photo credit: h.koppdelaney
I mentioned in my last post that guilt was the first thing I gave up to help me lose weight. But there was also something I added to my daily life that was equally important in the process of transforming my health.
I added a practice devoted to aligning with Source every day.
I spent years gathering resources for personal healing: yoga, energy work, meditation, alchemical processes. It was the commitment to practice these resources with a sincere heart, to use these as tools for consciously aligning with Source every day that, I am convinced, made giving up guilt (and therefore the weight) possible.
I believe a daily relationship with Source to be the single most important requirement for healing and transforming our lives.
No matter what problems, issues or ailments we may have, the true remedy comes through healing our mind. The only way to truly heal the mind is to align with what is real. How else are we going to recognize truth from illusion? There is only one reality; there is only one thing that is totally real; that is Source.
Nothing is more important than having an ongoing relationship with Source. Make it your highest priority. Start now.
Blessings,
2 Responses
This comment is a general one in which I want to share how enriching the web can be and the blessing of serendipity.
I am a realtor in NJ and a blog site I belong to named ActiveRain carried a post from a writer who referenced Baba Ram Dass. I came across his teachings back in the 1970s and I think, to one degree or another, they led to my introduction to Baba Muktananda and, ultimately, to a very different kind of spiritualist, Carlos Castaneda. Are you following this?
Well, after reading the post about Baba Ram Dass, I saw fit to comment but wanted to check the spelling of Yaqui, as in Yaqui warrior. I searched Yaqui warrior on Google and, lo and behold, found your essay entitled “Dying to Live,” which I absolutely loved. My thought and your interesting perspective prompted me to post the following to my blog, http://westessexneighborhoods.com.
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I came across this while browsing around the ActiveRain site:
“The quieter you become the more you hear.”
Posted by Lou Ludwig of Boca Raton, Florida, it triggered two memories. The first was a business training initiative, sponsored by Xerox Corporation, the subject of which was the development of listening skills. After all, a good listener knows far more about a client’s needs than does a good talker. And, the fact that Xerox sales people had been trained to listen…Xerox built an entire ad campaign around the theme…made it a good company with which to do business.
The other memory concerned the writer of the quote, Baba Ram Dass, a well known and much beloved spiritual teacher with whom I became acquainted in the 1970s.
Well, Lou’s quote set me to thinking because wisdom and understanding comes to each of us through different channels and no single channel has a monopoly on it. And, most assuredly, anyone in the stressful business of sales can use a little wisdom and understanding from time to time. I know I do.
Back in the 1970s, the author of Lou’s quote, Baba Ram Dass, opened the door to Baba Muktananda which led to a much deeper understanding of myself and what I do for a living. In the same vain, I also looked to the teachings of the Yaqui warrior, Don Juan, who was immortalized by Carlos Castaneda in his book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.
Referencing Don Juan in “Dying to Live,” Lynne Forrest writes: “Warriors of the Yaqui Tribe in Mexico, as described by Carlos Castaneda in his writings, develop an intimate relationship with death. A Yaqui warrior learns to enter fully into life by staying ever alert to the possibility of his own demise. Not with morbid preoccupation, or with constant backward glances caused by anxiety-induced hyper-vigilance, but instead with a steadiness of purpose that comes from living every moment as if it were his last. Here there is a resolve; a calm acceptance that comes from having learned to view Death as a friend or advisor, as an “ally”. In this way ones every action is performed with what Don Juan (the old Sorcerer from Casteneda’s books) calls “impeccability”. From the understanding that life offers no guarantees; that this could well be one’s final moment, every act becomes infused with consciousness. If we were to allow ourselves the awareness, as Don Juan said, that death stands, ever present and ready to claim us, there would be little, if any, thoughtless words, or action. What an awesome way to live! Can you imagine how much less regret there might be if we all gave this kind of attention to our lives?”
Having spent a lifetime in sales and marketing, I believe that the profession bares a striking connection to Don Juan’s notion of the warrior. It is, after all, a symbolic death that we suffer when a sale is lost. It is also important that we face loss as would the Yaqui warrior who resides within us all. With that overarching philosophy it is also easy to embrace the value of working hard for our clients because, for the true warrior, hard work has no meaning. It is, quite simply, something a warrior does.
Now, to bring this around to the value of silence, I think the first step towards ones embrace of silence is not to be afraid of it. A silent place is where we learn about ourselves and where we learn about our clients’ needs and wants. It makes sense, then, that we, as true warriors, should allow our silence to act as a vacuum to be filled with information that our clients give us…information that will help us serve them better and, in the process, win our symbolic battles by doing the right thing.
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So, thank you for having such a valuable web site and, if you start hearing from a bunch of realtors, please be gentle to them :).
Brian McCabe
Hi Lynne
This post puts the last post into context. Thanks!
Love and Regards
Rahul