Joy goes to work for you when you release it! Start your week off with this “Joy Bomb” from SoulPancake, and let yourself smile. The powerful energy of expressed joy is a magnate for like energy. May this small moment of joy grow exponentially in your life.
One more for good measure:
A few posts ago I embarked on the 30 day before bed challenge to see how the five minutes before sleep can change waking reality. In this challenge I have been flooding myself with what it will feel like when all of my dreams come true, assuming the feeling as if those dreams had truly come to pass already.
The inspiration for this challenge came from Dr. Wayne Dyer’s Wishes Fulfilled where he says, “In this brief portion of your day, you are going to tell your subconscious mind how you feel and what wishes God (the universal one subconscious mind) is to fulfill upon awakening from your deep slumber. This five-minute segment of time in your bed, about to enter into your subconscious and marinate for the next eight hours or so, is the most crucial segment of your entire 24-hour day,” (Dyer 136).
Since I didn’t fall asleep the second my head hit the pillow last night, I decided to flood myself with the feeling of great love for the people in my life. Although the miracle of this challenge isn’t what happens during sleep, but rather what begins to manifest in the waking hours of life, my dream last night was so fantastic that I have share its personal revelations.
In last night’s dream I was in a big lecture hall listening to none other than Oprah herself, and she was talking to various people in the audience. I found myself standing up, staring right at her, when she pointed at me and asked, “What are you?” Being unsure of my life’s purpose I uneasily responded, “I am a poet?” She laughed and in her fabulous Oprah tenor replied, “Girl, you’re a talk show host!”
Needless to say, in the dream I was thrilled. I finally knew my life’s purpose, it had been right in front of me all along! Just then, in the midst of my jubilation, a man sprayed a hose full of water right in my face. I then realized something I had been avoiding by not living out my purpose; when you start to live your dreams there will be more opposition from others.
The higher you are lifted, the stronger the force will be in the opposite direction. Yet, there is nothing wrong with that, quite the opposite is the case; that backlash is a helpful sign you are living on purpose. That metaphorical hose down in my dream did not dampen my spirits, I was so overwhelming overjoyed to finally have my purpose revealed to me.
Purpose can come in the form of something you physically do, or it can come in the form of a way of being. Purpose can be an intention you live by, such as being pure love, being the light of consciousness, or being joy made manifest. Whether your purpose is a way of being in the world, or has gone on to be a physical task, the joy that comes from living on purpose is unique and endlessly fulfilling.
On this Valentine’s Day which is so often focused on other people’s purposes in our lives, it is my wish to focus on our unique purposes in our own lives. May this message from Bishop T.D. Jakes on Oprah’s Lifeclass be a refreshing perspective on purpose and fulfillment:
Could you write yourself a love letter? Reading a letter from someone else expressing love to you is a wonderful experience, but there is nothing quite like being wholly accepted, acknowledged, and loved by yourself. Being a good friend starts at home; acting and speaking like a good friend to yourself is great practice at how to be a good friend to others. As cheesy as the premise of the following SoulPancake video may seem, I love the idea of writing a love letter to your very own self. An awesome byproduct of hearing these people’s love letters to themselves was that I ended up loving them too.
If you were absolutely sure, beyond any doubt, that your thoughts create your experience of reality, what you would you do? Or rather, what would you think?
The following video offers amazing examples of the power of belief over our ability to maintain a state of health and well-being. But it goes further than that. It tells us that stress, which is commonly linked to negative physical side effects, is made negative by our thoughts about it.
Psychologist Kelly McGonigal cites a study done in the US that tracked 30,000 adults for eight years. At the beginning of the study those adults were asked about their levels of stress in the last year and if they believed stress was harmful for their health. Then, as McGonigal states, “they used public death records to find out who died.” While people who experienced a high level of stress had a 43% increase in dying, they all had one other factor in common, they believed stress was bad for them. The adults who were highly stressed but didn’t believe stress was harmful to their health had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including the participants with relatively low levels of stress.
McGonigal goes on to explain these results on a physical level, but the message of her TED talk has implications for more than just the experience of stress. When we experience anything in our lives we have the choice to accept that it is happening, or resist it internally. Nonresistance of what is not only opens us up to experiencing the highest manifestation that can be born of that situation, but it also allows the body to regulate itself and maintain its own health.
Today I invite you to ask yourself, “What thoughts about my life situation are causing me pain or dis-ease?” Experiment with replacing that view-point with one that is accepting, empowering, and joyful. You could be saving your own life!
Eckhart Tolle has a “secret formula” for navigating the myriad of changing forms we call life. I’m going to give it away, even before the video: what is is. Ok so the formula is no secret, it is pretty obvious that this moment is how it is. Such a perspective could not be more basic. But when you actually feel that “what is is” a momentous transformation takes place. You have allowed your experience to be as it is, and in surrender have placed yourself at the seat of power. You can now witness your situation and allow the highest potential response to emerge from that awareness. Burden and effort are replaced by ease, spontaneity, and creativity. In the following video Tolle offers how to enter this state in any given situation:
When studying poetry in college I often heard, and posed, the question, “what does this mean?”
One of the more commonly frustrating aspects of poetry is that, as a reader, it is natural to want to know the meaning of a poem when the meaning can be fluid and not obvious. This begs the question, what is the meaning of poetry altogether?
It was only through the act of writing poetry that I began to truly understand the answer to that question. More intelligent and creative poets are able to articulate their answers exquisitely, and while I cannot yet satisfactorily answer that question through prose I nonetheless have the understanding, the essential first illuminating step that precedes a verbal explanation.
What does this have to do with spirituality? Like poetry, spirituality can seem elusive, vague, and unsatisfyingly fluid in its meaning. But just as the act of writing a poem can help a person understand the meaning of poetry better than any cerebral exercise, the practice of spirituality is the basis for gaining a real understanding of the meaning of that word. In the following video Eckhart Tolle beautifully articulates where the true meaning of spirituality can be found:
There haven’t been many days in the new year as of yet, but this video deserves the title, “Best of 2014.” Pema Chodron can save us all years of heartache and hard learning through this simple, transformative, universally pertinent answer to “This Lousy World.”
It is with a heart full of gratitude for you and your loving presence that I offer a gift of relaxation this Christmas. The video below is a guided relaxation, Shavasana, by yours truly with photography and music by Peter Spero. Thank you to Swami Satchidananda whose version of Shavasana this is based upon, and for many of the wise words and lessons included within it.
Click here for a free download of the audio version of Shavasana with Katie Spero.
In this inspiring video Ryan Levinson teaches a powerful lesson in what it means to truly exist in the present moment, and how he is able to get there.
Take a moment today to find what brings you utterly into the present moment. That experience of presence can teach you what it feels like to be right where you are, instead of in past or future thoughts. After experiencing a profound oneness with the present moment, it will be easier to practice present moment awareness in all aspects of life.
A few weeks ago I heard a speaker on education, but instead of learning about adolescent behavior I was taught a lesson in the behavior of my own mind. A person in the back of the auditorium had been chatting throughout the session, and my mind was not okay with it. Instead of focusing on that which I had showed up for, my thoughts were preoccupied with judgement. Even afterwards when the event had passed and was no more than a thought in my mind, I chose to keep the memory of a person I deemed “rude” alive through further internal judgement, not to mention commiserating with my friend who had also noticed this slight disruption.
In my last post I celebrated the incomprehensible mystery that is every individual human being. When my mind was busy judging a person for behavior I felt was unacceptable I was operating completely unaware of this intrinsic truth.
How do we foster compassion for other human beings when it is so easy to reduce them into nothing more than thoughts in our heads? The following video with author Karen Armstrong, on Super Soul Sunday, offers concrete tools for experiencing the depth of inherent mystery within all people:
Let Yourself Learn 