Meditationguide.org aims to create more happiness in the world by showing people how to transform stress, negative emotions and limiting beliefs into joy, unconditional happiness, and inspiration.

What is happiness meditation? It’s the ability to transform your negative emotions; therefore, you no longer feel stressed out, unhappy or burdened by life. You begin to live your life with clarity, insight, and wisdom. When you operate this way, life feels amazing and unhappiness no longer weighs you down.

How Does One Transform Negative Emotions and Expand Consciousness?

You do this through meditation, but before we show you how to meditate, let us explain how consciousness works.

Chapter 1 How does Consciousness Work?

Your consciousness works through your awareness such as you’re aware of your five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell) and you’re also aware of your own mind such as thinking and feeling. Through your awareness you make decisions.

Here are the steps in mental processes:

MENTAL PROCESSES

1. Your mind receives input from its senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell).
2. Your mind identifies what it receives from its senses. For example, when you see this picture , your mind will identify what it is; give it a name; and create meaning. This picture actually has no meaning until your mind gives it a name and meaning.

3. Your mind judges or evaluates what it perceives. Is this good or bad?

4. If your mind likes what it is judging, the mind then generates a positive emotion – you feel good. If your mind doesn’t like it, it then produces a negative reaction; therefore, you feel bad.

5. Your mind decides what to do about it. You can also choose to do nothing.

6. Your mind stores the information of each event as well as the emotional response in its memory. Thus, how you react to things would determine how you feel.

Insight #1: Your reaction is creating how you feel. Can you recall how many times you have responded positively or negatively in life? Each time you did that, it creates an emotional pattern; therefore, your positive and negative reactions would form your personality and outlook on life. As the result, you’ve produced a certain mindset by how you respond to things. The good news is you can change how you react; release your stress; and expand your awareness. Hence, you’re no longer trapped in negative emotions, but feel tremendously free and joyful.

Become Familiar with Your Mental Processes

Please become familiar with the 6 steps of how your mind creates reality. Ask yourself often of how you’re experiencing your current reality by including these 6 steps into your daily observation. When you’re well acquainted with this, you will also know how to change your response or reaction. You don’t need to automatically generate negative emotions and feel stressed out every time you dislike something. There are other options besides feeling bad, worried or fearful. In fact, you can heal your emotional pain; thus, you allow yourself to feel unconditionally happy and balanced.

Insight #2: You don’t need to default to unhappiness every time you don’t get what you desire. There is another state of awareness you can tap into, which uplifts your emotions.

Looking Back at How You Create Who You Are

What is your earliest memory from childhood? Can you remember? You’ve been creating your reality since birth by how you respond to people, objects and situations. Each time you did that through your mental processes, you form your likes and dislikes; and establish how you view the world. You produce your belief system based on your judgment. You may take other people’s accounts and society’s standards into how you form your opinions or you may not. All in all, you go through the 6 steps of mental processes to create your reality and how you feel.

From this process, you also produce your personality. The more you react negatively to things, the more likely you will have a gloomy outlook on existence. If you tend to respond positively and see the silver lining in difficult circumstances, then you’re more likely to have a cheerful disposition and enjoy life because you don’t put a negative spin on it. Therefore, the key to changing how you feel and experiencing true happiness is to change how you react and respond to life’s situations.

Insight #3: You can change how you feel by looking at life from a new perspective – seeing the big picture. Be open-minded and allow yourself to access good feelings inside of you.

Why Does Consciousness Create the Feeling of Unhappiness in the First Place?

If you knew this, you can transform it also. The answer is the human brain is equipped with the fight or flight response. This is not a bad thing because the instinct of “fight or flight” helps us to survive in the physical world. Without it we cannot live here very long and simply let predator animals eat us or let a car hit us and not get out of its way. Thus, the survival instinct is very useful in a dangerous situation. However, the fight or flight response also produces all kinds of fear and negative emotions; thus, we feel very stressful and unhappy.

Therefore, your meditation practice will help you to alleviate your emotional pain, distress, and anxiety; and transform them into emotional balance where you feel clear-minded, joyful and at peace. Hence, you operate your consciousness through wisdom, and you can still use your fight or flight response when you run into a life-threatening situation, but you don’t hold on to the fearful emotions because you know how to let go and transmute them into something insightful. Thus, you feel a sense of well-being and become more intelligent. Instead of being a victim to unhappiness, you can now tap into unconditional joy from within.

Insight #4: You have the ability to enlighten yourself; therefore, nothing can get you down, but you feel inspired and creative. You can solve problems without doing harm and enjoy creating benefits.

What is everything in existence?

Everything Is Energy

In science, everything is energy and energy is vibrating at different frequencies. How does this relate to consciousness? As we spoke earlier about the instinct of fight or flight, it helps us to survive in a dangerous situation, but it also produces all kinds of negative emotions, which are vibrating at a lower frequency, and we tend to dwell in these unhappy feelings such as worry, fear, impatience, hate, anxiety, anger, sadness, loneliness, jealousy, envy, etc. Unfortunately, the fight or flight response seems to dominate our consciousness; thus, we must use this survival instinct wisely and not be a victim of stress by changing how we react or respond to life’s situations.

Insight #5: We live in a sea of energy. Everything we experience is energy and there are different frequencies we can tap into, ranging from lower to higher vibrations.

Let’s take a look at lower vibration.

Lower Consciousness / Dense Vibration

The survival instinct of fight or flight is our lower consciousness because it creates dense vibration. When we’re unhappy, we feel compressed and heavy emotionally.

Luckily, we also have access to higher consciousness or lighter vibration, which allows us to feel expanded and emotionally balanced. Your meditation practice will help you to discover this and you’ll start to feel joyful for no reason. It’s unconditional happiness. This is your natural state.

Insight #6: Unconditional joy is our natural state. This happens when we feel emotionally relaxed, centered and expanded.

If unconditional joy is our natural state, why don’t we feel it all the time? It’s because of lower consciousness. Let’s take a look at how it operates.

The Structure of Lower Consciousness or Ego

Lower consciousness or ego is made of the survival instinct of fight or flight. Here are the characteristics of the ego:

1. It relies on fear and judgment to make choices.

What is judging? Judging is comparing. When you judge, you get 3 outcomes.

i. This is better than that.

ii. This is worse than that.

iii. This is the same as that.

up-down-left-right The ego is also attached to the idea of time; thus, it gets caught up in the past and worries about its future. Therefore, the egoic mind fluctuates. It goes up when it feels good and goes down when it feels bad. It moves to the left when it’s thinking of the past and moves to the right when it’s projecting the future. There is no sense of inner peace with the ego because it has a hard time being joyful in the present moment. It can only feel good when things are going according to its expectations. If they don’t go as planned, the ego feels frustrated.

2. It has the need to control.

3. It has the need to be right.

4. It has the need to blame, complain and find fault with itself or others.

5. Through judging it creates the idea of being superior or inferior. I’m better than or less than. I am right or I am wrong. The ego likes to think it is correct and it hates being wrong. However, right and wrong are simply based on the ego’s likes and dislikes. If you like something, then it appears to be “right” in your mind. If you don’t like it, then it seems “wrong.” What is right for one person may be wrong for another because each individual perceives reality differently according to his or her judgment, and everyone has different preferences. The ego also generates a sense of separation. It’s me against another or us against them; thus, conflict occurs.

6. It can justify doing harm to itself or others. This is why we mistreat each other. Our ego justifies it. If you hurt me, then I must hurt you or the ego does harm to itself due to inner turmoil.

7. Due to being judgmental, the ego creates a sense of “not enough” or “dissatisfaction” no matter how much it achieves. Thus, it never truly feels fulfilled with life or knows unconditional joy.

8. It only knows conditional happiness. If I get what I want, I feel happy. If I don’t, I feel frustrated.

9. Since the ego only knows conditional happiness, it thrives on competition. Winning feels good, but losing feels terrible. Hence, the ego always feels emotionally up and down depending on its life’s situation. Satisfaction is short-lived for the ego because it doesn’t know or feel unconditional happiness from within.

10. Therefore, the ego always looks outside of itself in order to feel good such as having more money; receiving higher status; becoming a success according to society’s standards; finding a partner who caters to the ego’s needs; getting approval from others, etc. When it gets what it wants, it feels great. When it does not, it feels angry, unhappy or depressed.

These ideas sound logical to the ego, but life doesn’t always go according to plan; thus, our egoic mind reacts negatively and produces all kinds of stressful responses and these become our emotional wounds, especially when we’ve encountered traumatic events or felt abandoned.

The ego does not address these emotional wounds because it doesn’t like to look within itself. It prefers to look outside of itself and chases after temporary pleasures. Even if the ego gets all that it wants, it will begin to ask “is that all there is?” This is because the ego continues to judge itself and others. Thus, most people don’t feel happy for very long since they still harbor discontentment and the sense of being incomplete. They get used to the things they have acquired, and when life is no longer exciting, they will start to pursue what they think will fulfill them. The ego simply gets caught up in a loop and never truly feels satisfied with life. The negative reactions; hurtful feelings; and the feeling of lack are still there. These have not turned into healing where you feel whole and complete. They have not turned into insight where you can see the big picture and allow wisdom to occur. Therefore, your meditation practice is a bridge to your transformation where you no longer feel inadequate, but capable of handling life’s challenges with joy.

Insight #7: The characteristics of the ego may appear to be bad, but please do not hate the ego. Instead, allow yourself to learn, integrate and transform it into a higher frequency.

Higher Consciousness or Lighter Vibration

The good news is we don’t just have lower consciousness, but higher vibration as well, which is the ability to see the bigger picture of existence. Our higher consciousness operates based on balance, unconditional love, cooperation, kindness, compassion, clarity, insight, wisdom, inspiration, creativity, intuition, generosity, gratitude and discernment through inner peace. Unfortunately, we tend to rely more on the lower consciousness in our daily living because fear has a stronger grip on our psyche.

We’re afraid that we might not be able to survive without the instinct of fight or flight. We use it so much that we forget to tap into our higher awareness, which can help us to thrive even better. Now, the ego may look at the characteristics of higher consciousness as “being weak.” The ego feels it has to be strong and controlling in order to get what it wants so it can feel good about itself. This is because the ego has the need to be right. However, this rigid mind creates all kinds of negative emotions when it doesn’t get what it desires. It throws a tantrum. Since not everything will go your way all the time, you will just end up being unhappy due to using the egoic mindset. Therefore, it is your duty to teach your fear and judgment that there is a better way to live by accessing your higher consciousness. You’re not neglecting the lower consciousness by doing this. In fact, you will get intimate with your ego and address each negative feeling and emotional wound and transform each one into balance. Thus, you receive the benefits and allow yourself to experience pure joy and a sense of well-being. You’re creating a win-win situation from within. You get to understand both parts of your consciousness – lower and higher vibrations. None is overlooked.

Therefore, your meditation practice is a link to discovering your true self, which has no suffering whatsoever, but unconditional bliss.

Go To Chapter 2

Chapter 1 – How does Consciousness Work?