Thursday, December 2

Thought of Today:
"THE LESS YOU SPEAK, THE MORE YOU ARE LISTENED TO"
Although many would link the term meditation to religion, meditation is far from that. It could be used when practicing any religious ritual, but it remains to be a mind technique. I personally like to call it meditation because mind relaxation gives the wrong impression of the whole idea of the exercise. When you meditate you are releasing your body, soul and mind from all the tensions of your daily chores. But during meditation, your mind is actually very active. Active in a sense of transforming all the negative energies in your body and mind, by using the surrounding environmental energy (the universal energies), into positive ones.

When you start your vacation, you take a tour to release your mind from your daily chores. And once you are away, people you deal with on a daily bases would understand that this time is for you to enjoy yourself, therefore they will leave you alone especially if you do INSIST on being left alone.
Meditation is a mind tour, and "people you deal with" are your thoughts. And if you're serious about being left alone, then they" the thoughts" will leave you alone to enjoy your journey, but remember you have to be INSISTENT.

There are so many meditation techniques that are used in yoga classes. The most common one takes the form of The Corpse pose(Savsana or Shava-asana in Sanskrit). This is the technique I usually use in my yoga sessions, and I am going to demonstrate it hereafter:

Preparation for the Corpse pose:
- prepare a room for your meditation, using incense, and light it with three unscented candles. Different incense is mentioned in my last post, and I personally prefer the use of lavender oil or patchouli.
-If you have a mat, spread it on the floor, if you don't have a mat, a small blanket will do.
-make sure you have some comfortable clothes on, and put on warm socks.
- lie down on your mat in a corpse pose as shown in the picture above, and make sure you are comfortable in this pose , if not, you can tilt yourself a bit to one side keeping in mind that your spinal cord (the home of five energy centers) is touching the ground..
- Your palms should be facing upwards toward the ceiling in a comfortable lazy style, and the soles of your feet should not touch the ground because both your palms and the soles of your feet contain minor energy centers and you don't need to loose your energies to the ground (earth is a very good absorbent of energy; see the post" Your Body is Your Pharmacy and you are the Doctor").
- Cover yourself with a light blanket, because during meditation your body looses temperature, and you might even shiver.

Relaxing the body:
Although it doesn't sound so, but this is a mind exercise. In this exercise you will learn how to create a link between your mind and every muscle in your body. This exercise is very important because a relaxed mind can not reside in a tense body and vise versa. Therefore throughout the whole meditation session the mind has to be set on ALERT and should provide a prompt control to each muscle group in your body. ANY PHYSICAL TENSION DURING THE MIND RELAXATION SESSION WILL READILY DISTRACT THE RESTED MIND AND THE WHOLE MEDITATION SESSION WOULD LOOSE ITS EFFECTIVENESS. Just bare this in mind throughout all your meditation session.

Points to remember while you are practicing this exercise:
- We will start this exercise by tensing then relaxing each muscle group, and since tension is the natural state of our muscles, and relaxation is foreign to them, we will need to take our time in relaxing each muscle group; it usually takes 10 times the time to relax a muscle as opposed to the time needed for tensing it. When you relax any muscle group think of it as a hair braid, which you are trying to loosen up each hair strand ; one by one, all in your mind.
- While practicing this exercise; every time you are asked to tense or relax a certain muscle group, you will notice that other connected muscles will be affected as well. Don't worry about that, just concentrate on the pointed areas.

Body exercise:
1- Move your toes vigorously, then slowly, taking your time, bring each toe back to the relaxed stage (remember the points mentioned above). Calculate, observe, and feel each toe with your mind as you do that.
2- Then move up to your calved and tense them, then relax them as you did in exercise (1)
3- Move up to your thighs and repeat exercise (2) on your thighs.
4- Move up to your abdomen and repeat exercise (2) on your abdomen.
5- Move up to your stomach and again repeat exercise (2) on your stomach.
6- Move up to your chest and repeat exercise (2) on your chest, and if you can't tense your chest, raise it slightly up and again relax it slowly on the mat, calculating with your mind each and every muscle touching the mat.
7- Move your fingers then again relax them by letting each finger slowly abide to gravity.
8- Move up to your forearms and repeat exercise (2) on your forearms.
9- Move up to your shoulders and repeat exercise (2) on your shoulders.

At this stage your whole body is relaxed now, except the head. And you will start feeling some tingling sensations in your palms and toes, and your body temperature would start to drop.

Head exercise:
11-respectively; relax your chin, then let your mouth drop on the sides, relax your cheeks, nose, and finally your eyes, observing each move with your mind.
22- Slowly; take a deep breath in ( inhale using your entire lung's capacity), then pose for a while, and then exhale slowly until you vacuum your lungs completely.
33- Repeat exercise (22) two more times.
44- Return to your natural breathing process.
55- Now tense your eyebrows, making a very narrow forehead, then slowly relax the eyebrows, making a very wide forehead, and at the same time observing the tingling sensation you will feel between your eyes, a bit above your eyebrows, in a place sometimes called the Third Eye. This is your main energy center through which your body is absorbing the surrounding energy and therefore, harmonizing the flow of energy in other energy centers of your body.

Relaxing the mind:
To bring positive energy in, you would have to tune your mind with your relaxed body. This is done through positive thinking, and a lot of yoga classes( when practiced in gyms) use meditation music and let the practitioner's thought drift, or may be ask them to just concentrate on some nice objects in their mind's eye, or just imagine a point of light and divert all thoughts toward that light.
And since the mind is very naughty, and can easily be distracted with the slightest stimuli; I do recommend the use of Mantra (explained in the last post) for the powerful impact they posses. So if you have your mantra ready, play the tape with a remote control (make sure you bring your moved hand back to the relaxed state slowly as you learned before), listen to the words, feel them, connect with them.
When the mantra is over and your music starts, go over the words in your mind until the music stops. And remember what I have said in the beginning of the post; be INSISTANT.

REMEMBER TO HAVE A PART OF YOUR MIND CONSTANTLY CHECKING EACH MUSCLE IN YOUR BODY. AND WHEN ANY MUSCLE IS TENSED, BRING IT BACK TO THE RELAXED STAGE VERY SLOWLY AND PATIENTLY. This is very important to remember so that your session can be a success.
If you do fall asleep, do not resist, you will wake up in due time.
When the music stops, turn and lie down on your right shoulder for sometime before you help yourself up, pushing your body away from the mat with the help of your hands to the seating position.
Sit down for a while before leaving your mat to make sure that your head is not spinning.
Do not touch water or any electric appliances with your palms for about 10-15 min so that you give enough time for the energy to work on your body (you can drink water if you want so long that your palms are not touching water)
You can go back to your daily routine; work, errands, even workout if you want.

meditation does not make you lazy. In contrary; it will recharge your batteries.

Enjoy the bliss, and.....
ChingChing

Posted by AyyA:: at :: 1:08 AM::

3 Comments:

 Jelly Belly said...

Thank you for your post and thanks for breaking down the technique for us. It actually made it so much easier to meditate at least for me. I have been meditating every night lately and I have to say I think I’m getting better sleep now. So thank you Rabab :)

6:44 AM  

 AyyA said...

I'm glad you liked the post and could actually get something out of it. As you might know writing about this subject is not easy considering the fact that you don't want to bore your readers with too much detail and at the same time you want to give the subject the weight it deserves. If there is any point that you do need more details or you think is not clear please let me know, I have in mind to dedicate a post for some selected Mantras and anther post for the benefits of meditation.

q8tkv
Thanx buddy for the encouragement and I'm sorry I did not check my archives, and did not know about your comment till now.
And I assure you that retiring does not mean the end to me, it's just like changing course in life. I am happy and contented with all my past accomplishments, and looking forward for more inshallah, only in a different direction .
Thanx again.

9:32 PM  

 Peach said...

Goodo! this is nice :)
unfortunatly I don't have the time to read it all right now .. But I can tell I'm gonna love it! and I can also tell I'm gonna have a lot of things to ask u about Rabab .. so get ready ;)
good work ..
I now dub thee officially my Guru :)

2:54 AM  

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