The following is an excerpt from Session Two of Twelve Keys for Life and Self Mastery: Opening the Gate to Self Knowledge and Self Awareness

For a complete description of the one hour downloadable program and worksheets click here: http://bit.ly/JztBYf
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We are energetic beings living in a sea of energy and just as the energy of the universe takes many forms and has many layers, so do WE. To fully connect with and express our best selves in the world then it is imperative to have true Self knowledge and Self awareness. These are most efficiently gained through understanding  of the structure of our minds and energy systems.

It has often been said that “knowledge is power,” and nowhere is that truer than when we are speaking about ourselves and the lives we create. Self-knowledge includes understanding how we work as human beings as well as how we have personally operated up until now to construct our lives.

That brings us to Self-awareness. Self-awareness includes the ability to observe oneself, but the way we are using the term implies even more than that.

We share the view that each of us is in the world to bring more of our spiritual nature into human form – to become more of our authentic Selves and grow past the small identity that may have served us well until now but no longer does.

We live in a time that necessitates living in new ways … a time that requires us to rise to challenges from a different perspective than in the past so we can live lives that are more nurturing, satisfying, fulfilling, abundant and prosperous in every way.

To us, the term Self-awareness represents a knowing beyond observation of our patterns of thought, feeling and action. It describes a presence of “I AMNESS” that is beyond the average thought, feeling or sensation of human experience. It is the direct awareness of our spiritual nature.

We are addressing moving from the lower mind controlled by the ego and its self-protective – but often mistaken – ideas and beliefs to a level of BEING that embodies more of your spiritual essence … your soul nature. This is the place where we embrace our full potential and engage the power of our authentic Selves.

There is an art and science involved in this opening to the authentic Self. The way has been laid out for us through the millennia, but now we have the additional benefit of research in Mind-Body Medicine and Energy Psychology, as well as Quantum Physics, documenting age-old wisdom and providing important information to help speed us along on this exciting adventure of discovery.

The beginning of this journey necessarily includes a working knowledge of the mind, as it is the vehicle that transports us for a portion of our journey.

Our mind is not only an operating system; it is also where many of our obstacles lie. To understand the mind’s structure and have a working knowledge of its functions can help smooth our way as we seek to create change in our lives.

In this session we discuss the three levels of mind and how to use each of them appropriately. We talk about methods that are most useful with each level and provide an experiential exercise to help you begin to identify and sort out the layers of your own mind.

“The practice of meditation gave me the set of skills to guide my own transformation. It has been the most life altering skill that I have gained. I shifted from thinking that my emotion and thoughts owned me to feeling like I could play a role in changing my state.”

From Neuroplasticity: Changing our Belief about Change, by  Joanna Holsten

http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=221

An interesting article from NPR on how positive perception can enhance performance. The study was done with golfers but the process applies to any endeavor. Exciting to once again see science corroborating what has been

Can You Think Your Way To That Hole-In-One? http://n.pr/HT6Kdt

Image via Wikipedia

We all crave inner peace, well being and happiness yet we commonly seek those things in the wrong places and end up feeling even more empty, unhappy, lost or frustrated than we were at the start . Ultimately there really is no wrong as it is all learning and experience; however there are ways that are more direct, enjoyable and productive if we are really committed to creating these outcomes for ourselves.

The place to look for the path to our inner contentment is our mind. Not that it is the final resting place, but that knowledge and mastery of it leads us to our essential nature where all that we seek resides.  In the most fundamental way this is a journey of energy, however cognitive and emotional approaches can be an entry point as well. From my perspective, approaching our lives from an energetic standpoint clears the clutter and simplifies but we all must pass through the doorway on our own terms.

It can be helpful to think about your mind is awareness on a continuum. Think about it as a river that flows with your experience of it being a result of where you place your attention.  Whatever area you focus on becomes reality for that time with all its attendant resources and ecology, E.G. feelings, strengths, weaknesses etc. If you focus on the portion of the river that is congested with negative thoughts, the past, your story, unresolved feelings and dire predictions of the future, then that is what you have to work with. If you go upstream and connect at the mouth of the river that flows out of pristine mountain streams, you have a different reality and resources to draw on. From this vantage point the power of a clearer, truer flow can help clear the blockages downstream. This clearing of our blockages, old patterns and the release of our accumulated hurts and wounds brings a sense of renewal, a powerful shift in perspective and an embodiment of our true nature.

We all believe at some point that we do not have time to focus on, learn about and master our inner landscape, but when we look  at how things really work in this universe, the question can be asked…”Do we have time NOT to?”

I (Peg) am fascinated with the energetic aspects of money and what is does to us, what it does to society. For some time I have been thinking about the value of work and goods and services. Why do people work at jobs they don’t like? What factors go into deciding that an hour of time from one person is worth more or less than an hour of time from another? How did we get to the point where so many people are not earning a living wage while others have more than they will ever need or use? There are many reasons for all of this, on multiple levels.

What is interesting about our current times is that these topics have reached the mainstream and we are beginning to have intelligent conversations about them in many spheres of influence. Last week I started reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber. Within a few days, a friend told me about Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein. Interestingly enough, they were published on the same day: July 12, 2011, just ahead of the Occupy Wall St. movement. As I was scanning my email today, a third link came in. The Daily Good posted a story called: “When Generosity Meets Venture Capital.” When I delve deep into a topic, things often come to me in groups of three.

A public conversation about money, debt and humanity is emerging. It’s a growing movement and it’s exciting. During Biblical times, Jubilee years were held periodically where all consumer debt was cancelled. Just imagine how things would shift if we did this today! The time is right to envision a world where we all live in peace, health and happiness … and we can all contribute in one way or another.

Related articles

• Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber (theglobeandmail.com)

We’re hearing a lot about memory these days. What does it have to do with energy and being? Quite a bit, actually. Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Science of Remembering Everything, tells us that to memorize is to be more mindful and to pay more attention to the world around you. He says that “remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.” Taking notice is about being present. The more you notice and register in your mind via lively details, the more you truly experience. Your perspective broadens and your life becomes richer.

One of the tricks to remembering is to categorize what you’d like to remember into segments that represent people, objects and actions, make them vivid or “sticky”, and then store them in memory palaces (such as the rooms of your childhood home). Think about your own life and some of the things you can clearly recall. What are some of your happiest moments as a child? What about the saddest or the most frightening? What do you recall about your first job? How about your first relationship? More than likely an array of events, circumstances and situations come to mind. You can probably recall the exact day or time, who was present, where you were, what was happening. The deeper the imprint, the more likely you are to remember.

Although it takes a bit of practice, you can train your memory. As your memory expands, your knowledge base and perspective do as well. In ancient times, the collective memory was maintained and shared orally through the power of story. People memorized the stories and passed them down from generation to generation, expanding the mind. As the written word emerged, the human collective memory shifted from the individual mind to books. Now we are experiencing another significant shift with the proliferation of aids — such as the internet, smart phones with apps that will tell you where to park, what to eat, GPS systems that remember addresses and direct you how to go, and much more — that literally replace our memory. One of the downsides is that we don’t have to remember … our devices do it for us. This trend coincides with our stress-filled lives and the increasing decline of our memories.

Our lives are profoundly shaped by our perceptions and our perspective about life is expanded by our experiences … what we see, feel, hear, touch, and what we know.  To help broaden your mind and expand your energy, seek out new experiences and be mindful of them. Observe everything and remember to practice the art of presence every day.

Related articles

• Moonwalking (thefineprints.wordpress.com)
• Memory: Content or Method? (customerthink.com)

Bring Back My Happiness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. — Chuang Tzu

After I cleared my incoming email recently of non-essential messages, five remained. “How curious,” I thought as two of the five messages pertained to happiness. One was from the Daily Good, which opened with the above quote from Chuang Tzu. Simple, refreshing and clean. The other was from publishing coach, Robin Hoffman, with details about another happiness book.

Next I typed “happiness” into the Yahoo search engine and noted 227,000,000 results! A Google search on the same term yielded 54,300,000 results. Far fewer, yet overwhelming.

What is it about happiness, I thought? The more we seem to pursue it, the further from our grasp it seems to be. Then I returned to the Chuang Tzu quote. It’s all right there. Stop doing and start being. Experiment with withdrawing your attention from the pursuit of happiness and decide to BE happy. Experience happiness in the moment, in every moment. Try it and share your experiences with us via comments to this blog or on our Living Energy Facebook page.

Related articles

• Livia Kohn, Ph.D.: Chuang-tzu: The Tao of Perfect Happiness (huffingtonpost.com)

Energy. It’s everywhere. Inside. Outside. All around and ever-expanding. Karen Kallie, Tony Pace and I call our work together Living Energy because it is alive, connected and always changing.

One of the aspects of energy that fascinates me is how our individual and collective energy patterns are mirrored in our space and visa versa. Have you ever noticed a pattern between your computer or technical devices and personal energy?  I have. When my energy is not running smoothly, my computer displays similar patterns and visa versa.

When it takes me longer than usual to do something, I know it is time to shift my energy, attention and focus: take a break, go for a walk, do some yoga, meditate, garden, write a note, cook a meal, call a friend, etc.  When I return, the process usually goes much more smoothly and takes far less time. Since this is a type of energy I want to expand every day, it’s worthwhile for me to tune in and notice what is happening. If I continued on the same path, I would be expanding the energy of blockage, frustration, jams and more.

The next time you realize that you are pushing against something, take a break. As Esther and Jerry Hicks might say, drop your oars, allow your boat to turn around and float downstream. Shifting your focus changes your energy and enables a new pattern to take root. Going with the flow that comes naturally to each of us, through our hearts and intuition, is far easier than moving against the current. It also feels much better.

There is a bit of controversy at Harvard University about the voluntary “Kindness Pledge” the institution has asked incoming students to sign this year. Some of those in opposition have indicated that kindness conflicts with intellectual freedom and that the pledge does not have a place at Harvard.

The Kindness Bus

I can understand this perspective. Kindness is a virtue that emanates from the heart, not the mind or the intellect. In my opinion, kindness is an automatic response when we cultivate love within our hearts, within ourselves. I can see where too much thinking about kindness might get you all mixed up inside. If you are arguing a point, the rational mind might suggest tossing aside civility and going for the jugular … win your argument at all costs.

What is “kindness” anyway and why is it important? The dictionary defines kindness as the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. Wikipedia indicates that kindness is the act or the state of being kind —marked by goodness and charitable behaviour, mild disposition, pleasantness, tenderness and concern for others. It is known as a virtue, and recognized as a value in many cultures and religions. In his book “Rhetoric,” Aristotle wrote that kindness is an emotion that is defined as being helpful to someone in need, not in exchange for anything or for an advantage to the helper. Kindness is about caring. Kindness is important because it holds the possibility of all of us creating a better world. We are all human and we are one global community. What we do to one another, we do to ourselves.

While Harvard debates kindness, the rest of us can model kindness. Act according to your heart. Do what feels right. To learn more, check out Random Acts of Kindness, One Million Acts of Kindness, Carry Out Kindness. They’ll take you to even more resources and sites.

Be kind to yourself today and be kind to everyone you meet.

Related articles

• Harvard’s ‘Kindness’ Pledge: (huffingtonpost.com)
• Harvard Pledge Values ‘Kindness’ Over Learning: Virginia Postrel (businessweek.com)

This article and accompanying pictures provide great motivation to get into and stay with a routine meditation practice!

Even Beginners Can Curb Pain With Meditation

by Adam Cole 02:05 pm April 6, 2011

Robert Coghill/Wake Forest University School of MedicineSigns of pain disappeared from MRI images of the brain when freshly trained novices meditated.

Meditation has long been touted as a holistic approach to pain relief. And studies show that long-time meditators can tolerate quite a bit of pain.

Now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found you don’t have to be a lifelong Buddhist monk to pull it off. Novices were able to tame pain after just a few training sessions.

Sounds a bit mystical, we know, but researchers using a special type of brain imaging were also able to see changes in the brain activity of newbies. Their conclusion? “A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, a neuroscientist and the study’s lead author, tells Shots. That finding’s a first, Zeidan says.

In the study, a small group of healthy medical students attended four 20-minute training sessions on “mindfulness meditation” — a technique adapted from a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation called samatha. It’s all about acknowledging and letting go of distraction.”You are trying to sustain attention in the present moment — everything is momentary so you don’t need to react,” Zeidan explains. “What that does healthwise is it reduces the stress response. The feeling of pain is a very blatant distraction.”

So how did the researchers gauge the effect? They administered a very distracting bit of pain: A small, thermal stimulator heated to 120 degrees was applied to the back of each volunteer’s right calf.  The subjects reported both the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain. If pain were music, intensity would be volume.  Unpleasantness would have more of an emotional component, kind of like how much you love or hate a song.

After meditation training, the subjects reported a 40 percent decrease in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.  And it wasn’t just their perception of pain that changed. Brain activity changed too.

Primary Somatosensory Cortex

Notes

This depiction of the body, the cortical homunculus, was first developed by Wilder Penfield.  Each body part maps to a specific spot on a cross section of the brain’s sensory processing region, the primary somatosensory cortex. The larger the feature, the more brain space devoted to it.

Source: NPR; Credit: Adam Cole, Nelson Hsu

Every part of the body is mapped to a specific part of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex. “If I touch you on your left hand right above your left knuckle, there is an area in the brain that corresponds to that specific area in your hand that will be activated,” Zeidan explains. “When you are in pain it is much more activated — more intense and more widespread.”

This activation shows up on MRI brain scans.  When subjects experienced the heat stimulus under normal conditions, the “right calf” part of the primary somatosensory cortex lit up.  But after the subjects were trained in meditation, the activity in this region was not even detectable.

Brain images also show that meditation increased activation in areas of the brain related to cognitive control and emotion — areas where the experience of pain is built. What’s more, better meditators (those who scored higher on a standard scale of mindfulness) tended to have more activation in these areas and a lower experience of pain.

But can you achieve similar results by just approximating meditation, or believing you are in control of your pain tolerance? Zeidan says probably not. In this study, subjects who paid attention to their breathing to mimic meditation saw no significant change in pain.  And, in a previous study, subjects given fake training failed to see meditation’s effects, even though they believed they were actually performing mindfulness meditation.

Zeidan says he will run some more studies to get at how meditation relieves pain.  He hopes meditation can soon be applied clinically, perhaps to help patients cope with pain after surgery or chemotherapy.

“You might not need extensive training to realize pain-relief benefits,” Zeidan says. “Most people don’t have time to spend months in a monastery.”

Related articles

• More about Pain and Meditation (contemplativemind.wordpress.com)
• Regular Meditation Can Help Tune Out Distractions, Study Says (fitsugar.com)