The Candle Exercise

Psychic Maria Duval says that the candle exercise is excellent for achieving the level of concentration conducive to good visualisation. Settle yourself down comfortably and steady your breathing so it is calm and relaxed. Close your eyes and, behind the ʻscreenʼ of your closed eyelids, at a point located between the eyebrows, just above the bridge of your nose (third eye), visualise a candle, with strength and determination.

Create a mental image of a candle, first the base in white or coloured wax, the wick, then the blue, gas-like flame and finally the yellow-orange flame, which flickers gently, as if in a light breeze. Keep the image of the object firmly in your mind, without losing your concentration…donʼt allow other thoughts to invade your mind… Once you can manage to maintain a clear image for several minutes, without losing yourself in parasitic thoughts that dissolve the image, you can consider the exercise complete. You have to be able to ʻseeʼ the candle, in as much detail as possible, with your eyes closed.

Maria Duval confirms that this exercise will teach you to create thought-forms and to develop your ʻpsychic visionʼ.

If necessary, you can go through a preliminary stage before you do the exercise. This involves lighting a candle and focusing all your attention on it (at a distance of around 40 centimetres from your face), keeping your eyes open, without blinking. Try to memorise every last detail faithfully. Then close your eyes (before they start watering!): youʼll notice how the image of the candle remains fixed for a moment on the retina of your eye, before gradually dissolving. Before the image totally disappears, recreate the thought-form of that candle using a mental image… In other words, from that point onwards, focus your concentration on the internalized image of the candle within you and visualise it. Imagine a beautiful halo of golden light completely surrounding this candle. Hold this perception for as long as possible.

Persevere with your training: after several attempts, youʼll find youʼre able to hold clearer, more detailed images, for longer and longer periods.

Learn from mistakes and change the Mindset

Internal defeat is a mindset, where you begin to believe that most new ideas will fail. You might think -"After all, what I tried in last week's Yoga class, failed."

ou will always learn from mistakes. When you see them clearly as a test, examine the results, and study them closely for the reason why they went wrong.

Whether it is a lesson plan, trying mantras, Hot Yoga, Gentle Yoga, a pro shop, or trying anything new, it is better to make mistakes than do nothing at all.

Some of the most successful Yoga teachers, I know, deal with mistakes as part of the learning curve. They turn all of their defeats into learning experiences. This is extremely powerful when you consider the cost of learning anything of value.

After all, what did you spend on your education, so far? Did you think you would stop learning at a certain point in life? Did you learn from your past mistakes? Of course you did, and now you are stronger due to the corrective adjustments, you have made.

When a child learns to ride a bicycle, there are plenty of falls along the way, and then the falling stops. However, even skilled adults fall off bicycles, sometimes.

So, don't take past failures personally. Put them behind you and learn from each one.

Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers had failures, but nobody seems to remember that. Just like them, you are not a failure, but you may have failed in the past, just like they did. When you get down on yourself, look back at what you have accomplished.

When you take on your next project, do the research first, assemble a team, make a full commitment to succeed, and never mentally quit before you start.

Lastly, whenever it is possible, learn from the mistakes of others. This is why Yoga businesses approach me for consulting services: To save money by avoiding known mistakes, pitfalls, and traps.

Our life experience is divine!

Every experience you have in life is divine.

Why do I say that? Do you believe me when I claim each of these experiences is a gift to you, whether good or bad experiences, which may put our lives in bliss or turn our lives around. These experiences come and go. Everyday, it happens. It seems like a regular normal clock.

And we always get annoyed when we don't receive when the fact is you are receiving in life all the time but you do not know it as you are blocked by your own judgement. Imagine that your lungs exclaim, "I can't exhale for you because some peter need this air more than you." This is not possible, right?

However, if I look at it with another angle and ask, what will my life be like when I give and receive from a place of love and abundance? Just imagine looking back on my experiences from that place of love and flow and now I really see the gifts. I also see how they are important in my own spiritual growth and I will finally realize how beautiful I have become due to those divine experiences.

Therefore I say, everybody's experience is a divine gift of give and receive. This is the simple brick of human lives. When I finish this post, it is already after 3am Sunday morning. In this quietness of the wee morning hours, I feel that my spiritual experience has received much. It is time that I learn to give more. I also have to thank Maria Duval for some of her divine guidance at all times. Maria Duval has really taught me a lot.