Category: Higher Purpose
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.
Does your life feel like it’s on a treadmill?
A treadmill is a great workout machine. It is designed to keep you walking once you turn it on. And you can do nothing but walk or run on it; if you stop while it’s running, you will fall. Suppose someone sets the treadmill at a pace that you aren’t comfortable and you can’t turn it off either. How would it feel? You must keep walking and running at an uncomfortable pace with no control and no ability to get off.
We go through phases when it can feel like our entire life is on a treadmill. And here’s how that can feel:
You’re busy day in and day out, with very little time left for activities you would like to do.
You can’t control or choose your time.
You are into activities that do not feel productive, meaningful, or enjoyable.
You cannot stop the monotony; you are too scared to change your life.
Your commitments are crushing you.
You wonder how long this will continue and don’t see a way out.
You can feel the stress and some anxiety and don’t see a way out.
Meditation can help, and we are here to help you change your life positively.
Why meditation and spirituality are difficult
The most catchy advertisements for meditation try to make it look simple so you can learn it in a few minutes and achieve Nirvana shortly after. And likely solve all the problems in your life within the next hour after that. And those who are out to make money by selling spirituality and meditation say they’re both very easily achievable. Yet you must pay them for many sessions and classes for a very long time to get the benefits. They also say that meditation can only be achieved with one of their teachers. The irony is more than evident.
Here at Sahaja Online, we like to be straight with you. Meditation is challenging to master. Spirituality is even more complex, and it takes a lifetime to immerse yourself in it.
Let’s explore why and see what it takes to get the most out of meditation and spirituality.
How meditation improves our perspective and sense of perception
A great picture means different things to different people. The greatest of pictures talk to us in very expressive ways depending on our sense of perception and the perspective we have in our attention at that very moment.
Ever think of how you feel joyful and captivated by specific images and experiences? Yet, those same images barely produce a reaction within us if our attention and sense of perception are busy or colored with something else.
So, how do we get to a point in life when we can enjoy every image and experience to its fullest extent?
Sustained, long-term meditation can help with that.
Spirituality requires grit and determination
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.