Rev. Monica McDowell - Healer, Mystic, Author
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Core Strengthening for the Soul: Four Exercises for Expanded Well-Being

2/27/2013

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In physical fitness, the idea of core strengthening is very simple. By keeping your core muscles in the abdominal area strong, it helps to keep your spine and therefore most everything in your body in alignment.

This is a great metaphor for soul work but with a different starting point. At your spiritual core, you are already infinitely strong. There is no need to “improve” or “correct” or “save” or “strengthen” even an iota of who you are at your core. Everyone’s True Self, by nature of each person’s divine spark or essence, is infinitely strong, totally whole, and perfectly radiant. However, humans are multi-dimensional, multi-layered beings and beyond your True Self or core spirit you may experience yourself as having a soul (astral body), thoughts (mental body), feelings (emotional body), and a physical body. Although these derivative bodies are all interconnected energetically and therefore mutually affect each other, each of these layers can be strengthened the more you focus on or “exercise” your core. By exercising your core strength you keep your various “bodies” in alignment with your core and this increases harmony and well-being in all of your layers, as well as increases the continuing growth and expansion of your embodied consciousness.

So how do you focus on your core?

The first exercise is meditation. Meditation in some form or another helps you get in touch with your core essence. Meditation comes in about as many shapes and sizes as physical bodies do so don’t think that “it doesn’t work for me” if you’ve tried one or two types of meditation and it didn’t take. Keep experimenting. Keep exploring. With one client, I asked about her spiritual practice and she said she didn’t have one—this said while looking like she felt entirely depressed about her sad spiritual state. I kept asking questions from different angles: “Well, what makes you feel connected to peace or joy?” “What do you have to do to keep your life in balance?”

It turns out that she spent an hour in nature a day just being quiet and recharging! That’s powerful meditation my friends! She just didn’t think it was meditation because she wasn’t chanting or trying to get rid of her thoughts or praying or in a certain yogic pose while she was outside. Whatever gets you back to love, joy, and/or peace (LJP) is meditation for you! Pay attention to your life—you may already be meditating!

The second exercise is to focus on feeling one or more of the states of being that your core self is whenever you can, that is feeling LJP. By feeling these states of being you exercise them, bringing that core strength into your astral, mental, emotional, and physical bodies.  Use your memory (past experiences with LJP) or imagination (future experiences with LJP) if necessary to help you get in touch with the feelings of these eternal, infinite states of Being and Bliss.

The third exercise is to think thoughts in alignment with your core radiance and magnificence. This is generally done through affirmations and intentions. Some people who have negative thought patterns hard-wired into their brains have a difficult time switching off the negative talk. There are ways to do this (EFT, inner work, various spiritual tools) that I won’t go into here, but if you have some mechanism for simply observing your thoughts, no matter whether they’re positive, neutral or negative, that in and of itself is good enough as it keeps the real you, the aware observer, detached from your thoughts.

Which leads to the fourth exercise: practice detachment. I find detachment easier if I think of this entire material universe as a holographic mirage and virtual reality program designed to help me heal back into my original wholeness. If you have an out-of-body experience (OBE) you quickly discover that the idea of a holographic mirage is actually very close to reality, because what appears as solid when you are in a body is not at all solid when your consciousness is out-of-body. This holographic universe’s virtual reality programming will help you by showing you everywhere in your astral, mental, emotional and physical bodies that is not in alignment with your core strength. Every person or situation that arises that pulls you out of LJP is a teacher, that is, a mirror reflecting back the fragmented bits and pieces of your multi-dimensional reality that need to be healed and integrated back in your core reality.

These four exercises help keep me centered on who I Am. Reminder: This is a process! Sometimes you have to release the limiting beliefs, the negative thoughts, the emotional baggage by experiencing them to the fullest extent first and then shifting out of them. Energy work helps. A lot. Inner work will get you there too.

The bottom line is to exercise your core strength. Exercise and celebrate your own original magnificence and have fun doing it!
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The Butterfly Effect: Why Small Soul Moves Matter

2/1/2013

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Many times after a big macro shift when your world rattles and shakes in earthquaking fashion, come a lot of micro shifting tremors. They can be unsettling, coming on the heels of a mega transformation because you’re thinking, “What? Again? So Soon? Take it easy on me, universe!”

However, if you can stay with the micro-shifting tremors they are a whole lot easier to navigate than a macro cataclysm and they can be just as significant. Here’s what I mean.

In my last blog I described another macro shift I was going through. It seems to have mostly subsided except that small tremors are popping up here and there. Now, I could avoid these tremors by thinking, Oh I am so not going to look at that issue in me! I just did so much shifting, I don’t want to shift again! It might open up a whole new cataclysm!

However, I have learned from experience that not looking at them is what is more likely to open up a whole new Grand Canyon cataclysm. So, as unfun as it can be to look at yet another area where I am not in alignment with divine essence, I know I will. A spoonful of medicine is better and less costly than an ER visit any day.

For example, a few days ago a tremor pops up and it’s just a teensy bit of codependency in a certain relationship of mine. It’s not a big deal—pee-wee league crazy-making at the most. But I finally see it with clearer eyes, now that I’ve been through my macro mega quake, and it becomes apparent how to end the tremor. The next day, pure as gold, crazy-making tremor has ended. Voila! This stuff works like magic!

Moreover, since I made this single internal micro-shift, I have witnessed several other huge effects in my external world coming from this tiny, nearly non-event. Energy released, clarity sharpened, the shifting of other people’s relationships around me, opportunities arising, and the like.

The smaller tremors that occur after the Big One help the shifting tectonic plates settle in, readjust, and quiet down. These tremors are just as important to healing your life as the Big One is, as pennies are just as important as dollars since indeed 100 pennies make up a dollar. Mind the pennies, the dollars come into being. Mind the tremors, the Big One comes into being in larger and more expansive ways.

This butterfly effect in your soul is a marvelous thing. Don’t dismiss the small moves, the hidden act of kindness or forgiveness, the love sent in prayer for a loved one or a stranger, the peace one holds within in the midst of someone’s tragedy or even worldwide calamity. The closer you get to alignment, the more you’ve cleared and shifted, it becomes very obvious that many small moves have as much power as the big ones. Never doubt your worth or your effect on the world. 

Here’s a great inspirational story that demonstrates that small moves even by the least significant of people (by most of western society’s standards of success) reverberate in amazing ways, even in a big metropolis like New York City.


"Small moves, Ellie, small moves." ~ Father to daughter in the film, Contact
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    Monica is a healer, author, ordained minister and spiritual director. She lives in Seattle, the land of prehistoric-sized dandelions, with her family.

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