Happy Mind: Meditations from the Ancient World to Modernity

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No one likes to think about it but each of us has experienced the feelings of shame or humiliation or done something we deeply rgret. At one time or another, more frequently or less, everyone has had the fear that people will see you as a fraud, they will judge you as a failure, or that they will reject you because you are unreliable. That toxic cocktail of deep embarrassment combined with fear and regret and even self-loathing is not something anyone wants to taste.

So, if you’d rather not go there right now, I understand. Most of the Serena meditations allow you to bypass these dark places. The method is such that, without repressing or suppressing these darker passages of our history, we can free ourselves from them without directly addressing them. But sometimes the unpleasant moments of our past (we could even call them ghosts) haunt us with such persistence that it is helpful to have a technique to just go right at it and let go of these feelings and memories directly. So that is what we are going to do today. I am going to guide you through the steps to let go of your “ghosts” of regret, shame or humiliation.

As a side note, I should say that I will be using the words ghost and demons in this meditation. You should be aware that I use them as a device to focus your mind. If you prefer, you can call them habitual patterns of neurological activity that irresistibly manifest as unpleasant emotions and dysfunctional behavior. But those aren’t words we can work with very easily to effect a change in your life. They might please our intellect, but they do nothing for our emotional self. So, I’m going to stick with the ghost metaphor and (unless you’re someone that is really into ghosts), I ask that you just think of this term like a sort of brain hack or shortcut and play along with the metaphor.

Note: this is a 30 minute version of the Letting Go of Shame & Regret meditation

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We can claim an air of self confidence whenever we choose, and that is what this meditation is about. The truth is, however, that sustainable self confidence only arises when we realize that we actually have no control over anything and that there is a benevolent force that does have this control. Everything that happens is an expression of what the ancient masters might call the Divine Will, or as might be expressed today, what we could call the Physical Laws of Nature. We can't argue with what is. What has happened or is happening just is. You can stick a supernatural being in there as the prime mover or just call it physics or whatever but there is little basis to argue that any one of us individually as a human or even all of us collectively as a species can actually control what happens in every detail. I tell my arm to move, yes, and it moves, but the chain of causation that led to me having that thought and that ability I had nothing to do with and it is infinitely complex and goes back in time indefinitely. And modern neuroscience is producing more and more evidence supporting the claim that our actions emerge prior to us even being conscious of our intentions. So we don't control it. Our freedom of choice in the actions of bodies in the world of form is an illusion. A useful illusion for maximizing the propagation of our genes. Fine. But wait, there's more! There is this recipe for navigating through this life of ours, of adapting the electrical and chemical activity of the brain to create a sense of happiness and abundance and peace. We can short-circuit the more typical pattern of endless dissatisfaction. THAT is where we DO have control, where we CAN exercise our free will. We can choose to follow this recipe or we can choose to ignore it. Meditations like this one will help you along the path to realizing this true self-confidence; a self-confidence that is rooted in the notion that the Universe controls the Universe but you get to choose how you react to it and what emotions and thoughts you have in response.

This is a 45 minute version of the I Am Confident guided meditation

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