If you have been on the road to empowerment or enlightenment for any period of time, you will have heard, “meditate every day” at some point. Also, many teachers, speakers and gurus will tell you to do certain exercises every day which will guarantee growth, awareness, empowerment and enlightenment.
You buy the book and read the book, or maybe you bought the course and listened to it. Maybe you even went to an event or two, a retreat perhaps.
Yet, you get home, put on your house bottoms, switch on the TV, FaceBook, or your favorite websites, and three months later you are still having the same problems, same types of relationship interactions, same job, same frustrations and same everything.
You go and open that book again, listen to the course again, or the recording you received from the event you went to. And this time, you might actually do one or two of the exercises… once. Or you might get a new book and read that… once.
But, every day? Not really. You don’t have the time. You can’t even meditate anymore anyway and when you did, it didn’t really help.
You promise yourself to start for real tomorrow… and that particular tomorrow never comes.
Procrastination, distraction, resistance to do (otherwise known as laziness), all conspire to keep you from growing.
This is because, just like when we want to get somewhere physically, for us to move toward a goal, do the actual meditation or other exercises, we have to have a pull as well as a push.
That’s a push out of where you are toward a pull to where you want to be.
When the push and pull are negative, the road gets very hard. Yes, I know a lot of people believe that things have to get super bad for you to move forward, but that’s ONLY if you believe so and have been trained through pain. In this case the push is the person being in huge suffering or frustration, and the pull is a lessening of that suffering or frustration.
When we teach our children through pain, we are basically teaching them that they need to move out of a negative behavior, or else something even more negative is going to happen to them. Compound this and the pattern emerges that says, it has to be really, really bad for me to stop doing whatever it is that is causing the initial amount of pain. Flittering our days away in pleasurable pursuits (even if it is staring at the ceiling and seeing how many faces we can see in the plaster for a few hours), doesn’t result in enough nasty to move us out of it.
When we are in our house bottoms, eating icecream, watching our favorite shows, and 8am turns into 2am day after day… well, nothing much is going to help us start meditating unless we lose our job, relationship or home… or another type of huge suffering ensues. Because, let’s face it, getting through the day, day after day, is not really that bad.
Basically, we have been programmed that negative behavior doesn’t have to be stopped unless it results in a pain that is big enough to move our butts off our couch, computer screen, or dead end job.
And that’s a program that has worked a lot, works great a lot of the time. Yet, if you follow that program and sabotage your life to create the amount of pain that will move you into action, all that time you allow yourself to be in negative behaviors, and all that suffering that ensues, creates more of the same. Basically, not only does it feed the negativity in your own live for as long as you kept it going, it also feeds the negative energies of everyone you know, our society, and our species. In other words, the ripple effects of your procrastination, and movement into enough suffering for action, are huge.
Guilt tripping over, there is a different approach to programming ourselves out of negative behavior and into positive behavior that results in an amazing happy life. The type of life that you wake up to every day and go…”holy smokes! I love my life.” And fills you with excitement to savour every single minute of that day. And guess what, lounging around in your house bottoms day in and day out is a non issue.
The way that we can start meditating every day, do all the exercises in the books, events and teachings we listen to more than once, and actively start shifting our personal vibration into a higher spectrum is by looking for and finding a different push and pull.
This push and pull is based on interest, inspiration, curiosity, and pleasure. Yup, the key is to find things that stimulate you more positively than spending seven hours on FaceBook every day.
What might that be? You may ask.
The first step is to acknowledge everything that you presently do that brings you pleasure. And then, find something to attach to it that brings you growth. And here is a great first step.
BEFORE you switch on your computer to do whatever pleasurable activity that you spend a lot of hours there doing, let’s use FaceBook as an example, say this, “for every 15 mins of meditation, I can spend an hour on FaceBook.” FaceBook then becomes your reward for a job well done!
You might think, but I hate meditating, can’t do it. I can never do this, this is BS. Well, here’s the thing. There are thousands of different types of meditations. Millions probably by now. So, the first one you can do is one that is a self guided meditation. And this self guided meditation is super easy to do.
Basically, you sit with your back straight (don’t lie down or you will fall asleep), you close your eyes, breathe deeply three times, then feel your breath as it goes in and out of your body. Now, as your mind starts it’s monkeytalk, thoughts start flashing, your body gets fidgety, and you want to switch on your computer, start daydreaming that that is exactly what you are doing. See yourself going to your computer, switching it on, going to FaceBook, and start seeing and reading the posts there, start typing responses and clicking likes. Now, because you are in a daydream and you can do whatever you want in that daydream, see yourself sitting exactly where you are, with your computer in front of you, but your environment is a beautiful ancient woods by a stream. As you enjoy your FaceBook time, breathe in the fresh scent of plants and trees, feel the sun hit your skin through the leaves. A person appears next to you and sits by you, maybe slightly in front of you. This is your high frequency guide. You can talk to him/her/it, or you can just bask in their high frequency for a while.
Set an alarm for one hour and spend that time on FaceBook. After your hour is over, promise yourself to do something completely different. Plan what that different thing is before you start, so you know to do it. So, if you were sitting down for the hour, the activity has to be standing up or walking. And there is no time limit on this one. One minute, one hour, it doesn’t matter, as long as you acknowledge it as being different to what you just did for an hour. Rinse and repeat.
We do the things we do every day because we get pleasure out of them. Whether the pleasure is from distracting us from our horrid existence, or because we literally love doing whatever it is that we do hour in and hour out, they are pleasurable. And being in pleasure is a natural and healthy thing! So, let’s use that pleasure to our advantage. Let’s make it the treat that we give ourselves for doing that meditation, doing the exercise our guru taught us, or listening to that MP3 again that we got last year.
Short of good empowerment exercises to do? Here are tons of fun, powerful in-depth ones you can get and support me in return.
And if you are short of money, here’s tons of powerful basic free ones.
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