Life is often full of struggle and suffering.
And yet, joy is our birthright!
Even the darkest and most painful experiences can lead to profound insights and inner growth. These types of experiences may even expand our capacity for joy.
How might we break free of struggle in healthy ways?
One proven route involves finding the peaceful foundation of our consciousness through meditation. With practice, we can rid ourselves of attachments to negative thought patterns, one of the roots of dis-ease.
It may be confusing to think that we’re attached to our negative thought patterns, but over time, repeated habits have a way of sticking around.
Healing is a process of reclaiming our power and finding greater degrees of freedom, as renowned Biofield Tuning inventor Eileen McKusick pointed out.
One important way we can find more freedom is creating more space in our minds, our busy minds.
Meditation gives us practice in observing our own thoughts. Then, later, we are more able to create a gap between our thoughts and our actions, allowing us to make a different choice, a less reactive choice. Through the habitual practice of observing our thoughts in meditation, we finding the space to be less reactive, less negative, less fixated on whatever it is that’s holding us back.
When we create that kind of space, we can release our attachment to the negative thought patterns that stick around on a loop. And so thought meditation, we have freed ourselves in a fundamental way.
Letting go of the thoughts and behavior patterns which bind us — which blind us to the truth of our own potential to experience joy — is a great gift.
One of the wonderful things about meditation is that it is free, and you can do it for yourself anywhere!
However, it can be difficult to get started, or to keep going once you’ve started.
A guided meditation is a wonderful way to start down the path of creating a meditation practice that works for you. Also, it’s important to know that there are many, many forms of meditation. So there is bound to be some kind of guided meditation that is likely to stick with you and form the basis of a new, wonderful activity in your life.
One of my most recommended tools for meditation is the Insight Timer App. Insight Timer is a free app for iPhone or Android which boasts over 34 million users around the globe, with thousands upon thousands of guided meditations to choose from. And the original heart of the experience, as the name implies, is a great timer you can set to chime with bells or play background music and the like as you meditate.
However you find your way to meditation, and however deep you go, it’s a practice that delivers greater and greater rewards across a lifetime. Wishing you joy in the discovery of greater degrees of freedom!