Category Archives: Spirituality

How To Grow Spiritually While Your Partner Is Not

“Spiritual growth” has nothing to do with the knowledge, and everything to do with wisdom.  Communication, compassion, understanding, emotional intelligence, honesty, and transparency lie at the heart of spiritual development.  Believing in aliens, channeling, channels, crystal healing, chakras, or the afterlife will certainly expand your mind and influence the way you look at life, but I think we can all agree that this information is useless unless it impacts our behaviour and changes the state of our heart and mind.

Keeping in mind that spiritual growth has nothing to do with what we believe and everything to do with the state of our consciousness and heart, it helps us look at our partners from a more grounded perspective.  Let’s go over 4 ways to deal with growing spiritually while your partner.

1) Keep love as the foundationshutterstock_401072437

The best thing to do is allow your spiritual maturity to translate it into wisdom, understanding, and positive energy within the relationship.  Keep love and acceptance as the source of your interactions with them, as opposed to judgment, expectation or resentment for not being for not being the way you want them to be.

Not everyone is going to believe what you believe, and not everyone cares to experience the same things you want to experience.  Understanding this and releasing yourself from expectation will prevent yourself a lot of tension within the relationship. Continue reading

3 Ways to Kindly Call People Out When They Are Lying To You

As nice as it would be to live in a world where everyone is honest and transparent, the truth is, we have a long way to go with that still as a species.  Something that can really help you on your journey is being able to distinguish between a lie and a truth.  It is good to learn the ways to identify a lie NOW so that you don’t have to learn the hard way through experience later.

We all have an intuition and a built-in mechanism of discernment that allows us to distinguish between a lie and a truth.  Knowing if someone is lying is generally easy to do.  The hard part is knowing what to do about.  How do you manage the feeling of being deceived?  Should you say anything to them? How do you bring it up to them?

If you do bring it up to them, you run the risk of hurting them or embarrassing them.  If you don’t bring it up, you have a feeling of dissonance inside you which pollutes your soul.  You may also develop resentment to them down the line.  And hey, maybe they will resent you one day for not calling them out on it to help them out.

So what is the proper way to call someone out when they are lying to you? Here are some good places to start:

1) Ask them the same question in a different way, implying you know that they are lying

Let’s say you want to know where your partner was last night because they got home extra late after work.  You may ask something like “Hey why were you late today?” And they may say “Traffic was support awful coming home today. Went through a couple accidents”.  At this point, if you know they are lying, you may want to ask a follow up question:shutterstock_266712599

“Are you sure there isn’t anything else you did that made you late?”

At this point, you may get an answer like “Well I felt a bit hungry so I stopped off at a restaurant and got some food and a beer”. And then if you feel you are not getting the full truth still, continue to ask more questions.

There will come a point at which you know for certain they are lying, and that they will know you are aware they are lying.  This is a great place to start with confronting someone. Continue reading

The Science of Crying: Why It’s Healthy & Necessary For Personal Growth

Did you know that human beings aren’t the only animals that feel sadness? Almost all animals express sadness, depression, and loneliness in their own way.  In fact, almost all mammals mourn the loss of their offspring.  But human beings are the only type of animal that are taught self-expression should be tamed or suppressed.  Girls are told to stop being so “sensitive”, and boys are told to “be a man” and toughen up.  Boys are taught that crying to much means they are a sissy, and girls are told crying too much makes them crazy.

We aren’t told that crying is actually essential and is something we should do more of if we feel it’s what we need to do to express ourselves.  We develop resistance to crying, which causes emotional suppression, which causes psychological and physical complications.  We bottle up our emotions and expect them to take care of themselves, when the cure to our problems is sometimes as simple as allowing ourselves to actually feel deeply for a moment.

Continue reading

Sensory Processing Disorder: The Science Behind Being An Empath

I knew all my life that I was “sensitive” and could pick up on things that others did not.  I also knew that my body didn’t handle sensory stimuli the same way other bodies did.  I could easily become overwhelmed by itchy clothes, too much noise or strange smells.  High emotion in a room could send me over the edge. 

Sometimes if too much input came at me all at once, it would send me into a full blown panic attack. But it wasn’t until I began studying Sensory Processing Disorder that I really came to understand that being a “empath” isn’t just some woo-woo label that New Agers made up to make themselves feel special. I learned that my nervous system is actually wired differently than most humans.  Yes, it’s actually a scientific reality.

shutterstock_131255069

I like to think of Sensory Processing Disorder as science’s explanation for what’s been known by mystics as the “Empath”.  In this space, science and mysticism come together beautifully.

Revolutionary occupational therapist, psychologist, and neuroscientist A. Jean Ayres, Ph.D., explained Sensory Processing Disorder as a “traffic jam” within the brain.  This traffic jam keeps parts of the brain from receiving and interpreting sensory information properly.

Someone with SPD receives sensory stimuli just like other people do: smelling, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, balance, and the sense of where the body is in space, but when the sensory signals reach the brain, they get scrambled.  Not only does the brain interpret information differently, but the person with SPD may in fact actually be accessing MORE information than the average person. 

Getting flooded with so much additional information can sometimes lead to behaviors that seem odd to other people, even inappropriate.  In reality, those behaviors are completely appropriate given the experience that the sensitive person is having – which may not be the same experience everyone else is having.  In other words, he is literally experiencing reality in a new way.

The Gifted Empath

From here forth, I will refer to Sensory Processing Disorder as Sensory Processing DIFFERENCE because in my view, it’s not a disorder.  It’s a manifestation of human evolution.  Empaths, Sensitives and those with Sensory Processing Differences may well have abilities that regular people often marvel at, including the ability to sense subtle sound, light, and energy vibration, emotional subtlety and even mystical phenomena.  In recent years, we’ve seen a rapid increase in the numbers of children born with SPD.  In my opinion, this is a sign that the human race is progressing toward a superior state.  The ability to take in much larger amounts of sensory data is an evolutionary leap for our species. Continue reading

Letting Go Of Attachments: How To Experience True Freedom

“Attachment is the root of all suffering” – Buddha

We all want to be free and feel free, but what does this really look like?  Most people imagine it looks like something along the lines of being your own boss, not living by the alarm clock, or leaving the ratrace.  The truth is, freedom is more of a mental state than anything else, and you can be working a 9-5 job and be absolutely free.  You can also be your own boss and be totally enslaved.

It all comes down to your intentions, your desires, and your level of attachment to particular outcomes.  Are you resisting your heart and resisting life, or are you flowing with them both and embracing each moment?  For the last year and a half, I have been my own boss.  I have also been more of a slave than ever before up until recently, not because of my lifestyle, but because of my mentality.

Here are 5 attachments we need to let go of to experience true freedom in life:

1) Societies expectations

Your dad wants you to get a good education.  Your mom wants you to find a nice girl or guy to marry.  Your teachers want to see you land a 9-5 job.  The media forces down your throat what the “ideal” life is and wants you to spend your life chasing after the “American dream”.  All of these outside influences keep you trapped in a state of mind that is plagued by the constant need to impress someone or live up to expectations that have nothing to do with what YOU really want to do as a person.

Maybe you want to drop out of school and start your own business.  Maybe you want to be single, and you are content without having very much money or material items.  The world around you is constantly trying to make you into someone you are not by imposing their expectations on to your life.  This creates a program in your psychology that keeps you constantly trying fulfill these expectations to feel like you are “successful”, when in reality you are spending your energy trying to make a mark in someone else’s consciousness to gain their approval.  To be free is to live for yourself.

2) Your past

Your past doesn’t define who you are.  Contrary to what people around you may tell you, you are not defined by your sins, achievements, mistakes, successes, or failures.  Anything you have done in your past, whether it is good or bad, will prevent you from evolving if you are attached to it.  If it is bad and you are attached to it, you are going to cause yourself depression and self-hate over something that no longer even exists.  If it is good and you are attached to it, you are projecting yourself out of the present moment and into a memory-stream.

Your past is meant to act as a guide and a compass to serve you, but we are told by the world that we are the sum of our history.  When we apply for a job, we are expected to provide a resume.  We are also expected to provide a kind of resume to the world when we are discussing who we are as a person.  When we see an old friend we haven’t seen in a while, the first thing that often comes up is “What have you been up to?”.

This translates into “What have you done or accomplished within your recent past?”, which keeps us attached to the past and reliant on it for our sense of identity and worth in the world.  Whatever you have or haven’t done in your past, it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t define you.  The only thing that matters is what you choose to do with this moment moving forward.

3) The need to impress others

The need to impress others ultimately comes from our egos, which are products of millions of years of evolution.  It has created a spirit of competition within us that keeps us enslaved to the constant need to outshine other members of our species. The species that are fastest, strongest, and most adaptable are the ones that carry over into the next generation and reproduce, and this is the purpose the ego has served us in our past.

This is not needed in a modern society of rational human beings, but the sense of needing to compete with one another ultimately stems from an archaic part of our brains that is still wired through millions of years of evolution.

This translates into competing for “likes” with other people on Facebook, comparing cars, bank accounts, or physical fitness levels. It manifests in the need to be recognized, the instinct to compare ourselves with others, the need to make impressions on others, and so forth.

Being free from your ego is the key to being free from feeling like you have to outshine other people.  Live for yourself, and be true to what you want in life.  A lot of people work at jobs they hate to buy things they can’t afford to impress people they don’t even know, and this all boils down to being identified with the ego.

4) Fear of the future

[shareaholic app=”share_buttons” id=”5111567″]
Fear of the future stems from us projecting our attention away from the present moment and into an undesirable hypothetical moment that doesn’t even exist.  Because our attention is consumed with that undesirable hypothetical moment, emotions begin to generate within our energy field that correspond to those thoughts.

There is nothing scary about the future.  The future is only scary of we anticipate failure and pain, and we would only anticipate failure of pain if we lack confidence or self-esteem in the present moment.  The key to overcoming fear of the future comes in two parts.  First, we have to keep our mind and attention concentrated on what is happening within the present moment.  Secondly, we have to overcome any feelings of disbelief we have in ourselves.

The future is nothing to fear. It is just another present moment just like this one.  If we can learn how to tap into the present moment and make it as awesome as possible, our future is guaranteed to be as awesome as possible since the future is just an extension of the present moment.

5) Relationships that aren’t worth it

Relationships come in all shapes and sizes.  Romantic partnerships, friends, family members, co-workers.  Sometimes, we remain in relationships we know we don’t want to be in simply because we don’t want to hurt another person.  In other words, we maintain relationships and friendships with people out of a feeling a guilt.

If you are staying in a relationship that isn’t worth it because of guilt, then you are attaching yourself to an unhealthy situation out of fear.  So many people put up with unhappy marriages and relationships out of fear, forgetting that life is too short to do anything but follow your heart.  Let go of fear and give yourself permission to follow your heart.  Being free means being free to expressive yourself, say what you mean, and feel what you feel, even if it means it may make someone else unhappy.

You are not free in life until you are free from all attachment.  You can still work hard, be ambitious, and be in relationships without being attached and dependent upon a particular outcome to rectify your existence.  Just as much as we pursue money, education, and health we should pursue freedom.   Am I following my heart?  Am I living for myself or for my parents? Am I being true to what I feel each moment?

How To Transform Your Relationship Into A Spiritual Communion

We all want magical relationships that inspire us to grow into better people, but here is the truth.  The Universe isn’t going to just drop something in your lap because you want it.  You have to meet the Universe half way and create it for yourself.  If you are bored with your current relationship or plan on entering a relationship with a new person, don’t be afraid to take a hold of the direction you wish the relationship to go.

You are the driver of your experience in life, and thankfully this means that you get to choose the life you want to live.  Maybe all you want is a person you can spend time with, and it doesn’t have to be anything extraordinary or grand.  That is totally fine. But some of you want a taste of what a relationship can be like when two conscious evolved individuals come together with the intention of creating something magical.

Here are some super essential ways that you can either create a spiritual partnership in your current relationship or start one with a future partner:

Continue reading