Why We Meditate
Bring your soul back home
You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the ocean in a drop
Our soul wants to go home; meditation is the path that brings our soul home.
Until we bring our soul home, our innate restlessness will not go away. When we do, we will find happiness, peace & freedom. Our soul is part of the Universal Soul, this is its home, this is where it belongs.
The pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human drive, hard-wired into us from birth. Our desire for happiness fuels our thoughts & actions. However, our mind & body often look for happiness & freedom in different places from our heart & soul, and sometimes this leads to conflict.
It is this conflict, when the thoughts & actions of our mind & body do not align with the needs & desires of our heart & soul, that we experience disharmony & dissonance, and this is often the cause of emotional suffering.
We are all eternal souls born into a mind & body that has evolved since the dawn of life, and each of us must find a way for our mind & body to live in harmony with our heart & soul.
We are born with fundamental human drives, yet in the West we find it difficult to accept that each of us carries the baggage of previous incarnations. What we can agree on though is the concept of conditioning, we are conditioned from birth by both our nature & nurture.
Our conditioning leads each of us to develop individual tendencies, where a tendency is a natural inclination to think or act in a certain way. It is these tendencies that fuels our habits, desires, and temperament.
Our conditioning & tendencies steer our thoughts & actions in habitual directions to satisfy our needs & desires. It is the outcome of our thoughts & actions that drives our emotional state, this is the way we feel about ourselves, others, and the world around us.
Under the same circumstances, on some days we feel happy & fulfilled, and yet on other days we feel utterly dejected & miserable, such is the consequence of living our life at the whim of our thoughts. This constant see-saw of emotions sucks the life out of the best of us, leaving us further at the mercy of our thoughts and reactions.
Thoughts are good servants but poor masters.
Resigned to living reactively at the behest of our thoughts, our massive potential withers. We, the creatures of vast oceans, resign ourselves to our fate in the goldfish bowl.
We can unleash our mind and harness its power to live a life of fulfilment & achievement. We can bring our soul home to where it belongs. Meditation is the way.
Meditation is taming our flow of consciousness.
Consciousness is the flow of life, we experience its existence daily in the changing landscape of our thoughts & emotions. We swing from elation to despair, when nothing outside seems to have changed at all.
Meditation helps to straighten out the knots in our consciousness. It helps to calm the tides of emotions that afflict us in the ocean of life. To tap into our full potential we must go beyond the incessant chattering of our mind, first we have to wipe the slate clean.
The only way to taste the fruits of meditation is to do it right, to do it properly.
We can find a way for our mind & body to live in harmony with our heart & soul. We can experience real & lasting happiness & freedom. Let’s follow the guidance of the gurus and yogis that have gone before us, let’s follow the path of meditation together.
*The above is a distillation of the Introduction of ‘a million Thoughts’, by Om Swami. It is the book that we will use as guidance to begin & build our meditation practice together. I hope you join me.