Two Perspectives

Two Perspectives on Meditation as a Tool for Transformation

Dr. Amit Nagpal, New Delhi, India, and

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield, Florida, USA

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Amit Nagpal’s Perspective

For introverts and silence lovers, meditation is probably the most powerful personal transformation tool. While chanting and Vipassana may be good examples of formal meditation techniques, living in the moment, silence and simply observing your breath may be good examples of informal meditation techniques.

Here are some of the major benefits of meditative/contemplative practices:

Finding Joy and Peace

The conscious mind is the source of stress and limiting beliefs. Silencing the conscious mind helps us not just relieve stress but rather find peace and joy. I personally believe, “Meditation should not be used as a reactive tool for handling stress but rather used as a proactive tool for creating joy.” In fact my collaborative book (with 19 thought leaders from 6 countries) highlights that money is not the only source of joy but connecting with self, discovering our deep passion and so on are sources of joy which the society is yet to fully tap.

Understanding our Passion and Purpose

Self-reflection with the help of meditation is the best way to discover our true and deepest passion. We can use many spiritual and non-spiritual tools to discover our passions but using meditation can make the process of discovery much faster. If you feel more comfortable with self reflection or plain contemplation or sitting silently surrounded by nature rather than meditation, it is very much fine. The sub-conscious provides us the wisdom, intuition and clarity of thinking to find out what we truly want. We have many passions in life or many hobbies we feel passionate about, but it takes time to discover our deep passion. Here is a post I wrote, “Discover Your Deepest Passion.”

Boosting Our Creativity

Meditation releases Theta waves which boost our creativity and provide us inspiration. My advice to creative professionals is to practice meditation to see exponential growth in their creativity. Meditation boosts our creativity through reflection, though practice and repetition play a critical role in honing creative skills. A desire to boost creativity through meditation can create stress and expectation, which may backfire. So just meditate to relax and improved creativity will be a side benefit. Here is an interesting post, “How I Regained my Lost Creativity.”

Beauty and Charisma

When one has peace within, the face being the index of the mind reflects that as peace written all over you which makes you look beautiful and attractive. Inner beauty comes from a stress-free mind and a confident, giving personality. Someone has rightly said, worry is like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. Here is a detailed post on “Beauty and Charisma through Meditation.”

Tapping the Sub-Conscious

Prayer and meditation also increase levels of dopamine, often referred to as the brain’s pleasure hormone. During meditation the conscious mind gets silent. As a result, we are able to hear the sub-conscious mind or we can say that the sub-conscious gets activated. Then begins the sweet journey of creativity, joy, wisdom, intuition, awareness and in fact, a point of ecstasy and oneness, where none of these matter.

(If you fail at meditation or have failed in the past, then you must read this post.)

_____________________________________________________________________________

Dr Amit Nagpal is a Personal Branding Consultant and Deepest Passion Coach. He is based in New Delhi, India and specializes in personal branding with a holistic touch. His philosophy is, “Enlarge as a Human Being, Excel as a Social Media Being and Evolve as a Personal Brand.”

______________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield’s Perspective

Background:

Meditation is a mind-body-spirit practice originating in ancient Eastern spiritual traditions and used throughout the world for thousands of years. It calms the conditioned mind, relaxes the body, and allows the practitioner to connect to a much larger, more encompassing energy, variously labeled “God”, “The Tao”, “Higher Power”, “Allah”, “Jehovah”, “Universal Consciousness”, “YHWH”, “intuition”, “creativity”, Cosmic Energy. The practitioner learns to trust this power because of the amazing growth, freedom, and spiritual strength it provides.

Benefits of Meditation:

1. Relaxed awareness
2. Stress release
3. Letting go of fear
4. Channeling rage into constructive action
5. Mental self-regulation
6. Improved focus
7. New ways of thinking
8. Single pointed concentration
9. Correct understanding
10. Humility
11. Effortless speech
12. Effortless action
13. Building internal energy
14. Developing compassion, love, patience, forgiveness
15. Openness to synchronicities that effortlessly resolve challenges
16. Indestructible sense of well-being
17. Bliss
18. Transformation

Enhance Your Experience with:

1. A quiet location
2. A comfortable position
3. An open attitude
4. Mental focus

Some Forms of Meditation:

1. Mindfulness meditation
2. Transcendental meditation
3. Mantra meditation
4. Zen Buddhist meditation
5. Breath meditation
6. Relaxation response
7. Action meditation
8. Sound meditation
9. Reiki meditation
10. Guided meditation
11. HeartMath meditation
12. Walking meditation
13. Crystal bowl meditation
14. Chanting
15. Rituals
16. Jungian meditation

Areas in Which Scientific Research is Being Done:

1. Relief of chronic back pain
2. Minimizing hot flashes in menopausal women
3. Relieving asthma
4. Improving the ability to focus and prioritize
5. Releasing stress in caregivers of elderly patients with dementia
6. Fibromyalgia
7. Cancer
8. Hypertension
9. Psoriasis
10. Changing brain and immune functions in positive ways
11. Anxiety disorders
12. Women’s health

Here is one example of a guided meditation:

Here are some other resources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfFJ6BI1l_E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx-cJrVUBPE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wbC2n-9FKI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWttCv0p6WQ

Enjoy!

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield serves wisdom-seekers who want understanding and clarity so they can live peaceful, powerful, prosperous lives. Through her unique combination of holistic, creative, right-brain transformational experiences and 22 years of rigorous, left-brain law practice, she has learned how to sculpt words in atypical ways to shift her listeners into experiences beyond words, transforming turmoil into inner peace. For more information, see wordsculptures.com, janetsmithwarfield.com, and wordsculpturespublishing.com.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Two Perspectives on Tools for Transformation

Dr. Amit Nagpal, New Delhi, India, and

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield, Florida, USA

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Amit Nagpal’s Perspective

Transformation – Why, When and How

Transform simply means we cross and move beyond our current form.

Why transform

Life is a journey and each birth is a step towards the final goal – enlightenment (or something similar). The soul learns its lessons through experiences, mistakes and conscious efforts to grow.

Experiences and mistakes may teach us and transform us for the better but we can learn faster (and with lesser mistakes and pain) by taking conscious efforts for our transformation. Transformation implies inner transformation, which impacts our external behavior though.

When to Transform

Only one thing is constant in this world and that is change. Transformation also becomes necessary to adapt to the external changes (adaptability) but it tends to be reactive. We can rather go for proactive change.

How to Transform

Here is a sequence of steps which can be undertaken for self-transformation:-

1. Make a list of your areas of improvement (weaknesses or strengths to be further improved)
2. Prioritize
3. Set goals
4. Take action
5. Monitor progress
6. Take corrective action, if required (or revise goals)

A famous saying goes;

“No matter how good intentions we may have, the world looks only at our presentations.

No matter how good presentations we may have, God looks at only our intentions.”

To fit into the world (by the way, you need to decide how much you want to fit), we need to package ourselves and manage our image/impression. But to find peace or to connect with higher consciousness/power, we must work on improving our intentions, making them more and more pure. Gratitude and positive interpretation of events helps us in purifying our intent.

I once posted on Facebook,

“When you become a little more mindful,
You become a little more soulful.
When you become a little more soulful,
You become a little more mindful.

Little by little, the journey must go on.”

It will very often happen that when you will take two steps forward, life will push you one step backward. Fine, keep trying; just keep rising every time you fail.

There will be times, you will be too depressed. It is believed that every human being seriously contemplates suicide at least once in life; we all go through trying times. You will feel that life has over-punished you for a small crime and sometimes in spite of the best of efforts, things will not work out.

Just remember, so what if life slapped you hard. Get up and carry on, because the trouble of today is the joke of tomorrow.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Dr Amit Nagpal is a Personal Branding Consultant & Deepest Passion Coach. He is based in New Delhi, India and specializes in personal branding with a holistic touch. His philosophy is, “Enlarge as a Human Being, Excel as a Social Media Being and Evolve as a Personal Brand”

______________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield’s Perspective

What is personal transformation¹, and why would we want to experience it?

Personal transformation is like looking at an optical illusion. The lines, shapes, and colors on the paper don’t change. What changes is how our minds shape what is on the paper, the words we use to describe what we see, how we feel about what we see, and the actions we take as a result.

The real world is the same way. Nothing out there changes.² What changes is the way our minds shape what is out there. Personal transformation is suddenly seeing the world through new eyes.

Do we want to see a man’s face or do we want to see the word “Liar?” Which makes us feel better? Which makes our relationships work more smoothly?

When personal transformation happens, we are suddenly free. We realize we can choose in each and every moment the perspectives, words, and actions that bring us the greatest peace and happiness.

If we desire to experience personal transformation, how do we bring it into our lives? With the optical illusion, we can’t force ourselves to see the word “Liar” if we only see a man’s face. We can’t force ourselves to see a man’s face if we only see the word “Liar.”

Likewise, we can’t force ourselves to experience personal transformation. We can only commit to using tools and practices which support shifts in perception through sudden moments of clarity. We pick a tool from the cornucopia of possibilities, try it out, and observe how it works. If we don’t like one tool, we try another until we find one we like.

Experiencing personal transformation in the real world is much more challenging than seeing the different perspectives of an optical illusion. In the real world, the perspectives we cling to are usually charged with emotion such as guilt, fear, rage, despair, or pride. If we are suffering from the shock of a spouse’s betrayal, how can we transform betrayal into trust? If we are suffering from the death of a child, how can we transform grief into life purpose and meaning?

Personal transformation in the real world is also challenging because we cling to conditioned beliefs we’ve been taught as children. Usually, we’re not even aware that our beliefs are conditioned. They may have been such wonderful guidelines that we honor them as Truth. The fact is that wonderful guidelines are never Truth. They are only tools that work in many situations for particular purposes.

Here are some time-tested tools and practices to help us go deep within, shift perspectives and see through new eyes:

1. Journaling
2. Meditation
3. Vision boards
4. Ropes courses
5. Labyrinths
6. Forgiveness
7. Gratitude
8. Mantras
9. Drumming
10. Toning
11. Crystal bowls
12. Focusing on the breath, e.g., soham breathing
13. Heart resonance
14. Yoga
15. Martial arts

The list keeps growing as our awareness and creativity expand and we shift into greater and greater abundance.

Amit and I will be exploring each tool and practice in depth in subsequent blogs.

________________________________________________________________________________________

 1. Personal Transformation is only one aspect of transformation. Other aspects are marital transformation, family transformation, community transformation, world transformation, and more.

2. Since I am writing with the intention of clarifying personal transformation, I am stating that nothing out there changes. If I were writing with the intention of clarifying intention, I would be stating that what is out there does change depending on the intentions we set.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield serves wisdom-seekers who want understanding and clarity so they can live peaceful, powerful, prosperous lives. Through her unique combination of holistic, creative, right-brain transformational experiences and 22 years of rigorous, left-brain law practice, she has learned how to sculpt words in atypical ways to shift her listeners into experiences beyond words, transforming turmoil into inner peace. For more information, see www.wordsculptures.com, www.wordsculpturespublishing.com, and www.janetsmithwarfield.com.