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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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.

Attention (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Energy flows where our attention goes….and scattered mental energy impacts our emotional energy that wears away at our physical energy. Because this all happens in an internal invisible realm it  is easy to think there are no consequences, but there are!

Here are some ways to begin to train your attention and reclaim your precious energy for attending to what you do want in life.

1. The obvious: get adequate sleep, eat a healthy balanced diet and exercise. Avoid alcohol or other mind altering substances….they weaken your energy and make it difficult to engage in more positive approaches.

2. Take Omega 3 fatty acids and a good B complex vitamin in addition to a high quality multivitamin..

3. Reduce the distractibility factor in your life. Each person must define for themselves what constitutes a distraction as we are all different.What factors distract you from what is really important and how can you eliminate or modify them?

4. Balance novelty and structure in your day/week/month. Too much novelty can overstimulate, overwhelm and confuse. Too much structure creates boredom, constriction and apathy.

5. Organize—but only good enough not obsessively!

6. Do as much of what you want to do as possible. engagement, being present and performing well increases motivation. It is easier to be engaged with things we like and we can use this to build that muscle of being present in the now and thereby eliminating the mental brain drain. The skill that you are building with being present and fully immersing yourself in a task can be brought to things that you like less.

7. Build variety into your day as much as you can—it keeps your mind sharp and improves being present and mindful.

8. Vary tasks. Varying your tasks can keep your mind fresh.

9. Don’t expect your attention to last forever. Replenish your attention with breath breaks, changes in approaches or tasks or a simple stretch or walk.

10. Shift out of negative states ASAP. Once you realize your energy  has been hijacked engage in a process that gets it back on track. It may be as simple as doing a cognitive task to divert the energy that your emotional brain has monopolized, or you may need to stop and practice a technique that allows you to release the emotion. At other times you may need to talk it over with someone or recognize what need is driving the negativity. Be kind to yourself!

11. Actively promote laughter, gratitude, joy and happiness in your life. At first you may have to make it a homework assignment but it will become self regulating as your physiology gets with the program.

12. Play! Spend some time doing puzzles or games that build attention. Learn something new–the brain develops in response to learning.

Our CD collection provides guidance in learning how to release, stress and negative states from mind and body and help to open you to developing positive strong energy and healthy inner “patterns”.

Click here to learn more about specific programs: https://www.livingenergyworks.com/store/?ccUser=

Take Five:
Release Stress and Revitalize Your Energy

Simply click on the FB icon to your right and when you get to our page click LIKE and you will be able to download the 7 minute audio recording to use anytime you need to release stress, relax, refresh and revitalize!

Little vampire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Modern Day Vampires
Modern day vampires are not thieves who come in the night and drain our energy. Today they are right out in front of us—on our desks, night stands, in our living rooms, pockets and pocketbooks. …techno-vampires!

There are also non technological vampires in our lives that we must attend to if we are to reclaim our time, energy, attention and sanity! Below are some of the common sources and some suggested strategies for taking charge of these energy drains. Also let us know how you may have approached some of these issues to safe guard your precious life (force).

Screens

We all have multiple screens that occupy us throughout the day—we even carry many of them with us!! Computers, TV, Kindles, phones, I Pods…it can feel as if there is no escape!

The true escape is to become conscious and committed to YOU—your time, energy, values health and peace of mind.

Screens have a curious quality. They suck us in and keep us fixated while our energy is being silently drained away through our eyes, attention and effect of the technology and the noise it creates within our energy fields, as well as within our minds. Preliminary research is suggesting that we get a hit of feel good chemistry from some of our on screen behavior which makes it act much like a substance abuse issue!

There are many good things about screens. It is a matter of managing our relationship with them.

Taking Your Energy Back

1. Problem
   Procrastinating: screens are great for this! We can avoid all manner of unpleasant task while believing we are busy or doing something useful, fun or necessary.

You are susceptible to energy drain from a screen every time you turn on, tune in, or log on.

Solution
Awareness and insight can lead to moderating your use.

Setting a timer can be helpful if you are playing computer games or surfing the net

Keep a list of your goals and values handy so you can remind yourself what is really important to you in terms of how you spend your time.

Be aware that if you spend time depleting energy and not rebuilding it, it will not be there to fuel your dreams, health or goals. Develop a reminder for this that is in frequent and easy sight.

1. Problem
   Energy Vampires are people or projects that suck the life out of you.

Solution
If you find yourself de-energized by a project or a person in your life, question your motives for remaining, resolve it so you can find the door out and you can move on. We are all different. What depletes one person will energize another. Your energy is not a negotiable item and you have the right, responsibility and deserve to determine what is correct for you.

Notice the people and projects that fill you with energy and commit to developing more of those in your life.

1. Problem
   The spirits of procrastination will haunt you in the night or at most inconvenient times! These are the tasks you dislike or things that you keep putting off. You expend a lot of energy reacting to them with dread, guilt or frustration.

Solution
Make a list…make a plan including when and how you are going to take care of the issue and then follow through. As much as this may pain you as you change your habit, in the end you will have more energy as you will have eliminated a very insidious drain. The enhanced energy you feel will become a new motivation.

1. Problem
   Clutter! We all have it….it infiltrates our mailboxes—email and otherwise. It exists in the form of requests from a multitude of directions, as well as in the information we pile up “just in case”, or because “someday I will need that”.

Solution
Make it a rule to only handle something once and set up a system for that can work.

Set up a system where every request does not reach you: get off lists, use voicemail delete, have a barrier between you and requests.

1. Problem
   Split attention is rampant with the profusion of electronic and other stimuli in modern life. It is a myth that we can be effective multi-tasking. We can’t and it is bad for our brain and nervous system.

Solution
Cultivate the ability to attend to your present moment and the task at hand.

Being busy in the ways we are these days insidiously takes control of our lives until it feels out of our hands. This busyness creates toxic stress, contributes to accidents and mistakes, as well as adding conflict to relationships and severely reducing the capacity for creativity or to relax and enjoy life. Perhaps if we look at the short time we have on this planet we could also say that the biggest harm comes from keeping one from what is really important.

Energy flows where attention goes. Attention and Intention are two of the biggest influences for how our life force is channeled and used.

One of the first steps to bringing the stress and busyness under control is to define what most matters to you…what is really important. It is so easy to get caught up in activities that do not really matter to us and that do not really contribute to our personal or professional lives.

What is really important to you in each area of your life?

Where would you like your energy to flow more freely?

How would you like to feel each day? What if you took periodic one minute breaks and felt that through the day–like building an energy account?

What would it take for you to take back your intention and attention…come off autopilot and structure your life according to what is important to you?

Or are you too busy?

 Over the next two weeks I’ll be writing here  about some ideas to take charge of time and energy without giving up what is necessary and helpful in our lives. I would also welcome hearing your ideas about what you are doing to manage keeping stress down and your life balanced.

How Long Term Memories are Formed (BabyBook page Insert) (Photo credit: jefrey lacson)

Irritable? Frazzled? Can’t concentrate? There are many reasons in modern life to feel this way, but perhaps you may have overlooked the effect of your computer and electronic devices. Much has been made of the EMF”s and their effect on the brain. Beyond that however there is the issue of how information is coming at us and how we are processing and being conditioned and how it is contributing to our moods as well as to memory.

The effects are already becoming painfully obvious even to the casual observer. Research is being done–of course!–but what we know already is enough to give one serious pause and think about how to take back control of the miracle that is our brain.

One of the most disturbing facts to me is how our brains are being so overloaded that we are seeing loss of connection and access to our higher centers and more behavior and attitudes originating from more primitive brain structures—just think about the last time you were amazed at someone’s rude, hasty or offensive behavior.  There is very real reason and physiology for this. We do not have to delve into that to know that the solution is to take charge of our time and attention and structure our lives so the wonderful technology that we have benefit of continues to serve us instead of us becoming its slave and losing our capacity for inspiration, deep thought, creativity and wonder.

Below is an article that has some straightforward thoughts on where we are and what the pitfalls may be if we are not conscious and stay in charge of our time, attention and energy.

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

- Nicholas Carr -

“What is crucial about building individual intelligence – particularly deep, conceptual knowledge and understanding– is the ability to move information that comes into our working memory over to our long-term memory, which is not constrained at all in terms of its capacity. The term for this is ‘memory consolidation’, and where the Internet begins to disrupt this process is that it keeps our working memory overloaded. When you’re constantly taking in new bits of information – as we do when we browse the Web, check e-mail or read text messages – we take things in very quickly, and because our working memory has such a small capacity, it has to sort of shepherd information into and out of the brain very quickly to make room for more incoming stuff. If your working memory is constantly overloaded and you never pay focused attention to one thing, you aren’t consolidating information into your long-term memory, and as a result, you’re not building all the mental connections between information and experiences and emotions that are essential to developing a rich intellect. Research shows that these connections are essential to conceptual thinking, critical thinking and certain types of creative thinking.”

Read the full article here: http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4948

“Why is it that between 25 and 50 percent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.

What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.” Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We have control over this!! It feels like we don’t as we unconsciously go about our business, but when you really stop and think about it –we do! It used to be that we had built in stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Now it is up to us. First we must realize that multitasking is bad for our brains (if you don’t take care of it–it will not take care of you!), second we must know that our inner reserves do not replenish themselves,  and third we are not effective when we scatter and split our attention. So, what do we do? Perhaps beginning with some questions can help define where each of us can make changes to preserve our energy, health and sanity!

Gorilla Scratching Head (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An honest appraisal of time management can be useful. The average person wastes upwards of two hours a day. Where can you reclaim time to devote to replenishing your energy reserves through exercise, deep relaxation/meditation? Meditation is particularly helpful as it serves multiple purposes: (1)decreases effects of stress on health, (2) begins to train the brain to be better able to focus and concentrate, (3) builds the ability to remain in the present moment which contributes to efficiency,and enjoyment and satisfaction in life.

Where could you draw limits with people or activities to free up time for yourself?

How could you streamline your day and give yourself breaks to regroup and replenish your energy?

Bringing a mindful presence to each activity that you do can begin the ball rolling to get some of the positive effects already mentioned, but it also helps to create motivation and momentum for the other suggestions to reclaim your life!

One of the things that I try to remember when things are moving too fast is that I do not want to get to the end of my life feeling like I missed it! When we let things get out of control, are overwhelmed and stressed, we are not present to people or our experience….and are left with a sense of dissatisfaction and loss of fulfillment–like we were not even there!

What are some other ways that you could bring a more sane and healthful approach to your day? Feel free to share in the comment box as sharing ideas and thoughts is helpful to us all! 

letyourlightshine byRita Loyd

This post excerpted from “The Keys to Your Kingdom”, Session 1 of 12 Keys for Life and Self Mastery

How we feel reflects the state of our energetic vibration. Our feelings come from our thoughts and our thoughts generate feelings. So thought and feeling mingle together to form an electromagnetic reality, a personal field, that influences what we meet in life as well as how we respond to it.

We all have had the experience of feeling light and happy and having our day go smoothly. Everyone we meet is warm and friendly. On the flip side, we have also had the experience of getting up on the wrong side of the world and having everything go horribly wrong throughout our entire day. What we may not realize is that there is an invisible but ever so real energetic cloak that surrounds us and plays a significant part in influencing events.

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 in addition to 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 of the most important pieces he has added to the puzzle of reality formation are:

1.  The most effective results occur when intention is combined with coherence.

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.

The idea that our thoughts are a part of and connected to the universal consciousness is one that that continues to recycle and be upgraded over time. Presently even more scientific documentation is emerging and we are seeing greater awareness of these ideas in the collective consciousness, mainstreaming the news about consciousness and energy.

Do you feel like time is speeding up and flying by?  It is. We have been living through the acceleration of consciousness. We have experienced an increase in momentum simultaneous with greater access to, and integration of, higher energies. The changes within us as well as within the universe are part of an expansion and a leap in our evolution as a species.

12 Keys for Life and Self Mastery includes tools, techniques and guided meditations to help you cope with stress, expand consciousness and strengthen your “infrastructure” for greater health, well being and performance. For more info on this series click here:http://bit.ly/I5IlBg