Taking a Vow: An Effortless Effort
by Sri Jeff Poole
When teaching mediation, I request students take 40-day vows to practice their meditation regularly twice daily without missing a day for 40 consecutive days. When we all next meet at the conclusion of this vow, each student re-assess their progress to see how far they've come during that timeframe.
My Guruji once told us that "when you take a vow and successfully achieve it, all the Angels in heaven come to congratulate you - it's a big celebration!"
Vows are powerfully flexible and flawless processes for achievement of your goals. If you've successfully kept a vow, you experience the reward and happiness completing it brings.
Even if you miss a day, you just effortlessly start over from there. So no matter what you're in process of achieving that vow, you still get to celebrate, because you're still on the path to accomplishing your goal. It becomes an effortless effort for you.
In this same way, a vow can be used as a powerful aid to establish a regular discipline of daily meditation through this effortless effort.
A gardener prepares for healthy plants by regularly watering the plant's roots. Even when the fruits ripen and everyone's busy enjoying the fruit, the gardener keeps on watering the roots so the plant continues to thrive and live.
Meditation is just like watering the root at the source of life. When we regularly attend to our source through daily meditation, we ensure the continuous quality of our life and contribute to its success.
Our regular meditation becomes very important contributing to life's balance and progress, since it ensures we live from a strong foundation.
Daily meditation brings improvements in health, mental clarity and inner fulfillment to life through contact with our silent, still source & center; it infuses these orderly qualites into our lives. During each meditation we effortlessly come to rest in this silent stillness absorbing and infusing it in every fiber of our being, and when we come out, we begin to radiate this stillness and balance in everything we do.
This produces dramatic changes not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of everyone around us. In fact, the Vedas proclaim that "meditation, influences seven generations into the future and seven generations into the past."
This means our meditations can generate an influence so powerful they actually change the effects of the actions our ancestors performed in the past and in the future for generations to come. Regular meditation offers solutions to life's problems by eliminating disorderly stress that contributes to those problems throughout time.
All it takes is a small amount of effort to continue a practice of effortless meditation on a regular daily basis and create such positive influence in life. Then just like the 40-day vow, a daily meditation practice becomes an effortless-effort as well.
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