Meditation or Dhyan Yoga

Meditation is the practice of bringing your mind inward by focusing the attention on a single object in total concentration. Since it is the nature of the mind to continuously create thoughts and keep your attention jumping from one thing to the next, single-pointed concentration is essential for meditation to happen. However, over time, the effort and perseverance of daily meditation practice will pay off, as the thought waves will diminish and your mind will become calm and quiet.

Why Meditate?

Meditation creates an empty space within by quieting the mind. That space provides an uninterrupted flow of clarity and energy, because the usual preoccupations with the world completely disappear. That space allows you to tap into your true nature, and all ego-driven fears and emotions vanish. At the highest levels of meditation, duality also disappears and there is nothing but oneness with the Divine. This is called Samadhi. The permanent state of Samadhi is what we call Liberation or Self-realization, and it is the aim of all forms of yoga and all spiritual paths. Liberation is the ultimate aim of human life, and meditation is both the practice and the door to attaining it.

So the ultimate benefit of meditation is Self-realization, but a daily meditation practice will provide many other advantages, both on a physical and emotional levels, as well as in terms of spiritual development. Since it purifies the body in general, and the nervous system in particular, it can greatly enhance your overall health and prevent or improve any type of disease. Your energy levels and mental powers will increase as well; your creativity and intuition will be enhanced, and inner joy will becomes a regular experience. Meditation can highly reduce stress levels, and the medical community is starting to realize the value of the different practices yogis have been doing for thousands of years, particularly hatha yoga and meditation, and integrating them into the hospital environment.

If you are able to meditate at least for a half hour daily, you will become level headed and face life with peace and spiritual strength. Meditation is the most powerful mental and nerve tonic. Divine energy freely flows during meditation and exerts a benign influence on your mind, nervous system, and sense organs. It opens the door to intuitive knowledge and to other realms of reality. When your mind becomes calm and steady, inner peace becomes real and part of your experience.

With practice, duality disappears and Samadhi, or the superconscious state, is reached. Be patient and consistent, because reaching this state takes a long time, but what you acquire along the way, such as clarity and inner peace, are just as priceless.

Important Guidelines for Meditation

* As purity begins with the physical body, cleanse your body before meditation.

* The seat for meditation or asana should be made of wool on the bottom and cotton cloth on the top. Avoid sitting on the bare ground, since your energy may be drained off, and-most importantly-do not share your asana with anyone.

* Regularity of time, place, and practice are important, as they condition your mind to slow down, paving the path to deeper levels of meditation. Ten minutes every day is better than one hour every now and then.

* The best times to meditate are early dawn and dusk, when the atmosphere is quiet and charged with special spiritual energy. If it is not possible to sit for meditation at these times, choose a specific time and stick to it everyday.

* Try to have a separate room for meditation. As meditation is repeated, the energy will increase and the atmosphere will be filled with peace and purity.

* When sitting, face North or East in order to take advantage of favorable magnetic vibrations.

* Sit in a steady, comfortable, cross-legged position with the spine and neck straight but not tense.

* Keep your breathing rhythmic: inhale for three seconds and exhale for three seconds. The breath, the prana (vital force) and the mind are connected. Regulating and controlling one will regulate and control the other.

* Do not force your mind to be still, as this will just set in motion more thought waves. Allow it to wander without focusing or following any thought, by concentrating on a mantra (word of power) or specific technique. With practice, it will eventually become still.

* Select a focal point for your mind to rest. Most people choose the Ajna chakra (third eye), as it is close to the eyes and easy to focus on. Eventually, you may choose the Anahata (heart) chakra to go deeper.

* If you are not using a mantra, you can also focus on a neutral or uplifting object or image while concentrating on your breath as you inhale and exhale.

* Attempt to live a pure, pious, sattvic life. Treat your body as a temple. Strive to eat pure, nutritious food and avoid intoxicants. A vegetarian diet will certain decrease toxic energy and accelerate your spiritual development.

Yol Swan is an Intuitive Spiritual Counselor & Life Purpose Coach helping people understand who they are and what their purpose is, to heal emotionally and achieve their dreams. Her expertise of over 27 years includes: Intuitive Spiritual Counseling, Life Purpose Coaching, Distant Energy Healing, Numerology, Meditation, Emotional Freedom techniques, Vedic and Metaphysical Sciences, and Spiritual Tools for Self-Growth. She offers services in person and long distance, and is currently writing a self-help book to reach a broader audience. Book a service online now! Or visit Intuitive Spiritual Counseling for more information and resources.

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Meditation Tips - 4 Methods For Mantras

"The mantra becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God." -Mahatma Gandhi

Mantras are a powerful form of meditation practiced in many traditions. And just as Gandhi stated, they are a powerful way to help you through the challenges that arise in life.

At a simple level, a mantra can be a chant, a word, or a phrase repeated over and over again.

"Om" and "Om Mani Padme Hum" are two classic mantras from India.

When I teach people to play with mantra meditation, there are four levels of practice.

Listen to a recorded mantra: This one is pretty straightforward. If you don't have anything already, I suggest In The Om Zone 2.0 by Steven Halpern (which is available on Amazon.com). Sit, relax, and listen. You can start with 5 minutes and work up from there. Notice how you feel after listening.
Speak your own mantra out loud: Also pretty straightforward. This is where you begin chanting the mantra, yourself. Sit in a quiet place. Allow yourself to relax. Begin chanting your mantra. At first do your best to pour all your awareness and energy into chanting the mantra. Once you feel you are getting highly focused, and you can continue chanting without all your attention applied to it, you can experiment with non-judgmentally listening to the sound of your mantra as you chant it. Adjust your volume to your level of comfort. You may find you enjoy chanting your mantra louder or more quietly.
Speak your own mantra internally: This is where we make the mantra practice more subjective. Here, you do not chant your mantra out loud, you just chant it inside your mind. You prepare the same way you did for chanting out loud, and you can also play with the internal volume the same way you played with external volume, before. Playing with very quiet internal mantra can help prepare you for the next step. If you practice enough, you might find that your mantra continues internally even when you aren't focusing on it.
Listen for the internal mantra already being spoken: This one is a bit weird! Sometimes the last step will lead to this automatically. Start your practice the same way (quiet seated relaxation), turn your awareness inward, and listen for the same mantra being chanted inside your mind. Don't actively chant it, just listen for it. It may seem that the mantra is being chanted somewhere in the background of your mind, or it may seem that the mantra is the basic background sound of the universe. When you pass this level, it will become very easy to connect with a place of deep inner peace.

As you might guess, the more you practice these mantra meditation tips, the better you will get.

Play with at least one form of mantra practice for a few minutes everyday, and notice how your focus, relaxation, and overall happiness transforms as you get better and better!

Benjamin Langley has been studying meditation, self-hypnosis, energy work, and other healing methods for over 15 years. He has taken the time to study, practice, and integrate these methods, and he has written over 400 articles on these subjects, as well as numerous podcasts and videos that can be found on his site and others.

If you want to get a deeper understanding of meditation quickly, you can find the best free meditation tips and techniques on the web at http://PeacefulProsperity.com/Meditation-Techniques

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Mindfulness Meditation - How to Mine Your Past for Creative Gold

In our headlong rush to create a new, supposedly better reality for ourselves, there is a great danger of reinforcing a pervasive belief that what we have now isn't good enough. Such an attitude is counter-productive and a sure recipe for unhappiness. But this constant focus on the future also causes us to ignore a potential source of creative gold: memories of happy experiences from our past. And those memories should not be overlooked, for their vividness in our minds gives them an extra creative potential that wishful thoughts about an imaginary future often lack.

The Past is Not Dead, But it Could be Killing Your Future

Once we have accepted the unconventional proposition that we create our reality with our thoughts, then the six-million dollar question inevitably becomes, "What are we setting ourselves up for by thinking what we're thinking?" Through the cultivation of mindfulness, we must constantly observe our thoughts and emotions, and stand ready to police negativity that will cause problems if left unchecked.

What that mindfulness often reveals is that we spend a great deal of our time rehashing events from our past - usually bad ones. If just one little thing goes wrong with an otherwise decent day, you can bet your bottom dollar that you'll be dwelling on that isolated incident, blowing it up out of all proportion and granting it a significance it almost certainly doesn't deserve. Not only does this make you unhappy without good reason; it also sets in motion creative forces that will cause this poor quality of experience to expand. Think of it as a snowball effect or as a vicious circle, but you are going to get more of what you concentrate upon.

Sadly, we often end up using our creative power not to make the better future we want by concentrating on how things could be, but instead create a poorer future by focusing on the lousy things that have already been. This process is at work all the time, even for people who would laugh at the suggestion that their own thoughts and feelings affect their physical reality. Those of us who have made this breakthrough and perceived our own power ought to know better, but all too often fall into the same self-destructive traps as everyone else. It takes a tremendous degree of experienced mindfulness to learn this lesson.

Time to Turn the Tables

Most efforts to create better realities involve positive thoughts and images about a potential future. Those efforts are particularly difficult when we sabotage ourselves by allocating more time to complaints about the past and present. This tendency dooms many people to failure before they start, so it is no wonder that some say creative visualization doesn't do any good. In a generally dark mental environment, a few rays of sunshine amount to little more than damage limitation.

There are two things we can do to give our future a better chance at working out the way we want, and both involve our past. The first, following on from what we have just discussed, is to stop dwelling on all the bad things we habitually churn up from our past, whether that past occurred earlier today or twenty years ago. (Memories of ancient harms don't go away. In fact, the brain is hard-wired to hang on to them.)

The second thing we can do is to deliberately focus on all the good things that have happened in the past. And, no, it's not acceptable for you to say, "What good things?" Unless you've been a prisoner of war all your life, there will have been some good along the way. And even if your life has been unusually hard, we should not forget what Viktor Frankl told us in Man's Search for Meaning. The most resilient humans - those who survive against all odds - are somehow able to find something positive in the most hellish conditions imaginable.

Focusing on the best events from your past will encourage those better qualities of experience to reappear. No matter what else has happened since, or is happening right now, no one can ever take those memories away from you. They are always available to you, ready and willing to help you focus your attention and creative energy through a brighter prism, and to rekindle happier emotions.

Thus, instead of dredging up toxic mud from the murky depths of your past, only to dump it into the flow of your current consciousness, why not instead tap into your deep reserves of creative gold? The more you do this, the easier it will become. And if you persist long enough, you will start to detect those same happy qualities of experience occurring anew. The details will be different, but life will try to give you more of the same. Once again, the bottom line is this: What do you want more of - the worst things that have happened to you, or the best?

The uses and limits of mindfulness practices are discussed in greater detail in this thoughtful and unique meditation blog.

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