WONDERFUL MEDITATIONS

I was looking through my blogs and realised that I had written more than 100 of them since early 2013. I never intended to write so much, but I realised that I had experienced so many wonderful, as well as painful experiences that it was a form of meditation to write about them. Therefore, I would like to share with you my "Wonderful Meditations".

I have written about the music, the concerts and the many artists I was privileged to work with that filled me with joy over the years - However, I also began writing about the things that I felt were of major importance - not only to me personally but to every one of us - Subjects like Meditation, Compassion, Violence in the World, Abuse of Women and a whole range of subjects, which so many of you have kindly read and commented upon.

The older I get and maybe the more reflective I become, I realise the importance of living and experiencing every moment of our lives - This is so precious and is undoubtedly the true path to HAPPINESS.

We waste our lives don't we? Every day we occupy our day with hundreds of tasks without thinking about them - we wake up, have a shower, brush our teeth, make tea or coffee, have breakfast if there's time, get the kids to school, rush off to work and so on. We get back later that day tired, have dinner, slump in front of the television, watch mindless rubbish on the screen - some of you will go to the gym, some of you may run - and after a day packed with things to occupy your mind and body you get to bed. Your mind fires thousands of thoughts that worry you, excite you, drive you on and can cause everything from depression to ecstasy - but how many of you can honestly say that you control you own MIND?

In a famous quote about meditation - when asked "What have you gained from meditation? - The answer was "nothing" but let me tell you what I have lost : Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Insecurity, Fear of Old Age and Death" - not bad eh? Wouldn't you like to lose some of these - if not all of them?

There is a way of bringing peace and happiness to your troubled lives - By Meditation, which is about bringing peace and happiness to your Mind - instead of your Mind controlling you! It is about bringing calmness to your overworked Mind - giving it a rest - give you a rest! Learn to bring peace and calmness to your life, but not in a sleepy way, where you nod off to sleep - but in a way that makes you very much alive and aware of each precious minute of your life. Pretty important stuff

We all waste our lives by wanting more and more - more money, bigger homes, better cars, maybe fame, notoriety, power, accumulating things like some hoarding Squirrel - the thrill of the chase - wanting a sexy man or girl even when already in a marriage or relationship - bored with the old one!! Always wanting new experiences, needing to feed to the desire machine - feed the ego - build the pride - all things that cause us ultimate unhappiness.

People never stop to think that PRIDE, EGO, DESIRE, IGNORANCE, HATRED, ANGER all bring SUFFERING and that LOVE, KINDNESS, COMPASSION, PEACE all bring Happiness

How many times do you hear someone say "I hate that", "I hate this", "I hate so and so" , "I hate him or her" or even "I hate myself"? How can you hate yourself? You can if you're obsessed with the way you look or obsessed by your passion to succeed or whatever drives you and you feel unsuccessful or unwanted or lonely. So many billions of people in some form or other are unhappy - not satisfied with their lives - maybe suffering illnesses, maybe stressed about money and a million things to worry about.

Perfectly lovely, healthy, normal young girls or young boys saying "I hate my body" or "I am too fat or too thin" - "Nobody will love me"  or whatever makes them unhappy instead of living every minute and finding great joy and happiness in the wonder of nature, being with animals, being comfortable in their own skins, enjoying being with people - to stop being so self obsessed - looking in the mirror every five minutes and begin the joy of relishing every second of their lives. BUT HOW TO ACHIEVE THIS?

MEDITATION is the path of bringing peace and happiness to your life and you should begin NOW

Let me begin by saying that Meditation is NOT a religious pursuit

It doesn't matter what spiritual beliefs you have as long as they harm nobody including YOU. We must learn to develop our COMPASSION. We all suffer, no matter who we are - whether you are rich, poor, president, king or Janitor - we are all one and all the same - we all feel pain; we all experience joy and pain; we all get sick at some time in our lives and we will old get older and eventually die. You can't escape it no matter how much we would like to. So why not change your life and begin to REALLY LIVE IT TO THE FULL in peace and happiness.

We have to learn that none of us are better than anyone else - or for that matter any living creature. When I hear of these ISIS murderers saying we are going to kill all unbelievers - I feel enormous compassion for them and of course their victims that suffer unbelievable pain and death. Why do I feel compassion for these killers - because they are creating the worse kind of Karma for themselves and they are going to suffer the worst kind of hell for eternity - do they really believe that by killing people they will be welcomed in heaven or paradise? It so the saddest thing imaginable - we must never kill or harm any living person or creature - "we reap what we sow" - The Karmic Effect on each and everyone of us can have a devastating effect on the rest of our lives and if you believe in a life after death or reincarnation then - think about it - the future will be the worst kind of hell as you pay back for the misery, pain and suffering you have caused. CAUSE AND EFFECT - give happiness and love and you will experience happiness and love - cause pain and suffering and you will suffer - you can't avoid it!

There are many types of meditation - I personally follow the loving path of Tibetan Buddhist Meditation, but there is Transcendental Meditation and many variants available to you - any of the Buddhist meditations are wonderful - you just need to experiment a bit until you find a path that makes you HAPPY - but let me take you through a very basic breathing meditation:

I have written about this before, but this will help you to learn how to meditate and how to being peace and happiness to your busy lives.

How to meditate: There are so many ways to meditate but let us begin with the basic and most simple way. Sit in a chair - if you're supple enough you can sit on a cushion on the floor in the Lotus or semi-Lotus position or you can do this as you lie in bed. 




It may help to begin by closing your eyes - your eyes don't have to be closed - you can keep them open and look at an object or maybe a candle flame  - just sit or lie peacefully and comfortably whatever works for you.




To begin with let’s concentrate on your breathing - its the most important thing you have - if you stop breathing you die!!! Think of your breathing - the essence of life itself - in your mind think or even whisper - "I breathe in - I breathe out" You will find your mind becomes quiet - yes of course thoughts will arise - but most important of all - do not follow them - always come back to the breathing - I breathe in - I breathe out - give your poor old mind a rest - no thoughts just the breathing - again thoughts will come and go but don't follow them - always come back to the breath. 




Your breathing will become quieter and more gentle - your mind will slowly become at peace and you will realise how important this process is. 




Its not as easy as it sounds. Try this for three minutes each morning or at night when you go to bed and then make it a bit longer to five minutes and then to ten. You will begin to look forward to your meditation sessions because it will bring you great peace and happiness. A mind that is becoming peaceful is just the beginning.




You will learn to wake up each morning and say to yourself "I pray that all people and creatures in the world today will find HAPPINESS and that they may find and enjoy the root of happiness - love, caring, consideration and compassion. And that all people will be free from SUFFERING and free from the root of suffering - hatred, greed, ignorance, jealousy, anger, fear and overt desire.




In this positive state of mind each day you will bring happiness to everyone around you - even if you are feeling under the weather yourself. Your every thought will begin to reflect the compassion and care you feel not just about those of your family and friends but everyone you meet. Yes, you'll still want to shout at an inconsiderate or dangerous driver or get angry at the client who is snappy with you, but you will also understand that everyone suffers - everyone at some time in their life has pain and illness, they lose parents, friends and children - everyone SUFFERS - and when you realise this your compassion will grow and grow. We are all the same - we all suffer and we all want to be happy - is this so difficult to understand? We should never hurt anyone or any living creature - I don't care what religion or belief you have - but surely above all else you can see that we must not and cannot hurt anyone or anything - its the same as hurting ourself.




Mindful Meditation is realising that everything is impermanent - every thought has a beginning, a middle and and end - this means that every moment of your life is precious - you must learn to cherish each minute and to use every moment to think positive, compassionate thoughts - believe me you will learn to sleep peacefully and easily.




Try meditating tonight when you lie down to sleep - bring your mind some peace that it badly craves for - say to yourself "I am doing this to bring love and happiness to my family, my friends, myself and this wonderful world we live in" - I breathe in - I breathe out - let all your thoughts drift away - don't follow them - your mind will gradually become peaceful and you will realise how important each moment of your life is even as you go to sleep in peace and love.

AND IT ALL BEGINS IN THE MIND - THINK ABOUT IT!!!!!

Here are some loving meditations to look at, think about and bring joy to your life - thanks for reading - please see below:




LIVE WITH COMPASSION

The following words came from a post on COMPASSION and largely relates to the Buddhist spiritual path - however, it doesn't matter what religion and beliefs you have, whether you are a fully fledged Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Baha'i, Jain, Agnostic or Atheist we can all learn about compassion and how this will affect your life and those around you. 

All the great religions teach us about many things including forgiveness, hope, love and compassion therefore it doesn't matter where the message comes from - its about how YOU live your life and how you can enrich not only yourself but all those you love and everyone you meet - can't be bad can it?

1. Live with compassion

Compassion is one of the most revered qualities in Buddhism and great compassion is a sign of a highly realized human being.

Compassion doesn’t just help the world at large, and it isn’t just about the fact that it’s the right thing to do. Compassion, and seeking to understand those around you, can transform your life for a number of reasons.

First, self-compassion is altogether critical towards finding peace within yourself. By learning to forgive yourself and accepting that you’re human you can heal deep wounds bring yourself back from difficult challenges.

Next, we can often be tortured because of the fact that we don’t completely understand why people do certain things.

Compassion is understanding the basic goodness in all people and then seeking to discover that basic goodness in specific people. Because of this, it helps you from going through the often mental torture we experience because we don’t understand the actions of others.

But even more than that, expressing compassion is the very act of connecting wholeheartedly with others, and simply connecting in this way can be a great source of joy for us.

The reasons for practicing compassion are numerous and powerful. Seek to live in a way that you treat everyone you meet as you would yourself. Once you begin trying to do this, it will seem altogether impossible. But keep at it, and you’ll realize the full power of living with compassion.

2. Connect with others and nurture those connections

In Buddhism, a community of practitioners is called a “Sangha”. A sangha is a community of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen who practice together in peace towards the united “goal” of realizing greater awakening, not only for themselves but for all beings.

The sangha is a principle, which much of the world can greatly benefit from. People come together in groups all the time, but it’s usually for the purpose of creating monetary riches or obtaining substantial power and rarely towards the united goal o1f attaining peace, happiness, and realizing greater wisdom.

The principle of the sangha can be expressed in your own life in many ways. The Sangha is ultimately just one way of looking at life, through the lens of the individual “expressions” of the totality.

By living in a way that you’re fully aware of the power of connecting with others, whether it’s one person or a group of 100, and seeking to nurture those relationships in the appropriate way, you can transform your life in ways that will pay dividends for years to come.

3. Wake up

One of the most powerful points on this list, the power of simply living in a way that you’re fully awake to every moment of your life, pretty much couldn’t be exaggerated even if I tried.

Mindfulness, greater awareness, paying attention, whatever you want to call it- it changes every facet of your life and in every way. It’s as simple as that.

Strive to live fully awake to each moment of your daily life and overcome your greatest personal struggles, find a great sense of peace and joy, and realize the greatest lessons life can teach you as a result of living fully awake to the present moment.1

4. Live deeply

To live deeply, in a way that you become keenly aware of the precious nature of life, is to begin down the path of true peace and happiness.

Why? Because to live in this way is to gradually become aware of the true nature of the world. This will happen essentially in “sections” of the whole, such as realizing your interconnectedness (you begin to see how everything is connected to everything else) and impermanence (you begin to see how everything is ever-changing, constantly dying only to be reborn in another form).

These realizations are the bread and butter of Buddhism and all spiritual practice. These “sections of the whole” are fragments of the ultimate realization, ways for us to understand that, which can’t be fully understood in the traditional sense.

By living in a way that you seek to realize these various “qualities of the ultimate” you find greater and greater peace in realizing the natural way of things. This cultivates in us the ability to savor every moment of life, to find peace in even the most mundane activities, as well as the ability to transform your typically “negative” experiences into something altogether nourishing and healing.

5. Change yourself, change the world

Buddhists understand that you can hardly help another before you help yourself. But this isn’t referring to you gaining power or riches before you can help others, or living in a way that you ignore others.

This is mostly referring to the fact that because we’re all interconnected, by you helping yourself you create an exponentially positive effect on the rest of the world.

If you want to make an impact on the world, don’t falsely convince yourself that it’s “you or them”. You don’t need to drag yourself through the mud to help those around you. If you do this, you’ll greatly hamper your ability to create a positive impact.

At the deepest level of understanding, by making it about you you’re also making it about them because you know there’s no separating “you” and “them”.

Take care of yourself and seek to be more than just a help, but an example of how to live for others to follow and you’ll create waves of exponential possibility that inspires others to do the same.

6. Embrace death

Death is an often - taboo topic in Western society. We do everything we can to not only avoid the subject, but pretend that it doesn’t even exist.

The reality is, this is really unfortunate and in no way helps us lead better lives. Becoming keenly aware of your own impermanence and deeply understanding the nature of death with regards to our interconnectedness are both things, which can help us find great peace.

In Buddhism, students in many sects at one point or another “meditate on the corpse” as it were (a practice which is said to have originated at least as far back as the Buddha’s lifetime).

This is literally what it sounds like. They meditate on the image of a corpse slowing decomposing and imagine that process through to its end, eventually resulting in a deep and profound realization on the true nature of death.

That might sound a little intense to you, but the truth is, if you live you’re entire life acting as if you’re never going to die or ignoring your own impermanence then you won’t ever be able to find true peace within yourself.

You don’t necessarily have to meditate on the image of a corpse, but simply opening up to yourself about death so that you’re no longer shielding it from your mind (which you’re likely doing unconsciously, as that’s how most of us were brought up in the West) can begin to be a great source of peace and help you appreciate the many joys in your everyday life.

A true appreciation for life can never be fully realized until you come face-to-face with your own impermanence. But once you do this, the world opens up in a new and profound way.

7. Your food is (very) special

Buddhist meditative practice, particularly mindfulness and contemplation, helps you realize the precious nature of the food in front of you. Indeed, with how integral a part food plays in our lives, to transform our relationship with food is to transform a key aspect of our entire lives, both now and in the future.

By contemplating on the food in front of us, for example, we can come to realize the vast system of interconnectedness that is our life, and how our food coming to be on our dinner plate as it is depended on numerous elements coming to be.

This helps us to deepen our relationship with food, cultivate a deep sense of gratitude before each meal, and learn to respect the delicate but ever-pressing balance that is life.

8. Understand the nature of giving

Giving is more than the act of giving Christmas and Birthday gifts, it’s also about those gifts which we give each and every day which we don’t typically see as gifts at all.

Buddhists hold a very deep understanding of the nature of giving, particularly in that life is a constant play between the act of giving and receiving. This doesn’t just help us find peace in understanding the way of the world around us, but helps us realize the amazing gifts we all have within us that we can give others in every moment, such as our love, compassion, and presence.

9. Work to disarm the ego

The easiest way to sum up all “spiritual” practice is this: spirituality is the act of coming in touch with the ultimate reality or the ground of being, and as a result spiritual practice is the act of overcoming those obstacles which keep us from realizing that.

The primary obstacle in our way? The ego.

To put it short and sweet, the reason the ego is the major obstacle in spiritual practice, or simply the practice of finding true peace and happiness (whatever you choose to call it, it’s all the same), is because it’s very function is to pull you away from the ground of your being by convincing you that you’re this separate self.

The process of unraveling the ego can take time, as it’s something, which has been with us, intertwined with us, for years. But it’s infinitely rewarding and altogether necessary if we want to realize our best life.

10. Remove the 3 poisons

Life is filled with vices, things which attempt to bind us to unwholesome ways of living and therefore do the very opposite of cultivate peace, joy, and greater realization in our lives. Among these, the 3 poisons are some of the most powerful. The 3 poisons are:

1  Greed

2  Hatred

3  Delusion

Together, these 3 poisons are responsible for the majority of the pain and suffering we experience as a collective species. It’s perfectly normal to be affected by each of these poisons throughout your life, so don’t knock yourself for falling for them.

Instead, simply accept that they’re something you’re experiencing and begin working to remove them from your life. This can take time, but it’s a key aspect on the path towards realizing true peace and happiness.

11. Right livelihood

We should all strive to work and make our living in a way that’s more “conscious” or aware. This generally means not selling harmful items such as guns, drugs, and services that harm other people, but it goes deeper than that.

There’s ultimately two aspects to this: making a living by doing something which doesn’t inhibit your own ability to realize peace and making a living doing something which doesn’t inhibit others ability to realize peace.

Facing this can lead to some interesting situations for some people, and as Thich Nhat Hanh has mentioned this is a collective effort as opposed to a solely personal one (the butcher isn’t a butcher only because he decided to be, but because there is a demand from people for meat to be neatly packaged and made available for them to be purchased from supermarkets), but you should strive to do your best.

Following the teaching on right livelihood can help you realize the harmful effect that your own work is having on you and therefore coming up with a solution can result in a largely positive shift in your life as a whole. Only you can decide if a change needs to happen though.

Whatever the case, seek to make a living doing something that promotes the peace and happiness of yourself and those around you as much as possible.

12. Realize non-attachment

This is a difficult point to put into so few words, but a profound one I felt would be greatly beneficial to mention nonetheless.

To realize non-attachment in a Buddhist sense doesn’t mean to abandon your friends and family and live alone for the rest of your life, never truly living again just so that you don’t become attached to these desires.

Non-attachment refers to living in a way that you exist in the natural flow of life and generally living a typical modern life, building a family, working, etc., while simultaneously not being attached to any of these things. It simply means to live in a way that you’ve become aware of and accepted the impermanence of all things in this life and live in a way that you’re ever-aware of this fact.

It’s perfectly normal for a Zen student in Japan, once having completed his training, to actually de-robe and go “back into the world” so to speak. This is because, once they’ve reached this level of realization, they see the beauty in all things and are compelled to live fully absorbed in all the beauty and wonders of this life. From this point on, they can truly “live life to the fullest”, while not clinging to any of these things.

Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that you stop feeling emotions. On the contrary, these emotions are welcomed and expected, and fully experienced with mindfulness in the moment of their impact. But this is simply the natural course of things.

Once these emotions subside though, and when we have no mental formations or obstructions to block our path, a natural healing process takes place that heals the wound and allows us to continue on living in peace and joy instead of dragging us down into darkness.