The Genesis story explains the birth of your human ego. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had all their needs met and lived in paradise while being intimately connected to God.  There was only one rule:  Don’t eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words, “If you want to remain in blissful ignorance, don’t do it.”

You know the rest of the story. They took the infamous bite ingesting the knowledge of good and evil, also called duality.  Immediately, they fell from Grace feeling separate and alienated from God.  They felt ashamed, so what did they do? They covered themselves with fig leaves. Symbolically, the fig leaves represent the ego, whose job is to cover and hide our shame of feeling  “less than how God and others want us to be.”

This is the birth of the human ego, from one spiritual perspective. The rest of the Bible, in one way or another, is the human quest to find our way back to God and the Promised Land.  We all seek to reunite with our Source of origin while battling the forces of the ego, or as it is known in spiritual terms, Satan or sin.

Christianity refers to the Genesis story as the fall from Grace. It views the Garden of Eden as an actual physical place and the beginning of all of man’s troubles. Adam and Eve are believed to be actual people who made a seriously bad decision that changes the course of history for all mankind.

Other interpretations, including mine, view the fall as rich spiritual symbolism. It was a necessary and expected part of humanity’s evolution. One such school of religious thought that  holds this view and has been around longer than Christianity is called Jewish Kabala.

Eden is the realm of the spirit and must be left in order to become an individual soul.  The time spent on Earth as a human is the beginning of a process of returning to God. In this spiritual or symbolic version of the fall, disobeying God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents a human being first exercising free will and the birth of the ego. In psychological terms, we might call this the terrible two’s of humanity. In spiritual terms, it is moment when humans evolved from being animals to possessing a soul capable of choosing right from wrong and good from evil.  The ego then becomes a spiritual necessity to having a relationship with God.

The two drives of the separate “I” are survival and wholeness. The drive to survive through protecting and getting behaviors, unfortunately, keep us separate from the experience of being connected to the sacred. An acronym for an ego rooted in fear is Edging God Out.
At a certain point in our individual development, we begin to realize that our strategies for success are not working to bring us the feeling of happiness and wholeness that we imagined.  What do we do?  Try harder to either slowly and gradually or immediately and boldly, find a way to surrender. If you have to choose, choose wholeness over outward success.  When you begin to let go of your control strategies, what often happens is a flood of un-integrated feelings rise to the surface. This doesn’t feel good. You feel out of control. This is an important choice point. Your ego will have you feel like retreating back to the familiar control strategies that seemed to work at one time. In your heart, you know these strategies will also close you off from the spiritual connection that the deepest part of you seeks. What do you do? What will you do?

I recommend that you find a group or teacher that will support you in staying in the fire of transformation. It’s uncomfortably hot, yet if you remain, what you gain is a transformation of your ego being rooted in fear and survival to a sense of  “I” grounded in Spirit, Essence or God. At this point the ego’s acronym becomes Expressing God/Grace/Gifts Outrageously.

So, are you … Edging God Out, or, Expressing God Outrageously?

In Wholeness,

Michael

I begin my morning routine,  for the third day in a row,  with an intention of generating 20 deliberate yawns prior to meditation.  If this sounds a little too weird, you gotta read the previous blog.  Anyway, after about the 6th big,  wide mouthed, close eyed, deeply relaxing and energizing yawn, the yawns just kind of took over and I found myself  having one yawn after another, almost uncontrollably. Rather than pausing between yawns like I had intended, the yawns just wanted to keep on coming!

I could have stopped at anytime, (so I say) yet why?  It was as if I was being yawned for about ten minutes. I then entered one of the deepest states of meditation that I’ve touched in a while.

So, I’m sticking with this conscious yawning practice. I’m now choosing to take-allow a yawn whenever I remember. I’ve been preaching the benefits of remembering to regularly take deep, full belly breaths. This is still a good idea, yet DELIBERATE YAWNING trumps. Crazy as it might sound, maybe you’ll join me in deliberately yawning more frequently. Maybe I’ll change the ending of my voice mail greeting to: “I invite you to take a deep, full, conscious yawn.”

12 Essential Reasons To Yawn

1. Stimulates alertness and concentration
2. Optimizes brain activity and metabolism
3. Improves cognitive function
4. Increases memory recall
5. Enhance consciousness and introspection
6. lowers stress
7. Relaxes every part of your body
8. Improve voluntary muscle control
9. Enhances athletic skills
10. Fine-tunes your sense of time
11. Increases empathy and social awareness
12. Enhances pleasure and sensitivity

This list is from the book: How God Changes Your Brain by Andrew Newberg, M.D.

Go ahead….You know you want to….have a few BIG YAWNS!

In Wholeness,

Michael

I usually begin my mornings with a few minutes of conscious breathing and meditation. On  this beautiful morning I tried something a little different, I replaced my usual conscious breathing routine with a series of 20 conscious YAWNS. That’s right, I intentionally generated 20 big,  wide mouthed, close eyed, deeply relaxing and cellular renewing yawns over about a six minute period. The procedure went  like this: I sit quietly while waiting for my body to signal that it wants to take breath, then the biggest yawn that I can muster, sitting quietly again waiting for the next felt sense from my body and repeat. Yes I know, sounds a bit weird. So go ahead and  laugh if you want (laughter is great for the mind -body connection as well, yet according to the latest  neuroscience research, not as beneficial a good yawn).

As many of you know, one of my core passions is studying and researching transformation as well as ways of utilizing our inner resources to influence our moods or most desired  of states of being.  I often use myself as a laboratory. This was the case this morning, the yawning lab.  During those six minutes I easily slipped in to my own  favorite state of being of what I call “peaceful-aliveness”.

Several recent brain scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating deep relaxation, introspection, alertness, social awareness and creating feelings of empathy. One of those areas is the precuneus, a tiny structure hidden within the parietal lobe. This area of the brain appears to play a central role in consciousness, self reflection and memory retrieval. The precuneus  is also stimulated by deep conscious and yogic breathing.

As a practitioner and teacher of conscious breath work of many years, I can say that nothing simulates a more beneficial breath than a nice big yawn.

“Yawning will relax you and bring you into a state of alertness faster than any other meditation technique.” Neuroscientist author or of five books including his newest, How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg.

Stay tuned for more research and tips on the power of….you guest it, yawning.

Hope this made you yawn!

In Wholeness,

Michael

He is being true to his nature. He is obsessed with chasing the mouse, or more accurately chasing after the curs0r on the computer screen. He is black and beautiful, with one white whisker. Let me introduce you to PacObama, our new kitty.

The animal rescue unit got wind of  a litter of black kittens that might be sacrificed in some kind of  weird ritual or something, that has to do with black cats. Anyway, thankfully, they arrived in time to save the litter of three  adorable little black kittens.

They were all given Spanish  names.  One was named Paco. This all happened to take  place on the historic Inauguration of our 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Imagine….Your eyes and ears  are glued to the screen in front of you displaying  Barack Obama delivering his  Inaugural  speech, while little Paco is wildly competing for your loving attention. Where does your attention go?

Apparently, the blurt just kind off rolled out…Paco, Paaaco, Paco…OBAMA!  Can’t you just  hear it?

PacObama!

A client of Leslie, and founder of  Small Dog Rescue brought Paco’s picture in to the  Body Awareness studio, showed it to Leslie and told her the story.  That was it!

Leslie and I have never  had a black cat, never thought of a black cat as ever being a part of our home -not going to happen. People said that too, about Americans electing a black president; yes?

We now feel proud that our country is being governed by our first African American President,  Barack Obama…… while our lives are also being enriched and  governed by our first black Kitty-PacObama.

xsdrvtyuuu88832!

Oops, there he goes again chasing the cursor, sorry!

In Wholeness,

Michael  & PacObama

I first heard about the Mythic Journeys project in December of 2005 at Deepak Chopra’s Alliance For A New Humanity Conference in Puerto Rico. The idea was in first trimester, just beginning to show the first signs of life.  I was invited to the conference as a presenter to lead the Breath of Life Dolphin Meditation. I felt so honored to be invited.

I facilitated, with Leslie’s assistance, the Dolphin Meditation twice to some large groups. I also had the opportunity to co-lead another guided meditation I created, the Deep Listening Meditation, on the beach at sunrise with Deepak Chopra. The whole experience was one of the highlights of my life.

I’m happy to report that the Mythic Journey project led by Michael Karlin and created by a 60-member team recently gave birth to a beautiful, inspiring and relevant 2-hour documentary. Leslie and I felt particularly blessed to see this film at its opening last night.

The Mythic Journey’s message that I believe is so important for you, I and the world to hear is that if we, as a human family don’t have a collective Story of Oneness to live up to, we die.  Even if we avoid completely destroying one another and our physical world, our souls will lack the richness of meaning. Throughout history, the great myths have brought people together for a conman good and created the greatest civilizations. We need a myth today more than ever to point us to the truth.

You may be asking, “What is a myth, anyway?” Isn’t it something that is not true? Shouldn’t rational folks simply ignore them because the facts don’t support the story? One of the great teachings in this documentary is that facts don’t always reveal the truth and the deepest truths of our lives are not always supported by facts. Think about this.

The work of Joseph Campbell is one of my greatest influences and possibly the most important spiritual teacher of my life. Before being introduced to Campbell’s work I considered myself a recovering Christian and was mostly agnostic in my beliefs. When I first watched Campbell’s PBS series with Bill Moyers, the gate opened.

Moyers asked Campbell to tell us about God, since he had most likely researched the subject more than anyone. Campbell’s response transformed me. He humbly said, “We first have to remember that what we refer to as “god” is simply a word. This word has many different names within many different cultures. By whatever name, it references something that we deeply feel to be true, yet, it is beyond concept and therefore, beyond our ability to speak about it directly. What we wind up speaking about and even creating wars over, are Masks of God.

Our greatest religious figures had direct realizations of the divine. By what method did they attempt to share the truths they discovered? In the only way that could approximate their direct experience, they taught through stories and parables or myths.

The trouble is people begin worshiping the messenger rather than taking in the message or accusing the messenger of being some kind of impostor spreading lies and myths. Campbell said that we refer to as “god” is in essence true but beyond concept and will always remain a mystery. If we can allow the myths to do their archetypal work within us they can pitch us out of our limited selves to have our own direct knowing of this divine mystery. The ego’s need for some illusion of certainty demands an explanation and wants to find some rational understanding of this mystery. Sadly, this often results in religious dogma.  Campbell cautioned us not to confuse the connotation with the denotation.  This one distinction helps me to read the Holy Bible with reverence.

The life and teachings of Joseph Campbell are the inspiration for the Mythic Journeys documentary. Shortly before his death, Campbell said that our greatest task, the task that would determine humanities evolution or dissolution is to discover or create a new story, a myth with which the whole world can begin to align, and a story of unity.

I feel my heart beating faster and tears beginning to form in my eyes as I reflect on these ideas and the birth of a great and timely film. Are these my tears or the tears of unity longing to emerge from our collective heart? I do not know, yet they flow.

Is this what the film refers to as a myth leading me to a deeper truth?

Michael

You can find out more about the film at: www.mythicimagination.org