Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening
Highlights
Breathe and Feel. Always
Holistic physicians often say that conscious breathing is the number one health practice. Spiritual teachers often call it the number one spiritual practice.
Breathe and Feel. Always
The heart center is nested right in the center of your lungs, and one of the most natural ways to activate the heart’s feeling intelligence is by breathing consciously.
Breathe and Feel. Always
If you bring that heart-feeling through the breath into the whole body, you energize every level of being, from toe to crown. This includes the full spectrum of subtle energies, from etheric to astral, to psychic and supramental.
Breathe and Feel. Always
Anytime you want to bring more feeling or awareness into the present moment, the most effective thing you can do is to take a deep, feeling breath.
Anytime you become frightened or angry, contracted, armored, or frozen, the first and most effective thing you can do is to take a deep, feeling breath.
Anytime you become ungrounded or become dissociatively stuck in the head, the first and most effective thing you can do is to take a deep, feeling breath.
Constant Consciousness
That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real.
—Ramana Maharshi
Sleeping to Awaken
Ultimately, consciousness even finally notices its inseparability from everything that arises within it—it wakes up to the fact of its non-separation from the whole changing dance of experience. Ultimately there is nothing dividing consciousness from anything within or beyond the play of experience.
Constant Consciousness
you are released from the terror and the torment that necessarily arise when you identify with a little subject in a world of little objects.
Once you find your formless identity
Constant Consciousness
You will empty yourself of emptiness: you will pour yourself out into the mind and world and create them in the process, and enter them all equally, but especially and particularly that specific mind and body that is called by your name. And then this lesser self will become the vehicle of the Spirit that you are.
And then all things, including your own little mind and body and feelings and thoughts, will arise in the vast emptiness that you are, and they will self-liberate into their own true nature just as they arise, precisely because you no longer identify with any of them, but rather let them play, let them all arise, in the emptiness and openness that you now are. You then will awaken as radical freedom, sing those songs of radiant release, beam an infinity too obvious to see, and drink an ocean of delight. You will look at the moon as part of your body and bow to the sun as part of your heart, and all of it is just so. For eternally and always, eternally and always, there is only this.
Spiritual Practice for an Integral Age
What do we mean by “Spirit”? What is “spirituality” and “spiritual practice”? These words all refer to “the matter of ultimate concern,” the epitome of all that is meaningful, the essence of goodness, truth, and beauty. It is said that Spirit is love itself, without limitation. And it is said that Spirit is beyond description.