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.

Center your life around meditation; make time for it.

While most people try to fix their problems individually, our strategy is simple – establish a spiritual foundation and tap into the powers within; the problems disappear gradually.

Meditation gives you powerful, intuitive direction from within and a force that can bring positive changes in your life. So, the first step is committing to it becoming a part of your routine, lifestyle, and mainstay. The path to sustainable improvement in your life is then apparent.

It feels as though the clouds are lifting, and the clutter in your life is beginning to reduce. You begin to choose fewer, more purposeful things that can give you fulfillment in life rather than continuing on an unsustainable path that will wear you out physically, mentally, and emotionally.

You begin to make some hard choices, do what you are passionate about, and, importantly, feel relaxed and never like you are doing a lot of hard work.

You get better and better at removing non-value-adding things in your life to make it richer. It is better to have a fulfilling and joyous moments in life doing fewer things than doing many things. Those moments replace the more mundane pursuits.

The importance of our attention

Spending time on something is different from the impact it has on our attention. Time is a quantifiable entity, whereas our attention is a subtler power to achieve things in life. The quality of time spent on various activities is of importance to us. For instance, we may spend a few hours working on something, but it may tax our attention and stress us out much more than other activities.

As meditators, we are about managing our attention and recharging it day in and day out. So rather than measure how much time something takes, we introspect on how much our attention is influenced by everything we do. Our attention keeps getting drawn by our thoughts from the past and the future, even outside of our working hours, in both positive and negative ways. The impact of the quality and the quantity of time spent each day is experienced on our attention.

After everything we do, if the net impact on our attention can be positive, such as giving us joy and satisfaction, the secret to leading a rich life in unveiled.

The impact of meditation on our attention

Now, let’s examine the specific benefits that meditation has on our attention that can help us get our lives off the treadmill that it is on.

Our time begins to free up as our productivity improves and the obstacles to getting things done are removed. Our chakra system within us has specific powers to help us achieve each of these benefits.

As we go deeper into our meditation, the power of silence and remaining in that thoughtless awareness state helps avoid attention fatigue. This makes us happier, energetic, and ready to go all the time.

From a life where our attention is always busy, we realize the value of inner silence and the need to give our attention a break. During this time, we sit back and allow our introspection to present us with ideas and suggestions. With meditation, this phenomenon is more than just a timeout or a break; it allows us to find solutions from our inner intuitive knowledge since we’re deliberately shutting out the external stimuli on our attention.

Attention cleansing

Attention cleansing using meditation is another great way to make ourselves productive and improve the quality of our lives. Our world tries very hard to dump many things and messages on our attention. This then drives our thinking, and a lot of it can be negative thoughts. If we learned to control our attention and divert it away from those inputs that cause negative thinking, our lives could be much more free, and we may find a lot of time on our hands.

Meditation helps greatly with attentional control because we practice separating our attention from our thoughts; over time, we master this technique. This can also liberate us from bad habits. That may be another great time saver and help us get our lives off the treadmill. Habits and especially, undesirable ones, are formed when our attention is filled with triggers, memories, and inputs we cannot control. And uncontrollable habits lead to using our attention, taking more and more time away from us. When we train our attention, we help ourselves get rid of those habits and return our time to more productive pursuits.

Doing our work without the feeling of it

In earlier articles, we have discussed a powerful spiritual tenet of meditation that manifests in the advanced stages of our meditation practice. We achieve harmony with nature and our surroundings, and everything falls into place and in line for us to carry on doing our work almost effortlessly. While we accomplish a lot, it hardly feels like we’re doing the work; this is the concept of Akarma. Work just gets done almost effortlessly and it can even surprise us most of the time.

Getting off the financial constraint treadmill

The vast majority of people have financial commitments, and this may force us to keep working with no end in sight. It is possible to reach that spiritual state through meditation when most of our financial problems can go away. This relates to the Nabhi chakra within us, and making it powerful and balanced can help achieve this state. The anecdotal experience from many Sahaja practitioners shows that they all see their financial problems getting solved over time soon as they begin to make meditation a part of their lives.

In addition to the spiritual state, our intuitive intelligence can also guide us to make better choices, such as finding ways to make or save more money in the same or less time. We can also introspect on whether the pay is linearly proportional to the hours we spend each day and find ways of breaking this linearity to free up time.

Our innate sense of self-improvement can also help us upskill or train ourselves to help improve our careers and lives since higher skills are more rewarding. Our sense of creativity and clarity can also improve the quality of our work. All employers love employees who do high-quality work, which is yet another way of improving our financial situation and gearing towards getting our lives off the treadmill.

Meditation also helps us question the status quo, find our true potential and use our talents and abilities more effectively.

Dependencies on our time

Our commitment to others can be an important part of our lives. Many of us may also be caregivers to our family members. Meditation strengthens relationships with everyone around us, and the understanding and appreciation of what we do for others can greatly increase.

From our side, the sense of patience and caring that increases because of our meditation can make the time we devote to others feel nearly effortless and never like a chore or duty.

For example, there are several reports from Sahaja practitioners when their teenage children offered to help or were no longer hard to deal with soon after they started meditating.

Facing change with courage

We can only get our lives off the treadmill if we are committed to improving our lives. But any form of change in a busy life can always be daunting; most people struggle with self-improvement because of fear or resistance towards change, consciously or unconsciously. When we meditate, we have the divine to help us at every step. We develop the courage to implement positive changes in our lives. Further, our sense of realism lets us live our lives to our standards, not those mandated by others or society.

Becoming a master of our own time

Some practical tips can help us free up time and take back control of our lives. While the concept of non-linearity at work is about delinking the time from the money we make, we can expand this concept of non-linearity to other aspects of our lives. This means achieving disproportionate results and impact for the same or lesser time spent. Here are some examples –

  • We are meditators, so let’s start with an example that is right up our alley: A 15-minute meditation at 5 am in a powerful ambiance can make your entire day much more productive than a much longer meditation later in the day. There’s a reason early morning meditations are very powerful. We discuss this at length in this article.
  • Physical activity that helps you stay fitter but takes much less time or can be combined with other work you must do. Household chores can give you a lot more exercise than you may imagine.
  • Introspection and making a few key and powerful decisions that save you and others lots of time rather than beginning to do a number of things without planning or strategizing. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln said.
  • A lot of time can be saved by seeking help when we need it and from the right people. If we build our network of contacts well enough, we may often find ourselves on the quickest path to the most optimal solution.
  • If the need to earn money takes up much of our time, consider investing wisely. The power of compound interest is often considered the 8th wonder of the world. Again, there are disproportionate results for the time that we spend. Here’s an article we shared with you a while ago on how meditators can approach finances and money related matters.
  • Do we need to be physically present or do all the work ourselves? Sometimes delegating it or taking help, or even paying for help can help us repurpose our valuable time towards something more enriching. In today’s connected digital work, help is almost always just a few clicks away.
  • Saving the time in our future – focusing on a few key preventative health strategies may save us a lot of time and pain later in our lives.
  • We are spirituality practitioners, so let’s close this list with a very deep spiritual tenet for achieving immediate, disproportionate happiness in life – instant forgiveness. We can introspect how much time something or someone that we have been unable to let go of has occupied our attention. If we try forgiving and moving on, it may free up almost a lifetime of our attention. Meditation can help with this by working on our Agnya chakra. This is something we focus on in our very first session of meditation and regularly. The attention freed up by forgiving incidents and people from our past can be truly liberating.

Transforming your life

As you get into your meditation routine, your inner instinct will guide you toward the above strategies and lead you to the right people and solutions. If you are reading this article, then it has already started working! Freeing up our time and attention can be one of the most potent tools for achieving a higher purpose in life. In turn, seeking a higher purpose and meditation can automatically free up our time from other mundane pursuits.