Meditate and Be Your Own Guru
In this episode of the Soulful and Wild Show, Karen shares two different spiritual processes you can use that will move you into a place where you can genuinely become your own guru. She says, it's really important that you not give your power away to others, that you do indeed know the answers to your own burning questions, the direction that you need to move in, and even what you are actually here to do.
Karen describes how to create inner stillness so that those special gems of insight that many go to others to find, can really drop into your consciousness - with ease, and that it just takes some time, a little patience, and a structure that is easy to follow. Karen shares the process that she calls 'Golden Bodies' one that she learnt in India - yes at an Ashram.
Some interesting concepts to consider here, and you might like to give these practices a test run to check their validity.
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Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome. Thank you very much for joining me for this rather short, I think, episode on being your own guru.
00:11.95
Karen Seinor
Now, so many people, I don't know if you've noticed this or whether this is just me, but so many people seem to put their power out there onto others, either literally a guru or you know a yoga teacher or a particular pathway, a style of meditation, and that becomes the be-all and the end-all of everything.
00:40.65
Karen Seinor
And it's got to be this way or it's no way. Now, one of the things that I've learned over time, and i have probably pretty much done that at different points along the way,
00:54.97
Karen Seinor
And maybe you've made that little journey or side street wander yourself where you think that if I do this, I'm going to find I'll become more spiritual or they know more than I do. But truth be told, we ourselves really are the higher knowledge.
01:21.74
Karen Seinor
It's just about getting quiet. making time and really going deep. And I don't know about you, but I actually find it quite difficult to set up a structure for myself where I really do that.
01:37.84
Karen Seinor
And I think that's the biggest challenge of all, is to have kind of a scaffold within which to work. And that's the beauty of working within an existing system.
01:51.34
Karen Seinor
So one of the things I'd like to put to you is that rather than putting your power out there to someone else who knows more than you, i would suggest that you actually start to investigate what it is you know and begin to follow your own higher knowledge.
02:14.11
Karen Seinor
Now, how do you tap into that? That's the thing, isn't it? How do you tap into your higher self, to the part of you that has the answers? Obviously, like I said before, it's about getting quiet, about becoming still and making the time, like really seriously scheduling the time to do that.
02:35.00
Karen Seinor
Now, at various times i have been strict with myself and done that. And when I do, wow, so much benefit, you know.
02:46.29
Karen Seinor
oh I used to actually meditate for 20 minutes. I made it very achievable. I started off with 10 minutes and that wasn't long enough. I did 15. I could do a bit more.
02:58.52
Karen Seinor
And then I started to do 20 minutes and I did it Monday to Friday. I was a slacker on the weekend and I enjoyed that, stayed in bed, didn't get up. And um I found that once I got to that 15, 20 minutes, I could have gone longer.
03:13.49
Karen Seinor
You know, there's a sort of a ah dropping in. And at first it's really hard to do that. You know, I'm talking meditation, obviously. And, you know, there's so many done different kinds of meditation too, isn't there?
03:27.85
Karen Seinor
But the simplest is literally just to sit and breathe and to bring your awareness to the breath and to actually just travel with the breath.
03:40.97
Karen Seinor
Now it's in the practice of doing that regularly that... You know, the mind gets very busy, busy, busy, busy. busy Things come through. What am I cooking for dinner? You know, I really haven't got time to do this today.
03:54.12
Karen Seinor
All the things. But to allow those thoughts, like to recognise, acknowledge that they're there, notice, and allow them to pass through. It's a bit like, you know, visitors.
04:08.65
Karen Seinor
You know, those people that you don't really like. You don't really want them to stay. They can visit and they can move through and off they go. And those thoughts that come in when you are in your state of stillness, we'll call it meditation for the for the purpose of our conversation.
04:26.22
Karen Seinor
um
04:29.08
Karen Seinor
When we're in that state, we're learning to quieten ourselves. We're training our minds to become still, to create a sacred space that becomes natural and normal and known to us because it's over time as we do that then it is possible for us to tap in quite easily to that higher self because when you sit there in silence in stillness rather silent stillness you know we can be silent and not be still up here but eventually they do come together we have to be
05:11.36
Karen Seinor
diligent, you know, and stay the distance. That's the gig, to stay the distance. In the doing of that, we
05:23.72
Karen Seinor
we create a place where the busyness of the mind begins to wane. When we don't give it a lot of attention, when we don't go dancing with it, it will move through like those, you know, visitors you don't want to stay.
05:37.49
Karen Seinor
and It's when you get to that place that you start to be able to drop a little bit deeper. And it's then that information from whether it's your higher self or directly from spirit or your spirit guides, whatever your framework is, it doesn't really matter what your framework is, that's when there's a place for that information to drop into.
06:07.33
Karen Seinor
And that's the way that you become your own source of higher knowledge. Now, I'm not suggesting for one moment that we don't need to go and learn tools and skills and to gather experience.
06:22.34
Karen Seinor
Obviously, we need to do that.
06:26.23
Karen Seinor
Because just sitting around and reading the holy book, you just become an intellectual, don't you? So it's a combination of things.
06:37.03
Karen Seinor
But we are all living a normal life, aren't we? And in the course of that, we are gathering experience, interacting with other people, being triggered, processing those things. But we've got to create that so that still, quiet place on a regular basis.
06:54.63
Karen Seinor
So that is the process, really, to becoming your own guru. When you have that foundation,
07:06.09
Karen Seinor
and you are sitting in that stillness on a regular basis, you're training your mind, you're training your body. And if you're somebody who needs to move their body to get rid of all the, you know, the zzzz energy, so that you can drop into stillness, do some yoga first, or go for a walk early in the morning, or go for a run if you're a runner, and then come back and sit in that space of stillness.
07:32.56
Karen Seinor
so that all that physical stuff is zapped out of you and then you're just in that energetic space.
07:43.67
Karen Seinor
I trust that I'm making sense here. I'm just talking completely off the cuff. I don't have notes here. It's just like, I just got that thing, right? Talk about this now. So
07:58.98
Karen Seinor
this is the practice. You can spend a great deal of money paying other people to teach you the way because they know they've got all the experience. But the truth is you have to.
08:14.38
Karen Seinor
There's one source, isn't there? And we all can tap into that source when we drop into that state of stillness. And that's what it's all about. Excuse me, I'm just going to cough.
08:26.77
Karen Seinor
Excuse me. So please don't so please don Send your energy. Don't give your power out to anybody else. Retain your power.
08:38.81
Karen Seinor
You are the knower of your own life and you can access a lot of information and use that information and allow it to become clear.
08:51.34
Karen Seinor
yeah So that's kind of the process for doing it. Now, I'd like to share with you something that I've used recently And I did go off and visit the guru to get this one.
09:05.51
Karen Seinor
um Years ago now ah went to India and spent some time in an ashram. And this is one of the most valuable tools that I gained from it.
09:19.57
Karen Seinor
And I call it golden bodies, but they call it something different. um And what it is, it's a very simple practice. And that's the trick, you see, because it's not complicated, we don't have to turn into a pretzel and hang upside down for three weeks eating, you know, doing OMS and eating Vegemite sandwiches or anything.
09:43.46
Karen Seinor
um We don't give these incredible tools the kudos that they deserve. But Don't underestimate this, please try it, it is absolutely amazing.
09:55.93
Karen Seinor
What happens is um I started doing this every day after work and it is ideal to do this at the end of the day. So what you do, and you can start short, you can start five minutes, work up to ten and go to up to thirty minutes.
10:15.06
Karen Seinor
um I think that's kind of the sweet spot somewhere in there, 25, 30 minutes. But you follow what's right for you, obviously, but do start slowly.
10:27.62
Karen Seinor
So you sit usually in a cross-legged position, but if that's not okay for your body, then sit on a chair. That's fine too.
10:39.27
Karen Seinor
What's important is that the spine is straight. So from the pelvis upwards, the spine is straight because you're working with those chakras in the spine, basically.
10:57.18
Karen Seinor
Now, this is an act of will. So you are using your will to make this happen. And I use my imagination as well. So what I do is I use my breath.
11:12.04
Karen Seinor
to help me stay focused. And I um use my imagination. I imagine you can see behind me these sheer curtains in front of the window, blind there.
11:24.68
Karen Seinor
And you probably will remember, if you're old enough, somebody having net curtains at their window. And always think that those net curtains in the wintertime, they collect the dust. And in the spring, when the fresh breeze comes through,
11:41.13
Karen Seinor
those particles of dust get blown out. And that's basically what we do using this process because as we go about our days, our lives, we are impacted by all of the negative thought forms, the advertising, the silly words, the radical comments made on the news, somebody's off-coloured joke all sorts of things, even our own negative thoughts.
12:14.94
Karen Seinor
So all of those things act like sticky notes sticking onto our body. And on an energetic level, that's what's happening. We're collecting all this muck and it becomes eventually like an armour around us, around our core.
12:32.17
Karen Seinor
And we want to actually get rid of, I'll just stay with that analogy of the um dusty curtains, if that's okay with you. and because I have had some dusty curtains in my life, maybe you have too.
12:44.12
Karen Seinor
and What we want to do is we want to clear out of our energy bodies, out of our subtle energy, that sticky dust that we've collected.
12:59.53
Karen Seinor
And so using the will, using the imagination and the breath, I imagine... bringing, as I breathe in a golden light in the front of my body, into the physical body, and then on the exhalation, I imagine I'm breathing out through my back.
13:27.42
Karen Seinor
So I'm breathing in that beautiful, clear, golden light. It collects all the dust in the curtain, and on the exhalation, it takes that dust out the back. So what we're doing using the conscious will, the breath, and our imagination, we're bringing in this beautiful golden high vibe energy and we're using it to collect all that negativity, all that junkola, and send it out through the back. Now you might like to imagine it going out the back like a dark oily smoke or just like dust from the curtain.
14:04.51
Karen Seinor
And as you do this over a period of time, even in your initial sitting, you'll find that, you know, you really have to pay attention and concentrate to do this.
14:18.44
Karen Seinor
But as you do, the longer that you do it for, you may find, and this will happen more as you continue with the practice, as time rolls on in each sitting, you'll get a sense of lightness.
14:37.40
Karen Seinor
Now you think about those dirty curtains that have been hanging up all winter.
14:44.89
Karen Seinor
At first there's a lot of dust in there, isn't there? And so at first it takes a bit to get to notice the difference. So it's that regularity and doing it for a period of like regularly all the time.
14:59.37
Karen Seinor
And you'll get to a point where eventually you're only dealing, eventually you'll get to a point where you're only dealing with the most recent negativity and you start to get brighter and shinier and you feel lighter it is a really amazing process it's a beautiful process to practice so what have I talked about I've talked about you being your own guru not giving your power away to someone else and
15:32.09
Karen Seinor
Still learning, gathering tools and information that you can use, sitting into a state of stillness so that information from your own higher self, your spirit guides or source itself can drop in to this beautiful space, sacred space that you've created through the practice of sitting in stillness.
16:00.18
Karen Seinor
Now, I like to do that in the morning. And because the mind is empty then, it's not full of the busy day, and it's easier. And if you can get up before the day breaks, even better.
16:14.52
Karen Seinor
If that's not you and you're a midday meditator, that is fine. But that is perfect. That is a practice that's going to get you into a place where you can access that knowledge. And to make that work even better, use that golden bodies process at the end of the day so that you're clearing any negativity.
16:33.80
Karen Seinor
Those two practices used together will actually put you into a genuine space where you do become your own guru.
16:45.63
Karen Seinor
You become the source of knowledge of spiritual knowledge. knowingness. So I encourage you to test this for yourself.
16:56.13
Karen Seinor
Don't trust what I'm saying. Test it and give it a good, you know, six weeks. Monday to Friday. don't have to do it Saturdays and Sundays, but really give it a good go. And if you want to be a seven day a week, do that.
17:11.06
Karen Seinor
um But really quite fantastic. Do not give your power away to others. Your power, your knowledge, your spirituality belongs to you and it is yours to care for and to use.
17:29.16
Karen Seinor
So keep it real and I'd be interested to hear how you find this process if you actually try them out.