The Way Spiritual Progression/Development

Meditation and Spiritual self-defence

Meditation:

What is mediation? At its most basic, meditation is a way of training your brain, which is always busy and nearly always active even when your asleep, to have a rest. This sounds straight forward but as with most things requires for you to acknowledge that it is needed and for you to practice. If you were to use your arm in a particular way 24 hours a day, you can all imagine how it would feel, it would either cause you an injury or you’d have an incredibly strong arm, but you would wear it out quicker than is normal, roughly the same applies to your brain.

Some of you will recognise an ability to quiet your brain while doing the ironing, playing golf or fishing, it really depends if you have an activity that enables you to not think about everyday life and take a mental rest, some people do this in some very strange ways. A good way to start to think about the practice of meditation is to listen to some calming music, NOT party music! It should be reasonably easy listening music, obviously this is a personal choice. I recommend that you are sitting in a comfortable chair or position initially for 15 – 30 minutes, preferably feet in contact with the floor, hands resting on your lap in a quiet relaxing environment, this will help when you’re first learning to meditate.

The soft calming music gives your brain something to focus on gently while you allow yourself to sit still, it is common and does work to add a breathing exercise at this time, the one I would recommend is the basic use of three deep breaths. The idea being you inhale a deep breath and exhale slowly and fully, while imagining your releasing the stresses of the day while shrinking to a quiet area internally. Repeat this step again with a second breath, hopefully this will calm you further, and the third breath do the same but with a softer and quieter breath. At this point allow yourself to drift mentally while listening to your chosen quiet music. You may notice that although you set you music volume very low before this point, this now sounds quite loud, this can be adjusted as you practice this exercise more.

I found an interesting exercise for myself when first learning was to set an alarm for 15 – 30 mins, and to then make a note afterwards of how much of that time I was able to not think about anything. What I found was that the more I practiced, the longer I was able to allow my mind to be quiet and rest. This is a good starting place for mediation for any reason. Whether we realise it or not, and believe me a lot of us will not accept it, we are all stressed; it is just the level that varies. Partners, finance, health, families, properties and personal development are all causes of stress, we could just say life. So everybody needs a way to rest their brain, life and death are stressful.

Once you have learned to rest the brain, you can develop your ability of calmness to be around you more of the time, not just when you mediate, it is my experience and observation that once you can do this, almost everything seems less stressful and easier to solve or deal with. All that I have mentioned so far is about guiding yourself and your life. If you carry on with mediation and you wish to look into spiritual progression, then the ability to quiet your brain is absolutely a first step to enable the parts of your mind to work that aren’t normally used.

Your mind will allow higher level communication initially described as your 6th sense to become even stronger and potentially to move onto spiritual communication. Even when this level is reached, it should initially be used for self-guidance and self-progression. At this point you will probably need to be in a spiritual circle working with a teacher and eventually your own guides. After much practice and testing of this level you would probably be able to work in the direction of spiritual mediumship and helping/guiding others.

Spiritual self-defence:

I have been asked about this on many occasions, so here is some guidance. Spiritual self-defence starts with you being aware that a particular situation, person or even an area, can cause you to feel from slightly negative to very uncomfortable. At its most basic there are techniques you can learn to block people’s negative energy, these should be used on people that you have to be around i.e it could be your boss or one of your parents. However a general rule would be, not to be around people that you feel have a negative effect on you. If you feel you have more of a problem in this area than this brief guidance can help you with, you absolutely need to speak to a spiritual teacher, as higher level spiritual defence actually requires individual training or guided protection.