Spiritual Wellness

Within all of us is a deep yearning for spirituality in our lives — lives that have been conditioned and battered by materialistic and individualistic values that have caused great pain, loneliness and economic, ecological and political damage to our world and our lives. We are indeed it seems in the middle of a transition and a great awakening of a collective consciousness that is focussed on love, intuitive knowledge, communitarianism and compassion and is directed towards shaping a more optimistic and better world. If we neglect the spiritua1 aspect of self we shut down the core of our being, the life-force within that enables other aspects of self to be energised and so to be able to function in a seemingly inhospitable, mad world with some joy and purpose. Schools unfortunately are full of workaholics, stressed and robotic adults who in their attempts to meet seemingly overwhelming expectations have lost their soul and spirit. For the workaholic, work has become the substitute religion for many — it is a socially accepted addiction enabling the person involved to experience adrenalin-charged forms of 'ecstasy' and an overly inflated view of responsibility. Ultimately it moves that person away from their true self and away from intimacy with loved ones. For the over-burdened and stressed, work so consumes and disturbs their sense of worth that they are no longer psychologically and spiritually healthy.

What does this do to our health and well-being?

What does this model to our young people and parents?

What does this do to our sense of professional collegiality?

How does this advance societal improvement?

We cannot afford to neglect our inner lives if we are to become who we really are; if we are to be compassionate and authentic educators for our young people and if we are to make deep and 'soulful' connections to others as a member of a professional learning community.

It is the soul, the heart of self that speaks to our young people in the classroom. What does that mean for you? What activates your spirit and connects with your life source within? How can that force be fostered and kept alive in the schoolplace? These are the questions that need to be confronted in the search for meaning, purpose and connection in our work and in our lives if we wish to be integrated loving spirits.

Perhaps the first thing we need to do is to create the space and give legitimacy to a language for speaking and dialoguing about our spiritual well being in the workplace. If we as staff can take responsibility for our own authentic voices, then we may together be able to create an environment for 116 (C) Creating Resilient Educators

young people to do likewise and to develop the capacity to explore and talk about their own inner lives and to nourish their own spirits.

The following activities are designed to help you to think about and take responsibility for your own spiritual wellness. We are all travellers on this cosmic journey and it makes sense to connect with joy and lightness to each other, whether at work or elsewhere. To do this the starting point is connecting with self. The following are an invitation to open up your hearts to your own inner beauty and intelligence and love — to become who you really are! For we are not what we seem! Below the threshold of ordinary consciousness within which we define ourselves (what we do and think and desire on the earthly plane), lies a different self — a soul self; a luminous identity that represents our true nature and which is sustainable beyond this world.

Exercise 1: to discover our own source of spirituality.

Think about what it is that most feeds and nourishes your inner spirit — when you feel in touch with your inner self; when you feel centred and connected and pure. Is it a time when you are close to nature; when you have strong connection to others within a community or family; when you are worshipping in fellowship with others in a religious setting; when you are meditating or praying or contemplating the awesome magic of a brilliant sunset, when you are in service to others; when you are listening to music; when you are transcending self and achieving the amazing in physical sport or academic excellence or moments of artistic or musical creativity …?

Perhaps your source is meditation, poetry, praying, collecting inspirational quotations… Whatever your source is, are you devoting enough time to this? 1s it time to reconnect with this?

If we do not nourish the spirit it will dry up and we will he unable to be what we desire to be.

Write down what you will do to nourish your soul from this moment on. Tell a loved one about your intention as a way of committing to it or start keeping a journal. Speak openly and honestly to your real self in your journal

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Exercise 2: to purify our intention so that our internal thoughts can reflect a loving heart generosity, forgiveness, honesty and commitment.

Think of a person that you are currently having difficulties with — perhaps someone who is competing with you for a new job; someone who is undermining you, someone who seems to he hurting you in some way…

Imagine what that person's life is like. What needs, feelings, hopes, hurts, challenges might that person have — given who they are, and their particular life experiences and circumstances. Sense being that person. Sense feeling that person's reality. What might a day in their life be like? Can you feel some connection with commonalities? Can you accept that person's needs are the same as yours? Can you begin to feel some compassion and understanding?

Jot down your responses (in words or symbols)

Exercise 3: cultivate soul thoughts

Souls seek each other, just like flowers reach for the sun and the sun reaches back to the flowers. Souls delight in each other as kindred spirits find each other. Souls enhance each other! To connect with another soul is to give a gift to that soul.

When your soul reaches out and finds another soul — both souls connect, and activate each other to strive to be what they can be. As you become aware of your centre, your soul, people become more interesting to you. You like connecting with them, and you like enhancing each other.

Strive for communitarianism and collective endeavours rather than individualism and solo performances.

Exercise 4: develop altruistic resiliency

1. Help complete strangers. Sometimes we give so much to the immediate family, that we become depleted and fatigued from the unrelenting giving and sacrifice.

2. Make personal contact. Rather than just sending a cheque, be there yourself. It is the personal contact that feeds the soul, not impersonal donations.

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3. Give from your extra energy, not your core. We can overdo any exercise, so be sure that you care for your own family and your own health first. This will free you to have the energy to give to others. Your central, authentic self must be protected so that your multiple selves can spread out to the community to offer comfort and aid.

4. Give about two hours a week.. We need to put in as much time giving per week as we need to exercise.

5. Focus on the act of helping, not achieving outcomes. Helping is giving, not fixing. Don’t assess the worth of your loving kindness by measurable outcomes.

Exercise 5: caring humour

Laughter is the perfect way to combine patience, connection, pleasantness, humbleness, and kindness into one joyful behaviour that brings pleasure to those around you. Laughter is a happy explosion of your seventh sense. Laughter shows you appreciate what is joyful and want to share your joy with others. Laughter signals that you have been patient enough to see the ridiculous in the natural chaos of life and to wait for the good times when you are going through bad times. Develop the capacity to be able to laugh at self.

Polly recently asked her Palliative Care doctor, what is it that people about to die most need. One of the things he said was “humour”. Yet we get serious, not funny, when a loved one is dying. Humour is soulful!

Overall, people with a good sense of humour experience less stress and better health. A few minutes of laughing lowers stress hormones and raises the number of circulating antibodies that fight off disease. Laughter can make stressors seem less negative and may evoke social support from other people. It can defuse interpersonal conflicts, contribute to effective teaching, strengthen relationships, improve social relationships at work, and even provide a means of confronting the existential reality of death.

Humour needs to be used appropriately. While kind and tender humour is constructive, people who use hostile, derogatory humour are prone to poor health and unhappiness. The humour that connects us is the humour that heals us.

Exercise 6: transcendence through suffering

Share personal stories about times when the spirit has been nourished — times when we’ve overcome adversity and suffering and grown from it; times when we’ve overcome a major disruption or depression and reconstructed our lives.

In listening to others stories, we grow our compassion and transcend our ordinary preoccupation with ourselves.

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Exercise 7: think about the question — does the heart have intelligence?

Is science beginning to make contact with the soul? Research in the new sciences and in the field of psychoneuroimmunology suggests that the heart can think; and cells can remember.

Does the idea that we can think with the heart seem like a real possibility to you? Does our dependence on our brain for interpretation of our experiences, get in the way of us being aware of the heart's own intelligence? The heart operates with the same neuro-chemicals and neuro-transmitters as the brain. The heart is the seed of intelligence. When the heart awakens it has the ability to literally transform the operations of the brain. The human brain is adept at picking up the quality of the messages from the heart. The power of the human to transform reality seems to be a reality. Our task is to open our hearts.

Think about examples of heart transplant recipients regarding changes in their food preferences, dreams and personality manifestations. Is this possibly related to the cellular memories of their donors? Is it therefore possible to get in touch with our own cellular memories or our ancestor's cellular memories? Brandon Bay's inspirational personal story of her own healing from cancer by accessing and redesigning cellular memories as described in her book The Journey is truly remarkable!

Can we then tune into other people's cellular codes? Can the heart send a coded signal from our soul to another soul? Polly believes so after experiencing healing from the collective thoughts, energies and prayers of hundreds of people when she first became ill. What might be the implications of this heart's code for how we are connected to each other, and the impact of negative behaviours that violate that connection?

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The Heart Intelligence

“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”

— Blaise Pascal

Science has recently discovered three startling new possibilities regarding how we think, feel, love, heal, and find meaning in our life. The new field of psychoneuroimmunology is taking us into “new” realms understood for centuries by indigenous healers. This research suggests that the heart thinks, cells remember, and that both of these processes are related to an as yet mysterious, extremely powerful, but very subtle energy with properties unlike any other known force. If the preliminary insights regarding these prospects continue to be verified, science may be taking the first tentative steps to understanding more about what shamans, kahuna, priests, spiritual leaders, and healers from ancient traditional medicines have been teaching about for centuries — the energy of the human spirit and the coded information that is the human soul.

The heart’s code is recorded and remembered in every cell in the body as an informational template of the soul, constantly resonating within and from us, sent forth from our heart. Anyone who has experienced the devastation of a broken heart may read the questions raised below with great interest.

• It is possible that the heart has its own form of intelligence that, because of our evolved dependence on our brain for interpretation of our experiences, we are seldom aware of?

• Although very discreetly and in a much different way than the brain, can the heart literally perceive and react on its own to the outside world, and communicate an info-energetic code of that reaction through a network of tens of thousands of miles of vessels and 75 trillion cells, which serve not only as the circulatory system but as an energy and information emitting network?

• Have we been too “brain focused” in our search for the mind, failing to see that the heart might be an informational and energetic cornerstone of a three-component or triune “Mind,” made up of a heart that energetically integrates the brilliantly adaptive brain with its miraculously self-healing body?

• Are the remarkable stories by some heart transplant recipients regarding changes in their food preferences, dreams fantasies, and personality manifestations related on some level to the cellular memories of their donor?

• If some very sensitive heart transplant recipient can recover the cellular memories of their donor, can any of us — if we learn how to be sensitive to the heart’s code — also voluntarily recover our own and our ancestors’ cellular memories?

• Is it possible to tune into the codes of other people’s hearts?

• Is there a form of energy — a vital life force — that humankind has sought for centuries and that science may have missed?

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• Is it possible that a subtle form of energy I call life or “L” energy, and which others refer to as a

“healing” or “X” force, carries information and that, just as Albert Einstein showed us that energy and matter are interchangeable, information and energy are also synonymous?

• If information does ride along within energy, and because the heart is the most energetically powerful organ in the body, does every beat of our heart send a coded, faint signal from our soul to other souls?

• Can the heart send and receive some form of info-energetic message to and from nonhuman systems, including plants, rocks, trees, water, and even machines?

• If the heart thinks, cells remember, and there is a form of “L” energy that is free of the limitations of space and time, what are the implications of this heart’s code for how we are connected with one another, the impact of behaviours that violate that connection, and the ways in which we become sick and heal?

The cutting-edge science that is exploring the above prospects is just entering its infancy. Many old paradigms need to be challenged and we need not only to seek new answers but to learn to ask entirely new questions similar to those above. Because of the first tentative scientific steps and the creative courage of those willing to talk about their own often confusing and even frightening experiences with cellular memories and “L” energy, we can begin to learn more about whether and how the heart has and conveys its own code, how to convey this code, and what this means for us. We may even gain the confidence and boldness to ask if it is possible that science is beginning to make its first tentative contact with the soul.

Adapted from “The Heart’s Code” By Paul Pearsall

Reflect on some of these possibilities and embrace some of the paradigm shifts that are inviting us to explore the heart intelligence. Care for your own heart and its intelligence by;

• being gentle with yourself • engaging in small acts of kindness • saying sorry • keeping promises

• being authentic and speaking your own truths • tapping into your talents

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