6 Ways You Can Make A Spiritual Connection

Throughout history, Native American tribes taught that we are all made of three parts – the mind, the body, and the spirit/soul. They believed that if one of the three were out of balance, the other two would suffer and so the tribal members made a daily effort to maintain harmony and inner peace by paying equal attention to the three basic elements of life.

Here are 6 practical ways you can learn to connect with your own spiritual side.

1. Understand Your Soul/Spirit Connection. Most of us have heard words like spirit, soul, and enlightenment. There are all sorts of mystical new age explanations of spirituality and spiritual topics. It’s easy to scratch your head and find yourself confused when learning about spirit and just as easy to conjure up images of ghostly visitors and angelic entities hovering above us. Forget all that, though, as you read the following simple definition of spirit.

Simply stated, spirit and soul are said to be separate entities, yet connected. The soul is the essence of our being; it is who we are. Spirit is the flow of energy that connects our soul with our Higher Power.

Our soul is our inner-self; it is the essence of our being. Spirit is the telephone line that connects our soul and a Higher Power and allows divine love to flow to us.

2. Trust Your Intuition. If you listen very closely, you can hear it calling you. There is a silent voice that whispers gently in our ear telling us there is more to life than what we see and hear in this world. Learn to listen to your own inner voice. It is how we listen from the heart, as well as with our mind. When we learn to do both, we are picking up the telephone that connects our soul with our Higher Power.

3. Find The Perfect Spot To Meditate. Whether we use the word meditation or prayer, what we are really doing is learning to listen to pick up the telephone and communicate. When we want to make an important phone call, most of us find a quiet spot before dialing the number, away from noise and other distractions. Find a comfortable spot to meditate, where you feel free to focus only on a two party conversation.

4. Learn How To Meditate. Most people think of communicating with a Higher Power in terms of prayer or meditation. Personally, I prefer to use the term intense relaxation when connecting with a Higher Power. Intense relaxation sounds like two entirely different things, but it is not. We are relaxing our body and our mind in order to focus intensely on making a spiritual connection. To focus properly, breathe deeply in order to relax your muscles. Find the most comfortable position for you, which allows us to release physical tension and the “busy” thoughts that constantly flood our brains. If you find yourself drifting back to random thoughts – and we all do – take some more deep breaths and imagine sending unwanted thoughts off in a balloon filled with helium. The goal is to share an informal, intimate mental conversation with our Higher Power. It helps to imagine your Higher Power as a close and trusted friend, whom you’ve known all your life. The kind of friend you can share anything with, including your deepest secrets and darkest fears, knowing that your best friend will never judge you or betray your trust. This is exactly how meditation works – your Higher Power is always there waiting to connect with you. The more you practice, the stronger your spiritual connection will become.

5. Meet Your Spirit Guides. This step requires an open mind. If you’re still reading this far down the page, there’s a good chance your mind is open to the concept of an afterlife. Faith and willingness to believe that you have a spirit guide are the keys to connecting with your own. While some people have reported communicating directly with their spirit guide, most of us have experienced a feeling that we are being guided, loved, and protected by an unseen energy at one time or another. Learning to meditate and trusting your intuition are two ways you can develop a relationship with your spirit guide or Higher Power, which many people have used to deepen their own spiritual awareness.

6. Visualize Your Own Spiritual Connection. As you practice the 5 steps listed above, it helps to create a mental picture of the connection between your inner self and the universe of which you are a part. Imagine divine love as the source of everything that exists. Think of love as the molecules that fill the spaces of everything you see on a daily basis, ranging from the car you drive to the stars in the sky. The carpenter that built the walls of your home used his love to create a safe, warm shelter for others to enjoy. This love comes from the same source that created the flowers, the oceans, and the food we eat. You can feel your soul, even if you can’t see it. We can’t see the air we breathe, either, but we know it exists. Imagine your soul as one telephone, your Higher Power as the other, and spirit as the wires of love that connect us all.

All happiness stems from a flow of love to you and from you. All emotional pain stems from a blockage of love to you and from you.

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Have questions, comments, or feel like telling me to take a long walk off a short pier? I’d love to hear from you.

3 Steps Recovery Coaching

 

Addiction is best described as a spiritual disease – or more accurately, spiritual dis-ease. A spiritual healing approach provides an extremely effective solution for the majority of people suffering with addiction.

When asked to describe how they feel after sobering up for the first time in years, most recovering addicts say the same thing – they feel nothing at all. They feel numb and empty inside. That’s because alcohol and drugs block the ability to feel normal emotions like joy, happiness and inner peace. It’s as if someone turned off a light switch inside them and left them sitting alone in a dark room. We feel disconnected from ourselves and from others, as well. This is known as becoming disconnected with one’s spirit, or spiritually disconnected.

We are all made of three basic parts – the physical body, the mind, and the spirit/soul. If any of the three parts are out of balance, the other two will suffer. As a trained recovery coach and spiritual counselor, my job is to help you re-connect with your inner self on a spiritual level, as well as on a physical and mental level.

This is done using a very simple program called 3 Steps To Spiritual Healing, along with weekly action plans and other Recovery Coaching solutions based on your own personal interests, talents and strengths. The 3 Steps are designed not only help you learn to quit using drugs or alcohol, but to heal the shame, guilt, anger and other negative emotions that drive the urge to drink or use.

I will teach you how to re-connect with your loved ones, the world around you, and most importantly, how to re-connect with yourself. 

www.breakingfreeaddictionrecovery.com

Welcome to 3 Steps To Spiritual Healing!

Today's topic from 3 Steps Command Control Central includes a brief introduction to a new program we're preparing to launch that is based on (not surprisingly) 3 Steps To Recovery - but with one difference. The new program is named 3 Steps To Spiritual Healing, which is designed to include people dealing with many other forms of spiritual dis-ease, as well as addiction. 


Just as addiction is merely a symptom of spiritual dis-ease, not the source of the problem, the vast majority of people dealing with depression, anger, loneliness, co-dependency, and a host of other issues also suffer from spiritual dis-ease. A spiritual healing is the cure and the 3 Steps are designed to create a spiritual healing. If you'd like to learn more about the 3 Steps program, email Dan@3stepstorecovery.com. 


Without further adieu, ladies and gentlemen, here is your introduction to 3 Steps To Spiritual Healing...


If you’re reading these words, it’s because you’re meant to be here with us. That’s how spirit works. Not in some fairytale, mystical, hoodoo-voodoo way, where tiny elves dance and fairies dressed in ballerina costumes sprinkle magic dust. Nor does God sit around wearing a white robe and a long beard casting judgment over us from the heavens.


You are meant to be here because your inner-self has felt a calling to connect with an invisible, yet very real, extremely powerful healing energy known as Divine Love.


If you listen closely, you can hear it calling you. There is a silent voice that whispers gently in our ear telling us there is more to life than what we see and hear in this world. The voice is called spirit, which acts much like a telephone line that connects us with a voice on the other end, no matter how near or far away. The party on our end of the line is our soul, while the party on the other end is our Higher Power. Spirit is the telephone wire that connects our soul and this Higher Power.


You will learn much more about the meaning of words like spirit, soul, and Higher Power in this course. You’ll also learn three simple, but extremely effective steps that anyone can use to connect with a Higher Power in order to experience a spiritual healing of your own.


If you’ve suffered from addiction, anxiety, anger issues, loss, hopelessness, depression, relationship issues, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, bullying, or other forms of trauma, 3 Steps To Spiritual Healing might just bring about an amazing change in your life. We won’t guarantee it, as the results depend entirely upon the amount of effort you put into the 3 Steps. But rest assured that the principles of this program have helped many others to experience a spiritual healing and has given them a brand new perspective on life.


Again, thanks for joining us and we look forward to working with you!

ACCEPTANCE - IT IS WHAT IT IS

 

If you've been paying attention, class, you'll notice my last two blog topics were about the importance of Surrender and Humility while asking a Higher Power to remove the urge to drink or use. The topic du jour (fancy French talk meaning "of the day") is Acceptance, which is a critical element when speaking with the Big Guy In The Sky.

If I were asked to define the word acceptance in 10 words or less, it would be something like “It is what it is and that’s okay”. Acceptance is a simple concept, if not always easy to apply. Acceptance is learning to accept the good things in life, as well as the bad. Even difficult experiences can teach us great things and there is much wisdom in the expression “inside every dark cloud there is a silver lining”.

Acceptance plays a huge role in applying the 3 Steps. Before we can admit we are powerless over any problem in life, we must first accept that there is a problem and we must accept that our life has become unmanageable because of it. Before we can surrender our will to a Higher Power, we must accept that a power greater than our own not only exists, but can and will help us to overcome our problem. And we must come to accept that there are some things in life that we cannot control or change using our own power - no matter how hard we try.

A lot of people refuse to accept that a Higher Power exists. Many tell themselves that if a loving God or Higher Power did exist, it would never allow murder, starvation, natural disasters, abusive parents, or other terrible and seemingly random events to occur. Others have come to fear a Higher Power after being taught in church or family that God will send them straight to hell if they don’t behave. Yet others choose to deny the existence of a Higher Power because their egos lead them to believe there could not possibly be any power wiser or more powerful than their own.

We are all free to believe as we wish, of course, but we are not free to choose the consequences of our beliefs. Our thoughts and actions are direct reflections of our beliefs, not just our thoughts. In other words, our beliefs affect our thoughts and our thoughts affect our behavior, as well. Self-centered, egotistical behavior results from self-centered, egotistical thinking. It’s been said before that it was our best thinking that got us into our worst mess, and it’s often true.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to forgive the drunk driver that killed someone near and dear to you. Acceptance means that you’ve learned to come to terms with the fact that what’s done is done and all the tears, anger, or drugs and alcohol in the world won’t bring them back. But if you are willing to believe in a Higher Power, then you must also believe that life after death exists. In other words, none of us ever truly dies and we will all be reunited with our loved ones one day. For those willing to believe, accepting the loss becomes a little less difficult. Not easy, but much less difficult.

Some people choose to focus on the ugliness in the world, rather than its beauty. War, poverty, unemployment, disease and crime definitely qualify as ugly. But then there are the oceans, the mountains, the blue skies and countless stars glimmering at night. If there is any question that a Higher Power not only exists, but consists of divine energy, all one needs to do is observe a single flower and ask if any human being on earth could create one of his or her own. The answer to the question will remind us of our own limited power and might well humble you, as well.

The truth is that there will always be both hardships and beauty in life. Acceptance is coming to terms with both the good and the bad in life. It’s not like we have much choice when it comes to acceptance. We can choose to enjoy the ride and go with the flow or we can rage our own private battle with the universe. Either way, we have no choice but to accept life on life’s terms. 

Refusal to accept the things we can’t control will never cause anything but inner turmoil, misery and distress. Acceptance is the oil that makes the ride we call life run a little smoother.

Another Slice Of Humble Pie?

In my last blog post, Surrender was the flavor of the day. Surrender is a key element in asking for, and receiving, a Spiritual Healing that removes all desire for alcohol or drugs. In order to surrender our addiction to a Higher Power effectively, however, we must ask humbly. You might want to blow the dust off your old album collection and listen to a little Humble Pie as you read along.

For your listening pleasure, here's one of my personal Humble Pie favorites that never fails to remind me of my month-long vacation in Club Rehab every time I hear it.

When we talk about surrendering one’s will, we’re not talking about surrendering our will to live or the positive things that make us who we are in life. We’re simply surrendering the issues that we’ve locked away behind the walls our ego has built around them. Those issues serve no purpose, are the source of our pain, and need to get out of Dodge.

Imagine yourself taking your fears, childhood abuse, anger, addiction or other negative issues you’ve been carrying inside and placing them in your hands. You no longer have any use for them and you ask your Higher Power to take them from you. When you are working the 3 Steps, you are doing just that – placing all your problems in your Higher Power’s hands. Your Higher Power will be more than happy to take them away and replace them with peace, love, and contentment.

But in order for it to happen, you and your Higher Power must be able to connect, one-on-one. This is where the word “humbly” becomes important. Being humble doesn’t mean we must tremble in fear or bow our heads in shame before a Higher Power. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. A Higher Power consists of nothing but divine love and never judges or punishes us. Our Higher Power is our best friend.  Asking humbly simply means that we must lower our guard, tear down the ego-driven walls we’ve built to protect us, and open ourselves to the hand that reaches out to us. Think of it as the Law of Attraction, where similar energies are attracted to one another. In this case, the energy is universal love. In order to attract love, we must open our hearts to receiving it, with no ego thoughts, no pride, or other obstacles to block the flow of energy. Imagine humility as being stranded alone on a desert island and seeing a rescue boat heading your way. You would be too lost in the moment to wonder how the captain found you or to question the rescue process. You would feel a combination of deep despair for having been stranded and an overwhelming sense of gratitude at the same time. This example defines a state of humbleness, or humility, in a nutshell.

Anyone that has ever experienced a sudden, intense spiritual healing will tell you that there are no words to describe the feeling. Gentle, yet intense waves of pure warmth and love flow through one’s entire body and years of sadness, shame, guilt or other negative emotions are wiped away in an instant – these fear-based emotions are replaced with a sense of calm and quiet strength that never leave us again. As a result, issues such as addiction, depression, loneliness, and other common ailments also disappear. We later realize that the pain we experienced were merely symptoms of deeper issues, and not the source of the problem. Do we become perfect people after a spiritual healing? Absolutely not – we will still have good days and bad ones and we will still have our faults. But the way we react to them will improve on a large scale. 

How does this happen? When we experience a spiritual connection with a Higher Power, we allow pure healing energy to enter into our being. This love displaces the shame, guilt, and other negative emotions that have ruled our thoughts in the past.

Think of ego as a man-made dam, holding back the water of love. When we open the floodgates (surrender our will), we allow that water to flow into us and through us, which is how divine love works. Love’s very nature is to flow purely and endlessly.

The way we open the floodgates and unblock the dam is through admitting powerlessness, humbly and sincerely surrendering our own will to a power greater than our own, and simply asking a Higher Power to remove the issue(s) that we have been unable to overcome using our own willpower. We must be very specific when we ask, however. For example, if you’re asking for help with an alcohol addiction, it’s important to ask your Higher Power to please remove the urge to drink. Asking only for your life to change is too general a question. By asking for your most urgent problem to be removed, we allow our Higher Power to form a stronger connection with us and to “zoom in” on a particular need.

Like most things in life, practice makes perfect, and we don’t always make the connection with our Higher Power the first time around. We often must ask many times a day over a period of days, weeks, or even months before we experience an intense spiritual healing. But as long as we follow the basics – surrender, sincerity, and asking humbly – it’s not a question of whether it will happen, but when. The energy is always here, with us, waiting to flow to us. We simply need to meet it halfway and our Higher Power will do the rest.  

What Does SURRENDER Mean In Addiction Recovery?

 

Anyone familiar with AA's 12 Steps has heard the word Surrender used more than once. But how many of us truly understand what it means, and why are so many of us reluctant to surrender to a power greater than our own?  

Truth is, no one likes the idea of surrendering to anyone or anything. We’ve been taught to view surrender as a sign of weakness. Society teaches us that only a coward surrenders to the enemy, while the strong and brave defeat their enemies – or, so we have been led to believe. But is that an accurate perception? Actor John Wayne never surrendered to one bad guy in the movies, but that only happens in our fantasies, of course. In real life, he lost his battle with cigarette addiction and died of lung cancer. His own willpower was not powerful enough to quit smoking on his own – more accurately, it was not powerful enough to overcome the issues that drove his addiction to cigarettes.

Sometimes, however, the only choices we have are to surrender or die. When the enemy holds a gun to your head, as sometimes happens during war, any soldier would be foolish to challenge the aggressor without a weapon of his own. It is a do or die situation, and the soldier surrenders in order to survive. In the process, many prisoners of war discover new strengths they never knew existed and become stronger than ever. He surrenders in order to fight his enemy another day. 

Surrendering our problems to a Higher Power is similar to surrendering to the enemy, but in reverse. The difference is that, unlike an enemy army, our Higher Power wants only the best for us. Hand over your troubles to a power greater than your own and your Higher Power will replace them with a new strength we never thought possible.

We all surrender to many things every day, although we don’t give it much thought. How many of us would be foolish enough to cross the street without waiting for an oncoming bus to pass by first? Would we refuse to surrender to gravity by leaping out of an airplane without a parachute or decide to step outside for a stroll during a tornado? Of course we wouldn’t do those things. We surrender to gravity, the weather, the air we breathe and passing traffic in order to live and survive. We surrender to them because we have no power to control them and because they are a power greater than our own.

Yet, many of us refuse to surrender to a Higher Power, even when we’re told that a power greater than our own consists of nothing but pure, unconditional love and only wants to help us.

Why do some people refuse to surrender? There is one word that best sums it up – fear. People are afraid to connect with a Higher Power for two main reasons. Fear of losing control and fear that they will be punished or judged by the powers that be, rather than loved and forgiven. These fears are based on past experiences, of course, and were instilled in us by abusive people that have hurt us in the past. We’ve been taught to shut up and keep our problems to ourselves, unless we want more of the same. We’re told that surrender is for the weak and to put on our big boy/girl pants and deal with our problems alone. And boy, do we ever try. We come up with all kinds of ways to ignore trauma and other painful experiences of the past. We work hard to earn money, diet and exercise to look and feel better, physically, or try to outrun our fears by staying busy in other ways. Many a workaholic is driven by fear of the past and fear of the future, for example.

Or we try more self-destructive forms of escape. We overeat, drink ourselves into oblivion, and/or become addicted to drugs, sex, relationships, or gambling. While working out, eating right and earning money might be better for your physical health and state of mind than eating or drinking yourself to death, they do nothing to ensure we feel happier about ourselves on a spiritual level.

Surrendering to a Higher Power is not about throwing in the towel and giving up on our self. We don’t surrender our best qualities when we surrender – we are simply surrendering the negative emotions, trauma and pain that have been holding us back from true happiness for years. It’s really more of a merger than surrender. We are actually joining forces with a Higher Power’s energy. We’re surrendering our issues to a Higher Power in the belief that a power greater than our own can, and will, remove the issues and problems that we cannot remove using our own power.

A Higher Power not only can and will do this for us, but does remove them every day for someone, somewhere.

Surrender is a mutual, joint effort, where people and universal love work together, one surrendering to the other on a constant basis. When a baby draws its first breath of air, for example, the universe is surrendering to the baby. When our bodies die, we surrender our final breath to the universe and the cycle is complete. For the entire time we are alive, here on earth, we exist in a constant state of give and take with a power greater than our own. Those that choose to take a deep breath and make a leap of faith with a Higher Power no longer view life as a battlefield. Instead, they join with and embrace life in a way that most people will never know.

Once again, we don’t give up the best parts of ourselves when we surrender to a Higher Power. We join forces with it. Our Higher Power is our best friend. In successful long-term relationships, couples don’t surrender to one another's demands (ego-driven wants and needs). If you've ever been in that type of relationship, you know it's a recipe for failure. Instead, they surrender to a Higher Love, both collectively and as individuals. They surrender to a Higher Love as one and learn to accept, compromise and love each other on a higher level.

Although one person might temporarily surrender to their partner’s will, rather than a Higher Power’s will, neither party will know happiness for very long. When we surrender to a power greater than our own, the negative emotions within us are not only removed, but are replaced with acceptance, tolerance, patience and other traits that allow us to love others in the truest sense of the word.

We can choose to hold onto painful memories of the past and remain sad, angry, guilty and unhappy or we can choose to surrender them to a Higher Power and live a free and contented life. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once stated that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself” and he was correct. When we hand our childhood issues and other trauma over to a Higher Power, it is actually our deepest fears that we are surrendering. Ask anyone that has experienced a sudden, intense spiritual healing and they will tell you that their fear was the first to go. Imagine a bridge with a town called Fear on one side and Happiness on the other. Surrender is the name of the bridge that allows us to cross from one side to the other.

Spiritual Water Of Love

Don't be confused by the title. We're talking spiritual waters here, not holy water in the religious sense. I have absolutely nothing against religion, for those that choose it, but this post is about connecting with divine love on a spiritual energy level.

As someone that was trapped in the darkness of addiction for more than 20 years, this song especially strikes a chord with me, as I often visualize love/light to be like water, in the sense that one of its main properties is to flow to and fill everything in its path. To me, these song lyrics represent a man that believes his water of love has run dry and he can't find it anywhere... he doesn't yet realize that his ego is his own little dam and if he'd just open the floodgates the water would flow through and fill him with love.