Posts tagged Spiritual Meditation
Meditation Help – Quiet the Mind and Enjoy It!
Sep 28th
Meditation helps in several different ways which depend on your intention and reason for meditating. The benefits from meditation can be felt or experienced within just a few days of beginning a meditation practice.
There are three different areas of our lives that meditation helps us improve: Physical, Mental/Emotional, and Spiritual.
Meditation affects the mind by quieting the mental chatter. It is hard to be fully aware of our bodies and environment when we have too much mental chatter, worries, concerns, etc. A quiet mind is a happy mind. It’s a mind at peace. This is what meditation does and contrary to what most people think it is not about going blank and thinking nothing. The mind being clear is more about actually feeling what you are experiencing and being aware of it.
There are many different tips and techniques you can utilize such as using a candle in order to focus on the flame or using meditation guided audios or even just soft pleasant music.
It’s about paying attention to one thing, instead of having a million thoughts flowing through your mind. Even if you feel like you do not succeed at quieting the mind, if you are taking time to pay attention to one thing, you are receiving a significant benefit from your meditation. Your mind is slowing down. Believing anyone can go from having hundreds of thoughts in a minute to having absolutely no thoughts, immediately is ridiculous.
So the idea is to slow your thoughts, and eventually become clear and focused. You can sit and concentrate on how your breath feels to enter and exit your body. Do not try to change your breath just feel how it feels as you breathe. Pay attention, can you feel your lungs expand? How does air feel going into your nose? How does your body feel? Focusing on these things start making you pay attention to feeling your body or experiencing the sensations in your body, which means your mind is not thinking as much or having as many thoughts. Even if you have a few, you are having significantly less!!! This is exactly the purpose of meditation or I should say the reason people meditate.
This is what leads to other benefits. Such as the physical benefits, your body starts relaxing, your muscles relax, your blood pressure lowers, your immune system gets a boost. Emotionally you become more come, and then anxiety and stress are lessened. When your mind is going a millions miles an hour it is almost impossible to hear anything else other than the constant bombardment of our own thoughts, Meditations helps Spiritually as well because your mind is quieter you have more space to connect to whatever higher power you believe in. But remember all of these benefits are all because you are slowing down the mind.
Slowing the mind can be done enjoyably. Actually it is most beneficial when you enjoy the process. Meditation helps with hundreds of symptoms and can provide more benefit than you can imagine. Try different mediation techniques. Hopefully this has helped you see that meditation is not just sitting quietly with your eyes closed.
ANYTHING that slows your mind and quiets the mind is meditation. You can even walk and focus on every little movement in your body. That is meditation. There are thousands of techniques to use in order to meditate. Have FUN with it.
Light Meditation As a Venue to Reach a State of Presence
Sep 27th
Light Meditation is only one of the venues into the realm of Presence and is a form of spiritual meditation.
Contemplation, reflection or visualization are similar states recognized also as meditation, but meditation needs to have a deeper purpose other than visualizing what one wants to achieve, or create in our life, that has its place, but before one can create or manifest anything, one has to be in a place of fulfillment, complete fulfillment, and that is only achieved when we can be at one with our Inner Being. So What is Meditation? Meditation is an inward movement that can take us to unveil the deeper aspects of ourselves.
What meditation is not
Meditation is not “thinking about our problems”, is not thinking to find solutions to anything, is not a way to solve our personal dilemmas. Meditation is our relinquishing of our everyday thinking, is letting go of the internal chatter, is transcending and passing thorough to a state of “No Thought”, is to reach inner silence in the depths of our Inner Being, where the peace of the universe exists within us, and is the only place where we can find it.
The spiritual search is an essential aspect of human existence. Psychologist and Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm was once asked for a practical answer to the problems of living, he said “Quietness, concentration for a half hour a day, twice a day if possible.” Transpersonal Psychology is relatively new as a formal discipline of Psychology and concerns itself with higher states of consciousness and the spiritual search of humankind, by trying to integrate Western thought with Classic Eastern Traditions. In his book Insearch, Psychology and Religion, Psychologist James Hillman says ” The unconscious is the door through which we pass to find the Soul.” If you find yourself wanting to practice with any form of meditation, that means there is in you a natural urge to search for that deeper dimension within you and you must follow it.
The Object
Light Meditation uses an object, in this case usually the light of a candle, to help us reach a deeper level within. However, the object can be anything you choose, in this case is a light, but it could be a flower, the sky, a cloud, a leaf or any object like a shoe, or a pen, anything that you choose and that you can quietly focus on. When you see the beauty in that object, the depth within it, with no thoughts in your mind, you have got in touch with the divine aspect that you share with the object, because you and the object come from the same source of creation.
Why has light being chosen as an aid to meditate? In classic tradition Light is an expression of the Divine, in its simplest and most complex definition, light is just the opposite of darkness, and you have both aspects within you as well. When you find yourself in communion with the light that you are contemplating, then you have achieved communion with the divine in you. However, there are more practical reason for the use of candlelight in meditation, the light of a candle inspires certain depth, it has a peaceful quality to it, it has movement, it has color and often brings us to a peaceful place just by looking at it, thus helping us clear our mind more easily.
The process of meditation is basically a process that beginners must go through to reach the peaceful place within that is our essence, after that has been achieved then meditation becomes integrated with daily living. When we are in that state with our eyes open and listening to the world around us, we have then achieved the peace within and without. We have become the unobstructed instrument that life needs us to be to express itself in the world through us.
The mind is the most amazing tool we have to create ideas and solve problems, and that is how it best serves us and our deeper self. The mind is the part of us that makes schedules, plans the project goals at work, decides what we need to cook for dinner, follows the rules of the road while driving; that is our practical mind, the servant of our Inner being. But there is another aspect of the mind that creates a chatter of worry, of recreating the past, of creating fear; that is the dark aspect of the mind and that is the aspect that we need to let go, that is the mind dysfunction that we need to heal with the aid of meditation. Thus Meditation is a way to access the deeper self and go beyond the superficial persona/self that we present to the world.
A good meditation book or meditation guide on Light Meditation techniques can be useful as a roadmap to get started in the most fulfilling of human journeys, your Awakening.
