Epiphany at the Portola
Last month I took a group of students, primarily high-powered businessmen and women, to China and Tibet for a meditation retreat. I was amazed at how much China had changed from the late eighties. Back then almost everyone wore a drab uniform and very few people looked happy. What I remembered most were all the guards carrying machine guns and being watched very carefully wherever I went. Now, in Shanghai and Beijing anyway, I was happy to see thoroughly modern cities. People were wearing bright colors and had happy, hopeful faces. Evidence of prosperity was everywhere. Even the guards at the Great Wall would sit and laugh with us. Tibet was even more amazing. It is such a beautiful country, with majestic mountains and magical temples filled with brilliant murals and golden beaming Buddha's. We were quite taken aback when at every temple and every statue we would be met by a monk who would inform us of the fee for taking a picture. Ten Yuan for this room, twenty for this Buddha, forty to videotape it. Of course, we were happy to make some donations to help restore the temples and delighted to support the ongoing work at the monasteries. But the gift that was given to us, perhaps by the Prosperity Buddha, was the idea of being open to receive and how money served as a means to help people. In my early years of meditating as a "yogi in training," I adopted the notion that money was un-spiritual. My mind had created a division between my business life and my spiritual life. As a result I lived in lack because my mind thought it was a more spiritual state to be in. Teaching yoga and meditation in the eighties I would always teach on a donation basis but rarely received enough to pay for the overhead. For years SAI remained a meditation backwater in Orange County. Then, in the early 21st Century, my friend, student and teacher Matthew Ferry, pointed out to me that my lack of prosperity consciousness was keeping my work from being enjoyed by other people. Once I was open to receive, others began to receive more too. Once my consciousness shifted from lack to value, The Self Awareness Institute grew from a few hundred people to tens of thousands all over the world in just a few years. This same shift may be helpful for you too. Are you living in lack? Do you deny yourself prosperity, happiness or peace of mind? Later this month I am conducting a Prosperity Consciousness workshop that I encourage you to attend. Prosperity is a state of consciousness, and your prosperity contributes to global prosperity. Lack serves nobody. This epiphany occurred at the Portola Palace in Lhasa. God bless the people of Tibet. Check out the photos visit: www.selfawareness.com/VideoPhotoGallery.html. From the heart, Steven S. Sadleir
Steven S. Sadleir is the Director of the Self Awareness Institute and is recognized as a Shaktipat Master in two lineages. He has developed powerful distance learning programs for people of all cultures and faiths, trained thousands of people from all over the world, and welcomes all of you who are ready for full Self-Realization. Visit http://www.SelfAwareness.com for FREE guided meditation mp3s and ebook!
Mindfulness Meditation and the Law of Attraction
Do you feel overhwelmed and at odds with your life? Does it seem like your mind rambles incessantly, as if you can never experience a moment of peace? Many people in our modern world describe their lives as frenzied and imbalanced. The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. Many Asian cultures have understood something for the past several thousand years that modern people are gradually beginning to discover: That we have to learn how to work with our minds in a conscious and healthy way if we are to attract peace, abundance, and joy into our lives. Without a consistent method of cultivating awareness, we will be forever resigned to circumstances that feel out of our control. That is why so many modern people are struggling. We have lost the ancient practice of connecting our inner world of thoughts, feelings, and energy with our outer world of the circumstances we attract into our lives. Because of this, everything that appears seems to be random. We lose trust in the unfolding of the universe. As a result, our minds are filled with anxiety and worry, which only attracts more seeming chaos and confusion into our lives. Does this sound familiar?
The law of attraction states that what you focus on expands. If your thoughts and feelings resonate with anxiety and confusion, then you will attract more of those qualites to you through your relationships, work, finances, etc. The key is not to trick our minds into creating positive thoughts through affirmations or other methods, but to develop space around the workings of our minds altogether. Herein lies the magic of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is a method of becoming acutely aware of everything that happens within the scope of our perception. We shed light on what we think, feel, and sense. We make conscious all of the subconscious material that typically sabotages our good intentions. We don't try to change it. Instead, we just become extremely aware of it. We do this by sitting still and doing nothing but watching how our mind works without attachment or judgment. We just sit and witness what takes place within us and we start to draw parallels between what we believe to be true and what we are constantly attracting into our lives. Many people, particulalry Westerners, try meditation for a period of time and then give up after getting frustrated with the process. This is because we are always looking for results. We are deeply attached to our expectations of what should happen. Most of us try to use meditation to shut our minds down, to dwell in a space of 'no thought.' If you try to use meditation to stop thinking, you are in for a rude surprise. You simply cannot do it. In fact, the harder you try to stop thinking, the louder and more obnoxious your thoughts become. This is not the way. The main intention of mindfulness is to be fundamentally OK with whatever arises as you practice. Whether you have a good thought or a bad thought, you give it the same attention. You remain neutral. By doing this, you stop feeding the energy of your thoughts. This is the first step in cutting through the vicious cycle of thought-feeling-reaction that keeps so many of us habitually attracting the wrong kinds of energy, people, and circumstances into our lives. If we believe what we think, the energy of the thought will evolve into a feeling. The momentum of the feeling will cause us to react to it, which will create a cause in the world that will always lead to an effect. The effect will always be a reflection of that initial thought impulse. So, if your thoughts are habitually centered around negativity, greed, fear, or narcissism, then the effects you will see in your life will mirror this back to you.
Mindfulness is a process of becoming truly proactive for the first time in your life. Most of the time, we are just reacting to what we think and feel, which brings us endless cycles of conflict and disappointment. When we remain neutral to our thoughts and feelings, then we will gradually make contact with an aspect of ourselves that is spontaneous and awake. We will act (not react) from this place. We will attract what we truly desire into our lives based on a conscious process of heightening our senses. And, yes, at some point the mind does slow down. We experience wonderful and refreshing moments of peace and openness. The universe is naturally seen as a benevolent place. Instead of our typical attempts to outsmart the universe, mindfulness is a humbling process of surrender and gratitude.
Cultivate space, endless space, around your thoughts and feelings. Allow your spirit to inhabit your body fully. Don't buy into self-defeating storylines and beliefs. Don't try to force yourself to see the positive in life or repeat useless affirmations that you have no innate connection with. Instead, taste the perfection of this moment as it is. If you can feel in your bones that you are fundamentally OK and that life is precious, you will attract much more meaningful relationships with people, better health, more fulfilling work and more prosperity on all levels of being. That is the power of mindfulness.
Kevin Doherty, L.Ac., MS is alicensed acupuncturist in private practice in Superior, Co. where he teaches many of his patients how to meditate for better health and overall quality of life. For more information about Kevn and his approach to meditation, go to http://www.mindfulnesscd.net
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