Question: I have a very busy mind. It keeps wandering when I try to meditate. How can I meditate when I am not able to shut off my mind? Sampriya: The short answer is: it is not possible or necessary to control your mind in order to meditate. There is a persistent and pervasive myth keeping countless people from enjoying their own Meditation practice. It is the belief that one needs to empty or control the mind in order to meditate. This misconception is due to unfortunate translations and lack of understanding of the original yogic scriptures as much as to the nature of the mind itself. The h ..read more

Question: Even though I have been on the path of Meditation for a while, I am still suffering. Unease and worries are always in the background. They make coping with daily life a challenge. Will that ever change? Sampriya: As human beings we don't want to suffer. From an early age we are told that we should have a good life; a life that is supposed to be easy and free from worries. Society tells us that in pursuing our wants and desires we can rightfully expect the results to be happiness and ease. Thus, when suffering does occur, as it inevitably will, we want to get away from it as quickly a ..read more

This simple yet powerful quote by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes both - the human predicament as well as the solution that is in everyone's reach. The human predicament is to believe that we are human beings needing to strive to become spiritual. It implies that we are confined to a human form and the limited understanding of the mind, and that we somehow need to become something more or something better. The widespread affliction of feeling that we are "not good enough" has its roots in this misunderstanding. The solution is to be found in the second part of the statement: "we are Spir ..read more

Pure Love is infinite and omnipresent. It has no beginning and no end. Pure Love is all-encompassing and all-permeating, free from need, want or expectation - it is Freedom itself. Pure Love is the Source of everything in manifestation, for it is the essence, the power and the expression of the Divine. Without Pure Love there is no world and no breath to give life to all the manifested beings. Pure Love is the power that creates and animates every form, thought and movement. Through its power of creation, It gives life to all of manifestation yet it never becomes anything other than Pure Love ..read more

For a meditator, Vivek, the power to discriminate between the Unchanging and the ever-changing, is an absolute necessity. Without it s/he is eternally caught in the wheel of the mind that can only discriminate within the duality of its limited spectrum. The mind will know the difference between good and bad, black and white, right or wrong and especially between what it likes and doesn't like. In other words, the mind has the ability to discriminate within the dimension of the ever-changing waking state, but it can't go beyond. In everyday life, our attention is focused exclusively on the cha ..read more

All relationships are subject to fluctuations. Be it family relations, friendships or intimate relationships, they go through cycles of harmony and disharmony, peace and conflict. Sometimes the disagreements are such that we'd rather move on to a different relationship than deal with the challenge in front of us. We believe that somewhere else the grass is greener and therefore a new relationship will be easier and more peaceful. In this equation we forget that the difficulty does not stem from a person or from our relationship with them. It comes from the fact that our mind is filled with ma ..read more

In these uncertain times, many feel like they are at a breaking point. They are afraid that they can't take much more pressure without the risk of falling apart. The human mind interprets such distressing feelings as a precursor to something ominous. From the perspective of the Self, we have the possibility to consider an entirely different scenario. What if we were to treat it as breaking open instead of breaking down, as falling into who we really are, instead of falling apart? What we are trying to hold together so desperately is the sense of existing as the individual person we are famili ..read more

My teacher used to say: "you know that you are the Light of the Self, but you don't accept it". He was right of course. We accept that we are a human being every morning upon waking up and we practice and confirm it with every breath we take. We accept the story in our mind as the sole truth of our existence just because it is there. Even though we know that the sun is shining above the clouds, we accept the rain and the fact that we are getting wet as the only reality... In the same way and with the same awareness that we accept our human form every morning, we can accept that our True Natur ..read more

This simple yet powerful quote by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes both - the human predicament as well as the solution that is in everyone's reach. The human predicament is to believe that we are human beings needing to strive to become spiritual. It implies that we are confined to a human form and the limited understanding of the mind, and that we somehow need to become something more or something better. The widespread affliction of feeling that we are "not good enough" has its roots in this misunderstanding. The solution is to be found in the second part of the statement: "we are Spir ..read more

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