Yes, Meditating Can Pay Your Bills
If you have been struggling to improve your circumstances or your attitude, here is the cause of the problem, and the solution.
“Make your life worthwhile by choosing to be responsible for your states of awareness, and mental and emotional states.” Roy Eugene Davis
To the extent that you feel dissatisfied with your life you have INNER work to do. While most believe they need to make outer changes to bring them the feeling of satisfaction that they desire, the reality is: if you feel dissatisfied where you are you will feel dissatisfied where you are going.
In fact, in terms of your actual experience, striving for external change without internal change means that, essentially, no matter what changes you appear to make in your external world, you will be where you are now. You will continue to feel the same old feelings and continue to think the same old thoughts. You will speak as you have spoken and do as you have done, and soon you will find the same types of people and situations showing up as before. Any changes you have made through external work alone will be on the level of appearance only, if at all, failing to produce the experience of actual, meaningful improvement. You will feel that you are in the same old place, with the same old problems, including the problem of “nothing has changed, not really.”
One Of The Big Illusions
One of the big illusions in human consciousness is the belief that inner work is notrealwork. The reality is that you are paid as much for your internal state as for your external work. If you want to experience more freedom, abundance and prosperity in your life, you need to do theinnerwork that allows that to happen.
This is not meant to discount the value and necessity for physical work. Building something with your hands, making phone calls, producing plans on paper, visiting clients, being on time, cleaning your home, physically working out, paying your bills, depositing your checks, are all positive ways to produce desirable physical results in your life. But so is shifting your inner state from negative and limiting thoughts and feelings to positive and unlimiting states of consciousness.
Relying on outer work alone produces a hollow life of results that really don’t mean anything to you. Your habits of thought and emotion will continue to rule your internal experience of your life until you do something internally to change them. Negative thoughts and feelings de-motivate and dis-empower our ability to take the most effective, creative, productive action possible. Thus, our negative inner states operate as a drag on our ability to function optimally and thus prohibit us from producing the best possible results.
Your internal states profoundly influence both the quality of your life and the results of your actions.
When you experience an empowered state of positive, unlimited feeling and thinking you energize your ability to function more effectively on your own behalf, and on the behalf of others.
Our ability to take the most effective action possible can be compared to a whistling kettle. The kettle doesn’t whistle until the heat applied to it builds up enough steam-pressure to produce the whistle. Similarly, your internal state of empowerment needs to build up to the point that it produces the highest level of functional activity possible. If you rely upon action before your internal energy state is fully charged, your action is weak. The kettle doesn’t whistle.
Carrying around negative thoughts and feelings is really what we mean by the phrase “psychological baggage” and it oppresses us in the same way as going through the day carrying heavy, heavy bags that weigh us down and wear us out with every step we take. It thus becomes harder and harder to feel good and to do good and our lack-luster results reflect our inner state of lethargy and pain.
Inner Work Required
We materialize circumstances consistent with the inner state that we live in. The darker and heavier your inner state the more dismal will your outer circumstances appear. The brighter, freer and more joyful your inner state the more your outer circumstances will conform to your ideals for them.
Everyone wants to live in a positive inner state. No one wants to feel unhappy. Obviously, though, few people really understand how to achieve happiness This is demonstrated by the numbers. A recent poll reveals that over 80% of American workers today say they are unhappy and dissatisfied in their job. That means that for at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, they live in negativity. Add to that the amount of time they spend thinking about how miserable their job is! Why is this happening? There is really only one reason. They believe that their job, or their workplace, or the people they work for or with, cause them to feel as they do. In other words, they attribute the cause of their inner problem to an outer condition.
Depending on the outer for happiness lets us down.
The reality is that we cannot produce lasting improvements in our inner state as long as we count on outer conditions to make that happen. At best a pleasant outer condition produces a few minutes of fleeting joy. Winning the election, winning the World Series, getting a raise, falling in love, buying that dream-house for yourself or even for your mother… these are all external sources of happiness that produce a temporary internal lift. Very quickly our negative habits of thought and feeling returns. We find our feelings of gratitude fading into fault-finding, our joy returning to disappointment, our love turning back into resentment.
The inner work required to experience the inner states that we want also materializes the outer conditions that we want. Feeling good is not just a good way to feel. As we have seen, it liberates our power to do our very best in every area of life, including health and healing, financial prosperity, making meaningful contributions in our work, and enjoying high levels of harmony in our relationships because the better we feel the better we do.
How Happy People Annoy Unhappy People
To the extent that your inner state of joy is limited you will find that the level of other people’s happiness annoys you when it seems to exceed your own. Bumping up against their joy causes you to bump up against the inner pain that blocks your joy. You will then find yourself lashing out at them in some uncontrollable way.
This is what happens to you when your level of joy exceeds another’s. While you are liberally sharing your blissful state with, say, your sister or your brother, the other is experiencing sharp suffering that represents the circumference of their happiness, and then responds with a mean jab. That person is not being evil. He or she is just expressing a habitual reaction to inner pain, pain brought up into consciousness through exposure to your joy.
This is why we have to be careful about how much happiness we share with others. You don’t want to make the other person hurt, or incite that person to attack you, in response to your joy. This is also why it is not advisable to spend too much time with someone who cannot be supportive of your limitless joy. You cannot be entirely open and expressive of who you are with them, without generating conflict. It’s better to keep as much space between you and such people as necessary to avoid shrinking your happiness and taking on their pain to conform to the limits of their bliss.
The Need For Meditation
The way to achieve the inner states of union with our highest joy has been taught for millennia. It is meditation. Meditation is the act of turning inward, to examine your thoughts and feelings consciously. Advanced meditation practice involves the use of meditative processes for releasing attachment to negativity, including all inner states of limitation and pain (the process I use and teach is The Method). As internal limiters are released, we can engage in an inner act of openness to the infinite reservoir of power-love-joy-enlightenment that we can call the Divine. This brings about the highest states of fulfillment and empowerment. There is no limit to how deep one can go, liberating more and more power-love-joy-enlightenment, which can then be translated into higher levels of functionality regarding all of our abilities.
Creatively Imagining
Among our most powerful abilities is the creative use of the imagination. As you experience the expansion of joyful power you can direct your creative imagination to envision yourself in physical conditions consistent with your highest happiness. This means living in an interior life-situation that represents the physical or material life-condition that you desire. For instance, you can live in your inner vision of health, healing, prosperity, success, loving relationships and world-service. You can imagine yourself as fully enlightened. Based on the creative law of thought, which states that you bring about what you think about, the inner vision consistently engaged in with feeling has a tendency to reproduce itself in outer circumstances.
It is not enough, however, to occasionally envision what you want. You have to do the inner work necessary to clear your mind of the negative visions of what you don’t want. Your negative visions produce negative feelings and have a Karmic component. In other words, you cause yourself the difficulties that you imagine. Don’t think of yourself as not good enough. Don’t think that you lack opportunity. Don’t think that you are the victim of another’s cruelty . These are examples of misuses of the creative power of thought that place you those difficult conditions. The way out is to take command of our creative imagination right where we are. Since our automatic thinking and emotional states are almost entirely habitual, it can take a long period of constant dedication to extricating ourselves from the habitual thought and feeling patterns that work against us.
First Realization
Just realizing that our negativity is produced within ourselves through our own internal reactivity pattern, rather than attributing the cause of how we think and feel outside of ourselves, constitutes the first major step toward our ultimate liberation. It opens us up to the understanding that we need to engage in inner work to set ourselves free.
A principle obstacle to engaging in the inner work that sets us free, though, is the idea that we are not really working while engaged in it. When people ask me what I do for a living, I sometimes say – cheekily, I admit – that I meditate.
The inner work involved in meditation really is an essential part of meeting your worldly responsibilities and achieving your goals of deepest value. You are liberating your best work when you are engaged in the inner work of liberating your inner experience of empowerment, peace, confidence and good cheer. You are making money by living in the happy visualization of prosperity. You are improving your heath and healing when you are living in the internal feeling and vision of physical wellbeing. You are bringing more harmony into your relationships as you live in the inner feeling of a totally loving, harmonious and beautiful relationship experience. You are turning your drag-job into your dream-job as you live in the internal state of being in that fulfilling and inspiring work experience.
It’s not that easy.
Before you presume that engaging directly in the meditative exercise of inner liberation sounds too easy to be true, let me assure you that it is far from easy for long-term benefit. It requires first the overcoming of the pervasive belief that inner work is a useless indulgence and an utter waste of time. It requires overcoming the belief that the way to improve your life is through action alone, rather than through integrating a deep change in your thought and feeling patterns. And it requires overcoming the obstacle of resistance to the discipline of spending time everyday in deepening meditation.
If you really want to make changes in your life that really matter to you, you have the motivation it takes to pursue the inward route for allowing those changes to happen. If you feel the subtle sense of an inner calling drawing you to go inward, to live a more internally conscious life, you will find your fulfillment by heeding this call.
The point is that your inner state is as at least as essential as is your physical action for living the life you want, and thus that inner work is real work.
It almost always requires capable support for making the inner changes necessary to release our joy and produce the outer conditions we have been chasing.
Contact me to set up a time when we can discuss how my phone coaching with The Method can take you through the liberation process.