We often hear that the secret to success is to think positively or feel appreciation and gratitude.  While these are definitely powerful practices, they can turn us against parts of ourselves that aren’t thinking and feeling that way.  As a result, we may become resistant to having negative thoughts and feelings or try to avoid anything that isn’t sweet and rosy.

However, these resistant or avoidant strategies fail to acknowledge the reason why these thoughts and feelings arise.  Instead of alleviating negativity, if anything, they perpetuate it.  In this article, we’ll explore a different strategy that both honors and releases us from the negative effects of negativity.

So, it’s likely that you’ve heard the headlines that positive thinking and feeling boost your energy and immune function and propel you toward all the good things in life.  When you hear that news, it’s natural to want to only have positive thoughts and feelings.  It’s natural to get a negative edge toward negativity.  It’s natural to see negativity as the enemy of your dreams and higher aspirations.  It’s natural to fear it and want to avoid it at all costs.

However, it also seems to be true that what we resist or avoid persists.  When we resist something, we keep it alive as something we are pushing against.  When we avoid negativity the cause of that negativity goes unnoticed.  It gets stored in our subconscious and continues to wreak silent havoc there.

So if resistance and avoidance don’t work, what other strategy is possible?  Is there another way to relate to negativity that honors its purpose and creates deeper release and integration at the same time?  Is there a way to relate to negativity that actually uses its energy and information in a positive way?  Is there another way to view positive thinking and feeling that includes negativity as a healthy and beneficial aspect of your life?

The problem with the “headline” view of positive thinking and feeling is that it leads you to believe that you are supposed to try to always have only positive thoughts and feelings.  Here’s a news flash: That’s not going to happen.  You are a human being who is involved in complex systems of relationships, events, and circumstances that create many different appropriate states of thought and feeling.  Things happen that have appropriate emotional responses of anger, sadness, and fear.  When things don’t go well, it’s appropriate to have negative thoughts about what is happening.

Negative thoughts and feelings arise as responses to what is actually happening inside and around us.  Now, certainly, sometimes we overdramatize these thoughts and feelings, blow them out of proportion, and allow them to carry us away in actions that are damaging to ourselves and others.  However, if we shift our relationship to these “negative” experiences, we can learn from them and use their energy and information appropriately.

I would redefine positive thinking and feeling as a “positive attitude to whatever happens.”  It is about how we relate to “positive” or “negative” experiences, events, and circumstances.  We can teach ourselves to view each moment, thought, feeling, and experience as informative.  Negative thoughts and feelings can be our greatest teachers, when we view them in a positive way.

For example, if you have a negative thought such as “I can’t do that.  I’m a loser.  I have no skills here,” instead of resisting those thoughts and trying to have a positive one instead, see if you can turn and face those thoughts head-on.  Ask yourself, “What is the message in this thought?”  See if you can turn the light of your awareness directly on that “negative” thought and see what you can learn from it.

When you turn and face your thought, rather than resisting or avoiding it, you gain a different relationship to it.  If you welcome and accept your thought and seek “the gift” in it, you now have a new positive relationship with it.  The thought loses its negative force and becomes a portal of information.

For example, the negative thoughts above could be pointing out that, in this situation, it would be good to learn and practice a specific skill.  If you look at what you are not doing well head-on, without shrinking from it, you can learn how to do things better.

The same idea can be applied to emotions.  For example, anger can alert you that something or someone needs protection.  Sadness can alert you that it’s time to let go of something or someone.  Fear can alert you to possible action that you need to take.

Any uncomfortable experience arises with information about yourself and others and energy to do something with that information.  Negative thoughts and feelings alert you that something needs to be acknowledged, learned, and/or shifted.  When you turn toward, welcome, accept, and appreciate every thought, feeling, and sensation as a moment of information, you gain access to that information so you can use it effectively.  You’ve now gained a positive viewpoint within a “negative” thought, feeling, or sensation.  This is a deeper and more productive meaning of positive thinking and feeling.  It is an empowering attitude toward life.

Of course, this new relationship to negativity takes some training.  One of the best ways to train your mind and emotions is meditation.  To discover how to work productively with all your thoughts and feelings, check out the Resource box below.

Enjoy your practice.

Are You Ready To Discover The Benefits Of Meditation For Yourself? In the next few minutes, I’ll show you a simple meditation technique you can use to instantly release ANY unwanted thought feeling or belief.  If your health and well being are important to you, click here to get started now.

© by Kevin Schoeninger

The Evolution Ezine may receive a commission if you place an order after clicking a link in this post.  This helps us keep the ezine free.  We thank you for you continued support

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You may have heard that to master your life, you must first master your inner state.  Life happens from the inside out.  Where you are coming from on the inside—your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and physical state—is the strongest determining factor in what happens around you and in how you experience and interpret whatever happens.  Because of that, many people have turned to meditation as a way to shift into a more relaxed, positive, clear, and focused inner state.

In this article, we’ll explore four simple steps that can help you discover the peace within.  Meditation is a way to practice using these four steps.  As you master these steps in your meditation practice, you can also use them at any moment in your life to bring you out of stress mode in relaxed clarity.  No matter which style of meditation you practice, you can use these four cues to meditate more easily and effectively.

1. Relax and Align Your Posture: Meditation begins with active relaxation.  Active relaxation means that you put your attention inside your body and use your mind to release muscular tension.  Maintaining a relaxed upright posture is an important key to actively releasing tension.

When you sit to meditate, notice and adjust your posture from your feet upward.  Sit on the front edge of a chair, couch, or bed with your feet flat on the floor and parallel to each other.  An ideal seat height is one in which your hips are level with or slightly above your knees.

Rest your hands palms down on your thighs.  Drop your shoulders and soften your hands to release any tension in your arms.  Imagine a string attached to the top of your head gently drawing your spine upright.  Tuck your chin slightly lengthening the back of your neck.  Close your lips lightly and place the tip of your tongue up to the roof of your mouth to relax your jaw.

Sitting upright like this is not mandatory, but it can be helpful.  If you are unable to sit without back support, you can sit with your back against the back of a chair or in any comfortable position, even lying down.  The bottom line is to actively relax yourself by becoming aware of your posture and making adjustments to release tension.

2. Feel your Inner Body: Adjusting your posture puts you in touch with what is happening in your body.  The next step is to feel inside your skin, to feel your inner space.  Notice what is happening inside your body without reacting to it—just become aware of it.  Observe your thoughts, feelings, and, most importantly, the sensations in your body.  Witness these without reacting to them, criticizing them, or trying to change them.  Just make note of what is going on.  Scan your body to find any areas of tension or pain and settle your attention there—again just observing and relaxing.

Inner body sensing is the gateway to self-knowledge, self-mastery, and discerning inner guidance.

3. Breathe Consciously: One of the best ways to begin to feel inside your body is to become aware of your breathing.  Imagine and feel as if your inhalation begins in your lower abdomen and expands upward into your upper abdomen and chest all the way up to your collarbones.  As you exhale, imagine and feel that whole space emptying from top to bottom.  Allow your breathing to slow down and settle into a deep rhythm.  Slow, deep, rhythmic breathing will balance your emotions and regulate your heart-rate and brainwaves so that your body comes into calm coherence.

If you notice any areas of tension in your body, you can imagine breathing into those areas to release pain or tightness.  As you inhale, imagine gently filling the area of pain or tension with your breath.  Imagine your breath easily expanding into that space.  As you exhale, imagine that same space emptying out.

4. Smile Inside: To assist you in releasing inner tension and shifting into a positive state, practice inner smiling.  Put a subtle smile on your lips.  Feel appreciation and gratitude for the opportunity to relax and feel positive in this moment.  Smile with nurturing acceptance of whatever is happening inside.   Imagine that every cell is smiling.

Inner smiling instantly shifts your body and brain chemistry and makes you feel positive and function optimally.  This creates a positive cellular environment and grooves positive neural pathways in your body and brain.  Inner smiling embodies an accepting, non-judgmental attitude toward yourself and others.  It opens your heart and enables you to embrace what is good in your life.

For ease of memory, let’s shorten these four steps to:
Relax, Feel, Breathe, and Smile.

Practice this a little everyday and watch your inner state shift and your life come into balance.  No matter what you want to do, you’ll do it better with a relaxed body, an open heart, and a clear and focused mind.  This sets the stage for a healthier, happier, more abundant, loving, and purposeful life—a life that flows effortlessly from inner guidance.  Enjoy your practice!

Are You Ready To Discover The Benefits Of Meditation For Yourself? In the next few minutes, I’ll show you a simple meditation technique you can use to instantly release ANY unwanted thought feeling or belief.  If your health and well being are important to you, click here to get started now.

© by Kevin Schoeninger

The Evolution Ezine may receive a commission if you place an order after clicking a link in this post.  This helps us keep the ezine free.  We thank you for you continued support

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With the explosion of current research on the amazing powerful benefits of meditation, many people are giving it a try. Many people get excited to change their lives through meditation. A good many of those will give it up after a week or a month, saying that “This program’s just not working for me” or “It’s not what I expected” or “I thought it was supposed to make me feel peaceful and I’m more anxious” or “It’s just too frustrating, I can’t quiet my mind.”

If you’ve any experiences similar to these, read on. What you’re about to hear might not be what you expect and it could change your life.

As an author of several meditation and mind-body training programs, I’m always looking for the best ways to communicate these practices in a way that people “get it” and “change their lives” for the better. What I’ve come to learn is that people often don’t get the experience they are looking for because they are either over anxious, or they are trying too hard, or they don’t really understand what they’re doing or what is happening to them during meditation.

Many people come to meditation because they want to relax and de-stress. They are caught up in certain habits of thinking and feeling that are wearing them out and they want to learn how to change that. The challenge is that meditation teaches you a different way to relate to your thoughts and feelings and it often takes some time before it becomes easy and automatic. Meditation is a learned skill that you will get better and better at through consistent practice.

In meditation you learn to observe how you think and feel without being caught up in it and carried away by it. You learn to focus your attention on one thing or one pattern, such as your breathing, a place in your body, or a particular thought, feeling, or intention for a period of time. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered from your focus, you simply recognize that your mind has wandered, you let that wandering thought go, and you return to your point of focus.

As you meditate, you are going to start noticing when you are anxious or stressed. You may notice your lack of inner peace or the nonstop chatter in your mind. Meditation didn’t cause these experiences, it enables you to see them. When you begin to notice your anxiety, your stress, and the non-stop chatter in your mind, what is most important is your attitude toward these experiences and toward yourself.

Accept them and accept yourself-completely. Instead of judging yourself critically for wandering from your focus, or for being anxious or tense, or for having a busy mind, welcome your realization, accept it, then let those experiences go and return to your meditative focus. You do this gently and easily as many times as it happens.

This attitude of complete self acceptance, of acceptance of whatever happens, begins to free you from the mental habit of pushing yourself, criticizing yourself and others, and generally resisting what life brings to you. “Acceptance of what is” is a doorway into deeper self knowledge and expansion of your greater possibilities.

So, if you’ve started meditating and have found it frustrating, begin by accepting the process exactly as it is. Observe your mind during meditation without judgment. Allow yourself to be exactly as you are. As you release self-critical pressure, amazing things will begin to happen. Your meditation will deepen naturally, your mind will begin to quiet, you will more accurately sense inner guidance, and you’ll be on the way to living the ideal possibilities that you are meant to live.

Are You Ready To Discover The Benefits Of Meditation For Yourself? In the next few minutes, I’ll show you a simple meditation technique you can use to instantly release ANY unwanted thought feeling or belief.  If your health and well being are important to you, click here to get started now.

© 2009 by Kevin Schoeninger

The Evolution Ezine may receive a commission if you place an order after clicking a link in this post.  This helps us keep the ezine free.  We thank you for you continued support

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Discovering altered states of consciousness can be quite an amazing journey for many people. Getting into the inner phases of the mind and then harnessing the experience in your life WILL, without a shadow of a doubt, raise the overall quality of your life.

But, contrary to what a lot of mental well being experts and practitioners would have you believe, you do not need any special medication or drug to achieve this. Instead, there are methods which are completely natural that’ll get you the results you want.

So let me explain how to explore your mind in unimaginable ways. The following practice will help you – step by step – to sink into your soul, start sensing your mind’s true potential and explore altered states of consciousness:

CORE-FOCUSED ACTIVE MEDITATION

This method is based on sociological studies that indicate a storehouse of energy resides deep in the abdominal region of your body forming an overwhelming core. Sadly, in most individuals this remains dormant for a greater part of their life. To get more in touch with your subconscious, you need to awaken your core.

Start out by focusing on each sense of the five senses, while doing your everyday activities. That’ll get your mind prepared to delve deeper within itself.

To focus on the sense of seeing, you will actually close your eyes and look into the mind’s eye. For this, you can focus your attention in the center of your skull. For taste, focus on every sensation in your mouth. For smelling, sense the aroma in your environment. For touch, become aware of how your clothes feel against your skin, sense any object you are touching, such as a coffee cup clutched in your fingers… for hearing, simply put your attention on the symphony of sounds playing in the background. If all is silent, focus on the silence.

Experience each sense for about 60 seconds.

Move your awareness from one sense to the other and immerse yourself in them.

Repeat this practice for a few days until you’re fairly comfortable with moving your full awareness into and out of each of your senses, ignoring any disturbances in the environment around you.

Once you have gained this simple yet profound ability of one-pointed focus on each of your five senses, combine breathing with sensory awareness. For example, as you move your full attention into your sense of sight, inhale deeply and direct the breath into the area of your third eye. On exhale, feel the area pulsate with power.

Do this for each of the five senses:

Sight-Breath

Touch-Breath

Sound-Breath

Smell-Breath

Taste-Breath

After a few days of this practice, you’ll notice all of your senses have been heightened.

This is the point where you can go deep into your senses and get really involved. You may start to feel all your senses exerting a subtle force towards your internal center – somewhere below your stomach. You might also feel a strong pull towards your core.

You may also notice that while breathing, your core begins to vibrate within your body. As this happens, your brainwaves are predominantly vibrating in an alpha state of consciousness and the brain’s oscillations resonate with the energy in your core.

Continue doing the practice and make one addition… your enlivened core.

Just place your attention there and notice what you notice in that area. If you have been diligent with this practice thus far, you may sense something like a rotating ball of energy in and around the naval area. Breathing into this area while your full attention is there can cause dramatic and sometimes even paranormal effects or events.

Continue this practice on a daily basis and within a month or so, your senses will be hyper-active and may begin to give you more information than you had access to before. Also, sensing your awakened core can unlock a pathway to your right-brain hemisphere and can give an amazing new clarity to your intuition, among other gifts.

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When I was a kid, I owned a bright steel-blue Schwinn bicycle with balloon tires. On my block it was considered really cool to attach playing cards to the spokes of one’s tires so that they would make noise. And so ever wanting to be accepted by my pre-adolescent peers, I adorned my shiny wonder with an entire pack, yes… an entire pack! I borrowed an assortment of clothes pins from my mother and attached the cards in every conceivable space. As a result, when I rode around the neighborhood, it sounded like a mad cacophony of firecrackers gone amuck.

To top off the whole thing, I attached two whirly-gigs to the handlebars. I taped them on with duct tape, one to the right and one to the left. Even back then I searched for the solace of symmetry.

Whirly-gigs for those not familiar with the term are actually pin wheels, usually made of plastic and often placed atop a wooden dowel. They spin easily. The stronger the breeze, the faster they twirl. I became fascinated by the twirling of my whirly-gigs. I would peddle as fast as I could and then watch the tiny propellers dissolve into one mass of spinning color. One day I got too caught up in watching my whirly-gigs and failed to notice that I had run off the sidewalk and into a deserted lot. The next thing I knew, I was flat on the ground, the victim of a head-on collision with a tree. My whirly-gigs were askew and the front of my bike bent. I had learned a sobering lesson–pay attention to what you are doing.

As time passed on, I gave up my bike and my whirly-gigs, but I have never lost my fondness for them or, for that matter, for bikes with balloon tires.

Now, much older, I don’t watch whirly-gigs on the handlebars of bicycles. Instead, I watch them spin inside my mind. Although it might strike you as an odd metaphor, I think our thoughts and emotions are a lot like whirly-gigs. They spin easily. It doesn’t take much for a thought or a feeling to start spinning inside our heads. Sometimes the whirly-gigs of mind spin in a nice gentle way. At times they spin so fast, they seem out of control.

It’s an odd thing, the whirly-gigs of the mind. When they start to spin, we tend to identify with the arising thoughts and feelings as our own. If the whirly-gig of the mind happens to spin in a pleasant manner, and pleasant thoughts arise, we embrace it. We say we are happy or content. If, however, the whirly-gig of our mind spins in an unpleasant direction, and we are besieged by unpleasant thoughts and feelings, we are repulsed. We say we are upset.

Most of us experience the oscillation between the two extremes of grasping (for what we want) and avoiding (what we don’t want) on a daily basis. The whirly-gig of mind is always spinning because that is its nature. In other words, it is always moving. Thoughts and feelings are always arising from this movement of the mind. And thousands of years ago, ancient sages throughout the world discovered that the source of the mind’s movement was the flow of subtle energies within our bodies. Tibetans call this lung (or the winds). Yogis call it prana, and Taoists call it chi.

Each of these alchemical systems has, in their own way, mapped out the subtle pathways responsible for the experience of thought and emotion. They describe these movements of subtle energy quite clearly and have developed means to alter their flow. The result is an inner technology that directly affects the mind and its creations (thoughts and feelings).

A quick glance at the diverse alchemical traditions of the world will reveal a striking similarity in their attitude towards the mind and its creations. Virtually every system teaches a means to still the mind. The reason for this obsession with inner stillness is that it is only in stillness that the Mind (or consciousness) can become aware of itself. Until then, we are mesmerized by the whirly-gigs of our mental experience. We identify ourselves with our thoughts and feelings instead of realizing that they come and go like clouds. And like clouds, they are ephemeral, possessing little substance.

By transcending identification with our minds (our whirly-gigs) we begin to glimpse our true identity, as pure consciousness. And as the purity of our innate consciousness rises into awareness, we begin to awaken from the dream of this world. We begin to see that we are, and have always been, eternally free. It is simply a matter of waking up from the fixated spinning of our own minds.

So the practical question becomes: how do we wake up to our own greater identity?

One path of self-realization was created by the Taoists of ancient China. And like alchemists in other cultures, they discovered the inner pathways of consciousness and their relationship to the mind.

In order to comprehend Taoist alchemy we must come to an understanding of a subtle force called chi. From the immense mystery of the Tao, which creates all worlds, but is untouched by them, there is an eternal flow of this vital force (chi).

There are many types of chi. There is, for instance, a vital force flowing out of quasars and stars, though this is quite different in quality from the chi created by a stream. When most people think about chi, they usually think about the subtle life force in air. This type of chi is most concentrated in natural areas, away from cities. This kind of vital force is strongest in large areas of tree growth, by lakes, rivers and streams, as well as by larger bodies of water like oceans. Some have speculated that this type of chi is related to negative ions, and there is evidence that this is so. But there are other types of chi as well–more subtle, more refined types of chi and these are one of the focuses of advanced Taoist alchemy.

Traditionally, Taoist sages spent much of their time as hermits in nature. In later periods, groups of men or women would form communities to pursue their alchemical search with others. But almost always, these Taoist abodes were far from cities. They were usually located in places where the chi was especially strong, often in areas designated as Dragon Points.

Dragon Points are places of convergence where one form of chi meets another. They are most dramatically seen in mountain ranges. When two ridges meet, there is often a trench or a gorge that flows down the sides of the mountains. As celestial chi (the type of chi generated in the sky) flows downward, it meets the terrestrial chi of the mountain at the point between the ridges. This is called a Dragon Point.

Where two streams or rivers converge, there is a detectable increase of chi, and this too, is called a Dragon Point. Taoist sages would search for these places and put their abodes either in the Dragon Point itself, or nearby. This made their alchemical work easier since there was a ready abundance of chi that they could draw upon in their practices.

Thought, Time and Breath

As with other forms of internal alchemy, the Taoist practitioner must train the mind to enter prolonged states of stillness. This quiescence of mind is crucial since the Tao can only be experienced in mental silence, and many of the alchemical transformations of Taoist alchemy also require a silent mind as well.

There are many classes of stillness practices. Some of them involve movement such as Tai Chi, and others involve sitting meditation, such as the Celestial Gate, which I will discuss in a moment.

In these stillness practices, the mind is eventually led to a state of deep quietude. In actual practice, especially at the beginning, there may be a flurry of mental activity. Thoughts come and go, sometimes in a torrent, sometimes in a trickle. Eventually the practitioner notices that the speed of his or her thought seems to be slowing down. There seems to be more space between thoughts, and at some point they stop altogether, if only briefly.

The practitioner also notices that the breath changes during these states. There is a tendency for the breath to slow down as thought slows down. And when there is no thought, there is often no breath, or it is very shallow. This is significant for several reasons.

From a neurological standpoint we could say that this is because the brain waves of the practitioner are in the lower states of alpha and/or theta where the breath naturally gets slower. Research on meditation has noted, by the way, that these states also produce a decrease in muscle tension, heart rate, blood pressure and respiration, all of which are quite positive in their stress reducing effects. In fact, studies have shown that those who practice forms of meditation that produce these effects, as in the Taoist stillness practices, are generally less stressed than their counterparts who do not meditate

Several years ago, about an hour before twilight, I chose to do the stillness practice known as the Celestial Gate (also referred to as Heaven’s Gate) in a park. As twilight descended around me, I was still doing the practice and noticed that my breathing had stopped. Not only this, but thought seemed to be arrested. My mind was clear and as calm as the surface of a tranquil lake. But most impressive to me, in the moment, was that time also seemed to have stopped, and I was suspended in a timeless dimension of mind.

I decided to walk back to my car as it was getting dark, and the trip took me twenty minutes or so. I noted that the impulse to go back to the car came as a sensation as if it had come from deep within my body. It did not come as a thought. I did not think, “now I need to get back to the car.” This non-speaking state of mind seemed oddly amusing to me at the time. During my saunter I noticed that my breath was very shallow, even though the trail back to the car was over hilly terrain. That timeless feeling was still very strong, and I seemed to move over the hills with little effort.

Ironically, when I saw my car in the parking lot I remembered an appointment later that evening, and I spontaneously took a deep breath. My breath had returned to normal, and that feeling of timelessness vanished. I was firmly rooted back in time.

There is a fascinating relationship between the perception of timelessness and the cessation of breath. In Taoist meditation practice this suspension of the breath is often encountered when entering the deeper states of mental quiescence.

As a psychotherapist working in the area of psychoneuroimmunology, or how our thoughts and feelings affect immunity, I find the time paradox even more fascinating.

A study conducted with patients admitted to an emergency room due to cardiac arrest reveal some fascinating information about the interplay between body and mind. During recovery, these patients were asked some questions about their perception of time. Based on their responses, researchers could predict who would recover and who would die from another heart attack. Those patients who said that they were letting things go to take care of themselves and who reported feeling that there would be more than enough time to do what needed to be done, were more likely to recover and avoid a second heart attack. Those patients, however, who stated that they were under tremendous pressure to do what had been left undone and who felt that they were running out of time, invariably suffered a higher incidence of death due to a second cardiac arrest.

None of this would come as a surprise to a Taoist sage. From the standpoint of Taoism, our modern time-crunch world is disturbing to both health and spiritual attainment. We need to bring our time-crunched mind back to tranquility on a regular basis or suffer the ill effects of our modern age.

I have taught a simple form of the Taoist stillness practice to hundreds if not thousands of people by now. Everyone has expressed a deep appreciation for a method of meditation that is so quick and easy to enter into. Those who have never been able to meditate due to continual thought (inner dialogue) are especially appreciative of this method since thought is not a hindrance to the practice.

The Celestial Gate Meditation

The Celestial Gate Meditation practice is based on Dragon Points. Dragon Points, as I mentioned earlier, are places of convergence, where one form of chi meets another.

There are several Dragon Points within the human body. The Celestial Gate is just one of these, and happens to be a place where heavenly chi (a very subtle form of chi) flows into the body and meets the terrestrial (or earth) chi of the body itself. Thus this place is an energetically charged area, and Taoist sages discovered a long time ago how to take advantage of it.

Sit comfortably and close your eyes. You can lie down if you wish, but this makes some people go to sleep. For a moment, just notice your breath. Don’t change it in any way; just watch it. Notice the rhythm and the depth of your breath. Then after a moment, become aware of the space about an inch behind the bridge of the nose. Imagine that there is an opening about one inch square in this area. This is the Celestial Gate. All you do is focus on it.

Do not concentrate on it. Just be aware of it. If you are having thoughts or fantasies, this is not a problem. Let them continue on their merry way. Just let some part of your attention be on the opening. You can think all you want about anything you want and the practice will still work so long as some part of your attention is on the Celestial Gate (the opening).

As you continue to focus at the gate, you will notice that thoughts eventually seem to slow down. After a while, there will be more space between the thoughts or fantasies. And eventually they will stop altogether, if only temporarily. It is during these moments that you might find that your breath has stopped or has become very shallow. This is natural, and is, in fact, a sign that you are entering the deeper states of stillness. It is in these deepest states of quiescence where there is no breath and no thought that contact with the Tao takes place.

Doing it for about five minutes will usually give you a clear sense of how this practice alters awareness. Beginners usually take several minutes to settle down into the light stages of mental stillness. But over time these periods get longer and one feels more confident about how to enter these deeply relaxing states of mind.

Research has shown that stillness practices, such as this, are very effective at counteracting some of the negative effects of stress. Just twenty minutes once or twice a day can make a tremendous difference in your sense of wellbeing.

Don’t let the simplicity of this meditation fool you. It is a profound stillness practice that will eventually lead you to a direct experience of the Tao itself. Gently extend the periods of stillness, so that you become acquainted with and comfortable with these deep places of quiet.

In Taoism, the deepest secrets are revealed only by the Tao itself. You cannot find the deeper alchemical truths in books for it is forbidden to write about them. Thus, meditations like the Celestial Gate are cosmic keys. They can, if practiced faithfully over time, open the inner doors of perception.

But you must turn the key to open the lock. Just thinking about it won’t create transformation. If you wish to experience the mysteries of the Tao for yourself, don’t just read about them. Turn the key and walk through the door.

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If you are thinking about using music for meditation, then I’m very pleased that you found this page. I’d like to introduce you to a few important facts that you should be aware of before you introduce any form of music into your meditation experience.So before we look at how to use music for meditation, lets start by answering the question, “Should you use music for meditation?“

Well this really depends on what you goal is with meditation. Allow me to explain a little further…

Meditation Music for Relaxation
If you wish to experience a light meditation or if you just want to relax your mind and unwind, then most forms of ambient meditation music will be of great assistance. Let’s face it, the modern world we live in can be pretty fast paced, noisy and stressful at times. Most of us could really use some time out to relax and rejuvenate, and listening to some meditation music is a great way to do this.Most “new age music” is suitable for general relaxation and can help ease you in to a meditation, but for some people it can actually become a distraction once they reach a certain level of depth and stillness in their meditation.

This is because a lot of new age meditation music is designed to be a little more “entertaining” than it needs to be, and is not really composed with the core principles of meditation in mind. It is wonderful, enjoyable music, but it’s not always suitable for deep meditation.

Deep Meditation Music
If you wish to experience truly deep meditation, then it is essential that you only use music that was specifically composed for the purpose of enhancing and deepening meditation.

These specialized forms of meditation music are composed with the principles of psychoacoustics in mind (the psychology of sound), and they are designed not just to relax you, but to absorb your attention and gently coax your mind into a state of deep meditation.

Here are some examples of meditation music styles that are suitable for meditation:

Soothing meditation music
Any slow moving music that is free from vocal performances or extravagant instrumentation can be used for meditation. Just so long as the music has a very slow tempo and doesn’t contain any overly distracting performances, it will be fine to use.

Sonic Mantra meditation music
Sonic mantra meditation music is a specialized form of meditation music that encourages deep meditation through musical mantras that are made from sound.

Binaural Music
Binaural music is music that contains binaural beats. This type of audio technology can have a profound and direct effect on your state of mind and is very effective at inducing deep states of relaxation.

Tips for using music for meditation

1. Keep it Down
If you are using music for meditation, then make sure that you don’t play the music too loudly. Your music should not seem dominant or intrusive. It should just be a serene and comfortable backdrop to your meditation. Turn it down a notch or two.
2. Headphones
Headphones are not always required, but I do recommend them for two reasons. Firstly, they make the music feel as though it is coming from inside of your own mind. If you are using music for meditation, then you’ll want to become deeply absorbed in the music, and the use of headphones really encourages this. Secondly, some headphones help to block out external sounds, which makes them very useful if you are meditating somewhere a little bit noisy.

3. Choose the right music.
As I already mentioned, if you wish to meditate deeply then I recommend that you avoid meditation music that is overly “entertaining”. By this I mean that you should steer clear of music that contains percussion, vocal performances or lots of instrumentation and variation. Music like this might be great for winding down out and relaxing, but it may not encourage a truly deep meditation experience.

4. Unwind.
Meditation music can also be used prior to meditation, to help put you into a calm, relaxed state of mind. So even if you choose to meditate without music, taking some time out to unwind while listening to some meditation music will help to prepare you for a deeper meditation experience.

Dr Clarke’s compositions can be purchased at mindpowermp3.com in the category Inner Journeys.  You can also hear samples of his work in our Free Sound Transformation Starter Kit (Sacred Love and Unforgettable Journeys) as well as access his products at amazing savings when you take advantage of our very special limited time offer you will only see when you sign up for the Starter Kit.

About the Author
The author of numerous articles on the science of sound, Dr. Christopher Lloyd Clarke is well versed in the scientific principles of psychoacoustics and music psychology, and he applies these principles whenever he writes music for hypnosis and deep relaxation. A long-time meditator himself, he combines the artistry and science of music composition with his own unique insights into relaxation states. Not only does he compose and produce music for professional meditation teachers, hypnotherapists and holistic healers, he has hands-on experience in personally using music to achieve deep, healing, transformative states.

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Do you want genius, money, fame and fortune or an extended life?

You can easily achieve anything you want, when you learn this priceless skill.

Almost no one uses it, but those who do always enjoy a better, easier life.

Did you know there is a secret science to Total Relaxation?

You can do it anywhere, anytime – in minutes… or seconds with practice.

Imagine all your stress melting away in a single moment of bliss – no matter where you are, or what you’re doing. It only takes a few seconds to completely change your situation and get a better result.

Even if you’re stuck in rush-hour traffic… just burned your left hand on the oven…

missed your emergency meeting for the 3rd time… you can learn to relax anywhere, at any time, easily.

Here’s one of my favorite methods for instant, total relaxation:

Now take a long deep breath and hold it for a few seconds.

As you exhale this breath, allow your eyes to close and let go of the surface tension in your body.

Just let your body relax as much as possible right now. Place your awareness on your eye muscles and relax the muscles around your eyes to the point they just won’t work. When you’re sure they’re so relaxed that as long as you hold on to this relaxation, they just won’t work, hold onto that relaxation and test them to make sure THEY WON’T WORK.

Now, this relaxation you have in your eyes is the same quality of relaxation you can have throughout your whole body. So, just let this quality of relaxation flow through your whole body from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.

Now, we can deepen this relaxation much more.

In a moment, you’re going to open and close your eyes.

When you close your eyes, that’s your signal to let this feeling of relaxation become 10 times deeper.

All you have to do is want it to happen and you can make it happen very easily.

Ok, now, open your eyes… now close your eyes and feel that relaxation flowing through your entire body, taking you much deeper. Use your wonderful imagination and imagine your whole body is covered and wrapped in a warm blanket of relaxation.

Now, we can deepen this relaxation much more.

In a moment, you’re going to open and close your eyes one more time.

Again, when you close your eyes, double the relaxation you now have.

Make it become twice as deep.

Ok, now once more, open your eyes…close your eyes and double your relaxation.

Let every muscle in your body become so relaxed that as long as you hold on to this quality of relaxation, every muscle of your body will not work.

In a moment, you’re going to open and close your eyes one more time.

Again, when you close your eyes, double the relaxation you now have.

Make it become twice as deep.

Ok, now once more open your eyes…close your eyes and double your relaxation.

Let every muscle in your body become so relaxed that as long as you hold on to this quality of relaxation, every muscle of your body will not work.

And now, open your eyes…

Notice How You Feel

Ask yourself, “do I feel more, or less relaxed than before?”

Always take notice of how you feel before, during and after you do anything.

The reason why is obvious, you want to be able to tell if what you’re doing is working.

Many people try many techniques and often claim they don’t work, without ever learning how to notice if they’re working or not. A small secret of creating change is noticing any change taking place within your body or mind that seems different from before. Once the mind locks onto a small change, or shift within the atmosphere (ANY change) it can pull you into a complete experience of that change.

For instance, noticing a small shift in your level of relaxation is more than enough to trigger total relaxation through your commanded intent… which opens the mind to accept new programming.

When you relax, you become more receptive.

And this receptive state is where all mental magic happens. Once you access it (with conscious intent), it becomes easier and easier each time you want it.

Soon, you’ll be able to relax in an instant, just by giving attention to the relaxed feeling around your eyes… noticing how they’re relaxing to the point they won’t work, and gently flowing that feeling of total relaxation throughout your body. That’s all it takes to enter this receptive state in seconds.

This is referred to as the “alpha” brainwave state. It is in the alpha state that mental miracles can happen which are otherwise not possible.

You can imagine brainwave states as gateways to different realms of your consciousness. It isn’t hard to begin playing with this, by practicing going to alpha.

It’s the first state beyond normal waking beta, and easiest to access.

The Alpha state occurs when your brainwaves reach 8-12 cycles per second of activity.

You slip in and out of this state multiple times per day, you just weren’t conscious of it.

Which means, your conscious awareness went elsewhere.

Use the technique described above to go into alpha on purpose.

From alpha, deeper and more profound states can be explored and enjoyed.

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In this article, we’ll explore three insights that I’ve found absolutely essential to shift from being a victim in life to being an empowered co-creator.  If you’re at all like me, interested in personal evolution, human potential, and spiritual growth, you may find yourself bombarded with Life Secrets, Keys to Success, and the like.  Sometimes amidst the complexity and quantity of information coming at me everyday, I find it necessary to remind myself of the essentials.  You may feel the same way.

While variety is interesting, the essentials are what help us filter complexity and stay on track with what is most important.  So, with that in mind, here are three insights that have guided my work with clients for the past three decades.  I hope you find this presentation a good reminder and an inspiration to deepen your personal practice and realize your inner power.  If you’re new to inner work, you may find this a good introduction, as well:

The Three Most Powerful Lessons I’ve Learned

1.  What you experience is the result of what you bring to your experience. Life is an interpretive act.  While we endeavor to grow in consciousness and to see things more clearly, we do not experience things “as they are.”  Instead, we experience everything through the lens of our intentions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, mood, and physical state at the moment.

I want you to take a look at the diagram below and answer this question:

“Which center circle is bigger?”

Figure 1.1 Which center circle is bigger?
(This diagram was suggested by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran in Scientific American Mind, December/January 2007, p. 16)

Does the circle inside the six circles on the left look larger than the circle inside the six circles on the right?

The fact is that both circles are exactly the same size.  The surrounding circles make them appear different.

This graphic illustrates my first point, which we could also describe in these words:

“Context creates experience.”

I call this the Primary Insight.  It is the foundation for understanding how we experience life.  You cannot perceive any isolated thing “out there” apart from your meaning-giving interaction with it.  A figure, the thing that you are looking at in the foreground, always appears within or against a background, the context which gives it meaning and significance to you.

A context is a set of things that lie behind and around an object
that enable you to perceive it in a certain way.

Both of those center circles were the same size, yet you experienced them as different sizes because of the contexts in which they appear.

The next realization: All our life experiences are like that.

Everything appears to you the way that it does
because of the meaning context within which you perceive it.

In other words, what you bring to life determines the experiences you have. Your intentions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, sensations, needs, desires, learning, inheritance, and environmental conditions all play a role in what you perceive.  These are the small circles around the center circle, which is your life experience at any given moment.

You have probably heard this many times in many ways.  Nevertheless, it’s likely that at certain moments you forget.  When you forget this, it’s likely that you experience tension, conflict, and resistance.

While you may know this concept in your mind, it is another to practice it in all areas of your life.  You may master it in one aspect of your life or in one or more relationships, while finding it more difficult in another area of your life or in a particular relationship.

You can practice regaining this insight whenever you experience tension, frustration, or conflict, by asking yourself the following question:

What role am I playing in this situation?

Asking that question shifts you away from blaming or judging others or circumstances.  You take responsibility for your side of the equation.  That doesn’t mean that others or circumstances don’t play a role.  It simply means that you have a responsibility for your side of every situation.  How much conflict could be avoided or resolved with that simple realization?

Secondly, the way you are interpreting things makes a huge difference.  You do not see things “the way they are”; you see them from your perspective at the moment—and your perspective can easily change.

For example, have you noticed that when you are relaxed, well-rested, and have a positive outlook, good things tend to happen?  And when you’re tired, stressed, and overwhelmed more negative and overwhelming things seem to pile up?  I’ve noticed when I am tired and feeling like “I have to do it all” more people ask me to do things.

When you really understand this first insight and take it to heart, it leads you to a second point:

2. You can shift your life experiences by shifting your inner state.

When you realize the role you play in the experiences you are having, you may get motivated to play that role better.  You may develop a strong desire to create positive shifts in your inner state to create positive results in your life.  You can do this in any number of ways, from self-observation, to meditation, to affirmations, to physical exercise, to dietary supplements, to actively listening and communicating better, to taking up a sacred mindset by acknowledging your relationship to the Universal Life Force, to seeing all things and every being as an expression of the One Life that we all share.

Having practiced all of the above for the past three decades, I’ve found one practice that creates profound shifts on all four dimensions of my being: body-heart-mind-spirit.  That practice is Core Energy Meditation™.  If you have the “Raise Your Vibration” program, you have a full exploration of this practice as it relates to the Law of Attraction

Core Energy Meditation™ incorporates physical cues to relax and align your posture, along with deep breathing, inner smiling, and visualization and feeling of your three primary energy centers to create a state of strong, positive, clear and coherent energetic vibration.  I call this a Core Energy State (CES).

The more you become familiar with this state, the more you practice it, the more it becomes a consistent background for all your life experiences.  Your background state strongly influences what you experience in the foreground of your consciousness.  Remember from the earlier diagram that the “figure” you see is strongly shaped by the “background” against which it appears.

Becoming familiar with a CES also makes you more sensitive to times when you are not experiencing that.  You more easily recognize when you are caught up in reactivity, tension, and unnecessary drama.  Through consistent practice over time, a CES becomes a clear, relaxed, background presence that you can return to whenever you get caught up in stress or lost in the tangles of life.

Personally I’ve found Core Energy Meditation™ to be a lifelong practice that refines with each year that I work with it.  You may find that, when you first start practicing, you have certain energy centers that are more open and clear.  At first, your energy flows smoothly in some areas of your body and not in others.

Wherever you’ve had injuries or store past tensions and unresolved traumas in your body, your energy will be congested in those spots.  By practicing a calm accepting attitude as you become aware of your inner tensions, you facilitate release.  Through meditation, you learn that while you have had trauma and tension, these do not define who you are.  Though you have thoughts and feelings running through you, these also, do not define who you are.  Though you get caught up in stress, it doesn’t have to rule your life.

You learn instead that you are an energetic presence who can inhabit anything—any intention, thought, feeling, action, place, relationship. . . How would your life be different if you lived from that understanding?  You are an energetic presence who can inhabit anything you choose.

This brings us to the third essential point:

3. You have an authentic life path which is your unique contribution to the One Life that we all share.

You are here with purpose.  You are not here to do anything at all, but to engage in certain things that you are particularly gifted to share.  On a spiritual level, you are part of an infinite field of unlimited possibilities.  Here in this body, in this life, you have some very specific things that are yours to do.

When each of us do what we are here to do, we all benefit.  Your authentic path is not just for you.  It is your service to “Us.”  It is what you add to the whole.  You are specially resourced and situated to express specific talents, insights, skills, and gifts.  Your authentic path is Life acting through you in the best way possible.  Your inner power is really not “yours” at all, it is the power of Life moving through you.

Each of us is here to fully express our unique perspective and to support others to do the same.

When you choose that which is authentic for you, your life unfolds with greater meaning and purpose as well as greater ease, health, and happiness.  That doesn’t mean that your authentic path is without pain and struggle.  Yet it is how you relate to these things, the awareness you gain, what you learn, and the way that you deal with any experience that makes all the difference.

The more you learn to dis-identify with your pain and struggle, your life history and negative conditioning, the more you release those imprints from your consciousness.  As a result you open to receive the support, guidance, resources, and opportunities that are available to you every moment.  Life is always working with you every step of the way.

You can look at these three essential points as a three-step process.  Try this out whenever you feel tense, negative, or just “off track” from “who you are.”  Ask yourself these three questions to activate inner power in any situation:

1.  How am I contributing to this experience?

2. How can I let that go and relax my inner state right now?

3. What is my most authentic response, the response that is best for all, in this situation?

I call these steps the 3Rs: Recognize, Release, and Return.  Recognize what you are doing, release your attachment to that, and return to your Core Energy, to your most authentic response.  This is a life-long practice that will empower you to expand into your fullest potential.  Enjoy!

If you’d like to learn more about a comprehensive practice to help you tune into your body, heart, mind, and spirit, check out: Core Energy Meditation

Copyright 2010 Kevin Schoeninger

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Evolution Ezine may receive a commission if you buy through one of the links – these proceeds help keep the Evolution Ezine free. Thanks for your continued support.Qigong Meditation Program)

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Whether you’ve been practicing energy meditation in the form of qigong, Core Energy Meditation™, pranayama, kundalini, or some other system for awhile, or if you’re just beginning, I think you’ll find the following eight tips helpful for your progress. Many of these tips you can apply to any other type of meditation practice as well.

Meditation is a practice of focusing your attention on a specific object or in a specific way for a period of time. Energy meditation means that you are using imagination and feeling of your life energy, prana, or “qi” (“chee”) as your focal object. The energy centers and pathways through your body are a great way to meditate because they give your mind an active path to follow. It’s interesting and it generally feels great—especially when you’ve developed your skills.

Energy meditation grounds you in the present moment in your body, which is an effective way to “get out of your head.” It also has tremendous health benefits, including activation of your natural relaxation response, improved posture, tension release, improved circulation, deeper breathing, coherent brain and heart function, and improved immune response.

Energy meditation helps you to feel at ease, positive, and vitally alive. Most importantly, it connects you to the essence level of “who you are” and “what you are here to do.” It connects you to your inner guidance, deeper purpose, and feelings of oneness with Life.

In the Chinese system of qigong and in Core Energy Meditation™, we focus on three primary energy centers or dantians (“dahn-tee-ens”) in your body:

1. Your lower dantian or Body Center in your lower abdomen which relates to your primal life force and physical vitality.

2. Your middle dantian or Heart Center in the center of your chest which relates to your refined feelings and qualities of interaction with others including appreciation, gratitude, trust, compassion, and love.

3. Your upper dantian or Mind Center in the center of your brain which relates to your mind powers of insight, imagination, intuition, and concentration as well as your ability to calmly observe your experiences without being overwhelmed by them.

When you first practice imagining and feeling your energy centers, you may not imagine or feel much at all. It may be a challenge to keep focused on them during your practice. It’s also common that you might feel one of them but not the others, or two of them and not the third. What you experience depends on your natural aptitude for visualization and kinesthetic sensing, the degree of activation of your energy centers, and how much you have practiced feeling inside your body.

No matter where you stand in your ability to visualize and feel inside your body, it’s O.K. You can benefit from applying yourself to the practice, no matter what your current abilities. If you practice consistently over time, you’ll gradually awaken your ability to perceive, feel, gather, circulate, refine, and still your inner life force. I’ve practiced energy meditation for over 25 years and find myself improving these abilities year by year.

As you grow your abilities, you will also notice positive effects in your ability to sense inner guidance, make good choices, be present, and follow through on your best intentions. You will come to feel more at home, healthy, and positive in your body, heart, mind, and spirit. You will develop a consistent strong, positive, clear and coherent personal energetic vibration, or what I like to call a “Core Energy State.” Here are eight tips to keep you progressing.

Eight Tips for Effective Energy Meditation:

1. First and foremost, practice daily. If you are practicing only when you think you need it, know that there is much more for you in the practice than merely using it to calm and come back to center when you get “stressed out” (though this is certainly important).

If you practice every day, you’ll discover that you are better able to process the experiences and tensions of the last 24-hour period so that you approach life in a much more clear, relaxed, positive, and focused way. You may also notice the difference when you miss even a day of practice as unresolved tensions begin to cloud your perception and affect how you feel.

It’s common in the first several years of practice, to experience letting go of “old stuff” that may bubble up into your consciousness as you meditate. The more you release these past held tensions, the more you can live freely in the present.

To encourage your daily practice, I suggest that you choose an amount of time that seems very reasonable to you, maybe 15-20 minutes, and schedule it at the same time every day (for example, first thing in the morning). Though it may be challenging to wake up earlier at first, it’s likely that you’ll start to look forward to waking up and getting into a “Core Energy State.”

The most important reason for daily practice is that each time you sit down you will be able to move right into your practice and build on what you’ve done the day before. You’ll stay in the flow of it. If you practice sporadically or infrequently you will, in a sense, “always be starting over.”

2. If you’ve been practicing consistently for awhile, you may want to consider increasing the amount of time you devote to your practice. While 15-20 minutes daily is fantastic, you may find that meditating longer will deepen and strengthen the benefits. You can get into progressively deeper, clearer, and quieter states the longer you meditate.

It’s common for the first 10-15 minutes of practice to involve a lot of mind chatter that progressively quiets down the longer you continue. If you sit for 30-40 minutes or more, you may have more time in a quieter state. The additional time will grow the influence of this state in your mind and body and make it a more reliable reference point to which you can more easily return.

To increase your time, you may consider doing one longer session per week or maybe two longer sessions per week on the weekend days. However, don’t give yourself too much to do that it becomes a chore. Lengthen your time as your natural desire increases.

3. Besides increasing your overall time, you can increase the time that you spend focusing on any one energy center. For example, you may find it easy to focus into the center of your brain, but harder to focus into your heart or your lower abdomen. It’s common to have one or more of these centers that is easier to focus on and one or more that is more challenging.

When you first start practicing, you may tend to want to spend more time in the energy center(s) that you are most comfortable with. That is certainly fine, to build your confidence.

However, as you continue, you’ll make the most progress in your practice and your life if you spend extra time focusing on the energy center(s) that you feel the least or that you find to be most challenging. These are likely the places where your energy flow is not as fluid and free. You may be storing long-held emotions or traumas in these spots.

Spending extra time with these places with an attitude of curiosity, a feeling of appreciation for the way your body works to keep you safe, and a calm observing attention can begin to release these held tensions so that your energy system will function more fully and integrate more deeply. One way to do this is to settle your attention into a feeling of spacious, silent stillness in the middle of any energy center. Simply being present within an energy center, resting your attention there without trying to do anything or make anything happen, can have a therapeutic effect.

In the Daoist tradition, it is regarded as safest to put extra focus into your lower dantian or lower abdominal energy center when you are beginning your practice. As your energy builds in that center, your energy will naturally flow upward to the middle dantian or Heart Center, then, to the upper dantian or Mind Center. Whether you follow that progression or another form based on your particular needs, it’s a good idea to begin and end your practice by gathering energy in your lower dantian.

4. To support strong vitality in your lower dantian care for your body well. It takes surplus energy to strongly focus your attention and grow your practice. The foundation of this extra energy is your physical vitality. To increase your physical vitality, monitor these five things:

A. Manage your “To Do List” well,
B. Get adequate sleep,
C. Eat a variety of foods that are as fresh and as close to their natural state as possible,
D. Drink enough water to stay well-hydrated (approximately 64 ounces a day for most of us), and
E. Exercise regularly

If you have committed to getting up early to practice, but you are exhausted from your life activities and haven’t gone to bed early enough, haven’t eaten quality food, aren’t well-hydrated, and haven’t adequately exercised, you likely won’t have the energy for a good practice session. With sufficient physical vitality you will be able to devote strong attention to activating, opening, clearing, and integrating your energy centers.

5. A great way to activate and clear any energy center is to imagine and feel yourself breathing through it. As you inhale, imagine and feel that you are filling up that energy center with your breath. As you exhale, imagine and feel that you are emptying that energy center and releasing any tension held there. When you inhale, try imagining that your breath is bringing light, open, spaciousness into your energy center. When you exhale, try imagining that you are exhaling any congestion or density.

You can also apply this technique to tension anywhere in your body. First, imagine and feel as if you are breathing into the space around the tight area, softening up its edges. Then, draw your breathe right into the center of the space where you feel tension or tightness. Imagine and feel as if your breath is bringing light, open, spaciousness into that area. Exhale any density or tightness.

6. You can also spend more time focusing on the connections between the energy centers. Connecting the three dantians is the Central Channel or Middle Mai Channel. This channel can be visualized and felt as a vertical cylinder extending from your perineum (between genitals and anus) up through the center of your body (in front of your spine, though you can also imagine it including the spine) to the top of your head. This channel connects your three dantians and integrates them into a coherent balanced system.

You may feel one energy center is strong, open, and clear and another is numb, tense, or clouded. You can imagine and feel the connection between them through the Central Channel as a way to activate and clear the center that feels clouded. You can also imagine and feel your breath traveling between the two as you inhale and exhale.

Another possibility is that you feel openness in the energy centers themselves but lack a feeling of integration between them. You may feel that they are not vertically aligned or not functioning well together. For example, your mind is not working with your heart and your body. They aren’t in sync. Your mind thinks one thing, your heart feels another, and your body desires something altogether different.

If that is the case, you can imagine and feel the Central Channel as a straight vertical column with the three dantians resting in the middle of it and breathe through that channel. I like to do this at a few points during my practice to refresh my concentration. I also finish my practice by inhaling up through the Central Channel and exhaling down through the Central Channel several times. Then, I gather energy in the lower dantian before opening my eyes.

The bottom line with energy meditation practice is that it is specific to each person. You begin by learning good forms to follow. Once you master the forms, then you can adapt them to your specific needs and what is going on for you at any given time. The more you understand the practice and the more sensitive you become to your internal energy flow or lack of flow, the more you will know how to proceed. Energy meditation sensitizes you to pick up on your inner guidance.

7. Once you have thoroughly learned a form or forms of meditation by following a guided audio, you might try practicing on your own without the audio. This could be after months or years of practice. Allow your inner guidance to lead you in how to refine and develop your internal energy. Spend more time where you need to, use your breathing to open up areas of tension, and allow your conscious presence within your energy field to lead the way.

Whenever your attention wanders, recognize and accept it, and gently return to your meditative focus. As you remain present, accept whatever arises, and return to allowing life energy to flow smoothly through you, I believe you’ll discover a profound trust in the deeper Life Force that is guiding your life.
That brings us to the eighth tip for effective practice.

8. When you sit to meditate have a firm and clear intention for your practice. Having a strong “why” will lead to firm focus and unwavering attention.

For example, my purpose in meditation is to become a clear channel for Life Energy to flow through me. I call this a Core Energy State. In such a state I feel calm, clear, free, purposeful, and whole. Moving into life from this state I find that I can better sense and follow what I am here to do, my service to others in each moment. If I sit down to meditate with this intention strong and clear in my mind, my practice has more power.

Contemplate why you meditate and state your intention as you sit down to practice. See if that helps to rouse your motivation and strengthen your focus.

I hope you find the eight guidelines above helpful for cultivating your meditative experience, refining your life energy, and increasing the positive feelings of vitality and purpose in your life.

if you’d like to learn more about a comprehensive practice to help you tune into your body, heart, mind, and spirit, check out: Core Energy Meditation

Copyright 2010 Kevin Schoeninger

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Evolution Ezine may receive a commission if you buy through one of the links – these proceeds help keep the Evolution Ezine free. Thanks for your continued support.Qigong Meditation Program)

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As an author of programs on meditation, personal development, and spiritual growth, I often get questions about challenges people face in applying these programs to their lives. At the end of Core Energy Meditation practice, for instance, we ask “What is most important to you?” We then spend some time imagining and feeling “that” as a present reality. This patterns your mental-emotional circuitry to more readily experience “that” in your life.

Yet, many people tell me they draw a blank on that question. They just don’t know what’s most important to them or what they truly want. How can that be? After all, what is more natural than pursuing what you desire? Judging by our levels of stress and traffic, lots of us are running around busily pursuing things we want. Why, then, is this question so difficult?

First off, it seems that many of us are running around doing things we think we “should” or “have to” do, instead of doing what “we want to do.” We find ourselves so busy with these “shoulds” and “have tos” that there’s just no time for anything else. O.K. I get that. We feel pressure to survive and get it all done. I’ve been there and done lots of that. . . Until I saw that I was racing to frustration, stress, disappointment, and illness, I ran in that “rat race” for years.

At a certain point, many of us come to realize that “What I’m racing around doing isn’t getting me where I want to be. I need to try a something different.” That’s usually when people get interested in personal growth programs.

The challenge is that these programs are going to ask you to slow down, tune in, and understand what you’ve been doing, who you are, and where you want to go. The problem with that is that what you’ve been doing up to this point may not have trained you in those skills. In fact, it may have cut you off from the very abilities that you need to answer these questions. It may have cut you off from your body, your heart, and your soul.

The “rat race” has taught us to check our inner feelings at the door, live in our heads, constantly check off tasks on our “To Do” lists, and do whatever it takes to get it all done. Occasionally, an illness will crop up to slow us down, but these we treat symptomatically, so we can get back to pushing forward with the endless list of all the stuff we’ve got to do.

A personal growth practice such as meditation puts a stop sign in the middle of that action. It reveals the incessant mental chatter that drives us and asks us to develop other inner skills. It teaches us to observe the chatter without buying into it. It trains us to connect with our bodies, check in with our hearts, and wonder about our purpose in being here, now.

It’s not surprising that when we are used to continuously processing a virtual world of thoughts, visual images, sound bites, and massive amounts of information, we find our other senses atrophied and hard to access. When we go to check in with these other senses, nothing seems to be there. We’re not attuned to pick up those frequencies. We’ve lost the ability to sense guidance, to feel free flowing emotion, and to discern the path we are meant to live. In fact, when we try to focus inside there may be so much mental chatter that it drowns out the possibility of anything else.

If you continue to live in the world of this chatter, at a certain point things start to break down. You become exhausted, or sick, or so frustrated and tense that you feel you might explode. This breaking point may feel like a further problem, but it can be the moment of great opportunity. It can be the point at which you say “I’ve got to do things differently. I need to regain my balance, because this isn’t working.” At this point, you may open to connecting with neglected parts of yourself. You may open up to connecting to your body, cultivating your heart, and realizing your life purpose.

If you’ve reached that point, or if you’d just like to strengthen an already ongoing inner practice, there are some specific things you can do to regain your inner balance and raise your life to a new level. Here’s the basic idea: schedule some time every day to “check-in” with your inner state and notice “where you are coming from” in these three dimensions: body, heart, and spirit. Your mind has been busy enough. You can give your thoughts a rest during this time. You can bring them back online in a more conscious way later.

Here are some ways to practice “checking in.”

First, tune into your body. You’d think it would be natural for you to feel what is happening in your body. After all, this is where you live 24/7. However, I’ve found that, as I lead people into the simple practice of sensing what’s happening in the body, they often tell me they don’t feel anything. That’s O.K. You start from where you are. Simply know that you can awaken your inner senses.

Inner sensing is a skill that you can develop. In fact, I’d say it’s the primary skill toward knowing “who you are” and “what you’re here to do.” Sensing inside your body is the firm basis for knowing what’s important to you. Your body gives you concrete information once you learn how to pick up on what it’s saying.

So here are some instructional cues: “Feel your body as a whole from the inside. Feel the space inside your skin.” If you’re not accustomed to doing this, that instruction may sound odd. You may feel nothing at first. That’s O.K. You can begin by closing your eyes, sitting up straight, and being aware of your breathing and/or any other physical sensations that come into your awareness.

If this seems too “unfocused” and hard to practice, you can place your hands on your abdomen and become aware of sensation in your hands as you breathe consciously. Or you can simply focus on feeling the skin on the surface of your hands and, then, the feeling inside your hands. Most people are fairly sensitive to feelings in their hands. This can be very relaxing. You can then expand this feeling of inner sensation to other parts of your body. For example, you might try sensing your feet by feeling the soles of your feet on the ground. This is a great way to “get out of your head” and lower feelings of stress.

If you take frequent “inner sensing” breaks, you will begin to awaken your inner sensing abilities. You will come to be more present in your body. If you usually tune out your body or cover over your inner sensations with pain killers, alcohol, or drugs, it may take some time to reawaken your inner senses. Go slowly and be gentle with yourself.

In next month’s article, we’ll expand from that basic practice by learning how to tune into your heart and into your life purpose. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about a comprehensive practice to help you tune into your body, heart, mind, and spirit, check out:   Core Energy Meditation

Copyright 2010 Kevin Schoeninger

—————————————————————————————-

Evolution Ezine may receive a commission if you buy through one of the links – these proceeds help keep the Evolution Ezine free. Thanks for your continued support.

Related posts:

1. Bringing Peace to Life: 3 Easy Ways to Transform Your World with Meditation by Kevin Schoeninger These days many people are well-acquainted with the wealth of...
2. What Does Breathing Have to Do With Health and Happiness? by Kevin Schoeninger “What Does Breathing Have To Do With Health and Happiness?”...
3. Set Yourself Up For Success: Part 3 in Our Meditation Series by Kevin Schoeninger Whatever you want to grow in your life, it’s essential...