Nimrod GabrielThis is a guest article and video by Dada Jyotirupananda. Dada is a teacher of meditation for over 30 years in about 30 countries. He is the author of “Meditation: Searching for the Real You”. He is also a speaker at events such as UN conferences, vegetarian and environmental conferences, universities and many other venues. If you would like to hear more. Book your tickets to his next talk with this link
A Yogic Monks Guide To Inner Peace
Though I’m a yogic monk, whose appearance and life style – to some extent – may seem foreign to you, my desires and goals, generally speaking, are the same as anyone reading this.
I simply want a meaningful life, security, a sense of place in the world. And on a more mundane level, yes, I need some money, a roof over my head, something to do every day, good relationships, health and as many days as possible with the sun instead of clouds overhead.
In other words, I want happiness. As do we all.
Through meditation and gradually understanding what makes me tick, I realised there are two types of happiness. They are not completely separate from each other, but they do move us to act in different ways. I call them ‘dependent happiness’ and ‘independent happiness.’
The names themselves probably tell you what they are, tell you which one you want. Dependent happiness of course means that what makes you happy depends on things which may be outside of your control. And Independent happiness is more about what you can do to make yourself, and others, feel happy.
Yoga theory says that the only thing everyone really wants is happiness, and we want happiness so we can have peace of mind.
So if you find your happiness through things of the world that are always changing, and which may initially seem good for you, but which may turn out to be not at all good for you, then your happiness may not last long at all.
I do NOT mean that one should give up the world and go to a cave or a monastery, but rather that each of us should balance our worldly activities with some practice, some ‘reminder’ of a deeper type of happiness, a happiness which does not depend on the things in the world which are always changing.
So, enjoy your favourite music group, or club or sports team. But remember that they won’t always serve up happiness. The group will break up, or you’ll get bored by their music. The club may close down, or you’ll grow away from that type of socialising. And one’s favourite sports team may have won a lot last year, but this year they don’t do good at all.
Thus, after some time, all of these sorts of happiness will fade away.
So, I do not ask you to give up the world. But bring something more long-lasting into your life. Meditation helps us find eternal happiness. As you might guess, it doesn’t depend on changing, impermanent things. Rather, as the old saying goes, ‘it’s all in your mind.’
One definition of meditation is ‘concentrated thinking.’ Of course there are many valid definitions and practices of meditation. But the idea here is to focus your mind on a universal goal or concept. Meditation helps us to remind ourselves every day of the ultimate aim of our life. The practice of meditation, though, is not just to repeat an idea or phrase in your mind in a mechanical way. I teach a meditation which helps you to guide your mind away from the distractive world for a bit of time each day. By doing such a practice, we can come back to our daily life with a refreshed and refined view of what we want to do.
Thus we learn that our happiness does not have to depend only on changing things, but we can access a deeper level of truth, of well-being, of happiness and inner peace.
Come and see what it’s about! You can book your tickets for his next talk with this link.
