Cary Bayer is a Life Coach and the founder of Higher Self Healing Meditation. He conducts private practices and teaches meditation classes by the ocean in South Florida (954-788-3380) and in the mountains in Woodstock, New York (845-679-5526). You can find him at www.carybayer.com and reach him at successaerobics@aol.com
It’s estimated by doctors that as many as 10 percent of Americans, some 30 million people, suffer from some form of Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS). Its many causes include chronic diseases, sleep deprivation, and alcohol use, so stress may very well be an underlying factor. I think that many more people suffer from what I refer to as Restless Soul Syndrome. What is Restless Soul Syndrome, you ask?
It’s the soul’s longing for something deeper, some more meaning, and some more purpose. According to the American Psychological Association website, nearly half of households in our country have had someone in them seek treatment for support in improving their mental health. What’s more, some 91 percent of those polled said that they’d likely consult a mental health professional if they or someone in their family had a problem.
A whopping 36 million Americans are now practicing Yoga as of 2016, an increase of nearly 80 percent from just four years before, according to a study carried out for Yoga Journal.
As of 2012, a study undertaken by National Health Interview Survey, found that 18 million people in our country practice some form of meditation. That includes mantra meditation, mindfulness meditation, and meditation methods that are part of such practices as Yoga, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong, among others.
As a meditator since the age of 17 and a meditation teacher since the age of 20, when I began teaching Transcendental Meditation to many hundreds of people until 2010 when I launched Higher Self Healing Meditation, I would say that the souls of tens of millions of people are sensing that there’s far more to life than they’ve been living. These people seek out spiritual methods and psychological counseling to find that something more. A full-time life coach since 2001 - my work is called Breakthrough Coaching and includes Life Coaching, Business Coaching, and Meditation Coaching - I’ve worked with hundreds of people who are seeking a deeper sense of being alive. The French have long called this a raison d’etre, a soul-felt reason for being.
The Appestat and the “Soulstat” It’s as if the ache in their souls tips these people off that something is missing in life. When you haven’t eaten in many hours, your hunger thermostat - what’s known technically as the appestat - sends a signal from your stomach to your brain that it needs to eat. Heavily processed foods, such as junk food, for example, throw off your appestat, and can cause eating long after the stomach is actually full.
I think a similar mechanism to the appestat - I call it a “soulstat”- sends signals to your brain from your inner being, letting it know that your soul longs for something deeper in life. But much like the junk food that dulls your appestat, alcohol, materialistic pursuits, hedonistic living, and mindless entertainments, etc. can dull your soulstat so that you don’t hear its call for a deeper, more meaningful life. No less a multimillionaire than John D. Rockefeller, the scion who created the vast wealth of his Rockefeller descendants, put it ever so clearly about the emptiness of living just for pleasure: “I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.” The captain of industry was strongly encouraging people to find a kind of work that brings satisfaction to the soul. As a business coach for 15 years, I’ve seen what a difference it can make in the lives of clients who’ve replaced bi-weekly checks from jobs they tolerate at best to the joys of doing the work they love to support themselves and their families.
Restlessness can Lead to Restfulness and Peace
One irony that I discovered while teaching TM and Higher Self Healing Meditation is that the restlessness that leads so many people to meditation actually creates restfulness. This restfulness, however, is not the relaxation of a catnap, but a level of rest that is twice as deep as the deepest point in a night’s sleep, as measured by significantly decreased oxygen consumption. While the body experiences this deeply settled state, the mind becomes increasingly silent until it lets go of all perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, and experiences its source - the higher self within - in a fourth state of awareness, known as Transcendental Consciousness, as distinct from waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, as each is from each other. It’s a state of great peace, perhaps what T.S. Eliot was referring to when he wrote of “the still point in the turning world”. This restfully-alert state brings fulfillment temporarily to the restlessness of the soul, which is seeking a kind of happiness that it never quite finds in the outer world.
In time, when this fourth state becomes permanent, and co-exists with waking, dreaming, and sleeping, a fifth state of awareness develops called Self-Realization. This state of Enlightenment puts an end forever to the soul’s restlessness. The profound happiness that it was always looking for in the material world has been discovered as a state of bliss that never leaves on a 24/7 basis.
When you combine this awakened liberation with coaching that focuses on transforming what one does in the world from a livelihood to a “lovelihood,” based on making money by doing what you love, you create a life that’s lived to its full 200 percent value - 100 percent of its spiritual reality coupled with 100 percent of material abundance. Such a life is truly worth living, and puts an end to restlessness of any kind.
