Just incredibly cool. I discovered quite viscerally, when I was training in the Flower of Life, that working with this seminal geometrical form is very, very powerful. This meditation video is really well done. Enjoy!
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Yantras come from the more than 2000 years old tantric tradition. A yantra is the yogic equivalent of the Buddhist mandala.
Sri yantra is called the mother of all yantras because all other yantras derive from it.
The meditation tools provided herein work for me. That doesn't mean they'll work for you.
Meditation is, by definition, simple. You don't really need much, if anything. Simply sitting quietly is meditation. A walk in the park is meditation. But, for me, the aim of meditation is to really slow my brain frequency, and shut down the beta frequency; the chatter, or "monkey mind." For this, I find certain auditory and visual cues helpful. A Sri Yantra (see above) is a very powerful visual, but a lit candle will do. Tibetan bowls make a nice, soothing soundtrack, which offers the added benefit of having no easily memorized and anticipated melody. I also find sitar music very powerful. My mother had a live Ravi Shankar album that I practically wore out, in my youth.
Probably the most effective and targeted meditation music I've come across is from Master Charles Cannon and his Synchronicity method. His website is back up, after being taken down following the tragedy in Mumbai, which resulted in deaths and injuries of some Synchronicity members traveling there. Master Charles is both a mystic and a musician, whose audio tracks are designed to very quickly move the brain into a primarily alpha, theta, or even delta brainwave pattern. His website offers some sample audio tracks, as well as an online meditation room, providing an assortment of music tracks and a moving mandala presentation. I highly recommend taking advantage of this experience, which is free on the Synchronicity site. I've listened to a lot of high tech meditation audio, through the years. None of it has impressed me like his. It does exactly what it says it will do.
The use of scent can also be very helpful. By this, I mean natural scents, not chemical fragrance. Essential oils, resins burned on charcoal, or prepared incense made from only natural sources. The primary meditation scents are sandalwood and frankincense. This is because they slow the breathing and heart rate and assist you physically into a meditative state. Again, this physiological response can only be achieved by the use of high quality, natural sources.
I share these tools now, because finding and holding our center is of increasing importance as we undergo the current global changes. Enjoy.
Why I Meditate
I sit because the Dadaists screamed on Mirror Street/I sit because the Surrealists ate angry pillows/I sit because the Imagists breathed calmly in Rutherford and Manhattan/I sit because 2400 years/I sit in America because Buddha saw a Corpse in Lumbini/I sit because the Yippies whooped up Chicago's teargas skies once/I sit because No because/I sit because I was unable to trace the Unborn back to the womb/I sit because it's easy/I sit because I get angry if I don't/I sit because they told me to/I sit because I read about it in the Funny Papers/I sit because I had a vision also dropped LSD/I sit because I don't know what else to do like Peter Orlovsky/I sit because after Lunacharsky got fired and Stalin gave Zhdanov a special tennis court I became a rootless cosmopolitan/I sit inside the shell of the old Me/I sit for world revolution
Homage to the Perfection of Wisdom, the Lovely, the Holy!
Avalokita, The Holy Lord and Bodhisattva, was moving in the deep course of the Wisdom which has gone beyond. He looked down from on high, He beheld but five heaps, and he saw that in their own-being they were empty.
Here, Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness.
Here, Sariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness; they are not produced or stopped, not defiled or immaculate, not deficient or complete.
Therefore, Sariputra, in emptiness there is no form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness; No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; No forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables or objects of mind; No sight-organ element, and so forth, until we come to: No mind-consciousness element; There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so forth, until we come to: there is no decay and death, no extinction of decay and death. There is no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path. There is no cognition, no attainment and non-attainment.
Therefore, Sariputra, it is because of his non-attainment that a Bodhisattva, through having relied on the Perfection of Wisdom, dwells without thought-coverings. In the absence of thought-coverings he has not been made to tremble, he has overcome what can upset, and in the end he attains to Nirvana.
All those who appear as Buddhas in the three periods of time fully awake to the utmost, right and perfect Enlightenment because they have relied on the Perfection of Wisdom.Therefore one should know the prajnaparamita as the great spell, the spell of great knowledge, the utmost spell, the unequalled spell, allayer of all suffering, in truth - for what could go wrong? By the prajnaparamita has this spell been delivered. It runs like this:
Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all-hail!
Hat-tip to Unexplained Mysteries for noting this article on brain function and meditation. A recent study concludes that mindful observation of our darker emotions advances our healing process.
If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.
Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”
Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works.
I have written and spoken a good deal about the use of active denial as a spiritual practice. Most recently, in my review of the movie "The Secret," but also here. I have come down hard against "Secret" mania, not because it is the worst offender, but because of the viral nature of the message. It's cleverly packaged pop-spirituality, but the message is a retread of one many of us grew up with: "Don't dwell."
As I wrote in that review:
I nearly fell out my chair when I heard "The Secret's" Bob Proctor advise that when you're feeling bad you should simply put on some music, because it would change your mood, and to "block out everything but that [happy] thought." Try that if you're clinically depressed. Just try it. Or if you are recovering from childhood sexual abuse. Or if you are one of our returning veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Even the joyous sounds of Steve Martin's banjo won't make you happy, and to suggest that it's that simple is insulting. And if you could block out all that pain, it would be anything but healthy.
In her appearance on "Oprah," Lisa Nichols explained how she addresses people who want to talk about their personal history or "story." Her response is "I don't want to know it, because you've used it to keep yourself where you are." So word to the wise, if you want someone to help you heal and come complete with your painful history, Lisa Nichols is probably not the appropriate facilitator for you.
Many years ago, as a communications student, I was taught that the most important communication tool is listening. When I started working professionally as a reader and healing facilitator, the importance of well-honed listening skill was really brought home for me. I found that there are readings in which I really say very little, but which facilitate enormous transformation in the client. I allow my guides to direct me in a process of transmitting the messages I receive; then listening, breathing, and experiencing what is happening in a client's body when they speak their truth. In this way I am able to help them process and clear. The longer I do this work, the less I run my suck. People need to be heard, and in most of our daily lives, we are not.
The message of this fascinating bit of brain research is that listening to ourselves -- to the streaming of our own thoughts -- is also crucial to our emotional health. More importantly, we need to acknowledge and name our feelings; even and especially the ones we don't like.
When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region—an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences—became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.
. . .
“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said of his study, which is detailed in the current issue of Psychological Science.
This runs exactly counter to the ideas advanced in "The Secret" and other new age staples on positive thought. For years we all heard that focusing on our negative thoughts and feelings would exacerbate them and cause us to "magnetize" more negative experiences. The suggested remedy was to focus on the positive, thereby "manifesting" positive results. Never mind that our ideas of positive and negative are, not only subjective, but entrenched in a dualistic conception of life and the universe. In other words, this splitting function actually keeps us from experiencing wholeness, or "one-ness."
Suppressing and denying also keeps us from processing and healing our painful emotions, as this study graphically illustrates. Thinking only happy thoughts will not cause our unpleasant emotions to atrophy and disappear. It simply drives them underground. (It can also cause them to play out in our bodies, but that's a subject for another discussion.) It is actually acknowledging the darker feelings rattling around the subconscious, that reduces their effect on our overall emotional state.
Emphasis on the word "may." The article so entitled is heavily caveated. First the good news:
Yoga's postures, controlled breathing and meditation may work together to help ease brains plagued by anxiety or depression, a new study shows.
Brain scans of yoga practitioners showed a healthy boost in levels of the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) immediately after a one-hour yoga session. Low brain levels of GABA are associated with anxiety and depression, the researchers said.
"I am quite sure that this is the first study that's shown that there's a real, measurable change in a major neurotransmitter with a behavioral intervention such as yoga," said lead researcher Dr. Chris Streeter, assistant professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Now, for the bad news: None of the research subjects actually suffered from these or other psychological disorders.
[Zindel Segal, chairman of psychotherapy and a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto] also pointed out that all of the people in the study were mentally healthy, and clinical depression and anxiety disorders involve more than the "daily fluctuations in stress and tension" that healthy individuals are prone to.
The control group used in the study sat and read -- a rather cerebral activity and far from stress reducing depending on what one reads. The study did not compare different types of physical activities, or even other forms of meditation. Segal again:
"We know that yoga can have a profound effect" on smoothing out life's daily ups and downs, Segal said. "But so does working out on a Stairmaster for an hour."
On the plus side, we now know a little more about why yoga is really good for healthy people.
