Category: Meditation
Change Your Personality — Without Changing Who You Are
🧭 The Myth of “You Can’t Change”
We’ve all heard it—“People don’t really change.” That’s about as comforting as hearing “This is your life now” during a midlife crisis.
Psychology does tell us that much of our personality is stable; if you’ve always been the planner, odds are you’re still the one carrying an extra charger on vacations. But “stable” isn’t “stuck.”
You can grow. You can soften sharp edges. You can even become calmer, kinder, and more centered. It just won’t happen overnight—this isn’t an Eat Pray Love montage. Think more like Friends—slowly evolving from “We were on a break!” chaos to something resembling emotional intelligence.
Mid-Life’s Sacred Passage: How to Ascend Higher When Your Body Whispers Change
Many of us come to this practice of meditation with a proactive spirit, seeking deeper insights into the journey of life even before the clouds of challenge begin to form. That’s a beautiful, advanced stage of spiritual evolution! Just as a seasoned mariner studies the far-off weather patterns, let’s look with clear eyes at the major health shifts that middle age (40-60) often brings, and, more importantly, how a focused spiritual practice is the long-term solution for not just coping, but flourishing.
Last week, we wrote to you about some of the pressing problems faced by many of us. This week, we launched our online workshops, starting with strategies to combat health challenges as our first topic.
What worries middle aged people in America the most
Our quest at Sahaja Online has always been to provide a unique experience and more importantly, information and assistance that helps us naturally lead a spiritual lifestyle in today’s challenging world with so many distractions and tensions.
Learning how to meditate or techniques is just the beginning, we focus on adopting and orienting ourselves spiritually, so that both our lives and the practice of meditation can be effortless, so to speak. Feel like a breeze, in other words.
But that’s easier said than done, as most of you will appreciate. Consistency and persistence are truly the traits that will help us get there. And so, all you need to do is stay tuned and take the journey with us.
With decades of the practice of Sahaja, our belief is that success in one’s meditation practice should ultimately reflect in two important areas – our behavior should reflect the traits and the calming benefits helping face every situation in our life with ease. Second, it should provide a ready tool for us to solve every problem in our lives and guide us in the right direction.
So, not unsurprisingly, we decided to use AI to tell me the most pressing problems of middle aged people in America today. Here’s what ChatGPT said.
Better than a New Year resolution
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.
The best way to overcome tiredness
Relax, take it easy, get some rest, they’ll say. As meditation practitioners, we can certainly do something much better and specific than that.
We feel tired because our attention within us is tired, and we cannot cope and take it anymore. Ever notice how you feel tired or lacking motivation even when you haven’t exerted yourself physically or mentally?
When we keep our attention fresh, recharged, and raring to go, we can cope with nearly any level of physical or mental exertion.
The secret to having lots of energy is to work on our attention, cleanse it, and recharge it frequently.
Let’s examine how meditation can help with this.