Wake Up to the Joy of You: 52 Meditations and Practices for a Calmer, Happier Life - Softcover

Stassinopoulos, Agapi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593981340 ISBN 13: 9780593981344

Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

This is your year of self-discovery, a journey to create a life filled with grace, meaning, zest, peace, and joy.

ONE OF HEALTHLINE'S 8 BEST MEDITATION BOOKS OF THE YEAR

With warmth and wisdom from a lifetime of spiritual seeking, inspirational force Agapi Stassinopoulos guides you through fifty-two weeks of letting go of what doesn't work for you and finding what does. You'll cultivate the building blocks of self-care (meditation, health, making time for yourself) and confront the common roadblocks we all face, like pouring your energy into other people or living in denial. You'll explore your "conflict" areas, such as relationships, money, self-esteem, anxiety, and your childhood. And you'll learn to trust your creativity, keep your heart open, and connect to the bigger spirit that lives inside you.

Keep this book by your bedside. It is your loving companion. Be creative and have fun with it. Use it as a tool to unlock your goodness, and wake up to the joy of you!

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AGAPI STASSINOPOULOS is a bestselling author and speaker who inspires audiences around the world. In her previous book, Unbinding the Heart: A Dose of Greek Wisdom, Generosity, and Unconditional Love, she shares wisdom from her life's adventures and experiences. Agapi was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and then moved on to receive her master's degree in psychology from the University of Santa Monica. Her previous books on the Greek archetypes, Gods and God­desses in Love and Conversations with the Goddesses, were turned into PBS specials. She is currently conducting workshops for Thrive Global, a company founded by her sister, Arianna Huffington, to help change the way we work and live. She divides her time between New York and Los Angeles and was born and raised in Athens, Greece.

Find her online at www.WakeUptotheJoyofYou.com

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1.

The Art of Meditation

“Know the world in yourself. Never look for yourself in the world.”
--Ancient Egyptian proverb

From the moment you wake up to the second you fall asleep, I’m willing to bet that you are completely consumed by the outside world. There’s work, relationships, finances, making dinner, getting the kids to do their homework. Your mind is filled with chatter about your kid’s report card, your friend who filed for divorce, your rent, those ten pounds you need to lose .?.?. it’s never-ending.

Reality can be the ultimate taskmaster. It will never give you a break unless you take one and create a new habit of freeing yourself from the cycle of doing. Most of us are so caught up in just keeping pace that we neglect our inner worlds. But there is a reason why we are called human beings and not human doings.

Your inner world has nothing to do with your thoughts, your emotions, your unpaid bills, or your worries about whether your partner really loves you. In order to move past these worldly concerns that can consume you, I like to imagine being in a plane. As you ascend, the city below looks otherworldly, with small patches of green and minute toy houses. You feel a sense of detachment, elevation, and perspective. The noise of the world quiets.

This is one of the reasons why I love to fly: I can think clearly, find solutions to challenging situations, and feel gratitude for the mystery of being alive. I always promise myself that when I land safely, I’ll never worry again. Then I land and pick up my worries at the baggage claim. That’s why I meditate. To bring back that feeling of a higher perspective.

Meditation involves going deeper into who you are. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors. For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths out of sight, in the deep living heart.” There is this yearning in all of us to go deeper, to get to your heart, to your being. To know yourself beyond your identity. Any form of meditation in which you disconnect from the outside world can be one of the most supportive and effective things you can do to shift daily stresses and find your way to your own being. And little by little you’ll learn to undo the tension that has accumulated in your body so you can begin to relax and let go.

People often tell me that they’ve tried meditation but given up because they couldn’t escape looping thoughts and worries. They tell me meditating makes them more anxious than they were already. I understand. In fact, I’ve been there! Finding the sweet spot of peace and balance so you’re simply present, beyond all the chatter, takes practice. Don’t be discouraged, just keep going. I love this quote from Steve Jobs, a lifelong practitioner of meditation: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear subtler things--that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”

The practice of meditation is ancient. It’s been a part of daily life in Eastern civilizations for centuries. In the West, stress and burnout has led us to look toward the East and learn from that tradition. Meditation, along with yoga, has gone mainstream--a great addition to our culture. The most essential ingredient for these practices is heartfelt devotion. If you are meditating without devotion, the results won’t be as rich as they could be. It can’t just be another thing to check off your to-do list.

There’s a beautiful prayer by a Benedictine nun: “Dear God, show me the truth about myself no matter how beautiful it is.” If you are struggling with meditation, I suggest starting your daily practice with a heartfelt prayer, which can take the form of a poem that moves you or a lovely picture of a sunset, a garden, a mountaintop, the ocean--whatever moves you, calms you, and connects you with the wonders of life. Picture someone you love in your heart, and bring your whole self and your senses into it.

In that moment of true connection, you’ll find there are no distractions. You are present in your heart. Do it in the way that’s wonderfully particular to you, just make sure you put your heart in it. Don’t ever worry about emptying your mind, because that’s not going to happen. What you’re doing is refocusing your mind to whatever lifts you.

So often, people share with me that when they sit quietly with nothing to do, focusing on their breath or a word, they start to see their faults and inadequacies. They find it’s dark inside. Recognize that this “nothingness” is really no-thing--that it’s the absence of thoughts, personality, and the material world. Sit with it. You’ll find that behind the emptiness is something bigger--the richness of your spirit.

Here are my meditation tips. If you start to feel upset about something, don’t fight it, don’t judge it, just observe it, relax, and breathe into it. There’s a good chance the disturbance will diminish or evaporate if you don’t keep feeding it.

Meditating is similar to strengthening muscles at the gym. Like exercising, it takes practice, persistence, and commitment. You never know when it will click. At some point, you’ll be sitting down, chanting and observing your breath, and wow, something opens up and you are aware that you have entered a lovely, quiet, still place inside yourself.

I find that meditation is all about connecting to a loving, accepting, and centered part of myself, which I call my “calm.” You don’t have to be sitting under a mango tree to get the experience. It can happen anywhere. Don’t limit yourself, you can meditate in the car, in the bathtub, in your office, at a restaurant, on the train to work, definitely on a plane. It’s great if you have a sacred place in your home where you can build this energy, but sometimes people will stop meditating because they think it has to be at a particular time and place. No! You can take a few minutes anywhere you are. For my mother, washing dishes or cooking for friends and family was her prayer, her meditation, her ritual of reverence. “All of us eating together is my human communion,” she’d say. She meditated in her own distinctive way--feeding seagulls at the beach, dancing outside on a rainy day.

If we don’t involve our heartfelt spirit in everything we do--including meditation--we deny ourselves a rich life. Imagine if you lived every moment connected with your inner self, your invisible soul. If you knew for sure that meditating could connect you to your soul, wouldn’t you want to start practicing and keep going no matter what? Meditation, yoga, or any spiritual practice can become a joyful journey to your soul.

It’s wondrous how much creativity and insight can open for us as we become receptive and listen to our spirit, which can always guide us through our inner and outer life. Often after meditating, solutions appear; inspiration shows up. I write poetry, run into someone I’ve been wanting to connect with--there’s plenty of time to do everything I want, things miraculously fall into place.

Meditation is an incredibly powerful tool. A regular practice can result in a more fulfilling life. You’ll start to drop your agenda of what your life should be like and open up to your higher purpose. By meditating with devotion, it’s possible...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593981340
• ISBN 13: 9780593981344
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 321
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland