Meditation With A Purpose

I have been hosting my own Personal Development Seminars for the last fifteen years. A few years ago a good friend took part in the two days and asked me “For how long have you been running Meditation Workshops?” My answer was that I’d never viewed meditation as a central part of the two days – that I simply regard meditation as a means to an end. On that two days, I had somebody who had been meditating for the preceding twenty years. He told me that he may as well have been “scratching his backside” for those minutes each day because he hadn’t appreciated the link between that meditation and the rough and tumble, gried and pain of normal daily life. He got his twenty minutes tranquillity in the morning – but all the good it did him!

As I say, meditation is simply a tool – and, like a hammer, you can use it for its intended purpose or you can wallop yourself with it! Meditation is purely a means to an end and it will never make any difference in your life unless you are certain in your head why you’re meditating and what you really want from your life as a result of your meditation. So, meditation is a way to unleash your inner power and attaining your innermost desires. Meditation disciplines an otherwise completely undisciplined mind. If you don’t appreciate this just cast your eye over seven decades of research in the field of psychology which confirm that the ordinary mind is out of control. Meditation gives you back control of your mind and, as a result, control of your life.

Armed with that understanding, perhaps you will begin to appreciate meditation in its wider context. Meditation is not an end in itself. Before you ever start meditating ask yourself what your goals are. I don’t mean the normal crass nonsense that self help gurus talk about – I’m not talking about luxury cars, Caribbean beaches, fancy condos and speedboats. My concern is what really matters to you – and it’s up to you to answer that question. However, if you don’t address these issues first, your life will continue to be just as confused after meditating as it was beforehand.

So you need to know why you’re meditating. If you’ve got your motivation tied down, meditation is transformed and transforming. Through calming your mind, through getting rid of the noise in your head, meditation frees you up to attend to what’s important and come to your senses (you’ve got five of them, use them!). It enables you focus on the reality of the moment – and it’s what you actually do right here, right now that decide where you are going in life.

How Will Meditation Give You Happiness

Large numbers of people meditate – many daily. Yet hundreds of surveys show that the vast majority of people are unhappy. Most of my personal development clients meditate – but a lot of them still find that they are stressed, worried and unhappy during the later on in the day. So the important question is can meditation give you peace of mind?

Firstly, many people don’t even discover peace and contentment while they’re meditating! Their heads are all over the place, they’re easily distracted or often they end up consumed by completely irrelevant thoughts. All too often, whilst they meditate, they get even more unsettled than they were before they started because they think that they don’t know how to meditate. However, even if you’re expert at meditating and get true clarity of mind while you’re practicing it, you can take it for granted that that same focus and peace of mind doesn’t stay with you as your day progresses. You revert to your normal state of mind.

As humans We’re conditioned to be mentally all over the place – it’s a simple fact of life. And that’s how we’ll stay unless we take the appropriate steps – not just when we meditate but throughout every single day. The first thing to realize is that meditation should be regarded as source of mental discipline. Basically, even if you are all over the place whilst meditating, the determinationto see it through disciplines your mind. You shouldn’t get hassled, you shouldn’t fret, you should just get all the way through your session.

Even more importantly, most practitioners don’t understand the link between meditating and what’s happening during their everyday existence. You must stop yourself during the day to check up on your state of mind. Chances are, you’ll be all over the place relative to the peace that can embrace you during a good meditation session. After you’re established how you’re feeling, you need to take action to bring yourself back towards a clear and present state of mind. You don’t have to take drastic action. It can be something simple, like standing up from your desk for a few minutes to take a breather – literally, focus on your inward and outward breathing, nobody else will know the difference. You can head outside for your habitual cigarette and really smoke it – yes, even that awful habit can be a meditation. The important thing is that you’ve got to pause, check in with your state of mind and turn yourself back on to the reality of the present.

As I explained, meditation is a discipline. Discipline yourself regularly – not just with a quick session of meditation before the day gets going, but during the day. Otherwise, the calm that you experience from (even if it’s only every so often) will be of no practical assistance to you as the day progresses. And, if meditating doesn’t result in a practical difference when it matters, why bother?

Self-Help: Are You Fooling Yourself?

With the huge growth in sales of self improvement books and the proliferation of personal development websites, wouldn’t you think that you would by now have witnessed a major shift in human awareness – a demonstrable improvement in the human condition? In fact it’s not just that there little evidence of improvement, all the evidence points to the opposite – increased levels of anxiety and worry as the economy nosedived having been hijacked by a small number of people obsessed with their own greed; a rise in anti-social behaviour and violent crime and the ongoing inappropriate behaviour of people who should know better on the international stage of so-called diplomacy and politics.

So, what are all those people who are indulging in self-help books doing? Actually, in the course of my work I speak to or meet quite a few of them and, undoubtedly, whilst some are taking major leaps forward in their lives, there are many who, as in every other facet of their lives, are going through the motions, fooling themselves into thinking that their mental state, attitude, behaviour and lives are being transformed.

It’s very simple to pursue a course of personal development and slip into a routine not dissimilar to all your other routines – habitual, repetitive, automatic and ultimately mindless. The minute anything becomes routine, it becomes useless to you in creating a better life. And, so, I encounter many people who have convinced themselves that they are developing their mindfulness – but who have ended up doing something else mindlessly! I’ve met plenty of people who meditate, who tell me that they’ve never felt as calm and focused in their lives – but, if they were to take one step back and take a look, they would discover that their lives are crumbling around them.

If you have embarked on the journey of self improvement you should immediately notice positive results in your everyday life. If you see no tangible results or benefits in terms of both personal effectiveness and the downstream benefits in your professional, personal and financial life, you are fooling yourself. And the longer you fool yourself the more dangerous it becomes – because you will convince yourself that your life is changing for the better when, in fact, you are becoming more divorced from the real world.

There are hugely useful and practical personal development resources around – but they are tools that have to be put to the appropriate use. They must be used during the minute to minute rough and tumble of your day – not just whilst you’re sitting in the lotus position at seven o’clock in the morning! Mindfulness – and all that flows from it – is something that must be practiced within the day – not in preparation for it. Until you bring what you’ve learned in your personal development courses and self-help books into the very moment to moment behaviour of your daily life not only will things not improve, they’ll get worse.