Honor: 0 [ Give / Take ]
12 entries this month
PRIVATE ENTRY
17:24 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 698
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PRIVATE ENTRY
17:21 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 699
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PRIVATE ENTRY
17:16 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 700
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PRIVATE ENTRY
17:12 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 701
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PRIVATE ENTRY
17:10 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 702
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Lucid Dreaming
17:06 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 703
Lucid Dreaming
From the monks of Tibetan Buddhism to the 12th century Spanish Sufi Ibn El-Arabi, mystics the world over have proclaimed the benefits of lucid dreaming. Achieve in dream lucidity has been approached as a way to illuminate both the nature of the self and the nature of reality. As early as the eighth century A.D. Tibetan monks are comparisons between the ability to recognize the illusory quality of a dream and the ability to recognize the illusory quality of reality. By extension, if the dreamer could learn to control the imagery of the dream once that dream was recognized as an allusion, then a similar control could be gained over the elements of the waking world once that world was also recognized as an illusion.
Hervey Saint-Denys coined the term reve lucide (lucid dream) in 1867. Despite this, Dutch psychiatrist Frederik Van Eeden is usually credited with developing the concept of lucid dreams, based on research he performed between the years of 1898 and 1912.
The first written description of a lucid dream goes to Saint Augustine who, in 415A.D, recorded the dreams of the Roman physician Gennadius. Gennadius is the first recorded lucid dreamer, but considering the power and the meaning attributed to dreams by individuals in the ancient world, it is very unlikely that he was the first lucid dreamer.
Lucid dreams are such a consistent human phenomenon that, at the same time that Van Eeden was doing his work on lucid dreaming -- which included shouting and singing very loudly in his dreams to see whether or not any of this carried over to his sleeping body size to wake his wife -- 16-year-old Hugh Calloway was also recording and experimenting with lucid dreams. Calloway, who wrote under the pen name Oliver Fox, called his lucid dreams "dreams of knowledge," as they possessed/presented the knowledge that he was dreaming.
Carlos Castaneda introduced the modern American metaphysical community to the notion of lucid dreams in his 1972 publication "Journey to Ixtlan." Through his Yaqui sorcerer-teacher Don Juan, Castaneda offers up a helpful technique for achieving lucidity in dreams: look at your hands. Picking any predetermined object to focus on in dreams can help the dreamer achieve lucidity, but for Don Juan, pans were especially useful because he noted that they would always be there.
Although the reality of lucid dreams was long doubted by scientists, with the development of REM sleep monitoring systems, it has become possible for lucid dreamers to issue a prearranged signal of eye movements in a laboratory environment that can prove that they were at once fully asleep, fully dreaming, and yet aware enough on some level to transmit the sign agreed-upon while still in the dream. The foremost named in modern lucid dream research is Stephen LaBerge. A psychologist at the Stanford University sleep research center, LaBerge is the recognized expert on lucid dreaming. In fact, he wrote the book on it. Many Americans have successfully used LaBerge's MILD technique for lucid dreaming. MILD stands for mnemonic induction of lucid dreams, and it is a technique in which the dreamer wakes up from the dream and take some time to visualize the dream again. While putting himself back in the dream, the dreamer that reminds himself that the next time he dreams he will recognize the fact that he is dreaming. Robert Monroe of the Monroe Institute and several others have developed similar memory induction techniques, most of which rely on a kind of self hypnosis or neurolinguistic programming to encourage the subconscious to become conscious in dreams.
Teachings: Beginning Meditation
16:52 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 706
Teachings: Beginning Meditation
This is a quick and simple method of achieving a focused meditative state, and it will help you draw your attention inward so you may think with perfect clarity. Use this exercise whenever you need to clear your mind, or use it just before you do any kind of intuitive or subtle reality work in order to heighten and focus your perceptions.
The Thirty Count
Sit down and get comfortable. Close your eyes. Take several deep, cleansing breaths.
Begin counting from one to thirty. Count slowly, and quietly enunciate each number. As you count upward, imagine that everything is getting quieter and more internalized. Keep your breathing slow, steady and even, and try to let go of any stress or distractions each time you exhale.
1. At five, let go of any stress or other distractions that prevent you from giving the exercise your total focus.
2. At ten, focus completely on the sound and action of your breathing.
3. At fifteen, draw your awareness even further in, focusing on the sound and feel of your heart as it pumps your blood.
4. At twenty, focus on your pulse and feel it move faintly throughout your entire body.
5. At twenty-five, feel a stillness and clarity arise from deep within. Open yourself to this and welcome it. Let is wash over you.
6. At thirty, allow this focus to deepen so that all of your senses are turned toward your private, inner world. You will not be distracted by outside concerns, nor will you be distracted by any stray thoughts.
From this point, you can choose to use the meditative state simply to regain your inner balance or use it as a jumping-off point for other, more profound metaphysical workings such as energy work, internal alchemy, or creative visualization.
Michelle Belanger
Exercises: Changing Energy, Changing the World
16:46 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 708
Exercises: Changing Energy, Changing the World
The following is an intensive program of meditation adn visualization that attempts to enact significant, positive change in the world around you. Building up over a period of seven weeks, the process takes your from learning to sense and respond to the energy around you to actually influencing that energy. It is not an exercise to be undertaken lightly, but if successful, it is something that can be infinitely rewarding.
Prerequisites: In order to perform the assignments described below, you need a good working knowledge of meditation. You don’t have to be a master Yogi, but you should be able to block out all the distractions of the world and to find a stillpoint within yourself. Experience with visualization will be helpful as well. The final thing you’ll need is enough faith and confidence in your own impressions that you will not second guess everything that you feel during the exercises. You can analyze things after the fact, but when you are doing the exercises, you have to trust that what you’re experiencing is real and has the potential to impact the world around you.
Week One:
Your relation to the world:
For this week, focus on how your special sensitivities make you react to the world around you. How do the energies of other places and other people affect you? You don’t have to do anything special in order to gain experiences that will give you insight into this. Go to work as you normally do, but instead of just putting your sensitivities into the background of your mind, bring them forward. Be very conscious of how you react to certain people and certain places. Does your work environment inspire an unusual reaction in you? Can you “feel” the emotions of your fellow workers? And when these emotions are negative, how does this affect your own work experience? Keep your spiritual eyes wide open all week long, and try to reflect each night on how seeing with these eyes makes your experience different from the norm.
Week Two:
Your affect on the world:
You have already spent a week paying close attention to how the world around you affects you. This week, focus on how you affect the world. Each of us move both in the physical and spiritual realities. How does this extra interaction affect the world around you? Do you subtly control the chaos of morning rush hour so that your car always has the most open path? Do you subtly affect your customers with your energy so they always go away in a better mood? For most of us, these abilities come so naturally that we barely pay any attention to them as we do them. But for this week, try to bring your activities into the conscious realm of your mind. Have you ever noticed that when you’re in a foul mood, it gets cloudy and rains? Or if you really want warm and balmy weather, the world complies? How much of this is coincidence and how much is the product of your subtle energy relationship with the world at large? Reflect on your common everyday experiences and see if you can’t see the extraordinary there, just beneath the surface.
Week Three:
Feeling the energy of the world:
This week, focus on your sense of the energy in the world around you. This is an awareness that is so natural it is easy to ignore in our daily lives. For this week, focus only on the impressions you get from inanimate objects. While going to work, what do you feel from your car? How does energy affect that machine and interact with it? Do inanimate objects have character – maybe even some kind of sentience? Can you feel this personality in the energy, maybe even communicate with it? What possibilities does this open for you? When you’re in the city, reach out and feel the buildings around you. How do the older ones feel compared to the younger ones? Can you feel the weight of a thousand remembered footsteps on the path beneath your feet? At night, go out and look to the sky. Can you reach out and feel the distant, cold energy of the stars? Do certain stars feel different? Reach out to the trees and see if you can’t connect with their energy, too. Open yourself to all the myriad of experiences around you. Reach your sensitivities out and touch everything. Savor it. Understand it. Then reflect on your experiences and try to record them as accurately as possible in your journal.
Week Four:
Getting in Touch with People:
Last week, you opened yourself up to the energies of the inanimate world, feeling buildings, trees, stars, and the earth beneath your feet. This week, reach out and experience your awareness of people. Whenever you interact with someone, try to feel their emotions. See if you can gain a sense of their health and their state of mind. Seek out an impression of their thoughts as well. When you close your eyes in a crowded room, can you feel each distinct person? Can you pick up on the dull roar of all their thoughts and feelings? Can you focus on just one person and pick them out from the crowd? When you touch someone, do the impressions get stronger? What about when you look them directly in the eye? Do you get stronger impressions from people that you know or from total strangers? If you can’t feel anything, explore inside of yourself and see if maybe you’ve constructed unconscious shields to protect you from the babble of all the minds around you. Don’t try to affect any of these people with your energy just yet: just try to feel them. Open yourself up and experience as deeply as possible. Reflect on your experiences each day and record your thoughts in your journal.
Week Five:
Expanding your limits:
You have spent a week feeling the people around you as they come into your personal space and interact with you. But how about feeling people you cannot directly see? If you live in an apartment or dormitory, lay back some place quiet and try to feel the other people in the building with you. See if you can’t gain an impression of what they’re doing in their own little homes. Taste their feelings, their ambient thoughts. If you live in a house, start by trying to feel the people in other rooms. If you know these people, and care to share your experiments with them, then you can talk with them later and compare your impressions with what was actually happening. Don’t be disappointed if your impressions weren’t one hundred percent accurate. The mind works through symbols, and maybe you can see how your impressions fit the situation but in a symbolic sense. Spend the whole week honing these long-distance impressions from the house or apartment around you. If people are sleeping when you reach out your awareness, see if you can’t sense their dreams.
Week Six:
A further step away:
When you have gained a pretty good feel for the house or apartment around you, try stretching your awareness even further. See if you can feel the other houses in your neighborhood. See if you can get a general feel for the people inside of them, and the emotions they’re going through. The further out you expand your senses, the less intense and specific they are going to be: think of it like the zoom lens on a camera. If you zoom out, you can get a larger piece of the picture, but the details will be smaller and harder to see. But you’ll still get a reasonably good rendition of the picture. So for this week, “zoom out” with your spiritual senses and try to feel your entire neighborhood. Focus on the houses in your immediate vicinity first, but then try to get a general feel of all the people in the area. If there is an emergency nearby, can you feel the emotions involved? If you hear sirens, can you locate where they are going and why? If you hear children laughing and playing in a backyard nearby, can you feel their innocence and their joy? After focusing on this exercise for a while, you’ll find that emotions and energies move throughout a neighborhood like the eddies and currents of the sea. If the people of one house are balanced and cheerful, those positive energies stretch out and affect people around them. When a crime occurs, with all the negative emotions associated with it, that stretches out as well, affecting everyone with negative feelings. See if you can get a feel for these currents of energy moving through your neighborhood. What is the overall “feel” you get from your neighborhood? Is it a good feel, or a bad feel? What, if anything, do you think could be done to change it?
Week Seven:
Touching the collective:
In the previous weeks, you have honed your senses for the world around you and the people in it. You have come to get a better understanding of how your energies are affected by the world around you and how your energies can affect the world at large. You have learned to sense the people near you, the people in the same building as you, and the people in your larger geographic area. You have learned that neighborhoods have energy patterns, and that these patterns are affected by the activities and emotions of everyone who lives in that area. Now you are going to reach out and sense things on the widest angle possible, and you are going to affect change.
Just as you did in last weeks’ exercises, lay back in a quiet place and start reaching out to the world around you. Let your perceptions extend beyond your body to the people in your house, then extend beyond that to everyone in your community. Feel the households around you and the interaction of all the people within them. Feel everyone’s emotions, both happy and sad. Stretch out your awareness until you feel like the whole of your neighborhood is held inside of you – like you are all through it, all around it, embracing everything. Now focus on the currents of emotion and energy that move through the neighborhood, affecting all of its people. Each person contributes to these currents with his or her own energy and emotions, and each person in turn in affected by them. Feel the currents, get a sense of what emotions and sensations predominate in them.
Now, try to change them for the better. If you live in an economically depressed neighborhood and there is a lot of frustration and despair, try to lighten that with hope and joy in simple things. Send these emotions out on the currents you can feel, and see your positive emotions touching and affecting every single person within the neighborhood. If your community is rich but lacks any kind of spiritual depth or tolerance of differences, fill yourself with the feeling of spiritual hunger and of the fulfillment that comes from spiritual pursuits. Fill yourself with love and respect for everyone, no matter their race, religion, or personal differences. Send these feelings out onto the currents around you and envision them touching everyone, filling them too, so that these emotions eclipse the smaller, petty feelings which previously predominated. Do this each night, reaching out to everything and sending out the emotions you think will achieve the most positive change. Watch your neighborhood carefully for the next several weeks. Try to identify changes in people and in attitudes that you can link back to what you’ve put out there. One person can change the world, and all it really takes is a simple, focused thought.
--Michelle Belanger
Seated Meditation16:44 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 709
Teachings: Seated Meditation
This technique is a good starting off point for a lot of other workings, but I find it very refreshing and energizing to just reach the point where it feels like the energy is moving all through me, stretching above and below, then return to the ordinary world. It's like hitting the re-set button during your daily routine. With a little practice you'll hit the intense state quickly enough that you can do this on your lunch break or during a few spare moments at work. Although this technique will leave you deeply relaxed, it should not make you sleepy. Generally, I experience greater clarity and intensity just after going through this meditation.
External Positioning: sit up, back straight, legs placed about a foot apart. Your feet should preferably be bear or just in socks, and they should be placed flat against the floor, toes pointing forward. Lay your hands palms-down on your thighs, shoulders loose and relaxed.
Internal Positioning: Press your tongue up against the roof of your mouth. The tip should be up against the backs of your front teeth and the mid-section should be against your hard palate. Lightly flex the Hu-Yin point at the center of the root chakra. This is a little tricky, as it's a muscle structure we are generally unaware of. In women, it corresponds to the Kegel muscle. In men, it will feel like you're trying not to go to the bathroom. What you are doing here is closing a circuit within your body. By pressing the tongue to the roof of your mouth and flexing the Hu-Yin point, you are forcing the energy to cycle within you as opposed to flowing out.
First Step: Close your eyes and relax. Try not to concentrate too much on the tongue or Hu-Yin point, but keep them in place all the same. Take slow, deep, measured breaths through your nose. Feel yourself breathing in vital energy and breathing out the stress and distractions of the day.
Second Step: Once you feel somewhat relaxed, tilt your head up a little and, with your eyes still closed, turn them as if you were looking at something in the middle of your forehead. This might feel a little strange at first, but basically, the idea is to turn your vision inward. Turn your hands over in your lap so they are cupped, palms-up, fingers slightly over-lapping. Continue to deep, measured breathing.
Third Step: By this point, you should feel a pleasant tingling in various portions of your body. Your hands should feel warm, and you should feel a kind of opening of expanding in the center of your head. Focus on the feelings. Turn all of your thoughts and perceptions inward, to your body. Feel the energy circulating through you, gathering in your hands, flowing from root to center to crown and back again. Feel your feet ground you to earth and feel the energy in your head carrying you upward, toward the universal flow.
Fourth Step: From this point, you can choose to either engage in some kind of visualization or internal energy work, or you can choose to relax out of the intense internal flow and end the meditation.
Michelle Belanger
Teachings: Discipline, Meditation, and Asceticism
16:43 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 710
Teachings: Discipline, Meditation, and Asceticism
When we speak of meditation, the image that arises immediately in most Westerners' minds is that of a monk, seated in the lotus position, looking for all the world as still as a statue. According to all of the Eastern techniques that we've imported into the West, the lotus position is the de facto position for meditation.
For those unfamiliar with it, the lotus position requires us to sit cross-legged with both feet tucked up on top of our bent knees. For any Westerner who's tried sitting in that position for any length of time, they will know first-hand that it is by no means a comfortable position, and any time spent in it invariably results in a loss of circulation to the lower limbs and the terrible pins-and-needles affect that this inspires.
I find this position uncomfortable to the point where it often detracts from the actual exercise. The Eastern view on this, of course, is that learning to overcome that uncomfortability is part of the discipline required for following a spiritual path. Long before any actual internal work is done, years worth of exercises are often devoted to simply getting the body accustomed to sitting in the lotus position for periods of four hours or more without any kind of fidgeting or other extraneous movement.
In my opinion, this is needlessly extreme. Aside from the fact that in today's world, it is utterly impractical to spend four hours at a time meditating in *any* position, I think the rigorous demands of asceticism can even detract from the real point of following a spiritual path. That kind of extreme denial of the body actually works against the spiritual principle of balance, and I think we are better off without it. Certainly, there is something to be said about achieving discipline and learning how to bend the demands of the body with the will of the soul and the mind, but every virtue, carried too far, becomes a vice.
That being said, let me conclude by asserting that styles of meditation, like everything else in one's spirituality, are a matter of personal preference, necessity, and choice. The ascetic approach works for some people, and for these it is the best approach. For others, sitting for hours in the lotus position will do nothing but give them aching joints and a sense of overwhelming frustration. The bottom line is we each must find what works best for us and stick with it, and if we have to explore ten or even ten hundred different systems in our search for our best approach, then we must do so, as long as we have the insight and sense to realize when we have hit upon the path we're meant to walk .
House of Kheperu
Teachings: Learning to Harness a Meditative State16:36 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 712
Teachings: Learning to Harness a Meditative State
Meditation allows you to intentionally enter an altered state of consciousness that is more focused and more profound than ordinary consciousness. While meditation is associated mainly with Eastern religions, it is important to understand that meditation is not necessarily a religious practice. Meditation is simply a tool that helps harness and balance spirit and mind.
The heightened and focused state of meditation gives you a greater awareness of your energy. It also helps you balance that energy and achieve a greater sense of clarity. Finally, meditation helps you achieve the kind of internal concentration that is necessary for advanced energy work and visualization.
Most people equate meditating with the techniques practiced by Hindu Yogis or Buddhist monks. This traditional style of meditation typically involves sitting rigidly in a fixed position and turning the mind inward. The meditator clears his or her mind, discarding distracting thoughts or input from the body until a heightened state is achieved. In traditional meditation, the main tools used to reach this heightened state involve breathing and a mastery of the body-mind duad. However, this style of meditation does not work for everyone. There are numerous other methods, almost as varied as the people who practice them, that can help you achieve a similar kind of internal focus. Almost all of these involve some repetitive action that helps the mind transcend the limits of the body, including drumming, dance, chanting, singing, and even driving.
While you are encouraged to experiment with other methods and find what works for you, for right now we are going to focus on the most familiar, and arguably the easiest, style of meditation.
Traditional Meditation
For this exercise, you will want to sit or lie down. If you sit, make certain that you maintain good posture, keeping your spine erect. You don’t have to cross your legs in the Lotus position in order to properly meditate. Find a position that is most comfortable for you. If you are lying down, hold your arms close to your sides or cross them on your chest, and cross your ankles as well. This helps close the circuit of your body, and it keeps your energy focused inside you.
One of the most basic aspects of traditional meditation is breathing. By focusing on your breathing, you heighten your awareness of the movement of both breath and energy. Once you are aware of the flow of breath and energy, you can easily achieve a heightened state where your consciousness is balanced between spirit and body.
When meditating, you typically take deep, regular breaths. This is not the kind of breath where you inhale sharply all at once and your entire upper chest expands. Instead, you must breathe with your diaphragm and imagine the breath being pulled down to the very bottom of your lungs. It is helpful to imagine that you are breathing through a very small straw. You need to exhale just as slowly as you inhaled, letting go of the breath in a controlled and steady stream. Some systems suggest that you breathe in through your nose and breathe out through your mouth, though this is not strictly necessary.
If your are breathing correctly, you will naturally begin to relax. If you are having trouble relaxing, you may want to try a simple but effective muscular exercise. As you breathe in, tense the muscles throughout your body and hold this tension for a few moments. When you exhale, release the tension and imagine all of the tension leaving you with the breath you exhale. Do this several times, and you should begin to tingle all over, feeling very light and relaxed.
Once you have gotten the breathing and relaxation, close your eyes and turn your attention inward. Focus your eyes as if you were looking into the middle of your own head. Now still your thoughts so all you can feel is the low hum of awareness that is you. If random thoughts and images flit through your mind, do not allow them to break your concentration. Instead, simply do not focus on them and allow them to pass away. Do this until nothing you do not want to focus on is entering your mind.
Once you have achieved this point, take a few moments to enjoy this stillness of mind. Your whole body should be thrumming. You will also have a heightened sense of focus and mental clarity. This in and of itself can be a very enlightening and empowering experience. However, meditation is best used as a stepping stone to other more complicated metaphysical work. Despite the common misconception, the goal of meditation is not to clear the mind so you can focus entirely on nothing, but to clear the mind so you can turn that one-pointed focus toward potent and transformational metaphysical techniques. One of these techniques is visualization, a skill which serves as the foundation for nearly all energy work.
Michelle Belanger
The Fundamentals of Meditation16:34 Mar 13 2007
Times Read: 713
Teachings: The Fundamentals of Meditation
For those who are following a spiritual or mystical path, meditation is one of the most fundamental skills to cultivate. Meditation allows the individual to intentionally enter an altered state of consciousness that is more focused and more profound than ordinary consciousness.
Although most people in the modern era tend to associate meditation with Hinduism or Buddhism, numerous religious and mystical traditions the world over make meditation an integral part of their practices. Additionally, it is important to understand that meditation, although most often utilized in a religious or spiritual context, is simply a tool of the mind to help balance and focus consciousness.
As such, meditation is a-religious, and can be practiced by individuals of any belief system or can be used outside of the context of spirituality simply to focus and elevate personal consciousness.
This presentation is intended to instruct you in the basics of meditation while also dispelling some common misconceptions about the practice.
The Benefits of Meditation:
Allows you to achieve clarity
Helps to manage stress
Strengthens concentration and focus
Improves your ability to visualize.
The Basics of Meditation:
For Your Body:
Breathing
Relaxation
For Your Mind:
Inward Focus
One-Pointed Concentration
Steps for Meditating:
Slow Your Breathing
Relax Your Body
Let Go of Stress and Negativity
Focus Inward
Still Your Mind
Find a Focus
Return to Ordinary Consciousness
Breathing:
One of the most basic aspects of meditation is breathing. Before you even try to enter a meditative state, you should regulate your breathing so you are taking very slow, very deep breaths in and letting them out just as carefully and slowly.
When someone says, “Take a deep breath” most people inhale sharply, filling the upper part of their lungs so their chests expand noticeably. This is not the kind of deep breath you want to take in meditation. Instead of inhaling sharply and all at once, you want to breathe in very slowly, as if you are taking air in through a straw. You must breathe with your diaphragm and imagine the breath being pulled down to the very bottom of your lungs.
When you exhale, it is not like letting all the air out of a balloon. You need to exhale just as slowly as you inhaled, letting go of the breath in a small but steady stream. In general, it is best to start off by breathing in through your nose and breathing out through your mouth. When you exhale, purse your lips together like you are going to blow into a bottle and let the breath out in a controlled and extended stream through the small aperture in your lips.
Ideally, you should breathe in for at least 8 counts, hold it for at least 2 counts, then breathe out for another 8 counts.
Relaxation:
If your are breathing correctly, to a certain extent you will naturally begin to relax. However, you really need to let go of all the stress and tension of your day before you enter into a proper meditative state. To achieve the proper relaxed state, I recommend the following exercise, to be used in conjunction with deep breathing, as described above:
Starting from your feet up, begin to tense the muscles in your feet and lower legs. Gradually increase that tension while you breathe inward for a count of 8. Hold the breath for a count of 2, then release the tension as you exhale, drawing out the exhalation for a count of 8.
Move up to your upper legs and hips. Tense the muscles while you breathe in, trying to feel all the different muscle groups being pulled taut. Hold the breath and the tension in your muscles for a count of two, then release the tension with your breath gradually over a count of 8.
Do the same thing with the muscles in your abdomen and lower back, then move on to your hands and forearms. From there go to your chest and upper back, then your upper arms and shoulders. Next, tense all the muscles in your face and neck, increasing the tension as you breathe in for 8, holding it for 2, then releasing it for 8. Finally, tense all the muscles in your entire body, increasing the tension while you breathe in for an 8 count, holding it for two, then releasing all of the tension from your entire body as you exhale for a final count of 8.
Clearing Your Mind:
It is a common misconception that the whole point of meditation is to empty or clear your mind. That’s a part of meditation, but it’s only a step toward the real purpose. Meditation, as mentioned previously, is a tool of consciousness that allows you to achieve a uniquely focused state of mind. This focused state is known as “One pointed-concentration” and it allows you to focus intently and without distraction upon just one thing. Clearing your mind is more about overcoming any uncontrolled or random thoughts that might distract you from this purpose than it is about trying to exorcise any kind of thoughts at all from your consciousness.
Once you have gotten the breathing and relaxation part down, close your eyes and turn your attention inward. Focus your eyes as if you were looking into the middle of your own head. Now try to still your thoughts so all you can feel is the low hum of awareness that is you.
If you are having difficulty with stray thoughts, try imagining that you have a remote control in your hand, and whenever a distraction presents itself, you can just press your thumb down on the “off” button to make it go away. Do this until nothing you do not want to focus on is entering your mind. Once you have achieved this point, take a few moments to enjoy this stillness of mind, then turn your focus to the specific task that you wanted to accomplish through meditating, whether it is a visualization, some kind of internal energy working, a prayer, a mantra, or the actualization of some goal in your life.
Body-Mind Union
Meditation is not just about the body, nor is it just about the mind. In order to get the full benefits of meditating, there must be total cooperation between the two. You can do breathing exercises and relax yourself from your toes to the top of your head, and this will relieve a lot of stress and make you feel great, but if you cannot still your mind, then you will not be able to properly meditate.
Stilling your mind, especially in today’s busy world, is the hardest and most challenging part of meditation. Our minds are used to processing tons of information all at once, all day long, and so a state of stillness and one-pointed concentration is very alien to us. But with practice, it can be done, and the results are impressive. In time, you will learn to be able to enter a focused and meditative state in just a few moments, at any point during your day. It will help you to tune out distractions, and simply turn your attention inward, to what you want to think about.
Michelle Belanger
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