Spirit in the Village

Deepak Chopra - Consciousness, Awareness, Meditation and Art

Posted by Kevin Boon. Follow me on Twitter.

Deepak Chopra through his books and recordings was the first to explain to me God or consciousness from a scientific perspective. On Monday April 27th I had the opportunity to hear Deepak once again during his visit to Toronto.

What Does Science Really Know About God?

There are many perspectives on what we call God or consciousness, so many in fact that we rarely agree. Our religious or spiritual traditions teach us how to live and within stories we are encouraged to have faith however the biggest challenge is so much is un-provable from a scientific perspective. Chopra and other ground breaking philosophers and scientists we are getting closer to helping us understand God.

We are not our bodies

Chopra tells the story of life from the perspective of our bodies, our minds, beliefs and our emotions. He says science shows us today that we are none of these. He uses examples from quantum physics that describe how with each breath we take in 10 to the power of 22 atoms from the universe. That’s 10 plus 22 zeros atoms from just one breath. When we breathe out we do the same and with the simple act of breathing these atoms are re-creating our bodies, our organs, our heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, etc.

He says within 3 years the human body recycles 98% of itself and what makes up your body today might be atoms from a plant, a snail or other human beings. He says each human living today has over a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ or Buddha but we also have a million atoms that once belonged to Hitler or Saddam Hussein.

We intimately share our bodies and yet we live in this illusion that we are separate.

Science has proven that we are not our bodies.

Our thoughts, beliefs, emotions, possessions and relationships

What about our thoughts, beliefs or emotions?

Deepak describes while we can understand the physical nature of the body and mind there is something within that is unexplainable.

He calls it awareness. Other philosophers call it consciousness, aliveness and some call it God.

Deepak goes on to say that awareness is non-local meaning it’s not necessarily located within our body or brain. In fact we don’t know where it’s located. He says it is both local and non-local at the same time meaning awareness within you or me is part of a much greater universal consciousness or universal mind.

Why Does Knowing about Awareness Matter?

Our bodies, our possessions, our relationships, our jobs and those things we think are real are actually not real at all. He says our interest in the material world is more like a “superstition” or even an “addiction” especially when they take over our life.

If our bodies, minds, relationships or possessions are not real then why are we here? This is where most people get lost in this teaching because each one of us has a job, families, mortgages, wants and desires. This is where it becomes important to listen to the next phase of what he says. By knowing we are awareness we have the ability to tap into that awareness and improve the quality of our lives.

What I like about Chopra is his willingness to go after the highest truth and although is a little mind bending what he speaks of makes sense. The next part describes how he gets in touch with that awareness.

A Meditation to Connect with Awareness

Here is a meditation for getting in touch with that awareness.

• Close your eyes, relax, breathe, listen to your breathe and get comfortable.
• Think about those areas of your life where you feel grateful. Having gratitude opens the doorway to awareness.
• Put thought in what you want from your life from relationships, career, health, abundance, prosperity or whatever it is for you.
• Silently meditate and repeat within your mind the mantra “I AM” “I AM” and continue to repeat for 15 or 20 minutes. If you get off track then just bring yourself back into the “I AM” mantra.

This meditation is designed to connect us with the universal consciousness or awareness. By connecting with our awareness we can tap into the power of the creative process or the universal mind.

Everything in this world once started as a thought. To create a chair there is first the thought, the planning, assembling the materials and then construction. All things from buildings, to artwork, and even relationships are created with thought first.

Art and it's Connection to the Soul

The day after Deepak we went to the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) in Toronto and as I walked around looking at the works of art I began to connect with that sense of the awareness. Artwork sometimes can allow us to connect deeper within our soul.

One thing I know for sure is the awareness can only be explained to a certain point with words. In reality it can only be experienced.

I’m going to practice Deepak’s meditation of Gratitude, Desires and then the mantra of I AM and I’ll keep you posted on how that meditation comes together.

Here is an interview with Ellen and Deepak.

3 Steps to Support the Healing of Others & 6 Steps for Self Healing

Posted by Kevin Boon. Follow me on Twitter.

Lately events in my life have centered on friends and family, several who are going through a variety of challenges. Most times we are limited as to how we can help others and the best we can do is provide good thoughts, loving support and encouragement.

The Healing Power of Directing our Thoughts for Others

One technique that I learned that might seem airy fairy to some is to visualize sending light, love and healing energy to those we care about.

The process is simple and can be done with a simple meditation.

Here are the steps:

1. Visualize the light and love from your own heart center. See it as a ball of light.
2. Visualize the gathering light, healing energy and love from the universe, God or whatever you want to call it. Or you can simply collect positive thoughts.
3. Send all that energy and surround the person or situation with a blanket of light and love. Put them in an incubator where the feeling is of love, safety, insight and healing of their situation.

This process does not require you to be with the person but if you are great!

By simply meditating and visualizing light and love surrounding another person there can at least be a calming effect on the situation and sometimes positive outcomes come from this process.

Don’t get too caught up about my process or the labels I use. For example you might send love, light energy, healing energy, positive thoughts or a prayer. There are entire prayer groups that do this kind of work.

Come up with a process that works for you.

Helping those with Physical Ailments

Recently my mother-in-law was in the hospital with an unknown illness. We were not sure what was happening. As we visited her in the hospital I chose to use my meditation (above) and then simply raised my hands while I was with her to allow the flow of positive energy to move through my hands to support her healing.

As someone who feels energy there was a great deal of heaviness (emotional & physical pain) so what I chose to do was simply pour light into her with the intent of supporting her in her own healing. Ultimately we all make our own healing choices. She was very open to having me stand over her and she told me whatever I was doing felt peaceful and calming.

Well the good news is after two weeks she began to recover and with what appear to be some physiotherapy work she should soon be back to normal. Whatever happened to her I could certainly feel the negative energy lift as she became better.

Self Healing Meditation

Lately I’ve been sending out a lot of energy to others but what I discovered is my own energy has felt depleted. I had forgotten about myself. So I chose to give myself a self healing meditation to help create more balance. What I didn’t realize was how badly I needed this.

Here is the process that I used:

1. Write down all the areas where you feel you are out of balance.
2. Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and close your eyes and meditate.
3. Visualize a white light coming from your heart center and then take that light and hold it in your hands.
4. Bring your hands together and hold the light as if you are holding a ball. See the white light as you, your spirit and all those emotions, thoughts, feelings and areas where you feel out of balance.
5. With your eyes closed simply focus on the white light and direct your thoughts to providing more light, love and healing energy into the ball of light. See if you can feel the intensity and energy in your hands.
6. Breathe, focus your attention on the ball of white and keep doing so until the timer rings or you feel intuitively that you feel some relief.

After this meditation I went to bed. As I lay there about to go to sleep I lay on my back and then visualized my body wrapped in a cocoon and then I visualized surrounding my body in loving, light, healing energy.

When I woke up I felt balanced, refreshed and all the negative energy I was holding onto from the previous day had gone away. For me it’s a reminder that although helping others is good we also need to take care of ourselves.

4 Things Babies Can Teach Adults About Life

Posted by Kevin Boon. Follow me on Twitter.

This weekend we had an open house for our new grand daughter.

Babies have such a mesmerizing effect on adults. They take us back to a time when life was simpler and it’s interesting to watch adults (myself included) open up around babies. We must see something in a baby that maybe we have forgotten. Whatever it is we can learn from babies about how to live naturally and be in the moment.

Here are 4 Things babies can teach us:

How to Sleep & Feel Rested

Young babies require a lot of sleep. I’m amazed at how deeply they sleep and how restful their sleeps seems regardless of external noise or distractions. As life gets more complex we sometimes lose our ability to sleep soundly, feel rested or relax.

Be Free of Thought, Opinions or Judgments

Because their brains are not yet fully developed babies seem to have little thought and I’m guessing no opinions or judgments. They do seem to be able to sense when something is not right for them (intuition) but you can guarantee a baby won’t judge you for the shoes you’re wearing or hold a grudge.

Transforming our Emotional States

Babies can experience a myriad of emotions within a very short time. One moment a baby can be crying or screaming and at the next moment cooing and feeling relaxed, happy and content. Adults tend to hang on to our emotional states for longer periods and can carry a grudge for hours or weeks at a time. Babies show us that we can quickly transform our emotional states.

Love, Happiness & Fun

Babies naturally know how to smile, laugh, love and have fun. When they are in this state you can tell they are in the moment enjoying the experience. All babies want to be loved and do not carry the emotional and thought baggage. When they feel loved then play and fun are natural responses to the environment around them.

Meditation, yoga or tai chi often teach us to become aware and let go of our thoughts, relax our bodies, and let go of rigid emotions or judgements. It’s ironic that we start out this way, go out in the world and learn about life and then at some stage we long to go back to the place where we started.

Observations, Mind Stuff, Visualization, Goals & People

Posted by Kevin Boon. Follow me on Twitter.

The last few days have been interesting. In my post on Monday I spoke about 6 steps for letting go of our mental resistance. Yesterday I spoke about Anger and how it can be a motivator to help us to move forward. There has been so much going that I thought today’s post could offer some tidbits from what I’ve been learning.

Mental Resistance

Remembering the old adage what we resist persists. When we hold rigid opinions, judgments or beliefs about ourselves or others we are in resistance. The way to let go of our resistant thoughts is to become flexible in our minds, identify those thoughts that limit us and then shift our perception toward a more positive thought. When you let go of your judgments, rigid opinions or negative beliefs your mind relaxes and you feel great.

Here's the link to the 6 steps.

Negative & Positive Emotions

Positive and negative emotions are part of our experience as human beings. When we experience negative emotion it’s okay to sit with the feeling, meditate and know that like the flow of life this too shall pass. Contemplate what is bothering you, meditate and move your mind toward the positive thought. Staying in negativity too long can harm us. Sometimes we need triggers to bring us back into the positive, friends, family, books, music, words… whatever it takes… reflect and bring your mind back into the positive state.

Positive thoughts and emotions are the only way to go.

Meditation & Visualization

Sometimes our dreams and desires can seem elusive. We have our goals, we know what we want but at times it may feel like a pipe dream if it hasn’t yet happened. Some will give up and say this impossible, move into a negative mind state and stop the pursuit of their dream.

Let’s say you have a goal for your career. Here are some tips: write it down, let it come from your heart, start to see it happening in your mind, meditate and when you meditate visualize and see yourself in that place, in that position, working with those people, networking and having those positive experiences. Do it everyday for just a few minutes. Keep your goal front and center, focus but at the same time let your mind relax and see yourself doing and experiencing what you love. When negative thinking or negative resistance comes in just know it’s temporary and do what you can to get back into a positive frame of mind.

Visualization can have huge benefits in helping you to move in the direction of your goals.

People, Stories & Gratitude

Last night I had a chance to attend a song writers competition at a pub in Guelph, Ontario. Although I wasn’t participating (here's my song page) the talent was amazing and I couldn’t help looking at the musicians who got up on stage and being awed by their creations. Some of them were nervous, others seemed more relaxed, some already rock stars in their own minds but each one of them had a story to tell.

Over the past few days I discovered each one of us has a story to tell and the real essence of our lives is our stories. Finding our true passions is part of the story we tell and part of life’s journey. For some reason last night time stopped for me as I realized...

Finding our true passion is the only real truth in life.

Someone asked me a similar question at the site Divine Purpose Unleased and I didn't have an answer. Today I feel I have that answer.

Letting Anger be your Motivator

Posted by Kevin Boon. Follow me on Twitter.

Yesterday was an interesting day being one of those days where nothing seemed to come together. In the morning I wrote the post 6 Steps for Letting Go of Mental Resistance . Now most of my blog entries flow and I can complete them within 45 minutes to an hour. This one took almost 3 hours to write. Over the weekend I had done some work around letting go of resistance and it seemed like a no brainer. Thinking, I’ll write this up pretty quickly and I’ll be on my way. Boy was I wrong!

Monday’s are usually my toughest day to get into the flow of writing or work. My mind is usually a little more relaxed and I find it takes me time (at least the morning) to get up to speed for the week. The rest of my day flowed in some ways but by about 5pm I was spent. I was exhausted and my wife said to me, you look frustrated. I acknowledged that I was frustrated and took some time away to clear my head. At the same time there was other chaos going on at the house that pushed my buttons. I got angry, frustrated, pissed off and recognized that these emotions were not going away any time soon. Better to just relax, read a bit and ride them out.

As I went to bed last night I was angry, frustrated and pissed off at just about everything. I slept well and when did wake I lay there for a while processing these emotions.

Law of Attraction & the Downstream Flow

Jerry and Ester Hicks in their books on the Law of Attraction frequently say, if you want to move toward your goals learn to align yourself with the downstream flow of your life. My understanding of this teaching is to let your emotions be your guide and let go of rigid thinking (beliefs, opinions, judgments) Rigid thinking keeps you paddling upstream and against the natural flow of your life. In the downstream the goal is to get to the better feeling place, which most times we think is a positive emotion or thought, however Hicks also say that sometimes the downstream thought is a negative one like anger, frustration, even rage and resentment.

Observing my anger and rage I started to realize that all my anxiety and frustration from the day before was all about my resistance to going with the downstream flow (which for me yesterday and this morning is anger, rage and resentment).

Negative Emotions as a Positive Motivator

When I get into those feelings my anger and rage do not become outer manifestations for yelling or tearing a strip off someone, although some might note that I seem a little more abrupt. The anger and rage are my inner emotions that I connect to, observe and feel within my mind and body. Using meditation I let those emotions sit and simply become the observer.

Being in the downstream flow these emotions of anger, rage and resentment are actually positive motivators and give me more determination to go after my goals. This is good thing to note because quite often people think only the positive thoughts and feelings matter.

Today as I go about my day I’m going to observe and play with these emotions. What I’ve found is the downstream changes all the time and as long as I’m moving within the flow then I’ll know that I’m moving in the direction of my goals.

Footnote: Anger is not a place where you want to stay for long but when the emotions do come up it's good to meditate with them you'll find they'll eventually change to something more positive.