Great video on interaction of mind, experience and brain and the benefits of developing mindfulness. Cultivating this state helps to improve health, relationships, and the ability to learn and enjoy life. This video is focused on children but it has great wisdom for all of us!
Please join us on Monday Dec.13, 2009 at 10 A.M. – when we will be airing Session One of our foundation program: 12 Keys for Life and Self Mastery. This show will be recorded and available for download so you can listen at your leisure if you cannot join us at show time.
Click here to access the show or the archived program: http://www.divatoolbox.com/diva-toolbox-radio-/hosts/2007-peg-donahue-and-karen-kallie-living-energy.html
This session recording includes such topics as:
In addition there are many suggestions and tools to help you to:
Here is a brief excerpt from the section of the program where we discuss contributions from various teachers of conscious creation throughout this century:
In the 1990s we began to hear from William Tiller, a scientist and Stanford Professor who has been very involved in his own spiritual development since the sixties as well as conducting experiments, writing and reporting on matter, energy and the nature of consciousness. Dr. Tiller has contributed much to our understanding of the unseen forces in our universe and our relationship to it all.
Two essential to solve the puzzle of reality formation:
1. Intentionality combined with coherence is key for creative results.
2. We need to develop our infrastructure, that is our nervous and energy systems, through inner self management methods in order to grow in consciousness and be able to adequately guide universal forces on our behalf.
Peg, Tony and I would love to have you join us for our radio show on Monday Nov. 30 at 10 A.M. – our topic will be Cultivating Joy. The holiday season is supposed to be one of joy; however it often is not for many. On this show we will be discussing ways that you can tap into more joy regardless of the stresses in the world or in one’s personal life. If you cannot join us live the show is recorded and available for listening later.
http://www.divatoolbox.com/diva-toolbox-radio-/hosts/2007-peg-donahue-and-karen-kallie-living-energy.html
Your energy system has a direct influence on your mind, body and spirit. It impacts your health, your moods, your outlook on life and much more. By tuning into your personal energy level throughout the day you will feel better and begin to develop a foundation for being able to expand your ability to manage, focus and channel your energy.
We would love to have you join us on our radio show on Diva Toolbox on Monday 11-23-09 @ 10 A.M. where our topic will be Practical Solutions for Holiday Stress. If you cannot make it at that time the show is aways recorded and you can access it from our link on Diva Toolbox.
Have a happy stress free weekend!
Learning to connect with your authentic nature moves you into a personal energy flow that affects your entire life in a strong and positive way. Our personal energy system is the means through which we directly contact and receive information regarding the people, places and things we come into contact with. Our higher nature or authentic self communicates with us through this energy system. Most people call this intuition.
We are in constant contact with information from our higher nature but tend to not understand it, discount it or ignore it. Emotional reactions to people and events, half formed or unexplained feelings, hunches are all ways that our psyche is trying to inform us of the true nature of our interactions. Our thoughts, wishes, desires and attitudes are all also a part of this mix. This can make it tricky to sort out what message is coming from which source.
Working with your personal energy system so that it becomes more open, clear and flowing helps you to be more clear and in tune with the truth of things…helps you to move past the tangle of fears, old beliefs and conditioned reactions to live more freely from your true center –your authentic self.
It can be useful to have some cognitive awareness regarding the competing messages that crowd our inner world! The following chart may be helpful in sorting out the various “voices in your head”!
Normal Awareness Higher Awareness
Five Senses Senses Energy Fields
Processes via Nervous System Experiences Directly
Interprets via rational mind Processes via energy system
Filters via past experience Direct ‘now’ experience
Me centered, mechanical Heart centered
Concern based in survival Spiritually aware
Cause and effect Non-linear awareness
Three dimensional Awareness of other dimensions
Sequential time No limits to time & space
Orderly, predictable Not dependent on logic
Future= know present, remember past Point of power in present
Being aware of these differences can help you observe yourself throughout the day and help move you to make different choices about where to “live from”.
We’d love to hear what you notice!
In a previous post I made mention of Secondary Attention as an aspect of mind that focuses more on the spiritual, inner world as opposed to the more common mind that focuses on external realities. We certainly need that outer focus and the aspect of mind that facilitates it, but that is not all of who we are and it is not what may be most needed at this juncture in time as we are being challenged to evolve, stretch our limits and create a new world that works for all of humanity’s support, nurture and survival.
First Attention
Our five senses draw our attention to the outer physical world. When we have an outer directed focus we look for our inner needs to be filled through material sources. This is usually a short lived and unsatisfying solution. You may have experienced this at some time in your life! Interestingly (and painfully!), this orientation tends to lead to blame, criticism, judgments, and compulsivity (repetitive behaviors expecting a different outcome).
From a spiritual perspective being outwardly directed tends to produce reliance on a spiritual being external to ourselves. We beseech this Great Being to bestow favors upon us –and we continue to define ourselves through the physical, roles and material possessions–a limited consciousness that has limited results. In addition, it a mindset that begins and ends in fear—never particularly useful! Such a mindset, or perspective, leaves us up one day down the next as there is no real inner center to hold on to. Like it or not, change is inextricably woven into the fabric of life and a consciousness that is deeply focused on and attached to the outer world does not help you to move gracefully through cycles of change. AND such a focus certainly does not help to increase your capacity to function in the world in a meaningful way that leads to peace, joy & happiness!
Second Attention
Second Attention can be likened to your intuition, gut feeling, inner knowing or sixth sense. This sense is about an inner awareness that can assist you to resolve issues, release struggle and longing and receive the true fulfillment of your deepest desires.
Developing this aspect of self is an inner path allows you to (1) examine thoughts, feelings and beliefs that lead to problems and root them out at the core which is far more effective than struggling against the consequences of living with an unexamined mind, (2) open the way to more creative problem solving, (3) expand your consciousness beyond the physical and material world and awaken you to who you truly are, (4) help you to transcend limitations, expand creative ability, and step into your true power. And in the process you can also gain increased tolerance, ease of being, happiness, understanding and vitality!
Expansion of Second Attention
Proper alignment and attunement of the energies of body, mind and spirit goes to the core of developing second attention through a clear and present awareness. This awareness allows you to know what is good for you, and helps to attract to you those things that assist you to be happy and healthy. You also become more conscious of what robs you of your natural healthy state and eliminate the sources of your struggles.
Developing your inner awareness and learning how to manage your energy involves learning to listen to your body and mind in a new way that helps you to create health and happiness from the inside out! It is also about bringing balance to your life, fulfilling a basic need for purpose and meaning, as well as opening to the wisdom available to you. Educating yourself about how to work with energy can also aid you in riding the waves of life more gracefully. We all have an innate capacity for joy, pleasure, harmony and a balanced spiritual toughness (resiliency) that goes largely untapped. These inner capabilities can help us to find pleasure in everyday life.
As a culture we are grappling with yearning for deeper connections within ourselves, with each other, and the world around us. We also are facing challenges that go beyond the capacity of the common mind to rise to and move beyond. We need a higher perspective and more highly creative solutions to birth a sustainable new world. A new human has been posited to be a part of creating that new world as well as being an inhabitant of it. Inner development is needed to fulfill those realities. Learning to develop our mind and its abilities, to masterfully navigate our mind-body systems, and work with personal and universal energy we can accomplish these tasks.
Skill Building: Develop your Second Attention
1. Do you ever get exhausted after spending time with certain people?
People who lack energy look outside themselves to “recharge their batteries.” When you are with them, they can take your energy to replenish theirs.
2. Have you ever felt someone staring at you?
We emit large amounts of energy from our eyes. When someone is staring at you, you are literally feeling their energy.
3. Have you ever felt an instant dislike for someone?
We are always “reading” other people’s energy fields to see how compatible they are with ours. Just as some substances – like oil and water – don’t mix well, when you feel an instant dislike for someone, your energy field isn’t mixing well with theirs.
4. Do some people excite and energize you more than others?
People who have energy reserves tend to extend and exchange their energy with others. When you’re with someone who excites you, or whose energy mixes well with yours your energy level is boosted, you feel more energized.
5. Do you ever know how someone is feeling before they tell you?
People emit information about themselves through their energy fields. When you can sense how someone feels, you are picking up and decoding this information.
6. Do you ever experience different feelings in different rooms in your home, or in other people’s homes?
Environments have an energetic” blueprint,” just as people do. Often this is a result of the emotional exchanges that have gone on in that space. When you get a feeling from a place, you are picking up on this residual energy.
7. Have you ever had an initial impression that you talked yourself out of, only to find later that you were correct?
We pick up on energy and register impressions/information unconsciously. When you don’t act on a hunch, it’s because your unconscious mind picks up on the energy associated with the hunch, but, because your conscious mind can’t see or measure your thoughts, it rationalizes it away.
The above are all examples of knowing that emerges from Second Attention.
You may want to play with sensing how the different places you inhabit in a day feel when you get out of your mind and settle down inside to simply directly experience them.
Be aware of how your sense impressions feel when you quiet your mind and just allow yourself to ‘be present’ with them.
We would love to hear about your experience in the comment section!
Several of the most recent posts on this blog reference energy, science of consciousness and the power of mind. While the science is very fascinating and even mind boggling, unless we have a way to turn the information into practical use, it remains on the realm of ideas and lab experiments and of no relevance to everyday life.
Admittedly all the data is not in regarding energy and consciousness, but the new science has corroborated enough of what is contained in ancient perennial wisdom to begin using it to live more healthy, peace filled and joyful lives! The work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), Lynn McTaggart, Deepak Chopra, Greg Braden, Bruce Lipton and many more are all showing the way–and will continue to do so as new awareness and discoveries unfold about life, the universe and everything!
Our mission with Living Energy is to provide both information and tools to facilitate the process of bringing the theory of energy and consciousness out of the realm of the conceptual and into the realm of practicality to help us all create happier, healthier, more peace filled and posperous lives.
Knowledge of the new science is of course helpful, but it is really only a first step toward benefitting from this information. A helpful next step is to open to a personal experience and awareness of the movement of energy and consciousness in your own life. This can feel like a bit of a challenge as you wonder where to begin, afterall energy and consciousness are a bit like electricity and the wind—they are invisible! We do however observe their movement through their effects. And,we do sense and feel them. So it is with energy and consciousness. We can develop the ability to directly experience them. Even though they are not visible , they are still very real and can be experienced. In fact you do experience them all the time, you simply do not recogniize it as such. In addition to this lack of recognition there is also a lack of awareness regrading how to harness these abilites in order to benefit more positively from them.
One way to begin this process of recognition and expansion of ability to mange energy and consciousness is to think about your mind as possessing two diffent kinds of attention. Primary attention is the one you are most familiar with. This attention is directed outward. You pay attenion with it all day long as you direct your focus on computers, TV, people, and outer events. Even the stream of thoughts running unceasingly (and perhaps unnoticed as they tend to become background hum) through your mind are all in the province of first attention.
Secondary attention is a more of an inward experience. It is deeper, more peaceful and below the chaos of the common chattering mind. It is subtle and allows you to attune to deeper levels of awareness of yourself, your environment and the universe!
Techniques that are helpful in developing second attention are : meditation, deep relaxation and contemplation. These practices can help you become more aware of the subtler levels of your reality, the qualities and movement of energy and consciousness in your life.
Another simple way to begin to tune into the world of energy and expanded consciousness is to become aware of your thought patterns and notice not only what they are but how they affect you. Thoughts are are a particular frequency of energy and they in turn produce another type of energy….feeling or emotion which then affects your denser energetic being—your body. So you can play with thought energy, experiment in your personal laboratory and see how you are creating your daily experience: thought>>emotion>>bodily experience. You may even begin to pick up on how your inner states affect how others respond to you!
Once you develop more awareness regarding energy and consciousness you become freer to make choices that nurture and support you rather than drag you down and create havoc with you health, life, work and relationships.
In the next post we will delve deeper into the specifics of cultivating secondary attention: what it means, feels like and how you can use it to create a more whole, healthy and prosperous life!
Recent studies in neuroscience are supporting chilling out, day dreaming and a don’t worry, be happy attitude in order to be more productive and creative…something regular meditators experience as a by product of their practice along with health benefits and a less stressful life!
NY Times
“In fact, our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind is wandering and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts, a new brain-scanning study suggests. “Solving a problem with insight is fundamentally different from solving a problem analytically,” Dr. Kounios says. “There really are different brain mechanisms involved.”
By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.
“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As measured by brain activity, however, “mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”
She suspects that the flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. “You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight,” she says.
In a series of experiments over the past five years, Dr. Kounios and his collaborator Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern University used brain scanners and EEG sensors to study insights taking form below the surface of self-awareness. They recorded the neural activity of volunteers wrestling with word puzzles and scanned their brains as they sought solutions.
Some volunteers found answers by methodically working through the possibilities. Some were stumped. For others, even though the solution seemed to come out of nowhere, they had no doubt it was correct.
In those cases, the EEG recordings revealed a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain’s right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem. The brain broadcast that signal one-third of a second before a volunteer experienced their conscious moment of insight — an eternity at the speed of thought.
The scientists may have recorded the first snapshots of a Eureka moment. “It almost certainly reflects the popping into awareness of a solution,” says Dr. Kounios.
In addition, they found that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate.
“You want to quiet the noise in your head to solidify that fragile germ of an idea,” says Dr. Jung-Beeman at Northwestern.”
To read the entire article:
In my mind this ground of Being is not only THE source of the peace and happiness we seek but it is also the space from which we create more easily, effortlessly. It is from this space that we can create most effortlessly the best of ourselves…and a life that nurtures, supports and enlivens us and those around us.
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| Reprinted from New Heaven New Earth |
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| MEDITATION SWITCHES ON DISEASE FIGHTING GENES Family health GuideOriginal Link
Researchers at the Harvard Medical School have found that deep relaxation seems to switch off ‘disease causing’ genes, while switching on genes that actively protect us from disorders such as high blood pressure to pain to infertility and even rheumatoid arthritis. Researchers attribute these changes to a phenomenon they call the ‘Relaxation Effect.’ The researchers compared the genetic profile of individuals who were long-term practitioners of relaxation methods such as yoga and meditation to a control group of individuals who were not relaxation practitioners. In the words of Dr Herbert Benson, who led the research group at the Harvard Medical School, “We found a range of disease fighting genes that were active in the relaxation practitioners but not active in the control group.” Interestingly, in as little as two months after the control group began meditating, their genetic profile changed to resemble those of the relaxation practitioners. In a separate study conducted by Dr Dean Ornish and co-workers, men diagnosed with low-risk prostate cancer were asked to incorporate positive lifestyle changes as a potential treatment for their disease, as they had opted not to undergo conventional treatment. The researchers conducted two prostate biopsies on each individual, one before and one three months after incorporation of changes such as following a plant-based diet, exercise, stress management techniques such as meditation, and participating in a support group. They reported that the biopsy samples collected post-lifestyle change had a different gene expression pattern with various disease-promoting genes switched off, and various protective genes turned on. It seemed that Drs Benson and Ornish had hit upon a treatment that came with huge benefits minus the usual side effects.
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