Category: Body, mind and spirit

There is nothing more frustrating than being unable to sleep – especially when you feel exhausted. All you need and long for is a night of restful sleep, to give you clarity and energy as well as to help you function well at work.

When you are stressed, you can often find yourself lying awake, worrying, making it more difficult to sleep. This in itself can become a source of stress. It feels like one is fuelling the other, however there is an underlying issue that impacts both stress and the inability to sleep. This is a shortage of energy, Qi energy.

What is Stress?

Qi energy is your life force energy, your vital energy. It is the energy that sustains and supports all life. A shortage of Qi makes it hard to manage emotions. This is the start of stress.

The first sign of stress is when you lack mental clarity and generally feel negative about things. When stressed, you may overthink a situation without being able to find a solution. You may find it hard to switch off as thoughts and emotions circulate around you head.

The second sign of stress is when your emotions overwhelm you. For example, you may struggle to remain calm in difficult situation. Your emotions may start to overwhelm you, such as – anger, fear, frustration, sadness, anxiety. This is a clear sign you are lacking in Qi energy.

The third sign of stress is when you start to feel physical symptoms such as extreme tiredness, pain and other issues such as digestion.

So how does this affect our ability to sleep?

We need Qi energy to sleep. The vibration of Qi is calm and peaceful. When we have a healthy circulation of Qi around the body we feel clam and our body can produce all the right hormones to enable sleep. Qi creates balance.

A shortage of Qi is often the root cause of insomnia and other sleep issues.  When we are short of Qi, we feel a sense of restlessness and the inability to switch off. Our body over compensates for the lack of Qi and produces too much fire energy, making it harder for us to switch off, preventing our body from finding peace and therefore sleep.

How do we re-energise?

First, you need to ascertain how stressed you are as this will indicate how low your Qi energy is and what the possible solutions are. Master Oh has a simple five-minute Stress Out test which will give you an idea of your energy levels, and what to do next.

Depending on your energy levels, before bedtime it is always good to practice quietening your mind. This may include a five- minute breathing meditation.

If you find meditating difficult and feel that your thoughts are over-whelming you, try Master Oh’s instant treatment which is a simple online treatment for insomnia. During this treatment you will receive vital Qi energy helping you to recharge your body and mind to prepare you for sleep.

Try an instant treatment to help you sleep

Read Marco’s Story about overcoming chronic insomnia

Marco’s Story

In 2000, I was working long hours and evening shifts whilst studying in London. I was really run down and as I had saved enough money I decided to give up work to concentrate wholly on my degree. In the 2/3 weeks after finishing work, I was sleeping long hours every night which my body obviously needed and then all of a sudden one night I just stopped sleeping. From then on I was unable to sleep at all during the night, not even for one hour. This would last for 3 to 4 nights in a row until I would simply collapse and pass out for a few hours. As time went by the number of nights I wasn’t sleeping increased and the pattern got worse and worse until I became someone who simply did not sleep at all and I felt like I was slowly going mad. (read more) →

Creating lasting happiness

When terrible things are happening around us, how do we go about create happiness that can be lasting? First we have to remind ourselves that agony and happiness come from the same place – the mind. We have to create peace in our minds for the process to start.

I have created this simple daily practice to help you create harmony in the mind.

The Happiness Diary is designed to help you maintain a positive state of mind. It is only with a positive mind that you will be able to release painful emotional patterns and self-limiting beliefs that you have accumulated through your life experiences. This practice does not involve your brain; it involves your heart – just another word for your mind.

The following five guidelines, if practised daily, will help you to live more positively:

• Gratitude
• The power of smiling
• Practising kindness
• Doing without doing
• Think, talk and behave positively

At the end of your day, sit down in a quiet room if possible and review the day’s events. Write a short paragraph on each guideline, detailing your experiences and your reactions to them. Recording this information will help you to reflect more deeply on your actions. Sincere reflection makes space for realisations, which opens the door to more clarity and the capacity to deal more positively with what life throws at us.

1. Gratitude

Write three things you appreciate the most:

In you: what do you like most about yourself? What gratitude do you feel for the good things you have done, and what more can you do to make your life better? How can you extend this gratitude to others who have helped you in some way?

In others: what do you appreciate most about the people in your life? How do you show it to them? If someone has helped you in some way, enjoy the feeling of gratitude you have for them.

In your current situation: if something or someone is creating a negative emotional reaction, try to see it as an opportunity for change. Negative feelings are a sign that something needs to be changed, and by finding the root of the problem we can see ourselves more clearly. Try to feel grateful for the opportunity.

2. The power of smiling

The world’s awful atrocities could stop us from smiling altogether. But smiling gives us strength, it gives us hope and most of all it’s infectious to those around us. As the saying goes: ‘Smile and whole world smiles with you.’ It makes a much needed connection.

3. Practise kindness

Do things for yourself and for others with kindness, love and with your heart without expecting anything in return. A kind act is never forgotten.

4. ‘Doing without doing’:

Try not to involve your ego when doing something for someone. In other words: do it but don’t advertise it – especially if you know that it will bring you praise and acknowledgement from colleagues, friends, family, etc. “Once you do a good deed, let it go.”

5. Think, talk and behave positively:

Thinking negatively leads to negative talk and behaviour. Be aware of your thoughts and think twice before voicing them if they will have a negative impact on others. To change a negative thinking pattern into a positive one requires vigilance and consistency. When you catch yourself having a negative thought immediately think about something good. With practice it becomes easier.

Be happy.

Master Oh

Three ways to influence Qi in your every day life

Qi is invisible, but it does exist. The energy you can’t see. We probably know more about it than we think we do. For example, you can sit next to someone and immediately feel uncomfortable. You can sense tension or joy between people. You can feel calm when with people who are at ease with themselves.

If you watch parents of young children, they have become more sensitive to energy. If you wake in the morning and you’re still tired without good reason, you know you’re lacking in energy. Human energy is present in every cell. But what we don’t understand so well is how to encourage this energy and avoid depleting it.

Understanding human energy

Different forms of human energy can make you feel very different. Someone near you – their energy may affect you. Someone negative in your life can often affect your own energy unless you can control how it impacts you. Negative energy you carry around with you can re-surface as anger or frustration.

Three ways to encourage and protect your energy levels

1. Thoughts and intention create a path for energy to follow. If you imagine something positive happening, it will invariably start to happen. The same can also go for negative thoughts. Think positive thoughts and positive energy will follow.

2. Energy centres in our body and when our energy channels become blocked, this has an affect on our health. Deep-seated negative energy channels such as anger and frustration, or even past experiences can block these channels. Our Energy Treatments help to unblock these channels so Qi can move freely.

3. Judging situations and people mean we are giving negative energy and also filling ourselves with negative energy. By being non-judgmental, we are helping to maintain our Qi.

With January coming to an end, most of us are still clinging into our New Year’s resolutions, trying to use forgiveness. If we find we’re struggling with personal promises to be fit and healthy, why not adapt our focus to our state of mind and how this can affect our wellbeing. How can we be more positive and improve our flow of human energy also feeds into being fit and healthy.

A recent study shows that happy people are more forgiving than unhappy people. Research has shown that forgiveness is linked to mental health outcomes such as reduced anxiety and depression, fewer physical health symptoms and lower mortality rates.

But how easy is it to forgive and how can Master Oh help us in this process?

What is Forgiveness and why is it so hard?

Forgiveness is a process that includes letting go of negative emotions, thoughts, and behaviours, and replacing those with positive thoughts and emotions.

We tend to feel hurt when someone has done something to undermine, disrespect or disregard us. When we feel we haven’t been treated in a loving, kind and considerate way, it can make us feel angry and upset.

The problem with holding on to the negative feelings caused by the other person is that it connects us to our ego which is always busy thinking about ourselves. Even though holding on to negative feelings can make us feel down and depressed, the ego still gets something out of it, because we are thinking about ourselves.

Can Forgiveness Set Us Free?

Forgiving others and ourselves is essential for happiness and health, which is why practicing forgiveness on a regular basis can pay off.

Research has shown that people who had greater levels of accumulated lifetime stresses exhibited worse mental health outcomes.

Stress relief is probably the chief factor connecting forgiveness and wellbeing. While this is important, it is also believed that there are other important mechanisms by which forgiveness works its magic. One of those is “toxic” anger. There’s nothing wrong with healthy anger, but when anger is very deep and long lasting, it can deeply affect us. When you get rid of anger, your muscles relax, you’re less anxious, you have more energy and your immune system can strengthen.

Master Oh on how to forgive:

“We are not individual beings. All human beings are connected, we are one. When we feel hurt or upset by someone else’s actions we lose our inner peace and happiness and that disconnects us from ourselves and others.

Therefore it is important to forgive every day. We can do this by taking time to meditate on the incident or person that made us upset. Try to imagine how they lived the situation, how they felt and why they reacted the way they did.

By making the effort to put our personal feelings aside and putting ourselves in somebody else’s shoes we can begin to understand their motives allowing us to forgive. If we truly understand someone else, we can see why they reacted a certain way, even if it was wrong. Perhaps, in their eyes it was the right thing to do, or it may have been the only thing they could do at the time. Although our view of the situation might not change, the way we see the other person does. When we understand the other person that opens our heart and we can feel compassion for them, rather than anger.

For example if a father tells his son off for breaking a precious artefact. The son can feel attacked and upset and can hold on to these emotions which can eat away at him for the rest of his life, affecting his health and even his relationships. However if the son decides to heal, the first step is to try and understand his father. With time, by putting himself in his father’s shoes he can see that the vase was very precious to him and that his breaking it made him so angry he wasn’t able to take his son’s feeling into account. It didn’t mean that he didn’t love his son.

The exercise of putting our personal emotions aside in order to understand others is a very powerful exercise as it takes us out of the ego and connects us to our original or universal mind, which is full of love, consideration, justice, kindness and generosity. Practicing this mind is what makes us and others happy.”

If you have tried to forgive but still feel stuck in negative emotions, Master Oh’s energy treatments can help. With one energy treatment Master Oh can open up deep energy blockages and release negative emotions and stagnant energy. Allowing our ‘human energy’ to flow correctly can make us feel light and help us to move on and open our heart to new and positive experiences and people.

“Now is the time to put all our past pain, sadness, anger and fear aside. Let’s open our mind and heart widely and remember who we are, so that we can be truly happy and truly one” Master Oh.

Even though we live comfortably with many ‘things’ that are invisible and beyond scientific proof, it is still difficult to accept fully the reality of the invisible world; a world on which all life depends. Opening your mind is the way to see it.

Harmonious interaction with the invisible world is essential to our health and happiness, which does not depend entirely on our intellect and grandiose technological advances. It depends too on the wisdom of the heart and our ability to respect and nurture life.

Seeing beyond the material world

Life, as we see it is, has very much become physical material world and nothing else. We find it difficult to see (and do) with the heart, which means seeing what we truly are: body, mind and spirit.

For all matter in our physical world, we understand that there are three states: solid, liquid and gas. Water, for example, can be ice (solid), liquid (at room temperature) and vapour (gas). These three states can be used as an analogy to describe the human being: the body being solid, the mind liquid and the spirit gas.

In this blog, I’m going to look at the mind only.

A harmonious mind

A mind in harmony with nature is like water – it flows around things. This is a mind in harmony: it is adaptable, flexible and fluid and unaffected by stress. An interesting thought is that stress only exists in the mind.

This is the original mind before it’s been influenced by a world full of gadgets that create desires and needs. The more things we desire, the more things we need and the less flexibility the mind has.

Once the mind loses this liquid state it starts to become solid and rigid. Consequently, energy won’t flow very well through the body. Hard blockages appear in the body and the body itself becomes inflexible, rigid and solid. A solid mind creates a solid body. If energy doesn’t flow well through the channels and organs their function becomes compromised.

There are many benefits from achieving a harmonious mind:

• It boosts immunity
• It assists fertility
• It lowers blood pressure and helps a healthy heart
• It reduces psychological distress, depression, and anxiety
• It can help relieve symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) such as bloating, belching, diarrhoea and constipation.

If you would like to explore ways of achieving a more harmonious mind, please get in touch.

We’ve spent the last few blogs exploring the causes of blocked energy and today we present the final blog in this mini energy series which explains more about the spiritual causes that may be blocking your energy flow.

It’s a familiar scenario that we strive for a happier and healthier life and set out to work through any emotional and physical energy blockages. However, rather disparagingly, we may still find ailments and patterns that we just cannot shift.

This is likely to be due to spiritual causes.

What are spiritual causes?

Spiritual causes are often referred to as inherited or ancestral blockages. This is because they are caused by physical and emotional energy patterns passed down through the generations of the family. Essentially, we believe that people’s energy can be affected by the history and energy of their family.

How and where do spiritual blockages manifest in your life?

We see that every human being is given the opportunity to live a physical life to grow in wisdom, love and compassion for all living beings. The love and wisdom we grow during our lives are passed on to the next generations, which may in turn grow greater respect and gratitude for life. In this way we can ensure that life evolves both materially and spiritually.

Just like the roots of a tree which provide the nutrients for it to grow, we too are connected to our roots, which are our parents and ancestors. Their physical and emotional character is written in our bodies and minds.

In the same way their energy is with us too and may, over time, manifest physically and emotionally. Energy, unlike material things, never dies, and the information encoded in our energy system is transmitted from generation to generation.

We are not surprised to see that people are increasingly interested in researching their family history to see how their lives have been shaped by previous generations. We inherit our physical features through our genetic make-up, but in the energy system emotional patterns, ancestor’s life experiences, memories, pain, health issues and even addictions can be imprinted and carried forward to future generations. We may be born with weaknesses in our energy system inherited from our ancestors that can have a significant impact on our physical and mental wellbeing.

Resolving spiritual energy blockages

The Ancestor Healing Programme run at our Centres, addresses this crucial but not well-understood aspect of human life by healing these inherited patterns, and freeing us from their influence. The programme is a profound and spiritual experience to clear inherited energy patterns that can affect our life, wellbeing and relationships.