#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization #nondualawareness #nonduality #advaita  To read my self-development articles please visit my site here:http://freedomfromtheknown.com Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitesizewisdom Hello, I'm Ivan: travel junkie, blogger, teacher, a student of life. Welcome to my little home on the net, where I hope to share ideas and insights to help you lead a deeply fulfilling life....

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealizationToday's quote is by Sir Francis Bacon, “In charity, there is no excess”   If you are on a self-development or spiritual journey, much of that journey at times can seem selfish as you are mainly focused on yourself. This can be ok because in order to truly help others we must be able to help ourselves first.  This will also help us to relate to other people’s struggles and then we can be in a better position to help by having some...

#selfdevelopment​ #conciousness​ #spirituality​ #selfrealization ​I think it’s safe to say that most of us will spend our whole lives searching. Searching for love, money, happiness, success, and many other worldly desires.   This search takes place mainly in our external world, a search that leads us further away from what we actually want and from who we really are. We feel that once we attain these worldly desires that life will be grand, everything will be ok, that we will be deeply...

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization  The title of today’s video is “How To Become a Leader: What Trump Taught The World”, but it’s actually based on an article I wrote a long time ago, which was “How To Become a Leader: What Hitler Taught The World”. It’s not my intent to discuss politics here, but if Donald Trump has done anything well, I think many of us will agree that he did a great job of implementing the main ideas that I discuss in the post.   The purpose of...

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization Today's quote is by William James, “Genius...means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitable way.” If you have watched some of my videos you will know how much I stress and talk about the faculty of attention. If you are new to my channel check out my video where I give an overview of the 3 levels of attention. I’ll put some helpful links in the description box below.   Understanding The Three Levels of...

Today we’ll talk about increasing our ability of working with our sensitive energies, of getting more acquainted with recognizing sensation for what it truly is.   With learning to relax the body, emotions, and thoughts we are laying the foundation for our journey into our inner space. Our ability to perceive what’s going on inside us becomes more acute and vivid. When our body is no longer wasting its vital energy on unnecessary tension and strains the energy that keeps us in relationship...

Living From Presence: How To Really Enter The Present Moment: https://youtu.be/-Px1k1XLJ2A Developing Presence 101: Relaxing The Body and Releasing Its Tensions: https://youtu.be/Yj6x1VzN874  Recently I made a couple of videos about living from presence, If you haven’t checked them out, I'll put the links in the description box. In the first video, I talked about the importance of grounding our attention in the raw sensation of the body, in the 2nd video I talked about the next step of...

Today's quote is by Epictetus, “For if a person shifts their caution to their own reasoned choices and the acts of those choices, they will at the same time gain the will to avoid, but if they shift their caution away from their own reasoned choices to things not under their control, seeking to avoid what is controlled by others, they will then be agitated, fearful, and unstable.””   This quote highlights an idea we've discussed before, which is the importance of creating a life aim for...

“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.”   They say patience is a virtue, and it truly is the number one quality to cultivate in our lives because it ties in and is a by-product of all our self-development work. Real patience is the result of our genuine inner work, of us, becoming more conscious.   To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com  Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitesizewisdom  Follow us on Instagram:...

Recently I made a video about living from presence, If you haven’t checked it out here: https://youtu.be/-Px1k1XLJ2A  In that video, I gave a brief overview of how our spiritual journey is one where we go from the gross to the very subtle, and the importance of learning to ground our attention in the energy of sensation in our bodies in order to grow and feed our presence.   Today I’ll get a little bit into discussing the initial stage of developing contact with our body, with our body...

Today's quote is by Mark Twain, “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”   We're living in crazy times right now, and we all could use a little cheering up. Unfortunately, modern life in many parts of the world has encouraged more selfish ways of living, of being. It’s a dog eat dog kind of world out there. Which has become a big source for stress and unhappiness for many.  To read my self-development articles please visit my site here:...

Today our topic is on living from Presence.   Our whole self-development journey is one towards a deeper understanding and embodiment of presence. The more presence we invite into our life, the more our life comes alive. Living with little presence our life just slips through our hands and passes us by. We become passive participants in our life and don’t experience it fully.   Presence means to be here and now grounded in our life, grounded in our bodies, through not only the sensory...

Today's quote is by the Buddha,   “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.”   I know it seems as if the sky is falling every day as we hear non-stop about all the different crises going on around the world. Especially if you are someone who has been directly impacted by everything going on. It can be...

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization  I have spoken before on the importance of making an aim for oneself in respect to our self-development work. Our aim is what keeps us on the right track. After careful and sincere self-observation, of being objectively mindful of our behavior we should be able to identify areas that we need to work on in order to progress on our journey of becoming more conscious. This data helps us to formulate an aim for our self-development...

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization All of us have heard the importance of learning to be present, of living in the now, but how many of us are actually really living it, how many of us really understand what that means or how to do it…   Today I’ll briefly touch upon this by emphasizing that we need to live like we really mean it.  It means we need to learn to identify the silent presence behind all experiences and to live by having our intention in whatever it is...

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization Today we will continue our discussion on negative emotions, specifically that you have the choice or right to not be negative.   To read my self-development articles please visit my site here: http://freedomfromtheknown.com

In recent years due to the success of the Secret, the law of attraction has enjoyed a mass revival. Although it was good that the focus was generally on being more positive, it lacked a comprehensive understanding and also gave birth to many negative outcomes due to this. I  Instead of helping people become more free, it subtly enslaved many people as well by enabling them to become more egotistical and the results promised did not materialize for most. Peoples hopes and dreams are being...

On our journey of self-development, one of the key themes that you will find across all spiritual paths is that of purification...and specifically of the purification of our emotions.   The emotions that we have picked up through life, that are now part of our false personality, is what keeps us at the level of being that we are currently at.   False personality is all that we have acquired from life, all our conditioning from the external environment that has shaped us. False because it’s...

Today we will talk a little bit about how we can use our habits to help us in our self-development work. In trying to change ourselves to live more consciously we need all the energy we can get. Much of our energy is spent through all the automatic habits that we have developed, and through all our various energy leaks such as indulging in negative emotions, at the end of the day we simply don’t have enough energy left for our self-development work. So we need to become less mechanical, more...

Energy is all around you. On our self-development journey, one of the primary tools that we use to gain self-knowledge is our attention. We develop a deep and intimate relationship with attention. Which is just an aspect of our true Will. Not what most people take their Will to be which is a constantly changing little “i”, the will of our conditioned personality.    When our attention is refined enough it may be possible for us to be able to perceive and to draw in the energy in the air....

We live in a culture of me, me, me! We all occupy a very small part of the world, we live in our own tiny bubble that doesn’t make any real contact with the greater world. It is important for us to try to conceive of something greater than ourselves. To extend beyond our own little bubble, and in doing so new vistas will open up to us.   For example, if all of us could every day upon waking up try to realize the fact that our time on this earth in the grand scheme of things is actually very...

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization Today's quote is by Saadi Shirazi, “Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.”    In a world that seems to be exponentially moving faster, developing real patience will help us to navigate life much more intelligently.   How can we develop real patience? Real patience can be a by-product of our sincere self-development work like our meditation practices and our active self-observation. On my channel, you...

Today's quote is by Henry James, “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind”    I think we can all agree that our world can always use a little more kindness. Today, I just want to provide a little gentle reminder to deliberately be more kind as you go about your day.  If you are trying to be kind to others, do it with the attitude that you will be kind to others without the expectation that they will then be kind...

#selfdevelopment #conciousness #spirituality #selfrealization We live in a world that is dominated by thought. Thought has allowed us to create a materially comfortable world. It’s allowed some amazing inventions to come to life, but at the same time has enslaved us as evidenced by the levels of unhappiness and depression that people deal with despite that the common man has more wealth then even Kings had not long ago.  On the quest towards inner freedom, it is essential that we come to an...