Whatever You Do, Just Don’t Lose Yourself

I know life gets crazy busy with all of its demands on your time and energy, but you can’t let yourself go. You can’t allow your SELF to diminish in the multitude of daily tasks that require your immediate attention.  Those things are always going to be there.  You will always have a list of a million things to do, and long after you’re dead and gone there will continue to be a million things that you left undone. And just like now, life will go on.  So before you become completely undone and begin to drown in a sea of responsibilities and obligations, do your SELF a favor and grab hold to some sound words to live by.  Losing yourself is not worth whatever you feel you have to gain by doing so.  When you lose touch with your SELF, you lose touch with the deeper, more fulfilling aspects of life.  Allow me to explain.

When you maintain a very busy schedule, it’s important to come up for air long enough to breathe very deep, very slow breaths while you quiet your mind and recharge your energy.   This means that you need to schedule time in your day where you can be in total silence to clear your mind of the constant chatter that goes on in your head almost unceasingly.  When you find yourself more irritable then normal then you’ve waited too long to retreat into stillness.  Take some time to release.  All day you’re receiving and processing mundane information and that takes energy from you.  Not just mental energy, but physical, spiritual and emotional energy as well; they’re all connected.   So it’s important to recharge yourself by releasing all that you’ve received from the mundane world and then receiving from the infinite mind that designed you.  This is what happens when you achieve a state of meditation.  You are actually feeding and strengthening your higher, spiritual self which is important in order to achieve and maintain a state of balance and peace in your life.

To better explain this, let’s say that within your being, you have two selves; a higher self and a lower self.  Your higher self is your divinity, your divine nature.  This is the self that identifies with divinity.  It is your source, your direct connection to God, it is God.  It receives divine wisdom and knowledge directly from the infinite mind, it is the infinite mind.  It has, woven within the fabrics of its being, unconditional love and universal knowledge.  It is concerned with the whole of existence rather than self alone.  This aspect of your self is the quiet voice of reason that you hear when you’re about to do or say something you’ll later regret.  It’s the angel on the shoulder that leads you down the righteous road.  It’s the old sage that has the experience and patience to teach you how to live happy and free.  It is beautiful, calm and more powerful than you could ever imagine.  But with all of its power and ability, this self is only as strong as you allow it to be in your life.  One way to strengthen the power of this aspect of your self is through meditation.

Your lower self is your animalistic nature, your natural instincts.  This is the self that identifies with self only.  It seeks to preserve and please only itself and is not concerned about the greater whole.  This self speaks loud and begs you to let it have its way even when it knows its wrong.  It pulls you in the opposite direction of your higher self wisdom.  It has no control over its emotions; it is driven by nature and is only concerned with survival and pleasure.  It’s the beast in us that if gone untamed and untrained will ruin our own lives and the lives of others we encounter.  Lack of balance in this aspect of self can be self-defeating.

With this perspective, we see that within humanity, both a divine and animalistic nature influence our choices.  Which influence is the strongest in our lives depends upon which nature we nourish the most.  If our animalistic nature or “flesh” or “ego” is constantly being fed without care and attention given to our divine nature, then you allow your lower self to have more power than your higher self in the decisions regarding your life.  But when you nourish your higher self with meditation (divine communion) you strengthen the aspect of yourself that has the power to transform your life in amazing and permanent ways.

So when I say, don’t lose your SELF, I’m talking about your higher self.  Don’t lose touch with the self that allows you to experience those delicacies like divine peace, freedom, joy, balance, and unconditional love.  It’s imperative to unplug from the unlimited noise of the mundane world and enter into the stillness that exists beyond the realm of the tangible.  Don’t allow the demands of life to pull you into a downward spiral to the point where your higher self is so weak that it can’t pull you back out.  Recharge everyday with meditation. -love, sj