Out of Darkness

Spirituality and meditation are activities that people find not worthy of their time. However, meditating can alleviate certain physical and mental problems that people experience in their daily lives. Meditation also helps a person find their focus in life, specifically their objectives and goals. Here’s a list of exercises to promote your inner spirituality.

1. Find a Silent Room
A silent room is all you’ll need to meditate. Ensure that this room is cool, quiet and a soft mat lies underneath you as you sit down. Sit on the mat and assume a position that keeps your back comfortable and relaxed.

2. Breathing Exercises
Now, close your eyes and breathe deeply. For each breath you take, think of all the stress you faced during the day. Think of it regardless of how it weighs in your priorities and imagine it being resolved with each breath. Repeat for as many times as you want.

3. Facing Your Demons
People who always seem tired or irritable are people who haven’t faced their inner demons just yet. Inner demons are things in the past that they run from, problems that were unresolved, left hanging in the air and needed some time from you. This is probably one of the most difficult parts of meditating.

4. Adjusting Your Goals
Now that you’ve resolved your issues for the day, think about your plans in the next three months. These may be career-based or personal goals. Adjust your goals depending on your capabilities in the real world. Once you’ve set them, write them down and post them on your wall. Be sure to assess how this goal will benefit you in the long run and why you need it.

While this blog is dedicated to improving yourself and “coming out of darkness” so to speak, it doesn’t imply that anybody should avoid depression and all the negative things in life. Sure you may have made the wrong choices at some point in life, but it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily wrong. Depression is the point in one’s life where he or she can prove to him or herself that it is easy to pick one’s self out of the ground.

Life is not always about happiness; no matter how hard you try, you can fail at one point in life. This is inevitable, but if you understand and anticipate that, you can make your own contingency plan or at least have yourself ready to devise a strategy to help you get out of the mess.

People who give in to depression are the ones who genuinely suffer and regret their losses. The depression takes hold of their thinking capacities and leaves them making choices on impulse and disbelief, which leads to even more problems. The lack of self-control contributes to depression, but soon, one of their errors will eventually turn them to the right track.

It is important that one learn from the struggles in life. It is not always about happiness and success that one manages to attain; to get to genuine and real success, one must always know depression and struggle. Only then can they truly appreciate the value of their happiness.

In the United Kingdom, a child is anybody who is under the age of 18. However, a child has until his or her 21^st age to start a legal accident compensation claim. At this point, the child, legally known as “minor”, cannot make a claim on his or her own but will need an adult to make a claim for them. The adult is known as the child’s “litigation friend”, who would then handle making the child’s claim on its own. The adult, usually the natural parent of the child, a guardian or any adult the child is entrusted to who can prove that they are legally able to act on the child’s behalf.

Contrary to adult accident or injury compensation claims, children’s injury claims extend until his or her 21^st birthday. So if an accident caused by another party happened when he or she was still seven years old, he or she has until 21 years old to make the accident claim. If the child is 18, yet he or she does not have any adult to make a claim on their behalf, three years is the deadline for the 18 year old child.

Neither the “litigation friend” nor the personal injury lawyer who are acting on the child’s interest can conclude the accident compensation claim without the court’s approval. The judge will be the one to consider all the evidences in the claim and considering the sufficiency of the final offer for compensation.

The Financial Services Authority recently fined the UK industry giant £4.3 million because the FSA finds Lloyds’ PPI redress systems to be “below their standards”. Lloyds had delayed at least 140,000 PPI claims with claimants receiving their claims more than 28 days or even within six months.

Aside from the delays, over 24,000 PPI claims were “inadvertently dropped” by the bank, according to the FSA. The city watchdog says that Lloyds’ redress systems were “chaotic”; employees could not explain to customers the reasons for redress delays or fast tracks. Employees cannot even inform customers about the definite date they can receive their compensation.

PPI is an insurance policy banks designed to help customers repay loan, mortgage and credit card repayments in case they get sick or become unemployed. However, banks used abusive sales strategies to sell the insurance to customers who did not need and were ineligible for the insurance policy. A consumer can make an effective claim by submitting a well-written PPI template letter along with evidences to support their claim.

The FSA gave the reduced £4.3 million fine to Lloyds instead of the initial £6.3 million fine as the bank agreed to settle immediately.

Lloyds gave a public apology to its customers, explaining that like every financial company today, they underestimated the wide scale of PPI mis selling. They said the bank was unprepared to handle the great number of consumer claims and is still adjusting to give the finest customer service to PPI consumer claims.

You cannot blame yourself if you do not want to accept anything that is right in front of you; your superiors taught you never to be satisfied in being second best or even in being the best. This particular idea, while helpful, is also a straight-drive into insatiability. When you look for the best things in life, you are moving in a way to find something that society dictates the best, but if you consider something as the best, then you are setting yourself the best that you believe it to be.

Because of insatiability, people tend to forget their small accomplishments. People are taught to aim for bigger things, to aim for stability, to get everything they need, to get what is socially-dictated the “best in life”. However, if you know yourself greatly, you dictate for yourself what is the best in life, and often, people forget that they have already achieved something and they forgot to add it to their self-confidence and realization.

Always remember to appreciate the small accomplishments you make; from making it through a bad day at work and rewarding yourself for it to accomplishing everything you’ve listed in your daily task, you deserve to be happy about it. Small things are where big thing come from, and if you cannot appreciate the small things your hands can appreciate, you won’t even appreciate the big things you accomplish or you won’t even notice it.

A person should always have motivation in everything and anything he or she does because without it, a day would go routinely without any self-review of what the day had improved for the person. To retain focus, one must always ensure that he or she focuses and motivates him or herself. Here are a few things to remember to ensure that you are motivated on a daily basis.

1. Inspiration
An inspiration is not always a romantic notion; it could always be that you are inspired by the accomplishments of other people or because you want to prove something to yourself. Finding inspiration is not at all difficult, you just need to look at the right people that helps motivate you. By integrating their values and spirituality into your own life, you gain your own inspiration.

2. Challenge Yourself
Struggles are a daily part of life whether a person likes it or not, but a person should not see these as hassles. Struggles are challenges that help improve your personality and your view in life. When you give in to the struggles, you lose yourself and you will continue to be demotivated. Instead, challenge these struggles and face them with every ounce of readiness that you have.

3. Purpose
Sometimes, at work, you could actually question the tasks that you are given. Sometimes, if your boss does not explain the weight of the task he or she is giving you, you fail in motivating yourself to make sure it works. Purpose is an important factor in any kind of work because it gives you focus and with focus, you get motivated to do it the best way you can.

You work on a 9AM to -5PM work shift on a daily basis and this goes on for about 5 days a week and clearly, every day is not getting any better for you or your family. You have to keep up with projects, deadlines and make sure your relationship with everyone in the office remains professional and productive. Keeping up a smiling face and doing the daily routine is a struggle and you know this very well. Sometimes, before you sleep, you might ask yourself what is the purpose of struggle in life.

In most religions and belief systems, struggles are seen as contemporary challenges faced by the person to which is given to him or her by a god or some deity, or as fate or forces beyond man’s control. When a person gets through these obstacles, he or she emerges as a better person in the end.

In self-enlightenment, this is actually true as well. Challenges are important because they shape your personality and hone your values and mental capabilities so that you could be a better person in the future.

Without any struggle, reward is senseless. There is no use for rewarding one’s self if a task is easy. Sometimes, people who win against the struggle do not even seek rewards, saying that the struggle itself is rewarding.

For a person dealing with a daily office struggle, enlightening one’ self means considering the fact that their struggles makes some aspects of their lives, like spending time with their family and friends and being productive, as important as they can be.

Once people embrace the fact that struggle is a part of life to make themselves better, the stress from work and everything associated with it then fades completely.

To attain your highest spirituality and enlightenment, you must look deep inside yourself to know yourself. Allow your heart to make decisions for a span of time. This helps you know more about yourself, the things you want, what makes you happy, what makes you sad and what can irritate or even make you mad. Allowing your emotions to go all out helps your mind observe what is happening and what can satisfy your inner being, which is crucial to knowing your wants and objective in life.

This practice helps you learn about self-honesty. Self-honesty is relevant to the honesty taught to children, except that it is neither a sin nor a criminal act to lie. Self-honesty is when you get to do the things you want for yourself and you do it because it satisfies you and it does not satisfy the needs of other people. It is a selfish gesture, but one that is productive.

Through self-honesty, you admit and accept all your strengths and weaknesses, hence the emotional practice mentioned earlier. You then continue to work on your weaknesses while you cultivate your strengths. Once you know yourself better, you can talk and be yourself with confidence that no other people can tell you otherwise about what you are.

Once you know yourself, you are now an entity on its way to enlightenment.

Philosophers, great thinkers, intellectuals and scientists all work in different methods just to discover one thing, and that is the meaning of existence. For centuries the world has existed, man had different answers for the meaning of life, and the difference of answers reflects that each person’s outcome is based on their own decision.

The path to self-enlightenment is not just by following a single religion, a new belief or value system or by believing in something. If you look inside yourself and meditate on the things that surround you, how they affect you and how you want to affect them, you discover what makes you tick, what makes you as you are and what you want from the world.

It is not because a god’s hand is guiding you or because you need to do good to get rewards by the end of your life; it is how you decide for yourself that makes your life a success or a failure. Even the view of success or failure is subject to your decision of looking at it as a success or failure.

Life is about decisions and there is no wrong or right decision. However, if you continue to be honest to yourself and the things you want, you continue your path to self-enlightenment and knowing your purpose in life.