YOGA PART 2 … MEDITATION
I was only going to get to this aspect of yoga practice later on in my writings on yoga, but I have been asked questions about it and thinking about it a lot, so decided to write about it now.
Meditation is probably the most fundamentally important thing for a human being to do, and probably also the most neglected. Just this simple fact explains a lot about human society, and the state of our individual selves.
When I am slack on the meditation front, and later resume the practice, I curse myself for having neglected such a crucial thing and done myself such a disservice.
The aim of meditation is simple – free yourself from the daily rubbish that floods your mind, and let conscious thought cease. You literally go into a different state of awareness, which has been proven scientifically by the changes in the brainwaves of practicing adepts. But the scientific angle is the least important.
What is important is the effect of it, where you drop the unconscious and subconscious minds and rise into the superconscious. Where you come into a direct mystical experience, as the divine and eternal part of you binds again with the force that created it, and of which it is a part. It sustains you as energy flows into you as you tune into it. Everytime you meditate, in those few minutes you evolve as a human being and advance spiritually.
The question I get asked the most often, and it is a natural question, is for guidelines on how to meditate. Here are a few simple techniques that you can apply:
Breath:
This is the most famous, and tried and trusted. Each school of philosophy includes it as a method. You focus on the breath, each breath in and each breath out. When the mind wanders, you simply stop that train of thought as soon as you realize that you are riding it, and focus on the breath.
Once you are able do to this, you can wrap your mind around a few things, such as who is breathing, and who is watching the breath? Which one is you?
Breathing exercises that focus on the chakras are also very powerful and wonderfully invigorating.
Visualisation:
While the aim of meditation is to “switch off” conscious thought, visualization exercises can also be very powerful. Some interesting ones are:
Imagine your mind as a closed lotus flower, and with each breath out you unfold a petal until you are gloriously open, turned to the sun. When you cease the session of meditation, your mind remains a tiny bit more open than the previous time.
See yourself in your room, in your position of meditation, with a circle of light around you. This circle is your love. Slowly draw back your angle of perception, and widen the circle of love, until it includes the room, then the building, then the city, the province, the country. See the planet spinning on its access, moving through the heavens, the solar system at the edge of the galaxy, the galaxy a speck in a huge universe. Feel your relation to, and love for, all of it.
The most important point, is to practice very regularly, until a meditative state enters your entire life. When you are distanced from the “realities” of life, you gain perspective and stop being so wrapped up in what is not really important or even very real.
Think of this. Imagine one intelligent being with thousands of eyes. If one of those eyes opens and looks at another eye on the same being, it is exactly identical to you looking into the face of another human being. And if that eye were to close and reflect on itself and the being it is a part of, then that is meditation.