If you have been struggling to get started or become a regular meditator, you’re not alone. A lot of people and those who have been practitioners for many years struggle with this problem too. Initially, meditation sounds great, has proven benefits and everyone who practices it typically has at least one benefit that convinces them of its value.

Yet, things get in the way, circumstances keep changing and complacency can creep in. We know that we have to get back on track, but it feels like heavy lifting to get back to the once-exhilarating meditation schedule that gave us so many benefits. Those constant negative voices tell us it’s okay to be irregular or make meditation look daunting – yes, think of it, something that’s meant to relax you and make you completely peaceful and calm feels rather difficult. Doubts begin to creep in or meditation gets on your action items or New Year Resolutions list pretty quickly. Or it has been a bookmark in your life for many years, but you can’t just get yourself to pull the trigger.

And then there’s the quality of meditation, an even bigger challenge. The majority of meditators hit a plateau in their progress at some point and it feels like they have peaked out on their benefits and positive experiences. While they’ve established their routine and follow it diligently, there just isn’t enough depth in their sessions. Regular meditation, therefore, isn’t just about being regular; it is about consistent, high-quality meditation over the longer term.

Familiar feelings and thoughts? It’s not always your lack of self-discipline, desire to improve or put in the effort; there are other hidden forces at work that we need to understand.

Every day our attention is drawn to promotional and marketing messages on virtually every channel or platform we spend time on – the internet, social media platforms, TV, billboards and so on. There’s always someone who wants to sell something. The better ones try to make your life better or build a relationship with you – but they eventually are on the mission to make you buy something. 

For decades, we’ve seen advertising on the rise and diversify into so many channels – from print media, radio, and television to now into streaming platforms, social media and ever clever and innovative methods of catching our attention.

While many of us have matured to this phenomenon and even grown resilient in some cases (turning off or muting the advertisement for instance), it’s useful to understand the deeper effect of marketing and advertising on our spiritual life.

Last Sunday, we commenced a new series on solving problems in our lives using meditation as a tool.

The lives of meditators who pursue spirituality are different in some ways. We consider spirituality and Higher Purpose at the center of our lives and to guide us at every step. More importantly, the patience, calmness and resilience we develop because of our meditation percolate to every other facet of our lives. That is, of course, the goal.

The fundamentals of the approach to problem-solving involve two parts – working on our spiritual state at all times and finding specific or targeted solutions to our and others’ problems. The former can even help us stay clear of problems, so we don’t have to worry about them or solve them. The latter helps us quickly resolve our problems to continue to focus our attention on more important things in life.

Meditation is a holistic solution to many of our life’s challenges and problems. It’s not just about stress relief. In our 50 years of the Sahaja practice, we’ve seen some dramatic turnarounds for meditators in their professional lives. If your job or career, in general, takes up the larger part of your day, as it does for most of us, then you’ll be surprised at how your meditation practice can transform it in different ways. The anecdotal experiences of thousands of Sahaja practitioners confirm this type of transformation.

In Sahaja, we regularly speak of the power of our attention and how important and central it is to our meditation practice. If you’re new to Sahaja, here’s the upshot. The rising Kundalini energy elevates our attention to a higher plane of consciousness. All the wide-ranging and amazing benefits of meditation result from our attention being in that higher unique spiritual realm. A purer and clearer attention can get us more easily into that state, and vice versa, when our attention is in that higher state, it gets purified, steady and balanced – enough for us to take full control of it.

While there have been many aspects of our attention spoken about in our articles, and we’ll continue to do so in the future, here are the most important things your attention needs to avoid. These are abjectly harmful to our attention and, therefore, to our pursuit of spirituality and meditation.