Category Archives: Techniques

Realizing Our Full Potential – Part Two

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Realizing Our Full Potential – Part Two
By Tomas and Joan Heartfield, Ph.D.

We realize our full potential by following what has heart and meaning in our lives, or by following our bliss as Joseph Campbell phrased it. This is no easy task when creating a life for one’s self in this day and age.  To be able to listen to our inner voice is an art worth pursuing. The true voice is not a digitized recording, but a reservoir of information stored in the heart.  It knows things the mind does not, but the mind must give the heart permission to speak.  Listen carefully.  As you attune to the heart frequency ask the question, “What is alive in me right now?  How can I show up and make a difference?”

Our full potential lies in our ability to use all our resources, even when we don’t have all the resources we think we need in any given situation. Itzhak Perlman, the great violinist, gave an extraordinary performance with a broken string. With only three strings, he expressed a level of creativity and genius never heard before.  He saw the broken string as a call to rise above the limitation of the moment.  It was quite possibly the best performance of his career.

Life often challenges us to improvise with what we have. Those who succeed in meeting the challenge rise above their perceived limitations. They touch the vast reservoir of their true potential, and they inspire us to try it for ourselves.

What does it take to tap into this place and nurture these seeds?  Here are twelve things we have found helpful

1. Seek and desire to realize your full potential. Ask to be shown the highest options for your life.

2. Be present and aware, so that when opportunities do show up, you are ready to move towards them.

3. Ask that your every thought, word and act be for the highest good.  Orient toward the most positive possibilities.

4. Cultivate and hone your talents and skills. Be as good as you can be at whatever you do. Resource talent you would aspire to have yourself.

5. Believe in yourself and have faith that you are being guided.

6. Have goals and break them down into short and long term increments.

7. Persevere.  Keep moving toward your goals, one step at a time.

8. Take time to cultivate your connection to Divine Intelligence through meditation, prayer and study of the sacred.

9. Trust your visions and have the courage to follow them.

10. Balance study, work and focus with stillness, time in nature and play.

11. Have compassion and reverence for yourself and all life.

12. Know you are doing the best you can do at any moment in your life, and you can always make new choices.  Learn from your choices.  Relax and enjoy the process.

Realizing Our Full Potential – Part One

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Realizing Our Full Potential – Part One
By Tomas and Joan Heartfield, Ph.D.

We realize our full potential by following what has heart and meaning in our lives, or by following our bliss as Joseph Campbell phrased it. This is no easy task when creating a life for one’s self in this day and age.  To be able to listen to our inner voice is an art worth pursuing. The true voice is not a digitized recording, but a reservoir of information stored in the heart.  It knows things the mind does not but the mind must give the heart permission to speak.  Listen carefully.  As you attune to the heart frequency ask the question, “What is alive in me right now?  How can I show up and make a difference?”

Our full potential lies in our ability to use all our resources, even when we don’t have all the resources we think we need in any given situation. Itzhak Perlman, the great violinist, gave an extraordinary performance with a broken string. With only three strings, he expressed a level of creativity and genius never heard before.  He saw the broken string as a call to rise above the limitation of the moment.  It was quite possibly the best performance of his career.

Life often challenges us to improvise with what we have. Those who succeed in meeting the challenge rise above their perceived limitations. They touch the vast reservoir of their true potential, and they inspire us to try it for ourselves.

What does it take to tap into this place and nurture these seeds?  Here are four things we have found helpful:

Know your purpose and the energy it holds for you.

1. Believe in yourself and your dreams. Have faith that you are being guided.

2. Break goals down into doable bytes and move toward them, one step at a time.

3. Cultivate your talents and skills. Resource talent you would aspire to have yourself. Learn from your choices.  Relax and enjoy the process.

Love as a Practice

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Love As a Practice
By Tomas and Joan Heartfield. Ph.D.

Some time ago I was talking with a friend who had just returned from visiting her daughter’s family in California.  She commiserated with me that she used to enjoy being Grandma, but this time all she could see was a lack of love.  Her daughter and son-in-law never once expressed affection towards each other. As soon as her daughter entered the door from work she lit into her husband. The TV was always on. It was a battleground with screaming kids and parents trying to cope and make enough money to keep their beautiful house. She wanted to help and didn’t know how.  She felt she was seeing herself at her daughters age, in that same state, but felt helpless to “make it better”.

I shared with her I had heard this story a number of times. Her experience is all too common.  In a home where the feeling of love is absent it is difficult to feel comfortable. Many people were raised in homes where feelings of anger, sadness and pain obscured the love. It is easy to be overwhelmed and taken over by the frustrations relaionship, family, work and life bring to us on a regular basis.

I suggested she focus on giving love as a practice and have a heart-to-heart conversation with her daughter using a combination of telling the truth without blame or judgment and empathy. It might sound something like this.

“When I see you come in the door with so much tension and I feel the energy of frustration in your home, I feel sad. I’m aware that all of you need more positive energy.  I know you feel overwhelmed. I remember how I felt when I was where you are now. I was the same way with you, and I feel sad I didn’t know how to be a relaxed, loving mom.  I see how much you have to do and how little time you have to yourself. With all my heart I want to support you by learning from my past mistakes. I love you and want to make a difference in your life. May I share my awareness, and support you in finding a way to feel less stressed?”

She acknowledged it was challenging being the grandma who contributes her wisdom without meddling. I suggested she look beyond the drama of the situation and see where love was needed and give it as a healing for herself for all the times she didn’t know how to do it when her daughter was small. She could now choose to give it not from guilt for not giving it, but as a gift to the world she is helping to create. She imagined feeling love streaming out of her heart into theirs. She decided that even if she didn’t feel it coming back she would remember that this is her spiritual practice!

When I saw her next, she had returned from her Christmas visit. “It was a completely different experience. I shared my feelings and really was able to be empathetic. I just kept beaming everyone love and really listened to their needs. It was the nicest Christmas we’d had in a long time. The very best thing was how I felt about myself in doing this practice. I now trust I can show up as the loving person I really am. I know how to give love in the way it is needed.”

Cultivating our sexual energy

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 Cultivating our sexual energy

 Is there a practical reason to cultivate our sexual energy other than to have sex?

Absolutely, I mean definitely cultivating our sexual energy in order to, let’s say, enjoy more of that sexual energy in all of the ways in which we use it because, sexual energy is a life energy, it is a life force energy, and so all the ways in which we might use our life-force energy, in our creative endeavors, in our conversations with people when we really feel passionate about something.

Passion is an energy, we want to be able to bring it up and be able to use it in the world to get things done, whatever it is we want to get done and to feel loved, being able to bring passion into the way which we love so that we can, really make a difference in the world in a way which we communicate, to have a passionate communication, to have a passionate understanding or awareness, to have a passionate connection with the Divine.

So the more of this life-force energy that we have, the more we can bring to all aspects of our life including of course having maybe more fun making love.

Calling All Love

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Calling All Love

Other than putting out an all points bulletin for someone to call our own, how do we attract that quality of energy and connection to us?  Is there some mysterious secret that, if we know what it was, could manifest a beloved with a wink of an eye?

The secret is this: the beloved radiates through us as an attractor for the experience of love to be known. As we take on the role of beloved and feel the beloved as us, we open to the love that is all around us. What we find is that it is us that is keeping love and beloved at bay.

There is a direct connection between our external and internal experience. If we are vibrating at the frequency of love it brings us more loving opportunities and experiences. Opening to love is an inside job that starts with ourselves. If we believe we are unlovable this will send out signals that prevent true love from coming to us.

One man we worked with for two years did everything he could to attract women and love to him. He would find women who were exactly the wrong type for him because his mind would tell him that was what he wanted. The more he tried to make it work, the angrier and more frustrated he got. He finally revealed that he felt himself unlovable and undeserving of love. Once this was resolved, and he really got how loveable he is, within weeks he attracted to him the perfect person—someone who was beyond his wildest dreams. Once he dissolved his “unlovable” thought form, the beloved immediately showed up. In fact she found him!

How love emerges and takes us into its mysteries is every bit as amazing as how universes are created and what gives flimsy little butterflies the capacity to fly thousands of miles. Love and its messenger the beloved is here to reveal more of who we really are, show us what needs healing and give us a dependable source of support through the journey of life.

We feel loved when our need for connection is met so completely that merging into the field of oneness becomes effortless. We stay in love when we can identify accurately what encourages this state for ourselves and have another being willing to support it. Love stays alive and grows when both people agree to listen attentively to what has heart and meaning and celebrate it as fuel for loves fire.

Opening as love accelerates the possibility of entering loves domain here and now. As love is eternal, it is us who must accommodate and make room for what is already here.

Here is an activity that activates the energy of the beloved.

Sit quietly in a place where you feel comfortable and will be undisturbed.

1.   Put your left hand on your heart, your right hand on your belly.

2.   Breathe quietly for five minutes. Just let your breath rise and fall. Feel you heart beating, expanding with each breath. Imagine the beloved lives in your heart. Speak to the beloved in your heart as you would a precious lover. Share your deepest desires for the quality of love you wish to cultivate and your appreciation that you can now have a relationship with this beloved that lives in you, as you.