Fulfilling Your Spiritual Needs

Spiritual health is the ultimate goal to achieve total wellness, and leads to a heightened awareness of the Divine Spirit referred to, but seldom fostered by religions. It doesnt matter how you achieve Spiritual health. What matters is that you come to know and attune yourself to spiritual guidance in all areas of your daily life. Doing so reduces fear, anxiety, worrying and provides a greater capacity for loving oneself and others unconditionally. Spirituality helps you reconnect to your special talents and gifts so that you can fulfill your lifes purpose.

An intimate emotional connection to ones spouse, partner, family, friends, and community provides the greatest opportunity for spiritual growth and for learning how to receive and impart unconditional love.
The four most important practices to achieve spiritual health are: Prayer, Meditation, Gratitude, Spending time in nature, including near fire and water.

Prayer: Harvard researcher and mind/body medicine expert Herbert Benson, M.D., author of The Relaxation Response, has found that regular prayer or the repetition of spiritual phrasesShalom," "Hail Mary, Amen triggers relaxation and reduces stress.

Prayer is the most common spiritual practice. Some engage in personal conversations with God, stating their need/concern and asking for divine intervention. Others find acknowledging all one is grateful for and giving thanks for what one desires highly effective. Giving thanks for what one desires is more effective than asking for what one desires, because God knows what is needed before one needs ittherefore giving thanks acknowledges what one hasnt experienced yet, thus drawing it toward oneself. Others walk silently in nature as prayerfulness.
Meditation: Meditation has been scientifically researched and proven to have physiological benefits. Besides its physical benefits, which include stress-relief, improved immune and cardiovascular function, relaxation, and decreased pain, the regular practice of meditation can lead to new insights about life issues (often healing past emotional trauma), heightened creativity, inspiration, greater compassion for others, and a greater connection to one's own inner guidance.

Meditation can be done while sitting, lying, walking or jogging. Some people include singing, chanting a word or phrase that has spiritual significance. Meditation has one commonalityconscious breathing and focusing on what is transpiring in each moment, until the mind becomes empty of thoughts, judgments, and past/future concerns.

Gratitude: Dr. Robert Anderson describes gratitude as the Great Attitude. "Gratitude produces feelings of joy and self-acceptance, and is an attitude that anyone can choose, just as we can choose to see the glass half full or half empty. Being grateful for what you have, instead of worrying about what you lack, enables you to let go of negative thoughts and attitudes more easily.

One method of cultivating feelings of gratitude is keeping a gratitude journal. Another technique is closing your eyes before bed, and recognizing everything you experiencedgive thanks for them. Every experience is an opportunity to learn. "By making gratitude a regular part of your daily experience, you set the stage for living connected to spirit. In the process, your life will be transformed into an increasingly joyous adventure," Dr. Anderson stated.
Spend time in nature: The most visible manifestation of spirit is nature, where one fully encounters and interacts with life's primal energiesearth, water, fire, and air.

Walking barefoot in the back yard, gardening, walking in a park, hiking, biking in the country, camping and boating are excellent ways of reconnecting with nature. Spending regular time in nature enables one to understand the rhythms of life, including ones own. Staying connected with nature wherever you live is important.

Spend time near/in water: Water's higher concentration of negative ions contributes to feelings of well-being. Being in the ocean, lakes, rivers, or soaking in a mineral hot springs is a great way to benefit from natures life-enhancing energy.

Exposure to fire: A campfire or a fireplace has health benefits. Leonard Orr discovered fire cleanses the bio-energy field of negative energies, and can be a powerful aid in curing physical disease. Native Americans connect with the Great Spirit and discover their life purpose through sweat lodges heated by wood fires.

Of all nature's elements, the closest expression of Spirit is the air. Clean, fresh air is essential to health on all levels, and practicing conscious breathing is a potent self-care method for restoring energy and creating awareness of the power of Spirit as it flows through you.

Regular exposure to these four elements helps you become more conscious how Spirit's loving intelligence sustains the world, while more deeply recognizing your place within it.

Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD, an inspirational leader who empowers people to meet life's challenges as an opportunity for Personal/Professional Growth and Spiritual Awakening. Author of If I'd Only KnownSexual Abuse in or out of the Family: A Guide to Prevention, speaker and seminar leader she has over twenty years experience. http://www.drdorothy.net

How Stress Negatively Impacts Health

Strangely enough, life is as complicated today as it is simple! Though our everyday tasks have been made easier, thanks to numerous electronic and other gadgets, factors like stress and tension are on the steady rise. Traveling during rush hour traffic, stress in the office environment, tending to mundane household problems, children's needs and so on, can actually add to your mental load. The result? Too much accumulated tensions that actually take their toll on your general health.

Is stress really THAT harmful to health?

The answer is yes. Any kind of worry can have alarmingly negative side effects on both your mind and body. The worst thing here is that you may not realize it immediately, as some of them tend to impact you much later in your life. The most common symptoms of this type of PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are heightened pulse rate and blood pressure. In fact, irrespective of whether we realize it or not, many of our health problems can be directly related to the impact of various kinds of worries and tensions present in our lives. Now let us try and understand how exactly stress can adversely affect our lives:

• General healthSome chronic conditions like high blood pressure and high blood sugar, which are also potentially life-taking, are usually linked to overweight and a bad lifestyle. But there is one thing you have to know here - these problems arise due to stress as well! Why, mental tension may well be the main contributor for this condition.
• HormonesStress and tension is actually capable of attacking the hormonal system of the body. Adrenaline is a major hormone that controls the body's response to danger. When the body senses lurking danger, this hormone sets it running into full action, pumping blood faster, activating the brain to work sharper and so on.
  
  Of course, adrenaline comes of great use when necessary. But if one is expected to respond this way every single day, it can prove to be fatal. High blood pressure is always related to heart attacks, seizures, strokes and other dangerous conditions.
• Mental healthAs we all know, the direct impact of stress is on the mind. During periods of trouble, we forget to remain happy and positive, lose our patience, get crabby and snappy at all and sundry! In extreme cases, chronic worry can cause tremendous mood swings, severely damaging all our relationships, be they personal or professional. Hence, the mental impact can actually end up getting a lot more serious than the physical aspect.
  
  Now that you know how truly dangerous stress can get on your health, you need to take measures to safeguard yourself from it. Be aware of how you feel, learn to get in touch with yourself by way of meditation, yoga and so on and most of all, smile, in the knowledge that 'this too shall pass'!

Priya Viswanathan is a Performing Artiste, an Internet Marketer and publisher of Inner Power Positive, a website that focuses on looking at positive thinking as a way of life. Do visit Inner Power Positive for interesting information, articles and products for all-round wellness.

How to Greatly Improve Your Manifestations

Chances you are familiar with: The Power of Intention, Think and Grow Rich, The Secret, The Law of Attraction, or Ask and it is Given. Let's face it, these methods for manifesting your desires into reality teach much of the same methods, through different angles.

What makes up their bulk of their messages (instead of focusing on the important mystic essentials for one to directly change reality to their will) are hours of self-help, spiritual inspiration, and tools for personal and inner transformation. May just be me, but that sounds like another subject matter. Yet supposedly these are the real issues behind your ability, or lack thereof. It boils down to surrendering negative thoughts, re-remembering positive elements of life, and going through self-therapy until the results in your life follow the changes in your outlook. Once you can hold a positive outlook, the petty psychology that fueled what manifested in your life until now, will fade away, replaced by positive changes. Some schools even use generalizations in quantum physics to support their methods. The bottom line is by changing your thoughts, you will change your reality.

Why then, is it so impossible to achieve for the mass majority!?

If you are like thousands of others, you may be thinking sure it sounds logical, but why (despite how much you understand positive thinking), behind all the applied optimism, does it feel like everything is still a luck of the draw situation? That much like a domino effect, your destiny seems to have been set in motion by cosmic dice thrown at the moment of your birth? Pretty fatalistic right? What if there was a way to alter those dominoes? That is what Manifesting or co-creating is all about right?

It doesn't matter how many authors out there can explain away the logic, it doesn't automatically make them qualified to teach how-to achieve it. Sure, in order to teach how, you must do so from experiential success, but the other side is understanding the mind-state (not just the intentions) of the student learning it. So let's get to the heart of this article.

Most people automate. They are not in control of their thoughts. Hindu yogi's call it the monkey mind. The Higher Balance Institute calls it your "Babbler". The bottom line is, if you don't know how to control it, then it won't matter how much you grasp, your brain will still play thoughts like a broken record. No matter how clearly you've traced where your negativity originated from in childhood, figuring that out will only change "the content" your babbler uses to dilute your focus while manifesting.

Put positive and negative aside. If your mind is undisciplined, your attempts at manifesting won't generate enough "fuel" or energy to alter the cosmic dominoes beyond your awareness. But, if you somehow had enough fuel to "broadcast" your intentions out to God or the Universe, call it what you will, I guarantee it would add the missing link!

So how can you build this kind of fuel? There are several easy ways. No, I'm not trying to trick you, they really are easy if you put one daily foot in front of the other.

1. Learn how to control your thoughts. Learn an effective meditation and make it a daily practice. Never mind enlightenment (for now), just train your thought control. (make sure it's not a mantra technique, you don't want any triggered spoken or structured thoughts at all) I highly recommend the methods that focus on a chakra. Once you can hold a state of "non-thought" for 1 minute, you are VERY close to your goal.

2. Use this new skill in your manifestation sessions. Relax into a clear state of "nonthought", and instead of a ton of babbled-thoughts representing your intention, or representing what you are asking God, you will use your new meditative skill to isolate the emotional texture (behind the words) of what it is you desire. It cuts to the chase and amplifies the fuel!

3. Hold that emotion! Focus solely on broadcasting the feeling to the universe. Then broadcast it to the deepest part of your heart and mind. Use this fuel technique to program yourself too. Our bodies are electrical, programmed from birth by reality itself. This works far better than spoken or 'babbled' affirmations.

Having more fuel makes all the difference. But if you still have an undisciplined mind, just forget about it. Sure, your desires have an emotional fuel in themselves, but if your mind can only last 5 seconds before another thought comes in diluting it, it basically just evaporated whatever fuel was building.

Train your non-thought skill. Use it to enhance your manifestations and achieve the success you know you've earned. That's Direct Manifestation!

Matt Struve

Higher Balance Institute offers tools for meditation, spiritual development, enhanced intuition and sensory awareness in the world. Our mission is simple - to awaken the world one mind at a time. For more information and a free 1 hour Q&A Audio recording on Manifestation visit us at http://www.higherbalance.com

Use A Dream Dictionary With Personal Reflection

A dream dictionary may seem overwhelming at first but the key to understanding how to use a dream dictionary is to use a little self evaluation along with the dream dictionary. Some details of your dream may have multiple meanings according to your dream dictionary. When this occurs it is necessary to do an internal examination to determine which definition is more applicable. It is through reflecting on your life and really thinking about your past as well as your current circumstances that it may become obvious which definition in the dream dictionary is more likely to be worthwhile in interpreting your dream.

A dream dictionary can often have the effect of causing the person using the dream dictionary to interpret their dreams to begin to reflect on their lives and on what is happening that can be causing these dreams. When this happens the dream dictionary is useful in not only explaining the meaning of a dream that may have been troubling but also in helping the person to deal with circumstances in their life that may be causing them concern. When you use a dream dictionary in this way, it is important to realize that just because the dream may contain certain symbols, it is only when combined with a little reflection that the person gains insight into their subconscious.

Todd runs the Dream Interpretations Guide website where you can find a large free online dream dictionary. Check it out today at: http://dreaminterpretationsguide.com

The Law of Attraction and Word of Faith

What faith can add to your life is astonishing. When you are thinking positively, using the power of the Law of Attraction and the words of faith, you'll be amazed by what you are able to achieve in life. Think of everything that you desire and how you should approach acquiring them. When you don't think positively about what you desire, or you don't believe that you will achieve it you will not be able to succeed and cause them to become reality in your life.

You add power to the Law of Attraction by your word of faith. In order to attain your goals in life you must believe it can happen. There are countless ways that you can accomplish this when you really think about it. It's very simple really, all you have to do is simply think about your goal and how much you want to have it. Never use the words can't, won't never, or any other negative words. They are poison to your mind. Instead, use positive versions of such words. For example, instead of saying "I'll never be able to have that ___." Change it to "___ is on it's way to me now." now here is the important part, YOU MUST BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL GET IT! It is here where most people fail and dismiss the Law of Attraction as nothing more than "positive thinking" or a joke (think Stuart Smally in the Saturday Night Live Skit - "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!") There is nothing farther from the truth!

Jesus Himself said "When you pray, whatsoever you ask for, BELIEVE YOU WILL HAVE IT. And your Father in Heaven will give it to you." How can you argue with such a source? If you are religious, it is very beneficial to use the Law of Attraction in your prayers. Just be sure not pray as a "victim". Instead, pray as a child asking his or her parents for that new toy, knowing all along that they will get it.

When you find things are going slow in your life and you're not happy with the results, you need to think of ways to make your situation better. After you know what must be done, you will see that things aren't not so bad and it will be easier to get what you want. It's all about your mind, faith, and how well you work to make things go the way that you plan.

Negative thinking will only make things worse. You can't be successful if you are not using your mind positive in a positive way. There are many CD's and videos about how you can use the law of attraction to attain your desires. Such items have very good lessons that will help you use the Law of Attraction and the word of faith to better your life and the lives of others. You need to be sure that you are using these items to get to where you want to be in life. Figure out what is most important to you and go after it. Think positive about everything that you want and do not falter. However if you do, do not beat yourself up over it. Simply forgive yourself and resolve to do better, then put the unfortunate event behind you. This is going to help you be more in control and be just as you wish to be.

The power of the law of attraction is something very special. When blended with the power of Faith, it is responsible for nothing short of miracles It is something that you should use anytime and anywhere to bring happiness and success into your life and the lives of others. This way of thinking is all about you and how you use your mind. Do not let anything stand in your way of success. This is one of the best and most rewarding journeys in your life.

For many more useful Law of Attraction secrets make sure to visit http://LawOfAttractionSecrets.Homestead.com - a 100% free site that gives you the tools you need to improve your life.

Choose your path with the Law of Attraction.

How to Get What You Really Want - Wayne Dyer Video

I love Wayne Dyer and here's one of his great videos

What are you going to change today about your life? Make a list of things that you're not happy with about your life and start making the new habits that you need to create the life you deserve and desire.

Greg Vanden Berge is a published author, internet marketing expert, motivational inspiration to millions of people all over the world and is sharing some of his wisdom with experts in the fields of writing,marketing, and personal development.

Greg is currently working on a personal development article library filled with great movies on a wide array of topics, like religion, self help and spiritual changes in the world. His views on religious freedom are slowly changing the way people think about institutional religion.

Why I Built Spiritualbooks4u

You Are Going to Lose Your Job! What Does That Do to Your Attitude?

The news is out. Many people will be losing their jobs. Will you be one of them? What does that do to your attitude?

To most, it will send them in a downward spiral of self pity, disappointment and negativity. They will become a victim and it will be reflected in their attitude. They will let the outside world enter and destroy their inside world. They will loose more than their job. They will lose their role in life, their self confidence, their self esteem and self respect. They will loose their sense of self worth and their net worth.

Why? Primarily because they never took control of their life or never determined what things are within their control. They were living a life of chance and circumstance from the outside in. They forgot who the most important person in the world is and got caught up in today's fast growing addiction - becoming a corporate junkie.

They became corporate junkies because they had nothing better to do or because of the fear of loosing their jobs if they didn't keep up with the other junkies. In the process they forgot themselves, their desires, their dreams, their aspirations and even their families. And now, they stand to lose it all.

Losing your job is an awakening call. It is time to wake up and to start living your life from the inside-out. It is time to get to know you. It is time to define what you want to be, to do or to have and to create a plan to make it happen the way you envisioned. It is time to take control of your life and start living the life your so desire.

You may or may not know if you are going to lose your job, but why wait to find out. Have a proactive attitude if you want to take care of the most important person in the world. Don't wait, as a reactive attitude is sure to destroy your spirit.

Start planning your future life today. If you were to lose your job, what would you do next?

If you comprise a prepared mindset and a contingency plan, they will set you apart from the junkies. Your proactive attitude will shine and your actions will speak louder than words. Your changed attitude will make you more desirable and thus, you may not loose your job.

Wouldn't it be great to be in a position to have a choice of opportunities? These opportunities only come to those who are in control of their lives and know what they want, where they are going and how they are going to get there.

You need to take control of your life and make some decisions. Do you want to live a life of chance and circumstance or do you want to live the life of your dreams? Do you want to work for the accomplishment of your goals or for the accomplishment of someone else's goals? Will you have a proactive attitude or a reactive attitude?

Only you, the decision maker, can make the decision work. It is your life so what will it be? Rise up, make a decision and reap the benefits. Nothing is standing in your way.

Bob Urichuck is an International Speaker, Trainer and Best-Selling Author. Learn personally from Bob in the areas of Sales, Motivation, Leadership and Team Skills. Bob presents a series of great ideas and strategies with combination of facts, humor, and practical concept in a high-energy and self-discovery process that you can apply right away to achieve results. Subscribe to Bob's Free Newsletter, worth $297, visit http://www.BobU.com Now!