Making Your Mind Your Best Friend

Meditation as a practice is an effort to stop the mind from its natural tendency to weave thoughts. In meditation, you need to relax yourself and then focus your mind on a divine form, a sacred sound, a word or phrase as a mantra; or to focus on your own physical body, your own breath or your own thoughts. It is, in fact, sitting with your own mind for a while.

You watch the drifting thoughts in the space of your mind. As you keep watching, the mind wanders away; you bring it back to the watchful, playful, mindful, act of being in the mind, for the mind, with the mind. Then you are in the grand world of your Inner Being. This is meditation.

It is not just a forced technique to practice. It is the playfulness of your spirit. Remember - the purpose of meditation is not to achieve anything. It is to reach a state of letting go, a profound state of relaxation. Meditation is your willingness to do nothing. You are obsessed with doing too many things. As if that is not enough, you are obsessed with doing them perfectly! That leads to untold stress. In meditation your effort is to attain to Non-Doing.

To do something without any expectation, then the mind cannot calculate any more. It has to melt. It melts into the flow of the Universal rhythm of joy. Meditation empowers your mind to be more disciplined, more focused, more refined, more content. True happiness in life, flows out of it spontaneously. Meditation connects you to that spontaneous inner source.

One of the best ways to enter Meditation is to watch one’s breath. As your mind comes close to the rim of your nostrils, you witness the warm air moving in and out. Count to ten while breathing (one cycle of inhale and exhale would be 1), then again start from 1 to 10, you will see that your mind is calming down and with that, your body and mind are vibrating in a higher frequency. This vibration invites lightness and luminosity, health and harmony into your life.

Meditation need not always be simply sitting quietly, absorbed in Oneness. One can be in a beautiful state of meditation, even in the process of doing. You need to be awake to your inner reality - to your spirit! You can do the same things mindfully, consciously. For example if you are doing the dishes, recognize that you are not doing them alone. The water is also washing them. The detergent, the sink, the trees that provide you oxygen are also washing. The clouds in the sky provide the water. The air helps you to breathe. Mother Earth, the air, the sun, all have joined with you, in celebration. You feel washing dishes is a chore only when you cannot consciously connect to the Cosmic process involved in your work.

When you feel a part of the whole, everything becomes sacred. You don’t work; you are not doing. Work happens through you, it flows through you. You are no longer an obstruction. When you are not mindful, it is your ego, thinking in isolation, which feels alone. With mindfulness, your consciousness expands. You access the Whole.

A true yogi is one who does not give up action, but who makes action divine by turning it into worship and meditation.

The effort in meditation is always to be effortless. In meditation, as you persevere through the initial obstacles, you begin to feel your natural connection to the universal field of energy and vibrations. You feel the calm state of your mind. Mundane emotions are transmuted into a joyful experience of giving and forgiving. You feel your body and mind are in rhythm with the universal rhythm, and you are not struggling to be happy any more. Meditation thus is more an inner journey toward the Self within, a journey for discovering the real 'I" as contrasted with the “I” that goes through all the ups and downs of the outer world.

As you bathe in that Cosmic Energy, bask in it, dance in it, you are in the utter ecstasy of divine bliss. Once you realize the need to connect to your deepest Source within, you will come to know what you have been missing all through your life. It is your love affair with your Self!

Happiness and Love

You cannot please everyone in the world and be happy within yourself. But, you can please the Self within you, the You in you, and be happy for ever.

As long as you work from the plane of mundane consciousness, you will tend to do things for others and to have expectations of them. Consequently, at some point, you will feel exhausted and cheated. These feelings are really tricks of your ego. But, if you learn to be true to Yourself, true to your own consciousness, you will not stretch expectations of others beyond a certain level, lest you lose the sight of the point of balance.

The best way to cope is to learn the balance in life. Your spiritual objective is to attain that balanced state, that awareness, which keeps you calm and focused, so that you know how much you can stretch yourself to help another. Your true spiritual practice creates the stable ground of your mind from which you actually draw your happiness and joy in life.

It is not praise from other people that will provide a solid base on which you can build your home of joy. Your base is the experience and the awareness of the Spirit within you. The Spirit gives you the power to truly love, for love would happen to you as fragrance to flowers. You would never get exhausted because love is supplied by the infinite source of the Universe, and not from the capricious judgment of your ego self or dependence on the opinions of others.

Wake up to the reality that true happiness is found in the balance of your Mind, Body, and Spirit. To reach a this balance, you must first work to create a solid ground within your own mind. You must fine tune yourself to appreciate the Higher realities and realize the Power to share without expectation or judgment.

Love and infinite blessings from Baba!

While meditating, if you find it difficult to observe your breath - relax. Take a few deep cleansing breaths. As you continue to breathe abdominally (while inhaling take the abdomen out; while exhaling bring the abdomen in), observe each body part, moving from the crown of your head to your toes. Take your time, until you feel a sense of silence dawning upon your mind.

All problems arise from the mind, which has been trained over time to unconsciously support the root of the ego-self, the pseudo-self.

Until the mind is purged of its impurities, of the dross collected over your whole lifetime, until it can find something Higher to surrender to, until it becomes silent; the clinging, craving, crying, demanding, fearing continues to take the individual on a roller coaster ride.

The best way to purge yourself, is to realize that anything that bothers you, is NOT YOU. It is your ego, your conditioned mind, your mind attached to the past and future. It is your mind that is not in the Moment.

To unfetter yourself you need to recognize the Self that transcends all these fleeting thoughts and emotions.

Ego demands endlessly. It has a hunger that can never be appeased. You keep filling it, but it is never content. It only gives you a momentary feeling of apparent fulfillment; then it sends you off on the next pursuit, then the next, all due to its own sense of lacking. The cycle never stops. Ego never wants to die.

When you focus on your physical body, gradually you move into the space beyond the physiology and anatomical knowledge that you have gained over time. You move into direct experience, the experience of the moment. You feel the vibrations and sensations of the body, which become a doorway to the now.

The mind begins to quiet, experience deepens; it begins silencing the mind. When the mind stops taking you to the dead past and the uncertain future, when the mind has nothing more to cling to, it ceases its identification and modifications. There is a sudden stillness. In that stillness, in the now, in the eternal 'moment' is the death of the ego, and the resurrection of the Spirit, the Soul, the Universal Self that is beyond dualism.

Your mind is a space. In its natural state, it is pristine, open, luminous, at One, in a constant state of celebration with the Infinite creative energies of the Universe.

If you are unable to celebrate, if you are filled with worries, if you are constantly in the grip of stress, it is because your mind is occupied. There is no space for celebration in a cluttered mind.

You may think that with meditation, all your worries will disappear. This will not happen! It will not happen because you are holding on to dead energies, negative energies at a biological level as well as in the mind.

Your priority is not to start meditating. Start with the external. Start with your body, with your own breath.
Your breath is the primary source of your biological and energetic renewal. Your mind cannot see with fresh eyes, because your body is filled with stale air!

Your breath releases 70% of the toxins in your body. If your breath is shallow, if your breath is constricted by
accumulating stress, if it has shut down due to physical or emotional trauma, toxins accumulate in your body and mind, poisoning them.

You accumulate clutter that blocks the flow of your energy. You also have every power to release that clutter, to create space for celebration. The most important thing in your life is your determination, your Will Power. With will power you can uplift your mind from all negativity, you can breathe freshness and joy, you can usher in positive light and vision.

You don't have to regulate your breath as you do in pranayama or chi practices. Just watch your breath. Just be the witness to the Universal play of energy, the prana flowing in and out through your nostrils. Focus your attention to the upper lip around the rim of your nostrils, and feel the flow of life! It is calming. It is detoxifying. It is emptying you of all the negativity that you have been unconsciously accumulating.

Your mind longs to be in a state of total rest. You long to be in the kingdom of peace and tranquility, joy and harmony that is within you. You alone can open the doorway. The doorway is there. You alone can clear the clutter that obstructs your source.