Physical closeness, hugging someone, loving someone, making love , holding hands, touching someone’s arm, these are experiences that we need in our everydaylife. Many people, many people who are single, widowed, who live alone, older people, younger people, everybody needs the feeling of touch. Everyone wants to be touched. As human beings, touching is connecting. It’s sharing love. It’s connecting on an energetic level. It’s connecting on a physical level. We can’t undervalue the experience and the need for touch. Yet many people go through their life not extending themselves to others and not receiving the kind of physical communication they need. I wanted to create this post to share with you and to invite you to remember that the act of touch is not only an exchange of energy, but it’s an exchange of love. Many people go through life and they feel fearful, they feel it’s inappropriate to ...
My work as a teacher is to help people make their life their practice. Simply put, this means we use our everyday life as our practice pad to work in the energies, the spiritual values that we say we hold dear. Compassion, patience, tolerance, wisdom, understanding. These are a few of the values we work with every single day. What I’ve noticed is that often we try to make very big changes in our life when really all we need to do are make small changes, one step at a time. When people set out to change their behavior, whether they seek to “watch their thoughts as they have them or “observe their feelings” as they happen, they are looking to make a really big shift. That’s not a simple or automatic process. What often happens is that we seek big changes and on an unconscious level we get overwhelmed, ...
The power of one. The power of oneness. In history, in present time, we hear stories of people. People with simple lives who made a difference, who stepped up, who spoke their truth. Through speaking their truth, they not only created an event. They created a movement. Marin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Mother Meara. You know these names. You know these people. What defined them from anyone else was the simple fact that they not only had a truth, but they took the action to speak their truth. When they did, their truth resonated with thousands and millions of people. Why? Because we all resonate with the same energy. We all have within us the energy of that which created us. It’s in all of us. When we hear truth we know it and we respond. What enabled these seemingly simple people to create movements, not only within us, ...
The word grace is one of my very favorite words. The definition of grace, because there are many definitions of grace, the definition that resonates for me is lack of judgment. Lack of judgment. When you hold someone in grace, you hold them in a place where there is no judgment. Everything is as it should be. They are as they should be. What they are is just enough. Holding someone in grace. Holding yourself in grace. Holding yourself without judgment. How many of us can do that? Can you? Can you hold yourself in grace? Do you hold yourself in grace? Tell us about that. Where are you on your own grace list? Share with us here your thoughts about grace in regards to this definition, not holding judgment. No judgment needed. Share with us where you are on your own grace list. We want to know. ...
“It is not your beliefs, it is your behavior that counts. It is not your faith, but your function that counts. It is not your conviction, but your character that counts.” These are words by Swami Sarvagatananda. They resonate quite loudly with me. It is not your beliefs, it’s your behavior that counts. What is he telling us? It seems to me it’s not your thoughts, it’s what you do with them. It’s not your intentions, it’s the attention you put on them. It’s not your faith, but your function. People call themselves Christians, they call themselves Jews, they call themselves Muslims. Sometimes their behavior, their function is anything but what their faith calls for. It is not your conviction, but your character that counts. You may have grand ideas, but how you walk in the world, does it reflect your ideas, your beliefs?? Many of the people that come ...
When I first heard the phrase, “Namaste and send them on their way,” I thought it was a joke. I thought it was funny. I thought it was a curious and funny saying. Then my teacher explained to me that it was very serious business. It seems as if, “Namaste and send them on their way,” is a tool we have, a choice we make when we want to honor somebody in our life who is no longer in alignment with our values or our thinking. This might be an acquaintance or a very dear friend. It can even be a family member. We’re not banishing them from our lives. What we’re choosing to do is remove ourselves from their energy field for a period of time. We may make this choice because they constantly speak of things in a very negative way, or they’re not honest. They’ve done hurtful ...
What part does drama play in your world, in your life? Does it sneak in just a little bit? Is it not at all apparent? You don’t let drama into your life? Or do you live for drama? Let me tell you what I mean when I say the word drama. Living for drama, living with drama is staying inside of the stories of perceived hurt, pain, and disrespect that you experience in life. One of the very first steps when one begins a journey, on a spiritual path, is to stop living inside your stories. Leave them behind. Telling stories over and over and over, the calling of the friend, the support groups, over and over and over, leave it behind. Why? Because when you repeat your stories you are bringing the energy of the pain into your existence. If we’d like to leave that pain behind, why would ...
In this blog post I’m going to discuss one of the most important tools that we can use as we make our life our practice. We who choose to build a deeper, more meaningful life, who choose to work with our inner life and not just the outer life work with this tool every day. It’s an important tool. The tool is choice. Choice. It’s yours. I want you to take it. I think back to a few years ago when my older son was about to graduate. It was the day of his graduation and I was so excited. I was proud. I was pumped. I was looking forward to sharing the day with my family. The morning of the graduation arrived and I received a call very early in the morning from my younger son. Then the day seemed to begin to spin out of control. The circumstances ...
Fear. I am going to suggest a new way to experience and use the state of fear. I’m not talking about the kind of fear we experience when we walk off a curb in the middle of a busy street and realize we haven’t looked to the left and right, or the kind of fear that we put ourselves through when we sit in the front of a roller coaster at an amusement fair. I’m talking about the fear that creeps up, when we wake up in the middle of the night. The fear that paralyzes some people when they’re starting new projects and they can’t move forward. The fear that tells somebody that they can’t accomplish a new project, a new goal that they’ve started on. We’re told all the time that fear is not a state to live in. it’s not an experience we want to move forward ...
Years ago when my children were little and I was married and I had my consulting business, I was a very busy person. I was a very stressed person. I was beginning to really bring the elements and the understanding I had of spiritual principles into my life. I was just starting at that point to integrate them. I was very far away from where I am today, 20 years later. It was a possibility for me and it was a very big practice for me that was important. Here I was, in the middle of this learning of this integration-the beginning of this integration and I was still very stressed. One day, in a particularly stressful moment – I don’t even remember the story, the reason behind the stress-it really never matters. The reasons never matter. The results are what we work with. On this particular day I was ...