Recently I spoke at a Unity Church in Northern California about what I call “Spiritual Adulthood”. There’s not a lot of information about this topic available anywhere that I looked. I did find one reference from a blogger named Jim Tolles. He said that a “spiritual adult” has traits that can be recognized as follows:
An ease in offering love & compassion to any situation
Greater patience
Selflessness
Clarity on what is real in life and what is illusion
Less inclination to blame others
More openness in expression and in being who they are
While I agree with most of what he says here, I believe that there are more basic criteria that have to be present in order to fully experience spiritual adulthood or for someone to recognize when they have arrived at spiritual adulthood.
These criteria are:
Acceptance of WHATYOU ARE!
Practice UNCONDITIONAL LOVE…toward your SELF!
So then, WHAT are we? I say we are spiritual beings having a human experience! We are children of the Universe. We are creators. We are Gods among Gods.
It is my contention that we have to come to the awareness and understanding that we, and we alone create our experiences. We have created the world we experience…the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
I also believe that all the bad or negative experiences that have happened to you— are because you are not controlling your state of mind and— staying out of a waking/walking state of hypnosis. You may not think you are in hypnosis— but I can assure you that, you are probably in hypnosis more often than not! I always ask my new clients if they have ever been hypnotized before. Most answer me “No”. I then proceed to explain the following—“You have experienced being in hypnosis— lots of times.”
For example; you’re watching a movie in a theater and even though you know it’s not real, have found yourself scared or laughing or crying and not even noticing the person sitting next to you munching popcorn? Movie producers and directors actually count- on us going into hypnosis during the film. That’s why the volume gets loud and the lights flash and the music is chosen very skillfully and carefully—to evoke a mood!
Or you’re driving along a familiar route when suddenly you realize that you have missed the turn-off that you’ve taken many times in the past because your mind was on something else or walked into another room of your house only to find yourself standing there, trying to remember why you walked into that room.
We are so regularly bombarded by negative news on a worldwide scale that we become overloaded with information nearly every day. There are disasters of all sorts, new technology, heavy commuter traffic, economic uncertainties, inflation, overpopulation, air, water and noise pollution to name a few. This overload triggers our sympathetic nerve system to engage the body’s freeze, fight or flight response so our mind escapes (flight) into hypnosis, leaving us vulnerable to all kinds of negative influences, leaving us feeling disempowered and impotent to control our life’s circumstances and lose sight of who we really are.
People like Deepak Chopra, M.D., Bruce Lipton, PhD, Joe Dispenza, BS,D.C. and Dan Siegal, M.D. all agree that this “waking/walking hypnosis is a destroyer of health and happiness.
It is vital that we learn how to stay out of hypnosis if we are to change our reality to one that is positive, nurturing and life-affirming. This can be accomplished with relative ease. When we are feeling fear and anxiety or even simply worrying too much I recommend my B.E.A.T. process.
B Learn how to belly-breathe to offset oxygen debt that comes from shallow breathing as a result of anxiety.
Eat something, preferably protein to stabilize your blood sugar and to keep your body from going into the freeze, flight/fight response to fears.
Assess your emotional state of mind and determine if what you are feeling is based on a real or imagined threat.
Take action. Change your physiology by moving, making silly faces in your rear-view mirror if you are in a traffic jam or if possible, take a nap. Taking a nap “resets” your brain.
If you do this simple process when faced with fear or anxiety, it can help you stay out of hypnosis and help you attain higher emotional states easily and effortlessly. This is what self-mastery is all about and it is what knowing and being what you are—a master creator.
