Yes, you read that right. A routine, high-quality meditation experience may give the impression of calm, gentle people, entirely at peace with themselves and nearly looking like they’re floating in the heavens. Or that they’re in blissful enjoyment every moment of their lives.

While those are the outcomes that we strive for and are typical benefits, a meditator’s life is not easy and rosy. It requires hard work, tenacity, grit, determination, and getting past periods of poor progress and even failures along the way related to spiritual achievements.

If someone sold you 10-minute stress relief, a magical solution called meditation that grants benefits ranging from a complete makeover of your personality to almost being able to solve world hunger miraculously, you have been conned.

Meditation is a long-term effort with delayed gratification. Or at least the deeper benefits certainly take longer to manifest.

Yet, what keeps us on this path is that it offers the promise of the most significant and highest achievement of the purpose of our lives. And the rewards in the later stages of the journey are unmatched and life-transforming.

So, let’s understand the hard part of our spiritual journey clearly.

As the new year ushers in another year of hope and exciting possibilities, an often ignored part of our lives is our spiritual goals for the year. There are many reasons for this. The most common among them is that there are too many facets in our lives, all needing some sort of focus and planning as each new year begins. At other times, we feel excited about doing something new and changing our lives. So we make changes to our lives voluntarily.

It’s hard to revisit our spiritual state with complete honesty and prioritize an improvement this year. That’s because the self-assessment of our subtler spiritual state can be challenging. Spirituality is an ocean and the deepest of them all. Since we cannot know its depths, we cannot also know our position relative to the most profound state possible.

That’s where Sahaja comes in. Through many of our tools, approaches and guidance, we can help make a big difference in your spiritual journey this year.

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.

A mid-life crisis is a common phrase in Western countries that describes a period of confusion and insecurity when faced with difficult choices and questions in life. The path they take from here on could make or break their lives and, more importantly, achieving purpose and fulfillment. But not everyone has a mid-life crisis, nor is it very common as a concept in Eastern cultures.

A situation like a mid-life crisis can be a good thing. It can trigger some deep introspection within us about the direction of our lives and take actions to make the best of our remaining active and healthy years.

But for it to be meaningful, the level of questions we ask ourselves must be related to a higher purpose and not about mundane aspirations or ambitions. Nor should it be about just our own lives or those of our close family members. It should be about something that leaves a mark and impact on the world.

What might a mid-life crisis look like for a spiritual person? We throw some light on the types of questions and answers that matter.

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.