Watch the video, Healing and Spiritual Awakening and learn about the 16 areas that are vital to continue the journey, evolving, and transformation or read the blog below.
Strangely or not, healing through the spiritual awakening process is the same for our evolution of our body, mind emotions, and spirit. We are evolving through this time and need to include certain activities and methods for healing our past as well as continuing our journey. It is in this process we discover who we are, our purpose if we do not already know, and our deep inner connection to our lives and our dharma. Dharma is our right path in the world, and role and within the Cosmos that does not create karma but instead holds us steady on our Purpose in its unfolding. More about this area below.
We are Healing Ourselves
We are healing ourselves, those around us by our commitments to our truth and healing, and to the past relationships by no longer being willing to participate in energy that bogs us down. This does not mean we are less responsible, less caring, or less evolving in our destiny. It means the opposite. We are more caring, more present, more on our Purpose our dharma, more in the flow, and more building the new in this time of transformation.
The following areas are components of ourselves for our continuous healing that we need to attend to. Get the nuances of the areas you may be aware of and learn about other areas that will surprise you. Let’s dive in and in each area there are methods you can include to connect and expand into.
Nature
Nature in understanding deeper meanings of what is sacred and what the soul needs. spiritual resource that nurtures the soul. It offers a wellspring of inspiration, solace, and inner growth to those who seek it. Inspiration, cycles rain and sun, wind, storm, and noticing the changes in the sky, temperature, landscape and wildlife presence. And in observing the night sky and stars It has guided our creativity and deepened our understanding of the universe. Countless poets, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have drawn wisdom from the natural world.
Sanctuary
Nature is also our sanctuary because it is a respite from the outside world in the sounds and visual areas that soothe our souls. Whether we are walking in the forest and taking in the odors that helps us relax, being at the ocean and hearing the repetition of the rhythms of the waves, breathing in the saltwater air, or in the desert. Nature gives us all the elements that connect us deeply to our inner selves and the cycles of time.
Other ways we connect to nature is through noticing trees around us, having a garden that we tend that gets us outside regularly, going to outdoor farmers markets, seeking out botanical gardens, natural water sources and arboretums, and even plant nurseries.
~Ways to Connect to Nature and Earth
Earth Stewardship sustainability, recycling, volunteer for clean ups in nature and to restore the environment, commit to be in nature, plant trees in your yard or help to plant trees in your community, look at ways to lessen your carbon footprint by using less plastic and learning about buying sustainable products, lessen foods that contribute to the fast food waste industry, make purchases that support slow clothing movement, learn about household waste, paints, lightbulbs, plastic bags, batteries and solvents and where to recycle
Creative Expression
On our soul’s journey in healing and synchronizing with our dharma our Purpose and alignment is our creative expression. In all of the methods listed here are areas that heal, and this includes the area of finding our voice, finding our expression and creativity. Our creative expression manifests in many unlimited ways seen as art and in ways we work with others, systems, finding resolution, and developing
resilience. Our creative expression cannot be washed out of us but is constantly expressed as our passion and innate self, sometimes even not obvious to ourselves because it is us. In our creative expression we can become lost and lose sense of time which is called being in the flow and another way that is a type of meditation with all the features of its benefits. The list of amazing life-changing benefits is coming up.
Social Support Community and Connection
Through the changes we make on our spiritual awakening journey and healing our relationship with others changes. Discovering and making new connections with people that understand our language and some of our experiences is part of our human experience and social needs. There is often an evolution to our relationships as our interests, certainty, commitment to our journey evolve and transcend limitations and even change direction. Close relationships within families may also take on different dynamics as the contracts shift, boundaries may change, awareness and forgiveness, compassion, and commitment adjust, uplevel. Through all of this the need for us to support others, be in service, do acts of kindness, and receive support is innate to our journey.
~An act of kindness a day changes you! The following act of kindness is a commitment to do for the rest of your life every day. Find a stranger and speak to them words of encouragement and beauty that they will remember for the rest of their life. Done in person is preferable. This also can be done when chatting with tech support and is often a significant upleveling for people who are chatting with people who are complaining. Make a journal of each day with the date and one word to describe the feeling your experienced. It becomes an interesting exercise to see who will show up. There is no limit you can do in a day. This is injecting into the quantum field the energy to change the paradigm from lack of compassion and kindness to a better world. We never know what ta person is going through and how that will make their day, week, or life.
Gratitude
When people are grateful there is a change in their energy and focus shifting from complaining, gossiping, disadvantages, lack, hyper-focus on perceived or real physical, mental, and emotional health issues, and other negative thoughts. Having gratitude does not imply a person overlooks or neglects, does not stop helping others or the environment, or making a contribution to areas that are in need, or making changes in our social and culture that need attention, like helping the homeless or abandoned animals and creatures. Having gratitude also does not mean we relinquish or stop having boundaries.
Gratitude for simple things that are around us, including our five senses, our limbs, and body are interventions upon these above negative perspectives that infiltrate and often dominate our lives unknowingly.
How does being grateful affect us? When we connect to the feeling of gratitude it lives in the area of our heart which is the front of the body, on the chest. The feeling is openness, connection and appreciation. The awareness of the feelings is key and sometimes takes practice in willingness to feel. “It is not happiness that brings us gratitude. It is gratitude that brings us happiness.”
These connections to gratitude are not superficial but genuinely cultivate a positive mindset that flows into how we relate to other people. When we show gratitude to others, that is recognizing their showing up, it creates a reciprocal sense of connection and kindness and appreciation that can lead to deeper more fulling relationships. And generally when we are more grateful we are cultivating a sense of contentment and observation that contributes to our spiritual awakening process and helps to release negative energy.
An Unexpected Connection with Gratitude and Grief
Another component of gratitude which is unexpected is its positive interrelationship with grief. When people have a gratitude practice grief and loss is experienced differently. It is not that grief is lessened or taken away but instead because gratitude practices develop resilience grief is less devastating because it develops coping mechanisms and inner strength that also are the opposite of sustaining stress.
What does the research show on how gratitude affect us?
There are many different areas that are positively affected by using gratitude which include
- Fosters restructuring in the brain which promotes positive thinking
- Reduces fear and anxiety because there is a regulation of the stress hormones
- Stimulates the release of dopamine and serotonin the feel-good chemicals
- improves social interpersonal relationships and connections
- diminishes that production of cortisol which is the stress hormone and helps to regulate stress
- improves the ability to get to sleep and get good sleep
- develops resilience through coping mechanisms, and builds inner strength
~It is helpful to say things that you are grateful for out loud,
to hear your own voice saying what you are grateful. It is helpful to even say what you are grateful for with other people, each person is a witness to the others in respect and observance, so each person has a turn without being interrupted. I have a practice of doing gratitude with our family ceremonies when we get together including the children. Teaching our children these practices helps them too. It is helpful to practice saying you are grateful for a lesson you learned and how it benefited you. A simple method for gratitude is to say one thing you are grateful for about the world. Then, say one thing you are grateful for about one other person and why. This could be a person alive or in history (the story of the past). And the third area is to say one thing about yourself that you are grateful for out loud, in front of others. This last one is often the most challenging.
Compassion
Developing compassion for ourselves, other people, animals, creatures, and nature is a part of our human development and evolution that is also a significant component of the development in spiritual awakening. Compassion is defined by words of empathy, kindness, forgiveness, consideration, sense of connection with others, and is a cornerstone of our spiritual development.
Spiritual Practices
Within the scope and content of spiritual practices, everyday methods that strengthen our inner connection and build our focus and ability of intention and openness to the inspiration of insight and intuition are the practices that feed our soul. Sometimes mystical, out of the ordinary daily routine, which remind us and call us to continue to clear our path, stay open and open hearted. The following areas are those.
Contracts
The spiritual awakening process can bring our awareness to different sacred agreements also known as contracts we have with ourselves, our past, with our family and other people. As part of our healing, heightening our perception of the layers of these relationships and how they serve us can become known to us. We have the opportunity to change the dynamics and operate from a place of loving choice that can change the interactions of these relationships through how we respond to and maintain the interactions.
Using Sacred Circles
Although Western culture is distanced from ancient practices their meaning and collective unconscious impact remains profound. Creating for ourselves and joining with others in these sacred circles is a timeless, restorative, and dynamic method that continues our journey of presence and healing and building the energy for transformation. Being in a circle can be an opportunity to share and have witnesses to your sharing that is unburdening and healing. Healing for the speaker as well as those who are the witness. It is a time of vulnerability, willingness, sharing, openness and compassion that changes people beyond politics, divisiveness, and isolation.
Practices that Change our Consciousness
Develops transcendence, connection, restoration, intuition and insight; we call them meditation.
Walking a labyrinth is an example of a method that connects to the Relaxation Response which is one of the significant characteristics of meditation. It is also a circle of sorts that can be done alone as well as with others at the exact geographic location with different practices that heighten awareness. Another component of the labyrinth that is connective is knowing there are labyrinths around the world and other people are walking the labyrinth as you are. The labyrinth is a sacred journey that is emotional sensory, and that is occurring worldwide and connects the walkers at multiple levels.
Ceremony Ritual
Beyond the sacred circle gathering which can become a ceremony and ritual are also ceremony and ritual that repeat through time as meaningful ways to connect us to the cycles of seasons, circles of the sun, moon, and Earth, our relationships with the stars in the night sky, and our greater connection to the Cosmos. Spiritual awakening is about deepening reverence and connection through these practices that have meaning and are beyond many of the modern practices that are mostly commercialized. Ceremony and ritual often have specific songs, odors, spoken words, exchanges, sometimes clothing, foods, and practices that honor and are associated with these times that speak to our souls.
Feelings and Grief
In our journey of spiritual awakening and healing we are called to be fully present on Earth with the array of feelings that come forth in the human experience. Suppression of difficult feelings as well as what is considered crazy and does not fit into the ‘norm’ is a highlight of our times. Experiencing the difficult feelings as well as the peak experiences helps us with allowing and experience our intuitive awarenesses and is another significant component of our healing process. Often when people have experienced trauma and or grief there can be a suppression of these feelings that bottles up the flow of energy. As we heal ourselves and allow ourselves to fully be present, knowing we are not the feelings, they move through us as an experience, but they do not own us.
Healing our trauma, healing the trauma and memory that is never spoken but lives within us as a silent memory that was passed to us through the unconsciousness of our families, and the generations is another component of our healing journey that contains and reclaims our energy our presence our wholeness that also expands our awareness and perception.
There are many other practices that heighten our spiritual awakening journey, including 30–40-day practices that repeat the same method to increase and potentiate the changes in our being, and to notice nuances not discernable when only doing one time.
Meditation
The encompassing definition of meditation is a practice that changes our brain waves (from ordinary waking consciousness), heart rate, and breathing simultaneously, creating the relaxation response and connecting to alpha brain waves or deeper. And sometimes the term, embody is used to represent these functions. As a component of the broader term, meditation, mindfulness meditation (which means to hold being present in the mind/awareness) has spread in its acceptance due to the consistent scientific research. The mindfulness movement is an introduction that has paved the way for other profound and easy meditation methods.
Transformational Meditation in Groups and for Individuals
Transformational meditation in groups and for individuals has consistently through time been with the use of specific rhythms, and tones that allow us to align in resonance, be held by the patterns and frequency without effort, sustaining our deep inner connection. These ancient patterns can be vocalizations, instruments or both and have been and are used to gain insight, develop and expand into mystical, numinous states where we are engaging beyond the ordinary. Introduction to these methods are gentle and easy and have the potential for intense transformation as music and sound experiences that are profound methods of transcendence.
The benefits of accessing transformational states; shifting our of ordinary consciousness are long and include
- Diminishing stress, inflammation, depression and anxiety
- Increase in dopamine and serotonin the feel-good chemicals
- Develops calm and centeredness
- Develops resilience, problem-solving and insight
- Boosts the immune system
- Creates mental and emotional regulation
- Develops neuroplasticity which increases learning and creates epigenetic responses to mental and physical illness triggered by inflammation and cortisol the response to stress. The underlying causes of the following mental and physical disease are caused by inflammation and cortisol production; Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, cancer, addiction, immune-compromised illness, diabetes, schizophrenia, bi-polar, depression and anxiety.
- Deepens personal spiritual connection and intuition. Intuition and insight are characteristics of evolution as is epigenetic responses because they develop the ability to solve problems beyond the constructs of social norms and expectations
Nutrition, Deficiencies & Digestion
As the spiritual awakening journey continues there are often changes in what people want to consume to put into their bodies. This is not to build muscle, become ripped, or an external focus on our physical body presence but because food choices become another area of where we are feeding our souls consciously with foods that are the best for our functioning physical, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. And because there is awareness we do not live in a vacuum and our choices contribute to and effect the land and air through farming, resource availability, pollution, transportation as well as other creatures and how they are effected.
In the spiritual awakening journey and healing recognizing our stress and healing impacts our physical, mental, emotional selves is deeply effected by our food intake, nutritional intake, that substances also have depletions associated with them as well as side effects. These areas include how our digestion is functioning and depletions that are often never examined in Western medicine but instead given a mental or physical health diagnosis. In this expanding areas of understanding we holistically change and heal ourselves and the paradigm.
Sleep
In spiritual practices our sleep and the dreamtime are resources for our development in four different areas.
- It is through our dreams we connect to messages, gain insight, and even get answers and direction that are unbidden besides processing the day to day
- When we learn to work with our dreams we can incubate suggestions like an affirmation right before falling asleep that carries into our dreams
- Lucid dreaming is another area where expansion of our spiritual awakening and healing can occur.
- After death communication occurs during dreaming which offers comfort, kinesthetic and audio connection, thought transference (also known as telepathy) and knowing
- Dream walking where a spiritual teacher visits in a dream at a specific time to convey information, guidance, and teaching
These are all healing and restorative practices and are not useful unless there is a valuing of getting good sleep and deep sleep. Another component of getting sleep is recognizing when people have trauma sleep can be a difficult time. (I had a very gifted spiritual teacher who also had childhood abuse and trauma who could not sleep which is very erosive) Honoring and ability to shift from waking consciousness into the dream state is invaluable. Systems that engage dreaming methods from beginning to advanced include incubation, lucid dreaming, and dream walking. Below are directions for connecting to dream walking study program.
Personal Growth and the Blind Side
The only way we grow outwardly and change our lives is by going inward
As we are on our spiritual awakening journey there are always levels of growth, expansion and contraction, and insight development. There are times when we are more inward focused and times when we come out of this stage like a chrysalis coming out of the cocoon with new wings to fly to another level and growth stage. These are cycles of life just as mentioned above in being in nature and how that helps us to notice the seasons, and changes of rise and fall as natural ebb and flow.
Often we are shown the very public side of people as razzle dazzle all beautiful and all good especially on social media. This is a distortion of the human condition and experience without any cycles and changes of going inward and coming out. Our inner development is part of our personal growth and can allow us to tolerate noticing the areas where we are blinded like in controlling behavior, inappropriate behavior, speaking inappropriately, or being insensitive so we can change growing in humbleness.
Companions of Pets and Plants
In our healing journey our surroundings contribute to our healing journey. Our plants and animal or creature companions give to us their presence, connection, releasing stress and increasing dopamine and serotonin. Caring for and attending to plants, including gardens and house plants and creatures connects us emotionally, helps us to see patterns in cycles and behaviors, and are witnesses to our days and nights without judgement. Their dependence is not daunting or depleting because what they contribute to us is far greater. We develop empathy and compassion as well as attachment with our animal companions and unconditional love, comfort, security, social connection, and self-efficacy.
Movement
Lately I have heard many people talk about feeling stuck. Feeling stuck is also stagnation often without knowing how to get unstuck, or what needs to shift, or a knowing there is a need for a new practice to nudge the energy for change. This feeling of stagnation can also occur when the person is ready for change but also resistant for different reasons. While regular physical movement helps our physical body, mind, and emotions it also contributes to the movement of our spirit, gets us into nature and the connection with the Earth. Having regular physical movement also helps us digest and release toxins as well as get better sleep; all contributing to our overall health and wellness as part of our continuous healing and health.
Movement also occurs when we journal and record many of the areas listed above because journaling releases the thoughts from within, allows us to see them in a concretely on a page. This process also allows us to process and going back can show us patterns in time, triggers, and insights. Journaling in the following areas include our grief, dreams, sleep patterns, gratitude, meditation experiences, writing the contracts we have and how we would change and uplevel them, experiences from walking a labyrinth, setting intentions, and the kindness exercise.
Movement of our energy through practices that regularly sweep and release, connect to being present and grounded, as we become more expansive are also critical methods for anchoring, integrating, understanding, noticing nuances, and developing further. Movement of our energy also occurs when we visit sacred locations, walk a labyrinth, join in a sacred circle practice which can include sacred songs or chants where breath, tone, rhythm are shared creating entrainment and alignment with the numinous and mystical. Sometimes we reach a plateau and there is a need for different content to rouse our movement, to take on new practices to revive ourselves, which becomes another layer of the ebb and flow of the cycles of our transformation within the greater transformation that is occurring. In our spiritual awakening journey of healing we are composed of all of these areas that contribute to evolution.
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