practice, some yogis feel confused whether they really want to be a yoga teacher. With the mentioned five ways, find out if you’re ready to take a step in the transformative voyage of the body, mind, and soul with yoga teacher training.
People ask me regularly about how spiritual practice can guide us in responding to the state of our society. They tell me that while the teachings of compassion are alive and helpful in other parts of their lives, they seem out of reach when they read the headlines each day. In a recent e-mail from one of our DC community Spiritual Friends groups, members asked:
I’ve had many waves of anger, fear and aversion in reaction to the harm being perpetrated in our society. In my own practice, it helps to keep starting right where I am, not judging my own reactions, thinking “I shouldn’t feel this.” Rather than trying to let go of these feelings, I often reflect that “this belongs,” it’s the inner weather of the moment. Then I can feel the fear or aversion with acceptance and kindness.
Every New Year I wake up with so much gratitude and awe, and think of that fateful night in 1985, when I finally hit bottom, took my last drink, my last drug, and surrendered to my Higher Power. After all you can’t pray for deliverance and not let go. At some point the bottom rises to meet you. Then there is one moment of choice. We choose our future in these kind of moments, where we stand at the turning point and leap into the unknown or go back to the painful familiar.
Today marks 32 years of continuous sobriety from drugs and alcohol and its true that a lifetime has passed one day at a time. Who I was then, is not who I am today.
What I learned by being sober was first to live one day at a time. Every 24 hours if I lived with humility and gratitude I would be choosing a new future. It was in following a spiritual program that I learned that these principles can be applied to any struggle, anything at all that harms or victimizes. Addiction is a symptom of a spiritual and mental malaise at its core. Gratitude is the abracadabra that swings the door to a new world wide open.
I view spiritual practice as the freeing of awareness from identification with anything. That’s a spiritual practice. How that is done is through a wide variety of means. It can be done, for example, in the heart through a devotional practice. In other words, I can bring my mind through to love using some icon, or some being, or some person, and loving it so thoroughly that it frees the mind from all the rest of the stuff. Then I can go into that love so deeply, that I go into the formless love. I go through form into formlessness, and I come to that place of free awareness through love.
For example, I use mala prayer beads. This is a technique for reminding me that you and I are only relatively real. I’m keeping another plane of reality going simultaneously to remind me of the formlessness inherent in the form. In other words, I’m doing a practice while I’m talking to you.
Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extricating awareness from the identification with thought and sensation.
I am a work in progress … always … and some days are better than others. How about you?
One thing I see a lot in my clients and students, and something I have struggled with in the past myself … is staying connected to spirit … being consistent with my spiritual practice. I have found that for myself, that it is an absolute necessity even though for many years I felt like it was a choice. It’s not, not for me anyway. I soon discovered … that for me …
