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.
Welcome to Happiness Meditation – A Bridge to Self-Discovery
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 and Expand Consciousness?
You do this via 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 what you’re thinking and feeling. Through your awareness you make decisions.
Here are the steps of mental processing:
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 description (label it) and create meaning.
3. Your mind judges or evaluates what it perceives. Is this (information, object, person or situation) good or bad?
4. If your mind likes what it is judging, the mind then generates a positive emotion within itself as a response (you feel good). If your mind doesn’t like the information, object, person or situation, it then produces a negative reaction; therefore, you feel bad, fearful or angry.
5. Your mind decides what to do about the information, object, person or situation. 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 objects, people or situations 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 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.
Reality Is Instantaneous
Reality happens rather quickly that you probably don’t notice the mental processes that take place. Let’s take a look at how you’re experiencing this moment by matching up with the steps above. You’re reading this information (step 1, you’re using your sight sense). Since you have learned the English language, you’re able to interpret it (step 2). If you don’t know this language, then what you’re looking at has no meaning at all. As you’re reading this information, you’re also judging it (step 3). If you like what you’re reading, then your mind generates a positive emotion within you and towards the information. If you don’t, then your mind produces a negative feeling and also against the information (step 4). If you like it, then you will probably continue to read it and see how this information can help to transform your negative emotions into joy. If you don’t like what you’ve read so far, you will probably stop looking at it and go do something else (step 5). You store the information of this activity in your memory (step 6) and also record how you responded to the information (positive, negative or neutral). When the subject of meditation comes up in a conversation or in your mind, you will express a positive, negative or neutral opinion based on how you reacted. Therefore, how you respond to things would produce how you feel.
Become Familiar with Your Mental Processes
Please become familiar with the 6 steps above 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 or react to people, objects and situations. Each time you did that through your mental processes (the 6 steps above) you form your preferences of likes and dislikes; and establish how you view the world, others and yourself. You produce your belief system based on your judgment. You may take other people’s accounts and society’s standards into how you form opinions or you may not. All in all, you go through the 6 steps to create your reality and how you feel. From this process, you also produce your personality. The more you react negatively, fearfully or despondently 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 no matter what happens because you don’t put a negative spin on it. Therefore, the key to changing how you feel and experiencing true happiness is to alter 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 new insights (aha moments).
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; thus, nothing can get you down, but you feel inspired and creative. You can solve problems without doing harm and enjoy creating benefits.
Everything Is Energy
In science, everything is energy or vibration (energy is oscillating 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 (lower frequencies) such as worry, fear, impatience, hate, anxiety, anger, sadness, loneliness, jealousy, envy, etc. and we tend to dwell in these unhappy feelings (lower vibrations). Unfortunately, the fight or flight response seems to dominate our consciousness; thus, we must use this survival instinct wisely and not be a victim to stress by changing how we react or respond to unpleasant situations.
Insight #5: We live in a sea of energies. Everything we experience is energy and there are different frequencies we can tap into, ranging from lower to higher vibrations.
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 (unconditional happiness). This is your natural state.
Insight #6: Unconditional joy is our natural state when we feel emotionally relaxed, centered (balanced) and expanded.
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 (superior – good – experience pleasurable feeling – emotionally upbeat – I like this).
ii. This is worse than that (inferior – bad – experience unpleasant feeling – emotionally distraught – I hate this).
iii. This is the same as that (could be equally good or equally bad or neither good nor bad depending on your judgment).
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 up (feeling good), down (feeling bad), left (thinking of the past) and right (projecting the future). There is no sense of inner peace with the ego because it has a hard time being joyful in the now. It can only feel good if things go 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 faults with itself or others.
5. Through judging it creates the feeling of being superior (right) or inferior (wrong). The ego thinks 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, 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 one does harm to oneself 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 it only knows conditional happiness, the ego thrives on competition. Winning (getting what I want) feels good, but losing (not getting what I desire) 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, negativity, 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 emotional wounds (negative reactions/limiting beliefs); hurtful feelings (offended or abandoned by something); and the feeling of lack (nothing seems to be enough) are still there. These have not turned into healing (feeling whole and complete), insight (seeing the big picture) and wisdom (knowing what to do). Therefore, your meditation practice is a bridge to your transformation and expansion, where you no longer feel inadequate, but capable of handling life’s challenges with joy.
Higher Consciousness / Lighter Vibration
The good news is we don’t just have lower consciousness, but higher vibration as well (it’s 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 fear (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 (manipulative) 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 wants (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 ego (fear and judgment) that there is a better way to live by accessing your higher consciousness. You’re not neglecting the ego 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, your ego benefits and you 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). None is overlooked.
Therefore, your meditation practice is a link to discovering your true self, which has no suffering whatsoever, but unconditional bliss.
Characteristics of Lower Consciousness / Higher Consciousness
Lower Vibration (Compressed State)
Fear – It feels aggressive, defensive or offended; it wants to attack or run away (fight or flight).
With fear (egoic mind) you believe you’re your past and you also worry about your future.
The ego’s intelligence is based on the survival instinct of fight or flight (looking at reality from a fearful perspective).
The ego is only interested in producing profits for itself (service-to-self attitude and win-lose situation) and not considerate of others.
Your egoic mind can choose to do harm and justify harming others or oneself.
Being Judgmental makes you feel superior or inferior because you like to compare yourself to another. The judgmental mind likes to label things into different categories; thus it feels separate from others. It has a narrow mindset, which classifies people and things according to its preferences (likes and dislikes). This creates biases or prejudices, which seem correct to the ego because the ego is attached to the idea of right and wrong. It has the need to be right; the need to control; the need to find fault; the need to blame; the need to punish; and has an addiction to conditional happiness (I can only feel good if I get what I want. If I don’t, then I feel unhappy).
The ego produces negative emotions such as fear, hatred, anger, jealousy, dissatisfaction, anxiety, worry, frustration, depression, insecurity, self-doubt, restlessness, boredom, guilt and shame.
Higher Vibration (Expanded State)
Higher vibration operates through non-judgment, unconditional love, clarity, insight, wisdom, kindness, compassion, independent happiness, inner joy, inspiration, gratitude, appreciation, creativity and lives in the present.
Your higher mind acknowledges fear; embraces it; accepts it; processes it; gains insight from it; appreciates it; and transforms it into balance. It doesn’t hold on to fear, but expands (moves from immaturity into wisdom).
You’re not addicted to conditional happiness. You can be happy regardless of circumstances because you can change how you react or respond to things; know how to find your emotional balance; and do no harm to yourself or others because hurting others is the same as hurting yourself.
Therefore, you’re interested in creating benefits for others with integrity and honesty (service-to-others attitude), which also produces prosperity for yourself.
You’re not attached to the idea of right and wrong (don’t feel superior or inferior to others), but enjoy helping and generating abundance, harmony and balance (create win-win situation).
You enjoy life. You know you’re not your past and don’t worry about the future because there is only now. When you’re unconditionally happy in the present, you will also know how to feel it in another now moment because this true happiness is emanating from your own inner joy; hence, you can always rely on it.
Insight #7: The characteristics of the ego appear to be bad, but please do not hate the ego. Instead, allow yourself to learn, integrate and transform it into a higher frequency.