Signposts of the Spiritual Journey

Welcome to Healing From Within with your host Sheryl Glick RMT Reiki Master Energy Teacher Medium and author of a trilogy the newest addition A New Life Awaits: Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening which shares stories and messages from Spirit that show us our greatest challenges are not merely economic political or societal but simply a great disconnect from our spiritual values and the inner soul essence that connects us to Higher Source. We are delighted to welcome John Siddique, author of Signposts of the Spiritual Journey, a true roadmap for those embarking on an inner journey to heal life and live authentically.

We thank John for joining us on Healing From Within to share his own view of the signposts as well as the obstacles that may be encountered on perhaps the greatest journey of all that of going within and knowing the energy of eternal oneness and life in many dimensions.

As listeners of Healing From Within are well aware Sheryl and her guests share intimate insightful stories that show us how the duality of life actually is necessary to remember we are souls having a physical life so we may refine our thoughts and actions and grow to higher levels of awareness and consciousness as we learn that life is not random We are not alone and all experiences are just right neither good nor bad but necessary to raise our vibration to higher planes of existence and personal growth.

In today’s episode of Healing From Within John Siddique one of the most popular teachers on the meditation app Insight Timer who has been featured in Time Magazine The Guardian and CNN and the BBC. As well as having a Talk and Workshop for the Theosophical Society of America. He will discuss the five tools and 3 practices to cut through the noise and find a connection in meditation to higher source.

When John is asked about his childhood days and to remember a person, place, or event that might have signaled to him about the lifestyle he might embark on as an adult, he immediately remembers when he was 6 years old, and swimming under the water, free from his familial impressions and knowing the light within him or his soul was going to be the force that created the best life for him. In time, he came to accept that beyond beliefs there is a sense of knowing the universal source, creation, and the beauty of interconnectedness of life. And in his book, Signposts of the Spiritual Journey, he shares ways that meditation and other tools for knowing oneself lead to an awakening that is endless, boundless, soulful, as well as joyful.

John tells us about the arising of questions and the urge to honestly meet yourself as he decided it was the only way to begin an inner decision to move forward.

At this point, you might find yourself questioning what is going on in the world around you, or you may be questioning the purpose of your own life. Anyone who dares to reflect on life and its meaning, finds that things tend to boil down to three primary questions. I’ll just place the three questions here without commentary because you know them already, and in essence, they are why you are here. You have always known these questions.

• Who am I?
• What am I here for?
• Is there a way to end suffering?

Seven other secondary questions feature prominently throughout the journey, which you will similarly find you already know: Who? What? Why, Where? When? What if? How?

Learning to turn toward awareness You can notice, or even encourage a shift within yourself toward awareness by the way you frame your questions as you meet daily life situations. For example, if we allow a movement from asking questions such as “Why is this person doing this to me?” or “Why is (insert personal difficult situation) always happening to me?” and instead try to drop taking the situation personally, and allow appreciation of any other person involved, then we’re not coming from the place of it being a problem.

Then we can ask things such as:

• How can I bring awareness to what is going on?
• What if I choose to respond rather than react?
• What really would improve the world?
• How do I step out of my way to transcend this situation?

All of our ten initial questions, if asked with this openness, will take you toward a better way of meeting and experiencing your own life, and other people. We restore our humanity instantly and easily with a simple shift

John wrote “Somehow, by grace – and it is always by grace – we feel a sense that our lives are something more than what we have been told and conditioned into by the world. Something perhaps unnameable in you seems to be calling you on. Perhaps there has been something happening in your life that has brought the way things are into question. Maybe you have read a book or heard something within your religion that has penetrated somewhere deep inside you. You might have experienced a profound love or a meeting or an occurrence in nature or art. Whichever way it comes, something makes a hole in the concepts and thoughts of who we think we are.

Very often, it is suffering that punches a hole through the veil: a death, a loss, an illness, or a meeting with one’s own mortality, or maybe we just wake up one day and know that what the world offers through its appearances and our acquisitions is not enough for us. We need something real to live by, though we may not know how to do anything about these feelings.”

John tells us “Or you might be one of those people who are born with a sense of their own soul that never leaves them. Usually, people like this just don’t fit in that well with society, or they always seem to have the questions we’ve been discussing on their lips or in their bearing. If you are this type of person, you may have found your way, or you might still be seeking and reaching for a place to rest your heart. I’d say that every child feels this calling naturally, but it is more often than not quickly covered over by societal and generational conditioning as the established mechanisms of our societies work to turn us into a “someone”. We are shaped to operate as a function of the society, rather than a human being moving through life fulfilling the fundamental goal of humanity and existence. Whichever way it is for you, somewhere there is this urge. It will show itself in the drive to feel like you need to complete yourself somehow.

Sheryl says That as a sensitive child feeling great joy or sadness of those around her and not knowing at that time she was an empath and intuitive who could pick up information in so many ways She knew we were more than our physical body but did not yet believe in an afterlife as her family was a very practical methodical group of individuals. At about the age of 42 she started to question why there was something missing in her life and a pain in her heart. May mystical events started to happen and she was guided by spirit to open up her heart and mind to the real purpose of her soul life and many questions were answered and beliefs fell away and a greater sense of knowing took its place.

In her book A New Life Awaits, Sheryl writes, “In reading A New Life Awaits, I know you will discover much synchronicity with your own daily observations and find comfort in validating many of your dearest wishes to live life in an expansive and bolder approach, creating new perspectives, new thoughts, taking you in the direction that your soul and heart were born to experience. Unencumbered by the rules and limitations of societal or family systems that may have temporarily made you forget the amazing, loving, magnificent entity that you are that was born to walk in delight on our beautiful earth landscape and in spiritual light, you will find that a new life awaits you, and know you do not walk alone. As spiritual beings having a human life experience, readers will also take away with them a greater awareness of human life in these tumultuous, changing modern times as we are encouraged to develop a more heightened and astute social consciousness in order to bring about worldwide cooperation when dealing with health, educational, medical, and political concerns affecting all of life: evolution in all our communities, spiritually and physically offering much needed new ways to go about eliminating injustice, the proliferation of crime, conquering disease, reinventing social graces and finding ways to integrate higher Universal Laws for wellbeing and success into our human daily lives. If we are being watched from above by those who live in gentler conditions than here on Earth and who, with love and hope for our advancement as a human species, expect us to expand and create more loving interactions and conquer warring impulses, the choice to do this is non-negotiable.”

John shares with us that it is important to develop a clearer sense of choice in order to move from fear to love. He tells us how one begins to do that.

“Over the decades of my own practice, I have realized that there are four dimensions to our awareness that act as the truest gauge of our progress on the path.

To paraphrase them quickly they are:

1. Noticing delayed awareness.
2. Greater awareness of inner life, less interest in stories and drama.
3. Presence-based awareness.
4. Spontaneous awareness that is informed by genuine insight. Don’t worry, we’ll be exploring these in depth as we go on.

Once you are aware of these dimensions, you will find yourself more able to learn and realize things yourself. Awareness will allow you to meet your own life with increasing love, honesty, and forgiveness regarding your questions. These four aspects of awareness are the most reliable compass I have found, and with my hand on my heart, I want to tell you that I would not have survived without them, nor would I be speaking to you now through these pages had I not encountered these truths.

As you work with them, they will guide you to become more congruent with your own core of being. This process is the absolute foundation of the journey. Awareness is the very basis of who we are. Making a conscious choice about meeting your path as sincerely and as honestly as you can is essential at each stage because if we don’t, things will just rise up anyway.

Our shift to vulnerability is what brings us into awareness, and hence the opportunity to live our human situations with wisdom. We also get to access real love, presence, humor and freedom. The increase of these qualities is a very reliable gauge as we make our way.

As Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” The process we are speaking of always comes down to being more of an allowing than a making. Sheryl says that it is allowing, accepting, and surrendering to what is that one is able to truly LET GO of the reality of a three dimensional world and “be at one with their own soul energy,” which is a composite of all knowledge throughout the universe.” Awareness has to be met with an attitude of allowing because it is already who we are.” Sheryl who has always been delighted discuss anything about Carl Jung, because he was a spiritual psychologist who understood that the soul and our thoughts can create and manifest our reality and not waste too much time mulling over the mistakes, pain, and failures of our past. Those emotions are but memories, floating on the wind and have no substance in creating our moment to moment life.

John tells us about the five tools to help you in the here and now and three practices to cut through the stories of the mind and repetitive noise of life.

This is my hope for this book too. That it should meet you in this way and that you step into your journey with a taste of the sacredness within you. Then we might also have a bit of honest fun with things along the way, which is a much better way to walk together. This work is too serious to take too seriously. A lot of humor, forgiveness, and love is required. This is, perhaps, the second most important rule of the path, the first of course being: “Don’t be an asshole.”

FIVE RULES OF THE SPIRITUAL PATH (JUST FOR FUN)

1. Don’t be an asshole.
2. Love and forgive ad infinitum (including yourself).
3. Authenticity and vulnerability are your real strengths.
4. The path requires tea and biscuits and often chocolate.
5. If anyone sighs, says they love you, and comes in for a four minute hug – RUN. Only kidding, but not really

Our minds are beautiful tools to have, but they only become genuinely beneficial when met with awareness. Please understand that they are not to be silenced or got rid of. That is a huge misunderstanding that has crept into spiritual teaching over the years. Thoughts are not our enemies, but they are not awareness, and the mind is not an end in itself. More often than not, mind is a product of condition

John tells us about the Four Dimensions of Awareness. “The four dimensions of awareness are the key to the whole journey is awareness. Rather than being a process of learning something as information that we can hold onto, it is imperative to understand that we are not making an externalized attempt at trying to embody something in an accumulating or “fake it till you make it” kind of way. So many commandment-based or precept-based practices are sadly taken with the attitude of wearing their guidance as rules or laws. Naturally, we strive to be good within the rules of our religions and so on, but we will often feel that we fall short. We can quite easily end up living out an egoic and controlled/controlling version of someone who follows the rules. Yet our intuitive sense of life can get so buried that we utterly believe this striving self is who we are. This is the situation for most of us in the world today, including many people who consider themselves to be on the path. It’s not that the precepts and commandments are not trustworthy, but we have learned to wear them as masks rather than realizing and expressing their truth. Your innate human qualities, such as compassion, presence, empathy, not killing, and authenticity, are all expressions of your soul. They are not concepts or constraints. Thankfully life keeps on turning up, trying to show us the bigger picture. Over the decades of my own practice, I have realized that there are four dimensions to our awareness that act as the truest gauge of our progress on the path.”

To paraphrase them quickly they are:

1. Noticing delayed awareness.
2. Greater awareness of inner life, less interest in stories and drama.
3. Presence-based awareness.
4. Spontaneous awareness that is informed by genuine insight.

Once you are aware of these dimensions, you will find yourself more able to learn and realize things yourself. Awareness will allow you to meet your own life with increasing love, honesty, and forgiveness regarding your questions.

Yet our intuitive sense of life can get so buried that we utterly believe this striving self is who we are. This is the situation for most of us in the world today, including many people who consider themselves to be on the path. It’s not that the precepts and commandments are not trustworthy, but we have learned to wear them as masks rather than realizing and expressing their truth. Your innate human qualities, such as compassion, presence, empathy, not killing, and authenticity, are all expressions of your soul and your awareness. Awareness is the very basis of who we are. Making a conscious choice about meeting your path as sincerely and as honestly as you can is essential at each stage because if we don’t, things will just rise up anyway. If we refuse to see what arises, situations tend to end up looking like they are happening by chance and will usually create suffering. If we are not open to awareness, we will often find that the learnings and strategies we hold dearly will only work so far.

The Five Tools that John describes help you here and now. We need a few good reliable tools on our journey, so John likes to offer you a range of things that may be of service to you whether you are just starting out or a long-term practitioner. The right tool for the right job is always the best way to get things done. Many of us only had a hammer that was handed down to us while growing up, and while a hammer has its uses, it’s probably not that helpful for when we are performing heart surgery, which in many ways we are. The heart is where our soul learns greater love and compassion, and is delicate and needs constant refining of energies to improve the quality of life.

Here are the Five Tools:

1. Knowing your life is fully your life Perhaps the number one thing that will serve you best on your whole journey is to realize that your life is your life. This realization allows us to start to take 100 percent responsibility for every area of our lives: our health, relationships, work, balance, finances, self-determination, family, and so on. Every moment of your life is your life. Yet so many people think their life is somewhere else or will be some time later. “When I have twelve million dollars”, “When I get home from work”, “When I’m in the right relationship”. As you can see, all of these stem from the internalization of particular training and beliefs that we have been conditioned with. Hearing that “every moment of your life is your life” will cause some people great weariness, a feeling of “I just can’t do any more… I’m already doing so much to keep myself together”It is often less effort required around those beliefs and more space to hear your inner voice. We really can’t do more adding to ourselves, so we need to learn the difference between “doing” responsibility and “being” responsible for our lives.
2. Admitting you have a problem and that you don’t know how to work with it. The second tool is about having the guts to admit to ourselves that we have a problem. We may not know what love really is. We may be trapped in addictive or codependent relationships at home, at work, politically, in our religions and so on. We may be ignorant of what our life is for, or be feeling helpless around an addiction. We could make an endless list, but the goal here is not to point and blame but to acknowledge things so that we can heal and grow. Admittance of a problem is not a step down or a humiliation unless we’re meeting this from an egoic perspective. Much of the world is built on pretending that we don’t have problems or pasts, so nothing much ever changes. Once we honestly admit that there is a problem that we’ve been living through, the space for awareness opens a little within ourselves. When we admit we have a problem and don’t know what to do, it releases us from feeling so trapped and lost, and this creates space for us to explore the possibilities of learning, seeking and even receiving help. Admission is the beginning of becoming genuinely responsible and authentic in our lives.
3. Actively enjoying your neuroplasticity On the physical level of the body, introducing new and novel experiences can help us quickly build new pathways in the brain. Even just four days of doing things even slightly differently can encourage new neural pathways to start forming. Establishing healthy habits for yourself is rooted in working with your neuroplasticity. Things like changing up your route to work, exercise routine, walking and being in nature, yoga, meditation, running, baking. All of these, when used with awareness, can help create space for healing and newness. Your journey is not just a physical and chemical one, it is the journey of your soul, yet our bodies and brains are firmly part of the equation. I advise my students to bring physicality and fun into things and try to see their journey with a sense of adventure and curiosity. The kindness of being able to laugh at yourself is paramount. I’m particularly fond of dancing as a way to begin freeing us up.. However you choose to work with your neural pathways, getting your wiring to connect in fresh and helpful ways is deeply effective. Throughout your journey, I hope you can see that there is one underlying word that helps with everything, and that word is, of course, love. We need to allow love into our life, into our adventure in soul and awareness. The difference between, say, putting your clothes and shoes on with a bit of love and presence in the morning, or just throwing them on with your head already in the car and driving down the street before you go to work is the difference between life and death.
4. Realizing there are no magic bullets In over four decades of practice and three decades of teaching, I’ve seen too many people indulge the belief that they can beat the odds and some kind of magic will take place so that they can keep all their stuff and not really change too much while making their spiritual journey. As part of our becoming responsible for ourselves, we have to actively let go of the magic bullets idea or the wish that someone else can do things for us.
5. Allowing meditation into your life Meditation is a beautiful, natural vehicle that we can rely on for this journey. Beginning and staying true with a meditation practice that suits you and which changes as you grow is something that is available to every person. Meditation is not an add-on to our lives, it is a natural human function. It is utterly vital to understand that meditation is so valuable, it is not an end in itself. You do not meditate to become a good mediator; you meditate to become free from conditioning and falseness. Meditation opens us to the wisdom and awareness that is within ourselves and around us. Allowing meditation into your lives leads us to the place in ourselves that is the home we’ve always wanted

John tells us of the three practices he recommends.

But if this journey is real, you will likely be drawn to meet these practices in some form when ready.

1. Arya mouna – noble silence. One of the best ways to allow ourselves to be in our true awareness and inspired by our intuition is to include some periods of silence in our days and commit to this as a daily practice. I’m sure you will be aware of the practice of silence within many religions, and you probably will have also seen it used as a kind of trope where we imagine a person adopting silence to cut off from life or to hide from the world. In ancient yoga, there is a beautiful practice called arya mouna, or “keeping noble silence”. It is generally one of the first practices adopted by anyone who sincerely wants to find their way into union with their soul. You begin by allowing yourself to silence first thing in the morning for 30 minutes or so, which also means not looking at the news, phone, or putting the radio on. It doesn’t mean “sushing” everyone in your household and demanding their silence, but rather we just allow for space and quiet. The reason for this is simple, very often we just jump into talk and ideas as soon as we wake. We grab onto things like social media, emails and the news and are lost in them straight away. We give them our energy and are pulled reactively by their triggers and demands.
   
   With arya mouna, we can instead allow ourselves the space to meditate, do our ablutions and so on. For a short time, we just don’t add anything extra. This type of silence will teach us everything about ourselves. It opens up love. It will show us our fears, allow us to access deeper wisdom, and give our intuition and creativity space. It will show us where we hide, how our minds and emotions work. It also reveals the things and ideas that we cling to too tightly and so much more. As we deepen into it, it will also show us within a very short time the well of nourishment within our own being, revealing our compassion and help us better witness the wholeness of life.
2. Hand on the heart. This beautiful practice can be used everywhere and at any time, especially when you need a better sense of connection with yourself. The practice is to simply put one hand on your heart and to allow kind physical contact with yourself. It can be helpful when you are with people or in situations that tend to draw you away from your sense of being or when you are dealing with difficult things. Use it at any moment where you realize that you have to hold the line, or when you are out of sorts and need to come back to a better sense of yourself. It is a beautiful thing to use when you feel like you need some self-soothing. Try it next time you catch yourself entering into a situation that is argumentative or that has the egoic need to be righteous in it. You can use this technique as an aid within your meditation or prayer practice as a way to be grounded in the here and now a bit more when you need it. Perhaps when emotions are shifting, or when you are feeling stuck or needing to tend to yourself with kindness and compassion.
3. Contemplation of your death I wasn’t sure when to drop this one on you, as it can look terrifying, and it’s far too easy to think of this as being morbid or morose or that this is to lead you into a place of nihilism. Rather than trying to scare you, this is surprisingly one of the greatest heart-opening and restoring practices there is. We can think of it as being like a shot of double espresso to wake us up. This ancient and classic practice is not about walking around, talking about everything dying all the time and losing hope. As usual, a sense of humour is vital with ourselves here. This contemplation on our physical mortality helps you to cut to the chase. Who are you? What are you here for? What is most important for you in this moment? What matters most in this relationship? What if this is your last meeting or moment with this person? Do you want to be here in presence and love, or do you want to cling to defending false conditioning? We squander so much of our lives away lost in things that are supposed to be important but that aren’t worth a minute of your time or attention. You can turn to this contemplation whenever you feel stuck or have a question about life, work, relationships, the meaning of how you are spending your time. It can help us see how we can contribute more meaningfully to the world, such as making a little extra food when cooking and giving it to the homeless person you pass every day. Being kind to the person serving you dinner or coffee. It takes you out from the need to be right to a place of seeking to understand. It allows for space so that you can be of service and provide leadership.

John might like you to realize as he wrote, “Awakening is not an idea; it is your natural state of being. Notice I say awakening rather than being awakened. This is because awakening is not an endpoint. It is a continuity that eternally unfolds. Human beings live on three levels simultaneously, our ordinary human level, the soul level, and lit by life or God. Though we usually tend to only know that we are alive in a more surface kind of way. Meeting the path of gentle upgrade with honesty helps you to begin to see that we have to honor our human lives, and as this more authentic way begins to help you access some space, you then start to see that we also live on the level of the soul. You might also be able to see that your uniqueness expresses from a deeper spaciousness that is before the soul that we might call God.

Sheryl would like to thank John Siddique author of Signposts of the Spiritual Journey for sharing practices and ways to be aware of life in all aspects of soul mind and body and for truly learning to enjoy the spiritual path we are all part of even if we are not fully aware of it at times.

In summarizing today’s episode of Healing From Within we have expressed ways to embark on a meaningful life or transformative journey for those seeking and opening of the mind and heart to rewire old thought processes overcome their mental roadblocks and find a spiritual life of enlightenment and to live authentically rather than from a place of false identity acquired beliefs and social mores that are not in your best interests and to learn practices such as meditation and being in silence to allow yourself the space to find peace and the true nature of being.

John wrote, “Our practice of arya mouna is so wonderfully helpful with this offering. It can help you touch the truth of your physical, mental, emotional and human needs, creating space as you naturally start to see the three levels of your life. Baby step by baby step, awareness moves out of the time-lag reactive state into a more natural and responsive place of presence that will lead you onward. Step by step, your daily life becomes more incrementally authentic, beautiful and meaningful, and what is perhaps the most significant and obvious secret begins to become more apparent, that your humanity is the spiritual path itself.”

John and Sheryl would have you discover that the spiritual path is one we all walk as our souls have incarnated into a physical life to experience the emotions and feelings only possible in a human body that allow us to refine our energy and led us to love more completely as we recognize the true magnificence of our life for creating through thoughts and actions a more purposeful and united life in alignment to All that is.

I am your host of Healing From Within Sheryl Glick RMT and author of the newest book in a trilogy. A New Life Awaits and invite you to visit my website www.sherylglick.com to read about and listen to visionaries’, spiritualists, metaphysician’s, scientists medical and energy healers, psychologists, and those in the arts and music fields who seek answers to Universal questions of life and the meaning of eternal source. Shows may also be heard on www.webtalkradio.net and www.dreamvisions7radio.com

Today’s Guest

http://www.johnsiddique.com/

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