How to

A practical guide for personal and spiritual development

(Exercises)

Rodica Militaru

Table of Contents First steps..3 How to meditate4 How to use your subconscious.....5 How to liberate yourself from emotional pain and negative thoughts..7 How to identify your fake/ true Self.8 How to transform unconsciousness into self-consciousness..9 How to get free from emotional dependency10 What do I really want? How to identify your real values and objectives in life11 How to make choices12 Material to read.12

This e-book is written as a practical guide to solve different problems that almost all of us have experienced over the years. I have read different books, I have experienced and now I think that would be good to share with you those things that helped me, so that we can keep on growing together. Do these exercises and, if your life improves a little, Ill be happy! The exercises are really simple, for people who do not necessary have special knowledge, but they will improve your life if you persistently repeat them, until you reach the desired results.

Good luck!

I. First steps
The first and most important step in order to improve your life is to say STOP to your life as you know it; just stay for a moment (or more) and analyze your life. Are you happy with yourself, with the things you got, with how your life looks like? Before doing so, you must put yourself in the center of your life. You are the most important person from your life and this will be our focus in this e-book. Imagine a long road in front of you; it is your life. The people you meet, the life situations, different events, more or less agreeable, they are All Your Creation. As you walk on that road, you are continuously creating your world, your reality. Each person has his own way, as he/ she create it. The problem is that many of us (maybe you, too) live a large part of our life on other people road and not on ours; we improve others life and road and, when we watch back, at our road, we realize that it is ugly, worthless. This happens when you do not take care of your road; you have been too busy with other people` roads. Okwhen you reached this conclusion, that your road is not beautiful enough, or safe enough, or stable enough, you understand that it is necessary to leave those other roads, to get back to yours and start working for it. You see, it is like you would say: I have a home, but it is ugly and weatherbeaten; I better go to my neighbors home, because it is already beautiful, clean and safe. You must understand that your neighbor has a beautiful home because he/she takes care of it and you also can have a home just as beautiful if you start working at yours. Accept reality as it is, that you do not yet have the greatest home, but it is yours, and then think about what you can do to improve it. The rest of this material will help you do this. Briefly, the practical exercise is the following: Imagine the road of your life and walk backwards on it, toward your first years of life. Notice, without judging, everything that was good and bad, notice yourself in different life situations: what you said, how you reacted, how you took important decisions etc. then, write on a piece of paper, on two columns: good things and bad things in my life. As you go further with this exercise, more and more things are going to come

to the surface into your mind, emerging from your subconscious. Write them down. Just do that. You will start feeling much better just through this exercise.

II. Meditation
You can practice meditation in different ways; it is good to practice it every day, if it is possible. It clarifies your mind, your senses, gives you more energy and increases your inner strength. I am going to present you, briefly, the main meditation techniques; you will see, within this material that many of the personal, spiritual, mental or emotional problems can be solved using meditation. To eyewitness is the form of meditation that implies being detached from your thoughts and emotions and just keep track of them; objectively, without judging or analyzing. This form of meditation is very powerful, because, through observation, you withdraw into your inner self and stop identifying with your mind or emotions. In this way, you cease feeding your mind and emotions with energy and you will notice that, in a short period of time, that thought which does not leave you alone or that ugly, teasing emotion just diminish until they disappear completely. Vipassana - is the form of meditation that implies paying attention to your breath, in the same way, as a silent witness; your mind will be too busy with this activity, so that it can not focus on anything else. Listening - is the form of meditation that implies active and conscious listening, not just hearing, a sound, music, a noise. Most of the times we unconsciously hear noises around us, but do not actively listen to them. Practicing listening, we liberate from our mind, our senses become sharper, we are clearer and in peace. Mantra - is the form of meditation that implies repeating certain words. You just identify some words or a phrase that you like to repeat, maybe words to increase your self confidence or to emotionally stabilize you (for ex.: I am fully confident; I remain calm and balanced in any situation). Repeat them as often as you can, especially before an important moment, emotionally heavy.

The contemplative look - is the form of meditation that implies staring at a point; we keep looking at it for a long period of time; any time you feel your mind starts thinking about something else, just come back and focus your attention on that point. The meditation through action it supposes to be present, aware and active, no matter what you do at a given moment. For example, if you wash your hand, pay attention to the way you feel the water on your hands, to the sensation produced by your hands when they touch each other, to what sound produce the water drops when they fall into the sink Another form of meditation supposes just to stay without doing anything, without thinking; it supposes to pass beyond your thoughts. You do not think of anything; the screen of your mind is empty and black and you feel the peace and the silence. Try these types of meditation; one or more of them will like you more than the others. Continue practicing it/ them as often as you can; in any way you meditate, the most important result is the same: you become present and liberate yourself from the identification with your mind, with your thoughts and emotions.

III. How to use your subconscious

In this chapter I want to make you understand what huge power lies into your subconscious mind. In order to be very simple to understand, imagine your subconscious mind as a computer with a large memory and a lot of programs. And you can access it just as you use a computer. It stores everything you live in your life, absolutely everything (experiences, words, discussions, books you have read, memorized information, places you have been to etc.). Every time you think of something, you access information from your subconscious mind. Some of it is closer to the surface, while other is buried into the deepness of your subconscious. But it is all there. On one hand, everything you have lived is structured into some patterns, which the conscious mind use and multiply every day. That is why you feel that many things you have lived before or emotions you have felt before tend to come back again and again.

On the other hand, your mind uses this information stored in there to solve different problems you are dealing with. Thus, working with the subconscious mind, we have two great opportunities: 1. We can modify the patterns we do not like, registering into the subconscious the information we like (we just replace the existing information with another one). For example, if our pattern supposes that, when someone shouts at us, we get scared and lose our self confidence, we register something else over this pattern: when someone shouts at us, we remain calm, strong and our answer is firm and confident. Exercise: Step 1: identify a situation in which your response is different than that you want; Step 2: think about how you would really want to react in that situation; Step 3: formulate a sentence with a few words which represent that reaction; Step 4: begin to meditate, as your subconscious is very receptive when you meditate, and repeat that sentence as often as you can. After a while, you will see that the change happened. For the above example, when someone becomes verbally aggressive, we may repeat this sentence: Any time someone is aggressive with me in any way, I remain calm, balanced and confident. It would be good to formulate your own sentences, for each situation, and repeat them as often as you can. After a while the reaction stored into the subconscious mind will be replaced with the desired reaction. 2. We can ask our subconscious to solve difficult problems for us, to find solutions; the truth is that our mind uses only a little part of our subconscious, thus its power remaining unexplored. Exercise: think about a difficult problem, for which you do not have a solution yet. Begin to meditate and say: I ask the infinite wisdom of my subconscious to find a proper solution for the problem x (your problem) until y (set a date). After that, just be at peace, convinced that the solution will show up. After presenting its task, the subconscious starts working, combining information and it will give the answer by the due date.

IV How to liberate yourself from emotional pain and negative thoughts

After experiencing what I have read, I discovered two very good techniques which help you to get rid almost instant, of a negative thought or a feeling of oppression. The first technique supposes to use the first type of meditation described above: to eyewitness. You totally liberate yourself from your thoughts and emotions and notice them; it is just like in your body would be two persons one who embodies the thought or the emotion, and another who notice what happens into her body, without analyzing or judging. Do not focus on that thought, do not say anything. Just notice it. You will shortly realize that the unwanted thought or emotion start decreasing in intensity, until they disappear. This is a very good technique, used not only to get rid of present emotional pain, but also of those stored into your subconscious as late as your childhood. Exercise: be completely aware of yourself now; feel what is not right with you. Lets say you feel a really bad emotion, a fear nested in your chest (feel whatever is bothering you right now); you just detach from that emotion, you look at it, at that form of negative energy; you observe its form, consistency, its features. You just notice, without judging; you are accepting it, without taking a stand against it. Continue to breathe and notice that heaviness until it disappears completely. 2. A second technique supposes that you monitor your thoughts and take care to maintain only positive thoughts. Within a working day you are probably too busy to keep practicing meditation; however, you can always monitor your thoughts. Accept the reality of your life as it is, but always focus on its positive aspects. What you manifest as energetic vibration, you receive back the law of attraction- that is why, the more positive your thoughts are, the more the energy you manifest is positive and, consequently, what you receive in return is good and positive. Every time you detect a negative thought, do not stand against it; just change your focus, consciously, towards another thought. Be grateful for what you already have, rather than complaining for what you do not have. Dream, visualize all the things you want; enjoy, pretending that you already have them.

The practical exercise consists in practicing at all seasons this technique; speak and think only positive things; the more you have good things in your life, the more the bad things grow less.

V. How to identify your Fake/ True Self

Who am I? This is a question that many of us have begun to ask frequently. Well, first of all, let me tell you who you don`t are: you are nothing from what you believe to be your identity family, history, memory, profession, career, friends this is the fake Self, created by our mind to offer us an exterior image and the false feeling of identity. Our mind lives through past and future and creates a self by combining elements from your past with potential elements it predicts for your future. It uses the past to predict future. Unfortunately, unless you begin to change and become aware of who you really are, your mind will turn out to be right as future is concerned. Eckhart Tolle, in The power of now, describes in an excellent manner these phenomena and guides us how to discover our true self: by living the present, the Right Now moment. Your true self unveils only when youre completely present, aware, alert, when you place yourself beyond thoughts; in order to do that, he suggests meditation, especially the eyewitness and the meditation through action. It is really important that you identify your inner nature, because, otherwise, no matter how many things youd get in life, you will be unhappy. Your true self is a part of the Being, of the Universal energy, of the Unmanifested, of God or whatever concept you want to use and its purpose is to reconnect itself with the Being, with the Source (this is the Illumination). But we can realize this reconnection only here and now, in the present, free from our mind, free from the past or the future. Your true self is the spectator; it is the one that observes thoughts and feelings and doesnt judge. It is already accomplished and complete and its force is huge. Exercise: any of the above described exercises and any form of meditation bring you into contact with your inner self.

VI. How to transform unconsciousness into self-consciousness

Most of us live at an unconscious level; we are driven by our minds and react according to some patterns. The mind, at its turn, only knows the past and anticipates the future; it cannot exist into present. Notice your thoughts and you`ll realize that, whatever youd think, it refers only to information embedded into your memory or anticipates, creates scenarios about the future. That is to say, while youre thinking, you are whether in the past, or in the future; you are never present, into the Now. This is unconsciousness. The mind was created as an instrument, to help us solve problems of every day life; yet, we have become dependent on our mind; moreover, we identify with it. We have the impression that we cannot cease to think, even if we want, that our thoughts have practically their own will and are all over our mind, as they want. The fact that we let a simple instrument to lead our life and keep us into unconsciousness doesnt allow us to understand how far we are from our inner self, who can only be known in the present. In order to transform unconsciousness into consciousness, in order to let our inner self to come out, we must get free from our mind, to live in present as much as we can. Also, it is necessary that we monitor our thoughts and consciously focus on positive thoughts. As you become more aware and the inner self manifests, you feel more relaxed and at peace, whatever would happen into your life at that time. You understand that your inner mood does not depend on outside reasons. Of course, you work to improve different aspects of your life, but reality doesnt bother you anymore. You accept it and remain at peace. It is important that we accept our life situation as it is, even if we work to change it. Resisting to what is is never a solution; inner resistance at what is attracts resistance from the things you want. You maybe noticed from your experience, that, the more you struggle to get something, the more difficult it is to get that thing. This happens because you are so obsessed and desperate, that those are the signals you send to the universe and this is what you get back; more despair, more obsession. Our thoughts and feelings send a certain vibration and the Universe answers by giving back even more of that energy. The two exrcises at this chapter suppose, as I mentioned before:

- to stay in the present as much as you can; you`ll see that in the present you feel good and at peace; our mind distorts the present, makes us worry for something that maybe will happen in a year, a month or maybe or over 10 minutes. It is not important what will happen over 10 minutes; it is important what happens now. - To be always aware of your thoughts, to keep them in the positive area. Although it seems difficult at the beginning, after a while you`ll realize that you have begun to think positive in a natural manner, without any effort. That means, as I already told you in the chapter 3, that your subconscious transformed and acts on your conscious principles; the negative patterns have been replaced with positive patterns. The energy you now spread around is positive and more positive energy comes back to you. Some people need more time to produce these changes, others need less. This ultimately depends on the level of negativity already existent in your subconscious mind. But don`t be disappointed. Keep practicing, be perseverant, until you succeed.

VII. How to get free from emotional dependency

Emotional dependency, as well as other types of dependency, appears on the background of a weak inner strength; as we feel weak, we search outside us for an object or a person to hang on to, to borrow some of its force. We invest that person with a lot of influence on us, we almost cant breath if he/she is not around, we get scared and anxious or furious whenever it seems to us that the person is not there for us, to support us. Over this time, our inner strength, already weak, becomes even weaker. And when the person is no longer near us or available for us, from different reasons, we crash, our entire world collapses. Any time you borrow something from outside, whether it is money, power, love, affection, authority etc. you become weaker. The source, the one who lends you all these may go away and then you`ll feel terrible. Remember what I told you in the beginning, about the road which is your life. Well, instead of taking care of it, you just place in the center of your life another person, whom you believe you love. You move on his/her road, which is much more beautiful and abandon your own. The problem is, that when the person doesnt allow you to stay

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on his/her road anymore, you think you have nothing left, nothing to come back to, no identity. Then you turn against that person you used to say you love, now that person is seen as absolutely horrible and mean but remember: you invaded his/her territory and not contrarily. You can not own someone else, just as you cant be someone elses slave. We are free people, each one of us has his own road, which looks as good as we keep it. I believe you understood the mechanism. Now, what you have to do is: - first of all, go back to your road, which means you place yourself in the center of your life, just as it is good or bad; also, you understand that you must take in hand your own life; you are the only one responsible for your happiness and bliss. - analyze you flaws and qualities, what is good and wrong in your life, what youd like to change. - try different activities, in order to realize what you want, what makes you happy. - develop you spiritual side. Once you established what you want, apply these exercises to produce the change you need. I don`t say its easy to overcome your statute as a victim and improve your inner strengths, but it is surely possible.

VIII. What do I really want? How to identify your real values and objectives in life
I wrote this little chapter to help you accomplish the tasks from the previous chapter. If you don`t know what you want yet, what suits you best in life, take this exercise: write on a piece of paper all the things that matter to you; everything that comes to your mind. Take care that every concept you use, you understand its meaning very well (for example, if you write down love, what are you referring to? You refer to a feeling, to a relationship, to marriage etc? Keep in mind exactly the meaning of that concept) The second step is to arrange them according to their importance; you take a word from the list and compare it with all the other words. Is there any word more important than this one? If it is, you take that new word/concept and compare it with the others

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eventually, you will have a first concept which represents the most important thing for you in life. You write it down on another piece of paper, and, from the rest of the words, you pick another, which you analyze in the same manner. Arrange all the words; the first 7-8 words from the new list represent your values in life, your purposes and would be good to pursue them in everything you do.

IX. How to make choices

When you have established your purposes in life, you`ll know exactly what you have to do. However, there are moments when we have to decide and act quickly and we don`t know what is the best choice. To solve this situation, use your emotional guiding system; think of different solutions and figure out what you feel. The best solution for you is the one that makes you feel very good. Also, when you experience a conflict between emotions and thoughts, the emotion will be the truth, while the thought will be the deception. As long as you guide your life based on what makes you feel good, you will be successful and will experience a state of joy all the time.

Material to read Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind Robin Norwood, Women who love too much The Secret Also, you may find on the Internet a lot of information about meditation

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