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5 November, 2014 by Choki team

Social Transformation – Like Ripples in an Ocean

If you transform yourself you transform society.

With each person having the potential to become a shining light for humanity, like the sages of yesterday and today, the understanding and awareness of what we can become compared to what we are can bring a wave of inspiration for us to consciously evolve.

Social transformation on a global, transpersonal level can only come about if we all work together to achieve such goals. At the very least, there must be a passionate and mindful group of people who see that humanity is still very young and is just now pushing out of the Stone Age of Consciousness and into a yet-to-be-determined future where the principles of oneness and unity are truly felt, expressed and reflected by humanity and its societies.

Social transformation can come in small and frequent shifts or in massive quantum leaps. No matter in which way such positive and progressive change occurs, we can rest assured that the transformational process has been occurring ever since humanity began, and most recently has been seen to be progressing faster than ever before.

For example, a 20-something year old today, when told of the existence of segregation of different races in America only a few decades ago, will be dumbfounded that such an era even existed in such recent history; that some elements of humanity supported and promoted such bizarre things.

It’s as if time is speeding up, or perhaps slowing down but we feel more is occurring in less time. The transformational process is constant, like the flow of a river. Those who see that there is so much more in store for the human consciousness than what is currently in existence; those who see humanity is still a toddler in the cradle of consciousness, can envision how much more can be changed, shifted, and evolved.

From Carl Jung’s research all the way to post-modern scientific studies on consciousness, it is seen that humans, the environment, the entire universe and perhaps the multiverse is interconnected, both in seen and unseen ways. Whatever affects one aspect of reality, affects the whole of reality. In this way, when even one person’s position of awareness is shifted, or just a handful of individual perceptions of reality are modified, then these will directly affect the global human consciousness as a whole.

Each person, no matter who he or she is, can influence the future present of our timeline. There is no cause that does not effect. Influence is constant. No person should feel that he or she is unable to participate in the process of social transformation. We’re all able to do our part. With ignorance being replaced with awareness, more and more people can become understanding of the current state of humanity and the positive and progressive potential that it has.

Our actions and reactions are like ripples in an infinite ocean, spreading out and affecting all that is beyond them. In this same way, even the simple existence within the feelings of happiness or joy can positively affect others and make others feel happy or ecstatic, as a Harvard University and UC San Diego study has demonstrated.

As Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and medical sociologist at Harvard who co-wrote the study said, “your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make, but also on actions and choices of other people, many of which you don’t even know.” Not only happiness, but also ecstasy, love, and other higher states of consciousness directly affect others around us in positive ways, because of the universal reality that everything is ultimately One.

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Author: Paul Lenda / Wake up World

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29 October, 2014 by Choki team

Dreams Are Another Reality

Do you have dreams? Do you have nightmares? Are they real? Think about their reality for a minute.

When you are in the dream they are real and when you are in a nightmare the situation you are going through is all too real. Very often in a nightmare we are struggling to escape from the reality because it can be so painful, sorrowful, horrid or frightening. When we do get out of that world and back into this one we are very happy to have been able to escape from the nightmare.

I’m sure there are dreams you’ve had which were beautiful, wonderful and loving. You wanted to stay in them forever. When we wake up from this kind of dream we often keep the feeling of warmth and love with us for most of the day and look forward to it again when go to sleep that night.

In the Western world we have some confused thinking about dreams, nightmares and their reality. When we are awake we say they are not real but when we are asleep and in them we know they are real. How do we sort this out in our heads?

Two realities

We are dealing with two realities. Our physical outer world is real when we are awake and moving around in it. Our dream or inner world is real when we are asleep physically and awake in the dream worlds. When you leave the dream world they are no longer real because you have moved your focus from one reality to another. You, your focus of attention, Soul, has moved from your inner world to your outer world, from your dream world to your physical world. This switch of realities happens as soon as you start to move out of your bed.

When I wake up in the morning the first thing I notice is the light. Is it dark or light? If its light i know its close to getting up time. Then I check my mind for the day of the week and also if there are any appointments I have to meet early this morning. If there is no rush in getting up, I’ll roll over to see the time on my bedside clock. I’ll also check to see how my body feels. Am I still tired or do I have a lot of energy? The answer will determine my next move.

If I don’t have to get out of bed I may drift back into my dreams. I’ll see if there are any still lingering around from a few moments ago. There may be some of interest which I’d like to continue. Getting back into a dream depends on how sleepy I am.

If I’m a little too awake to drop back to sleep, I’ll go over the dreams I had last night. As I lie snoozing in bed I’ll recall as many dreams as I can from the previous night. If there is what I consider a significant dream I’ll go over it in detail, trying to remember it all. I’ll piece it together as I lie almost asleep in bed. This way I can bring the dream from my inner memory into my outer memory. Once I have a satisfactory amount of it transferred, I’ll reach for my journal and start wring what I can recall of the dream. While a lot of what I write may not make logical sense in this physical world, it is all possible in the dream world. Keeping a note of the dream will help me relate it back to something going on in my physical world in a few months time if I don’t already recognize what it relates to.

Writing my dreams

What I’ve found from writing my dreams down, is that I am able to see what they relate to more easily and can sometimes get an insight from them straight away. Other dreams reveal their message after some time has passed and I’ve been through some experiences. Then the meaning of the dream becomes apparent. This is how I move my inner dream reality into my outer physical world.

If the dream relates to something happening at the moment in my life, when I come to that situation I’ll remember the dream insight because I wrote it down earlier. If I didn’t spend the time writing it down I probably wouldn’t recall the dream as I go through the situation and so miss the chance to use the wisdom.

In reality we are living in two worlds

Hopefully this helps you see that we are more than our physical body. We are living in two worlds, our outer physical and our inner dream world. When we are in one we generally disregard the other. When we wake up in the morning as soon as we open our eyes we begin to engage in our outer world. Our focus, our true self Soul, now moves into surviving in the physical world. It requires the gathering of our energy, paying attention to where we are going and getting ourselves organized to start our day. Our dream world is only a distraction in this physical world so we completely forget about it as we focus on what is going on around us. Thus our dream world is no longer real but only minutes ago it was our main reality and existence.

Another reason to be aware of this is to use the wisdom and insights we receive while we are in our dream worlds. Our dream worlds are usually a higher level of existence. Our dreams give us insights into the situations, people and challenges of our physical world. Once we realise the existence of these two realities we can begin to uncover the wisdom and vision from our inner world.

Wake up slowly, gather the memories of your dreams together and bring them into your outer memory, your second reality.

If there is a significant dream, write it down in a dream diary or journal.

Be aware that you can slip into your inner world at any time using your imagination and daydreams. You don’t have to wait to go to sleep.

Wishing you insights, wisdom and love as you explore your two realities.

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Author: Ed Parkinson

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24 October, 2014 by Choki team

Who Thinks Your Thoughts?

The notion that how we feel is merely caused by events around us or directly involving us, is a scourge of our modern times. To believe that the external world and its perceived relationship to us is the major determinative factor in how we feel (“I can’t believe he/she said that to me—that’s so outrageous!”) is disempowering and self-destructive.

We impose our “shoulds” on what we perceive as “the world out there”, and then when it fails to live up to our arbitrary and abstract standards, we pout, mope, grumble and complain that it “should” have been different. Rather than tweaking our perception, we demand that the thing we perceive should tweak itself! When people fail to conform to our whimsy, we often then fall into yet another error avoided by the mindful: we replay upsetting events (events that we perceived as upsetting) and our emotional response/s to them in our heads over and over, further upsetting ourselves!

Many people like to imagine how they would have responded differently to an unpleasant scenario: perhaps some pithy and scathing repartee to put the aggressor in their place, or some supremely composed nonchalance in the face of adversity. But these mental rehashing and rehearsals have several negative effects, including: further encouraging sloppy, undisciplined and counterproductive thinking; distracting us from the present, wasting our time and energy; and the internally generated fight-or-flight stress response needlessly releases more cortisol into our blood, aging us even faster and suppressing our immune systems)—even though the moment has passed.

This function of our “time-binding semantic circuit” (as Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson have referred to it) makes us unique among the creatures on this planet. Only we humans choose to torture ourselves by replaying imaginary scenarios from the past that are unrelated to the present moment! We are unique among the creatures on this planet in our ability to squander the gift of the present moment by our thoughts of the past.

The remedy?

Firstly, we need to drop our “shoulds” in the moment and adopt a more “go with the flow” mindset wherein we acknowledge the infinite diversity of the multiverse and accept that there will always be things that crop up along the way that we won’t necessarily be overjoyed about. Believe that that is okay (and that it may ultimately be in your best interests!), and, as Niebuhr said, try to cultivate the serenity to accept the things you cannot change.

Next, we need to learn not to RE-act unconsciously to stimuli, rehashing our established habitual response to some perceived stressor. (“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me again!”) Instead, we need to develop a modicum of detachment and learn to observe what is occurring without identifying with it. That goes for both external processes and internal thought processes.

People forget that no matter what happens, there is always a multitude of angles to view it from, all of them complimentary. Too easily do we adopt the idea that our personal viewing angle trumps any other: “How I see it is right. I am completely objective. THEY are wrong.” It can be an extremely useful and healing exercise to step into another party’s shoes and try to humble oneself enough to see things from their perspective.

If it’s too late for you to try multi-angle viewing in the moment because you’ve already gotten swept away on a wave of emotion, all is not lost. You can still step back from your own thoughts and feelings: they are not you. Any thought or feeling you can observe (which is all of them) must be something other than yourself, something less than the totality of who and what you are.

Your thoughts and feelings come and go, they are transient, and yet through them all, you remain. Observe an emotional response, resist the temptation to fight it, and allow it to pass without judging yourself for having the feeling. Feelings are only human, but as the observer, you are uncolored, untainted consciousness.

Before we ever thought or felt, we were simply consciousness being. We can be that consciousness and train ourselves out of unconscious identification with our transient thoughts and feelings. You have feelings (and beliefs and thoughts), but they are not what you are. As Stephen Wolinsky notes in Quantum Consciousness, if a part of you can observe your feelings of sadness, then you must be more than merely the sadness itself. Observe it, don’t identify with it: it isn’t you. Thus, we learn to become the master, and emotion the servant.

Given the realization that you have a choice between neutrality, humor, offense, sadness, pain, anger, or even joy, in virtually any given circumstance, “Surely,” you might reason, “only a masochist would consciously choose anything other than enjoyable psychological assessments of and responses to events, or at the very least, relatively peaceful or neutral ones.” But we habitually and unconsciously choose anything but peace, neutrality or joy. Through effort, we can cultivate the mindfulness that allows us to recognize (“know again”) in the moment that we are the ones who choose our thoughts and feelings, no one else.

What will be the next choice you make in experiencing your subjective observer-created reality? If finding the lighter side of adversity comes to you with difficulty, then try to cultivate the habit of observing, and then observing yourself observing. You’ll be amazed at the number of cognitive options you see at your disposal that would go completely unnoticed if you were identifying with your perceptions, beliefs, and judgements, and the feelings flowing from them.

No identification, no suffering. From an “observer space” you can consciously choose what to think and feel—you have options. Identification, on the other hand, leads to transient reactive emotion (often pain). In observer mode, you might see that no one does anything “wrong” according to the world view they have constructed.

In identification mode, you can be upset and offended and will judge and label instead of observing. This often leads to festering resentment, and the aforementioned mental replays of an upsetting incident ad nauseum, thus allowing the “culprit” to live rent-free in your mind (“I’m not going to let them get away with that!”). But once a troubling or challenging event has passed, if there are still lingering thoughts and replays running in my mind, I find it a useful strategy to get honest with myself and ask: “Who is thinking my thoughts? Who creates my emotions?” Obviously, the answer is me, so therefore it is I who is now causing myself the grief — what a masochist! Knowing this, I can acknowledge that I and I alone, get to choose what I believe and think, and therefore how I feel. Observing that is a powerful thing!

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Author: Brendan D. Murphy.

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21 October, 2014 by Choki team

The Matrix of Four Forms of Meditative Breath

Breath is the basis of all life. Breath is also the basis of all meditation and meditative movement. Breath is the primary manner in which we all obtain life energy. The other three in metaphysical understanding are water, food and prana or chi. The most important concept to understand about breath and meditative movement is that one moves in coordination with the breath. One moves in and out of postures with the breath and one deepens and lengthens postures in coordination with the breath. Inhalations equate to tension whereas exhalations equate to relaxation and release.

There are four important aspects of meditative breath. It is important to breathe slowly, deeply, steadily and consciously. It’s said most people breathe wrong. Most people breathe either from high, mid or low points. A complete yogi breath is a cyclical movement beginning from low point moving like a wave. Meditative movement leads to proper cyclical, complete breath.

Balanced breathing is utilized most frequently. Balanced breathing means the four parts to one breath cycle are equalized. The inhalations and exhalations are the same length of time to each other and the pause full and pause empty are the same length of time to each other too. For example 8 seconds in, 2 second pause, 8 seconds out, 2 second pause is an example of steady balanced breath. Meditation practitioners from long ago would count the breath not in seconds, but heartbeats.

There are innumerable variations of meditative breath, however in most all meditations awareness of the matrix of meditative breath is a primarily important perception. Some more developed meditation practitioners move beyond focus on the breath, however even masters come back to and start with the breath. For the rest of us focus on the matrix of breath can calm the distracted monkey mind that swings from vine to vine, thought to thought. Trouble in meditation equates to, in general having a full mind, perceiving the breath allows one to be alternatively mindful so as to begin and develop meditation.

Balanced breath is beneficial to balancing one’s energy, often all we need. As one masters balanced breath one can implement new patterns to enhance energy movement in four basic patterns beyond balanced breathing similar conceptually to the depiction of the Yin Yang mandala. Unlike balanced breath these forms build and release energy in specific ways. There is the enhancement and lengthening of the pause full, in/pause/out patter for building Yin energy. There is the enhancement of pause empty, in/out/pause for Yang energy. Then a pause is inserted midway between either the inhale or exhale for energy movement, in/pause/in/out for Yin and lastly in/out/pause/out for Yang.

Meditation is mindfulness – the fullness of mind of the present. Whether distracted or focused, whether in still or moving meditation or in daily life, simply being mindful of the breath can connect mind and body. It is especially important to simply realize the four parts to every breath cycle and the four aspects of meditative breath.

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Author: Ethan Indigo Smith / Wake up World

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18 October, 2014 by Choki team

Researchers Finally Show How Mindfulness and Your Thoughts Can Induce Specific Molecular Changes To Your Genes

With evidence growing that training the mind or inducing specific modes of consciousness can have beneficial health effects, scientists have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body. A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of intensive mindfulness practice.

The study investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating machinery and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice,” says study author Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Most interestingly, the changes were observed in genes that are the current targets of anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs,” says Perla Kaliman, first author of the article and a researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona, Spain (IIBB-CSIC-IDIBAPS), where the molecular analyses were conducted.

Mindfulness-based trainings have shown beneficial effects on inflammatory disorders in prior clinical studies and are endorsed by the American Heart Association as a preventative intervention. The new results provide a possible biological mechanism for therapeutic effects.

Gene Activity Can Change According To Perception

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, gene activity can change on a daily basis. If the perception in your mind is reflected in the chemistry of your body, and if your nervous system reads and interprets the environment and then controls the blood’s chemistry, then you can literally change the fate of your cells by altering your thoughts.

In fact, Dr. Lipton’s research illustrates that by changing your perception, your mind can alter the activity of your genes and create over thirty thousand variations of products from each gene. He gives more detail by saying that the gene programs are contained within the nucleus of the cell, and you can rewrite those genetic programs through changing your blood chemistry.

In the simplest terms, this means that we need to change the way we think if we are to heal cancer. “The function of the mind is to create coherence between our beliefs and the reality we experience,” Dr. Lipton said. “What that means is that your mind will adjust the body’s biology and behavior to fit with your beliefs. If you’ve been told you’ll die in six months and your mind believes it, you most likely will die in six months. That’s called the nocebo effect, the result of a negative thought, which is the opposite of the placebo effect, where healing is mediated by a positive thought.”

“It’s a complex situation,” said Dr. Lipton. People have been programmed to believe that they’re victims and that they have no control. We’re programmed from the start with our mother and father’s beliefs. So, for instance, when we got sick, we were told by our parents that we had to go to the doctor because the doctor is the authority concerning our health. We all got the message throughout childhood that doctors were the authority on health and that we were victims of bodily forces beyond our ability to control. The joke, however, is that people often get better while on the way to the doctor. That’s when the innate ability for self-healing kicks in, another example of the placebo effect.

Subconscious Beliefs Are Key

Too many positive thinkers know that thinking good thoughts–and reciting affirmations for hours on end–doesn’t always bring about the results that feel-good books promise.

Dr. Lipton didn’t argue this point, because positive thoughts come from the conscious mind, while contradictory negative thoughts are usually programmed in the more powerful subconscious mind.

“The major problem is that people are aware of their conscious beliefs and behaviors, but not of subconscious beliefs and behaviors. Most people don’t even acknowledge that their subconscious mind is at play, when the fact is that the subconscious mind is a million times more powerful than the conscious mind and that we operate 95 to 99 percent of our lives from subconscious programs.

“Your subconscious beliefs are working either for you or against you, but the truth is that you are not controlling your life, because your subconscious mind supersedes all conscious control. So when you are trying to heal from a conscious level–citing affirmations and telling yourself you’re healthy–there may be an invisible subconscious program that’s sabotaging you.”

The new science of epigenetics promises that every person on the planet has the opportunity to become who they really are, complete with unimaginable power and the ability to operate from, and go for, the highest possibilities, including healing our bodies and our culture and living in peace.

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Author: Michael Forrester / Wake up world

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14 October, 2014 by Choki team

Finding Our Peace: The Art of Loving Our Experience

The usual tendency in our modern secular thinking is to view the outer world as separate from ourselves, but really it is just a partial reflection of what we fundamentally are. Objective reality is one of two pieces. Both pieces make up one whole. The other part is our subjective world, which are our feelings, thoughts and beliefs.

In this ancient and rebirthed understanding, we are realizing we are both the inner and outer worlds.

Now I could go into why quantum physics specifies that these two portions are inseparable, or why ancient wisdom and modern mystics say the same thing, but if we’re on this path we intuitively and possibly even logically know this already.

Instead, here I’m going to focus on what actually makes up our experience, as well as ways to find our peace by loving our experience, because it’s not always easy to accept and embrace all of what we perceive in life.

Some of it is simply hard for our hearts to take and challenging for our minds to fathom. But our experience is much like an intimate relationship: it has its ups and downs, there are things that need to change, there are things that we wouldn’t change for the world and there are hard lessons involved which hopefully inspire us to develop ourselves. And just like we love our partner regardless of their positives and negatives, we should also love our experience, irrespective of its strengths and weaknesses.

Another way to begin to look at it is by considering how we love ourselves. Just as we don’t condone everything about our partner, yet we still love them, we still love ourselves, even if sometimes we’re not proud of all our feelings, thoughts and actions. After all, we make mistakes, learn and navigate our entire lives growing into our new, more developed selves.

But our experience is much bigger than our ego, or our perception and the ingredients of our ‘illusory separate’ selves. It’s also the objects of our experience, because if we change the objects, we also change the experience. Therefore, it is the two realities combined; it’s an intimate interconnection between the inner and outer worlds.

Let’s put it in a simple model:

Subjective world = feelings, thoughts, beliefs, actions

Objective world = body, people, earth, universe.

Experience = the interconnected total of our subjective and objective worlds.

This means that there is something which is the bridge between or the basis of these two seemingly separate realities.

Both pioneer scientists and contemporary spirituality view consciousness (or something like consciousness) as the ground of all being and therefore the bridge of these realms. Though to be clear: it’s not our individual consciousness but the whole of consciousness which is the unifying factor.

One way to illustrate this is through the analogy of a fire. The whole of consciousness is the fire, the objective world including our brain is a flame in the fire and our subjective world is our flame’s heat. All are the fire. All are consciousness.

One common assumption about our individual consciousness is that it is generated by the big brain (containing 100 billion neurons), the second brain (100 million neurons embedded in the walls of our gut) and the heart (which contains 40,000 neurons); much like a generator creates electricity. Even though this is voiced by some materialists as being a proven scientific fact, it’s not – it’s speculation based primarily on the evidence that if we tamper with the brains (particularly the big brain) in certain ways, it tampers with our awareness in particular ways too.

But just as all scientists and laymen alike should know – correlation does not imply causation. Just because our individual consciousness changes when we alter our brain does not mean that the brain created the consciousness in the first place.

The alternative to this explanation, one that is receiving support from emerging scientific evidence, is that the brain receives or tunes into consciousness, much like a radio or television tunes into signals. If we tamper with our radio or TV set, then it will no doubt have an associated impact on the way the signal is received, without actually changing the signal itself. Therefore, just because modifying our brain can alter our experience, does not inherently mean that we have changed consciousness itself. We have simply changed our experience of consciousness.

This makes sense when we acknowledge how our experience is influenced by what’s happening both inside and outside of us. We’re tuning into particular frequencies of consciousness to have an experience which is co-created by both our inner and outer worlds.

When we begin to meditate this point becomes even clearer. Think of our conscious awareness as the light from a torch and the darkness as our subconscious mind. When we meditate, we can navigate through our subconscious mind by making it conscious with our light. Meditation is the act of navigating our awareness through our subconscious mind. The more skilled we become at expanding our mind with meditation, the deeper we go into the darkness of our subconscious. Then suddenly – as many experienced meditators agree – we potentially reach beyond our subconscious mind.

In other words – advanced meditation can craft our individual awareness into a cosmic consciousness or even consciousness itself. This is also a common experience when taking a psychedelic substance. Over and over again, through countless individuals and a wide array of tribal, traditional and current cultures, it is believed that during a psychedelic trip (or other trance-induced activity) the mind becomes one with the whole of reality.

The line between the internal and external worlds has become reverently blurred. This is a big concept to entertain, but once we do, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion. If our experience is a melting between two interconnected worlds, and we love our experience, then we love both worlds. We therefore have a solid foundation to establish and maintain our inner peace.

That isn’t to say that we like everything within it – such as war, murder, emotional dysfunction, suffering etc. – just that we embrace it for what it is. We’re at peace because we understand it as a manifestation of what we fundamentally are: consciousness (or the more traditional term of God). The way we then operate through our lives is based on love, because we view our experience as a reflection of ourselves and we love it as we would love ourselves, and all humanity.

This is when it loving our experience becomes an art because we learn to consciously co-create our experience in a way that is beautiful, inspiring and above all loving. Ultimately, you should love your experience like you love yourself, because it is you. It’s a sure-fire way to be at peace.

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Author: Phil Watt / Wake up world

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10 October, 2014 by Choki team

10 Reasons Why a Spiritual Journey will Improve your Life

Lets face it. Living day by day in the average human environment is not a very fun one. Working Jobs, Commuting, Traffic, McDonalds…. It’s not just boring, but sad and depressing. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for yourself is to go on a journey or a quest of sorts to cleanse your spirit, mind and body, and to become One with the nature that you are.

Jobs Can Sometimes Make You Forget The Beauty In Life

At the point where you walk outside and you don’t notice the sun is shining perfectly in the sky, you need a RESET. If we all had life the way we wanted it, we would have much less “jobs” and have much more inspired creation. This shift and transition can happen right now. What are you waiting for? Perhaps you don’t know what you want to create, perhaps you feel stuck or trapped. Getting out of your environment might be just what you need to make a transition into finding what gives you lasting happiness.

Life Just Got Stale

You know how sometimes if you eat something over and over again it gets really old.. especially if that food is just starches and fats with no nutrients at all? Perhaps it’s time to change that intake valve to something a little more free! No one wants a life more stale than a 1998 bag of Lay’s potato chips. Going on adventures make the heart feel fresh and new again.

It’ll Inspire You To Have Better Relationships with others

Going to travel around the world or even somewhere nearby often allow your mind to reset. When this happens, you can observe your relationships in a new way and come back to the table with a fresh outlook. Also – if you go somewhere WITH someone, that can be a tremendous way to grow together and strengthen your relationship, regardless of what that relationship is.

Redefines the Relationship You Have With Yourself

Everyone needs “Alone Time” sometimes, and so taking some time just to be with yourself can be a powerful meditation to be at peace without constantly engaging with those who don’t get you. Just remember not to pull away too far, for isolation from loved ones if stretched too far can leave stretch marks that take a long time to heal if not properly cared for.

Journeys Provide You New Prospectives For Your Education

Getting out into the world, you’ll find new people that resonate with your highest potential. When you are in your normal environment, its very much like being “inside the box”, in that it is not very often subject to change. However our true potential for our life path is never found inside of any box, even if, figuratively speaking, we find a post card that points to our dreams, we will never reach that magical place from the comfort of our boxes. Most people inside the box want the education and careers the box promotes but once we allow our minds to expand, we can quickly find out where we want to place our energy.

You May Receive A Fresh Prospective On Your Priorities

Lets just be honest, life can be hard sometimes. Ok…. scratch that… life can be hard most of the time as we grow and become more responsible. However, just because we have a lot of responsibilities doesn’t mean we have them prioritized. Getting out of the old environment even for a little while allows your mind to shuffle and sort whats truly important to you and what needs to be done for the benefit of everyone and everything.

You’ll Become Better At Navigating Your Perception Of Drama

When things get dramatic, there is usually for a reason for it. Whether there is a problem between you and a loved one or a disagreement in the workplace – when things are in a panic it can become difficult to be on-point and do the right thing. Sometimes taking a step outside of the house for an afternoon of reflection can make all of the difference in the world. For me, I climb the tree in the front of the house and meditate for a while, engaging fully with the task at hand in order to come to a more complete understanding and resolution to the problem.

Gain Mental Clarity In Your Life

Is life looking dense, thick and sticky like walking through muck? Going on a Spiritual Journey will cut through the density like a knife through Wonder Bread. The more earthly experience you have, the more angles of reflection you have for making better decisions. By practicing mindfulness to all of these, we can “go with the flow” with a lot more care than the stuck-ness we face when we do not.

Overall Optimism will increase

Yep, you guessed it! Trees, Rivers, Grass, Temples, Foreign Languages, and limited access to bathrooms seems to play a huge role in the increase of appreciation and an overall more positive outlook on the blessed life you have. A positive outlook on life can make all the difference in your creativity.

Spiritual Journeys Promote Mindfulness About Your Physical Health

Healthwise, a lot comes down to resource management when you are taking a real spiritual journey. Most of us will typically eat much healthier while on a journey of some sort or at least have a better sense of how to keep the body in a better state of holistic comfort.

So yeah, Go on a journey! Create something new for yourself, and create something new for your friends and family. You are a reflection of them after all, and any adjustments you make to your auric field will have an impact on them, whether you are aware of it or not.

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Author: Christopher Taylor

Edited by Jordan Pearce

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6 October, 2014 by Choki team

Have You Found Your Calling Yet?

You are a hero. I am a hero. We are all, every single one of us, on what Joseph Campbell calls “a hero’s journey”. We all have within us a Nelson Mandela or Joan of Arc or Luke Skywalker or Mother Teresa or Harry Potter. Like all of these classic heroes, we are all little sparks of divinity on a mission to step into our true nature and fulfill the Divine assignment our souls were sent here to earth in order to fulfill.

Who Will Save the World?

But if you’re like most of us, you may not realize yet what a hero you really are. Most of us feel a sense of mission involving a major transformation in human experience, a strong sense that (whatever that mission is) it’s getting closer in time, a compulsion to master certain skills in preparation for this half-understood personal mission, high levels of empathy, an urgent desire to lessen the suffering for humans, animals and plants, and a loneliness stemming from a sense of difference, despite being generally social.

The Dysfunction of the “Ordinary World”

We only discover we are heroes when we get disillusioned enough with the dysfunction of our present circumstances. When we feel sad enough and lost enough and hopeless enough, something deep within us has the opportunity to emerge, something stronger and wiser than we may ever have known existed within us. We all have this heroic spark that never dies, even when we’re in our darkest moments. I call this part of you your “Inner Pilot Light,” which is your inner superhero. This spark within you is fueled by a pressing sense that there is adventure out there, that your life has purpose, that you’re on a quest you may not understand yet, that your small little existence on this very big planet could mean something, that there is more to life than the ordinary, dysfunctional world, and that perhaps all it takes is a cape and a mask and some really cool boots in order to save the world.

The Phone Rings

Right when you might start to question your inner superhero and feel tempted to lose hope that your little blip of existence in this great, big world could really make a world-changing difference, you’re likely to hear the phone ring. It usually rings very softly at first, perhaps so softly that, like your cell phone with the ringer off, you miss it altogether. But when you fail to pick up, the phone is likely to ring louder. Some Divine force turns the ringer on.

When this happens, this is your calling ringing you, just like that, with a loud RING that you can’t help noticing. It’s your life’s purpose calling, complete with instructions not just for how you can change the world in your own precious way, but with the Prescription for how you can lead a wholly healthy life that will prepare you to fulfill this calling.

The Refusal of the Call

Because heroes are inherently curious, you won’t be able to resist picking up the jangling phone, yet when you hear what you’re meant to do on your hero’s journey, if you’re like the rest of us, you’re likely to respond with a rousing, “HELL NO.” What you are being called to do is too scary. The dangers are too risky. Your comfort zone is too secure. Fear wracks you. There are so many really, really good reasons to hang up the phone and refuse the call. Nobody would blame you. You’re only human. It would be natural to turn your back on something so terrifying. Yet no matter how much you pretend you’re not available for that last minute Friday night date with destiny, I guarantee you that, when it’s your true calling, the call will keep pestering you.

The Universe will conspire to encourage you to heed the call, even if it means thwacking you upside the head with the proverbial two by four. When you ignore the call, you may get sick. Your relationships may fall apart. You might find yourself in financial ruin. You may experience a loss so painful you’ll think you won’t be able to keep living. But you will. Because you’re on a hero’s journey. And the hero must prevail.

You Finally Say Yes

However your calling shows up, you are likely to be humbled into submission until you finally, reluctantly, answer the call. The call simply won’t go away. You will finally surrender because The Universe won’t give up on you. Never. Not when the stakes are this high. Not when there’s a world to make better because you are here on a mission.

Finally, you either muster up the moxy to rally to the task, picking up the phone with a smile, or you get so worn down by the incessant ringing that you pick up with a sigh and a roll of the eyes. Nobody’s going to give you an A for a cheerful attitude. The mission you’re on is pass/fail. Will you answer the call? Or will you not?

Because you are a hero, you will finally agree to your task. Because you must. And when The Universe says, “I have a Divine assignment for you,” you will finally say, with a humble, trembling voice, “Okay Universe. I’m in.”

The world is in crisis. Our health care system, education system, and political systems are dismantling. We are at war with ourselves as a species, not just externally, but internally. The time to save the world is now.

We need you. Are you ready to answer your call?

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Author: Lissa Ranking MD / Wake up World

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3 October, 2014 by Choki team

The Imprisonment of Cultural Programming

There is one truth that nobody can debate, and that is that we physically die at some point within the near future, relative to the life spans of everything else in the universe. However, it seems that many forget this fact of life and dedicate great amounts of time and energy towards icons, personalities, and ideas that are unconnected to their own day-to-day lives and do not matter in the grand scheme of things.

The intense (and sometimes violent) passion that sports fans experience as well as the immersion of oneself into the “sleazy” world of celebrities are some ways in which cultures and societies divert our thoughts away from things in life that matter the most; things which directly affect us and make lasting impressions upon our beings. By creating illusory focus points within reality for the masses to lock their awareness into, culture and those who have enough power to dictate or influence it becomes a hindrance to one’s own personal self-growth and self-actualization.

Think about the massive quantities of time that people spend on these things which have no direct connection to their lives…. all that time which could have been dedicated towards something a bit more constructive or positive in experiential existence.

The Prison of Cultural Programming

Our culture is an artificially-created box in which a seemingly-endless number of things exist, which attempt to entice an individual towards giving away massive amounts of his or her conscious lives towards the focusing in on trivialities or things which have no direct influence on his or her life and self-actualization. American author and philosopher Terrence McKenna had mused on the same thought-form, which is that humanity seems to be imprisoned by its cultural programming. This programming is so intense and strong, that it seems to be the most imprisoning factor within our lives. Culture does indeed appear to be a mass hallucination.

There are numerous boundaries that exist within culture have been erected by groups or individuals within society that (either knowingly or unknowingly) helped hinder any progress being made in peoples’ self-growth, self-actualization, and/or Self-realization. Things such as sports rivalries, clothes styles and various types of class systems are just a few of the boundaries that had hardly had any useful place in reality because they did not exist prior to us creating them.

Only by complete boundary dissolution can we revert to a more pure form of experiential existence, where the focus of one’s self was on one’s personal growth and of others’. Boundary dissolution refers to deconstruction and dissolving of boundaries that have been created by humans and which have existed as long as the ego has influenced humanity.

The purpose of boundary dissolution is to do away with these falsehoods that separate humanity rather than uniting it. Societal boundaries and other boundaries based on the self-ish nature of the ego can be said to be the cause of many of society’s ills and problems.

With a good system come good results, and the results and outcomes of boundary dissolution indeed are many. You can try for yourself to see this as being a reality. Instead of giving into cultures’ aspects that are unhelpful in shifting your consciousness to a higher level, have the idea of oneness within your mind and immerse yourself in things that unite, rather than divide.

By doing away with the constructs that separate you from others or create any bit of hostility, hatred, or animosity between you and someone else and by letting go of the fear that hinders you from taking these actions, you will be freed from the overbearing grip of the ego. When you dissolve the boundaries that divide and separate you from others, you will have the ability to transform your world into one of serenity, tranquility, and peace. Oneness will not be just a philosophical or utopian concept but a reality that will be experienced by the totality of the human race.

We must always have hope that this will become a reality because the future is yet to be determined. Possibilities are endless.

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Author: Paul Lenda / Wake up World

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29 September, 2014 by Choki team

Can’t Get the Hang of Meditation? Try This Instead

I’m sure you don’t need convincing that chronic stress is bad for your brain, and that if you are stressed out you need to relax. But that’s easier said than done!

One of the most widely heralded stress reduction techniques is mindfulness meditation. But many people find it difficult, if not impossible, to quiet their mind.

It’s not unusual for people to feel frustrated and disillusioned with their meditation practice. Then meditation becomes an additional source of stress!

There are some excellent reasons to pursue meditation, even when it seems to be the problem and not the answer. And there are other ways to achieve the same benefits if you can’t get the hang of traditional meditation.

Stress Destroys Brain Cells

When a situation you perceive as stressful occurs, it initiates a launch of biochemicals such as adrenalin and cortisol.

Too much stress over prolonged periods actually changes the structure and function of the brain. Cortisol kills brain cells in the hippocampus, the seat of the memory. It literally excites your brain cells to death.

Stress conversely causes the amygdala, your fear center, to grow, causing you to become more fearful and anxious.

Research suggests that chronic stress stimulates the growth of certain proteins that might even be the cause of Alzheimer’s.

Benefits of Meditation for Stress Reduction

There are many lifestyle changes you can make to reduce stress, but meditation keeps popping up as one of the best. Over 1,000 studies have been published showing the health benefits of this relaxation technique.

Meditation has become a mainstream relaxation technique which has been reported on favorably by prestigious medical institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, National Institutes of Health, and Harvard’s Women’s Health Watch.

It helps your brain by reducing stress, but meditation does a lot more too.

Meditation has been shown to improve learning and memory by increasing the communication between the right side and left side of the brain. It also puts your brain in a desirable brainwave state. Meditation enhances the brain’s ability to regenerate new brain cells and new neural connections. One of the most exciting findings is that mindfulness can even slow down the rate of cellular aging!

Problems with Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is one of the most common types of meditation.

It involves sitting quietly while trying to keep your mind focused on the present. This can be done by concentrating on your breath or by repeating a mantra.

Some of the most common complaints about traditional meditation include feelings of impatience, frustration, boredom, and not getting the desired results. It understandably leaves many people questioning whether they are wasting their time. Imagine how hard meditation can be when trying to fit it into a sensory-bombarding, multitasking Western life!

Sound Meditation Can Help

The sound of waves at the beach, the crackle of an open fire, or listening to relaxing music causes your brainwaves to synchronize with that sound’s frequency and puts you in a relaxed state.

I’ve used sound technology in addition to traditional meditation for years. I find meditation to be hit or miss. Some days I feel like I’ve nailed it but many days I feel like my thoughts were a runaway train and I don’t know what, if anything, I got out of it.

The sounds soothe my mind and dissipate the constant urge to think. I find I don’t even “think about thinking.” I come out of each experience feeling like I’ve been on a mini-vacation. I never feel the frustration, impatience, or boredom I experience with meditation the old-fashioned way.

Everyone is different, so the only way you’ll know what either traditional meditation or sound meditation can do for you is to give them a try.

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Author: Deane Alban / Wake up World

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