Ben Ralston

Why healing, personal development and spirituality are really the same thing.

Kiwan and Jai. Masters of Simplicity.
Sometimes, life seems so damn complicated, doesn’t it?! I have an intimate relationship with my wife to maintain and nourish; my child to educate, support, and nurture; my work to soak up my passion and creativity… and all the while the whole world seems to be trying to sell me something!


But lately, more and more, I’m feeling like everything is actually incredibly simple. Because the root of all these various and complex problems is the same – me!
When I get myself in order, everything else falls into place. Life becomes, once again, very joyful.
I used to think that I had to do lots of different things in order to get myself into that joyful space: Yoga; meditation; eat just right; get a balance between work and play; personal development work so that my relationships would work (as long as my partner also did personal development work!)… God, when I look back at what I was doing I cringe…
Now I realize that there is only one thing I need to do, and all the labels I used to apply really boil down, in essence, to this one thing:
Healing is this one thing.
Personal development is the same as this one thing.
Spiritual growth comes about as a result of this one thing.
Healing.
I’m not talking about the word ‘healing’ as it’s come to be used so much – as a kind of band-aid. This healer and that healer who do this and that, and eventually, after a while, you realize that actually, nothing has been healed!
I’m talking about profound, permanent transformation.
The reason why healing, personal development, and spirituality are the same thing: because we are already perfect.
There is nothing to do, to achieve, to get. It’s all there already, right there, inside you.
All we have to do, is let go of what’s blocking it form coming out!
When Buddha said: “Be a light unto thyself”, I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant: ‘just look at yourself, you’re perfect!’
When Jesus said “All these things, and greater, you shall do too”, he was saying that he was nothing special – just an ordinary human being like you and I, who had realized his perfection, and through it, was able to achieve miracles. And that we all can do that too!
We’re all so beautiful, amazing, and perfect. But we don’t love ourselves enough. And that’s the crux of the matter. We simply have to let go of the blockages that stop us from loving ourselves.
That’s healing (and it’s really very simple).
It’s also personal development and spiritual growth.

3 impossible true stories (and 1 way to feel more like God).

Thinks he’s an otter…

There have been times when I’ve felt so bad I’ve wanted the Earth to swallow me up. Times when, if I’d had one wish, I would not have wished for more money or time or power; I’d have wished to disappear in a puff of smoke.
And there was a time when I very, very nearly killed myself.
We’re all human, which is to say, we all have the capacity to experience tremendous pain. I’m talking about emotional pain here, but the same goes for physical…
I think it was Primo Levi who said something like:
“A human is an animal that can adapt to any circumstances”.
I once watched a documentary called “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off”. It was about a boy with a rare disease – his skin fell off his body every few days. His skin kept falling off all the time. His parents had to bandage him up, and he lived with that pain day in, day out, his whole life. In the end, he died of skin cancer.
I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much, or been so moved, as I did and was by that movie. That boy’s courage and dignity will remain with me, always. You can watch it here. You will be moved and shaken and inspired.
I wrote recently about feeling like an Ant. And about feeling like God.
To me, the difference between the two is just all about where we place our attention (and where we place our attention is the greatest sign of our intelligence)…

So I want to share with you a great way to shift your attention from the mundane, painful, ant-like aspects of life, towards God:
It’s called synchronicity.
Some people call it co-incidence, but I like to say that there is no such thing as co-incidence. Others call it luck, and I like to say that we make our own luck, and one of the ways in which I’ve made mine (and I’m one of the luckiest people in the history of luck) is by doing what I’m about to tell you about.
Actually, a better word than synchronicity is perhaps ‘miracle’. Because although mathematicians would be able to work out the odds of some of the things I’m about to tell you about happening; and although they might say that there is a billion to one chance; I’d say that it’s simply impossible. So it’s a miracle.
For example:
In 1999 I was reading a book about synchronicity.
I was living in a shabby little room in a big shabby house in Stoke Newington, London. For those of you that don’t know London, that’s very close to where the recent riots all kicked off.
The room I was in had one thing going for it – it overlooked a small park (I think it was called Stoke Newington Green).
And one morning, as I was making myself breakfast, I was thinking about the head-on car crash I’d had when I was 18 yrs old, when I’d only seconds earlier put on my seat belt (in itself, a kind of synchronicity). I never used to wear my seat belt, but that day, and I don’t know why, I did. It might have saved my life. It certainly prevented any injury, and the other guy wasn’t so lucky…
Anyway, I’m standing there making my breakfast and remembering that car crash, when suddenly I hear an almighty KRUNSCH. I look out the window, and across the other side of the park, two cars have just collided. This blew my mind. But it’s not the punchline.
The very next day, standing there making myself breakfast again, thinking about the previous days synchronicity… KRUNSCH. I look out the window, and in exactly the same spot, two cars have collided.
Impossible.
When I was working as an actor I had no work. I was a terrible actor. So one day I had to go out and get myself a job, and after walking around London literally all day without success, I told myself: “One more”.
I walked into one more bar and asked if they needed a barman. The girl behind the bar (full of piercings and tats, with a shaved head, and a ton of attitude) said ‘no’, at the same time as a guy appeared from the stockroom. As I turned to leave, thoroughly dejected, he called out:
“Wait a minute, we might be looking for someone”.
So I sat down for a coffee with him and had an interview.
While we were talking I noticed a photo of two naked men walking down the beach away from camera, hand in hand. Then I noticed that my interviewer had a handlebar moustache and a leather waistcoat. Then I noticed the girl behind the bar again, and all the other very obvious signs that I was in a gay bar.
The owner – the guy interviewing me – was called Robin. He owned the place with two other guys, Gordon (his boyfriend) and Guy (his best friend).
On the wall, above the photo, was a metal sign:
The Back Bar.
As I clocked the photo on the wall, Robin asked me:
“Is it a problem for you, working in a gay bar?”
I thought about it for a moment. I couldn’t find any reason why it should be a problem.
“No”, I said.
And so I worked there for a year. It was a great year. I loved almost every minute of it. And a tip for any single young straight men out there: working in a gay bar is a great way to meet girls. Trust me.
A few years later, and a few weeks after the double car crash synchronicity, I was in a rehearsal studio with my band (I was the drummer). As we left the studio, we were all talking about what a terrible drummer I was. I was worse at drumming than I was at acting. I’d been thinking for a while about drum lessons, and just as I was thinking about it again, we walked past the door of one of the other studios… and heard the most amazing drum solo. There was someone in there playing the drums like I’d never heard the drums played before. We all stopped. I had to go in there. It couldn’t be a co-incidence.
So I went in there. I slowly opened the door and saw this young guy playing the kit as if it was a part of him. He was amazing. But the most amazing part of it all, and the reason I stood there with my mouth wide open for a while even after he stopped playing – on the wall, above his head, was a metal sign:
The Back Bar.
Impossible.
When I moved to Slovenia, my (now) wife and I talked a lot about getting a dog. We had both always had dogs around us, but right then we were a little afraid of the doggy responsibility. Now we have a dog, two cats, and a baby, and I’m still afraid of responsibility …
So we were thinking of getting a dog for 2 years, and it went like this:
“Let’s get a dog?”
“Yay!”
“Hang on, what about the responsibility…”
“You’re right, forget it.”
One day we were out walking in the hills and the same conversation came up. And this time my wife said:
“Let’s ask the universe what we should do”.
I’d never heard of this ‘ask the universe’ concept (sounded a little too ‘New Age’ for me to be honest), but we did it. We put this question out there to the universe, and simply waited for the answer.
We didn’t have to wait long…
After the walk, we were heading into town. We got into the car, and my wife was fiddling with the radio. Our usual radio station wasn’t available, and she was trying to find another channel.
Suddenly (on Slovene radio) an English voice said:
“And now, from 1966, ‘I Love My Dog’ by Cat Stevens”.
It’s a cool song (“all the pay I need comes shining through his eyes”).
“That’s it, that’s the sign, we’re getting a dog!”
In town we saw a poster. A woman’s dog had had puppies. When we got there, only one puppy was left. His name:
Ben.
Impossible.
We renamed that puppy Jai.
Jai on dry land
I could go on and on giving examples of synchronicities, or miracles, that have happened to me. On and on and on. Because the more open you are to them, the more you see them. They happen all the time. Life is a long succession of miracles. You are a miracle.
So here’s what to do: be open to miracles. Keep an eye out for synchronicities. Because when things like this happen, you stop feeling like a helpless little ant, and you realize that you are part of a much bigger picture. You stop and say ‘wow’.
Just WOW.
That’s impossible.


Please spread the WOW: leave a comment, and share using the green ShareThis button. 

You eat what you are?


So much more to us than meets the eye…




This was inspired by the recent debate (over on Elephant Journal, where I’m a regular columnist) on garlic. If you missed that, and would like to ‘catch up’, you can follow the links at the foot of this piece.

To cut a long story short: someone said that garlic is bad for meditation (he went so far as to call it a ‘brain toxin’). A lot of people were pretty upset about it; someone else wrote an article refuting their claims, and extolling the health benefits of garlic; then there was a refutation to the refutation, and so on.

Here’s what I think:
Garlic is toxic, but not to the brain – to our higher, subtle awareness. That awareness is not brain centered, although most people think it is.

 In this article:

  1. I want to explain how both parties in the recent debate about garlic are right!
  2. I also want to share some very useful information with you about the nature of your being, and
  3. I’ll share with you some practical tips, including a free, instant remedy for Jet Lag…

When I first saw the original article, …… I thought nothing of it, except that I was mildly pleased to see the subject broached on a popular forum.

I have not eaten garlic or onion for 10 years. However, I’m not obsessive about it; if I’m in a restaurant or at a friends’ home I’ll eat it without a thought.

I stopped eating garlic and onion when I trained as a yoga teacher in India in 2001. I learned many, many fascinating things on that course. For example: the ideal consistency of the feces of a healthy person is that of a ripe banana. Useful huh?! I thought so too…

Well, I learned a lot of useful information on that course. I recall thinking at the time that these things should be taught in schools – why, for example, did I have to wait 27 years, and travel to a distant continent in order to find out what my stools should look like? Why, after an expensive public school education in England, did I know the date of the battle of Hastings (1066) and various other utterly, utterly useless bits of information, but not these simple things that affect my everyday life?

During the month that I spent immersed in that course, from early morning to late at night, I felt as if my real education had just begun…

One of the things that I learnt is that according to the ancient yogic teachings, a human being consists of not just one, but three bodies: a physical body (which we’re all very aware of), an astral body (which sounds to many people like pure hokum, I know, but bear with me!), and a causal body.

Now, the 3 bodies have 5 ‘sheaths’ (if you thought the astral body stuff was hokum, you’ll love this!).

The physical body is composed of the Food Sheath (when you die: food for the worms!);
The astral body contains the Vital Sheath (think: energy); the Mental Sheath (senses, thoughts, doubts, and emotions, also the sub-conscious), and the Intellectual Sheath (analytical process, discrimination, decision making, and ego).
Finally, the causal body is composed of the Blissful Sheath (bliss, joy, calmness and peace).

Physical:

Food

Astral:

Vital (energy)
Mental (senses, thoughts, emotions)
Intellectual (analysis, discrimination, ego)

Causal:

Blissful (bliss)

The point of all this is: we are complex beings, ironically not unlike onions! We consist of many different aspects. Peel back one ‘layer’, and there is another underneath.

Now, the whole garlic-eating debate seemed to hinge on a basic misunderstanding that many people have (because it’s one of those things that they don’t deem important enough to teach us at school).

Our physical body is the densest, most material, gross manifestation of who we are. There is a subtler layer beneath it (or around it, or pervading it) known as the astral body, and an even subtler layer called the causal body.

Our society is focused (like tunnel vision and to the exclusion of all else) on the material. Awareness of the subtle aspects of our being is limited to small groups of people.

That’s my understanding of what Einstein meant when he said:
“The rational mind is a faithful servant. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. We have created a society that honors he servant, and has forgotten the gift.”



The rational mind is concerned with, and grounded in the material world – our body, and it’s physical environment.
The intuitive mind is more concerned with, and grounded in the higher awareness – energy (prana, chi), emotion, intellect, bliss.

However, the tunnel vision of our society has not always been so. Thousands of years ago in India, the sages who developed Yoga had intimate knowledge of many things that our modern sciences are only now discovering.

For example, on my yoga teacher training 10 years ago there was a lecture by Amit Goswami, a now well-known professor of theoretical physics. (If you’ve seen the movie ‘What the bleep do we know?’ then you’ll have seen him). What he said blew my mind. In a nutshell, he explained that much of the knowledge of quantum physics that has emerged very recently in the scientific community was already known thousands of years ago!

Now, the misunderstanding that I referred to (as the cause for confusion in the ‘garlic-gate’ episode) is quite simply due to the lack of awareness that most people have about the more subtle aspects of themselves! (It’s understandable because we’re not taught about it – we learn about what happened when, and algebra, and oxbow lakes, and ‘stranger danger’, and grammar, and how to dissect frogs… but not about what our stools should look like, or what we actually are)!

Garlic of course has many wonderful health benefits (as the rebuttal to the original articles clearly showed) – including for the brain. However the ancient yogis never said (as far as I am aware) that garlic is bad for you physically; they said that it interferes with the higher, subtler aspects of the consciousness. They were not concerned with the physical health benefits of garlic, because they didn’t need them!



They almost certainly had optimal health (check the link for an very relevant article about what health really is), a highly robust immune system, and extremely strong, healthy bodies. They didn’t sit all day in cars and at desks; they didn’t have to worry about pollution, genetically modified vegetables, or genetically engineered (Franken) fish. They developed the practice of asana and pranayama and lived in harmony with their environment.

So, I’m confident in my assertion that they were healthy.

I’ve been practicing yoga (in all it’s aspects) for many years, and I find that I also don’t need garlic to stay healthy. If ever I need antibiotics, sure, I’ll get them from natural sources where possible: and garlic is one of those sources.

Yoga is personal development: in fact, one of the oldest methods of personal development; one that has stood the test of time; and upon which many modern systems are built – Pilates, auto suggestive relaxation techniques, various techniques for concentation and meditation, and so on…

Personal development means development of the person. And Yoga, as we’ve seen, takes the view that our person is much, much more than a body. So it means developing the physical, energetic, and causal bodies, so that we become truly coherent and integrated as a whole person.

When the physical body is healthy and you want to focus on developing your higher faculties through regular meditation; when you want to experience the world around you not only through your physical body but also through the astral and causal bodies; perhaps even, ultimately, to experience true, lasting bliss; then, it may be that garlic interferes with that purpose.

Certainly that’s what the ancient yogis thought, and who am I to disagree with the only teachers I ever had that taught me what my poo should look like?

Another very useful thing that they taught me, which I hope will demonstrate to you very clearly why I hold what they say in such high regard, is a cure for jet lag…

Anyone who has ever been seriously jet lagged knows how valuable this is: I’ve only been jet lagged once, but it was so bad I wished the earth would swallow me up.

I couldn’t sleep for a week, and was hallucinating from tiredness. In the end I got very sick. It happened when I flew to India…

Jet lag is your body clock out of whack. The ancient yogis knew what regulated the body clock. This is amazing, because our scientists don’t even know for sure (or if they do, they only just *very* recently figured it out) what regulates the body clock.

It’s the pineal / pituitary gland in the middle of our brains.

So the cure for jet lag is: headstand. It was known by the ancient yogis as the ‘King of the Asanas’ because it has such powerful restorative uses: in fact, it is written that one who practices headstand for 3 hours conquers death! I can’t testify to that – the most I’ve ever done is 10 minutes!

However, I can tell you that when I went to India I was jetlagged so badly I almost wanted to die… and when I left India, I stood on my head before the flight for 3 minutes, and after the flight for 3 minutes, and slept like a baby when I got home – no jet lag whatsoever.

Those ancient yogis sure knew a lot of useful stuff.

Were they right about garlic interfering with higher awareness? I’ve found it to be true, yes.

It’s good to first take care of your body and health, because that’ll give you a firm foundation on which to build your personal development. When you’ve done that, you may wish to take care of the other aspects of your self.

Meditate deeply, go beyond body consciousness, and experiment with your diet. You may find that garlic and onion suddenly seem less important.

MAY YOUR CHILDREN TURN THEIR FACES FROM YOU

Being real in this world
of fantasy film, video games, mass media marketing, and 24-hour everything isn’t easy is it?

Real means whole.
Whole means complete.
To me, ‘being real’ means spirituality. Grounded Spirituality.
Our society wants us to be less than all we can be. It wants us to turn from our intuition and from our heart, and to live from our head space:
want more, think less, be good consumers.
So I swim against the tide of the conditioning and ‘mis-education’ that I experienced as a child and as a young adult, at home and at school.
There is a battle going on: between the side of me that wants things to remain the same, to control, and thus to ease into a lazy life of comfortable mediocrity; and the side of me that wants to embrace change; go with the flow; and surrender fully to the wonder and magic of this present moment.
They say that ‘all is fair in love and war’. Well, I use all the weapons I can get my hands on. I employ every strategy available.
The purpose of this article is to share one of those strategies with you.
It is: constantly remembering my motivation…




I try to keep in mind why I walk this spiritual path. So much of the world around me is geared towards making me forget, keeping me down, putting me to sleep—I find that if I start to fall, it’s good to have a reminder of why I’m fighting this battle.


So I want to share one of my reminders here with you now…
Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist, who in 1943 became a partisan to fight against the Fascist regime. He was later captured, and finally ended up in Auschwitz concentration camp. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months. He survived just under a year there, and wrote with great courage and honesty about his experience in the book ‘If This is a Man’. This is the poem he wrote at the start of that book:
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
‘Meditate that this came about.’ This is the line that gets me.
Meditation is not navel gazing. It’s not a self-indulgent temporary escape from reality. It’s not about ‘feeling better.’
It is about being whole again. It’s for putting things right, and remembering our divine nature: our perfect essence.
When enough people do that—practice spirituality rather than just talk about it as an idea—then we will have created a world in which Auschwitz can finally be forgotten. There will be no more Holocausts, Srebrenica’s, and Rwanda’s.
Terrorism will be a thing of the past.
The real war is inside.
I keep this poem close by, so that from time to time I can remind myself of why it’s important to keep fighting. It’s hard for me to read that poem and then go back to sleep. 
I carve the words in my heart, and I will repeat them to my children, and I do commend them to you, because it helps me to be all I can be. It’s a strategy I use in the ongoing ‘war against ego-ism.’