December is a month of festivity. Twinkling white lights wrap around homes and trees, Christmas music is playing everywhere we go, eggnog fills the stores and peppermint chocolate is the flavour of the season.
At first glance, it is the month of glitter, jingles and shopping. It is busy and buzzing with activity.
But look deeper. There is a quieter magic to the month. Can you feel it?
Underneath layers of cookies and clothes and beneath the tons and tons of pleasure, a more lasting fulfillment is waiting to be touched.
December is a time for taking a pause, reflecting, and taking stock of all that we have accomplished and learned in the year that just passed.
It is a time to connect, be real and share our wins and learnings with the people we care about.
And I care about you.
So I’m gonna share two special things with you today.
The FIRST is: one big thing I have learned in 2021, written for you and with you in mind. More importantly, I’m gonna give you two of the most powerful spiritual practices that helped me break out of my “mental shell” and allow flow back into my life.
These practices have helped me:
- Let go of negative looping thoughts and emotions.
- Feel calm and confident even when things seem not to be going well.
- Feel a warm joy and security without the need for validation from the world or others.
- Build an incredibly fulfilling relationship, and much more!
I know they can help you too!
The SECOND: the first edition to “THE PRACTICAL ALCHEMIST”, a twice a month newsletter, written with love to help you think bigger, feel happier, and turn your challenges, pain and struggle into gold.
Let’s get to it
My Lesson: EMOTIONS: YOU CAN’T LIVE WITH THEM? YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THEM.
“I had discovered that if I became proficient at thinking, I could avoid feeling anything, because thinking comes faster than feeling. To feel things, one has to slow down and give feelings time to surface, and I was determined never to let buried feelings catch up with me”.
– The Emerald Table, Dennis William Hauck
There was a time, 12 years ago, when anger took over me. I was having a hard time with my emotions. On the outside, I was calm; inside, I was boiling. Without being aware of it, my body was keeping score, every time I was kind and people responded with cruelty, every time I was jovial and uncalculating and the world took advantage.
Anger rushed in, draining me of love. I felt this maddening need to break things, to “get back at” and settle the score. My anger was threatening to turn into aggression. I knew that if I allowed it to take over, it would destroy everything in my world.
So, I turned away from it. I shut down. I turned to the calm logic of the mind.
I felt ok, under control, able to stay clear, and unaffected by others. Yet, there was this little voice (the continuous irritation and discomfort, a flatness and an emptiness lodged in my muscles and bones, an inability to connect, an avoidance of reaching out to people and a feeling of being a lone soldier in the world, yeah that voice) that told me: “Mike, wake up; something is missing!”
I didn’t know what though. I didn’t know that the anger I turned away from lived inside me, disconnecting me from myself, others, from God and the world. The more that happened, the emptier I felt, and the emptier I felt, the angrier I became.
What made things more difficult was that I did not remember what warmth felt like, nor did I know that I needed to find it.
The energy work I did helped me feel good in my body temporarily. It wasn’t filling the emptiness because that emptiness was emotional disconnection.
I was stuck.
Until I met someone – my partner – who literally refused to deal with my disconnection. Her emotional nature reminded me of what I needed to unlock within me.
My lesson: you can’t have a fulfilling life without embracing your emotions. Instead of suppressing my emotions to find calm, I learned to embrace them, and through spiritual techniques, use them to give me an enriching peace and joy.
A little over a year later, here I am with two of the most powerful spiritual practices that helped me break out of my “mental shell” and allow flow back into my life.
Technique 1: HEARTH AND HOME MEDITATION
Read technique 1. After you are done, set your alarm for 10 minutes and begin.
Find your meditative posture, preferably seated on a chair, spine straight and feet planted firmly on the ground. If that is not comfortable, recline, making sure your head is higher than your feet.
Breathe in and out fully, relaxing the body one body part at a time. Begin with your feet and go all the way to your head (parts: feet, lower legs, upper legs and knees, lower abdomen, lower back, stomach, back, shoulders, hands arms and fingers, neck, face, head, and the body as a whole).
Take your mind’s eye to that body part, breathing into it and feeling that body part expand. And as you exhale, feeling the tension melt away and every cell relax.
One you are relaxed, sense the energy of life giving fire coming from God, the Universe or Source (whichever speaks to you), through the top of your head and into you.
In your mind’s eye, see yourself walking through a blizzard, walking through a wall of snow, grinding your heels into the ground, tilting your body forward as you push against the powerful winds. Cold burns your cheeks and your vision is blurred.
In the distance, you see a small cozy home, your home. A warm orange-red light shines through the window, like a beacon, guiding you.
Focus your attention on that orange-red light, walking towards it with single-minded intent. You arrive. That light was the fire you’ve lit, warming your home and casting its soft light onto you and all around you.
Connect with the warmth, comfort, coziness and support the fire provides. Feel it slowly heating up your skin and flowing through your veins. Feel it fill your heart with a feeling of security and love.
Continue to allow yourself to receive this feeling and let it come into your heart and body. Realize that this warmth is always there for you from God and cannot be taken away by anyone.
Let it flow through you.
Technique 2: ROASTING CINNABAR
“The basic problem is that we identify with our superficial personalities, not our true essences, and we invest all our energy in our egos. In other words, we spend our life force trying to animate Frankenstein monsters that we were never meant to live”
– The Emerald Table, Dennis William Hauck
We run from our emotions because we recognize the chaos and fear that if we allow them in, they would overwhelm us. This is because we have not learned to work with the ego. It tightly holds on to anger, shame and fear, burying it in our bodies and reactions so we don’t see. And as such, we are ruled by our egos.
Roasting Cinnabar is an incredibly powerful alchemist’s meditation practice that seeks to work with the powers beyond our ego and create something new. Instead of the many meditation practices that seek to still the mind, this practice instead works through inspired imagination, and using the power of visualization to heal and empower us.
Sign up now to attend my 1 hr FREE guided meditation – a powerful technique based on the 8000 year old hermetics tradition and activate the power of your true imagination to let go of negative emotions in a healthy way, burn through the limitations of the ego, and release your divine essence.
Sign up, and even if you could not attend, a recorded zoom meditation will be sent to you 24-48 hrs after the guided meditation is held.
Working with your emotions can mean the difference between health and illness, even between – life and death.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE IMPORTANCE OF EMOTIONS
During the 13th century, king Frederick II conducted an experiment intended to discover the language children would grow up to speak if never spoken to. He took newborns and placed them in the care of nurses who were forbidden to speak in their hearing range. Strangely enough, he imposed a second rule: the nurses were not allowed to touch them. Senseless and cruel, yes.
Incidentally, the results were unexpected and groundbreaking. Without touch, the babies died. Modern medicine calls this phenomenon, “failure to thrive.” We humans flourish under the influence of love and we gradually die without it.
Dr. Dean Ornish in his national best seller, “Love and Survival” summarizes study after study on the role emotions play in our health with:
“Anything that promotes feelings of love and intimacy is healing; anything that promotes isolation, separation, loneliness, loss, hostility, anger, cynicism, depression, alienation, and related feelings often leads to suffering, disease, and premature death from all causes”.
Emotions? THEY ARE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH.
We cannot afford to live without embracing AND THEN healing our emotions.
Sign up now and attend my 1 hr FREE guided meditation. Even if you were not able to attend, a recorded zoom meditation will be sent to you 24-48 hrs after the guided meditation is held.
Can’t wait to see you!
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