Happy New Year!

After a brutal 2020 that saw life-changing impacts to so many across the world, it’s time to look forward to a strong and positive 2021.

It’s that time of the year again when we’re looking back on things we missed doing, failed attempts as well as new habits we want to include in our lives. After what’s happened in 2020, the wide-ranging health benefits of Sahaja meditation alone must be reason enough to start practicing or go deeper into this year.

Most people who have something to sell will first try to exploit the New Year Resolution urge in you to lead you to a habit that ultimately results in buying something from them.

At Sahaja, because there’s never anything to buy or sell, we’re going to do the opposite. We’re telling you why something like trying to meditate shouldn’t be just another New Year resolution. That’s despite so many people who try to tell you to make a New Year Resolution to learn to meditate.

Prepare for the Long Haul

First, meditation and we’re talking here exclusively of Sahaja meditation and the kind that are deep and yield better benefits with long-term persistence and hard work, is a habit that you want to be enjoyable. It should definitely be something that you can keep up, no matter what. It cannot be started off as something that has such a high failure rate as a New Year Resolution. For interest, the statistic according to a Bodybuilding.com study is that 73% of New Year resolutions (albeit those that are related to fitness) fail and almost half of the people who take it up, give up in 6 weeks or less.

Focus on the Experience, Not on the Regimen

The problem with New Year resolutions is that they all come with a heavy focus on doing something, a regimen of some sort. Arguably, that is required because you cannot benefit or experience anything by doing nothing. And almost always, results and experiences are directly proportional to the effort you put into any activity.

But what if we told you that meditation could be a jumpstart in your life driven by a profound, enjoyable experience with comparatively less or very little effort?

The experience of Self-Realization and the initial few days or couple of weeks of your meditation falls into this category. It differs from a typical weight loss routine where every hour of your workout gradually burns off the fat or helps you lose the pounds of weight. Meditation sort of gives you a peak experience, a new dimension in your awareness immediately at the start, and in most cases enough to ignite some sort of a new journey of transformation in your life.

Thereafter, it is possible to entirely base your activities and time you spend on the varied types of experiences and positive changes you’ll see in yourself. Look at those as new experiences to enjoy and look forward to more of those. This moves you away from the pressure of doing something to trying to experience something that can be more and more life-changing and beneficial.

Do it for Yourself

A lot of people decide to do a number of new things due to peer or social pressure. Or just because everyone seems to get into it. Meditation and the journey of spirituality is something you want to keep a personal exploration and journey into the depths of your being. Your experience and benefits are unique and individualized to you and can never match that of anyone else. This is also the reason that your journey can never be typical, there isn’t such a thing as the typical meditation journey. Not at least if you’re into the right kind of meditation. The standard, canned, stress relief kind or even the mindfulness kind will try to quickly standardize your experience and make it fall into a scientifically proven statistic.

Sahaja is different, it’s a unique, innate, personal discovery of newer dimensions inside you. For instance, you could watch how others around you suddenly want to bond with you or respect you a lot more. Or closer to home, how your disobedient kids suddenly start falling in line because they feel the unseen power of love emanating from you. Or how you suddenly start enjoying the beauty of nature seeing things you never were able to.

Allow Yourself to be Guided

 

Instead of making lists and elaborate plans that are so hard to keep to all by yourself, move yourself out of the DIY mindset and try meditation as a set of guided meditation sessions you can watch or attend online on our website. This means you can enjoy it almost like a movie you can watch in the same time you attend our session. Compare that with a resolution that says you’ll wake up every day at 6 am and do your meditation for at least 15 minutes. And another 15 minutes before you go to bed. Discipline is good but doesn’t always lend itself to tuning yourself to pleasant, intriguing and rejuvenating experiences in life. So all you need is to sign up for a series of online sessions we offer and done by different instructors.

No doubt, you’ll have to eventually complement the online sessions with meditation at home, but we’re trying here to ease you into meditation in an easier, enjoyable way rather than telling you that you have to develop a habit or routine and work hard at it. Like all that other advice from those who tell you to make New Year Resolutions and loads of tips on how to make them stick.

Maybe what you need once in a while is to free yourself from the shackles of these resolutions and get into a pleasurable experiment to see what happens.

The Enjoyment of Going Deeper

If you treat getting into meditation as a journey into yourself, you’re going to discover multiple new things about yourself – how patient you can be, how you can heal your relationships, be a better parent, be able to juggle various things in your life, be more productive at work and so on. Yet, you don’t have to work on these individually. These tend to happen to you over time and gradually. All you’ll need to do is understand how to tap into that great energy inside you, sit still and get into your own inner depths. The rest follows over time, almost automatically and magically. While that sounds a bit unreal, the point is that you need to learn how to go deeper and enjoy this journey.

Then and only then can you settle down to a long-lasting, meaningful and productive meditation routine in your life. So what’s your new year resolution idea? Share with us here!