Real Deal Meditation:Don’t Be Fooled

Don’t Be Fooled

In my years of doing healing work I have talked to many people about how to heal yourself. I have many people come to me and tell me that they want to get off their medicine or “have to” stop their medicine for some reason.  Then they look at me and ask, “well, what do I do next?” Here’s how I usually answer:

Let’s talk about a little common sense for a second here. First I am going to ask you is this:  Have you told your doctor what you are doing or what you are planning?  Second I am going to ask you, what are you doing right now for your illness?   Third, what are you willing to give up to heal and how much are you going to change in your life?

Telling your doctor what you are doing is very important because the medicine you’re on is trying to heal you in its own way.  You need to know why the doctor has taken that particular route for healing.  Plus you have to look at the side effects of getting off the medicine. Always remember to be smart and see what you’re getting into. 

I have asked you what you are doing for your illness to have you think. For example if you are still smoking and you have lung cancer think about it, does it make sense? What’s the first thing you could do to step toward health?  If you have sugar diabetes and you have not refined your diet to the best of your abilities, then take a look. See what could be your first step.  This is change. This is work.

The last question asks how much are you willing to give up and how much change are you ready to make?  Your life is connected to your body.  Look at the body, it will tell you what kind of life you live.  If your lifestyle is making you sick then you need to change it.

What I have done to heal myself was not easy.  It was a complete change in how I thought, how I treated my body and how I lived. Is it impossible? No, it is very possible! I did it and that means you can too but don’t be fooled.  Make a plan. Use common sense. Use the knowledge around you.  Make the changes that need to be made in your life and stick with them.  Then ask yourself, when you make positive change in your life, don’t you already feel better?

Real Deal Meditation: Check this out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4HGQHgeFE&feature=related

Real Deal Meditation:Learning Something about Myself

Learning Something about Myself

I learned something new about myself this weekend.  I learned how angry I have been about my learning difference.  The anger I have been holding was uncovered when I went to a four day class in energy work.  The funny part is I thought I dealt with those emotions years ago.

I have been through a lot in my life, just like everyone, but with all the meditation I have done I thought I would have noticed this.  I started asking myself how I missed it.  How did I not feel this raw anger?  How did I not see it?  Even in starting to write this post, I see an anger monster thrashing around inside of me and I am afraid to let my anger loose on world.

I am hoping writing this post will help relieve some of this energy.  So here is my anger about my learning difference, which is being dyslexic.  I am not mad about being dyslexic, I am mad that no one saw it when I was a young child.  I am mad that no one explained it to me or my mother.  I am mad that because I did not know that I had this learning challenge and did not even know it existed, I ended up believing I was dumb and I ended up at that conclusion myself.

I hate that I, me, myself, believed that I was dumb. I gave up on myself as a kid and I did not dream too big because there were things I could not do like write or spell or even read with any clarity.  I am mad that at forty seven years old, even though I write and read well now, I feel like it is a little late to dream big because now I am at an age where some things cannot be changed.

I am not down playing what I have done in my life but I am mad that I did not get to dream and I gave up.

On the other hand I can see that the disability that I am mad about is also the gift that allows me to be the meditation teacher I am and the healer that I am.  Maybe that should have been my dream when I was a kid.

As I have been writing this, I noticed that the monster inside of me is just sitting in the pit of my stomach now and it is not trashing around anymore.  The angry child in me is still mad but I feel it is moving quickly to healing and forgiving myself for not believing in myself.  Like a child being comforted it will be relieved and dreaming big will be my new gift.  I believe in time I will be fine.  Like any storm this will pass and the sun will shine again.

Real Deal Meditation: Connections and the Stories Around Them

Connections and the Stories Around Them

When electricity passes through a wire to complete a circuit there is a measurable field of energy that is created around the wire called EM or electromagnetic field. It is a field of energy that powers the circuit when guided by the wires.  I am mentioning this example because our minds do the same thing.

When we create a connection to a person, place, or thing there is a direct connection and it comes with an energy field around it.  The ego thinking can get involved in this energy, collecting bits and pieces of thought, until it puts them all together and there is a story around the connection.  After some time the ego explains in a huge story why this connection exists and the story begins to take on a life of its own. 

The story sometimes takes over as the connection. Sometimes the story enhances the truth of the connection, sometimes it takes away from it.  The story is what the mind goes to when it looks to tell your story of how you explain the way you’re connected to a person, place, or thing. There might be facts in your story, and there also might be emotion or texture.  When we add texture, we start describing these stories using words like love and hate: “I love that place”, or “I love him/her”.

The most powerful energetic connections are between people.  The story grows because people create their stories together.  This is how the mind works in our everyday life. Our connections are constantly changing: expanding and contracting. 

I mentioned this to a friend and he asked me, “if two people have a connection and these people create a story around their connection, are they lying?”  He went on to say, “because you are saying there is the connection and then the ego tries to explain the connection, creating information that seems to make sense to you, so you create your story on why the connection exists.”

My answer was no, it is not a lie because it is the ego that is creating the story, adding the emotion, texture, and reason why to the connection.  The ego is just doing its job.  However if you quiet the chatter of the mind, the story, you can see the connection in the present moment, without emotion, texture, or the reason why.  Quieting the chatter lets you drop the story and see the true connection and what it represents in your life.

I believe we are connected to everyone and everything.  I believe that like energy, we have a stronger attraction when two like energies connect or a large group of like energies connect and it creates a growth of universal learning for all that are connected.   Connections themselves are not bad  and the ego story is not bad if it is not hurting your well being.  It is important to understand how the mind works so you can use your connections and your stories about them to the best of your abilities and your life, to make the best for yourself.

Real Deal Meditation: Answer to a Question

This comment was asked on my other blog www.ihealedmycrohnscolitis.wordpress.com and I wanted to share it with you.

Comment: I Like Chris’s statement that we all have “something” we would like to overcome. (Nov 10 comment) I have been meditating for many years now and enjoy the peace it brings while I’m in that ‘space’. Then real life steps back in. I still feel powerless to change many areas of my life that cause overeating, self medicating, stress, etc. Living arrangements, finances in this economy are realistic, “in your face” concerns. So I do have fears about my future and don’t like the feeling of just passing time.

My answer:

What needs to be changed are not the issues but your thought of the issues.  When we focus just on what is wrong we forget what is right in our lives.  This voice in our head that tells us how much we are a failure is called ego.  This voice is of doubt. This voice creates lack in our lives that we (our personalities) react to with things like over eating, self medicating and so on.  If you look outside of yourself for the answer to your life you’re moving away from the answer.

Meditation is about moving yourself back into to your own universe, your own existence, your own life.  You wrote in your post “ I have been meditating for many years now and enjoy the peace it brings while I’m in that ‘space’. Then real life steps back in”.  Your real life is the one that is created deep inside of yourself, the one you see through using meditation as a tool to take back your life not just while you are in a “meditation space” but even when you are facing your day. Meditation brings out the true voice of spirit, soul, and/or universe, the voice with the true power of creation, the voice that gives you strength to have power over the chatter of ego.

We create stories of lack in our lives everyday using the ego. We support these stories and fulfill them by using food, pills, sex, and anything that is outside of our bodies and minds.  I have a question for people who meditate or even people who don’t: When you get to a quiet, safe place in your body and mind, do you have stories?  Do you have lack? 

If you use meditation only as a place to go to be safe then you are not using meditation to its fullest potential.  If you meditate to bring a better understanding and control of your stories, thoughts and life, then you are seeing how meditation is a tool and its effects are the real world. If you are using meditation to observe the thoughts and life that the ego generates all day instead of reacting to each thought as it is created, as a great master would, then you are using meditation to its potential.  When you stop reacting, you start creating thoughts that are in line with your real self and you can bring them into play with choices that will fulfill the grand destiny that awaits each and every one of us if we choose it.

Real Deal Meditation: The Noise of Silence

The Noise of Silence

I was talking in class today about meditation and thought.  I told them thoughts or even chatter are good to have in your meditation.   They asked why.  I explained, your mind is a thought machine, its job is to create thoughts and stories. Sometimes your mind attaches emotion and feeling to thoughts and stories to give them a life like feel.

So one student spoke up and said, “what about all this stuff about silence you talked about in your latest posts on your blog?”  My answer is this: chatter and thought are superficial noise. They are like sitting in meditation class and listening to a jack hammer that’s across the street working on the new gas station. If you observe the noise, soon the noise blends in with the silence.  Silence can be loud, it is your body making noise, it is passing cars, it is the jack hammer next door, it is chatter in your mind.

However, true silence is not having an attachment to the chatter, the jackhammer, and the cars passing by. It is witnessing the noise but not saying “oh there goes that jack hammer again”, it is not creating a story about how fast the cars are going by, it is not getting attached to how you feel about what you hear. Attachment is the real noise in meditation. I tell people in class that the chatter of the mind is like a passing train; you only get dragged down the track when you grab on to the handle of the passing cars.

We have noise around us all the time.  Silence is not about being in a noiseless environment.  Silence is about understanding that noise can be silence and only when you attach to the noise do you give it power and the break the silence.

Real Deal Meditation: Enlightened Master

I have been writing for my other blog www.ihealedmycrohnscolitis.wordpress.com so I am going to post some of the more interesting posts from that blog onto this one.  I hope you enjoy them.

Enlightened Master

I have been reading a lot of articles, posts, and books with “master” or “guru” in front of the writer’s name.  Well long story short I was talking with my editor and we got to talking about what does being a master mean?  So I wrote a post called “What is a true master” and sent it to her.  She read it and said it was pretty good, but with her tone said I could do better, without saying it.

As we talked one thing came to my mind: that I myself can only tell you my vision of what an enlightened master is.

So here is my vision. I am talking about more than self proclaimed masters or ones that have “made it” by studying scripture for twenty years or a person who has meditated for nine years staring at a wall.  These masters have what I call “time in” and earned a title. I believe this kind of mastership is based in this earth’s existence and is titled in ego if it does not go deeper into one’s being.

My vision of an enlightened master is this: you can tell right away, you see it in their eyes.   You feel it when you are near them.  They look at you and say “how are you?” and smile and your problems melt away.  When they speak in a group it feels like he/she is talking directly to you.  When they speak with you alone they open your eyes to the bigger picture and they leave you with hope. An enlightened master understands that we, our egos, live in a world of happiness, sorrow, and a year is 365 days.  An enlightened master also understands the big picture of all things and that their body is a vessel that carries them until they have no more use for it, at which time the body is shed and they move back into the big picture once more.

An enlightened master realizes the power of thought, intention, and belief.  In their own unique and natural way, he/she provides support to people in need and also understands that the person in need is the only one who can bring positive change into their life.  The enlightened master understands sickness comes from thought and the energy of thought brings it to being. He/she understands that change is also a thought linked to intention and the energy of intention makes change happen.

The enlightened master I speak of lives in every one of us.  We have choices to live in ego or in soul and make the best of both. We have the sight to see the big picture or just to the end of our noses.  We can live for eighty years or we can understand that this life experience is just a blink of an eye for the soul.  We can pray on an earthly level or open our sights to the big picture where there are no questions or words to be said because we are complete.

I have seen some of these enlightened masters come out in the news.  They have given the answers to help save our planet or save miners that are stuck underground or land a plane in a harbor without getting hurt. These masters are everyday people solving problems, bringing hope and saving us all.   I believe our enlightened master is there for our beckon call. I believe that when the ego moves to the side and relinquishes its control, the soul and the ego work together in harmony and the enlightened master appears.  We look to the sky waiting for answers. Look no further. Look into your heart and see the enlightened master that lives inside of you.  If you want to know what it feels like, feel and have hope.

Real Deal Meditation: Honing My Craft of Silence

Honing My Craft of Silence

I am really excited tonight about creating a new post for this blog.  I have so many thoughts and feelings, so many questions and even some answers.  It is a glorious thing, thought, because it can fuel creation. But in order for that to work you have to clear the mind so thought can become a tool.  When I think about meditation the first thing that comes to mind is honing my craft.  When I say that, people think that I am sharpening my meditation skills or training my mind. 

My craft is using the silence that is created through my meditation.  I meditate to create the silence. I use meditation as a tool to open a true connection to the universe.  I listen to the energy of the universe and allow it to flow through me.  Meditation is my warm up to have a conversation with my higher power, the universe, some might say god.

The energy that I speak of does not come and speak to me with words, word are so limiting.  The energy speaks by flowing through me, leaving me with a knowingness that I really can not describe.  It heightens my awareness of the true power of the universe. In the flow of this energy the silence is deafening.  I feel it washing away the fear of being human.  It brings understanding that there is a beauty that lies in every problem and every triumph.

Through this silence I can see the higher meaning in my everyday life. I understand I choose to make my life hard or easy by the way I use thought as a tool. I understand that with every breath I take I can quiet my mind and reconnect to that flow of energy, my higher power, honing my connection to the universe.

Meditation: The Key to Universal Spirit

Meditation: The Key to the Universal Spirit

I have been meditating for over twenty years and I will never be able to give you the true beauty of meditation using any language or with any printed word.  When you move past using meditations to observe your thoughts, to change your health, or manifest the life you want, you start to see something bigger than these thoughts, this health or this life. You start to truly grasp that you were never born and you will never die.  You understand that your body is just a vessel that carries your never-ending life force, and when this vessel is too small to carry your life force any longer it morphs and creates another vessel to keeps moving on the journey of spirit.  You, your ego, begins to understand how small its job is compared to the journey of the spirit.  You become in awe of your deeper self.

Meditation is the pull cord to move the drapes of the ego that blind us to the universal truth of the never ending life we call spirit. Connecting to spirit this way is nothing you can learn to do, it is not a trick, or a secret. It is the moment that you understand and you accept the path that you are walking in this vessel.  It is knowing to look at every situation and ask, why? It is to look at every person and say, what am I learning? It is to know change is your friend.

Meditation is the key to opening the door to the universal spirit  that is yours to behold.