To be in alignment with your heart, remember the first and very simple practice of breathing into your heart center, one breath at a time, until you feel a stirring, a tingling, a clear response to your slow and gentle urging. Being fully in alignment with your heart center is an inside job, only you can do it and only you can know when you are there. Your body and your energetic centers, your chakras, will let you know when you are there. Keep that alignment alive and well, every day of your life. It will change you like nothing else!
Every day is an opportunity to make new decisions, either slowly and deliberately, with planning and preparation, or abruptly, with neither forethought nor outcome in mind. No matter your preferred method, trust that when you are in alignment with your heart there will only be positive results from your decisions. Trusting your heart is the first big step of change.
Abundance surrounds you no matter the state you are in. It exists at all times; you just have to notice. As you begin the day, or end the day, give thanks for all the gifts you have been given, seen and unseen. You may notice many gifts and you may not notice others that come to you all the time. It doesn’t matter if you do or not. The main point we are making is that as soon as you turn your attention toward the greater Universe that grants all wishes, it will respond. It will grant what you ask for. Place your trust in it and ask from that fully heart-centered place you have been honing. Keep your intentions alive by giving thanks for them before they even arrive, and always remain open and receptive no matter what your thinking mind says. Doubt and fear and worry are normal brain activities, but they are not activities of the loving heart, so give them short shrift and focus instead on what you are learning, that the true center of your being is your heart center.
As things continually ramp up in the world outside of you, reject the notion that you have to get upset too. Let your newfound heart-centered practice show you a different way, a way that is accepting and receptive to the ways of the world, just as you are learning to be accepting of and receptive to the unfolding of your own life. For it is in the receptiveness and the acceptance of life’s ups and downs that you are learning how to navigate, both within and without, to the best of your heart’s intent, and to the best of your honest self as well. The honest, heart-centered self is the self that knows that all things that come to pass must come to pass and that you will survive them all, for you are a magnificent being on a magnificent journey, today and every day.
We arrive at the place of wisdom when we stop active thinking and open to receive inner knowing. We innately know when we are in sympathy with our own High Self. We are in sympathy when both our conscious presence and our High Self are each experiencing the same feeling at the same time. Wisdom springs from this union, this oneness.
When we think, we invariably separate from this state of oneness. Thinking requires contrasts, as it reasons, weighs and compares. In oneness we are in pure light, absent the shadows generated by thinking. In thinking, we actively turn our light toward, and interact with, the created objects of our thoughts. As valuable as thinking is, it separates us from our oneness of being.
This interaction of light and separate objects does produce knowledge of the workings of the physical world, which often condenses into opinions and beliefs, but the best of this knowledge is always shy of the wisdom born of the pure light of absolute oneness. Without wisdom, all knowledge is limited by some shadow of error.
The current renaissance in psychedelic journeying is born of the spiritual impulse to bypass the errors and constraints of the thinking left brain to obtain wisdom through the right-brained experiences of greater oneness.
This method of bypassing the filtering power of the left brain involves the ingestion of synthetic drugs or plant medicines that deliver their own intents in steering the brain into latent but frequently unused neural pathways.
If the insights gained in these journeys are recapitulated and integrated into daily consciousness one might incorporate new wisdom in one’s perception of life, resulting in new behaviors. This is called neuroplasticity, where the neurons of new experience are paired with the neurons of ordinary life, forming new neural pathways. As Joe Dispenza frequently points out, “neurons that fire together, wire together.”
However, let not the pervasiveness of psychedelic use create the illusion that psychedelics are legal. Though many clinical trials are exploring the clinical value of psychedelics—as was the case in the 1970s when Richard Nixon, fed up with the Vietnam War protests of the love generation, shut down all clinical trials and made all psychedelics illegal— they are still mostly illegal in today’s world.
One potential side effect of psychedelic journeying is a kind of fascination with the heightened awareness experienced through the substances ingested, which beckons repeat and novel experiences, but which fails to integrate those experiences into new neural pathways, or to change default habits.
Other approaches to the transpersonal states of wisdom involve the use of the breath. In fact, after the 1970s shutdown of psychedelic trials, researcher Stan Grof, together with his wife Christina, developed Holotropic Breathwork to achieve the same experiential outcomes he had accessed with psychedelics.
I will offer an insinuation of a practice with breathwork that I personally use to actualize this intent of greater union. I use the word insinuation rather than structured practice, for to make it an official thing robs it of its spontaneous wisdom. If something resonates for you, try it, but allow your own wisdom to guide you in how you practice it.
I call this practice, Holy Union. I must confess that I am very much a failed Christian, but I have always appreciated the insinuation of a union with the Divine, as suggested by the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion.
Both Christian Communion and Jewish Sabbath utilize the substances of bread and wine to sanctify spiritual union. In Holy Union Breathwork, one inhales and holds the spirit of air, or the Holy Spirit of Wisdom.
Every time we breathe in air, we are communing with the spirit dimension, whose air physically enters and nourishes the body and then exits with its toxins. If we choose to hold our breath after an inhalation, we enter a state of prolonged union of the greater oneness of body and spirit.
Certain Pranayama breathing practices, such as Kumbhaka, incorporate holding the breath, as do breathing practices established by Wim Hof. It matters little how long one might hold one’s breath. One should always pay attention to the body and only hold the breath for as long as is comfortable. What is important is the intent to be in a state of oneness, however brief that might be.
Set the intent for Holy Union with the High Self before the inhalation. Breathe in a comfortable level of air. Hold the breath according to the limits suggested by a method you have chosen, or simply for as long as you feel comfortable. Do not struggle! That will only lessen the intention. The intent is deeply relaxed, loving union. After the exhalation one might choose to hold the breath briefly again, before taking another inhalation of Spirit.
Sometimes, I might choose a mantra, a word that has spiritually presented itself to me, and quietly say that word over and over again while I hold the breath. Words are power objects, especially if they have been previously paired with, or become wired with, transcendent experience.
The words relax, oneness, love, peace, if imbued with spiritual mana, will immediately calm the solidity of the physical body to join the higher vibration of the High Self.
At other times, I might completely silence the mind and put full attention to the physical experience of vibration, as body and mind blend into a oneness of sheer energy.
Sometimes, I have entered the Holy Union with the intention of total adjustment or healing from a physical condition I have felt imprisoned by.
Often, upon entering this state of vibratory oneness, I discover a total realignment to health from my previous frozen state of energy, which is then sustained throughout the day.
Again, I could not prescribe for anyone how they might structure their own spiritual breathwork practice. These are just suggestions for beginning a process of self-exploration.
We all, universally, breathe. I simply offer the possibility of an awareness with breath that offers everyone the opportunity to partake in being in the oneness of wisdom.
