Meditate Your Way To Success

The Benefits of Meditation
makes you younger
enhances performance
leads to positive personality growth
improves overall self-esteem, feelings of worthiness and self-acceptance
helps proactive health, producing the relaxation response which induces changes in metabolism, heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, brain chemistry and all the signs of biological ageing
reduces stress; the recurrence of depression, pain symptoms and the sensation of pain itself.
improves the quality of sleep
even negative programming from the past can be offset by taking the time every day to go into silence
improvement is shown in just ONE day
brings that comfort of knowing you are a child of nature, secure, permanent and loved
connects us with the still voice within and leads us to the wisdom of our heart and soul. Away from the past / future and into the now!

You’ve seen the benefits of meditation above, so impressive that no one questions how good it is for you anymore, although sadly that doesn’t reflect in attendance at classes and the discipline of practice. In fact, many people, only find meditation when things get desperate, when they can’t switch off the constant rant in their head. That’s how it was for me, I was continually nagging and criticising myself. I was full of self-hatred, shame and quite frankly reeling at the shock of reality after a 12-year opiate habit.

It was 1987 and rehab meant a stint in psychiatric hospital unless you had the dosh for a Harley Street quack. Fortunately, I did. My mental rehab was a law degree and it worked, to a point but I was just occupying my time, I had no place inside myself where I could simply be. I saved up my doses of methadone so I could get stoned later in the day and in between I studied like a lunatic, played solitaire when my brain was too tired to study, chain smoked, and binged on fat and sugar- our local Aberdonian delicacy: ”hot rowies clarted with syrup”. At 30 I was overweight, bloated and arthritic, I had no one to talk to because everyone including me thought the only important thing was that I’d stopped using.

My mother, bless her, now 87, had become a vege at 40 and a reiki practitioner in her early 50s, dragged me along to a transcendental meditation course. At that stage I didn’t even want to leave my room. I remember having to steel myself to walk the fifty yards to the paper shop, counting the sapling larch on the way, wondering at the ugliness of their supports with their grey metal straps. Yet the truth was I needed something like that myself. It was terrifying just walking down the street. I wasn’t even aware that I’d become so numb to life, never mind having a clue what to do about it. However, a meeting with a few of the sandal brigade with Mum in tow seemed a safe enough venture, I went, and I completed the course.

I can’t remember much about meditating those first three years. I know I did though, and once my body found its fitness again and the chemical rampage began to settle down, I sensed a growing calm. Then one day I noticed the buds on one of those larch trees and realised life could renew itself and so could I.

Awareness kind of crept up on me after that, although believe me there have been many times when I wished I could put it back again!

Meditation wakes you up, takes you out of whatever illusion you pretend is reality, but it also does so much more.

Something will shift, it did for me, it wasn’t everything, but it was a start. I continued studying meditation, I finished my degree then studied reiki and anything else I could find in the personal development field. I somehow ended up as a personal fitness trainer and it was during that phase that I started to question the mind. How did an ex-junky end up with a body like a gladiator yet the woman with the picture book life never get to the gym nor past her wine and nibbles every evening. Alongside my fitness career, I studied Hypnosis and NLP. I loved it. These were the tools I used to achieve my goals and change my mind set and have continued to share with many others ever since. As far as I’m concerned Hypnosis and NLP are by far the greatest tools there are for transformation.

It was easy to blend it in with my existing practice. Meditation about up and out and hypnosis about down and in. That’s the technical difference but what it means to me is this. Meditation teaches your mind to stay where you put it and is ultimately about knowing the reality of existence without anyone having to tell you. It’s profound. As far as hypnosis is concerned, no one, as yet, has come up with a solid definition. We tend to talk around things we don’t fully understand. I tend to think of it as a fast track to changing your mental and emotional programmes, it teaches you how to speak to your subconscious mind as opposed to the conscious mind or the ranting ego. Your subconscious mind is amazing, communicating correctly with it can bring results you have never dreamed of – yet!

I’ll write more about talking to your subconscious mind soon. Meanwhile I would like to say that I have meditated most of my life since then. There have been times when things have been so hard that I have thrown my hands in the air and stopped practice for a while. During those times I have reverted to what the addiction experts call “stinking thinking”, times when I just motor on regardless believing I can fix things by doing more, even though inside I know this is simply not true. But in the end it is like exercise, once you’ve been there, once you know how good it feels to be fit, mentally, physically and emotionally, it is a place where you will always want to return. I will forever be grateful for the day I sat with my Mum and the man with the funny sandals.