Remembering the Light Within: A Course in Soul-Centered Living by Mary R Hulnick and H Ronald Hulnick

What does Awakening mean? It begins with the awareness that we simultaneously reside in two worlds.

Awakening into the Awareness of who you truly are and living your life from within that Awakened state  is the essence of Soul-Centered living.

Awakening is a very active process through which step-by-step you remove or dissolve the barriers from your consciousness that are all that prevent you from knowing your Soul's nature. 

Our journey into the Spiritual context begins by distinguishing between what we refer to as the Goal Line and the Soul Line of life.

Intention is perhaps best understood as determination to act in a certain way or to produce a specific outcome.  It can also be thought of as your resolve.

Your current life is a manifestation of your cumulative intention whether you think you have any or not!

Only through the mechanisms of the ego, which operate on the mental and emotional levels, can patterns be stored within your consciousness so that you have the opportunity to heal them.

It's your internal reality that draws you to the outer experiences of your life. 

You construct your perceptual filter and perpetuate your personal mythology through internalizing beliefs based upon your family patterns, cultural values, environmental influences, and religious training…. These often result in limiting beliefs, misinterpretations of reality, erroneous conclusions, and misidentification with a story of self-victimization, self-sabotage, and unworthiness.

The Beauty of Discomfort: How What We Avoid Is What We Need by Amanda Lang

If you cannot tolerate discomfort, you cannot get better at things that are difficult. You cannot achieve your won goals. You cannot grow.

Gifted children, who experience success early, often exhibit less confidence, possibly because they’re aware that they didn’t exert much effort to achieve results.  What they haven’t learned is how to try hard at things, fail, then pick themselves up and try again – essential skills not just in school but in life. In other words, they are less likely to be comfortable with discomfort, which may help explain why prodigies rarely go on to become creative geniuses. 

The prodigy, long accustomed to approval and gold stars, must get comfortable with discomfort: uncertainty, wrong turns, the possibility of failure, and the certainty of the occasional disappointment.

People spend 47% of their time thinking about something other than the present moment.

If you interpret your discomfort as threatening – or obsess about it instead of focusing on your goal – you will suddenly be living in a world of pain.

Our frame of mind dramatically influences how we respond to our circumstances.

Reframing discomfort can be as simple as casting it in the best possible light.

The right degree of stress will build resilience.

Gratitude and forgiveness are...the twin pillars of happiness.

Happiness... Is an individual choice. We choose to cultivate an attitude that promotes it, or we don't.

"What's next?" is a question that inevitably follows change -- and for most of us, it's one of the scariest questions of all. We shrink from the unknown and the ambiguous. We prefer the certain, the well-trodden, the understood.

Anxiety really is the enemy of progress and basically shuts the gate on learning. The problem isn't discomfort with challenge and change, but how we respond to and manage -- or don't manage it. If the response is to freak out, discomfort becomes a real obstacle to growth and development.

How do we resist the gravitational pull of comfort? One way is simply to think about comfort as a trap, not a cushion -- as something that may harm you in the long run.

Change hasn't been accomplished... until you prove that you can maintain it.

Making the unconscious conscious isn't easy because we are fearful of uncertainty -- our brains dislike ambiguity intensely -- we cling to the status quo.... The secret is to be aware of that weakness, observe where it affects us, and then stop. 

Your Body Speaks Your Mind: Decoding the Emotional, Psychological, and Spiritual Messages That Underlie Illness by Deb Shapiro

 “Re-mission”, to re-find or become reconnected with your mission or purpose.  In other words, disease can diminish when you reconnect with a deeper meaning or purpose in your life.  Remission has another, lesser-known meaning, which is forgiveness.

Healing comes when you make the choice to work with your vulnerabilities, to open to the challenge of change.  It is recognizing that the illness itself is the way the body is dealing with underlying imbalances or traumatized energies, and it is the resolution of those imbalances.

Your body is like a walking autobiography.

Trauma does not necessarily equal illness, but unexpressed fears and anxieties surrounding trauma can lead to physical problems.  Obviously, you cannot avoid crisis.  What you can do is become more conscious of your feelings, acknowledging and releasing them as they arise or as soon as possible afterward, rather than repressing or denying them.

Your body is actually a source of great wisdom.  By listening and paying attention to it you have a chance to contribute to your own health, to participate with your body in coming back to a state of wholeness and balance.  So, rather than blaming yourself by saying “why did I choose to have this illness?” you can ask, “how am I choosing to grow with this illness?”  You can use whatever difficulties you have in order to learn and grown, to release old patterns of negativity, to deepen compassion, forgiveness, and insight.

Your state of health shows how you have been thinking:  the seeds take root and begin to influence and shape the cell structures of your physical body.

Exploring your own hidden agenda is not easy for the simple reason that it is hidden. It means being very honest about how you feel being ill and the way it is affecting your life.

A symptom is never an isolated event.

You will probably notice how much you avoid yourself, particularly your weak areas, or how often you want to change the subject, start fidgeting, remember something that needs to be done, or suddenly get very tired; how easily you fill your days with things to do so there are no empty spaces.

[Symptoms] are like messengers from the unconscious. 

Healing comes when you make the choice to work with your vulnerabilities, to open to the challenge of change.  It is recognizing that the illness itself is the way they body is dealing with underlying imbalances or traumatized energies, and it is the resolution of those imbalances.

The limbic system is the emotional center of the brain.  The limbic system includes the hypothalamus, a small gland that transforms emotions into physical responses.  It also controls appetite, blood-sugar levels, body temperature, and the automatic functioning of the heart, lungs and digestive and circulatory systems.  It is like a pharmacy, releasing the neuropeptides necessary to maintain a balanced system.

In the limbic system sits the amygdala, a brain structure that is connected to fear and pleasure, and the pineal gland, which monitors the hormone system and releases powerful endorphins that not only act as painkillers but also as anti-depressants.  This indicates the intimate relationship between the mind, the endocrine systems, and the nervous system – the connection between how you feel and how you behave, between your emotions and your physical state.

You are in charge of your own attitudes and feelings, of the way you treat yourself and your world, but you cannot determine the outcome of every circumstance.  You do not create your own reality so much as you are responsible to your reality.  You cannot direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails.  You are responsible for developing peace of mind, but you may still need to have chemotherapy.  The resolution and healing of your inner being is within your control, and this may also bring a cure to the physical body.  But if it does not, it is vital to remember that you are not guilty and you are not a failure.

The symptom is like a doorway into yourself.

Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry by Christine Wilcox

You may have heard that everything is a toxin in the right dose, but that's not quite true.  A large enough dose can make something toxic, but if it takes a lot to kill you, then a substance isn't a toxin.

Platypuses are really awfully, terribly venomous.  From what I've heard, being stung by a platypus is a life-changing experience, as any deeply traumatic event shapes who you are.  Their venom causes excruciating pain for several hours, even days.

King cobras can deliver up to 7 milliliters of venom with every bite -- enough to kill twenty people!

There is a long history of using venomous animals for violence -- so much that in several ancient cultures, specific punishments are detailed for those who commit such crimes.

The Vish Kanya -- legendary young women assassins in India during the Mauryan Empire (321-185 B.C.) who were said to be bitten by snakes from birth until their very blood and saliva were so toxic with venom that they could kill with a kiss.

In Egypt, death by snakebite was thought to give a person spiritual immortality. In Alexandria, snakebite was generally considered a humane method of execution.

Bees and their relatives kill more people every year in the United States than snakes, scorpions, and spiders combined -- ten times as many, in fact.

In the Arctic, mosquito populations can be so dense that caribou herds will alter their migration course just to avoid them.  The bloodsuckers have been known to drain 300 milliliters of blood -- almost a soda can's worth -- from every single caribou in a herd daily.

The Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) is the largest living lizard in the world.  The biggest one on record measured more than ten feet long and weighed more than 360 pounds.  They're intimidating beasts known to feed on anything they want, from pigs to water buffalo (which can stand more than six feet at the shoulder and weigh more than one thousand pounds).

Out of the eight thousand venomous snakebites that occur annually in the United States --most of which are attributed to rattlesnakes -- fewer than a dozen are fatal.

Necrosis is defined as the death of living tissue, but the clinical definition fails to encapsulate just how disgusting and horrible tissue death is.  Necrotic venoms leave large areas of skin and even entire limbs rotten and gangrenous, oozing blood and pus and stinking of decay. Healthy, pink tissue becomes black in death, swelling from fluid from liquefied flesh, until it falls from the bone in putrid, zombified chunks.

The worst necrotic venoms don't just tear through cells on their own: they enlist our own immune system to continue the death and destruction.

Our immune cells are trained to fight to the death -- which, in the case of bacterial or viral infection, is a great thing.  But in the case of snake venom, there's no one to kill.

In America, a sly smile and a few Benjamins might buy you an eight ball of cocaine, but in Delhi, a similar amount could get you a taste of cobra venom.

Traditional Indian medicine, referred to as Ayurveda, frequently employed snake venoms as therapeutics, delivering them on the tip of a needle (a technique called suchikavoron) or after a detoxification process (shodhono).

There are several documented cases where venoms appear to have treated what doctors failed to.  One of the most incredible stories I have ever heard is that of Ellie Lobel, a woman who was dying of Lyme disease until she was viciously attacked by a swarm of Africanized bees.

Melittin -- the most abundant component of bee venoms -- is a potent antibiotic.  In high doses, it tears holes in bacterial cells, killing them. 

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J Levitin

Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage.  If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of activations can cause competition among different nodes, leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get through to consciousness.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.  That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to any one time…. In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.  With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time.

The Sumerian city of Uruk (~5000 BCE) was one of the world's earliest large cities.  Its active commercial trade created an unprecedented volume of business transactions, and Sumerian merchants required an accounting system for keeping track of the day's inventory and receipts; this was the birth of writing. 

Neuroscientists are increasingly appreciating that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing state; rather, it is a continuum of different states.

When we have something on our minds that is important -- especially a To Do item -- we're afraid we'll forget it, so our brain rehearses it, tossing it around and around in circles in something that cognitive psychologists actually refer to as the rehearsal loop…. Writing them down gives both implicit and explicit permission to the rehearsal loop to let them go, to relax its natural circuits so that we can focus on something else.

Some foods that we consider haute cuisine today, such as lobster, were so plentiful in the 1800s that they were fed to prisoners and orphans, and ground up into fertilizer; servants requested written assurance that they would not be fed lobster more than twice a week.

Three out of four Americans report that their garages are too full to put a car into them.  Women's cortisol levels (the stress hormone) spike when confronted with such clutter (men's, not so much).  Elevated cortisol levels can lead to chronic cognitive impairment, fatigue, and suppression of the body's immune system.

The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: if you're working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each.  Just stepping into a different space hits the reset button on your brain and allows for more productive and creative thinking.

Being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an e-mail is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.

It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones.  One of the first things we lose is impulse control.

You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers.  You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier).  Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine.

Notions of privacy that we take for granted today were very different just two hundred years ago. It was common practice to share rooms and even beds at roadside inns well into the nineteenth century.  Diaries tell of guests complaining about late-arriving guests who climbed into bed with them in the middle of the night.

The act of living in cities and towns together is fundamentally an act of cooperation.

The natural intuitive see-saw between focusing and daydreaming helps to recalibrate and restore the brain.  Multitasking does not.

That middle-of-the-night waking might have evolved to help ward off nocturnal predators.

Two faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success.

During flow [state], two key regions of the brain deactivate: the portion of the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-criticism, and the amygdala, the brain's fear center.

The Gift of the Stars: Anangoog Meegiwaewinan by Basil Johnston

It was the land, along with its plants, insects, birds, animals and fish; climate, seasons and the skies that taught our ancestors what they needed to know about the land and themselves in order to live in harmony with it.  They called the earth's teachings "aki-inoomaugaewin", the land's directions.

Laziness comes in many guises; the longing for leisure, the belief that some task is much too difficult, or that one does not measure up to it, or that it can be put off until a more convenient time; or that the insects are too bothersome, or that the work to be carried out is another person's duty.

Getting a name is not simply getting a name, it is more than that; it is receiving an identity.

The Art of Quantum Planning: Lessons from Quantum Physics for Breakthrough Strategy, Innovation, and Leadership by Gerald Harris

Learning is a thinking process, so the quality of thinking is central.

A mistake is not a failure, but a tool for calibrating and trying again.

The process of taking a position and defending it leads to polarization and therefore narrow thinking.

Behaviors that indicate disrespect (eye rolling, ignoring the speaker, showing signs of impatience, and cutting people off while speaking) are very typical.  Behaviors that indicate privilege are also very common (dominating the conversation, "correcting others", and verbally enforcing "order").

Immortality & Reincarnation: Wisdom from the Forbidden Journey by Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden

Thought creates a duality: the thinker and the thing thought. 

The world is movement.

It is you alone who, by virtue of the dispositions within you, is going to pronounce sentence upon you and assign you to such and such a reincarnation.

What we call “consciousness”, learned lamas say, is a mental operation.  It is certainly not a person.

To Be Continued: Reincarnation & the Purpose of Our Lives by Karen Berg

It’s through our challenges that we perfect our souls and become who we need to be. 

Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart by Tara Bennett-Goleman

Full attention is the antidote to boredom.

Sometimes people confuse the concept of letting to of a thought or feeling --  noticing it arise in your awareness but not pursuing it -- with pushing a painful feeling away by trying to suppress it.  But suppression is not mindfulness.  Mindfulness hides from nothing.

"The opposite of investigation is assuming -- assuming that we already know how things are".  Narayan Liebenson Grady

Distractedness is one sign that we are avoiding the truth of the moment.

When we run through the same old routines of thought and feeling, there is little likelihood that much will change.  But since mindfulness see things afresh -- it can open up new possibilities, allowing the potential for change.

Emotions add the qualities of pleasantness or unpleasantness to what the mind perceives.

Every coping strategy is in some way a useful solution to a life problem.  They all have, or once had, desirable aspects.  But typically these solutions, which worked well enough earlier in life, have become calcified, frozen in place, and are now applied over and over even though they no longer work so well.

Ordinarily, when we are swept away by an emotion, our feelings lead us to act without thought about what we are about to do -- we just react.  But mindfulness allows us to bring to the emotional process a precise awareness that makes distinctions among the thoughts, the feelings, and the impulse to act.  An enhanced ability to notice the moment of intention -- the mental movement that comes before we act -- gives us more choice. Mindfulness gives us freedom at that critical choice point.

Extremely strong emotional reactions of any kind are often a clue that what happened carried some deeper symbolic meaning for you and that the intensity of your reaction stems from the symbolic reality rather than what was actually  happening.

Mindfulness can be emotionally freeing: it brings an active awareness to our otherwise automatic emotional patterns, interposing a reflecting consciousness between emotional impulse and action.  And that breaks the chain of emotional habit.

When we transform anger constructively, we are left with a clarity about what needs to be done and an intense energy to achieve our goals. 

In general, when we have a strong, intensely disturbing feeling about something -- especially when the disturbance is out of proportion to what is happening -- it's a signal that a blind emotional habit, more than likely a schema, is being triggered.

The tender heads of our intention are a powerful force that can, with sustained effort, break through the dense solidity of our schemas.  The process of change starts with an intentional act -- doing something different, something that alters an old habit.

Each afflictive emotion has a corresponding positive one that can supplant it in a  healthy way.  Anger, for instance, can be alleviated by reflecting on loving-kindness, arrogance by reflecting on humility, and equanimity offers an antidote to agitation as well as other disturbing emotions. 

Behind the schemas that drive emotional habits are sensitized feelings that need care and compassion.  Deep beneath unlovability and deprivation lies a pool of profound sadness; beneath mistrust and subjugation is a smoldering anger; beneath vulnerability, social exclusion, and abandonment lurks fear.  An anxious self-doubt drives perfectionism and failure alike.  And at the core of entitlement very often lies shame. 

Strong emotions are messages from the unconscious.

Emotional deprivation propels people to act like caretakers rather than voicing their own needs.

The stronger an emotion, the more useful it can be as a vehicle for awakening -- though only if one knows how to use it that way.

The Simplest Words: A Storyteller's Journey by Ale Miller

An assumption driving the great diaspora of European culture for at least the past five hundred years has been that the acquisition of land and knowledge is a sacred duty.  Colonialism and European culture are not separable but are aspects of the same urgent meditation.  We will not be in a post-colonial age until we are in a post-European age.

We are engaged on a cultural project in which we define human existence as something that is in need of a cure and we retain a deeply ambivalent love/hate tension with the land we occupy -- both our resource and victim, the ancient dark of our spiritual wellbeing.

If we live long enough, everything we learned when we were children is reversed and there comes a time when instead of knowing everything, as our wise elders once did, we know almost nothing at all and must rely on our children for accurate information about our own society and how it works.

Charge and the Energy Body: The Vital Key to Healing Your Life, Your Chakras, and Your Relationships by Anodea Judith

Onto your hardware, enormous amounts of software have been installed -- all your conscious and unconscious programming.  From the basic instincts that are "hardwired" into your body, to the memories, beliefs, and learning that you have accumulated over a lifetime, including the language you speak and the habits you've developed, this software is stored on your hardware, in the muscles, nerve pathways, and central processing unit of the brain.

Essentially, the programming in your personal software tells your life force energy where to go in your body/hardware and where not to go.  Your program may tell you it's not safe to open your mouth (or your heart), and as a result, the charge doesn't flow into your throat or heart very much. 

If there is too little charge, you might not be able to activate a program that's already there.  You may know exactly how to do a particular dance form, but if you're exhausted, you can't perform it until you're recharged.

Everything you do is essentially run by your beliefs as the master programs installed onto your hardware.  Just as money coming into your bank account gets spent on the things you think are important, when charge comes into your body, it is directed by your beliefs about what is important, which in turn activates your behavior.

Very few people, when they feel uncomfortable, really look to see what is making them uncomfortable.

Bringing awareness to this edge of your comfort zone is the first step in the healing process.

Healing happens at the edge of the comfort zone, but not over it.

You expand your comfort zone by going right to the edge of it and noticing what's there.

Binding is like wrapping sticky tape around a package so nothing can get loose.  Binding ties up the charge in the muscles and organs of the body, creating chronic tension, or what we call a block.

Whatever the pattern, bound charge is less available.  It's like having your money tied up in a frozen account and not being able to draw it out when you need to.

Typically, we bind our charge when discharge is impossible.

Bound-up charge shrinks the comfort zone.  We have less room for ourselves, less freedom to be who we are, and we need more control over our environment. 

Each chakra is a chamber in the temple of your body that handles a particular kind of energy, much like the different rooms in your home handle distinct energies.

Non-dual consciousness simply experiences, without commentary.

Our beliefs tell us how to operate. 

The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Dr Norman Doidge

There is an endless war of nerves going on inside each of our brains.

In order to keep the brain fit, we must learn something new, rather than simply replaying already-mastered skills.

We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present.  As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. 

As phantoms show, we don’t need a body part or even pain receptors to feel pain.  We need only a body image, produced by our brain maps. 

If an arm can exist after being removed, so then might the whole person exist after the annihilation of the body. 

We grieve by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go. 

Most of us think of the brain as a container and learning as putting something in it.  When we try to break a bad habit, we think the solution is to put something new into the container.  But when we learn a bad habit, it takes over a brain map, and each time we repeat it, it claims more control of that map and prevents the use of that space for “good” habits. 

Songbirds sing new songs each season.

The Yoga of Relationships: A Practical Guide for Loving Yourself and Others by Yogi Amrit Desai

PART TWO

A sense of deficiency builds barriers to protect what we believe is ours. 

Consciously changing breathing patterns releases the conflicting unconscious forces that keep us from being relaxed and present.

Unless we take responsibility, we will never change the source of our unhappiness. We only continue to make more problems in the name of solving them.

  

The desire to change according to personal preferences means there is still someone inside the persona choosing one thing over another. This keeps us trapped in past conditioning. 

Being the Witness gives us permission to surrender, without pushing away what we no longer need. 

There is not one “you”, but a whole crowd of personalities that live within you.  They deafen your ears with their conflicting views and voices. The crowd is made up of many facets of the self-image, each identifying with different memories of the past and expectations of the future, all vying for attention vs the self that lives always in the present.

By not succumbing to passing moods and following your determination, you establish your consciousness, which carries through into all your daily situations.

When you connect with physical sensations through choiceless awareness, it reintroduces you to the self-healing transformative wisdom of the prana body.

Faith and trust are not functions of the mind. Faith is an aspect of the supernatural possibilities within you. The mind is human; but faith is superhuman.

The groundwork of faith is self-trust and courage. 

Self-trust is the basis of developing faith. Fearlessness is the foundation of faith.

Once energy is no longer projected as strategy, it returns to a state of equilibrium where everything remains peaceful and points toward that silent awareness within where all thoughts and perceptions come and go. 

Clarity of mind brings about a relaxation from old patterns.

Instead of trying to explain ourselves, it is better to open our heart to the other before speaking.

How often have we regretted harsh words spoken in an emotional state? The words seem to multiply and take on a life of their own.  Who then is speaking? The insulted self-image or the real you?

Accepting responsibility for our part in any misunderstanding is a quantum leap.

Communicating objectively with others without blame or shame is paramount.