Archive for the ‘Spiritual Coaching’ Category
Creating your Sustainable Spiritual Practice
Posted by learning | Filed under Empowerment, Enlightenment, Self Realization, Spiritual Coaching, Spiritual Evolution, Spiritual Growth
From LTF Newsletter – August 27th, 2009
Greetings from Learning To Flow!
This week, I am starting an eight week series of how to create a sustainable spiritual practice. For the next seven weeks, I will share a fundamental spiritual practice, how I have applied it in my life and some ideas on how you can apply it in your life as well.
Each week, I will also be sharing a way to apply this spiritual practice as it connect to the physical body, either in exercise or diet so you can balance yourself physically as well as spiritually and emotionally.
This week, I am providing an overview of the topics I will be covering as well as an exercise to plan for how your life would look if all of these areas were balanced.
As always, if you have any questions, comments or feedback…it is all welcome!
Namaste
Jeff Scholl
Learning to Flow
Spiritual Life Coaching
Creating Your Sustainable Spiritual Practice
This week, I am sharing the seven basic elements of a sustainable spiritual practice. I learned these seven elements over the course of my studies and the use of these elements ensures that I continue to grow and evolve as a soul. There are a myriad of ways to apply these different elements and I am going to write a more in depth newsletter on each of these, what I have found to work for me and what resources I’ve found.
What has worked for me may or may not work for you. What I have found is the result of a significant amount of exploration and while I will be sharing how I found the avenues to explore…the actual exploration is up to you. I can tell you that quite often throughout the course of my journey, I have felt this inner pressure to speed up the process…to grow NOW. For a long time, I confused that with the whispers of my soul. I thought my soul was telling me I needed to heal it all now, but I was misunderstanding the message. While my soul was indeed pulling me forward, the sense of urgency was the underlying anxiety that I had carried all of my life. The anxiety that I felt twisted the message from my soul as is so often the case with many of the messages we receive.
Just as we perceive the outer world through the filter of our repressed fears and pain, we also quite often perceive our inner world…the world of Spirit the same way. It is only through a conscious practice of these principles that we can release our false perceptions and understand what is being reflected to us in our outer world and receive the purity of what is available in the NOW moment of the inner world.
The seven spiritual practices are:
- Surrendering in Prayer
- Feeling our Feelings
- Healing the Inner Child
- Meditation
- Detachment
- Imagination
- Acceptance / Being in the Now
Now just because I am writing about these elements does not mean I have mastered all of these. I along with the other spiritual teachers on the planet are teaching and practicing our way to mastery. There is an old joke that those that can’t do…teach. J
There is actually some truth to that…especially for spiritual teachers. We teach what we most need to learn. We teach it over and over in order to master it. Some of these seven elements I have practiced a lot and have grown significantly as a result. There are others of these that my ego still resists and of course, when that happens, I find myself with excuses like, “I’m too busy” and “I don’t know who could help me learn this.” Because any time I am telling myself or the world that I am not making progress due to forces outside of me, I am denying who and what I am. I am simply not open to receiving the very assistance I need. When I open to receiving assistance, it shows up. But it does not always show up the way “I” want it to…meaning it does not always show up the way my ego wants it to…or the way in which my inner child just feels completely comfortable. As I noted in the newsletter last week, it is precisely when my inner child feels triggered that I need to accept the help that is in front of me…instead of telling myself that this person just isn’t the right one.
In order to achieve that ever elusive balance in our lives, we must also balance the emotional and spiritual with the physical. When I found these spiritual practices and started using them in my life, I unconsciously created an imbalance because I focused almost exclusively on my spiritual health and did not focus as much on my physical health. As a result, while I felt more emotionally and spiritually balanced than ever, I did not feel as good physically as I had before. Over the course of my spiritual studies, I gained about 35 pounds. I also noticed when I would go to Wellness and Holistic Expos that almost all of the spiritual teachers were either significantly overweight or abused their bodies in other ways such as smoking and drinking. Intuitively, I knew that most of the time when I ate, I was not actually feeding my body. I was feeding my emotions, but even after I had released most of my emotional burdens, the habits of over-eating remained.
Being physically healthy isn’t rocket science. It didn’t require me to research and study the latest and greatest authors as I had done with my spiritual work. All it required was for me to follow the patterns of people who had done this successfully time and time again. There are many choices of programs out there that work, so this is one path that you will have to explore to find the one that works for you. My wife and I are currently following the Body For Life program by Bill Phillips. We work out in the gym six days a week and eat healthy. We are eating primarily vegetarian…about 90% veg and 10% or less meat. The program allows us to eat whatever we want for one day a week which is a nice bonus. This week, I will be adding yoga a couple of days this week as well.
But everything I am doing, I am now doing mindfully. I realized that part of my overeating was that I was just putting food into my body to satisfy the need for food, but I was not really enjoying my food. I would eat primarily in front of the TV or the computer and focus more on what was happening in front of me instead of focusing on tasting what I ate. I discovered that the more I focused on really tasting what I ate, I could not eat as much.
This initially created a conflict within me because I had a belief that I had to finish everything on my plate. This was a habit that my parents kind of forced upon me with good intentions, but I continued as an adult even though I knew I didn’t have to do it any more. I used to use techniques to reduce how much went on the plate such as eating on a smaller plate or putting less food there and eating more slowly. Both of these work, but I am now also following that up by releasing the energy of frustration and disappointment that I felt as a child when my parents forced me to eat past the point where it was comfortable for me.
My parents believed in the paradigm of eating three meals a day and what is interesting to me is that my body knew at the time that this wasn’t what was healthy for me. My body knew that six small meals a day were healthier and now the nutritional research supports that. My parents gave me the knowledge they had, so it is important for me to forgive them for teaching me unhealthy habits and allowing my inner child to release the frustration I felt. Because it is actually these energies of frustration and disappointment that perpetuates my unhealthy eating.
For awhile, I also told myself that I couldn’t afford to eat healthier because “healthy” food costs more. But what I have found is that in eating healthy food and eating mindfully, I eat less food so it works out about the same or less. I realize now that my mind comes up with any excuse it can in order not to change, but once I decide I am going to make a change and turn “downstream” so to speak, that everything becomes easier because I am simply not allowing excuses any more.
I can also say that my new eating and exercise habits have deepened my spiritual practices. By creating a balance with my physical body, my meditations have become deeper and resulted in more realizations. I am able to get to sleep faster and sleeping more peacefully. I am staying more in the Now and finding myself enjoying those moments where I find myself in a moment of stillness. I have noticed that I do not focus on health issues that have been a concern such as my weight because I am now doing something about that.
It is easier to accept where I am now when I know I am headed downstream with the flow.
This week, make a change to balance your physical self with your spiritual self…and enjoy the benefits it creates.
Namaste
Jeff
Quote of the Week:
“There are two keys to eating right. First you have to know what to do and then you have to do what you know! - Bill Phillips Fitness guru and author of “Body for Life” and “Eating for Life”
Exercise of the Week:
Schedule a few minutes every day to look at your vision board and practice your intention to create this life. Allow yourself to imagine hearing how this life sounds. Most importantly, FEEL the excitement and sheer joy of living a life YOU have created for yourself and the satisfaction of knowing that when you tire of something, you can simply create something MORE joyful!Unless otherwise noted on a particular article or message,
Over the course of the next seven weeks, we are going to be exploring Seven Spiritual Practices. It will be important to balance your spiritual and physical practices. While we are inherently spiritual beings, we need healthy physical bodies to carry out our spiritual work in this life and of course to be able to fully enjoy the incredible opportunities we have in this life.
Every week, I will be including a tip for improving the physical along with the spiritual practice of the week.
This week, your assignment is simply to create a vision board for your new life when you have achieved the balance of the physical, emotional and spiritual. Look in magazines, copy images from the internet, include inspirational quotes and allow yourself to create a collage of your ideal life.
Allow yourself to dream BIG.
© 2009-2010, Jeffrey L. Scholl. Learning to Flow
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LTF Weekly Newsletter – August 22nd, 2009
Posted by learning | Filed under Spiritual Coaching, Spiritual Evolution, Spiritual Growth, Spiritual Life Coaching
Greetings from Learning To Flow!
I have been working with a coach again in the past couple of weeks and she has really been getting into some stuff I’ve carried for a long, long time. In last night’s session, the pain was so intense as one point that it was difficult to focus my consciousness on it and just let it be there. In finally feeling something I had repressed all of my life, I realized how that energy had manifested again and again in my life…and in feeling the intensity of that pain, I understood why I had avoided it for so long.
There is no way I would have faced that pain, no way that my mind would have allowed me to dig in that deep. It was only through the assistance of a very good coach that I felt safe enough to face it, to know that I would be guided through what to do and how to let it go.
I have been doing this off and on for years and have coached others through it and the one thing I’ve learned is that NO ONE can go through this alone. We all need help to face our innermost fears. Our ego rationalize that we are enlightened enough enough to do this alone, but the truth is that we can’t.
An analogy I learned is this. “Take one of your fingers and brush it lightly along the back of the hand of the opposite hand betwen the fingers and the wrist as lightly as you can. Notice how sensitive your sense of touch actually is. Realize that your skin protects your body much like your ego mind protects your psyche, but with one exception. Your ego mind is a thousand times more sensitive than your skin.”
Realize that getting close to some of these emotions is akin to reaching out with your hand to a white hot stove. No matter how strong your will, your hand will jerk away before you can get there.
To face what we need to face in order to peel away the layers of what keeps us from living our heaven on earth, we have to ask for and receive help.
Allow yourself to surrender to the help that your Angels and guides are leading you towards.
Quote of the Week:
“If you believe that there are aspects of yourself this sun should not shine its light upon, that there are places where it shouldn’t shine, that there are things it shouldn’t warm with its rays, then everyone and everything you meet around you will confirm these beliefs..” -Jeshua Channelings: The Healing Series by Pamela Kribbe
This week’s article:
“I Don’t NEED help!”
It is not an accident that you are reading these words right now. If you found the time to sit down and read this message, know that this is in response to a question you have been asking.
Many of us are in the process of awakening…or reawakening as it were. We are actually reincarnating in the bodies we are currently in…and in order to do that, we have to examine all of the areas of darkness within us. Many of these areas are sensitive…and our ego has been shielding these areas from our consciousness for most of our lives. Our ego protects us in this way.
But if we are to be reborn as the embodiment of who and what we are, we must face our deepest fears. Our fears cry out to us to be recognized, acknowledged, accepted and loved. They do this through the reflections in our lives. You see, our fears are constantly being projected out into our lives. We see our fears reflected to us in every area of our lives and now we are a point in history where those fears are being brought to the surface to be healed.
Last week, we looked at an example of how we are using the subject of healthcare as a way to feel the fear and pain we have within us. The topic isn’t the problem. The reactions of others isn’t the problem. The problem is how we feel about it. When we can face our deepest fears on this topic and let them go…only then can we allow Love into this area.
Have you ever heard that “no two things can occupy the same space at the same time?” This means that you cannot hold within you a vibration of fear AND a vibration of love on the same topic at the same time. Each of us have an emotional setpoint (as explained in “Ask and It is Given” by Abraham-Hicks) on every topic in our world. We are somewhere on the sliding emotional scale between utter hopelessness and unbridled joy. Where we are on that scale is determined by the thoughts we consciously or unconsciously choose. All of us were conditioned by our childhood environments and what we believe may closely match what our parents believed. This is not an accident. As children, we were vibrational sponges and whether we consciously chose to replicate our parents thoughts, we absorbed their anxieties and convictions. We release all that we become conscious of, but we can only heal that which we can see to change.
In order to heal that which lies beneath the surface of our conscious mind, we need help. There are many modalities which have evolved in the last decade to help us release our unconscious beliefs and validate the emotional burdens that we’ve carried for many lifetimes. That’s a key here. We have to recognize that we did not generate all of the energy that we carry in THIS lifetime. So much of what we think has happened to us in this lifetime has been little more than a reflection of the energy we brought in with us from previous lifetimes. We can use those reflections however to our advantage. Because with those reflections, we now have something to validate. We have a way to tap into those feelings and release them.
If we can look at our experiences in this lifetime as reflections, then it is easier to forgive many of those we feel have hurt us…since they were reflecting energy we already had.
In this lifetime, many of us brought in the energy from all of our previous lifetimes to heal and release. Only by healing and releasing ALL of it can we become the light vibrational beings we truly are. The vibrations of fear, anger and pain are “heavy” vibrations and they weigh us down. Our ego likes to tell us that we just need to release some of it so we can manifest what we desire. And while our journey certainly is a process of doing that, our desire before we arrived was to release all of it. We no longer want to hold the energy of the past. We no longer want to control and manipulate others. We no longer want to carry memories of pain, anger and fear…and allow these to influence how we live our lives.
We want to live our lives in peace, harmony and bliss…and somewhere within us, we know that is possible. We know that even as we learn to create through joy that it isn’t the end of creating. We will simply learn to create greater and greater levels of joy instead of creating more and more struggle in our lives.
But to do that, to dig that deep into our consciousness means that we will have to ask for help. It is not an accident that small armies of healers and counselors have been called to heal their own consciousness in order to be able to help others. We felt the pull of this within us years before the waves of people hearing that call now.
But even those of us who have felt that call get stuck from time to time. We find a modality that helps us heal part of us and we allow our ego to deceive us by telling us that we are now “enlightened” and because we are teachers, we no longer need help from others. So the big test to that is…look out at your life. Is your life working in every area the way you desire? If it isn’t, then your ego is hiding something from you…in an effort to protect you from feeling some deep level of pain. It is this pain that you must surface and heal.
Intuitively we know that we are powerful and our ego uses that inherent knowledge to rationalize why we don’t need help from others. Yet if we are to heal, we have to find new ways to get past the ego’s defenses. This is why despite the effectiveness of the coaching methods I use, I will frequently seek the services of someone in a completely different modality. At some point, I have to admit that I need help and that if I want my life to change, I have to change my approach.
The Universe appears to be ratcheting up the pressure. We are going to be seeing more changes in our world as the veil gets thinner and our deepest fears are surfacing. We cannot stop this process. We all chose to incarnate at this particular point in history to be a part of this transformation. Yet if we are to help others make this transition, we must complete the transition ourselves. We must seek help from others.
If you have areas of your life that aren’t working, it’s time to stop using the same approach you’ve been using. It’s time to take a great leap forward. That fear you feel when you think about that is simply your ego fearing its demise. It’s time to let your ego off the hook, to allow it to step down from its guard post and to allow guidance to spring forth from the joy that already resides within you.
Your mission this week…is to find it!
Namaste
Jeff
This Week’s Exercise:
I know I wrote kind of on this same topic a couple of weeks ago, but my guides are telling me that it is very important to stress this right now…to help inspire people to take the step they have been thinking about, the step they have been praying about and to take action on the answers they have received but not been completely willing to acknowledge.
So this week’s exercise is simple. Take that step. For whatever modality you have been using, do something completely different this week. If you have not received any ideas on that yet, pray about it and when that answer comes act on it.
I have received answers to these questions at times by spending time in nature…getting away from my daily thoughts, relaxing and opening my mind to new ideas.
But make no mistake, if you are to get past your ego’s defenses that are “protecting” you from what you’ve been hiding from for all of your life…you will need help to get there.
Explore different modalities. Go to a metaphysical fair and experience different healers. Getting past your ego’s defenses may require that you use the services of the person with whom you feel the most uncomfortable…the one who seems to push your buttons the most. Again this is your ego screaming out, “NOOOO!”
If you stay with the healers you feel safe with, it is quite likely that you feel safe because they are not getting into those sensitive areas.
The time to move forward is NOW.
The Difference between Therapy and Spiritual Life Coaching
Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Self Realization, Spiritual Coaching, Spiritual Life Coaching
In having been to a couple of therapist on my own and in talking with many of my clients about their therapy, I thought it would be a good idea to clarify some of the primary difference between traditional psychological / psychiatric therapy and Spiritual Life Coaching.
So for one thing, traditional therapies like to diagnose a person and give them a label. Common psychological disorders include: ADHD, Anxiety, Addictions, Bipolar, Borderline Personality, Dissociative Identity, Depression, Eating Disorders, etc.
In Spiritual Life Coaching, we start out with the premise that every person is a Divine Spiritual Being. We know this to be true and our role is to help the client realize this for themselves.
Traditional therapy prescribes drugs to treat the various disorders.
In Spiritual Life Coaching, we know that the disorder itself is an illusion created by the mind. While we do not interfere with anyone under a doctor’s care and cannot/will not tell anyone to stop taking drugs if they are on them, the client themselves will eventually stop because they realize they feel much better without the drugs than with them. We will have to peel away the layers of emotional pain to get to that point though.
Traditional therapy gives clients ways to cope with their “disorder.”
We give our clients a way to permanently heal their pain and this creates permanent behavioral change in their lives.
Traditional therapy quite often goes on for years, sometimes decades.
With Spiritual Life Coaching, the average client experiences a 35% improvement in how they feel in 15 sessions. The average client completes their coaching in 30 sessions. Some clients opt to go beyond that to have help to work on some isolated issues, but the average client will heal 80% of their repressed emotional pain in 30 sessions…if they do the work.
Now that’s the kicker.
In traditional therapy, the onus is on the therapist to do all of the work. While there can be homework sometimes, typically the client just comes in every week and the therapist tells them what to do next, sometimes even guiding them to make life choices in their relationships.
As a Spiritual Life Coach, I never guide my clients to make life choices. But all of my clients must do the work if they are going to heal. I teach them how to master each step of the process and how to use all of the tools they are given so that they understand why things are happening and how to heal it long after our work together is completed.
In traditional therapy, the therapist themselves may have completed a degree, studied the disorders, therapeutic treatments and learned how to be a great counselor. But they also likely never healed their own emotional issues. Many therapists are attracted by the field unconsciously because they want to heal their own stuff.
But one cannot heal simply by studying healing. You have to do it. You cannot give away that which you don’t have.
As a Spiritual Life Coach, I had to go through my own course before I could learn to teach it to others. I healed the first 80% in my own coursework. Then I started teaching it to others and have been doing so for the past 4 years. I have healed so much of my remaining pain that I am able to live most of my time in the present moment now because I have very few negative emotional anchors to my past. I have given them up…healed them.
I teach this to others because I know what it like to carry so much pain, anger, disappointment, frustration, fear, embarrassment and shame around. I know how all of that energy attacks the body and creates dis-ease within it. I know how the repression of emotional energies impacts relationships, careers and one’s sense of self-worth / well-being.
Having healed most of my own pain, I am able to help others peel away their layers of emotional pain. I help them to realize themselves as the Spiritual Beings that they truly are and live their lives from that perspective.
I don’t just offer hope…I provide a way to heal permanently for anyone who has reached the point where they know they have to find a way to change and are willing to do whatever it takes to do that.
I am there as your guide every step of the way, leading you to healing, leading you home to your Self.
All you have to do is reach out your hand for help.
Namaste
Jeff