Ashwin's Power

A New way to meditate

I have a routine I follow every day. Every morning, I do my yoga, breathing exercises and meditation and the entire sequence takes me about an hour and a half.

I’ve been at it for about 6 months now, and I can honestly say that it has been one of the best investment I’ve made yet. Not only for my health, but for the overall defining of my lifestyle. The benefits of yoga, breathing exercises and meditation are already known to most of us. Some of us believe it, some don’t. That’s everyone’s personal choice. But from personal experience I can say that the routine has not only boosted my energy levels, but there is something about the meditation that changes the way you look at life and the world around you. Rather, the world within you.

I will be honest, I don’t know how it happens and I don’t know why. But it has to deal with how my routine has shaped my life. Not many things exist in our lives, that can significantly boost the growth of our spirituality, while at the same time being easy to do and requiring a very small investment of time on our part. This is one of them.

I won’t get into “how to meditate” because each one of us has our own style of getting into that state, but there are a few things that I have noticed that greatly seem to enhance the length and ease with which I am able to hold that state. That’s what I want to discuss with you. For me, I can sense that I have entered “state” when my body relaxes completely, and there is this tingling, almost vibrational, feeling that starts travelling throughout my body. One way that I confirm this is by focusing on specific body parts and as I focus, I can literally feel that tingling travel or spread over to that body part. That’s when I know I’m in an enhanced state of awareness, consciousness or simply just “in state”. For others, it might be something else, but we all have some kind of signal that lets us know that we have reached a heightened awareness.

Once in this state, some people choose to visualize things, some people ask themselves questions, some just try to keep a silent mind and the list goes on. But the problem arises when I sometimes encounter difficulty in being able to hit that state. Some days it just happens within the first five minutes of finishing the breathing exercises and getting into meditation mode, but other times I’d be at the end cycle and nothing happens.

Why was this happening? And how was I going to make "missing state" more infrequent?

Eventually I figured out the reason for my lack of state at times…

Voices in my head!

Cryptic as it sounds, that’s what it really was. A very important part of getting into that meditative state was being able to quite out the chatter in my head, long enough for me to be able to gain a stronghold over the noise and fade it out, or rather, stop it from registering any distractive impression on my mind.

The solution was: Physical exhaustion

Physical exhaustion doesn't imply crazy sweating like a triathlete. Physical exhaustion means having the various body parts well stretched and pushed to a comfortable level of physical Activity prior to the breathing exercises. What this does is it gets each one of your body parts warmed up and the blood circulation increases throughout the body This has tremendous benefits from not only a medical health point of view, but also for our purpose of meditation.

And that’s when I figured out that yoga might in some sense be aimed at this exact goal. To stretch and get the body all set for meditation! In ancient days, they’d do yoga prior to long sessions of meditation. Maybe this is the reason why they did it. The yoga helped in getting the body too tired to think about distracting and random thoughts!

I had learnt some yoga techniques and applying those, before a meditation session , has really boosted my reaching of “state.” Making it easier to achieve and lasting much longer.

I realize that most of us might choose not to do it because it’s “extra” work. First doing the yoga then meditation. But trust me and give it a try. Do it for a week and you will notice changes that you could only attribute to a miracle. Believe it will work and have faith in your actions. You are in for an AMAZING experience and this is going to work wonders for you :D

Real Self Improvement is Scary

Like the title says, real self improvement is scary, actually it's very very scary. I say this not to demotivate, i say it because it's true. Small improvements such as developing a new habit, quitting old ones, choosing to optimize your schedule may be easy, and are a simple matter of focusing your will. But real self improvement, the type that shapes your character, your being, your soul, that is a whole different ball game altogether.

I'm talking about self improvement not in its generic convention of usage, but in terms of character development.Things like adopting a new belief system, choosing a new job you love over a more lucrative one that you don't love, doing things you love even if people don't think it's "cool". I'm talking about making paradigm shifting improvements to your life and lifestyle that YOU KNOW will make you happier.

Improvements to your life, like these, go beyond just the personal domain and have an effect on the world around you. Peoples attitudes, reactions and behavior towards you changes. And most often than not, it's this sudden change in the people around you that makes Real self improvement so scary.

Someone once said that no man is an island and that we all are dependent on each other for support. So it's only natural that we'd built a network of support people around us who would provide the benefit of comfort that one gets from social interactions. The social structure is not restricted to comfort but in any case it provides some sort of need fulfillment within our complex psychological desire structure.

Real self improvement is scary because with our "internal change" will also come a change in the "reactions of other people" and when we think about how our social relationship with other people will change, it's usually something we are not very comfortable dealing with. It's the "what will others think of me","they'll call me a wannabee","they'll think I'm a fake","will they think I'm selfish for doing what i love?" These kinds of thoughts arise in our mind and we begin to doubt the effectiveness of the change even before we implement it. Not just that, but by worrying about others reactions, we tend to strengthen our own beliefs of our weaknesses , no matter how farce they are. Whats needed is for us to become more open minded and less judgmental. and I say "us" and not "others" because a lot of the time we project our own thoughts and behaviors on to other people.

That is to say that if we ourselves are the kind of person who judges (negatively, i presume) others for trying to make some "real self improvement" into their life, then we in turn will also be hounded by worries of others thinking of us in that same sense if we were to ever make some " real self improvement" in our livers.For example; you see someone wearing shades in the cinema and think of them as an idiot. The next time you get the sudden urge to try and be "cool" and consider wearing shades into the cinema, you're gonna keep thinking of yourself as an idiot and get uncomfortable. Similarly, if you don't have any judgments about people belching in public , then you wouldn't have any trouble doing it yourself.

So what it really comes down to is that we have to become more open minded towards ourselves and others and then we can truly get over the feeling that real self improvement is scary. When in fact it's actually the most inspirational, motivating and productive thing you could ever do.

Learning to Let go

Learning to let go, I believe, is a very crucial part of growth and evolution. It's something that not all of us are very comfortable doing, but it is something that inevitably we're all going to have to deal with. One day or the other.

The last few months of my life, haven't been rather kind to me.Within the moment, it hurts and you don't understand why you have to go through it. But when you look back upon it, you realise that it was for the best. You realise how much it helped you grow. They have been so full of changes and new beginnings and endings that letting go of certain aspects of my life no longer bother or hurt me the way they usually would.

The concept of letting go can be used in a variety of contexts. But when broken down, it really has just two forms. One is a a microscopic form and the other is macroscopic.

Things like:

Getting irritated or annoyed by someone

Getting angry or vengeful

Getting upset over something

are all situations of emotional spikes, moments of sudden emotional bursts. The funny thing about it is that it always feels like the cause is someone else and not us. He pushed me, now I'm pissed. He made fun of me so I'm gonna get back at him (anger/revenge), he's trying to hit on my girl, so now i'm going to show him whose really alpha. Do you get the point? Incidents like these force us to react in unpleasant ways which, more often than not, we end up regretting. They constitute the microscopic domain and are more implusive emotion related.

Letting go in such situations is a tricky game of being in the moment and outside it aswell. What I mean, is that you must be within the present moment to to realize how you're letting small things get the better of you and at the same time, be able to observe and percieve the situation from a larger perspective and realize just how trivial it really is. you've got to understand that it's not that big a deal, so you got pushed or incited by someone, so what? let it go, there really is no reason to go an eye for an eye or get disheartened because it's really not worth your time or energy.

The macroscopic form consists of major life events like:

moving to a new job/ locality/ continent

losing a loved one

Seperation / divorce from a long term partner

Being tricked out of your own company

Losing a great deal of money over some unwise transactions

and the list goes on...

These kinds of situations usually involve deep emotional sentiments and a painful feeling of loss. What you have to realise in these situations is that "nothing in this world is permanent, except change." Change has to happen and WILL happen, regardless of how YOU feel about it. Thats the beauty of life. It helps you grow and evolve into greater and more experienced beings. Whats important in these times is to not lose hope, even if things seem bleek in the future or time seems short.You HAVE to have faith and believe that things WILL GET BETTER. It's the circle of life. Life is really like a wave, it has it's crests and troughs, it's ups and downs, it highs and lows. You gotta not get stuck in that moment of low and gotta start focusing on the HIGH thats about to follow. I don't care how uncertain the future looks. If it hasn't happened yet, that means YOU still have the POWER to make something good out of it. LEARN FROM THE PAST, THATS WHAT ITS FOR!

I know it can be hard, very very hard, dealing with many of the macroscopic incidents, but you have to understand that LIFE GOES ON. You must have faith. Honestly, the one most important thing that life can teach you is HAVING FAITH AND HOPE. It worked with religion didn't it? Most of the world is living off of faith and hope, that things will get better and it provides a great deal of closure and comfort to the soul. This isn't escapism but rather a matter of choosing to acknowledge the bad and IN SPITE OF IT, FOCUSING on the GOOD.Learning to come to term with the downs of life and Letting go of the past for mental peace is something we all need to be able to live happier lives.

Ashwin's Power

THE JOURNEY TO PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AND LIFESTYLE BUILDING

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A New way to meditate

Real Self Improvement is Scary

Learning to Let go

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