Celebrating Our Spiritual Cores

Tags

beliefs, celebration, healing, practices, renewal, values

Summer is often a season of travel, of new explorations and discoveries that often lead to further explorations. It is a season of days with long hours of sunlight, of watching fireflies and sunsets and moonrise. Summer brings heat and sweat and thunderstorms and awareness of climate change. It is often in the early morning coolness and long, late evening twilights that I find opportunities to reflect on, to review and renew my cores.

The core components that I find myself focusing on are the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual. While they are all distinct cores, they are also all connected like the members of a multi-dimensional honeycomb. Our mental core affects our psychological core, which in turn affects our physical core, and so on. When the state of any of our cores is less than optimal, all our states suffer, and pain in one core begets in in another.

Self awareness teaches us that it takes a bit of (self) discipline to develop and maintain sustainable, holistic practice for the best health of our cores. Our practices are influenced by our core beliefs, our core values, our core inputs and our core connections. These can be viewed as our four core quadrants. They are like the four legs of the lunar lander – if any of the legs were to be unduly compromised, it could lead to a failure of our spiritual core, our journey and our mission.

Inertia is often what stands between us and the adoption of new disciplines and practices. Our unexamined state of idleness, or even our accepted state of motion, takes a certain amount of ‘force’ to effect internal change of speed or direction. It often takes an (unanticipated) life event to shake us out of our inertia or reverie to ask – what are my core values, beliefs, connections and inputs? How do they influence my daily core practices? How do they affect my spiritual core?

For me, it all began with a simple question – how do I get out of the state of my spiritual inertia? I made small changes in my physical core (waking up rested, walking in nature, eating better), my mental core (guarding my input gates, meditating) and my emotional core (friend and family connections, my reactions, my judgements). Over time and space, every meditation hour, every small nature walk, every new association with fellow travelers, has added up to a perceptible change in my spiritual core.

The result of a renewed spiritual core? I have good quality fuel and oxidant, guidance, and company for the journey ahead. I have appreciation and gratitude for all those who have inspired me, walked with me, celebrated with me, and continue to do so. Awareness, joy, silence, solitude and stillness have become my reservoirs. ‘Thou art That’ has become my internal engine. ‘For the benefit of All’ has become my charioteer. All the quadrants have become focused on the center, where the heart flows love and light abundant, which empowers me to share freely, without hesitation, and with a core spirit of celebration.

Kumud @AjmaniK

P.S. Join us as we gather for our weekly chat, Sunday July 28 at 9amET on Twitter in #SpiritChat – we will celebrate our cores, all of them, as we complete eight years of our journey together – Kumud.

A return to the core space – where the five elements meet for renewal…

Spiritual Vision and Values

Tags

messengers, spirituality, values, vision

On Friday, June 19th 2015, I had the opportunity to be in the presence of Amma Karunamayi for a few hours. The event consisted of prayers for global peace and healing, a short discourse, a personal blessing, and much more that cannot be put into words 🙂 Here are some notes that I ‘recorded’ during a break in the event that must have inspired the topic of “Vision and Values”. I present them to you, unedited… and invite you to add your thoughts in the comments… – Kumud

We are blinded by the external – the outer is only a very small fractional projection of what lies within us… So much of our vision, our energy is focused on what lies without, that we cannot seem to create and find time to turn our gaze inwards on what lies within. The key to developing inner vision is in our daily routine, our self-discipline, our self-regulatory behavior…

Our vision should be towards Dharma – which incorporates all our values which lead us to become messengers of peace and goodness towards all – it is when we have this vision towards all that we truly go beyond faith and trust – to divine experience. Once we have actually seen the Sun with our own eyes, we don’t need to rely on trust or faith to describe what we have felt and seen. Personal experience of all That is divine becomes the standard with which we can communicate the same to those around us…

When we have felt the energy of the divine in every hair, every pore of our bodies, we become walking embodiments and messengers of love and peace. Our vision goes from being something esoteric and intangible to That which is a manifestation of Dharma, of our values…

Our lives are bigger than that which exists in our immediate physical vicinity – we need to expand our vision to all that which lies beyond our small sphere of influence so that our actions may represent the truth of the loving, giving and caring beings that we truly are.

Cultivating a love for silence, for stillness, for meditation, is what creates higher awareness and leads us to ask – what is our vision? What are our values? Do our vision and values match up with our words, our thoughts, our actions, and what our hands and feet are doing on an everyday basis? What are our vision and values spreading and sharing in the world within and the world around us?

We may close our eyes and our ears but once we have come face to face with the needs of others, our hearts will never be able to say that we did not know…

What we believe, what we trust, what we have faith in, and above all, what we have experienced through our awareness will guide and inspire us, and hold our hands, like the omniscient mother or father that leads their child from the ordinary and mundane to the extraordinary and divine. If we are to be and become, may we all become channels of that higher awareness that resides within us in unconditional love. May that vision lead us, like the light of a thousand suns, of which the stars in the darkest of nights shine on us like diamonds in the sky!

Namaste.

Kumud

Join us in #SpiritChat on twitter, Sunday June 21st at 9amET/1pmUTC where we will discuss the ideas of Spiritual Vision and Values. Come and share with us, and celebrate… the Summer/Fall Solstice, International Yoga Day, and Fathers’ Day (North America)!!

On Traditions and Spirituality

Tags

practices, spirit, spiritchat, traditions, values

What is a tradition? The classic dictionary definition is

Tradition is the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way… To transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping.

Traditions have symbolic meaning or special significance, with some of them being more special to us than others. Traditions can help add color, light, sound, taste and flavor to our occasionally mundane lives. As we go and grow through life and spend time with different cultures, and their ways of doing certain things, we may also have an opportunity to absorb their traditions and enhance our own.

However, there are hurdles that face our traditions. For instance, when crossing national boundaries, the desire of immigrants to preserve traditions can become a challenge. This is particularly true when the cultures of the immigrant and the host country are vastly different. One choice is to compromise – to bend but not break, to allow the tradition to flex, and be infused with the fragrance of the new culture. Some of us may be resistant to assimilate the traditions of the societies we live in – for fear of losing our past traditions. We may choose to be hard, non-compromising and rigid in our attitude. This may keep the tradition(s) pure for a little while, but invites the inevitable conflict(s) within families and communities.

Religion and its practices are well-known for their affinity for tradition(s). Holidays, celebrations and festivals are opportunities to renew old traditions, and, on occasion, establish some new ones. The memories and records of these traditions in our lives become intertwined with, and may even surpass the religious significance of these celebrations! The traditions can hence become the means with which to preserve those specific values which the particular religious community wants to nourish and grow.

A traditional Rangoli decoration for ‘Diwali’ – India’s ‘Festival of Lights’

Photo by S. Majumdar / CC BY 2.0

In a spiritual context, we my inherit certain practices, and we may develop some of our own as we weave our way through life. How can we decide which of these practices will eventually become traditions which we may want to preserve? How do we preserve our own traditions, while remaining open to the traditions of others? Do you feel that this need to preserve traditions is a ‘red-herring’, a distraction on our spiritual journey? Or do you feel that this is part of our purpose, our mission, our legacy?

I invite you to reflect on this topic, and then join us in our weekly #SpiritChat on Sunday, November 3rd 10th at 9amET on twitter. Share your thoughts, and some of your traditions with us. These Sunday morning conversations on spirituality have almost become a tradition for many – I hope you will get to meet some of these good folks! Namaste.

Kumud

P.S. I invite you to test out the special chat site developed by @tchatio for #SpiritChat at http://chat.spiritchat.org – we hope to ‘filter’ the displayed chat stream of any ‘non-traditional’ visitors during the live chat 😉