Shankar Ramani

January 4, 2025

Wishing a Happy New Year to all our subscribers and meditators. As another year comes into focus, we can’t help but wonder how we’ve been accustomed to positive thinking and optimism at the beginning of each year. There’s an innate desire to make changes in our lives and consider new ventures and attempts at self-improvement.

It is also the most introspective time of the year than any other. For most of us, that’s because another year has slipped by, and we’re re-evaluating if we achieved what we had set out to do. Also, where do we stand, and what more we can strive for?

For whatever it’s worth, we try to establish new goals, resolutions, and decisions—anything we can do to use this fleeting moment of shining the light into our lives to make them better. Experience tells us that the “New Year optimism and excitement” wears off pretty fast. It gives way to falling back to old ways, embracing the mundane lives we’ve been leading, or worse still, locking us deeper into the grind that we seem to be stuck with.

New Year’s Resolutions are great; they represent our attempts at introspection, self-evaluation, and self-improvement. But they come with the usual risks—the reversion to the mean or the same old life and habits and the disappointment of yet another promise we make to ourselves remaining unfulfilled.

But most people don’t notice that they almost always come with something we have to do, take action on, and spend time and effort. Instead, what if we went the other way for a change? What if we did nothing physically or cognitively but surrendered to the great spiritual power that we already have access to and allowed it to tell us where we stand in our lives and guide us into necessary changes? Stated differently, we pause our everyday lives for a moment and shift our attention to what the all-powerful nature that created us is telling us.

Are you committed to meditation and spirituality?

For our method to work, of course, a commitment is required for us to turn our lives more spiritual and reflective than most people. If you are reading this article, you are on the journey of self-improvement through spirituality and meditation, so that’s a given. However, while many of us have an interest in and spend time in spirituality and meditation, we do not actively and dynamically take cues and manage our lives by reading the signals from our inner spiritual system. That aspect is the most crucial first step to benefiting from this exercise.

We take a step back, reduce the number of things we’re doing, or take a complete break for a week or two. We reduce our thinking, analysis, and mental reverberations about our lives. We allow ourselves to integrate with the universal spiritual being, seeking guidance in our lives. We reduce our cognitive, physical, and emotional activity to give way to more spiritual activity. It’s almost as if we rise above and look at ourselves from a distance. At some point, clarity emerges.

We can do this through focused, increased meditation sessions and a strong sense of awareness that we need to make a big push this new year on the spiritual front. During these spiritual moments, we surrender entirely to the divine rather than do, plan, act, think, etc., as we would with a New Year’s Resolution.

Doing nothing can indeed be the most powerful strategy here, as we allow our spiritual connection to stabilize and give us more input.

When we do this, we find answers from within—truths about ourselves and our lives, and sometimes even stark and shocking revelations.

What exactly are we looking for?

Now that we know we have to surrender and work on our inner connection, it behooves us to introspect along the following lines.

Is our life spiritual enough, and do we have a strong foundation yet?

Are all our priorities in life geared towards our spiritual growth?

Are there things we do or associations we keep that harm our spiritual growth?

Is our life one of richness and quality, higher values and profound experiences that material wealth cannot provide?

These are good starter points, but it’s important to focus on the connection during our meditation and allow intuitive input to occur. Sometimes, they may flow incessantly, and sometimes, it might just be blissful silence. We cannot influence or control intuition and risk making this a mental exercise. The whole point is spiritual introspection in the oneness of our spirit with the universal all-pervading power.

All the chaos in our lives, the wrong decisions and choices we make, and our inability to feel happy from within are because we have lost this oneness or integration of our inner self with the all-pervading power. We allowed ourselves to be consumed by attacks on our pure attention and, in many cases, sought to do things because everyone else was doing them.

The results of spiritual introspection

I once had someone tell me that they went through this exercise and got no intuitive inputs but felt very peaceful – they drew a complete blank. I congratulated them on their first sustained attempt at real meditation. No thoughts at all are ideal for us as long as we’re well connected. The divine’s answer and gift to this person was that state of being with no thought. That’s what this person needed most, and the message was to keep trying to feel that state.

Many others have reported doing this exercise every few months or years. Each time, they emerge with the clarity they need, and almost always, it leads to giving up or giving away many things and simplifying their lives.

Some people found answers and guidance to some of their most pressing problems, which was the ideal outcome of this exercise.

And yet, some others felt no change at all. No guidance or answers and no material change in their state. No Eureka moment. The point is that in exercises like these, there is no failure. Cause and effect, effort and reward cannot be logical and scientific when it comes to spirituality. We have no choice but to be humble and patient enough to keep trying. And that in itself is a gift. Every attempt that feels like nothing has been achieved makes us more humble and lays the path for a more opportune time to reward us with the answers we seek. And being humble makes us seek more.

If you’d like to delve deeper into these topics and see if you can make a significant impact this year on the spiritual front, join us for our online sessions this month. Look forward to the updates on our Meditation calendar online.