Well, it’s that time of year again. Time to…meditate? No, shop! Or, is it time to meditate on why we shop, why we consume hoping to find some outer reward to our thirst for something…new, different? Time to find happiness in…Target? Nordstroms? Amazon?

How often have you felt an urge to go out and buy something, only to find that after you’d bought whatever it was, there was still a hollow place inside? Have you ever been really stressed out and felt like a little “retail therapy” was just the thing that you needed to remove your negative thinking?

What we find as we begin to explore our mind and our “meditative self” is that there resides within us a deep and abiding happiness that’s not dependent upon our outer circumstances, not dependent upon what we have in our closets, what we do for a living, or what we watch on TV. We begin to find a happiness that has always been there, within our mind, within our heart, that – for the most part – has nothing to do with what’s going on “out there,” not dependent on our outer circumstances.

This part of our mind is one within which resides a genuine happiness, that can be there whether we’re healthy or sick, whether we’re rich or poor, whether we have Armani or second-hand.

I recently found myself in the Nordstrom Rack (a store where I can supposedly find real happiness because I can find buy quality stuff at discount prices – yay!) No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find anything that I liked. I searched the aisles, almost in desperation, looking for something perfect that would make me feel better.

Finally I stopped in an aisle and asked myself, “what are you looking for?!” At that moment, I just took a breath, meditated in the moment, and realized that I was feeling stressed out by a number of things that were going on in my life. I walked out of the store, took a look at the sky, felt the cool air on my face, and simply breathed…

What I experienced in that moment was to witness my mind go from a state of confusion to clarity. The confusion was the belief that I could somehow heal the inner turmoil that I was feeling at the moment through the purchase of some “thing.” The clarity that I experienced was, through meditating on the moment, realizing that I’d lost touch with my own inner happiness, hoping to find it elsewhere, and that I could easily return to that inner happiness by simply taking a moment – just one precious moment – to check in with myself.

Black Friday is the shopping day of the year in the US. It’s a day of wanton consumerism, a day for all-out buying! No worries; might as well have one day of hog-heaven. But, wouldn’t the experience be even better if we could have our mind about us, so that whatever we purchased, whatever we chose, was chosen and purchased from a sane state of mind?

Here are a few tips for how to “meditatively” shop, ways to bring mindfulness even to our consuming. Give it a try and see if you’re shopping is different:

1. First, before you even leave the house, settle your mind and make a list of what you really need, what you really want, and what is simply a luxury. Maybe even set up a system to know which is which.
2. Next, before you enter the store, maybe when you’re sitting in your car, or getting off the bus, or walking to the store, practice a little meditation. Take a deep breath, center your mind, check in with your mind. Check in with your mental and physiological state. Are you nervous? Excited? Anxious? Blissed out? Calm yourself. Center. Breath.
3. When you enter the store, see what changes happen within your body and mind. Do you begin to feel distracted? Does your attention flit from one item to another? Do you find yourself forgetting what you came into the store for?
4. Before you pay for your item(s), even if you’re on line at the register, ask yourself these questions: “Do I really need this?” “Does the person who I’m buying this for really need this?” “Will I be happier with this item?” “What if I didn’t have this, would I still be happy?” “Where is the happiness that is already inside of me?”
5. Check in with yourself frequently when shopping. Remember, stores and retailers are designed to build the craving and desire within your mind. They’re not your friends. They want you to spend money, and the more that you spend, the happier they are (even if their happiness is also dependent upon outer circumstances.)
6. Remember that mindfulness and meditative awareness are skills that we develop formally to use informally in any situation, even while shopping!

I’ve found that over the years, as I’ve increased my familiarity with my mind, as I’ve become aware of what is going on within my mind and my body, my tendency to buy impulsively has decreased dramatically! You could almost say that meditation and knowing one’s mind isn’t good for a consumerist society…but it is very good for the people in that society!

Try it out. Practice meditation. Use it in everyday life. Take breaks to meditate. And, see if your shopping habits change when you meditate. You may find that you spend less of your vital resources on “stuff,” and more of your vital presence within the natural state of your mind.

For more information on how to meditate and how to deal with challenges to meditation, please see the Related Posts below. Also, don’t forget to download the free ebook, Can Meditation Change the Way that You View Your World?, for help with getting started in you meditation practice. Also, you can download the ebook, How to Work with the Four Distractions to Meditation to learn how to deal with some of the obstacles to meditation.

ALSO, visit the Media, page where you can find articles, MP3 tracks for downloading, and videos on the subject of meditation.

As always, please feel free to share your comments. And, as always, please feel free to contact me if you’d like to see additional content or other discussions on this site.