Meditation and Mastering Your Life

After watching the amazing video below, one Youtube viewer appended this saying from Milarepa, perhaps Tibet's most beloved sage:

If ones tries to vanquish foes in the outer world,
They increase in greater measure.
If one conquers his Self-mind within,
All his foes soon disappear.
~ Milarepa (A tibetan yogi)

So enjoy this beautiful and profound animated video and ask yourself afterward, "How does this apply to MY life?"

To Learn Meditation

...and to begin to taste the incredible experience of life that proficiency in meditation offers to every human being, including you, join me this coming Thursday night at 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific, for a special multi-media presentation on:

The Meditation Miracle

4 Steps to Transforming Every Moment into Rock Solid Inner Peace, Health and Happiness

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Thursday October 7 at 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific

http://attendthisevent.com/?eventID=15305691

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Watch your email for further information!

~Dr. Symeon Rodger

Your Optimal Health Cheat Sheet

Turn up your speakers or read the text version below:

Over the last month I think I've given the "7 Deadly Spirals of Disease" teleclass about five times to various audiences totaling thousands of people.  It's one of the most in-demand health presentations out there today. 

And while there's a place for presentations that go into that much depth, there's also a place for the high-level check list of things you can do to ensure fantastic health for years to come.  So here's just such a list for you:

1. Detox your body - There are lots of great detox systems out there.  One of my personal favorites is from a company called Blessed Herbs.  Detoxifying your system two to four times per year is highly advisable, since your body is being forced to deal with a toxic load that's well in excess of its design specifications!
   
   
2. Stop loading your body with new toxins - yes it's time to start thinking about eating more organic fruits and veggies, meat that's hormone and antibiotic-free, free range eggs, and the like.  And, for that matter, to beware of any non-organic personal care products you use, such as toothpastes, shampoos, cosmetics and the rest.  If it goes on your skin, it goes into your bloodstream.
    
   
3. Get everything circulating - one of the greatest keys to excellent health is to take your entire body through its total range of motion on a regular basis, pack your organs, bones and fasciae with Qi (vital energy) and ensure that your blood, spinal fluid, lymph fluid and Qi are all circulating unobstructed throughout your body.  This alone will short-circuit the disease process. To find out more, go to http://www.rocksolidvitality.com/dvd. 
   
   
4. Optimize your diet - learn what your body really needs nutritionally.  Take Dr. Mercola's free nutritional typing test to figure out what you should be eating.  Learn from internationally famous nutritional expert Michael Morningstar by taking the course he and I put together at http://www.mindsetbootcamp.com/symeon/healthmastery.html.
   
   
5. Avoid the electromagnetic storm - learn about the dangers of information-bearing radio waves.  Avoid wireless internet, be careful about how and how often you use your cell phone, your cordless phone and your laptop.  And be especially careful to educate your kids about this too!
   
   
6. Cultivate gratitude - this the nature's most natural stress-killer.  Whereas stress sends your body's pH level into the disease-prone acidic range, the frequent practice of gratitude will have the opposite effect.  Remember, an alkaline body is a very poor host for illness.
    
   
7. Smile habitually and never complain - this has the same effect.  Yes, you're surrounded by the frustrating (and sometimes mind-bendingly stupid) actions of other people.  But the more you can learn to disregard it all, the more you'll stress-proof yourself.  When your friends or coworkers complain, propose a solution instead!
   
   
8. Give affection, get affection - people who give and receive affection frequently live longer and happier lives.  Become one of them!
   
   
9. Deal with your emotions - this is one of the greatest keys to dealing with stress.  Learn simple and powerful tools like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Be Set Free Fast (BSFF).  Then you'll never again have to wallow helplessly in a puddle of negative emotion and put your health at risk. 
   
   
10. Meditate - it's one of the key elements of the ancient Taoist longevity system.  Moreover, it gives you mastery of your mind and emotions, and makes you totally stress-proof.  That's in addition to all its spiritual benefits, of course.
     
    
11. Learn to breathe - learn Normal Abdominal Breathing, the way the human being was meant to breathe.  This has enormous physical, psychological and spiritual benefits.  It's even more powerful when you join your breath, your movement and your mental attention into one.  You can learn more at: http://www.harapower.com/
    
    
12. Aim at harmony - we live in an anti-harmony culture.  Just walk down a busy street in any of our cities and you'll realize we've constructed a way of life hostile to our physical and emotional health.  When you aim at physical and emotional harmony in your own life, you counteract the persistently destructive influence of the man-made outside world.  Again, http://www.harapower.com/ will teach you more about this.
    

Please note you shouldn't try to do all of this or too much of it at once.  If you can implement just one of these this week or this month, you'll be making great progress!  

Remember that there's no one, single silver bullet for your health.  There are several and you need to take them all into account when you're building your new, healthier and more resilient lifestyle.  

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Resilience Tip: Drop Your Interpretations of Reality

We're evaluating constantly.  "This course is going to be SO boring."  "This meeting with my boss will be SO stressful."  "I hate doing the grocery shopping."  "How could she say something like that?"

And on and on it goes.  We see the world not as it really is but as we've been conditioned to see it.  Well, that's only partly true... We see the world as we have conditioned ourselves to see it.  Yes, we're the biggest conditioning influence on ourselves, no doubt about it.


One of the principle goals of all Authentic Ancient Traditions is to show you how to cleanse your mental continuum from all that temporal conditioning and finally break free - free from all those conventional perceptions you've been taught and free from all that fear, doubt, anxiety, self-limiting beliefs and other junk you've been busy repressing.

Strange thing, though... you don't break free by repressing all of this, but by allowing it to be there.  Many of your problems are the result of mentally running away from the discomfort of your emotions.  You only break free when you allow them to be, when you spend some time with them.  Of course, you first have to stop taking them so damn seriously.  


Once you do that, you make a miraculous discovery... those emotions and beliefs that so troubled you are important.  They contain vital information for you.  They're the manure that allows the beautiful flower to grow.  They're part of the richness, the earthiness of life.  This is the mystery of how you "surrender" to reality while no longer allowing your habitual interpretations to run your life.  

Of course, you may need some radical help to accomplish that.  Good thing help is on the way...

http://www.blogger.com/ 

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger 

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Resilience Tip: Now, Cultivate INNER Flexibility

In the previous Resilience Tip we talked about the vital importance of improving your flexibility.  And from what we said there, you may be assuming that "outer" flexibility is physical, while "inner" flexibility is mental.

Nope.  At least, that's not what I have in mind here.  You see, both are physical and both will greatly improve your ability to adapt to any situation in life.

Outer flexibility consists largely of obvious stretching techniques, such as you see with calisthenics or even much of Yoga - at least the part of Yoga that's most obvious to the untrained eye.


Inner flexibility uses more sophisticated and less obvious methods to massage your tissue, especially your core body tissue.  It works with qi much more effectively and unifies your mind and body.  And, in the end, it's even more vital for long term health.


The other great thing about cultivating inner flexibility is that once you've learned its methods, you can incorporate them into all your movements all day long, so you don't need to take time out of your busy schedule to "practice".  


Now, you might think that outer flexibility is more concerned with limb stretching, while the inner methods target the body's core.  There's some truth in that although, strictly speaking, they both target the whole body to some extent.  And both are absolutely necessary for developing superb health, immunity and longevity; it's just that the inner flexibility methods give you much more bang for the buck.  


The single best method I've ever found for building inner flexibility is here:


http://www.harapower.com/

Remember the bottom line: unless you take back control of your body, you have little hope of governing your mind, emotions and spirit, and so total well-being will continue to elude you.


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Making Your Life a "Work of Art"

You're walking through your neighborhood, enjoying the sunshine, the crisp, clean air and the birds. Everything is peaceful and you're very content...

...and then a diesel truck speeds by, spewing black smoke and leaving you coughing and sputtering for the next 60 seconds.

Sound familiar? We all seek harmony and beauty in our surrounding, but those surroundings are anything but harmonious and beautiful much of the time. All too often, we're engulfed by noise, air pollution and visual "pollution". Then it dawns on us that maybe harmony and beauty have never been high on our society's priority list.

That's changing, of course, as I outlined in my Special Report called "Gong-Fu" last year. (You can find a copy here: http://bit.ly/4pyuw6).

In Monday's post we talked about health. In Wednesday's about spiritual life. In the end, we all realize that it's harmony and beauty that are the key to both. What does that mean?

It means that we need emotional harmony within ourselves, otherwise both physical health and spiritual life will elude us.

We need tranquility of thought - to bring our thinking processes under our control.

We need a lifestyle that cultivates and builds harmony deliberately on every level.

Now what if there were a way to access the fundamental harmony and beauty of the universe already build into us? What if it was a matter of simply accessing what we've buried inside rather than "inventing" anything? That would be much easier, wouldn't it?

The good news is... that's the case. Not only do we have a built-in way to access the harmony and beauty of the universe, but that harmony and beauty is already inside, just waiting to be rediscovered.

With the ancient Taoist art of HARA, that's what students most frequently report - that a whole new universe of profound peace, great beauty and wonderful harmony has just opened up to them.

There's a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon we loved so much we had it framed. Calvin asks his dad why old pictures are always in black and white. His dad mischievously replies that the world only turned color a few decades ago.

That experience of feeling your world turn from black and white to color describes the feeling of practicing HARA. It also explains why HARA is the very foundation of both Tai Chi and Qi Gong. Must have been pretty successful ;-)

You can learn more about HARA here:

http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/hara.html

For anyone who grabs a copy of this unique course before Sunday at midnight, I'll toss in a free copy of The 5 Pillars of Life as well.

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Becoming a "Hollow Bone"

Hi all,

Just a couple of days ago I was teaching a University class on Native American Spirituality. We were talking about the famous Sioux medicine man, Frank Fools Crow, and how he approached his spiritual path and his healing of others.

Fools Crow said that since the power that healed himself and others wasn't his own power but just came through him, he first had to make himself like a "hollow bone" (i.e. a tube), so that the Power from on high wasn't obstructed or blocked.

To do this, Fools Crow used some Sioux rituals for expelling unwanted thoughts, energies and emotional content, and for refocusing himself on his relationship to this Power that comes from "Wakan Tanka" (the Sioux name for God).

This way, he noted, the medicine men and holy men of the Sioux typically lived longer and happier lives than most of the people around them. And, true to form, Fools Crow passed away in 1989 in his 100th year of life.


How to Become a "Hollow Bone":

Obviously, learning Sioux rituals is highly impractical for anyone outside that culture. Fortunately there are alternatives.

We all know that if we make our happiness dependent on our circumstances, life will always seem like a struggle. And we can pretty easily understand that if our minds are full of negative emotional states, we're the opposite of a "hollow bone". Instead we're a blocked pipe, and the energy of God can't penetrate.

That's the essence of the teachings of the "Authentic Ancient Traditions" I described in The 5 Pillars of Life. They all teach methods for becoming a "hollow bone" - that is, for emptying your self-concern and entering into inner silence - because human happiness depends on that.

So exactly HOW do you do it?? Yes, the intention to do so is vital, but how do you defeat your habits that create the opposite result?

Centuries ago, Taoist masters came up with their own method, one that's simple, direct and can be used by anyone. When they took it to Japan, the Japanese eventually named it "Hara-gei", the "art of the belly".

By doing a makeover of your breathing, posture and movement, and then combining them with your mental attention, the ancient masters came up with a fool-proof way to return your entire mind-body organism to its natural state - a state of positive emotion, where no thoughts arise to disturb you... unless you decide to think about something.

This method was so powerful that the famous Chinese physician Sun Simiao - who himself lived over a hundred years in good health, wrote: "Tranquility then attains to concentration, and the body continues to live for years eternal."

To learn more about this amazing method, you can go here:

http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/hara.html

This course is, so far as I know, the ONLY one in the entire English speaking world that actually shows you how to master HARA step-by-step.

And for anyone who grabs a copy this week, I'll throw in a free copy of The 5 Pillars of Life.

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Want Health? Then You Can't Afford to Ignore This...

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
- Thomas Edison

Hi all,

Edison was right, all those years ago, and despite the power and political clout of the pharmaceutical industry, people will likely look back at the medical and health practices of the our time and shake their heads saying...

"What WERE they thinking??"

Ancient cultures made some miraculous medical discoveries, and none more far-reaching in its effectiveness than the science of BREATHING. Sounds ridiculously simple?

What if I told you that just by using certain breathing methods for minutes a day, you could detox your whole body? Here's the scoop...


Beyond "Deep Breathing"

Taoist longevity masters discovered that although ordinary "deep breathing" is really good for you, there's something even better. Yes, it's a great idea to go outside first thing in the morning, expel all the stale air from your lungs and take in some crisp, clean air to oxygenate your system (and wake you up ;-), but there's more...

They discovered that the human body is designed for "abdominal breathing", not the chest breathing adults are used to, and that when you change over to abdominal breathing, amazing things happen. For one thing, it will detox your whole body continually (a big plus in our toxin-filled society). Here's how:

Your body eliminates toxins in 3 main ways - through your lungs, your skin and your bowels.

Abdominal breathing uses the whole lung and eliminates toxins through the lungs more efficiently than chest breathing. Abdominal breathing continuously massages the lower digestive tract, allowing your intestines, kidneys and bladder to eliminate waste products far more effectively than they usually do.

And now the "piece de resistance"... they discovered that through breath control they could access the body's energy field. You can too. Focus your attention on the tip of one finger as you practice abdominal breathing and you'll notice something...

Your finger feels like it's breathing too! Eventually, you'll learn to feel this sensation everywhere. To make a long story very short, using this dynamic allows you to eliminate toxins directly through your skin.

The Taoist masters also noticed that normal abdominal breathing and the special exercises that use it radically improved the circulation of blood, lymph fluid and energy throughout the body and eased the burden on the heart muscle. And they enable you to gather energy all day long instead of just expending it.

There are further benefits on the emotional and spiritual levels too, but I've run out of space for today, so...

To learn more about these miracles, just hop on over to:

http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/hara.html

For anyone who grabs a copy this week, I'll toss in a free copy of my book, The 5 Pillars of Life in case you don't already have one ;-)

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Meditation: Why You Need to Change Your Paradigm

One of the greatest RESILIENCE-BUILDERS out there is the regular practice of meditation. More and more people are taking up meditation for a variety of reasons, ranging from stress-management to seeking inner peace to enhancing their spiritual life to controlling their inner energy (Qi).

Unfortunately, most people are not getting nearly the benefits their meditation practice has to offer simply because they're making a culturally ingrained mistake that every Westerner is pretty much bound to make...

...they meditate when they meditate; then they get up and switch their brain into the same old stressed-out "daytime" mode they're so used to.

Hear this: your meditation's effectiveness can be easily quadrupled by simply avoiding that habitual mental shift.

"Great," you say, "but just how am I supposed to do that? My kids need their lunches made and a ride to school. My boss is on my case about that report and I'm run off my feet!"


SHIFTING YOUR FRAMEWORK

Fair enough. Let me explain... You're obviously familiar with the idea that whatever you focus on, especially with strong emotion, grows and eventually becomes your reality.

So if you insist on focusing on how insanely busy you are and how everyone is making demands on you, then that will become your reality. Let's call it the "fundamental background" of your life. Incidents will come and go throughout your day, but this "fundamental background" will always remain -ever-present and unchanged.

Suppose you decided to change that. What if the calm and centeredness of your meditation practice could be the NEW fundamental background of your life? What if your focus were constantly on that instead of on your problems and challenges?

For one thing, you'd have a lot less stress. Unpleasant incidents during the day would barely phase you. You'd be more effective and productive, since the meditative mind is always more effective than so-called "waking consciousness". And you'd be more deeply relaxed, so your health and resilience would naturally improve.


"YOU STILL HAVEN'T TOLD ME HOW, DOC!"

Mea culpa - guilty as charged! So let's get to that part now...

Here's a step-by-step method you can use to get started. Keep in mind this won't change your life overnight because your old habits of mind and body are SOOO deeply ingrained.

1. Meditate first thing in the morning

2. When you're ready to finish your meditation session, remind yourself that maintaining your meditative mind, the awareness of your inner being, is going to be the "fundamental background" of your day.

3. Become aware of the delightful PHYSICAL sensations of meditation as you go through your day - the rhythm of your breathing, the inner energy contracting and expanding, etc.

4. By focusing on these sensations, strive to keep your mind and emotions clear and calm.

"Can't be done," you say? Nonsense! Generations of experience show that people living in far more challenging circumstances than yours and mine trained themselves to do this and reaped the awesome benefits of health, immunity, longevity, inner peace and spiritual insight. That's why...

...you can too!

To learn about the SILVER BULLET for mastering meditation, whether you're sitting, standing, moving or doing anything at all, go here:

http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/hara.html

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Putting "Strength in Your Belly"

"If there is no strength in your dantien, vices such as jealously, envy, anger, greed and distrust appear."
~ Okado Torajiro

We could also add "stress", "anxiety" and "fear" to the list.

Everything I've shared with you over the past week has been to prepare you for today.

If you've been practicing this stuff daily you can't help but feel a whole lot better. That would be impossible. Our problem these days is that nobody will practice anything consistently and diligently. Instead, they just dabble, and dabblers don't get results in any area of life.

Okay, so we've already talked about your breathing and how you need to learn Normal Abdominal Breathing in order to stop creating stress accidentally.

When you're practicing this kind of breathing during meditation, you want to bring your breath down into your "lower dantien". Dantien means "elixir field" and it's your body's main energy storage area just below your navel. This will help you to put strength into your dantien, as Torajiro says above.

It's easy to feel the breath filling the dantien because your abdomen is actually expanding as you inhale.

We've also talked about how you can learn to integrate your mind, breath and physical movements into one. The next part of that equation is to learn to move from the dantien. In other words, you should feel every movement you make coming from the dantien, as if it moves a nano second before the rest of your body.

That kind of movement may seems strange to you, but keep in mind that all of Tai Chi (and other internal martial arts) and most of Qi Gong are performed just this way.

Go "play" with these approaches and you'll soon experience a world of difference!

~Dr. Symeon Rodger
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Disclaimer: This material is not intended to diagnose or treat any medical condition, nor toreplace the advice of qualified medical practitioners. You should not engage in any of the exercises suggested here without consulting your physician, particularly if you have anychronic medical issues or have reason to suspect these exercises could cause injury to you. If you are pregnant or think you might be, do not attempt any of these breathing or movement exercises without the express permission of your medical doctor and a licensed practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
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Recovering Childlike Wonder

In the story I shared with you in today's email - about the child who boarded a plane for Jamaica one night and thought he was moving through outer space because all he could see out the aircraft's window were stars - we have a vivid reminder of how WE ourselves used to see the world around us... as a wonderous and magical place...

...before we grew up and got "educated".

The question is, can we recover that sense of childlike wonder and innocence or will we spend the rest of our days in the "adult" world of boredom, the world devoid of magic, mystery and finally meaning.

This is a question I've thought about for decades. I guess the first really startling insight for me came from running into people from other cultures who just don't see the world in the same way Westerners do. Whether they're native peoples of North America, the descendents of the Pharoahs (the Egyptian Copts) or people from various places in the Far East, there seemed to be a common thread - this world is not nearly as solid and "real" as our eyes would suggest.

It's really astonishing to hang out with people who think this way. And it's very refreshing!

The fact is, we live in a civilization that, for all its achievements, has some bizarre ideas. For that last few centuries it's been telling us that the world as we see it is indeed very solid and real, and that it's the only thing that is real!

Until now...

As I explained in some detail in the "Gong-Fu" Special Report, science is now doing a "180" and saying basically, "Sorry. About that 'sold and real' stuff... we sort of screwed up. Turns out that everything you see as solid is just energy and your consciousness plays a role in how it manifests itself."

Okay, so far so good. It just means that every habit of perception we've learned since we were pre-schoolers turns out to be dead wrong. A minor adjustment (!) to our daily habits is in order.

But what's this mean in the end? Well, for one thing, it means that recovering childlike wonder isn't about building some escapist fantasy. Instead, it's about learning to see things the way the REALLY are. It's about seeing past what our senses tell us.

The question is how to do that. Fortunately, Authentic Ancient Traditions come to our rescue again, this time with an approach that's found everywhere from ancient Christianity to Taoism, Buddhism and elsewhere.

In the Far East it's usually referred to as "emptiness". It's the process of detaching yourself from the idea the world is solid and real. And there are lots of different methods used worldwide to achieve this, including meditations on emptiness, continuously reminding yourself of the "unreality" of the world of appearances and much more.

You can read more about this in my book, The 5 Pillars of Life, pages 167-170.

What are the advantages? Well, if you see everything that happens to you as "solid and real", then of course life's challenges will rip you apart emotionally because you are giving them the power to do that. On the other hand, as one Tibetan lama describes the perceptions of people who have had a direct experience of emptiness:

"...good and bad external conditions no longer have the power to disturb their mind, because they realize them to be like a magician's illusion, with no existence separate from the mind. Instead of being pulled apart like a puppet on a string, their minds remain free and tranquil in the knowlege of the equal and unchanging ultimate nature of all things. In this way, the person who directly realizes the true nature of phenomena experiences peace day and night." (1)

The catch for Westerners is that until we learn to quiet our mind and thoughts and arrive at the ability to enter into inner silence, at least for short periods, there's no way we're going to detach from appearances and reduce our vulnerability to our circumstances.

Without a doubt, the easiest way to enter into stillness is the ancient Taoist method the Japanese named Hara or Hara-gei. Why's it the best? Because it reintroduces you to the genuine wonder of the universe within you. It allows you to experience the childlike awe of tapping into the rhythms in your own body-mind organism, to feel and sense things you've been totally oblivious to since early childhood.

That takes you directly into stillness, which in turn is the surest foundation for the practice of emptiness, which in turn is the "adult's" recipe for returning to the experience of childlike wonder at and appreciation of the true magic of life.

To learn more about Hara, jump on over to:

http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/hara.html

You see, once your mind starts to pay attention to the wonders within you, your endless inner dialogue and your unruly emotions will quiet down without much effort on your part. And from there you just as effortlessly enter into emptiness.

However - and I won't delude you here - it takes a good deal of consistent application to get there. This is no magic pill. It's a wonderous and joyful process, but it's not an instant fix intended that will give you bliss even if the rest of your lifestyle sucks. There is no such thing.

In plain language, Hara is for Warriors, not wimps. Use it with care!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

(1) From Mahamudra Tantra: The Supreme Heart Jewel Nectar, by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. New York: Tharpa Publications, 2005, pp. 137-8.

Welcome to Our New WARRIORSHIP Blog

Hi and welcome to our new Warriorship Blog!

This will give us a chance to communicate in a more relaxed way than email usually allows, since you'll be able to post YOUR thoughts here too.

And it will give you a bit more insight into what I'm up to from week to week.

At the moment I'm away on a very special course that has a definite "warrior's edge" to it. I'm learning to run an operations center to handle disasters on the scale of a 9/11 or a Katrina.

It's fun, I admit, but it's a real challenge too. Tomorrow the real fun begins as our group of 50 or so students starts to run simulated disasters. We're all given specific roles to play and tough decisions to make, often with too little time and too little information - distressingly like what happens in real life incidents.

It's great information and a surprising amount of it can be directly applied to anyone's daily life - all the decision-making and communication skills, the planning methods, preparedness training and much more.

Next week we have a special event coming up, and I'll tell you more about that later.

Meantime, if you haven't already had a chance, go take advantage of our free Warrior Assessment Tool to help you get a handle on where your life is at and what you most want to achieve. You can find it at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=7RiJR6cGhDNW4kQtsme0lA_3d_3d

Gotta get some sleep... after spending all day on this course, I'm beat!

~Dr. Symeon Rodger