Learn the Keys to Happiness!   “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way” ~Thich Nhat Hanh Do you ever feel as though you would be happy if only things were a little different? You know that happiness is important, but you keep putting it on the backburner because there simply isn’t enough time to prioritize your own inner joy. And at the same time, you know that meditation would help, but you can’t even imagine where you’re going to get the spare time you need to sit still and meditate. In an ideal world, we would schedule moments every day in which to cater to our health needs, because health and well-being are paramount. Yet despite our best efforts we will inevitably face those times when we’re busy every minute of the day. I know I’ve been there. A few years ago I moved country while pursuing life as a freelance journalist. I was working non-stop for a less than minimum wage, and I had zero time to focus on my mental health. Life became unbearably stressful. And while I knew that I could stop the stress if I meditated, I simply couldn’t work out how I would ever get the time to do it. My happiness drifted further and further away. Stress built. Anxiety hit hard. And with zero free time I simply couldn’t find a way out of my misery. I knew meditation was the key. I just didn’t have the time for it. So I made a choice. Instead of meditating the old-fashioned way, sitting still doing nothing, I would find ways to meditate while still being productive. That way I could work on my happiness while still doing everything I needed to do. The key was mindfulness. By simply being present and living in the moment, I could meditate while getting things done. This was a total game-changer for me. Suddenly I had all the time in the world to practice mindfulness because I could do it while still being productive. I was mindful day and night. I would eat meals mindfully, walk mindfully, read my email mindfully… whatever I needed to do I would do mindfully. Suddenly I had gone from having no time to meditate to making mindfulness an integrated part of my life. All mindful moments were helpful at this time. But there were ten mindful practices that I found particularly valuable. And even though today I keep a much healthier schedule and make sure not to spread myself too thin, I still use these practices. Whether you’re going through a busy time or looking for an alternative to traditional seated-meditation, you can use these techniques to boost your mindfulness while saving time. 1. Walk mindfully. Walking is one of the most relaxing exercises in the world. But it can be all too easy to ruin a good walk by thinking too much. When walking, be mindful of the world around you, paying attention to [...]

For more than 3000 years mantras (sacred sounds) have been chanted for the purpose of spiritual healing. During the early period of Hinduism, spiritual gurus became fascinated by poetry and began to write sounds in sacred texts like the Rigveda. Those same sounds have echoed throughout the East all the way to today, and are now chanted by billions of Hindus, Buddhists and spiritualists the world over. Today, mantras are chanted for myriad reasons. There are mantras to cure depression and anxiety, mantras said to create wealth, mantras used to attract wealth… for near every purpose there is a corresponding mantra. Yet despite the billions of people who use mantras, and the sheer range of their uses, the Western world has stubbornly turned a blind eye to this oldest of spiritual practices. It is shocking to think that after 3000 years there is still virtually zero scientific research to substantiate mantras, but no funding has been given to scientifically investigate this most important spiritual practice. And, so, it has fallen to the spiritual community itself to substantiate the mantras. So what, precisely, do we truly know about mantras? Yoga masters claim that mantras have the power to create chemical changes in the body. The argument is that the specific vibrational qualities of mantras create reverberations in the body that lead to changes on the molecular level. We can understand how this works when we consider man’s relation to sound. Our auditory faculty has evolved through millions of years to include specific constants that form the very foundations of our auditory composition. Many of the sounds we make today, like grunts and some syllables, have been used for millions of years, long before we became homo-sapiens. Similar to the way birds use song to communicate information about the weather, we have used grunts and syllables to form our understanding of the world. The reason why many of today’s words are onomatopoetic is because human vocals were created as an echo of nature. Early man used syllables as a way of echoing the sound of the thing they were trying to describe. Hence why “bob” (as in “bobbing up and down”) sounds like an object bobbing up and down in the water. “Crash”, “Bang”, “Honk”, and “Chime” are other examples. As mankind has evolved we have moved away from onomatopoetic language. So it is that English is not nearly as onomatopoetic as Sanskrit, the latter being a much earlier language. When we speak in Sanskrit we create sounds that are very closely related to the sounds of nature. The sacred Sanskrit word “Om”, for instance, means “Universe” and we can hear an echo of the universe in the sound of the mantra. We get a sense of the open and infinite nature of the universe when we listen to this sound. “Om” is a vey open sound. It seems to conjure thoughts of an open space, reconnecting us with the vastness of the universe. To say that “Om” [...]