This week, a dear friend has written a blog on the Mind - Body - Spirit Connection that I want to share with you.  I have known Cheryl for at least five years, and she is a wonderful friend and an excellent psychic medium.  Honoring the connection between our mind, body and spirit, allows us to live a more balanced life, helping us feel more peace and joy each and every day.  Often making "time" to honor this connection gets lost in our busy lives - but it really does not take much "time" if we can find creative ways to take 5-10 minutes as part of our routine each day - just like showering, or brushing our teeth - it becomes a positive habit.  I hope you enjoy Cheryl's blog as much as I do, and as always, I welcome comments!  Thank you!

With Cheryl Jennings as Guest Blogger:
Taking care of YOU is necessary for spiritual development and development of your psychic, mediumship, and healing potential. How often have you told someone who looks a bit frayed at the seams, “You need to take care of yourself”? How often have you promised yourself that this year you will really learn to take better care of yourself? We have the greatest intentions in the world, but life happens. Our day gets filled to the max with children, our significant other, our job, meetings, running errands, shopping, cooking, e-mails, taking care of our pets, etc. – so much so that it often seems laughable to carve out time for meditation and the other things we must do to develop spiritually. However, we know instinctively, that neglecting our spiritual development will inevitably lead us to being less effective, healthy and happy in the long run.
I’ve come to realize that exercise and meditation are necessary for me to feel fit and happy and an effort has to be made to include each in our lives. I have struggled with fitting both consistently into my busy week. I know that every week I don’t exercise is a week my muscles lose strength and tone, making it increasingly harder to keep my weight off and my health up. Every week that I don’t carve out time for meditation, I put unnecessary stress in my life. I want to continue to feel and look wonderful as I grow older and exercise and meditation are necessary tools I need for this goal. So I’ve taught myself not to think twice, but to take action even if I have to involve pets, children, or family in my daily exercise or meditation.
Nearly everyone can manage 5 minutes of meditation per day and those 5 minutes might completely change your life. Start with something simple, like taking 5 minutes of your lunch and concentrating solely on your breath as you breathe deeply in and out. Then make a commitment to stretch the 5 minutes to 10. Then 10 to 15. Then 15 to 30.
Choose a meditation that works for you and that’s easy to do, such as, concentrating on your breath, counting backwards, repeating a mantra over and over, moving energy through your body, etc. www.psychicperspectives.net has a great free energy body guided meditation that is short. Also, be inventive about working meditation into your schedule. How about meditating in your car while parked in line to pick up your child from school or meditating during your daily walk?
To ensure that I meditated regularly, I SCHEDULED it into my life.  In the beginning I attended a circle that started with a meditation twice a week. In effect, I scheduled meditation like I scheduled all my other activities. The consistent practice eventually paid off by fueling my spiritual development, which was my goal.
If you think you’re too busy to work meditation into your life, you are wrong!  Be inventive and work it into your schedule where practical and soon you’ll find you miss not meditating if you give it up. You’ll also find that meditation spurs your psychic – spiritual development and is definitely worth the effort of fitting it into your life.

I don't know about you, but I am not perfect!  In fact, far from it.  But I like to think about what that means.  What is perfection anyway?  It is defined by our beliefs.  Your idea of perfection might be quite different from mine.  So, perfection is a cluster of your beliefs about what you and others "should be" or how your life "should be," or even your beliefs about "what your life is like" or "your car/house/kids/etc is/are like," and whether any of those things are good or bad.   These clusters of beliefs form our perspective on life - who our friends are - how we interact with them - and most importantly, how much joy we experience in our lives.  Unexamined beliefs about what we and others "should be" can keep us prisoners to our minds, because we are constantly comparing, assessing and making decisions based on these clusters of beliefs, and affirm a lonely sort of separateness from others.  We often miss new experiences, opportunities, a deeper understanding of a situation, or our role in it, when we are trapped in those habituated mind patterns caused by judgement.  We miss the moment, and miss experiencing our very beingness.   When we are in the habit of judging from a place of emotion and comparing the people and things in our lives,  we live in a constant state of anxiety, fear and general unhappiness.  We never arrive at the place we think we need to be - kind of like trying to fill a glass with holes in it - we can pour all day, but the water never stays in it very long.  The habit of judging ourselves and others unconsciously, also makes us feel separate and detached from others, by always looking for ways that differentiate us from others, as being "better than" in some way, or "not being as good as" in other ways.  These unconscious judgements often leave us feeling very emotional - either "good" because we feel "better than" or "bad" if we feel "less than."  A clear example is when we feel a sort of "thrill" about hearing how "bad" someone behaved, how we got into a certain school or program and someone else did not, or how so-and-so lost their job or had some other negative thing happen to them.   Unexamined, it somehow makes us feel "better than" since that is not happening in our lives - or we beat them in some way (separateness)!   It is somewhat like when we read gossip magazines, and read about all these terrible and largely exaggerated things that happen to famous people - "well they are beautiful and famous, but they are sure messed up!" we think (better than).  Believe it or not these thoughts and experiences are negative habits that we can learn how to break.  Habits that once we break, allow us to feel a deep joy for life, and most importantly, "compassion" for ourselves and others - even when they, or we, seem to create some of our own misfortunes.

Exercise: So how do we get out of the habit of judgement?  Learning how to "observe" the clusters of beliefs and the mind patterns generated by them, is the first step to getting out of the habit of judgement.  Think of a time when  you were judging someone or something (including yourself) - pay attention to that voice in your head using words like, "I (or that person) should...work out more....eat less....call that person...dress better...etc." about socially acceptable ideas, looks, words.  Journal about what was going on in your mind.  Did thinking about another person's perceived "failure" make you feel superior or better than them?  How long did that feeling last?  Looking honestly at it now, how do you feel?  After you have journaled about this, reexamine the situation - this time, reverse the roles.  If you chose an example of yourself getting a job over someone else, or getting into a school, and they did not, or you losing more weight than they did, (you get the idea), reverse the roles.  Imagine you are them - really feel what it would be like to be them with regard to that issue.  How does it feel?  Journal about that.  Feel compassion for your situation as that person, really feel it deeply.  Now feel grateful for whatever happened to you in that situation.  What does that feel like?