Meditation

As you then move into your day, do you get twenty quality minutes where the radio is not murmuring in the background or your kids or associates are not clamoring for your attention? Twenty minutes where your mind is not cluttered with life’s trials and tribulations? And mind you, when we say twenty minutes, a more perfect world would rather have you enjoy half an hour, even better a full hour.

But let’s get back to that twenty that allows you to stay in the real world of deadlines, telephones and the needs of all those around us.  Are you bold enough to regularly divorce yourself from all of this? Can you honestly say that you give yourself twenty minutes a day to let the world go on without you? One-third of an hour to engage in the purity of consciousness, and not to the explosion of thoughts that build themselves around what someone else said, what the radio said, that catchy jingle or the words from your favorite song?   

This may have happened to you when you were so consumed by an activity that you forget about people, time or place. It can happen when you ride a bike on a quiet mountain road. It can happen when you lose yourself in the redwoods while on a hike. You can catch glimpses of this state when you are doing housework. No matter how you got there, any time you suspended consciousness, you went to the very place where all miracles, great ideas, inventions, even heightened experiences of peace, calm and love came from. Congratulate yourself, for no matter how long, you have meditated!

You are probably wondering how you can get there on a regular basis. First of all, until you advance enough to where many of the events in your life have consciously become a meditation, you need somewhere to go, a physical location. Ideally, such a “power space” needs to be a place where you can feel safe and where you will not be interrupted. It needs to be a place that gives you power.

To make the space you have identified more powerful, here are some things you can do (you might be on the lookout for ways to do this for your entire home). Eliminate anything from your  power room that competes for your attention. Examples of this are books, pictures or art that do not inspire or uplift you.

Seek simplicity in everything that you surround yourself with in your special place. Put the knick knacks and the piles of anything that may have accumulated somewhere else. Keep your room neat, clean and uncomplicated. Be aware of everything that occupies your space with you, if it does not feel pure, if it, for example, conjures up unpleasant memories of the person or store you obtained it from, move it to somewhere else.

You will go to your  power room to recharge your batteries. You will need to be able to dim the lighting. You will need quiet. No telephones, obviously no TV or radio and no loud noises from people or machines or cars. You will find ear plugs invaluable in places where quiet has become an endangered commodity. It should be obvious that, with a few modifications, this place can just as readily be your own bedroom as it can be your front room or the separate structure that you may do your yoga in.

If you are married or live with your significant other, try to enroll them in the new direction your life will soon be taking. And if they are not interested, see that as also fine. It only means, that for you, your bedroom may not be a suitable location in the morning hours.

Once you know where you will be practicing and you have set your space up appropriately, you will need to know when you will go there. For this, you will need to pick out a block of however much time you can afford to spend. Almost any hour of the day will work. Note the word ‘almost’. You stand a far  greater risk of just falling asleep if you wait until the evening hours, after 7PM, for example, assuming you don’t work an evening or graveyard shift..

To make sure that you get there at the time you identified, make an appointment with yourself. Just like you make an appointment to get your hair cut, to go to the gym or to meet with an important client, you will need to make a slot for alone time on your daily calendar.

Don’t half-heartedly plan to see if such time does indeed become available, instead, build your day around it. Give it a high priority, because you are telling your very important other world that you have acknowledged how important it really is. And when you do, it readies itself for you. You will have affirmed on a daily basis that you are, as Wayne Dyer says in his  important book, “Real Magic”,  a spiritual being  having a human  experience.             

To make sure you are ready when your hour of power comes, it is best to establish a consistent time for this. Your body/mind likes predictability. It likes to know what is expected of it at what time.  Since most of you will find morning the most convenient time, you might want to get up half an hour earlier.

But, you must make sure that you do just that, get up — get out of bed. Make sure your body is awake before you take yourself up on the time you’ve promised for yourself. Take your morning shower, make the bed (if you’re the only one sleeping in it), feed your dog, prepare your lunch, eat some breakfast, do something  that will truly  awaken you.

When your time arrives and your power room awaits your energies,  what do you do next? Do you have to memorize some kind of chant, study the innermost point of a mandala, listen to meditation music, surround yourself with crystals or get the focus you need by fixing your gaze on the candle you may have bought for this occasion? Not necessarily. Such tools may be helpful or even fun from time to time, but they are not necessary for getting the quality alone time all of us so importantly need. All you will need is a lightweight blanket to cover yourself and a pillow for your head if that makes you comfortable.

After you shut the door and hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on it, if needed, find a place where you can lay in Shivasana. Shivasana is a Sanskrit word. It means to lie flat on your back with outstretched arms and legs.

In this position, your palms face the  ceiling and your legs are held slightly apart from one another as you adjust your body until it feel as comfortable as possible. For your  appointment with yourself, either a bed or the floor will work. If your floor is uncarpeted, you may want to lay on a padded exercise mat.

In order to make a habit out of getting the  kind of quality alone time we are discussing, try to make a ritual out of how you begin. Besides predictability, your body/mind also likes ritual. So when you are mindful of the way you kick off your shoes, loosen your belt, position your keys, dim the lights or close the shades, your  body/mind will know what you  expect of it the next time you begin this “ceremony”.

Find a comfortable place to sit for a few moments and give thanks for this time you have made for yourself. Now you are ready to go into the Shivasana described above. Cover yourself with whatever blanket is appropriate. Since you will not be moving, your body temperature will drop and, even in the summer, you will still need some kind of covering.

So then what do you do? How about RELAXING. But do you  know how to relax? Most of us here in the West do not. Our bodies may be stopped but our minds are still going a thousand miles an hour. As you close your eyes, acknowledge the quiet, the children playing, the sounds of the city, the birds singing or whatever else may be in your background of sounds. Release these and feel privileged to be a part of the life they represent (note: you do not want these sounds to be so loud that they feel invasive, if they do, you will  either have to find a more suitable location or use ear plugs).

Next pay attention to your chest as it rises and falls with each breath. And as you watch it pass through your nostrils, realize that you are taking  in the same breath as Buddha, the Christed One and all the wise men that have gone before us. Feel their knowingness, as each inhalation sparkles with golden sunlight, rejuvenating every cell in the body,  and activating every particle of your DNA. Quietly celebrate the miracle of just being a part of this melting pot of knowledge, this cosmic soup of bliss.

Move your awareness from your breath to that of your body. Start with your feet and bring relaxation to them, allow them to feel heavy as they sink into the earth below. Once you’ve achieved this sense for your feet, you can go on to your lower legs, your knees, your upper legs, your stomach, chest, shoulders, neck, jaw and face, deliberating for a few moments on each until every part of you body is completely calm.

If you are going to try to do anything now that you are fully relaxed, try just to BE. As you try to BE, release any need you may have to think, to have thoughts. Forget about the world, it will always be there when you come  back. Surrender to the perfection of the direction your mind wants to wander. Don’t try to control it. If, as you in a detached way, observe yourself deliberating about this, that or the other, or in other words, you catch yourself thinking thoughts, lovingly see your mind as a small child, forgive it and move back into the perfection of nothingness.

Often, with practice you will lapse into what feels like an  awakened sense of sleep. And if you don’t that’s fine too. If you just doze off, there is nothing wrong with that either. Your physical body just needed rest. What’s important is that you are making a statement to the very core of your being. You are telling yourself that you fully acknowledge the importance of your spiritual nature and by clearing out such a space in your life, you make it easier to receive higher level communication throughout your day.

The above is a sample meditation. There is no right or wrong way to do so. Don’t be confused by schools that, in their zeal for what they tap into, try to sell you their program as being the only way. Any teaching, formal or informal, even gurus, or customized mantras are not really necessary for establishing this union with God, or whatever you want to call it, that your soul so desperately cries out for.

Also do not be intimidated by what others claim to be their experience of this state. Perhaps they may talk about enchanted gardens where their higher self appears before them in robes or you may hear about those “more advanced practitioners” who fly across the room while in a seated lotus position. That’s just what happens to them. Don’t worry about what you see or what you don’t see. If you’re like me, you may not even know where you go, if you go at all, you just know it’s not the  same as sleep.

Everyone’s experience of meditation is different. The only consistent report you may hear is that people feel refreshed and more connected to everything around them after taking such time for themselves.

Project Solving

Another more active use for your appointment with yourself is for project solving (notice the word ‘problem’ was not used, you will see why later in this book). The more capable you are at handling any of that which life sends your way, the higher the value you will automatically place on yourself. As a result, less of your life will have its basis in fear. Being able to effectively move through any of life’s difficulties, will help you find it much easier to love yourself, those around you even “strangers”.

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By building confidence with something as simple as your own internal alarm clock, you will develop more and more  belief in yourself as a spiritual being. You will begin more and more to see that not only can you emerge from sleep or meditation at exactly the time you want to emerge, but that you can emerge with all the answers you will ever need to make this a true heaven here on earth.

When your alarm clock, internal or external, sounds, come  back into the room slowly and  gently. Don’t try to get up and explode back into the world. You may  want to spend a few moments giving thanks. You  may want to  record any thoughts that came  to you about that which you are working on in the inner realms. Stretch your body. Yawn.

Now that you’ve effectively recharged your batteries, and seen how by loving yourself you can become rich in many ways, we will move on to a  discussion of ways in which you  can consciously practice love of self.

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