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 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.

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.

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.