Meditation 2.0 – The Road to Enlightenment?

You know what I mean, that state of being when you are in your flow, it feels like you are flying high, everything works for you, things just slot into place, you feel so clear minded about your life and everything and everyone in it. You feel, well, happy.

A while back, a friend of ours was asking about meditation as an alternative to the euphoric high induced by certain drugs. He’d heard about the possibility of this clear-minded, joyous state being achieved in quite a natural way through meditation. Not a new connection as many fans of the Beatles and various other music followers of the sixties and seventies will remember.

Until I received an invite to a webcast exploring a new evolution in meditation I had forgotten about this hope that some have for the practice. Certainly it’s possible to achieve a state of joy, enlightenment, euphoria, awakening (whatever best describes it for you), as a result of the type of meditation that is traditionally taught, but it’s not common.

In fact, as was pointed out in the webcast, it’s more likely that you are led to try meditation after stumbling upon a burst of being in that state in a bid to try and reignite it again.

That said, you can achieve that state of joy naturally, at will, and I will explain how.

First a bit of background.

From each one of the trillions of cells in our body to the trillions of stars, planets, moons and everything in between in our cosmos and beyond, we are vibrational energy, or consciousness.

Thought is the creative clay through which we experience life. At last science has caught up with the fact that the vibrational energy created by thought determines your physical experience (Dr Bruce Lipton’s work on Epigenetics makes a good starting point if you are interested in the science of things). Regardless, the concept that you get what you expect in this life is now widely accepted.

Arising simultaneously with each thought is the emotion we attach to it. Given that we each think 60,000-70,000 thoughts each day (and 90% are a repeat of yesterday’s), it’s much easier to monitor whether your thoughts are serving you by simply looking at what you have in your life and how you feel about it.

Think about emotions on a scale of awful to great. Let’s say we start at the depths of despair and hopelessness, and work up through anxiety, shame, sadness, anger, rage, hatred, worry, frustration, impatience, loneliness and doubt to a point of neutrality, of stillness. Prior to the point of neutrality, all of these emotions are low in vibrational energy.

This is not new news, expressions like “carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders”, “bad vibes” and “low energy” are common place.

Then there’s the top end of the scale, working our way up from feelings like faith and hopefulness, through worthiness, light-heartedness, ease, inspiration, confidence, happiness, gratitude and compassion to feelings like love, passion and joy. These are all high in vibrational energy.

​In my article Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success, I explained how making the time to sit and do nothing for 15 minutes each and every day would give you the clarity and confidence to achieve whatever you want to in your life, debunking some of the common meditation myths.

The sad fact is that, as adults, we spend too much of our time in the lower end of the vibrational scale. Our thoughts tend to follow what we are observing, and if we are in a job or relationship we are not entirely happy with, or we have health or financial issues, these dominate our experience. The chances are that many- if not most - of your thoughts about these situations are unlikely to be serving you.

So as you begin to regularly practice meditating, it allows you to become more aware of these thoughts, and that is your starting point. Once you become aware of something, it’s much harder to tolerate it, so you are likely to start seeking out more things that feel good.

Yes, some of the drugs our friend was discussing can cut through all of that and take you to the euphoric state you are seeking. However, there is the down side to that as the effects wear off, and I imagine there is a feeling of powerlessness as you feel you can’t achieve that state on your own.

​Take heart. Our true nature is at the higher end of the scale, it’s only our thoughts that start to depress the vibrational energy. Think of your essential nature like a cork being held below water; if you remove the force holding it, it naturally springs back up again.

If you would like proof, take a look at newborns, full of joy – unless they are not. There is no suppression of emotion at a young age, it’s all there. Wet nappy? Dirty nappy? Tired? Hungry? Hot? Cold? Wanting Comfort? Attend to the need and boom, the joy is back.

Over the years we gradually wear our energy levels down, like tuning in the radio at a lower frequency. Meditation starts to help you spring back to a more neutral point by letting go of the thoughts clouding your experience. Over time as you practice the effect is cumulative, your energy lifts upwards.

True mastery of this occurs when you can be completely grateful for what you have in your life right now, wanting new experiences just for the fun of them rather felling that they are necessary for your happiness. When there is no circumstance that brings you down, you know you have a broader perspective of your life and your vibrational energy is more consistently high.

​For most this is a long journey because it’s our nature to want to ‘do’ something, to strive towards our goals. Yet the irony is that the fastest route to all that you want is to completely surrender. To surrender all that you have taken yourself to be to this point, to let go of whatever image you have of yourself, and every concept, every idea and just be fully present.

Let me use the analogy of young children again. When they are unhappy, there is no doubting it. There is also a natural process of ‘bottoming out’ that happens. When my 3 year old is having a melt down, she cannot calm herself, the train has left the station – more accurately, in the words of Abraham Hicks, she has jumped out the plane without a parachute and the only way is down. There’s too much momentum.

Crying, yelling, tantrums and so on, are all ways in which the body rebalances itself. Left to naturally conclude, it restores a sense of peace. Our inclination is to suppress it, because it makes us feel bad (note, someone who has the kind of mastery I refer to above remains unaffected, holding their vibration high) most of us are holding the cork well beneath the surface.

Some adults when they hit rock bottom, left untreated, the cork has nowhere to go except to shoot straight back upwards; Eckhart Tolle is a great example of this, instant enlightenment. But that is drastic, hard for the body to adjust to, and it’s much easier if you can surrender to your true nature in a more gentle way.

​So being aware of your thoughts and feelings is a first step, feeling good is a second step. I have written much about this second step, because it’s a choice we make in each moment of each day and there are many ways to achieve it. What I liked about the approach (called Meditation 2.0) I heard from Craig Hamilton in his webcast this week, is the gentle nature of it.

​He has developed a very subtle way of evolving traditional meditation that seems to work well. By taking you to a quiet centre of stillness (achieved in most meditative practices), then by gently prompting your focus and intention in the direction of your true nature, your vibration will shift upwards and you will get more out of the practice than you have before.

I imagine the effects are also cumulative, as they are in traditional meditation, it’s just that the aim of the practice is at the higher end of the vibrational scale rather than a point of neutrality.
​
Regardless of the approach you use, your best life awaits, you just need to tune in to pick up its frequency.

​Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or  share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. You can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.