Mind Calm (3 page)

The list goes on and on. But none of these things are ultimately you. Yes, they contribute to your personality and what you tend to do with your day, but that does not make them you.

Why? They are all temporary, come and go and change. Therefore attempting to find your Self in these transient labels is a bit like trying to stay still in the ocean without an anchor. It's not going to work and you'll find yourself drifting. Moving from one mental construct to another can
be very confusing - not to mention highly stressful - if you attempt to define who you are from the things in your life that constantly change and are, to a large extent, outside your immediate control.

What if you are not who or what you think?
Are you willing to explore a new way of perceiving and experiencing your Self?

When I refer to your ‘real Self', I'm speaking about the permanent aspect to you. The dimension of you that does not come and go or change, and is not temporary. The aspect of you that is present - always.

During literally thousands of hours of meditation, I've explored this big question and come to conclude: I am simply the Self that is aware. Everything else is a mind-made creation or life circumstance that comes and goes. But that which is aware does not. So who are you? You are the conscious awareness that is aware of the voice in your head and all the other thoughts and emotions happening daily. The awareness that is aware of your body and all the physical sensations and conditions that occur. The awareness that's aware of all of your relationships, bank balance, the jobs you do, the houses you inhabit and the hobbies that you happen to love.

Awareness is the one facet of you that has been with you your entire life and you've never for one iota of a moment existed without.

Even if you've been unaware of it, your conscious awareness has been fully present the entire time. Consciousness is what still exists when you are not having thoughts or emotions. It is forever with you despite the people in your life moving on, your job titles changing, your body growing older, your home addresses moving and so on; it is the contextual landscape in which everything else in your life occurs.

Believe it or not, problems are made up by the mind. This potentially shocking possibility is so because without the mind's interference through judging things as negative, bad, wrong or worse, life happens without anything being experienced as problematic. Yes, tricky, unexpected and perhaps unpleasant things may occur, but the mind needs to judge things negatively for them to be deemed a problem.

Buddha was once quoted to have said:
‘No mind, no problem.'
And it is so true.

Owing to the way the mind operates, if you spend your days thinking then you can end up stuck in a never-ending cycle of problem-solving and finding new things needing to be fixed. The unfortunate knock-on effect of being unaware of consciousness and caught up in the myriad of mind-made problems is having a body under copious amounts of stress, living on an emotional roller coaster of ups and downs, and ultimately a sense of never feeling truly satisfied or successful in business and life.

Beyond the mind exists a still silent consciousness that holds within it the solution to any mind-made problem. By solution I don't mean an answer that comes from clever or positive thinking but a way out of the box of the thinking mind altogether.

Until I knew still silent awareness and the pristine peace, limitless love, joy and unbounded abundance that it contains, I never felt totally satisfied with the life that I'd worked so hard to build. Always feeling like ‘there must be more to life than this', I chased goal after goal in the hope that the next tick on the list would bring me true satisfaction. I thought I wasn't happy yet due to my life not being how I thought it needed to be. I simply hadn't ever considered that my discontentment could be coming from the fact that I was living lost in my pendulum-like mind - swinging from judgement to judgement - and as a result of this unseen habit, inadvertently missing a huge aspect of my life and my Self.

None of my achievements could ever relieve the eternal itch that something was missing.
I was simply looking for fulfilment in places that it couldn't be found.

No amount of money can buy you the inner peace and connection, fulfilment and happiness that you naturally and immediately experience when engaging present moment awareness. All these wonderful things are built into the fabric of your conscious awareness. Available to you now, no matter how positive or perfected you make
your thoughts, emotions, body and life. Does this sound too good to be true? Keep with me and stay open-minded!

Having been involved in this field of work for a decade, I've worked with a whole spectrum of individuals; some of them almost broke, others multimillionaires. Irrespective of the size of their bank balances, however, everyone is equal when it comes to having the same abundant awareness living inside them. The richer folk haven't necessarily been any happier; they've just had different problems to deal with. It's become clear to me that true success is not measured by external means, but by how calm, contented and connected to your real Self you are on the inside.

During this journey to a new way of experiencing your mind, your Self, and life, I hope you will clearly see that the secret to success is stillness.

Mind Calm is a simple, easy and fun modern-day meditation technique for being consciously aware in life. ‘CALM' stands for ‘Conscious Awareness Life Meditation', and it is a way to meditate that does exactly what the name suggests.

Through meditation with your eyes open and closed, you can become more consciously aware during daily life. This book will give you guidance on how to use Mind Calm along with the know-how you need to be able to practise it with ease and in the most effective ways.

‘Peace with Mind' is not a typo. Far from it! The term is one I've been using for a while and has been my main inspiration for writing this book. With Mind Calm I would love to put ‘peace WITH mind' on the map.

I've observed that peace of mind is perhaps one of the most confusing and demoralizing spiritual incentives on the planet, as it implies totally clearing your mind of thoughts for good. Yes, permanent peace of mind is possible. Not to mention marvellous - for the few who manage to attain it in this lifetime. However, that's my point. To reach such a state of mind-body harmony, where thoughts are permanently stilled, can take many hours of meditation, very precise guidance on how to let go of the mind's subtle attachments and, in some cases, a good dose of divine intervention.

In today's world most people have incredibly busy lives. They balance career pressures with family and financial responsibilities, which all take up the bulk of their time and attention. Even if they wanted to disappear off to a monastery somewhere, to meditate for months in a quest to find permanent peace of mind, for most people this simply is not an option. As a result, achieving this state can seem like a pipe dream. So far from the realms of possibility, it can unfortunately make meditation seem to be an ill-affordable luxury in an already full schedule.

So it is for those people, who make up the bulk of the current population, with whom I'm keen to share Mind Calm, along with the very appealing and achievable possibility of ‘peace with mind'. I have also found this approach to be
highly beneficial for people who have already worked on ‘waking up', as it provides a bridge that anyone can walk to be more consciously aware and find calm on the inside.

Mind Calm offers a solution that is not just for making your mind still, but also for making peace with your mind when it inevitably starts moving again.

Stopping your mind from having thoughts is possible. You are going to experience this is true when you play with the Mind Calm Games shared later in this book. Never having another thought again - i.e. permanent peace of mind - however, is an entirely different ball game. Especially when you take into account how much the average person's mind is stimulated and overworked. Also, if you happen to like your mind, it can be an unappealing suggestion that you should never think again. So Mind Calm is a solution that enables you to coexist peacefully with your mind. It is my hope that you are also willing to explore what exists beyond your mind, to find the aspect of your radiant real Self that deserves your attention too.

Being consciously aware, you create space between you and your mind. Putting your attention on this space leads to an immediate inner calm. Not because you have stopped your thoughts necessarily, but due to experiencing the still silent presence of your own conscious awareness. With practice you can find that the calm continues, even if you start having negative thoughts or emotions. Or even if
you are having challenging physical issues or unexpected difficulties arise in your external life circumstances.

How remarkable is that? You don't need to stop your negative thoughts or emotions in order to enjoy inner calm, neither are you destined to be negatively impacted by the unpredictable nature of your life circumstances. You can be free to enjoy calm irrespective.

This liberated way of living comes from healing your relationship with your mind, emotions, body and life. So once you learn how to get Mind Calm any time you want, by being consciously aware (see
the Quick Start in Chapter 4
), the rest of the book is about making it a habit to be at peace with your thoughts, at peace with your emotions, at peace with your body and, eventually, at peace with your life in general.

Mind Calm offers a two-part path of peace and prosperity:

• Part I: Peace of mind (sometimes), and
  
• Part II: Peace with your mind (the rest of the time)
  

Until you are in harmony with life, you can gather as many riches as you like, but you won't necessarily be living a truly successful life. I want your calm, clarity or contentment never to fall victim to the movement of your mind. I want you to discover that when you are at peace with your mind you are at peace with your life. Ultimately I want you to know how, by stopping your mind whenever you want and also being unaffected by your mind when it inevitably moves, you can transform your relationship with life for the infinitely better.

Conscious awareness is inherently still and silent. A sign that you are aware is that you experience inner stillness and silence. It is my hope that reading this book is an eye opener for you. Not solely from a conceptual perspective, but that you experience what I refer to as the ‘Infinite I'. Spoken about by countless spiritual teachers over millennia, the Infinite I (or ‘infinite-eye', if that makes more sense to you) is the awareness that is observing life unfold and the consciousness that all of life exists within. You have front-row seats at this glorious adventure called your life. It is time to say ‘bring it on' and welcome whatever happens with wide-open arms.

To get started, let's explore why you have such a busy mind, so that you can make the move from so much mental activity to mind calm.

The lotus leaf is often used to symbolize the ‘infinite', and although at first glance the logo looks like a person sitting in meditation, on deeper inspection you can see that the arms reaching upwards also form an eye in the centre. This Mind Calm logo is therefore intended to be a symbolic representation and reminder of the purpose of Mind Calm, which is to be consciously aware by being inwardly attentive to the Infinite I (or ‘infinite-eye').