Meditation

Each thought creates your reality. You are the master of your destiny and like an artist you get to create your own life, create your thoughts and decisions. You alone can give your life new perspective, and bring enthusiasm and the joy for living.

You can achieve all that your mind imagines. Welcome abundance in your life, send healing to your body, allow peace and happiness to replace depression or despair. Heal old wounds & get rid of stress. When your mind is calm, what seemed 'problems' become easier to solve and obstacles become moveable.

Meditation benefits everyone both physically and psychologically, decreasing anxiety and depression, aiding wellbeing and improving the memory, reducing insomnia and achieving relaxation awareness.

Through Meditation you can:

• Become intuitively aware of who you really are beyond the superficial labels of modern society
• Experience the core energy of your being which is peaceful, positive and powerful
• Direct that power into our abilities to create, communicate and co-operate with others
• Discern the real meaning of life and your unique purpose in this lifetime (from Relax7)

Some people meditate to achieve a higher state of consciousness, to gain greater focus or self-awareness, or simply to try and learn how to relax and let go of stress. In most cases, we initiate a state of stress in our lives ourselves by worrying about things that 'might happen' or looking at worse case scenarios. We learn worry from an early age from home, school and work life! - it seems to be very programmed in a lot of peoples lives.

We can't prevent all situations that come to haunt us, but looking deeply within ourselves can bring the understanding on how to reverse a negative situation into a more positive outcome. The difficulty of living our lives and giving love and compassion and then letting go of the outcome - whatever it may be, is a hard task as we tend to cling to the worry of "what would happen to US if what we worry about actually happens in a situation or to someone - how would WE cope?

It would be better then, to look at what is around us at the present moment. The past can't be changed, although we can learn from past events and the future is unknown but can be thought of positively if we take on any lessons from the past. (Spiritually speaking, we come here to learn lessons in this life and to rectify past actions that won't benefit us now. Often we find certain difficult situations re-occur in different areas of our life and until we come to grips with learning how to deal with these situations, they will continue in some way or another. Worry and stress can easily spiral out of control.) The important bit is the here and now, getting that right each day, leads to a positive tomorrow, helping us participate fully and enthusisatically in our own lives. By using meditation, our 'programmed' mind can let go and we can explore our life experiences and situations more fully and in a calm and quiet manner without the everyday incidentals influencing it.

Many religions practice meditation and usually this would be in silence and with the emphasis on the breath - in other words the synchronisity of breathing in and out, almost into a trance state - this in itself would bring about a deep state of relaxation.

Too many problems to unravel?... People often say they can't meditate or relax because their minds are too busy and too many thoughts are flying around their head. Guided or visualisation meditation can help as this sort of meditation will lead you by words and music to 'visualise' yourself in different scenarios - in this way, your brain does not have time to think of anything else except following instructions - this therefore stops distractions and brings you into a near dream state whilst relaxing you and inducing clearer thought.

For meditation done in silence or to background music, the mind needs to be trained to allow outside sounds and abstract thoughts to be quickly acknowledged and then let go and not investigate the thought flow. In this sort of meditation, you would notice how busy your mind can really be; and almost every thought your could think of will come running in! with more practice, being able to ignore the distractions will lead to deep relaxation and calm, a clearer mind and stress relief.

Our meditation evenings with small groups or one to one have taken the form of both guided meditation and quiet meditation with instructions on how to use the breath - this can then be practiced at home - even just 10 minutes is enough to revive both your mind and being.