Learning to meditate can help you reduce stress and rejuvenate your soul. Science has proven that reducing the ill effects of stress can increase the quality of your life. It can also help prevent heart attacks and even cancer.

In reality, meditation is simply learning techniques that help you to relax. Unfortunately, many people associate meditation with religious beliefs. Although some religions do use meditation, the use of these techniques may be implemented without any religious connotations.

Getting Started

Learning to meditate requires that you understand three separate principles. These steps of meditation are posture, breathing, and attitude. All of these concepts must be used together in order to achieve the maximum effects. Posture is a fundamental part of meditation. The posture for any relaxation should keep the spine straight. This will provide the proper circulation through your nerves and help you to stay alert.

Breathing is the most crucial part of learning to meditate. You should take slow, even breaths that come from your diaphragm. It will take some practice to get the process down. The final step is all about focusing on the task, which is clearing your mind and concentrating on relaxing your body. This is often the most challenging part of meditation. Beginners often find that their mind will wonder into daily worries or daydreams. When this happens, simply refocus your attention back to meditation.

Tools of The Trade

There are things that you can do and purchase that will help you, when learning to meditate. Tapes, DVDs, and books offer step-by-step instructions on proper meditation. They can be extremely helpful to beginners. Chairs are produced specifically for the purpose of relaxation and meditation. They are designed to provide proper posture and help with breathing. You can also use mantras, which are simple chants that can help you stay focused.

Our doubt concerning our self-worth is the main obstacle to our emotional and inter-relational harmony. This doubt is the cause of our greatest fears such as being rejected, laughed at, ignored, unloved, and most of all, of being alone.

Loneliness and Doubt

Loneliness is the disease of our age, and its cause is self-doubt. Fear of being alone is perhaps our most ancient one. It comes from the fact that in the past, he who was not accepted was ostracized from the group. In those days, that did not mean simply feeling lonely, but also being unable to survive.

Another factor that makes us fear rejection or not being accepted by others is the fear of being punished by them or by God. We have been brought up to believe in a God, whose love is conditional, depending upon whether we are perfect in His/Her/Its eyes or not.

Childhood Programming

We receive messages from our parents and other important persons throughout our childhood years concerning whether and under what conditions we are good or worthy.

As children, we learn from adults that we must measure our self-worth by:

1. What others think of us.
2. The results of our efforts in school, our profession and life.
3. Our appearance
4. How we compare to others.
5. How much we know.
6. How much money we have.
7. And various other conditions

Our doubt of our self-worth then becomes our greatest obstacle to inner peace, harmonious communication and loving relationships. These doubts are the foundation of most of our negative emotions and relationship conflicts.

*** If we had more self-acceptance, we would have less need to prove ourselves to others. ***

Then we would not feel offended so frequently and we could overlook others’ negativity and be at peace with them regardless of their behavior.

Let us now look at how we can increase and stabilize our self-acceptance.

The first step is to discover the situations in which we lose our sense of self-worth or self-acceptance.

The reasons we most often loose our feelings of self-worth are examined in the following questionnaire.

OBSTACLES TO LOVING OURSELVES

In which situations do you lose your sense of self-love, self-worth, self- esteem or self-acceptance?

1. When others ask for your help and you * do not say “yes” *, or do not respond.

2. When you have * made a mistake * or have * failed * at some effort.

3. When * others are more capable * than you are at certain tasks or concerning certain qualities (i.e. intelligence, artistic ability, speech, sports, cooking, professional success, their children’s success, economically, making friends, employing disciplines).

4. When * others attract more attention, * esteem and respect in a group situation.

5. When others * have offered more to you * than you have offered them.

6. When you are * not perfect *.

7. When * others criticize, are angry at or reject you *.

8. When * others do not agree with you or believe that you are wrong *.

9. When others * are able to manipulate you *.

10. When * you have “created” pain * for others.

11. When you are * not in harmony with your conscience *.

The accompanying more detailed questionnaire will help us determine more clearly when we lose our feelings of self-worth. We suggest that as you read through it, you mark those items that might relate to you.

I Tend to Lose My Feelings of Self-Worth:
(Worth what; love, happiness, health, success, satisfaction?)

1. When others criticize me, blame me, or do not approve of me.
2. When others are angry with me.
3. When my children, spouse or parents are not happy, healthy, successful, or satisfied.
4. When I do not know as much as others around me.
5. When I do not have an intimate relationship partner.
6. When my house is not clean and in order.
7. When my partner shows interest in others.
8. If I am not successful professionally.
9. If I do not have enough money.
10. If I am not attractive to the opposite sex.
11. If I do not make an impression on others.
12. If I do not have many sexual successes.
13. If others do not respect me.
14. If my child is ill.
15. If I do not have what others have.
16. If I am not perfect.
17. If I do not achieve many things.
18. If others are able to cheat or mislead me.
19. If I do not have
20. If I do not do
21. Other reasons

SOCIAL PROGRAMMING OR CONSCIENCE

Once we have established the particular situations or stimuli that obstruct our feelings of self-worth or self-acceptance, we will need to separate our answers into two groups.

1. Those which have to do with * social programming * and not with our conscience. In such a case, we need to analyze each reason separately as we attempt to discover and change the beliefs that cause us to lose our self-acceptance in those situations.

When we lose our feelings of self-worth because of social programming we are buying into societies illusions concerning who is worthy and who is not. We are measuring ourselves by superficial standards set by society such as money, appearance profession etc, and not by our conscience, such as honesty, love, sincerity, selflessness etc.

2. Situations in which we reject ourselves because our * actions are not in alignment with our inner conscience *. We behave toward others, as we would not like them to behave toward us. Our answers to 10 and 11 in the first questionnaire might indicate such situations.

In such cases, we are interested in how we could react differently in those situations so that our behavior is in tune with our conscience.

In these second cases which have to do with conscience, we will most often find that we behave in such ways because we are being controlled by the previous categories if social beliefs.

For example we tell lies (matter of conscience) because we believe that our self-worth depends on what others think about us and thus want to hide the truth from them

The final solution for the matter of self-worth is to realize that all beings deserve love and respect exactly as they are regardless of all their flaws simply because they are unique aspects of divine creation- just as all flowers and all of nature.

In such a case, we must not confuse one’s ability and/or morality with worthiness of love and respect. As aspects of divine creation all deserve love and respect regardless of ability or morality.

The difference is that those who have ability deserve positions of greater responsibility that those without. While those without morality do deserve our love and respect they may not deserve trust or freedom to move about in society, until they are healed of their problem.

The greatest self help-book of all times “The Greatest Salesman in the World” was written by Og Mandino. He is probably the most famous for an anecdotal story he tells from one of his favorite books called “Acres of Diamonds” written by Russell Herman Conwell which is known by just about every great salesmen or trainer alive today. Og Mandino invigorated the story just as every motivational guru has since. The “Greatest Salesman in the World” sold over 40 million copies and was translated into 22 different languages. In “Acres of Diamonds” the anecdotal story is told about an Arab guide, a man who wanted to find diamonds so badly that he sold all he possessed to go off in a futile mission to find them while the new owner of his home actually discovers that a rich diamond mine was located right there on the property originally owned by this Arab. If the Arab had gone just three feet more he would have found that diamond mine, he would have found the diamonds in his own back yard if he had looked a little harder and not given up so easily. Instead he lost his enthusiasm and looked for greener pastures elsewhere. There are a lot of lessons in that story, but the chief one is the idea about not giving up.

Abraham Lincoln spoke also about not giving up. He said “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” Easier said than done, right? Nevertheless this is a truism, one of those natural laws of the universe I speak so much about. The fact is we are here in this life on this planet to learn. Earth is our school set up to develop our talents, and teach us how to acquire skills we need to live and love one another. How we go about that is truly our unique path in life, but one of the lessons we are bound to run into is the one where our resolve is tested. Will we give up or press on?

The fact is so many of us do give up. Consider the ratio of business failures to start-ups. Consider that over 50% of marriages fail in divorce. Consider the rate of drop-outs to graduates. It is a glaring truth that we as humans do give up more than we should. Above all that is the amazing comparison to the anecdote that is we had just hung in there a little longer we would have made a success of our endeavor

We all have weaknesses to work on. This one quite frankly is so wide spread we might as well say that we should all pay attention to not giving up. In Lincoln’s quote we find an important tidbit of information that could help us. He said, “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” First recognize that failures are part of the game. Learn to embrace failure to failure. You must fail to learn. In the movie “Batman Begins” young Bruce Wayne is asked by his father, “Why do we fall son?” The answer is, “So we can learn how to get up.” In sales we all learn it’s a numbers game. Your victories, those things you call closes are based on how many successful appointments you get, which in turn is based on how many calls you make, which is based on how many leads you get. It’s all a numbers game. You know as sure as the sum rises that you will have 10 sales if you can get 20 appointments. You need 100 calls to get 25 appointments. It’s a numbers game, So is everything in life. Learning how to recover is a lesson all its own. Eventually you can get up and smile and take on the world again with enthusiasm. That is the meaning in the message today. Be empowered and learn to fall and get up again. Learn to go from fall to fall and maintain your enthusiasm. Don’t let anyone get you discouraged.