In the below video interview, Elevated Existence Founder Tammy Mastroberte interviews author and founder of Intent.com, Mallika Chopra, on her new book “Living With Intent: My Somewhat Messy Journey to Purpose Peace and Joy.”
Daughter of Deepak Chopra, she shares some of her best tips for Living with Intent!
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By Jennifer McCartney
Did you know it takes less than 60 seconds to improve your mood, lower stress, reduce anxiety and increase work productivity?
Mark Waldman, bestselling author of “How God Changes Your Brain,” and one of the world’s leading experts on spirituality, consciousness and the brain, shared some of the most powerful brain-changing strategies — those he teaches to MBA students at Loyola Marymount University and to organizations around the world, during the “Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Summit Season 2,” to help listeners reduce stress, and live a better, more relaxed life.
Mark shared:
“If you have too much stress, you are eight times more likely to come down with cardiovascular disease. Stress is the No. 1 enemy of the world health organization,” he told listeners. The key to reducing that stress — backed by enormous amounts of scientific research, is mindfulness. “This is the only strategy that is the most effective for dealing with virtually every kind of form of stress,” said Waldman, noting it can even act as a cancer preventive and help in the treatment of cancer. “That’s how powerful mindfulness is,” he said.
The problem is even though we know the benefits of mindfulness, “most of us in the business world will not spend even five minutes on meditation,” he said. Most of us just can’t find the time in our day to meditate regularly. But luckily, studies have shown that just 20 minutes of meditation are as effective as 40 minutes of meditation—and Waldman discovered that even just 12 minutes has the same positive results!
“We are talking about meditating for one minute every hour throughout the workday,” he said.
During that one minute, we can do simple mindfulness exercises to center and reconnect, including taking a full 60 seconds to slowly roll our neck in a circle. This alerts us to all the areas of tension we are carrying, and helps to dissolve them. Even yawning — starting with a forced yawn, and then yawning 10 times in a row — can bring us to a very relaxed state, Walman explained.
He also shared how to find one word that will turn on stress-reducing genes in our body — and this can be different for everyone. After getting into a more relaxed state, whether yawning, meditating or doing a mindfulness exercise — Waldman teaches many — we can ask ourselves: “What is your deepest value?” Write down the first word that comes to mind on a piece of paper. This one word that you discover after your minute of yawning, stretching, etc. can help you focus in your meditation, relax quickly and reduce stress.
“We now have evidence that the word you come up with…will turn on 1,200 stress reducing genes,” said Waldman
Additionally, 90 percent of Waldman’s students reported their stress levels went down and their work productivity went up after performing one of the mindfulness exercises Waldman shared on the call. These include:
1. Yawning: One of the quickest ways to relax is to yawn—so if you can “fake” 10 yawns you might feel awkward for the first few, but after that you’ll feel relaxed. With each yawn, notice how your awareness changes. “With each yawn that you take…you’ll notice that all of your worries and fears and concerns about yesterday or about tomorrow begin to fade away. As your brain and your mind relaxes, you end up coming into the present moment more and more. And it’s very pleasant. Yawning actually wakes you up,” said Waldman.
2. Stretch slowly: Take time to roll your neck, or your shoulders, and feel how your body reacts as you slowly bring the blood flow back to your body and release areas of tension. By engaging your muscles and focusing on how your body feels, you’ll be increasing awareness of your physical body and getting closer to that self-awareness.
3. Self-nurturing: Take a moment and be kind to yourself. “Touch your fingers and the palms of your hands, tickle and stroke them with your other fingers the way that gives you the most amount of pleasure,” advised Waldman. Your skin is part of the nervous system and all systems in your body are interconnected. So if you can do this one minute per day, or a few times per day, you can help make yourself feel better.
Waldman explained the science behind the yawn, stretch, self-nurture meditation: The more pleasure you feel, the more dopamine is released by your brain. It’s the feel good hormone—so if you want to raise your consciousness or increase your spiritual awareness, “take a few seconds to slowly stretch, take a few more seconds to yawn…and add self-touch. You will find you enter these blissful states.”
The application of this one-minute meditation isn’t just limited to a quick way to relax at your work desk. He advised it can be practiced before a big meeting, or before you have to give a speech or appear on stage, and it can also be used in interpersonal relationships—if you’re having relationship issues just take a moment to stretch and yawn and reground your awareness.
He also recommended downloading a mindfulness bell app, and setting it to ring every hour. The one-minute break you take is the perfect opportunity to do a mindfulness exercises.
“And once an hour, ask yourself this question: what is your deepest most innermost value,” he said.
For more from Mark and the other 25 experts in mind, body and spirit topics, sign up FREE to Season 2 of the Living an Elevated Existence Summit.
By Jennifer McCartney
What if there was a new way of looking at the world? So that instead of always trying to address the physical manifestation of our problems we could see where they originated—see the secret energy that caused these problems to manifest. Well, we can learn a new way of looking at the world. CEO and founder of Global Paradigm Ltd, Jeddah Mali joined Tammy Mastroberte, founder of Elevated Existence Magazine for the ““Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Summit Season 2,” to explain how we can transform our understanding of the world in order to lead better, happier lives.
Most of our experience is with physical, mental, and emotional health. But this is not enough to be a healthy and happy human being, according to Mali. We need to factor in our spiritual health, our existential health, and once we learn to see this underlying structure, we can begin to work with the life and the universe rather than against it.
Modalities, such as meditation and yoga can be helpful, they don’t necessarily give us access to bigger picture, she explained. Instead of trying to address the physical manifestations of our issues (whether it’s stress, relationship issues, or financial problems) we need to address the real root cause.
“There is a structural skeleton to life and this is how life is built,” Mali told listeners. “Everything works off this central principal, but we don’t see it because we’re focused on what is built on top of it. Never having known about it, you don’t know to look for it. We’re so geared towards our five physical senses, we neglect to develop our sixth sense.”
Without developing our sixth sense, it’s hared for us to realize and understand what we are missing, she said. “The structural mechanics [of life and existence] are being overlooked, when in fact, they are the only element that can unify us and bring us to a place of wholeness and unification,” Mali noted. “We get caught up in the diversity of form and forget that it all comes from a single source.”
Once we turn our attention away from the physical manifestation, we can quite readily discern the hidden layer underneath, including “emotional forms, mental forms, heart forms and beyond,” she said. “I refer to it as existence. I like the plain, mechanical name for things…in its purest form its energy.” This isn’t to be confused with consciousness, however, which is growing and developing. Existence “is the all of it.”
Changing the Paradigm
So how do we learn to see this hidden structure and begin to change our lives? The starting point is always to “see” the design, and connect with the energy beneath all the manifestations we see in our lives.
“For most people that’s something that is completely new to them,” said Mali. Once we see what lies at the heart of existence, we can begin to create with intention. “Once we realize we’re doing the creating, we can create something else,” she explained. And it all starts with our thoughts.
“Just think of a continuous sea of energy — all these billions of subatomic particles, and the only thing that can move that energy is the input of thought. So where we place our attention…will temporarily cluster energy, which becomes a thought, which becomes emotion, which becomes a physical sensation,” she said.
Every time we think a certain thought it gives us an emotional, physical experience. When we start to recognize our thoughts and put intention behind them, we can being to see our old patters of thinking and being melt away, Mail explained.
“Existence isn’t cruel or perverse in that design–that’s how it works. As we enter into these misunderstandings, this discomfort brings us awake and makes us question a better way and ultimately serves a better purpose,” she said.
By Jennifer McCartney
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Our shadows, whether we realize it or not, dictate the quality of our lives, impacting our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, actions, inactions and choices. They determine the amount of success, love, joy, abundance and confidence we will or will not realize. When we deny our shadows and hide the parts of ourselves that we deem inappropriate or do not like or want to be, we whittle away at our full self-expression.
Kelley Kosow, life coach and chief creative officer and faculty member at The Ford Institute for Transformational Training, founded by New York Times bestselling author Debbie Ford, joined Tammy Mastroberte, founder of Elevated Existence Magazine for the “Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Summit Season 2,” to explain how we can bring the light of awareness and compassion to our shadow selves and improve all areas of our lives.
“The shadow is the parts of ourselves that we don’t want to be, that we try to hide, that we deem inappropriate,” Kosow told listeners. “Little by little, we begin to whittle away parts of ourselves. Our concept is based on wholeness—it’s about being able to live to the full expression and the full range of who you are.”
So how do we develop these shadows, and where do they come from? Kosow explained our shadows are often something we develop very young. When we’re upset, or we don’t know how to handle an event, we blame it on ourselves and become shameful. We unconsciously choose to hide those parts of ourselves away. For example, if a child stutters in school, they might come to believe they are stupid, and then they try and hide that they are stupid for everyone around them. Or, it could be as a child, if our parents are divorced and we never see our father. Our shadow self tells us we are unlovable. Then as we grow up we keep attracting events, people and situations to ourselves to prove this point right.
“It creates self-sabotage,” she said. “So it’s the seven-year-old that’s running your life, not the mature adult because you’re going back to that place when the shadow belief was created.” So even though our shadows are living in the outskirts of our conscious mind, they’re actually running the operating system of our conscious mind. “It’s there even though you don’t realize it, impacting every aspect of your daily life,” she explained.
These shadow selves we refuse to own can manifest themselves in many ways in our adult lives, sabotaging us and popping up at the worst time and in the worst way. Kosow shared an example of a public figure with a shadow — Elliott Spitzer, the governor of New York.
“My favorite all time example is Elliot Spitzer who went around trying to rid New York City of prostitution . . . and then was caught with a prostitute. So that’s a perfect example of a shadow quality.”
We often create an opposite persona of our shadow to cover it up, she explained. “We put so much energy in the denial of it,” she said. But we are not healing that wound until we learn to embrace the shadow and find the gift hidden within it. “Every quality has a gift to it,” she told listeners, even those we believe are negative or undesirable. And we possess all of them — all the qualities we don’t like in others exist within us, and we want to develop a loving relationship with them so they can’t sabotage or hinder us.
We might think we don’t want to be nasty, angry or a failure, but there is a gift in all of these qualities. If we let go and embrace these qualities, we can be more whole and authentic. If we let go and embrace failure, for example, we can see failure allows us to leave a bad marriage or allows us to leave a job we don’t want—both which offer positive outcomes.
“At the end of the day, we’re here to evolve,” Kosow explained. “The shadow is here to show you you so you can be who you are and live a fuller life and an authentic life.”
Kosow shared three steps to finding and embracing our shadow selves:
1. Unconceal — We have to know what our shadows are so the first step is to unconceal them. “I love when I find a shadow because I know on the other side of that shadow is freedom,” said Kosow.
We can look to the outside world to see what our triggers might be. What aggravates us about someone? The world is our mirror and is there to teach us, and because we can’t see ourselves we need other people to show us. If we are triggered by someone, we are reacting to a part of ourselves. “Anything you judge in others is is probably something you have yourself,” she said.
2. Own It — Say, “I am that.” So if we see someone that’s abusive—verbally or physically, we should examine our own actions. We may not be physically or emotionally abusive, but it may manifest itself differently. We may be self-abusive. “Every time I had a cookie when I was on a diet, or beat myself up for not being perfect, that’s abusive,” said Kosow. The quality may manifest itself very differently than the trait we see in another person. We may not be a “cheater” in the sense that we are unfaithful in your marriage, but we may cheat ourselves
3. Embrace It — Here is where we embrace and find the gift within the shadow. How does that quality actually serve you? For example, maybe not wanting to be a cheater may make you brutally honest. Or it may make you incredibly loyal. If you’re judgmental that shadow quality may make you a more discerning person and help you from being taken advantage of in life. If you feel unlovable, you may go to the other extreme and prove how lovable you are, and the gift in that is you’re helping other people, you have a lot of compassion for people, or you’ll have really good friends. “That’s what we call embracing the gift,” she said.
The outer world is a reflection of our own world, Kelley concluded. “If you only own 50 percent of yourself you’re only manifesting 50 percent of the real world. If you can own all of who you are, that’s when you’re open to manifesting everything,” she said. Once we have embraced 100 percent of our own potential, that’s what we will be able to create in the outer world. “
You can say to me, ‘Kelley you’re a bitch.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I know,’” she said. “There’s a gift in everything and owning those shadows can only make us more whole.”
By Jennifer McCartney
Do you feel disconnected or like a part of you is missing? Do you have difficulty remembering your early years? Are you afraid of certain things but don’t know why? Maybe you have recurring dreams or nightmares, or are prone to anxiety and panic attacks?
Past life regression and soul retrieval may contain the answers you’ve been looking for with Mary Beth Vanderlinden shared how past life regression and soul retrieval can help during an interview with Elevated Existence founder Tammy Mastroberte, during the Living an Elevated Existence Mind, Body & Soul Summit Season 2. ” Vanderlinden—an ordained minister and intuitive healer who has been called “the human CAT scan” for her ability to see, hear and feel energy—also explained the effects of retrieving fragmented soul parts and how this can bring a person back into wholeness so he or she can move forward in life. This reuniting can also bring back joy, free one from depression, addictions and more.
She explained our soul and it’s past lives hold the key to having a happy, healthy and prosperous future, and that past-life energy can negatively affect our current lives without us even realizing it. How do we know we have past life energy holding us back? “The main way you can tell past life energy is holding you is if you can’t move forward,” Vanderlinden said. “You feel stuck.” She compared it to feeling like we are sinking in quicksand.
Our present-day issues brought about by past life energy can manifest themselves in many ways. She gave the example of a woman who felt afraid or uncomfortable around men, explaining that it could be the result of a devastating sexual and physical abuse from a past life. Our bodies retain an imprint of that abuse. “There’s that cellular memory built in fear,” she said. Also, these past lives can affect not only us but also our entire families, for generations.
“If you see patterns that are repeating in families like poverty, that’s ancestral,” she shared. If we try and escape these patterns ourselves, by trying to overcome our fear of men or trying to better manage our money, or escape a cycle of abuse that our mothers and grandmothers also suffered, our cellular energy is actively fighting against us, telling us, “you can’t do that,” she said.
Protecting Our Energy
To complicate matters, it isn’t just past energy effecting on our daily lives, but also the energy people bring to us—everyone we interact with has their own energy and we often absorb it and take it on without realizing it.
“You’re soaking up their energy and you’re showing the symptoms of that energy,” she said, using the example of meeting a friend for lunch and suddenly feeling drained afterwards. “If you notice that every time you meet them for lunch the same things happens…you notice you always feel really drained or you just don’t feel right afterwards…that person is the one you’re picking up energy from.”
So how do we protect our own energy on a daily basis, and ground ourselves so we don’t absorb the energy of others and allow it to effect us in a negative way? Vanderlinden walked listeners though the below exercise to use before we start our day:
Get seated comfortably and uncross your legs. Rest your hands on your thighs or knees. Take in a deep cleansing breath. Do that three times.
In front of you just imagine a path in a meadow. Notice the flowers, the butterflies, and the birds. Feel the sun on your face. Now in front of you you’re about to enter a forest with massive oak trees. Walking through the forest you enter a clearing and you can feel free to sit down or remain standing.
Now you see a seedling dropping from an oak tree, fluttering toward you. It enters in through your belly and comes to settle in the core of your being. It sprouts and grows in the core of your being. It extends its roots down your back and leg and into the earth. All the way through the dirt and soil and rock to the hot core of the earth. See them drawing in that earth energy. The roots draw that energy back up into the core of your being. Feel that warm healing earth energy pulsing through your core and sit with that a moment.
Then see the heavens open and give heavenly light to our third eye and down through our heart to the core of our being. Feel that divine light and learning and protection. Take a deep breath. Now we’re solidly grounded to heaven and to earth.
Additionally, to establish energy boundaries, she taught listeners to “get into their coconut,” which involved projecting heavenly light from our core, our solar plexus, and pushing it out so it’s 5-feet on either side of us, as well as above and below us. This is our energy boundary and it has a hard shell, she said. Then we set the intention, “My energy is my energy, and it stays inside the coconut.”
You want to get into your coconut every morning, she said, suggesting we do the practice as soon as we wake up or while in the shower. “Otherwise, you keep getting mired in other people’s energy.”
