Meditation is an essential travel partner on your journey of personal transformation. Meditation connects you with your soul, and this connection gives you access to your intuition, your heartfelt desires, your integrity, and the inspiration to create a life you love — a soul-centered life.
Meditation is good medicine, but it’s more like taking a vitamin pill than an aspirin. Ideally, you use it every day as a way to prevent a problem or issue from arising, not as a way to “fix” yourself when you’re stressed.
Meditation: For Day-to-Day Well-Being
Don’t use meditation as an escape from your real life or responsibilities; instead, use it as a tool to help you navigate your life in a responsive and mindful way. In an interview, the Dalai Lama suggested that people should meditate “not for the next life, not for heaven, but for your day-to-day well-being.”
Sometimes all the changes, insights, and sense of expansion can be overwhelming. Emotional issues may come up that you would rather escape from. You may fall back into old patterns and habits that are not nourishing to you. If this happens, don’t be too hard on yourself. With awareness, change can become comfortable.
Three Essential Tools: Faith, Patience, Grace
Years of meditation practice have transformed the way I see myself and the world. One way I maintain that transformation is to remember my personal credo: Faith, patience, and grace.
Faith is a deep trust that the universe and life itself is on my side — and it’s on your side, too. Life is unfolding perfectly for each one of us. I trust that every desire I have will ultimately result in an outcome best suited for me and all others, in perfect timing. This, of course, requires patience.
Patience is doing my practices: staying in the present moment, meditating, taking care of myself, feeling my emotions, paying attention to my body, listening to my intuition, saying yes and no authentically, inquiring into thoughts that cause me pain or discomfort, choosing nourishing experiences and relationships, giving and receiving freely, finding things to be grateful for, and spending time in silence. This leads to grace.
Grace is a wondrous communion with the creative intelligence that totally surprises and delights me. It’s the unfolding perfection that completely supports each one of us on our heartfelt path.
I wish you faith, patience, and grace, along with peace and inspiration, as you journey along this path toward a soul-centered life.
*Subtitles by InnerSelf.com
©2012 by Sarah McLean.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Hay House Inc. www.hayhouse.com. All Rights Reserved.
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Soul-Centered: Transform Your Life in 8 Weeks with Meditation
by Sarah McLean.
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About the Author
Sarah McLean, an inspiring contemporary meditation teacher, makes meditation accessible to everyone. She's spent much of her life exploring the world's spiritual and mystic traditions. She's lived and studied in a Zen Buddhist monastery, meditated in ashrams and temples throughout India and the Far East, spent time in Afghan refugee camps, bicycled the Silk Route from Pakistan to China, trekked the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia, and taught English to Tibetan Buddhist Nuns in Dharamsala. Sarah is the founding director of the Sedona Meditation Training Company, and The McLean Meditation Institute, educational companies offering meditation training, self-discovery retreats, and teacher training certification programs that have transformed thousands of lives, and have earned her the praise of her peers and students.
