The most important with meditation is to stay away from this whole “discipline” type of approach.
If you tried already a few times to succeed with connecting with it, it could very well be because the steps that were proposed to you were “artificial” in a way and where hard to make them fit with your life style and mind set.
You can of course set your life on a path of self discovery where you have time, energy and motivation to invest 1 hour a day and make this exploration your priority number one in life.
Now, if you tried that approach and did not succeed in establishing such type of discipline in your life, it might be time to look at it from another angle:
Meditation happens spontaneously in you. There are little streams of life force which wake up any moment in the day.
Your thinking patterns are a doorway to meditation, the moment before you fall sleep, the second you arrive on this deserted beach and stare at the horizon.
Have you caught yourself sometimes lost in an inner world of dreams? You sometimes realize you have been silent and immobile for a minute and don’t know really what happened.
What about this sudden moment of bliss and intense happiness with your partner or the moment you go and help a crying child on the street.
The feeling which wakes up with music, the “trance” when you jog.
You get the picture? Life in itself is already magical.
Now learning meditation skills is about discovering how to go one step deeper (or higher) in the layers of your mind.
Why would you do that? What is in there?
The answer is simple: You normal state of awareness is packed with impressions, emotions and thoughts. It is an ongoing flow which tends to saturate your mind space.
It is a bit like getting 2000 emails at a time and having to sort all these impressions at once. It’s a permanent psychic flow of forms and energies.
Now, imagine for a second that all this suddenly stops. Imagine that your physical senses stop perceiving the outer world and that for a minute, your thinking and emotions simply come to a still point. What happens then? What happens in this “virgin” state?
I won’t alter your experience by telling you the feelings or impressions associated with it. You can call this “inner world” a link with your causal reality or nirvana. What you call it does not really matter. What really matters is the experience and how it impacts on your life.
You simply break through into a new world of awareness. It is a progressive form of enlightenment in which you simply integrate a “universal” or “unified” dimension in your daily life. It’s like having a fresh stream of life force through your garden.
You can look at it from an absolute perspective and really head for the highest place in your own inner core. You can as well simply use meditation as a “wellness” tool to take away stress and strengthen peace inside yourself.
If you want to succeed with establishing a meditation “stream” inside yourself, you need to ad a dimension of power to it.
You might think of meditation and spiritual development as a path of love and harmony. This is true, but the greatest mistake you can do is thinking that this is enough by itself.
The energy you bring with meditation is very subtle and in a way very fragile. When you confront this type of energy with the outside world, it gets heavily shaken.
Imagine: it is like having a very fragile flower on a side walk somewhere downtown. To protect that flower you need to ad a fence around it and simply give the protection it needs. You need to water it, care for it, etc.
It is important to realize this: If you simply wake up these inner feelings of beauty and harmony, simply go back to work the following day and spend the day in your office, it makes you extremely vulnerable.
Why? Because an office space is a lot about competition, challenge, power, etc.
Awareness is like gold! The more gold you have the more power and energy you need to protect and preserve it.
Thoughts and emotions are mind frames which naturally protect your mind space. They are an inner architecture of energy which simply stabilize your mind.
When you connect with meditation at first and "wake up" on that level, you tend to “open” up. This is very good on the “inner levels” but makes you vulnerable towards the outer world.
You live in a world full of challenges. They can come from work, family, activities, personal foundation, wellness, etc. You need to be present here and now to simply perform effectively.
The whole point of meditation is to add a quality of awareness without “taking off” to an inner secluded territory where external energies would feel like a threat.
This means integration.
Once you connect with inner realities through meditation, there is a moment of “conversion” where you bring back this into your daily life.
This is why you hear a lot terms like “spiritual warrior”. There is some form of “battle of energies” happening and the goal is simply to stay master of your mind and preserve your mind space.
It is easy to do when you are aware of it before you start. It is very simple: ad a dimension of power to it.
If you are not familiar with the idea of power or feel uncomfortable with what is behind that word, truly, take a moment to check it out. Power and abuse of power are two different things. Power is this key of your house. It is what you use to conquer, protect and transform. It is what you use to control what is yours. The set of keys in your hands are your “control” tools.
Does this make sense?
Ego is good! Your ego is your life vehicle. You can’t truly function in modern life without your ego. When you integrate new life force into your existence, what you do is pour it through your egoic body. Your egoic body is your personality.
So, remember this simple point:
The more harmony, love and peace you have, the more power you need to protect and preserve it.
Here is an example: Think of great compassionate figures of our time: Think of mother Teresa or Lady Diana for instance. You might think there was only love in their action? True, love was definitely the core. Would they have been able to do their work without power? I don’t think so: both of these beings where “sponsored” by very powerful energies. Lady Diana was literally at the head of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the world. Her mother in law is the richest woman in the world.
What about Mother Theresa? She was sponsored by the Christian church which is one of the most powerful organizations around the world. This structure provided her with funds and support to do her work.
This does not take anything away from their action. The point is simply this: Remove these “sponsoring” forces and you are left with pure love. Now, with pure love only, they would not have had the impact they had. There are hundreds of very compassionate people around the world who struggle with giving help to those who need it.
The most successful humanitarian organizations succeed when they join forces with business power and use powerful marketing strategies to get their message through.
This marketing body is the outer vehicle. This is what gives them the power to have a real impact.
Your life functions in the same way. The refined energies you connect with through meditation need a power input to be integrated into your daily life and reach the level of manifestation.
There is simply competition for space and energy. Unless you ad this dimension of will power and determination to your inner quest, there are good chances that your spiritual life remains suspended like an unfulfilled dream.
What matters is that you succeed with you quest.
Once you get this “right” your inner quest is much easier. You simply open space and give yourself the resources to succeed.
As I said in the beginning of this message, the idea of “discipline” is another great misconception.
If you tried practicing meditation with discipline and do not seem to succeed in establishing it in your life, try another road.
The idea is to take a very dynamic approach adding rhythm, spontaneity and creativity. You use your life’s existing frame and simply add here and there some very simple key actions.
When you consciously sit down and meditate, you only do it for 5 min max. You ad a few simple dynamic and energizing techniques. The whole idea is to free your mind rather than constrict within a rigid set of rules. The key point of meditation is to gain inner and outer freedom, not to limit yourself.
It is very easy to ad every week a couple of freeing techniques that you can practice and recreate to fit your own life style.
Again, you use your natural flow of desires and instincts and simply take it one step further.
All these small steps ad a dimension of life force and awareness to your daily life. That way, your whole life quality rises progressively and you simply feel more energized, more aware, more alive and happy on a daily base.
You can truly turn an existing micro line of inspiration into a powerful stream of life force and clarity.
The whole idea is simply to work with the forces of nature rather than against them.
To be honest, I could give you a couple of techniques to get you started but there are little chances that it would work. You’ll probably leave them and never even get the energy or inspiration to try them out.
Before you use any technique, you need the energy to breakthrough whatever is limiting your right now.
What I would like to help you with is connecting with an inner source of power which gives you the tools to tap into your natural resources of emotional fuel.
The difference between those who succeed and those who don’t is that those who succeed have simply a greater amount of will power and energy. The skills and techniques come after. What makes the difference is your conquering drive. This is something different. Once you have it, it makes a massive difference! It removes obstacles.
How does it work? It is very simple: it is an initiation. It is a power which is transmitted to you. Once you have it. That’s it! It’s yours and you have full responsibility and freedom to do what you want with it.