by Manish Verma
These suggestions are intended for those at the beginning and intermediate level of experience who wish to have a sustainable and joyful meditation practice:
- Make it fun, enjoying meditation is so important because it supports your wanting to meditate more and denotes progress at certain stages. Making it a joyous experience is helped by being open to the incredible realizations and energies of grace, healing, bliss and the great realization.
- Make the time you meditate not as a “should time”, but as a joyful healing experience that you look forward to, scheduling is helpful if it is joyful. If you find yourself resisting your meditation check in with your subconscious which is almost always the source of avoidance. You might also try including your subconscious life so they too can share in the fun.
- Remember meditation is as much about refinement of consciousness as it is expansion of consciousness. Pay attention to your body and the subtle energies and experiences that you contact and enter into your vehicles and chakras as you meditate.
- Good times to meditate are early morning because there is much chi at that time; noon is good because it is the fullest outpouring of chi for the day. The wonderful thing about meditating in the morning is that it can calibrate our awareness to positive and beautiful states of consciousness which can be available throughout the day to support our creative expression. Sunset is good as it is a time of energetic calming and quieting. The truth is you can meditate any time of the day or night.
- Take advantage of the energies of the full moon, 3 days before and 3 days afterward. This is a time of great blessing for humanity and for those seeking to serve, consequently it is usually a time of increased ease and positive results in your meditation.
- Be aware of the benefits of your meditation at the end of the session, noticing how you feel, physically, mentally and emotionally. The more you make the connection between your meditation practice and the positive psychological results of greater clarity and calmness and physical results of more energy and more balanced life force, the more fun it becomes to practice meditation regularly each day.
- Learn to meditate while walking or hiking in nature. It is a good use of time and it creates a centering focus and concentration that is a unique form of meditation which supports connecting to the “light substance of nature”. It’s important to use common sense and avoiding certain trance states of consciousness when walking. There aren’t many resources on learning to do these types of meditation but they are quite doable. Walking Zen meditation has been around for centuries.
- Keep your meditation alive. Try different meditation processes and techniques from traditions which may be different than what you are used to. The Course in Miracles has a great suggestion: “forget everything you know and everything you think you know and just be with the presence of God”. Let your intuition guide your meditation… this is often the consciousness of your divine essence guiding you.
- Practice “Teflon” consciousness, observing consciousness, being the fair witness, awareness without an object, the neutral compassionate watcher of thoughts.
- Learn to be your own meditation guide. Practice leading yourself in a guided meditation. This helps focus the purpose of your meditation and invests you in its creation and fulfillment.
- Cultivate creating a loving space for yourself when you are feeling stressed and listen to others from a loving space when they are stressed. This makes it easier to enter this state when you actually meditate.
- Keep a journal or log or your meditation experiences. This will allow you to more fully register and ground in your consciousness the insights, realizations and experience of your meditation, inform you of your progress and prevent any “undoing” of the subconscious mind.
- If possible create a sacred place, even it is very small in your home which is used just for meditation. Make it beautiful, simple, burn incense, and it will naturally fill with chi and become your own meditation temple.
- A loving blessing of humanity at the end or your meditation is very helpful, even essential as it completes the “consciousness circuit” between you and the One Life and joins you more fully in that Being.
Copyright 2014 Jerry Rosser
Psychologyofjoy.com