My spiritual blog & articles - My Spiritual Coach

What's the difference between your heart and your soul?

7/13/2021

The heart is the vehicle through which our Soul is expressed and experienced. We cannot contact our Soul, the part of us that is eternal and connected to All-That-Is, through our brains or minds. It is through our heart center that we make contact with our eternal being, the Soul.

Our minds are logical, dissecting mechanisms that are very good at solving material problems. But when it comes to the spiritual, we must use the heart. And I don’t mean the organ made of flesh and blood. I am talking about the energy center of our bodies that resides almost exactly where the physical heart lives. But it is something else. It is our unseen heart that feels love and joy in proportion to how we are tuned into our Souls.

The Soul is the part of us that never dies. It cannot be destroyed and it feels no fear. The mind, on the other hand, is a master of fear and is constantly looking out for the next threat to our survival. The path to the Soul is therefore, not through the mind but through the heart center.

The spiritual gut, which sometimes manifests in the physical gut as well, works in conjunction with the heart to contact and download the presence of Soul. You can feel this when you say, “I had a gut reaction.” Add this to your heart center and tune in to who you really are.

Do all enlightened beings renounce their worldly possessions?

4/29/2021

It’s not that enlightened beings renounce their worldly possession, it’s just that they don’t cling to them. They understand the everlastingness of their spiritual identity and therefore do not place a significant value on things that can be stolen, lost, or destroyed.

Enlightened beings may enjoy beautiful objects but they do not place high emotional value on them either. They don’t even have to own them to enjoy them. They can appreciate objects and experiences for what they are: Transitory and ephemeral, not lasting and eternal. Like a gorgeous butterfly that settles nearby and then flies away. The enlightened being does not need to place a pin in the butterfly and frame it to keep it for all time.

Enlightened beings do not put great importance on anything that comes and goes, or can disappear or be taken away. They focus their attention and energy on what is lasting and deep. Therefore, enlightened beings may even be extraordinarily wealthy, but they would be just as happy if they had nothing. With enlightened beings, it is never about the external manifestations of reality and more about the internal discoveries.

We don’t need to make a big fanfare of giving up everything that makes life comfortable to show that we are enlightened. We can just hold what is really valuable and enduring in our hearts and souls. Then we can be thankful for whatever good comes our way but not depend on physical items for our happiness and peace of mind.

Is the pursuit of enlightenment less of a thing for women?

1/25/2021

Enlightenment has been the center of my life since I was a small child. And I am a woman. At a young age, I also became aware that some religions don’t believe that women can achieve enlightenment or even be allowed into sections of an all-male heaven. I was perplexed.

Are you going to tell me that I won’t be allowed into the boys club of enlightened beings because I have been blessed with certain physical attributes or a certain distribution of hormones in my system?

Whether we have testosterone running through our veins or estrogen has nothing whatsoever to do with our Soul’s path. Those things belong to the body and determine whether we are male or female strictly for reproductive purposes.

From an enlightened point of view, we are not our bodies. They are the vehicles through which our Souls experience physical existence as part of their karmic journeys. It’s absurd to think that a male, regardless of how he behaved in this life, has a better chance of going to heaven than a female who has led a life of caring and spiritual pursuits.

One example is Digambar Jains. I am generally a big fan of Jains except on this one point. They believe that women are not capable of being enlightened. Svetambar Jains have opposite beliefs, believing that women are capable of enlightened and can become religious role models. But women, especially among Svetambar Jains, are believed to be deceitful. They believe that deceit is the foundation of their character. The reason they were reborn as a woman is because they were deceitful in a former life.

One of their sacred texts states:

“As the result of manifesting deception, a man in this world becomes a woman. As a woman, if her heart is pure, she becomes a man in this world.”

And men aren’t deceitful? That is my question. What does gender have to do with it? According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 93.% of the population in prisons are males and 6.7% are females. Is it not deceit to steal peoples lives through murder, theft, racketeering, con artistry, and other crimes? So please don’t tell me how holy the male population is, based on their criminal behavior.

According to a study entitled: Women in the Afterlife: The Islamic View as Seen from Quran and Tradition by Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad:

“The most basic relationship in Islamic society is not between a man and a woman but between a man and God: It is definitely not between woman and God.

. . .men, have, upon occasion, apparently used the assurance of their own place in eternity as a tool of control and of dominance.”
Yet other religious systems based on the Goddess, instead of a patriarchal punitive God, have deemed women as the leaders in enlightenment.

Heaven, (which I have experienced as enlightenment here on earth) is not a physical place of luxury where women take a subservient role as they wait upon men. This is fun fantasy for the male ego. This fairytale is not based on spirituality or any of my own deeply-held experiences of enlightenment. It looks like a pride-based and greedy imaginary man-made creation, based on physical dominance, very similar to life on earth.

What does it mean to find your “inner truth”, and have you found yours?

12/22/2020

So much of what we think is the truth is just received knowledge that we assimilated when we were too young to resist. We wanted to fit in when we were children. We wanted our parents to love us and to care for us. Therefore, it would not have been in our best interest to buck the system, even if we were capable of resisting.

Then we went to school. We had to learn what the teachers in our culture were teaching. It was considered to be the truth at the time, until we find out that history can be re-written according to cultural biases.

Our religious institutions also have their input into our view of truth. They frighten us with versions of hell at ages when, again, we are too young to resist and are not capable of intellectual argumentation. We are punished if we do not agree and it is much easier just to fit and and not make waves.
And so, most people never get to find their “inner truth.” To do that, we must scrub our consciousness clean of all received views and notions and find out what is so jut for ourselves. This requires going in within and learning about who we really are as Eternal Soul. It is a quiet place, away from all information input and entertainment. It is a place of peace, where you fearlessly discover what you love and what brings the most joy.

Yes, I have found inner truth for me, and it is a place of endless freedom. Most people don’t take the time to discover who they are. It’s much easier to accept outer truth. But, as we have seen through time, what we thought was true (such as the flat earth or that the earth is the center of the universe) is false. Inner truth is never false, because it is based on Soul, which can’t be incorrect.

How does being attached to the material world impact us?

12/22/2020

Being attached to the material world turns us into grasping, frightened beings. It is obvious to any thinking person, that all material items have an invisible time stamp on them. They are all going to go away one day. They will rot, rust, decay, die, get stolen, eroded, or perish in other ways. Anyone who observes the material world can attest to this.

Yet we fool ourselves, and delude ourselves, in a kind of mass hypnosis into valuing and seeking these things and more things to cope with our fear and boredom. We want to display these things to bolster our egos in front of others and make ourselves feel that we have “made it.” We want others to envy us, admire us, and want what we have. We entertain ourselves with shopping and adding even more to our storehouse of things that are never going to last. And so we waste the beautiful life we are here to experience. We are chasing after and placing value on something that can be easily taken away from us.

When enough people want to grasp all the material goods for themselves, our planet will not recover from this level of greed. Tearing down rain forests, overfishing and polluting our waters, paving over nature and creating fake scenarios to pamper our fantasies, does not bring inner peace, joy, or beauty. We must go within and discover our Eternal Soul, which never goes away and cannot die. All else, although entertaining and challenging, is a waste of time and creates more problems than solutions.

What did Echkart Tolle mean by saying problems are illusions, or fear is an illusion?

8/4/2020

When Eckhart Tolle says that problems are illusions, or that fear is an illusion, he is not making light of the pain and suffering we go through as humans. He knows very well the unhappiness and fear that so many people live in, regardless of their external circumstances.

Instead, he is referring to how we create problems and fear in our lives. We assume people are out to get us, that the Universe is playing tricks with us, and that we are helpless victims. Tolle’s approach to problems is threefold:

Leave them
Change them
Accept them

. . . anything else is craziness.

If we have a clear view of these solutions, the problems no longer remain problems because we have walked away, changed the situation, or accepted that the situation is not going to change so we might as well be happy and get on with our lives. Therefore, they are no longer problems, they are decisions we have a to make.

Fear is also an illusion. We cannot touch fear and we cannot make it stand still. It is a part of our thinking patterns that are influenced by so many things, including our brains’ hard-wiring for fear as a survival tactic. Tolle cites the example of sleeping in a safe, warm bed at night. The ego-mind will start conjuring up all kinds of things to be afraid of: Financial ruin, ill health, and even dying.

Meanwhile, we are snug and secure in our warm bed creating mental strife for ourselves. There is nothing to be afraid of and we are tied in knots of fear and dread. That is why Eckhart Tolle describes fear as an illusion. And like problems, fear disappears when we understand the reality of our existence as Eternal Souls.

What is cancer from a spiritual perspective?

7/11/2020

From a spiritual perspective, cancer is just another disease that invades the body with the unconscious determination to destroy it. It cannot destroy our Souls and it can never tarnish our Spirits. It is only something that preys on the body, just as microbes, yeasts, fungi, and other invasive agents do. From the spiritual perspective, these physical agents have no real power over us, for we are not these bodies.

Our bodies come and go, are constantly in a state of flux, and are not designed to last forever. It would be a plague on this planet if everyone went on indefinitely. And so we have various agents that are beautifully designed to take us out and make room for others. Cancer is nothing more than one of these agents. It is not the Big Bad Wolf, it is not some malevolent spirit that is attacking us personally.

We are spiritual beings partaking of a physical existence. These bodies are our rental properties to care for with respect and gratitude. But they are not us. These bodies are no more us than the apartments or houses where we live. Therefore, Cancer, though not to be taken lightly, is not to be feared either. For nothing can ever kill the Eternal Soul.

Why have concentration, discipline, harmony, and clarity of mind not been as big of a thing in Western philosophy as it has been in Eastern?

3/29/2020

Western Philosophy, with some exceptions, is a temple to the rational mind. Reasoning and figuring out why things are the way they are, are the main focus. For example, the Philosopher Kant, formulated reasons for why we need to behave altruistically towards others. Even Descartes, with his, “I think, therefore I am,” emphasizes the rational mind. He does not say: “I feel therefore I am,” or “I witness, therefore I am.”

Eastern philosophy is more concerned with going within to find who we are as an Eternal reflection of cosmic consciousness. To do this, we must bypass the rational mind and forget about the “why’s” of things. They are the way they are and no matter how bright we are, we will never get to the bottom of it all—but Who and What is it that wants to understand?

To find out who we are, behind the labels, masks, and conditioning, we must not be distracted by the constant stream of thoughts that swirl through the mind. It takes discipline to rise above this whirlpool. It takes training to recognize the tricks of the mind. This is what Eastern philosophy aims to do. And it offers pointers to how to move away from the collector’s search for never-ending knowledge.

In general, Western philosophy is about knowing. Eastern philosophy is about finding our unity with an underlying structure of reality that never dies and never changes. It presumes we can never fully know, but we can still unite in peace with All That Is, because, at base, this is who we really are anyway. All knowledge passes away, but the Soul, in its union with the Universe, is eternal.

We can collect as much knowledge as we want, but it does not bring peace or comfort. But once we go within, with a truly quiet mind, all the harmony of the Universe is revealed.

I'm afraid of getting specific with the law of attraction because I'm afraid there might be something better for me. Is it better to go specific or broad in manifesting?

3/22/2020

It is better to go specific, for if you go too broad it does not show enough committed intention. I am not saying that you will manifest the exact thing you passionately keep in mind. But if you don’t know what you want or are too general, you are not putting out enough energy to attract it.

In the case of the Law of Attraction, there is also the Law of Deliberate Intention. This is where you outline in detail what it is that you want to fulfill your life this time around. It may change, so mercifully, there is a gap between your ideation and the manifestation. This leeway allows us to fine-tune what we really want for our happiness and peace.

Then, we must acknowledge the Law of Allowing, and let the Universe bring to us what we desire. So its, deliberately intend, then attract, and then allow it to manifest in its own way and in its own time.

I notice in your question that you use the words “I am afraid” twice. Fear is also a vibration and all it can attract is more fear, as like attracts like. Don’t be afraid of the Law of Attraction. It’s not about getting as many goodies for yourself in the shortest amount of time and hoping they are the right ones. Those things don’t last anyway. There is nothing better out there in the future for you unless you come to peace with the present.

Does past life regression prove reincarnation, and are the results always accurate?

3/22/2020

Past life regression is not a proof but more of a journey of discovery. During regressions, people may get a sense of certain patterns of past lives that influence the way they act and react in this lifetime.

It depends on the person. Some have visual images of themselves, others connect to feelings or perceptions. And for others, nothing happens during a regression and later it comes to them in floods or in brief revelations. But it is never about accuracy. It is more about an impression. Regression may not be accurate but it can be very useful.

For example, I once regressed an argumentative and hostile woman, who plagued those around her with her miserable temper and antagonism. Her employer asked me to regress her, out of desperation. She dropped into a deep trance, snoring. I thought I had lost her to sleep. Yet, when she came out of the regression she told me of many images that appeared to her of when she had been an abused slave in various countries.

She understood that she had been carrying these hidden memories in her subconscious. Once she saw them, she was able to understand her nasty ways and knew she was dragging past life misery into this life. She jumped up, hugged me with great joy, smiled continuously and ended up changing the way she treated people from that day on.

Her life changed. She attracted a mate and got married, had friends, treated people kindly, and was all around a happier person. So this is not proof of reincarnation but it is an effective way for people to understand themselves better and to uncover underlying issues. I have seen it many times. The joy of understanding that we are Eternal Souls paying a visit in the physical form is liberating. It can be attained through a good past life regression session.