In today’s episode of Healing from Within Sheryl Glick, your host and author of her newest book, The Living Spirit: Answers for Healing and Infinite Love, launch date May 2014, welcomes Cindy Griffith-Bennett, author of Soul Soothers and coauthor with David Bennett of Voyage of Purpose. Whether for stress reduction or spiritual development, Cindy’s book provide listeners and readers the benefits of meditation a much needed practice to be incorporated into everyone’s life in these fast moving, challenging technological new times.
Cindy has been teaching meditation and spiritual development for over 20 years. Her writings on meditation and stress reduction are often published in Huffington Post. Cindy holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in spiritual counseling and Healing and is about to publish her thesis on the spiritual journey of the mystics for her Masters degree in Conscious Development. Both she and her husband, David, are both devoted in their own spiritual development and are great resources on metaphysical matters which are presented in television, newspapers, and magazines.
In today’s show, Cindy and Sheryl will discuss the values and advantages to Meditation as part of any spiritual practice and the way to help the body, mind and soul be peaceful, more loving, and healthy on all levels of our daily activities. Cindy shares with us, early on in the show, something that she remembers her mother telling her as a young girl and says her mother Mary Gray Griffith once gave her and her sisters a pamphlet with common sense wisdom and one thing stayed with her- JUST BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. With those 4 words, Cindy’s mother gave her permission to be free of the limitations of society, her peers and even her religious upbringing, and supported her even when she began her psychic work. Sheryl shares her observation that many of the authors and spiritual leaders who have been guests on this show often show a love of Spirit or Universal Source in their early life as their sensitivity to energy around them is quite acute. Sheryl, as a youngster like Cindy and so many energy workers, psychics, and mediums, though always a sensitive and cooperative soul, may not have been aware at that early age of how their spiritual gifts would develop, leading them into a life time of work revolving around metaphysical discoveries. Not all families or parents are as supportive of their children’s uniqueness as Cindy’s mother was. Perhaps, they were not fully aware as adults of the value of a deeper spiritual life, and therefore had fear for their gifted children that they would be different from ordinary people and their gifts wouldn’t be seen as valuable or acceptable by the general population.
Cindy wrote Soul Soothers for busy people whose life is strong on achievement yet lacking in tranquility. “Me-time” is hard to find even when you chose not to feel guilty about it. Actually, the true nature of our life is to learn more about ourselves and how we interact with people and our physical world. Self exploration in this way through meditation helps us to create or manifest the most healthy and productive life possible. It is nearly impossible to achieve this level of awareness without a spiritual practice- yoga, energy healing work or meditation. So, from simple to more advanced meditation practices, the values are innumerable and necessary for our total development. Since we are all in meditative states, often without being fully conscious of these moments, Cindy shows us numerous simple and more complex meditations that are quite necessary for us to learn more about meditation including its many benefits.
Cindy’s arsenal of meditations includes first; the Twenty Second Meditation (best done at a desk where you can support your elbows, simply telling your mind that it is time to take twenty seconds to clear your head), the Breathing Meditation, the Grounding Meditation, the Staying In Your Energy Meditation, the Walking Meditation, the Review Meditation, the Observation Meditation, the Attitude Adjustment Meditation, and many more. The majority of meditations listed all concern mindfulness or focus. All meditation, no matter what the main focus at the moment, help the body to relax and de-stress. Meditation has been known to physically decrease pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, oxygen consumption and can heighten cognitive ability. Spiritual relaxation and meditation are the keys to opening up to higher guidance.
Cindy goes on to suggest that there are certain times and places that adapt well to certain types of meditations. For example, the Activity Meditation and the Golden Light Meditation may even be done in the shower to clear your energetic system and set up an Aura of loving vibration, which is often felt by those you come into contact with during your daily activities. The breathing and grounding meditation, lead to greater awareness of our physical state and connection to those around you and can be practiced at your desk or even when preparing your children’s morning cereal. Cindy goes on to suggest that since everybody breathes, you may enhance the breathing process and empower your thinking and feeling of well-being when you begin to feel tired or are around unhealthy situations or people, and by taking that deep long breath and grounding yourself into your own state of peace, you can briefly disengage what is happening around you so you can collect your thoughts and not get caught up in the drama of the situation.
Cindy describes an Observation Meditation which is best done while out in nature, traffic, or with crowds of people. This meditation helps us to see how physical barriers, sounds, people, storefronts, and signs, affect how we and others move and react. It becomes necessary in this type of meditation to realize how our interconnection with others affects our choices and our feelings in the body. We begin to be able to hold our own sense of well-being and peace, allowing thoughts and judgments of what we are seeing, flow through us without paying much attention to them. This reinforces a spiritual truism that people are not good or bad- they are merely human beings expressing themselves in the ways necessary for their personal growth at any given moment. Once you become aware of everything going on around you, you can either chose to remain in that feeling or energy or make a conscious effort to return to your own vibration or a place where you are more comfortable.
Each chapter of Cindy’s books has wonderful quotes at the beginning of each chapter, written by her husband David, author Voyage of Purpose. One of the quotes reads “It is so important we not be overwhelmed with living in this physical world, that we forget to spend time in silence, getting to know our vital life force that makes up our being that will live forever.” Cindy then talks about how it is the plain and simple truth that other people’s energies or life force affects us and may at times overwhelm us. Very often, a person or even a place’s energy can be sensed before you can see the source of it, and it can affect from a distance as well. Cindy suggests that is why it is destructive to keep reliving a distressing experience and to keep immersing yourself in the unhealthy energy of those thoughts. Therefore, it is necessary to create more positive and uplifting thoughts and experiences, no matter what is going on in our daily situations.
It becomes apparent that when you interact with someone or even a group, your energies become deeply entwined. Cindy uses the Staying in Your Energy Meditation when you cannot get out of a difficult situation. This meditation may not remove you from the situation or person, but it can create a healthy boundary between the two forces of energy being produced. Remember that energy flows where attention goes, so thinking about a situation or person is like feeding it. In a healthy relationship, both partners send energy back and forth. We all must realize it is our responsibility to avoid being drained by difficult people and situations in our life. However, if we accept the fact that the obnoxious lady at the customer service desk is there because in our own soul developing life it gives us the opportunity to teach us patience then we can go beyond our human tendency to see the fault in the person and begin to learn better ways to appreciate that person and what we are learning from the interaction. By using meditation to alter our state of being and to increase our understanding of our own actions and the actions of others, we help our soul to grow and improve the quality of our own energy, giving out more comfort to those around us.
Sheryl, as a Reiki Energy Practitioner and Teacher was happy to see that Cindy devoted an entire chapter to the Chakra Meditations, which she suggests can be used as maintenance for the body’s energetic system. She goes on to describe the chakras or energy points located in the front and back of your body following the spinal cord as facilitators for energy to come into and leave your body. Each chakra transports energy to and from different organs and parts of the body and can be visualized as vortex’s. Chakras won’t be shown on an x-ray or cat scan, yet can be seen or felt to those who are sensitive to the chakra energy or aura. Most often, these people are healers or intuitive.
Chakras have their own vibratory rates rising faster and higher as you move from the root chakra, at the base of the spine, to the crown chakra at the top of the head. Each chakra deals with a different type of consciousness or life experiences that an individual is dealing with and if there is a problem in a person’s life, the chakra responding to those concerns will be weakened and not able to move and spin freely, creating an imbalance. Eventually the organs connected to that chakra will be affected. The seven chakras down the front of the body, begin with the root chakra, sacral chakra, solar plexus chakra, heart chakra, throat chakra, brow chakra and crown chakra. Lack of protein and hydration as well as too much time spent with people whose energy is not a good match for yours, lack of sleep or interrupted sleep can all affect the chakra system and un-ground a person.
The root chakra, concerned with our physical life is the slowest moving and keeps us concerned and connected to the energy of the earth or our physical life. Each chakra deals with a different type of consciousness, life issues, organ or organs, and relates to or vibrate at the rate of a certain color. While there may be issues in a particular chakra and an illness or dysfunction in dealing with issues in your life may present itself, you must remember that a chakra cannot be totally blocked or totally open without major illness. The best thing you can do when trying to open your chakras is to eat well, get enough rest, laugh, love and live your life as fully as possible and include a spiritual teacher and energy healing sessions as part of your health or wellness plan so you may become more aware of which chakras need more work.
The clearer your energy is the better you feel and the stronger your intuition. Your energy can be clear or muddy and is very similar to food. As a matter of fact, a calorie is a measurement of energy. Think of muddy energy as empty calories. You won’t get much from it. Your chakras clean energy while moving it into, around, and out of the body. If the chakras are working well, energy flows up and down the body through a channel called the sushumna. If one of the charkas is clogged , energy has to be re-routed or congestion forms. This type of energy congestion can create disease. Chakras have their own vibrational rate. Everything vibrates at a molecular level even what seems stationary is vibrating. Vibrations can be thought of as wave forms and can be measured. Sympathetic vibrations or resonance is when two waveforms of similar frequency and phase lock together- think of this as two radios in the house tuned to the same station sounding louder one reinforcing the other, than if each were playing different stations. Two similar vibrations get stronger when they are put together. Entrainment is where two vibrations are next to each other long enough. The weaker vibration will tend to start to adjust its own vibration to match the stronger one. Mood is a reflection of our vibration and can be altered by circumstances in our environment. So a happy person can have her mood altered if in close contact to a series of very negative vibrations and might begin to feel grumpy or uncomfortable, not knowing why.
Cindy describes grounding meditations which can protect your body form life’s overloads such as the loss of a job, divorce, illness, or death of a loved one. Grounding to the life force of your physical life and the personal needs of your own development are one of the most empowering ways to ensure your physical health. Grounding helps with hearing your intuition and inner wisdom and sorting through the daily mind chatter. Grounding meditations are the way to stay in your body and in the present moment no matter what is happening in the outside world. When you are grounded, you feel secure, energized, focused, and clear minded. You are not influenced by outside energies or inner insecurities. Energy can flow both in and out, so through grounding you can send the impact of your stress into the earth, which is a much larger body, much like when a little boy needs to hold mommy when the fireworks go off. He is grounding his stress into the mother as she has the larger body and can absorb it without harm. Whether it is a loud noise, difficult person, or psychic vibration, there is a great deal of stress in your environment. Even happy events cause stress. Grounding is the most effective way to cope with it all.
Looking at karma and being of service shows us another way that we are affected by “The Law of Attraction” or cause and effect. Karma is an impersonal universal law of cause and effect used to create balance. You can see karma as an act to balance the universe. The cause of a particular effect can be action, a thought, or even a desire. Karma is not good or bad, simply a balancing action that creates opportunities for you to continue evolving. Karma is not a system of rewards and punishments. Every spiritual tradition tells us that karma is balanced by doing service. There is truth in this…at the same time as a healer or intuitive or sensitive person, it is important to remember that each person is responsible to balance out their own mistakes. You hinder another person’s spiritual growth if you try to fix their mistakes. Example- my friend got angry and hit a time clock, hurting his hand. As a healer I helped his hand feel better and he quickly forgot his responsibility and anger for doing the wrong thing in the first place by banging and hitting something.
Sheryl says it has been her discovery over time that people are meditating without being fully aware that they are doing it. For example, when driving the car, your focus is of course on the road and destination but the sun shining through the window and quietness of being within an enclosed vehicle, offers you a sense of peace and freedom that you may not be able to access during much of your busy day. Many insights and messages from spirit may swiftly come into your thoughts at times like this without you even attempting to create a meditative state. In learning to use meditation in a silent time, we come to understand our own needs and refine the quality of our thinking and our expression of love. We discover the means to appreciate true life values and focus on what we wish to create in our daily life. We become conscious and cooperative citizens of a much larger life potential then our own immediate concerns. All meditations and time spent in silent contemplation along with the acceptance and allowance of other people uniqueness is the way forward for the evolution of humanity.
Cindy and Sheryl have discussed various meditation approaches and the value of meditation as a tool for spiritual growth where you may come to realize your soul’s wisdom can come through when you have a clear and well functioning chakra system and are leading a healthy life, paying attention to food, hydration, sleep. Guidance may then come through in a thought, hunch, idea, or even a synchronistic event when two connected events happen together even though it is unlikely that it would happen that way. Coincidences may also demonstrate that guides and spiritual souls beyond this dimension are working with us and the best way to achieve a clearer pathway for communication with spirit is through developing a greater focus on mindfulness, higher consciousness, and developing your internal sense of intuition. Meditation is a strong tool working towards that goal.
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