“When you change, everything changes”
“When you change, everything changes”
by Jacqualine Haller
Founder & Director of Jaya Yoga Toronto, voice/creator of Jaya Meditation and The Global OM Movement.
Today, we completed Day 5 of the 30-Day Meditation Challenge. It’s Saturday morning, and while students have the choice to attend in person at 06:30 or link into the LIVE feed, more students showed up in-person today since we started; a lovely way to start the weekend. And let’s be real, it is not that easy to do as it means most alarms are going off around 5am. Especially not that easy to do since most people wake up to an alarm during the week and use their weekend mornings to catch up on rest. But these students are committed to this challenge, which is evident. Conversations around how going to bed early is now necessary to make it for class, some students experimenting with biking to the studio from home and someone even brought in their morning tea in a mug. I love it all, and it is nice to see our lives are shifting around this. I have enjoyed being witness to an intimate community being born, as people share in this experience together.
During class, my mind starts to wonder how everyone is doing. We get together each morning, share in a 40-minute meditation and then go about our day. I feel like I am personally shifting inside from this daily experience, and I wonder if they feel a shift to. When you immerse yourself in a higher vibration experience, your personal vibration begins to match it. It would be impossible for it not to. When you create internal change, the world and how you experience it, changes around you. Slowly, slowly and then what feels like ‘almost suddenly,’ the vibration of other things, situations, people, experiences and conversation, sometimes no longer lines up with us. Tolerance for negativity, ignorance, hatred, ego and self-serving behavior naturally dissipates. Even the social networking we have created around us, isn’t enough to hold us in place and we simply get up and walk away, graciously leave the conversation or turn off the news; anything necessary to get back to that good feeling place we have created.
You start to notice a new standard has been set.
When you allow yourself to become quiet and still and give yourself a break from the relentless chatter in the mind (we all have it), you learn incredible subtleties about yourself. The bonus is that you are now quiet enough to notice them. You now have an awareness of how you have been contributing (vibrating) in the world, and what you have been participating in and contributing to. And it’s not to say that we need to come down hard on ourselves for it, but once we know better, we do better.
Look, we have all been in a state of ego. We have all acted and reacted from a place of our personal identity. We are human beings, and we need our ego for certain things. After all, our ego is also that thing that makes sure we don’t cross the street into oncoming traffic. So, there is never any reason to come down hard on yourself. However, transformation is when we wake up to what’s been going on and our unconscious behavior. Through transformation, we begin to become aware of the mind and start to use it as the servant it is meant to be.
We need more consciousness as a global community.
They say that none of us are evolved or enlightened until the very last one of us is evolved and enlightened. We are so connected to each other whether we believe that or not, that we cannot move forward until the very last one of us has reached that place. It is up to each one of us to work towards that, in whatever form it comes in. We have been told so much from government, our church, our social make up, the news. I remember my favorite political science professor in university lecturing our class to never believe anything that we are told in life until we can validate it on our own to be truth. I admired her and who she was and took that lesson to heart. And while I absolutely respect everyone and their belief system, I hope that people are believing because they have discovered it to be their truth and aren’t down a road of blind faith. We can’t afford blind faith anymore, and I think that goes without explanation. As a global community, we can no longer sit back comfortably and rely on what others tell us is going on in the world, what is right or wrong, good or bad. We must in the core of our gracious ‘being-ness’ determine that for ourselves and act accordingly.
Be responsible to awaken, take responsibility for your enlightenment. Live your truth, and you will be an example. When people see you living a higher vibration and not giving attention to drama, they will know that there is a better way and will mirror that for themselves. At the end of class today, I asked my students to think of something they are grateful for and sit for a minute in the feeling of its vibration. I participated too. I write this today as a thank you to each of my students who are on this 30-Day Meditation Journey with me, who are moving through their stuff as I move through mine. They have all become my teachers and for that, I am truly thankful.
Jacqualine (Jaya)