"Golden the age when men will do, rather than say their prayers."
~ James Martin Peebles, (1822-1922)
Prayer and meditation are important because they not only put you in touch with the Divine but with yourself. It becomes a beautiful opportunity for spiritual enrichment. When you receive guidance during prayer or meditation, it comes to your uncluttered and still mind with clearness.
Within your quiet and peaceful moments you open your connection with the world of spirit, allowing you to receive messages of love and divine inspiration, in addition to conversing with God or the Divine Source, your angels, spirit guides, and loved ones.
Meditation relieves stress, and puts you in touch with your higher self. It also allows for intellectual communication at a cellular level. Within the slightly altered state, much like the daydream state, the life force energy flows much freer throughout the body, and with the free energy flow, the chakras come into balance, into alignment. It is a time of cleansing and healing of the body, mind, and soul.
A meditation is a disciplined focus which encourages the mind to travel a specific path of thought toward a desired result. One may wish to meditate upon the nature of the divine and one's own relationship to it, or may wish to merely create a state of total relaxation which would be conducive to some desired physical or mental result.
Transcendental Meditation, a discipline for heightened awareness, which originated more than five thousand years ago with the ancient Vedas of India, has been practiced in Western society since its introduction to the United States by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1959. It is widely accepted by Western cultures today for its ability to reduce stress and promote physical and mental health. During its heyday, many U.S. corporate managers promoted the program among their executives and employees as a way to reducing stress and increasing productivity and creativity in the workplace. Although the more stylized approach of Transcendental Meditation has been left behind by many, meditation has found a place in the awareness of millions of Westerners who seek primarily to have an occasional "refresher" from the stress of everyday life and some sense of connection with the infinite.
As it is most commonly practiced today, meditation is usually associated with the processes of visualization and/or a tranquil dialogue with the body wisdom. Rather than chanting of mantra's, one may prefer to visualize a tranquil setting and a "journey" to that location while clearing the mind of random clutter and simply attempting to focus on some desired goal or effect. Many use this opportunity to contact their spiritual teachers or angels for guidance. Some use this quiet time for prayer, or for exploring their innermost thoughts and recording them in a diary or journal while still others, focus on an expansion of their creativity.
In the most sublime sense, this is a dialogue with the body/mind wisdom and therein lies the most productive use of such time.
A simple technique for personal problems is to simply and firmly state the nature of the problem and request a solution while in a meditative state. We are all much wiser than many of us may think we are, and the body knows things that our minds often do not. To engage in an inner dialogue will often reveal the answers we seek.
We all have spirit guides who work closely with us. Meditation is the opportune time for you to communicate, through visual or auditory efforts. Within the slightly altered state of meditation, you hear messages with somewhat more clarity. Do you recall times when you were caught up in negativity and could have used some spiritual insight to move you more swiftly into the positive? Have you been given spiritual answers from time to time? Within the dream state, do you often feel you leave the body and have a communion, an opportunity for nurturing and uplifting of the soul?
"Our life is what our thoughts make it."
~ Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180)
Effective meditation can help us to become more balanced and centered in our full expression of life's wondrous gifts, more resilient, more understanding and accepting of other points of view, more compassionate and sympathetic, more intuitive and creative, more responsive to the universal flow of life in which we are immersed.
I invite you now, to spend a few moments with my Forgiveness Meditation.
Copyright © 2006, 2010 by Linda Pendleton. All rights reserved.
