A lot of people want immediate change. Technology has trained them to expect instant gratification. You can go online, purchase something and have it delivered the same day or the very next day in a lot of cities nowadays. Advertisements are promising you quick weight loss, how to gain mastery on a topic over a…
Creating my app and all its content over the last few months has certainly been one of the biggest challenges I have taken on in recent years. It has required a tremendous amount of my willpower to bring to completion and to make it better than I think I could do it. It is a…
You have a mind. You are born with it. You live with it. Throughout your entire life, you function in the mind whether it be in your waking state or in your sleeping states. It’s the one thing you spend 24-hours a day with. You don’t even spend that much time with the people or…
Since I released my Introduction to Meditation course in 2016, thousands of students from more than 130 countries around the world have gone through this training. Many students have shared with me they have a better understanding of how their mind works, a greater ability to focus and that they have been able to create…
It’s easier to observe how much inborn willpower there is in a person when they are a child versus an adult. Think about the children that you know, you can tell right away that each child has a different amount of natural willpower. If you are a parent, you may have experienced the following scenario.…
Ultimately, it all comes down to how badly you desire to live a concentrated life. Most people don’t desire it badly enough and hence never reach a state of concentration where they can manifest the life that they want. They can concentrate for brief periods of time but the levels of concentration needed to create…
It is so important that we strive to understand each other, because out of understanding is born empathy and out of empathy is born compassion, out of compassion is born love and finally out of love comes peace. To summarize the sequence: concentration, listening, reflection, understanding, empathy, compassion, love then peace. The benefits of concentration…
Look at your life and look for opportunities to develop your willpower. Make this one of your life’s goals with a clear reason why you are developing willpower. To simply develop willpower is not enough. We need to understand why we are doing so and ultimately what will we use that willpower for. If you…
As events occur in life, most people react to them in an uncontrolled way. When this happens awareness gets drawn out and externalized. Their energies get externalized too, entangling itself with people and things around them. Before long they find themselves bound to the external world, and inner life seems non-existent. They live in a…
Whatever I invest my energy in will start to grow. If I invest my energy in something positive it will grow and become more positive. If I invest my energy into something negative it will grow and become more negative. Energy has no ability to discriminate between what is positive and what is negative. Whatever…
When I lived as a monk, my guru (Sivaya Subramuniyaswami) taught me a phrase he coined: ‘Where awareness goes, energy flows.’ It’s probably one of the most important things I’ve learned. First, we have to learn that awareness and the mind are two separate things. Second, our mind does not wander; our awareness moves within…
Your preparation for meditation is as important as your meditation practice, if not more so. The better you prepare, the better your meditation will be. Look at it this way, if someone very important was coming to your home for dinner you would prepare for this, would you not? You would clean your home, perhaps…
