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Search for a Spiritual Teacher

Search for a Spiritual Teacher


The spiritual pathway is one of continuous learning, knowledge, and practice.  How we learn and access knowledge will vary for all of us.  Our only constraint is our willingness to learn and our search for someone to teach us.  Teachers come in many forms depending on the spiritual model or modality you adopt, your teachers and the form they take is highly variable. Depending on your spiritual practice and modality, the role and nature of your teacher will also vary.  Each modality has a philosophy or convention associated with the practice which will direct your perspective of who or what constitutes a teacher. 

If we compare the two dominant spiritual models, the first is Spirituality as defined by self-awareness and universal consciousness, often associated with Eastern Religious Philosophies such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Sufism.  The main spiritual practices within these philosophies are orientated around Meditation and Yoga.  Within these practices is an established system of learning, accreditation, and teaching.  The other main arm of spiritualism is the more Animistic, Indigenous or Paganistic practices which encompass everything from Wicca to Mayan.  Practitioners believe, everything has an energetic or spiritual entity and connection.   These systems have an establishment of mastery based on the perceived level of spiritual skill, talents, and age. 

Regardless of how the practice or modality you practice or believe in, the decision, your decision to learn, will depend on your choice of a learning experience or a teacher.  Most of us, have a blend of different beliefs.  So how do we choose a teacher?  Firstly, the teacher and their methods need to fit with our values and our expectations of what a teacher does, what they need to be considered a teacher, and what we expect from the sessions.  We may trust a friend’s recommendations, our research, usually online, or on social media, might suggest to us a person whom we may or may not like, and last but not least our budget.  So, let’s start at the beginning and ask ourselves how we like to learn.  

Do I like structure?  Experimentation and/or Reading?

Do I prefer groups?

Am I after long-term, continual learning or do I just need an injection of knowledge and I take it from here?

Am I seeking more than just learning?  Is there healing? Companionship? Support Group? Or am I after a tribe?

Can I work online or do I like face-to-face in person?

These questions give you a checklist of how the experience should be and what forms of teaching experience are preferable.  From here we then add, the constraints of timing, duration, and budget.

At a more subtle level, we have to consider the very real impact of personal learning styles and preferences.  We have to ask about the person’s teaching style.  Does this question address our preferences for how we like to learn?   For a teacher to be effective, we need to have trust in who they are and how they behave.  What is their background, not just in the modality, but in their ability to understand and address our learning needs?   Do they know how to teach?  Do they vary up the learning experience or is it all just one teaching style?  Am I after a content expert or a knowledge transfer expert, someone who knows about adult learning?  The values and experience of the teacher present different learning experiences.  Hand in hand with teaching skill is the ability to express complex theories of spirituality in a way that makes sense to where we are at as learners.   Do we trust them?  Do they understand enough about their own practice to give me the understanding and explanations I need?

Do we need to be aware of cultural diversity in our understanding of the teacher-student relationship?  Different cultures have different values and behaviours in the learning environment.   Often we may like to choose teachers from different cultures as they have in-depth topic knowledge, but without the exposure to your learning culture, they may prove to be a poor fit.  When we do think about our choice of teacher we do need to ask ourselves how flexible are we prepared to be to learn under a different teaching style? 

 When looking for a teacher decide, in an honest way, what you need for the learning to be a successful experience for you, develop a checklist and if you are unsure, book one session, try it out, then commit.  I would also ask you to be open to the opportunity that a different teacher or teachers can offer as sometimes, we choose who we feel most comfortable with, but comfortability is not always the best environment for learning.  Learning best takes place under a little discomfort to trigger our curiosity, but not enough stress to make us resist the teachings.

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Spiritual Awakening – Encountering Spiritual Entities

It can be at times a little disconcerting to discover that you are aware of the presence of ghosts, entities, or energies that are cohabiting in the space that you are in.  As a child we embrace these interactions, as an adult we are skeptical or scared.  If you are reading this magazine, you have kept the magic of the unknown, and am still embracing the discovery of the mystical.  Congratulations, despite being urged to grow up, mature, and face facts, you understood that personal experience is a fact, and there is no need to doubt your personal experience. I am all about embracing the curious and embracing the experience, in this, I validate all of you.  

What I am here to do is to give some guiding advice to keep you safe as you embark on the spiritual path.  Firstly, you need to understand that just like in real life, not every entity or being on the spiritual superhighway has your back.  You need to think about the Spiritual Realm, a little bit like social media, you can not believe all you read.  Likewise, you need to understand that once you start to awaken your innate spiritual ability the word goes out very quickly and every entity and spirit is given a little push notification in their inbox. 

I have little clarification on the language I am using.  I use the word spirit to refer to energy manifestations that have a human form or that have roots in the human plan.   I call entities to be energies from the other realms, not our Universal Realm, both exist on the Spiritual Super Highway.  Spirits have an understanding of our culture, behaviors, and our life. 

Entities from other realms have a different understanding of culture, acceptable behavior, and norms, so you can expect these interactions to be a little more unsettling and unpredictable. 

We only need to worry, when we interact with beings who do not have the same intent as us.  Most experienced teachers and practitioners will talk about intent and the need for you to be clear on your intent when working in the Spiritual Realm.  When our intentions do not align, that is when we can get ourselves into sticky situations and form unhealthy and detrimental connections.  Make sure you are clear on your intent and you will be safe or safer, and unable to manage the outcomes of the mismatching of intent.   Like all relationships, having a great connection with spirits and entities needs to be based on a shared intention, a shared language, clear boundaries, and the capacity to finish the connections or conversation when it is best for both parties.  

In a spiritual context, what is the intent?  And how do we create strong, healthy intentions for our communication? And why does this keep us safe?   Let me briefly explain emotions more that thoughts are our strongest source of energy and vibration.  So having a solid intent that resonates in the heart and mind, sets up a strong energy identity and energy field.  This does two things.  One sends out the right message to the Spiritual Super Highway.  Think of your energy profile as your identity on the Highway.  In addition, it creates a protective energy field around you.  This field lets entities and spirits which resonate on the same frequency, with the same intent, interact with you and keeps the others away or out of your energy field.  You can consider your energy field as your identifier and personal space barrier. 

To have a clear intent, first state with a simple statement, often it is something, please show me my highest and best.  or a question, Are you here for my highest and my best?  Then trust completely your response to the entity or energy.  Does it make you feel safe, secure, and trusted?  Or is it a trickster, seducing you with promises of power, love, and strength?  Those who resonate with you, are there for your betterment.  They are guides and your support team. They have your back and they are honest.  With the Spiritual and Energetic Realm, always trust your gut and be clear on your intent, which then gives their intent clarity.  I had to learn this easy but often overlooked skill the hard way, with some not-so-safe interactions, which had uneasy consequences for me.  Feel free to learn from my mistakes

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Living with Spirits

Our awakening to the spiritual world opens doors to visitations, the likes of which we have never experienced before. It is seductive, enticing, frightening, and mind-blowing all at the same time. Making sense of what or who is knocking on your door, literally, and metaphysically, can take some doing. Sorting out whom to listen to and interact with takes learning and practice. For those of us who are awakening, I thought I would try to context to the beings you may encounter. 

Having now met, worked with, and banished many metaphysical beings, I can tell you that there is no end to their form, variance in behaviour, or origins.  I believe that we exist and that beings can exist in and across multiple plains, time frames, and universes. Likewise, each of these different plains and universes has their own rules of behaviour and forms of interactions. These behavioural patterns are familiar and in sympathy with our own, we tend to like them. We tend to dislike others due to their incompatible behaviour which causes us difficulties and is unsettling.

I do not work with the concept of good, bad, or evil. I experience and understand beings as being supportive and non-supportive. The supportive, working with us spiritually and vibrating in rhythm with our highest and best, and the others, vibrating out of sync. The out-of-sync vibrations are the easiest to recognize and, as a result, notice, leaving our Angels, Guides, and Guardians to be often overlooked. They are madly trying to be known but are drowned out by spiritual noise.

I understand Angels, Guides, and Guardians to be the same in concept and intention. They are here to guide us in the 3D world. Keeping us from harm, and enhancing our life efforts.  Working to heighten our intuition, support our learning and help us heal. Many of these beings have lived here or experienced a 3D life. They may appear in many forms, not always human, but in our 3D expectations of shape and form. Think animals, insects, feathers, light, sensations, intuition, temperature changes, and energy shifts. 

On the other side of the spirit world, are the hauntings. Haunting is not an encounter with a friendly spirit who has an attachment to a place, object, or even to yourself. They are often harmless and just here for a chat and to hang out. Haunting is when the spirit has not passed over or ventured into our plain and has an overly strong attachment to a place, object, or even yourself.  Spirits can wait many years for someone to acknowledge them.  For everyone’s sake, they need to be passed through or sent back.  The act of sending an entity back or the passing of someone through to the light requires a high level of skill and knowledge.  Please seek an experienced person with this skill set to undertake these tasks.  

The degree of unrest or incompatibility in the spirit or entity dictates the degree of unrest they cause. Your openness to the spirit world and your susceptibility impact their behaviour and your interaction. An experienced spirit master knows that when cleansing a restless spirit or returning an entity to a realm the attraction and attachment must also be broken. Make sure that you cleanse the space after the entity or spirit has been moved for you.  And be aware that if your wish for attachement is not broken, you are open to attracting another entity or spirit.  Do not be seduced by your curiosity.  it might be wise to consider an experienced spiritual master to restrict your spiritual openness. The restriction is only necessary while you learn to master your spiritual connectivity.

Other entities or beings that may appear, might be in the form of characters often associated with folklore; pixies, goblins, faye. They go by many names. Their behaviour depends on you, responding to your intent and the purity of thought. They are often playful, moving things around the house, and waking us up in the middle of the night to play. For the most part, unless provoked they are friendly, although they can be persistent, hard to get rid of, and have many friends. Please do not encourage them into your home.  A Spirit master can help rehouse these creatures. 

A general rule of thumb with spirits or entities is not to accept behaviour from the spirit world that you would not accept in the 3D. Boundaries are boundaries. Please be sure that you do not just move spirits or entities on, send them back, or onto where they should be. Moving them on without the correct destination only makes them someone else’s problem.  This is why I recommend you connect with a Spirit Master to undertake any Spirit or Entity Cleansing.  

Curiosity, a big dollop of common sense, and a Guide or Angel at your side are all you usually need to navigate the spiritual super highway.  Never underestimate the importance of knowing what you are doing.  With Hauntings, don’t risk un-leashed negativity, use a trained specialist. 

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Accelerate Your Healing with Gratitude

I know that many of you are now familiar with the concept of Gratitude. Using Gratitude as a means for manifesting, finding happiness, and expanding the heart space.  For those of you not yet in the regular practice of Gratitude, I encourage you to embrace it as part of your self-care spiritual practice.  It will bring in more good and great things in your life and kick you’re manifesting up a gear.   The aspect of gratitude I wish to explore with you is the conscious use of Gratitude as a healing tool.  

Healing is a multi-faceted practice, it involves working with the heart, mind, energetic, and, spiritual self.  Gratitude works on the heart space, aligning the heart’s vibration with your highest energetic and spiritual vibrations.  Our innate vibrational frequency, where we resonate at the soul level is one of harmony and it is the place where we heal and through healing grow.  For us to heal and grow from any negative experience we need to be able to transform the emotional feelings and energies which we associate with the experience, incident, or person (s).  To be able to positively transform any negative experience we need to be able to reframe how we perceive the experience.   

For many of our experiences we can move through the healing stage quickly, we may decide to grow from the experience or just move on, that is our choice.  One does not automatically follow on from the other.  Growth, like healing, is a conscious choice.  I commit to healing and growth, so for me, deciding to complete the healing cycle and move into the growth cycle, is a Spiritual Pathway commitment.  Everyone must make their own choices.  Without judgment, I offer this Gratitude Exercise.

Before expanding on the practice, I would like to give you my understanding and perspective on our blockages to healing.  To give context to this practice, I would like to remind you that I am a Buddhist Meditation Master and Master Teacher, trained in Lao PDR.  One of the key aspects of healing is the removal of emotional and intellectual attachement to our responses to the event.   This is a very natural occurrence, it is how we try to make sense of what happened, our ego-centered response.  Now depending on our relationship with our ego, this response can become embedded in our emotions and intellectual rendering or understanding of the event.   Naturally, once this occurs, it is now encompassed in our energetic and spiritual signatures.

Our emotional responses can range from victim and outrage, defensive or aggression, justification or acceptance.  The emotional or intellectual standpoint is not as important as our degree of attachement to the emotion, perception, or viewpoint that we are adhering to.  A healing process has several established processes and these are well documented in terms of emotional responses and language used to describe the event and its impact. As an example the Grief Process is well documented, we must pass through all the stages to allow us to heal.  If we become stuck within any one of the stages, then our healing stagnates.  

When we become stuck, we stay within our closed heart space, our vibrational integrity is impacted and our sense of self and well-being become askew.  Depending on the impact of the attachement to the pain, we can do enormous damage to ourselves, our relationships, and the people around us.  To enable us to move through our healing, we must remove our attachement to the event and our emotional and intellectual responses to the event.  

Consider the power of attachement, it can define us, through our viewpoint, our response patterns, our language, and our understanding of ourselves in this world.  The Gratitude Exercise that I use is one where I ask people to reconsider their standpoint and perspective on the event, the people, or the circumstances that resulted in the pain.  I ask clients to find and acknowledge aspects within or around the event that they can be grateful for.

‘I am grateful that I found out before I married him/her, what they are capable of.’

‘I am grateful for what I have learned that this workplace. 

This is not an easy exercise it forces you to reconsider and rewrite your internal dialogue.  It can be enormously challenging to your sense of self. It will dramatically change your relationship 

(emotional and intellectual responses) to the event.  It will remove your attachement, release your heart space and recharge your emotional and spiritual well-being.   It will accelerate your healing.

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Redefining Spiritual Self Care

Redefining Spiritual Self Care

In the wellness industry, the phrase Self Care is the calling card and tagline for almost every practitioner and industry player. The phrase is synonymous with spa days, luncheons and indulgences.  I think it is time to claim it back.  Let’s add the word Spiritual, then Self Care takes on a whole other meaning. Spiritual Self Care Days.  Days where we start to consider the Energetic Self, Spiritual Self and our connection to Soul and Universal Consciousness as a way to nurture and care for ourselves.  If we flip our perspective of Self Care to Spiritual Wellness then we start to look beyond special events and treats as a way to nurture and start to consider how on an every day basis we can spiritually and energetically nurture ourselves.

Spirituality is a journey of personal understanding and growth. It is path to understanding who and how we are on a daily basis and how this impacts on ourselves, the people around us and our world view.  It is not a way to hide from reality with a constant stream of positive accolades, affirmations or diversions.  It is a way for us to understand our reality, in the here and now, to understand how our past experiences and behaviours, based on our past understandings,  shaped and continues to shape our lives.  I would like us to include in our daily routines along side our work outs and beauty routines, the gift of two minutes of Self Compassion. 

Every day we are bombarded with harsh judgements in the forms of media, advertising, expectations and learned self limiting beliefs.  There is never enough time, did we do all we could do, have we achieved enough, was that the right decision or actions, do I look good, am I using the right products, the list of judgmental questions goes on and on.  When was the last time we received, gave or accepted a compliment, a personal reward or mental gratification?  If we are surrounded by harsh judgements designed to influence our thoughts, behaviors and buying decisions, where does the compassion for our own humanity come from? 

Spirituality teaches us that we are imperfect and designed to be imperfect.  It is within the imperfection that beauty lies.  The radiant beauty that comes from our Soul, that shines through our spirit and is reflected and magnified to the world through our energetic self.  Beauty is not in perfection, but in the understanding and acceptance of our imperfections and our efforts to be as true to our soul selves as we can be.   The very ideal of perfection is one of fashion and trends, it moves with the times and is tied too heavily with the concept of desirability through the attainment of a set of externally constructed criteria, the sum of which is perfection.  The fast, ever moving goal of perfection.

Striving constantly to meet moving ideals, creates within us a hunger of a never satisfied pursuit of the unobtainable.  And while we strive for this externally referenced ideal of perfection, we are so busy evaluating ourselves and others, that we become blind to who we are.  We become slaves to judgements that are not ours but someone else’s.  Giving ourselves up to other peoples judgement, completely gives our personal power away and hands it over to the hands of another.  We loose who we are and who we are meant to be.  That is the definition of lost souls.  A complete disconnect between our true self and how we live our lives.   

If we could be a little more gentle with ourselves, a little more forgiving, allowing for us to be human, imperfect and impure then we open the door to allowing ourselves to be.  Just to be who we are and who we are meant to be.  We are imperfect, living imperfect lives.  We try our best and there are days when our best is just not good enough.  Things happen, shitty things, unexpected things, great things.  We are not in control of the world nor should we seek to be.  We do not need to be in control of ourselves, we need to trust ourselves, believe in ourselves and give ourselves a break from the harsh criticisms and high standards which can so easily be bestowed. 

We are enough, we can be more, we can be less, but we are enough.  Be gentle with how you speak to yourself and how you judge yourself.  Our words can be harsh and once thought, the brain, so brilliant, will learn them without questioning their validity.  Once learnt, these harsh words and judgements can become truths, cast in stone and influencing our existence in ways that we do not understand, but haunt our life casting long shadows.  

So give yourself spiritual self care, speak gently and with love to yourself.  Actively forgive your mistakes, not so you pass through life unaffected by what you do, but so you are in a state of mind, where you understand the how and why of what you did, do now and will do in the future.  I was taught through my Buddhist Meditaiton Practice, first give  love to yourself, then give love to others.  Put another way, place your oxygen mask on first before you help others with theirs. 

Every morning and night, take a few minutes to speak with love and acceptance to yourself about who you are.  Create a new way of thinking about yourself and change your world. 

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Reframing our view of Ourselves and Our World.

Reframing our view of Ourselves and Our World.

Our conscious mind is designed to protect us, keep us safe.   It is also where we undertake progressive learning and it stores our memories.    It is our reference library where we store our lives.  It is designed to help us make decisions quickly, many of them from memory or learnt behaviour, imprinted by repetition, be that through structure learning environments, family, school or work place, church, community and the playground, or our own assessment.   Each of the lessons which we learn is designed to teach us what is right and wrong, what keeps us safe.  Be it bullying, trouble, hurt, danger, and likewise, where we are rewarded, love, money, gifts, friends and favours.  This learning, is shaping and forming our identity.   Setting universally applied, fundamental truths.

We learn our values, behaviours and mindsets from these environmental lessons.  Feedback, this is true, this is false, this is right, this is wrong, this behaviour is punished and that one is rewarded.   When these environments are challenged, removed, changed then these innate, almost automatic understandings, behaviours and responses that we use to govern our lives come under question.   Similarly, we need a major incident, often traumatic which sweeps in and changes our lives which then forces us to, or creates the opportunity to start rethinking our fundamental truths.   

By fundamental truths I mean those truths which we take for granted, those rules or understanding regarding how we process and understand the world around us and our place in it.  These truths, often handed down from generation to generation, we rarely challenge, unless we are forced to.  Often we hold these understandings of ourselves, the order of the world, our relationship to the world and ourselves so sacred, that we push back anyone who questions them, does not abide by them or who asks us to question our beliefs, values, understandings and therefore our behaviours.  Even if our truths do not fit the situation or the facts, we make it fit, often contradicting ourselves in the process.

A major incident, usually a loss, can offer the opportunity, to consider our fundamental truths.  The question is: Are we willing?  We are capable, but only if we choose to do the work and the hard yards do we see belief and behavioral changes.   It requires honesty, absolute honesty.  How often are we really honest with ourselves  and about ourselves?  How often do we hold ourselves up, bearing all to an internal review of our beliefs, understanding and our perception of our world, even of who we are and how we are?

It is easier if we approach this gradually, if we have or take the luxury, that is.   If we have the courage and take that path.  If we choose to actively seek to understand who we are and how our mind was put together at the most fundamental basis.   Beliefs that we never question.  Truths that we believe are absolute without questioning them.   One of the beauties of meditation is the ability to take us from a locked mental state to an open mental state, where, if we leave the conscious mind behind, escaping the strict frameworks of truth, belief and identity behind. Then what are we left with.  We are left with the freedom of the subconscious mind.  Stripped bear, we are faced with the honesty of the situation, without an emotional connection.  Emotion, as a value,  sits in the conscious mind, emotion as an experience, sits in the subconscious mind.   This is reframing.

(In the subconscious mind, there is no judgement of good, bad, evil, ok, it just is an experience.  Judgement can only exist, when we have a criteria within which we operate, this is the role of the conscious mind.  Fundamental truths are learnt.  Therefore, they can change.)

There is a truth, but this is a truth without judgement. There is a view of us, or an understanding of us, which is striped bear of the imposed or imprinted beliefs and understandings of who we are.  It is a more time relevant, wholistic repertory of what we have experienced and how we are experiencing our life and asking us if this is what we want.  It shows us how we are processing information, creating our own experiences by the way we are living our lives and most importantly showing us, where we have let ourselves down, but remaining fixed in our world view.   

We might find that some of our world views and understandings from our teachers is still relevant, valid and important, we choose to keep them.  It might also show us where we are outdated in our sense of self and our role in the world because what was true, or we were learnt was true is no longer so.   The difference, choice, do we choose to consider and re- evaluate who we want to be, how we want to be and if so, how we move towards that.    Who of us, if given the chance to rethink, transform and reframe our new view of ourselves and our relationship to the world around us, would choose to do so.   I have and I do.  It has given me a much fuller and happier life. 

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What is Soul? What is Spirit?

Language is one of our most precious gifts.  It allows us to explore meaning, to create understanding, expand knowledge and enhance our lives.   When we start to explore the concepts of Spirituality and Soul, away from modern Religious Constraints, finding common meaning for these words in a multi-cultural context can be difficult.  Nevertheless it is necessary to create understanding.   Having now discussed, channelled and mused over the different meanings, I have reached a definition for these words and an understanding of the their relationship.

We all have a soul, we are born with a soul.  We are have a spirit and we have an energy signature.  The Soul is our point of definition, our existence, the essence of who we are destined to be.   It is encoded in our DNA and it helps us define our uniqueness.  It is fixed.  Our challenge in life is to live within the soul, it is not to master our souls, but to allow our soul to master us.   The Soul is etherial and exists without the body, but it is tied to the body as this is how we experience our lives on earth.  Without the body, we would not have our earthly existence.  

Our spirit is our earthly expression of the Soul.  It is how we translate our Soul into the nature of who we are.  It helps us determine our life here.  It is how we express our Soul.  The spirit emirates from the soul, and our, spirit, unlike our soul, can be flexible, vulnerable and invincible.   As we progress through life, our spirit experiences what we experience and it can take on board our pain, triumphs and our love.   It is a energy force, which aligns to our soul, it is our true north.  Unlike the Soul, our spirit can take on different forms, the essence remains the same, but the forms change to reflect our state of emotional, mental and physiological well being.   It is the spirit that we work with on this plane to create a life of unconditional love, if you like our higher self.  We can impact the strength of the spirit by how we live our life.

We are metaphysical beings, within a physical existence, and the energy within us, usually expressed by emotions is powerful and radiates out beyond the boy, this is our energetic signature.  It is our emotional radar.  We tend to talk about emotions in absolute terms and demand that life gives us big emotions.  Big happiness, big love, big hurts, but the reality is that  our spirit, our soul, wants us to be stable with our emotional state, not swinging from one to another, but steady within ourselves, so the outside impacts of life we can move across and within   knowing that our core is strong and supports us.  

As an energy our signature moves in front of us, creating the life that we experience.   It is the experience that we are talking about, not the physical elements, but how we experience our life.   Similarly our energy signature can be altered, damaged, blocked, healed and manifested.   And yes, it is when aligned with spirit and soul, alighted with a power of creation and happiness that revolutionises how we experience our life.   To experience fully the life our Soul has envisions for us we must first work with the energetic self, then the spiritual self and then we meet our soul.  

The pathways may vary, your needs may vary, your experiences will definitely vary, but the choices can be the same, to seek a better understanding of who you essentially are and to be happy to express that sense of self at every point of existence.  This is what the soul academy is.  I believe everyone is a spiritual and energetic being, we just need to be open and embrace our potential.    The energetic and spiritual self will challenge you.  They will support you and challenge you.  Your soul will welcome you.   The physical world will respond and embrace you as you align yourself to your Soul.  

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Meditation as a Space for Healing.

Meditation as a space for healing

The Conscious Mind and embedding of reaction / action – social learning.

The conscious mind is the brains cognitive centre.  It is where we process information and where we spend the majority of our time.   It is our place of day to day work, play and relax.    The design of the brain is to learn and imprint important life lessons which we need for survival.   Survival is about making sense of the world around us and learning what behaviors keep us safe.   We learn or are taught to listen or look for certain events that represent danger to us physically, emotionally or mentally.   Alternatively we are taught that certain events that bring us success, happiness or plentifulness.  So we learn to escape, avoid or mitigate events that impact on us negatively or to seek events that impact on us positively.    In a nutshell, yes / no, good / bad, enjoyable / harmful.   

Our brain communicates these events and the outcomes of these events via pathways and chemical reactions which flow through the mind and the body.    The pathways with repeated behaviour become freeways / motorways of the brain, where we learn once the event happens, that this is the path or the appropriate reaction to take to elicit the correct. that is, learnt response.   The event becomes a trigger.  Once the trigger occurs, either something we see, hear or feel then the brain immediately without conscious thought begins our response.   We start to have automatic responses to certain triggers or responses.    

The learning of the triggers is by experience or experimentation, observation (both active and passive taught) and active teaching.  Unfortunately for us, these triggers are not time bound, so they remain relevant to us in the present, regardless of their relevance or acceptance in the current or in the future.   Time does exist in the conscious mind, but it is not contextual to the learning of yes / no, right / wrong, good/ bad.   

Therefore we have a tendency to hold on to our early learning and keep this as our constant framework for behaviour, evaluation and decision making, throughout out life, regardless of how much our life changes.  In our current environment of ever changing and fast moving situations, if we hold on to our original learning about yes / no, with blind acceptance, that this is a fundamental truth of the world and my response to the world, therefore my place in the world, we remain fixed.   

While there is comfort in staying fixed and rooted to your foundation understanding of the world, there is equal value and perhaps more value in being able to move your thinking into the present context of your life and how you want to live and experience this life

For most of us, once the trigger and the response is ingrained in the conscious mind we do not question the origins or validity of that response until we are forced to evaluate the event, our response and why we are triggered that way.   

The reason we are forced to re-evaluate is many, but usually:

  • we realize that our response is not working, often with the help of receiving the wrong outcome to our auto response.  The response is damaging us, rather than protecting us.  ( repeated or strong negative feedback.)
  • we suffer as a result of our behaviour. (we hurt someone of something we love)
  • we are taught a new way to think, consider advertising, especially political or social messages.
  • we are unable to undertake the triggered response.  ( your loss of speech.)

The realization that our old behavior or thought patterns is damaging is, that is, us recognizing the impact of the behaviour and taking responsibility for the creation of the event, sits uncomfortably with most of us.   Even in the most drastic of circumstances, we must be willing to accept that perhaps our behaviour or former behaviour was a not serving us well in the current circumstances of our life.    

This is the opportunity that meditation offers us.  It offers the opportunity to take  us into a space, within the subconscious where we do not have the judgements of the subconscious mind.  They do not reside in the subconscious, only the conscious mind.  In the subconscious mind there is no judgement, where we do not judge and are not judged.   Here we are safe to begin the process of evaluating our we are assessing our lifes, our life events and our thoughts and behaviours that we have been taught and that we live by.   Are they relevant to the person we wish to be.

Please note:  Professional Coaching and Counseling is a most important aspect to help us assess our behaviour and to make the changes.   I am not advocating meditation above or beyond either of these aspects.  It depends completely on your own circumstances and the current state of your wellbeing.  In some circumstances you will need additional assistance to create the right environment within the functioning of the brain and within your own willingness to go down the path of reviewing your fundamental truths.

The Lotus flower is a powerful image in Buddhism and Hinduism as a symbol of transformation.  Rising from the mud, traveling through the murky water to reach the sun.  Once it has reached the sun, the flower blooms, resting on the water and bathing in the beauty of the suns rays.

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