Archive for June, 2009

By Seamus Anthony

Do you suffer from a lack of self-confidence? Is so you should know that learning to meditate effectively can really help you to build your self-confidence levels up.

I recently started doing stand-up comedy as a hobby. Many people I know commented that I must have such strong levels of self-confidence to even consider such folly!

They are correct.

Despite my dubious comedic material, the reason I can go through with it (even though I still get very nervous before getting up on stage) is because I do actually have a lot of self-confidence and yes, a major reason I have this personality trait is due to meditation.

Allow me to explain.

How Meditation Helps You Become More Self-Confident

It is a sad fact of life that as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we invariably go through various degrees of emotional trauma. This is true even for those of us with relatively stable upbringings; think about how horrible kids at school were to you sometimes. This stuff all takes it toll on our developing minds and to protect ourselves from unwanted emotional pain, we build up defensive emotional walls.

By Seamus Anthony

I enjoy meditating. Personally I wonder what would have become of my life if I hadn’t discovered it at the time I did.

Recently I have decided to put my own personal meditation techniques down into a more general eBook about meditation (which is finished and coming out shortly).

A meditation book, that is, more general than Psychedelic Meditation, which sells quite nicely and in fact contains meditation instructions which will suffice anybody, but is if course angled at the “get high without drugs” niche.

Admittedly, using meditation to get high is a pretty obscure reason to practice such a noble art, and as I was doing some research to assist with the writing of the book I noted (not for the first time) some of the many reasons people meditate. From what I could tell, the two main reasons can be loosely categorized as:

1. Health
2. Happiness

And with good reason; meditation is well and truly proven to be excellent at improving your health and helping you to feel happier. I myself have more than once used meditation to help me to focus become healthier when I have been a slack little fatty and to fight off depression when it came a knockin’, it’s foul stinkin’ breath comin’ in under my door.

By Seamus Anthony

Part Three (click here to go back to the start)

I Found Jesus (he was behind my airplane seat all along)

Right  … where was I?

Oh yeah … So … After discovering meditation and DIY Enlightenment I spent the next few years quite blissed out. You know: “Very Zen” as the saying goes. In some ways it helped to kill my ambition for a while, which may or may not have been a bad thing, I’m not sure. I was just plain happy as Larry to hang out, meditate, read, play music for music’s sake (rather than with any career objective) and well, continue to party and have exciting affairs with beautiful young women.

Nothing wrong with all of that right? But as my twenties turned into my thirties and I found myself happily settled with a beautiful young lady (still my partner now and the wonderful mother of our child) I became aware that the old existential unease was returning. How could this be? I could still meditate myself happy, but increasingly over the years the darkness remained, hidden not that far under the surface.