Your Guide to Meditation and Conscious Wellbeing

Posted on by colinchenery

 

The Twelve Principles of Meditation

A peaceful and calm mind, along with a peaceful and calm heart brings a sense of wellbeing, relaxed focus, and increasingly produces a feeling of happiness. Brain wave patterns, happy hormone production accompany many benefits to mind and body. With practice, as the sense of thought and body dissolve into an open and spacious fullness and stillness, a spiritual benefit arises as we learn to achieve a state of presence that is found rather than manufactured, that is beyond thoughts, feelings and changing perception. This state of unified consciousness is the real essence and preparation of true yoga practice and meditation which go further with focus.

“The Self is not the individual body or mind, but rather that aspect

deep inside each person that knows the Truth.”

Swami Vishnu-devananda, renowned Hatha and Raja Yoga authority

and Founder of Interntaional Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres.

The state is best achieved by attaining steady observation of the mind in equanimity and calmness. With practice the benefits can be felt throughout the day and the meditation becomes the anchor point for continuous practice when in action. This is when we gain more freedom from reactivity, changing moods, stress responses, imbalance and disease. Meditation is showed to significantly reduce catabolic decline that accompanies ageing and assist in mental stability and wellbeing. In observing our inner life along with our outer life, we gain more choices in how to respond, so the doing and the being of living becomes a more conscious, progressive and enjoyable journey. We can feel more present and experience things more serenely and deeply.

The key to enjoying and developing this skill is to practice for the sake of practice. You just do it daily and let the results occur in their own time. Like sleep, meditation cannot be forced but allowed to happen. In the meantime it is a short time spent regularly for yourself that will eventually bare ‘flowers and fruits’ of immeasurable benefit.

It is not essential to still the mind completely as a beginner or even intermediate, so do not let ongoing thoughts discourage you. Sogyal Rinpoche, a renowned authority on Tibetan Buddhism, uses the analogy of letting your consciousness be like an old grandparent sitting calmly watching the children (your thoughts) at play. He also has used the analogy of sitting strong and stable, lower body a base and body still like a mountain, your mind the sky and thoughts clouds that come and go. Let them be and if they distract you, then when you realise it just let them be and come back to your practice.

Developing a calm mind is more likely with technique. Therefore a simple technique that provides a focus, synchronicity of breath focus and an inner object of concentration, is the best place to start.

There are many forms and styles of meditation, most of them eventuating in the same result. Swami Vishnu-devananda (pictured) formulated the following Twelve Principles which provide the key points in most meditation approaches and for beginners to achieve gradual results.

  1. Location – have a dedicated place where you practice regularly to build an atmosphere and place where you will quickly feel the right state with time.
  2. Time – choose a regular time once or twice a day, when you can switch off from daily concerns during your practice. Dawn and dusk are traditionally ideal times or early pre-dawn and last thing at night.
  3. Same time and location each day conditions the mind to slow down more quickly and deeply.
  4. Posture – spine straight and erect but comfortable. Use a meditation cushion for cross legged options can help align the hips and spine, or a firm chair where you can sit upright free of back or arm rests. Feet flat on the floor for chair sitting. Hands are best positioned in cupped the lap or palms up on the thighs where elbows are relaxed, and the shoulders a little back to open the chest slightly. The traditional meditation position is facing North, East or somewhere between.
  5. Instruct your mind to remain quiet for the duration of your practice. When thoughts do arise, observe them without attachment and maintaining focus as described in the following points.
  6. Regulate your breathing – start with three to five minutes of deep relaxed breathing, being mindful of each inhale and exhale without any forced holds, and then let it calm down into a natural rhythm. Build up to 30 minutes or more.
  7. Establish a comfortable contained pattern of gentle inhales and exhales of about three seconds each.
  8. Once you establish the breathing pattern, maintain this pattern consciously but also let the mind relax and wander a little as forced concentration will make the mind restless.
  9. Then choose a focal point either in the heart centre (anahata chakra) or between the eyebrows (ajna chakra). You may want to try a session on each until you decide which one is best for you then stick mostly to one location in your practice.
  10. Hold your attention in one of the above chakra (energy centre) points throughout the session while also moderating the breath as above.
  11. Allow meditation to come in glimpses and gradually more sustained periods. It will come when the mind is in a state of a clear non-verbal thought as you do your practice. Other sensations will occur which can be noticed and let go of like any random thought. You will still be aware of your practice without mental narrative or wandering.
  12. After long practice, duality of this from that, of the doer and doing, disappears and samadhi, the superconscious state is attained.

Some people who get agitated with a really active mind can include a mantra, like the sound of OM, to quietly repeat with each exhale and then, after a period of deep relaxed breathing, do silently within. This combined with the breath and point of focus at the anahata or ajna should help occupy the mind so it becomes more single pointedly focused and progressively relaxed. Otherwise the above points should be sufficient to build a good base with time and repeated sessions. There are various techniques to help calm the mind and focus that will be touched on in other articles. However, keep it simple at first and enjoy the journey the above approach will take you on.

Happy meditating!

Authentic Being, Love and Bliss is Closer than You Think!

Posted on by colinchenery

Much of spiritual experience seems to be about finding a place within ourselves that is less of our own conscious manufacture, and rather a place within ourselves that is there already when we let go. If there is truly a deeper more authentic inner presence and higher Self, then we all have an intrinsic capacity to not only recognise it, but to actually feel more at home there, as it is by definition who we really are.

It is here we must realise the bedrock of deep and abiding peace. This is opposed to fleeting glimpses of insight we may get when identifying with transient moods and mindsets that are geared around adjusting and surviving or thriving transient outer conditions. It is from this deeper sense of self we can discover our own love and a universal unconditional love as one and the same.

Personal spiritual experience at its beginnings, during its progress and maturing must include regular times of relaxing the mind and body completely. Our intent and personal insight are key, as are teachers or sources of inspiration, along with learning to put what is important to us into action. Yet the quiet private moments is where we can learn to rely on the full experience of what remains when everything to do with the body and thinking mind have fallen away.

This is getting beyond thinking and conditioned self identity to experience the substance of simply being, connecting with what many teachers and masters of all traditions refer to as the higher Self, spirit or changeless self which where our true sense of completeness and connection lies. It is so close, we can miss it, for it is within the consciousness with which we think and do. The trouble is we focus on our projections of consciousness and identify with them.

If we strip back the teachings of Jesus to the essentials and modern language, he taught the only way to spiritual consciousness and God-consciousness is to be in constant contact and identification with it through faith and authentic receptivity while living from good-will to all. Many teachings provide hints on developing this through prayer and meditation or communion, as well as applying this developing awareness to value-based thinking and living.

This approach is a universal approach, at the heart of all spiritual practices. It is independent of what we do in the world but not independent of how we do things. Naturally, the ideal of constant spiritual consciousness means doing all things, big and small, with a certain quality of mindfulness and soulfulness. It is a lofty ideal that is extremely difficult yet the practice yields great benefits. The path and destination then become one and the same. Love and goodwill in a mindset of service is harmonious to such a great desire, ideal and goal. It takes regular and committed practice while we attend to the tasks of living.

Our existential nature is an inseparable part of the universal source of life and consciousness. This ideal we can imagine and gradually understand more through experience. Personalising it as a cosmic parent, in whatever form we relate to, helps connect our personal human nature with this transcendent yet intimate state of consciousness. It helps open our mind beyond our separate and conditioned thinking to deeper and greater subtleties of love, joy and good-will to all life and creatures. It takes us not only beyond conditioned mind narratives, but beyond the intellect itself to a consciousness that includes intuition, creative and spontaneous realisation and gradually calm bliss and joy.

The Divine as ‘Father’ or ‘Mother’ invokes a personal love that is more than dissolving into a void or mindless mindfulness. This personal invocation encouraged by many masters and seers of all religions and persuasions harmonises our human nature with our cosmic nature which is of causeless pure love and pure consciousness. Aligning as a child to a parent creates humility, so we can drop our own narratives of the experience itself. This is necessary so we can be fully present and experience rather than intellectualise. With faith this approach helps us to step from searching to finding and being.

We can feel gratitude for life and awareness in any given moment, rather than the forgetful arrogance by the conditioned mind and manufactured ego that operates as separate self and self-made. The higher self is inseparable from the parent consciousness where child and parent, creator and created are one, just as in meditation the observer, observed and observing all become one.

Finally, the divine as parent connects us to our shared source and destiny as brothers and sisters. Humankind is aligned in spiritual unity which transcends differences of gender, race, culture, socio-economic status and even religious or idealogical affiliation.

Only through experience of our own true nature can we connect with the true nature in others and recognise our natures as one and the same. Nonetheless, integrity to basic morals and refined values are the foundation and framework in which we find fulfilment of quality and personal experience in this connection.

The realisation of being spiritual beings as brethren, not orphaned in a vast empty universe, but each a small yet integral part of a living and conscious evolving universe is at the core of true teachings beyond commentaries, rituals or institutions built around them.

Personal spiritual experience allows us to consciously commune and nourish ongoing personal experience and truth in life and with each other. Applying this in thoughts and actions, privately and with others, we can embody our own spirituality, yet be united at its depths -the spiritual ‘kingdom’.

Only spiritual realisation can truly transcend and harmonise the many persistent and inevitable divisions in the world. Personal spiritual practice is the means to harmonise and realise these ideals. Personal sovereignty lies in the true freedom this provides.