We all have a basis in divinity. We have all been put here with a purpose. No matter who you are, or where you are in life, you have potential for total life mastery within you.
The first step is to learn to allow the light of consciousness to begin to flow through you and open you up to the deeper knowledge and guidance of your higher self.
In many ways, the current state of our lives trains us off the search for deeper meaning. We are told to go to school, graduate high school, go to college, and then find a career based on a very limited set of choices.
This may just be fine for some. Some folks may just have been put on earth to be lawyers, doctors, accountants, or journalists.
But, the inspiration for a direction should come from inside and not from the instructions of parents, teachers, or anyone else.
An underlying goal of the work I am doing through Hacking the Body Mind has always been the creation of a way to facilitate the finding of ones divine purpose. It was originally catalyzed as way to discover techniques for opening myself up to the light of the universe….to my intuition and higher guidance.
Once someone develops even a small level of awareness, one of the first things they start to want to find is a way to live healthier.
A healthy life facilitates a much easier way with the world. The process of attaining your goals depends on many factors and I don’t want to make you think that once you start eating raw food, exercising, and meditating that things will automatically become easier.
But, the cleansing of the body’s channels, the strengthening of its systems, and the establishment of a more focused mind allows the creation of higher consciousness to come much more smoothly.
My life is not perfect, far from it. But, that is not the point. The point is that humanity is on a search for a mission. Something that I am hearing more and more is, “Where is the meaning in what I am doing?” It is becoming somewhat of a battle cry.
The economic crisis may just be a representation of humanity realizing that, on a whole, it is just tired of going to a meaningless job, to earn meaningless money, to spend on meaningless things.
Yes, we all need money. But, the dream is to earn it doing what we love.
That is what I want.
Learn to live your life ON purpose. Take a look at the program I outline in my book. Use it as a guide to opening yourself up to a new pattern of intention.
That’s its purpose. It is a DIY manual for healing the body and mind and resetting your state to a more receptive, open, and abundant level of awareness.
Within spiritual circles, we tend to hear a lot about this concept these days. But, how many of us really understand what it is and why its so important?
What is consciousness really?
For a very long time, it was made out to be such a mystical and esoteric concept that many people have gotten lost in the pursuit of it.
To develop oneself consciously means that the ego’s place in ones life begins to diminish. What is the ego? Well, for all intents and purposes, the ego consists of a persons particular views, habits, opinions. The ego based person tends to live in a very confined and limited lifestyle.
The ego is that part of us that creates distinction from the rest of the world. It is the ego that makes us believe that we are separate. Dr. Wayne Dyer said it best, that the ego creates within us a distinction between our higher self and the ideas we hold about who are supposed to be in the eyes of society.
Oftentimes, we get lost in our ego based ideas of who we are because it exists within the shadow and is typically hidden from our normal waking awareness.
Where the development of conscious awareness comes in is that the more highly evolved a person tends to be, the less control their ego can have on them.
Consciousness, in its essence, is the ability to see a broader set of circumstances. It means having the ability to move beyond our ingrains habitual responses. Having increased consciousness means that you can see the mechanisms of the universe that are at work in your life.
Being conscious gives us all the ability to act in accordance with the deeper aspects of life. It means that we can see the true causes of the problems in our lives. Much is made these days out of the idea of personal manifestation. But, the ability to manifest, in my opinion, is first born out of a deep knowledge of how our deeply held beliefs are truly affecting the world we see.
The conscious person does not resist the inevitability’s of life because they understand that the whole of life moves in cycles. The unconscious person resists anything that brings discomfort into their lives.
To look consciously at life, means that you know innately that life will go as it goes and what is most necessary is for us to accept all that life sends us and understand that each moment has something to teach.
Consciousness matters for a great many reasons.
But, there is a specific reason I wanted to go into it today. There is so much talk about change these days. But, do we, as a society, really know what it is going to take to bring that type of change into the world?
There have been so many revolutions up to this point. There have been so many times throughout history that have actually succeeded in bringing about dramatic changes.
All we need to do is look back to the sixties. There was protest, there was revolt, there was a tremendous and deep call for social change. And, in many ways, the people of this era succeeded.
The Vietnam war ended. The big fight to end this war happened. Wow. And, I know that the folks of my generation have always looked back at that generation in awe.
There is one glaring problem, though. Don’t you think that if the lessons of that time were truly learned, then we would have, as a whole culture, avoided the problems of war that we see today? Have the ravages of war truly ceased?
If you really look at it, aren’t the peace loving toke smoking hippies of yesterday now the republicans of today? And now, I am relatively unbiased when it comes to politics. I don’t completely believe in the abilities of the current system. So, I do not want to say that republicans are the bad guys.
I am only trying to prove a point. And, that point is that, that generation spent decades fighting an oppressive government. They actually won that fight. But, what happened shortly after is that the folks of that time fell into complacency. They stopped fighting for a cause because there was no longer a cause to fight for. And, they became the exact mirror images of what it was that they were fighting.
The folks of this time, missed the point. The root cause of the problems that existed did not get taken care of.
You see, so many of us seek to change the things that we see, things external from us. And, we believe that that is what will create lasting change in the world. We try to lose weight, but we don’t deal with the emotional attachments to food. We try to save money, but we don’t deal with the habit based spending habits. We try to diminish our attachments to anger without looking within to figure out what is in us that keeps these feelings coming.
I can go on and on.
A metaphor that I like to use about the way we tend to go about creating change is, its like we wrecked our car, totaled it, and instead of bringing it to the shop to get it repaired, we simply run it through the car wash.
To effect real change in the world, we all have to first catalyze changes in ourselves. If we want to create peace, we need to be peaceful. If we want to look out and see a loving world, we need to learn to give love unceasingly.
The point that those of the sixties missed was that they didn’t become conscious of those aspects of themselves that had contributed to creating the unjust world that they saw before them. They sought to create cosmetic change. And once they did, complacency set in and they went about their lives.
They stopped fighting because there was no longer a cause. The world became our sedative. Things were good for a long time.
Had those folks spent some quality time trying to understand themselves, then they might have actually succeeded in creating a pretty great world.
Take a lesson from this quote from Jesus:
“Before you seek to remove the speck from your brother’s eye, remove the plank from your own.”
That basically means that we need to first rid ourselves of the trash in our minds that keep us trapped before we can truly create the world we want.
This is consciousness. And, this is why it matters.
In the world of integral consciousness, anything that is done with the aim of improving the person as a whole, is considered to be a fundamental part of spiritual practice. From a pluralistic standpoint (which is the worldview of most of us on the planet) each method is categorized and labeled.
Within a pluralistic worldview, exercise is done to strengthen the body, while meditation is done to strengthen the mind. And, the two things are thought to be separate.
What this has created is two subsects of people who believe that people who workout are lunkheads and barbarians, and people who meditate are eggheads.
Now, lol, this is loosely quoted. But, its a very sad fact that for many people who actively strive toward the goal of self improvement, so much is lacking in their approach because they are inherently limited in what they will allow themselves to focus on.
It is true that physical exercise dramatically enhances the physical body, but is that totally unnecessary for true spiritual and mental growth?
And, yes, meditation does wonders for enhancing the mind, but is it totally unnecessary for the enhancement and strengthening of the physical body?
Many, on both sides, will tell you that living life on one side of the fence is enough. Meditators will tell you that exercise isn’t necessary because the body is only a hinderance. And, well, most athletes tend not to consider development of the mind because those who exercise are typical so appearance based that it doesn’t matter much to them either way.
For this discussion, what I want to look at is, the importance of having a multi faceted spiritual practice.
In Ken Wilber’s Integral Life Practice there are four bases (or modules) that need to be considered in the spiritual development of the whole person.
Those are: body, mind, spirit, and shadow.
What is considered in the integral model is that true development is not found by spending larger quantities or time practicing in one way for years. But, it is found within a widespread practice that encompasses a range of techniques.
So what this means is that, if a spiritual practioner only has an hour each day to devote to practice, that he or she will develop faster if they divided it up and spent a part of that hour meditating, and another part of the hour working out, rather than spending the whole hour in meditation.
So, what has been found is that the two things work in tandem.
And, I cannot agree more.
While this discussion can be taken in a myriad of directions, I want to focus on the two practices of meditation and physical training because they really do blend well and in some surprising ways.
Now, why might this be?
Well, one of the many complaints of a typical beginning meditator is that they have lower back pain if they sit too long in one position. This is a valid complaint and is something that really can be detrimental to ones success in meditation.
This pain can be pretty excrutiating if ignored. And, what one will tend to do if confronted with this problem, is just to fight through the pain for longer and longer periods.
The nature of this is that it will only make the achievement of growth within the practice be much longer in coming. What could be accomplished in months would likely take years. And this creates the phenomenon of our current stage where growth is believed to take decades to occur.
Well, what if that meditator began working out? Training with weights or doing bodyweight exercises does wonders for strenghthing the posterior chain.
If I haven’t mentioned it before, the posterior chain, is the back of the body that starts at the top of the neck and stretches to the tail bone.
And, this is likely the part of the body that many average meditators feel discomfort in.
Embarking on a training regimen that enhances this part of the body would do amazing things to promote their meditation practice because suddenly it would be much easier to fit for longer periods without their normal discomfort.
And, without this pain, don’t you think it would be easier to experience some level of spiritual growth as a result of the meditative practice?
Another way in which exercise can benefit a meditator is in the way physical exercises activates the mind. New neurons are created in the brain. Oxygenation is also enhanced. These things create a mind that is stronger and more elastic so to speak.
Another problem for most meditators is that they find it hard to stay awake during periods of meditation. If, through training, we developed a mind that was more active naturally, then this problem would be solved quite easily as well.
And, well, how would you think meditation can benefit one in physical training?
Meditation fundamentally creates an enhanced ability in the mind to remain focused, grounded and aware.
And, anyone who has worked out can tell you, that focused awareness is fundamental in building a powerful body because it is all about pushing past dramatic periods of pain so that you can spark your muscles to grow stronger.
So, not only does exercise make it easier to attain growth in meditation, but meditation can also make it dramatically easier to attain grow as a result of exercise as well.
So, thats my two cents worth for today.
Peace, Love, Life!
The process of conscious development has been discussed to various degrees for a very long time. But, it is still held within very mystical terms.
Talk of the process is filled with misinformation because there may only be a small handful of people in the world who have actually experienced the process. So many teachers and gurus who proclaim to be all knowing with regards to such subjects often find themselves embroiled in controversy at some point.
Many gurus have been brought down over the years and one of the biggest reasons is sexual infidelity or sexual abuse of their students.
I suppose it is a natural thing for a student to develop feelings for a very strong teacher that go beyond the student/teacher boundaries. And, because they are the student, I suppose it maybe shouldn’t be expected that they can easily see beyond those feelings and rationally understand them and put them away.
But, for an enlightened guru, wouldn’t you expect more of them?
But, we find this almost everywhere these days and not just in spiritual circles. We see it in industry, politics, our medical establishment.
And there is one common theme. The undue control of the Shadow.
What is the Shadow?
The shadow is a collection of all the things within ourselves that are hidden from our conscious awareness. They tend to make us feel uncomfortable when they come up or are acted out, so we push them deep down in our awareness and rather than acknowledging and dealing with them, we hide them from ourselves.
These can be, anger, sex addiction, food addiction, mistrust, need for power over others etc. All of these attributes are looked down upon in the realms of society and so we are naturally led to feeling uncomfortable whenever we are forced to deal with them.
So we don’t.
We repress them. And because of this, these things become shadows. And, what is the nature of a shadow? It is something that follows us continuously.
These things not only follow us, but they become outwardly active in their own way because now they are apart of our fundamental subconcious mind.
If it is understood that the universe is, in many ways, a reflection of what exists in the deeper parts of our awareness, then can it not be understood that if we carry these hidden shadows…that the world will inevitably begin to confront us with them in our daily lives?
Repressed sexuality turns a man into a rapist. Repressed need to control turns someone into a sociopath. Repress anger becomes random flare ups that result in job losses or ruined relationships. The consequences are many.
And, what happens is, because these things are shadows and are by nature unseen by us consciously, they become cycles of continuously negative circumstances that we feel we have no control over.
By remaining hidden, the powers of the shadow to influence and control us become immense.
And, we, out of fear, continue on hopelessly, never looking at the deeper reasons for our shortcomings.
One of the most ironic things of all of this is that, what we consider traditional spiritual practices, do not actually help us to uncover the shadow. The fallen guru is a perfect example of this. These are people who are expert meditators and are considered to be enlightened by many.
But, they still become embroiled in controversy.
Meditation, on its own, really does a lot to develop the mind. But, it is an easy way to skip shadow work. Meditation is by its nature a very inactive practice, in that, it doesn’t bring us face to face with those inner demons.
Shadow work, has to be active. We have to be willing to go through our everyday experience and actively deal with these negative situations as they arise. This is the best way I have found to deal with those inner shadow aspects.
Meditation enhances the witness. But, once the witness is developed, those witnessing abilities need to be turned toward your outer existence.
An example that I can take from my own life is my shadow of repressed anger. For one reason or another, I have grown up with a strong tendency toward anger. And, for years, that anger would flare up at the slightest provocation and always got me into situations that would have been better avoided.
I began my spiritual practice at maybe the age of 18 or so and for years I was continuously plagued with the anger that was always right behind me. Even though I tried continuously to rid myself of it, it remained and I never understood why.
One day, after years of seeing this cycle repeated, I came to the realization that it was not the fault of anything external.
I was holding onto this anger with a vice grip. And, it would explode everytime I felt this anger come up. What I began doing was actively being with this anger in times that I would become angry. And rather than letting it explode onto the person who pushed my button, I would allow it to flow through me as energy and without reaction.
And, this lead to the transmutation of it.
All emotions are energy and can be used for a range of purposes. One of the most important things we can do is learn to actively be with whatever emotion it is that we are trying to repress so that we can actively seek to transmute our lower energies (anger, sexuality, control) into a higher framework.
We are in a time now, where the shadows are arising within each of us and it is time that we acknowledge them and be with them actively.
Allow the energy to come in and flow through you. Transmute these energies into energies of abundance of love and you will find that they no longer control you.
Realize that it is ok to be angry, it is ok to want sex, it is ok to want to control your world. Realize that these are all the effects of our having evolved through time.
Back then, we had to want sex so that we could procreate, we had a need to control our circumstances so that we could survive, this is what it was all about.
Now, it is time to acknowledge these base desires. These base desires represent our inner need to survive.
But, now its time to acknowledge our need to globally unite and thrive.
In a previous article, as well as in a chapter in the manual I recently put together, I mentioned the importance of looking at fitness in an integral way.
To be integral, in a very simple description, means that you tend to look at all aspects that contribute to a single driving force. A typical view of what exercise is used for is to grow muscle and create a stronger physical body.
And, methods for doing so, tend to be limited in their scope due to this view. The tendency toward lifting weights in a bodybuilder style of training, while it does do the job of making muscles bigger, really doesn’t contribute to much else.
Also, due to the extremely limited focus of this style of training in its nature, neglects many aspects of the body that are very very important.
To take an integral view at developing a fitness program should mean that you include mechanisms that strengthen the mind (shen) the energetic body (chi) as well as the physical body (jing). But, also, within the context of your training, it is necessary to understand how the range of exercises you employ affect all of the many parts of the body that are normally neglected.
I think its becoming more well known that a typical bodybuilder, while having large and robust muscles, is not in actuality very strong.
Bodybuilding, as it is advertised, neglects so many components of the body structure. The posterior chain, which generally consists of all the muscles of the back and spine that extend from the top of the neck to the bottom of the tailbone, is one of the most important aspects of the body to consider.
Exercises like, squats, olympic lifts, deadlifts, push ups, dips, glute ham sit ups…truly go a very long way toward developing this part of the body.
The inherent limitation of singular muscle focused bodybuilding exercises misses this point entirely.
Another very important aspect, which has garnered very widespread attention these days, is the core. But, while some consider the core to only be the abdominal portion of the body, the truth is that the core truly extends from the top of the abs to the top of the knees.
While I do give credit to many fitness instructors giving due credence to the necessity of developing the core, I still find that many go about it in a very inefficient and limited way.
Having a strong posterior chain and core just makes life easier to live. It helps strengthen what tends to be the weakest parts of the body. Just a small thing like lower back pain, is so widespread and is harming so many and could so easily and efficiently be developed with a well proportioned exercise regimen.
So, the reasons that I have chosen crossfit as my main training style are many. But, the fact that it is one of the only truly integral training philosophies around stands at the top.
Crossfit, develops the entire body by employing exercises that tend to develop the body in a combined fashion.
Crossfit employs, bodyweight exercises, olympic lifting, power lifting, sprinting, kettlebell work, and simple gymnastics to train the body and to bring it to its full potential.
Not only are the exercises themselves integrally focused, but the structure of the workouts are as well. By combining circuit training and interval training with aspects of the Russian conjugate method, crossfit creates a style of training that is always extremely efficient and effective.
And, because each workout changes day to day, you never plateau. So, the development is continuous.
The best part is, the workouts take almost no time at all.
So, I am a big believer in the existence of opposing polarities. It’s not that things exist separately but that the world is divided into opposing forces which exist interdependently with one another.
The feminine and masculine tend to reside at opposing ends of the spectrum. The feminine shines, she excites, she intoxicates, she inspires. The masculine drives, controls, creates functionality, stabilizes and moves things forward.
We think of them as separate in our religiously inspired dualistic minds. But, each are here to balance the other. They are both equally necessary and the world is best when both are working in equal measure.
Much of what we see in the world today, its structure, its technology, its thought processes, would not be here if it were not for the overwhelming influence of the masculine force and its drive to create and improve everything it sees and touches.
The masculine is never truly comfortable unless it is building something, improving, moving in the direction of a goal. The feminine in most cases would much prefer play over work. She encourages us to go out and dance the night way, or to release our tension in a fit of blissful ecstasy.
The feminine is content to simply shine her light in radiance while the masculine is not content unless it is following that light in the direction of its own purpose. Men are creators, pursuers of those things that are to bring freedom, contentment, and stability to our lives.
But, in so many ways, men are no longer men. The masculine need to move has not been acted upon by many of our fathers, husbands, sons, significant others.
As men we are no longer living with purpose. And, we ignore the feminine when it calls us to something higher. We want to experience the feminine but we do not want to bring ourselves to a point where we are deserving of the gifts she wishes to give.
We are no longer worthy. We are angry, depressed, and lifeless.
This truly is my opinion. It is understandable because in a lot of ways, the masculine as an overall experience has been beaten down by over protective mothers and controlling wives.
And, over the millenia, it has become too far driven by the ego. By a need to exploit and control.
With the coming shift in cosmic consciousness, I think we are coming to a balance between what the masculine and feminine offer. This is so important because it is only when the many opposing forces work together that the world can truly come to its fruition.
It is an exciting time to be alive. To see what is being created in the caverns of cosmic consciousness is really intensely exciting. But, we have to get our act together. As men, we have to rediscover what makes us men. We have to find our purpose. We have to reclaim responsibility for our lives and those of our companions.
We have to stop wallowing in the pain of rejection, fear, emotional tension, and bondage. We have to stop begging our women to love us and begin showing them why we deserve their love.
If you are having problems in your relationship to your woman it is because you have let her down in some way. You have lost site of your purpose.
Our lovers are constantly testing us, prodding us, to see where we are, if we are conscious, awake and listening. They want to know that we are ready to protect them. They want to know that we are capable of providing them the strength that they require to feel safe in the world.
The measure of a man is his ability to remain calm and undisturbed in the face of the obstacles that the world throws his way.
The purpose of the feminine is to inspire us toward an understanding and a pursuing of our ultimate purpose. But, not before she tests us to make sure we are awake.
I say, stop reacting to the emotional displays your woman throws at you. Stop trying to help her through her problems with your logic. Begin, loving her truly. Love your woman from the deepest parts of yourself and you will find that that is the only thing she truly needs.
Be the space within which your woman can shine. You have to provide her that space. Her energy just is. It is here. She draws us in and offers us so much.
But unless we remain steadfast and single pointed on our purpose we will never be worthy of her gifts.
