Meditation: Living a Successful and Peaceful Life: Personal Health, Relationship, Self-Esteem

56 Pages·2015·0.49 MB·English

by  Jackson, Joanna

MEDITATION: LIVING A SUCCESSFUL AND
PEACEFUL LIFE

Personal Health, Relationship, Self-
Esteem, and Happiness
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 – The Voyage from one world to another
Chapter 2 – Introduction to Meditation
Chapter 3 – On the road to Kathmandu
Chapter 4 – Meditative Breathing
Chapter 5 – Introducing the Missing Element
Chapter 6 – Judgment
Chapter 7 – The Celebration of Meditation
Chapter 8 – Coming Home
Chapter 9 – How Meditation Helps Self Esteem and Self Awareness
Chapter 10 – Mindfulness and it’s benefits to your wellbeing
Chapter 11 - Recommended reading Chapter
Chapter 12 – Bonus Recommended Products
Conclusion
Check out my other books
Introduction

My journey into the world of meditation began on a hill in Tibet. There was
something spiritual that I was seeking when my voyage began and I was not sure
what it was. With life taking me on all kinds of twists and turns, I found that I
was questioning the value of western philosophy and wanting to embrace
something more meaningful in my life. We are taught from a very young age to
achieve. We go through the process of graduating throughout our educational
life and then go on into the workplace to discover that the strife for success is
still very much alive and kicking. In fact, we have to work even harder. What
was wrong with my life was that it was taking twists and turns without me. How
can that happen?

Well, it’s actually quite easy and it happens to a lot of people. Doors open and
because of western philosophy, we are considered successful if we take the
opportunity and go through that door on the next stage of our careers. However,
what people are finding more and more confusing is how to balance personal
and work life and to make sense of it all. You’re too tired after work to give your
best to your loved ones. You are too exhausted by all of the demands placed on
you and if you don’t keep up with them, you fail. That’s the process and we are
all apt to go along with it because we are also taught that we must strive to
succeed. However, my trip to Tibet was to get away as far as possible from this
competitive rat race and find out what I wanted from my life. In the same way,
people with self-esteem issues have the same kind of problems. People expect
those people to act in a certain way and if they don’t, they are criticized and
made to feel less of a person. After a lifetime of criticism, a human being can
feel that they are worthless and question the validity of the judgment passed
upon them. Getting away from the material world was my way to escape what I
saw as a very unsatisfactory life, though your escape could be more local than
that. The hill that overlooks your town could give you equal inspiration just as
the shoreline first thing in the morning can.

In a very similar way to others and with a broken relationship behind me, I
wanted to fix me. Success and peace do not frequently go hand in hand but I had
heard that they could. This trip was my effort to see how this was at all possible.
This was the ace up my sleeve and perhaps my escape from the competitive
world and I believed that being among people whose philosophy was so different
from that of our society might enrich me, but I had no idea how much. In a
retreat in a distant country, I was about to find out that my failures were indeed
my own failures and that no one else could be blamed for them. I also learned
how to face my demons and get rid of those hang-ups because not only is the
blame mine and mine alone, so is the remedy.

I had chosen my path in life but I was unaware of other doors which could have
been opened and which could have made the course of my life much more
successful and happy. What I sought was peace but I didn’t expect to find it.
How can you find peace when your mind is always in turmoil? Being on the
foothills of Tibet and standing in front of a temple, I felt this overwhelming need
to find out how monks with seemingly very little to eat were among the happiest
people I had ever met and I wanted to find out why. It’s easy to be positive in an
environment which encourages it, though when I went home to my bed at night,
I could not escape my thoughts and that was where my life was going wrong. It’s
also the place where most people’s lives go astray which is why this book was
written. I feel strongly that those with self-esteem issues or troubles carried from
the past can find solace within the words of this book because my experience
pointed me in the right direction.

My discovery came as a little bit of a shock to the system, but what I found was
a discovery that I can’t wait to share with readers because the voyage into the
world of meditation was a difficult one for me, as it will be to people who are
accustomed to deep thought processes. What I had never imagined for one
moment was that through meditation, I was actually able to dig deeper, to
achieve more, to be happier and to find answers that my mind on its own was
never able to find. The problems that befall people from the western world are
universal and it is hoped that my experience will help someone, even one person,
in seeking answers. When you find them, as I did, life really does show all of its
glory and you don’t need to go to Tibet to find those answers because I have
included them within the pages of this book to help you along your journey. I
took the hard work out of it, although if you ever do get the opportunity to go to
a retreat in Tibet, the experience was eye opening.
The book also highlights how you can incorporate meditation into your life as a
gradual process and gain a lot of peace of mind from it. You will also see from
my own experience and of course, yours, that meditation helps you to achieve
more, rather than less. This process is explained. I just wanted to include that in
the introduction because your energy levels increase, your mind power increases
and you find yourself not panicking about tight deadlines any more when you
start to put yourself first and find that nice place where meditation takes you.
You also gain a sense of who you are and are not really that put out if that does
not conform to other people’s expectations, since your own expectations of self
are far more important in the order of things. I used to think what people thought
of me was a reflection of who I was. However, it wasn’t. It’s the way that I
accept those messages from other people that made me see myself in a less than
positive light. That’s where most of us make our mistakes.

Throughout the chapters of this book, you can take my journey with me and
discover for yourself what meditation does and how it works and why it works,
even in a busy society that encourages success. It is explained because readers
don’t just need to know how to do it – their inquiring minds will also want to
know why it does it and feel the benefits of meditation themselves and
understand those feelings.
When you discover the secrets held within these pages, you discover something
that can last you a lifetime. You discover peace of mind. You discover happiness
with who you are and you are able to go through your life with a different
attitude because that’s what meditation does to you. I didn’t know it when I
arrived at the airport that this trip would change who I was for the rest of my life
and that indeed it would be my choices that were responsible for those changes.
However, each of us has the life that we live in our own hands and we are able to
change our perceptions and make that life the exact lifestyle that we want to live.
You just need to learn how.
There are some things that you cannot know until you try them and this book
explores how you can find inner peace and tranquility even in the western world,
by looking in the right places. You don’t need to look for the validation of others
to be happy and satisfied in your life because when you find that level of self-
sufficiency, that validation is meaningless. As long as you are your authentic self
and are happy with that self, then the rest is a matter of adjusting the way that
you take in external messages and live your life.
If you are looking for peace, it’s not as far away from your life as you may
suppose and you have all of the powerful tools to find that peace within yourself.
On a Tibetan hill, a long way away from home, I found that peace and wish to
share it with anyone who is willing to learn. The prayer flags that fluttered
against the Tibetan skyline were the beginning of a new understanding, one that
took me away from what I saw as my area of comfort, but indeed showed me
that your own area of comfort and happiness isn’t in your surroundings, nor in
the people that you mix with. They lie inside of you waiting to be discovered and
that’s where meditation will help you to unlock that power that enables you to
find a peaceful existence and acceptance of self.
Buddhism is a philosophy, rather than a religion, and will certainly not detract
from any religious belief that you have. You can work through this book and
find your way and still follow your chosen religion, so do not be alienated by the
fact that the book draws on experience gained within a Buddhist community.
You do not have to be a Buddhist to reap the benefits of the philosophy of the
Buddhists which predates the birth of Christ by two centuries. Those who follow
this path will indeed find themselves and will like what they find – because the
answers to life’s happiness have always been there. They have simply remained
obscure because you choose other priorities. It’s time to change all of that and
see life for what it really is. Tibet opened my eyes to life. It took away all of my
self-consciousness and made me into an extremely self-sufficient and happy
human being.
Chapter 1 – The Voyage From One World to Another

When you take a plane out of your own country, you look toward the Earth
below you and among all the blue skies, there are always going to be little white
clouds. I looked at these in the same way as I would look at rainclouds. Having
recently divorced, these rain clouds were likened to the kind of experience that
happens just when your life seems settled and that throw rain on your parade. I
had been the last person to suspect that the marriage was nearing its end and it
had come as a shock to me. This book isn’t about me, but my experiences will
help to explain about meditation and why people choose this route within their
lives and the good that it can do in circumstances such as those that I found
myself in. There were always moments of self-doubt. When you partner is
unfaithful to you, it’s quite common that he/she will make you feel that you are
responsible for their actions. This eats away at who you are and erodes your
sense of security and faith in yourself, but it isn’t the only kind of event that can
do that. There are many events in life that give people a complex about who they
are. In the western world we put great stock in how people look, how they dress
and how they conform to images we see in magazines and on the television.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that there are so many people suffering from self-
esteem issues. They feel that they do not match up to society’s expectations and
that’s exactly the way I felt as I took that plane journey to another world.

I had chosen a book by Elizabeth Gilbert as a travel companion entitled “Eat,
Pray, Love” and it told the story of her voyage that was very similar to my own.
Her choice of venue was different, though she found herself traveling to
countries far away in search of something – not really having a clear view of
what it was that she was seeking – a bit like me. The trouble is that there are so
many things that can make you unhappy in life. There are also things that we are
encouraged to strive for and when the foundations of your life are ripped away
by circumstance, there’s a need to find peace and calm in the storm to give you
the strength, the peace of mind and the resolution to actually start over. It’s the
same in any set of circumstances, whether you are too stressed, too overwhelmed
by life in general or have gone through some metamorphosis in your life that
makes you question the life that you are living. Similarly, people with self-
esteem issues left over from school days or from their upbringing may find