The wheel of life
Introduction to Samsara and Reincarnation or how to create a purpose-driven life
The wheel of life is a symbolic description of Samsara; a concept found in Buddhism that relates to birth, life, and death cycles. It depicts 6 realms of existence that souls can be reborn into based on their past experiences and actions.
Samsara is the cycle that we’re all caught on, which is Life, Death, and rebirth, originated in Hinduism and adapted in Buddhism and is known as the wheel of life.
In our world, people are born with no control over their condition, and people almost have no guidance about why they are here in all places; this is where the wheel of life comes in. The Tibetan Buddhism mandala shows the wheel of life as a designed image that gives hints and clues; the more you investigate this mandala, the more you see yourself in it until you see your whole life there, past, future, and even reincarnations.
The old philosophy of Buddhism explains that the person will be stuck on the wheel and continually have exams repeatedly. Buddhism explains that the person should understand that real happiness is not in the materialistic world. Satisfaction is higher than this dimension, and we need to balance each realm by learning from our experiences to find happiness.
The Wheel of life tool:
The wheel of life self-assessment tool looks at existence from 12 realms, or aspects of life, that if ignored or unfulfilled cause suffering and illness and cause blockages in related Chakras. The self-assessment tool allows people to take a snap-shot of where they are now in relation to what or where they desire to be in each realm, by scoring on a scale from 0 to 10 on how satisfied they are.
Once the assessment is complete, the participant is guided to use his super-power (intuition) to prioritize his realms and figure out baby steps to lift his scores.”
The Wheel of Life is a powerful tool to help give you a vivid visual representation of where you currently are considering different aspects of your life, compared with the way you’d ideally like it to be. It is called the “Wheel of Life” because each area of your life is in a circle, like a part of a wheel.
The Wheel of Life is a popular visual tool or worksheet used in coaching to help clients quickly understand how balanced or fulfilled their life is at the moment, so they can decide on what to do first to bring more balance to their lives. During this interactive event, you are working on creating your wheel of life so you can move forward with clarity and purpose.
Our method is to guide our guests within a meditation session, to create the Life vision realm, which makes the measurement easier for the user to understand the highest level of each realm.
We use this method to balance the past and future and set our destiny back on track with our modern understanding and technologies.
The user will compare the vision he is trying to reach, and the moment he is living.
Wheel of Life overview
The Bhavachakra: the Wheel of Life or Wheel of Becoming, is a mandala – a complex picture representing the Buddhist view of the universe. To Buddhists, existence is a cycle of life, death, rebirth, and suffering that they seek to escape altogether. (1)
In our method, we are using the last cycle of Samsara called Paticca Samuppada: “commonly translated as dependent origination, or dependent arising, it is a critical doctrine in Buddhism shared by all schools of Buddhism. It states that all Dharmas arise in dependence upon other
Dharmas: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist” (2)
Our philosophy is that every experience in life is going through this cycle. At the end of each cycle, we have a kind of exam that exam if we pass it we going to continue with a different level of life; otherwise, we go back to the same cycle again and again.
The Paticca Samuppada has 12 realms, and they depict a blind man or woman (representing ignorance); potters (formation); a monkey (consciousness); two men in a boat (mind and body); a house with six windows (the senses); an embracing couple (contact); an eye pierced by an arrow (sensation); a person drinking (thirst); a man gathering fruit (grasping); a couple making love (becoming); a woman giving birth (birth); and a man carrying a corpse (death).
To use this methodology in our physical life, We have 12 realms in our tool, starting from Health and Fitness and finishing with the Life vision
Each realm is divided into ten parts, look at figure no:1.
Want to know more? Download the free Personal assessment tool.
Health and fitness: this realm of the cycle is putting the light on health and wellness, which contains the quality of our food and our health in general, and also our physical exercises, which can be fitness, yoga, walking, dance, etc.
Intellectual Life: Intellectual life refers to the thoughts, knowledge, ideas, and problem-solving that run through your mind. The benefits of a robust intellectual life are many. The world seems less mysterious. You understand your viewpoints better and can explain them better.
Emotional life: Emotionally healthy People control their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Which means you’re aware of your emotions. You can deal with them, whether they’re positive or negative. Emotionally healthy people still feel stress, anger, and sadness to compare our level of emotions with our life vision within this realm.
Character: The way of thinking, feeling, and behaving, the person’s personality, which is the set of emotional qualities, ways of behaving, etc., that makes a person different from others.
Spiritual life: Spirituality is a broad concept with room for many perspectives. In general, it includes a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves and typically involves a search for meaning in life. As such, it is a universal human experience—something that touches us all.
Love & relationship: this realm about our feelings are we feel in love and loved by others, and the satisfaction of the love that we feel, which we are giving and taking, we also need to understand in which stage of the Relationship cycle we are, there are five stages in the Cycle of Relationships ·
1. ROMANCE STAGE ·
2. POWER STRUGGLE STAGE ·
3. STABILITY STAGE ·
4. COMMITMENT STAGE ·
5. CO-CREATION STAGE.
Family: how is our relationship with our family? It can be with our parents, brothers, sisters, or father. At the same time, it can be the relationship with our children and partner if we are in a family state.
Social life: This relates to how well we integrate into society and how well we network with others.
Financial life: this realm is one of the realms that individuals focus on in their daily lives. Most of us understand it as successful in life, and we forget that it’s only one part of the life wheel, and the financial life can include the amount of money we have, the income we are receiving, or the assets that we have.
Career: A career is a job or profession that someone does for an extended period of their life, which is one of the parts of our life wheel that most of us are focusing on, and most of us understand it as the measurement of success in life.
Life Purpose: This realm deals with how well we understand our mission and purpose in life.
Life Vision: this is an essential part of our life wheel that we can deal with as the measurement tool for our levels in each realm of life, and it is the highest vision that we can imagine for each domain. A life vision is a big picture and has many components that make up what you want your daily life to look like. These “departments” include all the 11 realms of the life wheel, which we can call reincarnation. When every individual reaches this level of life that dreaming about, at that time, the new cycle of life starts.
Conclusion: In our life, individuals focus on 2-3 realms of the wheel which is Finance, Career, and Love & Relationship, we forgetting the others realms of the wheel, first of all, we need to make balance, to reach that balance then its time to take a “helicopter view” of our life, so that we can bring things back into balance.
The challenge now is to transform this knowledge and desire for a more balanced life into a positive program of action.
And this can be done with a life coach, it’s available by many retreat programs, working on Body, Mind, and Spirit.
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by: Ahmed “Alen” Kadhim