Love knows no boundaries. Symbols of Love connect us to the Force of Love and its Eternal Wisdom
Heart as a Symbol of Love
We somehow naturally start with the heart as a symbol of love. It was firstly found on coins by the Cyrenes in the 7th century B.C.
It is interesting that the image depicted on the coins was the heart shaped seeds of a plant called Silphium, a type of fennel, that was used as a herbal contraceptive.
Practicing Spirituality as a Life Style
Wednesday 16 July 2014 at 08:08 am
Mindfulness Training
Practicing Spirituality as a Life Style
Often I am asked a curious question that perfectly reflects our 'busy' life-styles, thinking patterns and life habits:
How much of my time the AoL Mindfulness will take?
My answer to this one is usually: 'if you work hard, hopefully you'll manage to finalize it in just a life-time'...
Learning Mindfulness
Learning Mindfulness gives one a gift of experiencing Life fully.
Learning mindfulnessbrings into one's Life the quality of: Awareness, Awake-fullness, Alertness. It brings into one's Life a possibility to experience Life fully, a possibility to listen to one's Soul, a possibility to tune into the Flow of the Energy of Tao,Energy of Divine Life Force.
All throughout our history, cultivating creativity was our major contact with Divine. To master an art-form or a musical-instrument, an artist learns the skill for decades. The purity of their artistic expression takes the viewer beyond the world of day-to-day reality into the world of meditation, Divine exploration, Love. Standing in front of the Botticelli’s Venus within the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, or listening to the Divine sounds of Mozart or Bach within a Cathedral takes the art explorer into the same states of Samadhi a yogi desires to reach.
Now, at this point of the discussion, you will get all the different yogis denying this fact and the echo of their voice brings a touch of truthfulness within this scene - this is the energy, or the stand-point of the viewer. An ability to enter a meditation state observing the true art takes hours and hours of training. A child taken to the classical music concert will not enjoy it no matter how refine the musicians are; yet with a proper training they will learn to enter into the balance created by the composer, musicians and the conductor and would feel the sacred space of the church where the concert is performed.
Attending a school is a training, and it takes a tremendous amounts of time to train reading / writing / thinking. Unfortunately, some people had not ever had an opportunity to train their skills in thinking. Some did not even attend a primary school. At University we read 100s of books to get trained in thinking. It is an admiring amount of time spent in focusing on one subject. Attending a music school, training a sport, dance, or choosing to seriously learn art, is a tremendously difficult training that takes a amazing amounts of time, at least ½ hour a day for 10-15 years, this is why we usually are not in charge of this training but it is in hands of our parents to send us to art / music / dance / sport school while we are kids. Training kindness, truthfulness and compassion should also take this amount of time.
Now, back to the viewers and the experience of meditation or Divine entering the creative sphere and why they are not so different. The viewer’s attitude towards an art form could be polluted by many different influencers: watching TV, reading yellow press, being bombarded by “cheap” and “sellable” images and messages, or brain-washed with the stereotypes of humanity. Still the lack of training within the viewer could cause the experience to stay within the levels of the ordinary. Listening to Divine music, the viewer needs to be still, this stillness will take him into the meditation. If there is no training of stillness, the viewer might miss the opportunity to enter Divine. If we have deep contact with Nature, we live in Nature, we experience the stillness of a mountain or a lake regularly, we have a natural “trainer” within our surroundings that will allow us to enter the states of meditation while creating or experiencing art as Divine form.
Our mind is constantly active. Seeking stillness within the Mind that is in motion is impossible if we do not use the motion itself. When the surface of a lake is still, we will be able to tap into the magic of super-conscious. This is impossible when the surface is agitated by waves of thoughts, emotions, habits, fears. We use love as a focus, to help us still the thoughts.
Guided Love Meditation video by Nataša Pantovič 15 min
