Posts Tagged ‘Spirituality’
Friday, June 18th, 2010
 Ego often gets a bum rap. I was happy to see the video of Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, author of “My Stroke of Insight”, (see her video at the end of this post) a while back as she exemplifies why we need an ego and why is not a good idea to try to “get rid” of it.
First of all, unless you want to damage the left hemisphere of your brain (which was her challenge when she had the stroke), you are going to have a sense of “identity” which is what the ego is. It is the mental construct of the “false self”.
Ego is imbedded within your personality. Within the word personality is “persona”, which means, “mask”. It is not the real you, it is what I call the “Mental Me”; the story of who you THINK you are. This is in opposition to the “Magnificent Me” that most people apparently are not aware of.
The Magnificent Me is the Authentic Self, the Real Deal, not the memory you hold of yourself based on genetics (karma if you are so inclined), environment and simply the illogical mind of the child you once were. Most of our sense of limited identity starts in early childhood, which is when we are most susceptible and predisposed to believing the opinions of others and making up the meaning of our experiences.
It is not what happens to you; it is HOW you interpret the facts of your experience that determines the meaning that is assigned. This is what perception is in a nutshell. This would explain why one person can experience an event as horribly traumatic while for another it may just be “water off a duck’s back”.
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Tags: Confidence, Ego, Neuroscience, Self-Esteem, Spirituality, women empowerment
Posted in Practical Spirituality | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
 If confidence and self-esteem does not come from the inside out, we are bound to seek it from outside in. This is a never-ending bottomless pit. Who cares, you may ask. Why even concern yourself with confidence or self-esteem issues?
Well, for one thing, what the French author Anais Nin said many years ago is true:
“We don’t see things the way they are; we see them as we are”
You will not ever really rise above your own self-image. You may outwardly look pretty good, but inside, you won’t have peace of mind if you are always comparing your sense of self-worth, or even your material possessions to someone else.
This behavior often also impacts your attitude and the altitude that you rise to in life. You will always find someone who has more or less than you in some area. This is true whether the comparison is love, money, beauty or intelligence.
The answer is not in finding someone less than you to make you feel good about yourself. The answer is to learn how to love and accept yourself independent of the world around you. I had someone ask me recently in regard to her thoughts about feeling inadequate, “what if what they say is correct”?
Here’s my short answer. Everyone has their opinion and most of it is just a projection onto you of their own self-judgment. You see, what you do is not the same as who you are in your essence. What you do does reveal your character at the moment and it does reflect your level of consciousness, but consciousness shifts. What you do changes.
Even the roles you play changes. The external world is constantly shifting and changing. The key to personal power and peace of mind is to learn how to separate who you know you are from who you THINK you are.
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Tags: Confidence, Empowerment, Self-Esteem, Self-Mastery, Spirituality, women in business
Posted in Confidence and Self-Esteem, Practical Spirituality | No Comments »
Monday, January 4th, 2010
 Empowerment is about being able to go from where you are to where you want to be and to live from a place of abundance. Abundance for me refers to health, wealth and relationships.
We are living through turbulent and changing times, so coming from a place of empowerment is to be able to navigate change with awareness and conscious choice, instead of feeling like a victim. I went to see two movies last week that had a lot of current science, aspects of the mystical or spiritual and cultural/economic messages.
Avatar I thought was so good, I’m planning on seeing it again on IMAX with 3-D. What was so great about blue people and an outer space fiction movie? How does this relate to everyday life? I can’t cover everything, but here are the highlights.
Quantum physics has shown that everything is energy. Yes everything. Now there is debate over how our consciousness interacts with this energy, or for that matter, what consciousness is in the first place.
I don’t want to get too specific with the details of the movie, as I don’t want to spoil it for people. In the movie, there is reference to the connection of all of life, how we are one with nature and all of life, yet we are able to function as individuals. It also referred to how science, when it only comes from a place of intellect and holds a mechanistic viewpoint of life, just how fear-based and cruel it can be.
Then there were also spiritual references to the energy field, which some quantum physicists call the “Divine Matrix”. This is the energy that permeates all of life. Then there was Sherlock Holmes and his ability to visualize and “see” future events. There is science that documents all types of “paranormal” phenomenon.
Folks, this is not sci-fi or spooky.
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Tags: Confidence, Empowerment, Self-Esteem, Self-Mastery, Spirituality
Posted in Empowerment | 31 Comments »
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
 Spirituality for me has to be practical or else, it just does not make sense. Yes, I do often live by faith, but there is a difference between faith and believing a paradigm just because you were told to believe it. I’m grateful to be beyond the point in my life where I hang on to “tradition just because”.
If it does not empower me to live a healthy, happy and prosperous life – it just has to go. The ideas have outlived their welcome. There was a time in my life when I used to blame the devil for the drama in my life.
It was a funny thing; I wondered how was it that this devil knew all of my thoughts? How was it that it could “make” me do anything and how was it creating the drama in my life and fear thoughts? Here’s something interesting – spell devil backwards and notice what you get.
Devil is “Lived” spelled backwards. Well, knowing what I know now, I’d say I was living my life backwards all right. In fact I commonly lived with regret and worry all the time. Or, I was unforgiving and bitter about something from my past. I rarely lived in the present moment.
Here’s something else. Notice that “evil” is “live” backwards. I personally don’t see life as “the devil made me do it” anymore at all. In fact, the closest thing I see to some devil is a wounded ego. I don’t believe that the ego is the enemy; it is just that if your thoughts and your sense of self formed in the brain’s area of “autobiographical memory” is full of negative perceptions, you will wire your nervous system with negative self-talk.
Your ego, or “false sense of self” just needs to have its stories re-written, so to speak. These thoughts/beliefs literally get wired into your body at a cellular level. Well, when your negative wounded ego storyteller gets going, you start thinking negative thoughts and acting on them.
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Tags: Confidence, Ego, Self-Esteem, Spirituality
Posted in Ego, Practical Spirituality | 14 Comments »
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
 Empowerment is so elusive for so many people because they do not understand principles are at work all the time – whether you believe it or not! Take the Law of Gravity. You can say you do not believe in the Law, or that you think whatever it is that you think about the law – it does not matter because the bottom line is, if you jump off of your roof, you are going down!
I read an interesting discussion somewhere this week that discussed the issue of forgiveness. In summary, the author was asking the question about whether forgiving someone is necessary or really valid. On the table was also the issue of whether or not forgiveness is even possible. I had the sense that the perspective was, as it is so often, that forgiveness was for the perpetrator, versus the “victim”.
This issue about who is forgiveness for is the point of confusion that leads to the downfall of so many people. Forgiveness as a benefit is NOT for the perpetrator – it is for the person who feels wronged! “What?” you may ask. “How so”?
Forgiveness is of extreme importance for you, the person who feels harmed. Holding a grudge against someone is quite literally like taking poison and expecting the other person to die. When you hold unforgiveness and bitterness in your heart, you are setting yourself up to recycle negative energy in your body at a cellular level.
It has been shown in medical studies, that bitterness and chronically held anger is associated with such diseases as chronic arthritis and cancer, just to name a few. When we self-righteously hold someone else in bondage within our own minds, we poison our own bodies. I say “self-righteous” because if you are past the age of two, you probably have made mistakes somewhere with someone, in some relationship.
Also, this is how “button pushing” gets set up. The very things that we feel like a victim over, we are likely to react vehemently in future similar situations that remind us of our previous wound. Also, have you ever noticed that many self-righteous people often commit the same crimes that they are judging someone else for?
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Tags: Confidence, Empowerment, Self-Esteem, Self-Mastery, Spirituality
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Ego often gets a bum rap. I was happy to see the video of Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, author of “My Stroke of Insight”, (see her video at the end of this post) a while back as she exemplifies why we need an ego and why is not a good idea to try to “get rid” of it.
