Creating a positive relationship with our inner self is a lifelong adventure. Learning how to meditate has been the key to my own personal success and expansion. I recently wrote this piece on my personal inner process so I share it in the hope that it can inspire others to keep up the investigation into what it means to be human, why we make the decisions we make, how to become a more loving and connected person…

In the last year, I have deepened my practice, spending a couple of hours in meditation most mornings, and digging into who I am, what makes me tick, observing all the subtle way I am mis-identifying myself with thoughts, watching the contracting energy of stress and how it works on my body and thoughts. Seeing more clearly the subtle ways I check out of presence and invest my precious life-force in the vast collective unconscious.

Then there is the experience of feeling blooms of pure bliss when I access deeper levels of mind, allowing myself to linger in a place...

There is so much to be said for how we wake up and how we go to sleep. This precious time can be the most powerful of the entire day. Upon awakening, there is a newness, a sense of opportunity, of new beginnings that we can access so long as we do not rush to pick up the stress or agitation we were running with the day before. At the end of the day, if we take time to clear our mind and emotions we will get to sleep more easily and rise with a clearer mind.

Waking Up Consciously

One of my teachers told me something that stays with me to this day. He said, “as soon as you wake up, get up.” The sleep we get after we hit the snooze button can often make us more foggy and tired. If we get up right away, we can use the time to connect inwardly, before the duties of the day pull us into action.

When you first wake up, you are relaxed, your brain has been operating at the theta and delta brainwave states during sleep, which linger as you wake up. If you pay attention at this...

At any given moment we are influenced by so many things. Our senses are reporting in about our environment. Our mind is busy with some agenda whether conscious or unconscious. Our experience is being colored by whatever dominant emotions we feel, and somewhere in the midst of all this is our center, the still point around which everything else is turning.

PHYSICAL CENTER – In the Yoga Tradition, when you are standing upright, your physical center is considered the navel, typically described as around 1-2 inches below the belly button. This is your gravitational center. Gravity pulls mass downwards. When we are balanced and connected to our navel point it allows us to ground through the legs (with gravity) and lift through the spine and torso (resist gravity). When we are aware of and connected to our center of gravity, there is a natural balancing of the body, which in turn brings a feeling of ease, stability, and connection.

MENTAL CENTER – The mind...