Why You Don't Need to Worry About Anything.

Dear All,

Below is a stick figure drawing showing you what thoughtless awareness is good for on a day-to-day basis. Apart from the fact that studies have shown that achieving thoughtless awareness, even for a few seconds at a time, can relieve stress, anxiety and depression, it's also a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card for the daily challenges we may face in work and personal life.

The reason it works is because our patterns of thought have crystallised into various issues(red box in drawing) we may be facing and getting intothoughtless awareness helps us step outside our mental traps so that solutions can present themselves. The universe is benign and not hostile. 

The drawing shows a stick figure trapped in a two-dimensional (length & width) box. The only way for the stick figure to get out of the trap is to enter the third dimension (height) and simply step out of the box. We're actually in a 3-D world so to transcend this we'd need to enter the 4th dimension, which is thoughtless awareness hence another name for it in sanskrit is Turiya or '4th state'.

See you at group meditation tomorrow.

Regards

Got No Time? Here's a Better Way to Slice Your Pizza.

Dear All,

Got no time? This is perhaps one of the main causes of stress - that there doesn't seem to be enough time to deal with everything. But what it could come down to is that you're just not slicing your pizza up right. The pizza being the different things that you spend your day on, including sleep and work.

The chart below shows, by extrapolation, how each of us typically spends a day and unsurprisingly, work eats up most of the time. If we were to categorise the activities into those that drain our energy - physical, emotional, mental - and those that restore or replenish our energy, most of the activities would be on the debit side, with only sleep being on the credit side.

Because of stress, the quality and/or quantity of sleep is not sufficient to cover the debit side of your energy bank balance leaving you running on an overdraft situation. This is storing up debts - in the form of stress-related illness- for the future.

The reason that meditation is recommended even by GPs is because it's like a free cash-injection into your bank account - it clears your debts. Why would you not do it?

If you look at the chart again, I've inserted a few random meditation 'credit-lines' in, which would clear your overdraft and which you could move around to suit yourself. Sitting still and trying for thoughtless awareness for 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening is a very good approach.

Come and speak to me at the group meditation tomorrow and I may be able to recommend something specifically for you.

Regards

  

This is Your Brain on Music.

Dear All,

Below is your free access to some of the meditation music played at the group meditation session, along with 3 book recommendations.

In short the books are 3 different ways of understanding that the brain, which governs how we think, feel and behave, can be viewed as hardware on which the mind (software) runs. Both can be changed to help you live your best life. Meditation as a means to that change is mentioned in at least 2 of the books.

This 4 minute clip : How to Overcome Your Mental Limitations shows how the insights contained in the above books flows directly from your regular practice of sahaja yoga meditation.

Click here to download the meditation music to your phone.

While the meditation music typically tends to be Indian classical music, this is not to say that you can't find western music to lift the spirit. Here, for example, is Delibes' Lakme flower duet, sung by Anna Netrebko & Elina Garanca.

See you at group meditation tomorrow.

Regards

Your State Described in 11 Words

Dear All,

Now you know what to call it. Explained below are 11 sanskrit words for you to hang your experience of sahaja yoga meditation on.

See you at group meditation this evening.

Regards