Many of us try hard in life to achieve many things. We desire for things we don’t yet have, destinations we’ve not been to, or play roles and do activities we’ve not done before.
Uncannily, almost always, only a few of these wishes aspirations are really fulfilled. The rest seem out of our reach, to a point where we begin to feel that perhaps they were not meant to be.
Is that really accurate or is it just you?
By Shankar Ramani, Instructor, Sahaja Online
These days some herbal supplements and alternative medicine experts are on a rampage to create fancy solutions for pretty much every health and wellness need or problem. Recently I happened to read about a supplement that is a carb blocker. These are supplements you can take that help block out carbohydrates once you consume them and hence come with the benefits of allowing you to eat carbs but not take the hit of calories from eating them. You trick the body into avoiding carbs even when you are eating them.
It sounded like magic to me. Indulge as much as you want, but block out the consequences?
As a person close to self-improvement, I find this somewhat amusing. After all, shouldn’t the best form of carb blocker be our discretion in controlling what we eat? Why put carbs into your mouth and then again pay for and consume supplements that block carbs?
Ah, the elusive self-discipline and self-control paradigms, of course. Very few of us can fight the temptation of carbs, day in and day out for years on end. Ultimately, they overpower us. That’s why someone came up with this brilliant invention of carb blockers, setting aside the topic of how well these really work, for a moment.
Anyways, there’s a broader aspect here of how relying on self-discipline and self-control are alone are inadequate for one’s self-improvement. So what else can done do?
Have you ever noticed how you react to problems and crisis situations? Do you get consumed by them? Do you panic and reach out for help? How easily do you give up? Most importantly, how much resilience do you exhibit until the problem is resolved?
Even further, are you seen as a problem-solver for others?
A distinctive feature of meditators is their ability to deal with and work on problems. Here’s how they do this.
We are innately optimistic and hence switch to unearthing every possible positive outcome even when faced with adversity. Our negativity fighting attitude towards life gets us to focus quickly on eliminating the root cause of the problem and move towards healing and resolution.
Brooding and getting stuck is rarely in our style of living.
There’s a particular reason for this optimism. The energy that flows inside our subtle energy system and which we draw into is one of pure love and compassion. It is forever benevolent and trying to do good. And hence it’s always driving us to restore the balance to positivity and goodness in our lives.
Meditation trains us to watch ourselves always by separating our attention from the flow of constant thoughts. Once our attention is recaptured and clearly able to focus on truth and reality, this becomes a habit. This is invaluable during a crisis or a problematic situation. We have this unique ability to see and quickly understand what is wrong and what needs to happen. We avoid reacting or being consumed by the situation because our Spirit is watching everything, including the problem, we separate ourselves from the problem instantly.
Meditators always gravitate towards a situation of peace and calm. We do this at any cost as this is our primary existential state of mind – a state we want to always be in every moment of our lives. We value this state so we can focus on our higher pursuits. Most of the time, we don’t care if we have to pay our way through situations to get to this state. Or find creative ways or change things dramatically in our lives for it.
What might usually scare most people is having to spend money, which in turn comes from a strong attachment to worldly possessions and wants. Change in any form also bothers most people. And then, just being fearful and lacking confidence usually affects everyone in a crisis situation. Not us meditators, though. We organize everything in our lives around our higher, peaceful state of existence.
Time never stops for anyone. We get old all the time though we may only focus on reversing our aging or arresting the deterioration of our health at certain times in our lives.
Things get dirty all the time by default. But we only do cleaning intermittently, not all the time. Things are in constant motion in this universe. Human beings can either rise up in the upward spiral of improvement or when we do nothing, go down this same spiral. Nothing is stationary or constant.
There is a constant negative and impeding force working against our self-improvement. If we do nothing to improve ourselves, our higher pursuits in life simply degenerate. What’s a resilient strategy to ensure we keep going up the evolutionary spiral and improving continuously? We have some answers based on our experience as meditators.
About 10 days ago, most of our Sahaja Online meditation instructors were together at a very unique place. This is one of the very few places in this world where it feels timeless, priceless and exhilarating all the time. Usually, the mind-body-soul struggles work only one way. The busy mind loses touch with the soul and spirituality. The wants of the body then drag the mind and soul further away from subtlety.
But this was one place where things work in reverse. First, the material needs become irrelevant, and after that, the disturbing thoughts and emotions go quiet to give rise to endless joy and positive energy. The attention moves from the mundane to a very subtle and higher state of existence.
And quite effortlessly at that – that’s what is almost magical about the place.