10 Reasons You Should Develop a Spiritual Practice

A spiritual practice is the regular performance of actions and activities undertaken for the purpose of inducing spiritual experiences and cultivating spiritual development. A spiritual practice is something you do every single day that facilitates deeper self-awareness, empathy, and connectedness with others. Regular spiritual practice produces feelings of insight, understanding, integration, certainty, conviction, and truth, which surpass ordinary understandings and tend to persist long after the experience. Personal practice reconnects us with our deepest core values and our highest vision of who we are and why we are here. It heightens our sense of mission and purpose, empowering our personal evolution. It is important to remember that each person is different and so what works for one person may not work for another. The key is to choose an activity that makes you feel calm, centered, and relaxed. A spiritual activity might be gardening, hiking, running, dancing, drumming, chanting, painting, meditating, praying, doing yoga or tai chi. Here are 10 good reasons why you should develop a spiritual practice:

1. To integrate the body, mind, and spirit into wholeness and balance. Through reintegration of self, we come to understand who we truly are. The moment you bond with your spirit is the moment your heart opens. The first time you glimpse your spirit self, you gasp and cry. You know who you are. That is the moment you begin to heal.

2. It connects you to your inner truth. It is necessary to still the mind and quiet the emotions so that your personal truth can emerge. Inner stillness quells the ego and reconnects you to the guidance of your own intuitive knowing. Intuition reveals appropriate action in the moment for a given set of circumstances. So long as you follow your intuitive sense, your actions will be in accord with the true self and ultimately the cosmos.

3. To explore and develop the "inner life." Spiritual practice helps make us more fluent in the language of the inner life, which is where meaningful healing, transformation and insight arise. Being mindfully present with our thoughts, feelings and sensations is a journey into deeper self-awareness, heart awakening and embodied liberation. Regardless of what you call it -- personal growth, personal development, self-actualization or finding yourself -- this journey is you exploring and developing who you truly are.

4. It affords a holistic perspective of your life on a macrocosmic level. Spiritual practice is a valuable tool for stepping back and getting a balanced and ordered perspective on the broader picture. Through regular spiritual practice, we gain the perspective needed to move with the ebb and flow of change with grace and ease.

5. To achieve joy and bliss. A daily spiritual practice is the surest path to Joy. Joy is our song, which we share with the universe. Every living thing has a unique song, a pulsing rhythm that belongs only to it. Within the heart of each of us, there exists a silent pulse of perfect rhythm, which connects us to the totality of a dynamic, interrelated universe. This silent pulse is ever-present within each of us, but our awareness is rarely in sync with it. Awareness of perfect rhythm is not possible until we relinquish the desires and manipulations of the ego.

6. In order to cultivate the attention required to complete your tasks. Precision and awareness become elevated in whatever you choose to apply yourself to. Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience. It is through our attention that we influence and direct the aspects of our experience and the world around us. Those aspects of our experience that are most enduring are the effect of habitual expectations and beliefs. What we pay attention to becomes what we know as ourselves and our world, for energy flows where attention goes.

7. It cultivates equanimity or steadiness of mind. Equanimity is the capacity to remain poised and calm even when under stress. The kind of equanimity required must be rooted in the insight that we create our own reality. Nothing that happens to us comes from an external source outside ourselves; everything is the result of our own thoughts and deeds. Because this knowledge frees us from fear, it is the foundation of equanimity.

8. To develop divine qualities. We are all sparks of the same one Divine Source. Over time, spiritual practice helps to dissolve our mind and through it we gain access to Divine consciousness. This closeness to Divinity allows us to assimilate divine qualities and evolve spiritually.

9. It clears the mind of illusions and obstructions, transforming thought patterns of confusion to reveal inherent clear mind. The fire of clear mind is ever present within each of us, and to remove any obstruction of its clarity is the duty of all people, so that each may find the way to unity and harmony. Through the insight and understanding of illuminated mind, we can bring enlightenment to the world!

10. To ground ourselves fully in the present moment. The present moment is all you ever have. When you aren't present in the moment you become a victim of time. Your mind is pulled into the past or the future, or both. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. The present moment is the fundamental ceremony of life. When we bring ourselves fully into the present moment, our life becomes the spiritual practice.

Buryat Shamanic Prayer Poles

Photo by Simon Matzinger

The Republic of Buryatia is home of the Buryats, a people of Northern Mongols. The republic is located in the south-central region of Siberia along the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake by volume in the world, containing roughly 20% of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water. For Buryat Shamanists and Buddhists, Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal is a sacred and holy place. Along Cape Burkhan on Olkhon Island there is a very important pilgrimage site -- Shamanka (shaman) Rock, one of the nine holy places of Asia. If you walk along Cape Burkhan, you will come across serges -- ritual poles swaddled in cloth and ribbons left by pilgrims. It is custom to tie a ribbon to a serge and make a prayer to promote peace, compassion, and wisdom. Pilgrims believe the prayers will be blown by the wind to spread the good will and compassion into all pervading space. Different elements are associated with different colors -- a blue ribbon symbolizes the sky and space, white symbolizes the air and wind, red symbolizes fire, green symbolizes water, and yellow symbolizes earth. According to Buddhist tradition, health and harmony are produced through the balance of the five elements.

"Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World"

Rumble is a feature documentary about the role of Native Americans in popular music history, a little-known story built around the incredible lives and careers of the some of the greatest music legends. With music icons like Charley Patton, Link Wray, Oscar Pettiford, Mildred Bailey, Peter Lafarge, Jimi Hendrix, Jessie Ed Davis, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Rita Coolidge, and Robbie Robertson, Rumble will show how these gifted Native musicians helped shape the soundtracks of our lives and, through their contributions, influenced and shaped American and international popular culture. Rumble tells the story of a profound, essential, and until now, missing chapter in the history of American popular music. To learn more, visit Rumble.

10 Reasons Why You Should be Making Prayer Ties

The sacrament tobacco is used cross-culturally as a unifying thread of communication between humans and the spiritual powers. Offering tobacco smoke or a pinch of dry tobacco carries our prayers to the "Loom of Creation," thereby reweaving the pattern of existence in accordance with those prayers. Prayer ties are spiritual offerings created by wrapping tobacco into a cloth while praying and focusing on your intention -- what you desire or expect to accomplish. They should be thought of as a physical manifestation of your prayer.

A prayer tie is made with a small (about 2") square of 100% cotton cloth and it is usually tied with 100% cotton string. The cotton cloth is usually red, but can be of any color, depending on the circumstances, which tradition you are following, or what your intuition tells you. To make a prayer tie, begin by smudging yourself and your materials. After smudging, take a pinch of tobacco and focus on your intention while holding it. Next, place the pinch of tobacco at the center of the cloth. Gently bundle the tobacco into the cloth, and then loop the string around the bundle and pull tightly. If you are making more than one prayer tie, space them evenly on the string. I usually make a tobacco tie for each of the six directions -- East, South, West, North, Above and Below.

Making a small sacred bundle to hold the tobacco makes it easier to carry on your person, to make an offering of to another person, and to hold onto for longer periods of time. As with any sacred object, treat your prayer ties with the honor and respect they deserve. Upon completion, prayer tie offerings might be left hanging in a tree, buried in the ground, left on a mountain top, added to your sacred space, or offered to grandfather fire. When prayer ties are ritually burned, they open a path of communication between the human world and the spirit world. Here are 10 good reasons for making prayer ties:

1. For personal protection. Everyone should make personal prayer ties and then carry them at all times for protection from negativity. I carry my prayer ties in a small leather pouch that I wear around my neck.

2. To protect your home from negative or unwanted energies. You should hang a string of prayer ties over each door to your home. I also hang a strand of ties over the main east-facing window of my home.

3. As a way to honor and safeguard sacred objects. I always store a string of prayer ties in with items like my sacred pipe and shamanic drum.

4. When someone is ill. Making prayer ties is a good way to pray for friends and loved ones who are sick or injured. 

5. To prepare for ceremony. The making of prayer ties is a wonderful way to prepare for ceremonies such as sweat lodge, vision quest, or whenever there is a sacred fire.

6. When someone has died. Creating prayer ties is a good way to pray for the safe passage of newly deceased souls. Unfortunately, many of the psychopomp myths and rituals that once helped prepare people for this final rite of passage have become lost or forgotten. When people are unprepared to face death, they often need additional assistance crossing over into the spirit world.

7. As a sign of friendship. Gifting someone with a prayer tie is a great way to show how much you value their friendship.

8. When you are seeking advice or information from someone. Giving a tobacco tie to someone who has helped you is a good way to show your appreciation for what they have done for you.

9. As an offering of gratitude to Mother Earth. Foster a reciprocal relationship of meaning to the Earth. Take time to honor and respect the reciprocal cycle of give and take, for Mother Earth provides everything we need to live and flourish.

10. Anytime you feel called to pray to the Creator. Regular prayer is a cornerstone of spiritual practice. Over time, frequent prayers help to dissolve our mind and through them we gain access to Divine consciousness. Praying brings us Divine help, reduces our ego, grants us forgiveness of mistakes, and much more.