When you meditate - if you meditate! - don't fight the wayward thoughts that drift across your consciousness. To fight them would be to give them energy and energy makes thoughts reality. We're wired to distract ourselves - with approximately 70,000 thoughts drifting through our brain during each waking day we are bound to be visited by useless thought at just the moment that we are trying to empty our minds. So, when you meditate, let the thoughts that drift into consciousness drift on by and out of consciousness. Use your senses to develop your ability to not give energy to the thoughts that divorce you from the reality of the here and now.

Let's consider what lies ahead of us this week or, let's keep it simple, let's confine our clairvoyance to just today. Now, at this moment in time, we actually have no idea what might happen as the day progresses - whilst our automated mind strives to ensure that our lives follow a predictable preprogrammed pattern that normally resembles an ongoing flow of self-fulfilling prophecies born of our lowly self-expectations, we simply don't know what's going to happen next - we're not in control.

Not being in control is, perhaps, what most stresses most people: not being in control of my finances or my career, not being in control of what's happening in the financial markets, not even being in control of what's happening, in the here and now, on the motorway in front of me. A little like death, which is inevitable but, nevertheless, something that we assume isn't going to happen to us any time soon, we tie ourselves in knots thinking about and agonizing over a simple fact of life... we are not in control. And, regardless of what strides you take or efforts you make, you will never be in control - none of us is.

But both you and I could greatly influence the course of today, the course of this week, month or year... the course of our lives. There is one thing over which you can have absolute and total control regardless of what life throws at you: you can control, completely control, your own state of mind. And when you do that, everything else changes. First of all, everything is seen in a different, often brand-new, light. Even the mundane presents us with opportunities that our otherwise dormant mind could never see. Every moment is an opportunity to do the right thing, effortlessly, whatever the circumstances. Life becomes a great adventure instead of a struggle.

You are the only person who can control your own state of mind. It is the only thing in life over which you can exercise total - and, when you get the hang of it, effortless - control. Under control, your mind will focus on doing what needs to be done to get you to where you want to go. You won't always get there, you'll rarely get there in the manner in which your ordinary mind might have imagined, but you'll get the kind of life that is simply on a different plane to the mere existence that we normally put ourselves through when we fail to control our own state of mind.

Take control - you never know what wonderful things might happen!