If you let yourself just take that in for one minute, “everything is alright, everything is okay”, doesn’t it make you feel better? I mean, even if you were already feeling alright, sometimes we’re just not aware of all the stress, tension and control we are wound up in until we hear (or read) a soothing voice telling us that it’s all going to be okay.

Back in the “day” when I used to smoke mary-ju-juana, I was one of those people who partook because I wanted to not feel sad, afraid, hurt, angry, worried (insert issue here).  I spent the whole summer after my freshman year in college, high.  Or as close to it as I could.  And you know I didn’t get a thing done such as going to summer school or finding a job.  But I did discover a whole bunch of really good ways to combine food and eat sugar.  What I didn’t know then, but I do know now, is that I needed to discover that peaceful place inside of me that has a never ending fount of encouragement and feeling peaceful.  Somehow I didn’t make it into an Ashram, church, synagogue, counselor’s office or 12-step meeting then.  I guess I was still living my story and adding chapters of experience for figuring out later down the road.

When I finally did make it into all kinds of spiritual rooms, counselor offices and self-help groups I set down my weapons of rash dysfunction to my brain and walked around feeling pretty exposed for awhile there as learned to understand myself and who I was in the world (see Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning“).  I will be forever grateful for the therapist I saw during this period because of many reasons but most certainly because she had such a soothing way about her from just her disposition to her voice.  I think it was more the way she loved me to health rather than any great psychology that helped me get to the place of feeling that everything was going to be okay—although there was good psychology too!

It may seem disingenuous for me to tell you that even with the state of the Economy around the world, war, disease, and pestilence,  that everything really is fundamentally okay…but it is….really.  I’m thinking of even the worst times in my life when I’ve been hurting physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually (and there’s been a lot of those times) that in the center of each time, I was okay.  The “I” that cannot be measured.  The “I” that has a body and a soul and all kinds of things that we attach to ourselves to say to the world, “this is who I am”. But really that “I” of us is that place you can find, if you have the desire to find it, that is in the center of us but can’t be measured. It can be felt but not seen.   Meditation has definitely helped me find that “I” so that sometimes all I have to do is sit somewhere calming to me (like outside in the swinging chair on our back patio), disengage from all the things that are troubling my mind and soul and allow the “I” to float forward.

Sometimes though I need to run through the countryside or swim in the ocean….move my body till I can let go of what I am holding on to so that I can allow in, me.

No matter what is going on now for you, you too can find that calm within so that you feel the truth that everything is fundamentally well.

The journey may be long and the road may be rocky but the bliss is so worth it.

What are you willing to do today to feel the bliss within?

Paramahansa Yogananda