“Once the self-illusion is seen through, the awakening process will unfold whether we are actively contributing to the process or not.”

We tend to think that there’s a “me” that does everything and the language reinforces this phenomenon strongly.

The “me” or the “I” is attached to every single experience, thought, past and present and most of us are lost without the attached self to our existence. Although we are governed by our level of awareness throughout life, we are not always conscious of our motives and as we mature and evolve, a deep feeling of resentment sets in ruling the current perceived reality.

Many of us are burdened with the past and carry the pain of knowing we could’ve lived it differently. We tend to drag around the past wounds and turn it into an anchor of suffering.

One of the most powerful concepts I’m exploring recently is discernment, the ability to discern our own thoughts is truly extraordinary.

When we start to discern the interpretations and assumptions, we realise what is added to the story by thoughts and the illusion starts to fall away. There’s a saying that freedom belongs to the one who doesn’t carry the previous moment to the present moment and the past can be a powerful ally in discovering our gifts, not a prison sentence.

Love and Gratitude

 

There is a growing trend that love is our natural state available to all and comes packaged in beauty, fluff, rainbows and unicorns.

We are subject to mass engineering in such a belief that is detrimental to our evolution.

Survival is the natural state of humankind, not love. Our minds are not good at processing what is real. According to the Evolutionary perspective, our attention is always focused on survival and the rest is filtered out as this phenomenon was a huge advantage to the hunter-gatherers to stay alive.

In any given moment, we are bombarded with more stimulation than our minds can process therefore the mind will pay attention to perceived threats and filter away the rest.

Because of these attentional filters, love becomes the most difficult work. To step fully into the state of love, it’s going to take more than positive affirmations, practicing yoga, wearing crystals and burning sage.

According to Cadell Last, we must go to war for love, not the romantic kind of love but love for all and ultimately love for ourselves. That’s the real work.

It requires deep awareness to step fully into the expression of love. It requires digging into perceived self, facing emotional attachments, addiction to pain, acknowledging dysfunctions, understanding distractions we cling onto, accepting our shadows and accepting ourselves.

How can love be our natural state when we are walking around in judgement and fear?

Everything in life flows from the relationship to ourselves. To be a warrior of love is to lean into your rawness, vulnerability, courage, to discern the truth.

To be a warrior of love is to wake up, to embark on a soul journey, to self-acceptance, to remove the walls around your heart, to surrender and to trust the process.

Love and Gratitude

 

Emotional trauma lives in the autonomic memory of the body. It’s a painful paradox because the exact response that protected us from harm is also keeping us stuck.

That’s why a person can meditate for a decade and hardly change because the practice is reduced to a mental process.

Profound awareness is in our bodies not heads, hence why the emotional pain becomes imprinted in the body and body’s intelligence is often untapped resource in psychotherapy.

The story is told by the somatic narrative; posture, gesture, eye gaze, movement and the way we hold our presence is arguably more significant than the story told by words.

The language of the body communicates implicit meanings and reveals the legacy of early childhood trauma and early dynamics with caregivers. Your biography becomes your biology.

The body is the unconscious and the simplest ways to access deep emotions and distortions is through movement practices as movement invites the unconscious to release whatever lies within. The primary goal of the physical movement is to apply body intervention. Yoga, Tai Chi, dance are just a few examples of many more practices that has the capacity to heal the body and raise awareness to shift the consciousness.

“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”

Love and Gratitude

#mentalhealthawarenessday

“Remember you might be the lighthouse in someone else’s storm.”

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain but excruciatingly hard to bare. There is a truth in this pain that we need to pay attention and sometimes we need to go back to go forward.

Throughout our history the evolution of mental disorders are subject to judgment, stigmatisation and social exclusion.

Today, we live in an incredible time of consciousness shift and able to look at mental health holistically with great awareness but there’s still so much work to be done.

We now know that anyone can transcend and manage their symptoms. Recovery is a radical decision, a journey, not a destination but a process.

Healing doesn’t mean the disorder never existed, it just means that it no longer controls you.

Start where you are.

Use what you have.

Do what you can.

What mental health needs is more unashamed conversation, heart centred approach, courage to crush the walls we built around it.

If you know someone who’s effected, remember to hold space, go the extra mile, become the lighthouse in their storm.

Love and Gratitude

The power of prayer is undeniable to those who are deeply devoted. It’s a vital practice since the beginning of time across all human life.

Many people believe that prayer is a religious practice to communicate with God.

Let’s talk about prayer…

According to Caroline Myss, prayer is the intimate mystical experience with the non-physical world that changes us.

Prayer is one of the most profound ways we can enter a deep state of consciousness. It’s our sacred power. As we are becoming fearless in our spiritual evolution, we can honor this ancient method and create an extraordinary ally on our soul journey.

It is in our wiring to transcend the limitations of reasoning of the mind and connect with an inner realm of mystical truth. As humans we are eternal seekers by nature and prayer offers the courage to go within, reflect like we’ve never experienced before through intentional inner dialogue, speak our deepest truth, fears, desires, wants.

Prayer is a force that allows us to declare our awareness, voice our affirmations. Prayer is an invitation to be truly authentic, vulnerable, stripped naked in our existence. Prayer is honoring our ancestors who walked before us and acknowledging the people who are walking beside us. Prayer is offering our respect to the spirits, guides, non-physical energies. Prayer is profoundly appreciating life, walking in gratitude, connecting to the self. Prayer is an expression of humility, understanding that we are insignificantly significant, understanding the fragility of life, and mightiness of love.

Prayer is hope, believing, a conviction in our actions that we can move mountains. Prayer is acceptance, surrendering, letting go. Prayer is falling on our knees and opening our hearts. Prayer is discernment.

Prayer is a gift.

Love and Gratitude 

Image credit Ilonka Karasz

Incredibly intense five months of soul evolution, trials, challenges, triggers. According to Astrology, we have come to the end of a powerful cycle of Saturn Retrograde.

Saturn completes a full orbit around the Sun approximately every twenty-nine years, and this retrograde delivers a major shake-up and extremely strong waves of emotions to a point where you may have wanted to throw everything away, quit and have tantrums. Its intense energy cannot be ignored and forces us to undergo messy but necessary life-changing decisions. We can’t prove there’s a connection between cosmos and an individual person, we can only say there’s a correlation that exists in the movements of the planets and the changes in our lives.

I’ve rarely paid attention to Astrology and the cycles of the planet, yet I’ve found myself in strong tendencies to immerse in brutal letting go, purge, release the certain painful situations and entanglements of the past unconscious construction of the self and parts that no longer work. As I’ve been observing myself in the awakening process of multidimensional perception and intuition, I feel connected to the planetary flow of consciousness that interconnects the shamanic paradigm, and it’s all happening simultaneously. There is a pull, invitation, and innate sense of understanding that being one with our planet’s intrinsic energy is the key to our evolution.

Today marks the end of this intense cycle, completion of a profound phase giving us an opportunity to transcend all patterns, throw away the outdated contracts, old patterns, and transition into a new life chapter with grace, humility, awareness, and a smirk on our faces knowing that we’ve done the work with courage, until next time.

Love and Gratitude

 

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Nature, where have you been all my life!

I struggled for decades with connection; to the fellow humans, to nature, to self, to human experience in general. This emotional numbing is also known as coping survival skill during adverse childhood events. According to Psychodynamic perspective in psychology, self disconnection is a direct result of childhood trauma, which affects our subjective experience with ourselves and the world around us. When we experience overwhelming fear and pain in early life, our survival systems are activated to protect us from danger. Once these survival mechanisms are activated, we move onto a different developmental path and begin to live an altered life biologically and psychologically.

We now know that emotional trauma is also passed down across generations as our ancestors carried unresolved trauma. Consequently, the trauma is hidden biologically in the nervous system and locked away; therefore, we must remain disconnected to avoid any emotions from surfacing. We may even create a desperate need for control and sabotage any healing process.

The good news is, recent studies show that having contact with nature has unlimited positive effects, biologically, and emotionally. Nature offers nourishment so freely, healing our health right down to the cellular level. Over thousands of years, humans evolved in an interwoven relationship with nature, and in today’s world, we are far more disconnected from our mother earth just like we are disconnected from ourselves.

Reconnection with our mind, body, and spirit requires a deep grieving process, as we begin to reconnect to our severed heart. There is no shortcutting, and seeking a solution in talk therapy or a pill will not solve the suppressed emotional pain. The process of transcending demands surrender and letting go of the control we’ve built to avoid bringing conscious awareness to those aspects of ourselves that we have masterfully ignored.

The earth is our home, our sacred living mother. We must restore our relationship with nature. Commit to going out to take a walk even if it feels uncomfortable. In time, something inside will shift, and nature will reflect back to us our inner landscape and maybe, we may drop our tricks and come to terms with the reality that was no longer is. We must learn to walk in freedom with awakened hearts feeling truly connected. Great Mother Earth, Pachamama, continually giving life to all and to her, we will return.

Love and Gratitude

“If your presence does not move a person, your words certainly won’t.”

How much talking do you do on an average day?

How much do you listen?

How often do you practice silence intentionally?

Silence is one of the critical teachings of Mysticism in expanding consciousness. It’s the first step in contemplation. In silence, we become quieter and still within, observing our interactions with the world around us to acquire a greater understanding of the Self.

There are many ways we can practice silence. One type of meditation that takes silence very seriously is Vipassana Meditation. The word Vipassana means ‘insight,’ and it’s one of the worlds ancient techniques attributed to Buddha. It’s an incredible way to awaken through introspection and solitude that leads to a drastic transformation.

Nowadays, in our information-driven world, there’s a complete lack of discipline in the way we use words. Conversations are like a competitive sport, in which the person who talks the most makes the cleverest point.

Mostly, we hide behind chatter, using it as a distraction to avoid dealing with what’s beneath the surface and cling onto an empty and vague notion of spirituality that is emerging across humanity. Some people are afraid of silence because silence holds a powerful magnetic field that can be sensed by everyone within the field. Silence is the gateway to infinite dimensions, entire unspoken wisdom of the unified energetic field. It’s the secret to walking the mystical path, encountering deep awareness, becoming one with the divine, tapping into the cosmic consciousness.

Sometimes we need to stop talking and sit in silence. Silence is a gift in an age where no one has the time to sit still. Trust the silence. It is in this space we come to know the Self and depths our Soul. Silence is the starting point of where we are at on our Soul journey. Join me in practicing deliberate and intentional silence daily. No person, place, thing, or wonder can evoke such an incredible understanding of truth as silence does. There is a treasure to be found in silence.

Love and Gratitude.

Do you believe in a soulmate? Twin Flame? Do you believe relationships are fated? Do you believe that they are serving a higher purpose?

Let’s talk.

“Life is a filter reflecting your innermost thoughts.”

We are never drawn by accident to those relationships we tend to give names such as twin flame, a soul contract, soulmate, the one and so on. The intimate relationship serves a deep unconscious psychological need. According to John Gottman, what we are looking for in a relationship is not love, it is familiarity. It is not a coincidence that we bond with the people who carry similar unconscious blueprint that is carried forward from early life experiences.

As children, sometimes exposure to love is a chaotic experience. This is one of the reasons why most people are stuck in toxic relationships because the familiarity we seek is often destructive. In many cases, as the relationship deepens, people tend to suppress and withdraw not to rock the boat and in some cases, match the behavior that drives the chaotic dynamics, and most of the time, we try to change the other person because of the change we deeply crave.

The difficult relationship you are in now is the mirror of your unresolved internal conflicts in ways you cannot see. The hard truth is, everyone is your mirror. Every relationship is the representation of your inner relationship and beliefs staring right back at you, including the abusive relationships. At the root of all, you will find a severe lack of self-worth.

The conditioned childhood blueprint becomes the shadow projected in intimate relationships. The wounded inner child plays out, again and again, seeking acceptance, validity, and attention, desperately holding onto irrational, self-destructive repetitive relationship patterns reinforcing the emotional deficit and rejection.

As Rumi once said, “Your task is not to seek for love, merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” External events mirror the internal state. Since our experience of life is an experience of thought, our predominant beliefs dictate reality. There are no exceptions in the cosmic flow. You are the master of your own perceived reality.

Perhaps believing in the higher purpose of the dysfunctional relationships may offer comfort, however, meaningful relationships don’t come from fate, destiny or a supreme being. Meaningful relationships come from within, come from our attitude, come from our willingness to accept our own shadows and letting go of the superstition and practice consistently investing in the relationships that matter. How can we love the other when the love within is confused, conflicted and lost?

Love and Gratitude.

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

I’ve always wanted to write about “Resistance” since this concept came into my awareness around a few years ago and resistance kept winning over until now.

So why now? You ask…

Recently we’ve kicked off another online course with our team along with over 80 students from all around the globe, and it’s very timely to talk about resistance as I watch the resistance unleash itself onto our students whom will undergo a transformative shift in just short 8 weeks.

According to Steven Pressfield resistance arises from within, a force of nature, an engine of destruction, programmed to prevent us from doing the important work. I also experienced that resistance’s goal is to prevent us from making life-changing decisions, following our passion, stepping into our Soul’s calling and speaking our truth.

Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our Soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on Earth to give that no one else has but us. The more important a call to action is, the more resistance we feel towards pursuing it. Resistance is like the Terminator, reduce it to a single cell, and it will continue to attack. It never sleeps, resistance is the enemy within. Resistance is not out to get you personally, it doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t care. Everyone experiences resistance. We feed it with power by our fear.

Resistance by definition is self-sabotage, it kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling. And just when you overcome the resistance, you may find that those close to you begin acting strange and the entire family will enter into the resistance battle with emotional force to sabotage you.

Resistance comes in many many ways; The resistance of victimhood, self-medication, self-dramatization, procrastination, self-doubt, isolation…We often believe that our obstacles are the external unfortunate circumstances, but it’s not, it’s our inner force of resistance creating external obstacles. The only way to concur the resistance is to master the fear. Resistance hates it when we turn pro. We come into this world with a specific journey. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a Self to become.

Profoundly verbalized incredible wisdom by Steven Pressfield from his book, The War of Art.

Love and Gratitude.