Waking Up from the Dream

Does your life often feel like a swirling carousel with lifeless smiles, robotic movements, blinding white teeth, corporate speech, and cartoon eyelashes? All scrawled with a Crayola palette entrapped with tunes from the Twilight Zone?

Maybe you get carried away with the circus until a moment of grace shines through where you look around and ask, “what the hell is happening?” or “what is this life, really?” or “why am I wearing this meat suit?”.  Maybe you consider pinching your arm to see if you’ll wake up. But you realize, nope, I am fully awake.

Or are you?

Yogic philosophy says that we exist in the realm of Maya, the illusionary dream where we believe that who we are is our bodies and minds. So we often become obsessed with our physical bodies and take our wins and losses seriously. Where we believe we are separate from each other, and all of creation, as opposed to knowing that the Spirit within each of us is the same Spirit within everything else. It teaches us that this false belief is the root cause of all suffering.

And in order to shift from this ingrained perspective, we must learn to no longer be slaves to our conditioned mind, believing our thoughts. But to instead become the mind’s master. Similar to shifting from autopilot to manual. Or from unconscious to conscious.

When we become the master of our thoughts, we can begin to live more from the heart.

The heart is the place of unconditional love and presence. When we live from the heart, we begin to feel more compassion for ourselves and others. The deeper we live from the heart, the more connected we’ll feel to all of life. Eventually, we’ll become so interwoven that when we hurt a bug, we will feel it’s pain, and when we free a bird, we feel it’s freedom.

According to ancient yogic texts, we will come to a place where we will experience love as the binding force of creation. And we won’t just intellectually believe, but we will know and that each of us are waves within the infinite ocean of Spirit while experiencing the bliss of unity consciousness.

Here are some simple techniques to help you awaken from the dream:

1. Close your eyes and stand barefoot on the earth. Feel it breathe beneath your feet.
2. Take several deep diaphragmatic breaths.
3. Watch your breath flow in and out of your nose as if you’re watching someone else breathe.
4. Notice how when your breath becomes slow and steady, your mind also becomes slow and steady.
5. Begin to witness your thoughts and emotions travel in and out of awareness without judging, grasping or resisting.
6. Drop your inner gaze down into the center of your chest - your spiritual heart.
7. Breathe into your heart center and rest your awareness here.
8. Just be.
9. If you start to get caught in the web of your thoughts again, simply repeat the steps from the beginning.

If you’d like to continue your journey towards waking up from the dream, please scroll down to learn about a variety of offerings that will calm your nervous system, deepen your breath, steady your mind and awaken you into the omnipresent Spirit within your own heart.

With all my love,

Shannon