If we want to be successful at something, whether it’s running our own business, losing weight, quitting smoking, or learning to play the guitar we have to start out by setting an intention and focusing on it. Having a strong intention helps to maintain our focus even when tiredness, boredom, or exhaustion want to throw us off course. Strong intentions come from listening to our heart’s desire and then resonating with whatever it is that makes us feel truly alive.
Bringing the practice of mindfulness into this allows us to explore our inner landscapes in an intensely focused way, giving us the ability to discover our deepest desires and allowing us to avoid being side-tracked by daydreams or fantasies, those things that are really no more than superficial cravings. Mindfulness can bring clarity to our intentions as well as a laser-like intensity to our focus.
Perhaps what you want is a creative and intellectually stimulating job, or you want to have a home where your friends and family will want to spend time and that makes you feel peaceful and fulfilled. Perhaps you want to travel and discover the world.
Whatever it is that you have identified as being your core desire, you can develop a plan to manifest it. Mindfulness will help you bring clarity to that plan and also support you when you have self-doubt or life doesn’t seem to be going in your direction. When you find yourself contemplating throwing in the towel and settling for the mind-numbing 9-to-5 job that you have been desperate to avoid, mindfulness can help anchor you powerfully within your desires.
Mindfulness can also help us to embrace change. Change is a good thing, and it's often exactly what we need. Change can also be scary as we let go of old certainties and the things that pinned us into our comfort (or discomfort) zone and that contributed to preventing us from moving forward. Embracing change helps us to mold the perfect circumstances for our desires to truly flourish.
So much of the law of attraction is built around the energy that you put out. Human beings are for ever sending out thoughts, desires, emotions, and actions in a never-ending, un-focused deluge. All of this doing-mode activity prevents us from being in being-mode. How often do we take time to just stop and listen? Mindfulness can help us to develop the skill of listening, not just to the guidance coming from what the universe is saying to us each and every day, but also to our heart’s deepest essence. This is where our desires are born and first flower or if we don’t shine the light of awareness on them, die.
Mindfulness meditation has been proven, time and time again, to be beneficial for our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. As we know, like attracts like. The better we feel in ourselves, the more the universe resonates with this feeling of wellbeing. It’s no surprise then that manifesting our heart’s desires and meditation go hand in hand.
Meditation strengthens your connection to the universe by quietening the mind-chatter and allowing you to listen deeply and be more open to the guidance being offered. This ability increases as you become more and more still. In deep stillness, the universe can open like a book. Essentially, you move out of asking mode and into receiving mode.
When we approach the practice of mindfulness meditation, we should be clear about what it is that we are trying to achieve. Are we meditating simply for the sake of meditation? There is nothing wrong with this and in a pure sense, this is the whole point of the practice. As the Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki once noted, we sit, simply to sit, thus allowing us to experience and express our own true nature. Even in this, we can see that there is an intention: to be our own true selves. Letting go of the intention whilst simultaneously holding it lightly in our hands is the key to this. Doing mode arises naturally as an expression of being mode. Stillness gives rise to action, but action that is an outgrowth of deep knowing.
Meditation then can be seen as a way to experience the life that we truly, deeply desire through developing the ability to be still and at the same time have a laser-like focus on our final destination. The point of meditation is not to get good at meditation. No one cares if you are good at meditation. Meditation can, however, provide you with the tools you need to shift your personal and professional life in the direction that you want.
To develop deep stillness, we need to stick with the practice and develop it over time. It’s not a quick-fix solution to anything, though it is often surprising that when we start to move into a place of acceptance of the process just how fast benefits start to arise. If we sit down and expect an amazing revelatory experience, we’re often disappointed. The same can happen when we sit and expect feelings of deep calmness and serenity to arise out of a perfectly clear and thought-free mind.
Meditation is not about clearing the mind and stopping thinking. No one can do this. The mind is designed to think, and it is incredibly good at it. Meditation is about changing our relationship with those thoughts. We develop the skill to be able to observe our thoughts with deep awareness, rather than be those thoughts. Changing our relationship to our own mind is very important.
Thoughts are not necessarily facts, even those that claim they are. Meditation allows us to see thoughts in a different way: as mental events passing through the clear awareness of our minds, like clouds passing across the endless expanse of sky. They arise, have their moment, and then dissolve back into the stillness.
When we develop this ability to be still and observe with deep awareness, as science has shown us, we start to change the physical structure of our brain. We essentially perform neurosurgery on ourselves! This is called neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is a term that describes the changes in the physical structure of the brain that takes place in response to experience. Essentially the brain responds to the practice of meditation just as it would to any other experiential factor that is repeated many times over. Studies have shown that, through the use of brain-imaging techniques, meditation literally reduces the amount of grey matter present in the amygdala, which is the centre of our fight-or-flight response mechanism. The amygdala, in fact, shrinks.
As the amygdala shrinks, the pre-frontal cortex becomes thicker. This part of the brain is associated with higher-order brain functions such as awareness, concentration, and decision-making. Meditation allows us to develop a radically different relationship with our thinking and response mechanisms. The more we meditate, the more deeply these changes embed themselves, and the more we are overriding our primal responses and begin to default to more thoughtful and awareness-based responses.
Some studies suggest that just a 10-minute meditation practice a day over an eight-week period is enough to detect changes in brain physiology. In terms of how you feel, the results from meditation can be very rapid. For some, this can be as fast as the very first meditation experience. For others, it might take a little longer.
So why isn’t everyone meditating? For many it can be boring, it takes up time from other things we would rather be doing, and often we struggle with clearing our minds. These three things often keep us from experiencing the benefits of meditation, benefits that only manifest with long-term practice. We can get wound up in our lives, thinking and doing endlessly, but what we really need to do to manifest our dreams is to do less. We need to take time out to find stillness and be with ourselves.
When we spend a few minutes every day giving ourselves a deep rest we can achieve so much more. Brief meditation practice is five times deeper than sleep, making us more productive than if we had slept for an hour or had a coffee.
So, let’s look at some ways for manifesting abundance in your life through the power of mindfulness.
1/ The first step is to hone your awareness through establishing a good mindfulness practice. As that practice develops, start to notice the shift in your mindset towards more positive outcomes in your life. Acknowledge where you are starting from and be grateful for this. Gratitude for what is, right in this moment is an outcome of mindfulness. Awareness and acceptance of now loosens the mind's tendency to view now in a negative light. When we are in the mode of acceptance, it becomes easier to notice even small and subtle shifts in our feelings of abundance.
Try to be mindful of what actions you can take to bring more of what you want in your life. Coming out of that place of deep stillness, let opportunities that come your way gently unfold.
2/ Developing gratitude is a powerful and important principle. Try to be deeply grateful for what you already have. This must be a genuine, heartfelt outpouring. One method that you can use is to journal the things that you are grateful for. Just jotting down three to five things each morning or evening that you are grateful for can really make a big difference. Try to bring mindfulness to this exercise. Just writing stuff down mechanically is pointless. Go into whatever it is you wrote down and try to feel deep inside that place of gratitude. Let it expand within you.
3/ Sometimes, success and prosperity can go to your head. Mindfulness can help you stay humble whilst developing feelings of compassion for others. You don’t need to develop a superior mindset where you are on top and everyone else is below you. Genuine wealth and abundance should be shared out for the betterment of everyone. Working for yourself and for the success of others is the road to true wealth. Mindfulness moves you into a place of awareness of other's suffering and leads to an arising of a heartfelt desire to ease that suffering in whatever way you can.
4/ Try to take time to really appreciate some of the important things in your life. You might be busy posting to social media, your blog, developing your market through your website, or engaging in e-commerce, but sometimes it is a good idea to unplug from your smartphone and really savour some of the beautiful things that make up the world around you. When you are with friends, try to put your phone down, or turn it off and really pay attention to them. Listen intently and with interest. This isn’t going to cost you anything financially and the value that you gain from being fully present with your friends reaps its own rewards. Try to bring mindfulness to even mundane aspects of your life, like boiling a kettle to make tea. Go into the experience of the kettle boiling and really notice it. Lay on your back and gaze at the sky, watch the birds in the trees outside the window, feel the crunch of gravel underfoot as you walk, notice the smells coming from a kitchen. The important thing is to let go of judgement. None of these things are good, bad, boring, or exciting. They just are.
5/ Developing the practice of mindfulness helps to improve your relationships by subtly increasing feelings of empathy and emotional intelligence. This is an important life skill that you need to spend time developing. When there is conflict, spend some time trying to resolve the issue and put some thought into developing more positive relationships. Being more likable and easier to work with helps you with your ability to manifest abundance. You could practice the classic metta (loving-kindness) meditation to achieve this.
6/ By being more in tune with the needs of others allows you to provide more value, making you more indispensable to the achievement of their goals. Try to understand the perspectives of others and develop your insight. Developing compassion and empathy for others enables you to increase your abundance in many ways.
7/ Practicing mindfulness helps keep you positive. A positive mindset, especially when our financial situation is not going so well can be difficult, but the rewards accumulate rapidly when we cultivate positivity. We can’t maintain a positive outlook all of the time, of course. Sometimes life brings us down, but we can be mindful of even those times when we are not feeling so good. We can process such negative emotions in retrospect by putting aside some time each day and reflecting on their arising. When did this feeling of anger (or sadness, or jealousy, etc) arise? Where did it come from? Who was responsible for me feeling this way? When we start to realise just how much we are responsible for all the negative emotions that we experience, we can gain freedom and control over them.
Using mindfulness as an aid to increase abundance in your life is a no-brainer. If you really want to cultivate your heart’s desire and discover that deep core of happiness within you, then just sit, close your eyes, and just be. This is the way to watch the universe unfold for you.
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