In a fast-paced, stressful society like ours it’s easy to get caught up in the web of the collective ego-mind that pushes you to do, do, do, simply acting and reacting on automatic pilot, to accomplish things. But how often do you stop and smell the roses, as the saying goes, to take pause, re-center, and check your inner compass to connect with the flow of life?
We’re often pulled in different directions: work requires concentration and making decisions that may trigger self-doubt; relationships demand much attention and energy but don’t necessarily nurture us in return; and the hurdles of our individual paths challenge us with crises and dramas to test our strength and resilience.
So when do you start living the life you’ve envisioned for yourself and experiencing what you’re yearning for? And what exactly are you yearning for? No matter how successful or accomplished you may be in the world, many aspects of your soul remain wounded and unfulfilled, because the nurturing you need cannot be found outside of you.
I’d like to share a few simple habits that have helped me transform how I experience the world. Take them as guidelines to hep you find your own path. We’re all seeking the same inner peace and love that is our true divine nature, but we have individualized ways of getting there, depending on where we’re at and what we’re here to heal, experience, and explore.
- Carve time and space for yourself. Sometimes you just need to sit quietly and do nothing, sometimes you may want a date with yourself, to be pampered for no reason, and other times you may choose to focus on a personal project or enjoyable activity without investing any energy on anyone else. Give yourself that time and space to recharge and reconnect, with no agendas or ulterior motives. Learn to just be, drop being this or that, or identifying with doing this or that, and slow down a bit.
- Laugh and play like a child. To reclaim the innocence and freedom of early childhood you must stop perceiving life as something that needs fixing; this turns it into a heavy burden that sucks the joy out of what you do. Lighten up, laugh, be silly, be honest, be transparent (no pretending), and remind yourself it’s all a divine game: you’re neither the doer nor the owner of your experience as your ego wants you to believe. Who cares what others think? Drop your resistance, have faith, and surrender to your Divine Mother.
- Nurture and cherish silence. Talking is one of the most common ways we waste energy and disconnect from our center. Try to manage your energy more efficiently by listening rather than speaking. This is easier if you’re an introvert, but even so you may still use up a lot of energy talking rather than listening to yourself (overthink much?). Find something to focus on and be completely present in what you’re doing, to quiet the chatter. Discover the power of silence.
- Detach from the world and your fixed ideas. Developing detachment is crucial to live life from a higher place. It doesn’t mean you don’t care or don’t participate in the play of life, you’re just not as invested in the chaos of the material world or the fixations of your mind. You can be in the world without getting lost or overwhelmed, and you can hold an individualized perception without being enslaved by your thoughts or emotions. Self-reflection and mindfulness are key here: question your beliefs and the need to be right, don’t let those dictate how you respond to life. This leads to emotional freedom.
- Be disciplined to meditate daily. Meditation is essential to develop dispassion, which is love without attachment. It allows you to create an empty space between yourself and the world through which Consciousness comes through. As you go into deeper meditative states, you open up to a greater flow of love and clarity that gets reflected in how you treat yourself and others: ego-based fear, judgment, and guilt gradually dissolve. This leads to spiritual freedom.
- Give yourself permission to feel. Denying, rationalizing, or identifying with your emotions robs you of the right to feel whatever you’re feeling. Avoid this push and pull, and simply accept that whatever it is, it’s there for a purpose, helping you learn something about yourself: what you need to nurture, what you need to develop, and what you need to let go of. Trust your emotional compass knowing that thoughts and emotions are energy fluctuations that come and go, not fixed things that determine who you are (unless, of course, you attach to them, which is ego).
- See life as a journey of self-exploration. If you perceive life as something external that happens to you, how others behave and react determines how you perceive yourself; your ego-mind is in control. If you recognize it as your own life-movie mirroring what you must learn about yourself to heal, grow, and evolve, then it’s easier to allow your true Self (your inner witness) to discover and polish the individualized spark of Consciousness you are. See yourself and everyone else with dispassion and compassion, as equal vehicles of the Divine, and remain independent. This leads to self-mastery.
- Be honest, be humble and appreciate all of life. Honesty leads to humility: accepting that you’re human, not perfect, learning to grow and let go of ego-based, enslaving self-images, to reclaim your divine freedom. Humility leads to appreciating the world as a multilayered play field that allows you to experience both pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, to help you discriminate between what’s real (love) and what’s illusion (fear). Appreciating all of life means you accept things as they are, to be at peace with the world, while continuing to improve yourself through the service of others.
- Be focused and alert but relaxed in everything you do. The ego-mind invariably pushes the sense that you should be someone other than who you are doing something other than what you’re doing, to maintain the mental control of your life-movie. You can counteract this by immersing yourself in what you do while trusting you’re always guided and supported. This leads to being truly present, anchored in yourself, worshiping the divine forces within you through your peace and concentration of mind. This leads to a soul-guided life with less ego and more love.
- Trust God completely in this divine play. Everyone is a vehicle of energy playing a part in this eternal game of Infinite Consciousness (or God). You’re not the doer, you’re not the owner, and neither is anyone else, but we’re each individual souls deciding at every moment whether to listen, to be present, to surrender, and to take action—or not. If you have faith that your soul guides you to experience exactly what you need to help you grow and evolve towards Consciousness, you can make better choices for yourself and navigate life with the receptive and innocent mind of the divine child you are. This is how you regain the love, freedom, and peace you’re really yearning for (and usually looking for outside of yourself).
New habits of thought and perception don’t happen overnight, they require mental discipline, radical honesty, and a creative focus to harmoniously align the layers of your soul and connect you to the flow of a more meaningful and purposeful life. I have the ability to connect with you on a soul level to shed light on what remains hidden. So contact me today to embark on a journey of self-exploration with spiritual yet practical tools to guide you along the way!
© 2017 Yol Swan. All rights reserved.
