The Universe Beyond Science: My Spiritual Journey

Meditation, Mindfulness & Friendliness

Meditation, Mindfulness & Friendliness. These 3 are some of the ways to achieve Self-Realization.

At first, I thought meditation was easy. All I have to do is to sit in a yoga position, relax my body and not to think of anything. I was wrong. I am a human being. I have earthly responsibilities like getting a job, earn money so I can survive the day and be able to do the things I love like travelling, etc. But when the mind is too busy, it's hard to meditate at night. I started to lessen my earthly activities. I don't chat much with my friends anymore. I love music. I sing, composed songs. I play guitar and try to learn piano. I want to learn foreign languages. Write a book. Originally, I wanted to do so many things. But slowly, I gave up all these, one by one. Except the job of course because I need money.

I am a daydreamer person. Daydreaming makes me happy. In my imagination, I can be whoever I wanted to be and live the life I want I can never have in this physical realm. So switching to meditation takes a lot of work and practice.

I started to apply mindfulness while doing my daily chores. The main purpose here is to stop the mind from thinking and just focus on what I am presently doing. In this way, meditating at night will be a lot easier.

How do I meditate? And when do I do it?

I meditate at night before I go to sleep or sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and having a hard time going back to sleep. Or when I wake up too early in the morning. 

I sit in a yoga position. I make sure that my body is comfortable. I close my eyes and focus on the breathing only. I breath normally. Don't follow your breathing or try to prolong or shorten it. I just focus on the air that's coming out from the nostrils. At first I can do it for 5 minutes long, then 10, then 20 and so on.

During meditation, especially when you go deeper and longer into it, you can feel different sensations. It's hard to explain but it feels really good. You will start to hear your heart beat loudly. You will hear this cricket sound like but just very mild and it's just in your ears.

After more than 10 years of doing it regularly, I felt a big change in my whole personality. These changes are very subtle and gradual. I noticed, I became more intuitive, more energy sensitive. I can already see visions in my dreams even before I started meditating but this time, the visions are more frequent, prominent. 

I have more self control now. I slowly learned to be more calmer to the point that I don't give much reactions to almost anything. Those things that can easily irritate me before,  I just shrugged it off. My point is, If I get mad and yell, will it change things? Will it solve the problem? I will only waste my precious energy on things that I cannot change or no control with. 

I chose to feel love and happiness only. I slowly started to unfamiliarized myself with these negative emotions, anger, hatred, envy, sadness, etc. After all, these negative emotions are just our egos. God is LOVE. And our soul or consciousness is part of him. Therefore, our original self which is the soul is LOVE. But we forgot all about it because of this physical body, the illusion.

Before I took this path, I am familiar with the feeling of emptiness. I felt it once or twice sometime in my life and I don't like that feeling. It makes me feel so lonely and alone and I feel like I will go crazy. That feeling of emptiness, I never felt it anymore. Even if I am alone, my heart feels full and happy and contented. I actually enjoy being alone now. I feel at peace. Except when travelling. I prefer to have companion when I travel. It's for safety reason and of course, at least someone can take nice photos of me.

Now I understand why some people became shopaholic, or get addicted to games, etc. When you buy something, it makes you happy. But if you notice, that happiness is only temporary. The next few days you are lonely again.

The happiness that these earthly materials can give us are just temporary. Even those people who are happily married, with amazing careers and lovely kids, sometime in their lives, they felt empty. The only one that can fill that emptiness completely and permanently is GOD. I believe that, that feeling of emptiness was like programmed in our consciousness. It's the way for our soul to find HIM. Meditation is the best way to connect to him intimately. 

One time during my meditation, I think I went deeper into it. I came to a point where I can't feel my body anymore. It's like my head was floating in the air but I can't feel my body. Means, I didn't feel those anxieties, pains, anything that our body normally feels. At that time, I only felt pure happiness. It was intoxicating and addicting I wanted to cry. I want to stay in that state for eternity. Then in span of second I came back. And I was like...Oh noo I just want to stay at that moment. I don't want to go back. After that experience, no matter how busy I can be with my earthly responsibilities, meditation will always be important to me as much as I breath, eat or sleep.

Friendliness. Feeling compassion to all living and non living things. Everything is energy. Even the rocks has energy. Each of them has purpose in this existence and we have to respect them, not to destroy or abuse them.  After all, all of us are just transients here on this planet. We own nothing, we own no one.