Losing the Weight of the World

We're burdened with a great deal of responsibility. 20% of parents have two jobs in addition to raising their children, and 84% of today's parents believe their roles are tougher and more stressful than those of their own mothers and fathers.

Maybe we're self-critical and feel we're not good enough, and carry around a private sadness, shame or guilt that tightens our chest, and keeps us from getting enough oxygen, which makes us feel 'heavy'.

Maybe we're on edge, worried about the future -- our job, retirement, health or our children's college. As a result, we're carrying the weight of our insecurities and fears.

Maybe we're hiding emotional wounds and we fly from one task to another, as we keep busy to avoid becoming aware of our inner pain. Then we don't pay attention (maybe leading to carelessness, forgetfulness or accidents), and we don't fully enjoy our life.

Maybe we're tired out or feel life's on the decline. We fear we've already peaked and never knew it. We wonder what it's all for, and are weighted down by the sense we're missing something important in life.

Many of us carry around our burdens and wounds in secret, hiding them from others so they won't criticize or think less of us. Maybe we wish we could confess and find forgiveness, but we're not sure how to forgive ourselves. This makes all the burdens even heavier. We put on a happy face and stand as tall as we can under the weight of our private load. Often, we feel we have no choice, or don't even recognize we're carrying a burden.

But our burdens sap our energy and drive us to excess, be it shopping, food, work or stimulants and depressants, as we try to stand up under the stress and strain of it all and somehow make ourselves feel better.

We need something quick and easy and readily available, that nurtures and nourishes us both spiritually and psychologically. This the aim of the Spiritual Diet -- to give us a simple, quick and easy technique we can do on our own that will help us lose the weight of the world.

The Spiritual Diet feeds and energizes us by showing us how to find love, calm our racing mind, breathe more healthfully, and have daily moments of prayer, goodness, self worth, peace of mind and much more.

We can learn to extract the nutrients from the good we do, the people we love and who love us, the air we breathe -- all food for our psyche and Spirit that nourishes us and lightens the weight we're carrying.

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We can learn to loosen our grip on life and on having to have it all to be exactly the way we want it to be, and we can learn to extract the nutrients from the good we do, the effort we make, the small successes we achieve -- then we can appreciate the positives in life and we feel enriched and lighter.

Daily life is hard and we carry many burdens. We want to feel calm, cool and contented, but we're hurried, harried and hassled. Each day we struggle to pay the rent and read about murder, rape, and kidnappings in the newspaper, and then at night we see more killing, dishonor and dishonesty on TV. Millions understandably feel uptight, worried and insecure. But we aren't sure how to achieve a genuine peace of mind in the midst of all our worries and burdens.

Our lives are busy and fast, and we're weighed down by the pace.

Maybe we feel we're just surviving, just getting through the day. Something's missing, but it's not clear what it is. We know we're not living as full and enriching a life as we could be living.

It combines an ancient technique of focusing the mind and combining our awareness and presence with other elements that lift us up and nurture our soul.

It begins with the Basic Spiritual Diet that stimulates the Relaxation Response -- which calms our mind and body and helps us sleep better at night and feel better during the day. When we combine relaxation and greater awareness in the present, as in the Basic Spiritual Diet, with prayer or love or basic goodness or our connectedness with others or with our purpose in life -- we lift our spirit and heal ourselves personally. The result is that the Spiritual Diet supercharges our spiritual aim and can be used in conjunction with any religious focus or belief.

The Spiritual Diet is not a diet in the sense that we're deprived of something we like in order to accomplish some goal. The Spiritual Diet nurtures and nourishes. It feeds and replenishes us personally and spiritually, helping find the source of our greatest strength, helping us wake up and enjoy life.

Try the Spiritual Diet for a month and see for yourself if it doesn't help you feel calmer and lighter, helping you lose the weight of the world. You'd probably see some early signs of improvement in a week.

The Spiritual Diet offers brief breaks to nourish you personally and spiritually. It's simple, fast, cheap, easy and non-fattening. It takes a minimum of three breaths a day to lose the weight of the world.

Life's a feast if we learn to enjoy it. We have to learn to extract the nutrients from the efforts we make and the good we do.

Life's a feast -- Enjoy today; Have a delicious day; Eat and be merry; Taste life's sweetness; Drink in the wonder of it all; Wake up and look around; Be here now.

Love and kindness are enriching. We can be nourished by more than our food -- the sweet smell of a rose, a loved one's smile, the satisfaction from helping and being helped. These are all small ways we find emotional and spiritual sustenance.

LWW uncovers our basic worth and shows us how to be more spiritual in the midst of it all.

It teaches how to live more fully and freely.

It offers spiritual experience with or without religion.

It uses practical applied principles common to major organized religions that we can use in the midst of daily life to be calmer and more spiritually awake.

It offers a menu of choices to help us live a more spiritual and personally meaningful life. It's important to understand sin and suffering, as all major religions teach, but we also need to emphasize our spiritual core of basic goodness, and appreciate our connectedness with that which lies beyond our self -- which lightens our load.

LWW aims to help you more clearly understand the burdens that are weighing you down, and show you what you can do about them. Then you can act to lighten your load.

It's a practical book and a set of techniques for people with active lives and careers. It helps you create a recipe that suits your own tastes and helps you help yourself to grow both personally and spiritually.

It provides a nurturing blend of personal satisfaction with spiritual awakening, a balance of psychological and spiritual self-help that we all need now.

The burdens we carry cloud our mind, close our heart, tighten our breath and block our spiritual awareness. Yet we can clarify and calm our mind, feel content and complete, have greater intimacy, deal with guilt and shame and pain, discover the wonder of our senses, find meaning and purpose, and live a vibrant and juicy life.

We've heard a lot of talk in recent years about family values. LWW shows what it means to live by the Golden Rules common to the world's religions, and to have basic goodness, courtesy, consideration, forgiveness, gratitude, honor, integrity and responsibility as part of daily family life.

Consciousness in the present is the mind of Spirit; Love is its heart.

Daily moments of consciously resting in the present, make us calmer and happier (even when we're hurried and hassled).

The difficulty is that too often, people pray or repeat a mantra in a routine, mindless manner. And they use it to seek personal satisfaction. It's important to do it with meaning and feeling, and to use it to not simply beg a higher power to satisfy one or another of our wishes, but to align ourselves with Spirit.

And we're inundated by the darker side of life on TV, and in movies and the news -- all filled with violence, greed, and dishonesty. This creates tension and sadness, adding to our weight of the world.

But the words 'good' and 'God' have the same root, and our spiritual nature is basically good. So we can act out of our goodness, trying to make the world a better place, choosing to help, heal and forgive ourselves and others. Then we can lighten our load by appreciating the good we're trying to do, appreciating even our good intentions, and feel better about ourselves as a result.

To mature personally and spiritually means that we come to see our self in what seemed to be other, so we feel caring and intimacy with people, nature, children in general, and future. When we gain a spiritual perspective, we realize that on a fundamental level, we are the world.

We may have many rights as individuals, but we also have responsibilities as members of groups to which we belong, such as our family, our country, our culture, and the natural world.

The future of our species depends on this key point. Do we each seek our own self-interest without regard for our shared greater good? A global society in the nuclear/computer/bioengineering age cannot afford excessive individualism.

We'd do well to learn to use the Native American philosophy of the 7th generation -- in making important decisions, we should consider the possible effects on our great, great.... grandchildren and act accordingly.

It takes aim at the source of so much human suffering and destructiveness -- the greed and selfishness of excessive individualism that harms all of us and our planet.

If we don't go into the nuclear, computerized, technologized, genetically engineered 21st century with solid, life-affirming values and a spiritual basis for a global society, we'll be in danger of losing our connection with our soul and our humanity.

LWW enriches our life personally and spiritually, lightening our load and helping us lose the weight of the world.