Tag: Love

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Fear: A Useful Emotion or a Negative State of Mind?

 

My Spirit Care, 25 Years of Psychic and Spiritual Advice for Thousands of PeopleThere’s a lot of talk in New Age circles about how fear is a primary emotion that human beings need to overcome in order to be enlightened. We hear some talkers tell that the great cosmic being, Archangel Michael, has a specific “job” to help humans move beyond their fear. There is an endless supply of repetitive channeled material about letting go of fear. Many spiritual people have disciplined themselves to think in these terms and often attribute a lack of spiritual progress to not overcoming their fear.

In this article, we are going to take a look at this very powerful human emotion and explore its negative impact on human life, as well as the useful, nature-induced aspect of fear that serves an important purpose in this world. But before we get down-to-earth about fear, let’s get into the high-minded stuff first. Let’s talk spiritual!

Infinite Consciousness and Eternal Spirit

We are not just human beings: we are Infinite Consciousness. We are eternal spirits with Souls that span all incarnations, in all dimensions of time and space. We are immortal beings. Yet, many people don’t tap into this personal spiritual knowledge because they remain disconnected from their true Identity as “divine spirit in human form.” Enlightenment or spiritual awakening is nothing more than an applied awareness of this truth. (The trick, here, is the word “applied” but that is a subject for another post.)

Besides being spiritual in nature, we are also physical and mortal. Humans are biological animals. It will do no good to focus on being “spiritual” if we don’t understand what it is to be human and embrace that, first! Why? Because we weren’t born into the human condition to run away from it and have our heads in the stars all the time. We were born to experience what it is to be human, and then to be the most divine human we can be!

Intrinsic to the human experience is animal instinct, and the instinct for survival tops the list. Key to the survival of our species is sexual drive, hunger, and an inbuilt ability to know fear. The fear instinct has kept humankind from extinction: our progenitors knew better than to eat their food with a pride of lions or swim with the crocodiles or sleep in a viper pit. Without fear, the biologically-based, neural instinct that signals danger, pain, injury, or annihilation, humans probably wouldn’t be here today!

Fear forces addictive and stressful hormones through the body, and motivates us to act in necessary self-protection. For example, if a person makes an inappropriate move on you, your fear instinct raises an alarm to beware and engage appropriate measures. If your health is deteriorating because of a preventable habit and your doctor tells you to change or ways or you’re outta here, the fear of dying can motivate you to make the changes you need to make. The fear of burning your house down is what makes you unplug the iron and turn off the stove before you go on vacation. So not all fear is a bad thing: it is a human survival instinct and needs to be honored for its proper place in our lives. Sadly, many look to experience fear as entertainment, for the hormonal surges it activates within the body cause reactive processes that become addictive and harmful in many ways.

Born to be a Better Kind of Human

It’s when fear becomes reactive and dominating in our lives that we need to do something about it.We were born to be a better kind of human.

In our next and final post on this topic, How to Overcome Fear with Spiritual Power, we’ll examine how to deal with fear in a constructive way to get free of its damaging consequences. Don’t miss it. 

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

The Zen of Eating

Imagine this: a meal in which a single bowl of buttered barley is set before you and you are grateful to have it. You quietly render thanks to the Universal Provider for your sustenance, and you eat slowly, savoring each mouthful while you feel the nourishment that enters your body, from tongue to cell to quanta.

This is love in action.

You are eating a peach picked fresh from the tree. You feel the fuzz of its skin on your lips, the tender yield of its exterior as your teeth break into its taut, rosy skin. A warm syrup slides to the corners of your mouth and a heady scent curls upward, a fragrant steam of life force and raw sunshine, embracing your face.

This is love in action.

Eating with awareness and gratitude is a spiritual act in which we are conscious of the life forces that sustain us. We can take that moment to recognize and give thanks for the interdependent relationships of all life on this planet. In so doing, our bodies become vessels of heightened spiritual awareness and joyful recipients of unlimited love.

Many seek happiness by having material stuff. They look for spiritual connection through the glitter of big buildings and pompous ceremony. They seek satisfaction in a mound of frosting on the cake or a whole cow sandwiched between the buns.  Many today are consuming machines going faster, and faster, thinking less and less, losing soul parts as they go–like worn out cars flinging hubcaps along the highway.

Spiritual transcendence is attained through mindful thought and simplicity. Food today is hardly simple, as more is considered better and extravagance, best. As long as we have freedom to choose what we eat, what and and how we eat will reveal much of where we are in the frequency spectrum– or in other words, whether or not we are becoming conscious beings.

Why We Eat When We Need to Feel Loved

It’s not surprising that people often eat when they are feeling a need for love. Our unconscious minds make a connection between nourishment of the body and food for the soul.

When viewed with clairvoyance, eating for love is seen as a being a bit off the beam in our vibratory state. This imbalance will manifest as the response of reaching for food because the core part of us…deep inside…is aware that the act of taking in food is a loving exchange between multiple life forms and energies. When we eat to find love without knowing what we are doing, the result is calories, but no spiritual energy; weight, with a lean and hungry spirit.

Being Filled, Both Body and Soul

Often soul hunger can be greatly helped by slowing down, by noticing the simple things in life and bringing a reverent attitude into our lives.

My mother was mysterious, truly. I didn’t think so when I was young but in retrospect I think she was a guru. She used to tell us: “Let us dine, not feed.” I see now that this was more than a lesson in manners, but a message about simple, loving attention…and gratitude.

No doubt, she would fail to appreciate today’s fast food commercials with their busting ballistic buttons over the-one-too-many-mouthfuls, or wild-eyed eaters making gluttonous inhalations of ingredients slapped together without a shred of loving intention, a chemical mix made to part you from your money.

Television portrays our relationship to food as irreverent, self-absorbed and uncivilized. I would say “animalistic” but…have you ever watched a cat eat? They are so very dainty! In fact–other than hogs–I can’t name an animal that lacks more grace with eating than a human being in a television commercial. And when you get right down to it hogs are being the best they can be, while hoggish humans, aren’t.

So here’s food for thought: eating is an act of sustaining creation and of becoming one with that which sustains us. Next time we are tempted to “grab” something to eat let’s remember to receive rather than seize. Let’s strive to keep it simple and healthy. If we will let ourselves feel the love in the purest of food, we will soon reflect the loving consciousness that we have swallowed.

—And we will no longer be famished.

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditating About, Understanding, and Coping With Emotions, Part Two

Part Two: Becoming the Master of Your Emotions

(Continued from Part One, click here to read.)


In the Grip of Emotion

When we are having a very strong emotional experience, we can feel only that emotion in the moment. Sensible perspective flies out the window! With that loss of perspective, we compound the intensity of the emotion through the power of focused attention. For example, during a powerful unhappy state we might feel as if we’ve always been miserable, always will be miserable and thereby we can literally trap ourselves in misery by faulty loop-de-loop thinking.

Avoid Reacting to Negative Emotion

At My Spirit Care we show you how to care for your own spirit, and this includes coming to the objective realization that you are not your emotions. You are eternal Spirit, Divine Consciousness, unhurt by painful emotions that are processed by your personality in this moment. When we are in terrible emotional states, we need to observe ourselves during these times and to recognize that the emotion of the moment is only a speck in the fabric of time. It will pass.

It’s what we do with the emotion we are having that counts. If we can maintain the presence of mind to remind ourselves when we are having extreme emotions that we are having a temporary state of mind that will pass and that clarity will come later, we can forgo some avoidable mistakes. —Such as lashing out at someone in rage, breaking up a relationship because we just feel like it in that moment, saying terrible things we can’t take back, etc.

Strong emotional states are not the times to make major decisions. So when I say it’s what we do with the emotion that counts, I mean we must recognize it as our own very personal experience and not make it someone else’s problem. It certainly helps to realize that emotions arise from core beliefs which are not the same as “reality as it is.”

We need to learn to control emotion rather than allow emotion to control us. We can acknowledge that emotions run very deep within us and honor ourselves by tracing the roots of our feelings. When we do that, we will find faulty beliefs or self-created deceptions that have in one way or another fueled our present emotional state. When we understand the reality of the situation (a clarity that can only come once emotions are stabilized) we can learn to cope with emotions in a balanced way.

What You Feel Is Real, But it May Not be the Truth of What Is

Reality and perceptions are most often at odds. The old saying, “Things are not what they appear to be,” is very true. Difficult emotions that arise from a resistance to “what is” are simply a symptom of denial. If you are left by a lover and then proceed to tear yourself and your life apart or injure the other person because you are emotionally  out-of-control, you are not taking into account the reality of the situation. Although pain may be unavoidable, one must live through the experience, cope with it, and in time an understanding of the situation will come…when emotions are stabilized.

Sadness is to happiness is what winter is to summer. They are partners in life. Both of these opposites are contained in the exquisite experience of being a Divine spirit in a human body; neither are bad or good…they are mere pieces of the spiraling dynamic of a cosmic existence.

Next Post: Part Three, Emotional Addiction and the Influence of Collective Emotions

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Stepping Above Guided Meditation: 5 Steps to a Daily Spiritual Practice

Okay, guided meditation is a cool thing, no doubt. It’s used for all kinds of reasons, with good results.

But what about the spiritual aspect of our lives? What about getting familiar with who we really are, without needing a CD or technology to try to do that? What about…just you, and Life…becoming one, moving together smoothly the way a dolphin is one with the sea or a rainbow trout is one with the river? Becoming one with Life and all things is the most ancient spiritual wisdom; shamans from the dawn of history have known and taught the greatest of all truths that everything is interconnected.

Once you learn how to relax and let go, once you learn that imagination is NOT “imaginary,” it may be time to just be with yourself and the silence. Why? Because when it gets right down to it, guided meditation is a beginning for some, but then what? To mature spiritually we will have to sometime surrender the training wheels.

Most people want to be spiritually connected. Those on the spiritual path want to ascend, for crying out loud! We tell ourselves we “should” meditate, we “should” pray, we “should” and “should”…and (sigh) let’s change the subject! So, how’s work coming along?

Yep, for many people on the spiritual path that’s about the size of it. We don’t have a spiritual practice once a week, let alone once a day. I bet some of you felt a twinge of guilt when you read the title to this article. (Some of your friends may have skipped it altogether.) See! I can read your mind!

Actually, if you don’t have a dedicated spiritual practice you would be in the majority and so my guess is merely “playing the odds.” Most people just don’t make the time to connect spiritually. Many people don’t even think about it, or even dare to hope it’s possible. Others don’t find it at all important and even more people leave this up to churches and clergy to “do it” for them!

But all of the above probably isn’t you, either. This is a spiritual site and you’re here for a reason, so for those who are open to the path to enlightenment but can’t get in the groove, maybe it’s time to make it happen for yourself.

In order to get motivated, it helps to understand how an intimate, living spiritual practice can make a difference in your life, and what that entails, exactly.

A personal, dedicated spiritual practice will lead to a sense of connection to the Divine, and to an inner strength that comes from knowing your life has a unique purpose. You will develop your own psychic awareness. You will gain clarity, wisdom, knowledge, foresight…and if you are truly successful, you will become a more loving being.

Here are a few short suggestions on how to get started:

Want to make the connection: you have to want to know what you are all about, under your skin. People with a Christian background will recall that Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. To advance spiritually, we must first know ourselves.

How you decide to have a spiritual connection is completely individual. There are no rules, only guidelines. Find a personal system, or a composite of modalities, that work best for you. So here are 5 steps to get you past “I should” to “I do!”

  • Remember, you have to want to improve your life and be willing to explore for greater truth.
  • Turn off the phone, and eliminate external distractions. Put a “do not disturb” sign on your door if others in the house are used to summoning you at their fancy. Let others know this is YOUR private time.
  • Set aside 15 uninterrupted minutes, the same time each day. Why the same time? …A little discipline is needed to develop good habits, and setting the same time establishes a basis for sacred ritual, which enriches the experience over time. (If you should miss your appointment with the Divine, don’t skip that day. Find the 15 minutes somewhere else in your day before you go to bed and give that spiritual time your full, surrendered attention.)
  • Prepare to share. A relationship with the Divine, whether the Creator of All-That-Is or your own Higher Self, is a two-way street that involves expression of your feelings or intention and the reception of insight or guidance.
  • Listen. Don’t run out on yourself…allow time to just listen in quiet for the guidance from within.

Try not to think of this as work…it’s not. It’s joyful self-development! It’s an awesome experience to be on the right track, gaining solid inner guidance. Higher insight, or personal psychic connectedness, is worth more than anything in this world that money can buy.

Don’t be surprised if you realize, during your spiritual connections, that you are not alone in this world. Opening your heart in this way is to go through that “straight and narrow” Gate to Infinite Consciousness, which is your true and perfect Home. Heaven, you will find, is in your own heart and is with you all the time, right where you are, right now. 🙂

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditating About, Understanding, and Coping With Emotions, Part Three

Part Three: Emotional Addiction and the Influence of Collective Emotions

(Continued from Part Two)

Addiction to Emotions and the Dramas They Create

Did you know that intense emotional states can be addictive? They are. For example, a person who has known mostly depression in life will feel “strange” when not depressed, as if something is not quite right because they are in an unfamiliar feeling state. There are biochemical reasons for this, but there are also energetic reasons. As a clairvoyant who sees auric and other energies, I have observed how the frequency of a particular emotion seeks itself out: sadness is drawn to sadness; happiness to happiness; love to love, and so on. This fact of energetic physics explains why it’s so hard to break out of an emotional loop and why conscious awareness in needed to do so.  At My Spirit Care, we address these energetic issues with those who seek balance in their lives.

Balance is not easy to come by: many people are addicted to energetic/emotional states. They cannot stop the dramas in their lives because they cannot feel alive or powerful unless there is high emotion at play all the time. That’s right: many people are so disconnected from their core identity that they feel dead inside unless they are all worked up about something. This is a deeply destructive pattern that blocks all genuine personal growth and higher spiritual connection. Like all problems, however, being aware of it is half the battle. 🙂

Collective Social Emotions & You

One important aspect of experiencing emotional upset is the significant historical time period in which we now live.

This is an Age of upheaval and immense change on the national and world stage. All around, events and situations seem to threaten personal stability whether through war, financial upheaval and economic uncertainty, health challenges brought on by modern stress, etc. Fear is the “emotion dujouer” served up daily in the media, in radical religions that fervently believe in horrific judgments and the End of Days. Government is not responsive to the needs of the common person and we are often frustrated by systems and programs that are inept or unjust.

Many of you are experiencing not only your own emotions, but are being impacted by the “energetic soup” of the mass mind. We are all connected energetically, and to remain emotionally stable in these intense times, one simply must have a daily, personal, spiritual practice. See the bigger picture.

Next Post: Part Four, Victory Over Self and Circumstance

Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditating About, Understanding, and Coping With Emotions, Part Four

Part Four: Victory Over Self and Circumstance

(Continued from Parts One, Two, and Three)


Choosing a Spiritual Perspective

In difficult emotional states, it’s very important to know that you are loved by a Divine presence and there is a meaningful purpose in your suffering.

You may be one who is required to let go of an old idea of a punishing God, and  that good things should happen when you are good.

All of us are destined to learn that difficulty happens to everyone until we eventually understand that we are all One.  We may have mistaken beliefs about worthiness and privilege that need to be abandoned, in order to know the reality of life as it truly is.

Life is a spiritual school for all humans, to teach us how to love, to forgive and trust. —How to live true to our unique Divine purpose. Emotions are the challenging “pop quizzes” of life that reveal how much we are learning.

Wisdom Teacher in the School of Life

Children can cry over anything…have fits… and object to reality until they possibly get their way. —You know, cry over the candy they were told they couldn’t have.

Over time, we learn we can’t have all that we demand or want. Many a frustrating emotion arises from trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, so-to-speak. The passing years of life teach us how to deal with the spontaneous emotions that started in childhood, how to understand our emotions and cope with them from a wiser perspective, as follows:


Categories
Diana's Spirit Care Blog Articles

Meditate This: Loving Yourself…Do You Know How?

Have you noticed that in most talk about spiritual enlightenment there isn’t a whole lot of discussion about love?

There are discussions about spiritual techniques, about the (mysterious) love of God, about being detached and objective, even about aliens from space coming to save us and the planet, from ourselves.

There’s a lot of fancy language and a myriad of beliefs about what’s spiritual. Compared to all the claims, all the “do’s” and “don’ts,” you will not hear that much about the word “love” or what that means, exactly. In fact, people get a little uncomfortable with that word unless it is used in the most superficial way; just as they are sometimes secretly uncomfortable or suspicious when another person behaves in a loving way towards them.

And then there’s this: people often have ideas about who is okay to love, and who isn’t. There is so much bias, fear, misunderstanding, and woundedness charged around the interpretation of love that the last thing many people ever think about is loving themselves.

Although most of us have heard,  “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and most try to live up to the “love thy neighbor” part, we don’t give “love thyself” a second thought. It gets lost in what seems to be the first imperative, when loving one’s  neighbor isn’t the first imperative at all! Let’s translate the sentence so you can understand what it says: “Love yourself and love your neighbor the same.” Ah, yes, that’s it.

I tell you that I have given at least 15,000 clairvoyant/psychic readings in my long career (I stopped counting after that) and the biggest problem that people grapple with is a love of themselves. “So what?” you ask, “Why does that matter?”

It matters because self-love is the bedrock foundation of a meaningful and happy life and there can be no real love in our lives without it. Period. It matters because nothing in the universe can save us from ourselves until and unless we understand the real meaning of love, and that starts with self-love first.

This is not about conceit, which is being in love with yourself. The difference between loving yourself and being in love with yourself is that the first is a powering up of the spiritual life force; and the second, is to be centered in egotistical narcissism.

Now while it may be true that “giving is better than receiving,” it is crucial we fill up our emotional warehouse with self-love, first. Otherwise, we’ll be giving from deep-down emptiness and that can make one more unhappy, tired, and depressed. When it gets right down to it, how can you give something away that you don’t even have?

Relationships forged between two people with no self-love have a bleak outlook. Often, for all the effort we put into failed relationships that are not really based on love, we end up thinking there is something wrong with us, that somehow we have failed. Truth is, most often there was no real love there to start with; truth is, one or both partners did not have self-love. (It may have felt like love…but that’s a subject for another post.)

I’m amazed at what treatment a man or woman will put up with when they would not sanction someone to treat their best friend in the same way. Often  they wouldn’t want someone they love to suffer with the situation they willingly subject themselves to, only because they never give a second thought to self love.

There’s some pop psychology out there about “women who love too much.” Now while we need awareness about the tendency people have for destructive self-sacrifice, there really isn’t such a thing as “loving too much.” For in truth, love is an infinite force: it’s what life is made from. No, the problem isn’t “loving too much,” the problem is that we don’t know what love really is!!!

The understanding of what love is starts inside, with a feeling connection to your own true heart. And while love itself is an infinite force that is difficult to describe, we can describe the indicators of its presence in our lives.

As far as the most important obligation of loving yourself, the following are indicators that you do:

  1. You don’t need constant reinforcement from someone else that you are loved.
  2. You require respect from others the same as you give.
  3. You forgive yourself for mistakes and practice self-understanding.
  4. You allow and honor your own personal beliefs and viewpoints. Your inner voice is not a teacher, parent, or preacher, telling you how or what to be.
  5. You trust yourself.
  6. You take enough time for your own needs and have a healthy, creative inner life.
  7. You are thoughtful and wise about your choices and the impact they will have on your own personal well-being.
  8. You are comfortable being alone.
  9. You feel inner support, or self-confidence, because you stand with yourself in life.
  10. You are kind to yourself in thought and deed.

If you didn’t answer many affirmatives on the list, don’t despair. Self love is not an easy thing to learn because most people weren’t taught about that. In fact, their parents didn’t know about it, either. That’s because we live in a world where truth is not premium, but the imitation of it is everywhere.

So, the next time you find yourself engaging in self-criticism or other unloving thoughts and emotions, on one of those days you’re being hard on yourself, just look in the mirror and say right out loud,

“Be Patient! I’m not finished with me yet!”

And then from My Spirit Careto you…give yourself a great big hug!