meditation

A long-term benefit of meditation is that you are able to be in line with yourself and the world around you. You are way more alert and in a more peaceful state of being. Not to mention that you will have lower blood pressure, reduced risk of cardiovascular disease by increasing circulation, reduced insulin resistance, reduced mortality rates, and reduced heart-rate variability. In some ways, it’s the perfect antidote to the amount of stress we have in our daily lives.

adapted from Natural Solutions Magazine, by Jill Englund, April 2011

Timers with chime, perfect for meditating day or night...

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Meditation

After meditating for a while, you start to respond instead of reacting to life. The term “react” is a monkey-mind or knee-jerk reaction. To “respond” is to actually think about acting consciously. Practicing meditation puts you in a position where you can take a breath, and actually respond to people and situations, especially those that are stressful or challenging.

adapted from Natural Solutions Magazine, by Jill Englund, April 2011

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meditation

One of the immediate benefits experienced through meditation is that you will be able to slow down and be conscious of your thoughts. Many times we assume the thoughts in our mind are real because we perceive and experience them. When we slow down our thoughts (especially those of stress and danger) and we look at our self-talk while we are flipping out, we are using that muscle in our mind we developed that allows us to be in the driver’s seat and examine our thoughts. Challenge them and ask yourself if those thoughts are helpful to you.

meditation timers

adapted from Natural Solutions Magazine, by Jill Englund, April 2011

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What benefits can I get from meditation?

Benefits may seem slow to come and are subtle at first, but are long lasting and very effective. Just like exercise, you’re not going to see the changes in your body right away, but if you keep with it, you know you will reap the benefits. It’s the same with meditation.
     There are many benefits to practicing meditation, many of which have been scientifically documented and studied.

Natural Solutions Magazine, by Jill Englund, April 2011

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meditation

Meditation is often something thought of as a practice reserved for monks or the spiritual elite. Happily, this is far from the truth. It’s been said that there are many paths up the mountain of meditation. We are living in a time where the mountain is closer and more accessible than it’s ever been. With the presence of the Internet and the ever-expanding global village, we have access to many paths that were far beyond reach only years ago. The seeker today has access to an unlimited wealth of information. With the click of the mouse you can access meditation techniques that are commonplace in remote parts of the world.
     A really cool thing about living in our time is science and spirituality finding common ground. Today we have the science to quantify the benefits of meditation that the practitioner previously had to take on faith alone. Western medicine has traditionally shied away from mediation as a “prescription,” but now that there is concrete, scientific evidence proving the benefits of meditation, we are seeing the mainstream medical community look to mediation as a viable treatment option for a number of conditions and illnesses.
     Let’s take a quick look at what science has shown us about our brainwaves: Every day, your brain is constantly operating on various wavelengths. While you are awake and interacting with others, you are in the Beta wavelength, at about 14 to 30 cycles per second (or hertz). When you get into the Alpha waves, you are still alert and paying attention, but get into a relaxed and calm state while your brain is at 9 to 13 hertz. When you get even more relaxed—and sometimes zoned out—you are in the Theta waves at about 4 to 8 hertz; we call this the meditative state. When you go further into a deep sleep, you are in the Delta waves at 1 to 3 hertz.
      When it comes to dealing with stress, in many ways our brain is operating on the same basic circuitry as our ancient ancestors the cavemen, with a primal “fight, flight, or freeze” reaction to stress/danger. Our caveman brain can be triggered by stress—even perceived stress that may or may not be real—with a primal: “Oh my God! I’m being chased by a saber-toothed tiger!” Cortisol and adrenaline are then pumped into our systems, we experience a rise in glucose levels, and we are able to flee or fight the danger. If we take flight or fight, our bodies break down those chemicals— this is the original design of the flight response. When we are stuck in this position, all of our rest, digest, repair, and reproductive systems take a back seat to the emergency.
     Unfortunately, the reality of our modern lifestyle is that most of us are sitting at a desk being chased by something like a deadline or the perceived danger of job loss (not by an actual saber-toothed tiger), but our brains react much the sameway and those chemicals in our bodies turn into figurative shards of glass when they’re not being burned off by exercise.
     So, how do we dissolve those shards and deal with the stress? There are many ways to do this, while exercise is one of the best ways to burn off the chemicals once they are unleashed, meditation is one of best preemptive methods for staying centered and being able to ask ourselves “Is this really a saber-tooth tiger chasing me?” We’ll talk later about slowing down our thoughts, but first, let’s look at how that meditative state in the Alpha/Theta brainwave pattern brings our bodies and some of those chemicals back into balance.
     When you meditate, you body releases DHEA (a chemical that promotes relaxation, memory, and reduces cardiovascular disease risk), serotonin levels rise and your blood pressure starts todrop. In meditation you are completely awake and alert, but at the same time still and quiet, coming into full consciousness of the present moment. Meditation brings us to a depth within ourselves where we can access our inner compass and our deep, inner calm: that place of peace and awareness we already have.
     Take this metaphor by David Fontana, PhD: The sky itself is our true nature and true self, but there are clouds in the sky obscuring our view. The clouds represent our “monkey mind” or our constant mental chatter. In our normal Beta state, the clouds of our thoughts, worries, hopes, and fears are continually obscuring our view, and it is all but impossible to see the sky for what it is. Meditation is our tool to clear away the clouds and experience the vastness of the sky, and the vastness of our true being.

adapted from Natural Solutions Magazine, by Jill Englund, April 2011

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meditation sunrise

How to Meditate
One of the first things you want to do is decide on a place, time, and position for meditation. Ask yourself: What’s the besttime of day for me? What is my commitment level? Can I make a commitment to do it at this time, every day? Will it be for 10 minutes, 20 minutes? How long will I commit to this? Will it be 10 days, 30 days, 60 days?
   

  Write down your answers and journal about it. Then mark your calendar and note how you felt on the days you meditated. Writing these things down will keep you more accountable and set you up for continued success.
    

Find the spot you’re going to meditate in, but make sure it’s not a spot that you watch television in, or do anything else. When you train your body to recognize that “this is where I meditate,” you are supporting your meditation with a physical habit that your body recognizes.
    

Also think of bells and smells. Find the things that make your space sacred, create an ambiance that signifies thatthis is your space for meditation. Ask yourself: Do I need sound? Do I need candles or incense? Start with what you’re attracted to and find those things that resonate with you.
    

Once you’ve found your place, be sure to sit with your head, neck, and spine in alignment. In this position, you minimize the stress level for your body because it doesn’t have to work as hard to maintain balance. This position also allows you to be open to relaxation and minimizes your chances of falling asleep.
    

 Now that you’ve found the place and time to meditate, let’s talk about the nature of your mind. It has never been trained to meditate and it’s natural that it will try to rebel. St. Teresa of Ávela said the mind before meditation is like a wild horse. When you decide to meditate, the mind attempts to buck you off and do everything it possibly can to keep you from “breaking” it. If you stay on it until you break it, that horse (your mind in meditation) will do you a great service.
    

I’ve found the major roadblocksfor people who are just beginning a meditation practice tend to fall into two categories: those that think they need to be perfect at meditation and give up because they miss a day or two, or feel they should have the mind of a monk with no distractions after just a few attempts. Or there are those on the opposite end of the spectrum who are sporadic about their practice and wonder why the benefits haven’t shown themselves. So when you begin meditation, expect that your mind is going to be like an untrained  horse.
  

I find it’s best to set yourself up for success by starting with a short, 10- minute meditation. Meditating can be overwhelming for those who start with 30-minute meditations (or more), because the wild, untrained horse of your mind can be bucking and challenging you the entire time. Ten minutesis enough for people to start training themselves for meditation and feeling a little bit of success—like it’s working.
    

Think of meditation like exercise: You wouldn’t expect yourself to go into a gym and lift 150 pounds on your first try. You have to start with 10 pounds first and train up to it. It’s the same with meditation, and the 10-minute mark seems to be a great starting point.

When you first start to meditate, your brain usually goes off in different directions: to your grocery list or reminding you that you need to stop at the gas station on the way home. It’s a typical reaction for the “critic” in you to say “Oh no, I’m not meditating! I knew I couldn’t do this.” Instead of giving up, bring  yourself back to center by focusing on your breath. At this point, you’re already in the driver’s seat of consciousness or you wouldn’t have noticed that you were distracted. Each time you catch yourself drifting off and bring yourself back to center, you are developing a muscle in your mind. Just like any other muscle, it needs to be trained, and this muscle will benefit you in countless ways.
    

Once you are able to reach this meditative state, you become the master of your mind (instead of a slave to it) and are able to push away the clouds of your monkey mind.

adapted from Natural Solutions Magazine, by Jill Englund,  April 2011

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Meditation

I recently stumbled across a powerful meditation technique that uses a three-dimensional mandala as the point of departure for an amazing visualization exercise. As you read it over, I invite you to guess the time and place this technique comes from:

• Imagine the entire universe. Hold it as clearly and distinctly in your mind as you possibly can. See the whole cosmos as if it’s inside an unimaginably vast transparent sphere.
• Visualize our sun and the stars in our sky. Then picture all the living beings on the earth or in the sea. Observe them calmly.
• Call to mind the limitlessly vast Supreme Intelligence who created this universe. Ask it to enter your awareness, bringing with it all the divine forces that exist inside it. Notice that the Supreme Being and all its divine energies and all the creatures and objects and worlds it has created exist together in seamless unity. Imagine the Supreme Being’s unlimited power and awareness extending to all infinity.
• Now bring this vision inside yourself, as if you are that all-pervading Supreme Intelligence. Hold the entire cosmos and all its powers and all its creatures inside your own all-pervading awareness.
• Then let go of the visual images you’ve been imagining. Simply let all the scenes you’ve been visualizing dissolve completely. Instead, focus only on the living reality of the all-pervading Cosmic Intelligence who is silently present.
• Don’t allow any sense of separateness to enter your awareness. Just immerse yourself totally in the divine presence.
• Surrender yourself completely to the Supreme Being who, at this very moment, is holding you in its perfect, unitary awareness. The Supreme Intelligence is totally present in this moment, and there is no distinction whatever between it and you.
• Mentally saluting the Supreme Being, shift your awareness back to your physical body in this physical room in this physical universe, and open your eyes.

This exercise carries your awareness from a concrete image into a higher state of consciousness that is beyond images altogether. It seeks to unite your individual awareness with the cosmic consciousness which holds the whole universe in its awareness the way you hold mental images in yours. Any guesses where it comes from?

Here’s the surprising answer: This meditation was practiced in the city of Rome in the 3rd century AD. It is almost certainly the technique taught to Caesar Gallienus, who ruled the Roman Empire from 253 to 268 AD, and his wife Cornelia. How do I know that? Because it comes from the Enneads, a book written by one of the most famous spiritual masters of the Roman world. His name was Plotinus, and he was the teacher of the emperor and empress as well as numerous prominent members of the Roman Senate. Plotinus concluded the exercise with this advice for the meditator: “If you imagine you’re different from the all-pervading Divine Being, you are not yet in the fully illumined state. When you and it are perfectly one, with no sense of even the possibility that you could be two, then you have attained real understanding and a true perception of your highest self, the true inner being which never departs from complete perfection.”

Did the ancient Greeks and Romans—the founders of Western civilization—practice yoga?

Did the ancient Greeks and Romans—the founders of Western civilization—practice yoga? The astonishing answer is that they certainly practiced something very like it. In southern Europe 2,000 years ago, the deepest state of meditation (samadhi in Sanskrit) was called henosis. Heno is the Greek word for “one”; henosis literally meant “one-pointed awareness” or “unitary consciousness.” There were many centers where you could go to learn how to stabilize your mind in henosis—in the Platonic Academy in Athens, for example, or at the great university in Alexandria, Egypt, or in the schools of extraordinary masters like Plotinus in Rome.

The Oracle at Delphi—the spiritual center of the ancient Greek world—is famous for its simple advice: “Know thyself.” Spiritual teachers like Plotinus took this suggestion to heart. He urged his disciples to “close your eyes and awaken to another way of seeing. This is a skill everyone possesses but few choose to use.” Plotinus died in the year 270. His final words were: “Try to unite the divinity in yourself with the divine in all things.”

Meditation goes back a long way in the Graeco-Roman world. Empedocles, one of the most popular of the Greek sages, was born in Sicily at the beginning of the 5th century BC, 700 years before Plotinus was born. Here’s what Empedocles had to say about the journey within:

You must plunge beneath your crowded thoughts and calmly contemplate the higher realities with pure, focused attention. If you do this, a state of inspired serenity will remain with you throughout your life, shaping your character and benefiting you in so many ways. But if you direct your attention instead to the trivial things most people obsess about, the silly nonsense that dulls their minds, you’ll just acquire more objects which you’ll only lose anyway.

Like many of the ancient Greek masters, Empedocles also spoke of reincarnation when he said, “The wise never imagine that man lives only for one lifetime, that before and afterwards he doesn’t exist at all. Souls, who through their own error fall under the power of fear and delusion, are forced by eternal law to wander for long cycles taking birth in mortal bodies, exchanging suffering in one type of body for suffering in another. I’m one of these exiles myself, wandering far from my heavenly source, having mistakenly put my faith in this violent, crazy world.”

Lasting happiness and peace come to those “who have gained the true wealth of divine understanding,” he went on to explain. They realize that the Divine “isn’t something you can see with your eyes or hold in your hands, it doesn’t have a face or feet or gender, but is pure consciousness which extends throughout the entire cosmos…. Divine Being is without beginning or end; it is nothing but consciousness in any direction, and eternally rejoices in the encircling silence.”

It is our task, according to Empedocles, to reclaim this divine awareness, lost when we forgot our undying inner self and identified completely with a body. The sages who have attained self-realization “have no more part in sorrow or weariness,” he said.

Today we think of the ancient Greeks as the men who invented science and democracy. We forget that in their own time many of them were recognized as spiritual adepts. Our modern history books, for example, record that Heraclitus (who lived at about the same time as Empedocles) taught that the universe was created from the element fire. This is a gross oversimplification of his ideas, but more importantly, it ignores the major emphasis he placed on inner life. While many of his contemporaries explored the secrets of the natural world, Heraclitus focused on a more central mystery. “I investigate myself,” he said, maintaining that hidden in the deepest recesses of spirit are the greatest truths, and that this inner quest is endless. “You’ll never find the limits of the soul, no matter how many roads you travel,” he continued, but went on to say that inquiring into the nature of our innermost self is exactly what we must do. “Self-knowledge is every person’s birthright,” he insisted.

Today we consider meditation, the concept of reincarnation, and the recognition of the essential unity of all things to be purely Eastern beliefs. We’ve forgotten that these teachings were once an integral part of our own Western spiritual heritage. While most of this inner lore was lost in the West, it has been lovingly preserved in India. And so, just as Columbus had to sail west to reach the East, today we have to travel east to rediscover the teachings and techniques at the root of Western history. Yoga is a truly universal tradition, an invaluable key to self-knowledge, a common thread of inner wisdom shared by all times and cultures.

adapted from Yoga International by Linda Johnsen, she is the author of Lost Masters: Sages of Ancient Greece.

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find a quiet place to meditate

You should find a simple, uncluttered, quiet place where you will not be disturbed. Sit on the floor with a cushion under you or in a firm chair, with your back straight and your eyes closed. Then bring your awareness slowly down through your body, allowing all of the muscles to relax except those that are supporting your head, neck, and back. Take your time and enjoy the process of letting go of the tension in your body. Meditation is the art and science of letting go, and this letting go begins with the body and then progresses to thoughts.

adapted from Yoga International by Swami Rama

meditation timers and clocks

Now & Zen

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(800) 779-6383