Regular practice of Yoga meditation will most certainly result in a gradually widening awareness of both our inner and external lives. Meditation will effectively expand your personal aspirations, as well as helping you arrive at a clearer vision and understanding of the world around you. But most importantly, meditation provides the most appropriate environment for you to personally experience the reality of your soul and spiritual being. This help to satisfy the profound need of us all to feel secure in our place in the grand scheme of the Universe.
There are many approaches one can take to Meditation and this is only one of the many approaches used by students of Yoga.
Firstly some preparation is helpful:
The body is prepared by a period of gentle exercise and stretching together with appropriate breath control. This allows the mind and body muscles to come together, or to integrate prior to stretching the consciousness.
The body should be comfortable and seated upright either in one of the cross-legged positions or in the so-called (in Yoga) ‘Egyptian’ pose, where you are seated in a straight-backed dining type chair, with spine straight and erect and hands resting on thighs. It is preferable that the chair seat be of such a height that you thighs are parallel with the ground.
Eyes are closed from the commencement.
Easy rhythmic breathing relaxes the nervous system. To focus upon this for some minutes in itself is extremely helpful, employing the restless mind and tiring it, in preparation for mental relaxation. Rhythm breathing should be followed by a number of rounds of the Yogic pranayama exercise Nadis shodana or Alternating Breath.
Now focus upon one part of the body, such as the Ajna chakra (the point between the eyebrows), which helps to anchor the mind further. An alternative is to concentrate upon a part of the body, such as the hands, and to feel your energy radiate from them.
Proceed from concentration upon the body to focusing the mind upon a single thought that you select for your Yoga meditation. If you seek to feel peaceful, concentrate upon an appropriate image or word, or both, in order to encourage a state of calm. For example, visualizing a soft blue colour, or a tranquil lake and inwardly repeating the word ‘peace’ or ‘calm’ or ‘shanti’ in the language with which you feel most comfortable-this helps you to ‘tune in’ to the quality you seek.
After a few minutes, the mind usually tires of this.
Now is the time to relax and make no mental effort at all, but just to sit and wait for your full awareness to unfold. Perhaps you will feel inclined to continue the thought of the blue colour, or you will mentally continue silently repeating the word or mantra you have chosen but this diminishes as you enter the meditative state, which is purely receptive.
Meditation brings you the experience of peace for a period of time and a state of being which you tend to hope will last and last. This is the reward for your personal aspiration to alter and improve your state of consciousness. This is the experience of the meditative state in which you let go your conscious thinking, effort and struggles, to enjoy a time of pure being.
What each of us discovers in this sacred time of being is personal and unique to us and our particular relationship or feeling of connection to the Universe around us. However, we usually share many common stages along the way as we make progress in increasing our ability to surrender our attention and sense of the material world and to enter the spheres of deeper feeling where our own intuition guides us further.
Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Yoga [http://yoga-guideto.com/]
