The Art and Science of Happiness with Turiya Moore

A visualization for planetary peace and harmony

Life is a school.The constant battle between good and evil in our own minds has a purpose and is intended to help us eventually realize our own divinity. Near death experiences. The spiritual nature and purpose of life. The direct experience of God in prayer and meditation. An important learning experience about prayer and attitude gained through trying to survive aggressive cancer treatment. 

If you want your prayers to be answered and if you want this relationship. And you want it to be intimate and direct and personal. It is there for you, but God has to be number one. God isn't playing games. It's gotta be number one. You've got to learn to want that and enjoy that more than anything else in my opinion, otherwise it won't come. And so where you're meditating it's ok to pray and say alright I can't hear you but I'd like to hear you, I'd like to hear you more, I'd like to know what you want me to do with my life you know. So I'm gonna make you a promise. I'm gonna do everything I can till the next time I meditate, to try to feel you guiding my thoughts. And if I don't feel you guiding my thoughts, I'm gonna pretend like you're guiding my thoughts. I'm gonna live like you're guiding my life whether you guide my life or not, so you damn well better step in at some point. I'm not going to tell anybody, but I'm going to do everything in Your name...

Excerpt from the talk: And what if that relationship between us and everything that there is, what if it's a choice? What if we really do have free will? And the choice is not about how your life ends up and all that kind of thing, because there's all this action and reaction that's happening all over the place that's outside of our control. Stupid people make stupid decisions, the next thing you know we're all dead. It's wonderful, it's a perfect environment to grow spiritually. And so what if the only choice that matters is: do we create the space in our lives to be quiet to calm down, so live from our intuition a little bit more and trust more what we feel instead of so much what we think and what we've heard and what we've been told and take time to really love our children and to appreciate the sky and to let our hearts guide us toward the next steps in our lives, whatever they might be, making time for other people, being patient with them, giving them money when they need it even when you can't afford to, just being more serviceful, more loving, because in your heart you know that you want to, even though your mind says that you can't. There's a fork in the road at every moment of our lives to realize and to step into a greater reality that includes us and enjoys us, where were we belong.

To get the benefits of meditation that we hear about, like being more free of anxiety, being more positive, being more calm, more clear, more focused and also maybe a lot of things having to do with physical health, does not require a lot of depth in meditation. What it requires is a steady practice, doing something like watching the breath every day or just about every day, once or twice a day, short bursts of concentrated stillness and developing the commitment to do it, but also the understanding that when you're doing your meditation, it's got to at least feel decent, right? So the best way to feel decent if your mind's wandering, you're having trouble with the breath, you're physically fidgety, you have anxiety, you're having negative thoughts or something, just keep bringing your mind back to the feeling of the breath without controlling it and learn to leave the meditation and feel absolutely successful that you did your best. In the beginning, a lot of the benefits that we hear about in the medical field, in western science about meditation, those can be obtained that way and that kind of a meditation can evolve into something like twenty or thirty minutes at a time and you're just doing something, there's a lot of techniques out there like that, where you're just inhaling this, exhaling that, focusing here. You'll get a lot of the benefits. But when you read books about deep spiritual experiences, saints communing with God, St. Francis communing with Jesus, Yogananda with Krishna, or when you talk about that kind of meditation, going deeper spiritually, having a direct relationship with the Divine, the way I would define if we're moving deep, it's never going to be like visions, crazy astral experiences, out of body weirdness. Half the time when people experience those things it's because they fell asleep and they don't even know it, because you can get used to meditating and have a really straight spine and be completely asleep and you just go off into subconscious, you go off into dreamland and you'll have dreams related to whatever you think about meditation, whatever you want about meditation and you might come out thinking you had this mind blowing, great spiritual experience and it was literally a subconscious dream. But the way to know if your meditation is deep, specifically what I'm talking about when I say depth, it's an experience of freedom. In other words you don't feel like you're meditating, you don't feel like you're doing a technique anymore. You might even be doing it, but you're observing a different experience inside where you feel free and when I say freedom what I mean is (and I can only speak about my own experience) when the part of my consciousness that divides everything up into life into likes and dislikes is gone. The likes and the dislikes go away and you're completely aware and you feel free...

And so we learn with the things that we love, we learn to accept them with all levels of their realities, whether they feel good or bad or they are harmful or not, right? We start to have a deeper relationship with things when we can accept the whole picture, not just what we want and that relationship can be very freeing because only then do we start to have a dynamic connection with it and so with people, when we can accept people as they are, with all their imperfections, like the mountainside that will kill you, like the ocean that will drown you if you let them, right? 

Forgiveness is the opposite of weakness. The more we can accept what is, the more energy we will reclaim to become more aware, more free and more wise.  

Guided Meditation 24 Min by Turiya Moore

Recorded at Free Monday Night Guided Meditation and Lecture on July 24, 2017.

If the world wasn't practically tearing itself apart with ego and materialism and selfishness and greed, nobody would be meditating. The benefit of meditating is way better than anything that this world can offer. I don't like to use the word all the time, but it comes out of me all the time – you can have a direct relationship with God. That's really what meditation is all about. And you don't need to know what God is. I don't know what God is, but I have a direct relationship with that thing that I can't define. And I know it's real and it will be there for me on my deathbed. I'm not afraid of dying, I'm not afraid of anybody rejecting me, because I know where the love is coming from and nothing can take that away.

Most of us have been fooled most of our lives. What we seek will not be found in things or in others. True happiness is not complex, it's simple. Why is it that we put so much energy into things that are not important to achieving our own most cherished goals? When does true happiness happen? Recorded at Free Monday Night Guided Meditation and Lecture August 7, 2017.

Whatever your purpose is in life, whatever it is that that you really think is important, I would say don't be fooled! Don't be fooled by other things. If other things get in the way of what you really want to become or be doing with your life, don't be fooled by what everybody says and what everybody does and what seems normal. Just be a complete freak of nature, follow your heart and do what really inspires you and makes your heart feel good inside and you'll be inspiration not just for yourself but everybody around you. Recorded at Free Monday Night Guided Meditation and Lecture on July 31, 2017.

Life is a school. Life is a playground and a school, it's the same thing. And it has a purpose and we come here to learn and we come here to learn who we are and eventually we come here to learn it because what drives us is that we want to be happy. And we want freedom, we want to be able to ride the bike as fast as we can and feel like we're just free. Everybody wants to be free.  http://meditationunlimited.com/talks/

Yoga science offers two directions for happiness and fulfillment. Both are important and needed to balance each other. Look at a young child, one that hasn't learnt to mask his feelings yet and when he's happy and enthusiastic, he has an erect spine and he even wants to jump, right? and then if he's got something really weighing down on him and he's unhappy, he slouches, he'd be all folded up on the couch like this and Mom would be like “What's wrong?”. You can see it from the outside – the movement of energy inside the body.

A guided meditation with silence that ends with healing visualization for planetary peace and harmony. http://meditationunlimited.com/guided-meditations/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/meditation-unlimited/id1217046512  

A short starter for meditation that you can use to get started and allows you to continue in silence as long as you wish.

A 14 minute guided meditation for beginners with Turiya Moore, recorded at Meditation Unlimited in Torrance, CA on May 15, 2017.

“Good health is more than a state of not being ill. It is a radiant state of inner wellbeing. Physical illnesses may be cured by medicines. No medicine however can induce that state of boundless energy which comes when every cell in the body cooperates with the mind willingly, joyfully in all that it seeks to do. Such radiant wellbeing comes after the mind has been cleared of every shadow of unwillingness, of fear and of doubt when one has learned to say “yes” to life and when one has learned to love.” – Affirmations for Self-Healing by Swami Kriyananda Recorded at Meditation Unlimited, Torrance CA during Monday Free Guided Meditation for Beginners. April 24, 2017 http://meditationunlimited.com/

How enthusiasm can help us better achieve our long term goals and be happier, how limitations we create by being overly concerned or attached to specific outcomes, and developing intuition and greater sensitivity to the experience and needs of others and how to better serve them. Recorded live at Meditation Unlimited in Torrance, CA April, 17, 2017 with Turiya Moore.

So you watch the little waves, they blow with life changes. Wind is like emotions and changing conditions and sometimes it's turbulent and sometimes it's calm and these little waves just blow like little victims from one side of the ocean to the other, then they crash on the beach and die. Yet the ocean never changed. The volume of the ocean never changed, the depth never changed, the whole ocean is the same, untouched, uninvolved, but completely there and present in the experience of the wave. So this is how in yoga they explain that is like the individualized spirit that is identified as a separate reality, the ego. And if it would just relax! You know how they say – the bigger they are, the harder they fall. The more we're identified with this “I”-ness, if it's in the wrong way, the more we suffer with ups and downs, like really big wins and then really terrible losses, because it's all about “me” and because we're like these waves that are crashing right? One approach to meditation is to see it as we watch the breath or we concentrate on other things that are happening inwardly, as a way to take us away from our identity as something that's unique, separate and limited and merge our awareness, reconnect with our ultimate potential as something much greater and much more permanent than a human body and the current personality and thought processes that we experience as our own. This is a talk from our Free Monday Meditation Series. Recorded at Meditation Unlimited in Torrance, CA on April 10, 2017

Willingness is a great virtue. In this talk I'm focusing on developing the willingness to see the divine in everything. Our appreciation of beauty in all things is dynamic to change ourselves and to change our world. Those things we focus on, we also draw into our world and strengthen.

A 25 minute guided meditation. Practice on an empty stomach. Be rested and have fresh air. Sit in a comfortable position where you can maintain upright posture. Have fun and let me know how it goes for you!

What we're seeking through meditation is also attained through self-control. Meditation isn't just lying down and dreaming about whatever you want to dream. Meditation is about putting the mind on something and learning to concentrate and hold it there, to get the thinking mind out of the way and the reason it's so important in our tradition to watch something without controlling it, it's so in time we can experience the distance between the thinking mind and our actual perceptions. So our awareness, our consciousness is not defined by our thoughts, it's not defined by our desires and so there's another way to do desires and sense pleasures and all that kind of stuff, experiencing something that is sensual whether it's sex or chocolate, a cigarette, loud music or just like some real emotional kind of a thing. It's just sensual stuff, it's all cool, it's all great, we're human beings.

Is there anyone in this room who could use more willpower? There are a few of us right? Basically willpower is like a muscle. Something we develop over time. I'm out of shape, so if I was going to the gym for first time I would not pick up the heaviest weights. I would start with something I can handle. Start small. The thing is that if you want to develop willpower choose something you want to overcome that you believe is within reach. Not the biggest tests. Start small. But be extremely rigid even violent if that is what is needed to break that little habit. It might be a certain food or attitude. A short introduction to yoga meditation and developing willpower. Recorded at Meditation Unlimited in Torrance, CA on March 13, 2017.