Imagine being able to put life into joyful perspective, so that you can take care of your daily duties, drudgeries, and delights with fuller, truer self-awareness. Imagine receiving clear inner guidance you can use for business decisions, artistic work, relationships, time and money management, and improving your physical health. This and much, much more is possible when you make Western-style meditation a part of your daily life.
Lectures, workshops, and group sessions abound, and many inspired and scholarly works have been written on the subject of meditation. The term "meditation" means different things to Hindus, Catholics, music composers, metaphysicians, and others, so let's define "meditation" and Western-style meditation and explain how to benefit from incorporating it into daily life.
For our purposes, meditation is a primarily receptive, altered state of consciousness during which the meditator is attuned to the Life-Source (Creator, God). Meditation is one of the many natural states of consciousness possible for human beings. It can happen regularly, with or without realizing what is happening or associating this subtle experience with the word "meditation." Used as a spiritual or health practice, meditation allows an altered state of consciousness to be deliberately invoked for specific purposes.
In a meditative state the ego, normally full of uncontrolled chatter and distractions, quiets down. These thoughts may not always disappear altogether, but cease to dominate. Instead, the balance of awareness shifts, allowing spiritual awareness to more fully fill the consciousness. Awareness shifts in increasing degrees, described as "waves" by meditators. Thoughts can be observed and allowed to float by without attachment, without identifying with the thoughts or investing them with emotion or meaning. Meditators report deepening levels of peace and alertness, two qualities which are paradoxically inseparable in the meditative state.
This alertness may manifest in many ways, such as enhanced inner or outer hearing, or sensations on the skin similar to the tingling of alcohol evaporation. Often there is a pervading sense that all is well, with no desire to return to "normal" consciousness at the ending time.Most of our popular knowledge of meditation comes from the infusion of eastern religions into American culture. The primary difference between the eastern and the western approach is that the western approach uses desire as a path to transformation rather than something to be removed or denied, so the ego is a conscious, valuable, focused participant, transformed by degrees at each session and contributing to spiritual transformation.
Western-style meditation is considered by many who have tried eastern and western methods to be the one more suited for individuals raised in contemporary western society.
Western-style meditation's goal is always self-transformation. It incorporates techniques for requesting guidance or understanding to achieve a goal, which could concern either an outer world or inner life situation. The meditator practices listening for that guidance, which may come through inner hearing, in the form of a vision or image, or as a feeling. Nothing may seem to happen during the session at all, but later a relevant and significant event occurs, either in the world of action or in one's inner perception. Because of the meditator's readiness to grow and change, eventually goals taken into meditation may fall away or be transformed.
The ability to hear, recognize, trust, and obey the inner senses is the most important tool of the meditator. It is important to learn to use discernment when receiving guidance in the meditative state by testing the "guidance" until true guidance can readily be differentiated from ego-voices or other pesky intrusions.
Western-style meditators witness rapid changes in awareness and in their lives, directly related to the goal-oriented meditative work they have completed. Often, results are experienced as miracles or as a multitude of synchronistic events. Positive change always emerges for the steady meditator. For those well-grounded in daily practice, crises can be dealt with more effectively and with less upset than before. The greatest value of this kind of meditation comes from frequent, regular practice while not in a state of crisis. Then, when a crisis arrives, it is just a matter of course to take the problem into meditation to find the best solution.
Since meditation conditions the ego to be increasingly receptive to, and cooperative with, Universal Intelligence, it increases what is often called "self-reliance" in life-planning and problem solving. It fosters a since being connected to others as well as greater courage, insight, mental clarity and emotional equilibrium. In this age of "how to" books and workshops, here is a practice which strengthens the individual's ability to tap into the Life-Source and Universal Intelligence so clearly and naturally that one need never wonder where to go for guidance or answers again.
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