A lot of times, I hear people in the spiritual world say that fear is just a word. Well, the word fear is a word, but the experience of fear is obviously much more than a word. It's a whole body experience, which–by and large–we don't enjoy. Some people learn to interpret fear in some different ways such as excitement, and while I don't know if there's a difference in the biochemistry of general fear versus excitement fear from something like bungee jumping, I don't think that most people want to feel that much agitation and intense energy on a regular basis.Thinking of fear in terms of agitation can also be a helpful road …
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After a Spiritual Awakening Unleashes All Your Emotions
After a spiritual awakening opens up your heart, every emotion you can imagine becomes available to you–every single one. In an open heart, we embrace every emotion that we can humanly experience. We remove our limitations on what we can feel, so we can feel the fullness of love, compassion, terror, hatred, sadness, and more. This is what it means to be truly open-hearted.Do you understand what it means to be unlimited now? I hope you …
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7 Signs that You’re a Wounded Healer
The wounded healer is anyone who serves others, but who has not healed many of the issues that they aim to help others heal. The wounded healer is also someone who attempts to do lots of helpful and healing things for other people as a means of avoiding taking care of themselves. The unconscious mentality is that if they can help enough other people, then they'll feel good or safe or loved.Of course, this is unconscious…
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Webinar Recording: Spiritual Awakening Stages and Cycles
I wrote a blog post about different spiritual awakening stages and cycles, but I soon decided to follow it up by holding a webinar on this topic. If you haven’t read the blog post already, you can do so on the link below:Spiritual Awakening StagesOne of the things I like to emphasize is that awakening is not linear. So the idea that you go from spiritual awakening stage 1 to spiritual awakening stage 2 to spiritual awakening stage 3 is generally speaking incorrect, although there are some shifts from which you generally do not go backwards. In speaking about spiritual awakening stages, we should not be …
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Webinar: Highly Sensitive People and Living a Spiritual Life
Once a year, I like to turn my attention to the topic of highly sensitive people. As a highly sensitive person, I understand a lot of the unsettling emotions and energies that are going on around me pretty much all the time, but because of the spiritual path, I've learned how to be at peace with…
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How to Resolve Power and Authority Issues
Power and authority issues are about as common as cockroaches in New York City (or bed bugs during those occasional outbreaks). They're unwelcome cohabitants in your life, and they're best eliminated as soon as possible.Putting aside the sacred right of all beings to live for the sake of the metaphor, you get the point. Power and authority issues are nothing but trouble, and actually, they cause more than just a bad night's sleep. They corrupt our relationships, our societies, and our governments. The greater the issues people have around power, the more likely they are to abuse power, act…
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5 Motivational Tips To Keep You Going Through Tough Issues
Dealing with many internal issues can take us into some tough stuff. It can feel like grinding our way through an iceberg, and whenever we get into these old pains, this is when we hear the ego screaming the loudest. It shouts, "I never should have done this spiritual healing thing," or "Why did a spiritual awakening have to happen to me?"And it has many other shouts, threats, fears, and additional issues that it piles on top of whatever issue you may be working…
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Focusing on Reality
A great spiritual tool for growing in consciousness after a spiritual awakening is simply this: focus on reality.What is real right now?What is actually happening in your current physical experience?So often our triggers lead to inner threats about our future or repeats of past pains, and they have no bearing on what is actually happening in the moment. When the mind is this out-of-sync with reality, this shines a big bright light on problems with the ego. Along with that, seeing that we aren't in any actual danger allows us to let go more deeply to process whatever pain that may be surfacing. Remember that a past event we are feeling …
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Webinar: Spiritual Awakening Stages and Cycles
I recently wrote a blog post about different spiritual awakening stages and cycles, but I wanted to take time in a webinar to answer some of your questions on this topic. If you haven't read the blog post, you can do so on the link below:Spiritual Awakening StagesOne of the things I like to emphasize is that awakening is not linear. So the idea that you go from spiritual awakening stage 1 to spiritual awakening stage 2 to spiritual awakening stage 3 is generally speaking incorrect, although there are some shifts from which you generally do not go backwards. In speaking about spiritual awakening stages, we should not be harboring the idea that we'll get to …
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Webinar Recording: Spiritual Tips for Facing Fear
Fear is a fundamental human emotion. It’s been built into our survival system to excite our bodies to fight or flee danger. But for most of us, it has gone haywire. We become easily afraid of a host of insignificant things, and when a significant event does come up, our fear generally causes us to react poorly, which often leads to greater problems.As such, the spiritual path must embrace and face fear to help us find liberation. But spiritual freedom isn’t about never feeling fear. Rather it is about being able to be at peace with it so that it comes and goes. With it’s passing, we work on maintaining mindfulness and consciously choosing our actions rather…
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5 Ego Defenses and Traps You Need to Know
The truth is so simple, yet we find so many issues with it. Why? Because our ego-self knows its days are limited, and the spiritual path is going to take us into a whole new world of the unknown. Of course, the world has always been unknown. It is constantly unfolding before us in surprising ways, but for the most part, we try to avoid this truth. We try to find safety through routine and making things as regular to us as possible. That familiarity is known, and what is familiar is often considered to be safe–even if it actually isn't (such as the woman staying with an abusive husband or vice versus).Along the way, we have a whole…
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Spiritual Awakening Stages
Anyone who has been reading this spiritual awakening blog for some time knows that I avoid overly linear, goal-oriented language. Too many people are way too stuck in their egos, and they want to turn spirituality into a race to the finish line replete with awards and high-fives. But there is no finish line. There's just this moment, and that's more than enough to find our happiness and love. It's the only place to find it too, and fortunately, it's always where we are.But our egos have learned how to piece together life events and time into linear mental stories. Think of a lot of what you think as a kind…
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Webinar: Spiritual Tips for Facing Fear
Fear is a fundamental human emotion. It's been built into our survival system to excite our bodies to fight or flee danger. But for most of us, it has gone haywire. We become easily afraid of a host of insignificant things, and when a significant event does come up, our fear generally causes us to react poorly, which often leads to greater problems.As such, the spiritual path must embrace and face fear to help us find liberation. But spiritual freedom isn't about never feeling fear. Rather it is about being able to be at peace with it so that it comes and goes. With it's passing, we work on maintaining mindfulness and consciously choosing our actions rather that being driven to an…
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The Embittering Process
The embittering process is the path on which people become more hard-hearted, cold, cynical, and closed. It is the path that most people are on.But they don't know it. It starts simply by having a difficult experience that you can't handle or don't want to handle. That pain gets stuck in you. As a result, you tend to…
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Impact of CBT on Self-Efficacy in Panic Disorders | The Beck Institute
Cognitive models of panic disorder (PD) with or without agoraphobia have stressed the role of catastrophic beliefs of bodily symptoms as a central mediating variable of the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
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Webinar Recording: Spiritual Awakening and Powerful Relationships
The spiritual path brings many interesting lessons and situations into our lives, and of course, all of those are dependent on the people who are part of our experiences. Especially after a spiritual awakening, there often are a lot of powerful relationships that arrive for people. For some people, those relationships were already here, but when you are open to receive, those relationships can finally expand to offer greater depths than before. For others, it really does seem like the universe can send a wave of amazing, unsettling, and even terrifyingly powerful relationships your way.The types of …
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5 Types of Spiritual Awakening Sleep Problems and Insomnia
Spiritual awakening shifts around a lot of stuff in our inner worlds, and having all the inner furniture moving can certainly cause a lot of ruckus in other rooms in our inner home. One notable room is how we sleep. Because sleep is one of the fundamental elements of being a human being, not getting enough or not getting the right kind of sleep directly impacts how you …
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How to Manifest Your Dreams and When Manifestation Becomes Control
I'm sure that more than a few of you have heard the term "manifestation." People love to toss this term around, and it simply means getting what you want. That's basically it. All spiritual mumbo jumbo aside, people want to believe they can get what they want.But how many people really…
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Webinar: Spiritual Awakening and Powerful Relationships
The spiritual path brings many interesting lessons and situations into our lives, and of course, all of those are dependent on the people who are part of our experiences. Especially after a spiritual awakening, there often are a lot of powerful relationships that arrive for people. For some people, those relationships were already here, but when you are open to receive, those relationships can finally expand to offer greater depths than before. For others, it really does seem like…
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Positive Thinking: The Amazing Power and Utter Uselessness of Positivity
Positive thinking is one of those spiritual tools that has a time and a place. Typically that time and place is early on in someone's spiritual journey. The further down this road someone comes, the more the concept of labeling some things as positive and the necessity to label others as negative becomes…
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Webinar Recording: Becoming a Modern Day Spiritual Teacher or Healer
Many of you will discover that you have a calling to become a spiritual teacher or healer as you grow on your spiritual journey. Others of you have always felt this pull within. And some of you will be quite surprised when people start putting you in places to teach or heal. Any way that you end up on the path of the spiritual teacher and healer is sacred, but it still involves work.In this webinar, I discussed the dedication, self-care, and business of becoming a spiritual teacher and/or healer in our modern society.Becoming a Spiritual Teacher or Spiritual Healer Additional CommentsOffering yourself to others as a spiritual teacher and/or spiritual healer is a profound service to the …
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Getting Out of the Rat Race and the End of Competition
One of the hallmarks of Western Society has been an emphasis on competition. The idea is that competition brings out the best in us. That has hardly been the case. The reality is that competition is immensely wasteful. It triggers people's survival fears to keep them agitated enough to work long hours and attempt to "get ahead" because people don't want to fail, which is associated with being poor, not having enough, and so forth. Ultimately at the root of this is the fear of death.The enormity of energy that people exert from this fear-based thinking exhausts people and leads…
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Bullied, Beaten, and Abused: The Prevalence of Physical Violence in Western Culture
As I continue to blog about the body and what embodied spirituality means, it is an important and necessary stop along this journey to talk about physical abuse and physical violence. There are so many kinds that I won’t attempt to list them all, and many of them are actually encouraged and glorified in Western Society. Particularly for men, enduring pain and being able to inflict pain on others has often been considered a praise-worthy attribute. Consider all the big summer blockbuster movies; the superheros aren’t inviting the villains to a peace negotiation process.Clearly, using violence to create peace is a …
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Hidden, Subtle Levels of Physical Fear and Agitation
You probably don't realize it, but right now, subtle levels of fear and agitation are probably moving through you. They're so invisible and so seemingly natural that you may think you are relaxed. But you are not. You are habituated to this level of fear and agitation, and it only tends to become apparent when we truly stop…