A Quiet Mind

It’s Monday morning and you’re late again. You’re stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and losing it. That jerk in the convertible just cut you off and that crazy person behind you is ridding your ass. Your trapped behind a Wal-Mart truck that is spewing diesel fumes into your passenger side widow making you choke and tear up. The widows rolled down because the air conditioner is on the fritz again and you’re spritzing like an animal. You can feel the rage beginning to build up inside you.It’s hot, smelly, overcrowded and insane. Your on the edge…

How can you possibly meditate or relax in this situation? Listen to this podcast to learn some ways to help you navigate through the chaos and noise. Explore some innate abilities that help you cope and relive your suffering, dis-ease and stress.

When the attachment to thoughts subsides our mind naturally gets quiet and we begin to experience gaps between thoughts. In these gaps we can hear the soft -spoken voice of the heart.This soft-spoken voice is a compass, that can point us to the direction we need to travel - inward.In life sometimes we need guidance and advice so we may look outward to our friends and family for counsel and wisdom. My advice to you is this, seek the inward path to your own inner teacher, it’s there for us at anytime and any place. This guide has always been there within us we were born with it, at times it’s just difficult or impossible to hear. The voice of the heart is quiet, soft and non intrusive. On the other had the external noises of life are often so harsh and loud that the soto voice of our heart is drowned out completely.

What can we do to hear our inner guidance? Daily seek a place of solitude and calm and simply stop. Set everything down. Be still. Take several long slow deep breathes in and out. Allow yourself to settle. Each day we have the opportunity to acknowledge this inner stillness and the soft voice of our can our heart-mind. Each day we can make this moment of stillness a priority. It’s up to us.

In every moment there is the opportunity to see that your true nature is happiness. There is no need to seek for what is already yours. The treasure is within you.

If you want to know the truth about who you really are and what this is really all about you have to be willing to give up the old methods, to reach beyond thought and thinking mind and to take the dive into the unknown.

Return to the one that is not touched by the circumstances of the world. The one that lives in this world but not of this world. Drop the meditator, drop the form and just sit without any rigid model. There is no reconnection or creation of an experience or paradigm, it’s ordinary and easy to do.

Do you have a barking dog mind? Do you want to throw it a bone?

When we use our breath to come home and check in we can catch ourselves before we use a tactic, habit or substance to escape the rat mind. When we catch ourselves before we engage in that habit we can instill this practice, the practice or activity just observing. Observing silently, without judgment and letting the thoughts pass by. Try sitting today for just two minutes. If your mind say’s it’s bored, then just sit there and be as bored as you can. Do boredom all the way. If your mind won’t stop spinning, just let it spin and don’t try to do a thing. Do nothing all the way everyday for just a few minutes.There is no need to have a formal meditation practice, just sit quietly, watch, listen and breath.

There is nothing to discover. There is nothing to remove. There is nothing to add.There is nothing to see.

If you think about it we were never taught to breath, isn’t that strange? We have been living out our whole lives without the basic instructions on how to breathe properly. Isn’t that shocking? Most of us breathe like little chipmunks that are being chased by Mr. Twinkles the neighborhood cat. That type of breathing is fight or flight, or panic breathing. We are all running from Mr. Twinkles in our own way throughout the day.

Here are the four questions we asked Mallika Chopra.