A beginner's guide to love and spiritual awakening by Leigh Longhurst

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

ABOUT

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO LOVE

Do you know what Love is? You will only be able to answer with a resounding ‘yes’ if you know what you are and that means casting an inward gaze.

Leigh Longhurst PhD 2018 ©

AND SPIRITUAL AWAKENING Free eBook

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Introduction Do you know what Love is? You will only be able to answer with a resounding ‘yes’ if you know what you are and that means casting an inward gaze. It means having insights into the nature of your very own being in its deepest dimensions. You will be held very tenderly in this endeavour, with guidance and exercises to gently but steadily help you let go of all the constrictions and tensions in your mind and body. This is a self-discovery guide where you learn to see how you upset yourself, how you cut yourself off from life and how you act in unloving ways towards yourself. With this self-awareness you can begin the process of change. Awareness puts you in the position of choosing a different way of being, a more authentic and forgiving way that puts love at the centre of your existence. A part of you will rise up in happy delight that you are finally learning to love yourself, unconditionally. This guide brings you home to Love, not romantic love but capital L Love, the source and genesis of all life. Then your experience of life is transformed as you recognise and re-awaken to your inter-connectedness to all things. Seeking love is a natural drive but you have been looking in all the wrong places, beautiful soul. You were socialized to search for love outside of yourself. Thinking that you must find another human being to complete you is a message drummed into you from birth. What pressure! The tragedy is that searching for Love in the external world is precisely what stops you experiencing the source of Love. Love is not to be found in outside things, people or events even when these things can bring temporary happiness. There is a part of you that is not like these things, not like any ‘thing’. It is not form, not an object that lives only to die but is with you eternally. This is the secret of transformation. You see beyond the form that you take yourself to be. You transform, you take your awareness to a higher level of your being, a dimension beyond the ego mind to a transpersonal power that heralds the start of your awakening. You sense the little remnant of heaven deep within you. It might only be a flickering pilot light right now, but with Aha moments to ignite its flame, you can wake up to your true identity. This is the only way to re-connect to the intrinsic energy of Love, to re-awaken in yourself what’s already there. Aha moments of insight return power to you because they come from you, bursting forth at all levels of your consciousness from body to mind to spirit. Society drains your power as you keep turning to it for answers to life’s burning questions and find only ignorance or deception. You learn to trust the power of your own Aha moments because they are always felt ‘in the bones’. They are so visceral, so clear and unmistakeable that you can rely on their guidance in a way you never could with any information from the outside world. You can consult the whole canon of personal development or spiritual literature but none of them is in a position to wake you up to your true nature. They may point the way, but only you can awaken to your innermost nature. It is not within anyone else’s gift to teach you the meaning of Love. The only reliable way of knowing anything is to know it for yourself and this is what Aha moments offer. When you surrender to your inner wisdom, you connect to the yearnings of your heart and soul. You begin to understand your passions and values and how to mobilise them. Insight into the workings of your mind, on the other hand, show you how it Leigh Longhurst ©2018

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

limits you. 70% of the thoughts you think every day are repetitive and useless, compulsive and involuntary. Aha moments wake you up to the domination of this robotic pattern that dictates your world. You find out that the way you think, feel and act all come from thoughts that have embedded themselves in your mind, mostly without your knowledge or permission. The chapter on Mind is the longest because understanding and unwinding the mind comes before any other transformation is possible. The path to Love and awakening is paved with not only self-awareness but selfforgiveness. It is bordered by gentleness and curiosity. Walking the path takes a little courage and a willingness to commit to the journey. But along the way you will start to heal. You will heal the split between your mind and body, the split between you as an ego and you as an eternal soul. We are interconnected souls in one field of energy, independent facets of the same diamond, meaning that as we learn to love and forgive ourselves and others we infuse the planet with the energy of Love, the greatest power there is. As we turn our gaze inwards we find great comfort and strength as we realize that we are not alone. We find the little light of Love within us and we turn it up, trusting in its guidance. We practice loving and accepting ourselves so totally that the love spills over on to every soul we meet. The promise here is that if you faithfully commit to the process you will have Aha moments big and small, breakthroughs in consciousness that will wake you up to your potential for Love. You are not asked to adopt blind faith because everything here is based on empirical evidence. You can have faith that you will start to awaken to Love as your natural state so long as you see clearly that your mind alone has created its opposite state, fear. Imagine trying to drive your car when the windscreen is so filthy you can’t see anything in front of you. This is how you view the world, through a window that has been blackened by fearful thoughts. The Nobel prize-winning physicist David Bohm called the contents of the mind ‘electrochemical fog’. Aha moments are the magic windscreen wipers that clear the fog. They bring a new you into view. They identify and remove all the ego fabrications you have unconsciously placed in the way of Love. They unveil the messages of the deeper dimensions of your intuitive consciousness. You will be given all the help you need to clear your mind and see a world of Love and not fear. Aha moments help you see that you don’t love yourself right now because you don’t know yourself. You’ve grown up in a ‘secret’ society where people have either hidden this knowledge or have languished in ignorance of it. The beauty of being alive right now is that increasing numbers of people are waking up to the lie that we possess only an ego identity, that we are bereft of any other dimensions of awareness besides the electrochemical fog in the brain. Many of us have long intuited that there’s something not right about this world. Maybe it’s felt as a vague sense of something missing, or a background hum of fear or foreboding. This unease continues even when we’ve achieved at least some of the things society promises will make us happy. Despite levels of success in careers or relationships or accolades, there lingers still agitation in the soul, a hole in the heart of our being. These sensations are accompanied by thoughts

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

like: “Is this all there is?”, “Why do I feel so restless?”, “There must be a better way to live…” There is. Find it out for yourself by giving yourself the gift of insight for the next 28 days. This is roughly the time it takes to build new pathways in the brain. The idea that a mere 28 days of focused attention and forgiveness will transform your life is not wishful thinking. It is based on my doctoral research about the transformational potential of Aha moments of insights in all dimensions of your being. You will see many quotes from participants - clients and life coaches who reported their Aha moments. These will help you to understand what’s possible in your own life when you experience the power of Aha moments. What could be more exciting than to re-cognise who you truly are and not the story you’ve been told about who you are, with all your human limitations? We all deserve to have the biggest Aha of all, the remembrance of the little guiding light in the centre of our being and integrating it into a consciousness of Love. Your biggest life purpose is to unfold all of your potentials from body to mind to soul to spirit. The process outlined in the following pages will enable your unfolding and they are extended to you with heart-felt love and gratitude. I am grateful that you are my mighty companions in a growing quest to awaken to Love, together. So climb aboard and take the only journey you ever need take, the one that goes nowhere yet arrives at the only worthwhile destination in this lifetime. Its final destination is the core of your being where you discover no separate ego, only the Oneness of true Love that you “always already are”. The journey will require: A Journal You will be spending time in quiet investigation and reflection. This will yield insights great and small about the person you take yourself to be and the meaning you give to Love and life. Increasing self-knowledge will lift you from one way of seeing the world to another level entirely, an expanded consciousness of acceptance and inclusion, energised with vitality and Love. Otherwise stated, you will not merely change your life by following this process, you will transform it. As you look back through your journal at the end of the month, you will see the progression of your own transformation. Attention, Energy Flow, Action, Forgiveness Attention To turn something from a nice idea into a desired outcome requires attention, the undivided sort. If you don’t attend to something, that thing fizzles out. But if you give it your steady and loving attention you infuse it with great power. So set your intention every day, and every minute of the day, to put Love first and stick to your promise. Being gentle and kind with yourself as you proceed is crucial because you will be trying out new ways of thinking and doing that are completely foreign to your ego. Your ego here is not just the psychological ego

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

but your whole experience of being a solitary, isolated individual. So your whole self is going to feel very threatened and is likely to fight back. This ego voice in your head will go into overdrive to prevent you from waking up to Love, because that would mean its demise. Yet as the ego cries, the soul rejoices. So stick like glue to your intention to watch your mind, to get to know and befriend your emotions, and to listen to the guidance of your intuition. At the end of this rainbow is the Love that you crave. Keep your task in the forefront of your mind. Post little reminders wherever you’ll see them frequently so you can always bring your attention back to your goal of living from Love. Energy always flows where attention goes. So keep your whole focus on the task at hand, coaching yourself to love yourself, and the energy of Love will naturally follow. Energy Flows Directing energy into self-love means you engage more in the flow of life instead of railing against it. The excitement of Aha moments will keep the flow open no matter how bumpy the ride. Being in the flow is a wonderful, connected state of being where you can be so happily concentrated on what you are doing that you lose track of time and can almost lose your sense of self as a solitary being. You are not resisting anything in the world, you are accepting it, being in harmony with it. You and the music, or you and the art, or you and the lover have blended as one. When we are in the flow of our lives we have taken a giant step home to Love. Love’s qualities include peace and contentment with no demand that the world be other than it is. Aha moments put you back in the flow of life as you reconnect to your body, heart and soul and feel integrated again. Action This will be a very active journey, where you’ll be experimenting with different ways of thinking and acting. Taking action is key to transformation but behaving in new ways can sometimes feel a little scary. So gently does it, be kind and patient with yourself. Keep it light and playful. Approach all the exercises with presence, give them your full attention and bring an attitude of tender compassion with no judgment. Be as patient and loving with yourself as you would be with a little 3 year-old child, with lots of humour and cajoling thrown in! Try all the exercises and stick with the ones you feel work best for you. Have this time for yourself be a joyful voyage of discovery. You truly deserve this because, as you’ll come to find out, at the heart of you is the same Love that permeates the entire universe. You are perfect, whole and lack nothing, just as you are. You will have the biggest Aha moments of all as you work with the exercises and come to realize this for yourself. Forgiveness Forgiveness is the key to unwinding the mind and body that hold so many grievances. Waking up to Love and practicing forgiveness work hand-in-hand. To practice forgiveness is to heal our fragmented minds and bodies, to soothe all the painful memories that have brought us to where we are now. We forgive always in relationship, to our self and others. The more we practice letting go of

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

judgments and forgiving, the more we heal our unloving attitudes and extend Love. Offering heart-felt forgiveness is the most loving, healing thing we can do for ourselves and for the world. We might hear the voice of the ego telling us all the justifications for holding on to our grievances but we don’t need to listen to it. We can drop our defenses and ask for guidance to forgive from our higher Self, our inner guide, the Holy Spirit, or whatever inadequate term we adopt to describe the inner light. Then we drop all judgments, let go of all demands and accept other people as they are, just as we accept all of who we are. With forgiveness we develop an attitude of gratitude for the people who come in to our lives. When we learn to truly forgive another person, we stop seeing them as different and separate from us. Be prepared for Aha moments to clean your foggy window on the world. Watch as they clear away all the unloving ways in which you have used your mind and emotions to attack yourself and others. They will strip away feelings of isolation and desolation as you deepen your understanding and compassion. You will begin to remove the blockages to Love from all layers of your being from body to mind to soul to spirit. Each layer reveals its truths to you so that you come to truly know your multi-dimensional self and accept it, acknowledge it, love it. You will come to know yourself outside and in. You will know what you love to do and express in the outside world. And you will know your inner life for the first time as you drill down into the core of who you are to discover your source in Love. So let’s get started…

Chapter 1: Love Your Mind Experiencing love or its opposite, fear, starts in the mind, a level of consciousness that is barely aware of itself. The vast majority of thinking happens subconsciously, monotonously repeating itself under the radar of our awareness. Thinking works with feelings and emotions to dictate our experience of life. So it is imperative to start with the mind and bring its buried thoughts into awareness. You will see as you work through this chapter that you have been keeping secrets from yourself, hiding them in your mind and body. This saps your life force because it takes up so much energy to bury thoughts and feelings. All the energy that you waste in hiding yourself from yourself and others could be deployed into making you feel alive! You will find great relief as you finally confess your thoughts, bring them into the light of day, acknowledge and own them. This is the only way to release their stranglehold over you and free you to live a lighter, more loving life. As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. So it’s time for some self-examination. Let’s see if your Aha moments are like the ones taken from my research which indicate the contexts for insights of the mind. Aha moments of the mind happen: • • •

In deep self-reflection and silence In connecting with your higher wisdom In analyzing attacks from your inner critics, or gremlins

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

• • •

In dis-identifying with your ego thoughts In choosing a loving perspective In practicing forgiveness and gratitude

Get Intimate With You Self-awareness begins to smash down the barriers to Love in a process of stripping away all of the belief systems that blind you to Love’s presence. It’s a process of unwinding your mind, laying it bear so that its contents can be known. Exercises are designed to help you discover how you have hidden your true Loving spirit. Your window to Love can only be polished when you bring the contents of your mind into awareness. This first exercise will show you your hidden habits of thinking you have about Love and about You. You will come to see that you attack yourself. This may sound extreme, but as you work through the exercises you will come to realize that everything that is not Love feels like an attack. From the mildest rebuke to the strongest condemnation of yourself or another, these are all attacks on Love. Exercise 1: I Love You Before beginning the exercise, set your intention. You intend to be very loving towards yourself, very gentle and kind as you set your focus. Your goal is to explore how you feel about love in relation to your self. Setting a clear intention cues your whole self to tune in and connect to the energy of love within you. So be determined to find out what love means to you, with simple curiosity and no judgment. When all your energy is devoted to discovering your true attitudes to love, you will find truth; not the stories you consciously tell yourself but the authentic truth in the depths of your body and mind. Just stay in the present moment and follow the instructions as best you can and you will gain deep insights into your true feelings about yourself and your attitudes to love. Here are your instructions:1. Get yourself a mirror or stand in front of one. Do this naked if you can bear it! Naked is better but not compulsory.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

2. Set a timer for five minutes. 3. Look into your own eyes and say “I love you”. 4. Gazing deeply into your eyes, repeat this phrase over and over again for the duration of the five minutes. 5. Maintain eye contact throughout. No matter what you experience, do not judge it, do not conceptualize it as good or bad, do not put any words to it all, just keep going! You will probably experience a mix of loving feelings and painful judgments during this exercise. Loving emotions might arise, causing your surroundings to recede as you connect fully with your present experience. These might be interspersed with all kinds of judgments about why you are not loving and not lovable. Even if these stories in your head provoke deeply uncomfortable feelings in your body, just allow the feelings to arise and regard them with simple curiosity, a welcoming attitude and no assessment. Don’t be surprised if some stories make you squirm with fear, shame, guilt, regret or any other hostile thoughts you might use to attack yourself. Love is Unconditional Loving involves total and unconditional acceptance but this exercise might demonstrate that we are far from accepting every part of ourselves. We discover how much of ourselves we actually reject as we appraise what we see in the mirror during this exercise. Even as we say “I love you” we are actually being taken over by thoughts such as “My hair’s a mess, why is my nose so big? More wrinkles?” etc. The exercise teaches us how conflicted we are in our egorationality. We see how much of our self-regard is highly conditional when it is judged by the ego mind that loves to attack. When it comes to self-love, attacking thoughts often take the conditional form of “if only” as in, I could love myself “If only I were smarter, taller, younger, more beautiful, more confident, less bald, less wrinkly, more courageous, more popular, more successful – then I could love myself”. Or you might hear shameful thoughts that persuade you that you don’t deserve to be loved, like “If they really knew me they wouldn’t love me, they’d run a mile”. You might see images of yourself that provoke guilt, leading to thoughts like “How can someone as selfish as me ever expect to be loved?” Pay attention to how these thoughts make you feel. Note the feeling of disconnect as you experience painful emotions while professing to love yourself. The conflicted emotions show us how split and divided we are within our minds and hearts. But the insights that arise for you during this exercise are truly to be welcomed because awareness opens the possibility of making a new choice, a choice to release self-attack. Journaling Write up your thoughts and feelings in your journal. Don’t keep any secrets from yourself but allow a steady steam of consciousness to flow out from you. This is very cleansing. Just keep writing about what came up for you in your mind and how that made you feel in your body in as much gory detail as possible. The very act of writing will help you to clarify your insights.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Painful as this exercise may be, it is essential to get these hidden thoughts and feelings out into the open. The insights you will gain are essential for your selfawareness in two fundamental ways: 1. Aha moments of the mind show you how much you really love yourself deep down. When you bury your head and your heart in your unconscious, you close off the possibility of choosing another way to be, you play the victim. Stifling true thoughts and feelings unwittingly gifts them the power to run your life from their underground bunkers. Reclaiming your power means exposing them, bringing them into the light of day where they can be scrutinized. You may want to keep some thoughts and beliefs, release others, but the point is now you have a choice and therein lies your power. Releasing victimhood and exercising power is to consciously choose loving thoughts over the fearful thoughts of the ego. 2. When you’ve done this exercise a few times you begin to realize that what you think about yourself is secretly what you think about other people. This is because the world we see is a projection of our own mind. We see in others the elements of ourselves that we don’t want to see, the ones we would prefer to keep underground! Whatever we are holding in our unconscious minds, whether fear or aggression, shame or guilt, we will see these qualities projected out there in the world. We will encounter people and situations that mirror these unwanted aspects of ourselves. There is no need to analyze any of your insights at this stage. Just delight in the fact that the hidden you is being revealed so that you can start to become the real you, the Love that you are. Okay love? Do this 5-minute exercise every other day of the 28 days for maximum revelations! Exercise 2: Write a Love Letter When we get older, most of us look back and wonder why the hell we didn’t appreciate our youth and vitality when we had it. We remember how much we found fault with ourselves when we were young. We were unhappy with the shape of our bodies, our pimply skin, our lack of self-confidence or a million other self-attacking themes. We worried about other people’s opinions of us and propelled our minds and fantasies into the future– future jobs, future relationships, future health and wealth. Always taking ourselves out of the real moments in our lives, mentally losing ourselves in an imaginary future, never tasting the sweetness of youth, never taking the time to feel gratitude for our beauty and vitality, never loving and appreciating who we were in those moments. Some of us still haven’t outgrown the tendency to attack ourselves and to disconnect from the present moment of our lives. Yet all that can change as soon as we start treating ourselves with a little love. It doesn’t matter how unloved you’ve felt in the past, you can start to love yourself right now, in this moment. You can treat yourself with encouragement and kindness. Let’s start this process by receiving a very special letter, a love letter from your wise self.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

This exercise is an invitation to sit down and write a letter in your journal. It is a very special love letter with a twist. It is written from you to you, but its author is not the ‘you’ of today. It comes from the 85 year-old you, a you who is no longer ruled by an ego mind. You have matured and evolved into a wise person, wise and loving and kind. You have learned that everything passes, all ego-driven dramas come to an end and so you are much more tolerant and patient, more accepting of life, more in the flow of the present moment, relishing whatever it offers. You have realized that because events and circumstances are constantly changing, all worries are a waste of precious time. So you write as a mentor, with all the wisdom of hindsight that you have, to your self as you are today. It is truly a love letter, written from your heart. It is reassuring and inspiring, imploring the younger you to stop and smell the roses, to have faith that whatever is needed will be provided, to trust the process of life, to have confidence in the intelligence of the universe that created you. The letter might advise you that love, loving yourself and extending love to everyone around you, will see you through the trials and tribulations of life. Love will lift you to a place of fulfillment and contentment. Tame Your Gremlins Having uncovered your attitudes to self-love, it’s time to look at your attitudes to yourself more generally. What messages hover just beneath the level of your attention? You’ll find some critical voices that are far from loving. Just to keep things light, let’s call the voices of these inner critics gremlins, scary little monsters that take different shapes and forms in the mental shadows. Unless you unearth these gremlins, your mind is quite simply not yours, but under the manipulation of your ego. Your mind evolved as a tool for practical use, not as a running commentary on who you are and what you’re like. These voices are echoes of the past, and they take you out of your real life and into a world of upset. If you watch your thoughts like a hawk, you’ll see how you agitate and upset yourself. You will see that your peace is constantly disturbed by your faultfinding gremlins, a parroting of past ideas you’ve heard about yourself. Gremlins begin to take shape in your mind from the youngest age as you absorb the judgments and criticisms of others. Parents, friends, siblings or teachers voiced negative opinions about you and you took their criticisms to heart, allowing your sense of yourself to be shaped by them. Over time you pushed them down and out of sight but not out of the subconscious mind. Blocked from conscious awareness, these stories continue to control your thinking from their hidey-holes. Mind and body become split as we say one thing and feel another. We have a long history of stifling emotions. We’ve been taught from a young age to control our feelings, dry our eyes, hide our anger, ignore our upset and be strong. So we tend to suppress ‘negative’ feelings like fear, anger, doubt or unworthiness by disowning them. Instead of acknowledging painful feelings within us, we project them out into the world and then we actually experience a world ‘out there’ that mirrors our fears. Instead of experiencing a loving world, we see it as frightening, foreign and untrustworthy if those are the secrets held in our mind. We are taught that seeing is believing but the exact opposite is true.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

The truth is that you believe first and as a consequence, you project that belief onto the world that you see, perceiving only that which matches your expectations. So to believe is to see. You paint the world with the colours of your own particular belief palette. You don’t see the world as it is but as you are, imbuing the world you see with your own prejudices. Such are the tricks of your mind, fantasies that suck you in, until you wake up to the projection game. Gremlins reside in your ego mind, a territory they captured. By denying your gremlins you have driven them down into their underground control centre. Hey presto! You have unconsciously given away your power to change. You have kept yourself small, you have failed to evolve because the task of gremlins is to maintain the status quo, to ensure that you always do what you’ve always done and always feel what you’ve always felt. Their big agenda is to enslave you to the past, to the ego mind that tells you the same old stories that make you feel fearful and inadequate. Over time, these gremlin voices appear to us as a kind of uncomfortable hum in the background creating an atmosphere of some vague, lingering sense of dread or anxiety. This feeling of unease, or disease takes on a life of its own, a life that superimposes itself on yours! You are now living in a matrix of fear. We need to get it through our heads that thoughts have no basis in truth, they do not represent some objective reality, they are just thoughts, mainly useless and repetitious. It is really important to see this, especially when we identify with negative, unloving thoughts about ourselves. To identify, from the Latin, means to ‘make the same as’ , meaning that when we identify with our minds alone, we see no difference between our selves and our thinking, we believe our thoughts and worse, we believe we are our thoughts. Since these thoughts are always conditioned by the past, they oblige us to re-feel and re-enact the past over and over again. This constant hauling of past baggage into the present kills any connection with real life stone dead. We freeze ourselves in ego time by repeatedly thinking the same thoughts, holding on to stale emotions and projecting the same world. These ingrained habits of mind run us like puppets until we WAKE UP and realize that we are doing this to ourselves by allowing gremlins to run our lives. Whenever you feel fear or limitation of any kind, you can bet one of your gremlins has taken centre stage in the drama you call “you”. A gremlin tells you variations on the themes of “You are too stupid”, “It’s too risky”, “You’re not ready”, “You’re not equipped”, “You should be stronger”, “They won’t like it if you . . .”Gremlins appeal to our sense of reason and their “advice” often sounds like constructive analysis: “I’ll be more productive if I wait until Monday”, “I should give xx more consideration”, “No need to be hasty”. Gremlins don’t care about your values and passions but will use them to beat you up: “You’re spineless”, “No follow through”, “Give it up”. Many gremlin statements boil down to “I’m not good enough” – not worthy enough, not lovable enough, not capable enough, not clever enough, simply not enough for this world. We ALL do this to ourselves and the way to stop it is to get intimate with our gremlins.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Exercise 3: Know Your Gremlins I invite you here to very gently bring your awareness to your own particular gremlins. Most of them take the form of thoughts and images that are buzzing in the background, in the engine room of your belief systems, out of sight but certainly not out of mind. In fact they’re fuelling your ego mind, your small self, and therefore all your beliefs and experience of who you are, what life is and what love is. This is why it is so important to bring them out of the shadows and into the light of day for inspection. You will come to see that the scary monsters of your mind are simply parts of you that you have alienated, parts that are waiting to be re-integrated or released. You will come to realize that by burying what you consider to be the ‘negatives’ in you, you have also laid to rest the positives like your potential for happiness and joy. It takes a lot of psychic energy to keep gremlins under wraps. The good news is that gremlins can’t stand too much scrutiny, so bring them out of the shadows and get to know him / her / them intimately. The trick is to just observe, very gently and without judgment the nature of your gremlin’s attack thoughts. Is it possible to stand back and simply watch them? If so you’ll derive huge self-awareness. Now note the answers to these questions in your journal: When does he / she / it show up? How, exactly, does it make you feel? What does it look like? What is the name of your gremlin? Draw / sculpt / make a collage of it /. Write a poem or letter about it. List the common statements that it tells you. What is the tone of its voice? Count the number of times it appears to you this week. Make sure to record all findings in your journal. Think of Yourself in Another Way No matter how persuasive the gremlins appear to be they are ONLY stories in your head. They are NOT you. You have just got yourself stuck in certain ways of seeing yourself. You are clinging to the past, a mental past that is not conducive to self-awareness, self-acceptance and certainly not self-love. To transcend the mind we must wake up to the fact that we project into the world not just our fearful thoughts but also all our skills and talents. We project the beauty within us, the Love within us that can set us free, and set others free too:

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

OUR DEEPEST FEAR is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? YOU ARE A CHILD OF GOD. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are born to manifest the glory that is within us. And as we let our light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. (Marianne Williamson) Prayer and Integration The way to transcend fear and reach Love, is to let go of all you think you know, to throw away all your concepts. These concepts have come purely from societal conditioning and do not represent anything real. You cannot know anything if you don’t live it. If you don’t know it “in your bones” the ‘knowledge’ is not authentic, it’s just conceptual posturing, lazy acceptance of other peoples’ ideas and theories. To truly know something is to experience it within your own heart and mind, to provide yourself with your own evidence. So cast aside all your conditioned beliefs about love, about prayer, about everything and find things out for yourself. Experiment with appealing to the higher power within you and around you. Don’t worry about what we might call it, just open your mind to the fact that it’s there. Turn to this higher power, this inner guide for the duration of these 28 days and ask for help in returning you to Love. You can practice this whenever you feel unloving thoughts arise in you throughout the day. It is very beneficial to include a few minutes in a quiet place once or twice a day to close your eyes and go inside your mind and heart to connect to your inner power. The important thing is the energy behind the practice. Set your intention to suspend all judgment, all you think you know about prayer and then sincerely pray for help, even whilst not knowing to whom or what you are appealing. Just entertain the idea that you have your own inner teacher and that you can be guided by its wisdom. If you are heartfelt you will lift your vibration closer to Love and begin to see amazing changes in your life. We are all energy and the energy must be integrated before we can return to a sense of wholeness, a sense of being at one with the world. Becoming whole starts with integrating the whole shadow, all the gremlins, all the talents and gifts, all of the dark and the light within you. When all denied and projected aspects of you are accepted and re-owned, powerful energies stir within you. Your system is no longer in conflict and so energies are free to flow into authentic self-expression. Integration strips away all the layers of false identity that the gremlins have built up over the years:

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

“All I had to do was strip away the artificial layers to be who I always was. It was liberating in the true sense of the word, the freedom just to be” (G. L., client) Meta-View Your Mind Games Drawing back from our thoughts to view them simply as objects in awareness deflates their power. We can look at thoughts with a soft focus and allow them to recede from the forefront of our awareness. We ‘un-blend’ from the thoughts in our mind so that instead of being configured by these thoughts we can simply witness them. Everyone has within them a Witnessing God, or a witnessing consciousness. By simply observing thoughts as they arise instead of getting hooked into them, they lose their status as the main figure in our awareness and fade into the background. Thoughts arise but we need not identify with them because they do not define who we are. They are simply habits of mind and habits can be broken. By taking a meta-view of our mind games we come to see that we may have thoughts, but we are not those thoughts. What is it in you that is aware of thoughts? Let this question sink in. What is this consciousness in you that can take a step back and simply watch thoughts passing like clouds across a blue sky? When you notice that you have disidentified with your thinking mind, you are not the same as your mind, ask yourself one question: who or what is this part of you that is aware of this. And when you identify this part, what is it you are identifying with? An easy way to start this process of dis-identification from your thinking mind is to take a meta-view of it. You ‘look down’ on your thoughts and behaviours from a detached perspective. Imagine yourself getting into a helicopter and hovering five miles above where you are now. From the vantage point of your helicopter window, you can now see yourself down there. This game creates mental space so that we can view the actions that stem from all our gremlins and mind games as simply objects in our awareness. Seeing our thoughts and actions from a distance triggers insight: “My coach asked me to describe what I saw from this ‘on-high’ perspective. As I looked down on me and my colleagues, suddenly I could see the way I was being, the games I was involved in” (D. C., client) Insights in the mind and body arise in a space of no judgment: “Aha moments happen when I take a step back and reflect on my own mind games, without judgment. I can also go into my body and listen to what it has to tell me” (S. L., client) Insights also crop up in a silent space: “I learned to sit in silence, just observing my thoughts as they arise”. (H. G., client) With consistent observation of the thoughts that have turned into belief systems it gradually begins to dawn that your thoughts are not even your own thoughts.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

They have all been put into your mind by other minds. When you tease apart the thoughts that are meaningful to you from the mountains of conditioned beliefs, you start to become kinder and more loving towards yourself. When you flush out all the foreign thoughts, you travel lighter. You feel more integrated, more authentic as you start to understand and live according to your own values and beliefs, and nobody else’s. You can decide for yourself what thoughts to allow into your mind, as this client discovered: “Examining my beliefs in self-reflection has led me to my being me, trusting myself, respecting myself. This is because I have let go of beliefs that don’t belong to me but were ‘put in’ to me” (C. G., client) Exercise 4: The Helicopter Get in to your helicopter every time you feel your buttons being pressed or you inexplicably feel negative. Look down from your helicopter perspective and see yourself as if you were looking at someone else. What do you see and feel from this person? What is their body language like, what mood are they in, how are they behaving, what does their energy emit? From this meta-perspective you will gain many insights about how you think and act and behave. Are these actions that you’re seeing loving ones? Exercise 5: Sparkling Stream Meditation Close your eyes and picture this: you are sitting in a green pasture on a lovely summer’s day beside a sparkling stream. Breathe deeply into your belly and allow your attention to follow your breath. When a thought arises, drop it softly into the stream. Notice that when it lands it turns into a little leaf that floats gently down the stream and fades from view. Return to your breathing and continue dropping any thought leaves into the stream until you’re all thought out. Practice daily if you can, even for a few minutes. Exercise 6: Forgive Yourself Never forget that your inner state creates your external world. Look at the way you judge and criticize and attack others in your mind. Don’t make yourself feel guilty or ashamed about it, just understand that these attacks are projections of your own psyche. And they are hurting you, not other people. You are seeing in others the criticisms you have of yourself, criticisms that you have buried in your unconscious mind. People who provoke criticism and attack in you provide a golden opportunity for forgiveness. By forgiving whatever it is that we’ve projected on to them, we begin to heal ourselves. Through forgiving our selves and others we gradually change our external world from one of fear to one of Love. So whenever someone triggers negative thoughts and feelings in you, this is your cue to practice forgiveness. You can say a little prayer that will help you heal the split with others that leads to healing the split in your own psyche. A simple forgiveness exercise is the ho’oponopono prayer. Ho'oponopono is an ancient

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Hawaiian prayer used for inner peace, self-love and healing. It's a simple yet powerful way to bring healing into your life by clearing the energy of past hurts and traumas. You can use it to free yourself from the pain you imagine another person has inflicted upon you. Or you can use it to forgive yourself for things you feel you've done wrong. The power of the vibration created by forgiveness eases us out of self-condemnation and into self-love. So try saying this prayer every time you experience negative thoughts and feelings about yourself or others. Hoʻoponopono Prayer Please forgive me. I'm so sorry. I love you. Thank you. Do You Have a Screw Loose? The mind is so ‘up close and personal’ that it is the primary figure in your existence, causing you to react in programmed and unconscious ways more than 95% of the time. You need to start watching it. As an ancient proverb says, “Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become habits. Watch your habits for they become your character. Watch your character for it becomes your destiny.” So it all starts with the concepts, beliefs and ideas that shape our world. There is no reality to them, they are all just constructs but as our brain absorbs them, they become the fixtures and fittings of our mind. The mind, you see, is a lazy instrument that takes the path of least resistance. Our brains form neuronal networks, pathways that are created because of the number of times the same old thoughts have trampled along them. Failing to question our intransigent beliefs keeps us heading down the same old mental cul-de-sacs, ingraining and calcifying these mental pathways. We waste energy defending points of view that are not ours anyway, just ideas from others that we’ve swallowed whole. Defending belief systems is an act of war, not love. Every time we answer somebody with a “Yes, but…” we are actually attacking ourselves. Peace comes when we release the need to argue. If we want to know ourselves we need to loosen the screws that hold our beliefs rigidly in place. This is how we make room for novelty, for creativity. Having a screw loose is an insult in our society but, as usual, societal thinking is upside down and backward. Were we to stop being sheep we would realize that we need far more loose screws, more lightening up of our entrenched beliefs, more tolerance of the views of others, less defensiveness so that we can become more accepting and experience life as more loving. There’s nothing like being stuck in one perspective in any area of your life to make you feel stuck in your life as a whole. This is especially true of love. Think of the parent you had most difficulties with. Only allow yourself to consider what you found difficult about them. Make a list of their negative qualities, the aspects of what they said and did that upset you. This is not about painting a fair and

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

rounded picture of your mother or father or whoever raised you, it’s about simply recalling their negative behaviour and its effect on you at the time and writing it down. Now think about your most important intimate relationship with a partner. Just think about the aspects of their behaviour that upset you. Again, just concentrate on these negative facets and then write a list as you did for your parent. Make sure your list is exhaustive, detailing all your grievances against this person. Now compare your two lists. Do not be surprised to find many similarities. Whatever our home life was like when we were young, this experience shapes our view of love, the convictions held in our unconscious mind and body. Never mind if our home life was abusive and threatening rather than safe and loving, to us it equates to what love means. So we follow an unconscious drive to replicate this experience of home as we grow up and start to have relationships. Perhaps we are trying on some unconscious level to heal the wounds inflicted on us in childhood. For whatever reason, it is not uncommon to attract partners with similar qualities to the problematic parent. When these unconscious drives are brought to the surface, something can be done about them. We can start to heal our own childhood hurts by challenging our world-views, the ones that cause us upset. Love does not hurt! The next time you notice that you’re stuck in an old, negative way of thinking, about love or anything else, give yourself a ‘perspectives check’. Your beliefs are not bolted down – they are nothing but ingrained habits of mind that you have failed to challenge. Your beliefs have chosen you! Choose again. When you play with different perspectives you start to see that you have limitless choice. You can choose a way of looking at something that your bodymind intuitively knows will work for you instead of against you: “I have learned to analyse situations from many different perspectives. I am no longer stuck in a particular point of view. I can choose a perspective that works for me instead of against me”. (K. M., client) This client’s beliefs about himself were making him feel very insecure, until he adopted the perspective of being the observer, looking at himself from the ‘outside’: “Having to make a flow-chart of what happens when I get insecure really helped me see myself from the outside. Great new perspective.” (H. M., client) You can only love yourself when you be yourself. Instead of presenting a selfimage, perspective taking provides insights that free you to abandon role-playing and just be yourself: “By understanding the effects on my mind and body when I strive to project an image of how I believe people want me to be, I’ve learned to drop the pretenses and just be myself. It’s such a relief!” (P. R., client)

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Perspective taking can also move relationships with others in a more loving direction: “A change of perspective regarding a person that I must cooperate with in my new position. From a threat to a possibility” (E. W., client) Seeing another person from different perspectives makes us feel more empathy towards them: “ I was not able to see a person from different angles. In the perspectives coaching I saw this “difficult” person as a 3 year old, a great grandfather, a customer and a colleague” (H. G., client) Previous exercises have given you glimpses into your thinking about love and about the stories you have created about your life – your ‘script’. They have encouraged you to simply witness your thoughts without identifying with them. This time it’s about actively choosing new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world, ways that are more compassionate and more loving. Breaking free of rigid beliefs begins with identifying repetitive ways of looking at the world that don’t serve your objective of being loving. Once you clarify your current perspective, you can begin to play with other perspectives. The operative word here is play: you play with your imagination to come up with different points of view, to ‘try on’ these alternative perspectives in your mind and body; you step into them like an actor donning a cloak, playing a role, and really ham them up. These perspectives may not be ‘rational’; in fact sometimes the more imaginative and downright whacky these perspectives can be, the better, the more they shake up your stale thinking. For instance you could use what’s right under your nose as a prompt for a perspective. If there’s a fruit bowl on the table in front of you, you might say to yourself: How would this situation/event/person look from the banana perspective? All it takes to free ourselves from our controlling beliefs and judgments is a little inventiveness. Exercise 7: Pick a Perspective Take an example from your own life. Suppose you’re stuck in a perspective about yourself that says: “Deep down, I’m afraid that I’m unlovable; I want love but I’m afraid of it”. Now stand up and see yourself, picture yourself in the centre of the room from this fear perspective. Give yourself permission to ONLY see yourself from this point of view. You’re stepping up to the perspective like an actor stepping up on to a stage. You wear the perspective like a cloak and act up a storm. Do not allow yourself to view yourself from any other perspective than this – there will be time for that later. Now, breathe into the fear perspective. What do you notice about the way your imaginary self looks like from this perspective – notice how she holds her body, notice her expression, her overall demeanour. Now breathe into your own body again. Where do you feel the fear in your body? What colour is it? What shape/size? What else do you notice about the fear? Stay with the feeling and see where it takes you. No matter how scary it feels, allow the fear to arise. If you do, it will naturally pass through you. Give

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

yourself a score out of 10 for the depth of fear you are feeling with 1 being not too afraid and 10 being petrified. Suppose you give the fear a 5, play with it; turn it up to an 8, then down to a 3. See how you can manipulate the fear and feel how your whole energy changes when you do. Now ask yourself the following questions with no judgment, just a gentle, honest approach: What does the fear perspective give me? You’ll be surprised what might come up that could be seen as payoffs: poor little me, I can’t cope with this scary world, I need you to look after me, for example. Now ask yourself: what is this fear choice costing me? How do you experience your life when you approach it from the fear perspective? How does it constrict you? What are you saying ‘no’ to simply because of fear, which is only an illusory thought in your mind? Now choose other perspectives. Let’s call the fear perspective ‘north’ so now you walk to the south and view yourself in the middle of the room from a different perspective. You might begin with the opposite of fear, i.e. love. Stand in the ‘love’ perspective and look at your imaginary self from this standpoint. Again, get into your body and find love, breath into it and expand the feeling. Identify where you feel it in your body. Now play with it as you did with the fear perspective. Be clear about what it gives you and what it costs you to see yourself from love. Maybe you’ll begin to realize that you ARE love and that everything that obscures this knowledge is only a thought system that you’re stuck in. Then move east and west finding other perspectives and try them out for size by engaging what’s happening in your mind and body as you experience them. Other perspectives could include courage, power, vulnerability or whatever object is in front of you – a light, a flower, a mountain or anything at all in your environment. This bringing together of mind and body as you explore the different perspectives in imaginative ways means that you are coming from a higher place than your rational mind. When you have exhausted all the perspectives you can think of, choose one. Your bodymind will guide your choice. Then make a commitment to staying in the new perspective for a week. Supposing you choose to stay in the love perspective. Make a list of 7 loving things you will do for yourself and others to promote this loving perspective. Your 7-point plan will be highly personal but here are some ideas to get you going: Catch my gremlin thoughts and turn them into loving thoughts about myself. Give myself encouragement, the way I would with a 3 year-old child. Reward myself for catching myself in negative thinking patterns with whatever tickles my fancy. Offer help to someone who needs it. Listen openly and without judgment to the things people say to me. Acknowledge my partner (best friend, relative) by telling them all the things I love about them. Keep a gratitude journal by my bed and before I go to sleep make a list of all the things I’m grateful for today. Practice your new perspective every day for a week and see how much more loving you feel!

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

With practice, the stories in your head can be spotted before they have time to take hold, again putting you in a position to make new choices: “I’ve learned to recognise my old story as it shows up”. (J.W., client) Chapter 3: Love Your Body The body is often treated as an inconvenient appendage that has to be fed and watered. You may protest that you treat yours well on the surface of things but if you fail to engage with the interior of your body, the world of feelings and emotions, you will be at war with yourself. You will feel disintegrated because you have cut yourself off from your feelings and now you fear them. The mind and heart that is ruled by fear will find ways to see everything as frightening. Fear compels you to react to life in programmed and painful ways that use up so much of your limited supply of energy. It’s not fear that keeps you trapped. It’s hiding the fear that keeps you trapped. Keeping a lid on fears can be a full time job as it stresses and constricts your whole energy flow, causing you endless unnecessary suffering. This suffering will begin to release as soon as you have the courage and compassion for yourself to start befriending your body. As you bring kindness and love to your emotions, they will help you to understand yourself, forgive yourself, heal yourself. You will find that under all emotions there is something vulnerable, something that needs your love. We all have this vulnerability, this frightened child within. So the whole world needs your love! The process starts by bringing presence and awareness to the life that is right here now, your life. This is the life that you can affect today and as you develop compassion for your own painful feelings, you automatically feel more empathy and understanding for others. The body is a source of great wisdom and intelligence. To confine your life to listening to what’s going on between your ears is to cut yourself off from this fountain of wisdom and guidance. You can trust this guide because you source it from inside you; you are not at the mercy of any outside authority. Aha Moments in the body happen: • • • • •

When you call upon the innate wisdom of the body When you reunite mind and body When feelings are accepted, integrated and released When emotional energy is allowed to be in motion When you trust the intuition of your emotional guidance system

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Even the scientific community is slowly waking up to the wisdom of the body. Recent research indicates that the brain is not the grand orchestrator of our experience, the pinnacle of intelligence we’ve long held it to be. The body acts alongside the brain, forming an information exchange system that sends chemical messengers called neuropeptides around the whole system. These are the chemicals of emotion and they link to receptors that change our behaviour and mood states. The blood carries these chemicals to all parts of the body, especially to the heart, gut and the immune system. It used to be thought that these chemicals were confined to the brain, hence ‘neuro’ peptides. It may be news to the West that the brain and body exchange these chemicals of emotion but ancient civilisations have long been aware of the intelligence of the heart and the gut. New technologies are confirming this. For example we now know that the power of the heart far exceeds that of the brain, generating an electrical field sixty times greater. The heart can receive information much faster than the brain. Love is power! This means that when you tune in to your body you are using your own higher intelligence, your innate power to gain much stronger insights than the ego mind could ever offer. Thoughts are ‘formed in’ you from ‘in-formation’ gained only from the outside world. How could any outside ‘expert’ know what’s going on in your life, your mind, your body? Why do we even turn to the outside world of other minds and bodies to tell us what’s going on inside our own? We forget that we possess the superpower of free will. This means we have a genuine choice. We can resist further indoctrination by a social system that keeps us in our heads and keeps us looking to the outside world for meaning. Or we can learn to trust our innate wisdom. Trust comes from finding the courage and compassion to turn inwards, to explore the reality of our own inner worlds. We have the Godgiven capacity to know our own bodies, to feel our own emotions, to re-integrate our minds and our bodies and to allow our emotions to guide us towards our higher good.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Our emotions evolved to give us feedback about the right choices to make, to act as an early warning system when we are about to make the wrong ones and to guide us to our life purpose. Since thoughts and emotions feed in to each other, both have been hijacked by our narrow-minded culture. Conventional thinking is very childish, dividing the world into black and white opposites. We’re conditioned to believe that everything in life is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or to be repelled. So we try to have ‘good’ feelings and get rid of the bad. The ego mind tells us we are incapable of withstanding painful emotions and so we hide them, we stuff them down, we pretend they don’t exist and carry on trying to make sense of why our lives aren’t working. Our lives are not working because we’ve cut our bodies off from our awareness and our internal feelings are at war. Whenever emotions feel ‘bad’ we bolt, escaping them in endless diversions and distractions. Of course this is all happening on a deeply subconscious level but this doesn’t change the fact that your mind and body are now split. We could say that the body speaks the mind and vice versa. If, for example, you were born feeling unwanted and unloved, you will develop into a belief system that says “I am unlovable” a painful belief that you will carry forward through life. The belief accompanies feelings that were too painful to experience as a child and have therefore been buried. Yet our beliefs vibrate in our bodies as a field of energy. And this energy is broadcast to the world, attracting people at the same vibrational level as us. Since like attracts like in the vibrational universe, the expectation of being unlovable becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is played out in the world as the ‘unlovable’ you keeps on attracting the kind of people that support this underlying belief. In other words, the belief creates a repetition of the same experience. Whether it’s Mary or John or whoever - same experience, different name. The common denominator in all these relationships is you! You are repeating the same pain out there in the world that is inside your own heart and mind. You have no control of anything or anybody out there in the world but you do have control of your own thoughts and feelings. You can begin to acknowledge the vulnerable child in you that has been hiding away for so long. With Aha moments of insight shining a light on the body of pain within, you can come to know your inner demons and finally release them. Aha moments wake us up to the fact that our bodies are a source of wisdom when we allow them to unveil their feelings. When we tune in to our own bodily intuitions, we come to know ourselves better. To know ourselves better is to love ourselves more as we let go of feelings of unworthiness, doubt, fear, shame and all the other emotions that shut down our capacity for love.

Practice 1. Your life energy always follows the flow of your attention. So give your body the kindness of your attention. Become aware of your body ‘geography’ – how you hold your body, how you walk, sit, move, breathe. Play with changing normal actions – use your left hand instead of your right, try walking in a different way and at different speeds, sit with a straight spine if your tendency is to hunch up. Get creative with ideas on

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

trying new ways of holding and using your body. If you’re sitting at a desk for hours, get up at regular intervals and stretch your body, noting where pain or tensions arise. Note also how pleasurable it is to feel that you are in your body, stretching it, using it, enjoying the strength of it. Bodymind Integration We have a thinking mind that is supposed to be a tool at our disposal. We have a feeling body that is supposed to be a guidance system. We have developed a tendency to talk nonsense in our heads and cut ourselves off from what’s in our hearts. Having your head feel disconnected from your body is one of the main reasons you feel so fragmented, so ill at ease, so far from love, far from home. How can we love when our heart is not open and available to us? How can we feel love and passion for life, for others, for ourselves? The mind and body are seen as separate entities, as if they act independently. They do not and in ignoring this we separate ourselves from Love by constantly trapping ourselves in the ego mind, feeling alienated from ourselves and from the world.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Body and mind must dance together in harmony for self-love to be fully realized. The unexamined mind and the unexamined body are dual aspects of the ego. The totality of the ego must be understood before mind and body can be integrated. It comprises the monkey mind that swings from one mindless thought to another and the painbody. The painbody is Eckhart Tolle’s neat way of describing all the unprocessed pain we’ve stuffed away in our bodies to be denied and forgotten about. These buried beliefs and feelings run us through programmed memories and emotional patterns, patterns that become deeply ingrained and persistent. Lack of awareness of these patterns closes our capacity for self-knowledge and therefore self-love. We cannot possibly know our true selves when a) our minds and bodies are divided and b) the full contents of both are hidden from our awareness. Life can hardly be lived authentically when we’ve hidden bits of ourselves from ourselves. Then we live a fabricated life based on the presentation of our self-image. The image stems from thoughts and beliefs about ourselves that, through repetition, become our story. With enough rehashing of the story it becomes the script that defines our self-identity and becomes our reality. Suppose that you hold tight to a story of yourself as a very calm and peaceful person. This means that you will disown your anger and rage because they have been written out of your script. Whenever you experience a vibration of anger you will perceive it to be out there in the world, being expressed by others, never in your own body/mind. To deny our emotions instead of allowing their expression is a very unloving practice that can make us ill. Unexpressed anger, for example, can solidify into bitter resentment. Resentment literally means refeeling the pain of old grievances held in the body. These grievances are like balls of pain that need to be brought to the surface where they can be acknowledged and finally allowed to express their pain. Only then can they be released. This client had an Aha moment when she realized that the jealousy that she was projecting onto her boyfriend was a feeling she was harbouring in her own heartmind: “I saw in a flash that the jealously I was accusing him of was in fact my own. I was brought up to believe that I had to be a ‘good’ girl. And good girls don’t feel spiteful feelings like jealousy and anger” (S. B., client) The client re-owned her projection. Many clients in my research talked of the relief that came with allowing their feelings to be fully experienced with no judgment. These clients had learned to become intimate with their disowned parts, the shadow. It is only when we deny shadow that we have no distance from it. What we are unaware of, what we are keeping in the dark, what we are busy trying to get away from, is precisely what controls us. Projecting negative emotions on to other people is not the only way we split body and mind. We cause ourselves upset in each moment when we are resisting what is happening in our mind or in the outside world, when we are not present, not in the real moment. When we are in complaining mode, our body reacts whether there’s something in the outside world to complain about or whether the complaint is in our heads. It responds anyway by pumping poisonous

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

chemicals around our system. Our mind complains that life isn’t dancing to our tune and our body reacts. Whenever we feel the slightest irritation or heave the smallest sigh, what’s really happening is that we are resisting the present moment as it is. We are subconsciously demanding that life be different, that circumstances be more to our liking. Suffering always results from resisting what is happening in the now moment of our lives. This is a recipe for suffering which is quite irrational. What’s happening is already happening so resisting it is utterly futile. This client had been ruled by emotions all her life, creating dramas big and small. The result of body insights moved her to be present to and accepting of her feelings: “I am more with myself and my feelings, but in a place of acceptance.” (D. L., client). So often our emotions hijack us by bypassing the neo-cortex, gripping our body and crippling our ability to respond rationally. So we just react, playing out the same old unconscious emotional patterns, causing ourselves (and others) endless suffering. To bring yourself out of this pattern is as easy as taking a loving, cleansing breath. Taking even one conscious breath interrupts the pattern of reacting like one of Pavlov’s dogs and brings you to a calmer state of mind. It returns you to the present moment, without the emotional baggage. It allows a pause for rationality to kick in so that we give ourselves the chance to step in to a more peaceful perspective. Whenever you feel a negative emotion being triggered, take a pause before reacting in your habitual way. Open yourself up to a deep inhale and let the breath cleanse your emotions and calm your system. As the poet Rumi so beautifully expressed it: There is a way of breathing that’s a shame and a suffocation and there’s another way of expiring a love breath, that lets you open infinitely. – Rumi It is important to realize that a favourite ego trick is to keep mind and body disjointed through shallow, constricted breathing. This superficial breathing engages the fight or flight response of the ‘sympathetic’ nervous system which puts us constantly on guard against imagined danger. It kicks in automatically when we face a perceived threat, even if the threat is only to our self-image. If you have experienced a racing heart and a dry mouth before having to speak in public, your sympathetic nervous system has taken over. Hormones released by the adrenal glands tell your heart to speed up while digestive processes like saliva production dry up. Breath offers a way to correct this. Deep, full-bodied breathing engages another system, one that offers a powerful method of restoring calm and balance. This much slower ‘parasympathetic’ nervous system reduces stress by helping the body to relax and repair. And the great thing is, it can be engaged at any time you remember to take oxygen deeply into the body. When the attention follows the breath, the monkey mind is stilled. Then you can open to a love breath.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Practice When you feel agitated simply take a 7/11 breath or two. Just breathe in deeply for a count of 7 and breathe out slowly for a count of 11. Making each out breath longer than the in breath naturally calms the body. The very act of counting distracts the mind from its usual aimless chattering. Give your full attention to your breath as you follow its journey into and out of your body. Continue until you feel calm. This body of yours that has been largely neglected since childhood will begin to thank you for the attention and will start to feel acknowledged and loved again. Emotional Wisdom Throughout our lives we have been unconsciously recoiling against the world. We tense and contract our bodies, bracing ourselves to push away those aspects of life that we find scary. The feelings that we’ve swallowed down and denied have caused many layers of painbody to settle and freeze over within us. They have not been allowed to complete their Gestalt and flow naturally through us. Over the years these frozen wastelands constrict our bodies and our life force. Our bodies are literally living in the past. This is a very unloving way to live. The loving thing to do is to gently shine a light on the shadow that is the frozen painbody. When you sit quietly and breathe into your body, your will find little diamonds glinting in the light, Aha moments of self-knowledge that can ultimately dissolve the pain in a burst of understanding. New insights unleash new ways of understanding as the body releases torrents of unconscious emotional material: “I felt a rush of energy and understanding. A very deep moment occurred and I filled up with emotion and tears”. (C.L., client) As you read these reports of body Aha moments, continue to feel into your own body. Become aware of where you are experiencing a sense of tension or constriction and bring your presence to the area, directing your breath to it. Approach the practice with simple curiosity. This will help you stay with uncomfortable feelings instead of running for cover: “Instead of immediately going for cover I ask myself what this sensation is trying to tell me” (H. G., client) Body Aha moments yield true self-knowledge because the body doesn’t lie. Its gift is a trustworthy emotional guidance system that you can easily tune in to. Loving yourself includes accepting this gift by paying attention to your body’s reactions. Giving your body your presence and attention is the only love it needs to reward you with inner teachings that help wake you up to your true nature. Drop the temptation to weave stories or interpretations about what you sense and feel. This closes off messages from the heart, the gut and all the other seats of wisdom in the body. As soon as you start befriending your body, you will start to

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

learn from your body’s messages. Insights from the body are richer than those of the mind, often preceding cognitive understanding: “My body senses it, my heart opens and my brain finally registers its meaning”. (S. H., client) Psychologists like Fritz Perls have always appreciated that the body holds a vital intelligence field without the need for any help from the thinking mind, thank you very much. This somatic intelligence is an intuitive knowing prior to thinking, subtler than thinking, a way of understanding in its own right. That’s why he advised, “Get out of your head and into your senses”. When you pay attention to this somatic intelligence linking body and mind, you tap into the wisdom of your body where you find that the gut always has a rich supply: “I know I will find a sense of calm excitement in my stomach. I go there when I need to feel powerful” (C. G., client). The visceral sense of Aha moments in the gut deliver a feeling of certainty and clarity that foreshadows the thinking mind: “Aha! Confirmation of the truth from my gut – ideas popping in my head” (A. D., client) Whatever emotions you are expressing out there in the world are also affecting your body and your health. Some experts believe that all symptoms of disease stem from unresolved emotional patterns. Suppose that in your relationship you easily get anxious or jealous or frustrated. That feeling is not only directed outwards, it is also flooding you internally. Neuropeptides, the chemicals of emotion, pump through your system and attach to the same receptors to which heroin attaches. So we seem to be addicted to our emotions. Yet if we turn our attention inwards and listen to our body it will give us the information we need to begin to heal. The profusion of these peptides and their receptors in the gut area has long been acknowledged in far Eastern cultures that regard the gut as a ‘second brain’. So having a ‘gut’ feeling is no metaphorical description but a source of body wisdom. Body Aha moments present themselves in all kinds of non-rational ways, including visual insights: “The Aha comes in a visual hit. Whenever I have ignored it, I have made the wrong decisions. Now I always trust these insights”. (N. Y., client) Trusting the wisdom of the body is key to melting the painbody. Animals could teach us a thing or two about how emotions should be allowed to pass through us, not get stuck in us. Whenever an animal faces sudden danger, like a deer in the headlights, it momentarily freezes but then, as soon as the danger passes, the deer shakes out its body. It is shaking off the trauma, releasing all the chemicals that flooded the system in the moment of fear. When we humans allow our reptilian brains to take over and bypass any rational approach to a situation, we don’t take a moment a moment to shake off the fear and allow it to pass through us and dissolve. And the difference between us and the animals is that we are

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

freaking out about situations that are not appearing in reality, only in our imaginations. As you work with bringing buried emotions into the light of awareness, resolve not to add any more. Allow emotions to pass through you. Every time you feel an emotional hit, take a breath and bring yourself into the present moment. See that in this moment there is nothing to fear. All of your pain comes from remembering and anticipating. So resting in the present moment becomes, with practice a means of not allowing feelings to hijack your peace. Practices Body movement like dance, yoga, Tai chi and Qigong are all great ways to raise your vibration to forge a bodymind reintegration. Exercise 9 Close your eyes and breathe deeply into your body, relaxing and letting go with every breath. Feel the space inside you and all around you soften and expand. When you have let go of all tensions and restrictions and are totally relaxed and calm, check out areas of your body that feel very peaceful or happy or excited. Go into the feeling fully. Now give your imagination permission to play. Look at the feeling and describe what you see. Where is it? How big is it? What does it weigh? What colour is it? What shape? Suppose the feeling is a flutter of excitement. On a scale of 1 – 10, how exciting is the feeling? Is it a 5? Okay so play with the dial. Turn the ‘volume’ up on the feeling from a 5 to an 8. What colour, shape, size etc. is it now? Now turn it up to a full 10-10. How excited do you feel now? You get the idea, play with each feeling like this and see how easy it is to ramp up the excitement. Emotional Detox Emotions, correctly experienced, are really energies in motion. Now that you have begun to stir up your stuck emotions, it’s time to go into them more deeply, feel them more fully and provide the conditions for their release. When you accept and befriend your emotions, it’s not too difficult to discover where you store different parts of your painbody: “I have learned how to dissolve and evaporate the knots of fear and frustration in my solar plexus and head” (S.L., client)

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Detoxing your emotions is just as important as detoxing your physical body. Releasing toxic emotions clears the way for healing, opens the channels for guidance. Getting intimate with our thoughts and feelings means fully exposing them, recognising that there are many disintegrated parts of ourselves that need to come together. One very effective way to bring these unconscious fragments out to play is journaling. Journaling can show us different parts of our psyche and bring them all out of hiding so that they finally have a voice: “I know that when I write, allowing my unconscious to spill out on paper, I sometimes have Aha moments. I can remember this happening particularly when I allowed different parts of my psyche a voice. As I moved the pen as fast as I could to capture their words, a dialogue would emerge among them from which an Aha moment might occur” (M.L., client). We all experience this fragmentation of ourselves into competing voices and conflicting emotions that we can think of as various sub-personalities. By gently coaxing the body to reveal its pain and its potential, you acknowledge and accept these various aspects of your psyche and allow them to re-integrate. The process starts with understanding that buried feelings and emotions need to be very gently coaxed to reveal their secrets. They will not present themselves if they feel unsafe. So it is vital to provide a space of deep acceptance and welcoming. Be present with them, giving them your full attention. The more you can treat them like a beloved child the better. This means setting a very clear intention to allow them to be. They should just be observed with curiosity and deep compassion and allowed to be as they are. You can begin to question them very gently and with open curiosity when they have come out of the shadows. Once they have been acknowledged, they are then free to release their hold over you. Now energy is available to fulfill its purpose of guiding you to your passions in life. Your heart-felt values are revealed at the levels of your body and soul. You feel much more alive when you are living your life ‘on purpose’. Because Aha moments reveal what you really want to be doing, their energy has a joyful ring and a call to action: “Aha. Energetic, restless, twitchy, wanting to move about. Positive energy – optimism”. (C. L., client) Aha moments into one’s passions are heart-felt, leading to an intuitive ‘click’ in the form of a feeling or a voice or a picture: “The “Aha” landed in my heart and showed me what’s truly important to me. There is a clear image – visual realisation of my life’s purpose”. Taking action that comes from your heart-felt values is an act of self-love. So get out of your head, into your body and feel the sparks of insight that will guide the road ahead.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Exercise 10 Set your intention to invite your emotions to come to the surface. Close your eyes and go inside your body, first to the belly and note how it feels. Allow it to soften. Next, go into the heart centre and note the feelings there. Allow it to soften and expand. Note any areas of tension in your body. See them as a cube of ice. Then direct a tender, loving breath into the area until the ice cube slowly melts away. Do this until you feel completely relaxed. Now, think of a time when you felt agitated or your emotions were triggered in some way. Allow those emotions to come to the surface, one at a time. Go to the most painful emotion and, ask it if it would like to join you for a cup of tea. You may find that the emotion is surrounded by a number of other emotions that are ‘protecting’ it. Get curious with the protectors. What is their colour/shape/size/texture? What is it they have to tell you? Ask if you might be allowed to chat with the emotion they are protecting. If the core emotion agrees to come to tea, welcome it in. Coax it as you would a little child to reveal what it feels and why. Just be curious as you invite it to communicate with you. Trust your intuition to receive the information. Don’t identify with the feeling, just un-blend from it and bring to it some loving kindness. Be tender and patient as it reveals its message. It can then be lovingly released. You may have to visit this or other emotions several times before the feeling feels safe enough to reveal itself. Or the emotion may just want to be acknowledged and released without too much of a story attached. Either way, you are now free to experience yourself without the burden of unprocessed emotions weighing you down. Chapter 4: Love Your Soul You will never be happy until you’re living your life according to the purpose of your soul. The body could be thought of as a container of many tubes. The tubes get blocked with unprocessed emotions that are mirrored in the physical body as pain and disease. Now that mental and emotional tubes have started to release their pent up thoughts and feelings, you can turn your attention to being loving to yourself by clarifying what brings you pleasure. What makes your heart sing? What awakens your deepest values and passions? Are you hiding any of those gifts and talents of yours under a bushel? We are happy when we are in the flow, doing what we do because we love it, free to express our skills and talents in the world. What we yearn for is made known to us by the soul, not the ego. A soul level of consciousness is one that has risen above the limitations of the mind. At this stage we have figured out that so long as we clog our minds with borrowed ideas and opinions, we will never feel whole. So we learn to listen to the heart and soul to find out who we uniquely are and how to express it in the world. Soul Aha moments are so deeply felt that they bring great confidence that we can rise above the commonplace and leave our mark on the world. After body and mind have integrated we evolve to the next

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

level of consciousness, the subtle consciousness of the soul. All the energy that went into attacking and defending the tubes of the mind and body is now free. You still have a stream of thinking available to you to use as the amazing tool that it is when thinking is called for, but you are no longer dominated by it. Emotions may still arise but they deliver their message and dissolve. As the channels for soul communication open, you develop a surety that you are here for a reason, that your life is purposeful. You alone can perfume the world with your particular fragrance. No-one else has exactly the same life purpose as you. To love yourself and by extension the world is to live ‘on purpose’ by offering up your unique gifts and talents. Living your life purpose is just as important for your evolution as knowing your essential nature as eternal spirit. Soul Aha moments remind you of who you were before society told you who you should be. They arise in independent minds that have transcended conventional indoctrination to be able to think for themselves. These minds have appreciated the importance of rationality but have transcended the status quo to also appreciate the limitations of thinking! Soul insights are transrational because they add vision and imagination to rational analysis. The faculty of vision delivers intelligence that is beyond what can be seen with the body’s eyes or thought with the body’s mind. The vision of the soul is like an inner teacher who knows who you really are. It guides you to unfold all of your potential. You are created from love to be an individual expression of love, in your own inimitable way. Without this self-knowledge your life lacks meaning and purpose. Without insights of the soul you are forever stuck in your brainwashed mind, caught in a web of rehashed ideas and recycled beliefs. Osho said it well: “When you have something authentically your own in your mind, you start moving toward the soul. Then you become worthy, then you are able to know the soul. Until you have an independent mind, it is simply impossible for individuality to be born.” Soul Aha moments have special characteristics: • • • • • •

They offer guidance about your life purpose They come from a still mind They reveal a Truth that is beyond the thinking mind to perceive They connect us to the creative, intuitive right brain They cannot be captured in words They motivate connection with others

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Mind the Gap The soul is reached in a silent mind, a mind that allows space between thoughts. There is peace in the gap. Just tell your brain to shut up for a moment and in that moment breathe deep into your body and touch the edges of peace. Aha moments are little droplets of gold, gold that is mined in the space of no mind. People report an intuitively felt “impasse”, a tiny time gap just before the “Aha” realization. One client describes what happens in this impasse: “The brain just stalls prior to the “Aha!” It’s a nanosecond when the analytical mind is suspended and in this interruption, latent intelligences have the chance to be engaged. Surrendering thought means a conscious decision to give up the need to know. This is not a passive state of being but an engaged listening, an expectation that we will hear or sense or feel the intuition of our soul. Surrendering thought takes some practice in this intellectually obsessed culture. We are so trained to figure things out that we have to “give ourselves permission” to relinquish the need to know. Then we realize that, when it comes to soul wisdom, intellectual is ineffectual: “I learned to sit in silence while allowing myself to not know the outcome. If I just “sit” with questions, often resolutions will appear”. (H.G., client) In the enlightened impasse of the space between thoughts pour forth the fruits of a deeper dimension of your multiple intelligences. Soul Aha moments deliver an intuitive light that floods the darkest corners of our unconscious body/minds. Not only are they felt very viscerally but they are often accompanied by a sense of re-cognition, a re-knowing of a wisdom that became lost along the way. This is why they have the ring of a very deep truth; not any professed truth that has been drummed into you, but a thunderbolt of recognition that resonates through all dimensions of your being: “The Aha moment came from another level of reality. I was in an alternate state of being. All of me, mind body and soul, recognised it as a TRUTH.” (N.O., client) In the gap we taste the freedom that comes from dis-identification with the mind and its insane ideas. People feel guided to unearth qualities within them that had

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

been covered up, qualities that indicate that their consciousness has evolved to a level of compassion and Love. You open to an interpretation of the world through the vision offered by your soul, not your eyes. From the soul rises Christ consciousness, or Buddha mind and we then see and experience a transformed world of loving kindness and connection. We have projected what we are now experiencing in our inner world. Hold terms like ‘soul’ or ‘Christ consciousness’ very lightly because these are only words, symbols of symbols. The soul’s intelligence, being of a higher vibration of reality than the thinking mind, cannot be defined or understood by the thinking mind through any words or concepts. Soul is not an object in the mind, it is not a thought form nor a function of our physical bodies but a formless, nameless energy in the subtle realm of our awareness: “It felt like an indrawn breath, as I moved to a place beyond words.” (H.G., client) To move beyond words is to move towards love, because love is experienced in the stillness of the heart and soul. The longing that you feel deep in your heart is a call to awaken to who you truly are. When you meet someone who ignites the flame in your heart or you cry during a romantic film, this is the soul’s longing arising in you. The loving feeling may have been sparked by the attraction you feel to another person but it has been there, a little neglected seed inside you, all along. It is Love as the source of all life that you feel, not the love that you believe comes from the ‘special one’. All he or she has done is to re-awaken the innate love that is calling you home. Deep down, you know this to be true, even if your mind hasn’t caught up with the knowledge. The remnant of heaven within you that is still connected to God, or Universal Source, the Ground of All Being, knows this. So you are never alone, you have this power and presence within you. And waking up to it taps into a universal energy of love that is not confined to our separate self: “My soul felt inspired by a mission and a purpose bigger than I am.” (B.L., client) Pursue Your Purpose To live a soulless life is a very unloving act. To deny your heart’s desires is an unconscious form of self-attack. For example, it is an act of self-loathing to live your life to please others, to bow to what society demands of you. This is the death of the soul. The resurrection is found in rising above the status quo and figuring things out for yourself. Soul insights help you to get crystal clear about what is meaningful to you. You will never find a way to Love with purely egorationality. As Rumi said, “Reason is powerless in the expression of love”. Aha moments at the transrational level of soul lift you above reason: “Aha moments result from the accumulation of new awarenesses and set you free from the mental plane so you can experience your soul.” (J.P., Co-Active Coach).

To be happy you need to identify your values, you need to be clear about your passions. Only then are you able to extend your unique gifts to the world and in

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

so doing feel wholly alive. Values and passions change over time so it is important to regularly check in with your inner wisdom, your heart and soul. Like the emotions, the soul points you in the direction of your highest truth. This is how to decide whether you’re envisioning your own values or ones you feel you “should” have, or that other people would like you to have. You bypass the critical mind and prioritize what’s important based on how it makes you feel. Welcome this intuition. It connects you to a subtle energy field that highlights the excitement you sense when you identify your highest values: “I got a huge rush of energy through my body as I answered my future self’s questions” (M.M., client). Gateways to the Soul Alternate states provide a gateway to insights of the soul. States of gratitude, presence, meditation, prayers to connect with our inner teacher all invite soul wisdom. With growing trust in our ability to reach these deeper dimensions, soul Aha moments persuade us to choose the heaven of inner guidance instead of the hell of our wayward minds. They deliver us from the realm of mental noise to settle in a place that feels more like our ‘true self’: “A series of paradigm shifts followed and then I had a peak experience of being my self. I felt this deep in my soul. I had different qualities of character when being my true self”. (S.D., client) Soul consciousness can be sparked when we spend time in nature. Soul Aha moments wake us up to the interconnection we feel with the energy of the earth and all its life forms. We feel the same vein of life running through and between all of us. In the stillness of the forest or the mountain or the shore, we are instinctively pulled to connect. Nature calls to our souls not just because of its beauty but because nature is so present. It is so still, it is just being. It has no thoughts or judgments, it is not acting or re-acting, not suffering. The flower just presents itself in all it’s pristine glory. The natural world compels us to join in its stillness and presence. The lived awareness of this interconnectedness is sometimes called nature mysticism: “I get to a place of feeling joy, losing the self into nature. Feeling that connection, a wave of joy washes over me” (J. McC., interviewee). Communing with nature also allows us to lose the obsession with the small self, shed the identification with a separate ‘me’ for a while and realize that we are all pulsating with the same energy, the one inter-connected life force. Soul level Aha moments belong not to the physical body but to a subtle energy within us and around us. Subtle energy fields may not be a common topic of conversation in Western society but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been known about in all cultures at all times. Whether labeled Holy Spirit or Chi or Kundalini, the knowledge and experience of this divine power dwelling in each one of us is a universal phenomenon. In kundalini yoga, for example, moving this subtle

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

energy through us from the bottom of the spine up through the crown opens us up to the realization of our own divine nature. The movement of subtle energy can be felt very viscerally: “I felt the “Aha” moment way beyond the confines of my body like an electric energy enveloping my whole being” (K.L., client). The subtle realm of dreams holds messages from the soul that can help us return ourselves to Love. Dreams can help us awaken to the splits in our psyche that need to be healed: “The Aha moment came when I saw that my dreams were wiser than my conscious ego. They showed me how to integrate the dissociated parts of my psyche” (P. R., client) Becoming aware of the messages of the soul in dreams can foster love and compassion within us: “My dreams gave me insights into how I could drop the social persona, surrender the need for tight control and learn to accept and have compassion for all the parts of me, even the wounded and ugly parts”. (G. M., client) Be Inspired in the Right Brain To be inspired is to be ‘in spirit’, to be aligned with guidance from a higher power. Without soul connection your life will feel meaningless. But with it your consciousness expands to a stage that is more peaceful, more tolerant, more inclusive, more evolved. Life feels more real and alive when you listen to the whispers of your soul. Life everywhere in the cosmos follows an impulse to unfold in ever-expanding spirals of creating, renewing and evolving. Your own personal evolutionary drive is bursting to unfold! Being inspired spreads the love. Soul Aha moments feed not only our heart’s desires but also our desire for connection, for offering love to others. We were meant to love each other, support each other, be inspired together. This happens automatically as consciousness evolves beyond the conventional, the personal, to a level of soul. At this stage of awareness we include everyone in our field of love. We see that to have love is to give love. Love grows by extension – by extending love to others you see it reflected back to you in a circle of connection. Society teaches that when we give something away we have less of it for ourselves. But the opposite is true (as usual); the more love we give away, the more we have for ourselves. Soul energy unites us: “I feel a stream of soul energy going to the other person and coming back, doing a circle”. (J.R., client) Soul consciousness is mainly reflected in the right brain hemisphere. Unlike the left side of the brain whose specialization is to analyze, categorize and repeat the same actions, the right brain revels in novelty. The left side is history and the

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

right is potential. The right brain lights up when we are not being ‘logical’ but playful, indulging in imagination, humour, art, fantasy, poetry, dance and every other way that we connect to the creative aspects of our nature. Einstein’s right brain was frequently engaged in the dreams and imaginings that produced his famous theories. He stated that all his creative ideas came from intuition. So these post-rational ways of knowing allowed him to fulfill his life purpose. We now know from research that experiences of a transcendent or mystical nature also show up in the right brain. So engaging these creative ways of being is an excellent strategy for rising above the mind and finding the wisdom of the soul. Creative visualizations can open the doors to this wisdom. The “Future Self” visualization works really well for triggering Aha moments into your life purpose (see Appendix A). You contact your future self, a metaphor for your own inner wisdom, to ask him/her about your life mission and purpose. Communication with this intuitive part of you draws out many insights about what is deeply important to you. The future self can use any creative expression to deepen our self-understanding. Art, music, writing, dance, poetry etc. can all be employed and enjoyed to help clarify your higher values. This client uses the movement of dance for guidance: “As soon as I started to dance my future self, I realised that this was a way I could really “tune in” to my body. I regularly dance now to expand my understanding”. (N.G., client) Practices So get practicing with ways to have Aha moments of the soul. Here are some suggestions: •

Indulge in creative visualizations that remind you to stay in touch with your heart-felt values. They help you answer the question “What am I here to do?” Keep in mind the gifts you are here to express that represent your life purpose

•

Paint, draw, dance, journal about your purpose whenever you feel inspired.

•

Keep a dream journal by the side of your bed so you write down your dreams upon waking. Do this the moment you start to wake up, when your eyes are barely open. Dreams fade very quickly when the ego mind takes over so the sooner you write them down the better. This practice makes it more likely you’ll recall your dreams in the future, which in turn makes it more likely you’ll heed any useful messages they send.

•

Get into nature and be present with the spirit of life all around you.

•

Meditate and still the mind to open the channels to soul wisdom.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Find a somatic meditation practice that takes you deep into your body. This website offers free guided practices: www.dharmaocean.org. Explore different types of yoga. Dahn yoga, for example, is dedicated to the freeing of blocked vital energy in the body and mind. It emulates the shaking off described earlier when animals clear emotions as they arise. Brain and body are vibrated until the system is running clear again, allowing the full expression of who you are, body, mind and soul. Kundalini yoga also aims to unblock vital energies in the body. The web provides some Dahn and Kundalini exercises you can try.

Exercise 11 Sit down and tune in to what’s happening inside. Think about what is deeply important to you at this juncture of your life. Draw a picture. Use words. Find metaphors. Write a list of your values and passions. Make sure they are your values and nobody else’s. As you contemplate each one, close your eyes and breathe it into your body. Check for feelings of excitement, motivation. Re-write your list in order of priority. Your body will tell you which values to prioritize.

Chapter 5: Love Your Spirit

Our society tells us that the only way to know anything is the way of the head. We are repeatedly fed a rationality-based secular worldview. We have conceptual ‘knowledge’ stuffed into us and our task in life is to regurgitate it without questioning. This overlooks the fact that there are two fundamental types of knowledge: conceptual and intuitive. In order to understand Love, we need an intuitive, felt way of knowing that is beyond rationality. If rationality bred love, peace and harmony, we would not live in a war-torn world. We desperately need to be introduced to the notion that we are not only beings of ego-rationality, but eternal beings of light. If this sounds grandiose, it’s only because you’ve never sought the part of your Mind

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

that is not of the ego. There are two ‘minds’ within us: the ego mind and the ‘Big Mind’ that is transpersonal, not confined to our individual thought system. Big Mind belongs to the one Mind that is the source of all life. We believe we are just separate waves on the ocean of life, so to speak. We have forgotten that we are also part of that same great ocean, emanating from it and returning to it. We need to wake up to the experience of Big Mind for ourselves. Do not let conventional thinking rob you of your right to know your true identity by wearing the same blinkers as the people around you. The culture has over-valued the ego mind’s conceptual knowledge for so long that we have become utterly addicted to thinking. This cannot be emphasized enough. If thinking were only being used purposefully and creatively there would be no problem, but this is not the case. Constant thinking has become epidemic and involuntary. It gives rise to the plague of futile, fear-driven thoughts that hold so many regrets and grievances. And because this lower mind of involuntary thinking is a function of the ego, thinking will necessarily be competitive and destructive. The nature of the ego is that it loves to be special and it loves to be right. The kind of thinking that is fruitful, that works creatively to solve problems comes from a mind that is not addicted to compulsive thinking. It is a mind that is sufficiently quiet to connect to the light of Big Mind, the spiritual intelligence in and around you. Be clear that only you can access the light within you and know it for yourself. You can read every spiritual book on the planet and listen to as many gurus but you will not illuminate the knowing of yourself as spirit without your own lived experience. Before you can access it you need to first open your mind to the idea that you have it. Your intuition will guide you to trust this possibility as you dig deeper into your own being. When you illuminate your understanding with this light you will be flooded with a knowing that shatters your previous understanding of life, Love and the nature of reality. The Promise of Spiritual Aha moments: • • • •

They are the escape from the prison of separation They shatter our view of ‘reality’ They move us from separation to wholeness They allow us to experience ourselves as one with source

During a ‘spiritual’ Aha moment we experience ourselves as being connected to all life. Where before we felt alone and imprisoned in a separate self, spiritual insight smashes through the prison walls as we re-connect to all life, to Oneness. Einstein said: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.”

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Freeing ourselves from the prison of delusion is a question of allowing the light within you to move you from separation to wholeness. It means dropping exclusive identification with the ego self and realizing our whole Self, our Holy Self. Beyond the separated self that we take ourselves to be lies an intuition of Being-ness, a unity consciousness at the apex of spiritual intelligence. One light, many lamps: our individual lamp dims and melts into the One light as separation drops away and the boundary between what appears to be self and not self dissolves. In this way spiritual Aha moments can awaken us to universal interconnection: “All…making connection with all” (S.T., client) Spiritual Aha moments reveal an experience that is outside of time and space, one that is beyond the capacity of words and concepts to capture. One way of describing it is a collapse of the personal self to expand into universal energy, cosmic consciousness: “Words can’t capture the enormity of the experience. Strong, gentle, firm. I was expanded and part of all of it. No separation. I zoomed into focus and everything else faded. I was in this energy that filled everything”. (B.M., client) The loss of an ego identity to find one’s self as “this energy that fills everything” is not exactly spoken of in our culture. The vast majority of us are so based in old school rationality (if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist), so grounded in a sense of separation, that it sounds like quite a mad idea. Indeed the preeminence of individuality is built into the cultural ethos. The West has long prized individualism, a philosophy emphasizing the worth of the sovereign individual. Yet spiritual teachings would argue that this is the very thing that causes our suffering, this sense of dislocation and separation from one another and from the universal source of creation. We may experience ourselves as separate egos in the relative world of ‘selfhood’ but that is to ignore the much vaster part of our consciousness that is limitless, eternal and connected to every living thing. This is Self, Source, Big Mind. Fortunately more people are waking up to Big Mind. Their ego identity is loosening as their spiritual intelligence develops. In the quote above, B. M. couldn’t capture in words the ‘enormity’ of his experience. The range of experiences of spiritual insights is vast but the important thing is that increasing numbers of people are becoming aware that they are not just a physical being. Thanks to our ability to access accounts of spiritual awakenings from all peoples across all times, we are now more aware of dimensions within ourselves that are not linked to physicality. You need to know about something before you can apply it in your life. Knowledge of spiritual wisdom is growing at an exponential rate. We can look into mystical paths from Shamanism to Buddhism to Sufism to Advaita Vedanta to the Tao and find their common themes. They all agree, for example, that knowledge of your true nature lies within you and you alone. The same energy of Love that created all life lies deep in your being. Awakening to the truth of this is an inside job. Everyone who ever awakened to their essence as eternal spirit did so with inner experiences. Universally, they report that they

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

have seen through the illusion that we are merely separate, individual egos. This is the most superficial level of Being. You don’t need to live up a mountain or in a cave meditating to awaken, you can do it with a little willingness. The willingness is to look beyond the ego, to drop our thoughts about everything. When ego identification is surrendered, when all thoughts and concepts are released, our consciousness returns to the ground of all being. When we meet a dimension within ourselves above the “little self” of the ego mind we find ourselves in a world of infinite peace and Love: “When the aha came, it came from a place beyond my ego, my ‘little self’ and felt like it came from my core, my essence, another order of reality completely, a universe of infinite peace and Love.” (S.W., client). No wonder we are so dissatisfied with worldly offerings when we see what we could have – entry into a domain that is beyond the wildest imaginings of the puny, socially constructed ego mind. It is clear that spiritual intelligence is not a construct of this lower mind. Indeed it is the egoic cluster of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and beliefs that actually function to keep us separate. The electrochemical fog in the mind draws a dark veil between what we take ourselves to be and the truth of who we are. Our cultural conditioning has fostered the dominance of an ego-rationality that persuades us that we were born alone to suffer, grow old and die. Alone. No wonder there is rampant depression and anxiety in our society! The key to having transcendental insights at the level of soul and spirit is to stop pouring energy into the thinking mind, stop investing it with any power or authority. Words just get in the way, clogging up life’s energy with endless useless concepts, keeping us firmly locked up in the prison of which Einstein spoke. But we have a superpower to free ourselves. Free will gives us the power to choose to pause between thoughts. It is in this gap that the possibility of an Aha moment arises. The insights reported here show that we can come to know what we essentially are when we lengthen the gap to give ourselves the peace of no thought. In a quiet mind and an open heart we re-connect to the tiny light, the subtle energy of divine grace within us that can lead the way home. When this light shines brightly, we come to the glorious revelation that we are no different from the Love that created us; we are quite simply a conscious extension of that Love, a little wave of Love in an Ocean of Love. Some of the participants in my study experienced out-of-the-blue spiritual insights, while most were following a spiritual practice. This is how a Buddhist described his spiritual insight: “I wasn’t there. Everything around me was golden. Don’t know how long it lasted but everything became gold. The feeling was just totally understanding of everything” (L.S., Buddhist practitioner and client). All spiritual or mystic paths would concur that Love is the unifying force of the universe and that you are infused with this force. It doesn’t matter whether we label the force Love or God or Brahman or the Tao because whatever path you

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

take up the mountain, the view from the top is always the same. In my own path (A Course in Miracles, or ACIM), the remembrance of Love within us is termed The Holy Spirit. This Spirit is the bridge from hell back to heaven, the inner guide that can re-awaken us to Love. God gave us this inner light, this personal teacher for exactly this purpose. It is up to us to choose this alternate mind of Love, Big Mind. Without access to this non-conceptual knowledge within us, we are doomed to live a life of fear, a life of hell because heaven and hell are states of mind. Hell is being held captive by a fear-inducing machine, the perpetual ego thoughts that would deny the existence of Love within us. For most people, there is no choice but to listen to this voice of fear – they have never been exposed to any higher levels of consciousness than the ego mind. However, when we know better, we can do better. We can choose to listen to our inner guide, however we construe it, Holy Spirit or simply intuitive knowing. If we want to heal our wrong perceptions of who we are and what Love is, we must surrender to this deeper inner wisdom that can return us to our source in Love. This is how you find in the essence of your being a communal Being that belongs to one source. And this is the way back to Love: “There is clarity, brilliant light dancing around me and within me. I suddenly get it. I am being breathed. I no longer have to be just me. The power of the universe is breathing me. I can sink into it. I am safe. I am loved. I AM LOVE.” (L.L., researcher). If you want to awaken to Love, there is nothing more important to know than that your usual voice, the one in your head that dominates your life, does not have the creative capacity to reveal your true identity. The ego’s whole existence depends on keeping you in the hell of fear and anxiety. This is not to say that you should engage with your ego, oppose it or argue with it in any way. The ego loves a good argument. It is about withdrawing attention from the jibber-jabbering mind and beginning to trust that there is another voice. This voice within you is one you can trust, one that knows you better than you know yourself. When you sink back into the pure awareness that you are, the consciousness from which this whole play of life is arising, you come to know your true identity. The alternative is to allow the ego to keep us in a state of constant stress, scanning the world for dangers. The body/mind is held in this state by the ‘sympathetic’ nervous system, the one that thinks it’s warding off danger by keeping us in a ‘fight or flight’ response. The trouble is, our ego sees fear and danger on every horizon, even in the inner world of thoughts and feelings that we hide from ourselves. The body doesn’t know what’s real, i.e. what’s happening now from what is being imagined. Fearful thoughts flood the body with harmful chemicals whether danger is real or imagined. This reactive pattern changes dramatically when we learn to trust our inner guidance system. We learn to notice when we’re living in fear. Now we become aware of this negative energy and now we are free to make a shift. We shift back to recognising the light within us, the Love that accompanies us everywhere we go. We learn to trust it to show us the way. Then it becomes easy to ignore the voice of the separate ego:

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

“Since my first big breakthrough Aha moment, I have slowly learned to ignore all my personal thoughts; there is one who walks with me, who shows me the way” (S. B., client). Instead of being ruled by the fight or flight response mechanism, we can actively and consciously choose the parasympathetic nervous system instead. As we saw in Chapter 3, this system slows and relaxes us; it is the bodily reflection of a peaceful mind. In ACIM teachings, we can use our body to create an internal atmosphere that is calm enough to hear the Voice of the Holy Spirit. We can use the breath to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and be in a relaxed and open state to receive the guidance of Holy Spirit, or intuition or soul or higher wisdom or whatever term we use. ACIM puts it beautifully: “When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in Summer”. When we calm the mind and relax, a clear and open channel for guidance is created: “My mind is calm…my spirit feels like it’s free and it’s guiding me” (F.C., client) Be Present in Your Life Ideas of mindfulness, presence and being in the ‘now’ are making their way into our collective consciousness. These are soft, Western terms given to ancient awakening practices. Awakening to the Love that you are can happen when you bring Presence into your life as a conscious act. In a state of Presence you reconnect with your whole Self, the Holy Self at the core of your Being. When you bring this quality of Being into your life in the here-and-now, you are in a state of Presence. Our intuition knows that we should live in the moment: “Mental and physical ‘clicking into place’ of the intuition that tells me - live in the moment”. (J. M., client) Everyone can understand in principle the simple notion of being present to what is unfolding in their life. But we are so lost in thought that real life eludes us. Being in the land of the mind is being wrapped up in memory and anticipation. Since these represent the past and the future, neither of which is real, you are not in contact with real life. You are caught in the matrix of the fearful mind, an illusion construed by your ego. You are not free to even notice, far less experience real life. You think it’s normal to consider reality to be the story your mind is telling you about what’s real. The next client puts it beautifully when he says that if we’re not living in the moment, we are living in a self-imposed virtual reality game: “I realised that in order to live, i.e. experience my life fully, I have to occupy this moment now. I realise that if we’re not experiencing the flow, we’re living in a virtual reality of our own making”. (J. Mc D., client).

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

You can easily prove that you cut yourself off from the present moment. Close your eyes for a minute or two and just watch the thoughts that come up. You will discover that in your ego mind, you are always mentally time travelling and never in the here-and-now. Now, with this awareness, you can make another choice. Presence is always a choice we can make afresh in every moment that we become conscious of thinking. We can choose to be present in the fullness of our lives, connected to that intuitive Being-ness, or we can choose to be in the madness of the fabricated ego-mind. Guidance for the next client, who has no spiritual practice, comes from a wise inner place. Whatever we call this spiritual intelligence, it takes us to a zone beyond the ego body/mind: “More and more do I feel that I am no longer dominated by my ego but from a centre deep within, an intuitive, wise place” (S.H., client) Being in the now moment is a state of mind devoid of illusory past or future. Aha moments at this level can cut through time to reveal the most penetrating of insights. You may come to see that you are not only a material human but one luminescent eternal Spirit when you settle in the here-and-now. And from this higher spiritual intelligence we experience joy and bliss: “In the moment, there is nothing to fear – no memories, no anxieties. And as I rest in the moment, a good feeling settles on me, then joy, then bliss” (M.L., client). So when we rest in the now moment, we are at peace. When we are in our heads we are imprisoned. How can we unfold all of our potentials, know all the dimensions of our being when we’ve allowed thoughts to bar our way to spiritual consciousness? Never forget that you were born with your free will superpower. Use your will to shine a laser light on your own now moment and keep it there for in Truth (capital T), there is no other moment than the eternal Now. Making a determined and conscious choice to focus on Presence at all times is simply a matter of exercising your will and directing your attention: “Since the initial AHA when I realised that I could be (and stay) in the present moment, being mindful, I now consciously direct my attention to present awareness in all situations”. (S.W., client). If we follow the mores of society we will never awaken to the Love that is our basic nature, our birthright. Intellectual understanding is not understanding of any value. Nothing is actually learned until it is lived. Only personal contact with the essence of who we are produces knowing and not knowledge; knowing is delivered from an intuition that is personally embodied whereas knowledge comprises only theories that we assimilate. Our culture has replaced intuition with tuition, the idea that we can be taught everything. By becoming reliant on outside knowledge, we have been kept in ignorance of our own inner wisdom, our own power to heal our split psyche. We have to re-cognize that in essence we are the presence of pure awareness, the consciousness in which all our thoughts, feelings and perceptions arise. By being present, in a still mind, we re-acquaint ourselves with the divine source that is within us and around us.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

This divine source is Love by any other name so as we come out of the mind and into presence we feel more compassion and connection with other people. In a state of presence we are not bringing all the baggage of our past thoughts and feelings to the encounter. We are able to see people with fresh eyes, without judgments or preconceptions: “I am reaching out to people from my soul, engaging in meaningful discussion. I am more present”. (A.R., client) Spiritual wisdom teachers suggest that there is only one Consciousness that we have always been part of and our spiritual journey is simply awakening to the realisation. We may appear to one another only as individual ego identities but this is the illusion. We are both individual expressions of the one consciousness and none other than consciousness itself. The ability to tolerate such paradox is a great leap forward in spiritual intelligence. This interviewee was amazed when she had a beautiful awakening to this Truth: “I am filled with this incredible light that shines down from my head all the way through my spine and into the core of the earth and I am amazed. I’m present in this body, I’m aware of my surroundings. I am not my surroundings. And this is totally new to me but it’s very, very, very old. I have been this before but I am this now and I will always be this”. (L.H., interviewee) Practices 1. This practice is from the teacher of Presence, Leonard Jacobson: Think of a flower, a tree, a mountain, a river; they are all simply here, being present. You can be too. All you need do is sink into whatever is arising in your body and place all your attention there, with no thought. Within this background of presence, these are the steps to take. Let’s use an example of a common negative emotion, anxiety. Low-level anxiety plagues many people today. Whenever you experience anxiety, become very present with it, settle in to it. Stay OUT of your head, do not use language or images, just fully feel it in your body. Feel, acknowledge and confess the feeling. Let it reveal itself. What are you really anxious about? If you can identify it, acknowledge it, let it express, it dissolves very quickly. Confess it out loud to God or to anything in your environment, even if it’s a plant on your windowsill. Saying things aloud helps you understand them and lets them begin to wash through you. 2. This is an Osho meditation on Being that emphasizes the meta-view, observing your existence from a distance and being present.

A Beginner’s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Meditation is a very simple phenomenon about simply being. That means you are not doing, or thinking, of contemplating in any way. When you are at your centre and thoroughly relaxed, that is meditation. And when you get the knack of it you can be in that state any time you want. Once you become aware that the centre of your being can remain undisturbed then slowly you can take this state of being out into the world of action. It is not that you have to escape from life, meditation teaches you a new way of life. You become the centre of the cyclone. Your life goes on with more intensity, more joy, more clarity, more vision and more creativity. Yet you are aloof, just a watcher on the hills, simply seeing all that is happening around you. You are not the doer. You are the watcher. Doing continues on its own level. Do everything without the centre being lost. That awareness, that watchfulness should remain absolutely unclouded, undisturbed. One should exist spontaneously. If the moment brings fight, fight and do it intensely. But don’t fight for a belief; don’t fight for a prejudice. Live in the moment, be alert, and in that state, enjoy whatever comes out of the moment. Release belief systems and have no care for consistency or respectability. Bring your whole attention to this moment – beyond this there is nothing. Finale I hope you have enjoyed this journey into your core. I hope it has brought you many insights into life’s most important questions. You may have chosen to work with just body/mind and didn’t feel willing or able to include the transpersonal levels of soul and spirit. That’s fine. Maybe one day you will. Or not. You can only do what feels right for you but if you can now see what you do to upset yourself you will have taken a giant step forward to contentment. If you can always choose a more tolerant and flexible perspective you will have taken a giant step towards Love. Research shows that if we work simultaneously with our body, mind and spirit we will transform our lives much more quickly than if we were working on them one at a time. So choose a practice from each level that you really enjoy. It could be weight lifting for the body, dis-identifying with thoughts for the mind and yoga for the spirit. Or it could be yoga for the body, perspective-taking for the mind and meditation for the spirit. The key is to choose practices that your intuition guides you to go with. They will be the ones that lift your energy the most and plug you back into a sense of being vibrantly alive. A final thought from ACIM: “You are the work of God, and His work is wholly lovable and wholly loving. This is how a man must think of himself in his heart, because that is what he is” (2:3-4). We could all benefit from reminding ourselves often during the day that we are the work of God and that as God’s work (or extension), we are wholly lovable and wholly loving. This practice helps return us to our true Identity. The more you identify yourself as being Love’s extension, the more you will just naturally extend the Love that you are.

A Beginnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide to Love and Spiritual Awakening, by Leigh Longhurst PhD

Leigh Longhurst ÂŠ2018