Unfolding

Unleash the Power of a Creative Spiritual Practice

September 11, 2019 By Cara Lumen Leave a Comment

Unleash the Power of a Creative Spiritual Practice
An Inner-world Exploration

Your spiritual practice should be eclectic. It should reflect you – what you believe in, what you need in your life right now. However, there are four elements to address as you continue to create and evolve your personal spiritual practice: regular practice, receptive atmosphere, intention and vibrational actions.

Regular practice is the foundation of your spiritual work

The truth is, you can add a bit of spiritual practice anytime, anyplace, but to elevate your awareness and deepen your connection, you need to create and maintain this spiritual practice.

Begin your day with inner work. Whether it’s a sitting meditative practice or an active meditative practice like yoga or Qi Gong, or both, you have control over your mornings, you can get up and stay tuned into yourself and to your inner world.

In the evening, you can add an element of spiritual practice when you move from workday to home. When I learned Transcendental Meditation fifty years ago, it was suggested we meditate 20 minutes upon arriving home in order to make that transition from work to family.

You can create another spiritual practice at bedtime, in gratitude for the day and in preparation for inner work during the night of rest.

Create a receptive atmosphere

For your spiritual practice, choose a place that feels tranquil to you and use it regularly. The energy in that space will build, the vibration will heighten, and the mere space will become a source of serenity and nurturing for you.

Sit on a chair or cross-legged and use a mudra (hand position) of your choosing to center you. Begin with hands lying palm up on your lap, one hand lying on top of the other, your thumbs touching. Experiment with mudras to find what calls to you.

Set an intention for your meditative session

Intention is the most powerful tool we have in all our inner work. It sets our course and is the wind beneath our wings.

What’s the purpose of your period of inner work? To heal? Clarity around a choice or action? To receive guidance from the unseen world? To bless the day or offer gratitude at the day’s end? Perhaps your intention is to raise your vibration or heighten the impact of your illumined service.

Consciously set an intention for every meditative session.

Use the power of vibration to heal and balance

We’re all one vibration. We communicate through vibration. Your spiritual practice can creatively contain many forms of vibration.

Create vocal vibrational sounds

First, simply sit quietly and breathe. Notice your breathing. As you exhale, release any tension or worry. Empty your mind and sit in silent stillness.

Then begin to hum. Whatever note you hum, notice where it vibrates in your body. Try different pitches and see where they resonate. Direct the hum to your hands or feet. Direct the hum to any part of your body that needs balancing. Just hum. Let the melodies simply appear, and experiment with directing the vibration of the tone.

You can focus sound on your chakras for opening and balancing them. You can send sound to the world, or a person or a situation. Take a slow deep breath, set an intention and hum the vibration where you want it to go.

Experiment with vibrational instruments

Find the vibrational instruments that resonate with you. We’re talking drums, flutes, bells, gongs, rattles, clapping your hands, tapping a rhythm on the arm of your chair, toning, chanting. This is where you do the most experimenting.

Create a ceremony that is uniquely yours

A ceremony anchors your intention. Create one that works for you. You might honor the seven directions – East, South, West, North, Above, Below and middle world. I also honor the Stone Clan and Nature. I use a drum and I drum and sing. I see that drum as connecting me to all the worlds.

I have two rain-sticks. I use them to welcome in the blue light of power, the green light of healing and the white light of unconditional love.

I use my small Tibetan gong to send energy to my past, my present and future. I use my Tibetan cymbals to send it to my home, the people of the earth and the planet. I use my rattle to shake around my home and send positive energy to all the crystals and groupings and to my cats and plants.

I give an intention to each vibrational creator I use. Gong, claves, thumb piano, flutes, rattles, bells. Listen to what you’re using and intuitively find its purpose.

The Manifestation Box

I have a lidded raffia box with a wonderful dragon on the front that I use for a manifestation box. On pieces of paper, I write what I want to bring forth. It can be specific physical healing, it can be ideas like wisdom and insight, healing the planet or simply an intention like “raised vibration.” Each day in my spiritual practice I open the box and read the intentions I’ve chosen. With intention send positive energy to the choices you’ve made.

Don’t forget the rocks!

Crystals hold a higher vibration and have guiding messages for you. Whether you hold a rock in your hand or place it on your altar, listen to the message it offers.

My space is a tad full of crystals so I bring a few to the forefront for a week at a time and work with them and listen to their messages and advice and gifts. Hold crystals in your left hand to receive. You may get a sensation in your body for you to interpret or simply pay attention to the thoughts that show up. Learn to hear and interpret the messages of the crystals.

Create vibrational movement

Movement is vibrational. Whether it’s Qi Gong or Yoga or T’ai chi or simply moving in rhythm to a chant, add conscious movement to your spiritual practice. You can also go outside and dance in nature.

Create a sacred altar

In the sacred space you have chosen for your spiritual practice, perhaps you place a simple table or plant stand to hold objects that resonate with you. My “altars” are all around me. One grouping is on the shelf in front of the desk that I sit at a lot. Another altar surface is on a table under the window beside me. I look out the window to play my flute and work with other objects. It also happens to have a great place for some of my drums underneath. There is another low chest near the chair from which I drum and play a lot of my vibrational instruments. And my desk surface itself is full of crystals and sound instruments because this is where I spend most of my time. This is where I sit to take my shamanic journeys because I change and type them in.

Journal

Whether you journal by hand or on the computer, when you write down what you remember from your meditation it makes room for the next layer to be made evident. Journaling also allows you to look back at your progress, or when something major happens, you can identify what you were doing to help that along.

You can journal at the end of the day in reflection and gratitude. You can journal to set your intentions for the day. Record your visions your insights, your inner messages. It brings them more deeply into your awareness.

Checklist for creating a unique and powerful spiritual practice

Regular practice is the foundation of your spiritual work. Pick some times and stick with them.
Create a receptive atmosphere of uninterrupted quiet.
Create vocal vibrational sounds and direct them for healing.
Experiment with vibrational instruments. Create power songs as you play if they offer themselves.
Create a ceremony to begin and end each spiritual session that is uniquely yours.
Don’t forget the rocks!
Create vibration movement.
Create and evolve your unique sacred altar.
Journal for deeper awareness.

Spend your day mindfully

Enter your day with mindfulness. Walk through your day with mindfulness and end your day in mindfulness. Find opportunities to reflect within throughout your day.

Your life is your spiritual practice!!!

Live it mindfully.

Deeper Song Affirmation

I create a spiritual practice that serves the uniqueness of me.

Deeper Song Process

Look at what you do in your spiritual practice now. What are your favorite things to do? Begin there.
Explore some of the ideas above – toning, sound instruments, movements and see what suits you.
Add that.

To Sing a Deeper Song, Consider:

You ARE Vibration and Why it Matters

How to Interpret the Messages from Within

Make Use of Emptiness

Build a Launching Pad for Your Inner work

Why You May Want to Have an Altar

The Power of a Ceremony of Releasing

The Pillar of Light Process

The Intentional OM HUM

Energy Cannot Be Destroyed – Only Re-Purposed

The Light Vibration of One

Broaden and Deepen
Your Personal Journey

I help spiritual adventurers explore the Unseen World so that we broaden and deepen our personal journey and learn to share our discoveries with others. We are guides and way showers with our light held high.

To receive our weekly
Deeper Song Insights and Applications

join the Deeper Song Community.

The Packed Potential Before the Beginning

May 29, 2019 By Cara Lumen Leave a Comment

The Packed Potential Before the Beginning
An Inner-World Exploration

Wuji means “no limits.” Wuji is at the center and the beginning of our pilgrimage. Wuji is essential stillness, the packed potential before the beginning. It is the beginning of the beginning. – I Ching, Deng Meng Dao

Imagine yourself in deep, deep stillness. No ideas frolic through your mind. No emotions nudge you for attention. You are simply there. At the beginning. Filled with packed potential. “Packed potential!” What a fabulous idea! What does that look like? Feel like? Can I truly be so still and present inside that I can feel the wuji, the center at the beginning of the next step of my personal journey?

I would like that. I would like to be so present and still and centered that I am like a bird sitting on a branch prepared to fly but not yet doing so. Simply being present and filled with the potential for movement.

How else can I experience wuji? How might I think of packed potential? How might I cultivate it and use it to move into whatever form I take that creates change?

Part of wuji is about waiting

Wuji is how you feel before you take action. For instance, I wanted to write this article in order to figure out how to apply this concept of packed potential. There are, as I write this, organic pauses that allow new thoughts to emerge for consideration and clarification. But underneath it all is that deep, deep, deep sense of permanence, of a part of me that is always present, the wuji, the packed potential that is me. Here in my body suit. Living my body suit life.

“Wuji means “no limits.”

I have to get out of my body suit in order to understand the concept of wuji – no limits – because my body suit is full of limitations. I have to journey to the unseen world of my inner knowing in order to even begin to conceive of “no limits.” That’s not a body suit concept. It’s an inner world concept, an unseen world concept. That unseen world is within us, open to us, beckoning to us to come explore. We can simply close our eyes, turn off our minds and fly. With no limits!

When we use our body suit minds, we cannot conceive of limitless potential because we can’t get there in our body suits. But our inner self knows and can take us there.

Perhaps all we need is to know wuji, “packed potential”, exists and that it is possible

If I sit here at my desk and go within, there’s a stillness. My body suit disappears and I’m left as an energy floating in the present moment. When I release my body suit, my inner self moves softly into the Great Nothingness where everything is potential, where everything is evolving and changing and shifting shapes and direction – constant unfolding and evolving movement. I become part of that transforming energy and I, too, change. I become presence. I become potential. I simply am.

And that’s where we begin to let our lives unfold.

Make time to unpack your wuji, your packed potential

You may find this wuji awareness of packed potential in meditation. You may find wuju in nature. You may find it in an action that you take.

I am changing my spiritual practice to include smaller but more frequent moments in my day. That gives me the opportunity to be still and silent and present more often. I pause to examine and evaluate where I am and where is calling me, deepen my spiritual connection and then make an aware and aligned choice. I will expand my midday shamanic journeying to include meditation with a crystal and more drumming and singing of power songs. I will pause again as the sun sets to be with nature and to begin to close the cycles of my day. At night I will drum my power songs to guide my dreams in the night. You get the idea. Create small moments of spiritual practice and inner awareness at various points in our day, then make that a habit.

How will you unpack the packed potential that awaits you?

Wui means “no limits.” Wuji is at the center and the beginning of our pilgrimage. Wuji is essential stillness, the packed potential before the beginning. – I Ching, Deng Meng Dao

DEEPER SONG AFFIRMATION

I sit in perfect stillness and experience the packed potential
that awaits me at each beginning.

TO SING A DEEPER SONG CONSIDER:

Another Part of You-The Unseen World

How to Interpret the Messages from Within

Do You See and Hear and Walk in a Sacred Manner?

Unleash the power of your Sacred Garden

How to Be Nothing

Raise Your Vibration and Change the World.
I help transformational thinkers raise their personal vibration so that we, collectively, can raise the consciousness of our planet.

To receive our weekly
Deeper Song Newsletter
with Insights and Applications,
join the Deeper Song Community.

Can You Let Your Life Unfold?

January 16, 2019 By Cara Lumen Leave a Comment

Can You Let Your Life Unfold?
An Inner-world Exploration

Periodically during the year, we make grand plans. Sometimes it’s because there’s a new year beginning, sometimes it’s a new quarter, or a new month or even just one week at a time.

The most productive, aligned way to manage your life is to simply to let it unfold. See what shows up, check it out in the moment and decide if this is the time to explore and develop that idea.

Otherwise we run the risk of being overwhelmed.

It helps to follow the seasons

There’s an unfolding flow in nature that we would do well to align ourselves with.

Winter: Contemplate and explore the possibilities in the seed catalog. Close what to plant.

Choose only the things you really want to do and the things you realistically can accomplish. How many plants can you grow in your personal garden of self?

I’m exploring new ideas and they’re currently in sort of a book format because that’s how I’m organizing my own learning process. However, the idea of working on a book while doing all this inner exploration/discovery work is overwhelming.

So, since it’s winter, I’ll contemplate the choices and experiences before me and go exploring to better understand what I’m being called to do. I place my order from the idea seed catalogue. That’s all I do – choose my priorities.

I may have different criteria for my choices – income, most effective use of time, greatest impact, easiest to do. A full seed catalog can be tempting. Do a reality check before you place your order.

Spring: Choose how many seeds you will plant based on what you can realistically care for, want to harvest and how much is needed.

After choosing what we want to plant, we have to do a reality check on how much we can physically and emotionally care for. How big is the garden plot (your available time). We have to prepare the ground. What skills and equipment or help do you need to produce this crop? Then you have to decide how much to plant based on how much you can care for and harvest and, better yet, use.

These are the decisions of spring. How much to plant. Where to plant. And make certain not to overprint or underplant. Give careful thought to what you actually need to produce.

I seem to have a second book that’s much closer to completion than this one I am creating from my new work. Hmmm. Can I harvest two crops? Oh yes, and there’s a niggle that I might record some guided meditations. Be careful here that you don’t choose too much to plant because there’s a lot of work to be done in the cultivation and care and bringing to harvest of whatever you choose.

Summer: Do the work

This is the part I love – the growth and development of an idea. The unfolding of a book. It’s a time for deep creativity and introspection as I pull together all I have learned in a form that others can understand. I put what I’ve been learning into a form I can share that will help others move along a similar path.

What will be required of you to tend the crops you have chosen to plant? Can you bring the crop safely to harvest?

Fall – Harvest what you sowed

I dread this part. We are talking technical stuff. Not hard, I just don’t do it very often. Get the book out the door stuff. But if that’s all I do for the fall – complete and publish – that doesn’t feel so daunting.

See how working in seasons makes the task less daunting?

There’s another step here I tend to not do well – let others know what I’ve created. So perhaps I can devise practical and realistic ways to do that.

If you found a stumbling block in your projected harvest, what solutions can you explore and what choices can you make earlier in the year to help you move through this challenge?

Completion time is made for giving gratitude for the gifts you have harvested and been encouraged to give.

Fall is also the time to notice what your work produces. What is popular and what is not? What did you run out of? It’s time to evaluate what action has called to you the most. Where did you receive the most satisfaction? What was the easiest part to do? Then set those ideas aside to be contemplated in the planning that takes place in the winter cycle.

Do your inner work

Before you begin a new cycle, do your inner work. What new skills did you develop? What do you want to do more of? Less of? What are the needs of the people you serve? How has the world changed? What is needed that you could provide?

What has changed in you and how will you honor that?

Then it’s time to begin the cycle again.

Deeper Song Process:

Write down what you would like to accomplish in the next year, quarter, month, whatever you choose.
Put a mark by the one accomplishment that would be the easiest to do.
Put a different mark by the one that would make your heart sing.
Use a different mark to identify the action that would bring in the most income, or whatever value you are working to achieve (personal growth, relationships, etc)
Choose one project that you marketed and apply the seasonal steps to it.
Winter – Contemplate the future possibilities. Order seeds.
Spring – Plant what you can care for and harvest.
Summer – Produce. Do the work. Get help if you need to.
Fall – Take your harvest to market and see how it’s received.
Repeat each season.

To Sing a Deeper Song, Consider:

Make Work Your Offering

How to Weave the Sacred into the Ordinary

Are You Sacred Space?

Do You See and Hear and Walk in a Sacred Manner?

What Core Beliefs are Guiding You Today?

Build on the Distance You Have Come

March 27, 2018 By Cara Lumen Leave a Comment

Build on the Distance You Have Come

“You can only progress by building on the distance you have come.”
– Everyday Tao, Ding Ming Dao

Where are you? How far have you come? Where do you want to go?

Before you move forward, examine where you are. What are your strengths, your gifts, your talents? What have you learned that can become a new foundation to build upon? What recently discovered awareness will open new doors?

Look at what’s missing. What do you need to acquire before you move forward? It may be in the form of knowledge, it may be a skill, it may be self-awareness. To get from here to there, what needs to change within you?

Change that.

More Deep Listening:

What are the Foundations Stones Upon Which Your Build Your Life?

Follow Your Personal Drumbeat

Live in the Center of Your Being

Hold the Vision of Light

Join the Circle of Light Beings

The Stumbling Block Called “Decision”

September 14, 2017 By Cara Lumen Leave a Comment

The next steps were easy, but each one called for a decision to be made. I realized that it was the need to make more choices that was holding back my progress.

I was putting a book up on iBooks. They wanted key words. A decision. They wanted a sample chapter. A decision. They wanted…you get the picture. The steps were easy but each one needed a decision on my part.

I looked around to see where else in my life decision-making was slowing me down – or stopping me altogether.

Choose one important thing and do it

My life changed when I read a suggestion that we simply pick one important thing to accomplish each day and do it. What a difference that made! One thing. One important thing. Just one.

So if I choose to get the book cover in iBooks Author as my one important thing that meant I could look at an instruction video, again, and make my decision. Then I could read the section on uploading in iProducer. And make uploading the book the most important thing I did the next day. Each day moves me further along. And each day I have only one important thing to accomplish.

I can do that. And so can you!

Group the type of tasks

It helps to group types of tasks together. I record four videos at a time because the light is set up, my hair is combed, etc.

I write posts every day, but once a month I go through them and pull out the ones that seem to have value. Then I work on them every other day for at least three days, so I can return to them with a beginner’s mind. Then I run them through www.grammarly.com and send them to my editor. When they come back I spend a focused period of time choosing photos for all of them and bingo – I have a month’s worth of posts ready.

All because I batched my actions.

Clear space to do the work

If we’re going to focus on one thing, we have to make a decision on what we’ll momentarily put aside in order to make that happen.

If my one important thing to do this week is to edit a batch of posts, then I probably won’t record my vLog.

If my weekly newsletter is due each Sunday, I have to work on it several times during the week. I find myself inspired to write pieces of it, but on Thursday I set aside time to edit and polish it and send it to be proofed.

Keep your schedule and your choices flexible and simply go with the flow of what’s needed next.

Keep your choices simple

I was stressing out over the number of places I could/should publish my e-books. Since that technical action is not my favorite thing to do, it was even more dreaded.

Then a friend said, “Where do you buy your books?” And I said, “Amazon.” She said, “Just do that.”

Life certainly got easier just by simplifying my choices.

Wrap your head around it

That’s an odd phrase – “wrap your head around it.” There are four distinct steps to that: study, explore, reflect, choose.

Study. Study the situation to get the widest possible view.

Explore. Go a little way down the paths that call most to you and see what possibilities/potential they hold.

Reflect. Go within and listen to your intuition, your inner voice, your feelings, your knowingness.

Choose. Pick one step, one project and begin. You can always stop. You can always expand. Just make a choice and begin.

Exploration and expanding choice

The more you go exploring, the broader your choices become.

When I made my first book covers, it was based on what I knew how to do at the time. But I kept experimenting and exploring different programs and allowing what I learned to become absorbed.

And I got better.

And better.

The more you learn, the broader your choices become.

Use visioning to explore

If I were faced with a decision that required me to place myself in a new position – or not – I’d use my imagination to explore my options. I’d examine my emotions and feeling and state of happiness in the new opportunity compared with my present circumstances, and let those feeling guide my choices.

For instance, as I study shamanism I’ve become clear that I do not want to develop a big practice for individual clients. But I do want to help change the world. I’ve found a form of shamanistic participation that fits my intentions and my circumstances. Now I get to explore exactly how I’m going to live that and share that. I simply let it unfold.

Sometimes one choice is as good as another

It doesn’t really matter what form my shamanic practice takes as long as I continue to explore and expand my own understanding and find expressive ways to share what I learn with the world.

Another example is that it doesn’t matter if I stir fry my vegetables or steam them. As long as I make the healthy choice of eating vegetables.

Some decisions are important. Others not so much.

Tomorrow is good too

If something blocks our way, move it aside for the moment. For instance, I was editing a batch of posts. I make my selections from all I’ve written lately, put them in one document and start working.

I came to one that needed a lot of work. I moved it to the bottom of the document I’m working in because I’ll feel better moving through the posts that are coming together well. I can put the decision of what to do about that post that needs work until all the rest are ready. I can make it the first thing I do tomorrow. It’ll be one decision and I’ll feel good about what I’ve already accomplished – the posts that are ready to go for proofing.

Allow yourself flexibility in your schedule and your choices in order to do your best work.

Make one decision at a time

Make a choice and go exploring. If that choice doesn’t feel right, go back to base camp and begin again in a different direction. If, on the other hand, you come to an enticing side trip, feel free to take that too.

Life is a wonderful adventure full both of choices and of surprises. Enjoy the journey.

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider.

The Unfolding Vision Board

Did You Over–plant?

The Power of Persistence

Are You Adapting Fast Enough to Change?

Magic is Simply a Change in Consciousness