G’day Gorgeous…
I can’t believe that we are getting to the end of 2017. It’s been a hectic year for me and I know many others, so I thought I would talk to you about an area in the book that I mentioned about spirit. It’s important that we connect with something that replenishes our spirit regularly, to maintain balance in our lives.
We regularly give our energy to other people through listening to friends’ problems, supporting others through life and through your regular day to day activities. Because we spend so much of our own energy on other people, we must have a way of being able to get that energy back in. In the book, I talk about several things that you can do to replenish your spirit.
Firstly, you need to find out what nourishes your spirit. This is something that makes your spirit pool feel full again, and lets your mind feel refreshed and balanced. This means that this ‘something’ is something that you choose to do only for yourself.
I find the best way for me to replenish my spirit is to spend some time at the ashram. There are a couple of Satyananda ashrams in Australia and in for several years I’ve been doing Satyananda yoga and I found it to be right for me as it covers all the seven areas of yoga. I find that just being there and being disconnected from the world (my mobile phone stops working about a kilometre from the front gate) and I find that it gives me this sense of disconnect that’s awesome. It makes it easy for me to relax to unwind, and just take time to focus on putting some positive energy back into my body.
If I go on a Saturday night, they do a vibrational chanting ceremony. As a psychotherapist, I understand the importance of vibration, and how vibration impacts the in the limbic system – where the amygdala is. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is involved in arousal (mainly your fight or flight instincts). Chanting, just in its vibration, helps to balance and settle that area down quite a lot. People who are highly anxious, who do chanting or vibrational work, tend to find that it really helps a lot in reducing their arousal, making them feel calmer and more settled. There is also a fire ceremony they usually do on a Saturday night in the ashram, which I enjoy because it helps me to be able to feel myself bringing in some positive energy, build up the vibration in my body and helps me replenish my energy.
As a psychotherapist, I spend a lot of my working week giving my energy to other people. While this is quite rewarding to see the positive return, I still need to remember that I have to replenish myself – something we all need to remember to do. This allows our energy flow to come in and out, similar to a flowing pool, rather than a well that can just run dry.
That’s why I talk about the importance of trying to find the thing that replenishes your spirit. It’s about doing things that allow me to stop, and in lots of ways just experience pure joy from doing something that I love to do.
I’ve taken time to reflect lately, and I’ve realised its been a while since I’ve been to the ashram and really done something to replenish my spirit. I’ve been really noticing it lately, where I’m starting to feel like I’m missing something, which means I’m not going to be able to keep doing what I’m doing. I have learnt through my own personal spiritual journey, that it’s important for me to be able to go to a place where I feel like I can have that input into my energy space. This time also allows me to reconnect with my intuition and to my own body. Through time I have built my awareness of how important it is, and I get to a point where I’m yearning for it.
So, as we head into the silly season, I just wanted to reinforce the importance of remembering to connect with your spirit, finding something in your life that allows you to give back to yourself in a way that renews on invigorates you, so that you can continue to connect with other people going forward.
