EMOTIONAL DISCIPLINE: Core Practices

SPIRITED DAILY

Learn to recognize the spirituality within your everyday feelings.

PREPARE
1. Find a quiet setting where you will be undisturbed.
2. Place your body in a position that supports being comfortable and alert.
3. Breathe and relax. Notice what you are aware of in the present moment. Whether you notice, sensations, thoughts, or feelings, simply let them come and go. Stay with this until you have settled into being present with yourself.
DIVINE BREATH
1. Become aware of the presence of God, the presence of love, within you and all around you. If you like, imagine those who love you gathered in a circle around you.
2. Breathe in, slowly and deeply, choosing to embody these words:
3. Receiving love, making all well.
  (Imagine and feel divine love as energy with a color or sound flowing into every cell in your body.)
4. Breathe out, slowly and deeply, choosing to embody these words:
5. Releasing love, making all well.
  (Imagine and feel divine love flowing through you to all those who are in need.)
6. Stay with this mantra until you feel well grounded, in your body, in the experience of divine love.
FEELING THE MEANING
1. Now, allow the Spirit of love, as it flows with your breath, to bring you back to significant moments of your day.
2. Feel yourself once again in a specific moment where your feelings were clear. Notice feeling content, joyful, scared, angry, sad, in pain, or any variations on these. Let the feeling connect with your breath. Feel it in your body. Let it be there. Honor it.
3. Feel the meaning. As you breathe with the feeling, open your mind to what it tells you about your relationship to whomever or whatever it is that you love in that moment. Acknowledge the divine presence in this moment of love.
4. When you are satisfied with feeling the meaning of one particular emotion, move on to another. Repeat until it is enough for now.
SIFTING
1. When you come upon an experience where something important is happening and you are unsure what you are feeling, spend a little time listening to yourself.
2. With your awareness anchored in your breath, let yourself be in the experience once again, as if it were happening now. Tune your senses into what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, doing.
3. As you’re in the experience, notice what thoughts move through your mind. Just let the thoughts come and go. If they carry you away, come back to your breath and your internal image of what is happening.
4. As you breathe, and allow your thoughts to come and go, notice any movement of energy or internal sensation in your body. If you didn’t hold yourself back, what does your body feel like doing?
5. Stay with it! Bring yourself back to awareness of your breath, your thoughts, and your bodily sensations. Be in the experience with an open heart, welcoming whatever way Spirit is moving in your body.
6. When the feeling becomes clear, return to Feeling the Meaning, as above.
FEELING NOW
1. Let go of reviewing prior experiences. Empty your thoughts by simply focusing on the rhythm of your breath.
2. As you breathe, notice what you are feeling at this moment. Recognize the divine presence in this feeling.
3. Acknowledge what the feeling tells you about the meaning of your day.
SET AN INTENTION
1. In closing, identify how you would like to be more aware of the presence of divine love in your day tomorrow.
2. Invite the Spirit to call to and inform your awareness so that you may Feel the Meaning when love is moving through you.

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