Tag Archives: meditation

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How to Become a Spiritual Warrior

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As a follow up to my previous Blog Post ‘The Spiritual Warrior’, I would now like to show you how to set yourself in motion along the Path.

Firstly you will need a clean space, free from disturbance and with a good ambience. I suggest you pick a time in the morning just after rising and having cleansed your body. Evening times may also work if you are not too tired after the days work.
Sit crossed legged on a suitably padded but firm cushion on the floor. Place the right hand on top of the left with the thumbs lightly touching each other forming an oval resting on the thighs just below the level of the navel, or just simply rest them on the thighs.
Keep an erect spine as if pushing the crown of the head towards the sky.
Rest the tongue up against the roof of the pallet and just behind the top teeth.
Relax the belly.
You can keep the eyes slightly open and in a soft focus neither trying to see through the eyes or allowing them to become bleary.
Allow yourself to sit for a few minutes in order to allow your mind to settle down.
Then bring your attention to the Crown of your head, pause for 2 minutes, then down to the Throat, again pause, and finally to the Heart Centre, located at the center of the chest behind the breast bone. Here you can hold your attention for 10 to 20 minutes.
If the mind wanders away from the object of concentration, the Heart Centre, then simply notice and bring it back to the Heart.
Keep the breathing completely natural.

During this sitting period try not to fidget or move unnecessarily.

Before you begin and when you finish your practice, place your two hands together at your Heart, and bow whilst at your seat, to the Divinity within all beings.

By bringing your attention back again and again to the object of concentration, you develop a strong Mindfulness which remembers it’s object of concentration.

The Mind will eventually come to enjoy the euphoric experience of being still in this heightened state of awareness. The first steps on the road to becoming a real life Spiritual Warrior whose opponent is one’s own miss-conceptions and negativity.

Enjoy,

Granville x

Yoga Articles

Daily Practice

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Crescent MoonSo what do we mean by Daily Life Practice? Well when we do our meditation in our regular schedule and we experience the benefits of these regular sessions, we may ask ourselves how to continue growing and developing in this way when we are in everyday situations that challenge our composure and good vibes. We may spend many hours in calmness and very happy with our achievement and ability to do this. Of course this is a good place to be in and I’d life runs smoothly then our peace can be maintained quite happily. But is this the way our life is and also it may be good to ask ourselves is meditation just about being calm and peaceful. I think if you ponder on this you may feel that becoming peaceful is only a part of the benefits but not the totality of it. We remain calm and peaceful when the root causes that can trigger our restlessness are eradicated from our consciousness. Ok, if we are not thinking of a particular situation that has previously upset us, then for the moment we can be peaceful. What happens though when something happens in our life, maybe just a thought or an encounter with someone who we take a particular dislike to, then our peace can be disturbed and so here we go again back on the treadmill of frustration and disturbance. All our composure can be lost just like that in an instant.
We could say that our meditation is quieting, our meditation is purifying, our meditation is revealing and it can be all of these and much more. And if we use of medittion sessions as a firm of contemplation then what do we do with the insights that can be revealed to us at these times? If for instance a particular point of view is clarified, if a solution occurs to us in relation to a particular problem, in other if some insight arises during our meditation, Fi we take notice and act on it or do we simply notice it but carry on with our ‘wrong attitude or understanding’ as before? Daily life practice is the ability to live our truth even though it may involve some unvomfortableness in order to effect this. If we do not live our life in this way then conflicting minds are present within us and we become ever more disjointed and alienated from our intuition and sence of following the Heart.
If we experience these conflicting minds then we need to look and measur whether our daily life reflects our meditative experience. In other words we need to ‘walk the talk’.

Yoga Articles

Why meditate?

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Sitting in Full Lotus

This is very often a question I’m asked and often people who have been practicing yoga for many years do not really understand the potentiality and real purpose of meditation. Well meditation can mean very different things to different people because the very fact that we consider or ponder a course of action is still meditation. But in the yogic sense it means to turn the mind towards those things that lead to liberation or freedom rather than those things that lead to greater entanglement, miss-understanding and eventually lead us to sorrow. So when we look at it in this light then we can see that to turn our attention towards those things that liberate the mind, we need to know what those things are. Those topics are usually the backbone of any traditional religion and can be grouped into 3 categories of :

1. Wisdom

2. Morality

3. Concentration

This may seem very formal but if we break it all down it makes sense because without these 3 categories, which again can be sub-divided into more headings then we start to uncover a way of behaviour that can guide us along in a specific direction. This then is what we call a path and hopefully the path we follow will lead us away from miss-understanding and towards a correct view of the way things really are.

In other words meditation is a science of the Mind. That is what meditation is. But not a cold interpretation of what Mind maybe but a true experience of what the Mind truly is. If we continually identity with those things or mental imaginings that are not truly ourselves then we will be continually disappointed and seek solace from outside ourselves in different ways. When true solace and refuge lie within our own hearts. We just have to realise it.

So why meditate? Because if we don’t consider and ponder our point of view, our way of acting and understanding the world and ourselves then how can we truly know fact from fiction and are we really satisfied with someone else’s understanding of how life is? We need to become a rock and to be a rock we need the foundation of understanding that comes from our own experience and knowledge tried and tested in the furnace of everyday living. And that’s why we meditate.