The Path of Enlightenment

When I was younger and more naive, I longed to be enlightened because I thought enlightenment was the answer to all my problems. I imagined I'd have it all together, that life would be simple, that nothing would ever bother me again. I thought I'd just live 24/7, in the inner peace I'd found through meditation. In a war of good versus bad, I honestly thought good could win.

I had knowledge that I would say but lacked the wisdom to really understand, like you can't have good without bad because they define each other. What I've come to realise is that to be on the path of enlightenment means to grow, continuously. There's no there that you get to and stop growing because there's no end to the depth of understanding of who we are. And this is wonderful really because if there was an end, I think we'd get bored.

The path of enlightenment or spiritual growth (or even just self growth) isn't a path of lollipops and rainbows with your head in the clouds. It is the constant breaking down of your beliefs and a renewal of your truths. This can, at times, be difficult. Your thoughts, beliefs and thus, your reality go into chaos so that your thoughts and beliefs will break down and re-organise into an evolved, higher understanding of yourself and reality. During the chaos phase, you can find yourself lost and confused. You may go through times where it feels as though everything is falling apart, however in reality, everything is re-organising and falling into place in a way that's better than you ever imagined.

Everyone, whether trying to or not, goes through growth. You grow to a new level of understanding when your current view of reality no longer works for you. Some people stay where they are for a long time because it works for them on some level, whether functional or dysfunctional.

You can purposely grow by using awareness, become aware of your inner thoughts and feelings and observe how they motivate your behavior then you can question your beliefs. They may be as simple as "I can't lose weight" or "I'll never be able to cook like my mum" or they may be bigger and effect a large portion of your life like, "I'll never be able to make a career change" or "Everyone is against me" or even staying on the topic of growth, when things go into chaos and it seems as though everything is going wrong, you may ask "Why me?" Only making it harder for yourself. Or it may even be your core understanding of how life works, according to you. Maybe you believe in a higher power guiding you. Perhaps you lean more towards atheism or maybe you're in chaos right now with no idea how life works.

 You'll have many beliefs you're unaware of. Being aware can bring light to those and this can be the key to your failure or success; to your unhappiness or happiness; to your inner stress or peace. You may also enjoy my other post about the power of belief, "Believe in Yourself"

With awareness as well, the chaos doesn't have to feel bad, simply being aware that you're on the verge of growth and a new epiphany can sometimes be enough to get you through. You may feel better through purposely being aware because you realise, you are not your thoughts and feelings themselves, you are the awareness. Awareness may help you see any dysfunctional patterns that you can then choose to change such as, going into victim mode ("Why me?") when things aren't going the way you wish.

This constant breaking down of your perspective of reality to new, higher understanding is the continuous path of enlightenment and as your inner world improves, your outer world will follow, it has to because it is your inner talk and emotions that influences your behaviour and creates your reactions and it is your beliefs and expectations that attracts your reality and molds your world. 

Although I had a naive perspective about enlightenment because I was yet to understand, it is everything as promised, just not in a way that you can imagine when you haven't experienced it yet:

• You do find more peace, more connectedness with others and the world, you deal with things better, from a more optimistic point of view.
• You can shift into mindfulness at any time
• You can also meditate with great ease
• You are more accepting of people and circumstances. 
• You are open minded and know you will be learning forever, because your beliefs have changed so many times and you're aware that even through the many epiphanies you've had, you still are no where near knowing everything, in fact, it makes you feel even further from knowing everything. 
• Constant growth also humbles you as you know you are equal to everyone and everyone is equal to you, we are just different, we are all a unique expression of consciousness itself.
• You accept yourself and decide to give yourself love  
• You can sense why you're here, for divine to express and experience itself.

We are all spiritual beings having a human experience, not human's having a spiritual experience. Relax as you go through hard times and know that it is happening to grow you. Know that all things work together for a purpose.

Namaste
Belinda

How to Connect to Your Guides

I was connecting to my guides long before I was even aware of it and perhaps you are too. In this post I'm going to go over what I believe our guides are and how you can connect to yours for guidance in your life.

 So what are guides?

In short, your guides are with you and are guiding you all the time. Signs, epiphanies, coincidences and miracles are all guides and your higher self at work. Sometimes, or even a lot of the time, you may mistake your guides and higher self for your own thoughts. With practice and awareness you can distinguish between you and your guides, you may never get to a point where you always know though because at times, it's in your best interest not to know. Once you're aware of your guides and know how to communicate with them you can ask questions. You'll know you've connected to your guides because the answers you receive will feel like epiphanies.

So that's what guides do, but who or what are they?

The concept of guides confused me for a long time. I connected to them and had some amazing epiphanies through them but still had no idea who or what they were.

For a while I believed my guides to be aspects of myself such as my inner child etc. I also believe we are all connected as one with all the consciousness of everything therefore all information, all knowing is available to us so I believed I was tapping into that. I didn't quite understand what all that meant at the time because I didn't truly understand myself.

 As I've grown spiritually and spent a lot of time meditating and connecting to my guides I've come to a deeper understanding of who I am. A divine aspect of a soul, choosing a human experience to enable consciousness itself to experience and express itself. Me, my higher self/my true self chose a traumatic childhood because it would push me to question reality, why we're here and the purpose of us, animals, the Earth and the Universe and thus force me to awaken to my true self, allowing consciousness itself to become aware of itself. I have come to this conclusion through experience with my guides and higher self. My guides and higher self are aspects of me and I am of them. We are divine beings working collectively in this experience of me and of life itself as everyone and everything is one.

This of course, is my interpretation of guides and the best way for you to discover and understand guides is for you to connect to them yourself because even if you come to the exact same conclusion as I have, it's best understood when you discover the answer for yourself.

How to connect to your guides

At first it may seem hard to connect to your guides as if it's a new experience, a new sense but really, it's quite simple because your guides are always with you. One of the ways to connect to your guides that I read a few years ago was to start by pretending because you always are anyway. As you pretend to talk in your mind to your guides, you will notice responses that don't seem to come from you.

Here are some guided meditations to connect you to your guides and higher self:

First, begin your meditation by mentally readying yourself and making yourself comfortable. Take a few deep breaths and then re-check that you are comfortable and move if you need to. Continue deep breathing and focus your mind to your breath, continue this until you find your mind is clear and you are deeply relaxed. 

Once relaxed you see yourself stood on a train station. This is your own train station, it can look any way you like, there may or may not be other people, it's up to you. You stand waiting for a train, your train. This train will take you to see your guides and higher self. Watch as the train approaches and look around at the detail of the train as you board. You may meet one or more of your guides on the train, sit with them and have a conversation or you may enjoy the ride and meet them when you arrive. The train chugs along on its tracks and winds through beautiful mountains and then before you know it, you're arriving at another station, this is where you get off to meet your guides and higher self. 

The details are up to you, you can purposely choose how everything looks or you can simply allow your mind to make it up for you. As you meet and talk to your guides and higher self you will receive answers to any questions you have in a way that is in your best interest. For example, I asked my guides why I took someone's opinions so personally. As I was new to talking to my guides I thought they would tell me that I was sensitive as I believed that to be the reason but my guides said "Someone's opinion is only as important as you let it be". Immediately I felt better and let go of caring about their opinion. I still remind myself of this if I feel affected by someone's words.

Another way to connect to your higher self is to start your meditation as before and once relaxed, imagine you're walking along a path through a beautiful forest. The path is windy and you cannot see where the path ends. Eventually you reach a gate and you know that this gate leads into your secret garden. As you enter, the garden is beautiful, the features of the garden are what you most desire in it, you may see flowers, trees, vines, fountains, mushrooms, fairy's... anything that tickles your fancy. Inside, you see a bench and sitting on one side of the bench is your higher self, your higher self welcomes you to sit with them. From here you can talk to your higher self. You may also meet guides in your garden as well. 

Enjoy connecting to your guides and higher self. Don't worry if you find it difficult, even after years I sometimes have days where I feel I can't connect, you will connect when the time is right. 

Namaste
Belinda

Believe in Yourself

Believing in yourself is the most important step in achieving what you want, if you've already decided to believe you can't then you won't even bother setting a goal to achieve what you want let alone make any steps to achieve it. The ego would rather be right than achieve inner dreams so will even go to lengths to subconsciously sabotage you.

You can even experiment with "I can" vs "I can't" by swinging back and forth while doing something, I did this with my children, we all stood on one foot and said, "I can't balance" and we fell back to 2 feet over and over, when we switched to "I can balance" we were able to hold the balance for a long time. I tried to do this with my partner but it didn't work because he was so confident in his ability to balance that he was unable to really convince himself even for a second that he couldn't. This is the power of belief. 

Another experiment I did was kind of by accident. A few years ago while exercising I got to the point where I felt I could no longer keep jogging, I heard myself think "I can't, I can't" and I stopped with exhaustion as I began jogging again I decided to use affirmations, "I can, I can" "I'm powerful" "I can keep going" I went on for a lot longer than I'd previously believed I could, the affirmations gave me more energy to keep going, it amazed me how energized I felt inside! It also made me start enjoying exercise. 

From these little experiments and understanding that it is my belief which determines my success I have been able to achieve many things in my life that I first thought weren't possible. I assumed that after 2 kids I would never get back down to the size I was before kids but with a shift in my belief, I did. I thought I was an easy target and that everyone ridiculed and put others down but with a change in my belief I allowed myself to drift apart from people like that and attracted those who love and support me. 

I achieved what I thought was impossible over and over but I didn't even bother trying to until I shifted my belief from impossible to possible. From "I can't" to "I can and I will".

At times you'll be working towards goals and they just won't go to plan. This isn't proof that your goal is impossible, it just means there's a better way to go about it that you aren't aware of yet. When your plan fails, don't take it personally, just use it as feedback and ask yourself, if that way of going about it doesn't work, what else can I try? Perhaps you have set your goal too high and as much as you try to use affirmations to achieve your goal, your inner self just doesn't believe it yet, set a lower goal and achieve that first, then you can keep raising your goal. When you start small you get to celebrate every step of achievement along the way. 

Sometimes, you may even find that you're thankful for blockages that come your way because you realise that particular goal or that way of going about it isn't for you after all or everything seems like it's falling apart only for you to realise later that it was all really coming together in ways better than you ever imagined. 

This isn't just true for goals, this is true for everything in your life. Experiment with this so you can experience it for yourself, it's very powerful. Question your assumptions about yourself and life, become aware of your inner beliefs and change the ones that aren't serving you. When you switch around your thoughts and feelings you'll be amazed with how much changes, you'll attract people, things and circumstances to assist and guide you and everything will fall into place in better ways than you can imagine.

Start with your beliefs, believe in yourself and write affirmations because as Henry Ford said, if you think you can or you can't, you are right.    


Namaste
Belinda

Loving the Body

My Journey of Getting Past Body Image Issues

I've had body image issues for a long time,  well ever since I can remember. It's such a long term old habit that it's hard to break. I don't remember exactly when it started but I know I was anorexic at 13 and although I stopped starving myself, I never started to love my body.  I'm now 28, that's a decade and a half of hatred towards my body and don't even get me started on the other parts of myself. I've practiced gratitude, a lot of meditation and dabbled in affirmations and I've finally put my foot down and said it's time to really love myself. It's time for me to break the old habits and give myself the love I deserve.

 I actually started a few weeks ago. I began using affirmations and used Louise Hay's advice of standing in the mirror and telling myself I love me. I practice a lot of self awareness. I'm a massive analyzer and I've learned how to break through my old thought patterns. I hear my thoughts and sense my feelings with it and I ask myself where the thoughts and feelings have come from. If I'm stuck I talk to my guides and higher self. I find that as I focus on an old thought with awareness I hear that it's just an old thought pattern that I don't actually believe anymore.

 I'm now slowly replacing the old thoughts with new ones. As I do this, I've begun to realise how crazy my old thoughts were. Don't get me wrong,  I still fall back into the old thoughts, I just hope I won't eventually. Here I am, as are you, a divine being, a soul if you will, having a human experience. A wonderful, unique expression of life itself. I'm blessed to be in a full functioning body, living in a rich society with all my needs met abundantly and spoilt with our first world luxuries like technology and leisure items. I'm so lucky, especially compared to those struggling to meet their basic needs. I have everything and then some (and I'm considered poor in this country). Yet there I stand, worried and insecure about my body shape. Comparing myself to a teenage, photoshopped model in a shop window. Are we mad? How or why is "body image" even a thing? We are all so amazing in our unique expression of consciousness.

The next crazy realisation I had was that we put pretend food that's made up of poisonous chemicals into our bodies and say we're treating ourselves. Spoiling ourselves is actually more towards the truth but think about an apple that is spoiled, it's rotten. To treat ourselves would be to eat real food and to tell ourselves we deserve to be healthy. This is showing ourselves and our bodies love and appreciation.

 I also realised that we give our loved ones love, respect and support but we forget to take the time to give this same care to ourselves. Imagine a world where we loved ourselves, each other and the Earth.  Where everyone felt secure in themselves. Be the change you want to see in the world.

We live in a society where we've forgotten what healthy means, with our ego's saying we want to be healthy but deep down the ego just wants to look good. Since our goal is about our looks, we make unhealthy choices like eating less than we need or we may binge on unhealthy pretend foods. We also have unrealistic and unobtainable goals for our bodies and feel insecure when we can't reach them.

Choices I'm making now to love and care for my body: (that you can too)

1. I show myself love and care which then leads me to want to feed my body real foods that nourish me. You may like my other post: Self Love: 10 Things to do to show yourself love.

2. I Choose to appreciate my body and say, "I love you,  body" instead of "I love my body" This takes away the ego identification with the body and motivates me to feed my body amazingly healthy foods. 

3. I check all labels of what I'm eating and avoid any fake lab made chemicals that are harmful to my body. I source non-GMO and organic foods.

4. I respect animals, and in turn myself, and only eat free range.

5. I stand in the mirror and use affirmations. I even stand nude and appreciate my unique shape and am grateful to have a healthy full functioning body that has healthily carried 3 children.

6. When I hear negative or shallow thoughts that dis-empower me, I remind myself that it's just old habits. I purposely let those thoughts and feelings go and choose positive, empowering ones instead.

7. If I do slip backwards and awareness, meditation and gratitude aren't helping, I allow my feelings and forgive myself.

I'm sure over time I will let go of many more negative insecure thoughts, feelings and actions that come from lack of self love. I'm excited about what future I'm creating as I begin to love and value myself. I just hope that by sharing this, you will too, choose to love yourself by taking time for you, caring for you, giving yourself love and admiration and making choices that serve you.

Namaste

Belinda

Gratitude is Awesome

I love practicing gratitude and if I'm honest, I don't think I do it enough! When I do find myself floating in a pool of inner bliss due to the contemplation of just how damn spoilt I am I question as to why I don't appreciate life more often.

When I first tried to practice some gratitude, nothing happened. I didn't get it. It clicked when someone said, the practice of gratitude is realising how lucky you are in comparison to those worse off than you. As I thought about my basic needs; food, clothing, water and shelter and compared what I had to those worse off than me, it hit me just how lucky I am. Some people lack food and I can open my full fridge and full pantry, whinge about the food I have because I don't feel like that and go to the shop to buy something else or sit in a restaurant and eat until I'm so full it hurts. 

 

Not only are all my survival needs met with abundance but I also have so many things that I enjoy having but don't need. I feel so happy and grateful to have been born into a society where our needs are easily met and we have the freedom to be, do and have whatever we want.

Today I'm specifically grateful for my beautiful children, our abundance of yummy and nutrient rich foods and the internet which allows me to connect to the world and learn about anything I'd like.

What are you grateful for today?

Have fun with it!

Namaste

Belinda

Namaste

Hey, I'm Belinda, welcome to my blog and please make yourself comfortable.

I love all things deep and spiritual and want to share my inner light, love and findings here with you. I enjoy meditation and deep contemplation of life itself. I like to analyze and question reality and our concepts. Join me here as I share my insights and epiphanies with you.

I hope you enjoy your stay.

Namaste

Belinda