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Applied Meditation: How to Make Changes in Your Everyday Life with Meditation, by A. Paul Miller, PhD

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Do you meditate? Or, do you wonder why people bother with meditation? After all, most of us are not concerned with reaching some higher plane of existence or gaining some "special powers." We have relationships to maintain, jobs to perform, and bills to pay. Meditation does provide us with some tranquil time, but we still have to function in this world—and cannot, therefore, go floating around in some "la-la" frame of mind. So, what does meditation really provide us? What if, we are able to not only reach our personal meditative goals, but also see the growth and change that is actively occurring?

If I, personally, were to have a personal growth goal, it would be about connecting with more peace and fulfillment in my life. So, how do I achieve that? How can my meditative practice help me to get them pragmatically? I want to be able to do it in a targeted way and not just left to the winds of fate...but how?

It seems like, even after thousands of years of teachings by enlightened beings, we are still living at the whim of our internal baggage. I wanted a practical, accessible meditation technique that worked within my daily life, and that did not entail spending extended time in a forest or ashram—but how? These where the questions I asked myself as I set about trying to create a method for finding more peace and fulfillment in my life—which, once developed, I called Applied Meditation.

What is Applied Meditation? I mean actively using our meditative practice to make pragmatic, trackable changes in our lives, rather than only passively by just doing the practice of meditation.

Many years ago I was in a very difficult place in my life. I had just been laid off from my engineering job, and needed to get my stress levels back down to a normal level. (The fact that I even had these thoughts about stress levels is a damning statement about how we are living our lives today.) I had heard that meditation was a way to lower stress levels, so I started my quest to learn how to do it.

Never quite sure what a successful meditation was supposed to "feel" like, I tried several techniques to experience that "magic feeling" that everybody seems to talk about. The problem was that I had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling. Was it "floaty?" Present (whatever that is supposed to feel like)? Peaceful? Calm? Still (which, for the life of me, I had no idea what was supposed to feel like)? So I went back to the basics, to find a practice that held my attention enough that my mind did not keep wandering off. In this case it was focusing on a candle flame. After trying this for a couple of weeks I noticed that I felt very different inside after meditating. I wanted to understand what it was that I was feeling, so I sat down and asked myself how would I describe how I feel inside to someone else. By asking myself that question it helped me to get a more tangible connection to the feelings. I avoided words like "good," "nice," "better," and "relaxed," as they were too generic and could easily apply to how I felt with a tub of ice cream or a bar of chocolate. After experiencing the feelings over several practices I concluded that I felt peaceful, calm, and...there was another feeling, what was it? My mind was not racing; in fact, it felt like someone had just pushed the pause button on it. I asked myself, how does my mind feel? What does "pause" feel like? As I sat there trying to pick a word to describe the feeling, it suddenly hit me—still! Wow, this is what stillness felt like! I then wondered, had I just succeeded in meditating "correctly?" I thought about it for a bit, and then decided that it did not matter—the point was that I felt as though I was in a much better place with my feelings. I wanted a catchy phrase to describe these feelings so that in my journal I could refer to them without having to keep writing out all three descriptions. I thought about it for a few days and came up the phrase, "the Meditative Feeling." (Yes, that was as good a description as any, I thought.)

So, I now had a technique that helped me to create this new "space" inside myself where I was more at peace with myself and the world around me. However, I noticed that after a short time I went back into my old, discordant mode of how I thought, behaved, and felt. At this point I wondered, what was the point of meditating? Sure, I felt good while I was doing it, but it only lasted for a short time. So what was the point of it all? Then, the logical, engineering part of me came to the fore. I thought to myself, what if I were to treat the Meditative Feeling as a platform for change? I knew that while I was experiencing the Meditative Feeling my perceptions of myself and the world were less judgmental, and that I felt more resilient against the chaotic, tidal flow of the world around me. There must be a way that I can use this feeling to make active, tangible changes in my life rather than the passive ones that would come from just doing the practice of meditation.

There had to be a way that I could use this Meditative Feeling. I just had to sit down, contemplate a bit, and logically figure it out. These became my first few steps into the development of the Applied Meditation process.

The first consideration was how to maintain the feeling—that is, the Meditative Feeling—outside of the practice. If not, all I'd be doing was trying to change but doing so with my old discordant thoughts and feelings, which would feel the same as trying to push wet spaghetti up a hill. So, I needed a place and time when I was not having to rush to do anything after the practice. I decided that mediating on a morning at home was a good starting point. I would practice for ten minutes, first thing, and then get on with the rest of my day. I did not need any longer, as I could create the Meditative Feeling within that time. However, if I wanted to stay longer with the feeling, I would just stay there and enjoy it, but the primary goal was to simply create it. I made it into a game. Do my practice and then get ready for work or do a few odd jobs around the apartment, checking in with myself to see if I still felt the Meditative Feeling. In the beginning it would only be for a few minutes. I would write this down in my journal, and over a period of several weeks, noticed I was holding the feeling for almost ninety minutes. This was fun!

It was all well and good holding the feeling while in the comfort of my apartment, but I needed to be able to hold it when the world was getting in my face, whether that was on a busy freeway or some place else. I called this aspect "building my resilience" of the Meditative Feeling. I now had three stages to develop with respect to my meditation practice: Create, Hold, and Build. Create the meditative feeling, hold it outside of the practice, and build its resilience to the outside world.

My next step was to figure out how to build up the resilience without falling flat on my face all the time and getting disillusioned. The solution came to me by accident. I went into a shop that just had negative energy in it. I did not realize at the time, since I had been so used to going there that the feeling of negative energy was "normal" for me. On this particular occasion I had just meditated and was in my Meditative Feeling when I went in, and after only a few moments I felt that the Meditative Feeling had been knocked out of me. Initially I was a bit put out that it had happened, but then suddenly, in a moment of inspiration, I realized that I could use this place as a training ground to build up the resilience of my Meditative Feeling. I would meditate, go into the place, and then start to time how long it took for the Meditative Feeling to dissipate. I would consciously try to hold on to it by checking that the feeling was still there. It became a new game. After a few weeks I was up to thirty minutes, and then an hour, and then, very quickly, the entire time that I spent there.

After discovering how to build up the resilience I then wanted to try it out on other situations in my life. I needed to decide how to take baby steps with this technique. I knew that if I tried to hold the feeling in a very challenging place or situation that I would fail and get discouraged. I had to look at all the places and situations that would occur and order them from high to low. The lowest few I started to call, "the low-hanging fruit." I then split up the remaining challenges into "medium" and "high" fruits. I then worked on holding the Meditative Feeling for about three of the low fruits. The amazing thing was that, not only did the feeling change how I perceived these situations, it also altered how I behaved in them (and, as a consequence, how any other involved people behaved). It was almost like magic. In keeping my inner peace, I felt as though, while I was a part of it, life it was flowing around me and instead of knocking me around.

One trick I used in helping me to be specific with clarifying my goals for change was the acronym I had used in my time in corporate America, which was SMART. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Using that as my guide, I could pragmatically set goals for changes in my life and see them happening. It was amazing. Here is an example of how might work. Suppose I get angry during my daily commute to and from work, with all the traffic on the roads, and since I am always, while behind my own wheel, giving other drivers "advice" (which they will never hear) on how they can improve their driving. (I'm confident I'm not alone in this habit.) My SMART goals would be:

Specific: Not to vocalise my advice at least twice during the ten times I am commuting (I might still get angry, so let's take it in baby steps).
Measurable: This would be measured by whether I opened my mouth to comment on other drivers.
Achievable: Yes, I am capable of doing this. It is not beyond my ability, unlike, say, becoming an astronaut by next week.
Realistic: It is realistic to achieve the goal within the time that I have allocated.
Timely: I am going to give myself five days to achieve this goal: Monday to Friday.

I realized that, after a few weeks, using my meditative practice to make trackable changes in my life was working. As previously noted, I decided to call this practice Applied Meditation. Why Applied Meditation? I studied physics while in college; while there, I had classes in both Pure and Applied Mathematics, with Applied Mathematics being more related to everyday applications. Therefore, in a similar naming fashion, Applied Meditation would be more closely related to our everyday activities.

So, how can you, too, turn meditation into something that can help you make changes in your everyday life? Start by finding a meditation practice that easily (you should be able to create it with five minutes on an average day) creates the feelings of peace, calm, and stillness within you. While in a safe place (one where you are not being distracted by having to talk or listening to others), keeping checking in with yourself on whether you are still feeling those feelings and have fun tracking, perhaps in a journal, how long you can hold the feelings. Watch as the time increases from week to week. While you are doing this, create a list of your low, medium, and high "fruits." I'd recommend not trying to tackle any of the "fruits" until you are able to hold the Meditative Feeling for about a couple of hours. You need to prove to yourself that you can hold it outside of the practice for that long.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2019. All rights reserved.

I'm a writer of children's fiction and have long wondered about the curious and fascinating relationship that builds up with my characters during the writing of a book. I have guardian angels and spirit guides, and I communicate with them in much the same way that I would communicate with the characters I write about. It's as though I'm writing about real people, and the story is more like channeling than making stuff up. I wonder if these people are real in some dimension. My stories have a fantastic element to them and seem to be set in a world slightly outside of the one I'm living in. They're usually set in the past, too. I find my characters leave me little signs, much like my guides and angels do. One smells of smoke, another stands sulking. I entered into a long written correspondence about all sorts of topics with one of them, and yet another boy refused to be drawn into my time wasting and made me get on with things! (Incidentally, I finished his story first.) I wonder what's going on here, and whether I'm just a victim of my own endless imagination or really seeing stories as they happened. If so - why choose me to write them? Also, does the connection work both ways - are my people aware that I'm writing about them? Sometimes it feels like being in a book within a book, and I wonder if someone is writing about me too. The other thing that pickles my brain is whether I'm actually creating these worlds in some other place as I write. (Perhaps the story didn't exist before I wrote it, but now it does!) Any thoughts about all this?

Starlakid

Astrea:

My uncle is also a writer of children's books, and his characters are all very real to me because when I read about them, I see him in them. There is a little bit of him in every character he creates, just as I'm sure there is some of you in every character you write about. Recently, we attended an opera for which my uncle wrote the libretto, and those characters seemed completely real to me.

In order to come to life, your fictional characters and places must be born, developed, lived with, nurtured, and even fed from within you. As you clearly have a very well-developed imagination, you are exceptionally gifted at giving your creations life.

I think it's pretty common for writers to feel their characters are as real as the people around them, and to continue to have a sense of relationship to them long after their writing about them has been completed. In fact, I'm sure that writers who are like this are especially good at creating complex, believable characters.

It's only natural for you to relate to your characters as you would real people. How else are you supposed to bring them to life on the page? Corresponding with your characters sounds like a great way to figure out their thoughts and feelings. I think you've hit upon a wonderful writing technique; I'm sure lots of writers would benefit from giving it a try.

Each character you create comes from someone real: YOU. Each one of us is the sum of all the things we have both experienced and imagined. By creating these vivid, true to life characters, you are amalgamating many of your own life experiences. All of your stories and characters existed within you before you found ways to share them through your writing. Perhaps the fact that they were already real within you is what has you feeling the way you do.

Suspending disbelief is important for both the readers of fiction AND its writers. I think your characters have become real to you because you've done so much to make them vivid and believable. There is nothing unusual about getting lost in the creative process. Though you've taken it to an extreme level, perhaps that is just what you need to do in order to make the most of your creative gifts.

These characters aren't real, but that doesn't mean you're crazy: you're just especially good at getting lost in your own imagination. By relating to them as though they are real, you're able to make your characters come alive on the page. Keep up the good work!

*****

Susyn:

A writer's world is often filled with amazing ideas and experiences. I believe that parallel universes do exist, and that our minds can travel in other dimensions when we're lost in thought. It's said that we are only limited by our beliefs and imagination; because of your own unlimited beliefs and imagination, you possess the ability to experience your characters as real people.

You may indeed be composing stories about your spirit guides, loved ones who have crossed over to the other side, and souls you've spent past lives with. How wonderful to be in contact with all these entities at the same time, and to write their stories for them!

The most important part of this process is to embrace these experiences as they happen. Trust in the feelings these people bring you, the awareness they provide, and the new ideas they fill you with as they urge you to use their stories for your children's books.

No one is more open to the fantastic worlds you write about than children who have not had their beliefs challenged or distorted by society. Of course, it must be the same with you: In order to write freely about all sorts of fantasies, you must cast off the constraints of mundane reality. As a writer of children's books, it does you far more good to wholeheartedly embrace these characters than to question whether or not they are real.

You ask why these amazing characters would choose you to write their stories, and the answer is simple: Not only can you see, hear and sense them, you understand them. Imagine how difficult it must be to have a story to tell but no one who can hear it. These people trust you to hear and channel their stories into written form so they can be shared with the world.

Yes, they are definitely aware that you are doing for them what they cannot do for themselves. Like the boy who chastised you for wasting time, I'm sure they are very eager to have you turn their visions and experiences into written works.

You've asked if you may be creating these worlds in other dimensions as you write about them, and in some ways, this is a valid idea. The best way to determine where these ideas are coming from is to ponder whether you are channeling this information or drawing from personal experiences or learned knowledge in order to create them. When you are formulating the story or creating the world from within you, you could be creating those people and places in another dimension by writing them into being.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.