Relaxation, awareness through meditation

Relaxation, awareness through meditation

JAKARTA (JP): Meditation is a time of relaxation. It is a time
when you rest, allowing your brain to enter a deeper state of
relaxation that is halfway between being awake and sleeping. As a
human being, you are energy in physical form.

When you meditate, your brain waves slow to a certain
frequency which is closer to the frequency of the etheric
(invisible) bodies around you. These etheric bodies "hold" the
vibrations of emotions and thoughts so, in meditation, you are
more able to access your subconscious and unconscious mind.

You are also able to use your familiar senses and other senses
which we are not normally attuned to, to receive and transmit.
Meditation can be a time to expand your senses.

The meditation period is a time to have fun, destress and to
feel safe. It is proven effective in improving health and
reducing the risk of disease of many types.

Because in meditation one is not concerned with the physical
form, this is a time when you can be in a state of heightened
awareness; it can be used to learn more about yourself, to "heal"
past experiences, to learn why you are the way you are, to get
answers to questions, to feel your energy levels healing your own
body and to experience different levels of existence to such a
degree that you know things you would not normally know!

Meditation is easy. It can be guided -- in which case a person
talks you through a meditation (usually for 1.5 hours) -- or can
be through listening to music or to the sounds around you.

Many women -- especially Western women, and especially when
you first start -- find it easier to follow a guided meditation
rather than a Buddhist-style time when you just sit quietly with
no sound.

It is also easier to meditate in a group: there is, quite
literally, more energy around. Meditation is best done regularly
at a particular time -- it is nice to start off with some sort of
ritual such as lighting a candle, burning incense or counting
back from five to one. The ritual is a signal to your body that
becomes recognized so that, every time you follow that ritual, it
becomes easier and easier to reach a state of altered brain
waves, of the deep relaxation that is meditation.

Meditation can be terrific to help you learn how to feels to
be. People are always talking about being, but it is a difficult
concept to grasp as we constantly push ourselves to "do". We feel
we should be doing things but there is a balance -- we also need
to be: to be relaxed, to be happy with who we are, to reflect and
to expand our awareness of different aspects of this planet we
live on.

Although this is only an example, occasionally it is really
fun to "pretend" to be a tree, to feel what it feels like to be a
tree. To imagine that your feet have roots into the earth and
that, through them, you draw up nutrients from the earth. You can
feel the pressure of the earth around your "roots".

As a "tree", you can feel the sensation of water-bearing
nutrients traveling up your "veins": you can feel how these
tubular veins are encased and protected by their own membranes
and the thicker membranes that form the bark of the tree. You can
sense the nutrients flowing up through the branches, to the twigs
and into the leaves where they can react with the chemicals of
the leaves to release different types of energy.

You can feel what it feels like to be a leaf on your tree. To
feel blown by the breeze. To feel warmed by the sun. To feel the
cool of the evening and the night. To feel the different energies
of the day and night. You can also feel what it feels like to be
a bud or a flower on that tree. Or a fruit (nobody can know you
are pretending to be a tree, for you will just look like you are
resting with your eyes closed).

You can enjoy the pretense, enjoy your powers of imagination
and you can feel safe to relish being a tree. You can think about
what a tree is, what it represents. You can feel good about being
a tree, you can appreciate the symbolic importance and actual
importance of trees. And feel gratitude. Perhaps you can also
feel the strength of the tree and its enthusiasm for life, its
self-acceptance. Feel these qualities within you. You can allow
all the awareness that has come to you from this short time of
relaxation to nourish you.

This is a mini-meditation which you might like to try, with or
without music. All meditations are different.

You can use the state of meditation to feel and experience
marvelous states of being: for example, states of magnificence,
of incredibly deep love, and of wisdom.

You can also use this state of being to change thought
patterns. Thought is energy. Energy is thought. If you want to
change your self in any way, or change the state of the world,
you can change it by believing in the power of your Self to do
so. Thought is far, far more powerful than most of us realize.

Believe that you can effect change to achieve positive
results. Any belief that you are not this powerful is invalid and
you may find it beneficial to release feelings of inadequacy
(self-awareness courses are useful here). Feeling intimacy, trust
and caring -- not just for yourself but for other people and all
other forms -- is another wonderful by-product of meditation.

Learning to accept and love your self is an inevitable aspect
of meditation as you are giving yourself time to nourish yourself
-- doing what you know is good for you.

Many people prefer to start meditation with movement of some
kind as this gets the molecules moving round the body and makes
people feel more alive.

Try meditation. If you need guidelines let it be known (in
thought or verbally) that you would like to know more. You would
be amazed at what will happen. You may find a book falls at your
feet, or a person tells you of some wonderful course, or you open
a book and a phrase leaps out at you that you just know is meant
for you.

Let your life become free -- free of stress, free of fear,
free to feel joy and free to happy.

The writer is a spiritual healer and counselor.