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.