5 Tips to develop aikido-monk awareness

Martial artists develop insight into energy, mental and physical strength. They learn the mind and body are inseparable. They see thought and emotion interact together with consequences.  The mind attunes to energy consciousness and sensitivities.

Aikido blends martial arts, philosophy and spiritual beliefs. Practitioners train to re-direct aggressiveness and negativity with precise techniques and loving kindness. Progress arises from using energy fields and learning when not to exert oneself. To harness the flow of energy means one can move out of the way or respond accordingly to heavy energy fields.

Now, monks are spiritual masters of self-restraint. They do not permit egoism, attachment or vanity to control their decisions. They sense the flow of core energy and keep the peace. Monks subdue intense passions and are aware of the right thing to do. They set a standard for wisdom and self-control.

Aikido-monks attain a level of spiritual refinement that combines key traits of both monks and aikido. This hybrid perspective sheds light on inner power and reconciliation. Consider five tips to develop aikido-monk awareness;

1) Set your mind on your vision. Those who seek self-mastery do not find it. Those who master themselves grasp every being has degrees of awareness, but does not always grasp inner power or the paths and guidance to develop it.

2) Step back and observe. The simple step of choosing to become more aware helps you tap into inner knowing. You begin to identify and explore your conditioned responses.

3) Re-pattern instinctive responses to fear. Fear and insecurity are core beliefs that reinforce selfishness. Where these traits are not recognized and addressed, peace and compassion are less likely to become responses to conflict.

4) Synchronize thought, emotion and movement.  Gaining insight into emotions enables you to foresee what is coming or erupting and curtail it. Restraint in the senses can translate into restraint in conduct. That which cannot always be said or expressed in words can still be done. Be consistent.

5) Discipline the spirit. The path to personal harmony invites you to discipline your spirit and to explore power found in action and inaction.  Take steps to reconnect with chi energy and strengthen links between mind, body and spirit. Learn how the storage and sudden discharge of energy is possible without the use of muscular force. Learning is perpetual your way.

6 Strategies to leave your comfort zone

Many people will speak about comfort zones, but that does not always mean they understand their own or how to get out of them. Comfort zones are situations that are familiar and often turn into habits. Who truly knows what is good for the self? You know what's best for you, but you do not always listen to what the heart knows.  Venturing beyond comfort zones enables you to grow.

When it comes to stepping outside a comfort zone, each person is capable, but that does not mean they are always willing or have the awareness to know how it helps.  To get the ball rolling, you benefit from learning to follow the thread back to understand your current mindset and the underlying reasons for it.  Consider these strategies to step outside your comfort zone;

1) Notice where you are.  Self-awareness has many levels. To recognize the obvious as well as subtle nuances helps you to clarify how and why you feel as you do where you are. This includes decriptive things like physical address, geography, conditions. How you describe this adds layers and labels to your perceived identity, that is, how you view yourself as a point of reference.

2) Pinpoint the why. Environments and self-image begin to feel comfortable due to mental conditioning.  This relates back to how you feel. Some part of you begins to believe it is good for you, desirable or helpful for you to stay where you are. Your perceptions may reflect elements of truth or illusions, but your action will align with beliefs. In essence, you imagine reasons for anxiety and insecurity with mental limits when none of these things exist.

3) Identify a sense of risk. A sense of risk triggers fear of threat or loss.  As you imagine new kinds of experiences, part of you may be receptive, but if a more dominant side resists changes, then you are less likely to do so.  The irony is that how you think and feel may not be grounded in reality.  You may assume making a certain choice will necessarily have negative repercussions when this is not the case.  All or none of your assumptions may be true. Yet, without further investigation, you may be permitting fear to control you.

4) Attune to energy. To become more self-aware of energy flow requires you to connect your actions and self-conscious awareness with what seems natural or going against the grain.  Review how a sense of time, perceived abilities and self-confidence, all play a role in your decision to perceive challenges and take steps to repond or not.  How you experience energy influences whether you take steps to exert control or respond differently.

5) Align the body & mind. Ever heard the phrase the mind is willing but the body is not or vice versa? Adjustments are required to coordinate the functioning of different parts of you.  The answers lie inside.  Sometimes guidance is helpful to navigate through obstacles. Getting back in touch with your natural state requires you work though conditioning on many levels to dissolve what no longer works.  No single recipe is the answer for all. Embracing change is a process.

6) Awaken to sources of joy. From the moment you choose to reframe struggle, you begin to realize the very experience itself is like powerful medicine.  To get this far helps you to realize you already access wisdom.  Make smooth transitions. Guide yourself to empowerment with love.  

"Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort." -Peter McWilliams

13 Illusions to shake up your awareness

Illusions are self-created obstacles to a clearer view of things. Illusions are destined to dissolve as part of learning and unlearning.  This is part of a personal journey that is guided, diverges and finds its way home. Each stage is ultimately a choice. You decide when and where to pause. Your unique view of life is yours alone. You are invited to shatter your own myths.

When a person is ready to question or explore his own deeply entrenched ideas, he may awaken to acknowledge the rigidity of ideas and also shift positions or attitudes. Consider these 13 concepts to ponder and reframe;

1) Ego. Part of the psyche experiences and reacts to the outside world and imagines your self-image into being. To separate yourself from the selves of others and from objects of ego, thought causes you to forget or repress the truth. From the moment ambition is born, you are prompted to quantify it.

2) Money. This takes shape as a piece of paper with random value linkedto numbers. Virtually everyone buys into that idea and allows it to control how they think: what is affordable, enough, desirable, feasible, doable, relative and inconceivable. Currency is a human invention that arose with human motives.

3) Duality. To separate concepts into two parts is a gradual denial of unity or oneness with everything. To envision poverty distracts you from wealth and abundance. Polarities of positive and negative such as good and evil fragment underlying wholeness. As one concept exists, the opposite also exists, even if you do no choose to acknowledge it at this moment.

4) Consolation. From birth, part of you is consoled when you are fed, clothed, and loved. When was the last time you fully trusted all of your needs are met from outside yourself? Faith becomes consolation during trouble. Yet, you imagine issues where none exist and imagine what you require to dissolve it.

5) Comfort. This zone is a view of a degree of tolerance for mediocrity, anxiety, worry, and stress. It also denies what soul whispers. Some people view this as an excuse to stay put, to continue fooling self and everyone of what you need. To lose what you thought you needed shifts focus to what matters. You move away from tangible things that are bought, sold, stolen, burned or bequeathed to uncover other priorities.

6) Form. Your view of the physicality of things is grounded in beliefs. You envision or hear about objects, infer about density, texture and viscosity, without necessarily touching or experiencing them. You visualize shape without seeing and create interpretations of your sense of reality.

7) Beliefs. The focus of your devotion is hidden. It has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness or, level of conscious awareness and deliberate intent. To work in the realms of expectation and assumption creates layers of illusions you come to accept.

8) Fear. There is nothing to fear except your ability to create it. What you anticipate you will gain or lose goes deeper than ideas you access in the mind. This invokes fundamental views about what makes you who you are.  What can you live without? Few people recognize your own misunderstandings.

9) Pride. A high opinion of one's own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority is a view that grows from fears like inadequacy and insecurity. What you think you have or not does not change who you are.  Thinking without complete awareness explains many human issues.  People reflect each others issues, differing only in degree and level of awareness.

10) Effects. Reality is something other than perceived effects, for it is part of the Cause. Beside, over and above, under and behind, all forms of Being, Matter, Energy, Force and Power, is the ever-calm, contentedness. Reconnect to inner knowing grows into absolute trust. This translates into confidence in the goodness and justice of the only Reality that exists.

11) Crisis. When old ways of thinking and doing fall short or no longer satisfy perceived needs, a person may imagine the self is threatened. Behaving as you have done is not necessarily aligned with the natural flow of energy to start with. If you take too much without giving back, this creates imbalance. A sense of urgency draws attention to issues of survival.

12) Armageddon.  It is said a final battle involving good and evil will occur before the end of the world. Another way to view significant energy movement and upheavals is to concede former consciousness is dissolving on a wide scale. Such a view helps explain geographic, environmental and climatic shifts that might otherwise be viewed as a domino effect toward catastrophe.  Life-changing transition is imminent. How you understand it is grounded in perception.

13) Perception. If you agree your outer reality reflects your level of inner understanding, then indecision or turbulance speaks volumes.  How you come to recognize and grasp each experience is based not on superficial human senses, but on deeper awareness.  Answers do not always emerge in the form of words.  Letting go of ways you sense the world is an act of growth that dissolves dogma and resistance and brings you face to face with something indescribable.

"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction." -Eckhart Tolle

10 Reasons to face your fear

Everyone experiences fear. What sets us apart are the reasons why we create it, the ways we choose to react and whether we choose to learn from it. You can develop practical exercises to build confidence and break down your own illusions. This has potential to shift your perception and more if you allow it.

Brace yourself: every instant, you choose to imagine reasons for fear. You decide whether or not it will control you. You opt to confront your fear or not. Your behaviour sends out energy. People read it. You are inviting them to tell you what you think of yourself. Your words, posture, and gestures mirror for something deeper. Consider these ten reasons to face your fear;

1) You never know where disppointment is taking you. To reflect on jobs, relationships or roles you feared losing, lost or left actually paints an encouraging picture. Note how versatile, resourceful and resilient you become. Conditions stretch you to explore talents you never even knew you had. You accumulate knowledge in life stages and can share lessons. Your intrinsic value never changes. How aware you become determines how you share it and where this takes you.

2) You have reason to admire yourself. Exploring discomfort evokes intense feelings. Things may not appear to run smoothly. You may feel drained as you exert energy struggling against odds or an enemy you would prefer not to name. It may be a major inconvenience. And yet, underneath it all, your tenacity, staying power, and will to grow are astounding. Note where you have been got youwhere you are.

3) You can choose to reinvent yourself. Any turning point in your life invites you to rediscover your own courage. You are constantly gaining new insight into your personality and core nature. This helps you grasp which parts of you shape and perceive problems and which parts imagine how to solve them. As you choose to identify and develop certain traits and mask or disregard others, you reinvent how you view your strengths and weaknesses and what you manifest to the world.

4) You eliminate confusion. Just because you encounter fear, this does not mean you know why. The choice to explore possible reasons why enables you to dissolve misconceptions and eliminate confusion. This is also a means to learn how to atune to feelings inside yourself you did not notice before.

5) You raise awareness to new levels. Learning to step back and view fear from different angles enables you to increase your objectivity about yourself. This new awareness can carry over to how you viewother things. You may come to expand your perspective exponentially.

6) You redefine personal satisfaction. Human beings are on a silent quest to prove themselves. You have the power to create fear and also to use it to serve your own ends. Among your choices, you can opt to feel disoriented and negatively affected or, you can also decide to use fear to empower you on the path to greater independence, confidence, self-sufficency and self-mastery. You can draw the line before arrogance.

7) You move to sharpen self-discipline. As you learn you exert more power over your mind and control over your thoughts, you can learn to decide which thoughts to create and perpetuate and which ones to dissolve. As you discern what is not destructive or dangerous, you replace that with love.

8) You realize time is not your enemy.   Many people are unaware that perceived time is an illusion. Human beings create it for their own ends.  You decide if this will serve you and if so, how.  How long you sense a fear may increase the intensity and draw your attention to it more effectively.  Facing fear helps you begin to realize you are growing differently. Time and fear complement each other. To realize time is not your enemy enable you to sense how much it serves you.

9) You realize you can behave wiser. If you believe that you have finite amounts of time and energy, then you also believe what you can accomplish is limited and the time you have can become saturated.  As you decide to narrow the focus of how you think and what you do, then you learning to pay more attention to the demands you place on yourself.  You become more aware of how deliberate intent can be used to undermine or serve your own unconscious priorities.

10) You unveil the truth. People will jumpt to fear what they cannot readily explain or understand. Rather than accept something mysterious for what it is, rather than listen to your gut, you may deny or ignore possibilities that ly outside your comfort zone. Choosing to face your fear is an exercise in accepting levels of uncertainty.  It is an exercise in building faith and trust in phenomena you did not initially desire to see.  As you dissolve fear, you begin to sense differently. You expand the parameters of joy, bliss and open senses you forgot you had. You are already relearning how to use them.

7 Things you can do during dream yoga

As you explore astral dreaming, you may decide to experiment with dream yoga. If you hesitate, then you may wonder whether this is for you or, whether you do it already. On your journey to the next level, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Tibetans describe dream yoga as the original or basic state of lucid dreaming. They are historic masters at awakening their consciousness during dreams. Astral projecting is when you become aware of an out-of-body experience (OBEs). As you gain more conscious control of OBEs, you can become lucid.

Many methods exist to discipline the mind, deliberately induce OBEs and lucidity. As you contemplate whether this experience would appeal, or select among ones to share as comments, consider five things you can learn to do during dream yoga;

1) Manifest physical things-Based on your perception, you create external, objective physical things, and the internal, subjective physical things. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations are the external or objective physical things. The five base senses are the subjective of internal physical things.

2) Discriminate among feelings& shift recognition. You choose to experience positive, negative or indifferent energy. Then, you shift to identify particular things. This mental recognition exercise moves from unconscious to conscious. You bring the process to the surface and become observer.

3) Explore different planes. You visualize a particular place in all its detail and go there, whether you have heard of it and visited there before or whether your imagination conjured an image from somewhere.  Your mind sharpens the texture.

4) Dialogue with enlightened beings- You interact with beings of higher awareness on dream planes and different levels of awareness.  You  only release what you learn into conscious awareness when these beings sense you are ready.

5) Meet with other sentient beings- When you mobilize your mind, you can actually intend to meet other sentient beings in designated places. That is, while your physcial body is at rest, your astral body can be directed elsewhere. Its also possible to explore other dimensions, realms, and bodies and log them all.

6) Unpack your paradoxes.  You evolve to realize all conditioned ideas in waking life are lying to and about the awareness that knows them.  You await your own soul-level process of conscious awakening, trigger a domino effect and watch.  Then move beyond the watcher.

7) Dissolve or transcend the dream states. As you detach consciously from the physical body (recognize you are lucid) and detach from the dreaming mind (become observer to your dream within dream), then you move to observe the purest form of conscious awareness.  This is that level where you become aware of an emptiness and become aware of the nature and dimensions of the reality behind everything. Opportunities exist to move through many levels of dream states.

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