If you want peace of mind, you meditate. If you want a life of bliss, you meditate. If you want love in your life, you meditate. If you want prosperity, you meditate. Ask a group of people, why do you want to meditate and you will get as many and more answers. Well, meditation comes first and the solutions to all problems follow, no doubt. To meditate, you need to recede into a silent space. It can be in your home, at the work place or just by a pavement under a tree in a park. You wonder how it can be possible — phone bells ring, calling bells ring, people want you, you want people and as you attend to all these calls the day is gone and the time is gone with it too.
So you think the best place to meditate is in an ashram or a sanctuary; not just anywhere, but in the lap of the Himalayas, on the banks of the Ganga, in a clean and tidy ashram where you have a room to retire to with an air-conditioner and clean beds. When you are hungry, you choose the food you want to eat — South Indian or North Indian as your choice may rest with. To meditate with all these conditions can be tiring.
If you want meditation to happen right where you are, convert your home into an ashram. How does that happen? Clean up the space of all excess baggage, garbage. Free your wardrobe of old and not so long used clothes. Give them away to those who want it. Free your bookshelves of those old and dusty books that you haven’t browsed even once in the last 10 years. Keep the spiritual books with you — Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavatham, Ramayanam, Mahabharatham or many more — even if you haven’t touched them in your lifetime. It may make sense in your life, some day in the future.
Meditation happens easily when the air is free of clutter. When your house is free of clutter, your mind too is free of clutter. Clear your junk mails and social site clutter — we have more and more sources and space for clutter with the Internet too.
Make it your resolve to set aside one day a week for meditation. Sit quietly by yourself and allot that half-an-hour in the morning and evening, just for yourself. You listen to what is happening within you. Be by yourself in silence with the practice of mauna or silence for an hour on your meditation days. Increase this time to as many hours and days as you can. One fine day, you find your home has become an ashram and this is the best place to be. The best of the locations and scenic spots cannot give you this silence that your home can do — provided you make it into an ashram!
—Swahilya Shambhavi
(www.swahilya.blogspot.com)