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.

In one of my recent meditation sessions for a Sahaja Online audience, I decided to share a routine I try and follow a few times a week.

A surprising number of attendees from my session got back to me, stating how their experience was truly unique and how they experienced a rare, deep silence during their meditation using this approach.

In short, the approach is the antithesis of the fast-paced, busy, rushed world and lives we experience today. Every once in a while, I make a deliberate attempt to simulate the relaxed lives of people 50 or 100 years ago. These people had plenty of time, not a lot of pressure and most important of all, their lives were incredibly uncomplicated. There weren’t phones, the internet or television and they spent a lot of time with nature. Clearly, their attention was a lot less stressed and busy, unlike ours.

From time to time, we stop to admire people who are strong personalities and seem to live in absolute clarity. They are clear about what they want, experts in their area, have great self-discipline and most important of all, seem to magnetically attract a lot of followers. And some of them seem to be extremely spiritual too.

There’s a path to this kind of self-mastery in our lives and it is achievable.

In our spiritual subtle energy system of chakras and energy channels, a circular region existing in the abdominal cavity is known as the Void region. Usually, everyone knows and talks about the seven chakras, but the Void region is an integral part of the subtle energy system and as important as any chakra.

The 80s and 90s saw the rise of yoga and meditation in America as a mystical and exotic offering. Spiritual gurus from the East were flooding the country, trying to make a killing with their bizarre, pricey and hodgepodge spiritual products. And it resulted in those seeking or practicing meditation becoming branded and defined by unique and often weird or eccentric habits, viewpoints and lifestyles. For instance, they came to be associated automatically with organic food, green living activism, veganism or vegetarianism and naturopathy. 

Our happiness and emotional stability are dependent on our ability to love ourselves. This self-love is called self-esteem. Self-esteem works on us in subtle ways, dictating our choices, shaping our worldview. It lies at the heart of many of our problems in life, but because we may not be fully aware of our implicit self-evaluations, we may not realize that the root cause of a problem is how we feel about ourselves at the deepest level.

Unfortunately, self-esteem is often presented as some nebulous, magical quality that some people simply have and others don’t, or as a quality that we can improve by losing weight or buying a new wardrobe. But self-esteem is more complicated than that.

The more interesting and relevant fact is that meditation can help improve Self-esteem.