Play Your Position

Nevertheless, we took it all in anyway. It may not even have been consciously chosen. We just started picking up the characteristics of our family and later of group members whose dominance and power impressed us. We respected how they stayed in charge of us and we automatically tried to make that authority a part of ourselves. It's also been linked with helping to heal depression, anxiety, stress, and chronic pain. So it can be worth it to try if you want to activate your vagus nerve. There are a lot of different types of yoga to try. If you've been practicing yoga for a while, then stick with the ones you know or try something new. If you're a beginner, then don't start with the advanced classes. Here are some great types of yoga that are good for beginners but also help with stress reduction. Hatha Yoga - In a hatha yoga class, you'll can a basic understanding of the different poses in yoga. It's generally considered to be a gentle yoga class and shouldn't strain you too much. You'll learn to work on posture, while also following the breath. Iyengar Yoga- This type of yoga is very focused on your posture and poses. Awareness of the Map of Consciousness Advancing one's own level of consciousness by following and practicing verified spiritual teachings and principles of discernment (for example, see articles 8 and 9 of this article) It is thanks to the ego's tenacity that anyone is even alive to read this article. When we view the ego from an evolutionary perspective through the millennia, an understanding arises that allows for compassion. The ego is not our enemy but rather a pet to watch over. Instead of treating it with condemnation, hatred, and guilt, the way to de-energize it is by viewing it objectively for what it truly is--that is, a vestigial remnant of our evolutionary origins.

Paradoxically, the ego is reinforced by condemnation, labeling it as sin, repenting with sackcloth and ashes, and wallowing in guilt. Such approaches merely utilize the ego to attack the ego, thereby reinforcing it. As Freud discovered, out of guilt, we repress our animal nature and then project it onto others or a deity that purportedly has the same character defects as the worst humans. The ego is dissolved not by denunciation or self-hatred, which are expressions of the ego, but by benign and nonmoralistic acceptance and compassion that arise out of understanding its intrinsic nature and origin. The fact that this automatic taking-in of parental qualities really happens is known to any parents who ever caught themselves doing and saying the very things for which they had once resented their own parents. As a child, we may not have been allowed to behave like that dominant family member, but we still may have taken in that person's rigid attitudes and made them a part of our mental world. The very things we most disliked being told as a child often become the very things we unconsciously start to believe about ourselves. We can be taken over by these swallowed attitudes, as if they were a kind of draining life form. These thought parasites can live inside us for years, even if they originally had nothing to do with who we were or who we wanted to be. We may not even realize we are supporting these destructive parasitic thoughts because we have become so accustomed to them. The way we know these negative attitudes exist is by their destructive effects on our lives and our unfulfillment in the real world. Just like a virus, we know it is there not because we can see it, but because of our immune system's reaction to it. The same thing occurs psychologically when a person has swallowed some parental attributes in childhood that have made him or her emotionally sick. The person may feel depressed, anxious, hear voices or drink too much as an inner war rages. There isn't a lot of strenuous work, but you'll have to maintain poses for a while. The classes should be run by someone who understands the human body well and can provide you with support in different positions. If you choose to do Iyengar yoga, make sure that your instructor has been well-trained and can provide you with the necessary guidance so you don't hurt yourself. Restorative Yoga - Like the name itself suggests, restorative yoga is all about relaxation. In this style of yoga, you put yourself in poses while being supported by other materials. So while you are in the pose, you're not actually straining yourself

Each of these kinds of yoga can require a class with an instructor. However, if you don't want to go to an actual class, then you can find some good yoga videos online. For rest and relaxation, choose yoga videos that use terms like gentle yoga, beginner's yoga, or yoga for relaxation. Find videos that you enjoy and help you relax. Although guilt and repentance may have a certain pragmatic usefulness for brief periods in one's spiritual evolution, it is to be noted from examining the Map of Consciousness that Guilt, Hate (self-hatred), Regret, Despondency, and all such negative positionalities are at the bottom of the scale, whereas Forgiveness, Love, Acceptance, and Joy are at the top and lead to Enlightenment. The Map of Consciousness reveals that the world provides an infinite panorama, and by playing our part in being what we are, we serve others. Each one of us serves others merely by being here. People in the lower levels of consciousness are not bad for being what they are; We end up respecting them all. As mistaken as we think they might be, we can nonetheless respect someone who is willing to sacrifice their life for country, God, or whatever they believe they are doing it for. War itself serves the evolution of consciousness by providing a way for millions of people to cross over from cowardice to Courage as they walk through the hail of bullets in the name of a higher principle, God, country, king, or family. Warfare is the way that men, in the role of the warrior, have historically crossed over that critical line of 200. Women have traditionally made the same step through childbirth, risking death--and often dying--for the sake of birthing new life. Therefore, nothing in the evolution of consciousness needs to be judged or condemned, for each expression has served the whole by virtue of what it was at the time. As a therapist, I look at a conflicted person's symptoms and wonder what kind of alien ideas they must have taken in when they were children to create such tremendous inner conflict. The psychological immune system activates against foreign bodies just as predictably as its physical counterpart. Perhaps you too may have gulped down some beliefs in childhood that are now interfering with your adult development. Perhaps you may be discouraging yourself because of somebody else's old beliefs, to the point where you mistrust your own motivations. You may not have realized the alien, depleting nature of these hand-me-down beliefs. You have held them so long, they breathe right along with you.

Linda's Story Continues By the time Linda had come to my office, she had already begun to realize these mental parasites were there, distorting her self-image until she could not see herself clearly. I don't know who I am, she said honestly, I've become who my family wanted me to be, and now I'm not sure how to go about finding and being the real me. By speaking these painful words, Linda came closer than she had ever been to her true self. If gentle yoga is not your thing, they try vinyasa yoga, ashtanga yoga, or Bikram yoga. All of these are more intense, but also put a lot of emphasis on the breath and movement. All of them can help you achieve more balance in your body. Qigong is a very interesting type of meditation. It combines physical form and movement with focused breathing and meditation. Its goal is to balance your life energy, or Qi. It has a lot of backing from both traditional medicine and modern science. Many scientists consider qigong to promote well-being. It causes relaxation of your muscles, reduces your stress levels, and deepens your breathing, which, as has been repeated many times thus far, can help with activating your vagus nerve. Qigong has many different forms, and because of this, it can be adapted for many different people. Counterbalance Consciousness-calibration research reveals that approximately 92 percent of society's problems arise from people who calibrate below 200, and their overall financial cost to the citizenry is too enormous to calculate. Thus, a society that is overly permissive or supports nonintegrity pays an astronomical price not only in quality of life but also in every area of it, down to just simple, everyday physical safety. Because integrous individuals do not typically grasp the fact that they are actually in the minority, it bears repeating that only 15 percent of the world's population is above the critical consciousness level of 200. However, the collective power of that 15 percent has the weight to counterbalance the negativity of the remaining 85 percent of the world's population. Because the scale of power advances logarithmically, a single Avatar at a consciousness level of 1,000 can and does, in fact, totally counterbalance the collective negativity of all humankind.

Kinesiologic testing has shown: One individual at level 700 counterbalances 70 million individuals below level 200. One individual at level 600 counterbalances 10 million individuals below level 200. One individual at level 500 counterbalances 750,000 individuals below level 200. Of course, this was an extremely uncomfortable transition time; Her willingness to rediscover and commit to her true interests became the next step. How Linda Learned Self-Doubt When Linda was growing up, she was passionately motivated to spend all her time on things that truly interested her. When she took up tennis in high school, she practiced every day to become good enough to be on the school team. When oil painting captivated her, she spent every spare moment drawing and laying on thick bright colors with her brushes. As a teenager, Linda was not scattered or irresponsible in these pursuits; However, Linda's intense creative motivations made her mother uncomfortable. Her mother began to tell Linda that she was not leading a balanced life. For example, as Linda was going out the door to tennis practice in the evenings, her mother asked, Don't you think you're spending too much time on that? It's often used medically in China, is related to many different types of martial arts, and is sometimes just simple meditation and movement. One of the most well-known forms of qigong in the U. If you've ever walked through a park in a major city during the weekday morning, you may come across a group of people doing slow, fluid movements that look very much like martial arts. They're most likely doing tai chi. It is, in fact, a type of martial arts that focuses on the slow movement of the body and breath. It is considered a style of meditation, even though there is an exercise component to it.