Live the Full Spectrum of Human Experience

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Hello, everybody! Time for another Expanding on Expansive weekly tips and teachings, where I go deeper into one of the posts that I posted this week, or a theme within a few posts, and I give you a tip or practice or dive deeper into the teaching behind. And so I want to pick two posts that showed up this week, and I want to tell you two stories that illustrate them. And so the focus of the topic today is living the full spectrum of human experience. Living the full spectrum of human experience.

And so the post that I posted today, I posted expansive practice for you: “Learn to live in greater spiritual-material balance.” And on Tuesday, I posted, “Both nature and humanity are out of spiritual-material balance.” And so again, the nature of reality is spiritual-material unity. When you experience inner peace, you are the body that is experiencing– the matter that’s experiencing it– and that is affecting everything you do. And likewise, when you imbue something that you are doing with inner peace, then it begins to show and express inner peace in the world. And humanity is out of balance. We are not experiencing the full spectrum of human capacity.

And as a result, we’re putting nature out of balance. And so, you know, when I lived in Paris, I mean, it’s a feast for the senses, but without needing to be super spiritual in a conscious way, they are living in greater spiritual-material unity in many of their craftsmanship. So we all travel to Paris and we go, “Oh, Paris is so beautiful. The way they lay out the fruit in the daily market in the street or the architecture or the fashion or the baking or anything, you know, the art, whatever we see.” We travel there because there there is spiritual-material unity in craftsmanship. They take craftsmanship as a sacred act.

And so when they bake bread, they do it to the fullest of human capacity. They’re imbuing it with qualities. Even if they’re not sitting in a retreat center and saying, I’m going to be peaceful, or I’m going to be delightful. They bake the bread with these qualities. So when you taste it, you taste these qualities. And so it is for everything in Paris. That’s why we love going there.

You know how people cook food? We say, “he cooks with love,” or “she cooks with love”? Well, where is that love ingredient? It is poured into the dish as they’re cooking. And so when you eat something and you go, “this was cooked with love,” it is because you are ingesting, you know, materially, physically, but also spiritually, emotionally the love with which it was cooked.

So that is how you bring the two together. Now, when I had my spiritual awakening, probably 16 years ago or so, in Findhorn, which is a spiritual community in Northern Scotland. It’s an education center and an eco-village. And I had a two-week workshop with one of the original co-founders. It was called “Falling in Love with God.” And that’s where I had my spiritual awakening.

When I went back home, and I was living at the time in Israel. When I went back home, for a few weeks, I was walking around saying, “Oh my God, we’re all living only half the human experience.” You know, the houses in my neighborhood, the interactions people had, the way the streets looked, the news, everything I did, I could viscerally feel that half the human experience– and I’m not measuring, it’s symbolically– but half of human experience was non-existent. And I thought, “Oh my God, we can tap into so much more.”

And that was part of my awakening also, right? And so yesterday, it was my birthday. And so what I decided to do, it was a very simple calm day with a lot of ease. And what I decided is at every moment, as often as I can throughout the day, that’s my gift. That’s what I want to do for the day. I want to be present to the full capacity of human experience: to the spiritual and to the material. When I prepared food for lunch, when I went to the beach and stood on the cliff, and looked at the powerful, you know, high waves that came on at sunset in Northern California, I went out and picked maple leaves. It’s autumn. So in different colors and did a living Mandela of leaves on my deck for all the years I’ve lived in a few to come… Whatever I did, I was present and noticing this altered reality that exists and was tapping into it at that moment.

And so what happened in my birthday yesterday is that I decided to live with intention and to have this constant awareness of the spiritual reality and the material expression of it. And that’s what you experience when you go to Paris. That’s what you experience when you go on the retreat, you go to a retreat center, right? And everything is so lovely. So beautiful. There’s a water fountain that trickles water and it’s so peaceful. And there’s a bench there. And you can sit and hear some peacefulness, and beauty of a tree, or you could hear a bird, right? Or the food is presented so beautifully, and it’s so delicious. So nourishing to your body and your soul. And you just wish that all your life was like this, but it’s just a retreat center for three days and then you have to go home to half the human experience that we usually live.

The reason the retreat center is so amazing, and so nourishing, and so fulfilling is that they imbue their design and their structure and their schedule with spiritual qualities. They say, “I want to have– let’s have spaciousness.” So they design a garden that has spaciousness. Or, “let’s have a peaceful corner, let’s have privacy.” So privacy becomes the quality or peacefulness. And so they create with a lot of sacredness, just like the artisans, the craftsmanship in Paris, they design a bench for you to have a peaceful experience when you sit there. So you just walk into a field of peacefulness because someone created it for you.

And when the food is nourishing to your body and soul, it’s because it’s created that way. It’s designed– whatever the ingredients are, that vitality, the vibrancy of the food and the calming effect of it, the nourishing effect of it, whatever they design, you just walk into that field and you have the nourishment and you have a peacefulness, and you have grace, and you have beauty in the retreat center.

And so when I say that we’re out of balance it’s because we don’t live with this kind of intention on a daily basis. So the next day, today, tomorrow, live with intention around your work or your self-expression. Decide what quality you want to bring in to a meeting, to a product you’re developing, to a service that you’re offering, and bring that quality. Because when you create that field, just like in the retreat center, whoever walks into that field, the user of your product, the user of your service, the person you’re interacting with, they’re going to walk into the field that you’ve created, just like when you go to the peacefulness corner in a retreat and you just walk into a field of peacefulness.

We have the capacity to live in those two worlds. We have the capacity to move from the spiritual to the material, to imagine, to create, to envision, to manifest.

So it’s not just for traveling to Paris, or it’s not just when going into a retreat center, because those feel like luxurious endeavors where it’s normal that but it should be so amazing. We’re paying for it.

No, bring it into your life. Make what I did yesterday for my birthday. Like, that’s my commitment. How can I, every day, live in this mindfulness, in this awareness of spiritual material-unity, be connected to this altered, expansive state standing and looking at the waves and taking in not just the visual, but the power of the waves? So then I took in power. I was filled with power because the ocean was a field of power, a field of force, a field of beauty, a field of light. There’s so many qualities in the ocean. It was cleansing very, very cleansing. My mind was cleared up so much because it was just taking in the waves. So we can do it in everything that we do throughout our day.

And so that’s why I say, you know, tap into and live the full spectrum of human experience, both the spiritual and the material. Don’t wait until COVID is over and you can go to Paris or the retreat center, which you can’t go to now. Create the sacredness, the sacredness in the material, and the sacredness and the spiritual right now, for yourself, in your work, in the coming holidays, in your relationships, in everything that you experience.

So I leave you with that and I wish you the awareness of the full spectrum of human experience today, tomorrow, throughout the week, the weekend, and until we meet again next week for another expanding on expansive daily tips and weekly tips and teachings.

I send you blessings.