5 Spiritual Practices That Will Transform Your Life

Steven Bancarz/Spirit ScienceandMetaphysics 

We have all suffered from anxiety, depression, anger, and stress at some points in our life.  Sometimes, these sufferings contribute to our evolution and help squeeze us into more mature states of being.  Suffering can be a catalyst for personal transformation, but it can also be…well…useless, redundant, and unnecessary.  If suffering doesn’t serve a purpose in your life any longer, it doesn’t need to be in your reality.

I got sick of waking up at 4 in the morning to my mind reminding me about everything that was wrong with my life.  Was revisiting the same misery-causing thoughts all day really going to contribute to a positive solution?  I was waiting for the universe to send me a lollipop every time I got beat down by my thoughts, and I was dis-empowering myself by putting the keys to my happiness into the world around me.  Then, a shift happened in my life.  I realized I was the author of my energy field, and the owner of my mind.  I didn’t have to let involuntary thoughts create involuntary emotions anymore.  The obsessive and compulsive need to think about my problems all day had ended, and I was truly free for this first time.

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This happened because I revised my relationship to my thoughts and my mind.  This is all it takes to free you from suffering, and it will completely change your life.  No religion, ideology, dogma, pills, or wishful thinking.  Only consciousness and understanding.  The following 5 practices are ones that I have developed on my journey that have given me back ownership over my mind and my life, and I promise that if you promise these in your daily life, you will have more peace and inner freedom in your very first day:

Practice 1: Stop, and Take 10 Seconds

For some strange reason, the mind is convinced that it has to think about your problems all day or else they won’t get resolved . An amazing realization is that no matter how immediate or seemingly important an issue is in your life, you can always take just 10 seconds to not think about it. Sometimes it’s very difficult to stop thinking about a problem in our life for good, but the mind will always be able to understand that not thinking about your problem for just 10 seconds is justifiable.

One of the realizations that set in for me when I would attempt to take a ten second break from thinking is that thinking is an addiction.  I couldn’t stop doing it, and it felt so good to do.  Thought is a drug. We can’t stop indulging in it. Our minds crave it, and we can’t resist the cravings it gets. And the worst part is, we end up emotional victims to whatever thoughts it decides to feed off of.  But the amazing thing is, you can enact your will and actually choose to not think.

Right now, claim this in your mind: “For the next 10 seconds, I am not going to believe a SINGLE thing my mind says because I am going to choose not to think.  Any thought that arises is just a pattern and is not reflective of my will or intentions”.  Sure enough, halfway through you will see thoughts arise again.  But they aren’t yours. They are patterns. And you know this because you already claimed that any thought that arises is not yours.  Try to not think for just ten seconds right now, and pay attention to the involuntary thought patterns that arise.

Practice 2: Go Into The Now

Its so easy to allow thinking to suck up all of our attention to go through an entire day just daydreaming. As convincing and enticing our thoughts may be, the truth is that thought has no essential reality.  Thoughts are just voices that arise in our minds, and almost all of them are dedicated to past or possible future situations which don’t actually exist in reality.  If you all of a sudden couldn’t speak English, you wouldn’t understand anything your mind was telling you, and you would probably be the most peaceful you have ever been.  What does this tell us about the nature of the voices in our head?  That they only have power over our emotions when we give reality to them.

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