Holistic Health and WellBeing, LLC

Embrace Spiritual Wellness and Thrive

In the rhythm of our daily lives and the perceived busyness of the day, we forget to live in the moment. Most of you have heard how important it is to live in the now. Eckhart Tolle said, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the now the primary focus of your life.”

I understand Eckhart’s concept is imperative for us to find balance in our lives and that we can easily take each moment for granted. When we realize that each moment has a hidden sacred gift, we can make the choice to think good or bad thoughts; whether from a place of love or fear, these thoughts define the moments that follow. These moments become the building blocks for what unfolds next. 

Each thought we send out has a powerful energy field of consciousness. When we understand the world around us is matching our frequency, good or bad, it can motivate us to understand how our own communication skills affect everything around us. Each thought is a response to our previous judgments and perceptions that were influenced by prior experiences.

The way we perceive and interpret ourselves is a result of the belief system we adopted while growing up. This includes our thoughts about what we should, could, or would have done differently. Those perceptions/patterns/experiences from the past can interfere with how we live in the present moment, and they also can influence the next moment.

In 2016, after I took a horrific fall from an 18-foot-high skywalk, I woke up to the truth of what it means to live in the present moment. This accident, or what I like to call my awakening into a deeper level of God consciousness, not only sprained my whole body but also damaged my brain. 

The brain trauma I experienced forced me to live in each moment. Like it or not, to even slightly move my body took focused thoughts and positive, conscious choices. This challenging experience caused me to see, sense, and feel my life in a completely different way, moment by painstaking moment. There were many times when I lost hope and regretted that I survived the fall. As I took my recovery minute by minute and day by day, I had to call on my faith and everything I believed in, which is Mother/Father God, Jesus, angels, and Spirit.

Interestingly, in the months after that experience, as my pain slowly decreased, I noticed how I paid more attention to each moment. This recovery period showed me how important each positive thought or choice inspired me to heal in body, mind, and soul. I began to understand how important it was to embrace my faith, trust, hope, and divine intention.

Unlike those who have died from such falls, I lived to write about what I have learned. Through this experience, it was my state of consciousness and taking responsibility for how I felt in the present moment that helped me heal my brain and become physically stronger. I realized choices were the key component to how I felt or responded, what I held on to, or what let go of. 

I learned each thought defined who I was and what I experienced. I understood I was not a victim of this unfortunate, painful event, and I could have brought the accident’s baggage with me and suffered. Instead, I learned to surrender and see each moment as a blessing. That gift allowed me to create a new, healthier moment, a chance to heal the person I was and to embrace who I am now.

I came to the understanding that when we string all those thoughts and moments together, we create time. As the world spins around us in the outward appearance of time or moments, we can choose to perceive things differently. I embraced the thought: “What if we see time or moments as thoughts? There are only so many minutes and hours in the day, but thoughts are infinite.”

One thing is certain. I know that we live in an ever-changing universe where everything is eternally moving and shifting, and each moment’s passing is something we can never stop. However, I am guided through awareness that we can choose how to respond to each moment from a place of divine consciousness and no longer be victims to outside circumstances.

There’s Always a Choice

From divine empowered consciousness in each moment, we can choose what to create with positive intentional thoughts and not to take linear time literally. Linear time is a concept whereby time is seen as a progression, a series of events that lead toward something positive or negative. That “something” is both a beginning and an end. So when our moments are ruled by our intended thoughts, we choose what we want to create. Investing wisely in each moment’s thoughts can change our perception of our daily lives.

I believe that what we perceive as our future is based upon what we assign value to in each moment. That is what we can accomplish when we turn our moments into intentional thought choices.

There have been times in my life when I’ve thought, “God, if only I can make it through this moment, I will be okay." I had to remind myself that each moment is a gift to create a positive thought of love or joy or, conversely, a negative thought of fear or suffering. Each of us has the innate wisdom to decide in the moment to live or die, decide to laugh or cry, choose peace or worry, or create from the conscious, unconscious, or even God consciousness. We always have a choice.

Here is the magic in each moment’s choice: No matter what our choices have been, we will always have more moments to choose from. This allows the opportunity to direct ourselves toward positive results. Each moment and the choices therein are sacred, just as is each breath we take. Those thoughtful opportunities for choice allow us to experience a sacred, conscious moment with God. Each pure moment, with its free will, is ours to use healthfully.

So with this knowledge, how can we consciously use each sacred moment we are given for our highest good? We have clues to that answer when we flash back to how each child is brought into the world in innocence, an innocence that lasts until some incident or set of words shatters the child’s trust in self. One negative feeling of judgment can change a child’s story of who he or she is for the rest of that person’s life. External and internal forces that affect the child can wound the child’s sense of identity and wholeness, which can alter his or her divine birthright.

As children, we collected negative past influences in our cellular memories to deal with later in life. Then we often ignored these negative thoughts and experiences through play and laughter. However, as we grow and become more conscious of who we are, it becomes harder to shake off old wounds. Then the moment comes when the wound becomes our reality. It cripples us physically, emotionally, and mentally, influencing all aspects of our lives. Ultimately, in our innocent way as children, we have adopted a negative script that influences our opinion of ourselves and alters our life stories.

In the world of psychology, this is called the loss of innocence, our wounded child, or the wounded psyche. I call this the duality of living the human experience.

Choose Love or Fear

It appears we were born to experience both wellness and pain. In our truest moments as adults, what is most important is how we choose to react. True freedom is all about choice: a choice to decide how we feel, how we want to be, and how we create our thought-filled moments.

What if we decide in this moment that we are okay and our lives are filled with love? However, in the next moment, we feel someone’s judgment, and that experience sweeps away our “life filled with love” sentiment. This is where our freewill steps in. We have the ability to embrace the story of someone else’s opinions of our lives or to embrace the story of love.

Through practice, we find that life is not a battle; rather, it is a matter of our choices. We can choose to experience all of what it is to be human and spiritual, good and bad. However, each moment we are given a sacred opportunity to make a life-altering decision. These decisions can be as pivotal as those first childhood experiences that changed our perceptions of who we are. Again, each moment is an opportunity to choose a thought and to experience life through love or fear.

Our Lives Become What We Think

I’m reminded of the story about a spiritual healer who was placed in a position of labor and servitude, devoid of respect. His choice, built moment by moment, was to serve gladly with God in his heart. He rejected feelings of resentment, and his circumstances eventually resulted in his release from oppression.

Here’s the miracle of it all: if we choose from love, we will create new sacred moments again and again. The healer might have initially harbored resentment at his predicament, but he did not allow that to define him and instead embraced goodness. Love will follow.

Just as the healer found contentment in his situation, we can enhance our everyday routines from a place of love and courage. This will allow us to focus on our tasks and celebrate our lives as things unfold around us consciously. This will keep us from missing the preciousness of each moment’s choices, which offer a sacred opportunity for creating our ideal realities.

What I am saying is these choices force us to change (which takes courage and practice). As we wake up each morning and choose to do something different -- to walk on the edge, invite excitement and joy into our lives, or bring strength and contentment to our existence -- we can intend to make our world a better place. And as if by magic, the whole world seems just a bit brighter.

Following this path, some friends confided in me about having company over; it was not a visit they looked forward to. By using my sacred-moment-thought concept, they decided to look at the visit as not a matter of how it affected them but of how the visit would make the world brighter for their guest. And in thinking that way, it brightened everyone's day.

I feel we can see each moment as sacred through divine consciousness to be centered and grounded in each moment while creating and choosing peace, love, and balance. Together, we can choose to live our lives in divine awareness to take each moment as an opportunity to see, sense, and feel time in a way that works for all of us moment by moment.

I am guided to believe that life becomes what we think. Our thoughts create the vibrational quality of our reality now and our experience in the future. Each thought acts like a powerful magnet, attracting to us what we focus on.

Focus on the positive. When you notice negative thoughts arise, dismiss them without any judgment, and redirect your focus. Then with intention, create a new, healthier thought, such as, “I am at peace,” canceling out the pervious negative thought. Throughout the day, create more positive thoughts as you feel more peaceful, confident, and grateful for your creation. 

Cathleen L. Balfour, Holistic Health and WellBeing Practitioner in Liberty Lake WA