Mind Body Spirit Festival Review

On Friday I was at the London Mind Body Spirit Festival at the Royal Horticultural Halls. I've been interested in spirituality and New Age topics for three years now. I just want to make this post to let you know how it went, and what I learnt





Mind, Body and Spirit: My Experience Thus Far

To give you a brief background, my interest in MBS began in early 2007. I developed an interest in meditation and psychic development, but I only pursued it as a side interest and only for a few months. Later on in the year, as 2007 turned to 2008, I became interested in personal development. I was a regular reader of Steve Pavlina's blog (at http://www.stevepavlina.com) and from there I found a link to his wife's website (www.erinpavlina.com) which covered spirituality and psychic development. Once again, I found myself becoming very interested in such topics as meditation, the Law of Attraction and it was also during this time that I truly figured out what spirituality meant: asking serious questions about yourself, your life and the universe in which you existed.

There were always some things in the subject area which I found too hard to swallow- they were too far-fetched or sounded a tad fraudulent, or I couldn't relate it to my life experience. But there were things which I did accept. In early 2010 I decided to take a break from all this spiritual stuff, to allow myself to connect with reality through experience instead of just reading about stuff, and it was now with the Mind Body Spirit festival that I decided to reignite my passion for the spiritual.

Psychic Development

During the day, I went to two workshops. The first was titled Develop Your Psychic Skills by Heidi Sawyer. I was grateful for the chance to hear about the subject from an actual, practising psychic. The workshop covered early experiences in psychic development, plus the different psychic modalities (clairvoyance, clairsentience and clairaudience. There are also claircognizance and something involving smell/taste, but we didn't cover those.)


I learnt that I was clairsentient. Clairsentients receive psychic information in the form of feelings or emotions. I'm not sure if that is actually the case, but there is another telling point: Clairsentients tend to be very kinaesthetic people. They are touchy-feely types- just like me.
Whenever I'm in a shop looking for things, the way I always connect with them has been to touch them, or to pick them up and feel them. My favourite way of connecting with people is also like that- I'm quite fond of a hug :). Heidi actually said that if you put a bunch of clairsentients in a room and left them to their devices, 10 minutes later they would all be in a group hug. My idea of heaven :).

Tantra

The second workshop I attended was a workshop on tantra given by Mahasatvaa Sarita and her team from The School of Awakening. I'd heard briefly about tantra before, but this was the first time I had truly come across it.

The workshop was absolutely amazing. We started off doing an exercise in partners where we expressed our sexual and then our spiritual sides to one another, changing partners as we went. The former involved energetic dancing to funky (if a little cheesy) music. The latter was a more serene experience. Most of us just held hands, enjoyed being in the moment with each other and looked lovingly into each other's eyes. With one of the participants, it actually felt like I was in love. We embraced, and I felt so happy and so loved that I almost cried.

In the second part of the workshop, again in partners, we took part in a meditative exercise focused on being present through the senses. It involved one partner laying down blindfolded, and the other doing the following:
-Whispering in their partner's ear, to stimulate the auditory sense;
-Holding pieces of tissue paper with fragrances on them over their partner's nose, to stimulate the sense of smell;
-Feeding their partner pieces of fruit, to stimulate taste;
-Giving their partner a massage (sense of touch), and then;
-Removing their partner's blindfold and dancing for them (sense of vision).

Partners then switched roles and the above was repeated.

The big idea that I got from the Tantra workshop was this: Spirituality and sexuality are two sides of the same coin. We are beautiful as spiritual beings AND as sexual beings. One is an expression of beauty with respect to the physical, the other with respect to the spiritual aspect of ourselves. Neither one is better or worse, higher or lower, than the other. They simply are. And we are just simply both physical creatures and spiritual beings in nature, and having a body is nothing to be ashamed of.

The Rest of the Festival
I spent the remainder of the festival browsing the stands which were mostly related to health and fitness. A number of stands demonstrated massage techniques and also sold massage equipment. There was also an organic snack stand. There were also stands selling books, and offering readings and services of various kinds (astrology, tarot, reiki, theta healing, past life regression etc). There was also a stage which I went up to at numerous times during the festival to watch shows and demonstrations. I even got the chance to participate in the AcroYoga demonstration (see their website: www.acroyoga.org). It was slightly scary doing acrobatic moves in front of an audience when I had never done any kind of acrobatics before, but it was exhilarating and I had full trust in the professionals helping me.

In all, it was a fantastic occasion, and I can't wait to go again. Mind, Body and Spirit is one of those topics that you have to take in moderation, and there are many things you must take with a pinch of salt, but it is thrilling and can really help you answer some of the big questions in life.

Welcome to Chris Gaskell's blog

This is the first post in what I hope will become an insightful resource.

As I start this blog, it is the height of exam season. It is Saturday evening and I have just arrived home from a busy day of revision and helping out with an endeavour at my university called Books For Sudan. Outside my uni is a massive green shipping container, and we have been receiving van-loads of books from universities and public libraries to send off to a university in southern Sudan. I haven't been that involved in it but I was glad to lend a helping hand today. It's actually not too long before the container is shipped out :)