Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Valley Spirit Center
January 26, 2006
Seven Perennial Spiritual Practices:
1. Transform your motivation: reduce craving
and find your soul's desire.
2. Cultivate emotional wisdom: heal your heart and learn to love.
3. Live ethically: feel good by doing good.
4. Concentrate and calm your mind.
5. Awaken your spiritual vision: see clearly and recognize the sacred in all
things.
6. Cultivate spiritual intelligence: develop wisdom and understand life.
7. Express spirit in action: embrace generosity and the joy of service.
- Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.
Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central
Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind. (1999)
Twelve Gateways to Personal Growth
1. Preparation: Stairway to the Soul
2. Discover Your Worth: Opening to Life
3. Reclaim You Will: The Power to Change
4. Energize Your Body: A Foundation for Life
5. Manage Your Money: Sufficiency and Spiritual Practice
6. Tame Your Mind: Inner Peace and Simple Reality
7. Trust Your Intuition: Accessing Inner Guidance
8. Accept Your Emotions: The Center of the Cyclone
9. Face Your Fears: Living as Peaceful Warriors
10. Illuminate Your Shadow: Cultivating Compassion and Authenticity
11. Embrace Your Sexuality: Celebrating Life
12. Awaken Your Heart: The Healing Power of Love
13. Serve Your World: Completing the Circle of Life
- Dan Millman
Everyday Enlightenment: The Twelve Gateways
to Personal Growth. (1999)
The Six Principles of Enlightened Living
The Six Perfections (Paramitas) in Mahayana Buddhism:
1. Generosity: charity, kind-hearted giving, altruism, unattached
generosity, boundless
openness, unconditional love (Dana) .
2. Virtue: ethics, morality, self-discipline, not harming, proper conduct, impeccability
(Sila).
3. Patience: tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance (Kshanti).
4. Energy: diligence, courage, enthusiasm, vigor, effort (Virya).
5. Meditation: absorption, concentration, presence of mind, contemplation
(Dhyana).
6. Wisdom: transcendental wisdom, mystical insight, enlightenment (Prajna).
- Dzogchen Buddhism, Dharma Talk: Six Principles of Enlightened Living and Six Perfections (c 50 CE)
Reverse Your Biological Age By:
1. Changing your
perceptions.
2. Deep rest, restful awareness,
and restful sleep.
3. Lovingly nurturing you body through
healthy food.
4. Using nutritional complements
wisely.
5. Enhancing mind/body
integration: breathing exercises, yoga, tai chi, qigong, aikido, etc..
6. Exercise: strength and aerobic
conditioning.
7. Eliminating toxins from you
life.
8. Cultivating flexibility and
creativity in consciousness.
9. Love and loving
relationships.
10. Maintaining a youthful mind.
- Deepak Chopra,
M.D., and David Simon, M.D.
Grow Younger, Live Longer: Ten Steps
to Reverse Aging. (2001)
The Four Classic Western Cardinal Virtues
1. Temperance: moderation, self-control,
mindful, purity, disciplined.
2. Prudence: wise, intelligent, knowledgeable, insightful, forward
thinking, sagacious, sound judgment.
3. Courage: fortitude, endurance, composure, determination, will,
overcoming adversity.
4. Justice: fairness, principled, harmony, equality, utility, rule of law.
- Plato (c 340 BCE), Republic
The Seven Christian Holy Virtues
1. Humility: modesty, selflessness,
respectful, not prideful or vain.
2. Kindness: compassion, friendliness, gentleness, harming none, sympathy
without prejudice.
3. Patience: forbearance, endurance, composure, forgiveness, not angry.
4. Diligence: energetic, decisive, careful, attentive, enthusiasm,
working, zeal, not lazy.
5. Liberality: generosity, giving, charity, Sermon on the Mount,
vigilance, not covetous or envious.
6. Abstinence: restraint, moderation, temperance, self-control, mindful,
abstinence, not lacking sensual self-control.
7. Chastity: sexual self-control, purity, cleanliness, not lustful.
- Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (c. 410 CE), Psychomachia and Dante Aligihieri's (c 1315 CE), Divine Comedy
Ten Positive Energy Prescriptions
1. Awaken intuition and rejuvenate
yourself.
2. Find a nurturing spiritual path.
3. Design an energy-aware approach to diet, fitness and health.
4. Generate positive emotional energy to counter negativity.
5. Develop a heart-centered sexuality.
6. Open yourself to the flow of inspiration and creativity.
7. Celebrate the sacredness of laughter, pampering, and the replenishment
of retreat.
8. Attract positive people and situations.
9. Protect yourself from energy vampires.
10. Create abundance.
- Judith Orloff, M.D..
Positive Energy. (2004)
Five Precepts of Mahayana Buddhism
Eight Elements West
1. Consistent Exercise: Energize through safe, results-oriented
exercise.
2. Body Alignment: Promote proper posture, spinal strength with
flexibility, and body awareness.
3. Natural Nutrition: Implement sound eating practices for life.
4. Sound Mind: Embrace life obstacles with self-awareness, reflection,
imagination and creativity.
5. Relaxation and Centering: Cultivate and calm the body-mind connection
everyday.
6. Community and Environment: Surround yourself with trusted friends and
family. Be kind to the Earth.
7. Individual Action: Time is precious. Let change begin now, with you.
8. Heart of the Human Spirit: Transform life through your heart, where
true strength resides.
- Eight
Elements West
Some Guiding Principles for Integral Practices and
Institutions That Support Them:
1. They promote a simultaneous development of our various faculties.
2. They generally require mentors, rather than a single guru.
3. They require a strong and developing autonomy.
4. They are facilitated by personal traits that promote creativity in
general.
5. Though they encourage individual autonomy, they require surrender at
times to transformative agencies beyond ordinary functioning.
6. They require patience and the love of practice for its own sake.
7. They utilize inherited all-at-once responses, or psychosomatic
compliance for high-level change.
8. They utilize the manifold changes catalyzed by images and altered
states.
9. They enlist more that one mediation to achieve particular outcomes.
10. They surpass limits by negotiation rather than force.
11. They depend upon improvisation.
12. They utilized images of unity.
13. They require and facilitate conscious transitions between different
states of consciousness.
14. They depend on a developing awareness that transcends psychological
and somatic functioning.
15. They orient all our capacities and somatic processes toward the
extraordinary life arising in us.
- Michael Murphy, "The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature," 1992, pp. 579-586.
The Ten Commandments for the 21 Century
A Search, Discussion and Debate
Coming in April, 2006
Return to Valley Spirit Qigong
© Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California, 2007
Wuji Standing (Zhan Zhuang) Meditation
Taoism: Bibliography, Links, Resources
Cloud Hands: T'ai Chi Ch'uan and Chi Kung Website
Disclaimer for the Valley Spirit Center Qigong Website
Qigong Studies by Mike Garofalo
