Meditation, Prayer, and Personal Finance
Once or twice a day, I go into my bedroom, turn down the lights, lay on the bed, and look up at the ceiling. I start off by reflecting on a small handful of things that have really brought me significant joy in the past few days. After a few minutes of that, I focus entirely on emptying my mind for a while, and once that’s done, I just drift without anything in my mind. Sometimes thoughts drift in and out of my head – sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I doze off for a bit – other times, I don’t.
After about twenty minutes of concentrated mental relaxation, I almost always feel refreshed and much more able to tackle whatever is on the table in front of me, whether it’s a household task, some work to be done, some bills to be paid, or anything else. I get that stuff done faster and better than I ever would have done before the meditation.
Call it meditation or prayer or whatever you wish – it flat-out works.
When I first started doing this, I seemed like it would be an utter waste of a good twenty minutes. I started trying it at the urging of my pastor at the time, who told me to try to take some time every day to pray and to let God speak to me. I didn’t really have any idea what that even meant, so I tried mostly just spending some time reflecting on what was going on in my life in a positive way. I tried to spend fifteen minutes a day just reflecting on the good in my life.
It didn’t really work.
Instead, I started reading books on prayer and meditation to see what others had discovered. What I seemed to find, time and time again, is that people found success in just letting their mind drift and seeing what answers were revealed to them. This pops up over and over again in all sorts of religious and other writings.
What I’ve found is that an empty mind is a real clarifier. Those twenty minutes spent letting my mind be as empty as I can make it do more for my day than anything else I do.
That time seems to fill my mind with a great deal of motivation and, often, with ...
