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Meditation has many health benefits and is a highly effective way to release stress and maintain a healthier lifestyle.
Over time it builds self-discipline, promotes healthier coping mechanisms, improves self-image and awareness, helps people make better choices in life, compartmentalize and focus; and overall has a transformative effective on one’s experience relating to stress. Meditation is quite simple in nature yet transcends thought when one controls the monkeys. Buddha refers to distraction as monkeys vying for our attention, hence the phrase “the monkey mind”. When people are in a deep meditative state, they exist in the moment, and in that moment, time is suspended. They go beyond consciousness and are gifted with the whisper of the divine where compassion, respectfulness and forgiveness are strengthened, We now know that people from all the corners of the world, in whatever position they hold meditate to relieve stress. It is a practice that has both spiritual connections and has many expressions. It has been scientifically shown to lower blood pressure, aid with sleep, improve memory and help manage pain. People meditate as a:
The basic principles of meditative practice has four elements
There is no doubt we will be distracted during meditation. We need to recognize these as being part of our lives. By recognizing the distractions we give ourselves permission to remove them and get back to focus.
Thank you for Reading, Richard Fontanie (This is an excerpt from Stressology 200: The Remedies: Meditation. “Stressology: Stress Care for Today” is an eight-hour Masterclass and can be found in the Storefront, or you may consider becoming a Member of FORTIS where “Stressology: Stress Care for Today” is included in your membership fee.)
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 Your thoughts determine how you live your life. They become your mindset and outlook, which impacts your actions, which changes the outcomes of your life. Your thoughts inform your beliefs about you and your relationships with others. Whatever you believe about yourself and others, then, can become your perceived reality. Do you have dreams about where you would like to be in life? If you want to manifest those dreams and desires into life, you first have to believe that you can succeed. Once you think that you can achieve what you set out to do, your mind begins looking for solutions to problems rather than obstacles and challenges. The opposite is also true. If you believe you won’t succeed, you have set yourself up for finding blocks to your success. So, what happens when you believe negative thoughts about yourself? How Negative Thinking Manifests Itself If you think you can’t and if you focus on your faults and live in fear of possible outcomes in what you want to do, it impairs your ability to achieve your intended goals. When you think negatively about yourself and say such things as, “I don’t deserve to succeed”, you set yourself up to become less motivated to succeed. Every time you come across something that is an obstacle to your success, you will think that is what you deserve and will likely give up trying. When you do this you are lowering your self-esteem and you can end up settling for less because you don’t believe you deserve to actually achieve your dreams. In short, you’ll keep getting in your own way until you fulfill your prophecy about your ability to achieve your goal. How to Turn Negative Thinking into Positive Beliefs Set the Tone The first step to changing negative beliefs into positive manifestations is to quiet your mind and connect with yourself. Starting your day with a positive frame of mind is crucial and it will set the tone for your entire day. Before getting into the tasks of your day, engage in quiet meditation. Meditation will help you focus your thoughts, calm your anxieties and fears, and create room in your mind and heart for positive thoughts. Through meditation you touch silence, your inner self and the Spirit that makes you whole. It teaches you the 'interconnectedness' of all that exists as a sense of oneness. Some refer to this phenomenon as the coming together of the universe, others understand it as the dynamic grace of a loving God within all that exists. Clarify Your Vision Knowing what you want is vital to positively manifesting your goals. Focus on your bigger picture and what it is you are trying to accomplish. If you want to live a purposeful life, picture in your mind’s eye that purpose and visualize yourself actually having accomplished it. It is your vision that will drive you to a successful end. Now, every time you need to make a decision, ask yourself, does this get me closer to realizing my vision or goal? Is this helping me to manifest my vision? If not, it’s not worth your time, so move on. Negative thoughts don’t have a place in this process, and they certainly don’t contribute to your ability to fulfill your goals. Practice Gratitude Learning to be thankful for what you have in life is crucial for manifesting your dreams. When you are grateful for your abilities and achievements, you begin to love yourself more and strengthen your confidence in your ability to achieve your goals. Shift your energy toward gratitude, and you will notice that you will feel better about yourself and will have an improved focus for attaining your goals. (See my post on gratitude here) Feed Yourself With Positivity Staying positive is the key to manifesting what you want in life. Your negative thoughts about yourself will get in the way every time as your brain finds ways to make your fears and negative beliefs come true. If you believe you will fail, you will fail. If you think you don’t deserve happiness, you don’t deserve happiness. Focusing on positivity and working towards your goals means changing the way you feel about yourself so that you can make your dreams a reality. The bottom line in all of this is how your mind works. In order to eliminate negative thinking you will need to reprogram our mind. The good news is that you already have the power within you to do it. All you need to do is open the door to a better way. Manifest what you want in life by changing how you think. Release all that power within you. Go here to find a way to reprogram your thinking. Final Thoughts How you think about yourself powerfully impacts your everyday decisions, which will influence your dream and the goals you set out to achieve them. Instead of believing the worst in yourself, chose to think only the best. It just may be your elixir for a better and more prosperous life. Thank you for reading, Richard P Fontanie  Has this ever happened to you? You were thinking about a problem and no matter how hard you focus it seems that you're stuck. You've gone over the problem several times. You have tried to redefine it. You’ve looked at it from different angles. It seems that no matter what you do and regardless of when you think about the problem, nothing seems to happen.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that your conscious mind can easily get stuck in a holding pattern. If you've ever been on a plane that was trying to land at a busy airport, you probably have had the experience of being on holding pattern. Your plane would circle around a city several times delaying the moment of your arrival. When the runway clears and your plane is given the green light to land, your pilot will then break the holding pattern and start the descent. That’s how air traffic controllers organize planes for a safe landing. It's not much different from your thoughts. When your mind is burning precious energy trying to achieve some sort of breakthrough because you find yourself at an impasse, it goes into a holding pattern. It's as if you can't think of anything new. You just keep revisiting the same things over and over again. The mind works in almost the same way when you lose your keys. When was the last time you lost your keys? I’m willing to bet that when you were looking for your keys, you kept checking at the places that you checked before. At the back of your head, you know that your keys aren't there. After all, you just checked it a few minutes before, but you can't help yourself to keep checking in the same place over and over again. Maybe you just didn't look properly. Perhaps it's stuck somewhere in the back. Possibly, you just didn’t pay enough attention so you keep repeating the same pattern. That's how your mind works. Unfortunately, this habit doesn't get us any closer to the solution. How can it? You keep revisiting the same process. As the old saying goes, insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results each time. How can you achieve different results when you're doing the same thing? When you focus on the present moment, you get the chance to focus on your issues right here, right now. In other words, you can train all your creative and imaginative resources to the right problem at the right time and at the right place. This is definitely better than worrying sick about stuff that may or may not happen or, worse yet, crying over spilled milk. By learning to tap the present moment through mindfulness or meditation practices, you start looking at your situation differently. The reason why this happens is because your subconscious mind enters the picture. Your subconscious mind is very powerful. It enables you to achieve breakthroughs when you thought these were simply not possible. By the way tapping into your subconscious mind may be the first step towards connecting with your spiritual self. Watch for more information and how to tap into your subconscious mind next month. Thanks for reading, Richard P. Fontanie |
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