Stressed Out? Try This At Home…

No matter your current stress level, simple meditations is a cure-all for just about anything. Hold on a minute, before you log off or bypass this message because you think you’ve heard it all or tried it and it doesn’t work for you, give this another shot. Here is why.

An old Buddhist proverb says that on a regular day we ought to meditate 1 hour a day; on a stressful day we ought to meditate 2 hours a day. What a paradox – what contradiction! “How can I take 2 hours out of the day just to sit around doing “nothing” when I don’t even have 1 hour to spare?” you might ask yourself.

Let’s look at it from another angle. People who give 10% of their earnings back to “God,” whatever God is to them, report that somehow the remaining 90% seems to go farther. They can’t figure it out because when you take out a calculator and deduct 10% of your income, 10% can be quite a big chunk of money and obviously 90% of your paycheck is less than 100%. However, in real life 90% of your paycheck can actually go farther than 100% of your paycheck. You may ask how can you live on 90% when you can barely make it on 100%? Yet somehow these people say that their time is filled with blessings and miracles and they always have left over funds at the end of the month, even though they have given away 10%. As soon as they stop tithing the 100% they do earn seems to be short each month. How could this be since this seems to be a simple matter of math? It doesn’t make any sense.

You hold the key to your own inner castle, your own inner kingdom of heaven - it's there, it really is!

Yet going out on faith suddenly the energy that we create by trusting that the 90% will go farther than the 100% ever would, we realize that we suddenly get things for free that otherwise would have cost something. People do us favors instead of charging us. We come upon an unexpected sale that gives us twice the amount of food or the same amount of food at half the price. Suddenly we receive a refund in the mail, completely unexpected or someone sends us cash. And on and on the miracles continue.
The same thing happens with time when we meditate. Somehow the 24 hours each of us get seems to go much farther to those that take time to meditate in silence. Not only does it seem like time becomes irrelevant when we meditate, but it seems as though we float through space and time, neither of which exist in reality. We have become human doings, and have moved away from the status of being. Yet we are human beings, not human doings. We find our peace within when we are in the moment, when we stop controlling the outside world and become its observer. When we are at peace with what’s going on “out there” and only pay attention to what’s going on “in here.” In order for the “in here” to be at peace, however, we need to first get to that place of “within” and create a home of peace in the innermost parts. Peace that can only be attained through silence and reflection and complete detachment from ones self. And when we can achieve this kind of peace then our stress level goes down, our bodies calm down, our higher self can relax and comes forward to speak loudly and clearly to us, giving us more guidance on how to get things done in half the time. Things we got worked up over suddenly seem to have been taken care of on its own.

Meditation has been a life saver for me, in the truest sense. As we go along, I will gladly share some methods that have worked for me in calming down my mind’s chatter and become best friends with that loud and bickering ego of mine.