Meditation - A Peek into your Soul

Meditation has become a bit of cool trend these days. My meditation practice started back in October 2018 when someone I met at a business growth workshop recommended I start a meditation practice as a powerful way of getting clarity, connection to my purpose and inspiration for my life. She was using InsightTimer and so I downloaded it on my phone and haven't looked back since.

What is Meditation?

For some the ancient practice of meditation is a type of prayer or an avenue to grow in spirituality and to attain spiritual enlightenment or a super-consciousness that transcends earthly being.

And yet on a simple level, it may simply represent a method of detaching from the busyness of the external world, allowing the mind to find inner calm and peace, which is essentially what yogis do to the nth degree in order to detach from the physical and move into the spiritual realm.

More recently and more powerfully I've heard that it's a not necessarily a means of shutting out or shutting down your thoughts, but a way of observing your thoughts, being a witness to your thoughts. For when we become more self-aware, we can discover more about ourselves. We can consider whether the thoughts we habitually entertain are serving our best interests or not. We can also use the moments of meditation to reflect and contemplate events in one's life to make sense of our experiences.

For me it gives me focus, a sense of perspective, a connection to my body (tuning into what it needs) and to being fully present in the here and now. The here and now is where we can really make a difference: to be able to let go of the past, to release ourselves from anxiety about the future, and to being grateful for being alive in the present moment.

Why is it so popular?

Many personal development authors, including Tony Robbins, Mark Hanson and Jack Canfield endorse the power of meditation to bring more positivity and peace into our lives.

Over 1,500 separate studies since 1930 have shown that a meditation practice has major physiological and psychological benefits.

By inducing calm, the physical benefits are:

• A reduction in the production of the stress hormone cortisol and therefore greater resilience in stress situations.
• A lowering of blood pressure.
• A reduced risk and impact of heart disease and stroke and in some cases a reversal of coronary disease because meditation can actually reduce the thickness of artery walls.
• A lower chance of getting cancer – Louise Hay used meditation, alongside other techniques such as positive thinking, affirmations, yoga, breathing exercises, to actually cure herself of cancer.
• A reversal of autoimmune diseases through the rebalancing of the peptide flow.
• Prevention of insomnia (with 75% of insomniacs able to fall asleep within 20 minutes of going to bed after following a daily practice of meditation).
• Lowering of pain.
• Women with PMS showed symptom improvements after 5 months of steady daily rumination and reflection.
• You can live longer and look younger for longer.
• Shifting the mind from shoulda, coulda, woulda types of thinking promotes self-regulation and healing on all levels.

The psychological and spiritual effects of mediation are:

• An improvement in cognitive attention as we learn to focus and concentrate better with deliberate meditation.
• A greater capacity to love yourself and others unconditionally.
• A more peaceful and harmonious mental state which means we become less reactive to anger or stress. ?Also inner harmony can then lead to outer harmony.
• Less anxiety - 60% of anxiety prone people showed marked improvements in anxiety levels after 6-9 months.
• Greater confidence.
• Greater independence.
• Less nervousness.
• We are more at ease in our own skin, we start to feel more love for ourselves and we are also more likely to reach out to others in love.
• Feeling more positive – feelings are a barometer of your health.

Meditation in the Workplace

More and more businesses are turning to meditation, often in the modern form of mindfulness, to improve productivity and reduce absenteeism.?A Detroit-based chemical plant posted the following results three years after implementing meditation:

• Absenteeism fell by 85%
• Productivity rose 120%
• Injuries dropped 70%
• Profits increased 520%.

The NHS itself is using mediation or mindfulness to improve recovery rates after surgery, treatments and prevent further relapse.

Types of meditation

I've come across many different types and this list is by no means exhaustive:

• Guided meditations (where someone talks about a particular theme, sometimes accompanied by music)
• Metta (loving-kindness) meditations
• Body scan meditations
• Breathwork meditations
• Affirmation meditations
• Visualisation meditations
• Manifestation meditations
• Mantra meditations
• Mindfulness meditations
• Storytelling meditations
• Music meditations
• Nature sound meditations
• Soulful talk meditations or podcast meditations
• Meditations specifically for children
• Chakra meditations
• Angelic healing meditations.

How to start a meditation practice

The best way is to start with short periods of 2-5 mins and build it up gradually to 20-30 minutes.?The important thing is to be consistent and make it a daily habit, i.e. an early morning or evening ritual – the latter is good if you struggle to wind down and get to sleep.?If you own a Smartphone there are many free apps you can download both on Android and iOS (iPhone).?

My personal favourite at the moment (as you've gleaned from my intro) is InsightTimer. My particular favourite contributors on this app include Sarah Blondin (guided), Michelle Zarrin (guided), Carrie Grossman (singing/music), PAZ (mantra/music), Holly Honeychurch (music - harp), Pablo Arellano (music - varied), Weston Brown (music - piano), Peacebeam (guided + kids), davidji (soulful talks).

The preferred way to meditate is usually sitting down with your back straight and supported, your feet firmly planted (barefoot) on the ground and your eyes closed (or soft gaze at a distant object). Or you can sit cross-legged with a cushion helping you tilt your upper body forwards so that you can stay in this position comfortably for a long period of time without slouching.?

You can also meditate lying down or even whilst out walking (but not driving). There are so many different types of meditations as I've mentioned above: from podcast-type meditations to breathing meditations to music or nature sound meditations or a whole mix-up of one or the other. It all depends on where you are at and what your body and mind need the most.?If you choose to meditate with your eyes open, it’s best to focus on a lit candle or a distant, static object.?It is important that there are as little distractions and background noises as possible to get the maximum benefit.?If you are indoors, make sure that the room is not too hot or not too cold. When you relax through meditation your body temperature could drop, so it’s always good to have something warm – a jacket, cardigan, shawl, sweater or dressing gown to throw over you.

Be kind to yourself

There is no right or wrong to meditation, so be kind to yourself. In the beginning it’s very hard to stop the monkey mind from chattering. But if you consciously tell yourself to let them be and go on their way, you will find it easier to detach yourself from them.?The more you do this practice, the easier it gets. Never set yourself too high standards or expectations. Just go with the flow.

I've created a number of free meditations myself (I've yet to upload them to InsightTimer), but you can check these out on my website: www.energy-transformations.com/shop . A lot of the music pieces I've used in the background are from InsightTimer contributors.

In August 2020 I interviewed Michelle Clarke who is one of the founding members of Serenity Radio (they have an app you can download). It's a lovely relaxation music channel and may help your meditation practice. In conjunction with her many skills as an energy healer, she is also a meditation practitioner. She reveals how meditation has helped her overcome certain things in her life (saying "it literally saved her life") and why it's a cornerstone of her business today. She talks about her early challenges in starting a meditation practice and shares what helped her strengthen her meditation skills. For her, meditation is either about being more calm (less stressed) or gaining more insight (accessing your intuitive self).

I invite you to listen to the interview with Michelle Clarke here :

As for me, I've found personally that meditation really does help access your inner knowing, your inner wisdom or even foresight. Because in shutting out the outer clamour, you find a serenity that lends itself to an openness to receive intuitive downloads (things popping "out of blue" / the Universe into your consciousness), creative ideas, fresh inspiration. It's one of my key daily practices alongside the Energy Alignment Method to help me remove resistance (doubts, fears, worries) and to keep me in higher vibration energy and attuned to peace and love.

Please let me know what you thought of this article and if you haven't already started a meditation practice, I would wholly and thoroughly recommend it.