As you are evolving on the spiritual path, while observing your intents and actions, you let go of your primal fears and less and less identify with your emotions. As a result of the above you become freer, joyful and less needy, if at all.

That’s all good, as long as you do not have any expectations to receive an Oscar from your friends or relatives for being freer and for removing suffering from your life. Your friends and family won’t be happy to see you taking off to a blissful life while leaving them behind with their pain and suffering.

So be prepared! The moment you stop taking responsibility for other peoples’ pain by not allowing them to use you as the one to blame for their suffering, they declare war against you and the main weapon is accusation.

If you refuse to be pulled into their drama, they accuse you of being cold.

If you engage with them without a need while they need you, they say you are manipulative.

If you refuse to be swayed by their emotions, they complain you are hurting them.

And the best is when they claim your spiritual practice is selfish because you are not willing to take part in the collective mind’s drama anymore.

You are probably asking: so what to do when your friends and relatives are blaming you for not taking part in the human drama and for being detached? (On your side, make sure that you do not detach yourself from the world, cutting yourself off life. Non-attachment, the spiritual path, means not identifying with anything around you as well as yourself, and still always remain one with everything around you.)

The first thing is what not to do. Do not try to explain where you are at in seeing reality as it is. This will make them even more furious because they do not always have the capacity to experience where you are at. As a result they will start telling you what they really think about you (even though you never asked for their opinion ;-)). Trust me; their description of you is not going to be flattering, as this is their last chance to convince you to go back to reality where no one takes responsibility for their own emotions or actions.

Secondly, do not expect them to even want to understand your new “you”, as all they really care about is what they are going to lose by letting you be free.

But never stop loving them, and don’t become superior to them. Simply breathe and continue doing what needs to be done in each moment.

It is all about love love love
shakti

Our mind perceives reality by filing segments of information in its filing cabinet. Each folder represents a concept and the subfolders represent our perceptions of each concept. For example, to believe or experience God you need to have a file in your mind that is labeled “God”. The subfolders for the file “God” will be your perceptions of this concept. We cannot grasp a life experiences if we have no folders into which we can file them. For example, you wouldn’t be trustful if you didn’t have a file labeled “trust”; you wouldn’t feel confidence if you didn’t have a folder for it. The size and the amount of folders in each mind differ from person to person as well the way the files are classified and labeled. The amount of files, subfolders and their classifications is what make us different or similar to each other. We have files about sex, religions, friendship, death, moral codes, taboos, fears, goals, love, etc.

Rarely do people choose their own labels and folder selections.

At the time of our birth, each of us gets X number of files made by our parents, teachers and other people in our tribe. This is the filing cabinet that we start our lives with. As time goes by we keep adding new folders but often as sub folders to the files we already received in heritage. Seldom do we create new categories or new definitions or new perceptions. This is why it is so common to find family members carrying similar filing cabinets with the same folder classification systems for generations. In other words, the same way of perceiving reality is passed down through the family tribe.

Inheriting filing cabinet from your tribe with esoteric folders will enable you to have esoteric experiences as part of your reality. If you only have files for physical world experiences labeled “what you see is what it is”, in times when you cross an esoteric experience you either will miss it or dismiss it as you have no folder in which to file it, and you are unable to process it.

If, as a child, you received a huge filing cabinet with a large number of files that may consist of art, magic, spirituality, generosity, oneness, etc, you will probably have a large capacity for filing a large variety of life experiences. If you received a small filing cabinet with fewer files that may only have to do with evolutionary routines like marriage, kids, mortgage and retirement, obviously, you will be limited by the amount of experiences you can file. Thus, your reality is much more limited.

Most people are not aware that it is up to them to change and rearrange their filing cabinets, and by doing so change their reality. Actually, the head office of each tribe (in the form of churchs and religious leaders) will try to make sure that all of their members are classifying and filing their concepts and perceptions in the same order and manner so everyone thinks, feels, and believes the same.

Once a while, a unique child, a rebellious teenager or a brave adult will have the desire, the need, the yearning, or the strong drive to rearrange their own filing cabinet by getting rid of old files such as marriage, money, war, degrees etc. and adding new files such as freedom, arts, traveling, realization etc. The tribe, which always tries to keep its members’ filing cabinets in one custom, will find the individuals who have their own unique filing cabinets threatening. Those who take the freedom to be creative with their filing cabinet arrangements will be filed as rebellions, odd, unusual, unconventional, original, eccentric, etc.

We do not only file people and events in our personal filing cabinet, we also get filed in other people’s files and we are very much aware of it. In fact, being filed by others is one of our main concerns. Often when people who are important to us do not have a file that we can be filed into, this forces us to change who we are so we can fit under one of their existing folders.

Family members’ folders are usually all classified and titled in the same way as they pass the filing system from one to other. If you need to be filed in your family’s folders as who you see yourself to be, for example as a gay, as an artist, as a spiritual, as a traveler, as rebel, as a nonconformist, etc. and they have no files for these categories they will either dismiss your existence or will force you to change your definition to be classified into what they already have in their filing cabinet: straight versus gay, intellectual versus artist, conformist versus nonconformist, religious versus non-religious.

On the path of spirituality we may go through process that will consist of:

• Questioning all the files we received in heritage as well the ones we created
• Observing the limitations of a filing cabinet (i.e., the mind) in its ability to hold onto reality as it is.
• Starting to experience our moments outside of our filing system (i.e., oneness)

Namaste
shakti mhi

Large Filing Cabinets

If you’d like to comment on or discuss this posting, we’ve created a forum topic for that purpose.

Here’s another video from shakti’s Spiritual Dialogue addressing “Relating to the right thought in the right moment.”

If you’d like to discuss this, please use the forum topic dedicated to this video.

Here’s another video from shakti’s Spiritual Dialogue addressing “beliefs and Faith.”

If you’d like to discuss this, please use the forum topic dedicated to this video.

Here’s another video from shakti’s Spiritual Dialogue addressing “mind perception.”

If you’d like to discuss this, please use the forum topic dedicated to this video.

Here’s another video from shakti’s Spiritual Dialogue addressing “Intuition.”

If you’d like to discuss this, please use the forum topic dedicated to this video.

Here’s another video from shakti’s Spiritual Dialogue addressing the issue of “Moving beyond the senses.”

If you’d like to discuss this, please use the forum topic dedicated to this video.

The 10 Commandments of Finding the Right Yoga Teacher Training

1 ) Find a Spiritual Teacher

Avoid taking training from teachers that emphasize their teaching on the physical aspects of yoga only. It is important to have a teacher who can give you a full understanding of the spiritual (as opposed to religious) aspect of yoga. The teacher should not be a scholar who knows his/her information from reading books and taking workshops. The teacher’s teaching must arise from direct experience. Such a teacher will be able to deal with all of the spiritual concerns that the student may have with no hesitation.

2 ) Make Sure to Experience Direct Transmission

Do not settle for teacher training run by novice teachers who show the teachings of their master from a DVD. Do not settle for the said “master” to only occasionally appear in the course. Every student in the course needs to have direct contact and experience with the spiritual teacher, as the transmission of the knowledge and wisdom often happens on the energy level.

3 ) Bigger is Not Better

Often you see teacher training with 60 to 200 students in a course.

In an intense 200h course, as a result of the intense practice, students often go through physical, mental, emotional and spiritual crisis and may face multiple challenges. As a result of being in a large impersonal course, the student and their needs get lost in the crowd.

4 ) Avoid Religions, Cults and Worship

Avoid trainings with even a hint of worshipping the spiritual teacher. Yoga practice is a process to transform the novice to become a free master and not to become a sheep, following without knowing.

5 ) Practical Teaching

Make sure there is plenty of actual hands-on teaching experience for you during the course so you don’t end up with theoretical knowledge but are unprepared to actually teach. Knowing the asanas (yoga postures) inside and out won’t make you know how to teach them. Yoga teacher training is not a yoga boot camp of doing the asanas all day. You need to learn communication, the psychology of the mind, body language, how to correct by using hands-on techniques, and how to give mental and energetic support to your students in the future.

6 ) Yoga is Not Gymnastics

Remember that 90% of your students out there are beginners! Most of the people in the West are dealing with physical limitations and health conditions. Avoid vigorous acrobatic styles of yoga. Choose a style of yoga that can walk beginners safely into the practice. Otherwise you will join the endless number of yoga instructors who make the students feel (after their first class) that they are not flexible enough to practice yoga.

7 ) Restrictive Yoga Facilities

Avoid styles that constrict you and your students to a specific teaching facility environment (hot rooms or facilities with too many yoga gadgets). The essence of yoga practice is to be able to conduct it in any place and any time. Your students should be able to take the teaching you convey and practice on their own anywhere without dependency on a facility.

8 ) New-Age Yoga

Be careful of flakiness and new-age nonsense.

Knowledge of energy and the chakras is powerful, but there is much more to the yoga practice than just the chakras.

9 ) Connection With the Teacher After Course is Done

Make sure that the teacher will be available to you to answer questions after the course has ended and to guide you in your first steps of your teaching if needed. You should be able to find spiritual support from your teacher outside the course as your practice must continue after your certification.

10 ) The Power of Transformation

Let your heart, not only your mind and wallet, be involved in the search for the right teacher and teaching. Avoid being influenced by trends and burgeons. The teacher is the vehicle for the teaching that may resonate in you forever.

True teachers will expand your capacity to receive wisdom that arises from beyond your programmed mind.

Namaste,
shakti mhi

Examining Self Perception

Inner Silence

To say hot yoga is Yoga, is like saying that electric shock therapy calms the mind. Yes, it calms the mind, but by leaving the owner of the mind as a cooked vegetable.

The only union one can find in the non-yoga “hot-calisthenics”, is the union between a false teaching and novice student who doesn’t know better.

The blind leading the blind!

* The translation of the Sanskrit word yoga is “union.” *

~ shakti

To comment on or discuss this post, we’ve created a forum topic for that purpose.