spirituality

Who Is Your Spiritual Authority?

August 27, 2014 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

milky way — Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Going through life we learn from parents, teachers, lecturers, educators, coaches, trainers, workshop leaders, religious leaders, partners, and children. Spiritual seekers often learn from gurus. But who is your spiritual authority? Who tells you what’s right and what’s wrong? What to believe and from whom? When to apply what you have learnt and why?

The good, the bad and the useless

As a child, we learn and believe our parents. As pupils, we learn from our teachers. Sadly, not all the teaching we receive is beneficial. When the teaching is received in the formative years of a child, it is often taken on before they gain the ability to decipher between good and bad. As we grow older, we hopefully become more and more equipped to differentiate between what of the learning and beliefs we want to believe and what we need to throw overboard.

Experience and perception

If you were to ask me what I believe after all that I’ve been through, I wouldn’t be able to give you a simple answer. The answer is continuously changing and adapting to the current experience. The personal experience comes from within my body and my perspective of the current reality based on my perception, which is based on my learning and experiences in the past.

What have you been encouraged to believe?

Luckily I haven’t been brought up with strong religious dogma. My parents were liberal in their religious thinking and early on my dad encouraged me to read spiritual books about the kabala, numerology, meditation, hypnosis and various eastern religions. With any of those he used to answer my question “Do you believe this?” with his permissive statement: “I see this as a possibility, an option of many.”

Admiration of teachers

Encouraged to read and learn more I followed the breadcrumbs from one book to the next, picking and choosing what resonated with me. I have fallen into the trap of admiration of teachers and gurus, believing their version of the story to be the one. And I have been disillusioned many times and thrown my admirations over board.

Claim your spiritual authority

Just the other day, a new friend of mine said something about ‘claiming spiritual authority’ and I suddenly felt alert. When speaking more about the topic, she explained that in relating teachings to personal experience and picking and choosing what related to the self I suddenly felt my process and experience to be understood. She spoke more about the process of owning your own spiritual authority. This concept makes sense to me and it ties in with owning our body, mind, emotions and our spirit. I like it.

The only answer to the question above is: “I am!”

5 Tips for Christmas – How To Survive The Celebrations

December 22, 2013 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

The fact that Christmas originally really had nothing to do with family, love and being together in harmony might shock you. In fact, I was quite surprised to read that it apparently originated in what the Roman pagans first introduced as a weeklong period of lawlessness, the holiday of Saturnalia. In the week from 17 until 25 December, Roman courts were closed and no one could be punished for injuring people or damaging property. Imagine that!

According to the ancient Greek writer, poet and historian Lucian the festival included intoxication, going from house to house singing naked, sexual frivolities and even human sacrifice. He also mentioned the consummation of human-shaped biscuits.

Nowadays, most people in the Western world will deal with eating and drinking too much, keeping their family tradition-loving and harmonious and unpacking presents bought in the pre-Christmas frenzy but luckily we do not have to fear being sacrificed. In the light of today’s challenges, let’s have a look at how to ‘survive’ Christmas:

Tip 1: When Christmas is ‘just too much’

Think about what it is that you need and what you do not want to be a part of. Be honest and communicate it clearly. If, for example, you do not want to take part in the Christmas present frenzy say so, preferably ahead of time. Suggest an alternative like donating money to a charity.

Tip 2: When you are alone

If you are alone and prefer not to be: check out the local community and whether they offer something that might interest you. Talk to friends and mention you’re feeling alone. Ask to be invited or invite some friends to your house. There are other people who are alone and do not want to be, like ex-pats or people in homes. Why not invite them or volunteer somewhere?
If you are alone and prefer it that way: make sure to plan something that you like. Maybe it is watching a movie, reading a book or… (Fill in your own activity).

Tip 3: When you just want to get away from it all

Why not plan a holiday? Or go away for the day? Find an activity that you like and that is open on Christmas, for example, skiing. If you stay at a hotel you will surely be around people but you can choose whether you want to communicate or stay to yourself.

Tip 4: It’s a lot of work

Delegate. Make a list of all the things that need to be done and ask for help. Even though it might have been tradition that you cook the roast, serve the sumptuous meal and clean up after everyone we do live in the 21^st century and people do help each other. Traditions can evolve.

Tip 5: I miss them…

Given all the (pretend?) happiness and joyfulness people who are no longer with us, whether they are dead or have left, can be missed more strongly. Remember that you are allowed to feel sad but also know when you have to pull yourself out of feeling miserable. Preplan what you can do, if you need to cheer yourself up.

Self Knowledge – Differentiating Intuition From Conditioning

August 10, 2011 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Part of anyone’s personal development will be getting to know yourself and learning to tap into your intuition. At the beginning of that endeavor this can be a not so easy challenge to sort out “what really is intuition and what is all the other ‘crap'”?

Conditioning

To shed a bit more light on what’s driving you we need to understand conditioning. The way you are today, the way you think and behave is the result of your conditioning, your upbringing and your education. The sentences you heard from your parents, all well-meant and intended, will have left a mark on your unconscious mind. Some of those statements have become guiding principles, like the policies of a company that are stored somewhere in the archive cupboard.

Years later, in the present time, you are still running your ship with guiding principles and policies that might have been useful at an earlier time, but are outdated now. The crux of the situation is that they don’t update themselves, they quietly influence your everyday thinking, emoting and behaving. It’s time to clear out that archive cupboard and throw out those not really useful beliefs!

How to find limiting beliefs or guiding principles?

Start by listening to your mind. For example, you might be standing in the kitchen, preparing breakfast, intuitively reaching for the passion fruit yoghurt when a voice says: ‘You should first use up the blueberry yoghurt or it goes off.’ Alarm bells! ‘Should’ is always a good indication that you’ve just uncovered some old belief or guiding principle that was created by someone else. In the example it might be something like ‘You shouldn’t waste food’ or ‘You must always eat up what’s on your plate’ (later ‘in your fridge’). Does this make sense?

Even though those principles may not be ‘wrong’ as such, it is questionable if you are in the process of honing your intuition. For whatever reason, you were reaching for the passion fruit yoghurt. Often there is no clear logical explanation for intuition so don’t bother searching for one. It just is.

Choice point

When you are at the point where you notice what I’ve just explained in the example above, you are now at the point of being able to make your choice. This is the process of getting to know yourself and finding your voice of intuition.

If you find yourself overthinking a topic, there is a good chance that intuition has already been surpassed a while ago. Intuition usually is like a subtle voice, sense, or feeling that comes immediately when you do something. Also if you find yourself tossing and turning between two options that sound equally good and you find it hard to make a decision, just step back for a moment and when you come back to it, go with your gut instinct – that’s practising following your intuition.

What If… today was your last day?

August 24, 2009 By Nathalie Himmelrich 1 Comment

There has been a song on the radio called ‘If today was your last day’ sung by Nickelback which makes me really think: What if today was my last day?

There have been a few deaths of people I knew, friends of people I know… and as sad as it might be it allows serves me as a reminder to live every moment fully.

[Edit January 2021: 12 years later and I would add the following: I have lived through the death of my daughter (2011) and my mother (2012). Remembering that every day is a gift is a daily practice especially in the light of those people who do not have that possibility.]

What would you do, if today was your last day?

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Love is Everything

July 23, 2009 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Love is everything. Acceptance is a big part of love. Accepting yourself and accepting others is a huge step in loving yourself, and loving others. Each of us is here for a reason. That is why people think and act so differently as there are more reasons for being here than there are people.

Try and accept what people do and say without any form of judgment. Rather ask yourself what lesson you might learn from them in what they are doing or saying. Just this step alone will bring so much peace into your life. It will also bring acceptance of you, and respect for you.

Love is everything. It is everywhere. Be still and you will always find it and it will envelop you.

Des Lowe

Awakening

July 16, 2009 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. For most people, it is not an event but a process they undergo. Even those rare being who experience a sudden, dramatic and seemingly irreversible awakening will still go through a process in which the new state of consciousness gradually flows into and transforms everything they do and so becomes integrated into their lives.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life. Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness. Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits toward it. There isn’t a tidy sequence of logical steps that leads toward it, although the mind would love that. You don’t have to become worthy first. I may come to the sinner before it comes to the saint.

There is nothing you can DO about awakening. Whatever you do will be the ego trying to add awakening or enlightenment to itself as a prized possession and thereby making itself more important and bigger.

(Inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s book ‘A New Earth’)