I Am: Your Guide to Mind and Body Union for Total Awareness

By Maggie Moor

I Am: Your Guide to Mind and Body Union for Total Awareness is an inspiring and intriguing self-help guide that will show you how to lead a happier life with a greater sense of awareness of the need for a harmonious coexistence between your body and your mind. The meditation and journaling exercises at the end of each chapter will assist you in realizing the reality of a heightened sense of enlightenment in how you approach the day-to-day pressures of life.
MaggieMoor.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480879096

Maggie Moor

Maggie Moor is a visionary, healer, psychotherapist and author of I AM: Your Guide to Mind and Body Union for Total Awareness. Ms. Moor has spent the past ten years studying and developing ways of helping people heal trauma and connect to their internal emotional lives and their natural sources of energy and power. She devoted several years to the study of Buddhist meditation practice, which included a concentrated study at a Varanasi Temple in Northwestern India. Maggie Moor lives in New York where she has counseled individuals in Eastern Spirituality, Yoga, and Integrative Mind and Body Therapy for ten years, specializing in working with people who experience difficulties in intimacy and in their relationships. Ms. Moor is also certified to practice psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Her psychoanalytic paper, “Coloring Outside the Lines: Sadomasochistic Defense and the Search for Identity,” was nominated for the NAAP Gradiva Award. She has worked at The Treatment Service with patients recovering from anxiety, and at Rikers Island facilitating groups for women recovering from trauma and addiction. In her spare time, Ms. Moor is a three time National Figure Competitor, a Jazz-Rock singer/ songwriter and fiction novelist. She is the founder of Institute for the Advancement of the Mind.

Book preview

I AM

Your Guide to

Mind and Body Union

for Total Awareness

MAGGIE MOOR

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Copyright © 2019 Maggie Moor.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Archway Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover photo by Andrew Brucker.

Cover author photo by Kai York.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7907-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7908-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7909-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019909819

Archway Publishing rev. date: 7/23/2019

I’ve learned that

whenever I decide

something with

an open heart, I

usually make the

right decision.

—Maya Angelou

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1     Energetic Awareness

54326.png Metaphysical and philosophical concepts for understanding healing through mind-and-body union. Enlightenment. Synchronicity. Space-time continuum. Chaos theory.

54326.png Mindfulness Breath Meditation

Chapter 2     Honoring Your Body

54326.png A positive relationship with your body. Positive and negative self-talk. Physical fitness. Somatic awareness.

54326.png Journaling and Meditation: Body and Breath Practice

Chapter 3     Acceptance

54326.png What acceptance means. Living the moment and our nervous systems. Understanding your body energy. Pitfalls of society and media. Caught up in remembering and planning. Embracing the unknown.

54326.png Journaling and Meditation: Acceptance

Chapter 4     The Biology of Love

54326.png Human need for love. Neuroscience of touch. Self-destructive pleasure and healthy pleasure.

54326.png Journaling and Meditation: Touch and Cultivating Pleasure

Chapter 5     Emotion

54326.png What is a feeling? Psychology and physiology of memory and emotion. Maladaptive defenses. What is interoception?

54326.png Journaling and Meditation: Interoception Practice

Chapter 6     Anxiety, Addiction, and Obsession

54326.png Neuroscience and psychology of anxiety, addiction, and obsession.

54326.png Journaling: Anxiety

Chapter 7     Emotions and Your Heart

54326.png Heart-and-mind connection. Thymus gland. Benefits of positive emotion practices like empathy and appreciation.

54326.png Meditation: Heart Opening

Chapter 8     Soul Evolution

54326.png Analyzing psychological repetitions. Interpreting the seven deadly sins for healing and awareness. Contemplating truth.

54326.png Journaling and Meditation: Cultivating Soul-Consciousness

Chapter 9     Chakra Cleansing and Balancing Your Body’s Energy

54326.png What each chakra means. Identify blocks in your chakras. Healing trauma and total awareness through balancing body energy.

54326.png Journaling and Meditation: Clear and Balance Chakras

Chapter 10   Fantasy and Daydreams

54326.png What are fantasies and daydreams? How to explore your fantasies and daydreams for awareness and self-expression.

54326.png Journaling: Stream of Consciousness and Fantasy

Chapter 11   Mind and Body: Practices

54326.png Physical exercises for natural energy, healing trauma, well-being, and awareness.

Closing Thought and Prayers

Preface

I AM: Your Guide to Mind and Body Union for Total Awareness is a contemporary perspective that opens up a new understanding of the connection between your body and your brain. I present this text as a self-help guidebook for people of all ages who may be healing and rejuvenating from physical and mental anxiety, and trauma—and those who simply want to expand their overall awareness through mind-and-body union. I present this text to anyone who wants to advance their mind and lift their subtle vibration toward a state of enlightenment.

I have constructed this eleven chapter system to help clarify the process by which you can begin to incorporate this kind of awareness into your everyday perspective. Each chapter engages a psychological and spiritual discussion of specific topics that will help you learn to understand your mind and body connection and enhance a peaceful awareness in your being. For example, we will discuss topics like energetic awareness, honoring your body, acceptance, love, healthy pleasure, emotion, and so forth. At the close of each chapter, I present guided journaling exercises and meditation practices, which I have designed and found useful for helping people heal from the specific psychological and emotional issues presented in each discussion. This book will teach you to lead a happier, more joyful life with a greater sense of awareness regarding the need for a harmonious coexistence between your mind and your body. The journaling and meditation exercises at the end of each chapter will assist you in realizing a heightened sense of enlightenment in how you approach the day-to-day pressures of life.

I AM: Your Guide to Mind and Body Union for Total Awareness is different from other books on similar topics because I base my talks and techniques on Buddhist mindfulness philosophy and traditional Eastern practices, including journaling and meditation, to prescribe awareness to the body-mind connection, and a new understanding of the word sensuality. This contemporary perspective opens up an understanding of the connection between the body and the brain as a path toward total awareness, attunement to the sensuality or life force vibration in your body, and a cultivated state of enlightenment. Through these mindful practices in awareness, you will learn to clear psychic and physical blocks that stop you from being fully present and embracing the natural Life Force that moves through your organic cells, and thus lead you to experiencing heightened joys of Life.

By spending fifteen or twenty minutes per day on these practices, you will begin to experience a progression toward connecting your body with your mind. You will experience a whole new level of your inner consciousness, your natural energy, your senses, and your living pleasures. Ultimately, through following the steps and practices in this book, you will increase your awareness and capacity for self-love, by finding ways to calm your nervous system and open your sense. As you begin to incorporate these perceptions and practices into your life as an overall ‘way of being,’ you will find a natural experience of the sensuality, well spring of life force, that multiplies and radiates from you as an infinite, unconditional, and higher vibration manifest as pure love.

I would like to share with you how I came to write this book. We have learned in the media this year, and especially from the #MeToo movement, that almost 80 percent of our population has experienced some kind of life-altering trauma, ranging from sexual abuse and assault to anxiety, depression and addiction. This is not a personal memoir, but I want to share something about myself. If you take the 80 percent figure as truth, it is probably safe to say that you have experienced some sort of trauma in your life. Perhaps you’ve never dealt with it completely—or at all—but this book is meant to help you start the journey to wellness, to a sense of self you didn’t have before, and assist you in building a positive outlook toward your mind and body connection. Through the system presented in this book, I hope that you can find a willingness to let go of identifying your Self as your Story and become inspired to develop a beautiful empowered way of experiencing your inner self, and your life.

My trauma took place when I was just a kid. As a child of ten years old, I experienced sexual abuse that in many ways dictated the direction of my life. As an early teen, I battled drug and alcohol addiction, resulting in repeated homelessness and dangerous situations. More than twelve years ago, I was in deep spiritual, emotional, and physical pain, ranging from heart palpitations to pancreatic distress. I felt so hopeless that I prayed day and night for the life force to simply be lifted from my body, and that my own heart would stop beating—and I came pretty near close. When my body was pretty limited and I had not consumed food for days, all I could do was listen to my heart beating, the slow steady ticking of time passing. Some deeper part of me began praying for some answers to this spiritual dilemma, this wish to die, and I found myself holding on with each breath.

In those moments, I slowly awakened to the realization that something bigger than my mind was keeping me alive—that beyond my wish to dematerialize, inside of me, and despite my own thoughts, was a truly deep desire, a wish to live. In those moments, a voice inside guided me, saying You must find a way to honor and listen to this part of you that wants to live, You must honor the life force in your mind and body. You must honor your heartbeat. My healing path included recovery groups and a journey to Varanasi, India, to study yoga and meditation, Gestalt talk therapy and an official degree in psychoanalysis led to work with many healers, therapists, and my own healing and rejuvenation. I focused daily on the part of me that wanted to live and thrive, listening in to that voice, the voice of my heart.

I slowly became immersed in filling my days with activities that brought me closer to my heart, fueled the life force within me, and brought me to understand the many techniques and practices that bring mental and physical focus and fulfillment. I have since become a national fitness athlete, recorded albums and music videos, written manuscripts, developed warm and loving relationships in my personal life, and found a passion for helping others.

My passion for helping others find a reverence for listening to their own hearts became a training and devotion to studying and developing ways of helping people heal themselves from personal trauma and connect to their internal emotional lives and natural sources of energy and power. This life experience and professional training has enabled me to work therapeutically with a wide spectrum of people who have suffered emotional and physical anxiety, addiction, trauma, and spiritual crisis. I have also learned to specialize in helping those who experience difficulties in emotional and physical intimacy and relationships, and those who seek mind and body. If making a life centered around honoring and cultivating a life centered in a union of mind and body, greater awareness, deeper inner peace and joy is what you seek, this book is your guide.

Here are some definitions that I hope help you understand the techniques I will discuss as we continue on this journey together:

54326.png Yoga: A Hindu spiritual and ascetic discipline, a part of which, including breath control, simple meditation, and the adoption of specific bodily postures, is widely practiced for health and relaxation. Yoga offers direct, unmediated access to, or embodiment of, or participation in the divine. It is a belief in the body, and sensual experiences of the body as part of the path to the divine—not as a distraction for the divine.

54326.png Meditation: A technique for resting your mind and finding a state of consciousness different from the normal waking state that guides you to experience levels of yourself by experiencing the center of consciousness within.

54326.png Psychoanalysis: A method of analyzing psychic phenomena and treating emotional disorders that involves treatment session during which the patient is encouraged to talk freely about personal experiences, especially early childhood and dreams.

54326.png Gestalt therapy: Gestalt practitioners help people focus on their immediate thoughts, feelings, and behavior and better understand the way they relate to others. This increased awareness can help people find a new perspective, see the bigger picture, and start to effect changes. It often uses role-playing to aid resolution of past conflicts.

54326.png Addiction recovery: A process of change through many practices of introspection, group support, and self-discovery through which an individual achieves abstinence and a continuum of improved wellness and health. It is a highly unique path for each person.

54326.png Reiki: A Japanese technique, Rei means God’s wisdom and Ki means life force power. Based on the principle that the therapist channels energy into the patient by means of touch to activate the natural healing processes of the patient’s body and restore physical and emotional well-being.

54326.png Physical fitness training: Exercise that increases the heart rate to improve the body and brain’s oxygen consumption, like running, swimming, weightlifting, with the correct amount of intensity, duration, and frequency that produces a significant improvement related to health and physical and mental well-being.

54326.png Health and nutrition: The science of understanding the interplay of nutrients, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and other substances in food and water in relationship to maintenance, growth, health, and disease in the body and brain. It is individual to each person and best understood for learning about your own body’s needs for natural health, energy, and well-being.

54326.png Primitive Mind: Will, emotion, and reason. Often, our Mind gets us stuck in emotion, shuts away from intellect, and remains caught in the unprocessed, visceral elements, often in anxiety. This part of our mind is limited wholly by birth and death and time (the needs and desires of the mind, life and body).

54326.png Advanced Mind: Universal consciousness, source, and energetics.

54326.png When elevated in mental awareness and deepened by intensities of experiencing communications from your body, your mind can become aware of a greater divine consciousness, something great in yourself toward which all of life tends (a harmonious and One, grounded in pure white love). Advanced Mind knows only the present: a freedom in the self-knowledge, a free delight of being. A plane of perfect knowledge that has the full integral truth of anything. It is a plane that YOU can rise to above this current limited mentality, and have perfect understanding.

54326.png Presence: In presence you can tap into internalized powers, energy sources, that amplify the expressions of justice, peace, harmony, and love. Here you can displace the need to resort to ego fears that cause you to act in way that create difficulty, disease, ill will, resentment and negativity. In fact, as you set right the conditions of your mind and body relationship, you will attune to a higher vibration state of being, and set right the conditions of your life, which create experiences of good fortune, synchronicity, and intensely joyful feelings of lightness.

I created the system in this book with the hope that what I have learned about healing the primitive mind through awareness, and discovering a path to awakening the advanced mind, to presence, through mind-and-body union will help you. I don’t believe this book can take the place of actual in-person therapy, healing, and participation in recovery groups for those who need, but I do believe it can be used as a real and effective a guidebook for you to use as a way toward awareness, healing and awakening. I will be your guide on that journey.

Sensuality and the Advanced Mind

I hope to elucidate some of the mystery and even possible stigma placed on the word sensuality, and help you create your own, personal understanding of what your own sensuality means for you.

I have researched several definitions of the word sensuality and found that for the most part it is described as being related to the Primitive Mind. To me, sensuality does not just mean the pursuit of sex, or sexiness, or simply pleasure for pleasure’s sake. To me, sensuality is a source of energy that moves through our cellular, organic bodies, resonates within our vibrational core. When we attune to this natural resonance, this vibration within, our mind and body will synchronize in Presence. Here we experience Oneness with Source, even transcendence into advanced states of consciousness.

In this book, I use the word sensuality to mean a natural, libidinal and positive energy that pulses through your mind and body all the time. The vibration of your cellular being: Your Life Force, or Chi. When you begin to understand and cultivate sensuality as a natural part of your Life Force, you may begin to honor it as a gift, and thus honor it with a reverence. Sensuality is the most natural source of energy we have. With awareness, you can cultivate sensuality within your being and it will act as a natural power that can rejuvenate, heal, calm, empower and enlighten you. There are many ways to cultivate and channel sensuality in our beings, such as meditation, exercise, expression, breath, and positive thought, all of which we will discuss in this book.

I AM: Your Guide to Mind and Body Union for Total Awareness prescribes that we learn specific perspectives and techniques and that allow us to learn to shed defenses and thus have more space within to cultivate the subtle vibration of aliveness throughout our bodies and our minds. This means creating an awareness about how to be with our own minds, and how our own minds operate. You will learn to create an awareness of the primitive mind, the many defenses, blocks, traumas, and fears that exist there. You will learn to cultivate an honor and respect for the communications your body is sending your mind, instead of defending against, splitting off from, or rejecting your body’s wisdom. As we cultivate awareness of the mind and honor the experience of the body, we begin to live in a world of total awareness of a mind and body union. This creates space for the natural well spring of sensuality, and thus life force energies, in your own body to thrive and operate as a natural source of power. As you learn to experience this vibrational energy in your body that moves through all of your cells at all times during the day and night, and then learn channel this natural and rejuvenating source, and you will develop greater awareness, though a new found and total mind and body union. Here your consciousness can elevate to one of the Advanced Mind: self-love, universal love, and elevated consciousness.

Now remember, the Advanced Mind is not a state of being you will consistently exist in. You live in the material world and experience day to day pressures, so of course your mind will oscillate between Primitive and Advanced states of being. Through the perspectives and practices presented in this book, you can develop such a heightened individual awareness that you will be able to train your own mind to observe your mind and body union. As you move into observing rather than just reacting to your mind and body, you will have greater choice of perception and action. You will learn to shift your perception from fear and ego states, to higher states of pure white love and universal consciousness. Through the easy daily practices that I offer, you can find a reprieve from the egoic state of anxiety, self-will, repetitions, and fears that block your whole energetic being from attuning to Life Force vibrations within. 90% of success is staying