Meditation For Optimal Health

Meditation has become popular because it promotes optimal health, gives the body a profound rest, dissipates stress, sifts through your mind traffic, helps you to think ahead and keeps you organised.
Meditation looks after your body: Every cell in your body has a certain vibrational frequency for good health and vitality. Fear, anger, hostility, etc can cause the vibrational energy in your body to alter - to move toward disharmony or dis-ease. Meditation helps you to return to the vibrational frequencies of harmony and health. The daily practice of meditation will move you away from the harsher emotions of hate, bitterness, spite, and frustration and towards the more gentler emotions of love, compassion, and kindness.
Meditation can help you to unravel problems and find solutions by accessing your creative and/or intuitive self. Meditation can bring you a new level of living and a new experience of your own power; meditation can awaken a series of unexpected abilities to bring happiness and well-being into your life. The continual practice of meditation on a daily basis will bring peace and tranquillity into your life. When you are at peace with yourself and those around you then the world is a much happier place for everyone and goodwill towards all people becomes the logical result. When you reach a deep level of meditation you will begin to experience a deep calm, extraordinary personal power. It is a feeling of absolute peace, feeling centred, focused and clear with an ever deepening expression of strengthening self-love.
The experience of meditation varies with each person depending on their beliefs and attitudes. It must be remembered that if you were brought up in a happy environment that it will be easier for you to enter into a meditative state, but if you were brought up in a fearful environment it may take you longer, people who are fearful / critical are often cautious and therefore are not as willing to let go deeply. To meditate deeply you must let go of the need to analyse and question your experiences in meditation. If you analyse your meditation moment to moment, you will not drop into a deep meditative state. It is imperative that you let go of your need to control the process of meditation.
Meditation should be fun and effortless, look forward to your meditations as you would look forward to meeting an old friend. Let go of the need to control your meditation and allow yourself to just experience it moment to moment. Meditation begins by seeking refuge from stress and tension and ends with feelings of renewed strength, confidence and tranquillity. There are many forms of meditation, this is perhaps the simplest one for the novice.
Breath Meditation Breath meditation is a very simple meditation that you can practice almost anywhere. Sit down in a comfortable position in your favourite armchair. Close your eyes and roll your shoulders backwards to open up your chest cavity. As you breathe in, imagine that you are breathing all the way down to just below your navel. As you breathe, your abdomen will start to expand and contract. If you find that your shoulders are rising and falling, put your hands on your navel and push your abdomen out and in with each breath, to get you into the habit of breathing deeply into your lungs. You may like to imagine, as you breathe in, an arrow pointing downwards until it reaches below your navel, and then turning around for its return journey, as you breathe out. Practice this breathing for twenty minutes a day to develop your meditation skills. Use the first ten minutes to write down your mind traffic and the second ten minutes to focus on your breathing and having a quiet mind. To release your mind traffic, have a pen and paper beside you and when a thought comes into your mind, write it down on the paper. If you need something to focus on, you can use the word calm or relax or let go on your outgoing breath. To finish your meditation, imagine that you are awakening from a wonderful sleep. Wriggle your toes, stretch, open your eyes and then return to your usual activities.
Cheryl Cattarin is a spiritual counsellor with many years experience in natural healing therapies. Teaching people to access their spirituality, inner wisdom and intuition is her life's passion. You can read more about personal and spiritual development at http://www.cherylcattarin.com
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Society, Religion, Spirituality and Meditation

Meditation is widely used in the western world today. As people hear of the benefits of meditation it has travelled the world several times over under various different names. One thing that we have realised though is that countries like India, China and Japan have always been at the forefront of meditation. Most of the new enlightenment techniques that we are just learning now started in Asia, and often centuries ago. As you can imagine though there are a lot of differences between how people live in Asia and how we live in the West today.Our upbringings are different, our lifestyles are different, and the way we learn and understand is totally alien to the people of Asia. This means that the way our countries understand and accept meditation is also slightly different.
In Asia students of meditation learn the concepts by way of parables or stories. In the West we encourage critical thought. We teach our children how to think with rational, logical minds. Telling stories to explain a thought doesn't work. We require facts and scientific data. We lose a lot of the meaning behind meditation because of this, and limit ourselves to the depths that we can reach. There is a meditation society in most countries now. This is often the best place to find meditation courses and seminars local to your region.
Religion
Religion has also adapted to encompass meditation practices into it's daily programme. You can now find meditation exercises adopted to suit Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and many other religions. Some people are still finding resistance using meditation within their specific Church or Temple. While meditation has been accepted by most religions some people are finding it slow to trickle down to the people at the bottom. If you would like to incorporate meditation into your religious practices and are finding it difficult to get information from your local religious centre there are lots of examples and instructions online to show you the best ways to use meditation for your own religious purposes.
Spirituality
Spirituality and the new age movement was one of the first groups of people in the west to adopt and accept meditation practices into their way of life. Spirituality differs from religion in that spiritualists aim to reach a level of happiness in their lives. Religion tends to stick to a set of rules, where as spiritualists will try various different methods to find the path that is right for them. It is a very personal experience and they can use meditation to help them along the path that they have chosen.
It really doesn't matter why you come to meditation. It is such a simple technique to master that you can adapt it to almost any situation.
Brenda Mayhew writes on self development related issues. You can learn more about meditation by visiting her website, Meditation Basics.
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