George Bernard Shaw once said “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
I’d want to take that a step further and say “stop burying your head in distractions because life seems to lack meaning, find your own meaning.”
We live in a society in which Anti-Depressant medications are the most prescribed drugs after Antibiotics. Some demographic groups are far more likely to die from suicide than literally any other cause. Many people are committing more time and effort trying to feel good about themselves and the direction of their lives than they are simply living it. It seems sometimes that whole generations lack any real meaning or purpose. Perhaps for this reason, people will look for projects to distract themselves with; projects that will be so all consuming that they won’t have the time to take stock and consider their lives in case, on closer scrutiny, they appear to be futile. Some play computer games to the point of addiction, getting themselves lost in a world of adventure and magic (even if the magic is simply the ability to rise from the dead after failure and start again). Some will be devoted to following other people playing a game that they become total associated; you can hear football fans saying things like “we won” meaning that a football team, that they personally have nothing to do with other than watching, won. One study found that around 40% of English men said that without football their lives would be meaningless; and very few of those actually played football. These distracting projects need not be, of themselves, meaningless or without virtue in their own right, but they can still be so distracting and immersive, as to stop those involved from taking a moment to look at their own lives and consider if their distracting project is really what they wish for their lives.
Let me offer a suggestion. A suggestion based on evidence from a number of long-term studies (one Harvard study, for example, has been going for 70 years now) into what makes people happy, healthy, content and fulfilled. It turns out that it is the quality of your relationships that will make the greatest influence on your life. Not the number of relationships, but the quality. It’s about feeling secure in those relationships that you have.
Here is the problem. It isn’t as simple as ‘get a good relationship and you’ll be happy’. It turns out that until you are content, secure and happy with who you are, you won’t be able to maintain a secure and happy relationship. When you like yourself, others are be inspired to like you too. When you love yourself, others are more likely to love you too. When you respect yourself, yep you guessed, others will too. I’m sure you’re getting the idea now. The Meditation Living programs are designed to resource you with the techniques to developing these attributes, the resources to become the person you most wish to be. That person will principally be the real intrinsic you, that is why you have a longing to be, or express, that nature. That will be a person you can love and respect. The content and structure of these programs are designed to enable you to recreate yourself into the best possible you. It is about ‘mastering your potential.’ These programs will change the way you think about & perceive the universe you live in, other people, and most importantly, the way you think about yourself. This whole process, based on ancient wisdom from around the world, will prepare you for better relationships. It will help you to create your own meaning in life, rather than simply be distract from noticing the lack of personal meaning.
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