Tag Archives: spirit

Making Dreams Come True in 5 Minutes a Day

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This practice is so easy that sometimes I forget how effective it is! Studies even prove it – people that write down their goals are one to one and one-half times more likely to achieve them. So, let’s do it!

While this practice is useful for any kind of goal or dream, I’d like to encourage its use with Divinely inspired goals, goals that are good for both you and others, goals or dreams that make your soul sing!

The whole process will probably take you less than 5 minutes, depending on how detailed you are with it. Once you have your goal or dream in mind, you want to do four things: say it, write it, read it and see it. Every Day.

1. Say it. Recite it from memory and repeat it, changing the words around if necessary until it sounds just right.

2. Write it. Once you’re happy with the wording, write it out 10 times. You might want to keep a journal so you can look back on previous dreams and how they’ve changed or materialized.

3. Read it. Read what you just wrote, out loud. Every sentence.

4. See it. Close your eyes and see what that dream looks like once achieved. Feel into it as well: what does it feel like once it’s real?

It’s okay and even encouraged to write the same goal every day for weeks, or really for as long as it takes. You may find the goal evolves a little bit every day and that’s a good thing; focusing on it daily helps us to be clear in what we really desire.

It really is that easy! Might as well start right now: what is your dream?

 

Bring on More Joy!

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Do you want more joy in your life? Who doesn’t?! The good news is it’s quite simple to start allowing more joy in on a regular basis; we just have to get used to it. This is a great exercise to remember if we’re in a funk and want to get out of it. There is nothing wrong with feeling down, but eventually we’re ready to move on.

A quick note on negative and positive emotions – all are good and necessary. Negative does not mean bad; it is just relative to other emotions. It’s a scale, negative on one end and positive on the other, or terror and rage on one end and joy on the other end. The more we intentionally feel joy the more we move up the scale on a regular basis. Because most of us prefer to feel happy and joyful!

This exercise is so simple you can do it almost anywhere you are comfortable closing your eyes for a minute.

Bring to mind something that makes you very, very happy. It can be anything – a loved one, a pet, music, friends, art, mountains, food, elephants – truly anything; no one is judging you. Anything that just thinking about brings a smile to your face or makes you bust out laughing.

Once you have it in mind, set your timer for 17 seconds (“Siri, set timer 17 seconds”) and then just dive into that object of love and feel the joy; live it, feel it, surround yourself in it, swim in it and get it all over you! Feel the happiness and joy like it’s the only important thing in the world.

Once the timer goes off – how do you feel? Doesn’t it feel great to take the time to do nothing but sit and feel that joy? And it was less than a minute.

As you practice this more and more, you’ll find you instantaneously recall it throughout the day, lifting your mood more and more frequently.

Do this at least once a day every day for a week; two or three times a day is ideal. Feeling this every morning encourages good days to follow!

 

The Practice of Forgiveness

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If you are determined to move forward into a greater life for yourself, but you are harboring grudges or resentments towards another, forgiving is essential. I know it’s not easy. I know you may not want to do it; I didn’t. I had heard people promoting the value of forgiveness for many years before I decided to take a serious stab at it.

After all, “He did it to me; why should I forgive him?” He needed to suffer, and I wasn’t going to let him off the hook, no way; he needed to pay! The problem is, he wasn’t paying for it. I was. In reality, he probably had no idea the series of events still played over and over in my head and he’d long forgotten them, so it certainly didn’t torture him at all.

I was the one paying for it, wrapping up good energy on past events that truly had no significance in my current or future life. And that’s why we need to forgive; we need that valuable, awesome energy to help us move forward, not hold us back. It doesn’t make the person’s actions okay or acceptable; it’s a matter of taking back our energy and our Power. Take your Power back and get rid of that icky energy.

There are many ways to start a forgiveness practice. What I’ll share here are three possibilities using prayer beads or malas. There is no magic number of times you need to do it; you just do it until you feel you’re done. It might take one day, two weeks or two months, but eventually the charged energy goes away when you recall the person. None of these three practices is any better than the other. Do the one that feels best for the situation.

First Option: This is particularly useful when you really wanted someone to change. Imagine the person in front of you, as if you are speaking directly to them. Speak sincerely. “Joe, I forgive you for not being the person I wanted you to be.” It allows for a space of letting them be them, and not someone they’re not. Repeat it over and over until you feel a shift.

It is also sometimes useful to combine it with the second option.

Second option: Again, imagine the person in front of you, as if you are speaking to them. Speak sincerely. “Joe. I love you, I bless you, I forgive you, I release you.” That’s it, over and over.

Combined it is even more powerful: “Joe, I forgive you for not being the person I wanted you to be. I love you, I bless you, I release you.”

The third option is my personal favorite as it helps me recognize that the faults I see in others are also my own, which helps me come around quickly to compassion or understanding for that person. Again, imagine talking directly to them. “Joe, I forgive you and myself for being ignorant (Choose appropriate quality). I love you as I love myself, for God is the love I am.” This also turns the situation over to the Divine Source that allows love to flow to and from all without judgement.

I’d challenge you to just try one for a week if there is someone that really triggers you. You don’t have to fully forgive them, but just see if it frees anything up in you to be open to starting the process.

Are you willing to be open to moving toward your greater life?

 

Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

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Announcing my February Empowerment Class!

I’m so excited to announce my February Empowerment Class is based on the book A New Earth – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle! This book was instrumental in my spiritual evolution and “waking up” to a new idea of life.

Being present was a new idea to me at the time, at least naming it as such, and I learned very quickly how to be present when life got stressful. At the time I lived next to 60 acres of woods, so I was often present with the trees and paths anyway, but the exercises Eckhart offered took me to a different level. Learning to listen to all the sounds of the woods and enjoy them just as a sound, without naming the source, brought me great satisfaction in just being in the moment.

There are so many lessons I continue to practice what I first learned in this book; I think Eckhart does an amazing job of explaining things like attachment and acceptance and loss, the ego, the inner and outer body, and what is ours to do now.

This is why I want to share it with everyone that is ready to move forward with their lives; let’s do it and move on!

Find out more and sign up here.

Could you use a little help going deeper or getting unstuck? Karen works with people that are ready to move forward in their lives. Karen learned the power, joy and magic of committed spiritual practice and now helps others to as well. If you’d like to talk about it, sign up for a Spiritual Strategy Session with Karen here.

Book Club Quotes – The Alchemist

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“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.

“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

~The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

We never lose control of what is happening to us, but we lose the perception of having control over what is happening. Let me be clearer though – we can never control what another person does to us, but we can control our response and reaction, and thus the situation. Many people are unaware that there is a choice, that if we are being attacked in a physical, verbal or emotional way, that it requires a specific kind of response. But that’s not true. If it were true then everyone would react the exact same way to a specific stimulus, and we don’t. We are a product of so many things, including previous experiences, that we all experience the same event differently. This can be proven simply by asking four eyewitness what happened in an accident. There will be four different answers because they observe and report based on what is most important to them. The thing we need to try to understand is that what someone is doing to us is not about us, but about them, and although it may be very difficult and it feels like it’s about us, we must try to not take it personally. I realize this is not a quick or easy lesson to understand, but it’s worth the time to fully grasp it.

Back to the quote, losing control over what is happening and being controlled by fate is also about giving up, not believing we have a choice in how our future plays out. We do have a choice, and starting by understanding we have a choice in the moment leads us into understanding our perception shapes our future too. There are so many spiritual practices that can help with this; the one I want to share now is about writing your future.

Practice: You: the Novel. Consider a real situation you feel you have no control over. There is a good chance as you review this situation in your head, it never comes out in your favor. Let’s change that. Write down the situation, but as you’re writing it, write it in your favor. Change any details you need to change so you’re the winner, and feel the power of that! Really feel and imagine it as you write it, knowing that a new or different outcome really is possible. The situations you write about may not change immediately, but you will start to see unexpected outcomes, and as you continue this practice, things will begin to shift.

Here’s a video with more on the practice:

Create the life of your dreams!  Please let me know how writing your life works out.

The Automatic Truth

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If you’ve ever felt like you don’t know how to get an answer on a pressing issue, or you are looking for some clarity, you might want to try automatic writing. I find it especially useful when I need a little direction, and some people use automatic writing as a regular practice. Whether frequent or occasional, automatic writing helps the flow of insights come to us in a way that our subconscious can’t filter out.

And it’s easy! It’s as simple as a pen and paper or a computer keyboard. My experience is that my flow from the Divine is interrupted less with a pen and paper, but if a computer is best for you, then you do whichever way is most comfortable.

The key with automatic writing is to never stop writing. The pen is always on the paper, or the fingers are constantly moving on the keys, no breaks.

If you’re new to this practice, start with 10 minutes. If you have a smartphone or home assistant, take a few deep breaths, then tell it to “set alarm for 10 minutes,” and go!

It’s best to know the leading question or phrase that you’ll start with, particularly if you do have a pressing question you want an answer to. When the timer starts, write out your question first, for example, “What is the next best action for me to take in my business?” and then never lift the pen up until the timer goes off. Don’t worry about punctuation, don’t dot your i’s or cross your T’s, no judgement of what you are writing, and don’t worry about how neat it is.

During the process, there should be no critical thought going on. Once you start with the opening sentence, just let it flow, no matter how ridiculous it might sound. Removing all thought about it really allows your Divine Wisdom to show up, so let it.

When you’re finished, take some more deep breaths, and if you need to, step away from your writing for a few minutes. Don’t step away too long, as you’ll want to reread and make notes on some of it before you lose the train of thought in the parts that are too illegible to read. Reading back over it, you’ll likely get some additional insights you didn’t even realize you wrote down!

This is really a good way to hear your deep Truth, so I recommend doing this frequently, especially when you’re in need of guidance.

A Practice to Connect with All Life

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Wouldn’t it be great if there was a spiritual practice in which you got to connect with the animals or the trees or the mountains of the world? There is! In fact, there are several. This is one that I will be leading my safari group through while I’m in Kenya in November.

My safaris are not simply “see animal, take picture, move on.” No, on my safaris we take time to connect with the land, connect with the animals, connect with the people. It’s a completely different experience than most safaris.

The great thing is, you can experience some of this anywhere you are, so I wanted to teach you just one way to connect with life as my group will. This is the short version, but it’s a great intro to the process.

What do you want to connect with? It can truly be any part of nature: a river, a mountain, a flower, an ocean, an animal – even your own pets. The object of connection doesn’t necessarily have to be in your field of vision, but it does help if it is.

Watching the connected video may make it easier to go through this process, but I’ll also write it in case you’re unable to watch the video.

Once you have your object of connection, close your eyes and take a couple of deep grounding breaths. Begin to feel your skin. What does it feel like from the inside? Take a few minutes with that, and then actually take one hand and run it over your skin – is it soft? Rough? Smooth? Cold? Dry? Warm? Take a few minutes with this. Then open your eyes and look at your object. Imagine touching its outer cover, whether it’s a skin, fur, bark, snow, leaves – what does it feel like?

After a few minutes, come back inside yourself. Can you feel the blood pumping through your veins and your heart? What does it feel like? Turning to your connection object, imagine feeling its circulatory system, whether it’s blood, water, or some other form of life. There is some kind of life force energy moving through all natural objects; can you feel it?

Back to yourself again, what emotions do you feel inside you right now? Happy, Peace, Tranquil, Joy, Excitement? Then connecting again with your object, can you feel what emotions it might be exuding? Even if you don’t believe the object has emotions, pretend it did – what would they be?

As a bonus, ask the object if it has a message for you.

I would love to hear of your experience with this, especially any messages you received.

Enjoy your connection with life; it’s truly magical!

Reading as a Spiritual Practice?

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If a spiritual practice is something that helps open us up to knowing ourselves better, or opens us up to receiving Divine Wisdom and Love and Truth, moving us forward to help create a better life, then Yes, of course!  The best part is you don’t have to sit down and read a whole big book at once, and in fact it’s probably better to be on a slow, contemplative journey.

There is no rule about the exact book either, as long as it is uplifting, mind opening or inspiring. If it can create just a small crack or opening in your brain that allows you to receive a new idea about life, to think a little differently, then that’s all that is necessary.  Creating a big opening is even better, but not required.

There are many effective ways to study books of wisdom, here are just a few ideas to get you started.

Morning study:

Before your days sets into full swing, take 10 or so minutes to read a few pages of inspiration or uplift. Then sit for a few minutes and contemplate the reading and how you might incorporate the lessons of it into your day.  Set a daily intention for the day of ease and wonder you will have.

Evening study:

Similar to the morning study, read just a few pages from an inspiring book and then contemplate the meaning and application of it to your life. Connect events from your day to the previous night’s reading and intention. Having good thoughts of an intentional life before bed will allow for more restful sleep.

Journaling:

You can add this any time.  After reading, write your contemplations, intentions or successes in a journal.  Writing helps to firm, and discern, our ideas and thoughts, and allows for easier callback if you had deep insights

Discussion:

I like the idea of adding discussion to any other practice but it also stands very well on its own. I like it so much that I lead book discussion groups, so if you haven’t found any have a  look on my events page.  The power of discussion is not to have a teacher tell you what a book means, but to allow you to put words to your thoughts and also be open to insights from other members.  We learn a great deal from others, and we also find community in shared experience, so a discussion group can help you go deeper quicker.

 

Some possible books might be poetry by Rumi or Hafiz; Chicken Soup for the Soul, the Bible, Science of Mind meditations, a piece by Meister Eckhart, but the options are unlimited and I would really love to hear what works for you!  Please share your journey on my facebook page.