Category Archives: Metaphysical/Spiritual

Diabetes, Metaphysical/Spiritual, Yoga

Now….That is A Yoga Pose!

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I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in November of 1976 at the age of 14.   My biggest desire in life has been and remains to find the root cause and correct it.  Seventeen years ago I was introduced to yoga.

My first yoga class was at a Bikram Yoga Studio in Boca Raton, Florida in November of 1999.  The room is heated to 110 degrees and there are 26 postures that are repeated each class.  I sweated so much I lost 4 lbs during the class.  The postures are designed to “squeeze” the toxins from every aspect of your being; physical, mental and emotional.  Class is over and the 90 degree heat in Boca feels like a cool breeze.  I would go to Bikram yoga classes almost every day for the next 6 years.  Sometimes I would do two classes; “A double.”  In 2002 I had the opportunity to take three months off from work.  I would wake up, go to the 7am class.  Come home, go for a 3 mile run around 1pm and then go to the 4pm class.  I literally, transformed myself.  Bikram began to get old.  The same routine, the heat, the stink….

I decided I wanted to deepen my practice so, in September of 2006, I went to a 200 hour yoga teacher training course at Kripalu in Massachusetts in the Berkshire Mountains.  While Bikram had systemized yoga into a 90 minute “torture chamber” that had tremendous benefit, it was very narrow in its exploration of the “map” of yoga.  Kripalu enlightened me to a much deeper understanding of what yoga is.  The yoga postures; poses; Asana’s are but one aspect of many in the map of yoga.  When I told one of the senior teachers at Kripalu that I had been living with type 1 diabetes since age 14, she said, “Now that is a yoga pose.”  Since 2006 I have continued to practice yoga and even guide some others in the inquiry of yoga.  Yoga is, ultimately, not something you do…….It is, instead a path of inquiry.  As such, it has accelerated my quest to understanding and correcting diabetes.

Metaphysical/Spiritual

The Truth

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The Truth is not relative. It is what it is and no matter what “take” you have, it will always be what it is and nothing else. “I’ve come to realize that the biggest problem in the world is that people’s perspectives of reality are compulsively filtered through the mesh of what they want and do not want to be true.” Travis Walton.

The inquiry into what is real and what is not is the highest work of a human being. There are many starting points but all lead to the same destination – THE TRUTH. What is needed right now are more people searching for, understanding and living The Truth. I suggest the following entry points of inquiry – Yoga, Vipassana Meditation, The Bible, The Bahgavad Gita, Kabbalah, Christian Science, Philanthropy, Integral Theory, (www.integrallife.com), Volunteering, Teaching Dharma, The Buddha, Christ. Choose one, choose two, choose all of them just choose. When I say choose I don’t mean become a devotee or believe or have faith in….I mean inquire, check out, investigate, discover. Awaken the seeking mind so that you can awaken the mind that seeks “The Way.” I am not a religious person. My personal inquiry has shown me that most all religion is, at best, corrupted. However, that does not mean there is no Truth to found in religion. You have to dig deep but it is there. And what you find are gold nuggets on the journey. Our job is not to “know” the truth. Not one human being has that ability. It is our job to seek the Truth. With that said, I will end with this quote from The Bible….The words of the Bible were never meant to be taken literally. It is code. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. “I will bless those who bless you, but I will curse the one who curses you, and all the families of the earth will bless one another by your name.”

Metaphysical/Spiritual

Important Information

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Human consciousness is evolving.  This is not my opinion.  Do the research.  It is an empirical fact.  Transpersonal psychologists and others have mapped it.  There are many ways to represent this map, however, essentially, humans have undergone 5 general stage shifts in their developmental journey forward.  Watch this 22 min video by Ken Wilber describing these stages and the critical importance of the next stage, the 6th stage, emerging now………

Metaphysical/Spiritual

The Spiritual Path (Part 3); The Big Picture

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If you step back and take a look at “it” and by “it” I mean everything, and you start breaking it down and what I mean by breaking it down is to see the parts and how they interact, you can’t but help feel a sense of awe.  Most of everything that is going on we can’t see, touch, hear, feel, taste or smell; we can’t sense it.  We aren’t  conscious of these things.  Are you aware of the neural firings in the brain or the release of peptides and the docking of proteins on individual cells?  How often do you think of earth as one planet among trillions of other planets in the universe?    What about Black Holes and superstring theory?  We don’t “sense” these things.

What is “The Big Picture?”  The Big Picture is a description, representation, perspective of everything.  Now, I am not aware of everything.  And neither are you.  However, there is a way to inquire into it. Religion has tried to corner the market on The Big Picture. Each religion has its own Creation “story” and destination and rules of the game.    Science has progressed rapidly in describing what it sees. Science can only describe.  By its nature it is unable to explain.

So, where do we start?  In studying mystical teachings and practices like yoga we discover that there are essentially two fundamental components that make up the whole.  They are emptiness and form. As most of you know by now I like to provide multiple perspectives. Other ways to understand these two components are:

The Creator and The Created;  Ground of Being and The Physical World; Yang and Yin; Male and Female;  Light and Dark;  The Light and The Vessel…….

The problem we have is that we seem to be unable to focus on both of these components at the same time.  Everything arises in duality in our universe.  You ever think about that?  Anything that arises must do so with its polar opposite or it can not exist.  We can’t have a sense of sweet without knowing bitter.  If something is right then something is wrong.  A governing principle in Chinese Medicine is “As above so below.”  This principle is so profound and very valuable in our search for the Big Picture.  It provides us with the starting point.

There are many paths of inquiry from here.

 

 

 

Metaphysical/Spiritual, Yoga

The Spiritual Path (Part 2); “The Big Picture”

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We have all heard it…the quote that sums it up; the “zen” perspective of how it is; the assumption that brings us to the present moment……”It’s not the destination.  It’s the journey.”  Really?  Life is all about the journey?

Deciding to enter into serious spiritual study is to inquire into the big questions.  How did we get here?  Where did we come from?  Where are we going?  What is the destination?  What is meaningful?  Is there objective truth and morality?  There is no more important path to get on than the spiritual path.  Deciding to enter onto the “path” in search of “The Way” in itself provides direction and becomes the journey.

So what is the big picture?  Is there a main theme or plot to this whole existence thing?  Seeking out, discovering, inquiring into and studying the ancient metaphysical maps one begins to see a common theme…almost like a story where the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning and everything in the middle is the journey.  One understands that the “beginning” or the creation is critical to getting a glimpse of the big picture.

If you have thrown up your hands or you have given up on the concept of Creation…Don’t.  Within the Creation Story is a key ingredient to seeing “The Big Picture.”  Of course, all of this is a bit nebulous and those of you who are yearning for a more concrete discussion here hang in there.  Spiritual inquiry is, by it’s nature, obtuse and can be murky.  It’s kind of like the quantum physics’ concept of changing what is observed simply by observing.

The foundation of the Big Picture has a lot to do with the 3 steps of the path……namely….Beginning – Middle – End.  Now, within that construct we can inquire by using different words and ways of looking.  The “journey” is defined by where we came from and where we are going.  This is one way to look at it.

Here is another way.  Life is an elaborate interplay of Yin and Yang,  Desire and Fulfillment, Receiving and Sharing, Good and evil or, should I say evil and good, negative and positive, Dark and Light.    Where they  meet, where the dance occurs is the middle or the experience of journey.

And here is a third way……..Birth-Growth-Death.   Or, Immaculate Conception – Miracle/Illusion – Resurrection.

The Kabbalists tell us that the reason for the creation of our universe was/is to absolve Bread of Shame.  Bread of Shame is the feeling of unworthiness that emerges when one receives something that he feels is unearned.  This implies that there was something going on prior to the creation of this universe we find ourselves in.  This place, this existence is called “The Endless World.”  The Endless was/is an existence where the interplay or dance between Desire and Fulfillment was/is perfectly orchestrated and immediate.  There was no time or space dimension.  Cause and Effect occurred at the same “time”.  But a problem surfaced that needed attention.  Desire began to feel Bread of Shame.  Desire began to feel that it had not earned its fulfillment and wanted some space and time to do that.  BOOM!  Big Bang and a whole bunch of planets and stars and all that.  Eventually we appear and we seem to have evolved to a consciousness where we can consider all of this.  We came from a perfect connection with “The Light” of Fulfillment (Sound familiar to some of you?  Hint: garden of…) and we are going back to to that perfect connection.  The journey is all about awakening to this “Big Picture” perspective and doing the spiritual work.  And there is a lot to it.  It is not easy.  The more you delve into it the more you realize how much you do not know.  The Spiritual path and spiritual work is all about speeding up the process.  It is not about the journey.  It is about the destination and the creation.  Once this is seen the journey is re-calculated  and the work of unification and peace begins anew.

Part 3 in the works…