Saturday, August 28, 2010

7 Tips For Better Meditation

7 Tips For Better Meditation by Cucan Pemo

Meditation is an intensely personal and, for some people, private experience. It is a complete and total relaxation technique and some may need unique circumstances to help bring upon that level of rest.

For most people, however, there are basic guidelines to follow to get the most out of your meditation sessions. Here is a helpful list you can follow the next time you have a meditation session.

· Meditation is inexorably tied to your body. If you don’t feel confident and happy with the current state of your body, you will have a very hard time relaxing properly. This applies to all aspects of your body. If you are planning on meditating later that day, try to eat extra healthy that day so when you go to meditate, you know that you’ve made healthy choices that day.

If you feel much better about your body after a shower or bath, take one before you go to meditate. Try not to eat right before you meditate, but you can eat right earlier in the day. If you feel better after stretching, do that before you meditate. Any easy to implement practice that helps put you more at ease and in a relaxing frame of mind is a good idea before you meditate.

· Just as you should prepare your body for meditation, you should also prepare your mind. You should look forward to meditation, so that when the time comes, you’re ready for it and in the right frame of mind. Try to lock yourself away the best you can. If you can’t get away from a phone or guests, try turning your phone off and going in another room away from people.

If you have a nagging chore you need to do, finish it before you even consider meditating. You must have as clear of a mind as possible before you even consider sitting down to meditate.

· One of the ways that many people chose to set their mind at ease is with music. Music can be the best mood setter out there, so if you need a little extra help finding the right mood for your meditation, put on a favorite song or a song that you feel is empowering or makes you feel self confident. Get lost in the words or the beat and use it to help slide yourself into a meditative state. There is nothing wrong with using a bit of help if you need it and music is one of the best sources for that.

· You should make sure that your posture is good during meditation. While that may sound a bit odd, you need to make sure your back is straight and your legs crossed. If you can make it into a lotus position or the half lotus position, you’ll be in great shape. A straight back and proper posture will help your body achieve a deeper and more meaningful state of meditation.

· Follow the experts. People have been refining the art of meditation for millennia and your meditation instructor has likely learned from experts and passed that knowledge on to you. While a small amount of freelancing is fine, you should stick with the original lesson as much as possible. The methods taught are like that for a reason and they have been proven to achieve the highest levels of meditative bliss. While it may be tempting to do your own thing, you should place your trust in your teacher and use the examples he or she taught you.

· Meditation is habit forming. If you begin meditation and you’re serious about making it part of your life, it will be most beneficial to you if you make it a regular part of your life. You won’t experience the true benefit if you only do it once in a while. Practice does in fact make perfect in this instance and the more regular your meditation sessions are, the more you’ll enjoy it and the better you’ll feel.

· Patience is key. By introducing meditation into your life, you’ve taken a single step along a path of enlightenment and inner peace. It is a long journey, however. If you don’t feel like you’re getting the results you’re after once a week or a month has passed, be patient. There are people who spend a lifetime meditating who only reach what they are looking for after decades of practice. Stick with it and you’re sure to achieve your goal.

Meditation is a beautiful and wonderful practice that millions of people take part in every day around the world. It does, however, take years of meditation to truly see results and while that can be frustrating to some people, it is those with the foresight to stick with it that are rewarded in the end.

About the Author: Dream Come True
http://www.messageofamaster.com
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Friday, August 27, 2010

An Efficient Meditation Technique – Basic Steps To Follow

An Efficient Meditation Technique – Basic Steps To Follow by Michael Ross

Many individuals that are in search of clearing their minds from daily worries and stress turn to meditation. But is there a 100% efficient meditation technique? The facts are that there can be found various meditation techniques – some of them quite specialized and detailed – but there are a few steps that need to be followed regardless of the chosen method: the breathing, the relaxing and the meditation itself. Here they are!

How to Breathe

The first thing you should know is that there is not meditation without a proper breathing. Basically, you need to focus on your breathing, to breathe in slowly, yet deeply and to let the air out as slowly as you can, but without making effort. Try to think that the air is clean and pure, that it comes straight from God, from the perfect nature or from other positive, ideal sources. Furthermore, try to feel that the breathing is cleaning your entire body and that it is helping your body loosen up. Some individuals find it useful to try to breath as slowly as possible and, at the same time, as quietly as possible – try to think like you are “whispering” your breathing.

How to Relax

Meditation and relaxation go hand in hand and depend on each other, so make sure that you are committed to begin a complex and unite meditation exercises program, a program that is based on a previous relaxation and detachment from worries and problems. But how can you make sure that you reach the needed level of relaxation? Well, first of all, you need to be surrounded by a welcoming, appealing and intimate decor that can permit you relax and meditate. Select the place where you feel most comfortable and at peace.

How to Meditate

The wide range of meditation tools and techniques permits you to find the one that is most suitable for you. But there is one meditation technique that seems to be very popular and easily applicable: the visualization meditation practice. The only question here is: “What should you visualize?” the answer is quite simple: you should visualize the one thing that makes you feel relaxed, happy, satisfied or that induces any other feeling you enjoy. Basically, it can be anything: a moment that happened, a moment that you expect to happen, an activity that relaxes you, a fantasy, a trip to an exotic island or, why not, to your own room or home (the place where you feel safest and best), a natural element, your loved ones and the list can go on and on.

When you are imagining or picturing the selected moment or element, you have to let all its beauty invade you, you have to be receptive to all the stimulants that it offers you, to enjoy it in all the ways you can. Observe your selected element carefully, slowly, be attentive to the details. Live the emotions that it creates with intensity and you will live the meditation experience at high standards.

Once you have started to meditate, make sure you practice your meditation technique every day or at least every other day and make sure you follow the above tips, in order to get to the desired results. Remember that meditation is a key to a better health, a better sleep, a better focus and, in general, to a better life, so those 10 minutes every day are worth it!

About the Author: Want to calm your mind & super-charge your energy level? We've created a FREE audio e-course with meditation techniques. Click here to get started.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Breathing Exercises

Breathing Exercises by Jon Rhodes

Correct breathing can make a huge difference to how we feel. It is very difficult to feel upset or angry when you are breathing slowly, deeply and quietly. It is also a great way to help you sleep.

If you will, try taking a deep breath right now.

Do you feel more alert and energized now? Lack of oxygen in the blood makes us feel tired, and can cause headaches.

A few deep breaths can lower anxiety, ease mild indigestion, and help us wake up and go to sleep.

Meditation, which is similar to hypnosis, is also very effective at reducing stress. Try this simple breathing exercise daily, or at least when you are feeling stressed and need some time out.

Get yourself comfortable, you may wish to lie or sit. Make sure you not get disturbed for about half an hour. Subdue the lighting. Close your eyes if it helps you concentrate, or better still keep them half open.

Breath as naturally as you can, and count each out breath up to ten. Repeat this for about 20 minutes. Notice how your breath is warmer when exhaled.Listen to the sound of the breathing through your body. Enjoy!

Optional Extra

When you are in a relaxed and comfortable state, tell yourself a keyword such as “relax”. Tell yourself that whenever you say your keyword, no matter where you are or what you are doing, you will return to this current state of relaxation.

Try this in various different situations in your day to day life, you will be amazed at the results!

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The Alternative Nostril Breath

Sit or lie in a comfortable position. Breath in through the left nostril (you may need to use a finger to keep your right nostril closed), and how for a relaxed ten count. Now exhale gently out of the right nostril. Now repeat this breathing in through your right nostril with your and exhaling out of the left. The whole process should be repeated about 5 times

This is great for energizing and relaxing, and for clearing sinuses.

Jon Rhodes is a very experienced UK clinical hypnotherapist. Click to visit a free hypnosis site, or here for hypnosis audios

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Earth Healing Meditation

Earth Healing Meditation by Certified Crystal Healer Ashley Dalke

Meditation is a focusing or concentration of one's mental energy until one has reached a perfect stillness of the mind. With practice, meditation will allow one to realize the true self. There are several steps one can take to promote a successful meditation. First, one should create a sacred space in which he or she is comfortable. One's environment can greatly influence his or her success in meditation. Correct posture can also significantly contribute to one's meditative practice. One should sit in the posture that is most comfortable to oneself. When one is not comfortable, the discomfort can become distracting to the mind and can disrupt one's focus. Next, one should begin focused breathing and begin concentration. When stillness is achieved, one should retain it as long as possible until the end of the meditation session (at least 10 to 15 minutes).

Crystals can be used in meditation to help one concentrate and to focus his or her mind's energy. Crystals amplify one's intentions and thoughts which raise his or her energy vibration, promoting conscious awareness. One's thoughts become more pure through meditation with crystals; they become filled with love and light for the good of all beings.

This meditation was developed to send healing energy to the earth. When done with proper intent, it can combat the effects of pollution, global warming, and other negative environmental conditions in order help to return Mother Earth to a more wholesome state of being. This meditation is most effective when utilizing a Chrysocolla stone or one Azurite stone and one Malachite stone

Sit or stand in a comfortable position with the soles of your feet flat on the ground (no shoes please). Center yourself; begin to attune yourself to the earth's energy (you may wish to use a picture or some other symbol).

Begin circular breathing. Breathe in healing white universal light through your root chakra. See the light traveling up your chakras to the crown chakra. Exhale the light through your throat chakra back down to the basal chakra and breathe in the light again. Imagine the light like a wave. Imagine this wave of light moving in and out of your body like the tide. Now, expand the light so that it is a continuous loop of healing energy moving through your ethereal and physical bodies.

Imagine your chakras opening. Begin at the base chakra and picture a red swirling vortex of energy. Focus your attention on making this red energy very bright. Next, move up to the sacral chakra and imagine an orange energy vortex. Proceed through the chakras in this manner using yellow light at the solar plexus, green and pink at the heart, blue at the throat, indigo at the third eye, and violet at the crown.

Pick up your stone(s) (or place in front of you) and begin to focus your energy on earth-healing. Imagine the earth being covered with trees and flowers, with beautiful, flowing rivers, and being in a great state of health. Imagine it surrounded by white, healing light. Begin to further connect yourself to the earth by focusing on the two crystals. Start to pull in white healing light energy through your crown chakra. Next, imagine your legs and feet turning into roots and growing deep into the earth. Begin to transfer the white light from your crown, down through the chakras, and through your legs, out the roots, and into the earth.

Focus your attention on energizing the earth and on sending it love and healing light. Thank the earth if you wish. Spend some time sending these healing energies while continuing your circular breathing.

When you feel you are ready, imagine the roots loosening from the earth and resuming being your legs. Slowly come back to conscious awareness.

Certified Crystal Healer Ashley Dalke
(630) 254-4685 crystalhealer1@gmail.com
http://www.freewebs.com/crystalhealer1

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

True Meditation



True Meditation by Elfspear

There is a lot of interest in forms of ‘meditation’ by people using or espousing the ‘Law of Attraction’ where certain kinds of ‘meditation’ are utilised to help us feel and visualise our desires as a precursor to manifesting them. I myself am a great fan of the Law of Attraction – it is fun, useful and highly rewarding to manifest our heart’s desires. A lot has also been said about the benefits of meditation in bringing us states of calm, confidence, focus, love, etc...

While some or even all these things may be true, I believe using meditation to achieve these personal, ego-based ends is short-selling the practice and yourself, and misses the real 'prize'.

Certainly as you practice meditation, feelings of calm, love, rapture and bliss will arise, and of course all these things are wonderful.

But as you simply sit, being here and now, breathing gently and allowing thoughts and feelings to arise and pass away, you will also become aware of many negative things - painful experiences from your past, fear, anger, jealousy, guilt - all the unwanted stuff you've pushed into the dark recesses of your mind are illuminated in excruciating detail. No-one really wants to experience these things. No-one want to sit and face these things over and over again, with no escape, nowhere to run to and no distractions. Why would anyone freely dedicate themselves to such a practice?

The wonderful thing is that by merely letting these things come up in your awareness without becoming attached to them, simply allowing them to be there without judgement, without grasping them or trying to push them away you find that they will naturally dissipate. For all things that arise naturally pass away (only our habitual thought-patterns keep us locked in to these unpleasant states). It is then that joy and bliss arise, which in themselves are wonderful ‘rewards’ but we must be careful not to become too attached to these feelings either. While there is nothing wrong with enjoying these beautiful states, like all things that arise, they will also pass away, and attachment to them amounts to what Chogyam Trungpa called the 'Golden Chain of spirituality'.

We can become so fixated on being in these states that when change happens (and change does happen – that is the only constant n this Universe!) we become upset, distressed, depressed, confused… and before we know it we’re right back where we began!

The beauty of true meditation is that as we go through these cycles again and again, we start to see the futility of identifying with ANY state, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. All ‘things’ (objects, feelings, thoughts, sounds, ideas) are seen to be unreal in the sense that they have no enduring form.

So as we continue to practice, we stop identifying with ANYTHING transitory, and ultimately this is seen to include anything we imagine to be 'ourself'. This idea can be terrifying to the ‘ego’, which has spent lifetimes building up layers of illusion to convince everyone that you're a ‘somebody’ but when we pass beyond it, we see with the 'eye of God' - we know directly that for from being a mere ‘someone’ or ‘something’ we are everything, the whole Universe, beyond birth and death, containing but not limited to joy, pain, love, light, suffering and bliss.

And this realisation blows away any such idea as personal gain or ‘personal fulfilment’ whatever that might be!

And so by all means, follow your dreams, have fun creating a beautiful, exciting, prosperous, love-ful life. If this makes you happy and keeps you content, if it works for you, stick with it – it’s a wonderful way to live.

Just bear in the back of your mind, if ever you become tired or dissatisfied or bored with it all, if ever you come to a point where you just can’t shake taht feeling that there’s something more, something you’re missing… there is – your own divinity!

For more info, videos, ebooks and downloads on meditation and the Law of Attraction visit http://WellbeingOnline.weebly.com

You can follow the author of this article at http://Twitter.com/Elfspear

Monday, August 23, 2010

An Insight Into Dowsing

An Insight Into Dowsing by Sophie Chamberlain

Dowsing, sometimes associated with the word, radioesthesia, is the use of a special instrument to identify or find an object or condition in physical matter. Dowsing is generally associated with finding oil, water or precious metals, but sometimes an object that is missing. To this end, various Dowsing instruments are used - on either a map, a picture or an actual physical location. Dowsing is probably a very ancient practice. There is evidence that Dowsing goes back as far as ancient Egypt and ancient China. Dowsing was reportedly used to find coal during the Middle Ages.

The most popular tools for Dowsing are the “wishing rods,” which are often made out of metal these days but sometimes out of wood, as was common in the past- and the pendulum.

Dowsing, in the fast, generally used, wood. Popular woods that were used for Dowsing were hazel branches, generally forked, along with beech, alder and apple. Nowadays, as before, the Dowsing rods, when used, are held in an L-shape with discovery being made when the rods cross each other. Pendulums used for Dowsing are simply generally string weighted with some type of crystal or other type of weight.

Sir William Barrett, a physics professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin at the end of the century, was extremely skeptical of Dowsing until he became familiar with a dowser named John Mullins, who was hired by the Waterford Bacon Factory to locate underground streams of water. The small forked stick he used for Dowsing almost immediately bore more fruit than the work of various professional geologists who had failed to identify the water source. Later on, Barrett would be one of the main founders of the British Society for Psychical Research and publish the results of his research on Dowsing in the Society’s Proceedings.

Classic research on Dowsing was conducted and reported by Dr. Solco W. Tromp, a Dutch professor of geology, who was the director of the Bioclimatological Center in London. His chief book related to parapsychological research was Psychical Physics, a work speaking of the influence of various types of electrical and magnetic field on living organisms. It included the effects of these types of fields on dowsers, which he himself tested in the laboratory. To this end, used a galvanometer with a wooden ring and a coil of wire to create a magnetic field. He found that, although dowsers could not really determine the intensity of the field, they could detect changes in it. He also found that Dowsing in the field, using a pendulum for quicker results, could successfully enable to dowser to detect different types of magnetic anomalies

Theories of Dowsing vary, but it is often supposed that the Dowsing instrument conveys to the psyche of the dowser a subtle energy detected around the object in question. So a field of energy, perhaps still unknown to modern science, is postulated to be the cause of the phenomenon. For those interested, there is still an American and a British Society of Dowsers. Their addresses are: The British Society of Dowsers, Sycamore College, Tamley Lane, Hastingleigh, Ashford, Kent, TN25 5HW, England and The American Society of Dowsers, Inc., Danville, Vermont, 05828.

About the Author: Sophie Chamberlain is the author of the acclaimed Ultimate Paranormal Secrets. Read more about her activites at Derek Acorah Paranormal

Sunday, August 22, 2010

What are the Benefits of Tai Chi

What are the Benefits of Tai Chi by Mercedes Aspland

Tai Chi is becoming more and more popular and is being greeted by the medical world in a positive light. In this article we will look at what Tai Chi is, the principles behind it and the benefits that you can get through regular practise of Tai Chi.

What is Tai Chi?

Tai chi is a form of exercise that originates from ancient Chinese medicine. It is based on the principle of yin and yang and the idea is to bring balance between the two parts. In practise Tai Chi is a series of slow movements and breathing and focus. The aim is to bring strength to the mind and body and balance between them. The movements in Tai Chi originate from martial arts and although many of the principles are different the element of control that appears in many martial arts also appear in Tai Chi. It is a very low impact exercise that makes it great for people of all ages and physical abilities.

What are the Benefits of Tai Chi

There are a large number of benefits of Tai Chi and these are both mental and physical meaning that it can be very help for both mental and physical conditions. We have split the benefits into three categories, psychological, physical and emotional so that the full benefits can be properly highlighted.

1. Psychological - Tai Chi is a slow exercise that incorporates meditation which can help to calm the mind. In fact clinical studies in the USA have shown that people who practise Tai Chi on a regular basis experience a greater balance and peace of mind in the lives in just 8 weeks. The practise of Tai Chi can also help to boost self esteem and confidence and create a much brighter outlook on life.

2. Physical - Although Tai Chi uses slow movements it can still cause people to work up a sweat and strengthen muscles. This can also cause improved circulation as it cause the blood to flow more strongly. It is also believed that the flow of energy around the body can help to strengthen the immune system. The strengthening of the muscles can also help with conditions like arthritis, particularly in the knees and cartilage damage. A large number of benefits are also felt by the spine so it could be particularly beneficial for people suffering from back pain and other similar problems.

3. Emotional - a number of studies have shown that regular practise of Tai Chi can reduce cortisol levels in the body which can help to even out moods. This can be particularly beneficial for people who are suffering from conditions like depression, stress and anxiety. Tai Chi also has a spiritual element that allows people to connect their mind and body and so resolve inner conflicts. This peace can also help people to deal with everyday life and face problems in a much calmer balanced way then before.

Conclusion

The above shows that there are significant benefits to practising Tai Chi and one advantage is that it can be easy to practise at home on a regular basis. If you are unsure when starting it might be worth finding a class that can teach you the basics. You will then feel very prepared to move forwards on your own. If you are going to practise Tai Chi it might be a good idea to do a small amount each day and then you will be able to get the maximum benefit from the exercises. If you are still unsure then there are a large number of resources on the internet and we would recommend more research to make sure it is for you.

This article has been supplied by alternative therapies directory. You can also find more information on our Tai Chi page.