Using Spiritual Exercises to Expand your Metaphysical Muscles
There are metaphysical exercises that can be practiced by anyone who wants to improve the quality of their life. Here are a couple of them:
The Attitude of Gratitude
The attitude of gratitude can be practiced at any time. In this exercise we can note, either on paper or just to ourselves, all the things we are grateful for in our lives. It is amazing the number of wonderful things that we can stop and appreciate in our world. This is a very healthy exercise, sanity inducing and joyful. We are far more likely to be alert to our environment when we’re admiring it. We will be much more relaxed and the chemical levels in our bodies will be better balanced when we aren’t generating fear responses from tension. The “fight or flight response” that tends to be over-stimulated in our fast-paced world has the opportunity to even out when we name our power in it. That’s exactly what we’ve done when we identify areas of our lives which we feel good about, we are opening up to places and situations where we can be strong.
There’s no limit on how long or how often this exercise can be done. It can be done daily, at any spare moment that we happen to think about it. As we practice itemizing what we’re grateful for, an overall attitude is born. This attitude says that life is good, that we are deserving of a wonderful experience and that “somebody out there likes us”. These are good things to know and to accustom our minds to. The more practice our subconscious mind has in understanding such things, the more it will help in causing more good things to gravitate in our direction. In metaphysics that’s the real point, to create a difference in our world through the practice of working with our thoughts. As we develop this attitude, we are then prepared to practice the other exercise I mentioned above.
Expanding Our Acceptance of Good
We will accept or allow exactly as much good in our lives as we think we can deal with. We all have a glass ceiling on the sheer quantity of “cool stuff” that we can handle. Actually, this has nothing to do with capability. We all have an infinite capability to experience utter perfection in our lives and consciousness. It’s just one of those things that we infinite, immortal, spiritual beings are capable of. We come from a perfect Source, so somewhere within us we can cope with some serious wonderfulness.
The condition is that we have to get used to it. We live in a culture that will only accept a finite experience of good in a human being’s existence. Anything more and you have stepped beyond the realm of accepted reality and into fantasyland. The cultural archetype is that only so much good, in the form of prosperity, health, romance or happiness is all right, or you must be doing something wrong. Life becomes “too good to be true”. This has nothing to do with reality. It only has to do with that mysterious individual, “the cultural norm”. Most of us have accepted some version of this limiting thoughtform at least on a subconscious basis. It can be very constructive to knock it down.
What if you were the happiest person in your office today? How about if your body consistently performed at the highest level of your life? Suppose that your personal creativity was the next most popular entertainment for the world and everyone wanted to pay you for it? That’s how this exercise works. You pose “outrageously” good scenarios to yourself to seriously consider. Contemplate them. Deal with attitudes or excuses that say that these can’t possibly occur. Assume that any limitation to your good is some conditioned response in your mind that isn’t the truth at all. Really now, why not?
If we choose to believe that there is magic in our own minds, this magic being the primary tool of the metaphysician, then it helps a lot to do our mental “tune-ups”. We can open ourselves to a higher quality of existence if we only make the conscious choice to do so. Metaphysical muscles need exercise.
