Logically-based people often disregard emotionally-based people, and vice versa. 

Husbands and wives, rival siblings, parents and children, competitive co-workers - each takes a side and the attempt to deny the other’s point of view begins.  But no matter how hard they fight or weep, the apples will never convince the oranges that their perspective is the correct one. Someone may surrender the debate but neither is convinced. To be fundamentally based in either extreme is a limited and imbalanced viewpoint. 

The struggle between logic and emotion exists because earth is essentially an emotional planet and you are here to learn about these emotions.  You are not to deny them, for that would make you purely logical, nor to indulge in them, for that would make you purely emotional. You are to be emotionally intelligent.

You can get slammed, bogged down and stuck by your emotions.  They can be the downfall of your mental and physical self - if you let them lead you - for they determine your perspective, energy output, and momentum. 

At their worst, your emotions can sink you into deep depression and even suicide.

At their best, they can allow you to lighten up, rise up and embrace peace, joy and passion that can transcend any mental and physical challenges. 

You actually have a vast power to take charge of your emotions instead of having them take charge of you. 

You have the ability to be self-aware, self-dedicated and to maintain that commitment over your emotions by acquiring an expanded awareness of what’s really going on within you.   But only when you have reached a place of emotional understanding through deeper self-awareness are you able to use those qualities to gain a balanced perspective.

The first step is to know that you are not your external world and that you can choose any response to that world.  Your unconscious choices - those you boldly make without thinking - are actually based on patterns that you have repeated over and over again. 

For instance, when your partner leaves you, you become enraged.  The emotional choice of rage has been unconsciously chosen for you at this time because you have experienced being left many times before and rage was the emotional experience of choice.  Where once you could have chosen to feel confused or even liberated about your partner’s leaving, you chose rage more often and more dramatically, and now that emotion has almost cemented itself into your cellular system, which reacts swiftly and automatically for you. 

But you have choice. The more you know that and practice it, the more your new choice will prepare a new conscious pattern. 

If, for example, you are in a new situation with new people and a new environment, you can choose to respond emotionally to it from an emotionally mature place and feel curious, eager and trusting.  But if you carry dramatic memories within you of the same type of situation, and at those previous times you had chosen different emotions – perhaps to feel frightened, intimidated, closed or hostile – the more intensely dramatic your emotional reaction, the deeper the residual impression it would have left in your memory banks. 

These memories will continue to play themselves out and continue to make you debate with the more logical-minded people around you unless you make a new choice.

Step outside the pattern by becoming more self-aware, more humbly ready to see your part in the dynamic, and more willing to stop needing to be right. 
Your conscious emotional choice can therefore override your unconscious emotional choice, and freedom, peace and everyday ease are then yours. 

1. Trying to meditate after consuming several caffeinated drinks usually doesn’t work out well.
   
2. Breathe slowly, with your eyes open, for a half a minute or so. Then let them soften their focus as you gaze at nothing. Then close your eyes.
   
3. Don’t over-think meditating. Just meditate.
   
4. Stay open.  Don’t think you know what the meditation means, or is all about, while you’re in it. Wait till afterwards to do that. Just stay engaged with it while it’s going on.
   
5. The warm up is the breathing; the heart is the exercise.
   
6. It’s easier to “get in” if you go in emotionally, rather than blankly.  Go right to the depth, the centre of your feelings.  Go in feeling kind.  Feeling gratitude.
   
7. During meditation, if your mind is thinking, it is reflecting an imbalanced state of left-brain dominance. It is caught in a pattern of regurgitating past data, making it difficult to stay in the present moment. Let your breath help you. Focus on it.
   
8. If you try to control your meditation, you are not in trust. Remember, in life, if you don’t trust, you incur stress and eventually anger and/or illness.  It’s a given.
   
9. Treat your meditation with dignity, courtesy and respect and you will feel it too.
   
10. You can approach the act of meditation, (and the act of living) with passivity, but it’s unlikely you’ll get very much out of it that way. What if you approached them by being proactive, assertive, involved, engaged – by choice.
    

Our own personally-chosen philosophy should not be how we want to be seen by others or even how we want to be seen by ourselves.  

Instead our philosophy should be our fully committed, no-exceptions, no-excuse rule for living.  It represents how we live - our purpose and intentions, our priority and most importantly, our heart.  It represents what we care about, why we care about it and what we will never compromise in that care.

With anything and everything I do, my natural tendency is either to take it to a deep level or not at all.  I’m an intimacy seeker with people, places and things.  

I know one can make a deep connection, shallow connection, or no connection at all. When one is bored, it is simply that one is choosing to make little or no connection to what is going on around or within them.  Boredom is a choice and one I can say I rarely choose.  (I’m the friend who volunteers to wait in long, pedestrian queues for tickets, because I pass the time completely engaged and present.)  

I don’t live for love, although of course love is my conscious intention and action on a continual basis. But it’s not what drives me, what compels me. 

I have friends, family, colleagues and clients who live life boldly, bravely, uniquely, quietly, aggressively, passively, gently or loudly. 

I live life deeply – caring deeply, feeling deeply, seeing deeply, hearing deeply, communicating deeply, touching deeply, loving deeply.  It’s the level of connection where I am most comfortable.  It’s where I exhale.

And what about you?  Do you want to get closer to yourself?  Then share some time with your heart and thoughts after you read this.  Take some action by simply writing out a few words or phrases that begin to form your own personal, one-sentence philosophy.  

Write from your heart first.  Then your head.  Then stop and read it.  Does it sound like the ‘you’ you’ve come to know through your years?  If not, maybe it’s a call to focus your life with more truth and conviction.  If it does, then keep it pinned to your fridge or somewhere up front and centre, as a constant reminder of your integrity and honour – your dedication in life.


Over time, notice if it changes, if you want to add to it or delete a word or two.  Maybe you just find fresh words to replace and uplift the old ones but the meaning and intention remain the same. But continue to keep it in front of your life like a favourite memorized poem.  

In a world where change happens in a nanosecond, your most heartfelt concisely expressed philosophy will be your constant.  

Let’s face it: most of our problems, confusions and dilemmas usually boil down to some very basic truths that we have somehow ignored, denied or never learned. Problems we now have usually stems from obvious and often unconscious previous choices that have somehow landed us in our current situation.

Whether by innocence or ignorance, it is nonetheless the pivotal place where we made a choice, often by not making a clear, conscious one.  And what we are left with is the natural consequences of that time and place when we thought we could just coast along without having to step up to bat and be present and accountable. 

To be accountable to yourself and those you interact with requires you to stay awake.  Staying awake is the figurative expression that means staying conscious, fully focused, heart and head connected, strong, and aligned. 

To be accountable means you need to be alive and present, hearing and seeing and sensing and noticing and feeling and taking it all in.

Consciousness is the best stimulation there is - the alert factor is on full – necessary because life demands that we be present and accountable if we really want to be alive, happy and sustainable in all ways.

Our complaints are typically based on the circumstances we find ourselves in because we came from a position that was not fully conscious.  From that perspective, we simply cannot experience the life we feel is our birthright.  We are dulled, muted, blurred, fuzzy - nodding off. 

Our choices are greatly impacted by this state of being. Time goes by and problems, confusions, and dilemmas seem to seep into our lives.  If we don’t utilize our full consciousness to ward them off originally, we may complain, crying ‘victim’ as we roll over back to sleep. 

We may give great energy voicing our anger or attempting to manipulate, but it’s all too late, of course, for neither circumstance comes from conscious action, but rather from great reaction to the consequences of our own choosing to remain unaccountable. 

Accountability is today’s buzzword.  “The problem lies in the accountability,” they say.  “It’s the reason we have such a dilemma in our society, (or our ecology, or our humanity).”  They are right of course.  Lack of accountability is the culprit.  Individually and collectively, falling asleep either by conscious or unconscious choice is still the source of our problems and confusions: attempting to remove ourselves from life and its flow, as though no one was looking for a moment, as though we could get away with something.  We are fooling ourselves with those pretenses, and the fooling catches up with us.  It catches up to those around us as well, and our foolishness, our lack of being present and accountable, often hurts.  When it hurts us, that’s one thing; when it hurts those we love or even the planet we love, that feels like quite another. 

Accountability demands that you stay awake.  I purposefully say demands, not asks, because it’s not an option. Not for the desired results you want in life.

What can you do if you find yourself falling backwards into old thoughts, past patterns, and bad habits - again!

Take the power back with a conscious shift. 

Before you eat that (next) cookie, buy those (not needed) shoes, text your ex, step over your running shoes.... opt to rein in your emotions and reinstate your balance and integrity.

Stop. Breathe. Be consciously present. 

Then, pour a tall glass of water and drink the whole thing. Slowly. 

Emotional imbalance often indicates lack of proper hydration. Once you finished the water, move your body. Stretch, bend, twist, jump, dance. Just move it. Circulate the blood. Your brain will thank you. 

Keep breathing and bending.  

Now occupy your mind. Read your favourite blog, your journal, or pick up a magazine. Ingest SOMETHING into your brain and think about it. Consider it. 

Then take on the company of another. Play with your pet. Call your friend. Go for coffee. Stop by the supermarket. Talk with someone.

The 1, 2, 3, 4 step process won't work without you.  But you'll work a lot better with it. And it's a process that your mind will like, because it's creating a new pattern, a change of the old. 

Use the combination as often as you need. Consciously. And especially during a mercury retrograde....

The difference between the two is very important for your personal growth. In the simplest of terms, intuition is the voice of your spirit and your gut reaction is the voice of your memories, coming from your subconscious mind. And what’s the difference between your spirit and your subconscious mind?  Plenty.

Your subconscious mind is the part of you that stores all your memories and especially the ones you don’t consciously remember. Like, the day you were born, what happened to you on a specific date, your best moment in your second year of life, what you did the first time someone yelled at you and every single past-life memory as well. Every bit of information and experience of every kind is loaded up in your vast subconscious mind ready to be used in any moment.  

Now, add to this the fact that your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between time, so past, present and future doesn’t exist for it. Therefore it doesn’t discriminate between its stored experiences. It believes that all its memories are vital pieces of information about you and what you need to survive. Like a soldier approaching the front line, it’s ready at all times to assist you in what you need. Before you could ever engage your conscious mind in thinking about anything that is going on with you, your subconscious mind has an instant reaction to ‘assist’ you with what it believes to be trusted, tried-and-true information that’s personal to you alone.

Did you get that?  

It’s the part of you that reacts. It is the reactor. Re-actor. Acting again, on your behalf, in a situation it believes is real. It knows this situation you are in. It remembers what happened when a similar event occurred (which may have been several lifetimes ago) and it decides to react in the same way because this feels like the same event. 

Thus you would have an emotional gut reaction (an internal memory re-enactment) and you might take it further into some kind of verbal or physical gut reaction, by yelling, or crying, or running away. Whatever your instant reaction, you can bet if it was quick, sudden, loud inside you, and seemingly ‘out of control’, it was a gut reaction.  Either emotionally felt or physically delivered, or both, it came as an automatic subconscious reaction to something that triggered you.

Your intuition, on the other hand, is not based in your subconscious mind and your earth memories. It is not earth bound at all. Your intuition is based in your non-physical form and therefore in your spirit. It does not have stored human experiences and information from which to react. Your intuition has the feel of the quiet, subtle, gentle, sensitive side of you. It is awareness, rather than emotion, and that’s a key point. A gut reaction has an immediate emotional feeling. Intuition lets go of any attachment. 

Your intuition doesn’t react, it responds. It allows a natural response to come into its field of awareness.  It may feel the automatic subconscious mind’s gut reaction to the situation, but it chooses not to take it personally, nor to take physical or verbal reaction to the triggering situation.  Instead, your intuition brings with it a fresh chosen response to the situation, rather than a used common pattern.

I bet you know there is more to life than meets the eye (1). 
And I also bet you want to understand its secrets, its depth, its essence (2). 
You want more clarification and understanding of what’s happening in your life (3) 
and what’s preventing you from creating the life you want (4).

So what’s your greatest challenge?  Accessing those insights (5)? 
Trusting those insights (6)?  
Putting those insights into practice (7)?

Let me make a suggestion: When you meditate daily you start to cultivate those very things you want and gracefully move through the challenges.

A daily meditation practice:

1. connects you to more than your physical, mental and emotional. Check.
2. deepens your connection to the secrets of the essence of life. Check
3. assists your thinking mind in making sense of what is going on in your life. Check.
4. reveals the power of your creative manifestation abilities. Check.
5. opens you up as you open up. Check. 
6. calms your states of mistrust and allows true honesty to shine. Check.
7. inspires you to act on your visions and awareness’s. Check.
   

Consider The Power Of Ten – the evolving novice. Ten, 10-minute progressive meditations. Do one a day for 10 days.  And email me in the morning.

Or the weekly meditation membership program. It’s based on the current energy on the planet. Its purpose is to bring you into alignment with the influences of the cycles of the moon, the planetary changes, the seasons, and the affects they all have on us, constantly. This program works with those influences, helping you to rise above the human emotional triggers.

Any questions?

sychospiritual work is the study of what makes life most worth living. It is just as concerned with strength as with weakness, and as interested in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst.

The value of psychospiritual work is to complement and extend more problem-focused psychology that has been dominant for many decades. It’s about the good life.

What is good in life is as genuine as what is bad. 

What is good in life is not simply the absence of what is problematic. There is a difference between not being depressed, and jumping out of bed in the morning with enthusiasm. 

Happiness is a cause of good things in life and not simply a byproduct or a matter of luck. People who are satisfied with life eventually have even more reason to be satisfied, because happiness leads to desirable outcomes.

Happiness, strengths of character, and good social relationships are buffers against the effects of disappointments and setbacks.


Work matters in a good life, if it engages and provides meaning and purpose.


Money can buy happiness if it is spent on other people.


The heart matters more than the head in a good life. We are taught critical thinking when we should also be taught caring and compassion.


Good days have common features: feeling autonomous, competent, and connected to others.


The good life can be taught.

Yes, I said ‘most common’. These are the reasons I have heard most often in the last few weeks.  And while the majority of you ARE meditating and LOVING it, the rest of you have been telling the same-old common reasons…. And if you want to be common, and even ‘most common’, then that’s your choice. But I know you know you are more than that. You are actually a very interesting and at times, exceptional person. (Perhaps a little strange, but who’s judging...)

10) My environment isn’t conducive to meditation.

9) I keep falling asleep when I meditate.

8) I can’t quiet the voices in my head.

7) Things come up in meditation that I just don’t want to think about.

6) I have trouble relaxing, I’m too restless.

5) I don’t know anyone else who meditates.

4) I missed a few days of meditation and so I just gave up.

3) I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with this.

2) I’m not motivated enough.

1) I keep forgetting to do it.

Please, don’t be common. Prioritize yourself and you’ll feel valued.