It All Started out of Desperation

Since I am often asked about meditation, how to do it and what it has done for me, I decided to post this blog and eventually have my limited knowledge all in one place to refer people to. It should save a lot of time as I spend hours answering each individual question. Overall, my advice and impression of meditation is 'keep it simple'. Meditate on precise, exact and simple concepts. Don't try to incorporate elaborate plans and details into your meditation. Meditate on one thing at a time. Once a solution is found, replace it with another thing to meditate on and go forward refreshing your goals and objectives as past ones are achieved. Spend time! There is nothing you can do to make your mind stronger, more intelligent, more intuitive, than to link into your subconscious mind and interact with it. Just as your computer is your link to the vast knowledge of the internet, your subconscious mind is your link to the vast knowledge and intelligence of the universe. I am convinced that inferior intelligence linked into the subconcious can give the appearance of great intelligence. In other words, if you aren't too bright, that link into your subconcious mind and it's interface with the universe gives you vast intelligence and knowledge. What if you could Google everything at anytime? Wouldn't you appear super intelligent to everyone - especially if they didn't have any evidence that you Googled everything before responding? Theory of relativity? "The development of general relativity began with the equivalence principle, under which the states of accelerated motion and being at rest in a gravitational field (for example when standing on the surface of the Earth) are physically identical." from Wikipedia.org. Well, there are bound to be some 'wows'. You have similar potential wow factor by meditating and having a well connected subconscious assisting you in daily life. Now, you are not too rush and hurried into making a bad decision. You calmly consider alternatives and provide a well reasoned, well articulated and thought out choice.
You are more Linked In, then Linked In. You go from MySpace to MyUniverse and your Universe responds and gives back, giving as there is no shortage, only abundance. Eveything given from the Universe does nothing to take away from the Universe as it is the Universe.

One last thought before I begin the story. Meditation to arrive at financial and material gain is NOT what it is about. Greed and envy will backfire. You need to approach meditation in the spirit of abundance, prosperity, sharing and giving. The Universe gives to you and you must, in turn give to others. Not just money but also kindness, love, time. Those are the true gifts and the beauty and brightness you feel are so much the richer. Brighten people's lives in order to keep your own light burning. Your life is really insignificant if you do not use it to enrich others.
The Universe enriches you because it trusts you to be a good steward of the riches it shares. Do not betray that trust!

The Beginning, My First Meditation.

One day, my business partner and I realized that we were spending more money than we were making and, if it continued, which it would, we would be completely out of operating funds in a little over 30 days. Our sales, which had been pretty good the previous year had all but dried up, we had no other sources of revenue to depend on, in short, we were about to become a statistic after working our asses off to launch a new company that had shown great promise.

What do we do? Banks - "Ok, you need the money, so we can't lend you any". Friends, family - "Hey, we can hardly pay our cable bill and little Joey just got braces and his therapy bills are killing us". Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors - "Who the fuck are you guys again?". Ok, so we know we have a problem and there seems to be no out of the book solution.

Well, I had read all the self help books over the years, attended motivational seminars and had and continue to have a lot of confidence in the power of positive thought and the subconscious mind. Norman Vincent Peale? His book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was given to me by my church at high school graduation in 1974. I carried it around with for years and finally ran out of newspapers and magazine to read and dove in. Great book for forming a strong foundation of self and the network of friends. Twenty some years ago I picked up "The Power of the Subconscious Mind" by Joseph Murphy. Great book, I read it, agreed with it and did a few exercises, mostly in times of need - like trying to find a job in Europe, trying to get a promotion, trying to 'manifest' some lovely ladies into my life, that sort of thing. As far as I was concerned life was pretty good, I was surviving very well on a combination of luck and hard work.

Most books had one thing in common. They were a LOT of work. How could I do all the exercises Tony Robbins tells you to in order to master NLP. Dude, we have jobs, families and football is on TV. Actually, for me it is my guitar. I waste my time playing it as football and other televised sports bores me to tears. Somewhere in hell there is a torture chamber outfitted with ESPN 24/7 - until then I will jam, wham and slam my collection of guitars making all sorts of heavenly squels, shrills and divebombs! But enough of that.

Ok, so my sister kept on mentioning "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. "You have to watch it at least once". She and her friends had screened it several times at get togethers and she sang it praises. She told me about it so much that I felt as if I had already seen it. It had buzz!

Well, I knew what it was about and having already watched Dr. Wayne Dyer's program "Manifest Your Destiny" on PBS a few years back and read the book, I was ready to try
anything to get our company back up and running.

My business partner and I discussed it. It went a little like this..."So, we're going to take time out of our busy workday scrambling for business and do what?!!!!!!". I am keeping the dialog polite and free of F-bombs. There were definitely some F-bobms. I have an MBA in international business and I am going to lean on 'meditation' for recovering our business? Ok, get ready to lose the house, the cars, my guitar collection and recording studio 'cause it is so going to be a downhill ride from here!

Well, we made a deal. He would meditate twice a day and I would meditate twice a day. We would meditate on a common goal - $1M deal by March 31st, 2007. Ok, so what if we hadn't done $1M in total sales since we launched the partnership a year prior. So what if $1M deals usually take a few months to put together and a few months longer to be paid for. $1M by the end of the month it is.

We began our meditation. "Why won't these voices in my head shutup?!!!", "There is absolutely nothing you guys can do to save your business, it is a failure, you need to admit your shortcomings and go out there and beg for a real job!", "Your family is going to suffer because you are a loser!", "Hope you enjoyed the nice neighborhood, neighbors and school district. Do you think your neighbors will come visit you in the trailer...down by the river?!!!". Negative chatter was killing us. We were tuned into one radio station WFUP! We were two F'ups who were going down! It was brutal!

Well, over ther course of a couple of weeks of braving through logic, negativity and every incarnation of father, teacher, warden (ok, I'm joking about the warden!) telling us that we
will never make anything of ourselves - those voices, the negativity started fading...the voices, they weren't so loud anymore, they didn't carry as much weight, they weren't even believable.
"What do you mean we won't make it? We have seen ourselves make it twice a day for over two weeks! We are going to make it! We have already made it!!!". We saw it, we believed it. We were still broke, we saw bills arrive but knew they would be paid and weren't to be fretted over. We didn't see our mortgages, car payments, etc. as albatrosses but as non issues, they would all be paid.

Something strange. The phone started ringing. Aha! There is an opportunity to sell something for $750K and it needs to be done in a week. "Wait, did they say...gulp...a week?" We blitz the market to find a buyer. One of our great customers was in need for just that very thing. They sent $150K at the end of the week so we would secure the deal for them. They paid the balance a few days later. We weren't yet at the end of the month and we were still short $250K.

Another call came in for a $360K purchase. They sent the down payment and knocked us up to over $1M BEFORE the end of the month.

Ok, how did this happen? We stated a goal, impossible really, in light of prior performance. We meditated on this goal and it happened. Not only did it happen, but we were so close to the EXACT amount we had meditated on every day for weeks.

Well, was it a fluke? We immediately put it to the test. $5.5M by July 31st. Three months away. Never happen but let's see what we can stir up here. Meditate twice a day. As we did more meditation, it became easier to concentrate, easier to reach that state of calmness. I was finding I could take 2 - 3 minutes, meditate on the goal and go right back to my daily activities. I could reach meditation waiting in line at a redlight and snap out of it by the time we got green,
I could use a lot of wait - normally wasted time - and grab a few seconds to a few minutes. Ahh, it was beautiful!

Around mid-July we got a call from a business partner. They had a client needing to make a large purchase..just over $5M. We found a source and got the deal done. It wasn't quite $5.5M, but several days later, we got another deal in and we paid in early August making the total just over $5.5M. Ok, is this stuff working or is it a fluke?

Next goal, $8.5M by October 31, check. End of year goal between $10M and $12M. We entered December with $9.5M in sales. December 21st a customer purchased $475K worth of equipment. Boom! We hit $10M (never set a goal of between $X and $Y, always be specific, my suspicion is that our conscious and pessimistic minds keyed on the lower amount instead of a higher or even midlevel number).

So, we were in an impossible situation and had no way out. We decided to test meditation as a solution. We set specific goals with a timestamp (i.e. $1M by March 31st, 2007) and made a series of goals that were uncannily close to what we had set for ourselves.

My conclusion is that meditation works. Meditation incorporates everything needed to make something happen - whether our tiny minds decide it is impossible or not. Seeing is believing. Seeing does not necessarily mean physical seeing. If you can conceive it in your mind's eye, you can manifest it. See, believe, receive seems to work.

I will put my own personal experience and challenges with meditation in my next post.