HomeVolume 1Issue 2 Priorities

Welcome to the Real World. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you are in high school, college or you are a young adult, the decisions you make now are as real as any others you will make during the course of your life. Youth is not a shield behind which we hide our material immaturity, but the platform upon which we build the foundations of our future.

What you say, think, and do now actually matters. How is that for empowerment?

Almost everything in our 21st century, materialcentric life resists meditation. How? Because there is always another exam to prepare for, friend to catch up with, book to read, assignment to be done, lecture to attend, movie to watch, child or spouse to spend time with, instrument to practise, party raging somewhere, load of laundry to be washed, phone call to make, text message to respond to or wait for, email to write, work to get ahead on, etc.

Many new meditators think that at some point in their life everything will just fall into line, and meditation will naturally have an appropriate, steady, appointed time slot in their busy schedule. Meanwhile, as they wait for this blessed day to come (which never does), everything else they have to do continues to get done, while their meditation practice doesn’t.

Seasoned meditators know that it is on them, every day, to carve out the time to meditate. It is always sitting down that’s the hard part, as everything else continues to resist the time they set aside for meditation.

So what do they do?

How do they ignore the distractions of contemporary life and actually sit down and do their duty to themselves? They make meditation their unyielding number one priority, and they don’t let anything get in its way.

“But, I’m simply too busy to meditate.”
I don’t buy it, not even for a second. The busiest, most successful people I’ve ever met all have at least one uncompromising daily ritual of sorts. For many, it’s their physical workout routine. I’ve met countless high-level artists, surgeons, performers, and C-Level executives who have their secretaries deflect all calls and meetings during their appointed one hour every day while they swim, run, walk, meditate, or nap, and aside from consistently getting enough sleep every night, all of them credit this personal time as the key to their continued success.

Furthermore, there is a volume of scientific data and contemporary literature being written on this very topic of performance theory, which discusses the need for taking intentional breaks during the day.

Yet somehow, as college students and young adults, we think we have less time to meditate in our day than someone running a global company. No way. We just haven’t made it a priority like they have.

And why haven’t we made it a priority? Because we haven’t felt its effects yet. I sympathise with this line of logic, but, in order to feel its effect, we first must be uncompromising in our priorities. This is one of many situations in life where the chicken comes first. For once we do make it a priority, a magical thing happens: after a while, it becomes the point around which everything else in our life revolves – busy or not. Suddenly we start wondering how we could have ever lived without this sacred refuge of time alone with our inner being, no longer needing to force that which has become as natural to our wellbeing as breathing.

Here’s a true story:


 The day before leaving her Guru’s ashram to return home,
a girl goes to him to say goodbye.
She says, “Guruji, I am leaving tomorrow.
Could you tell me how long I should meditate every day?”
The Guru thinks for a few moments and says,
“For you, I think half-anhour a day will be sufficient.”
Aghast, the girl responds, “But Guruji, what about when I’m really busy?”
Without missing a beat, he smiles and says,
“Well then, when you are really busy, no less than one hour will do.”


Article by TREVOR WELTMAN



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