Category: Meditation
The effect of marketing and advertising on our spirituality
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.
Problem Solving using meditation
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.
How to feed your soul
Have you ever noticed how we spend so much attention on feeding our bodies and our tastes? Rarely do we miss a meal. But it’s well beyond that. We pay a lot of attention to enjoying our food and getting the best dining experiences. Sometimes, food is the ultimate epitome of a celebration in our lives.
And there’s nothing wrong with it; great experiences and comfort, to a degree, are part of a wholesome and fulfilling life, no matter which aspect of our lives they are related to. But our attention is not proportionately spent in enriching our lives equally in all of its facets. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs says that our attention is centered around what our body needs most of all and safety, i.e., the base of Maslow’s pyramid. After those needs are satisfied, it moves higher to fulfill our emotional and esteem-related needs. Finally, our spiritual needs or higher purpose sit at the peak of the pyramid. It’s not hard to see that the higher tiers of the pyramid require greater effort and energy, in part because they come much later in the hierarchy and are harder to get to. The other reason is that searching and seeking out the best and quickest ways to satisfy our spiritual needs are not easy to find.
The good news is that you’re in good hands now. In Sahaja, there’s a lot of experience and methods in giving equal, if not greater, emphasis on feeding our soul with rich experiences. In our busy lives and amidst all the challenges, nourishing our spiritual being requires careful planning and insights into how experienced meditators do it.
Drawing comparisons between how we feed our body and our soul can help us understand this in greater detail.
Meditation for career success
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.
Things your attention needs to avoid
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.