Happy Mind: Meditations from the Ancient World to Modernity

You can't be aware of not being. This must be, because you are. You were. And you will always be. It is up to you to choose your state of mind. No one can choose for you. Today you might be feeling self-doubt or lacking in confidence so the question is, are you going to choose freedom over wanting approval, love, or reassurance? What could be more important to you than freedom and inner peace? Perhaps there is something or things that are more important today. That is fine but until there is nothing more important than realizing that right now, right here, you are free you are just going to delay the realization of this truth. The longer you put off remembering who you really are, you are delaying the dawning of a new life of confidence, joy and peace. Why is it not obvious who you really are? Why does it seem to you that having someone else's approval is necessary? Because you believe yourself to be what it is not. As long as you spend your time preserving that which you are not, instead of celebrating that which you are, you are going to be stuck in your old life of uncertainty, confusion, and self-doubt. Or you can shift your attention to who you really are and do the work to recover the sensibilities, like self-confidence, that belong to you already.This is a 20 minute version of the I Am Confident guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Many people suffer from self-doubt, low self-esteem, or lack of confidence in some important dimension of their self or their life. In these cases, often you will look outside yourself for affirmation or compliments or reassurance. As comforting as the reassurance and approval of others can be, you don't need to rely on other people to remove your doubts or fears or validate your choices. We are self-existing, self-maintaining, and self-sustaining organisms. So your confidence comes from within. Your self-doubt or low self-esteem is rooted in a confusion about who you are and the nature of your true self. So self-assurance is a choice. For some of you it will be more natural than others but regardless, it is always a choice. This meditation will help you make that choice.This is a 10 minute version of the I Am Confident guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Your body, your mind and your self are just energies in a particular pattern. Part of mastery involves an understanding that mastering these energies serves a purpose. Technically, there really is no need to ‘master’ them because you are already a master. You have just forgotten. Think about it like this. On the one hand we say that God is good, love, all powerful and omnipresent. We say that we are all one. But was your day an experience of perfection, power, goodness, oneness and love? And if we are all one (or, if you are religious, you might say that ‘god is omnipresent’) then shouldn’t that have been your experience today? So, the practical question is then why wasn’t your day like that? What does omnipresent mean? Always there, everywhere, in a cell, in an atom. In this meditation you are going to practice being aware of your energy and sensing your connection to all energies; you will feel the flow and the natural connection between your energy and the energy in the world around you. If you don’t start exercising your power, if you don’t start paying attention to energy, how are you going to know how much power you really have? If your body is relaxed at a cellular level, you can choose to move your attention from the darkness to the light. If you don’t become aware of the light how shall you ever conclude that you are light? If you don’t make that conclusion how will it become apparent that light is limitless? How then shall you conclude that you are limitless? One conclusion serves as the floor for the next one. If you remember that you are eternal and unlimited, why would you fret about your body? Of course, once you realize this, then you have to let go of that realization too… See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Are you feeling sad, or anxious, or lonely? Or do you get angry or scattered? All these states of mind are nothing more than energy in a particular pattern. You are a self-existing and self-maintaining organism. Your energy is one with the energy all around you and throughout the universe. And this energy wants to move. That is the natural order of things. It takes a lot of energy to prevent energy from moving or to hold it in a particular pattern. For you to be upset or unhappy in any way for more than a moment you must be holding on, for it is the nature of energy is to change. How do you know if you are holding? How do you know it is time to let go? It is not an intellectual process. It has to be something that you experience and therefore know. The body doesn’t lie. It just reports. You choose whether to listen to those reports and you choose what value and valence you attach to those reports. In this meditation, you will connect with your breath and your heartbeat and use it to sense the light and the energy that is your true nature. The more you master the very simple technique of slowing down and controlling your awareness, the better you will get at sensing the light and power that belongs to you. This is how you become aware of your energy and how it flows. The old stories about “Falling from Grace” or getting booted out of the Garden of Eden are really metaphors for humans forgetting how to awaken to their own power and energy and light. Being cast out of Eden just means that you are unconsciously blocking the free-flowing universal life force from moving into and through your body. So you can use this meditation to help you reconnect with your inherent energy and power and light.This is a 45 minute version of the I Am Energized guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you want to feel energized, you have to move to the level of consciousness where you uncover the inherent energy and power of your true self, your best self. If you try to generate it using coffee or pills or some other foreign stimulus, you will may reap a short term gain but it either won't last or it may have some negative side effect. When you develop that awareness that you have a direct connection to the energy and power of the whole universe, in addition to feeling energized, there is this delicious sensibility that will belong to you in those moments. Once you realize that you *are* energy, you can’t get rid of that sensibility. If you are energized and powerful you don’t need to pursue energy or power. You just are it. But people are looking for energy and power in the wrong place. They pursue whatever they thought created energy or gave them power. They believed that energy and power was something they lacked so they pursued it outside themselves. But you know better now. Move out of this dualistic perspective into the consciousness where energy and power are inherent.This is a 30 minute version of the I Am Energized guided meditation  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Don’t let anything come between you and your energy. Thinking and feeling disturb your connection to the steady flow of energy in the universe. If you are aware of yourself emoting or thinking then your lower self is activated. Don’t let anything come between you and unlimited energy, including your thoughts, memories or feelings. By believing in these thoughts and feelings and memories and sensations, you are just delaying your direct connection to the universal flow, to your bliss. But you have another choice. You can appropriate your bliss and your energy right now. This meditation is a start. This is a 20 minute version of the I Am Energized guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

One way to define bliss and vitality is a an open and free flow of light and energy through your body. Holding, resistance, and wanting stifle this flow and block the light. But you can open the channels that guide this flow within you. And when you do that, you will feel energized and blissful.This is a 10 minute version of the I Am Energized guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You can have a tangible impact on the health of your body simply by changing the way you think. Dedicate the time to remodeling the structures of your brain that control the health of your body. This meditation helps you do that. This is a one hour version of the I Am Healthy guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Your body is very susceptible to suggestion. If you think negative thoughts or believe the negative things people say about you sometimes, your body might take you or them seriously. Unfortunately, that negativity can affect your health and wellbeing. Fortunately you can take advantage of that same susceptibility to influence your body in the other direction, too. You can remind yourself of your inner potential for vitality, power, fitness and health. So do that right now!This is a 45 minute version of the I Am Healthy guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you think negative thoughts or believe the negative things people say about you sometimes, your body might take you or them seriously. Unfortunately, that negativity can affect your health and wellbeing. Fortunately, this works in both directions so you can take advantage of that same susceptibility to influence your body towards health instead. You can remind yourself of your inner potential for vitality, power, fitness and health. So do that right now!This is a 30 minute version of the I Am Healthy guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you have an injury or are sick or are in pain for any reason, you can use the vast powers of your mind to mitigate your suffering and support your natural immune and healing processes. This meditation will guide you through this simple yet powerful process.This is a 20 minute version of the I Am Healthy guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Illness and pain are a natural part of life. Outside of the obvious things like eating right, getting enough sleep, washing our hands and reducing stress in our life, are there other techniques we can use to maximize our health and our strength? It turns out the body responds to positive thinking and can be healed by the presence of an otherworldly light. This light has been called prank, qi, and mana. But the point isn't the name. The point is to learn how to marshal this light in the service of your health and your vitality. So give it a try!This is a 10 minute version of the I Am Healthy guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Feelings of anxiety or sadness or anger or any other negative feeling are premised on the notion that there is something missing in your life. You sense that you are going to fail at something or that something bad will happen. In a word, you are living with wanting of some kind. You want approval or safety or love or companionship or to know or whatever it is. But you already have everything you need. The most fundamental want that you probably face, the one that often underlies other wants, is the desire for safety. Ultimately, the biggest risk is that we die. And based on the stress and anxiety you sometimes feel, or the level of anger or sadness that you might struggle with, your emotional self fears that there is a risk to your life. What is the antidote to these fears and the negative feelings that come up? The truth. The truth is that you are safe, and things are ok. You've just convinced yourself that this isn't the case. So this is a simple meditation to help remind your emotional self of the truth that you are going to be ok. Note: This is a one hour version of the I Am Safe guided meditationAs with any meditation, but especially with these longer ones, make sure you are in a regular habit of getting enough sleep. Some master will say that meditation is better than sleep. And maybe for their genetic make-up it is or maybe for advanced meditation masters their biochemistry really has changed. But for the vast majority of Homo Sapiens, 7-8 hours night after night after night is the minimum needed not just for a healthy body but also for the attentional powers necessary to embark on the transformative journey of self-mastery. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When you experience negative feelings, whatever kind they are, this means that you are perceiving some sort of lack in your life. There is something missing that you want to fill in. Maybe you want control or safety, approval or love, or maybe you just want to know or understand. Whatever it is, you have the power to cut to the chase and simply let go of wanting. An age old method of doing this is to just let the breath relax. You'll do that in this meditation but it is all too easy to slip back into the little circle you are stuck in, to get yourself into turmoil for days. Eventually, the opposite energy will finally take over but the suffering along the way can be tremendous and the 'eventually' can seem to last forever. So one simple technique to short circuit this loop of wanting and suffering is to remind your emotional self that everything is going to be ok, that everything actually IS ok already. And the first step to proving that to your emotional self is to point out the seemingly obvious fact that you are safe. With that foundation stabilized, all the good stuff can be built on top of that: joy, abundance, peace, purpose and flourishing can find solid footing again. Note: This is a 45 minute version of the I Am Safe guided meditation. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The strange nature of the human experience is that your thoughts and feelings aren't truth. They don't represent what is really happening in the world. They neither accurately reflect the nature of our physical reality (as Relativity and Quantum physics have proven), nor do they provide us access to the many other dimensions that make up consciousness. So until you get to the point that you look at what you think and feel as a lie, you will not progress beyond the yo-yo of feelings that probably characterizes your life right now. Until you look at your feelings -- whether the feeling is wanting control or safety, being filled with anger, fear or sadness -- as lies, you are sentenced to continue to feel them. You are sentencing yourself to this kind of a life because you continue to believe that thinking and feeling are indices of reality.  As you start to let go, as you start to work on exposing the lies that you have lived with for so long to the light of day, all the beliefs and feelings that were stored start to come up to the surface so this can make progress difficult and, especially if you are in therapy, can become a huge distraction. But you can just cut to the chase. You are free. Right here and right now. But you don’t behave that way. You still do what you think. You still do what you feel. You still believe the lies so feelings and thoughts still color what you think is actually happening in your life. But you are fine right now. Happiness, peace, flourishing and a sense of purpose and fulfillment are available to you right now. And you can start becoming comfortable with this truth by building a foundation of safety and security, by acquainting yourself with the truth of your physical safety right now, in this moment. That is what this meditation is all about.Note: This is a 30 minute version of the I Am Safe guided meditation.As always, more important than meditation is sleep. So if you are sleepy, use this time to nap and adjust your sleep routine so that you secure sufficient sleep (normally 7-8 hours) each night so that meditation can become as powerful as possible. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.