Once again I invite you to explore a range of ways you might bring meditation into your life from Sounds True. Maybe you have tried meditating before and become restless or bored, or it brought up painful feelings or perhaps you have never tried meditation. In the links below you may find a meditation practice (or more than one) that is just right for you.

Research has scientifically proven that meditation is a safe and simple way to balance your physical, emotional, and mental state and its countless values have been known and practiced for thousands of years. More and more doctors promote the benefits of meditation to cure many stress related illnesses.Meditation has been proven to:

• relieve stress
• lower blood pressure and heart rate
• improves the immune system
• improve mood (such as feeling blue or anxious)
• create new neural pathways in your brain leading to better states of mind and wellbeing
• increase the level of healthy neurotransmitters (e.g. serotonin)
• reconnect with yourself
• recognise and release  habitual thinking patterns

The ultimate expression of meditation comes when we can feel all the pains of the world, experience them with mindfulness and equanimity so they dissolve into energy, and then recolor that energy and radiate it out as unconditional love, moment by moment, through every pore of our being.
—Shinzen Young

Are you ready to experience meditation for yourself? Simply select the category on the right that interests you, and you’ll be on your way. “Meditation to Calm the Mind” and “Open to Awareness” offers you eight traditional techniques to settle your thoughts, strengthen your attention, and build a foundation for successful practice.
“Meditation to Soften and Nourish the Heart” includes a series of practices that focus on nurturing qualities like compassion and kindness. “Meditation on the Energy of the Body” shows us how to open up the free flow of life force throughout our being.
“Meditation as ’Just Being’” is less about technique and more about simply welcoming all experience. And perhaps the most practical, “Meditation in Daily Life” helps you bring the fruits of meditation into your everyday activities—while eating, driving, at the office, and so on.

Meditation Exercises Overview:

This interactive guide is designed for people who have heard about meditation but don’t know where to begin. To make it easy for you to learn how to meditate, Sounds True have created five categories, each of which includes exercises you can try right now

Meditation to Calm the Mind and Open to Awareness

• 1: Observing the Breath
• 2: Meditation for Relaxation
• 3: Mantra Meditation
• 4: Centring Prayer
• 5: Meditation on Harmony
• 6: Sufi Meditation
• 7: Walking Meditation
• 8: Meditation for Pain Relief

Meditation to Soften and Nourish the Heart

• 9: Metta— Meditation
• 10: Tonglen— Meditation
• 11: Forgiveness Meditation

Meditation on the Energy of the Body

• 12: Chakra Meditation
• 13: Standing Meditation
• 14: Inner-Body Meditation
• 15: Earth Breathing

Meditation as "Just Being"

• 16: Natural Meditation
• 17: True Meditation

Meditation in Daily Life

• 18: Meditation for Busy People
• 19: Morning Meditation
• 20: Mini Meditations
• 21: Eating Meditation

Tidying up my bookshelves this morning, as one does when one has an assignment due, I stumbled across a book, Wise Women by Susan Cahill, which I flipped open randomly.

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) wrote:

As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones.

Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not act but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a dire for success but a desire to be and to know.

The little virtues arise from our deepest instincts, from a defensive instinct; but in them reason speaks, holds forth, displays its arguments as the brilliant advocate of self-preservation.

The great virtues well up from an instinct in which reason does not speak, an instinct that seems to be difficult to name.

What are your great virtues? What wells up, with no need for reason or logic within you and within our community?

Which virtues appear for you in times of another’s great need when there is no time to think?

And when they well up what happens? How do they find expression in your life?

from: New York Times,  March 17, 2010, 2:34 pm By RONI CARYN RABIN

ZenShui/Getty Images

Deep conversations made people happier than small talk, one study found.

Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”

Dr. Mehl’s study was small and doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the kind of conversations one has and one’s happiness. But that’s the planned next step, when he will ask people to increase the number of substantive conversations they have each day and cut back on small talk, and vice versa.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved 79 college students — 32 men and 47 women — who agreed to wear an electronically activated recorder with a microphone on their lapel that recorded 30-second snippets of conversation every 12.5 minutes for four days, creating what Dr. Mehl called “an acoustic diary of their day.”

Researchers then went through the tapes and classified the conversation snippets as either small talk about the weather or having watched a TV show, and more substantive talk about current affairs, philosophy, the difference between Baptists and Catholics or the role of education. A conversation about a TV show wasn’t always considered small talk; it could be categorized as substantive if the speakers analyzed the characters and their motivations, for example.

Many conversations were more practical and did not fit in either category, including questions about homework or who was taking out the trash, for example, Dr. Mehl said. Over all, about a third of all conversation was ranked as substantive, and about a fifth consisted of small talk.

But the happiest person in the study, based on self-reports about satisfaction with life and other happiness measures as well as reports from people who knew the subject, had twice as many substantive conversations, and only one-third of the amount of small talk as the unhappiest, Dr. Mehl said. Almost every other conversation the happiest person had — 45.9 percent of the day’s conversations — were substantive, while only 21.8 percent of the unhappiest person’s conversations were substantive.

Small talk made up only 10 percent of the happiest person’s conversations, while it made up almost three times as much –- or 28.3 percent –- of the unhappiest person’s conversations.

Next, Dr. Mehl wants to see if people can actually make themselves happier by having more substantive conversations.

“It’s not that easy, like taking a pill once a day,” Dr. Mehl said. “But this has always intrigued me. Can we make people happier by asking them, for the next five days, to have one extra substantive conversation every day?”

__________________________________________

So…why do we feel happier after a deep conversations?

1. Because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and
2. because we are social creatures who want and need to connect with other people.

So this week try doing two things:

Decide that you will do your best to avoid colluding in the superficial banter that seems to have become part and parcel of daily interaction for at least 1 or 2 conversations a day.  When you ask “how are you?” invite the person you asked to tell you more. If they say they are busy at work ask another “how, what, or when” question.

1. Stop what you are doing and listen…no multitasking when having a deep conversation.
2. Ask yourself: Who will I be speaking with today and what are the conversations with these people that matter most?

Try this practice for the next week and see if the happiness research bears out in your life.

I’d like to share this  response that Ann Weiser Cornell wrote recently in her Weekly Tips and Support Newsletter.

“Focusing is a simple matter of holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to something which is directly experienced but not yet in words.” –from the introduction to The Focusing Student’s and Companion’s Manual by Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin.

Something which is directly experienced but not yet in words? What is that?
Well, that’s what we call a “felt sense,” and it’s really the heart of the matter.

A “felt sense” is what a problem or a situation “feels like” when you pause and get a sense of the whole thing. It’s not your usual emotions or thoughts–which can get stuck and keep you going around in circles–but rather it’s fresh, immediate, and often contains new information or a new perspective.

People are not used to pausing and getting felt senses. If more people would do this, I believe the world would be quite different!
Focusing starts with that pause…

Realize that true happiness lies within you.

Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside.

Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug.

Og Mandino

As a motivational speaker and executive coach, Caroline Adams Miller knows a few things about using mental exercises to achieve goals. But last year, one exercise she was asked to try took her by surprise. Every night, she was to think of three good things that happened that day and analyze why they occurred. That was supposed to increase her overall happiness. "I thought it was too simple to be effective," said Miller, 44, of Bethesda. Md. "I went to Harvard. I’m used to things being complicated." This article shares more about the growing body of research that is beginning to show that happiness can be learned.

http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=2777

~~~~

Be The Change:

Make a practice each day of silent gratitude for the good that happens.

About this talk

Why do people succeed? Is it because they’re smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.

About Richard St. John

A self-described average guy who found success doing what he loved, Richard St. John spent more than a decade researching the lessons of success — and distilling them into 8 words, 3 minutes…

[ted id="70"]

I have a spiritual practice. Indeed, grammatically I should write I have a few spiritual practices. Why? Well, I am a pragmatic woman.

I want a practice that is given plenty of opportunity for expression in my daily life. Both through stillness and movement. Through silence and voice.

I want a practice that helps me feel good about myself – not just my mind feeling stroked – one where my body feels good about itself somehow. Both emotionally well and physically well.

I want a practice that can hold my paradoxes – that of wanting to grow and transform and wanting complete acceptance of myself all while “letting go”. A crazy-making fully-accepting, releasing of self through the attention to self.

For me this is a felt process of becoming. By felt I mean that I experience it in my body. The body becomes the bridge to Presence, to the transcendent experience. I don’t write “transcendence” because so far I have experienced fleeting experiences. Wonderful and momentary. I unfold gently and with inner wisdom at my own pace. I sense for what is alive in the here and now. I feel at the edge for needs my attention, what is new, fresh and vital. I learn to trust myself. I learn to watch and be with myself in a caring way. I learn to hold all of me with the same acceptance.

Here are some of my favourite quotes from my paths of practice which help me to stay connected to what really works for me. Mindfulness, Focusing, valuing oneself, transformation and peace. This is what I practice – literally. And practice is not the same as “this is what I do and am good at.” It is simply what I pay attention to and what I teach. Mindfulness and Focusing as a way to find one’s own unique path while joyfully watching everyone walk their own paths.

Buddhism

“There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centred on the body.” Gautama Buddha

Focusing & Spirituality

Experience is a myriad richness.
We think more than we can say.
We feel more than we can think.
We live more than we can feel.
And there is much more still.

“You need to stand again in your own experiencing – in your own felt ongoingness, which is that intricate complexity inside of life – to put into the world what hasn’t been said yet that you are carrying from your particular experiencing” Eugene Gendlin

“A subtle, bodily feeling with vague meanings that brings new, clearer meanings involving a transcendent growth process.” Elfie Hinterkopf

How do I live each day so that a felt consciousness of living in a Presence can grow and deepen right within the experiences of daily life? The habit of felt sensing (Focusing) is a practical, physical way to open my body’s consciousness to the transcendent giftedness of everything, including events that threaten biological life. Living itself can be prayer. Our body itself, which we so identify with mortality, is meant to be our conscious bridge into immortality. It is the body process that creates an experiential faith. The habit of felt sensing gives us the body-feel for how in the practical order we can live connected in this world of gift, no matter what happens to us. Rev. Ed McMahon

You – as a gift to the world

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will never have it. Martha Graham, American dancer and choreographer

Spiritual Transformation

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation. J. Krishnamurti

Peace as spiritual practice

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart. Unknown

A few weeks ago I did an exercise from Mark Silver’s called “finding your Jewel”. This exercise is about finding out what is your unique gift in this world. In business there are thousands of massage therapists, life coaches bloggers, for example, but what is it about you that will attract particular clients.

Mark believes that  what our heart most deeply yearns, or thirsts for is the very same quality that our clients yearn or thirst for.

So, following his guided mp3 I sensed into what my heart yearns for. What came first were all the qualities that I am told are my strengths and that help my clients; clarity, insight, support, intuition.

Then, inviting still more. Going into the more vulnerable heart-felt space the word acceptance came. I yearn for acceptance; just as I am and just as I unfold and grow in the light of life’s experiences. Then, inviting still more I knew I hit upon a deep inner truth when the word trust came.

At first, my mind says, “Of course you want trust, who doesn’t want trust, how can you live in a world without trust! Obvious!”

Then, more came.  I yearn to trust my own heart. I yearn to trust my own judgement enough to be able to hear how other’s experience life. I yearn to trust my own reactions and emotions. Not to be swept away by them but to sense into what they are trying to tell me and paying attention to that responsively. Now I know when I have touched in to something essentially true for me when a sheen of tears come and my heart turns. TRUST & ACCEPTANCE.

Now, I have been sitting on this post for a few weeks. Not quite sure what comes next and yet sensing its not quite finished either. And today I saw a quote in Davina’s blog Shades of Crimson.

“Heaven and Earth can never meet as long as you hold even one person outside of your heart.” from Devrah Laval, The Magic Doorway into the Divine.

Davina asked herself “When a person can’t even hold themselves in their heart, how could they possibly attract their dreams?”

When a person can’t even hold themselves in their heart, then what?

How many people do you know who can truly hold themselves in their heart? All of themselves? In Davina’s blog her life coach asks why should she be in a lifeboat if her ship is sinking.  This brought Davina closer to the qualities she admires about herself. What about you -would you be able to let of all the parts of yourself  on to the lifeboat? Would you be able to accept all of you and bring them on board? Or would you turn some parts away? Or maybe you might not even notice some parts that need to get on?

And then who would be left on the lifeboat? Would that actually be “you” at all? Or just the you you have been told to be by your culture, your parents, your school teachers, priests, counsellors, and your inner critic to name just the obvious sources of advice and admonition we receive as we grow up. Would you really be “living” if all of you didn’t come on board.

For me, this raises the question what do our shadow parts bring to us as a gift? Do they bring energy, vulnerability, compassion? What is the jewel hidden inside our judgement of them? Why do these parts we shy away from, deny existance know they should be on the lifeboat?

How does it feel to even be considering bringing them all on board – and who is the part that thinks it gets to decide who stays behind and who boards?

When you can’t even hold all of yourself in your heart, then what does that mean for how you live “the all” of your life?

I am hearing so much talk about the how tough times are getting. Underneath all of this talk is a subtle message about reining in our lives: our spending, our expectations, our lifestyles.

However I say NO! Let’s look at this differently. Rather than shrinking we can THRIVE!

No, I’m not advocating new age positive affirmations that will miraculously turn your life around if you say them often enough, loud enough and with great gusto.

Neither am I advocating wildly ignoring the environment around us. We probably will know people who will experience the harsh reality of job displacement or retrenchment, loss of a regular income and the related personal and relationship challenges that come with that.

BUT, what if we perceive 2009 as a year of recalibration rather than recession. This is an opportunity to REVIEW, RECOGNISE, RE-FOCUS, RELEASE, RE-SET & RE-CALIBRATE. We can review the highs and lows of 2008 exploring our journey and the meanings we have made from it. We can recognise where we expend our time and energy and how aligned that is to our what we really want. We can pay attention to what’s working – and what’s no longer serving us. We can re-focus on core essentials and strengths. These essentials give us pleasure, confidence, outcomes, joy and integrity. These are underpinned by our values which become our new focus and motivators.  We can release our blocks to action, our limiting beliefs clearing a way for the new and fresh to enter our lives. We can re-set our compass bearings setting a course which takes us to where we CHOOSE to go. We can consistently re-calibrate by committing to staying focused, paying attention to our daily intentions and actions through self-awareness and keeping an open mind to what needs changing or adjusting.

The biggest variable in how this year goes for you is

WHAT YOU DO!

Personal responsibility and taking action is going to be what makes the difference between a year you can celebrate and a year you may wonder what happened – it just slid by or a year you’d rather forget.

Now, I’m not saying that we, literally, bring everything into our lives by our thoughts. Nonsense. People don’t bring earthquakes, hurricanes, accidents, and the like upon themselves. No!

I am saying the only thing we are in control of  is our intentions, our reactions and being a living expression of our core values.

And by paying attention to these we can choose to have a certain quality of life, our inner life holds our bearings no matter what is going on with our outer-life. We can choose to have a certain quality of relationships  and we can choose to spend more time on the things that make us feel great. If we are doing things that seem unavoidable, like driving the kids to school we have the choice to explore ‘the how of doing that.”  We can choose to recognise the underlying value we are meeting (contributing to the kids well-being & safety for example), and from that place we can find plenty of ways to meet those values (form a group to share the driving, pay a teenager to escort the kids on the school bus, move closer to the school so they can walk etc.)

The bottom line is we only have 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.  How do we  spend them? How do you want to spend them?

How are you spending them now? What percentage either brings you joy or meets your values?

Curious about how to thrive not survive in 2009?

1. REVIEW

What was great? Mapping the peaks & valleys of 2008. Find meaning in what happened.

2. RECOGNISE

What are you already saying “yes” to? What are your “yes” opportunities?  What can you say “no” to? Where is your energy being drained or displaced? Where are you expending your time and energy? How much of your time and energy is actually supporting your deepest values and aspirations?

3. RE-FOCUS

What do you want to focus on? Strengthen your strengths through identifying your core values and deepest passions.

4. RELEASE

What do you need to let go of in order to allow the entry of the new? Beliefs? Relationships? Busyness? Habits? Explore and embrace your blocks to transformation. When we listen to ourselves with non-judgmental curiosity what one always finds at the bottom of the barrel is precious life-going-forward energy.

5. RE-SET

Reset your compass bearings for thriving. Making choice-full-conscious decisions for self-care and growth. Once you’ve listened to all the concerns and worries of any specific inner voice then you can begin to listen for what that voice, that part, does want – what it’s passionate about. Experience the sense of wholeness and ease that comes when your joy and passion for living are lined up with the intentions that hold your hopes and dreams.

6. RE-CALIBRATE

Practice a simple technique for consistently checking in with what your body knows about how you are tracking; for me this is Focusing, for you it might be mediation, listening to your inner voice while watching the ocean, surfing, running, dancing. Learn to re-calibrate with sensitivity not reactivity, building your capacity for self-empathy, self-trust and emotional resilience.

Thriving is a choice for life ~ your life.

I do not believe we can be truly empathic with others without embodying self- empathy first. 

Yes, I have drawn your attention to “embodied self-empathy”.

I have just finished co-hosting a 4 day Focusing residential and two of the trainers-in-training ran a workshop on the caring-feeling presence (from Biospiritual Focusing).

I really got an embodied sense of how my body knows when it is completely and wholly accepting (my words for describing self-empathy) of all of me and I have noticed that since that workshop I have been so excited to bring my attention back to this embodiment. It would come as no surprise to any of you, I am sure, that the more connected I am with this, my embodied Presence, the more able I am to self-empathise beyond words into my deeper pain and living experiencing AND then the  more I am able to hold a caring-wholly-accepting presence with others.

In my trainings I integrate Focusing into the NVC training by going to feelings before observations. I use, Ann Weiser Cornell’s saying hello, or acknowledging of the feelings and then a sensing into what our body knows about this. Once these feelings feel heard by my inner self then I find I have the space and inclination to make an observation that is more objective and leads to agreement.  Then, later, before making requests I use Focusing to “vision” what my body knows and can show me about how it is when my needs are met. From this space my request is more gentle and less dependent on the other person agreeing to it.

One other way I use Focusing is by using metaphors for some of the feelings. For example, when I feel “disappointed” it may be not such a big thing, when my friend feels “disappointed” it actually feels like a deep pain to her. So if she hears me say I am disappointed she interprets a higher level of pain than I may actually feel. When she tells me she is disappointed I may not realise the depth of her pain. This comes from Gene Gendlin’s TAE process and the differentiation between our public knowing and shared understanding of a word and our own individual bodily knowing of that word in our particular context.  A metaphor however, gives the listener an insight into my inner landscape. The other reason I like metaphors is that the listener doesn’t seem to take on board that they are the source of disappointment in the same way.

To be honest I am gradually coming to some sense of realising that my inner relationship with myself is critical to my NVC practice – much more so than I had realised when I started learning and practising NVC. I am moving towards developing a more extensive workshop on connecting with our inner caring-feeling presence and embodying it through a variety of experiential activities. This seems like a wonderful foundational training. The first step towards inner peace. Then, my instinct tells me the listening and expressing in NVC will flow from our inner world.

Still ruminating on this…but here are some of the ways I have heard people describe embodied self-empathy:

caring-feeling presence

radical acceptance of everything

having a good relationship with yourself

self-acceptance

Presence

spacious non-judgment

poignant stillness