The secret ingredient

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Kendall

My online course has a secret ingredient.

I have studied martial arts for many years. I love the wisdom and technology of Tai Qi, Qi Gong and all forms of kung fu. “I love Kung Fuuuuu”. : ) But as a westerner I was often told that there were many secret techniques that would not be shown to westerners.

Only the advanced students who had proven themselves worthy would be lead through the secret door into the hidden chamber to receive the special initiation into the most advanced practices blah blah blah.

Since the advent of kung fu movies and sci-fi movies every fighter now has to have the skill of the best martial artist, so the lid has been taken off all the special techniques and skills. However it is one thing to know about the technique and another to use it.

The real secrets are not in the technique but in the student. A keen student who is willing to practice and practice until the skill becomes second nature. The ardent student must practice until the skill pattern becomes embedded in the subconscious, ligaments and muscle groups.

What I have learnt over my many years that it really is experience and practice that leads to greater understanding, that leads to a greater experience, that leads to greater wisdom. All the secrets are naturally revealed when the student truly develops the ‘eyes to see’.

When I practice Tai Qi I am always reminding myself of what my teacher told me to do.
“Soften Robert, drop your weight, let go any tension in your body, move slowly, stay focused on what you are doing right now, give over to gravity”.

It sounds easy but the best masters had to practice this softening skill for years before they could fight without any tension in their body. Their secret ingredient was total body relaxation. It gave them the internal power to send a person flying across a room with very little effort.

This happened to me after I was training for 4 years. I was at the kitchen table one evening and my friend accidentally knocked a pen off the table’s edge and I just reached across and caught it as it fell. My friend who observed all this said ‘wow your fast’ however to me it was falling slowly. Somehow my brain had become so fast in its reactions that time slowed down. What was even stranger was –
I had become faster by practising being slow.

Continue reading →

What happened to my year

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This is December 2018
and I am wondering where my life has gone. I had great plans at the beginning of the year. To finish my online course (Breaking the Stress Cycle), that’s done, but over the year it kept morphing, mainly because it bought up all my stress about communicating, marketing and selling it. Ha, the irony.

Money has been the big stress for me this year, in fact it has been the big stress for the last couple of years as I transition away from clinical one on one practice. Here I am teaching a course on how to overcome your stress and of course what do I have to deal with, are all my stresses. So I had to go deep into how do I clear all my subconscious stresses.

During the year I began to realise I was suffering from symptoms of anxiety. My blood pressure went up, I had breathing problems and I started getting skin problems. It was lucky that I had plenty of knowledge and experience from my 35+ years as an acupuncturist and herbalist to draw upon.

And yet, I didn’t really get lasting results until I faced my fears and began to let them go. Not by trying to work them out, but by deeply relaxing and surrendering them up to a higher power. Meditation and Surrendering them to the Beloved have been my saving grace. Continue reading →

I have spent my life seeking Happiness

Posted on February 3, 2018 by Kendall

Seeking Happiness
by Robert Kendall  www.in8wisdom.com

If you are like me, you want a better life.  We all want a better life, we want to be happy, playful and have more fun every day. We want to be healthy, energised, successful, with a mind that is free, creative and filled with inner peace, joy and love.

Ultimately we all want to experience love and happiness, don’t we?
So why don’t we have that?
Why is it so hard to stay happy?
Why can’t I spend my day in joyful, loving thoughts and feelings?

I have spent most of my adult life searching for the answers to those questions. I have done many things, travelled the world, lived in a spiritual community and spent loads of money on seminars, books and courses of all types, I have tried sex, drugs and loud rocking music, all to simply be happy and find the meaning to life.

Last week, I was walking along the beach talking to my inner child, as one does on the beach. I was thinking, ‘what advice would I give to my child about his future?’ and I started to go in a downward spiral thinking about all the problems he will have to face, the struggles, the broken hearts, the health problems and it felt like I should tell him to give up and find a safe little hole to climb into.

But I then remembered that my life also had another story to tell. One of adventure and great love and miracles of success with great learning and meeting amazing people and wonders of nature and its raw beauty and power.

How the colour of sunsets and flowers and the inner light will bring heart openings of love and deep inner peace. How grace, a sense of humour and a connection to the Divine will carry him through the lessons of dark times and I began to get excited for him.

I start telling him that it is worth taking the journey, that it is worth the effort to search and look for the truth in all things. I told him to jump out onto the path and head into the wilderness and follow the bright sun of the new day and the shinning stars of night.

“I am going on an adventure!”, Bilbo Baggins. The Hobbit Continue reading →

I can’t meditate or relax because my mind is always busy

Posted on December 18, 2017 by Kendall

Meditation leads you to a Loving heart and a Peaceful mind-is that true?
by Robert Kendall

Meditating for 45 years (wow) has brought me many gifts, profound insight, frustration, joy filled laughter (mostly at the antics of my own mind) and profound peace and inner connection.

When teaching people how to meditate the biggest problem I hear is “I can’t meditate because I just can’t stop thinking, my mind is always busy and I just end up sitting there frustrated and angry at myself”.

My answer to that is “good! your meditation is working”.
Most people want to learn to meditate so they may feel peaceful and happy, which really means they are unhappy, stressed, tense, worried, angry, etc. All those negative emotions that cause you suffering and be in some form of pain.

But that also cause us to look for answers.

Continue reading →

This full moon is really messing with my head

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Kendall

This full moon is really messing with my head.

You know the word lunacy comes from lunar. In Traditional Chinese Medicine they say that the energy is drawn up to the head and it is best not to treat the head during a full moon because you can make headaches worse. Best to treat the lower body and legs to pull the energy downwards.
‘If you want to relieve a headache massage the feet’

Anyway back to me (have we stopped talking about me?) It has been really hard for me to stay focused on finishing my online course (Breaking the Stress Cycle). I am so close to hitting the publish button and feel incredibly impatient to see it up and running. But my perfectionism keeps me wanting to add more or change what I have, which just keeps me extending my launch date. Continue reading →

It is time to heal the healer

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Kendall

I am about to change direction once again
by Robert Kendall

been a while since I wrote a blog I have been busy writing and filming by online course ‘Breaking the Stress cycle’. They always say you teach most what you want to learn and that is true for me.

The last couple of years I have been struggling with health issues and how to make a living while doing what inspires me. Being able to let go my identity as an Acupuncturist has been harder than I thought.

Over the last few years I have began to realise that my health was beginning to suffer from looking after so many sick people. hey I have been doing it for over 35 years.

Don’t get me wrong I love helping people get well but a few years ago I began to realise I was subconsciously taking on all the problems that the client presented me with. I was trying to sort out all their issues in an hour. Problems that they had accumulated over many years of not following the Tao/the way of health and happiness.

And here I was trying to do and say all I could in the appointed time. In fact the longer I spent with a client the better they felt and the worse I did. Do that for 10+ clients a day, year in year out and your health starts to break down. Thank God my wife is a great healer and I have my daily routine of meditation and Qi Gong. Continue reading →

Learning to find the blue sky called NOW

Posted on February 7, 2016 by Kendall

How do you find now? By letting go of the past and giving up your ideas of the future.
How do you do that? You just let go of controlling your thoughts and emotions.
How do you do that? You sit still in a comfortable position and you become the watcher and feeler of your thoughts and emotions. You give up controlling your feelings and thoughts and you let them run wild until they have no more energy, they begin to slow down and moments of peace, acceptance and stillness appear. “Hey you are meditating!”

While you meditate you might see your mind as a beautiful blue sky and your thoughts are the clouds that travel across the sky blocking the light. There are times when the clouds turn grey and fill with rain, hail, lightening and strong winds making the world dark and forlorn. But behind all that noise and movement sits the beautiful blue sky and glowing yellow sun. So depending on what you focus on will depend on what you experience in that moment. “Hey your meditating again”.

Meditating is easy if we understand that we have complete freedom to create our day by deciding on what to focus on in every moment. We do this anyway unconsciously in every moment. This ability to choose means that we have the power to completely change our world by changing our focus. Continue reading →

The need for a daily sacred practice

Posted on January 16, 2016 by Kendall

Creating Sacred Spaces

Shauna and I went to Bali a couple of years ago for a holiday. It was our first time to Bali and we just wanted to hang out and rest, do a little shopping and see the country. We found the Balinese happy and friendly. To us they appeared to be soft and gentle hearted people, who placed their Spiritual and family life first.

The majority of Balinese are Hindu and they place their spiritual lives above all things. Each house has a temple to the Gods and spirits of their ancestors; some of their sacred spaces are so large that they take up the whole top floor of their house. They fill each day with Spiritual awareness and at least 3 times a day the Balinese make a conscious connection with the Divine with offerings and prayer.

The streets were littered with little prayer parcels asking for blessings. In every doorway and place of business the blessing parcels where piled up. We could easily tell how desperate each shop was for business by how high their prayer parcels were piled.

When we landed in Bali, Shauna and I could immediately sense a change of energy in the environment, even just walking out of the plane into the airport. Bali felt calmer and more peaceful. It had a gentler type of energy, somewhat less frantic than where we live. Even though everyone drove their scooters as if there was no tomorrow, there was still this flow of life force that was neither pushed nor hurried. Life flowed through the present moment with no hurry. Continue reading →

Chasing God part 2

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Kendall

It seems that Jesus has always been at the back of all the spiritual journeys I have taken in my search for God. My recent mystical spiritual journey was with Sri AmmaBhagavan at the Oneness University in India. Over the last 7 years I have attended all their courses on becoming awakened but again the Indian path of devotion was hard to comprehend.

What I loved about their teachings was that it was important to have a personal relationship with the Divine and that we all needed to create our own God, especially if the one you had wasn’t working for you. Dr Richard Bartlett says, ” If your higher-self is not working for you, then hire another one!”

I have always found Spirit/light in every teaching, every religion. I don’t think the Divine would leave anyone out so He/She has turned up in every culture in the forms best suited for humanity to find love and peace.

So more recently I prayed for what would be the highest form for me to identify with and you guested it Jesus and the ACIM returned fully into my life. The more I wanted the Indian Gods to be present Christ appeared. Over the last 2 years since my trip to India, where I attended a course that guaranteed I would become Awakened, I have had a heightened experience of the Divine light that reveals all the blocks in me where I struggle to hold on to my personal self/ego.

A Course in Miracles is very clear about how love is unteachable, you don’t need to learn how to love. You are love, lovable, loved and loving. “You are as God created You” acim. However what you do have to do is remove all the blocks to loves presence. This is where all the pain and struggle arises. The altar of the heart has to be cleared of all the fear, anger judgements, worry, conflict and criticism before the Divine can enter. And it isn’t really clearing away the blocks, more like lovingly letting them go. It is the willingness to give up the struggle and resistance that allows God to reveal It-self.

This is where the path of surrender (letting go, acceptance, loving what is, forgiveness) and Divine Grace becomes paramount in taking the final steps on the journey home. One thing is for sure we can’t do it alone, that would be trying to pick up a stick while standing on it. We all need to ‘let go and let God’

Have I felt this presence? Yes many times. What has changed for me? Well I am more accepting of all my sub-personalities, I can regain my internal balance in under a half hour instead of the 3 or 4 days I would be fighting with my self. I have learnt to embrace me just as I am, ahhhh
Ram Dass says” this is where your neurosis becomes your style”.
I get through my negative stuff quicker, I forgive faster, I experience more beauty, light, wonder and feel loving kindness for my self and all that suffer on this blue orb. My wife says I am overall a happier, more peaceful individual.

I guess I have finally realised that chasing God out there is a waste of time. God sits in the light of my heart and I just need to be willing to ask for grace and surrender to the light of Divine Presence. Sounds easy but it can mean a huge journey that can take a life time. “The longest journey is the one from the head to the heart.” The trick is to enjoy the ride.

“Entering the water he disturbs nothing
he lets the water take him
he aims for the opposite shore
and allows the current to take him there,
he emerges relaxed, no energy expended
and goes on his way.”

Written by Robert Kendall

Chasing God

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Kendall

I have been on a spiritual journey for many years, not because I wanted to be holy or spiritual but because I recognized in my twenties that the answers to all my problems laid in the wisdom of the east. Christianity was, to me filled with fear and judgement, very limited in its understanding of the universe and consciousness.

It was only after I smoked some weed that my mind was released and I began to see a wider, deeper state of reality. I began reading every Buddhist and Indian philosophy book I could get my hands on. Here was an exciting world of endless possibilities. Here were universes within universes. Gods and Goddesses, masters that were fun, loving, intelligent, kind and generous with their wisdom and blessings. People who where living a magical world of miracles and everyday common sense.

God was anything you wanted Her to be, light, consciousness, Presence, beingness, bliss, Oneness and most of all love. The rules where more like guidelines helping you along the journey to become awakened, fully enlightened. The East, over thousands of years had created a road map on how to be happy and fully conscious in light and love. Their psychology was advanced with detail instructions on how to reach peace, and I loved it all.

But there was one problem that kept showing up, I had difficulty really understanding the rituals that where meant to awaken the God within and gain His grace.

In one of my trips to India I realised that the Indians see God, as there for them, not the other way around. God is supposed to help them in family, wealth creation, health and life in general. They have no problem with demanding from God what they need.

At the same time they do all they can to entice God to show up, hence all the elaborate ceremonies to draw Him to them. The crazy thing is that it works. Doing one of these 8 hour ceremonies I was taken into a different level of awareness, the energy shifts, the energy centers open within the body/mind and a different level of reality opened to reveal love, light and an awakened intelligence not previously present.

But I realised at the same time I wasn’t Indian and I was not brought up in the culture. The little nuances of an Indian upbringing was not in my DNA blue print. No matter how hard I tried, I was a western white boy with Christian DNA. It was at this time I prayed to Jesus Christ and my prayer went like this, “OK Jesus I am willing to have you in my life but I don’t want all the christian crap. You will have to come to me in a different way, a way that entails meditation and love” and I left it at that.

Two weeks later a friend came over with a set of Books. She said that a yoga teacher we both knew had given them to her, thinking I might be able to use them. She wasn’t interested in them and my name had popped up in her mind. The books where ‘A Course in Miracles’ (ACIM), a book channeled from Christ by a Jewish psychologist.

It pretty well covered all my criteria for how Jesus was allowed back into my life. And so started a journey that I have been on and off for 35 year. I started with the workbook, each lesson was as a daily meditation. Through these years Christ and I have had our ups and downs.The course took a back seat while I lived at the Findhorn community in Scotland. Over that 5 years it was 24 hour/ 7 days a week group encounter with 200 members. There was so much going on spiritually that I didn’t need to look at the books.

to be continued -Chasing God part 2