I thought for today's Random Resource ThuRsday I would bring a different flavor to spiritual self-care.
First how do we take care of ourselves spiritually? Below, is a site I came across when I was looking up spiritual self-care. I was thinking about God and all he has created. Then that lead me to thinking about nature which lead me to thinking about plants..and this lead me to ...
Using Flower Essences to Establish and Maintain Spiritual Needs. This is from The Desert-Alchemy's website and I found it interesting. They talk about spiritual needs on man levels including having a Higher Power, Meditation, Contemplation and yes, flowers. Please read as I think you will enjoy.
to Read more from that site, visit http://www.desert-alchemy.com.
The Core Issue
Spiritual Self-Care
An exploration of flower essences to establish and
maintain support for your spiritual needs
maintain support for your spiritual needs
spiritual self-care
- the activity we engage in to find and nurture a sense of connection to a Higher Power and deeper meaning for our lives
How do we take care of ourselves spiritually? Spiritual self-care is the activity we engage in to find and nurture a sense of connection to a Higher Power and meaning for our lives. Just as it is essential to nurture your body with food, it is necessary to nurture your soul with spirit.
There are many spiritual paths and spiritual support systems. Some of us may find that one particular spiritual path feels right and helps us find meaning and understanding for life. Others may find spiritual meaning through an eclectic blend of different spiritual traditions. Still others may blaze their own path.
Regardless of where you find spiritual meaning, a certain amount of effort and discipline are necessary for establishing and maintaining spiritual nurturance.
Higher Power
Perhaps spiritual self-care begins with feeling connected with a greater energy source, with God, a Higher Power, GodSelf, or Universal Oneness. All of us have a vital life force within that animates and brings meaning to life. When we feel this presence, we are connecting to our Higher Power. A Way to the GodSelf Formula helps us experience this connection.
When you are moving along nicely in your life you don't usually think as much about your Higher Power. Yet, when times become challenging, when you most need support and reassurance, you often lose a sense of connection to God or your Higher Self. It is not uncommon to feel as if you have been cut adrift and you are not sure of how to proceed in life. You may even think that you just cannot go on. Saguaro Cactusflower essence helps you find that the inner wisdom and strength that you seek is located right within yourself, and you can go on for one more breath, one more hour, or one more day.
Whether you are in the midst of a life crisis or experiencing a time of peaceful growth, there are a few practices that can help you on your spiritual journey, no matter what the path you are following. Two of them are meditation and contemplation.
Meditation
One common thing that many folks say is that their key to balance and inner harmony is meditation. If you have a daily meditation practice, even if it is for fifteen minutes a day, it can be amazingly effective. Meditation is so simple that you might think it couldn't possibly help.
Every day we clean our teeth, yet how many of us clean out our minds on a regular basis? Meditation is sitting quietly and detaching from your thoughts, even if just for a few minutes or even a few seconds.
Meditation can also be body movement with complete focus on the present moment that moves you out of your thoughts. Some people experience this state when they exercise and "get into the zone." Many Olympic athletes do this, and their performances have a quality that entrances those who watch.
Meditation is a simple, natural part of life. Scientists have found that children naturally meditate. Every hour or so a child's eyes will glaze over as his or her gaze turns inward for ten to thirty seconds. The child is present, yet detached, and usually will not respond right away if you speak to him or her. This is a natural phenomenon.
As we grow up our society teaches us to be more engaged in doing or accomplishing, and we lose this natural tendency. We learn that we should constantly focus on everything outside of ourselves, and we forget how to look within. If we sit in meditation for just fifteen minutes a day, we can recapture the feeling of refreshment and restore a sense of harmony to our lives.
Those who meditate on a regular basis say that their lives seem more manageable. After meditating you feel refreshed, you are able to detach from worries and concerns and you are usually restored to a sense of balance.
There are many different challenges to being able to meditate. One flower essence, Rainbow Cactus, can help you if you have difficulty in detaching from what your mind thinks. When you meditate, you do not stop thinking, you just allow your focus to go beyond your thoughts. Rainbow Cactus helps you move from one state of consciousness to another.
"We have a natural ability to go within ourselves to different levels or planes of consciousness. When we know to what plane of consciousness we want to go, this flower essence helps us arrive there.
"During normal daily awareness, we listen to our minds and function from this perspective. This is one level of consciousness. When we meditate, we go beyond what our mind thinks. This is another level." [1]
Rainbow Cactus can be an excellent support for moving easily into "observer consciousness", where you detach from what you mind thinks and simply observe. When you allow your thoughts to be background music instead of the main attraction, you slide easily into meditation.
Queen of the Night Cactus is another flower essence that helps with challenges to meditation. This night-blooming flower provides a flower essence that supports you in turning your focus within. Queen of the Night takes you deeply inside, through the inner corridors of darkness, to find that we are connected to all of creation through sensing and feeling.
This essence awakens you to feminine qualities of receptivity, subtlety, intuition, psychic impression, and deep feeling. It helps you find a state in which you can easily meditate. It can help you value your inner, intuitive self, especially if you have been taught that rational logic is more important than intuition.
When we meditate, some of us may fear losing control. As you let go of focus on your thoughts, you may have a feeling of falling, or of moving to the unknown. Sacred Datura is the essence of choice to help us let go, or surrender, into meditation. It is through letting go that we attain everything. It helps us to feel safe and protected as we let go of the known or familiar. This flower essence helps us to find comfort in formlessness. It supports us in dissolving our ideas about reality so that we can widen our experience of life and ourselves.
Another challenge to meditation is fear. You may find yourself afraid that you will be overpowered or taken over by dark forces or something that you don't know if you meditate. Scorpion Weed is the essence to use for these fears. This great flower essence can help you find that the strength of innocence and direct confrontation overcomes fear and paralysis. It supports the restoration of trust in your essential goodness and light.
If you want to begin or renew a meditation practice, you can take four drops of each essence in a glass of water, and then sit for ten minutes. At first you may just hear your mind thinking all of its thoughts. That's normal. When you meditate your mind does not stop thinking, but you learn to go beyond your mind's thoughts, to just observe them and not be engaged by them. Even if you sit and listen to the thoughts in your mind for ten minutes each day, congratulate yourself. This is how the practice begins. After time, the desire to meditate will arise spontaneously. In the beginning it takes effort to commit to sitting, but after some time it will come naturally.
It can be helpful, but not essential, to sit for meditation at the same time every day. If you want, you can extend the time you sit to fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, and then half an hour. Don't worry that you will spend too much time meditating. Before you sit for meditation, tell yourself how long you want to sit. You will naturally come back from meditation in precisely that length of time.
Within a few days or weeks you will find that you naturally want to sit for meditation. It will become easier to let go of your thoughts, and you may find that as you let go, you begin to experience "nothingness." As you go deeper into the "nothingness", you ultimately experience great bliss and joy.
Contemplation
Another important part of spiritual self-care is contemplation. When we contemplate, we review an event or a question and we study it with our minds and hearts. It is a way to help us to find higher meaning with the daily events of life. The word contemplation itself shows us its meaning: "con" means with; and temple is the root of "templation". It means being with the temple within you, or seeking inner spiritual wisdom.
When you contemplate, it is like meditation, only you invite your mind and your heart to be equal and active partners. You may contemplate especially difficult or challenging events in your daily life. Or, you may contemplate the especially easy things that happened in your day. Through contemplation you invite the truth of your heart to show you a deeper meaning to the mundane events of life.
The Saguaro-Queen Formula is an excellent support for contemplation. It contains two important flower essences that help balance cognitive function with intuitive listening: Saguaro Cactus and Queen of the Night Cactus.
Queen of the Night Cactus can help you pull your focus inward, to counter the compelling outer focus that your life brings. If you fear or distrust your intuition Queen of the Night can help you to cultivate a new relationship with intuition, which is an important part of contemplation.
Saguaro Cactus helps you recognize and listen to your inner wisdom. It can support you in translating your intuitive impressions into words and understandable concepts. It helps you recognize that true wisdom and the answers you are seeking reside within you.
For those who love to rush off into new life situations without contemplating and making wisdom from what we have experienced, Periwinkle can help. This flower essence inspires you to review and integrate an experience so that you may discover its inherent wisdom, before you rush off into a new event or situation. Periwinkle helps you extrapolate wisdom from experience so you have a greater foundation as you move on into new aspects of living.
Purpose
Perhaps the biggest question we attempt to answer in life is our purpose for living. When you have a sense of a higher purpose, the daily events of life become rich with meaning. When you feel that your life has meaning, you experience a greater sense of well being and confidence. You also can more easily let go of blame, regret, guilt and many of the things that leave you feeling anxious and stuck.
Connecting with Purpose Formula is a composite essence that helps you recognize your purpose. The chapter about this flower essence, on page 366 of The Alchemy of the Desert - Second Edition book, describes an exercise you can use along with the flower essence formula to help you define your purpose.
When you are clear about your spiritual ideals and want to integrate them into your daily life, Cliff Rose is the essence of choice. This essence helps keep you connected to your source and bring that quality of energy into manifestation. It helps you actualize your spiritual perspective in mundane situations.
Spiritual Support
Spiritual support is available in abundance if you ask for it. The tricky part is remembering to ask. The Giving & Receiving Support Formula is excellent for helping you remember to ask. It also helps you if, after asking for support, you tend not to allow yourself to receive it.
When you want to consciously have the boundless support of the angelic realm, you can use Invoking Celestial Guardians Formula from our Angelic Awareness Kit of flower essences.
It is helpful to have the support of people following the same, or similar, path by being involved with a spiritual community. Churches, meditation centers, and other spiritual groups can provide support through regular meetings and rituals that celebrate life events. For those who may be timid to join a group, Community Spirit Formula can be of special support. This essence can help you feel more comfortable being part of a group without giving up your individuality.
Nature can be a powerfully gentle ally in helping you recognize spiritual support. To consciously develop a deeper relationship with nature, you can use Deepening Inner Union Formula.
Spiritual self-care is as important to a balanced life as food is for the body. When we care for ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, we naturally find a sense of peace and meaning for our lives.
Selecting the Most Appropriate Flower Essences
Not every flower essence mentioned above will be appropriate for every person's specific needs. Different people have different issues with spiritual self-care. The process itself of exploring and contemplating your issues is important. It is the foundation for successfully selecting the most beneficial flower essences. Usually, careful self-examination can clearly show you which of the above flower essences are most appropriate for your particular needs.
Though you can use more than one flower essence together, you probably will not need to use all of the ones mentioned here. After contemplating your relationship to this issue, select the flower essences that apply for you, or use an intuitive method to select among them. (For more information on how to do this, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.) A general guideline is to use four drops at a time, four times a day, in water. However, it is fine to follow your intuition and use them as often as you like. Most people find that they tend to use them more often in the beginning and less often towards the end of the cycle. Unless otherwise indicated, a cycle is usually two to four weeks. [more]
For information on how to clearly evaluate the effects of the essences you have used, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.
