Learning To Flow

Creating Your World

Posted by learning | Filed under Law of Attraction, Spiritual Evolution, Spiritual Growth, Vibrational Being

Greetings from Learning To Flow!

Christ said, “Ye are gods and ye know it not.”

This statement is often misunderstood primarily because we have assimilated a belief in our mass consciousness that we are less than God…instead of understanding that we are God…expressed in human form.

Some have confused this line in the other extreme professing that they were God and this is in error also since none of us individually are God. Even everyone on Earth collectively, along with every rock, plant and animal…is not the entirety of God.

The human mind seeks to define God and has long defined God in his own image instead of the other way around…meaning that humans have bestowed limits, judgments and restrictions on their perception of God.
We have even misinterpreted that God made man in his own image. What would be more accurate is that God made the human soul…the essence of our Self in God’s own image…not our bodies or our minds.

We are unlimited beings and when we start identifying ourselves with that perception, then and only then do our lives start to blossom by unleashing the power that dwells within us.

This week, I encourage you to start using that power to create the life and the world YOU want to live in.

Quote of the Week:

“Life is always flowing to you and through you, but for you to have conscious deliberate awareness of it is the ultimate in truly living.” Abraham-Hicks “The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent”

Creating Your World

There are many books on how to create our reality. The science behind it is covered in “What the Bleep Do We Know.” It continued with “The Secret” and the Abraham-Hicks material that has been published in the last five years or so comes closest to describing how creation happens…by vibration.

Everything is energy and everything vibrates a different frequencies. A happy thought vibrates at a much higher vibration than an angry one.
Some have even defined the frequency of different thoughts and states of beings. But we do not have to understand any of the science, the vibrations or the levels of frequency to apply this information.

All we have to do is be able to discern the subtle differences in our feelings.

A word of caution…this will require practice! While we all have innate memories of being able to create instantly on the plane where we reside between lives, the very reason that we came into this life to create is because it does take more focus here. When you can create anything you desire instantly, there is no satisfaction gained from your creations.
A similar analogy would be someone who has been wealthy all of their lives. If all you have ever known is abundance, how can you truly appreciate it? If you have only known fabulous health all of your life, how can you appreciate a vitally healthy body?
If on the other side, everyone is love and all of your “relationships” are loving and peaceful, how can you appreciate loving relationships?

Now contrast that with your own lives. Have you achieved the ideal? Have you created realities for each of these areas that feel joyful and fulfilling to you?

If not, consider then the possibility that this is the reason that you are here. Consider that the people who frustrate, disappoint and hurt you the most are your greatest teachers…for they show you where you have yet to create what you truly desire.

When you start to experience your life from the perspective that you are a Divinely powerful creative being, then you start to become aware (through practice) of what thoughts you think and how they feel to you.

When you find yourself thinking a thought that does not feel good, ask yourself, “Why am I thinking this?” “Who says THIS has to be MY reality?”
The answer to that is that no one can choose your reality for you but you. You can choose to think thoughts of self-punishment and fear or you can choose to think loving and peaceful thoughts about yourself and the interesting thing is that no one can possibly make that choice for you…but YOU.
No one can think your thoughts for you. So since no one can do that but you, then you have the unique power to practice thoughts that feel good.
Now it’s only fair to say that when you start practicing a thought that is the highest you can dream, it will feel uncomfortable at first. It feels that way because the vibration of that thought is SO different than what you’re used to feeling. It will feel so different that it may even feel like you are lying to yourself. If you feel that, consider that you have already been lying to yourself if you have told yourself anything that does not reflect who you truly are…a Divine being…God being expressed in human form.

This is a crossroads and one you will be at many times as you grow. Each time you come to this crossroads, you will have to decide if you are willing to believe the lie you have been telling yourself or if you are willing to accept the truth of who you are.
As one of my teachers asked me once, “how good can you stand it?”
The answer to that will directly impact how easily your life flows in a way that feels good to you.

Practice thoughts that feel good. Practice images that feel good when you imagine your life and most of all, practice FEELING a higher vibration. All you really have to do is intend to feel better and breathe that in.

Why would God make it more difficult than that…if you ARE God?

Exercise of the Week

Envision something you want, but do not yet have. Close your eyes and imagine yourself with it.
So for example, imagine yourself in a new car. See yourself having plenty of money to buy the car you WANT, not the car you’ll settle for. See yourself in that car. Hear the engine or if it’s an electric hybrid, marvel at how quiet it is. Smell that new car smell as you get into it. Feel the steering wheel and the gearshift in your hand. Hear your friends and family tell you how well this car fits you and that they’re happy that you got the car you wanted.
How does that feel in your heart?

Now open your eyes and look at the car you have now. Do you have that same feeling? If not, just notice what this feels like.

Now realize the difference between owning the car you want and the car you have right now has less to do with anything you are doing than it does with the vibration you are sending out into the world. When you vibrate, when you send out an energy that matches the experience of having the car you want, it has to come into your life.

This is true whether it’s a car, a relationship, your health, being treated with respect and love by others or anything else you can imagine.

What you are living today is a direct match to the vibration you have been sending out. If you want to experience something different, but have been wanting someone else to change for that to happen, you’re in denial of how your reality is created.

If YOU want your life to change, you have to CHANGE your life. You have to BE that change…by changing your vibration.

Dialoguing with Your Inner Child

Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Inner Child Work, Spiritual Evolution, Spiritual Growth

Greetings from Learning To Flow!

This week, we are taking the next step forward in creating our sustainable spiritual practice by learning about the inner child. I will explain what the term “Inner child” means and why it is so important.
Each of the steps in our spiritual practice tie together so we will continue to build on the fundamental practices of feeling our feelings and being in the now. We have to be in the now to face our feelings and we have to be practicing feeling them in order to be willing to face our inner child’s deepest fears and pain.

It is so important to understand that the pain we carry within us is manifesting what we experience as our “problems” in life and until we release these energies from our being and replace them with a reflection of who and what we really are, our world will not change.

Being a man, I know how resistant the ego is to taking this kind of step. My ego told me that doing something like this was silly and wouldn’t have any impact. But phase I of the shift from an ego-based consciousness to a heart-based consciousness is the realization that ego methods are not working sufficiently and we long for more.

I encourage you to take this important step on your journey, to surrender to the necessity of it and allow your inner child’s messages to flow.

Namaste
Jeff Scholl

Quote of the Week:

“We originally established our protections as children in an attempt to protect ourselves from pain that was too overwhelming for our little beings…As adults, that pain is still within the Inner Child and we may still be protecting against it. As long as we choose to protect against it, the work we must do to avoid that pain controls our lives.” Margaret Paul, PH.D. in “Inner Bonding”

Dialoguing with the Inner Child

This week, we’re going to talk about working with the inner child. In the Self-Mastery process, I learned a method called Self-Parenting. In “Inner Bonding,” Margaret Paul teaches her own form of this method and establishes a two-way dialogue with our inner child. I am going to explain how I have learned to dialogue with my own inner child, how this has helped me to grow and evolve as a soul and what benefits I’ve experienced as a result.

Before we get too far into this subject, let’s clear up what this term “inner child” means since many people feel uncomfortable at first with this term. The inner child is essentially our emotional body. It is the part of us in which our emotions are felt and stored or actually repressed. When we have an experience that triggers our repressed emotional energy it is our “inner child” that cries foul. The emotional energy is triggered and starts coming to the surface. If we are identified with that pain AS us or we are primarily identified with our minds, then we do not understand that it is not only normal and natural for those feelings to come to the surface, it is necessary that they do so.
When we are triggered, all that is happening is that this repressed emotional energy has attracted a situation for the purpose of evolving our soul. When we learn to recognize that this is what is happening and open a dialogue with this energy through the symbolic visualization of communicating with our inner child, then we can let go of those feelings more easily and replace them with feelings of love, acceptance and security. When our inner child feels safe and secure, our vibration is raised and we experience the reflection of that higher vibration in our life experiences. In effect, we are clearing out the blockages in our emotional body which is imprinted upon our soul in this lifetime.
So again, it is important to note that what has happened in this lifetime did not “cause” these energies to be there. What happened to us with our parents, teachers, siblings, etc was a reflection of the energies…or the agenda we brought in with us. When we can detach ourselves enough from the perspective that we are this person who all of these bad things have happened to in our lives and start identifying ourselves primarily as a soul who is simply continuing our evolution in this lifetime, then we are able to move forward in that growth more easily.
Visualizing the inner child as being the one who has all of these upset emotions allows us to detach ourselves from identifying with the emotions and/or the thoughts that spring from these emotions. We are then able to be who we really are…a soul who is expressing our unique energy in a human form.

When I learned how to create this conversation with my “inner child,” pretty quickly I didn’t feel so attached to these emotions. I didn’t feel like they were mine. I just felt like they were being expressed through me. This is an important distinction as being able to see myself as the “observer” of the triggers and the resulting emotions has helped me to understand “why” my inner child is upset. It has helped me to validate that he has a right to feel angry, sad, frustrated, etc and to give him permission to feel it. This distinction between me and my inner child also allows me to create a safe space which allows him to let go of his repressed emotions. I can then see myself as his parent and giving him what he needs to feel which is loved, accepted and safe. And when he feels that…I feel it in my heart. As a result, I am feeling safer and more loved in my life…not because the outside world is giving it to me…but because I have the power to give myself this feeling.
But in doing so, it has changed my vibration significantly. I do feel safer and more confident in my life and I am seeing more people reflect acceptance and appreciation for who I am back to me. Another side effect is that I am experiencing an explosion of creativity for what I want to create in my life and what I want to write about. Right now I have more topics to write about than I have time, so my next project is to create more time to write.

For more on how to dialogue with your inner child, go to the “Spiritual Exercise of the Week.”

Spiritual Exercise of the Week

When you become aware that you are upset or fearful about something, find a place where you can get quiet and explore these feelings.
Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths…slowly inhaling and exhaling.
Scan your body with your awareness and feel for where you feel this energy in your body. Notice what it feels like and put all of your focus on just feeling it there.

Then see a younger version of yourself there. Notice what age your inner child is and ask him/her what she is feeling…and wait for an answer.
Then when you have that answer, ask them why they are feeling that. Let this energy tell you why this is coming up right now.

Validate your inner child by telling them that it is normal to feel that way.
So for example if your boundaries have been violated in some way, you need to validate your inner child that it is normal to feel angry when this happens. By doing so you are giving them permission to feel what they feel.
Most of us were never validated so this may take practice or you may need to have a coach help you with this prior to being able to get really good at this.

Once your inner child feels safe to feel what she/he is feeling, you may feel a strong rush of emotion. Whatever pain you have been experiencing may get significantly more intense. This is normal.
Just recognize what is happening and instead of running from it…breathe directly into the center of that pain. Inhale deeply and forcefully exhale. You may have to do this several times, but you will start to feel this energy coming up and out of you.
Some people say it helps to see the pain as a dark area and see themselves breathing light directly into that area. They then see the light breaking up the dark area and turning into a dark mist that they are exhaling…kind of like what happens in “The Green Mile.”
There is no right or wrong thing to see or experience. Allow yourself to create something that works for you.

After you release your pain, tell your inner child how courageous he/she is and tell them how much you love them. Give them a big hug and help them to feel safe.
Take a few moments and just practice feeling that love in your heart…and then open your eyes!

This may seem like a very simple exercise, but you will be surprised

Physical Exercise for Your Inner Child

Once you’ve established a dialogue with your inner child, maintain that dialogue and ask her/him what she wants to do to have fun.

Be willing to accept any answer that comes…whether it’s to go play on a playground, go to an amusement park or go dancing.
Be willing to go with whatever answer comes and allow yourself to have fun!

Being in the Moment of Now

Posted by learning | Filed under Being in the Now, Enlightenment, Inner Peace, Spiritual Evolution, Spiritual Growth

Greetings from Learning To Flow!

My mantra for the past couple of weeks has been “I AM THAT I AM.” Saying that every day has helped me to become more aware of when I am not in the moment and what I am thinking and feeling about that moment. It has helped me to understand how often I am not accepting someone for being who they are or what I am thinking about a situation in which I am focused on what I don’t like about that situation.
It has helped me to feel the subtle energies of my emotional body, to take my awareness to the next level of being able to feel when I am holding something, where I am holding it and instead of resisting it and allowing IT to control my thoughts and feelings. I can just let it be there…breathe into it and release it.

I know that everyone around me is always doing the best they can and I realize how hard I have been on others and myself. They do not do what they do to disappoint me. They do what they do because just as my first priority is ME, their first priority is themselves as well it should be.

Realizing this has enabled me to take a step back and just allow people to be who they are…and to start appreciating more of who they are. I find that when I step back and just allow myself to be in that moment, I almost automatically start seeing how hard people are working, how much they have on their plate, how frustrated and unappreciated they feel already. Seeing this sparks compassion and understanding within me.
It makes me want to gently shake them by the shoulder and whisper, “Wake up. It’s safe to wake up now.”

And this is the purpose of my writings, my newsletter, my book and the ones that follow it. It is the purpose of my coaching and my classes.

Unlike some teachers who have experienced a spontaneous awakening, I have slowly let go of my ego mind a little at a time. And by sharing what I am doing, how I am doing it and what thoughts and feelings I am experiencing as I do it…I leave a trail of bread crumbs for any who are seeking to find their way as well.

Namaste
Jeff Scholl

Quote of the Week:

“Every time I create a gap in the stream of my mind, the light of my consciousness grows stronger.” Eckhart Tolle

Why I Avoided Being in the Moment

For much of my life, I carried a feeling of anxiety within me. I didn’t allow myself to feel that feeling much. I used alcohol for years to numb it. I fed it with foods that would stifle it for awhile, but which only resulted in more anxiety for the effects that kind of food had on my body. I distracted myself from feeling it by using TV, the Internet, email and video games. I kept myself busy with work, unconsciously taking small problems and blowing them up into larger ones…anything to consume my time and keep me focused on something.
All of it was simply a distraction from being in the moment. Because what that moment ultimately made me face was the very feeling I had been seeking to drown out by all of those activities and substances. Because those moments I had alone brought me face to face with a very uncomfortable feeling that for years, I simply didn’t know how to handle.

This is why I shared last week on how to feel your feelings. When you are able to face your feelings without running from them, you are then able to just BE in the moment.

When I allow myself to just BE in the moment and take a few deep breaths, I often find some of the emotions that I have been repressing start to rise to the surface. I can just notice that my mind wants to start up the thought cycle on whatever triggered these emotions and if I get caught up in my dramas, before I know it, I am thinking about the past or the future or thinking about what they might say or what I should’ve said…thus creating more vibrational signals of drama for the future.
When I can just allow myself to stay in that moment, to notice those feelings and just let them be, I can almost feel the energy as a paper-thin barrier that moves and tingles around different areas of my body. And then if I can breathe into those feelings and allow them to be there without judging them or telling myself that they shouldn’t be there, then they start to dissipate. When I allow them to just be there instead of thinking why they are there or who I am holding responsible for them being there or why I must be bad, wrong or broken because they are there…when I just allow them to be there, they aren’t quite as scary as they were before. And the more I practice being in the moment with them, the faster I recognize it when I am projecting that feeling out onto someone else.

Projecting is one of the most difficult things to detect when we’re doing it…mainly because almost all of us are doing it all of the time. Psychologists have a term for it as “projectional transference.” So for example, when something happens at work that upsets me and I get overly upset, what’s happening it that I am transferring similar emotions that I had already repressed out onto this situation.

If I can slow down however and allow myself to be in the moment and feel what I am feeling, I can actually USE this situation for the purpose the Universe intended. The purpose of the situation coming into my life is to show me where I have repressed emotions. So when I have situations that come up in which I find myself upset, I still get upset from time to time. However, the amount of time that I stay upset has greatly diminished. And the level to which I get upset over something that would have really set me off a few years ago may barely register on my upset meter. And if I just allow myself to BE in the moment for a few minutes and feel my feelings, then I find that I am not thinking about the issue 9 or 10 times later that day. I am not sharing what happened with my wife and then getting upset all over again. I stop and allow myself to be in the moment, feel it, release it and it’s gone. And not only is IT gone, but whatever else that it triggers, I go ahead and release that as well.
I will explain a little bit of how to do this in this week’s exercise, but I will also cover it in more detail as we go in this series when we cover Dis-Creation and Forgiveness.

However now that I’ve released the feeling that upset me and I feel better that I’ve released it, I’m not done. Because I remember that I am a vibrational being, IF I want to experience something different in my future, then I CAN choose to feel good in order to send that signal out. And so in the moment, I may allow myself to just feel relieved and to really enjoy the feeling of relief.
I may feel grateful that I feel good now and grateful to my teachers who have provided me the tools to release the feelings that didn’t feel good. I may just feel at peace or happy and allow myself to enjoy those feelings.
So I take a few deep breaths and allow myself to truly enjoy those moments of feeling good for at least 68 seconds…to send a new signal out into the world…a signal that now says, “bring me more of this vibration!”

Namaste
Jeff

Spiritual Exercise of the Week:

What makes an experience memorable for us is the emotion that is attached to it. I can have a thousand experiences a week, but I only remember those to which I felt something. I may not remember the person who checked me out at the grocery store unless they were particularly nice or particularly rude. I may not remember going out to the mailbox and getting my mail unless something happened on the way there or back.
We sometimes think that we will always remember some memories, but I have found that as I release emotions attached to experiences from the past, either those memories disappear entirely or they become difficult to remember. I find that I don’t lose my good memories. I just lose the ones to which I have released the negative emotion.
So think of a recent situation that upset you and replay the experience again in your mind. Notice what you feel. Again, realize that if you feel some negative feeling you have repressed that emotion.

Take a deep breath and feel what you are feeling. Sometimes it helps to give it a name, so you can see it as something separate from you. So pick a word from the below list that matches it as closely as possible.

Anger – Betrayal – Rage
Sadness – Abandonment -
Grief – Powerlessness
Disappointment – Discouragement
Frustration – Dissatisfaction
Worry – Helplessness
Afraid – Anxiety
Hurt – Exclusion
Embarrassed – Inadequate
Envious – Jealousy
Scared – Hopelessness
Ashamed – Unworthiness

Really allow yourself to feel it. Where in your body do you feel it and what does it feel like? Write this down in your journal.
Allow the feeling to just BE there without judging it or wanting it to be gone. Just let it be. Imagine that you can see this energy in your body. What color is it?

Ask yourself if you have felt this feeling before and when? What was happening? Who was involved? What were they doing?
Allow yourself to feel this feeling again. Has it gotten stronger? Has it changed colors or gotten darker? Has it shifted to any other areas of your body or has it stayed in one place?
Allow yourself to accept whatever you feel without judging it or thinking that this shouldn’t be happening.

Start taking in several deep breaths and envision yourself breathing in a pure, golden white light. Feel the warmth of the light as it comes down into your body. Use your awareness to direct the light and the warmth into the emotion you are experiencing. Notice the light start to disperse the darkness. Just allow this to happen. You don’t have to force it to happen. Just observe it as it is happening.
As the light starts to break up the darkness, deepen your breaths and start to forcefully exhale. Sometimes when I do this, I find that I need to cough because so much is coming up and my body starts to assist me in clearing the toxins that I am releasing.
Continue to take deep breaths and forcefully exhale until you feel the feeling dissipate and be released. Take a few more deep cleansing breaths and use the sound of relief…the sound of “Ahhh” as you exhale. It is important to do this out loud. This sound is a therapeutic sound that you can use any time you want to feel relief in a situation.

Take a few moments and enjoy your improved feeling from before. Realize that you may not feel “perfect.” However after using this exercise, it is expected that you will feel much better than before. Keep practicing and use this with any new situations or feelings that surface. Allowing yourself to just be in the moment allows these feelings to surface on their own…which is much easier than having to experience all of them in your daily life in the form of drama.

Physical Exercise of the Week:

Practice yoga in some form this week and allow yourself to just breathe and BE in the moment. You can practice any form of yoga that you want. It can be something as simple as the Yoga on your Wii Fit program or as challenging as Rodney Yee’s “Slow Burn Yoga” DVD If you have FiTV on your satellite or cable, I recommend “Yoga Zen with Sara Ivanhoe” for beginners. If you want to try something different, try Maya Fiennes’ “Kundalini Yoga to Detox and Destress” DVD. We were able to rent both the Rodney Yee and Maya Fiennes DVD’s from Netflix and liked them so much that we purchased a copy.

If you are a beginner or even intermediate, it may help you to have someone else guide you through it such as a DVD. Or you may enjoy a class at your gym or a local yoga center. In your practice, focus on your movements and allow yourself to just BE in that moment. Focus on your breathing and allow it to BE what it is. Allow any emotions that you may feel to just surface and release. Some emotions are so strong that they need our attention in order to fully release them, but we do not need to do this for every emotion. Many can be released in our yoga practice simply by allowing them to leave us as we move, breathe and stretch.

May you have a wonderful week!

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Facing and Feeling your Feelings

Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Empowerment, Enlightenment, Spiritual Growth

From LTF Newsletter – September 5th, 2009

Greetings from Learning To Flow!
I had planned to talk about “Being in the Now” this week, but pretty much as soon as I wrote that, I started getting messages that the first topic needed to be about “Feeling Your Feelings.” And then to drive that point home with me, I was forced to feel my feelings all week long even those I didn’t want to feel.
In working again this week with my coach, she helped me peel back the layers on a core belief that had been manifesting more and more painful results throughout my life. The more I encountered the situation, the more energy I repressed that attracted it in the first place. The more energy I repressed, the worse the situation was when it happened again. Over time, this drove me to isolate myself from others because I did not feel safe to be around some without my boundaries being violated.

I realized this week that I had a core belief that I brought into this world to heal. In forgiving those that reflected it back to me, I was able to finally able to let these feelings go and embrace the energy of acceptance of who I am.

As we progress throughout the seven steps of a sustainable spiritual practice, you will find that to do any of it…you must be able to truly feel your feelings…for as it says in “Conversations with God”…’”feelings are the language of the soul.”‘

Namaste
Jeff Scholl

Quote of the Week:

“To be angry with someone is easy; but to be angry with the right person, at the right time, for the right reason and to the correct degree…that is difficult.” Aristotle – paraphrased

Facing and Feeling your Feelings

I notice that when I feel angry, my mind wants to play the situation that triggered it over and over in my mind to convince me that I have a right to feel angry. What it has taken me a long time to realize is that my mind does this because unconsciously, I had a belief that it was not safe to feel or express my anger. So in just being able to accept that it is normal for me to feel angry when my boundaries have been violated, I can then feel the energy of my anger in my being, breathe into it and release it.
One of the things prevented me from doing this is because for a long time, I had repressed so much anger that when I felt anger, I did not just feel the anger of the moment; I felt the energy of all of the anger I had repressed. I had forgiven people, but had mostly only done so from a conceptual perspective. I had not actually released all of the energy from that moment. So I was unconsciously repressing all that I had not released. My mind told me that I had handled that situation so it didn’t make sense to go back and feel those feelings again. In fact, because my mind did not want to experience those feelings again, I rationalized that I had “put it behind me.”
What I didn’t realize is that this is impossible. I am a being of energy and whatever I do not release, I hold onto. Whatever I hold onto becomes a part of my energetic signal.

To understand why this is important, we have to examine who and what we are. We are not our physical bodies and we know this. We are not our mind. We are spiritual beings. We are beings of energy that use our minds and bodies to express who and what we are in this world. We are essentially energy and we have been evolving for a long time throughout several lives.
For many of us in this lifetime, we brought all that we had not transcended into this life in order to heal it. The energies we brought in form layers of perceptions that color how we view the world. Our perception of the world is not simply affected by our childhood environment. Our childhood environment provides a stage for the energies we brought into this world. Our environment was selected by our soul to support what we wanted to experience and transcend in this lifetime. Our lives are an ongoing experiment in which we are learning how to allow energy to flow freely through us.

Our minds tell us that if we let go of the anger or the fear or the shame, that we will not have “learned our lesson.” We tell ourselves that only through guilt can we ensure we do not repeat our “transgressions.” But it actually works the opposite of this, for as long as we hold onto the energy we are attracting similar experiences into our lives again and again. It is only when we allow ourselves to let go of the energies we have repressed that we “learn” what that experience was there to teach us.

For me, I had to learn how to feel my feelings, so it was only in allowing myself to fully feel the energy in each moment that I have been able to release repressed energy from my past. It was easy for me to think about my feelings, to keep running events over and over in my mind thereby justifying my right to feel angry, fearful, sad, disappointed, hurt, etc.

I could not understand why I kept experiencing the same types of relationships, career struggles and even traffic incidents over and over until I understood why those experiences kept showing up in my life. They were there to show me what I had repressed. In many cases, it was only when the feeling overwhelmed me that I became aware of how much energy I had repressed for a particular emotion. Once I became aware of it, I was able to start feeling and releasing it.

Along the way, I have learned many methods of releasing this energy proactively rather than reactively and we will be covering many of these over the course of the next several weeks. But none of these methods were effective for me until I learned to feel my feelings. Because in each method, these emotions start floating to the surface. If my mind does not understand what is happening, it distracts me from allowing this energy to be released through the action of just allowing it to BE and feeling it. My mind focuses on things I need to do in the future, things I should have done in the past, things I need to be doing right now…anything to keep me from just feeling what I am feeling.

Once I learned to just allow it to be, breathe into it, feel it and allow it to leave…only then did I learn what it was there to teach me.

Learning to feel your feelings IS scary at first if you are not accustomed to feeling them at all, especially for men. It is much like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. Our emotions are designed to be taken in, felt and processed out…much like our food.

This week, allow yourself to either start this exploration of your feelings…or to deepen it.

Namaste
Jeff

There are many feelings exercises out there. One of the best I have found and what I use when I do not have a coach who can guide me through this is “Yoga for Emotional Flow” by Stephen Cope.

This is a two CD set in which the author provides some valuable information on how important it is to feel our feelings and why. On the second CD, he provides three meditations in which he will guide you through both how to clear your emotions on a daily basis and how to release them when you are feeling particularly turbulent emotions. In the “Riding the Wave” meditation, he provides a simple, yet repeatable process that you can learn and master.

Note: I am not connected to Stephen Cope in any way. As with all of the resources I recommend in my books, articles and newsletters, this is simply the most effective methods I have found in my research.

To practice feeling the subtle energies of your feelings this week, get a deep tissue massage. When your therapist finds a knot and presses into, allow yourself to face the pain, breathe into it and release it. The more you become comfortable in facing any pain, the easier it is to feel your feelings when they happen.

“Feelings are not right, wrong, good or bad…they just are!” – Hu Dalconzo

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.

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.

LTF Weekly Newsletter – August 15th, 2009

Posted by learning | Filed under Forgiveness, Law of Attraction, Spiritual Evolution, Uncategorized

Greetings from Learning To Flow!

This week, we will explore an issue that is proving to be highly volatile in our country right now…healthcare and we will use this example for how to express our Divine spirituality in a way that makes us feel good.

What many of us have yet to truly face is that there may be solutions we have not yet considered. The Universe / God / Our Higher Self cannot give us these solutions if we have closed our hearts through fear and anger.

It is not our faults that this fear and anger is surfacing. It is necessary that it happen, but the vast majority of the population does not understand why it’s happening and how allowing it to do so is both healing and cathartic.

If we are to heal individually and collectively, we must face our inner fears and pain. If we are to cxreate our heaven on earth, we must let go of the very pain that blocks us from being able to connect to the Source of All That Is.

Once we do so, solutions to these “problems” flow through us and out into our world. When we heal individually, we are also healing our world and almost as if by osmosis…many people awaken at once to solutions that then seem almost obvious, but lay hidden now.

So in exploring this topic this week, I encourage you to allow your fears and anger to surface. Breathe into it. Allow yourself to truly feel it and let it go!

It’s time to come together as One and create the world we want to live in.

Quote of the Week:

“Your politics is your spirituality…expressed.” -Conversations with God – Neale Donald Walsch

This week’s article:

Your Spirituality…Expressed!

So in continuing our discussion on the application of spiritual knowledge, let’s look at some areas in which we can apply this knowledge. Use the information in this article and the exercise to determine in advance what you will create based on the energy you are sending out. We no longer have to wait until we’ve created something and see it reflected back to us to get an idea as to what will show up.
So let’s look at the health care situation. Ask yourself how you feel about the healthcare you have for you and your family. When you ask that question, how do you feel?
Now notice I am not asking, “What do you think about it?” We can all recall experiences and talk a lot about why we feel what we feel. But for right now, I just want you to focus on what you feel. When you think about healthcare for you, your family…now and in the future, what emotion comes up for you…anger, fear, worry, frustration, disappointment…or peace, security and safety?
This is the starting point. In order to create anything, you have to know how you feel right now. Because how you feel right now on any topic is the energy you are sending out. And since the Law of Attraction states that “like attracts like,” as long as we collectively continue to send out fear, worry and anger…we will continue to attract the same situations into our lives over and over again.
So note how you feel and write that down in your journal. Write it out so that it triggers a feeling for you. So it will not be effective to simply write, “I feel afraid.”
What will bring up those feelings is to write something like, “When I think of my current healthcare, I feel frustrated.” “When I feel frustrated, I feel that feeling in my chest.” “It feels like my chest tightens and is slightly painful.”
Now that kind of statement clearly identifies what you feel and focuses you on the feeling instead of on the trigger for the feeling. The trigger is healthcare and it is only a reflection of our individual and collective consciousness on this issue.
Whether the topic is healthcare, our relationships, our careers, if we are not aware that we are creating our reality, we perpetuate our current reality by blaming others. So in relationships if we have a recurring situation, we tend to think that the other person needs to change and if they change their behavior, then we will feel better. But all we are doing when we communicate that to the other person is trying to control and manipulate them to make us feel better.
If we are going to create a situation that will feel good, we have to feel good first, then create an image in our mind that matches that…and then focus on how wonderful that would feel. We use the Law of Attraction to practice that good feeling for a minimum of 17 seconds and up to 68 seconds at a time. If you set a timer, you would be surprised at how short of a time 68 seconds actually is to simply hold a vibration and an image about something in your mind.
But what we typically do is the opposite. We continue to play the undesired situation over and over in our mind which ensures that we relive that feeling again and again…which our mind tells us provides the justification for us to feel what we are feeling. And all of this is a lie. All of it is a denial.
As long as we blame the other person, we are denying our power and actually giving our power away to the other person. We are essentially saying to them, “I surrender my power to you and allow you to determine if I feel good or bad.”
This is a denial of who you are as a Divine Spiritual Being.
It is also unrealistic to expect that anyone…anyone else is going to know how YOU feel and act in ways that make YOU feel good all of the time. YOU are the only one who knows how YOU feel, so the responsibility to create something different has to be YOURS.
If we are to create what we desire in our relationships, in our careers or in our healthcare system, we must take responsibility for what we are creating.
One of the first things I teach my clients is that they can no longer blame anyone else for what is happening in their lives. Because if I allow them to do that, I am also denying who and what they are…and I will not do that. Many of my clients would tell you that how I coach could be more accurately called “a kick in the ass” than “spiritual life coaching.”

I do not allow my clients to continue to b.s. themselves about what is happening in their lives and why. What is happening is because of the energy they are sending out…mostly unconsciously.
What my clients are experiencing, what you are experiencing in your personal lives and what we collectively are experiencing in our world and politics is not our fault. Taking responsibility for creating change does not mean that we have to find someone to blame. Actually what we must do to create change is find someone to forgive. We have to forgive others for creating out of a place of fear…and we can’t just throw stones at them since we are also creating fear from our own glass houses. All of us are creating some aspect of fear in our daily lives…unless we have awakened to the point where we are only creating experiences of love, peace and happiness…unless we are spiritual masters. .
I’m not there yet and I have yet to encounter someone who is. All of us are headed in that direction though and are at various levels of understanding and vibrational growth on that journey. Make no mistake though. ALL of us are on the journey to mastery. All of us are capable of getting there and many of us will get there in THIS LIFETIME. We will not get there individually as much as we will get there together. It is not a matter of who is destined to be there. We are all destined to be there. As Spiritual Beings, we were given the tools and free will to create what we want. We can choose to create heaven or hell on this earth. I know that I have created enough hell on this earth for myself and so now I am focused on creating heaven on earth.

If you want to start creating your heaven on earth, use the exercise this week to move in that direction. Use all of the spiritual knowledge you get from this and other sources. Often we tell ourselves that we don’t know enough to create what we want. Yet I’ve studied spiritual topics for most of my adult life and after all of this knowledge I’ve accumulated, the answer to all of my questions is Divinely simple.

Namaste
Jeff

Exercise of the Week

I am using the healthcare issue this week because it is something that is out there and almost everyone has an opinion on it. Since my goal with these messages is to get people to start applying their spiritual knowledge, this seemed to be as good of a topic as any.

Feel where you are right now in relation to the topic of healthcare. Is what you feel closer to Love…or Fear?

Realize that you may not be capable of creating an image that you can believe will happen that will reflect “Joy” or “perfection.” Perfection is an illusion. There is no such thing and there can be no such thing. Realize that we can create in one moment what we think is “perfect” and we will only be able to enjoy that feeling for just a short time before we will want more of that. So since we now want more, the situation we created wasn’t really “perfect” was it?
What we created was an improvement…not perfection.

So if we can accept that our intention is simply to create an improvement…not perfection, then we can more easily feel for what would be an improvement from what we feel now. So if we feel pessimistic right now, an improvement would be for us to feel optimistic.
If we feel frustrated, an improvement would be for us to feel relieved. Remember, to create what we want…we create the feeling first and then practice that feeling to have it reflected back to us in our reality.
What many of us try to do is control and manipulate others through fear or guilt to create what we want. This does not and will never create what we desire. So this means that if we are spending time blaming our government or insurance companies or doctors and communicating our frustrations to them, we cannot expect that the Universe will simply reflect back to us the opposite of what we are sending out.

So what would be an improved situation in your current healthcare situation? Obviously if you don’t have healthcare, to have it would be a relief to you. If you have it, but your premiums are so high that it has reduced the quality of living in other areas, having lower premiums would be a relief. If you have affordable premiums, but your deductible is so high that it’s cost prohibitive to use your insurance, then having a lower deductible to allow you to actually use your insurance would be a relief for you. If you are completely satisfied with your own healthcare, but feel pain when you see others who have none, then knowing others now have healthcare would be a relief to you.
From any perspective, we can all find a feeling of relief.

If we all simply focus and practice feeling relieved, we will be amazed at how this situation changes. We do not have to control and manipulate the outcome. We can surrender the outcome to God, to our Higher Self, to the Universe…to handle the details. As long as we focus on what we want that outcome to feel like, it must be reflected back to us.

This week, write out what that new situation looks like, sounds like and feels like. Then spend 68 seconds a day focusing on feeling relieved while imagining the situation(s) that are a reflection of this feeling.

Use this exercise for any situation that you want to change. If you find that you feel resistance when you try to visualize this, you may need assistance in clearing fears, pain or hurts before you can embrace a more joyful situation. If you need help, let us know. I can refer you to coaches and / or healers who can help you work through your roadblocks.

LTF Weekly Newsletter, August 8th, 2009

Posted by learning | Filed under Uncategorized

Greetings from Learning To Flow!

My teacher taught me that no matter how much I studied spirituality and self-help topics, if I wanted my life to change, I had to apply that knowledge.

I have also learned that if I want my life to change in a positive way, sometimes it requires me to step completely outside my comfort zone and experience something I never have.

I once took a skydiving course to do just that. I kept falling asleep in class because I had been out partying the night before and my friend had to wake me up at one point because they were talking about the emergency chute. I’ll never forget standing out on the strut of that plane waiting for the jumpmaster to yell, “Go!” I’ll also never forget the ride down and how I felt for three days afterwards. It changed my life and the way I viewed myself.

As did Navy boot camp and a variety of other experiences.

But to do any of those things, I had to be willing to do something different…to take a huge step forward.

It works the same in our spiritual lives. If we are to change our perspective of ourselves and the world, we have to be willing to step outside our comfort zones.

What are you willing to do differently?

Quote of the Week:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein

This Week’s article:

Moving Forward

Do you ever feel stuck in some area of your life? I have found that in order for me to feel happy and alive in my life, I have to be constantly moving forward in my growth. If I stay anywhere too long, I start to get restless. That doesn’t mean I can’t stay in the same relationship or the same house. It means that I have to keep things active and growing. If I stay at one vibration for very long, life starts to get boring. Having realized that I can live my life any way I choose, I want my life to be as exciting as possible!

One area that I had been working on for awhile is my health. I used to be very fit and healthy and in the past few years, had developed a mental image of myself that I was overweight. While I did all the work on my own that I could think of, I knew that if I was still continuing to experience the same results that there was something there that I couldn’t see. I had an unconscious energy block.
So last week, I did something completely different. I went to an acupuncturist and the day after that first session, suddenly I had a burning desire to start exercising more. I already had a gym membership, but had not been going.
Now it wasn’t simply that I went to the gym for the first time in awhile that was a noticeable change. It was the intensity with which I applied myself. I was able to push myself harder than I ever had…and it felt wonderful. I had tried working out before and had not been able to find that level of intensity. I am also visualizing my body as I work out and finding it easy to resist foods that appealed to me just a few weeks ago.

Now I have been consistently growing for many years. I have dabbled and experimented with many different modalities, diets, exercise regimes, etc. I found that I could be working with a particular healer or coach for awhile and then I would get to a point where I felt ready to move on. When my clients get to that point, I know my work is done.

My question to each of you is:

Where in your life do you feel stuck? Is it your relationships, your career, your level of abundance…where?

After you come up with an answer for that, ask yourself, what you’re doing to change it?

There is no ONE right way for everyone. There is no one diet that will work for us all. We each have to experiment and find what works for us…what feels right for our body. We have to sample with various healers and coaches until we find something with whom we feel comfortable.

We have to give ourselves permission to switch jobs and careers when we feel a desire to do something different. We don’t have to stay in a relationship, a career or even a city simply because it’s what others want for us. We can give ourselves permission to grow and live an exciting adventurous life.

Only we know when we start to feel bored, restless or stuck. Only we know when something feels right for us and only we know when it feels like time to move forward.
When things stop working, we feel it and we know it’s time to make a change.

Namaste
Jeff

Exercise of the Week

What area of your life do you feel stuck in?

Write it down in your journal.

Then consider that whatever you are experiencing is a reflection of the vibration you are sending out. Perhaps you feel stuck in a relationship.

But are you focusing on what you do not like about the relationship and yet hoping for something to change?

Do you feel stuck in an unsatisfying career? If so, what are you doing to pursue what could be your dream job?

Each of us are gifted with some particular talent that we can share with the world in a unique way. What are you doing to explore this talent?

Do you know what it is?

For whatever answer you seek, you can pray about it and seek answers that way. But when those answers start to arrive, whether they come in the form of inspiration, something you hear someone else say or read, if you are to live your dreams…you must take action!

So once again, what are you going to do?

It matters not what action you take…only that you are moving forward.

It can be something as simple as going to get a massage if you’ve never had one. You can go visit a Theta Healer, a Galactic Healer, a shaman. You can have your Tarot cards read or have your own personal numerology or astrology chart done.

You can take a new exercise class, visit a new city.

This week do something different! Live your life with joy, excitement and adventure!

Live your life in a way that actually makes you feel alive!

LTF Weekly Newsletter – August 1st, 2009

Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Inner Child Work, Spiritual Growth

Greetings from Learning To Flow!

We are continuing our view into our emotional consciousness this week and how those blockages can manifest in our lives.

I want to point out something that was not apparent to me for much of my spiritual path and that is the application of the knowledge being provided in these newsletters.

Whether you’ve been on your journey for a matter of months or for many years, all of this information is virtually use it unless you practice it.

How you practice the application to this information does not have to match what I am providing in these exercises. These much like the exercises in many other books by well known spiritual teachers are just suggestions. They are ideas for you to play with.

If you have created something that works well for you and you would like to share it, send it to me and I will publish it here so others may benefit.

All of us on a path of spiritual development are teachers. Some of us are doing it through overt methods as I am with my writing, teaching and coaching. But even that is designed to plant a seed within each individual I touch. The intent is to help you all implement a spiritual practice in your lives that helps you learn to identify with the spiritual beings you truly are…so you may explore how to express that in every aspect of your lives thereby modeling it for others.

As many have said, if we are going to change our world, we must BE the change.

I encourage each of you to practice being the change and sharing with us all how you are doing that, what you are learning and how it has benefited your life. I can assure you, that your story will inspire and benefit others.

Quote of the Week:

“It is easy to be angry with someone, but to be angry with the right person, at the right time, for the right reason and to the correct degree…that is difficult.” Aristotle – paraphrased

This week’s article:

Your Emotional Consciousness

Another way to consider who and what your inner child is…is your emotional consciousness. There is a consciousness within everything…within plants, animals, crystals, even every cell of your body has a consciousness. When anything within us is out of balance, we feel it and our inner child is our connection to that. Using the image of our inner child is simply a way for us to communicate with this consciousness in a paradigm that our minds can understand.
We know when we have angry or sad feelings within us. And at some point we learn to master how to release these feelings without having this inner dialogue. But that takes practice and in the interim, having this dialogue with your inner child can be a very valuable step.

I used to think that once I got to a certain point in my spiritual journey that I would just be in this place of peace, love and joy that no “bad” feeling could touch. But I have learned that my judgment about whether these feelings were good or bad was most of my problem. Emotions are simply part of the human experience. As long as I am here, I will have situations that will take me out of my place of peace. So for me, mastery is not about being in a place of perfect peace and joy. Mastery is about my conscious choice to return to that place of happiness in the face of a situation that provides an upset. It does not mean that I won’t ever get angry or sad or embarrassed or be ashamed. It means that I have learned how to use these experiences to grow.

So what does that mean?

As I have noted before in these posts, many of us were taught that it wasn’t acceptable for us to get angry. We were taught that by our parents and teachers as a child. As we grew, we may have always had an authority figure in our life with whom we didn’t feel we could express our anger. Many of us learn to just bottle that up inside of us. Make no mistake though…that energy is going to be expressed somewhere. Remember what emotions are…”energy in motion.”
We must be aware that we cannot stop the motion. We will either learn to holistically express our anger or we will learn the hard way that the emotional energy of that anger will “stay in motion” until it is released.

Read the quote by Aristotle over to the right. The goal is to be angry with the right person at the right time for the right reason. When we do this, we express the appropriate amount of anger. We are allowed to defend our boundaries and we MUST give ourselves permission to do that.
As a child, I learned that I was not allowed to do that. My mother called it “talking back” and I was punished for it, sometimes severely.

So how that has manifested in my adult life is that I have been afraid to say what I felt or thought when I was in stressful situations with someone. While my wife for example may feel completely comfortable expressing her anger in a disagreement, my mind shuts down and I have to walk away because I have yet to completely let go of the fear of speaking up for myself.

The difference between me and many of the people I come across in my life is that I know it and I consciously accept that I am in a process to let it go. I realize that my life is about seeing my reflection in others. It is not what they are consciously intending to show me or have me feel. It is my perception of life…my unconscious perception of life bouncing off of them.
Before I learned to really feel my feelings, I would just blame others and walk away. I walked away from many, many people…friends, lovers, business associates, family. I didn’t understand what those experiences were teaching me. I didn’t understand that some of what was happening was caused by my inability to express my feelings…to feel safe to express my anger, my disappointments, my frustrations, fears, worries and my embarrassment at not being able to understand what was happening.
I also in some cases stayed in situations long past the point where they were serving me because I didn’t understand how to translate the messages my feelings were giving me.

The only way I can ever find out whether to stay and work it out or to go though is to feel safe enough to express my feelings. And to be able to express them, I had to just stop and feel them instead of just thinking about them. I had to stop thinking about what the other person did or said…or what they didn’t do or say. I had to learn that if I was ever going to create the situation I DID want to experience, I had to let go of the energy that was reflecting what I didn’t want to experience. Because as I have learned both through my studies and my own life, that as long as I hold onto old hurts, angers and pains, I will unconsciously manifest the same experiences again and again.

My teacher taught me that this process is about “making the unconscious – conscious and making the conscious – unconscious.” What that means is that as long as our foundational beliefs, our foundational perceptions of fear are unconscious to us, we cannot heal it. We must make it conscious so we can feel it and release it.

We can then choose what we do want to feel in life and practice that feeling until it is unconscious to us…until we just accept that we are loved, that we are safe and that we are joyful expressions of the Divine.

Namaste
Jeff

Exercise of the Week:

Write down an experience that seems to continue to happen to you over and over again in different ways. Perhaps you seem to be dating the same type of person or having the same types of experiences with them. Perhaps you get jobs that have difficult managers or co-workers who betray you. Perhaps you have a body issue, weight you cannot lose or a health problem that crops up again and again.

Realize that if you have emotional energy blocked, it colors your perceptions and prevents you from realizing a path towards your solution.

So now that you have your experience written down, how do you feel about this?

Now think of the earliest time in your life when you felt this experience.

Journal about what was happening.

Allow those old emotions to flow to the surface. Breathe into them and release them.

These old emotions may remind you of something very painful someone did or said in your childhood. While it is common for the mind to want to hold onto this energy, it is necessary to let it go in order to heal.

Where do you feel this energy in your body?

What does it feel like?

Allow it to just BE there. Feel the tightness of this area and then start taking deep breaths. Use your conscious awareness to direct your breath to this place. Inhale through your nose and exhale forcefully. Do this several times and on your last few exhales, use the sound of “Ahhh” like a sigh of relief to let the last of it go.

Take a few more deep breaths imagining that you are breathing in light and love into this area.

Think about what you desire to experience. What would that look like? What would it sound like? Most importantly, what would it feel like?

Journal about what you intend to create. Let the Universe take care of how and when. Just focus on what it is that you want and practice that visualization and feeling as often as you can.

The more you practice that feeling, that vibration and that is the primary way you view this issue…from this new perspective and feeling, the faster it will manifest into your life perhaps in a way you never expected!

LTF Weekly Newsletter – July 25th, 2009

Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Inner Child Work

Greetings from Learning To Flow!

This week, we are going to explore how to create a dialogue with our emotions, why many of our emotions have been repressed and how releasing them can be highly beneficial for us.

We must learn to communicate with our emotional body since it is the connection between our physical body in this world and our non-physical self. It is through the nurturing of this connection that we are able to learn to allow our power to flow into this world.

We can learn to feel how open or closed this connection is and how to consciously choose to allow more of the peace, love, happiness and joy to flow freely through us.

Quote of the Week:

“Think of your subconscious as a small child…Every time you give thanks to yourself for something you have created, that little child within you lights up, sparkles and wants to do even more for you.” Sanalya Roman and Duane Packer “Creating Money”

Dialogue with Your Inner Child

Think back to when you were growing up. Did the adults around you listen to you or were you expected to listen to them? Did you have permission to have what you wanted, to play when YOU wanted, to laugh, cry, get angry and express your emotions freely? Did you feel safe, happy, loved and nurtured in your world?

If the answers to any of these questions is either “No” or “My parents did the best they could” or “I don’t remember,” then you may find it highly beneficial to establish an ongoing dialogue with your inner child.

You may have heard that term a lot and not really understood what it means. So when I use the term ”inner child” I am referring to your emotions…how you feel about things. So for example, how do you feel when you look at your body in the mirror? When you look at your body, do you feel happy, peaceful and excited about all of the activities you use your body to enjoy?

If not, the shortest way to changing either the health or fitness of your body may not be to just go hire a personal trainer or to get a doctor or nutritionist’s opinion on what you should be eating or drugs to take. It may be much more effective to ask your inner child what is going on.

If you as a child were not listened to by the people around you, it is quite common to have learned to repress what you wanted and for your subconscious to develop a belief of “no one listens to me.”

Now your subconscious and your emotions are closely tied together. So for example, your subconscious beliefs about your body and how you feel about your body are connected. If you have a belief that “no one listens to me” in your subconscious, it’s common that you are not listening to your inner child either. This is one way you are passing down the behavior that was modeled for you by your caretakers. It’s not their fault. It’s just what they knew.

If you want to change that and perhaps treat your children differently, you can develop that behavior by first learning how to listen to your own inner child first. When you learn to listen, to validate how your inner child feels and why, you may find for example that you eat foods out of habit but that your body isn’t all that happy about. You may have overlooked the signals that your body was sending you.

With the plethora of over the counter medications for lactose intolerance or antacids, we learn we can override our body’s signals. Sometimes our body may create illness or dis-ease to get our attention and then we go looking in other areas. We may have developed habits of eating certain foods to avoid facing how we felt about something.

And yet a step in that direction is to just look inward, create a dialogue and be willing to listen…to feel what is happening and to take responsibility for what we have been unconsciously creating.

How safe or happy our inner child feels about something determines how open our heart feels to it. Our heart is the connection between our physical reality and our non-physical self. Our Non-physical self is our soul, our Higher Self…our connection to Source energy. And so if we want to create peaceful, loving outcomes in our world, we cannot create those situatons if we feel fearful or angry most of the time. We cannot create that if our heart is closed.

We must learn to keep our hearts open, to keep that energy from our Higher Selves flowing through us. And our inner child is the gatekeeper to our heart. If our inner child feels safe, loved and nurtured, our heart is open. If our inner child feels angry, frustrated or hurt, our heart is closed.

Most of us go through our lives looking outwards to others, to external situations to be able to feel safe. But what is outside of us is a reflection to how safe our inner child feels. So if we want to see something different indicated to us in our physical reality, we must learn to nurture our inner child.

Use the exercise this week as an example of how to do this and let us know if you need any help determining what areas would be most beneficial to work on or to have someone guide you on how to do this effectively.

Namaste
Jeff

Exercise

Think of an area of your life that you want to change. Perhaps it is your fitness level (that’s mine!), your health, a relationship, your career, your romantic life, etc.

Close your eyes and imagine your inner child. Ask your inner child how old she’he is. Ask her how she/he feels about this situation. Notice that you can physically feel this somewhere in your body and allow it to be there.

Tell your inner child that you want to develop a relationship with her/him and that you want to start listening to what she’he has to say. Tell your inner child that you want her/him to share her/his feelings with you and ask her/him to give them to you.

Listen to what they have to say and then validate their feelings by telling them that it’s normal for them to feel that way. Anyone would feel that, but now it’s time to give those feelings to you. Breathe into those feelings and release them.

Then ask your inner child what they DO want to feel about this. Tell them to imagine their desired situation and envision this with them. Feel that feeling and breathe into it. If it is a positive emotion, allow it to flow freely throughout your body.

Praise your inner child for having the courage to give up their old feelings and for embracing change!

Journal about what you experience and make this a daily practice. If you do this for just a couple of weeks, you will be amazed at the changes you experience.

All of this may feel like you’re just making it up. Be willing to do that. All of us are either making up our lives as we go…or we’re reacting to what someone else made up for us.

Be willing to take hold of the reins of your life and create it the way YOU want it to be!

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Learning To Flow

Creating Your World

Dialoguing with Your Inner Child

Being in the Moment of Now

Facing and Feeling your Feelings

Creating your Sustainable Spiritual Practice

LTF Weekly Newsletter – August 22nd, 2009

LTF Weekly Newsletter – August 15th, 2009

LTF Weekly Newsletter, August 8th, 2009

LTF Weekly Newsletter – August 1st, 2009

LTF Weekly Newsletter – July 25th, 2009

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