If you’ve ever watched a film like the Godfather – or any other mafia-like film for that matter – you’ll have noted how easy it seems for the villains to move from shooting innocent people in the street one moment, to ducking into church for a Sunday service or quick confession the next.
We watch this, part amused, part horrified, legs up on a footrest, certain we would never be capable of such things.
And yet…
How often do you go from, say, meditation or Reiki practice, to a spiritual vacuum at work?
How often do you go from being fully aware of Spirit, of your connectedness to something greater, to being sucked right back into the ‘waking dream’ of everyday life? That place where you have no self-awareness, where you are so fully identified with your thoughts and feelings that you’ll immediately rush off wherever they push you.
So the problem of secluding spirituality to certain well-delineated times throughout the day and week is actually a common one.
For some, it is Sunday church. For others, thirty minutes a day on the meditation mat. For others still, a stroll through the forest once a week.
Whatever it is, the pattern is remarkably similar: moments of spiritual lucidity followed by long periods of spiritual darkness, periods where we live but are not fully alive.
So the time has come to change the paradigm. The time has come to eliminate the spiritual / ‘rest of life’ divide.
Because today we are ready for a much higher form of spirituality, a form that is integrated into everything we do.
Today we are ready to be spiritual at work, to be spiritual when we get up from the meditation mat, to be spiritual when we’re eating our dinner, playing ball or going about our household chores.
That is ‘integrated spirituality’.
That is the next step.
Because if our spiritual practice connects us to a deep and invigorating place of our being, why settle for living this deep connection only twenty, thirty, sixty minutes (whatever the number is) a day?
So let’s stop waiting for the weekend to live our life.
Let’s stop waiting for the meditation retreat to live our spirituality.
Time is ticking.
Your death is drawing nearer.
The moment has come!
Live it fully.
Decide that there is no time other than the present, so if that’s all you’ve got then there is no point deferring happiness.
No, you need to get ‘greedy’.
You need to demand that every moment can be a great one.
You need to have the discipline to bring a heightened level of self-awareness to every moment.
Don’t sleep through life.
Don’t put off connecting with Spirit.
Rather, make a vow that from today onwards you’ll treat each moment as a gift, a gift of equal value, a gift you are no longer going to waste waiting for ‘something better’, for a time when you can finally ‘get spiritual’.
Post Script
If you want an easy way to learn to connect more fully to the Spirit inside you, to feel more energy, to feel alive throughout the day (even amidst a hectic lifestyle), then Reiki is a perfect tool to get your there.
But everything, in essence, will actually start with a change in mindset: a decision to treat each moment the same, no matter what you are doing. A decision to find ‘God’ (the Universe, Allah – call It what you will) in everything you do.
So ask yourself if that is what you want, and if it is, make it happen.
My novel Full Speed is a story about having the courage to live your dreams when friends, family, society at large tell you to play it small, tell you that you’re taking too great a risk, tell you that you’ve got to be sensible!
It’s a book for those who are ready to be guided by their inner Spirit, who are sick of playing it safe.
It is full of ideas, lively characters and deep feeling.
Read it and you’ll definitely find yourself thinking about the characters, their experiences and, most importantly, your life.
For those of you who are interested in getting a copy, you can purchase one at a course, practice night or by visiting the novel’s website. Alternatively, you can get a digital copy by visitingAmazon’s Kindle shop (I’ve got it at a super discount!).
Remember, you don’t need a Kindle device to read the digital version. Just download the Kindle app. onto your smart phone, tablet or computer and you can be reading right away!
Have you ever sat down to meditate, told yourself that this time you’re really going to quieten your mind, only to find out that it has other ideas?
It’s like you sit down and say, “I’m going to meditate,” and your mind says, “Is that so?”.
At such times, it can feel like whatever you do, you just can’t get rid of your thoughts.
This typically leads to frustration – frustration that then makes it even harder to quieten the mind!
So what you do if you find yourself in one of these mental spins?
Well, to begin with, understand that your mind is actually a thought-making machine – one that will seldom (if ever) wish to be silent!
So don’t get hung up on the need to experience lengthy inner silence when you meditate, because it’s unlikely to happen.
What’s more – and this is big! – your mind was never created to make you happy, rather to mastermind your survival.
So if you find your head full of plots and schemes and strategies when you next try to ‘bliss out’ on meditation, then don’t go beating yourself up, because your mind will simply be doing its job.
And it’s not even like you can effort your way to success either.
Because if it is true that what you resist persists, then trying to use willpower to battle and resist your thoughts will only make things worse. Indeed, that will be a sure-fire way to ensure they continue to smash about in your mind.
So what we need is a different approach. We need to find a way to make peace with our thoughts.
Tibetan Wisdom:
I was pondering this problem years ago up in northern India when I learned of a Tibetan saying: “Trying to meditate without thoughts is like trying to have meat without bones.”
This got me thinking, and it made me wonder whether thoughts really were the problem after all. For so long, thoughts had been the bogeyman of my meditation, but was I misreading the situation?
Because what if thoughts were never the problem?
What if the problem was that I either a) sought to oppose my thoughts or b) allowed them to suck me off into daydream?
Pondering such issues made me think about what it must be like to be an enlightened person.
I mean, how do enlightened people deal with their thoughts?
It also got me wondering whether a meditation master really could meditate all the time, and it was here that an idea came to me.
The idea popped into my head as I imagined someone famous like the Dalai Lama entering a crowded restaurant with his retinue of followers. I pictured him strolling in. I imagined all of the restaurant’s diners lifting their heads from their meals to stare at him. I heard their expressions of surprise as he moved past them.
“Oh, is that the Dalai Lama?” “Look, it’s the Dalai Lama!” “I can’t believe it, it’s the Dalai Lama!”
All around, there would be a buzz of excitement as he made his way through the restaurant – a buzz of excitement that would typically make the normal person self-conscious.
But what of the Dalai Lama? Because wouldn’t a spiritual master like him remain unaffected by the hubbub around him?
In fact, better than just being unaffected, wouldn’t he even be able to stay in a deep meditative state as he made his way through the restaurant?
But if this is true to life, how would he do it?
How could he stay in meditative state with so much noise all around him?
Having thought about this, my answer was that he obviously wouldn’t buy into chatter and noise. He would treat them as you would the sound of birds twittering in the trees or a lawnmower going off in your neighbour’s front yard. Noises to be sure, but not noises you need to pay any particular attention.
Of course, you might say this all sounds rather difficult. But when you think about it, most of us have listened to music and remained in a meditative state.
And music is a kind of noise, right?
So sound or noise don’t necessarily take us out of meditation. What takes us out of it is our reaction to it.
This got me thinking further, and I started to wonder what it would be like to treat our thoughts as if they were no different to the sounds all around us.
Because, in a sense, the only difference is the distance they are away from us.
In one instance, the noises are outside of us. In the other, the ‘noises’ (thoughts) are inside our head. But fundamentally, it’s all just ‘noise’.
So if the thoughts inside our head are no different from the noises outside of it, how should we treat them?
Simple.
We observe them and leave it at that. We don’t try to manipulate or change them. We don’t rage against them. We just think, “Oh, there’s a thought. Interesting.” And that’s it.
This makes me think of another approach that some meditation teachers recommend: seeing the thoughts and images in our mind like you would images and sounds coming from a movie screen.
In this scenario, characters on the screen might be saying terrible things to each other; they might be shouting and screaming and erupting with all sorts of turbulent emotions but, as a spectator, you never buy in. Nope, when you watch a film, you just sit back and enjoy the show.
Of course, the challenge of all this – as you know – is to observe your thoughts without getting sucked into their ‘story’, without getting sucked into the daydream that results when you get tangled up in them.
You know what it’s like: you’re meditating, you’re aware of everything around you – of your breathing, of the rise and fall of your stomach, of the squishiness of the cushion beneath you – and then, next thing, you jolt upright with a start and realise you’ve just spent who-knows-how-long lost in reverie.
Now, treating your thoughts like external sounds is a big help for not getting sucked into them, but another interesting approach is to use your thoughts to help anchor you in meditation.
In this approach, your thoughts are like a mantra – but a mantra that has no fixed form or shape.
This form of meditation – what I call “Thinking Meditation” – has many layers to it, but to get going all you need to do is think thoughts non-stop and observe the thoughts you’re thinking.
To help train people to do this, I sometimes get them to force themselves to think for one minute straight.
The idea is that for this minute they can’t have any breaks in their thoughts.
Weird, I know. But that’s the technique.
In the exercise it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, they just need to keep thinking!
In other words, the thoughts could be as simple as “I’m thinking about doing this meditation and can’t really think of anything decent to say, but I’ve got to keep forcing thoughts out so I can keep thinking.”
The key to the process is to observe the thoughts as you think them and, if you do this, you’ll discover something interesting: thoughts help anchor you in the present moment and generate a meditative state within the body.
What’s more, if you have already been practicing a modality that works with energy and have a flow of energy in your body, then focusing on your thoughts as you force them out will actually strengthen the energy flow in your body.
What this shows is that thoughts are definitely not the problem when we meditate, because in this instance, the thoughts we are thinking actually help us to meditate! So the problem, as we said before, is simply the way we react to our thoughts.
So if you want to experiment, try doing one of the two things we discussed in this article:
1. Practice treating your thoughts as if they were the same as the sounds outside your body
2. Force yourself to keep an uninterrupted flow of thoughts tumbling into your mind, being sure to observe your thoughts the entire time.
What’s really neat about the second technique is that you can do it even when your mind is ridiculously busy.
Heck, you can do it when you’re busy!
You can do it as you cook, as you clean, as you wait for a bus, as you go for a jog – whatever.
Since you typically have no shortage of thoughts, all you need to do is give them an extra nudge so they continue to flow uninterrupted, and then observe them as they tumble into your mind.
Do this, and your ability to meditate ‘on the go’ will likely take on a whole new complexion.
(Article copyright 2016, Jeremy O’Carroll)
Postscript
If you’d like to go deeper into the intricacies and subtleties of these meditations, consider coming along to one of my CBM meditation courses.
The C stands for ‘core’, and in the section of the course devoted to it, you will learn to connect with your energetic core, i.e. your chakras and Sushumna (an energy channel that goes from your base chakra up to your crown chakra).
The B stands for ‘body’, and in the section focusing on it, you will learn to connect to your energy body, i.e. your energy field and aura.
The M stands for ‘mind’ and, among other things, the course goes deeply into the meditations we have discussed in this article.
I will be holding my only CBM Meditation course for the year on 29th-30th April (2017), and you can either enrol by clicking here or find out more by visiting the CBM meditation website.
If you have any questions, just reply to this email or call me on 1300 853 356 or 0417 328 457. I’d love to tell you more.
(Copyright, Jeremy O’Carroll 2017)
Jeremy O’Carroll is the Director of the Om Reiki and Melbourne Pellowah Centres. He is also the author of hundreds of Reiki articles and the novel Full Speed.
You can sign up for his weekly Reiki newsletter and receive a free copy of his ebook ‘Understanding the Seven Chakras’ by clicking here.
To become a successful professional healer requires much more than just healing skill and business knowledge. You also need to master certain habits and inner qualities.
Today’s blog discusses 7 key lessons I have learned throughout my nine plus years working as a full-time Reiki professional. Ultimately, they are lessons that will help you achieve success not just in the Reiki arena, but in almost any endeavor you choose to pursue.
The 7 key principles:
1. Find a profession that makes your heart sing.
Sometimes people who identify strongly with their spirituality may feel that their life only has meaning if they pursue solely spiritual activities (or a spiritual career). However, the key is actually to do something that makes your heart sing – no matter whether it is traditionally deemed ‘spiritual’ or not. There is nothing wrong with being a spiritual person who is a lawyer, accountant, whatever – so long as that is what you love and enjoy.
2. Believe in Yourself and Believe That Anything Is Possible.
Without self-belief in your abilities, you will be unlikely to find success.
I like to use the philosophy, “If someone else has done it, I can do it”. I don’t need to wait for other people to tell me I can do it. Because if do, I’ll often never get started. No, if we’re talking about a field I’m already pursuing, then I believe that if I have the passion and put in the effort, I can always achieve what others have.
Where things get even more interesting, of course, is in areas where no one has achieved something. Because often what we believe is impossible, is simply a false limitation we place on ourselves and others.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is the 4-minute mile. For a long time, everyone believed breaking it was impossible. On May 6th, 1954, however, Roger Bannister ran the distance in 3:59.4.
This was an incredible achievement for the time and has rightly gone down in legend but, what’s crazy is that in the years after Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, people all over the world started breaking it!
This demonstrates that it is often simply limiting beliefs that are holding us back.
So if you want to achieve the extraordinary, the trick is to be capable of believing not only that if someone else can do something, you can, but also that it is possible to do something even if no one else has yet managed to do it.
3. Don’t Wait for the Perfect Time (Just Do It!)
The fact is, there is never going to be a perfect time to get going. So quit waiting until you’re ‘confident’ enough. Quit waiting until you’re ‘expert’ enough. Instead, get going the moment you know you have something of value to share and let your confidence and expertise grow with experience.
There is a saying I like: “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”
To be successful you often simply need to take a leap of faith in yourself. You need to jump in and let things fall into place as you move forwards!
4. Self-Practice Is Key.
Success as a professional Reiki healer and teacher depends a lot on your personal energy, because that – to a large extent – is what will attract your clients and students.
Imagine yourself to be like a fisherman where your net is the energy you send out into the universe. The higher your energy, the bigger your net. The bigger your net, the more success you will have.
That’s why self-practice is critical. It is the magic ingredient for high energy.
Consistent self-practice also gives you a deep feeling of integrity, because you are practicing what you preach. This inner alignment between words and action will be felt by potential ‘clients’ and will make you a much more attractive healer/teacher.
To ensure you find time for self-practice, I recommend starting the day with some meditation and self-Reiki. This will set the tone of your day and ensure the energy you send out into the universe is the high-vibrational type it deserves!
5. ENJOY what you do.
If you don’t enjoy what you do (e.g. Reiki), then potential clients will feel it. As a result, it’s unlikely they will be attracted to you.
Of course, it’s not a problem if you don’t enjoy giving Reiki. All that means is that a career in Reiki may not be for you. But if you love what you do (e.g. being a Reiki practitioner) then others will feel and sense your passion and want to share it!
6. Never stop growing.
I like the phrase, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying”.
From my experience, a critical factor for your success is to continuously keep your energetic vibration high. To do this, you will want to pay attention to two things:
What things are not adding ‘real’ value to your life anymore.
What things you can do to brings value, abundance, and joy into your life.
This seems rather simplistic, I admit, but reflecting on these things is nevertheless useful. Time is a precious commodity, and one main reason we don’t fulfil our goals and dreams is simply because we squander it doing things that don’t add any real value to our life.
People often tell me they struggle to find time to do things like Reiki practice; but in almost all cases the problem isn’t a lack of time, rather the way they allocate their time.
For instance, perhaps instead of watching TV or slurping up the latest Facebook gossip for an hour before bed, you could swap that time for some spiritual reading and a short meditation.
Swapping your habits and routines to incorporate more ‘personal growth activities’ (such as reading, meditating, spending time in nature, etc.), will almost certainly help you to live more consciously and, as a result, take you closer to your most heartfelt goals.
7. Take care of your inner state.
To attract positive experiences, you must take care of your inner state. This means paying attention to your body’s needs and, sometimes, even saying no to others and putting yourself first.
For many healers this can be difficult, for we tend to be a giving bunch; but until you are able to fulfil your own needs, you will typically struggle to help fulfil anyone else’s.
This is particularly important as a Reiki professional because energy doesn’t lie. If you’re stressed, overworked or just feeling drained, then not only will you be unlikely to perform at your best, but other people (such as your clients) will be able to sense this lack of inner balance and won’t feel as relaxed in your presence.
So be sure to keep yourself well and healthy, both mentally and physically, and watch as your Reiki career grows from strength to strength.
Article by Jeremy O’Carroll (with Madeline Lynch).
Jeremy O’Carroll is the founder of the Om Reiki Centre and author of hundreds of Reiki articles.
Madeline Lynch is a level 2 Reiki practitioner with over 12 years of Reiki experience and a passion for holistic health and wellbeing.
(If you liked this blog, please let your friends know about it. If you would like to find out more about Om Reiki courses, please visit the Om Reiki Centre courses homepage.)
Jeremy O’Carroll is the Director of the 
Om Reiki Centre 