The Everyday Mystic

An Everyday Mystic understands that she must build her life like a Greek temple.  The foundation of the temple represents her personal values, those things she holds most dear and important.  The values support the temple columns, which represent different parts of us that we must nourish in order to be whole people: our hearts, our minds and our bodies.  The ceiling of the temple is our spirit, which depends on support from our values, our hearts, our minds and our bodies.  The roof of this temple is our Holistic Well-being, the pinnacle of a life well-lived.  In order to reach the pinnacle of well-being, an Everyday Mystic makes a commitment to honor and develop each of these aspects of herself, knowing that ignoring even one of them will contribute to an unstable temple.  What is true for the individual is true for the organization or team as well - each of these aspects of well-being must be nurtured in order to build a highly functional and productive team.  Let’s examine each of these elements that contribute to building the temple of well-being.

• Foundation: Values - Values represent the foundation of your character, and include the beliefs you hold most dear about living a good life.  This building block can encompass mission, vision and purpose statements as well as the values which govern your behavior.  Most corporate entities have created mission, vision and/or purpose statements that get shelved or filed in a drawer, never to have life breathed into them.  An Everyday Mystic might wish to create his own mission and purpose statements and discern his personal values.  Values include statements of how important things are to you, like money, achievement and the relative importance of family and friends vs. career.  I am creating some assessments for my coaching clients to help them identify their values, purpose and life mission.  My own personal purpose statement is to be a teacher of spiritual intelligence to others, and help them evolve their souls.  Whatever your values are, the real questions for both individuals and organizations are - are you living them, and how do you keep them alive?
• Column One: Body - The body represents our physical manifestation in this world.  There is great wisdom in the body, and it is intimately connected with mind and heart - indeed, body, mind and heart come together to support and build your spirit.  Some say the body cannot lie.  This is the basis of Applied Kinesiology, an alternative medicine practice that uses muscle testing to diagnose illness.  The fact that the body registers emotions is being proven by researchers, but we intuitively understand that through our own experiences: embarrassment causes our cheeks to flush, nervousness produces butterflies in the stomach, sadness makes us cry. We need to take good care of our bodies by feeding them well, exercising them appropriately and getting adequate rest and relaxation, all of which support the spirit. Column Two: Heart - The heart represents our emotional balance and social abilities.  In building spiritual intelligence, we strive to achieve mastery over our emotions. Mastery of emotions does not mean walling off your feelings and denying your emotions or moods. Rather, it is to feel emotions intensely but to let them wash through you without sticking, as it were - to let them roll off you.  One does that by noticing and deeply feeling the emotions, but gaining perspective on them so they don’t become your self-image.  The heart also represents the health of our closest relationships - are we in right relationship with our families and our close friends?  Are we being a best friend to ourselves?
• Column Three: Mind - The mind represents our intellectual capacities and our innate talents.  An Everyday Mystic is constantly on the look-out for new learning opportunities, whether it be through formal means (such as reading and attending classes) or experiential means (like traveling or trying new things).  The mind also represents self-awareness of our strengths and God-given talents, and the wisdom to know how best to develop them.  The mind, though full of wisdom, also holds wisdom’s opposite - the ego or false self, which is the negative inner voice that says you are separate from Source energy, that evil abounds, and that you are not good enough.  Our job is to feed the true self’s voice so the false self dies of starvation.  Then do we feed our spiritual intelligence.
• Spirit - Our spiritual intelligence is our awareness of our connection to Source/God and to all that is. It is our awareness of the meaning of our life, our conscience, our ability to forgive and let go and our ability to evolve our souls to higher levels of consciousness.  It is spiritual intelligence that encourages us to change perspectives, to see things from another person’s eyes, to keep things in perspective and to honor the inter-connectedness of all living beings.  Developing all the other aspects of ourselves allows our spirit to soar, but an Everyday Mystic spends as much time developing and honoring his spirit as he does taking care of the other aspects of himself.

It is the aim of The Everyday Mystic to provide avenues to develop each of the elements of holistic well-being.  Stay tuned for future blog posts that will explore the building blocks of well-being.  Be sure to check out our coaching services as well.

Related Articles

• How to Stay Sane during an Insane Day
• The Body does not Lie - The Mind/Body Connection
• Passion Week - Easter Sunday thoughts
• Meditation to Connect to Divine Wisdom
• Bequests from our Mothers

Have you ever been with a person whose negative attitude, perspective or energy seems to suck the very life out of your body?  Or, have you ever become aware of your own negative reaction to a person or situation and noticed how it seems to settle in your body? If you are aware enough to notice these situations, congratulate yourself because awareness is the first step in spiritual maturity.  What I’d like to share today is a technique to literally brush off negative energy and clear the way for your heart to embrace more loving thoughts and feelings.

When we are exposed to negative thoughts or emotions - whether they originate from others or ourselves - our heart space is most affected. It is our heart, more than our brain, that detects and radiates energy.  Researchers have shown that the heart’s energy radiates further from the body than the energy generated from the brain. The heart space is also an antenna for picking up energy that comes at us from others.  Therefore, we need to clear the heart space when we feel that we’ve been emotionally or energetically attacked or when we react negatively to outside stimulus.

The body is the best indicator of our emotions and reactions - the body will hold negative energy and feelings. If I sense a tightness in my stomach muscles, I know that I am either tense or feeling attacked. You may feel tension in your shoulders, your head or some other part of your body. Whenever you feel tension, it is a good practice to examine what is causing it and try to eliminate it. If it is negative energy or thoughts that you are holding (which it often is), give the following technique a try.

The Brush-off

It’s easy: With your hand held palm open, you simply brush your heart space with a downward and outward sweeping motion. Start by touching your heart, and then start the sweep. Do this several times and visualize feelings and vibrations being swept away from your body, your heart and your consciousness. You could hold the image of a broom sweeping out your heart as you do the motion. Flick your fingers a few times at the end of the sweep to clear the energy off your hands.

For extra credit, you can then do an aura self-sweep. Hold your hand about 6 inches above your heart space, palm open and facing your body. Slowly draw your hand up and down the front of your torso and head, hovering about 6 inches above your body. See if you can feel any differences in energy in any part of your torso.  If you do sense some difference, pause at that spot and perform the sweeping motion described above, but without touching your body. Flick your fingers and shake your hands out to completely disburse the vibrations.

When done, be sure to take several deep breaths to re-energize. Don’t forget to congratulate yourself for being aware and taking action to protect yourself!

You can do this exercise discretely at work or any other place.  At work, you can go to the restroom for maximum privacy, or simply turn your body toward a wall in your cubicle so you can discretely do the sweeping motion. I am writing this post in an airport, where I just performed the brush-off in the ladies’ room. Hmm, I feel so much better.

Do the brush-off and feel better!

Related Articles

• Releasing Judgmental Thoughts
• Limitations on the Law of Attraction
• Negative Thoughts
• Meditation to Connect to Divine Wisdom
• How to Stay Sane during an Insane Day

Our bodies tell us a lot if we only listen to them. An Everyday Mystic listens to his/her body, respecting it as the temple of the soul during this earth-bound life, attending to the lessons it provides.  When the body gets sick or experiences any type of disease, we need to listen to what message it might be sending us.

Louise L. Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life, was a pioneer in showing the connection between emotional or thought patterns and disease.  Recent scientific research likewise shows that emotional issues such as repressed anger can lead to heart disease and other serious illnesses.

We easily recognize that when we are embarrassed, our cheeks get red.  When we are nervous, our palms sweat.  When we are very sad, we cry. Likewise, long-term, repeated emotional or thought patterns can affect our physical body. That’s why Louise Hay has a dictionary of physical illnesses, their causes and affirmations to counter-act them.

What is the message in the illnesses we have?  Last week, I caught a cold. What a funny phrase - to "catch" a cold, like I was on the hunt for it. Maybe I was!  I started getting a scratchy throat as I was finishing a report for a short consulting gig that I accepted because I needed the cash flow.  I had "resigned" from doing that type of work late last fall, but reneged on my resolve last month when I assessed my lack of income.  I needn’t be too worried, because I saved a generous amount of money to get me through this transition period. As I write this, I realize that it was ego that motivated me to accept the consulting gig.  Ego was telling me to worry about income, to not draw on my savings even though they were set aside for just this situation. I have a lot of ego wrapped around the success of my business and the amount of income I create. I recognize now that my ego needs to step aside.

I got sick last week. Just a cold with a runny nose and one night of fever. A message from my body to my higher self that I’m not making good choices.  A warning that I must listen to my body as it tells me what to do. As if to remind me of the importance of this message, I am now experiencing a cough and nasal congestion - post-cold annoyances for certain, but reminders non the less that I need to pay attention.

Ignoring the wisdom of the body is perilous.  Sometimes we get sick just because we need the down time, the time to stay at home and rest.  Sometimes it is more than that - sometimes it is a wake-up call that we dare not sleep through. I am told that our spirit guides often use our body as a means to communicate with us, which underscores the importance of paying attention to the body’s message.

Eleven years ago I got a bad case of shingles. Usually a disease of the elderly (I was in my early 40’s at the time), shingles is a stress-related illness in which the chicken pox virus, which lies latent in our spinal chords since childhood, resurfaces to work great mischief. In my case, it was the symptom of an exhausted body and stressed out lifestyle. The ultimate outcome of that illness was I resigned from my corporate job and sought a different lifestyle.  That was when I started my consulting and training business, KR Consulting.  I am certain that if I hadn’t re-structured my life to allow more time for my family, rest for my body and attention to my spiritual life, shingles would have been only the start of a long road of disease that would not have had a pretty ending.

So as I write this, I commit again to following my conviction that I am on a new path and that I needn’t accept work that no longer fulfills me.  I know that my body - and my spirit guides - will thank me for listening to its wisdom by staying healthy.

How can you listen to your body?  What spiritual wisdom does it send you?  Please don’t ignore the messages your physical health sends you.  Remember, the body does not lie.

Blessings to you on this journey.

Related Articles

• Resilience and the Power of the Human Spirit
• How to Recognize and Trust your Heavenly Messengers
• Bloom Where You are Planted
• Practice Seeing the Grace of God
• Meditation to Connect to Divine Wisdom