Soulfire Sessions: Opening Up Our Attention & Hearing the Voice of The Divine

A friend shared an idea with me and I decided to run with it. This friend has taken a ton of fantastic workshops, learning inspiring and creative practices for sharing your experience and voice in a unique way.  The workshops are focused on growing heart-centered businesses. After all, in the realm of healing work, teaching yoga, and  personal transformation, there's a balance to be struck between marketing your business and maintaining a high level of integrity and openness. This is the first year of running my own business and I'm still learning about striking that balance. Serving others with integrity and openness is extremely important to me.

Her brilliant idea: tap into the vast network of amazing teachers and thought leaders that I've come to know and love through my 9+ years working with the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health and my many years of walking the path of wellness and spiritual exploration. Interview them on the topic of living healthy, fulfilling, soul-guided lives. Ask them about their current work in the world. Bask in the glow of their recent insights about life, love, health, prosperity and connecting with God/The Divine/Great Spirit/a Power Greater than Ourselves.

Juicy? I'd say so! I love hearing and sharing different perspectives on health, well-being, living fulfilling, soul-guided lives and connecting with The Divine and I love the idea of making it a part of what I offer. So... the spark was ignited and Soulfire Sessions was born. I'll post a Soulfire Session every other month.

Big thanks to my smart and savvy friend, who is worth checking out: Erin Burch, The Body Whisperer. She's a gifted and talented body worker/physical therapist/healer who recently relocated to the Bay Area. Her FB page: Limitless Body

My first Soulfire Session features a conversation with Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz, Medical Intuitive and author of several books including All Is Well - Heal Your Body with Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition; The Intuitive Advisor; The New Feminine Brain; and Awakening Intuition.

We covered a range of topics including intuition, our ten (yes, ten!) senses, the Talmud, looking for the meaning behind our illnesses and injuries, and Lady Gaga. In her own unique fashion, Mona Lisa took me down multiple avenues but always managed to guide the conversation back to Main Street where she backed-up her ideas with science and her own encounters with illness, injuries and healing…all the while infusing her discourse with some wicked good humor and the wisdom of popular music lyrics. 

In fact, she covered so much ground, I’m going to break it up into two parts.

Part I:

On Intuition, The Ten Senses, Dreams and Accessing the Divine…..

“People think intuition is something they learn on their own terms, they get some Tarot cards or astrology….rather, it’s something embedded between multiple avenues…resources…daily. You have to prime the attention circuits in your brain to be able to use every facet of your life to get to the ultimate wisdom. 

In the brain, when you look at the brain, there are five senses, five basic, primary senses. There’s vision, hearing, body sense/feel, smell and taste. There are five parallel senses of intuition:  vision = clairvoyance, hearing=clairaudiance; body sense= clairsentience and also clairsmell and clairtaste.  Some people have a revelatory spiritual experience and they smell roses when they touch you or they taste lemons. The point of the matter is that all five of our earth-bound senses have five spiritual senses/intuitive senses. So really, we don’t have a sixth sense. We have ten. Whenever I teach intuition, I tell people “if anyone tells you to get in touch with your sixth sense, go up to them and kick them in the knee.”  (laughter). I use humor a lot when I teach. 

The reason why [I challenge the idea of a sixth sense] is because it’s not anatomically correct and it doesn’t facilitate the user —you —in learning how to access intuition as an avenue to the Divine. There are also dreams…people think dreams occur only at night and that’s not true. If you look at the ancient Aborigines, or the modern-day Aborigines, and scientists, teach you that the brain when it’s asleep, in dreams, fires in the same patterns as it does when you’re awake. Therefore, dream reality is the same as waking reality.

Back to the brain and the senses:  once you get a sense, whether it’s earthbound or an intuitive sense, it literally doesn’t come to your consciousness until you attend to it. There’s a network in the brain for attention that’s connected to healing. The point is, you can hear things, see things, taste things, smell things, feel things, have clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairsmell, clairtaste, and dream, symbols when you’re asleep and when you’re awake, but they don’t mean didly-squat unless you give attention to them. Pay attention. 

There’s focused attention, there’s sustained attention, there’s distributed attention, and there’s freedom from distractibility. We all have to be able to focus on our daily life, but have distributed attention toward intuition imbedded in it…the Divine imagery embedded in it. So, I can focus on my schedule, call a friend and have them get angry at me because I called them to sing Happy Birthday and they didn’t want to hear it, and have distributed attention, still do my spiritual reading, and hear that it says, “Do not call a person in their time of wrath”  so I don’t call my friend back right away and give him a hard time about hanging up on me.  As a result, I can then hear the voice of the Divine.

But if you are so focused, and have focused attention to your daily schedule, you will not have distributed attention to those ten senses in your life, five of which are to the Divine”   [End of Part I]

An interesting perspective on opening up our attention to receive guidance from ALL of our senses and to hear the voice of the Divine. I love those times when I hear something or read something and  I feel a pull inside of me that tells me to pay attention. It never fails that it was just what I needed in that moment to move me along my path.  How wonderful and comforting to know that Divine Spirit is attending to us and communicating with us in such a specific, helpful way.  

How about you?  Have you experienced those moments of paying attention to a "message" and discovering it was incredibly timely and helpful?  Would you like to explore the realm of Spirit, healing and guidance?  Send me an email and we can explore the possibilities, which could include a Shamanic Healing session.  

Thank you, Mona Lisa. More to come in May 2015!  

Mona Lisa is completely worth experiencing in person! She teaches in Maine and nationwide and can be found on Facebook and Twitter. Her upcoming online course, The Pathways to Medical Intuition, starts Jan. 25^th. Check her out at www.monalisamd.com