The White Candle Meditation APP

It is far too easy to get caught up in our own minds and our thoughts in modern day life.

Life as we know it right now, is busy. Many of us are working at least one job, or running or starting a business. We have bills, mortgages, children, appointments, family, sport, the list goes on and on. Life starts the second the alarm goes off in the morning, and stops when we go to sleep at night, all the while many of us rarely feel rested.

The Personality Mind

I’m sure there is a proper definition of this, but as with most of my work, and my writing, I refer always to my own interpretation of what I have read or heard.

The personality mind, in my opinion, is the one where we spend most of our time. It is the one where we are comparing ourselves to others, the one where our thoughts are racing, it is the mind that we all too often are making decisions from, and then having to re-visit these decisions when things don’t work out.

This is my go to video when I need to step back and take a look at the bigger picture, and talks about the personality mind.

Operating from our personality mind is almost addictive in a sense. Eckart Tolle talks about how many humans in the modern day are addicted to thinking.

Take a look here at what he has to say, and yes, you do have time.

How often have you said, or heard someone else say “oh, I’ll have to think about that”, or, “I’ve been thinking about what you said…and…”.

Don’t get me wrong, thinking is great, I love it, but it is the thinking that we do in the personality mind, which can tend to be quite shut of from the outside world and from our higher power or self, that doesn’t not always serve our highest good, or our soul purpose.

Take note of the next time you find your thoughts being only about what is going on tomorrow, or the next day, or next month. Take note of the rising levels of stress and anxiety you start to feel when you are asking yourself how you are going to make everything work.

This here, I believe, is our queue (as Oprah talked about above), our queue to recognise that we are operating from our personality mind, and that we should be taking a moment to get still, and relax in the knowing that everything is a part of something much, much bigger, and far, far greater.

The Bigger Picture

“You have to look at the bigger picture”. 

Has someone ever said this to you? Have you ever said this to someone else?

Yes?

Think (the irony) back to the moment, or the situation leading up to you saying this to someone, or someone saying this to you. I would be confident in saying that it was a result of either you or another person getting all worked up over trivial things in life and expressing how you or they are not sure how it is all going to work.

It could go a little something like this;

“Oh my God, I have to pick up clothes from the cleaners by 5, and Katie has dance practice at 5:30, and I haven’t even thought about dinner, and Ken is away for work, and I’ve got people coming for dinner Saturday and I have not cleaned the house, I just don’t know how I am going to make it all work!”

A fairly general scenario, but I hope you can see the picture I am trying to paint for you. If you have been practicing your awareness through meditation, in any form that you choose and feel comfortable with, you would, by the end of your minor panic, be saying to yourself something along the lines of the following in your head;

“Ok, I’ve got this. I’ve been busier before, I’ve made things work that I felt at the time were impossible, I have a relaxed faith that I will get everything done, and what I do not, can just wait until I am ready.”

Even as I wrote the first scenario, I felt myself get anxious, and a bit worked up where the person was in a panic about not getting everything done. But after writing the second part of the scenario, or thought process, I felt an immediate sense of calm.

There is something about hearing or reading the words relaxed faith that shifts me from a state of panic and confusion, to a feeling of content, and a knowing that I’ve got this, and that I will get through it.

And that right there, is the bigger picture. It is being able to step back out of your immediate environment or your personality mind thought process, take a birds eye view if you will, and give yourself some credit in knowing that you’ve got this. You’ve got this life, you’ve got what you can control under control, and what you cannot control, just let it be, let it do what it needs to do, because it will, regardless of whether or not you intervene.

To Finish

The most crucial step between shifting from your personality mind to the bigger picture, is awareness. Awareness that you are escalating based on your racing thoughts, and then a knowing that you can just as easily de-escalate your thoughts and the situation.

Try not to get too caught up in the almost adrenalin like rush of getting all worked up and running around like you are super human, none of us are super human, but we are humans who often do some super things.

As you practice your meditation through what ever modality or medium that suits you, I believe I wrote about cleaning the toilet as a type of meditation a few weeks back, set up some “practice runs”. When you are home with little to do, or should I say little to do that is actually vital to your survival as a human being, get yourself worked up, stop, become aware, and then meditate your way back to a state of calm, elevate yourself above the situation and take a look at the bigger picture, you’ve got this!