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Meditation

How I Found My Inner Calling And Revolutionised My Life {Case Study of Louise Gardener}

Mother of two teenage children and owner of a prestigious UK social research company, Louise Gardener knew she needed to respond to an inner calling even though it threatened her status, finances, and lifestyle. Here’s how she discovered and answered the call.

Words by Louise

As a 40-year-old co-owner of a successful independent research company with a family of two teenagers, creating time to study the find life purpose course both challenging and life-changing.

Having graduated from Oxford University and married soon after, I worked as a special-effects and computer graphics producer with some of the biggest names in film and TV during my 20s, then decided I really wanted children as I turned 30.

Blessed with a healthy son and daughter by the age of 33, I knew that being present and caring for them was the most important thing, so I left the film and TV industry. I formed a company offering social research and analysis to the UK government, international charities, and liaising between academia and public policy on issues of education, sustainability, health, and justice.

It meant I could align and orientate my work around my family.

A longtime friend, Sebastian Pole founder of Pukka Herbs pointed me toward Big Shakti’s work. I am a lover of learning and found their meditations extremely effective. I enjoyed them daily with my young children after lunch.

When the Find life’s Purpose Course became available, I was excited to take part. I found the learning process deeply engaging and supportive. The guidance, using the two wings of theory and practice to fly, encouraging action even if we make mistakes, and taking as much time as needed, resonated with me.

Through following the deceptively simple yet profoundly effective yoga and meditation knowledge and practices, I realised a gnawing feeling inside.

Something in me needed to be expressed.

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The Power of Sankalpa (Intention) to Overcome Adversity, and Near Death

We have spent the past few months supporting students to create a powerful Sankalpa (a resolve) and to identify their heart’s desire through our Find Life Purpose Online Course.

The Sanskrit word sankalpa means “a resolve or intention formed in the heart”.

We’re greatly heartened to know that so many of our students have been empowered to make meaningful changes in their lives, some small, some large, all significant.

The ability to make a powerful Sankalpa – one that empowers us to manifest our intention is difficult to achieve because the mind is innately unstable, full of doubts, and conflicting desires.

To counteract these conflicts and doubts, students of our course are given various tools and exercises to examine each desire. Using Yogic Knowledge, Meditation Practices and Integration Exercises students test their desires and intentions through different perspectives or lenses. For example, how each desire fits into a particular stage of life and how to cognize the different desires that arise from each of the seven chakras. This results in an ability to form a holistic relationship with desires.

If we only listen to what one part of us wants we are silencing another part of us, and sooner or later this part will demand to be heard.

The Clarifying Power Of Adversity

Sometimes it takes a negative experience to stir up a powerful Sankalpa. In this way, adversity can be a blessing because it thrusts us into reconnecting with our will to survive, to overcome the odds, to heal, or to repair. And it is the aim of the course to support all of our students being able to remain on track while facing difficult, challenging and powerful life experiences, experiences that have the potential if they are managed wisely, to change your life for the better.

In our moment of truth we either collapse under the weight of the adversity or, if we are lucky and able, we muster all of our internal resources to rise to the challenge. The course will help you do this.

Case Study: How our student overcame a near death experience and taught her doctors about the power of Sankalpa

The story by Sanyasi Yogamitra epitomizes what we can do, even when faced with life-threatening illness, in what appears to be insurmountable odds.

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Genetic Stress is Proven – Here’s How You Can Reverse It

Science has proven through epigenetics that we inherit stress from our ancestors and that we absorb our mother’s stress in the womb. It has also proven that what we do today has an immense influence on our genetic expression, whether it develops into wellbeing or disease.

Both stress and relaxation are frequently misunderstood. It is often thought that stress is a minor problem, similar to a light cold, and that relaxation is simply an escape from work through recreation. They are much more than this.

Stress is deeply embedded in the body-mind from birth. You carry the cellular memory of the deep past; the trials and traumas of your ancestors, and the worries and tensions that your mother experienced while you were in her womb.

True relaxation is a skill that inhibits negative genetic expression and triggers positive genetic expression. It short-circuits your predisposition towards disease.

When you understand and practice relaxation you take significant control of your biological and psychological processes. You disrupt both the everyday stresses, and the deep tensions that you’ve carried since birth, and which have formed who you are. This enables regeneration of the body-mind on a cellular level.

Choosing how your genetics express

You had no choice or control over your ancestral inheritance, nor did you have a say in what happened to you in the womb. You inherited strengths and weaknesses from your ancestors, and you developed strengths and weaknesses while you were growing in the womb.

It is our weaknesses that cause us daily stress and, if not managed well, prevent us from dealing with ongoing accumulating pressures. This is what we all are obligated to address if we want a healthy, disease-free life. We have to learn how to use our strengths to manage our weaknesses and if we become skilled enough we can actually transform our weaknesses into strengths.

From a young age, you have made lifestyle choices that have had a positive or negative impact on your life. How well you feel today is a result of how successful you have been in reducing your accumulated daily stresses and combating the stress of your genetic inheritance.

Fortunately, you can still make choices today that will have a very positive impact on the rest your life, and that will alter your genetic vulnerabilities.

You are more powerful than you think

It is crucial to appreciate the immense power you have over your own genetic expression.

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3 Minute Meditation to Glimpse What You Really Want and to Sleep Better

When you think of all the things you want, your list could be thousands of items long. When you feel what you want, you’re more likely to have only a few things that really matter to you.

This simple meditation can be used to quickly cut through the confusion and can also help you go to sleep, especially if you do a lot of thinking in bed.

Meditation to see what your heart wants, quickly.

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Is Meditation Dangerous?

And How Long Should You Meditate For?

One of our students recently wrote to us asking our thoughts about the possibility that meditation is dangerous. She quoted an article that describes the experience of people who had reported that engaging in mindfulness-based meditation resulted in the following negative experiences:

  • strange, persistent and obsessive thoughts
  • the sense of depersonalization
  • extreme sensitivity and vulnerability
  • a feeling of being exposed
  • anhedonia – the inability to experience pleasure
  • lack of meaning and joy
  • loss of direction

Like anything in life, meditation can cause problems when it is misused or misunderstood. If you don’t approach meditation with the correct preparation and attitude, you can become excessively introverted and psychological disturbed. It’s also possible to develop physical symptoms such as digestive problems, joint stiffness, muscle pain and metabolic imbalance.

Yogic perspective on the dangers of meditation

From a yogic perspective, these symptoms are described as excessive activity in the ida nadi, the left-hand channel that runs along the spinal chord, which carries mental energy. There are three energy channels running along the spine: ida nadi carries mental energy, pingala nadi carries physical energy and sushumna carries spiritual energy.

For meditation to be successful it’s important to balance ida and pingala nadis, the mental and physical energies, otherwise, your brain and mind can become over-stimulated, and depleted.

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