6 questions to be more aware

In my first book, Self-Disclosure: Changes from Within (2009), many questionnaires are included to encourage readers to get to know themselves better and come to see how and why they are not living authentically. To take this process deeper, you create situations to interact with people who allow you to make the unconscious conscious.  Now, 12 books and much expansion later, I am still inviting individuals to explore, reframe and see beyond conditioned perception.  No matter where you are on this journey, ask 6 questions to be more aware:

What is running you?

Who is asking?

Where are you really coming from?

When is the focus of your attention (& is this changing)?

How are you feeling (and what are you hiding)? 

What is your relationship to time?

5 Tips to strengthen yourself

Regardless of what is arising or facing in your life at this stage, the moment is ripe to review and on these five tips to strengthen yourself:

1. Eat more alkaline foods

Benefits of eating more alkaline diet can include better heart health, stronger bones, decreased pain and the reversal of nutrient deficiencies. Foods highlighted as part of an alkaline diet include; whole fruits, legumes, vegetables, raw foods, green juices, beans, and nuts.

2. Take cold showers

Cold showers actually increase alertness, lucidity (clarity), refine hair and skin and also jumpstart the immune system and circulation. The cold water in a shower is even known to reduce stress and speed up recovery of sore muscles.  If your mood is a bit down or depression crosses your radar, the cold temp can help raise your spirits too. 

3. Hydrate more often

You need to be drinking half your body weight in pure water or healthy fluids every day and few people actually drink before they feel thirsty.  The latter indicates the onset of mild dehydration.  Anytime you feel stress arising, drink a glass of water to assist your body to recalibrate.

4.  Immerse in Nature

Getting back to Nature or spending time in natural environments is like getting in touch with yourself. Taking in the sounds and smells during a walk, hike or other nature adventure, allows you to relax, reflect, recalibrate, in ways you may not yet even realize.

5.  Listen to the heart (intuition/ Soul)

Listening to the heart is about knowing you always act (or not) for more than one reason. There is that which is conscious and that which is unconscious.  The ultimate purpose involves making the unconscious conscious and facing your shadows to accpt and integrate all of your fractured parts.  Listening to the heart is about feeling your way through life, taking action spotaneously and learning to trust yourself more.  The more your love yourself, the more you trust yourself for conditional love and trust are one in the same. 

3 Key pointers to the best advice ever

Many people ask what is the best piece of advice to guide you wisely through life.  Everyone collects such gems. Some have more impact and widespread relevance. Reflect on those punchy gems that are instilled by mentors and have a timeless effect on your evolving purpose or mission.

1.  Do not believe anything anyone tells you

No matter how much you read or how many mentors you consult, the only way to know is to experience directly for yourself. Knowing is not the same as belief. Knowing is awareness that cannot debate and requires no external proof.

2. Never look back and regret anything about the past

The key to everything is to be focused on the here and now.  Allowing the mind to wander into the past is simply a distraction from who and where you are.  Seeing everything as a lesson that keeps you in this moment.  Your materialistic life, you must live it as if you are going to die today. Do not waste time on activities that do not challenge and expand you. Stop talking.  Be a doer.  As for your spiritual life, see yourself as eternal and learn to function from this place of understanding.

3.  Never waste teachings & wisdom on those who do not listen

Choose carefully those people in whom to invest your attention and energy. Trusting intuition is about feeling your way into relationships and situations, learning available lessons and feeling the way out of what you outgrow, or creating something new that resonates with your Soul.  A key take away is to pay closer attention and listen to your vibes.  Logic can be a stepping stone to situations and valuable life lessons.  Yet, in a rigid condition, logic prevents you from experiencing anything. It can trigger suspicion and doubt. If you refine your logic based on changing insight and awareness, logic can be the Way to your liberation.

5 Tips to create and live the ideal life

You may not yet consciously know why you do all the things you do, but you are growing more aware of underlying motivations than ever before.  You nurture a vision of the ideal life, but your mind wonders how to translate an idea into physical experience in a practical way in real time.

Whether or not you consciously realize it, all you need arises with perfect timing. It can be no other way.   The question is, can you clarify the nature of your ideal life? What does it require for you to see and also to overcome self-created obstacles? Do you readily invest in mentors and avenues to expand your perception and deepen self-understanding?

Notice you feel inclined to shift your focus of attention and priorities because insights are coming to you from your future. This is about being aware of what it takes to unleash more of your untapped potential, allowing more of your emerging reason for being to reveal itself.

So, you encounter people and situations that invite you to pay closer attention to what you doubt within yourself. You can sense what feels right and what you outgrow.  To act on your intuition requires curiosity and courage.  Consider 5 tips to guide you to create the ideal life:

1.  Fearlessly feel the way

More people are thinking for themselves than ever before.   More people are thinking about and doing physical (external) yoga than ever before. Though other dimensions of yoga are not yet in the wider public domain, more people are curious about ancient yoga practice and meditation is growing more common. More than ever, people are paying attention to what they can do within themselves. This shows more people are willing to step into the unknown. Fearlessness arises as you explore reasons for your fear, and prove to yourself what is unfounded and move beyond it.

2. Balance inner and outer well-being 

People are beginning to look at balancing inner and outer well-being as a connected science. You have to stop looking at what goes on inside as separate from the outside. Inner attitude creates all outer experience. Without individuals being well (balanced), there can be no well-being for a country or for the world. Well-being comes from self-understanding, life endeavours that reinforce this understanding and commitment.

3.  Be aware of sacred geometry

Planet Earth is not tied to the sun with a physical cable.  It is a geometric perfection.  Perfection of geometry holds physical forms in space. The entire practice of yoga (and meditation) is about activating your systems to align with geometric perfection.  Your food choices, other habits and inclinations are always pointing to the state of your energy systems.  The more balanced and authentic you feel, the more sacred geometry you notice in nature, the more revelations arise within you beyond words.

4. Live in an inclusive way

The human tendency is to view things in parts.  Its why people look at each other as separate individuals, with separate limbs and organs.  People also separate their state of physical health from the state of the economy, the nation, the environment, the ocean, ect.  To live in an inclusive way is to respect and care for everything as if it is interconnected and to understand that we share the same air, water, forests, ecosystems and all perceived separation is illusion.  

5.   Shift focus from belief to seeking

To cling to beliefs is to be in a state of opposition and fear. When beliefs are imposed, a person has the choice to submit or fight back.  When you are seeking, you do not cling to ideas or impose them.  You grow more accepting and tolerant of diversity, levels of awareness and live by the view of do no harm, live and let live. A sense of interconnectedness arises and an ideal life is based on activities grounded in compassion.

5 Tips to reach deeper fulfillment

Perceived lack of fulfillment is one reason people take up new training, aspire for promotion, shift job or career or re-evaluate relationships. Restlessness triggers desire for change. Without realizing it, we create barriers to our own career progress.  As you muse over options, reflect on underlying reasons for your own choices.  Ponder these five tips to reach deeper fulfillment:

1) Shift your perspective

Rather than limit yourself to an area of job or career, shift to a wellness model.  Get in touch with what enables you to feel good about yourself. Career isn’t something to reflect on or change during crisis. Discover what career wellness is and make it your norm. You can avoid some crises, and definitely be better equipped to deal with any that occur.  All-the-while, what you gather experientially, and intellectually, none of this is you. The question of being peaceful, joyful or fulfilled only arises from ego. When you conduct your life by accident, or simply do what ego tells you, life is not fulfilling. As you live more consciously, you realize no accidents exist, only unconscious choices.  Functionning unconsciously is unfulfilling, no matter what you do. As you can get to know yourself, choose jobs or careers consciously, being in a heartfelt place happens. 

2) Let go of self-centredness

When ecstatic, you do not wonder what your life purpose is or seek fulfillment.  All questions about that come from burdonsomeness, restlessness, discontent.  The height of human ego is to assume existence is human-centred, that God has some hidden purpose for you to fulfill. Rather than ask why misery? Shift to ask how to transcend your misery. The path to fulfillment is not what you think. You feel the way, notice synchronicities, trust intuition, make fears conscious and master them.

3) Be open to new ways of seeing

If something is not yet in your experience, you are forced to believe or disbelieve.  When someone chooses to believe or disbelieve outside of their experience, they have a positive or negative story to tell. Assumptions and stories do not bring fulfillment. Seeing directly does. Practical experience in all sorts of settings evokes fulfillment.  Allow yourself to step outside your comfort zone. Do what makes you feel alive.

4) Stop the self-torture 

Happiness is neither easy nor difficult. You need not manage happiness. Simply learn to manage your faculties. Memory and imagination set you apart from other creatures.  You reflect on the past and project into the future. People seeking fulfillment suffer from effects of memory and imagination. Rather than seek happiness, or link it to another job or degree, notice how you are conducting your faulties. If you give your power away, somebody can cause you to get angry or unhappy.  How you think and feel are up to you.  Notice personality is not SELF. Personality is largely unconscious, a little bit conscious. Content of the mind is acquired. What is not acquired from outside is called SELF. Physical body and mind are software and hardware.  What is inside is undeniably here yet often overlooked. Concentrate here and watch what happens.

5) Focus on inner well-being

If you are truly interested in your life, pay closer attention to what goes on within you rather than what is happening outside. Right now, your physical and emotional needs are passing needs. It is not a question of what is inferior and superior, it is a matter of doing what feels right for you at a given moment.  This changes.  Focusing on inner well-being happens as you begin to understand what happens in the external world is a reflection of your inner world. What you want is what is happening within you already but you overlook it.  To focus on inner-well being, some striving is required. In body and content of mind, in personalities, in memories, we are different, yet the SELF, the essential me, everybody is the same. Realisation means something already here is recognized.  This is not an achievement or an accomplishment.  You do not make up or earn fulfillment. It is not something you feel based on what you do. Rather, it is core state of being like love and success that you fail to recognize and accept until ready. Only then do you feel truly fulfilled.