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Once we have started a meditation practice, we find our progress limited by our outer life circumstances. Sometimes if our meditation is not strong enough, the negativity we encounter in daily life can completely take away the joy we gained from our meditation, and it may be necessary to change our life circumstances to remove these obstacles. The great spiritual teacher Sri Ramakrishna likened a growing meditation practice to a young tree; at the beginning, you have to put a fence around it to stop it from being trampled upon and eaten, but when it grows into a tall tree an elephant can run into it and not affect it in the slightest!

Often your own meditation will give you inner messages to make some change to your life that will facilitate your personal growth. However at the beginning, it can be very difficult to listen to these messages due to the mind's dominance and our own personal unwillingness to break with routine. Many meditation teachers actually suggest certain principles for their students to abide by until such time as they can feel the reality of these principles through their own meditation. Here are a few areas of your daily life you could experiment with and see if your meditation practice (and outer life) run more smoothly as a result:

- Is your work atmosphere conducive to peace and happiness? Perhaps you find yourself getting caught up in the gossip and office politics, and losing your sense of peace and balance in the process. Sometimes when you make a quiet principled stand, and tactfully let it be known that you don't want to be a part of it, you will find that with time this has an effect on the the whole office atmosphere, and there is less negativity in general. Perhaps the hours are making you feel more stressed; maybe you can approach your boss (who probably values such a peaceful cheerful person in his or her staff anyway) and negotiate a more flexible deal. If all else fails, you can always look for another job that improves your quality of life. I even know some friends, who having a shared love of meditation, banded together to create an cafe which has a beautiful meditative feel to it, and which members of the public love to come to for a bit of peace and quiet!

- What about your relationships with other people? Perhaps you have certain friends who always manage to make you feel worse after you've visited them, but you keep meeting up with them out of a sense of obligation. Meditation makes you more aware of the influences others have on you. In particular, it is very helpful for a meditation practice to have some friends who also meditate; it can be very hard to share the changes and experiences that you have had due to meditation with someone who doesn't meditate.

- What you eat can also have quite an effect on you. Nowadays it goes without saying the benefit of healthy foods on your system; and how junk foods provide a quick burst of energy but leave one d. In addition many teachers of meditation advise that eating meat can cause excessive restlessness and agression, qualities we certainly sdont want to encourage in meditation.

- In the West, we also face a unique challenge to our meditative capacity from the constant amoint of distractions on offer - radio, TV and internet are all competing for our attention. It pays to be discriminating about what you listen to or watch, and strike some kind of balance between being informed and filling ourselves with a tremendous amount of largely useless information. Often a meditative life is about simplification and focusing on the truly essential things.

- In your own house you can surround yourself with meditative influences. Playing meditative music will help to keep that sweet meditative feeling inside your heart long after the meditation has ended, whilst reading books written by great spiritual teachers and seekers of truth will inspiring you to keep going forward along the meditation-road. Certain colours are more conducive to meditation than others; it is said that bright colours are more open and expansive and hence evoke the kind of atmosphere we are aiming to create in meditation Light blue evokes the vastness of the sea and the sky, whilst pure white evokes our determination to cleans ourselves of the superflous things in life and focus on the essentials. In contrast, darker colours have a constricting feel about them.

- If you are serious about expanding and deepening your meditative practice, than you could definitely benefit from the guidance of a meditation teacher. For all other subjects - mathematics, music or athletics - we feel the necessity of a teacher or coach, and meditation certainly is no different. All genuine meditation teachers teach in silence: by meditating with their teacher, the student comes to a deeper realisation and knowledge of meditation and the inner life. Choosing a teacher is no trivial task, and you should really listen to your heart when doing so - if their meditations, teachings or even the sight of their picture fills your heart with joy, then the chances are that you have found the teacher for you.

There are many other things which affect the ability to stay in a meditative state, in fact there is no part of our life which canot benefit from some change. The only real rule is experiment, experiment, experiment! Try and make one or two changes for a couple of week and make a sincere evaluation of whether they have had a positive effect. So often we merely take 'the path of least resistance' when making choices in our daily life; taking the plunge and trying something different can have a tremendously empowering effect and make you feel that it is really you who are in control of your life. Good luck!

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