Spiritual Practices

Centering Prayer

Prayer is a vehicle of transformation.  It helps us to re-source, to learn to use a different source to navigate through life.

Centering Prayer rewires a person from mental and egoic control to something more spacious and boundless.  This prayer actually helps us shift our neurobiology.  The simple act of releasing helps the amygdala to release restriction which creates a spaciousness where the forebrain and heart pathways can more easily resonate and become more coherent.  This helps us to be centered in the heart space, the location of true healing.  It is a departure from the cerebral into the affective realms.  It helps us to understand not what we are, but THAT we are.  We can find a direct, undivided, sensate awareness of a single, unified field of being which is perceived from a far deeper place of aliveness.

Centering prayer is a prayer of return and release.  It is driving on the road which leads toward the rediscovering of one’s True self and the releasing of the false self which has been accumulated throughout life.

Christian Meditation

Some may think that meditation is limited to eastern spirituality, when in fact Christian meditation has deep roots in its own tradition.  This meditation can be seen as a grounding place for learning to be a more awake, compassionate, Christlike human being.  Christian meditation draws us into a wordless awareness of oneness with God beyond what thoughts can grasp or words can adequately convey.  It is the process of realizing that God is wholly present in each step along our way to divine fulfillment; everything becomes a way of entering into a more interior, meditative awareness of oneness with God.  A consistent meditative practice embodies the desire to stabilize one’s self in a quiet confidence in God, present, whole and complete.   And that confidence oozes into one’s ordinary experience of one’s ordinary day-by-day life.

Visualizations

Visualization is effective for improving athletic performance, creative thinking, and strength. It’s been associated with numerous benefits, including improving confidence, courage, resilience, memory and recall, focus, concentration, and energy regulation. Beyond that, it’s shown to boost performance across a wide range of professions — helping doctors avoid errors, police officers lower stress levels, and aiding musicians to play faster and more accurately. Research also suggests that visualization can spark psychological flow — a state associated with peak performance

As we learn more about the brain, we’re discovering that the mind can’t distinguish between imagination and reality. When you have a thought, it triggers the same cascade of neurochemicals, regardless of whether you are thinking about the past, present, or future. Your brain is stimulated the same way whether you’re physically performing an action or simply visualizing it happen in your mind’s eye.

The neurochemicals stimulated go on to affect your motor control, attention, and planning, which spur you into action. Because neurons that fire together wire together, this process of imagining future outcomes creates new neural networks in your brain that help you form new beliefs, take new actions, and adopt new perspectives. You start to view the world differently, and thus, act in new ways to achieve your big goals.

Chants

Chanting is at the heart of all sacred traditions worldwide, and for very good reasons. What meditation accomplishes in silence, chanting accomplishes in sound: it wakes up the emotional center and sets it vibrating to the frequency of love and adoration while feeding the body with that mysterious higher “being food” of divine life. Sacred chanting is an extremely powerful way of awakening and purifying the heart because it allows us to experience, beyond the distortions of our own personal passions, the power and profundity of the divine passion itself.sound is healing and sacred. It is also believed that sound is one of the most powerful forces.

Heart Opening Practices

The heart is an organ of spiritual perception.  A pure heart is a heart which can access and resonate with Spirit.  Love is not an emotion — it is the cognition of the heart.  It is the energetic bandwidth in which the heart does its intimate work.  It is the capacity to perceive things from the inside by coming into sympathetic resonance with them; a mysterious, golden tenderness which allows us to perceive from a unified wholeness..  These practices help us to stabilize our true heart cognition into our default mode of perception.

Spirit can be touched and held by love, but not by thought.   Thoughts scatter, love collects;  release leads to opening;  energy flows where attention goes.  With these practices, a different heart is cultivated, a different Self evolves and one develops an ache to stay forever centered.

Yoga Kriyas

In Kundalini Yoga a kriya is a series of postures, breath, and sound that work toward a specific outcome. Practicing a kriya initiates a sequence of physical and mental changes that affect the body, mind, and spirit simultaneously. There are kriyas that support the liver, balance the glandular system, make you radiant, stimulate the pituitary, increase the flexibility of the spine, and many more. Each kriya has a different effect, but all work on all levels of your being.