What’s your reaction when people and situations don’t align with your expectations? Your subjective life, the stew of thoughts and feelings constantly moving within you, prompt most of your actions. If you’re like most people, addictive demands — automatic emotional states that come when you don’t get what you want — can run your subjective life and block your happiness.

Does the idea of developing spiritual awareness seem challenging? If it does, no worries, you’ve got help from the monks and nuns of the middle ages. They went through four stages in preparation for the awakening and development of spiritual awareness.

If you’re dealing with frustrations in your life and your relationships, yoga has a solution for you. Did you know that we have five powerful drives within us that are just craving to be fulfilled? If you deal with these drives, you can have a fulfilled life. And by helping the people you love fulfill these drives, you’ll have happier relationships.

Explore how the practices in Patanjali’s eightfold path can help you get free of vrittis, whirlpools of consciousness, that keep your mind feeling turbulent and feeling separate from the one mind, from spiritual awareness, from knowing the spiritual facts.

In The Gentle Art of Blessing, Pierre Pradervand explains that we ourselves are never the bestower but simply the witness — and instrument — of life’s abundance and blessings. As we grow spiritually, our level of consciousness shifts in a way that allows us to become clear instruments in which Spirit blesses others through us.

If you sincerely express yourself to God in prayer, a connection develops. Even if you don’t feel the connection at first, if you keep opening your heart to God, you will likely start receiving Spirit. As you begin to experience Spirit, you may enter into higher dimensions of prayer known as spiritually conscious prayer.

Lao Tzu, a wise man who inspired Confucianism and Buddhism, taught that without the cooperation of feelings, you can’t know the soul.

Yoga practice can lead to a beautiful state called sahaj samadhi in which you are living in contact with Spirit, aware of the connection all the time, while going about the activities of your daily life.

The key to your life being a lila, a Divine play between you and God, is to distinguish between your ego and your true self.

We are souls expressing through body and mind, but too often we ignore Spirit. The necessary ingredient for becoming spiritually aware is attraction to Spirit or God.