Over the past few millennia we have been introduced to meditation. Our teachers have taught us how to become aware of our bodies and our minds. This awareness has helped us foster a better understanding of our own thoughts and actions, both within ourselves, as well as with those, and even the universe around us.
Meditation has even allowed some to peer past the veil of existence to see what lays beyond.
Those same teachers have, through faiths like Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, taught us the art of compassion, love, and kindness. While their philosophies do not always overlap, they do interconnect through the paths of meditation and awareness.
For those of you who choose the path of meditation, you are often rewarded with an understanding and a sense of growing enlightenment. Each of which enables you to grow beyond yourself. The further you follow this path, the more you are able to move beyond the sense balance and calm you initially sought. In time you may even find a level of insight which will free you to cultivate wisdom free from oversight.
It is this insight that opens up an entire future where you are free to explore.
Simply knowing this gives me hope for the future. While it is not in my hands, it is there in my heart.
Thanks to the methodology of Western science, the physical and psychological effects of meditation have been proven ad-infinitum. With this approval, meditation is now being taught to children in schools and to employees at work. Both of whom are showing greater compassion and understanding for those and the world around them.
It gives me hope that we are building a foundation of peace for the next generation. I do not say this lightly, but if it is not for you that you meditate, then it is for your children and their children after, that you meditate. That with our energy, you can in fact leave the world a better place than when you arrived.
This is why it is so important to go beyond the self, to go beyond your own stress and unhappiness, and to look at the bigger picture -- so that you truly realize how your actions are moving the world in a better direction.
So when I am asked by a student, "What is next?" I smile. For that answer is not found in yourself. It is found in everything and everybody around you. It is knowing that when you hit someone, you are also hitting yourself, a smack that you will carry with you for years to come. It is found not just in one bottom line of Profit, but in a triple bottom line that balances People, Planet and Profits for the future.
"What is next?" Next is using the stability and clarity that you have gained to develop your own wisdom and to share it with those around you. And by wisdom, I mean the wisdom of the heart and the mind. For it is in that wisdom that you will find your divine. Not within yourself, but in the connections you enjoy with the those around you and with all of existence.
Keep that in mind if you ever ask yourself why you meditate. Or more likely, if that 40,000-year-old brain of yours ever asks you what you are doing, while shooting in some adrenaline and cortisol to get you worrying that you have better, more immediate tasks to do.
The next time you question what you are doing, simply stop. Simply dip your toe in the water of meditation with three simple breaths. Let those three breaths lead you to wade into the pool of calm as you leave the world crashing in the waves behind you.
Let yourself be carried away in the gentle currents of Love that you will quickly remember is meditation.