The simplest way for me to describe guided meditation is: It’s when you are guided by a narrator to relax your body and mind, to help you reach a deep meditative state before going on a journey in your mind.

Doesn’t that sound wonderful?

It not only creates a peaceful experience, but there are so many other benefits.

Benefits of Guided Meditation

• Improves clarity
• Creates sense of freedom
• Nurtures healing
• Enhances creativity
• Enables greater focus
• Increases mental well-being
• Lowers blood pressure
• Reduces stress

“Meditation is universal. It transcends all divides like religion, country and culture. It is a gift given to mankind to access the infinite spirit not limited by any identity. It is the only tool that can aid a person to return to innocence.” – The Art of Living

Does it really work?
Let me put it to you this way, guided meditation has balanced my crazy life.

Here’s my experience:

Every time I stretch out on my living room floor and relax into the bliss of ‘just being’, my soul wakes up and wants to dance. I become acutely aware of the beauty in solitude, in the gentle rise and fall of my chest as it takes in air, of the pleasant scent of freshly brewed coffee, of the colorful dots my mind creates behind my closed eyes, of the tingle in my extremities as they awaken, and the sweet taste of health as I flush out the negative and make room for the positive.

“Meditation can be nothing short of life changing, and the irony is, you sit down to meditate with no purpose, just a powerful trust in the process,” said Mark Fradkin, a meditation expert.

I’ve found myself over the course of my life saying,“If I could carve out more time in the day, I’d like to start meditating.” I must have said this a thousand times and each one of those times firmly believing that I just didn’t have the time to indulge in such activity, and to do so would mean something else more important in my life would suffer.

Okay, well, I finally came to a point in my life when I realized everything would suffer if I didn’t take the time to ‘just be’. The most important priority alongside my family is my well-being. For me to feel well, I must be balanced and focused. Meditation promised me such results. With so many restless thoughts infiltrating my mind at any given time, I needed a tool.

I figured what could it hurt to give it a try? So I did. 

Since taking on daily meditations, I’m happy to report that life has taken on a better vibe. I feel like I have a certain control over my thoughts and feelings now that I am being mindful of what I’m allowing in and out.

The flow of information we encounter on a daily basis can take on many forms and result in many effects. We attract what we think most about. The more we focus on peace, the more it will sail into our life like a rejuvenating breeze, swaying with our hearts and leaving us with its gentle kisses that bring promise of the lullabies of all that is sweet, mesmerizing, and in sync with our beating hearts. As our thoughts shift along the frequencies of love, abundance, peace, and kindness, we call it into our lives and set ourselves on a path where its energy circulates in and through is, nudging us to embrace what we need and release the rest back so that others may find similar increase tapping on the door to their souls. 

I’m curious if anyone else reading this meditates? What have been your results? Has it brought you clarity on big life decisions? Strengthened you mentally, physically, emotionally? Do you have any guided meditation links to share?

The unexpected curves and straight-lined paths propel us to change; change that may reward us with rich, new experiences.

We may not understand the immediate reason that our paths sometimes seem erratic and illogical with all their twists and turns. But each one has a purpose that supports who we become as we grow.

A vine may seem unyielding and without pattern, but it is really purposely developing stronger connections to help it withstand the pressures that occur around it. I believe this to be true of us, too.

Strength

We draw on each others’ strength to help us get to where we are going so that we can experience the parts of life that bring us the most satisfaction. The interactions in our crossing vines allow us to experience and share the gift of life and all it has to offer.

Life offers many paths to get to where we want to go. And along these paths we meet people, some who obstruct our goals, some who stand by and let us walk right past, and others who carry us through the tough zones along the way.

In my lifetime, some of the most influential people have been those who I met seemingly by mistake or slim chances.

A random, unscheduled stop over along the road of life was where I met some of the most pivotal people in my life who have shaped me into the person I am today. 

Just like a vine, be flexible to the defining curves encountered, for they may take us places we never dreamed possible.

And speaking of curves….

“Thank God for curves in the road,” Haley said.
“Yeah, I’d consider this curve a good one.”
“I’ve never come across a curve I didn’t like.”
Under the soothing caress of her admission, I softened. “I suspect you haven’t.”

An excerpt from The Fiche Room

Over to you. What are your thoughts on life’s defining curves?

I’m one of those who has turned to the distraction of social media when I crave a sense of belonging and harmony. Typically, I scroll and scroll endlessly seeking something that will distract me from the tasks at hand. I scroll and chuckle, temporarily lifting me to good vibes. 

Harmless, right?

At first glance, I’d agree. But, I never look at something just at first glance. I tend to dig deeper. In so doing, I realize that every time I escape into external stimuli, I become more and more dependent on it to pull me out of a temporary funk. 

The truth about harmony

So many of us live distracted lives. Many of us bury ourselves into our chosen distractions in order to avoid having to get to the root cause of our feelings in the first place. The more we do this, the deeper we will eventually bury ourselves.

This got me wondering, why do we escape in the first place? Are we running from ourselves?

We all have things that we’d rather not deal with. Maybe it’s a childhood bully who plagues the mind still. Maybe it’s a fear of getting old and becoming irrelevant. Maybe the fear is not being smart enough or having the necessary skills to succeed. Whatever it is, we’ve all got these hidden thoughts that chase us from time to time.

Truth

It’s exhausting to be in constant defense mode of them. As long as we keep running, we’ll never be in harmony.

For me, I always tended to measure my happiness in terms of how many books I sold at the end of the day. Most Indie writers might be able to relate to this. Checking the facts and figures is addictive, especially when those numbers continue to grow. The danger is when they start declining. You see, at one point I used to equate my success and purpose to those numbers. Pretty dangerous, right? I placed enormous power in something completely outside of myself, something over which I had virtually no control.

What a wake up call I finally had one day when I realized that I was addicted to my obsession of being relevant in my chosen field. I feared losing the grip on it. That fear created a rash of emotions that actually took me further away from the joy of building my treasured writing career.

This realization came to me when I read a book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joseph Dispenza. Every single sentence in that book rang true for me and opened my eyes to the notion that I was externalizing my reality, and as a result slowly destroying any chance I had of being fulfilled.

While reading this book, I started to ask myself questions about my purpose and desires. The answers surprised me. I learned, with little surprise, that I was trying to please people and worried about how others would perceive me. This was so dangerous. This put all control on others instead of myself.

How I Got Back in Harmony

How did I eventually get to the point where I changed this? I began to journal, and go inward. I began to ask myself deep questions that only I could answer for myself, questions completely independent of the external world.

Questions such as:

Why do I exist?

What’s good about some of the problems I’m facing?

How do I feel right at this moment?

What gifts do I have that I can share without concern for conformity and judgment?

What is one of life’s simplest joys?

Suddenly, I became mindful. I connected with myself on a personal level. I began to listen to myself and nurture the concerns that in the past made me want to escape. I faced the fears from which I had tried to run and stared at them with great intention, squashing their power.

From allowing for quiet time with myself, I explored past judgments and anxious emotions, perceiving them in new light and seeing them for that they really were, owned by the external world!

Take back Your Harmony!

In this journey, I freed myself mentally from being tangled up in the perceived dramas happening outside of myself. The result was discovering that I had the ability all along to erase self-doubt and fear by simply being still and honest with my thoughts.

In this information age, where so much can distract us, it’s easy to get lost. The process to break distracting habits and learn to love quiet, reflective time is a process and journey best taken one step at a time. With practice, old habits can be shed and new ones formed, ones that will be yours and yours only, dependent on no one but yourself.

When we free ourselves from a dependency on external factors, we place ourselves on the path to harmony and ultimate fulfillment.

Let’s turn it over to you.

Have you stopped to nurture yourself lately? Do you feel the outside world is noisy and keeping you from maintaining a healthy grip on your purpose and happiness? What are you doing about it? Do you have a process that has worked to help you reclaim your harmony?

Fellow animal lover friends, Jenny Lee and Amanda, shared their love at first sight story with me, too. I asked their permission to share it with you because it is that endearing and moving. I feel especially moved because they informed me that it was my novel, A New Leash on Life, that brought them to meet their beautiful furbaby, Shelby.

You see, Jenny and Amanda had just lost their precious dog right around the same time Jenny read A New Leash on Life. After learning about no-kill animal shelters and the need for good homes for all these beautiful dogs, they decided the time was right to open their hearts and home to another dog looking to be loved and be made a part of someone’s family.

I asked them more about their experience, and here is what Jenny had to say…

“Before Shelby, we lost our last fur baby suddenly to cancer. I was shattered. I’d raised her from a pup. She was my baby. I cried for weeks. It was also the first time in nearly twenty years we didn’t have a dog in the house. We felt lost. But I just couldn’t go out straight away and ‘replace’ the un-replaceable.

We talked long and hard about breeds and breeders until we read A New Leash on Life. Then, there was only one choice – we had to get a rescue.

It was also important to us to find a shelter or organisation that shared our ethics. Like in A New Leash on Life, the organisation we went through had strict guidelines for adoption. We often laughed saying it would have probably been easier adopting a human child! The result though, was a perfect match!! The organisation matched our needs with those of who would become our golden girl Shelby.

But how has Shelby impacted on our lives?

There is not a day we don’t laugh together (dogs do have a sense of humour)

We share a sense of wonder in everything in this world

And if we’re having a really bad day… She totally understands. She has also known loss without losing her ability to love.

I just started reading A New Leash on Life again (it’s been a while), since you’ve been talking of it with your new audiobook version just released on Audible. It’s interesting reminiscing now on how we got Shelby.

Was it love at first sight?

The dedication of the people running the organisation we got Shelby through is amazing. The most interesting part was the match making process… We didn’t go out of our way to get a Golden Retriever, it’s just that we took a liking to a particular golden girl called Maggie. We contacted the organisation and after talking with them, they said… No Maggie was not the dog for us! A few weeks later there was another dog and again, they said, no that dog was not for us!! This really intrigued us as most shelters are just happy to find the animal a home (any home).

A colleague of ours started calling them the Golden Retriever Nazis and our friends just couldn’t believe they hadn’t given us a dog. But all along, they said that they really wanted to find us the RIGHT dog. And then Shelby came along! And as we said, it was a perfect match!! (Yay! Sounds enough to me like love at first sight!)

Being a rescue, she did come with challenges. There are still times when she reacts a certain way to something new and we realise it is due to a bad experience that we will never fully understand. But it was only tonight when I was thinking about the difference between a rescue and a fur child raised from a pup, that it dawned on me…. A dog (or cat I guess) that you have had practically all its life would know nothing but absolute trust and the love that we provide. A rescue would have had to have gone through the trauma of abandonment and heaven knows what else. They teach us resilience.

Shelby lost her first family, but fills our lives with light and love every day. A heart can heal. That is something we can all learn from.”

So there you have it friends, that is proof enough for me that love at first sight sure does exist.

If you’d like to learn more about no-kill animals shelters, and the wonderful work the people who run them do, visit hua.org. Thanks to my readers (and listeners), I am able to donate a portion of my book proceeds to them each month to help them care for these precious beings waiting on a family to love them.