Love as a Change Agent

Love is a great change agent.  When you are exposed to, and experience great love, your life has a tremendous chance to change.   In the experience of love your unhappiness from a limited perspective, and beliefs in fear and lies can not survive.

One of the challenges is that when you exposed to love, your ego will fight back. It will try to deny,  diminish, and distract you from what you feel.   Such is the nature of stories in the mind.  They don’t feed well on unconditional love and fear starving to death.

Love and Fear,,,, this is the battle ground within for the Spiritual Warrior.  It is a battle over one’s attention.  On one side is Love and all the expressions of Love.  On the other, is fear, and all the expressions of  fear.

Self awareness is a necessary trait of a warrior.  Being aware of his expressions  is how he recognizes which side he is on in each moment.

for practical steps and exercises on finding your way try the free sessions of the Self Mastery program. 

 

Making Personal changes

How do make personal changes in your life?

Sometimes making changes in your beliefs, emotions, relationships, and elsewhere in your life is counter-intuitive.

When you are riding a bicycle,,, how do you turn the bike to the right?   You turn the handlebars to the left.    How do you change the negative thoughts in your head?   We’ll maybe you get the best results in a similar way.  Don’t try to push more positive ones on top of them.  Sometimes when you do you end up going in a negative direction.

Turning the handlebars to the right in order to turn the bike to the right makes logical sense if you aren’t aware of the other factors like the gyroscopic effect of precession.   Don’t know what you are doing when it comes to changing your beliefs or emotional reactions and you are likely to end up goring in the wrong direction.

The Self Mastery Course can help steer you in the right direction.  Some of the things might seem counter-intuitive, but they will make more sense when you have more awareness of how belief systems operate.

Originally posted at Making Personal Changes

ToltecSpirit.com, a resource for living by the Four Agreements.

 

Free Your Mind

The challenge is not to free your mind.

The challenge is to free your self from your mind.

 

This post by Gary van Warmerdam at https://www.toltecspirit.com/2010/02/free-your-mind/

Where you can find Wisdom of the Four Agreements for Spiritual Warriors

For practical steps and exercises to inventory and change your own beliefs/agreements there are exercises in the Self Mastery course.

The Challenge of a Spiritual Warrior

The challenge of the spiritual warrior is daunting.

A recent email from a client working his way through an emotionally challenging divorce caused me to share with him something about the challenge of a spiritual warrior.   In his breakup he is often overwhelmed with anger, sadness and frustration.  Outbursts still happen as he does not yet have control over his attention.   My reply:

It is a war,,, that’s why we call it being a Warrior.

In the beginning we will lose most, or almost all of the day to day, moment to moment battles for our attention.  In a way that is to be expected.  The benefit of understanding this is that you will not beat your self up when you fall into a story of drama, anger, or sadness etc.   The danger of telling you this is that your judge and victim in your belief system might distort the challenge into being so hard and convince you to not even try.

What will you do with the information that this is a challenge?  What will the judge and victim of your parasite do with the same information?

It is a risk to share this with you, and a risk to keep it from you.

My advice… do not measure the progress of your war by the results of a single moment, or even one day.

God Speed

Some of the bet guidance I can give can be found in the free audio and Self Mastery exercises at PathwayToHappiness.com The program is derived from my personal study with don Miguel Ruiz and the principles of the Four Agreements.

Mayan Calendar Prophecy of 2012

Hi Gary, There has been a lot of speculation on the doomsday theory of 2012 that many say was prophesized by the Mayans and other ancient cultures. Seeing as you would know more about Mesoamerican civilizations I was wondering if you can offer some insight on this theory or the significance of 2012 on the Mayan Calendar.  Thanks, Adam.

The cycle of the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 Apocalypse.   What does it mean?

The end of one of the cycles for the Mayan calendar is in 2012.  It was customary in the ancient Mesoamerican tradition to periodically let go of all the old traditions, beliefs, and myths, of the past at the end of each cycle.   Collectively as a culture they dropped all their baggage.  They took a careful look at everything in their culture to determine what worked the best and what didn’t work.  With scrutiny and skepticism they tossed outdated theories, methodologies, customs and practices and adopted a new way of life.

In this way their entire society took a leap forward in culture, science, architecture, agriculture, medicine, and spirituality.  Most civilizations creep along in growth, attempting to keep the old structures but making changes to them.  The result is out dated systems, bureaucracy, red tape, and superstition with changes built on top of them.

We often build systems to last but not with the flexibility to change and adapt with the circumstances, or new discoveries.  The wise men and women of ancient time understood that everything changes.   They understood that to evolve their society they would have to change their systems also.

Imagine doing that today.  Imagine a periodic overhaul of the legal system, education system, environmental policy, health care, and energy policy.   Imagine taking the best of what we know about what works in these areas and applying it 100%.  Most importantly this means dropping what doesn’t work well without any resistance from the old paradigms.   This is what they did.  They were masters of detachment and it allowed them to make giant leaps forward in their society.

To outsiders it would appear as the end of the world.  It would appear to be the end of the world of beliefs that people operated by.  It would mean dramatic change by letting go of all the beliefs, ideology, habits, and customs that you were accustomed and attached to.  Your world and your life would change dramatically.

When people describe Mayan prophecy of 2012 and refer to an apocalypse I have to wonder what the fears in their mind are projecting.  In letting go of the world of habits that we are familiar with it is uncomfortable.  We get comfortable with the familiar, even if it involves inefficiencies, hardship, and suffering.  But dramatic changes in your world doesn’t mean that it has to be bad.

What if you did this same process in your personal life?  Would the end of your virtual world of beliefs and emotions of suffering be okay with you?  Would the end of what doesn’t work about your relationships, career, attitudes, internal dialog of thoughts, and unhappy emotions be a challenging shift?  Certainly it would but the Mayans and Toltecs were not afraid of change.  They knew they would adopt the best of what worked in these areas and continue on.

One of the difficulties of letting go of our old world of beliefs is that it is very difficult to imagine life with out them.  In fact, in many ways it is impossible.  While we are enmeshed in old paradigms we are unable to see how our new life will work.  The wise men and women of ancient Mexico knew this, and so they didn’t even try.  They consciously challenged and overcame their fears that would have them cling to habits of the past.  They practiced letting go without knowing exactly what their future would be.  It was an act of faith.  It was a supreme act of detachment that ensured their freedom from fear and emotional suffering caused by attachments to their past.

In this approach to change we do not know what the coming world will be.  We could even say that it does not exist because it hasn’t been created yet.  With this perspective we more completely dissolve the past and live in the moment.  We sidestep the mind’s tendency to project beliefs from the past into the our mental future.   By saying that the world will end as we know it, we free our self from these projections of the mind and the limiting paradigms they contain.  This gives us greater freedom to create with more choices in our new life.

To help accomplish this supreme act of detachment the Mayans and Toltecs even structured their language to describe it as the end of the world.  They refrained from talking about or even imagining that another world would exist… until they built it for real.   This is one of the artful processes of their language and spiritual practices that helped them be present and live in the moment.

The truth is that we have an opportunity to do this kind of change ritual everyday.  Each night we lay down to sleep and let go.  However, most people live the next day in just about the exact same patterns as previous days.  How many patterns of emotions, thoughts, and relationship drama, do you live out today that you have done before?  The Mayans, Toltecs, and other traditions set times and created practices to consciously make these changes so they did not fall asleep in old habits like these.

The prophecy of the Mayan calendar that the world will end in 2012 is a metaphor.  However if your mind is fertile ground for fear, you will use the idea to create fearful stories and beliefs.  To be aware of how your mind generates fear with stories of the end of the world is an opportunity to detach from them.  And you don’t have to wait until 2012 to do so.

The audio program in Self Mastery provides a series of exercises to help you identify and change old patterns of behaviors, emotions, and beliefs.

Control Folly

JW. asks about Control Folly

So I’m battling with this idea of controlled folly. ( I think I know what you would say, don’t believe in controlled folly, lol). Do you have your own personal idea of what that is? I have a couple of interpretations of what that means. One would be to live in a state of love and grace while still respecting peoples fear boundary’s. Another would be to extract deeper meaning from what people say while still acting like there is little meaning in the way things happen.

Thanks for your time Gary, I always appreciate hearing from you.

JW

Dear JW.

For a Spiritual Warrior Control Folly doesn’t have much value as a practice until they have cleaned their mind of all old beliefs and social domestication. At that point a warrior has the option to act in any circumstance with an infinite number of choices. Any one of his actions is completely unimportant. However if a Spiritual Warrior chooses, he will engage in the experience in a way that is deeply connected and meaningful. That is Control Folley.

To engage in a way that is with complete respect and with unconditional love is just the common sense choice to be Impeccable.

Control Folly is really only something that can be done once a Warrior has cleaned their mind of old beliefs and dispensed with all their old habits.  Until then a person can too easily delude themselves into believing they are making a choice.

Gary

Circle of Fire Prayer

Power of Prayer to Strengthen Your Connection to Life

Growing up a in a Catholic family and being highly skeptical I didn’t appreciate prayer much. To say that I rebelled would be more accurate. What I found with prayer is that the power is not in the words. The words are just a mechanism with which we can direct our attention and intent.

Prayer can be a powerful force. It is so because we put our intent behind it. We focus our attention, our emotion, and our personal intent in the direction of our desire. Our prayers are also in the direction of Love. This aligns us with the natural intent of Life and furthers the strength of our Word. Miguel Ruiz was generous to provide us with an intent for our lives that helped guide us to our integrity and love. He took that expression of Life and put it into words as cleanly as he possibly could. He called it the Circle of Fire prayer. The depth of meaning and way of life that it has guided me to has been revealed over years.

Today, is the day of the Lord, when the Divinity returns to us.

When living our Free Will, and with all the Power of our Spirit,

We decide to live our lives in free Communion with God,

With no Expectations.

We will live our lives with Gratitude, Love, Loyalty and Justice,

Beginning with Ourselves,

And continuing with our Brothers and Sisters.

We will respect all Creations as the Symbol or our Love communion

With the One who Created us.

To the Eternal Happiness of Humanity.

from Prayers, a book by don Miguel Ruiz