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Meditation Basics: What, Why and How

“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.”
~Margaret J. Wheatley, Writer and Management Consultant

Light on Meditation

Meditation is a contemplative state which one enters in order to relax the waking consciousness. There are many reasons that people take up meditation and there are numerous benefits to incorporating a regular practice of meditation.

Meditation can be used to cultivate a deeper awareness of one’s relationships and surroundings. Calming the ego-consciousness (the judge) that lives within our waking mind and opening ourself up to receiving peace, allows us to recognize and, with diligence, to access a higher state of consciousness.

Why should you want to reach higher consciousness?

That is a very good question and yet, one that is very difficult to answer. You may want to reach higher consciousness for the changes that it makes in how you use your life. You may want to reach higher consciousness to develop new abilities. Or perhaps you would enjoy having a higher consciousness because of the differences your actions may make in the lives of others.

What can be said is that, through the regular practice of meditation, you will come to realizations, values and talents that you are very unlikely to arrive at without the aid of meditation. I say unlikely, I do not say never. Meditation is a tool, like a key to a door. It is not the key that makes the wondrous thing behind the door exist. That thing always existed, all that the key did was make it easier to reach.

The realization and changes that develop in you over time, while practicing meditation (things like, mindfulness, calm, spiritual oneness, empowerment) are subtle shifts in your level of awareness that will help you to, among other things:

    -Form more healthy romantic relationships
    -Fulfill your internal life purpose
    -Expel toxins and illness from your body
    -Speak and act with true integrity
    -See the beauty in all things
    -Cope better with change and challenges in life
    -Build self-esteem
    -Look and feel more youthful
    -Gain spiritual awareness / inspiration from the divine
    -Walk lighter on the Earth
    -Appreciate the gifts that you have in your life
    -Serve yourself and others with deep kindness
    -Channel positive creativity through your unique self

So I suppose that the question is not why you should want to reach higher consciousness, but why you should not want to?

What does meditation mean exactly? I have heard so many different things about it.

Meditation means many different things to many different people. There are several approaches to meditation, several layers of … Continue reading →

Resources for Spiritual and Intuitive Development

“Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.”
~Marianne Williamson, Inspirational Author

Butterfly Spirit

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This article is a repost from our old blog – originally dated January 2009.
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Wow. A new year already. The numerology seems to suggest that this year will be the beginning of a new life, for everyone. :-)

Sorry it’s been a while since I posted, my focus has finally shifted wholeheartedly to writing my book and I am finding it hard to concentrate on the blog articles at present.

But this one, or perhaps the invitation for this one, simply arrived in my scope of vision. A relative of mine asked for a bit more info on intuitive development which made me realize that this is indeed most likely to be what draws people to this blog. It is not just simply my stories of spirituality and psychic experiences, but a desire to have these things become an integral part of your own lives.

Now, this person asked for more info on developing intuition. I, of course, read way too much into things and become over excited, always wanting to help increase the vibration of this planet by guiding others to spiritual awareness and enlightenment. (Total Light-worker Syndrome.)

Anyhow. I have decided to create a multi-approach and multi-subject list of good reading materials for moving you along your path toward intuitive abilities and spiritual awareness.

There are beginner, intermediate and advanced books here. They deal with many facets of energy and spiritual awareness. Some will be too weird or too heavy for the absolute beginner. This does not, however, preclude you from being able to read them. The beauty of reading in these subject areas is that you know when you are ready for a book, by whether or not you like and understand what you are reading when you pick it up.

This is about intuitive development so, as Serge suggested while I was writing this, just scan the list of subjects and titles. Use your own intuitive vibe to choose which few books you’d like to read first. Then see where that reading leads you to next. I suppose you could call this “going with the flow.” When something is right, you just know.

My belief is that two things are essential to the development of intuitive gifts:

1) Meditation, lots of it, in many and any forms.

2) A shift in awareness, a willingness to look at things from a new point-of-view, I would call this “mindfulness,” the act of becoming consciously aware of all the multitude of things that we do mindlessly in our modern world. (Such as speaking, eating, bathing, buying, judging others and being entertained externally, in ways that disengage us from our spirit and our environment.)

Have a look below and see how you can begin developing the necessary spiritual awareness to connect you to our natural energies and intuitive abilities…

Spiritual Awareness
The Power of Now
The Book of Secrets
There is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem
A New Earth
Being in Balance: 9 Principles for Creating Habits to Match Your Desires
The Way of the Wizard
**Awakening: A Daily Guide to Conscious Living

Beginning Intuitive
Developing Intuition
**Trust Your Vibes
The Time Has Come to Accept Your Intuitive Gifts
**Personal Power Through Awareness
**Living With Joy

Intermediate Intuitive
Psychic Pathway
Awakening Your Psychic Skills
Living in the Light
Spiritual Growth: Being Your Higher Self

Contacting Spirit Guides
Ask Your Guides
Opening to Channel
Contact Your Spirit Guides To Enrich Your Life

Meditation
**Meditations: Creative Visualization and Meditation Exercises to Enrich Your Life
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Meditation for Beginners
**The Miracle of Mindfulness
How to Meditate: An Illustrated Guide to Calming the Mind and Relaxing the Body
Teach Yourself to Meditate in 10 Simple Lessons

From the blog front page, if you want more topics and materials click here: … Continue reading →

Medium Adventures: Two Warriors

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. ~Mark Twain, American author and Humorist

Here is an interesting thing that occurred recently. It only lasted about eight minutes, but it seemed like several days…

I was lying in bed, just getting to what I call the twilight place. It is that place between sleep and awake where you begin to have very surreal thoughts and scenes pass through your mind, but you are also aware of your “self” and thus technically still awake. (This is the place that astral travelers and people who practice lucid dreaming are able to maintain.)

Dark Ages WarriorAnyways, I became aware of an open field, or clearing, in which I was standing with a muddy garden and a small run-down hut off to my right. It was just about sunset in this clearing. There was a woman crying off to the edge of the clearing and she was looking down at the ground. I approached her and gazed down to try and see what was upsetting her so much.

When I did, I was looking into a deep hole and gazing straight into the blank, open eyes of a man who was stone cold dead. I got freaked (as one does) and just about lost my connection to the scene and this woman.

But I reminded myself of something that Erin Pavlina said to me when we had talked on the phone, “Allow yourself to be startled by what you are shown, but do not allow yourself to become frightened by it.”

I slowly calmed myself and pulled myself back into the scene. I mean, I was being shown this for a reason and I had to stay present long enough to figure out what that reason was.

I came back to the place and looked down into the grave hole again.

The man was clothed in a ripped and worn woolen tunic and leather breeches. There was also a very cheap and tarnished bit of chain mail in the hole beside him.

His eyes were wide open, staring blankly up into the cascading tree canopy that leaned over the edge of the clearing.

In those eyes I could see shock and pain, but not the normal … Continue reading →

First Words

“You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.”
~Deepak Chopra, Physician, Author & Lecturer

Psychic River Flowing

These are the first words that my guide ever spoke to me, back in the days when she and I only communicated through automatic writing. Then she convinced me that I could hear her well enough to fore-go the pencil and just listen… Now we are up to the point where I speak out loud for her if the occasion calls for it. Nevertheless here is some of our early stuff and some of the most direct stuff she’s ever written with the intention of reaching a wide audience….

~

A vision appears before me of ceramic people all sitting in a row. They stare sadly out to their world. It is this world. None see the others, each – a single machine. Thoughts permeate their minds, but never long enough to become actions. It is in this way that I began my life as well. But I see things differently now. You can too. But the journey is always unsure. Let me show you.

Life begins simply enough, two bodies enjoying sensations and combining life forces create another and it grows. These mechanics give way to birth and a spirit comes to join its new flesh. Thus begins our odd journey. Screaming out of the womb we enter into the “world.” But what is this world that we enter? Some would say it is … Continue reading →

Researching in the Akashic Library

“Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, but an eternal Now does always last. ”
~Abraham Cowley, 17th-Century English Poet

The Great Cosmic Library

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This article is a repost from our old blog – originally dated July 16. 2008.
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As a part of the channeling for our book manuscript I have been branching out and accessing new sources of information. Attempting new things is always a bit daunting, especially when you don’t know what to expect, but succeeding in new areas of channeling is always very exciting to me.

The most recent experience has been in accessing the Akashic Library. Of course, explanations of what the Akashic Records are abound so I won’t get too detailed here, suffice it to say that this wealth of information exists only ethereally. It is an energetic record of all that has ever been or will ever be in the universe. (Hey, you don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to, but really, what do you have to lose?)

There have been many descriptions of what this place looks like by those who supposedly have visited it. You will find that these descriptions vary widely and that those which bear a striking resemblance to one another do so because a person has read widely about the Library before attempting to go there.

I follow a different path, as I tend to absorb only the most perfunctory information about psychic phenomena before I attempt it. I just don’t want the wealth of other people’s opinions to cloud what I might experience.

With that in mind I have come to understand that … Continue reading →

Seasons of Renewal

“So as long as a person is capable of self-renewal, they are a living being.”
~Henri Frederic Amiel, 1821-1881, Swiss Poet & Philosopher

Spring Blossoms

With the birds chirping outside and the cool, yet sunny days growing longer, it is not difficult to appreciate the beauty of the springtime. The tulips poke their heads up through the ground, the squirrels and birds return to their business and the deep snows melt away. Still, spring is even more powerful than its inspiring visions of colorful flowers and running streams.

Spring carries with it a very unique energy, burgeoning with the buzz of renewal. Renewal, or to make all things new again, is a sacred energy, one that life could not continue without. The circle of life, so sacred to the belief structures of many cultures, would be an incomplete circle, and therefore not a continuous cycle, without the renewal, the rebirth.

How many times have we each wished that we could start things over again? Wished that we could have fresh energy or undo the mistakes or simply be young again? Well, spring is your time!

Though we may not know it, living in our fast-paced modern world, humans do enter a phase that is similar to hibernation during the winter months. Our energy gets lower, our bodies get looser, our sleep gets longer. With the natural return of the sun, spring begins the cycle of awakening, and thus renewal. We can embrace that energy and awaken feeling freshened, full of energy and ideas.

A very simple way of getting a little bit of this springtime energy into your soul is to … Continue reading →

Impulse or Inspiration?

“Cleanse your emotions, passions, impulses, attitudes, and reactions. That is the essence of spiritual discipline as laid down in all faiths.”
~ Sri Sathya Sai Baba, South Indian Guru and Spiritual Teacher

Crossroads in the Wilderness

While you are walking the path of spiritual development, slowly building a greater awareness of your spirit, personal motivations, actions and your effect upon the world, you are also learning to recognize the difference between a spirit-thought and an ego-thought.

The easiest way to phrase this is that you are learning to discern your impulses from your inspirations.

Sometimes these impulses are big things like the impulse to drink a case of beer at lunchtime or the impulse to jump in bed with a beautiful stranger behind your wife’s back. But often what we are faced with are the collection of small daily impulses that, when followed blindly, drain us of our energy, our focus and our self-esteem.

For instance, this morning, between the moment of waking, kissing my beloved, taking a sip of water, then using the bathroom (a sequence which took roughly 4 minutes) I had a total of four self-defeating and/or distracting impulses. All of which were completely unrelated to what my true spirit or a healthy, happy mind and body would desire in reality.

These consisted of several old friends such as: the go-back-to-bed monster, the fear-of-falling-down-the-stairs demon, the ghost of sugary-cereal-for-breakfast and the sucked-into-the-internet-inferno dragon.

Why do … Continue reading →

Oneness and Divinity Today

“I am a part of all that I have met.”
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom

Oneness and Love

You are my brother one. I am your sister one. The divine ALL from whence we came is calling upon us to ascend, to raise our personal vibration along with our awareness and begin to come together to show others the way of healing, of community.

We must take our awareness, which is still rather a rare gift, and use it to heal the planet, to save whomever we can by helping them to awaken to their own true divine connection and to accept the truth on a very real level, that we are all ONE. That each of us is just a simple expression of one tiny aspect of a larger, limitless whole. We are like molecules in the body of eternity, but molecules with all the creative and loving powers of that whole.

We can teach others verbally, or with written words, about light energy as creation, about the existence of the ALL that is all we see and more, or we can teach others by the laying on of hands. Some are open to these “direct understanding” methods of spiritual learning, but many are not. Are these the “sleeping” ones who will not ascend when our planet enters its true fourth-dimensional state? Perhaps. But I believe that we each have the opportunity to awaken some of them, and without any true forcing of the topic at hand. … Continue reading →

Send Us to Tikal

Why would you want to send us to Tikal? If you have 5 minutes, we would love to explain :-)

We are lifelong spiritual seekers and we feel we have been tapped by the Universe for a unique mission: to bring more loving light energy into the modern world and to uncover ancient mysteries that belonged to our ancestors — to help us all during the transition to a more empathic future world.

Tikal

Tikal

Our souls are calling us to Guatemala, to unwind from our book writing marathon and to explore and collect the sacred wisdom lying dormant within some of the world’s most sacred ruins and ecological wonders — Tikal.

Vera will use her time at Tikal to enter a trance state and channel the spirits of Tikal’s original inhabitants, priests and builders. Having already created a channeled connection with an ancient Mayan priest, Sadayin, she seeks now to gain a better understanding of the mystical beliefs of the everyday Mayans who lived at Tikal. Vera will also ask for the Mayan priests to share their insights about the coming events for 2012 and beyond.

After our trip, we will … Continue reading →

Take Joy, Take Peace

“No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.
The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take Joy.”
~Fra Giovanni Giocondo, 1513, Priest, Architect & Scholar

Tasha Tudor with her Beloved Goat

The new year being upon us, of which we celebrated the Celtic version back on November 1st, I have been dreaming and making plans for 2010. While “resolutions” seem non-conducive to success in my experience, “intentions” have a funny way of sticking around. The world seems to conspire with your higher self to pop up little reminders, reflections in the outside world that remind you internally of the intention you have set for yourself.

Mine and Serge’s intention for this coming year is to focus much more of our time and energy on our greater goals, number one being to channel and make many more spiritually inspiring creations. Whether this takes the form of videos, podcasts, ebooks, other audios or another book manuscript is something that will tell itself in time. All that I know is that, in the past, I have gotten in my own way when creating and now intend to step out of that shadowy place and let more light shine through into my work.

For all of us, there are many little moments that seem to happen to us. Things that are not created by us. We may not have asked for them, but the nature of life is that they come to us anyway. And each for some unknown reason or purpose. Yet these are the moments when it is very easy for us to lose our sense of self-knowing, or connection and faith in the spirit. As a sensitive, I can say that I have more of these experiences than most.

What can you do then, when the external world comes crashing into your inner world? How can you answer back as the will and actions of other people seem intent upon derailing you and turning you from your chosen course?

The answer is, … Continue reading →

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