Heart Centred Practices to Transform your Life & Relationships
Shepherds Close London N6 5AG 07855 781 210
Loving Kindness & Compassion
‘When love has carried us above all things . . . we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, and an intuition of Eternity? We behold that which we are, and we are that which we behold; because our being, without losing anything of its own personality, is united with the Divine Truth.” Ruysbroeck
The darkest week of the year marked by the Winter solstice has arrived along with Mercury retrograde, this is always a time of truth, when communications seem disrupted and misunderstandings are rife, misunderstandings themselves are part of the truth of being human. Mercury is retrograde from 19th December – 8th January, giving us a chance to address short comings and mistakes and correct the course of events.
The experience of darkness, shadow or Dark Night of the Soul, is necessary in order to feel the emerging light as celebratory, many people want to avoid the darkness. There is something fearful about the absence of physical light because it evokes the dark side of the psyche; your fears and depressed moods, your envies and secret longings.
Ask yourself; ‘What truth does this reveal to me, and why have I needed it revealed in this way at this time?’
In the darkest part of the year when the days are shortest, Mother Nature reminds every body to slow down, enjoy time with loved ones, to be open to listening. A time to move towards the vibration of compassion to become more effective in your relationships.
The days after the winter solstice begin to lengthen, shifting from the darkest part of the year back into the ever increasing light, is a perfect time to clear the old to make room for the new.
Many people feel unsettled about the global changes taking place, this has been accompanied by low vibrational emotions such as anger, blame, self-judgment, hopelessness, frustration, fear and worry, that do not serve consciousness nor good decision making.
Distress is alleviated by attending to yourself and your inner turmoil.
Everything you do and think affects the people in your life and their reactions to you. The choices you make have consequences. Each of us carries within the capacity to change the world in small ways for better or worse.
Every single effect within the world, upon the earth has a cause, an original starting point.
All paths have an original first step and from that first step comes a chain reaction of events with further offshoots spanning out in all directions and so on duplication and replication takes place.
All your thoughts and your behaviour and movements affect the entire universe according to the law of cause and effect.
When was the last time you were truly kind to yourself? Not just rewards and gifts, but true kindness?
Only when you have established a kind relationship with yourself can you begin to be truly loving with others; love is generated and experienced from within. In this state you are able to really open your hearts in our treatment of others.
Learning to treat yourself with kindness, to open your heart to yourself and others is the first and most important step in cultivating loving-kindness and compassion;
The passage of Mercury retrograde is a gift from the heavens giving you an opportunity to reflect, take stock, review, and correct mistakes you may previously have made in the rush, take your time to make conscious choices and plant seeds of new perspectives.
When you experience the true depth of the darkness of despair, tears might well up spontaneously, it can have a soothing effect. It changes your physiology from sympathetic nervous system defense and denial patterns into parasympathetic relaxation states. It improves your perspective on the world, especially if this disclosure is shared with another person. When you give into the exhaustion, you might fall into a restful and healing sleep, a sleep that could last a few minutes or hours. You can awaken feeling loving kindness compassion renewed and rested.
Being in contact with your bodily sensations, hidden rage towards a current or past injustice, an unexpressed desire for fulfillment or failure is not about acting on them but simply about feeling them. When you do this, what you have hidden from yourself in darkness can now be revealed in the light of awareness. You can become more completely yourself, more confident and more fully alive.
If then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become of the worthies of the world.” Henry David Thoreau
Sometimes the “life” you need to take in feels like a retreat and a loss. Nature herself waxes and wanes, grows and recedes, lives and dies. In the midst of this shifting and change is one certainty.
The inner eternal light will naturally follow the dark time of the soul; it’s the way of the earth and of all her creatures.
By practicing the relaxation techniques on a daily basis, you learn to let go of the unhealthy emotional states that lead to the physical and emotional tension. Meditation includes a strong element of bodily relaxation.
You can learn how to directly affect your emotional and mental states, promoting calmness and contentment. Learning how your body/ mind interacts will help you to influence your emotional states by regulating your posture and breathing and lifestyle.
Restoring Mind, Body, Spirit Retreat can help you to become more aware of how to make conscious choices that lead to outcomes that are more supportive of your well being and happiness.
Your heart carries a unique vibration it has a unique energy field and consciousness. Connecting with your heart energy is the most powerful tool you have for creating healthy relationships, balance, health, love and peace in your life, your heart has a consciousness. Your heart is a very powerful organ.
Listen not just with your ears, but with your heart, Listen with your essence – with every sense of your being.
When the inner waters of your mind are completely calm, can you be truly in sync with nature and your authentic self, a true union with the divine.
‘You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend’. Bruce Lee
“Everything in Life is Vibration” Albert Einstein
Every vibration produces a corresponding geometric form. Your Thoughts and Emotions create your Vibration and circumstances in your life, including Illness. Words are vibrations, which can Perpetuate or Heal Past Experiences.
Prayer and mantras are vibrations that carry positive healing energy.
The sound Om encompasses all words and sounds in human languages. Om is the cosmic sound of creation, the vibration of the universe, its energetic frequency connects unites everything.
Cultural, values and beliefs are encoded into the collective unconscious through language, symbols and words.
Beliefs can be held collectively in groups, families or nations. These messages are carried generationally, when unexamined and unchallenged they can create suffering for yourself and others. Trauma in the same way can be passed over generations. Trauma can take many shapes and forms. Trauma can be experienced physically, mentally, emotionally and beyond. Trauma can create obstacles to finding peace within yourself and the world.
Healing Trauma is an important focus of Living from The Heart which integrates Energy, Mind/ Body, Meditation and Psychotherapy. Unhealed trauma prevents people and groups from raising their vibration. Energy healing and Emotional clearing, helps people who are stuck in repetitive life circumstances and relationships. Emotions are energy, they carry a vibration also.
Quantum physics and the law of nature states everything has a vibration, thoughts are vibrations of energy, these vibrations influence your perception. Everything that manifests itself in your life is there because it matches the vibration from your thoughts.
When you become conscious of your thoughts as being vibrations of energy you begin to understand the powerful influence that each thought has and you connect with the power of intention.
John Lennon was encouraging the world to use the power of thought and intention to be conscious of your imagination and its potential, to create Peace beckoning the listener to imagine a world at peace without the barriers of borders or the divisions, to imagine humanity unattached to material possessions.The imagination, John Lennon was telling us, is the most powerful tool we have. Use it.
Every individual has potential, and is capable of influencing others, creating a ripple effect which can change society. If you approach the world as violent, self-gratifying or inconsiderate, what reactions will you generate? This is a time to be conscious of your actions and attitudes and their consequences.
We can use the power of collective consciousness through visualisation, prayer, mantra and meditation to improve the world.
What if everyone focussed their attention on visualising a peaceful world, characterised by nonviolence and harmonious relationships?
Your thoughts and feelings make ripples. Every action, thought and feeling have vibrations in a sea of energy, affecting everyone forever changing the composition of the whole universe, however small that change is. Change starts with you. Become strong so that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
Join me for a monthly Healing the Heart Meditation virtual event attend from any where in the world.
Please sign up here to be added to this free monthly group all you need to do is turn up and tune in.
Details will be emailed to you.
Imagine the power of your thoughts.
“What you may fail to see inside is a result of how you choose to process everything and everyone in your world. You project onto the world what you see inside, and you fail to project into the world what you fail to see inside. If you knew that you were an expression of the universal spirit of intention, that’s what you’d see. You’d raise your energy level beyond any possibility of encumbrances to your connection to the power of intention. It is only discord acting within your own feelings that will ever deprive you of every good thing that life holds for you! If you understand this simple observation, you’ll curb interferences to intention.” Wayne Dyer ‘The Power of Intention
Every being, a cell, plant, animal or human, lives by vibrating; by expanding and contracting taking in the new and letting go of the old. Your mind, too, vibrates, alternating between expanding to receive new ideas and contracting to get rid of the old.
Your Heart beats a rhythm of giving and receiving.
The nerves and arteries in your body contract and expand, to circulating blood, carrying nutrients to supply cells and eliminate toxins in the same way that the air (Chi or Prana) is carried to and from the cells.
Your body is constantly vibrating contracting and expanding, your stomach to digest and your bowels to eliminate.
The vibration in the cells of trees and plants allows the sap to rise, flow and feeds trees and plants.
When parts of your body become stressed or dis-eased, they are no longer vibrating at their optimal resonant frequency. To recalibrate your frequency, you need to understand how lower and higher vibrations affect your energy and health by taking care of your internal and external environments.
Your thoughts and feelings, and the mental and emotional vibrations that emanate from you, create the atmosphere around you. People can sense this atmosphere and are affected by it. This atmosphere also affects their feelings toward you. Please visit Living from The Heart’s resources for raising your consciousness.
Become conscious of the foods you eat. Pay attention to how you feel after eating something.
Become conscious of the music you listen to. What messages does it give you?
Become conscious of your home environment. Is it a peaceful oasis?
Become conscious of the vibration levels of your acquaintances, friends, and extended family.
Become conscious of practicing random acts of kindness and in return expect nothing. How does this affect you?
Become conscious of your mind/ body find ways to raise your vibration through meditation, breath work, Chi Kung is a wonderful way to raise your vibration as is a regular Yoga practice.
Become conscious of going to sleep with a grateful, open heart, it is a powerful healing practice.
Awaken and enter a blissful Heart space of potentiality and healing on a Living from The Heart Retreat, Consultation or Workshop
Love is a natural state of consciousness. Love is at your very core. Love shines a light on your uniqueness. In the spontaneity of love, boundaries disappear. When love appears, separateness disappears.
OM Shanti Shanti Shanti
I would love to hear your thoughts, experiences and comments!
Why go on a Retreat?
It may be that you feeling a little stressed lately? Living from The Heart Retreat could be just the thing for you. It may be that something is stirring inside, a call to explore some questions more deeply.
It may be the best investment you make for your self, health and all relationships. It may be that you are yearning for an opportunity to pause and look at your life from a new perspective, which often unlock answers to the questions that you just may not take the time to ask.
If you want to find balance of mind, body and spirit, or may need to find a quiet space to switch off.
You are guided to make a stronger your connection with your sense of self, which helps you to shift into new awareness about yourself and relationships. You will learn to master the art of conscious relationships where you make considered choices about your life and relationships while restoring a sense of balance of mind body and spirit.
Living from The Heart retreat provides a ‘container’ to connect to a deeper sense of meaning and self. Support is provided along the way during a healing and restorative, silent, creative and fun week. It can be a time for finding the courage to let go of things that no longer serve you or to become aware of what you are being drawn towards.
The retreat can provide a place, a space a moment in time to allow a deeper exploration; to discover within a renewed sense of meaning; to experience a deeper sense of connection and your willingness to be open more deeply and fully, in your heart, mind and body.
Transform challenges into positive, personal, professional and spiritual transitions
Living from the Heart will support and facilitate a process of being able to go beyond your familiar mind, with its logical and sometimes restrictive ways of seeing the world to a deeper, steadier and quieter place where new insight and inspiration can bring you closer to your true identity, your true Self. From this place of balance you will find fulfilment through living your life in a more congruent way.
Find a sacred and Healing space
Retreat for Individuals and Couples
September 2018 Portugal
Stay Young and Beautiful. Living from the Heart encourages you to live an authentic, healthier, happier, more joyful, purposeful life. To lead a life you can be proud of together with a lifestyle of practices that guide you towards a long healthy life. I encourage you to cultivate a set of practices to keep your mind, body and spirit engaged and strong and support your essence in the activities you immerse yourself in, changing and responding to your needs in the moment. Each moment helps you learn more about yourself and the world. People seek help when they recognise they are disconnected in some way from a life that supports and nurtures. People do not usually arrive knowing what is wrong with them, much of what causes suffering or dis-ease is often buried. People come with symptoms, which may be experienced as relationship difficulties, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, stress or tiredness. It may be that you are dealing with a bereavement, illness of a loved one, health problems, struggling with your career, or trying to create a new relationship or maintain the ones you have. When you become disconnected from what truly matters in life things can become really tough. Luckily, the answers and solutions can be found within you. Your energetic heart can be accessed through meditation, it is as vast as the entire universe. You can learn to access the power, clarity, insight, love, and peace of your heart. When you learn to listen to your heart you can gain access to the incredible qualities that you didn’t even know you had. When you have discovered and healed your heart, you can use your heart’s power and vulnerability to create a life you know is possible.
The first secret to Happiness and Longevity is to release judgements and cultivate an attitude towards not making up stories, or predefining age, or imposing limits to your true nature. The only true measure of life is not to measure it at all, but rather to simply live it fully. Live each day fully and actively. Lead a life that is rich and full of experience. This provides an edge to keep you healthy, flexible and strong. Live life according to your unique nature. Judgments provide for a life lived within a very defined set of rules with effectively limited or no free will. To live in this manner limits your potential and reduces the possibility of your actions.
“If you ignore the dragon, it will eat you. If you try to confront the dragon it will overpower you. If you ride the dragon, you will take advantage of its might and power.” — Chinese Proverb
The second secret to Happiness and Longevity is eating well.
Learn to listen to your body and respond to it by providing a good mixture of essences and nutrients to maintain your body’s optimum health. The body needs a balanced, varied and healthy diet. There are many books and literature that go into great detail about when, how and what you should eat. Essentially it is all about eating in balance and moderation. Many diets fail when they do not change in response to the changing needs of your body and climate. Experience and wisdom teaches a practice of treating food with respect with the least amount of processing. Food intake should be in moderation and balance. The respect you show towards your food’s life cycle mirrors the relationship with your own life cycle. Think. If an animal or plant is tortured during its growth, its essence will be saturated with fear, stress and imbalances. When this is consumed you devour its’ essence, any accumulated stress hormones or illness is taken into your own body. Eating such food promotes a life of fear and perpetuates mindless practices.
The third secret to Happiness and Longevity requires you to listen to your authentic nature.
Learn to accept yourself and lead a life of discovering who you are. Your nature is ever changing and remains the same. It is futile to attempt t resolve contradictions in life, instead learn to accept your nature. There are so many distractions, opinions, thoughts, ideas, desires, expectations, visions and images competing, working, trying to lead you to a supposedly better way. This chatter creates a distracting noise. How can you attain longevity if you are always busily moving to the rhythm of a larger world? Learn to live a long healthy life, move to rhythm of your own subtle cues, follow and trust your gut feelings and instincts. Longevity is pointless, unless you are your own person. Whats the point of extending misery? Meditate. Ask yourself ‘who am I’ and allow yourself to answer the question deep from within. Enter your inner space and ask, “Who am I?” You will arrive at a deeper experience of your consciousness and unique nature.
The fourth secret to Happiness and Longevity is exercise. Move your Body.
A physical practice keeps the body healthy. It is critical to keep the body moving and subtle. Exercise such as Yoga and Qigong help keep your body strong and flexible for an entire life time. They are both moving meditation. Working with the breath or pranayama is fundamental for the development of physical well-being, meditation, awareness, and enlightenment, it is both a form of meditation in itself and a preparation for deep meditation. Breathing or pranayama can rapidly bring the mind to the present moment and reduce stress. Breath work along side psychotherapy can relieve depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, stress and anxiety. By inducing stress resilience, breath work enables you to rapidly and compassionately relieve many forms of suffering. Stress is not caused alone by stressful situations or relationships – it is your response and reaction that creates a response in your mind and body.
The fifth secret to Happiness and Longevity is to attend to your attitude. Attitude is everything.
Your attitude to life is one of the key elements of your personality. It defines how you view reality. If you treat yourself as an opponent or as something to be dominated, there will be resistence. The more you resist the world, the more the world will resist back. The world is larger and more powerful than you, the battle will be lost when you make life a fight. Resistance is at the core of psychotherapy. It determines the process and is largely why psychotherapy can take so long. Understanding it, facing it, and working through are at the heart of therapy, One can resist memory by recalling facts but not the impact on yourself and others nor the experience. Reconnecting with the totality of an experience or relationship can free you from symptoms that cause distress such as anxiety and the anticipation of suffering or humiliation. Becoming conscious of your experience and range of feelings and perceptions can transform you. It is fine to fight occasionally, it is important to stand up for yourself, but to make a stand excessively against the world means the world will erode you eventually. There are times in your life when you are open to new ideas that run counter to the demands of your resistance, when your mind and heart are not open and resistance is high, nothing can reach you. Resistance works like friction it may feel like everything in your psyche is pushing you in the opposite direction. Resistance, develops from your defences, which are at the heart of your personality. It can take many forms, appearing as mistrust, anger, feeling discouraged, supercilious, bored, boring, confused, confusing, or dependent. When triggered it is central to your functioning and necessary for your survival.
Leading a life with low stress is desirable and necessary to accessing happiness and longevity. Stress is a major factor that contributes towards premature aging and dis-ease. Harness a good attitude which concentrates on good humour and low stress. Laughter is a healing balm with real healing powers, laughter has the power to charm and influence those around you in daily life, laughter can extend life, and make days truly worth living. Laughter is beautiful, it is infectious. The sound of laughter is far more contagious than a cough, or sneeze. Laughter can bring people closer together. Laughter triggers healthy physical changes in the body. Humour and laughter can strengthen your immune system, boost your energy, diminish pain, and protects you from the damaging effects of stress. When you laugh, you enter a state of “no thought” or emptiness, if only for a microsecond. With practice, laughter can be a powerful path to consciousness and enlightenment.
The sixth secret to Happiness and Longevity is cultivating a spiritual practice. You are more than a mind and body. You are a trinity of mind, body and spirit. Your Spirit is uniquely defined within the actions of how you lead your life. A spiritual practice keeps both the mind and body in balance with each other. A practice can be anything that helps you to find peace within your own nature. There are day to day activities you can perform with an intent of spirituality. Recognise how natural and easy it is to carve out a spiritual connection with the world. Spiritual practice is a combination of intent within your actions and the exploration of mysteries in your life. Your spiritual practice needs to define and refine over time responding to your needs and circumstances. If you are to lead a long life, then it helps to have a reason to do so. A spiritual practice provides motivation for enjoying a longer happier life not a miserable one.
The seventh secret to Happiness and Longevity is to avoid addiction. Addiction is a process of self destruction. It redefines an empty space with something external to your true nature. It is important to live as yourself. not in a haze. There are addictive substances that appear to solve problems; using drugs to shift the balance of your mind, to fit a social norm, using television, mobile phones and social media to help pass the time, all addictions erase a persons’ unique nature. The root cause of suffering is addiction or aversion to what you think will make you happy. ‘When you look at addictions’ says Ram Dass, ‘it’s not like ‘evil,’ it is just an attempt to ‘get back.’ The problem is that most behaviours that get you back, will allow you to be in the presence of something divine temporarily, it does not allow you to remain ‘at home’ in your unique nature. Live life as your self. Life is a challenge and the struggle has edges which defines your unique shape.
The eighth secret to Happiness and Longevity is unspoken.
Learn how to put these into practice on the next Healing The Heart Retreat 17th – 24th September 2015 in Portugal. The Venue is located in Central Portugal between the towns of Tomar and Sertã and near the small town of Cernache do Bonjardim. The nearest Airport is Lisbon which is approximately 1 hour and 45 mins away from the venue. Set in a tranquil location in the forested hills of Central Portugal, far away from the crowds, just 3 km from the beautiful ‘Castelo de Bode’ lake and 8 km from the small town of Cernache de Bonjardim.
In order to welcome love into your lives become aware and let go of some of your beliefs about Love, what you learnt from a young age whilst growing up, from your Mother, Father, siblings and significant people in your lives.
Listen to the deep internalised messages; feel them in your body and how they may have influenced some of your decisions now as an adult.
What messages did you receive? Are they true, are you shaping your life to the same soundtrack? What negative messages are you holding onto?
Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the centre so you have two columns record the negative messages and next to each one write down what replace the old messages with a new one
I.e.: ‘No one loves me’ on the right hand side you would counter this with ‘I love and approve of myself’Take some time to write down what you learnt about Love. Today write down and acknowledge what needs to be altered. Each day take a moment to work on each of these messages. Get support if you need to.
Once you stop telling yourself the story about your life and how you are loved and love – they will have less power over you – you are free to shape your own destiny.
By loving yourself you allow others to love you back.
Many people have not been taught how to receive, it is an innate skill. It’s never too late to unlearn the conditioning that veils your ability to open up and experience love, joy and aliveness.
Your task today is to become aware of how you create blocks to receiving today.
Ask yourself what do you deserve? You may find some beliefs about yourself and others that prevent you from aligning yourself to allow more love into your life. Be aware of how you respond to others when they show love and affection. Do you get uncomfortable when someone shows you kindness or gives you a compliment?
How you respond is exactly how you treat the people that love you.
Notice what happens when you think of making positive shifts in your life? Whether it is in your career, financial, love or relationship situation, does fear arise? If so you are holding onto a belief that will limit your ability to receive.
Consciously invite the fear to surface and spend some time listening to it. Experience it in your body do not judge it, allow it to be in the room with you, pour love, compassion and understanding onto this part as you would with a young child to help them heal and grow.
Your daily experience of Love begins with being open to receive as much as you are able to give Love.
Living from the Heart:
T 07855 781 210
S aishaali
E admin@livingfromtheheart.co.uk
Aisha Ali is a much sought after relationship specialist. She is known for her intuitive insight, she is very skilled at getting to the core of issues and helping individuals and couples transform unwanted repeated patterns. Her clients experience support clarity, awareness and a sense of peace, balance and accomplishment.