Making Your Mind Your Best Friend

Often at this time of year I receive lots of mail from people asking what they can do to avoid stress around the Holidays. One of the sure ways to combat stress during the Holidays or anytime you find yourself rushing around with to much to do is to remember to watch your breath. Just relax your body completely, from the top of your head to the tip of your toe, and breathe in and out slowly and rhythmically.

Conscious breathing helps you to slow down your racing thoughts which cause the stress. When you are tense about some thing that is fearful a train of thoughts come flooding your mind and you are completely lost in the thoughts, however negative that is. The most important thing is to practice, along with breathing exercises, regular meditation by which you create a much needed pause to watch your mind and its tendencies.

Resolve not to surrender to the random negative thoughts and uplift your mind with your own mind to yoke or unite with the Higher Mind or the Divine in your heart. As you open up to the Divine forces in play all the time all around you, you connect to the Higher Power and feel a sense of peace and assurance. Watch your breath and watch your mind and let the mind finally dissolve in the natural rhythm of the breath which is the manifested Spirit.

The Divine is ever taking care of you; you are stressed when you are separated from this Divine source. Be in Yoga, that is, be in the Remembrance of the Divine and All Is Well.

There could be hundreds of reasons why someone falls ill in life. As I've said before and I say it again, nothing happens in our life which is not destined to happen. And whatever happens has a purpose behind it, a purpose that is always beneficial and good for us.

The path of spirituality is the path of loving one's own Self and orienting one's life in such a manner that whatever is thought or done is motivated by the higher purpose of attaining the knowledge of the Self. The concept of urge or desire is essentially a movement in unconsciousness or unawareness or rather unmindfulness of what is beneficial to one's own Self.

Once you confirm the fact that your body is the most priceless gift and that it is only your body that can unravel the ultimate mystery of the Universe, once you confirm that your body is also the only instrument by which you can do service to God in order to reach to the ultimate state of unconditional surrender to the Divine, then you cannot do anything which is harmful to this most unique instrument that is available to you in this birth. Thus your mind-body is too precious for you to take it casually.

Become conscious of the purpose of human birth, ask your self every morning when you wake up from your bed how you are going to move forward toward the Divine without surrendering to addictive behavioral patterns and unconscious urges. Your positive affirmation about your positive powers to act mindfully in order to heal the body and not harm it anymore is of paramount importance in enlightening your path toward higher attainment. Just your mindfulness of the supreme opportunity that life is and your deep conviction to have God vision will always put you on the right track.

Every night when you retire to bed, relax your body, meditate upon your breath, and then fill yourself with positive affirmation that you no longer need those foods which are harmful to you for any particular disease pattern and that the need for that food is no longer there in your soul anymore. Meditate on the fact that you are healthy and happy with foods that are always conducive to good health and happiness.

Early in the morning when you wake up, do practice the same technique once again but this time have the conviction that you are going to be very mindful throughout the day of not surrendering to instinctive urges but you will be surrendered to the Divine Light which is your Divine Essence.
Love and gratitude and good luck!
Baba

The journey of life is from doubt to doubtlessness. How can you expect yourself to be without doubt when you are caught in the grip of the desiring mind? When doubtful thoughts come and go in your mind just witness them and don't give them much of your energy.

Usually you start your relationship with God by asking Him for what is dear to your heart, which is most natural. When you ask Him for what you think you need, and He does not answer you in the way you expect, you begin to harbour doubts. But a time has to come when you grow out of the need to have a relationship with God where you ask and He gives.

Just meditate for a while on your breath, the incoming and outgoing prana. As you become calm, experience the peace of your being. Experience from within what a Grace it is to have this body, this mind, and this breath that you are breathing. Feel that you are surrounded by infinite gifts all the time, coming from the Nature, from the Universe, from God.

As long as the purpose of your relationship with God is to have Him to fix your problems and satisfy your desires, there will be occasions when you will fall into the pits. First express your gratitude for all that He has already given you, take stock of His infinite Gifts, and then become happy for What He is to you.

Gradually you will see that you don't have to pray for the fulfillment of your desires, they will happen as fragrance happens to flowers. First love Him/Her and then All Is Yours, not in bits and pieces, but as a Whole.
Love and blessings,
Baba

How do you find answers to your deepest questions in life?

First you need to understand your own inner nature and its tendencies. Every night before you go to sleep, make it a point to sit and relax your whole body from head to toe. Then breathe deep breaths and spend some time just observing your natural breathing.

Finally come to a state of just observing your mind. Start this session with a deep question that you wish to find an answer to, and pray you get the answer through this meditative practice.

It may take quite a few days so don’t worry. Let the reply come again and again. Accept the answer only when you see that in that quiet state of mind, the answer has a tendency to be the same on most days. Then that is your natural tendency and you need to flow accordingly.

Don't repeat the words 'i am confused' more and more in your mind. That is a negative energy and it will welcome more and more thoughts that will further baffle you and you will be more confused, not knowing that you invited it all with your thought ‘i am confused'.

The mind remains confused more and more as you go through the process of cleansing that is meditation. As you become more conscious of your mind, the latent tendencies surface and you are baffled, 'Why is all this happening?'
Persevere. That is the WAY.

Keep practicing till you are able to just observe the Mind or your body or your breath without much distraction. This comes out of your long practice.

Learn to surrender to the Higher Power that governs this Universe, nay, trillions of cells in your body. You don't run them, do you? Then if it is run by some incredible intelligence with such perfection, how come you can't surrender to that Divine Power?

Once you learn to surrender the results of everything you do, you will gradually get into the zone of less confusion.

It is your ego that is creating the problem. Know that only ego can be confused. The Soul is Omniscient. There is no tint of confusion there.

Dwell on the thoughts of you being a soul and the purity of it all. Love all that comes into your life moment to moment, recognize them as the priceless gifts from the Divine, and cry in joy.
Love overflowing,
Baba

The Path of Meditation is to search and seek for that which we have never lost. The world has to realize that lost happiness and peace are not outside of us; we cannot find lost happiness and peace so long as we focus our search outside. We lost it inside of us, and can only find it inside of us. That is the path of meditation, to search and seek for that which we have never lost.

As we perceive the world through our senses - seeing, listening, hearing, being open to the outside world - we get used to the world of the periphery, forgetting the Center. We become attracted to externals and our senses pull us out all the time. We forget that there is an internal life too. Internal life is not objective but more clearly subjective. The practice of meditation is grounded in this subjective principle of life.

We can use an analogy to understand. If I have left my car key in my bedroom, and then forget where I left it, I may search all around the world; I may spend days and nights searching for the key out on the pavement, in the garage or all over the city. But I will never find it outside. For I have never lost it outside. I forgot that I left it in my bedroom, in my home. Till I come to my home and search in my bedroom I will not find it. When I find it in my bed room, I may think, how foolish of me to go around searching and seeking outside when it was just in my home!

So it is with the truth of our life. We never lost our peace and calm outside of us. But we think so. This illusion drives us to search in the objective world for that which we have in the home of our subjective Self. We have all the Peace and Happiness we are looking for inside our Self, if we only look there to find it!

Meditation is not a technique. It is your realization that you have not lost your happiness outside of you. No amount of searching in money, beauty, name and fame will help you be at peace. Just retreat back into the shrine of your Home. Peace is within you. It is in the silence of your restless mind. It is in the humility of your humbled emotion acknowledging the supremacy of Divine Wisdom. It is your connection of Body Mind with your Spirit within. It is your connection of individual self with the Cosmic Self. It is the journey of an individual to find the Universal. It is a simple art of opening your heart and mind to the Higher Light that guides the destiny of trillions of galaxies and Milky Ways. It is how you rejoice within you like a child in the lap of the mother.

Meditation helps you to find that natural self within you. It helps you to get to that inner rhythm which is inseparable from the Universal Rhythm. It helps you to feel you are ever interconnected, interrelated interdependent, to the rest of Cosmos. Once your sense of assumed separation melts in the light of awareness that is created in Meditation, you feel the expansion; you feel the essence of life as expansion enveloping everything as the manifestation of the Self within. That is a beautiful state of harmony and peace. It is so natural and effortlessly spontaneous. This state is the deepest state of Meditation called Samadhi, which is dissolution of the dualism and merging into the Unified Field of Consciousness.

Meditation is The Inner Journey to the Self Within

As I have said meditation as a practice is an effort to stop the mind from its natural tendency to weave thoughts. In the practice of meditation you try to relax yourself. You begin to focus your mind. You can focus on your Chosen Ideal, a Sacred Sound or chant, or on your own physical body, your own breath or your own thoughts. The effort in meditation is always to be effortless. Here, you are working to expand your subtle awareness, so you can feel the non-physical dimensions of your physical self and of this physical world. You begin to experience the stillness of your mind, the lightness of your body, and illumination of your intellect. You are flooded with Cosmic Energy in the process. As you persevere through the initial obstacles in meditation, you experience your natural connection to the universal field of energy. You feel the calm state of your mind. Mundane emotions transmute into joyful experiences of giving and forgiving. You feel your body and mind in rhythm with the universal rhythm. You are not struggling to be happy any more.

Meditation is an inner journey toward the Self. It is a journey to discover the real "I", the eternal transcendent “I”. The smaller "I" with whom you identify in your everyday consciousness is affected by all the ups and downs of the relative world. When meditation deepens, your eye of wisdom opens. All ignorance, ego, attachments, all aversions, all fear of death, gradually leave you. You become the conqueror of death and of limitation. That is what Meditation gives us. It opens the window to our Inner Self. It brings us closer to who we are. Meditation is to move from matter to energy, the Divine Energy.

The Not so Subtle Difference between Prayer and Meditation

In conclusion, when one prays, one is essentially thinking or doing a task, for one is either asking for something or being grateful for a prayer answered. And this state is usually manifested in words, or thoughts. Prayer implies a doer and a Receiver, Meditation implies that the DOER and RECEIVER are One in the Same! The difference between prayer and meditation is really not so subtle. It is the difference between mind and No-Mind, where the mind of the individual ceases and the Communion happens with the Universal Mind.

See Baba's website at www.feelinghearts.org