Make This Your Best Life

Introduction
It is around nine in the morning, and I am sitting on my cushion, legs crossed, covered with a blanket. I am surrounded by about fifty strangers. We are in silence. The air feels crisp, and every time I breathe I can feel every single hair move in my nose. Nobody is moving much. Every time someone coughs or moves a bit, we can all hear it. We have been in silence for the past three days, immersed in meditation for ten hours a day, not looking at each other, and living like monks. We are now at day four of a ten-day silent-meditation retreat. In that moment, as we are all quiet and peaceful, a cow starts mooing from the back of the field, and the other cattle follow into a mooing song. The sound is just so unexpected and unusual that some people start laughing. The cows continue mooing and grunting for a while. I am not sure how long it is, but they just kept going. Sitting cross-legged on my cushion, I can hear the cows mooing, but I have been attending to an intense sensation and experience of my own. I felt an excruciating pain in my hip as soon as I sat for meditation this morning. I tried to observe the sensation without reacting, but I was so uncomfortable that I had to move around. No position would take the pain away. I tried everything, and nothing would do it. The very technique I was there to learn was supposed to work through pain, but I was getting nowhere. I resolved to breathe through my pain. I decided to do deep, controlled breathing. I focused on getting the inhalation all the way to the pain in my hip and visualizing the pain moving out as I exhaled. I did that for approximately twenty minutes, and the transformation began. This was something I had never felt before. It started to tingle in my pelvis. There was a warmth and a feeling of something awakening. An energy started to move around my pelvic area, rolling and coiling. The serpent-like form was spinning in my pelvic area, starting slowly and spinning faster and faster. It then started to move up my spine, and a big burst of energy came all the way out through my heart and up into my head. I am sitting cross-legged on my meditation cushion, breathing normally, in silence. I notice the pain has completely dissipated. I am in a state of pure bliss. I feel at one with everything around me. I don't feel separated anymore from the people around me, with the air in the room, or the building we're in. I am that. A moment later, I hear the cows, I hear the reactions around me, and I just let that be what it is. I dwell in this perfect moment for about two hours, until the sitting is done. I feel the energy subside. I want this moment to continue for the rest of my life. That was about fifteen years ago. After this enlightening experience, I started a regular meditation practice. I spent three to four hours a day in meditation. My lifestyle was very simple yet very fulfilling. At that time, I went through a dilemma that caused me to do some deep soul-searching. I questioned the meaning of life—my life. I was clinging to more blissful experiences that I'd experienced during meditation, states of what we can call "flow" that I couldn't get in my regular, mundane life. I thought I had to choose between getting back into the world to live my life or moving to a monastery far away in India or Tibet, to deepen my meditation practice and live in bliss. I didn't see the need to go out into the world and work just to pay the bills. I no longer felt I had to accumulate stuff; I wasn't interested in seeking pleasurable experiences. I was cultivating equanimity moment to moment, but I was torn inside. It took me a few months to find meaning in my own life. I had to go through uncertainty and had to surrender to not knowing. It was necessary for me to recognize that my life was worth living—out in the world— because my purpose was to be self-actualized in a mundane life and not in a monastery. I knew that if I were to choose the monastic lifestyle I would be running away from something I had to accomplish in the world. My dilemma created the space I needed to discover my self. During that year after my first silent-meditation retreat, I realized that I had been surfing the flow. Now my task was to stay in the flow while facing everyday challenges, sometimes amid chaos and always in a battle with my ego. After a few years of committed practice, I didn't need to meditate for hours anymore in order to experience moments of flow. My life became the flow. I understood that, before I started a meditation practice, my resistance to my greatness was preventing me from living a blissful life during everyday tasks. Now my mundane life turned into a daily ritual, and my life became meaningful. I brought intention, dedication, and mindfulness to the small stuff. I realized that any task is important if you bring intention to it and that you can access states of flow while doing them. Any task, if you are inspired, becomes sacred. I discovered the meaning of my own life. I discovered my purpose.