People choose to meditate for many reasons and there is much research to support the benefits of daily investment in this practice. However, the best reason may surprise you...and it is that meditation is a powerful balancing technique and the key to experiencing the highest levels of fulfillment in life.
Meditation's Benefits
A quick Google search reveals that meditation can help alleviate stress symptoms, even help with post-traumatic stress disorder. Meditators may also sleep better, may feel less pain and may enjoy relief from depression. In addition, many individuals credit meditation for the increased energy, improved focus and enhanced creative and thinking abilities which allow them to function more productively in our stress filled world.
These benefits are profound, and may contribute to overall feelings of contentment with life, but there is much more. Most human beings are very fragmented. As life's events and circumstances shift around them they experience mood swings. They may even lash out at others on what they consider a bad day, even close friends.
On the other hand, if you read the biographies of mystics and saints you may admire their ability to achieve and maintain a state of bliss, regardless of the events happening around them. Did you ever wonder how they accomplish this? Are they just naturally that way, able to flow with what is? Are they just born saints?
In fact, they are people, like you and me who have mastered the art of living a life of balance, and a big part of that is a commitment to their daily meditation practice.
Balance Is the Key
The ancient wisdom traditions teach us that we are multi-dimensional beings who are much more than just our physical bodies. Further, those who live a truly happy and fulfilled life are able to access the subtle dimensions beyond the physical for the wisdom to be at their best, day after day, regardless of what is happening.
How is that related to balance?
Have you ever had one of those days which started out great before everything went downhill? You got out of bed looking forward to a productive day, enjoyed your first cup of coffee and told yourself what a wonderful life you have.
Then suddenly you noticed that while you were asleep your dog was sick on your new sofa, or maybe you spilled some of that gourmet coffee on your best suit, or you received a text message that the deal you thought you closed yesterday is now questionable or worse yet the buyer backed out completely.
How do you respond? Do you say yes to what is? Or no? Many (maybe most) people would resist what is, saying things like "It's not fair, I worked too hard on that deal for it to fall through," or "What's wrong with me?" "I can't believe how sloppy I am? " or "Why didn't the dog at least choose the floor?"
In other words, you engage with the negativity and try to push it away. Maybe you can't let it go and you take it with you on the road where you have a near accident or into the office where you snarl at a co-worker or speak sharply to your assistant. This is you out of balance mentally and emotionally. If you respond to stress by eating sugar or upping your caffeine intake, this will put you out of balance physically as well exacerbating the negative spiral.
Now consider what happens when you have a critical decision pending, or need to make an important presentation to a big client at work or get a call from your child's principal requesting your immediate presence to deal with an issue.
How effectively are you able to access your higher wisdom when caught up in a negative day? How well do you think you will be able to flow with what happens? To meet these challenges, will you react with understanding when a client cancels an appointment or will you make a sarcastic comment and hang up on them? Will you feel compassion towards the principal, or blame them for your child's misbehavior?
Thousands of years of experience have taught us that accessing the more subtle aspects of our multi-dimensionality, the mystical or higher mind part of who we are so that we flow with rather than resist what is, requires that we first be in a state of balance. We need to start with balancing not just our physical bodies, but also our mind and emotions. Otherwise we react on auto-pilot, cut off from the higher part of ourselves.
Achieving Balance
Physical balance requires eating well, and getting plenty of exercise. Mental and emotional balance are about choosing thoughts and feelings, that result in a conscious shift of focus in a positive direction as soon as you are aware of any negativity.
Obviously this is difficult, if not impossible, to do when right in the middle of a challenging incident. So, prepare by daily practicing mental and emotional balance using positive affirmations, keeping a gratitude journal, and regularly flowing feelings of love through your heart area as you focus on your breathing.
These are all effective tools for achieving balance, and represent essential starting points. However, the most powerful tool of all is meditation. Meditation balances the objective world you operate in every day, your so called "outside" world with that which is within. Unlike your outer world which is light and bright and frequently hyperactive and demanding, your inner world is calm, peaceful, deep, dark and slow.
Non-meditators experience this part of themselves when they sleep. Meditators increase their exposure and their balance by committing to a daily practice.
The mystics who are able to flow with what is, offering no resistance, all have meditation at the core of their spiritual life. In most cases their results reflect years and years of daily meditation for many hours a day, in circumstances that most contemporary people would find intimidating... like isolated monasteries or obscure caves in far off mountains.
Today, contemporary forms of meditation utilize technology to enhance the experience and make it accessible and relevant to people living a demanding Western lifestyle. The result is the same, increased balance, the foundation for the fulfillment we all seek.
Master Charles Cannon Website -- http://mastercharlescannon.com
To learn more about Master Charles Cannon and all of his other work, visit -- http://synchronicity.org including High-Tech Meditation.