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 want to spend time talking about the dedication, self-care, and business of becoming a spiritual teacher and/or healer in our modern society. For those of you who have been dabbling or hard at work in this area already, this…
7 Common Spiritual Awakening Experiences
There are many spiritual websites discussing all kinds of spiritual awakening signs and symptoms, and I know that it can be quite confusing. In my spiritual awakening blog post "5 Signs of a Spiritual Awakening," I offer my definition of some of the most basic aspects of an awakening. These are what I call primary spiritual awakening signs. From these signs, all kinds of byproduct experiences arise. What do I mean by byproduct experiences? I simply mean that an experience results because of the existence of the other signs of awakening. Without those signs, fatigue may simply be a sign that you aren't sleep well and not that any kind of spiritual shift is going on. You see what I mean?After …
5 Popular Spiritual Awakening Videos
For those of you who are new to my spiritual teaching or didn't already know, I have a YouTube channel with a bunch of spiritual awakening and other spirituality-related videos. The channel is under my name: Jim Tolles.Since my channel has been up for awhile, I felt like sharing the videos over there that…
How to Find and Release Physical Pain During a Spiritual Awakening
For my awakening friends, you probably have found some surprising pains stuck in your body as you've gone through your spiritual shifts and realizations. It can be quite a shock to discover how much pain you've been living in, and of course, physical pain is one of the hardest things with which to come to peace. Everything in our anatomy says that we should fix physical pain more so than most any mental…
Webinar: Energy and Life Shifts After Healing an Issue
I spend a great deal of time on this spiritual website helping people get to the point where they can engage with an issue to heal it. But guess what? Once something shifts, you're not really done. You're now in a new space, and the deeper fear of the unknown that abides in many people can turn this amazing opportunity to grow into a threat. Additionally, the rawness and vulnerability that people often feel can be unsettling, and it is an important practice to know how to sit in this space of greater openness and clarity to allow …
Enlightened Exercise: Discovering Your Body’s Natural Shape
Enlightened exercise is not about a certain state of awareness or fitness goal. It's about aligning to your body's needs and how to achieve your optimum health. That last phrase may sound a little cliche and like a goal. But your body does know what optimum health is, and it can't be described by a nutritionist, doctor, personal trainer, or whomever. Only your body truly knows what that feels like, and while we certainly take advantage of what…
Am I Having a Spiritual Awakening?
I get this question a lot: "Am I having a spiritual awakening?" The short answer is probably not. Spiritual awakening–as I define it–is actually quite rare. That doesn't mean that you're not having a spiritual shift, but allow me to expand your spiritual vocabulary. Our English language is quite lacking in this regard, and while I am making up definitions, they're only meant to be pointers to help you address your situation appropriately.Because there are all kinds of spiritual shifts. Spiritual shift is my over-arching term for pretty much any …
Spirituality and Making Love
Reclaiming our bodies in the context of Western Culture obviously includes how we eat, sleep, and exercise. But it also includes how we appreciate and own our sexuality. Too many religions have marginalized or shamed sexuality, and that inherently isn't spiritual. I say this because spirituality embraces all things. Strangely enough in Western Culture, people are more okay with watching various levels of extreme violence, but if you show a penis or a vagina, people immediately get upset or embarrassed.But there's nothing to be uncomfortable with concerning our sexuality. Our sexuality and our genitalia are innate aspects of us. It is ridiculous that I even have to emphasize it, but …
Webinar: Spiritual Awakening and Family Issues
We can't kid ourselves–family issues can be some tough stuff with which to grapple. Why is that? Those issues are all interlinked with some of our most basic patterns and concepts about life. Family and the people closest to us during our upbringing taught us everything. They taught us how to eat, clothe ourselves, think, speak, act, and live. It's no wonder that these can be some really tough issues to crack.But in so doing, we are not in a place of blaming, appeasing, or coddling our families. They are who they are. They have their paths to follow just as we do. Depending on your relationship with your…
Speaking Your Truth
Speaking your truth should be a natural and effortless action, but this is rarely the case. Too many ideas, fears, and lies have gunked up the vocal cords. People don't know what they're saying or why they're saying it. Because human beings are creatures that mimic patterns, we mimic our family and social circles. If there is a lot of freedom in speaking, them we have an easier time speaking our truth. If there is a lot of repression and judgment, then we may have a great difficulty in speaking about meaningful things. Even for someone who talks a lot, it doesn't mean that anything they'…
The End of Experiences
The spiritual path can sometimes be cut up into three segments. The first is very well understood and tread. It is the space of spiritual knowledge and intellectual learning about the path. It can be full of rote memorization and basic rituals, and it provides many people with a sense of comfort to know what to think and do to live a "good" life.The second part is usually dropped into the purview of the …
Telephone-CBT is Effective for Adolescents with OCD | The Beck …
METHOD: Seventy-two adolescents, aged 11 through 18 years with primary OCD, and their parents were randomized to receive specialist TCBT or CBT. The intervention provided differed only in the method of treatment …
Webinar: Healing Physical Pain
In this webinar, I'm taking a look at some of the ways we can get to the roots of physical pain. On the spiritual path, we stay engaged with our pain to understand any part we may be playing in creating it. This is part of how we appreciate the law of interconnection within ourselves–all parts of relate to all other parts of us. As we cultivate our sensitivity to ourselves…
Spirituality, Food Ideologies, and Diets
There's a lot of confusion and misconceptions around spiritual diets/ways of eating, and with the eating habits of Western Culture having becomes so warped, people just don't even know what they should eat anymore. Add on top of that, we have some of the weirdest situations and choices to make in the history of humanity with issues around pesticides on foods, growth hormones in animals, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), animal cruelty, sourcing of the food (Is it local or not?) and more. This has turned a trip to the …
Honoring Your Sacred Body
It's time to talk about the body. Sure, I've referenced it a lot, but until now, I haven't really spent a ton of time talking about it exclusively. Of course, nothing is really exclusive in terms of the heart, body, mind, and spirit. It's all intermingled together. So in that way, these types of separations can be a little bit of an absurdity. But not too much. Because clearly we have bodies. And clearly they function in certain ways that our emotions do not and that our minds (no matter what they think) do not.Honoring your sacred body starts with understanding this: your body is the …
Webinar: Embodying Spirituality
The concept of embodying spirituality is getting talked about a lot these days, and I wanted to have a webinar to hopefully help you understand this idea. On the one hand, it is an impossibility because we are all inherently spiritual. In this way, we are approaching the discussion from the space of what I call "higher truth." This is important because we want to connect with the truest Truth first. From that space, we come back to the truth of the moment. In our daily lives, we then can sense what feels most trust to our bodies from a clear perspective. When we have this connection to oneness and Truth, the practice of embodying spirituality in our …
You Are Perfect
You are perfect. There’s no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. You are perfect.It’s a deeply relieving thing to hear. Maybe you aren’t hearing it though. Take a moment then to read those three little words again. Breathe in. Breathe out. Do that a couple of times. Let that truth sink in.I know the objections that may be coming up instead. They are saying that you aren’t enough of this. You don’t have enough of that. On and on, those objections may come up, but even those objections are embraced by the total and complete perfection of the universe. That is how it is with the universe; at no time does it ever reject anything. In that total …
We Are All One: The Law of Interconnection
The spiritual path takes us unequivocally towards several important truths. One of which is that we are all one.This is not a new saying. I’m sure many of you have heard it before. I’m sure many of you have used this phrase, but to really know this from nose to toes is a whole other thing.In a spiritual awakening, someone is thrust into this truth and feels the profoundness of it. However, people rarely abide there completely. So there tends to be a lot of bouncing in and out of that state of awareness. In a spiritual…
The Return of the Ego
I want to start out by re-emphasizing that we'll always have an ego so long as we're in a human body. It is not an inherently bad thing. I define the ego as a lens to process immense amounts of physical, emotional, energetic, and mental information. That lens helps us to decide what is useful and what is not. An itch at the bottom of my foot can be ignored. A sharp stabbing pain means that I should see what I stepped on.However, there are many unconscious layers…
Spiritual Power Tools
When I talk about spiritual power tools, I'm really talking about your spiritual power tools. These are the tools that turn the wheel of your growth, healing, and spiritual awareness. You don't need to do much with a spiritual power tool. It's not like a weeklong kundalini yoga …
The Spiritual Teacher and Spiritual Student Relationship
The spiritual teacher and spiritual student relationship gets some attention in conversations and spiritual blogs, but I felt like offering my thoughts on this topic. I think it can't be emphasized enough how powerful of a relationship this can be, and like any powerful relationship, a lot of things can get stirred up in both people. So if you are a spiritual teacher, healer, or other spiritual helper, you have as much to do and be mindful of in this relationship as the student.Many of you helpers already know …
Spiritual Awakening and Holidays
Spiritual awakening is a big light bulb that illuminates all of life, and the holidays and their myriad of cultural illusions, beliefs, obligations, and myths get illuminated much like everything else. For many of you, you may suddenly be wondering, "Why am I doing this?"I'm not writing to say that any holidays are bad, but there certainly is lots of unconsciousness around them. People don't really know why they hand out candy for Halloween in the U.S. or what flying reindeer have to do with the birth of Jesus. But since everyone else seems to go along with it, we do too. Then the light goes on, and we have to look. We can't close our eyes anymore, …
Numbing Yourself to Life and Over-stimulation
As a whole, Western Society is heading down a very strange path. On the one hand, we have learned how to numb ourselves to pain. We numb ourselves in a variety of ways so that we can't hear thoughts we don't want to hear, feel emotions we don't want to feel, and can't sense physical pain that we don&#…
A Pebble in the Pond
Sometimes in life, your life starts to completely change itself over without you realizing it. It's a little pebble that got dropped into your pond, and a small ripple ran out from it. In most circumstances, that ripple runs out of energy and dissipates. The pond remains the same. But every now and then and with a little bit of grace, a pebble …