What is meditation?

Meditation has many forms. At its simplest level it 's a state of relaxation that allows your mind to slip into its strongest rhythm, the so-called alpha rhythm. In our active, day to day state of mind, we use beta brainwaves, and during sleep we're running on delta or theta waves. Alpha brainwaves are between these two and take the first letter of the alphabet because they're the strongest electrical signals we give off and were detected first by early recording equipment.

Daily practice.

Meditating each day gives you calm and deeper self-confidence.

EARTH HEALING MEDITATION  : A short meditation for dealing with pain and shock. 

DEVELOPING  A STRONG ROOT CHAKRA...

Do this simple meditation once and you will feel better. Spend 5 minutes every day doing it, and the powerful charge of your environment will become a force you recognise within you, like a steady tide ready to be summoned at will. Your strength and resilience in every situation will gradually increase.

It will help you to bear in mind that our parents give us life, but on a grander scale of things it is up to each individual to develop their own relationship with the universe during his or her lifetime. On this scale, the earth supplies all our needs as human beings. Everything that we have or use comes from the earth in the first place and goes back into the earth when we are finished. It is a continuous benevolent cycle in which we play our part by recognizing the bounty of the earth in the form of our lives, our food, our raw materials, and use our creativity and ingenuity to transform these things. When we have finished we give the waste back to the earth again, where it is again transformed to something usable. Everything we need depends on this benevolent cycle and when we are aware of how much it works in our favour we strengthen our relationship with our home, our job our shelter as we develop a trusting relationship with the earth to supply our needs.

This process also works with our feelings. They come from our experiences, lodge in our bodies, effecting changes and mutations, but they can also be consciously identified and given back to the earth in the way described below. Intense events or memories bring feelings with them like waves, that can threaten to drown us. When you first uncover a painful memory, the emotion it brings with it wells up inside as fresh as the day it occurred. But if we use these meditations and let the waves pass, giving each one back to the earth as it goes, we find ourselves releasing new energy and a fresh outlook, as well as the ability to deal differently with the people in the present who are still attached to those memories we have from the past.

This is what it means to feel 'rooted', not necessarily to stay in the same place, keep the same job or house, but to know that you carry the ability to get benefit from the earth as a human being and release negative energy to it instead of carrying it around with you, thereby enabling you to allow the maximum amount of earthly energy and support flow through you.

OUR MOTHER - THE EARTH 

Earth is the ideal mother. She is the Yin, the feminine principle, the creative, generative, the eternally receptive, the dark, and the yielding. This receptivity is the source of her immense strength. We can learn strength from her manner of yielding in the face of attack and consistently replacing the negative with positive.

Her strength arises from her harmonious relationship with the sky. The sun is the force that allows the earth to flourish. The sky and the planetary energies are the ideal father, the Yang, male principle, that brings knowledge, action, wisdom.

It is our harmonious relationship to BOTH OF THESE that gives us strength as human beings. The energies of both sky and earth meet in us, as in all living things, and through the power of consciousness that we uniquely have, we can transmit these energies for a creative purpose. With this energy we influence other living things, for good or evil. So dazzled are we by the knowledge in our conscious minds and our power to transmit it, that we tend to forget that our less glamorous parent, the earth, the mother of our bodies, is also an essential source of our strength. 

For us to feel the full flow of energy that is our entitlement, we need to be open to the force that comes from both earth and sky. Often our willingness to be open is damaged by painful experiences in childhood in relation to our actual mother and father. Unconsciously we close the door, unaware that we are also closing the door on our harmony with cosmic energy. Whatever your relationship with your mother or father, in this meditation you speak to the cosmic force that each parent of your being represents, and bypass your experience with your actual mother and father.

EXPERIENCING CHANGE

As you become stronger, you will recognise the great gift that your mother and father gave you. Whatever their faults and however they made you suffer, yours is the prize of life and it is yours to keep. Now is the time to enjoy it and choose what to do with it. 

You will be able to detect feelings like guilt, self-doubt or shame in your body and release them. These feelings have no use for you. If you have done wrong, by hurting another, then you must make amends in the way you would like to be treated yourself, but let go of your guilt. Accept your mistakes as useful lessons. You cannot learn without making mistakes.

This meditation allows you to release defensiveness, self-blame and pain that block the useful flow of energy in your body.

METHOD  

1.    Stand, in shoes or bare feet, in the open if possible. Your feet are facing forward, shoulder width apart, your knees slightly bent, and your arms relaxed by your sides. Breathe out for as long as you can through your nose, and then fill your lungs, feeling the base of your ribs widen as the breath fills you. Watch the tide of breath turn smoothly, like a wave running up the beach and flowing back again. Do this three times.

 2.    Feel the toes of your feet sink into the earth's skin, then the ball of the foot, then the heel of your foot, and the outer edge of the foot, which is the mirror image of your spine.

 3.    Consider the feeling that you wish to be free of. There is little difference between physical and emotional pain and as you think about your feeling you will be able to locate the part, or parts of the body where it is centred.

4.    Greet the earth under your feet. It's better if you speak aloud because the act of speaking engages your unconscious more fully and focuses your will. Say, for example

 5.    'I greet you earth mother and I ask you accept all the tension and pain in my body. I give you my fear (substitute anger, pain, impatience - whatever you feel is dominant), and I ask you to take it and destroy it.'

 6.    Imagine that you are rolling up the pain like a bundle of waste paper until it is a concentrated ball that you can roll down your body. With your eyes closed and concentrating on this imaginary bundle, push it down through your body and down your right leg ( left if you are left-handed). See this discharged bundle come out from the sole of your foot and into the earth. Watch it in your mind as it travels through the earth's skin, her rocky muscles, her dark caves and tunnels, her subterranean seas and into the white hot fire that is is the energy at her core. Watch the earth's fire destroy all the waste you have entrusted to her.

 7.    Then watch the white hot energy from the earth's core run up through the layers of fire, rock, water and earth beneath your feet and up into the sole of your left foot (right if you are left handed), through the bones and muscles of your calf and thigh, until it reaches the point at the very base of your trunk.

8.    See this bright ball of fire kindle at the base of your body into a red bowl of energy that surrounds it. This is the centre of your root chakra, now glowing and humming with energy. From this healthy chakra stems your sense of security, your trust in the world to meet your most basic needs for shelter and harmony with your environment. Allow this energy to rise through your body evenly and feel it fill you to the crown of your head. Imagine yourself putting down roots that run from this place down your legs and deep into the earth.

If you have felt poorly nurtured by your mother's love, you have now gone beyond her to a richer source. If you have been estranged from her, you have come home. If you have felt a lack of trust in her, you have overcome it. You have spoken directly to the earth and the earth has yielded you her power. You have welcomed the creative power of the earth's energy and it is now stronger within you.

Note any feelings or memories that occur to you as you do this and decide to think about them later. Check the source of the pain before the exercise and note how it has changed.

  

CHAKRA HEALING MEDITATION – HOW TO HEAL OLD WOUNDS 

There are many forms of meditation and each form has a different purpose. This meditation has the power to clear emotional memories that cause problems in our lives.This meditation is especially good to resolve turmoil in your relationships and tensions in your body. It is good preparation for making real progress in your quest for personal happiness, because it's like doing your dirty laundry. It sorts all the old stuff out and allows you to refresh it or chuck it out, and when you do this, you will experience miraculous transformations in your relationships with those close to you.  

 True healing takes place between feeling and thinking.

Your mind is in your body

We store our feelings in our bodies. When something hurts or frightens us as we grow, we retain the memory in muscle tissue or cells that correspond to the experience. Sometimes just touching a particular spot on our bodies will release a memory, but usually the feeling is buried deeper because we've told ourselves not to let it show. The instinct to get on with our lives and put pain behind us is healthy and powerful. But old feelings don't disappear if they're covered up. It's only when we make a conscious decision to let them go, that we can free ourselves from their power. That's why exploring and releasing the emotions behind old patterns of belief brings such extraordinary changes in your life.

Meditation accesses our subconscious, where our memories and consequent feelings are stored. This is the powerhouse that drives our actions and reactions and the condition of our bodies, and it materialises in our imagination.

When you meditate to solve a problem or to change some aspect of your life, you have to learn to trust your imagination.

Your imagination is your mind’s voice, and it is creative. Logic is your mind’s safety valve and it is restrictive. Both are essential parts of your mind’s power and you need to learn when to give rein to one and hold the other in check.

Memories are stored in our bodies: physically in our muscles and organs and energetically in the chakra zone that corresponds to our development at the time it occurred.

As we grow through childhood, we shape ourselves around emotional reactions, like a bean that grows around a pole. This affects how we see our current experiences.

When we go back to the remembered experience in our imagination we can iron out the kinks, release the emotion that we have carried around unconsciously for most of our lives, and make decisions in our current lives with clarity.

So make yourself a space and time to do this meditation. Return to each chakra as often as you need to – if this area of your life causes problems for you. Sometimes you can spend months working with the same chakra.

METHOD

1. Sit somewhere where you can be comfortable and undisturbed. Don’t lie down. You may fall asleep.
2. Relax your body. Take a deep breath and, as you breathe out, tell yourself to relax. Focus your attention on each part of your body in turn, starting with the fingers of your right hand and working up through the throat, left arm, neck, jaw. Eyes, forehead, then down through your lungs and other internal organs, to your legs and toes. Mentally command each part of your body to relax as your attention reaches it.
3. Now take your attention to the base of your body. This is the root chakra, whose colour is red. This develops from the time of conception to the age of 2 or 3.Its condition reflects your relationship with things to do with security: job; home; money and mother. Imagine you are entering a big red ball of energy, and bring to your mind any memories you have from those years. If you have none just imagine what it was like - how you related to your mother, how you saw your father in the home.. If there was tension or trouble, imagine that person in front of you now. Tell them how they made you feel. Ask them why they did what they did. Give them time to answer and give yourself time to listen to their answer. If you have more to say it now. Let yourself hear the answer. Go on until you feel there is nothing more to say.
4. Imagine this person as a ball of energy floating away from you. See them floating over the horizon like a balloon. Mentally take a pair of scissors and cut the string that binds the balloon to you. Let it float away.
5. As you become aware of your body again, consider how these feelings you remember or imagine may have shaped your approach to things that have to do with security now: your job, your home, money or your mother. If you made a different decision now about these things, would the effect be different? Is there something that would suit you better?

You can repeat this process with the other chakras in the body, which concern your development and related issues all the way up to the age of 21.

This is a really profound method of self-healing, and it has the effect of improving all your relationships in the present, as you recognize the part that you play in creating them as they are.

Anna uses this guided meditation in working with clients, which often allows you to go deeper than you thought possible, and discover connections that will free you from old ideas that are stopping you from getting wher you want to be. For more details of this effective and rapid form of help, click here.