Are you truly living from a place of awareness? Those who are were until now significantly rare, so our aim in this small book is to calm some of your fears, to contextualize your experiences and to give you some practical support to help you make more sense of what you are encountering in all areas of your daily life and show you how you can apply spiritual principles to them all.
You can nourish your spirit through practices such as prayer, devotional singing, and religious worship or by something as simple as turning your everyday surroundings into a sacred, contemplative and aesthetically pleasing space.
Physical practices, including yoga, martial arts, dance and breath work can help you anchor your appreciation of the divine into your body and give you the energy for an inspired and passionate mystical journey.
Spiritual practices for the mind include meditation, reading spiritual writings, and daily contemplation, helping you clear out the mental and emotional clutter that keeps us from experiencing inner freedom and guiding us to get to know the Universe in a more personal and joyful way.
Bringing more awareness and consciousness to all areas of our lives can only serve to elevate each one of us and catalyze those around us by osmosis! When you approach life with a spiritual perspective, you find it easier to treat your body, mind and soul with love and respect - as a temple of the divine and a gift from the Universe that has brought you to be alive in this world at this very point in time.
We wish no less for you, ourselves and ultimately for the whole of Humanity.
So what do we mean by Awakening? It's a word you used to hear tossed around a lot in spiritual circles, often being used as a New Age parallel for Eastern concepts of enlightenment.
These days though it's a term that's being used increasingly often, even in more conventional circles like the everyday media, yet there's still a lot of mystique (and fear) surrounding it.
· What in practical terms, does it mean? · How does one awaken? · How does one know if awakening has occurred? We can't tell you precisely ourselves since we're not yet fully awakened beings, but we can both certainly feel the vibrational shifts in ourselves and are waiting and watching with interest - and excitement! Plus we're also experiencing some weird and wonderful emotional and physical phenomena that appear to tie in with contemporary "Signs of Awakening" reports.
We found this great metaphor in an article recently, which we trust you won't find inappropriate! Q.
How do you know if an Awakening has happened to you? A.
Well, like an orgasm, if you have to ask if you had one, you probably haven't! You could think of awakening as the experience of becoming "differently conscious".
Most of us human beings live day after day in a state of deep mental involvement and identification with their thoughts and feelings.
We have little awareness that we are not our mind or how to pay less attention to its often-destructive chatter.
That means that although we are experiencing things all day long, although we are feeling sensations in the body and observing nature and people coming and going and constantly hearing sounds, although we're participating in the "real" world, our attention is actually more wrapped up in our thoughts, ideas, memories and projections about our experiences both past and present than it is in actually experiencing the moment itself.
Very few people are able to be 100% present or even know what being present means.
The majority of the planet has no idea that you can even choose your thoughts let alone watch them serenely without emotion as they float across the surface of their mind.
Once we not only realize this, but also start to practice 'watching' the thoughts and cleaning out our fixation with our identity, who and what we truly are is revealed, as we gradually eliminate who we are not -- much like peeling back the layers of an onion.
Part 5 in the Series is entitled: "Being Present - Awaken from the Mind Trance and Move into your Heart"