With all of the anger, strife, and anxiety in the world today, it can be difficult to find the joy in life, but that is where meditation for happiness can help.

With so much suffering and conflict, sometimes it might seem like the world has no joy to offer.

You might ask yourself, “How can we be happy when others have it so bad?”

Other times, we’re so focused on the negative things that are happening in our own lives, the challenges we’re dealing with, and the potential catastrophes that could arise at any moment, that we simply block our capacity to feel joy. 

But joy is what gives your life sweetness and meaning. If you want to fulfill your destiny and become your best version of yourself, it is imperative that you take the time to cultivate your joy.

So today I’d like to share a simple meditation that you can use at any time to create the experience of more joy in your life.

When I read the morning news, most of what I see are stories about people wanting to move past the pandemic. They’d like things to return to normal; they’d like things to be the way they were before. 

This is true even for people who were terribly unhappy with their lives, because for them the comfort of the known far outweighs the fear of the unknown.

But there are others who see a gift resting quietly in the misfortune and sadness that enfolds the Earth. 

Certainly, those who feel there’s a gift within this crisis also hold great compassion for those in pain, and they lovingly appreciate the souls who, on some level mysteriously unknown to us, have agreed to leave the planet during this pandemic.

But there is more going on than the universal opening of hearts to others. Much more.  

Are you full of worry, anxiety and stress due to uncertainty, causing your emotional wellbeing to suffer? Resulting in your health deteriorating from a lack of sleep, poor diet, no exercise and being emotionally exhausted. An easy solution to this is mindfulness to improve your emotional wellbeing, replenish energy and help you relax.

Mindfulness and meditation are terms thrown around lightly.

However, they are powerful activities you can easily integrate into your daily routine. Research has shown numerous benefits of mindfulness and meditation which makes them great tools to take advantage of right now. Additionally, the mind-body connection is very powerful and putting the work into your mind can improve all areas of your health.

With global closures and lockdowns, the usual solutions to your stress and anxiety may not be available. Therefore, activities that you can implement right now and easily are important to improve your emotional wellbeing and health.

What is Emotional Wellbeing and Why do You Need it?

Mindfulness and meditation are both great tools that can help us cultivate calm amidst chaos. For those who are new to mindfulness practice, it is not uncommon to mistake mindfulness for a form of meditation. If fact, it is a different practice altogether. Mindfulness is the practice of honing your focused attention and choosing what you wish to focus attentively on. Meditation takes many forms, from movement meditations to seated or even laying down meditations using the anchor of attention on the breath, a word, a phrase or a visualization. Some formal meditations have no anchor of attention, inviting you to notice your thoughts, feelings, and emotions and then practice noticing what comes up without judgement, allowing yourself to let the thoughts drift past without attaching to any story lines. This form is called open awareness meditation.

There is one way, and one way only, that any of us will ever know the real meaning behind the life of Christ, and that is... to share in his death. And by this, I do not mean symbolically, or by any other allegory. If our wish is to know the truth behind his seemingly incomprehensible, incomparable act of self-sacrifice -- and the rebirth that crowns this surrender -- there's but one thing to do: we must stop thinking about it... and get down to the business of actually dying to our own lower nature.

Spending one's time wondering why this god-man agreed to lay down his life for the sake of the immortal Self that he embodied... is like hoping to be healed by a medicine that you give someone else to take for you.
 

Let me be clear: it doesn't matter what we say we believe in, or otherwise profess to be true. Belief alone amounts to nothing. To paraphrase and enhance a timeless idea: faith without acts is not only fruitless, but along with being the dangerous root of fanaticism, it is one of the dark seeds from out of which grows the evil of religious intolerance. Comparing the value of our ideals to those of others is not what it means to act truly, anymore than the act of judging someone proves the worthiness of the judge.

Our world is created by a continuous flow of dynamic energy. We are constantly sharing, receiving, and evolving in spirit, including our bodies and minds. This concept once was considered new thought, and now it’s widely recognized.

Ask yourself, are you enjoying the flow of new energy, or struggling with change?

Each of us has the ability to manifest our dreams and enjoy a positive flow in life. To master this, we come into this world with assistance from the unseen world. We have Angels and Guides that are always with us. Ultimately, with their help, our life is inspired and sacred.  We achieve awakening as we learn how to communicate and co-create with our Universal energy, Angels, Guides, and all that is.  The crux is discovering our unique life directory and language.

It’s a wonderful thing to know that what we see outside us, is not the only reality, that there is more than one perspective to take when viewing both external and internal conditions! In fact, it’s a wonderful thing to know, that God and the Universe, HAVE YOUR BACK!

Can’t wrap your head around that? That’s just it, one can’t! But we can open our hearts and merge with what is currently shaking humanity to its core! And what is shaking humanity to its core is LOVE!

I sense we each have been presented with an extraordinary chance to cut our cord with separation!  Floating weightless in zero-gravity consciousness, we have a chance to make the jump to hyper-space, the quantum-leap from duality to Oneness, from the lie into the Light, from asleep to awake, from broken to whole.

With Spring’s natural turn just under our belts, we have nature on our side REGARDLESS OF CIRCUMSTANCES! As the sun grows brighter and the days longer, we begin the mythical journey of recreating life over again either in fear and reaction to external conditions or with a new, natural courageousness, confidence and intuitive creativity perhaps unknown to us before as it rises from a deep, inner knowing we have carried with us for our whole lives. This is but one opportunity these Viral Times are gifting us!

I had a vision of the GREAT CALM on March 14, 2020 which is posted here on SoulSpring. Click Here

I am grateful people around the world are recognizing the Great Calm. It was reassuring when I received an invitation the next day to join the daily Call to Calm meditations with Panache Desai. 

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The stock market crash in 1929 was part of the trigger that shifted the world into a reaction of fear and lack, leading to the Great Depression.

The Great Calm is a wave of Peace.

This global reset is restoring the natural state of Harmony.

When the original Great Calm post came out, friends requested a meditation audio version.

You can listen to the complete Great Calm audio recording and a short meditation by Clicking Here

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Do you see signs of the Great Calm in your life?

Have you felt greater expressions of harmony?

When I focus on peace, my experience of Peace expands.

We are drawn together by our Unity. Our natural attraction is to wholeness not repair.
Drama is not necessary when we have calm awareness. It’s okay to feel happy, calm, and grateful.

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“Life will always bring you the circumstances you need in order to move into your highest expression. Your job is to run toward the experience.”

If you’ve attempted to effect change by trying to control your mind, only to wind up tired and frustrated, you are not alone. Creating change solely through mental techniques is impossible. It is like treating only the surface of an open wound when the infection is deep inside. It’s only when you address the underlying energy holding these thoughts and beliefs in place that you can effectively create transformation.

Vibrational transformation is a powerful internal process that addresses embedded, unresolved vibrations—­dense emotional content and conditioning—­and changes them from a dissonant vibration into a harmonious vibration through the conscious acceptance of the root cause of the unconscious dissonance.

“Intuition is a sacred gift, the rational mind its faithful servant. Sadly we have thrown away the gift and have become enslaved to the servant.”  ~Albert Einstein

In Inner Bonding, we often talk about who is in charge—your wounded self or your guidance? Most people are enslaved by the thoughts and beliefs of their wounded self—their programmed mind. But the mind is meant to be the servant of our inner and higher guidance, not the master. Why do we too often throw away the gift of intuition – of our inner knowing?

Imagine living in a society where people trusted their intuition—trusted their feelings and their higher guidance. Could people in this society be easily controlled by government, religions, or the media? Obviously not, because when you trust your own inner knowing, you are not vulnerable to others’ manipulations and lies.

These are unprecedented times that we are all living through. There is fear and uncertainty so heavy in the air, you can certainly feel it and even almost taste it. We are all having this very real and shared experience of what it means to live as one people under the Sun. There's a shared sense of oneness because we are all in this together. It does not matter what creed, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation that you are, we are all managing, dealing and surviving this pandemic together.

This pandemic is shifting the way of life for all of us. And am I getting tired of sheltering in place? Absolutely… Anybody else? Is it frustrating? Absolutely…Are you tired of being patient and sheltering in place? YES! Trust and believe that even before all of this…I was not the most patient person and practicing patience is not one of my strong qualities. Yet, somehow, we must keep trusting. We must keep being patient, we must continue to persevere and move confidently forward.

And as I started meditating on what this time means in our lives, Divine Inspiration revealed that we all need a message grounded in how to have patience, how to persevere through difficulties, and how to have unshakable faith in God’s Promises during a season of frustration.

They say patience is truly a virtue and patience in God’s Timing is much different than the patience that we put on ourselves. I grew up believing that the Bible is our story. This Holy book like many Holy books can be used as our blueprint on how we navigate and govern our lives. It contains many stories of overcoming and can give us hope on how we not only survive but thrive through this thing that we call life.

On the dawn of a new world in 2020, with a knowing that the time is here, now, for us ALL as an entire civilization on Gaia comes online for an upgrade in the Golden Age and I find myself in practice for entering “gate 3”; my perceived last level of this game. Gate 3 in the book is called the No-Key-Gate; a keyless door made of Fantasian selenium that responds to the desires of those trying to pass through. Only those that don’t want to pass through, can. The more you desire, the more locked it remains.

So, how did Atreyu do it?
 

He was on a quest of a lifetime! But in the previous mirror-gate, he dropped his identity, he had no memory of past, he had no desires, he had only the present moment experience of being in pure joy. And so he passes through the final gate and he meets Uyulala, the voice of wisdom, in other words, he gains access to divine knowledge. Upgrade! Expansion!

Are you, like John Mayer sings, “waiting on the world to change?” Or are you trying, as Gandhi advised to “be the change that you wish to see in the world?” Maybe, like too many of us you’re humming that old Dusty Springfield song, “just wishing and hoping and thinking and praying. Planning and dreaming …”In her poem “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers, Emily Dickinson’s creates a metaphor of hope through a little bird “that perches in the soul” and “never stops—at all.” It’s always there inside. It never asks for anything and it never takes flight. It never reacts or participates. That’s the thing about hope. It just hangs out with us, especially during dark nights. Although hope offers encouragement, it rarely mobilizes our energy or our actions.

Woody Allen parodied this metaphor in his book Without Feathers, about his neurotic sense of hopelessness especially in regard to God and death. It’s funny. It’s counter intuitive and it made me wonder is the opposite of hope really despair? Or is it participation?

As a young girl growing up in the heart of the Bible belt, hope was affiliated with the concept of victim. “I hope that God will hear me.” It actually lowered expectations and consciousness because hope became something that was always delayed or put on the shelf. It was about waiting for the knight in shining armor or some magical evangelical leader to be the change. In my early life experience, it taught me to give my power away. It put the responsibility on someone else—to live a life in the fading light of day.

Take a moment and raise your point of view to the thought that during this pandemic, from a more ‘cosmic standpoint,’ we have actually done everything right! In fact, some would argue, it could not be any other way!

In the same way being in a boat on the surface of the ocean during a great storm, one would never be able to know the stillness that lies beneath the surface of the waves as they bounce you around demanding your full attention for fear of capsizing, for fear of dying! 

Below the waves of this pandemic that have kept our attention bouncing so completely and often in fear-based thinking; there has been taking place a great Stillness, impregnated into every nook and cranny of earth, human activity and all of life Itself!

This Stillness has been yearning to be recognized for eternity and whereas some have made the superficially perilous journey inward to this magnificent place of peace and silence: many more than not have put it off for a time when it would be ‘right’ for them to do so. 

And now, this ‘Stillness,’ this ‘Silence,’ has weaseled its way onto earth, for good. While no one was looking and everyone was busy being distracted by the pandemic, the Spirit of Love, Truth and Peace may just have settled Its way into the collective unconscious of humanity forever, awaiting Its sacred time and moment to subtly, overtly, gradually or explosively shatter the old ways of being and doing while replacing them with sustainable frequencies and forms as the foundational building blocks of the long anticipated New Earth!

After being born physically, we unfold within a second womb, meant to incubate our better angel. The second womb is an experiential one that, through the labor of a lifetime, births the soul on Earth. This journey opens us to a process of transformation that is mysterious, difficult, and inevitable. This dynamic transformation is how we are revealed and shaped by experience. By living the one life we are given, we release the wisdom that waits in our heart, and that tender, human process leads us to the way under the way, the place of true meeting. When we commit to these holy engagements that join who we are with the world, we discover that the temple is the world.

Eventually, all the love, suffering, and humility we go through wear away our walls of resistance until Spirit shines from within us like an inner sun. This is how Spirit is revealed on Earth—as the coverings we carry are worn away by life, the light we carry can pour into the world.

A lot of us are feeling powerless right now, like everything is outside our control. We can’t control when the government decides when we can go back to work. We can’t control who gets Coronavirus. We can’t even control what’s in stock at the grocery store!

So how do we navigate a space when we feel like we have no power and can’t control life outside of us?

The key is to recognize the huge difference between surrendering and giving up. 

We have to surrender to what we have no power over, what we can’t control. That doesn’t mean we say, “Oh yeah, what’s happening now is totally fine.” Or that we say, “Fine, I give up.” It doesn’t mean that we’re in denial about it either, like, “Oh, everything will be back to normal by Friday.” That’s not what I’m talking about!

What I’m talking about is the need to accept what’s going on outside of us in our current and immediate environment, and recognizing that there are certain things in our life that we have absolutely no power or control over. 

A Question to Walk With: Describe a recent experience you’ve had with grace and try to convey its appearance and feeling in words without using the word grace.

I was thinking that adversity is an organic phenomenon of nature that exists solely to increase our vibration. It doesn’t much matter where it appears to have come from, who or what generated it, but like a blade of grass growing up through the pavement, we push through under the pressure or the forces that may be trying to squash us but alas for them, it is only serving to increase our vibration. It is biology. It is chemistry.

When you apply mechanical pressure to a crystal, it generates an EM field. As the pressure is increased on us with our seclusion, the crystalline beings of Pure Diamond Light we are, rise in vibration to meet the Christ Light within us. Coal turns into diamonds! It’s geology. We are made of minerals and they are transforming into Crystal Light! 

If you were on your death bed, what would be important to you v.s everyday importance? Does the definition of importance change when you shift the context? What if we lived ‘death bed importance’ every day of our lives? Who would we be then and what actions would we take?  

Importance, what we value most is uniquely individual. I like to base my importance first on what is real. Some say reality doesn’t exist, that there is no reality. That reality is a useful lie we tell ourselves and one another in order to organize and get things done and that in truth, reality is subjective, a perception, a point of view.  

But for me, reality is the Infinite, is the Absolute, is the Original Creation of love by the Light that is, was and ever will be. This ‘reality’ of Oneness comes intact with certain rules, or laws that seem to govern the All Life: immutable laws of the universe.

It dawned on me early on knowing this, that I had a choice: to either do my best to study, live by/with/as those governing principles or deny them and try to negotiate with them at every turn! (Not a good strategy!)

“Often, the precursor to spiritual awakening is some crisis, something that cuts through the thick layers of illusion of the ego.“

Grace powers revelation. Grace is the sacred energy that creates expansion and the possibility of recognition of your Essential Self. There is grace in every situation. It shows up in countless forms. Whether you are standing in line at a movie theater, dealing with your crying baby, mourning the death of a loved one, or in the midst of the inevitable highs and lows of marriage or divorce, the power to reveal the Essential Self is always present.

Often, the precursor to spiritual awakening is some crisis, something that cuts through the thick layers of illusion of the ego. Someone leaves you. You contract a serious illness. You have a falling-­out with your closest friend. You deal with an addiction. You lose money.