Today's Teaching: Spiritual Strength

"Growth is hard, regression is easy"- Ken Wilbur

Sometimes when sitting in meditation, the hardest part is sitting still.  We make this commitment to not move or fidget or scratch and then BAM your back starts burning. What will you do? Can you take your attention from the pain and put it back to the background from which your experience is arising? If you find that your are being too wildly distracted from the subtle realm of infinity, then just shift a little and be done with it.  It's not worth spending all your time trying to NOT focus on something.  That just wastes your time.  There is so much more available than that.  So get yourself comfortable, but alert, when you sit to meditate.  The point here is to have NO relationship.  This goes deeper and deeper and gets more and more subtle.  And if you can sit and watch yourself throw an internal tantrum- and not move - you will have just had a spiritual work out.  What sort of spiritual strength would you like to have? What kind of person do you want to be? What part of yourself do you actually want to live from?

We are made up of many dimensions of self. There is the biological self, the cultural self, the emotional self, the soul- just to name a few. The biological self is governed by hormones, diet, environment, physical urges.  Our cultural self is the sense of who we are as defined by history- collective and personal.  Collective history or collective consciousness is an idea popularized by Carl Jung and it points to the fact that we are inextricably shaped by culture past and present. There is also another part, a part thatdeeper than the soul, that cannot be separated out from anything else, yet it exists independently.  As Ken Wilbur puts it:

"In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not yourself? When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your own limitless Being, waving back at you?"

In Kundalini Yoga we call it the Sat Nam (true identity) and it annihilates the sense of separateness. Call it whatever you want, it will always be you, and it is already, and always, free.  So as you sit in mediation and it gets difficult, flex your spiritual muscles and recognize that the experience you're having is the experience you're supposed to be having; it couldn’t be any other way.  Stick to the instructions.  Sometimes you only realize what you’ve accomplished when the chime rings and you open your eyes.

Just fyi today's meditation has much less guidance, lets see how it goes!

Day 8 Guided Meditation: 

 Download:  Spiritual Strength (24 min) or http://bit.ly/meditateeveryoneday1