Cara Lumen | Sing a Deeper Song

Sing a Deeper Song

Mindfulness

How Effective Is Your Spiritual Practice?

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How Effective Is Your Spiritual Practice?

Our spiritual practice is not just the time we spend in a specifically focused state of awareness – it’s how we live our life.  It’s the thoughts we think, the words we say, the deeds we do.

Our spiritual practice certainly consists of those specific moments in which we pause to remind ourselves that we are light, when we are embraced in a whole that includes All-There-Is, but our spiritual practice is most evident in how we conduct ourselves.

Our spiritual life is reflected in the degree of our self-love 

You can’t understand how to give and receive love until you love yourself.  Sometimes we don’t do that enough, or very well, or at all.  We focus on what’s not working, what we seem to lack, how we come up short when comparing ourselves with others.

Begin to expand your spiritual practice by giving yourself unconditional love. And by accepting it because you are worthy and deserving of it.  Notice the degree to which you approve of yourself, appreciate yourself, and believe in yourself. In your spiritual practice take steps to release your limiting beliefs.

Look and offer gratitude for what you offer the world. We each made an agreement to come into the world to learn a certain lesson and to offer a certain gift.  Focus some of your introspective time on contemplating how you feel about what you bring to the world, how that changes lives and contributes to the well-being of all.

Begin your spiritual practice with unconditional self-love and gratitude for the gift that you are to our world.

Our spiritual life is reflected in our choices

Our “spiritual” choices can range from how well we care for or don’t care for our body suit to what we do to our emotional body through fear and worry and allowing ourselves to feel a loss of power in the midst of chaos.

Use your spiritual time to meditate on upcoming possibilities.  Try them on for size – how they feel, what it would be like to accomplish that particular undertaking, how it would feel to know that person better, to make that change happen.

Use your spiritual time to explore your emotional body and how it feels about the choices you’re making.

Our spiritual life is reflected in our behavior in the world

I spend time in my spiritual practice sending light to the world, the planet, endangered species, the environment, people who are in fear, people who are in hate.  Use a healthy portion of your quiet time to send unconditional love to yourself and to our world.  It will be felt. It will be effective.

Trust that as you raise your own vibration to be more aware of your light-ness, others will recognize that same light in themselves.

Our spiritual practice asks us to immerse ourselves in one-ness

We have to feel our one-ness – with everything. We have to feel our connectedness – with everything.  When you understand that there’s only one energy, and that it includes each of us, you begin to understand how a tug here will affect a place over there and you begin to pay more attention to how steadily you are standing in your own light.

Whether you’re standing under a tree, walking in the woods, or sitting in your favorite meditation chair, the objective of your inward quiet time is to leave behind the confines and restrictions of your bodysuit and experience yourself free floating in the Emptiness That Holds Everything.  Lose your connection with your humanness, lose your identity of self, and experience your authentic identity as One In Source.

Then take that feeling of inner connection out into your world.

Life is an illusion and a dream. Go exploring

Some 95% of our existence is unknown. We live in only a teeny 5% of what’s possible. Think about that!

Another purpose of our spiritual practice is to explore those invisible realms. To move beyond the beliefs and limitations and narrow view of being human and move into the light of our Oneness.  The wholeness and freedom of one light.  Feel it. Know it.  Accept it.

Be mindful of your spiritual connection and expression throughout your day. Develop a conscious spiritual practice and bring that awareness and those feelings back into your restricted body-suit life. During your interactive hours, keep bringing forth the feeling of oneness you experienced in your meditative spiritual practice.

Because everything is one, there is no “other”

I can do a pretty good job of feeling that the animals and plants and the elements of nature are all one light energy with me.  I have a harder time in some one-to-one encounters with fellow humans who have an opposing viewpoint.  I come closer to shifting that when I realize that we are a fellow species on the planet and our well-being is interconnected.  It helps me look for common ground and see us both as illumined light beings.

Can you offer unconditional love?

I can’t yet.  I’m still working on accepting unconditional love directed by me to me.  That’s sort of Unconditional Love 101.

But I want to help the earth.  I want to help us through this chaotic change.  So I do it energetically.

In my spiritual practice and in moments of mindfulness, I send the wholeness of our one light out into the world as a reminder to all who see it and feel it that we are all one.

We are all interconnected. We are all responsible for each other.  We are each of us responsible for the well-being of our entire world!

You.  Me.  Us. We are responsible.  We must be the change.  We must be unconditional love radiating out to everyone and everything.

We can do that.

Up-level your spiritual practice

Realize that your spiritual practice is not just body-suit time spent in meditation, contemplation, ritual, ceremony, etc., it’s how those specific practices translate into our daily thoughts and choices.

If your spiritual life is well focused, so is your life.  Look no further than yourself for the “how” to make the corrections. It all begins inside – with you – and your innate wholeness.

MORE OF OUR LUMINIOUS LEGACY:

Unleash The Power of Your Inner Garden  

Live in the Center of  Your Being 

What Is The Foundation Upon Which You Build Your Life?

Discover Your Spiritual Heart

Join the Circle of Light Beings

 How to Access the Divine Feminine 

Are You Fighting Structure? 

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Look closely at how you define words that guide you. You may subconsciously be stopping yourself from moving forward. My friend was fighting the idea of structure. And I wondered if the resistance came from how he defined the word.

If you really are a free spirit, structure may feel confining. However, if you are a free spirit you probably need some structure. Hmm.

Structure is about relationship

Structure is the relationship between the parts or elements of something complex. Relationship. How they work together. How they support each other. What is needed and what is not.

When something has many moving parts, (like an idea), you have to make up some boundaries, some sort of categories, in order to bring the pieces into a manageable size. Organizing many things into a few categories helps you see the overview.  And that helps in creating a workable end result.

Why do you need structure?

A structure holds things together. A structure holds things up. We need the support of structure in our life. A structure can be loose or tight.  A loosely structured day is free-flowing and open to change.  You may not accomplish what you thought you would, but in the relaxed structure of your day, you may have discovered something that opens a new door.

The work world thrives on structure, hierarchy likes leaders and teams and levels of responsibility.  Even an entrepreneur has to find ways to wear every hat at one time or another and that means learning to work within several levels of structure.

You learn through structure. You are productive through structure.

Structure does not need to be confining

The structure of my home keeps me safe. The structure of my day – as in sleeping and eating at regular times – keeps me healthy. We need the support of structure in our life.

It is important to know how much structure you can handle.  Before I retired, there was the structure of coaching appointments and posts to write. I had outside influence on what I needed to put into my day.

Now that I’m retired, I get to choose.  I find two posts and one newsletter a week to be comfortable and still give me time and energy to toss in a few other creative projects, particularly when those projects have no timeline.  So I commit to that basic output and make it happen.

When I enrolled in a long-term course of study on shamanism, I was able to keep that schedule but other things I’d added, like vLogs and podcast, went on hold.  There is give and take in structure.

What do you want to accomplish?  What brings you joy?  Make that a cornerstone of your structure.

Structure brings clarity

You have to structure your ideas so others can hear what you have to say.

Let’s say I want to write a post. I have to choose one point to make. That becomes my structure. The boundary. The confines of what I will write.

I build ideas and explanations around that one idea.  I choose only what will clarify and support the main idea I want to convey.  Nothing else belongs in the structure of that post.

This post began because a friend was fighting structure. And I wondered how that applied to my life and yours.

The core purpose defines the structure.

Structure brings boundaries

The boundaries that a consciously chosen structure brings are a good thing. If I didn’t limit the topic and purpose of this post, I would be all over the place. Not a good thing.

If I were teaching a course, I would have to consider the boundaries of time agreed upon and the level of the students. Those boundaries are then built into the structure of what I present.

As I increase my personal spiritual work, I face the boundary of time, so I have to pick and choose how much time I’ll spend and what exactly it is I’ll do. Boundaries call for structure and structure creates boundaries.

Structure illuminates chaos

I’m redoing the template that helps me format my e-books. I’m making decisions and choices that will affect every e-book I write from here on out. But once this template is made, once this structure is created, I’m set. My books will look nice, they will come together quickly, and be easy to publish. All because I created a structure that serves as the foundation.

Structure will change as you become more skilled

I’ve written books in Pages.  Then I learned Scrivener. Then I learned iBooks Author and now I’m back to Pages. But I had to do all that exploring in order to understand what I needed and what I did not.  My move back to Pages came because of the discovery of one program, a grammar checker called Grammarly That has become a very important step and it’s easier to take from Pages. Your choices will change as you increase your skills and your structure will probably simplify as you need less outside support.

Keep the structure light

Too much structure means you have too many restrictions. Not enough structure means your house will fall down. You have to find a balance between what’s needed in the project and what you need for your freedom of expression.

Look closely at the idea of structure and make certain it’s not stopping you. At the same time, make certain you have enough structure to get the job done.

Look closely at how you define words that guide you. You may subconsciously be stopping yourself from moving forward

The Challenge in Repetition

What Do You Really Want?

The Mirror of Appreciation  

Repurpose Your Thought to Change the Outcome

The Stumbling Block Called Decision

How to Eliminate Worry

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Worry is full of “what if’s” and “maybe’s” and “might’s”.  It has nothing to do with what will or will not happen.  It’s like sitting there making up a worst-case scenario.  Don’t do that.

We make up stuff

My sister is moving.  There are many steps – selling her house, choosing a new space in an independent living complex, figuring out what to take and what not take.  She has herself worried sick.

For no reason. It’ll all simply unfold.  She’ll choose one of two apartments that are available. Her house is in good shape and is on the market.

And she’s nevertheless making up scenarios – bad scenarios.  If we’re going to make up “what if’s”, make up some good ones!

What if she loves the new apartment and feels the relief of not having property to take care of and finds she feels safe and secure? What if her home sells easily and effortlessly?  What if she keeps stumbling on pieces that are perfect for her new apartment? Wouldn’t that feel a whole lot better than those negative thoughts!

Monitor your negativity

It sure is easy to beat yourself up.  A friend sent me a link to videos with some lovely stretching exercises and because I haven’t done much physical work recently, the exercises were “hard” for me because they asked more of my body than it was used to.  But only in a very good way.

I had two ways to go – I could get very concerned that my body was so stiff and beat myself up for not moving more, or I could be grateful for the videos and make some positive decisions about where I’ll put those movements into my day.

Which one feels better? The positive one, of course.

Don’t settle for second best. 

What you look for, you get. What you expect, you receive.  Guess who gets to change all that. You do!  Expect the best and it’ll be there.  Settle for second best, and that, too, is what you’ll get.

See how easy it is?  Change your thinking and your world changes with it.

Unfolding frees you up

The practice of unfolding is amazing.  It releases you from striving and worrying and over-planning.  When you trust that your life is unfolding exactly as it should and that you’ll never be given more than you can handle, you’re good to go – to let it all unfold.

Explore different ideas

That doesn’t mean you sit there like a bump on a log.  You get to think and explore and learn new things, but be open to where that leads you.  Be open to who shows up for you to serve, what shows up for you to do, and what unexpected places you find yourself in.

It’s an awesome, ongoing adventure, this unfolding life, and all it takes is to simply allow it to happen.

Let go

Although I’m a natural list maker, as I practice unfolding I learn to be more general in my intentions.  For instance, I’d like to increase my knowledge of making video logs.  That’s a much looser intention than a list of overwhelming steps I might need to take to reach that goal.  With that general direction to flow in, I simply notice what opportunities show up and make a decision in the moment about how or if to take them.

When your life is open, great things appear

With a to-do list, your life can get very full.  Without a list, your life can become very exciting.  Which would you rather it be?

Cut down on your “things-you-should/could-do” list. Keep your to-do list as simple as you can.

It helps to choose only one important thing to do each day.  It’s very freeing to effectively accomplish that one thing.  Suddenly you have time open and can either choose another “important” thing to do or simply go exploring wherever your passion leads you.

Unfolding is a powerful way to let go of worry.

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider:

No Timetable, No Destination

The Mirror of Appreciation

Repurpose Your Thought to Change the Outcome

The Unfolding Vision Board

Did You Over–plant?

No Timetable, No Destination 

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boat sail 2

“If you don’t have a timetable, you can’t be late.
If you don’t have a destination, you can’t be lost.”

-Conrad Stafford Johan, nature photographer, PBS Nature Channel

No Timetable

Think about that. No timetable.  Just the organic flow of your day.  Stop to look out the window at the clouds when you feel like it. Go for a walk and keep going until you are content.  Only do work you love.  How glorious to be able to simply tune into whatever you feel like doing and do that.

No Destination

Life is simply going to unfold, whether you plan on that or not. So you don’t really know where you’re going to end up because you haven’t made the choices along the way to get you there.  What if an unexpected detour takes you somewhere spectacular your never expected?  Be open to exploring detours.

Without a destination, you can simply immerse yourself in and enjoy the now, this moment, this second.

When was the last time you simply floated through a day?

Floated.  No plans.  Nap when you want to. Eat when you’re hungry.  Be alone or not.  Choices.  Choices that are aligned with what you truly want.  Do you have that kind of freedom in your life? Do you remember the last time you did?

Find your own rhythm

I’m lucky. I’m retired and can pretty much do what I want when I want.  My opportunity then becomes how to get the most out of each moment.  Not with a strain or effort, but with consciousness, an awareness of what my body wants, what my mind wants, what my soul wants.  You have to listen within to get those messages.

Stop and breathe

Stop what you’re doing right now and take a deep breath.  Let it move through your whole body, relaxing and releasing as it goes.  Notice how that feels.  Take another breath and let go of even more.  Again, go within and listen to what calls to you, what you want.

You can do this anytime, anywhere and it’ll help you be more aware in the moment about what’s happening, and what you need.  Pretty simple, right?

Listen

I get great advice from my inner voice.  Sometimes it shouts at me; sometimes it whispers.  But it always gives me great advice.

Listen beyond the words of those people with whom you speak.  What are they not saying?  What does their body language tell you?

Listen to the rhythm of nature, the unfolding cycles, the constant give and take of support.  Copy that.  Learn to ebb and flow, give and take, to simply let your life unfold.

No destination, no timetable. Just the magical flow of life!!!!!

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider:

Your Breath is a Doorway to Higher Consciousness

Heal Your Past, Present, and Future

Embrace The Power of Your Inner Life

The Language of the Stubble Realms

How to Effortlessly Radiate Light

Take Time to Contemplate

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contemplation

We need time to let it sink in. We need time to let an idea simmer before it emerges. We need time to capture that idea that just popped into our head. If we are over scheduled, we don’t have time for life to emerge.

I’m not a phone person

My understanding is that the majority of people spend every unscheduled moment checking their phone. What if you had great spaces of nothingness in your day?   Moments in which you look out the window, or sit in the sun, or watch the clouds shift their shape? When was the last time you did that?

Cultivate your relationship with yourself

Rather than working so hard to connect with others, what about connecting with yourself?  What if you daydreamed?  Took a chair nap?  Learned to play your musical instrument better?  What if you wrote a song or a poem?  Or drew a picture?  All of those activities create space for your inner self to emerge and be captured in a form you can recognize.

I journey, I journal, I write posts like this to figure things out. I meditate. I do Chi Gong. All are activities of inner stillness, of quiet, waiting for the knowing, the clarity, the direction that we all receive from deep inside.

Simply look within

Stop. Stop reading this for a moment and close your eyes and listen. Notice your breathing. Notice your thoughts. Allow both time and space to move your attention into the Great Mystery, the All That Is. And simply float. Feel like you are lying back on a soft cloud lazily watching the world below you. Feel you. Hug yourself. Still your mind. Find the Nothingness.

Stay there. In that place within.

If there’s a message, take it. If there’s nothing but serenity, accept that.

Contemplate

Observe. Reflect. Listen. Stop your mind and just be present.

You can plan specific times in your day for your inner work, or find places in your day when you simply pause, breathe and are present. Observe how you feel, what you see. Encourage and establish stillness within before your return to your day.

Explore silence, stillness, awareness, feelings, being. All are experiences that come from contemplation.

How and where will you add more moments of contemplation to your life?

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider:

How to Explore Your Invisible Self

How to Nourish Your Inner Fire

What Seeds Are You Planting For the Future?

How to Draw Power and Guidance from Nature 

Video: Power Journaling

Podcast:   40 – Who Do You Want to Serve?