How do I achieve goals using Meditation?
I often hear from meditation purists that meditation is the opposite of goal setting. Yet setting and achieving goals is one of the most rewarding things that we do in life.
Just sitting in meditation on a regular basis can be a worthy goal
So it is absurd to say that meditation is not about goals, because being in meditation is already a goal! And meditation can be the activity that can accelerate your progress towards goals sometimes more than any activity or action you take.
Practiced well, meditation can be a force multiplier in your progress towards your goals
Using meditation to accelerate your pathway to achieving a goal is an antidote to the constant over-busyness, endless to-do lists and energy drain of being ‘busy’ all the time. Being busy and overwhelmed by to do lists comes from a thinking heavy approach to life. So using meditation to achieve goals is not about using your meditation as a time out from acting on your to do list to worrying about your to do list!
Meditation is about letting go of thinking and emotions, and expanding your awareness into the full range of ways that we can experience our consciousness.
Consciousness can include imagination, creativity, intuition and emotion, psychic perception and abstract spatial awareness . As our skill in managing consciousness increases by practicing specific types of meditation, we can even learn to identify these different aspects of consciousness, and deliberately shut then down or turn them off. This allows experienced meditators to experience a deep sense of calm and peace, free of the distractions of daily life.
Once you have mastered the skills of identifying what type of consciousness you are using, then deliberately turning it off, meditation can reliably provide a very clear mental space, where you can gently sort through what is important to you and those around you, let go of thoughts and emotions that are not aligned with achieving your goals, and make decisions about life that you are better in harmony with.
This clear mental space is also the birthplace of all creativity. You will know you are meditating effectively, when creative ideas just appear from nowhere! If that is not happening, then you have some way to go to achieving a clear, empty space in consciousness. The whole point of meditation is to prepare your mind to be as open and creative as possible, and the whole point of creativity is to give you ideas for action that are as personally meaningful to you and your life goals as possible. This is often missed in some schools of meditation, which focus on the objective of emptiness, without considering how that state of emptiness is the place where creativity arises from.
When ideas start to spontaneously create during your meditation, stop your meditation! Jump up, write it down, whack out a spreadsheet, get on the internet to do research, make that phone call. Take action!
So don’t just sit for hours struggling to let go of every thought, because of some purist view of what meditation is or isn’t. That’s not meditation, its stubbornness.
About the Author
Peter Hill loves to take time to think and feel deeply. Over more than thirty years, he has studied dozens of meditation, self-development and spiritual techniques. Guided by neuroscience rather than mysticism, his mission is to demystify consciousness and teach people to live better lives by using their brains more effectively.
