Achieving your goals is also a matter of concentration. According to the ancient wisdom that gave birth to the Yoga Sutras, every idea and every decision you make flourishes in the mental realm and descends to the other layers of consciousness until it reaches the material plane.
However, that idea will have to dialogue with your emotions, energy, and physical body to arrive at its destiny, and in this process, an idea that seemed to be brilliant and achievable at first is sometimes convinced otherwise by your emotions and thoughts via a Meditation Guide. Practicing daily meditation can help decision travel from the source to its final destination without much interference from the many degrees of consciousness.
The Meditation Process
The most fundamental concept of the Yoga Sutras is the principle of multiple levels of consciousness. Being aware that your real self resides beyond these layers; allows you to see sensations, emotions, thoughts, and intellect as independent creatures, all of them reclaiming their rights. These degrees of consciousness constitute a hierarchy of power, in which the will (or volition) is the highest instance, according to the ancient teachings.
It is important to understand that your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and sensations have a life of their own. The Yoga philosophy teaches that whenever you make a decision, your body will naturally ask for rest and comfort, your emotional body will ask for adrenaline and your intellect will ask for rational explanations, and only after passing through all these filters, a decision can be made.
The idea that your personality or your bodily sensations determine who you are and how you feel, can eclipse your willpower since your objective can be easily stopped by the instincts of each creature that lives inside you.
However, meditating can help you deal with all these filters by showing you to recognize the instinctive messages of the different layers of consciousness and finally allow you to put them all under your willpower’s command.
Exercises to Increase Will Power With Meditation
When you start your daily meditation, notice how your body responds to the idea of being quiet for a long time. If you erect your spine during meditation, after a while, your muscles will start to relax and most likely, your body will start to itch. This is your body trying to get away from your command – do not allow this to happen. Ignore the itches and keep focused to maintain yourself in the same position.
Clearing your mind is the main requirement for proper meditation, but this is possibly the most difficult part of the process. This is because your mind will do anything to be active. Watch as your thoughts start to become really chaotic to call your attention. Let them be, do not start a conversation with your mind.
Finally, when body and mind are quietened, you will feel an urge to get up because you will feel bored, as you will be under the impression that you are doing nothing. These are the emotions trying to trick you. Allow yourself to do nothing for a while, and you will see how you can also have control over your astral body.
If you see your body and mind as disciples that must be dominated by the master (that is, your willpower), then you will not allow yourself to be controlled by them when you need to make a decision or work harder. This is usually difficult because people are much identified with these vehicles, forgetting that their will is hierarchically superior to body and mind.
Applying Meditation Techniques to Daily Life
Everything that happens in meditation also happens in daily life. Whatever you want to do and whatever decision you make will go through the same filtering process. However, if you have trained yourself to recognize the messages from each of your “inner disciples”, you will be able to impose your willpower on them.
Next time you need to focus on a specific task (studying, writing, reading, working), watch your thoughts, sensations, emotions, and energy as they try to distract you from your objective, but instead of obeying them, tell them gently to be quiet and continue to do what you are doing. The secret to master this technique is to understand that you are the consciousness that tells your body and mind what to do and not the other way around. This will awake the superhero inside you.