Disclaimer: this post is not meant to bash religion or religious people.
I consider prayers to be a form of meditation. When I think of a prayer session, I think of a state of absolute and deep introspection in which a person looks inside his or herself and voices out all of his or her pains, struggles and agonies. It is a moment of extreme vulnerability.
I have seen people cry during prayers. I have seen people yell in anger. People punch objects while praying. There are also those who become so overwhelmed by the moment that they can hardly speak and just nod their heads and move their bodies back and forth. All sorts of emotions and gestures are displayed during a prayer session. All of these are positive emotions and they are fundamental in understanding the depth of your problems and how urgently they need to be dealt with.
Let's forgo spirituality for a moment and focus on psychology. We attribute the delirium people experience during prayers to the possession by the Holy Spirit. The pastor will announce to the congregation: "God is in our midst." and the congregation will respond with a resounding “Halleluyah”
Fine. But what do you plan to make of this moment of euphoria and epiphany?
Everybody meditates. I meditate. Whether you are religious or not religious is irrelevant. The only aspect that differs is the way this meditation happens. Because of our exposure to Asian culture, especially Buddhism, we are used to associating meditation with sitting down, crossing your legs and humming. But that’s just one of the many ways we can meditate.
Do you know that dreams are a form of meditation?
When you daydream, you are meditating.
When you soliloquise, you are meditating.
Meditation is any moment of deep contemplation in which you focus on yourself or on a problem and search for solutions and ways of improvement.
Prayers are such moments. But how come prayers often fail as a form of meditation?
Simple: because prayers don’t solve problems. They are just one of the many steps you need to follow to solve a problem.
What are these steps?
1. REALISATION: this is the moment in which you sense that you have a problem.
2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: this is the moment in which you accept and admit that you have a problem. Sometimes, people will sense that there is a problem but will fail to admit it to themselves because ignorance is bliss.
This is the phase in which a lot of religious people stop. This is the equivalent of praying and leaving it to God.
3. ANALYSIS: In this step, you analyse your problem.
Who is the cause?
What is the trigger?
How does it manifest?
Why is it a source of discomfort?
When did it begin?
Where did it begin?
Some people are able to complete this phase by themselves, while others might reach out to friends, family and professionals to help them with answers. It is important that we understand that finding answers to these questions won’t do much to your situation if those answers are not the correct ones.
People who generally have low self esteem or suffer from a type of personality disorder might erroneously attribute the cause of their problems to the wrong source.
4. DISSECTION: This is the step in which you dismantle your problems into smaller parts. When you think of your problems as one huge unique block, it could turn into an insurmountable obstacle: that’s why you need to start thinking of your problems as puzzles. Problems, themselves, never come around as a block. They start building up from minor issues that people often neglect or don’t just see. So, what you call a problem is actually the sum of many problems: problems and summed up and accumulated over the course of time.
5. HEAD OR TAIL: When you are able to see your problem in its entirety, solving it will become relatively easier. Why? Because you get to see the root of your problem which is where you need to focus most of your work.
People who skip the fourth step, do not find the root of their problems. What they see is the immediate cause and not the first trigger, so they solve the problem or think they have solved the problem by cutting the bull’s head.
Ask yourself: why is organised criminality so difficult to eradicate? Why is it that, after killing the boss, the organisation keeps going?
Answer: Because the boss is not the most important person in the organisation. He or she is often just a figurehead.
Your problem, just like any organisation, is a pyramid structure. It has a summit and it has a base.
The best way to solve a problem is to attack it from the top and from the bottom. You solve the immediate manifestation of that problem and at the same time make sure that the problem does not create a new manifestation.
5. RECONSTRUCTION: when you demolish a part of your life because problems, whether we like it or not, are a part of our essence, you need to rebuild everything that you lost during the resolution. And believe it or not, even people who manage to get to this final step, still fail. Why? Because they make the same mistake that led to the existence of the problem they just managed to solve.
Philosophically, history had been thought to be a vicious circle: a snake biting its tail. Because historians noticed that history always repeated itself.
Hegel, a German philosopher, noticed this tendency of history to repeat itself but objected that it was a vicious circle. According to him, history did repeat itself, but never in the same way, so we couldn’t speak of a circle, instead we had to think of history as a spiral.
The lives of many people are spirals. They keep making the same mistakes over and over again with different people and in different situations. They also make different mistakes with the same people and the same situations.
If you are one of those people, then you need to come to terms with a bitter truth: that the problem is YOU.
I have been the problem in many situations in which I found myself. It was hard to accept at first, but I knew that, if I wanted my life to take a different turn, I needed to have a better understanding of myself and accept that I have weaknesses on which I need to work.
These weaknesses are not all negative traits. Some of them are positive qualities, but they are qualities that constantly landed me in awful situations. Last year I experienced a severe breakdown because I had been too trusting, too kind and too open with someone I had thought was a friend.
From that acknowledgement, I opted for a new strategy to take control over my situation in order to solve my problem.
What are you doing about your problems and most importantly, do you even know that you could be the cause of your problems?
Good morning friends.
I consider prayers to be a form of meditation. When I think of a prayer session, I think of a state of absolute and deep introspection in which a person looks inside his or herself and voices out all of his or her pains, struggles and agonies. It is a moment of extreme vulnerability.
I have seen people cry during prayers. I have seen people yell in anger. People punch objects while praying. There are also those who become so overwhelmed by the moment that they can hardly speak and just nod their heads and move their bodies back and forth. All sorts of emotions and gestures are displayed during a prayer session. All of these are positive emotions and they are fundamental in understanding the depth of your problems and how urgently they need to be dealt with.
Let's forgo spirituality for a moment and focus on psychology. We attribute the delirium people experience during prayers to the possession by the Holy Spirit. The pastor will announce to the congregation: "God is in our midst." and the congregation will respond with a resounding “Halleluyah”
Fine. But what do you plan to make of this moment of euphoria and epiphany?
Everybody meditates. I meditate. Whether you are religious or not religious is irrelevant. The only aspect that differs is the way this meditation happens. Because of our exposure to Asian culture, especially Buddhism, we are used to associating meditation with sitting down, crossing your legs and humming. But that’s just one of the many ways we can meditate.
Do you know that dreams are a form of meditation?
When you daydream, you are meditating.
When you soliloquise, you are meditating.
Meditation is any moment of deep contemplation in which you focus on yourself or on a problem and search for solutions and ways of improvement.
Prayers are such moments. But how come prayers often fail as a form of meditation?
Simple: because prayers don’t solve problems. They are just one of the many steps you need to follow to solve a problem.
What are these steps?
1. REALISATION: this is the moment in which you sense that you have a problem.
2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: this is the moment in which you accept and admit that you have a problem. Sometimes, people will sense that there is a problem but will fail to admit it to themselves because ignorance is bliss.
This is the phase in which a lot of religious people stop. This is the equivalent of praying and leaving it to God.
3. ANALYSIS: In this step, you analyse your problem.
Who is the cause?
What is the trigger?
How does it manifest?
Why is it a source of discomfort?
When did it begin?
Where did it begin?
Some people are able to complete this phase by themselves, while others might reach out to friends, family and professionals to help them with answers. It is important that we understand that finding answers to these questions won’t do much to your situation if those answers are not the correct ones.
People who generally have low self esteem or suffer from a type of personality disorder might erroneously attribute the cause of their problems to the wrong source.
4. DISSECTION: This is the step in which you dismantle your problems into smaller parts. When you think of your problems as one huge unique block, it could turn into an insurmountable obstacle: that’s why you need to start thinking of your problems as puzzles. Problems, themselves, never come around as a block. They start building up from minor issues that people often neglect or don’t just see. So, what you call a problem is actually the sum of many problems: problems and summed up and accumulated over the course of time.
5. HEAD OR TAIL: When you are able to see your problem in its entirety, solving it will become relatively easier. Why? Because you get to see the root of your problem which is where you need to focus most of your work.
People who skip the fourth step, do not find the root of their problems. What they see is the immediate cause and not the first trigger, so they solve the problem or think they have solved the problem by cutting the bull’s head.
Ask yourself: why is organised criminality so difficult to eradicate? Why is it that, after killing the boss, the organisation keeps going?
Answer: Because the boss is not the most important person in the organisation. He or she is often just a figurehead.
Your problem, just like any organisation, is a pyramid structure. It has a summit and it has a base.
The best way to solve a problem is to attack it from the top and from the bottom. You solve the immediate manifestation of that problem and at the same time make sure that the problem does not create a new manifestation.
5. RECONSTRUCTION: when you demolish a part of your life because problems, whether we like it or not, are a part of our essence, you need to rebuild everything that you lost during the resolution. And believe it or not, even people who manage to get to this final step, still fail. Why? Because they make the same mistake that led to the existence of the problem they just managed to solve.
Philosophically, history had been thought to be a vicious circle: a snake biting its tail. Because historians noticed that history always repeated itself.
Hegel, a German philosopher, noticed this tendency of history to repeat itself but objected that it was a vicious circle. According to him, history did repeat itself, but never in the same way, so we couldn’t speak of a circle, instead we had to think of history as a spiral.
The lives of many people are spirals. They keep making the same mistakes over and over again with different people and in different situations. They also make different mistakes with the same people and the same situations.
If you are one of those people, then you need to come to terms with a bitter truth: that the problem is YOU.
I have been the problem in many situations in which I found myself. It was hard to accept at first, but I knew that, if I wanted my life to take a different turn, I needed to have a better understanding of myself and accept that I have weaknesses on which I need to work.
These weaknesses are not all negative traits. Some of them are positive qualities, but they are qualities that constantly landed me in awful situations. Last year I experienced a severe breakdown because I had been too trusting, too kind and too open with someone I had thought was a friend.
From that acknowledgement, I opted for a new strategy to take control over my situation in order to solve my problem.
What are you doing about your problems and most importantly, do you even know that you could be the cause of your problems?
Good morning friends.
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