5 Myths shattered about death

Many people believe they die. They do not agree on what this means or what will happen after that. Some individuals are convinced they have already died and returned to live again. Others feel they are always dreaming and will awaken at the point of death. Still others sense they communicate with the spirits of people supposedly dead.  Many refuse to discuss it.

What happens in the here and hereafter sparks curiosity, fear and controversy. Humans create myths as ways to distract them from what they believe is the inevitable. Now, what if false collective beliefs are used to justify a social institution? What if discussions on death actually invite you to learn to think for yourself? Choose to shatter these myths about dying;

1) You should avoid the subject. Many people do not speak about death as it evokes discomfort in them or, they assume it would bother others.  People who choose not to explore a subject at all do not permit themselves to question what they are told to be true. In fact, diverse perspectives exist and many belief systems to support them. How open-minded you are is said to affect your perception and experience.

2) Your fear will grow with age.  Your state of mind is not age-related.   Imagination affects your health and well-being. It can contribute to joy and anxiety at any age, and shapes how you deal with losing control and facing uncertainty. You are given myriad conditions to learn to adapt to transitions. Life experience gradually prepares you to be less shocked with change as it occurs, including what is expected as death.

3) You will take all you acquire. If you choose to agree, then possession and ownership become vital to you in the physical world.  Egyptian civilisations believed they would take physical possessions and even slaves and animals along to help them on the Other Side. Yet, curiously, objects are found still lying in their tombs.  Another view is all you take with you is your attitude and intangible wisdom. The rest is left behind.

4) Your awareness will not help you. How you think determines what you feel and experience wherever you are.  As you decide to explore what does and does not define you, beneath the conditioning and external appearances, you will begin to move beyond a cycle of suffering. You will gain insight into permanence and impermanence.

5) You must die yourself to understand. If you believe you are an energy being that died and returned to learn more lessons, then you underestimate how much insight you already have.  As you evolve to attune to energy, you enter new levels of awareness to help shatter your human-created myths. Reality is that you experience life to expand your knowledge of emotion, to become more discerning, to learn when attachment and detachment are appropriate.  By sensing the true nature of things, including yourself, doubt fades and trust emerges.

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.

4 ways to keep perspective

Every moment, you encounter situations with the potential to disrupt your inner peace.  You create a life based on your ideas of stability, security and what is required for survival.  Your mind sets you up to receive extraordinary gifts of insight.  This process helps correct your mistaken ideas about existence. 

When events unfold such that you lose a job, become ill, break-up in a relationship, feel challenged or jolted out of a state of comfort, then you learn how you thought things were is not how they are.  As you go through transitions of perception, you benefit from four ways to keep perspective;   

1) Focus on love and compassion.  Emotions that do not serve you stem from ignorance of how things are.  As you choose experiences that evoke healing emotions, this dissolves ignorance.  That is, when you consciously decide to send love to all people, including those who seem to hurt you, you begin to realize everyone helps trigger your revelations.

2) Develop a kind heart.  Tolerance is a stop on the road to deeper understanding.  Our moral strength is repeatedly tested as a way to encourage us to shift our sense of who we are.  As you imagine yourself changing places with a person to whom you are initially indifferent, callous, jealous, angry or negative, then you begin to sense why painful influences inspire a kinder heart.  Do unto others as you would have done unto you.  The nature of energy you send will come back to you.

3) Cultivate selflessness. Whenever your reflex is to place distance between yourself and a person or situation, ask yourself if your motivation is self-interest or something else.  The right thing to do is to put the needs of others before your own. It is a process to realize how this translates into your life and what sort of mindlfulness you are willing to create.

4) Favor mental flexibility.  In cases where you allow yourself to be too rigid, you are more likely to generate emotions and attitudes that do not serve you.  Where mental discipline is deliberate and conscious of intent, you grow to pay closer attention to detail.  This allows you to discover how the focus of your attention at a given moment creates beliefs that can be detrimental.  You find impetus to change.

10 Excuses used for withholding the truth and options

More often than you may be ready to admit, you hold back from expressing how you feel, from sharing what you sense and intuit. In essence, you muffle some of your abilities and hesitate or prevent yourself from realizing certain dreams.

Witholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and each new situation calls for a moral decision. Do you keep things to yourself and if so, do you do it out of self-interest, a desire for power, for approval, for the interest of the person from whom information is hidden? Maybe you are not aware of the why. 

Deciding to be more honest with yourself may seem to be an extraordinary task. It would require the never-ending burden of self-discipline. This helps explain why many people decide to live a life of minimal honesty. They brainwash themselves into believing its too hard to change or, not even in their interest.

This said, rewards exist for meeting the challenges of living with integrity. Although your course may seem frequently diverted, or plans suddenly thwarted, you also underestimate rather than overestimate your foresight. And, excuses are not necessarily bad. Consider ten excuses for withholding truth and how similar views help or hinder you;

1) You do not believe you are ready. Something within you may echo you do not have the courage, ability, skills or presumed experience required to go the next step. What you believe becomes your reality. People also read your vibes.

2)You imagine people will criticize. Part of you fears other people will judge or not understand. Yet many people actually share or resonate with you, and also tell themselves nobody else will get it. Your self-doubt leads to misperceptions that may prevent you from connecting with kindred spirits.

3) You assume things are not in your control. If part of you senses untapped skills or potential, then you may reason these things will be sharpened and a plan clarified by fate if you are mean to use them.  Another way to view this is fear of success or failure.  Either way, you remain where you are.

4) You find solace in secretiveness.  Something may appeal about keeping knowledge to yourself.  It is said the meek and humble are wise and silent.  The expression of thoughts, feelings and perceived insight may seem suitably withheld. This is not always for the purpose of self-interest.

5) You fear embarassment. You may have nurtured feelings for someone, or value something you sense others will not value as you do.  You fear your views or feelings will not be appreciated or shared. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

6) You argue timing is everything. Perhpas you are an expert at postponing or putting off decisions.  You may be assesing and re-assessing the capacity of another person to use the information for reasons you would support.  That you contemplate means you resist listening to your gut.  You decide the right time when you relinquish the need to control.

7) You are too proud.  You feel more secure in the thought that you are not contributing to the confusion of the world.  Your opinion of yourself would not permit you to shatter the image you have created. Appearances can be deceiving.

8) Your views conflict with your entourage.  Rather than sense non-conformity is the way to go, you may be willing to sacrifice what feels right for what appears to be right in the minds of people you respect. You choose to put their needs or expectations before your own, whatever the cost.

9) You prefer the hard way.  The more honest you are, the easier it is to continue.  The more lies you tell yourself or others, the harder it is to keep track, and the more necessary it is to keep lying out of fear of being found out.

10) Someone told you to do it.  You may confide your dream, your perspective or sense of the truth to someone who cautions you who to share this with.  The exercise of discipline is demanding insofar as it requires you to be flexible and insightful.  To be free, you must be willing to take responsibility for yourself and also to develop the capacity to reject responsibility that is not your own.  You determine what needs to be organized or feels right as spontaneous.

4 ways to explore your connections with energy

Every person has untapped capacity to better grasp their relationship to energy. What if the essence of your being is pure energy? You illuminate physical existence in matter.  During this life, you personify energy to create an identity.  How you think, feel and act show you evolve to master energy.  How about that?

Beyond this instant, you have many opportunities to connect with other energy forms.  All you require is the energy to do so. Nothing is ever lost. As you transcend the limits of what you think you know now, you create new kinds of interactions.  Consider four ways to explore your connections with energy;

1) Be open to the unconventional. If you believe the power of healing is mysterious enough, then you may choose not to measure or limit the framework of your journey. You may decide your own healing process is not dependent on anything so much as your commitment to grow, adapt and learn.

2) Expand your understanding of love. Feelings are the source of your energy.  They make it possible for you to live as you do.  Genuine love is self-renewing. It involves inner changes and the will to extend oneself rather than sacrifice.  As you love, you grow. You build trust, faith and creative self-discipline.  You realize experiences of suffering can be highly colorful and full of depth while they help you attune to love.

3) Invest energy in spiritual development. As you get-to-know yourself, you learn to contol your thoughts and actions.  You discern intrinsic value of equanimity, experience the peace of being even-tempered and forge your path to inner harmony.

4) Believe the continuence is real.  Vibrations you sense are not the beginning or the end.  They come through you but not from you.  They have their own thoughts.  They introduce you to the immortality of soul and the nature of spiritual existence.  As you evolve, teachers seem to appear.  Their energy has always existed.  You come to perceive it.

“The energy of the mind is the essence of life.” -Aristotle