Yogic Power

The entire universe is operating in a very organized manner. The energy that is operating the universe is the basic energy from which all types of energies are derived. That energy is called the Pranic energy. The Pranic energy is keeping the universe and all its animate and inanimate objects "alive". All organic and inorganic cycles are operating based on this subtle energy. All living things are also operating using this subtle energy.

The real secret of using this Pranic energy rests in the Master who is empowering you with this energy through the discipline of Yoga. The Master must have the power to give you the ability to hold Pranic energy over and above the normal level that is needed to sustain life. Only then, will a person be able to utilize this excess Pranic energy to perform miraculous psychic feats like healing and protecting oneself. This power works in everyone regardless of race, religion or nationality. 

Writing Acticle Source from Rajayoga Power Transcendental Meditation Centre

How do I know I'm meditating?

Phew!  This is a hard one.  Meditation means different things to different people.  To a religious person, meditation may mean contemplation of God, in prayer or study.  To a Zen practitioner, it is entering a space of "sacred emptiness".  To a Transcendental meditator, it could be the mental repetition of a sound to the exclusion of all else.  And that's just for starters.  There are infinite roads to that intangible state called meditation, yet there is a commonality running through all its forms.

What the yogis of old tell us about meditation is that, according to the Yoga sutras, meditation is the process of stilling the thought waves of the mind.  This is rather like a Catch-22 because you can't really try to stop your mind by force.  Like a needy child, it will make such a fuss.  The more you try to stop it, the more it clamours for your attention.

Yogic meditation is the disciplining of the mind until it becomes still.  Although it is not something you can learn to do in a day, the feeling of well-being and peace it creates is worth the time and commitment required.

The process of meditation isn't learned in a day, or even a year.  But if you put in a sincere effort every day, and increase the time you spend in meditation as you continue, you will find welcome changes in your mind and your life.


The Stages of Meditation

As you develop your practice of meditation, you will most likely find yourself moving through progressively deeper levels of stillness.

When you first meditate, you will get drawn into the mind's drama,  then you will realize you've been drawn in.  Little by little you begin to watch the mental activity.  As would a benevolent observer, you just watch the mind.  This is the process of the fifth of Patanjali's eight limbs, pratyahara, or inner focus.

With practice, your mind will eventually settle down and behave itself.  By aligning the breath and the inner focus, you experience one-pointed concentration.  You find that you are able to direct your mind with your will and imagination.  This is the realm of dharana.

The last of the eight limbs of yoga is samadhi, the master realm of total identification with the spirit.  You live as one who is grounded in what is often called higher awareness, or your higher nature.


Saying goodbye to good and bad

Assuming we all have a higher nature, whether we know it or not, anyone with a mind can become awakened to that higher nature.  In meditation, you develop a panoramic awareness of yourself, and everything you judge as good or bad about your life.  In fact, you may find that those things that you label as "bad" are the very motivation for you to meditate - and so they actually have done something very good for you.

Then you can gather up all these so-called negative parts, and instead of trying to throw them away, accept them as teachers.  Try to learn from these teachers.  They are your compost, the fertilizer for the new soil in which your higher nature can grow.

The most important thing to realize is that you are your higher nature.  It is not something unattainable, or outside of you.  Your higher nature is not some angelic being - you are your own angelic being!

Every time you act in kindness, shake yourself out of negative thoughts, do what you know is best for all involved - every time you forgive yourself and others, you are in your higher nature.

And what is wrong with judging yourself as good?  Well, nothing at all, if this analysis comes via neutral-minded self-assessment.  But often we pat ourselves on the back one minute, then pound our heads against the wall the next, because critiquing is based on relative circumstances.  Succinctly, if you puff yourself up, one day you're going to let yourself down.

Meditation goes past this seesaw of judgement, opening your mind into a panoramic mental viewpoint that allows you to remain steady through all of its fluctuations.



Source from K.I.S.S. Guide to Yoga by Shakta Kaur Khalsa

Why Meditate?

Meditation is a state of consciousness that can be understood only on a direct, intuitive level.  Ordinary experiences are limited by time, space, and the laws of causality, but the meditative state transcends all boundaries.  While you meditate, past and future cease to exist.  There is only the consciousness of I AM in the infinite, eternal, NOW.


What is Happiness?

Everyone wants to be happy; this is a universal fact.  Most people believe that some material object will bring this happiness - money, the perfect spouse, the dream job, a new car, a big house with swimming pool - but in truth the list of what would make you completely happy is never-ending.  Each "thing" will please only for a short time, until the novelty wears off.  As long as you think that happiness will come from something outside yourself, you will never be happy.  Happiness, the blissful state, comes from within your own self.  Anyone who believes otherwise is like a person wandering in th desert, constantly disappointed by mirages of water and shade.  Worldly happiness is equally elusive, always just beyond our grasp.  Two famous stories, told below, illustrate the reason why.


Searching for Sweetness

A man went to visit his guru, and when he arrived he found the teacher sitting in the yard in front of a massive pile of hot chilli peppers.  The teacher was eating the chillies, one by one.  Tears of pain were running down his face and he was sobbing "This is terrible", over and over.  When the man asked his guru why he was doing this, the teacher replied, "I am looking for the sweet one".  His actions exemplify the way in which most of us spend our lives.  We should know from past experience that "the sweet one" does not exist, but we continue to search for our happiness in external objects.  However, the sum total of all the pleasures of the physical world are nothing compared to the blissful state of meditation.


Looking in the Wrong Place

Once, an old woman dropped her needle.  A passer-by saw her searching in her garden and offered to help.  After looking for some time without success,  the kindly stranger asked the woman exactly where the needle had fallen.  He was amazed to learn that she had dropped it inside the house.  "Then why are you looking out here?" he asked.  "You will never find it."  She replied that her house was too dark, so she was looking outside, where there was more light.  Most of us are like that woman.  We are looking for our lost happiness where the bright lights are, but it isn't there to be found.


Physical  Benefits

Meditation provides a lasting spiritual rest, which must be experienced to be understood.  Once you can meditate, the time you normally devote to sleep can gradually be reduced to as little as three hours per night, and you will still feel more rested and peaceful than before.  By reducing heart rate and consumption of oxygen, meditation greatly reduces stress levels.  It seems that each part of the body, even down to the individual cells, is taught to relax and rejuvenate.  Meditation helps to prolong the body's period of growth and cell production, and reduces the decaying process.  After the age of 35, our brain cells die off at a rate of 100,000 per day, and they are not replaced, but meditation can reduce this decline, as it changes the vibratory make-up of both the body and the mind.  In this way, meditation can prevent or minimize senility.


Mental Benefits

We each possess vast inner resources of power and knowledge, much of it brought with us from past lives. In meditation, new patterns of thinking come to the surface and develop as we experience a new view of the universe, a vision of unity, happiness, harmony, and inner peace. Negative tendencies vanish, and the mind becomes steady.  Meditation brings freedom from fear of death, which is seen as a doorway to a new name and form.  People who meditate regularly tend to develop magnetic and dynamic personalities, cheerfulness, powerful speech, lustrous eyes, physical health, and boundless energy.  Others draw strength from such people and feel elevated in their presence.  Meditation is only possible when all mental modifications (thought waves) have been stilled, and with this comes mental peace.


States of Consciousness

Waking State

This is the normal everyday state of awareness.  The conscious mind is functioning.  You know that you are awake.  The intellect is working.  You are thinking and reasoning, and you are aware of your physical environment.  Time, space, and causality are in full control in the waking state.


Dream State

Contrary to popular belief, this intermediate state between waking and deep sleep is not a restful state, as mental energy is being expended.  The intellect is not functioning, but there remains some awareness of the physical world.  Regular asana practice will help you to relax at night and enter deep sleep.


Deep Sleep

When the mind is relaxed it will go into the state known as deep sleep.  The mind is blank; there is no awareness of yourself as a separate entity.  The ego identity does not exist.  There is no awareness of "I am doing..." nor of your physical environment, nor even an awareness of your own being.


Meditation

As in deep sleep, neither body consciousness nor awareness of an external physical reality exists.  Nor do time, space, or causality, but in meditation the awareness is transcendental.  It is the continuous flow of one thought of the Supreme, as identification of the individual with the divine.


Source from Yoga Mind & Body by Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre

A Path Without End

When beginning meditation, one common mistake is to have a definite goal in mind, and to pursue it doggedly.  We might decide to meditate to combat stress, to experience blissful states, or even to become enlightened, but these aims only set up "gateless gates" that impede progress.  By suggesting that we know where meditation will lead, we create fixed concepts about it, which obscure the actual experience.  The best approach is one of a relaxed "not knowing" and total open-mindedness.  So we can believe in the benefits of meditation, but should avoid having fixed ideas about how these will arise and what they will feel like.  In this sense, meditation is a path without end.  We have expectations that attract us to it in the first place, but once practice begins these must be put aside, and meditation entered into as an experience complete in itself.

Commentators have sometimes referred to meditation as a journey into vastness, or, as Zen Master Dogen described it, "just sitting".  This means a total absorption in the practice of meditation itself, without intention or expectation, and without impatience or disappointment.


Source from Learn to Meditate by David Fontana

Prana, Chi and Life Energy

In both Eastern and Western traditions, the breath is associated not only with life itself, but also with the spiritual world and the indwelling spirit in man.  The word inspire is a good illustration of this: it means both the "in-breath" and an "influx of spiritual or divine influence".  (The words suspire, respire and expire all come from the same root, and relate to giving up the breath or spirit.)  In the East, the breath has also been linked to prana, the Sanskrit word for the non-material life force or energy that is said to be drawn in with the breath.  In China this is known as chi or qi; and in Japan as ki.

Chi  (which is pronounced "chee") is thought to pass through twelve main channels or meridians in the body.  Each channel is associated with a different organ, and along each are points that may be accessed or stimulated to treat physical and mental disorders caused by blockages to chi.  When chi flows easily through our bodies, we feel relaxed.  But when chi becomes blocked by negative thoughts, its flow is hampered, and this may cause stress and ill-health.  Current research on the medical efficacy of acupuncture, which uses these channels, tends to support this idea.  It is also thought that through the mind power and awareness of the breath developed by the practice of meditation, this life energy can be brought under conscious control, to the benefit both of spiritual development and of physical health.

An important first step along the path of meditation is to use the awareness of your breathing to gain insight into the quality of the breaths themselves.  The Buddha was very specific about this.  In the Anapana-sati Sutra (Mindfulness of Breathing) he teaches that:"When breathing in a long breath [the meditator] knows that he breathes in a long breath, when breathing in a short breath he knows that he breathes in a short breath."  The meditator thus comes to know whether the breathing is long or shallow; whether it is from  the upper chest or from the diaphragm; whether it flows evenly or is jerky; whether it is fast or slow; whether it is noisy or quiet.  The breath reveals a great deal about the meditator's state of mind and his or her state of physical relaxation.

An ancient yoga teaching holds that each person's life span is represented by the number of breaths allocated to them before birth.  Quick, shallow breathing uses up the allocation faster than slow, deep breathing, thus shortening life.  Like many such teachings, there is an underlying truth to this in that slow, deep breathing is associated with the relaxation of body and mind, which is clearly beneficial both to meditation and to health.

It is important to remember that deep breathing refers not to the length of the breath, but to the fact that breathing takes place from the diaphragm, as low down as possible, rather than from the restricted area of the upper chest.  Upper chest breathing is useful after exercise, when the body has an urgent need for oxygen, but during sedentary periods requires unneccessary effort.

The complete breath, which some texts advise you to employ two or three times at the start of meditation as an aid to relaxation and concentration, refers to a slow measured breath that commences at the diaphragm, then fills the middle and finally the upper chest until the whole of the lung area is fully expanded.  But take care not to hyperventilate (take in too many complete breaths in quick succession), as this can lead to dizziness and even fainting.

The breath can also be used in connection with the power of visualization.  One simple practice is to imagine the breath flowing into your body in the form of white light and exiting in the form of grey or black smoke that contains all your tensions and tiredness.  To do this, allow your awareness to move from its usual place at the base of the nostrils and to extend from the nose down to the abdomen.  On the in-breath, the white light is seen as flooding this whole area, absorbing impurities, and then the smoke flows out leaving the body purified.  This practice can be combined with The Alternate Nostril Breathing, and used at the start of each meditation.


Source from Learn to Meditate by David Fontana

Focusing the Wayward Mind

Meditation is intended to help us order the confusion of the mind, not to stop us thinking altogether.  Most of us discover that the mind seems to be largely beyond our control.  It has never been trained to know what is expected of it; our education is largely devoted to teaching us facts, and has nothing to do with the mind itself and the potential that lies deep inside it.  The gradual training of the mind that occurs with regular meditation enables us to keep focused upon constructive thoughts, to abolish distractions and to progress on our meditative journey.

The mind has many ways of distracting our concentration.  It may begin with trivia, but when we refuse to let our mind wander it will go on to more preoccupying matters.  It will bring up happy or unpleasant memories, or remind us of pressing things we have to do.  Whatever the distraction, just let it go.


Source from Learn to Meditate by David Fontana

The Meditative Custom

Christianity,  Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Shinto, Jainism and the shamanistic and pagan traditions have all taught adherents how to turn their minds inward in order to plumb its mysteries and develop a relationship with the source from which our thoughts arise.  The practice of meditation - and of contemplation and prayer - lies at the heart of the great spiritual traditions.

Although we may refer to these traditions as spiritual, they are also practical psychologies for exploring and training the mind, and in many cases they are systems of philosophy and of physical culture as well.  Only in recent Western history have these various categories become separated from each other, to the detriment of each of them.  And only in recent Western history has the importance of meditation been virtually ignored, requiring us to turn eastward to rediscover those techniques that were once as familiar in the West as they have always been in the East.  Such a need to turn eastward means that particular reference is made to Hindu and Buddhist meditative practices.  But this does not imply a doctrinal approach, as meditation is for those who follow all traditions - or those who follow no tradition at all (it does not require allegiance to any particular faith or creed).

In fact, the more we study the great traditions, the more we recognise that there are many underlying similarities.  It is a strange quirk of human nature that people look for differences and divisions between things (which leads to conflict) rather than for similarities and agreements (which leads to balance and harmony).  Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of ideas and beliefs and of psychological and spiritual practices.  In meditation, all of the great traditions teach the same fundamental steps.  The details may vary, but the bedrock is the same.

The very antiquity and durability of the great traditions provides testament to their efficacy in helping people to live successful lives.  The founders of two of these traditions, Christ and the Buddha, lived respectively 2,000 and 2,500 years ago.  The Hindu rishis, responsible for the Vedas (some of the oldest books in the world), lived in India around 4,000 years ago.  Around the same time, the ancient Egyptians depicted people sitting in what appear to be straight-backed meditative poses.

The first book of the Hebrew Bible was probably written in the 5th century BCE, but dates back to a much earlier oral tradition; the Koran was written down in the 7th century CE; and the Tao Te Ching probably dates from the 4th century BCE.


Source from Learn To Meditate by David Fontana

What is Meditation?

Put simply, meditation is the experience of the limitless nature of the mind when it ceases to be dominated by its usual mental chatter.  Think for a moment of the sky.  If the sky is continually covered by clouds, we are never able to see its true nature.  Roll the clouds away, and magically we experience the blue vastness of the sky in all its beauty.  If the mind is continually clouded by thoughts, we are never able to experience it in and of itself.  All that we experience is the cloud-cover of its contents. 

Why should we want to experience the mind in and of itself?  The answer is that it represents our true nature, a nature that is naturally calm and serene, unclouded by the various anxieties and wishes, hopes and fears that usually occupy our attention.  To experience the mind in this unclouded way is to experience the sense of being fully and vitally alive, yet at the same time deeply at peace within ourselves.

Meditation brings with it many other benefits for body and mind, but all of these depend upon the ability to experience this central state of alert yet peaceful being. 

A way of understanding this is to imagine the mind as a pool of water that for years we have been busily churning into mud with our mental chatter.  Once the churning stops, the mud settles to the bottom, and the pool becomes clear.  Not only can we now see the limpid, pure water itself, but also we can enjoy other pleasures, such as quenching our thirst, and bathing.  Its clarity and cleanliness allow us to see through to the bottom of the pool, and discover there a new world of interest and wonder.  When the mind becomes calm and still in meditation, we come to a much deeper understanding of ourselves and of our own true nature.

By stilling and calming the thoughts, meditation also stills and calms the emotions.  Thought and emotion are inextricably linked in our everyday lives.  The mind goes over painful memories, current worries and concerns for the future, and as it does so it sparks off emotions such as regret, anger and fear.  When the mind enters into meditation, the emotions experience a new sense of peace.  Even if troubling thoughts arise, much of their usual power is lacking.  The meditator is able to observe them objectively, without becoming lost in them and identifying with them.  As a result, his or her ability to rouse unwelocme emotions decreases.  At the centre of everything, the tranquillity of mind and feeling remains.  Potentially disturbing thoughts pass through the mind like clouds across the face of the sun, and are replaced by an equanimity only possible when one is at peace with oneself.

Meditation should never be thought of as an external technique that we impose upon ourselves, much as we might learn a foreign language or master a computer.  It is in essence a re-discovery of something that has always been within us, an opening of half-familiar pages in a book that we once loved but have put aside.  This does not mean that in meditation we return to the mind of a child.  Meditation does not ask us to relinquish our life experiences nor to distrust the power of thought.  It also does not ask us to become different or less interesting people than we are now.  Once the meditation session is over, the mind returns to the plans and concerns that are its usual way of being - but now with an added clarity and power in its thinking, and a greater ability to meet both the challenges and the frustrations with which life continually confronts us.

Meditation does not take us away from the world, but helps us to become more clear-sighted and effective people within it.  It also enables us to become more sensitive and compassionate toward other people and toward the natural world, because it develops within us a sense of the unity and inter-dependence of all things, and an awareness of what it means to be human.  With this greater sensitivity and awareness comes an enhanced feeling of self-awareness and self-acceptance.  For the first time, we really sense the deep mystery and the precious nature of life.


Source from Learn To Meditate by David Fontana