Tag: meditation for self-improvement
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.
Changing habits – winning the fight
Everyone on a self-improvement journey knows how difficult it is to form new habits or eliminate bad ones.
The obvious traits that we use are willpower and discipline. Some YouTube self-improvement gurus may also give us cognitive strategies backed by science. However, these take time to implement and sustain continuously. If you can exercise them to change your habits, then let them be a plus or nice to have. We need other powerful ways that are intrinsic to us and that we can tap into.
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.
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.
Meditation for Career success
This coming Saturday, our meditation workshop will address the topic of career success. Most of us have had the opportunity to pursue a career or job with varied experiences. For some of us, it is one of the most important facets of our lives, even something we cannot exist without. Often it can also be one of our identities or even the identity that represents us in this world.
Then, there are those of us who pursue a career for the benefits – financial well-being or even to pursue our passion in a particular area.
But what does a career pursuit mean for a spiritual person? How should we look at it, plan for it and what should our attitude and focus towards it? We discuss many of these aspects in our workshop, including sharing how meditation can be used to transform your career in many ways.