So, why don’t we all meditate? Well, first, it can be seriously time consuming. Second, and more importantly, even when we sit with our eyes closed using some new age breathing techniques, most of us never really achieve that zen like state. I know a portion of my own meditative time is spent in something that feels like a good snooze!

At least that was the case until a couple of years ago when I discovered the lazy man’s way to meditate – the Holosync solution. Now, this is not an advertisement of any sort. I’m not getting paid to write this or commission from the company. I’m just telling you a story of how I have found more meaning in my life with a solution that guarantees to put me in a meditative state within a few minutes.

A couple of years ago, I was just post a bad break-up. The usual ice cream, movies, friends, and psychic hotlines were not doing the trick to lift my spirits. Some weeks and many, many hours of internet research later I happened upon a story of a man named Bill Harris. Bill, like myself, had gone to great lengths seeking meaning and happiness in his life.

Bill had heard that meditation would help him in this pursuit for meaning and joy, so when he was 19 he started meditating—an hour, sometimes more, each day—and he kept it up for sixteen years! Bill studied Eastern philosophy. He read everything he could get his hands on about psychology and psychotherapy. And, being a gung-ho, throw-caution-to-the-winds kind of guy, he actually tried everything people and book suggested!

It’s not that he didn’t get results from all these things. Sometimes Bill would even have what seemed to be dramatic breakthroughs. Eventually, though, he realized that the deep underlying cause of his unhappiness wasn’t really being altered by any of these things and the progress was unbearably slow. At this point, Bill sought out a better and faster way to find peace and thru his journey; a better and more effective way to meditate. And that’s when Bill started reading about neurotechnology. He found a neuro-audio technology that when placed beneath soothing music and listened to with stereo headphones, produces some absolutely mind-blowing experiences for the listener. Bill used this as a basis to produce his own technology that has now become his life work.

I’m not going to go into the technicals behind Holosync because, well, because I probably would screw up the explanation. I’m just going to tell you that Bill Harris has perfected this neurotechnology and has packaged it so you can literally get into a zen monk like meditative state with the touch of a button. After my first 30-minute session, I went deeper and more into that dream-like state than any of my previous meditation experiments over the last several years. The best part? I put the tracks on my ipod and hit play – virtually effortless.

What happens when you press play? Well, you listen to what seems to be very nice bells and rain and some other things you’d commonly find on one of those defunct sharper image noise machines. The difference is that the embedded audio tracks underneath these pleasant sounds sync with your brain and quickly put you in a deep meditative state. In the beginning, there were a lot of repressed emotional feelings that came up during my meditation. I actually cried a few times without realizing I was doing it- kinda freaky, but quite cathartic. After these sort of darker sessions, I’ve had more blissful ones and (this sounds hokey) many sessions that produce clear life visions. In fact, I even keep a notebook next to me when I meditate so I can scribble down all the thoughts and ideas that seem to be flowing like gifts in my mind.

I’m not saying it is the only or best way to meditate, but it is a great solution for those of you who do not intend on applying to monk school If you’ve ever had the desire to meditate but neither the time, nor patience, I suggest giving Holosync a whirl. I’ve been meditating with these cds for the last two years and it has truly changed my life.

Holosync can be pretty pricey (well, that’s all relative), but another great option to manifest the life you desire is to learn the simple laws of attraction here.

“If I find the right person and get married, I’ll be happy.”

“If I get that great job, I’ll be happy.”

“If I retire early, I’ll be happy.”

“If I take a year off and travel, I’ll be happy.”

Sound familiar? Have you ever had these things actually happen and not been as happy as you had predicted? In the past, you may have believed this was because you lacked perspective or were just naturally unhappy person. I know I’ve been down that path before. Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist, and author of the book “Stumbling on Happiness” offers an alternate solution.

Gilbert contends that people are incessantly wrong about predicting what will make them happy. He explains with both anecdotal and scientific studies that humans are just not capable of imagining future events and how they will feel accurately.

As evidence, Gilbert cites studies that demonstrate that a large majority of people who endure major traumas (war, break-ups, car accidents, rape) in their lives will return to a pre-trauma emotional state – in fact, many of them will report that they ended up happier than before the traumatic event. It’s as if we’re equipped with a gage that is constantly rebooting us back to our own baseline emotional state.

This concept may be more clear if you’ve ever had reminisced about a shared memory with a friend or family member. Somehow even though you may have been absolutely convinced of the order and details of a particular incident, others will have equally strong convictions of a different memory. It has been definitively proven that people use both selective and replacement memory techniques of past events.

Since we misremember how things that we have already experienced felt, we also mispredict how they will feel again in the future. The classic example here is childbirth, which women seem to misremember not being that bad. Gilbert says, “we expect the next car, the next house or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn’t and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won’t.”

What gets us through life is the right amount of delusion! Just enough to fool us into feeling relatively good about ourselves, but not so much as to exceed our own credulity.

“If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning,” Gilbert explains. “Yet if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our own slippers.”

What has been reinforced for me from this book is that we all need to find our happiness in the present and from within. If life experience hasn’t taught us that external factors do not produce true serenity, then this book will definitely convince the reader that time is of the essence – find your smile today!