Tag Archives: spiritual practice

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.

Your Car the Temple

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My Car is a Temple, Yes, my car is a temple for spiritual practices with my prayer beads!

I want to share these simple spiritual practices with you because I know firsthand that if life is feeling hard, and if you want deeper meaning or connection in your life, a spiritual practice can make all the difference.

This spiritual practice uses prayer beads, or malas. I always have one or two sets of prayer beads in my car. It doesn’t matter how many beads are on them – it can be 55 or 77 or 101 or 108…If there are fewer beads, you just do more circuits.

I love doing something like this in my car because I spend so much time in there; I might as well make the best of it. It certainly lightens the mood when stuck in traffic!

The four practices I may do are: Forgiveness, Blessings, Gratitude, or Affirmations. It’s completely random which one I choose; I just do whichever one feels best at the time. I get in the car, get situated, turn on the GPS and pick up my prayer beads, then ask, “What do I need to do?”

Typically, I do affirmations or blessings. But just the other day I was completely triggered by hearing about an old friend and their actions, so I knew the second I picked up the beads that forgiveness was in order!

I won’t get deep into specifics about each of these practices; they all have their own blog/video because they can be practiced so many different ways. So please be sure to see my other posts about forgiveness, gratitude, affirmations and blessings.

Back to the day of forgiveness – I picked up my beads and immediately started in “X – I forgive you and myself for being a bitch, I love you as I love myself, for God is the love I am.” Harsh, I know, but that was the only word I could seem to find for her actions.

I was only 3 or 4 beads in before the awareness of the times I was a bitch came to mind. That’s the thing about this practice, you’re fully admitting that if you see and are triggered by something in someone else, you have the trait alive in you – latent or active. And while I suspect most people wouldn’t call me one, there have been moments. And so, the work here for me is to find why I was. Where do I see that in me and what does it teach me about what kind of healing I need to do?

Recognizing it within me helps to find the place of compassion or understanding for the other person, and that’s where forgiveness starts.

In this case I was complete with this forgiveness practice within 15 beads. But that’s not always the case; it can take days or weeks for the awareness to arise and forgiveness to take over, so don’t be hard on yourself. Just keep at it.

All that work done while on a drive! No extra time out of my day, no sitting in meditation for hours.

Blessings, affirmations and gratitude practices with your prayer beads are equally as powerful, so please be sure to check out those specific blogs.

How could your life change if you started treating your car as your personal temple?

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!

You: The Novel

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What if you could write your life as you want it to be? Well, maybe you can! This is one of the practices I will be leading my safari group through while in Kenya this month. It’s a fun practice to do for anything, though. 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.

Here is the practice:

You are the author of your life, so you’re going to sit down and write it out as if you’re writing a novel. This can be applied to any area of your life and for any period of time. You might want to script out the next meeting with your boss, or your next trip, or your next five years, it’s up to you – you hold the pen!

As you’re writing, pay attention to what you want to experience and how you want to feel. Don’t get caught in details, but rather the feelings and emotions.

For example, I might be writing right now, “As we head out on safari and the Jeep turns a corner, we see these fabulous, majestic, amazing animals. I am flabbergasted, I’m amazed and I am just so grateful. Before I know it, almost before I can catch my breath again, I see one of these other amazing animals walk right in front of us! I never thought I would be so close to these animals in the wild; I never thought these dreams could come true as fabulous as they are today! I feel like the luckiest person alive, no I am the luckiest person alive to be able to experience this right here and now, and I can’t believe how many more miracles have happened today on top of everything that we experienced yesterday!”

Concentrate on the feeling and experience.

If your boss called you into the office, it might go something like this – “As I sit down at the desk across from Mr. Jones, he seems to be looking at me differently. I thought he was going to ask me in here to tell me how bad I was doing but the words that are coming out of his mouth are all praise! He loves my last project! He’s talking about promoting me! I feel honored, I feel recognized and I feel appreciated.”

What do you suppose might happen if you scripted your life every day? Are you open to the idea that in one week, or one year, your life may have changed for the better? Is there any harm in trying it?

I’d love for you to try it for a week or two and let me know what happens. Just remember to put the emphasis on the feelings and the experience, after all, that’s what really matters: how you feel.

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

Closing Your Day Well – How I Close My Day

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My Bedtime Spiritual Practice

Is it important to have a spiritual practice at bedtime? I think so. I think it’s a good idea to close out the day with a clear mind and heart, so your sleep is more restful, which then makes for a better tomorrow!

So, I’m going to share what I do every night before bed. It doesn’t mean this is exactly what you should do; it’s just a way I feel good about ending my day.

These are not bedtime specific practices either; they are practices that I talk about in other blogs that have several types of practice associated with them and can be done anytime during the day.

My bedtime practice first involves recycling or reusing old pieces of paper or paper that otherwise might get tossed. It might be a used notebook with just a page or two left, an unused pad of paper or decent sized scraps of paper that are still blank. I keep these in a pile by my bedside along with pen and bins or bags.

The first thing I do is to clear out any icky stuff from the day, so my first practice is forgiveness. Who or what do I need to forgive? At this particular time, it’s not a deep practice, just an acknowledgement of ill feelings towards someone or something to allow the healing practice to start. It might be a person or group or animal or myself, and I simply write, “I forgive Mr. X for doing that thing he did that made me feel so disrespected.” I might even add an excuse for them, such as, “I know he was only trying to protect his ego.” And that’s it; I toss it in my forgiveness bag.

Once I clear those feelings out, I open to gratitude and appreciation. I write down everything I’m grateful for that day, especially the unexpected miracles of the day. I write down everything that comes to me, big or small, and then throw it into the gratitude bag.  I actually have a gift bag I use with the words “Thank you” on it that they go in!

Next are my successes of the day. This part is relatively new for me, but I’ve found it’s a great acknowledgement of my accomplishments, and it’s important to recognize when we do good. It doesn’t have to be big; it might be mowing the lawn or eating well or brushing my teeth, but if you did it and it’s good for you or someone else, recognize it!

Then I also do a “future gratitudes” practice, which is what I’ll be grateful for when my goals and dreams materialize. What do you want to be grateful for in one month? One year? Write it down now, help it along!

These go into a bag and then I’m ready for a sweet blessed sleep!

Every so often, I take these papers and do my own ceremonial fire. I offer the forgiveness papers up to be released forever, and the others to be blessed and multiplied throughout the Universe.

This isn’t a hard or time-consuming practice, but it’s another small step toward opening myself up to the greater life of my dreams. Is this a practice you can see yourself doing?

 

Two Minutes More!

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Does the thought of sitting down for 20 minutes of meditation overwhelm you or keep you from even starting?  If so, this might be just the trick you need to get started.  That’s the very reason I started this practice, because I just couldn’t bear the thought of getting up any earlier in the morning, and I wasn’t sure that even if I did that I wouldn’t fall back asleep being still and quiet for that long, that early!

I call this my “Two Minutes More” meditation because that’s exactly what it is. Before I get into the details of it, let me ask you – is there a time in the morning, as you’re bustling about getting ready for the day and before you head out the door, that you sit down?  Do you sit to eat breakfast? Drink Coffee? Put on your shoes? Watch news or read the paper?  Put on makeup?  Or any other reason?  If so, this may be for you.  This won’t work for everyone, but if you fit the “sit” qualifications, why not give it a try?

This practice evolved the way it did because I knew as I sat at my makeup table, when the dog or cats would start to pester me to be fed or let out, I would just tell them they’d have to wait until I was done and so they became used to leaving me alone.  But when I would try to sit somewhere else to meditate they would disregard any boundaries and pester me nonstop. So I just extended my makeup time a little more, fooled them!

So, Two Minutes More was born.   When you’ve finished with your sitting activity, instead of rushing up and around right away, sit for just two more minutes.  If you have a smartphone, tell it to set a time for 2 minutes, close your eyes, straighten up a bit, and take a deep breath.  Really feel the air moving into your lungs, feel your lungs expand, then feel them relax as you slowly exhale.  Then also check your feet- are you feeling grounded to the earth?  Feel the bottom of your feet and maybe even feel them sink through all of the materials between you and the core of the earth.  Be grounded in your day to help you stay stable and unshakeable.

The two minutes will pass very quickly, so if at some point you want to increase it to three, five, seven minutes it’s easy to do.  The other beauty of this practice is you don’t need to get up any earlier, the alarm can stay the same because you can always squeeze 2 minutes in!

One gentleman told me he literally does not sit down from the time he gets up until he leaves the house, so this won’t work for everyone.  And if that’s the case, is there another time throughout the day you can try it?  Maybe before you start the car or after you turn it off?  First sit down on the bus? The coffee shop or your office?

I hope you’re able to give this a try.  Starting to establish a spiritual practice starts the shift in your life to allow more great things in, and this is a simple one to start!