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Straightforward and Simple Guide to Introductory Meditation

December 29th, 2009 . Posted in Spiritual Living, meditation | No Comments »
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A statue showing a common Hindu meditation

Meditation can lead to vast improvements in your lifestyle. In an overall sense, meditation is “push-ups” for your mental and spiritual state. Meditation helps you understand problems, increase your awareness, memory, focus, and more easily actualize your goals. It is one of the only exercises that is viable for all ages and all states of being.

Objectives

The concept of self-empowerment, improving yourself, or increasing your abilities to meet some end goal should not be an objective of thought within meditation. Our mind is automatically arriving at those conclusions constantly, so much so that we cannot stop thinking on our own. We are constantly bombarded by sensory input, distraction, and worries throughout our day that keep our mind busy and active. Our objective with introductory meditation is to understand and manage some of the fog within our minds to gain a greater clarity within ourselves.

Clarity and silence within our minds eventually branches into higher awareness. At first we may only be able to reach a state of emptiness (no thought) within our mind for one or two seconds. After that time, a random thought will enter our mind and distract us. This is completely normal, and as with any skill, practice and diligence is required. Meditation sessions will yield better control over our distractions and thoughts, and over time will give us control over our own minds and direction.

While there are several techniques of meditation, we’re focusing on one called “Samadhi,” which has been practiced all over the world for thousands of years.

Posture and Technique

meditation posture

This Hindu form of meditation places the hands near your “one-point” to maximize energy flow and distribution. Your back is straight and your form is as still as possible. It will take practice to reach a half-lotus position (shown) or a full lotus position, where both legs are crossed over one another. In introductory meditation it is more important to be comfortable than to concern yourself with the details of posture, and just sitting cross-legged is fine. Attempt to remain as still as possible.

Your eyes can be half-closed or open. Your first goal is to relax through “scanning,” beginning at your feet and slowly visualizing each part of your body relaxing. Spend roughly a half-minute on each part of your body, traveling upward and ending with your head. Advanced forms of scanning found in other meditative techniques can sometimes focus on single parts of the body for hours.

Once you are relaxed, begin focusing only on your breathing. Focus on the slow, gradual breath traveling in and out through your nose. Invariably, and likely in a very short amount of time, you will come across a thought. It may manifest as a reminder, a concern, a nagging feeling, or something you’ve remembered from a recent experience. Your mind will begin to diverge towards this thought process, and you will catch it here, observe it neutrally, and release it – returning to your breath. A thousand times will these thoughts continue to reach you, and it may be weeks or months before you move forward and reach a state of inner silence.

Your thoughts may be disturbing, enlightening, arousing, horrifying, blissfully joyful, or any combination of the aforementioned. “You” are not your mind in this practice, you are observing your mind neutrally. What you “think” and “feel” should be detached from “you” and your work should center on completely neutral observance. This practice will generate a silence in your mind that will lend you perceptions and experiences you may not imagine possible, as the sheer amount of sensory input in our daily lives blocks a unfathomably massive amount of true experience from reaching us.

By far the most important aspect of meditation is consistency. Meditating five minutes each day usually produces much more noticeable and favorable results than meditating an hour each week. Try to incorporate twenty minutes of meditation into each day, even if it’s split up. Moreover, putting yourself into a discipline of meditation improves your ability to lock onto your goals and be productive when you want to be. Keep up the practice and you will see results.

The 7% Solution (Simple Guide to Saving and Making Money)

December 21st, 2009 . Posted in Better Financial Living, Financial Tips | No Comments »
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dollarsigns
Thank you sincerely to Roger’s Rules of the Road, which made this post possible.

We are increasingly coming across troubled times in our world economy. As society comes to terms with a contracting money supply and an overall decrease in spending power we are more and more pressed to find ways to survive and thrive. Control over our finances and individuals and families is an imperative today and tomorrow, and the best way we exercise control is through knowledge.

Your personal financial power is dependent on your amount of control you possess over your own money supply, and your ability to pay your expenses in a consistent and timely manner. Your “wealth” is defined by the time you can survive (without additional income) paying your expenses and liabilities. This is not the conventional definition of “wealth,” which is typically defined by net income – though we find this definition inadequate as it doesn’t factor in that your income is irrelevant if your expenses are twice what you make in a month.

What follows is one of the best ways to bring your wealth under your control.

  1. Set up an opportunity/emergency fund immediately. Contribute a small fixed percentage of your earnings each month to this fund, ranging from 5-10%, depending on your disposable income. For example, if your paycheck brings you $3,000 a month, and your fixed percentage is 5%, take $150 (3000*.05) and put it away.
  2. When confronted with an opportunity or an emergency which would usually lead to borrowing, borrow instead from this account. Repay the amount borrowed in fixed monthly installments and include your own interest rate, preferably 7.5%.

Where to Place Your Money

Attempt to find a fund that accepts fixed monthly payments, preferably a savings account that is not through your bank (unless you can find a no-fee account, do not bother, why pay the bank to hold your money?) and instead through a no-fee company such as ING Direct, whose rate is 1.3% at the time of this writing. Again, make your “payments” to this account automatic, the same as your phone or internet payment. You can even forget about the payments.

Placing your money in a bank account with fees is counter-productive. If you are making $2-5 in interest every month, but your fee is $3-10, you are making less than you think. You are already fighting a (usually) losing battle against inflation, and do not need extra fees dipping into your savings.

The Potential of This Solution

We will use a couple examples with the 7% solution to show the power of this concept. We will assume you begin at age 18 with an income of only $5,000 a year. We will assume you will gain $1,000/year until you are 22. By age 22, we will assume you are educated enough to begin making an income of $22,000/year (roughly $10/hour). We then assume your income will increase by $1,000 a year until age 65, where you will be making $65,000 a year. This is a very modest projection and the potential of this plan if you are making more than this is staggering.

  1. At age 18, you have made $5,000 for the year. You have saved $350. (5000*.07). Your total is now $350.
  2. At age 21, you are making $22,000 a year. You can save $560 this year. Your total, including your savings each month since you were 18, is now $3,534.
  3. At age 40, you are making $40,000 a year. You can save $2,800 this year. Your total, including your savings each month since you were 18, is now $78,740.
  4. At age 50, you are making $50,000 a year. You can save $3,500 this year. Your total, including your savings each month since you were 18, is now $198,363.
  5. At age 65, you are making $65,000 a year. You can save $4,550 this year. Your total, including your savings each month since you were 18, is now $647,129!

By age 65 you can retire. The reality is that if you are following this plan diligently, making even slightly more than our numbers work with, or investing say, 10% instead of 7%, your retirement age is going to be much closer to 45-50. By age 65, with this plan, you are making enough income each year as your highest paying salary for the rest of your life. The same plan at 10%/month will give you $1,510,457 by age 65. Comparative to the $3000/month example, you’d be taking out $300 versus $150.

This is a far more organized and stable method of saving money than simply budgeting your financing. While you should have a plan to budget your expenses, the 7% solution is a reliable way to decrease your anxiety about money, avoid wasted expenses in interest payments, and give real freedom and independence to yourself at a comparatively early age.

How It’s All Connected

December 12th, 2009 . Posted in Lifestyle Design, Spiritual Living | No Comments »
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Spirituality and Floral Imagery

We tend to think of spirituality, lifestyle design, and better living as things we “will do” or activities that somehow are outside of our normal spectrum. We make excuses that we don’t have time to meditate, to organize ourselves, to exercise – when in reality these are things that must be simultaneous with our lives, instead of barricaded behind a time or scheduled in.

Spiritual living is not an activity or set of activities, it is a mindset. You do not need to hail from a specific belief system to be spiritual or design your life. The emerging field of lifestyle design (that is gaining so much traction on the internet through blogs like this one) is so powerful because it breaches cultural and religious barriers. It is this field that this blog attempts to encompass, with everything from helpful tips to spiritual guides and recommendations.

At the core of modern living, human beings are normally concerned with self-actualization (improvement and increased awareness of self) on four levels. These are:

  1. Physical – Losing weight, becoming stronger, looking better, exercise, healthy eating, strengthening your immune system – all these fall into this category. These are improvements you make to your body in some way.
  2. Mental - Memory, ideas and brainstorming, overcoming fears, beating procrastination, learning new skills – these are mental improvements.
  3. Financial - Although this is third on this list, for many people it should perhaps be first. Improvements associated with this are obvious – saving money, investing, being frugal in purchases, spending in the right places – these aforementioned encompass some financial improvements.
  4. Spiritual - Often neglected, we define spirituality through many different ways. The easiest way to refer to it for the purposes of this discussion is a sense of peace and purpose, an overall confidence in your direction. Spirituality encompasses a “bird’s eye” sense of life,  that is that like many animist religions, it pervades everything we do, and its progression/regression is directly related to our own success/failure and sense of happiness.

While we will gradually cover all four of these concepts in detail, it is important to note that a single change in one of them will inherently elicit a response in the other three. Can meditation make you more frugal, or improve your memory? Can saving a bit of your paycheck every month make you more spiritual? Absolutely. “Self-improvement” is a mindset, and each step you take to honor your own sense of progression is a step forward in accomplishing improvement in all four of these fields.

So we can no longer say to ourselves that we don’t have time to “be spiritual.” A small act of kindness to yourself or another is being spiritual. Even a slight improvement that takes ten minutes of your day is an improvement across all four fields. We are in a time where sensory input, stagnancy, and depression are at all time highs – and higher than any other time  in the course of human history. Small steps forward for yourself can equate to gigantic gains for society as a whole – for everything you do and teach (positive or negative) is transferred in some way to your immediate relationships, and then beyond that to those people’s own correspondents. A small ripple in the water can change the course of a river.

There is no better time than now to initiate change within ourselves – and we will come to understand that it is the fear of change that binds us. It is my hope that Root of Spirit can help you on that journey.