Week 6
Visual Meditations
By learning to meditate on visual objects, with the eyes open, you add a whole new dimension to the versatility and adaptability of meditation. Of course, you can meditate with the eyes open at any time, even if your focus is something 'internal', such as the breath, or something which doesn't require that you see, such as sounds, physical sensations or emotions.
A visual focus, however, can aid focus, interest and surprise to your meditation and makes for an ideal spot-meditation object. Just a minute is enough to drop your tension levels maybe 20%. If you do this several times a day the cumulative effect can be huge.
How to get what you want from meditation
Meditation is easy to do. With a little practice you can soon relax your body and calm your mind to some degree. If you just want to relax and sleep better you can get good results with just a few minutes a day. Other benefits will take more commitment and you will need to be clear about your objectives and set a plan in place to achieve them. Hopefully you will now know that meditation is neither dead easy nor impossibly complicated. The techniques we've learnt over the last six weeks are all fairly simple — and I trust that you've found them easy to understand. If you can apply them repeatedly — and that is the key — their compound effect can lead to very good results.
Even if your aspirations are modest, it is still important to know what you are doing, and to check that you are getting what you want. It's easy to meditate in a rather mindless, automatic fashion, but you'll pay the price for that carelessness. So, to start, ask yourself:
- Why do I want to meditate?
- How much time am I prepared to invest? (Both daily and over the coming months)
- How, where and when will I do it?
The clearer and more detailed your answers are to these questions, the more likely you are to succeed. I suggest you write them down and revisit them several times over several days until you are sure your aspirations have a good practical base. It can be difficult to develop a new skill. Here then is a Basic Plan, to get you started.
- Do the 7 Deep Breaths (or a shortened version, e.g. Three Sighs) at least 10 times a day.
- Do a spot meditation version of the Bodyscan at least 2-3 times a day.
- Know how to 'name the distractions'
- Do a longer breath or bodyscan meditation for at least 8-10 minutes once a day, even if only in bed at night.
This is a total time investment of about 15 minutes a day, and it needn't interrupt anything else you do. The challenge is simply to remember to do it, and to keep doing it.
Try to get into a good routine. Aim to do 'Three Sighs' every time you walk out your door, or get out of the car or into the tram, or when you stand up and start to walk somewhere. Once you get comfortable at this, you may find it naturally continuing into a bodyscan as well.
Make sure you get the most out of this course. You won't understand perfectly how to meditate after six weeks. Make use of the books and cd's available, as well as the course notes and website. Attend Simply Silence or other group sessions or repeat the course some time down the track. Most people need some kind of repetitive guidance for months before they can really do it well on their own.
If you follow a plan like that outlined above it can be enormously valuable for you. Just to be able to relax consciously whenever you need to can turn your life around. It can give you immediate relief from insomnia, migraines, anxiety and panic attacks. It will help you enjoy life more and be more balanced and focused during the day. It will take you a month or two to consolidate this 'Basic Program', but before that has happened you will find that you are naturally moving to the next stage anyway.
Good Luck!
A Meditation Template
| 1. | Preparation |
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| 2. | Come into the present |
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| 3. | Focus |
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| 4. | Go into the detail |
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| 5. | Name the distractions |
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| 6. | Feel the body relaxing |
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| 7. | Emerge slowly |
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