Friday, December 14, 2007

Practising Meditation at Work

With tight deadlines, performance reviews, and the threat of downsizing, today's highly competitive work environment places extraordinary pressures on employees and managers alike.

Even practitioners of traditionally stable occupations like teaching and medicine are experiencing unprecedented work stress. But whatever your job situation, you can reduce your stress by following these tips for meditating while you work:
  • Each morning before you leave, you can reinforce your resolve to stay as calm and relaxed as possible. If you can, meditate briefly before you head out the door to set the tone of the day.
  • Have lunch with people you like or have a quiet lunch alone. You can also take a walk or do some other kind of exercise during your break; a great way to relieve your stress.
  • Instead of hanging around the coffee machine and adding caffeine to your long list of stressors, use your breaks to meditate quietly in your office or cubicle.
  • Once every hour or two take a few minutes to stop what you're doing, take a few deep breaths, follow your breathing, and get up and stretch or walk around.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Initiating the Flow of Unconditional Love Through Meditation

The following steps will allow you to initiate the flow of unconditional love, also known as loving-kindness through meditation. To distinguish this kind of love from conditional love, imagine the love of a good mother for her baby. She gives her love freely and unconditionally, without expecting anything in return except her baby's happiness and well-being.

As with all the meditations, you may want to begin with five or ten minutes of a mindfulness practice like counting or following your breaths in order to deepen and stabilize your concentration. Once you get the knack, though, the cultivation of loving kindness itself can be an excellent way to develop concentration.

1. Begin by closing your eyes, taking a few deep breaths, and relaxing your body a little with each exhalation.

2. Imagine the face of someone who loved you very much as a child and whose love moved you deeply.

3. Remember a time when this person showed his or her love for you and you really took it in.

4. Notice the gratitude and love this memory evokes in your heart. Allow these feelings to well up and fill your heart.

5. Gently extend these feelings to this loved one. You may even experience a circulation of love between the two of you as you give and receive love freely.

6. Allow these loving feelings to overflow and gradually suffuse your whole being. Allow yourself to be filled with love.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Learn to Live with Meditation-Born Awareness.

Learn to live more superconsciousiy. This means to live with meditation-born awareness. Try to make the peace you experience in meditation the basis of your objective experience of life. Do not let the meditative peace slip between your fingers the moment you find the winds of worldly duties again hit you.

Do not let the insistent demands people make of you blow away your calm self-awareness. Never let others define you in their terms. You should live by what you believe and know of yourself, inwardly. Your abiding reality is the peace, love, and joy you have experienced in your own soul.

Meditation will sharpen your concentration and develop your will power. Obstacles of many kinds will simply disappear, and you will be able to accomplish in minutes what in the past might have taken you hours, days, or even weeks to do. By practicing meditation, many had found that by coming to work with a clear mind they could solve problems on which others would have spent days.

For intuition, the natural fruit of meditation has one supreme advantage over the reasoning faculty: It provides inner certainty. The rational mind can never be quite sure of anything. The best it ever does is decide on which, out of a variety of possibilities, seems the best choice. Great discoveries and accomplishments are the consequence, always, of some measure of intuition.

Learn to look at life more with a sense of unity. Do not try to analyze everything. Obviously, there are situations where analysis is necessary, but even then, cling to a deeper consciousness of the interrelationship of all things. Be guided, above all, by inner joy. The more you let yourself be guided superconsciousiy, the more you will feel joy in everything you do. You will reach the point of understanding that, if that quiet, inner joy is missing, anything you contemplate doing were better left undone. And when inner joy is present, it will be your way of knowing for a certainty that what you contemplate is right and good.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Meditation and the Third Eye

There is a huge significance in concentrating at the point between the eyebrows. The point between the eyebrows is known as the Christ center. It is here that the meditator, when deeply concentrated, beholds the spiritual eye or third eye, a phenomenon that has been known since ancient times.

Legends thousands of years old describe this third eye as being located right in the center of the forehead. Artists often depict it as a half moon. Modern scholars dismiss the entire concept as fanciful, or as merely symbolic. But then, few scholars know much about meditative practices; the understanding they admire is intellectual.

The spiritual eye is a reflection of the astral light in the medulla oblongata. The Christ center, where it resides, represents the positive pole of the medulla which is the seat of ego-consciousness. When this light is beheld perfectly, it takes the form of a five-pointed star set in a field of deep blue or violet light, and circled by a shining ring of gold. In a state of ecstasy, the consciousness penetrates the spiritual eye and enters the inner realms.

The consciousness of most human beings is centered in the medulla oblongata. Everything they do, think, and perceive, being centered in ego-awareness, originates from this point of awareness. The consciousness of enlightened beings, on the other hand, is centered in the Christ center between the eyebrows. All their actions, thoughts, and perceptions originate from that point.

It is good to deepen your awareness of the medulla, since it is the point through which consciousness and energy must pass in order to reach the Christ center. The goal, however, is to reach the Christ center. To remain blocked in the medulla would be to feed ego-consciousness. In meditation, concentrate at a point midway between the eyebrows. Raise your gaze upward—not crossing the eyes, but focusing them on a point somewhat beyond the forehead at about the distance of your thumb when you hold your arm extended above you. However, don't be too exact in this matter. The important thing is that your attention be focused at the point between the eyebrows.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Finding a Deeper Sense of Purpose through Meditation

When you practice making the shift from doing and thinking to being (living in the moment) you discover how to align yourself with a deeper current of meaning and belonging. You may get in touch with personal feelings and aspirations that have long remained hidden from your conscious awareness. Or you may connect with a more universal source of purpose and direction; what some people call the higher self or inner guidance.

As your meditation gradually opens you to the subtlety and richness of each fleeting but irreplaceable moment, you may naturally begin to see through the veil of appearances to the sacred reality at the heart of things, and you eventually may come to realize that the very same sacred reality is actually who you are in your own heart of hearts. This deep insight - what the sages and masters call "waking up from the illusion of separation" - cuts through and ultimately eliminates loneliness and alienation and opens you to the beauty of the human condition.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

5 Benefits of Meditation

Here are 5 benefits that meditation can bring to your life:

1. Increased focus and concentration. As you become adept at staying on task as you follow your breaths or recite your mantra, you can easily transfer this skill to working at your computer or playing ball with friends.

2. Greater endurance and longer attention span. As you gradually increase the length of your meditations from 10 to 15 to 20 minutes or more, you gradually build your power to pay attention longer. As a result, you may find that you don't get so easily burned out or discouraged when you turn your attention to an extended work project or other demanding activity.

2. Being in the moment, free from expectations. Even though you may have a particular goal in mind - for example, winning the race, completing the project, landing the ball in a tiny cup 300 yards away, etc, - the paradox is that you're more likely to succeed if you set aside your expectations and keep your attention focused on the precise movements or tasks you need to execute right now.

3. Enhanced mental and perceptual clarity. One of the fortuitous side effects of keeping your mind on the moment is that your senses become sharper and your mind quicker and more attuned to subtle details which comes in quite handy when you're trying to do something well.

4. Minimal distractions. The more regularly you meditate, the more quickly distractions fade into the background as your mind settles down and becomes one-pointed. Needless to say, you work or play more effectively without a million irrelevant thoughts chattering away inside your head.

5. Being in the moment, free from expectations. Even though you may have a particular goal in mind - for example, winning the race, completing the project, landing the ball in a tiny cup 300 yards away, etc, - the paradox is that you're more likely to succeed if you set aside your expectations and keep your attention focused on the precise movements or tasks you need to execute right now.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

The Mind of a Meditation Beginner

The greatest meditation teachers advise that the best attitude to take toward meditation is an open mind, completely free from all preconceptions and expectations. The goal of meditation is not to accumulate knowledge, learn something new, or achieve some special state of mind, but simply to maintain this fresh, uncluttered perspective.

"If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything," Zen master Shunryu Suzuki writes in his book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind, there are few." As the title of his book suggests, Suzuki teaches that beginner's mind and Zen mind - the awake, clear, unfettered mind of the enlightened Zen master - are essentially the same. Or, as another teacher puts it, "The seeker is the sought; the looker is what he or she is looking for!"

No matter which meditation technique you choose, try to practice it with the innocent, open, "don't know" spirit of beginner's mind. In a sense, beginner's mind is the non-attitude underlying all attitudes, the non-technique at the heart of all successful techniques.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Be Consistent with your Meditation Practise

Meditation, in some ways, can be compared to sport. If you train for a day and then do nothing for a week, you won't make a lot of progress. You may actually end up hurting yourself because you have not conditioned your body gradually, as most fitness experts recommend.

When you practice meditation, you are developing certain mental and emotional muscles like concentration, mindfulness (ongoing attention to whatever is arising, moment to moment), and receptive awareness. Here too, consistency is the key - you need to keep it up and keep it regular, no matter how you're feeling from day to day. In fact, your feelings provide the fodder for your meditation practice, as you expand your awareness from your breath to include the full range of your experience. There's no special way you need to be - just show up and be yourself!

As one old Chinese Zen master used to say, "Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha" - by which he meant, happy or sad, energetic or tired, just sit as the being you happen to be.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Awareness of your Thoughts During Meditation

Are you aware of your thoughts during meditation? If you are a beginner of meditation, you may sometimes feel overcome with your thoughts when practicing. The important thing is not to become caught up in them. Do not be like a weak swimmer who gets swept away by a strong current. Stand mentally on the bank, and watch the current flow past you. Be calmly observant of the flow, but still mentally detached from it.

Imagine that the bank on which you stand is situated at the the back of your head. There in fact lies the seat of ego consciousness. From that position, watch your thoughts and feelings flowing by you. Realize, as you watch, that not only your thoughts but your very perception of what is important keeps passing.

Nothing in life, neither your inner thoughts nor your outer circumstances, is firmly fixed. If any thought, feeling, or circumstance seems permanent to you, it is only because it has become snagged, temporarily, on a protruding rock of attachment. In a spirit of freedom, allow the current to release it from the rock.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Create Your Own Meditation Mantra

You may find it helpful to create your own mantra to use while you are meditating. But how to you go about creating a mantra?

First start by singing or humming the vowels in any way that occurs to you, at any volume, speed, or pitch. Feel free to change the order after a while (u-e-a, for example). Change the pronunciation however you like, for each sound has a dozen or so different ways of being said. Your preferences are important and may change with the time of day, according to how tired or energetic you are, and according to whether the sound is external and audible or purely internal and audible only to the mind's ear.

Select two vowel sounds, a-u, e-o, or any combination you prefer in this instant. Say that sound over and over softly, in a kind of chant. Let the sound become quieter over the course of several minutes and simply enjoy the rhythm of the sound, the vibrations in your head and throat, the subtle movements of your tongue, and the flow of the breath. Your eyes can be open or closed, and you can go back and forth between open and closed. At some point in the next several minutes let the softly audible chant become an internal chant. Let this transition happen in its own time, gradually.

When the chant becomes internal, it may change in various ways. Sometimes it continues as before and you are simply listening to the sound mentally. The chant can fluctuate in volume, from being loud and distinct in your inner hearing to being soft and faint. Then it may fade away, leaving you there listening to the silence, or to the absence of sound. Welcome this nothingness, or blank space, or "forgetting," and train yourself not to panic or to think you have failed when your mind goes silent. At some point there will probably be little interludes, little quiet spaces between sounds in which you can feel your body vibrating.

As you listen inwardly to the sound or sounds in a restful way, you may notice relaxed feelings coming over you, alternating with thoughts about what time it is, what you have to do next, and any worries you have. Train yourself to welcome this process, then gently return to the vowels.

Use this simple exercise to cultivate your sense of preference for sound, and in particular to heighten your appreciation of how beautiful the vowels are. Give yourself the freedom to discover what you love about sound, both inner sound and thoughts, and the sounds we use in speech. You may discover that you love the space before speech when you are looking for an appropriate word or sound to express what you are feeling, or possibly the silence after speech, when you have said something. The essence of meditation is to discover, not impose.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Getting To Know Your Breath

Breathing is a classic focus for meditation, for several reasons. For one thing, breathing is sensuous, rhythmic, and always with us, as long as we are alive. Also, breath is a gift to us from the larger universe; it comes inside our body, into our lungs, into our blood, then into every cell. Breath is an intimate exchange with the entire cosmos in which we live and move and have our being.

In paying close attention to a breath, we perceive all this directly. Our breath is intrinsically full of grace. There are hundreds of ways to pay attention to breath. You can be aware of its rhythm, of how it expands and contracts, of how it weaves from outside of the body to being drawn inside. You can visualize the breath, being aware of the tip of your nose, the quiet sounds of your breathing, the soft feeling in your throat, the pause at the end of the inhalation, and so on. You can focus through your sense of touch, movement, hearing, smell, or vision. You can use breath to withdraw from the world or to engage with it. When you meditate with the breath, allow your eyes to be open or closed, and whatever happens spontaneously you will learn to rest in the presence of breath, and your eyes will tend to close by themselves, but do not force them shut.

If you take this gentle approach, even the simple act of closing the eyes can feel exquisite. Your thoughts will drift off and then return to your focus. This is natural. Just keep coming back to your chosen pleasure. Keep in mind that you can sit anywhere and in any position that you find comfortable. Over time you will develop more and more sensory awareness of what breath is. And as you do so, it will become more and more engaging. Eliminate the phrase "trying to concentrate on my breath" from your vocabulary, and replace it with "I am developing an interest in breath." Use your senses to welcome each inhalation. As you become more aware of your breath, extraordinary realms of sensation begin to open up.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

How to find a Meditation Instructor

If you would like to play tennis but do not know how, what do you do? To start with, you can watch other people play, maybe buy a book or two, and then head out to the court yourself and start practicing. But once you have mastered the basics, you may want to take a class or get some personal instruction to help you refine your stroke or eliminate the mistakes you have picked up along the way.

The same holds true for meditation. Sure you can practice the exercises that you have learned for weeks, months, or even years and reap the benefits without additional instruction. But at a certain point, you may encounter difficulties you do not know how to handle by yourself, or you may start having spiritual experiences that give you glimpses of a greater reality and stimulate your appetite for further exploration. In order to continue to move forward and refine your meditation practice, you need to find yourself a good teacher.

Before choosing the right kind of teacher, you need to know exactly what kind of teacher you want. Most meditation instructors have a particular spiritual affiliation such as yogis or Zen Buddhists or Christian contemplatives, for example. In addition, the instruction they offer includes a particular orientation toward the spiritual journey as well as particular teachings and terminology. It should not be any problem if that is what you are looking for. But if you want your instruction straight, without any spirituality, you may have a more difficult time finding a suitable teacher.

Some yoga teachers offer basic meditation instructions with a minimum of Sanskrit words, and they may even know the territory well enough to help you if you get stuck. Nowadays, more and more adult education programs, community colleges, and local churches are offering generic meditation or stress-reduction classes. However, you may want to look over the instructors’ credentials before you enroll because he or she may be no further along in practice than you are.

You might want to check out the Vipassana tradition of Buddhism, also known as insight meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of the bestseller “Wherever You Go There You Are”, a long-time teacher of Vipassana, and also the founder of the mindfulness-based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, has developed a program that offers rigorous training to prospective instructors of basic mindfulness practices.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Making Time for Meditation

Meditation resembles sex in a number of ways, and this is one of them: You may prefer it short and quick or long and slow. But whatever your predilections, you would no doubt agree that some sexual contact with your beloved is better than no sex at all.

Well, apply this dictum to meditation, and you'll get the drift. If you can't schedule a half hour, then meditate for a few minutes. It's much better to sit for five or ten minutes every day than for an hour once a week - though you may want to do both. As with all the guidelines in this book, experiment with the different options until you find the one that suits you best.

Digital alarm watches provide an accurate and inexpensive way to time your meditations precisely without watching the clock. Also, you might like to signal the beginning and end of your meditation with the sound of a small bell, as is done in many traditional cultures.

Five minutes: If you're a beginner, a few minutes can seem like an eternity, so start off slow and increase the length of your sittings as your interest and enjoyment dictate. You may find that by the time you settle your body and start to focus on your breath, your time is up. If the session seems too short, you can always sit a little longer next time. As your practice develops, you'll find that even five minutes can be immeasurably refreshing.

Ten to 15 minutes: If you're like most people, you need several minutes at the start of meditation to get settled, a few more to become engaged in the process, and several at the end to reorient - which means that 10 or 15 minutes leaves you a little in the middle to deepen your concentration or expand your awareness. Once you've made it this far, try leveling off at 15 minutes a day for several weeks and watch how your powers of concentration build.

Twenty minutes to an hour: The longer you sit, the more time you'll have between preliminaries and endings to settle into a focused and relaxed state of mind. If you have the motivation and can carve out the time, by all means devote 40 minutes or 1 hour to meditation each day. You'll notice the difference - and you'll understand why most meditation teachers recommend sitting this long at a stretch. Perhaps it's the human attention span - look at the proverbial 50-minute hour of psychotherapy or the optimal length for most TV shows.

But remember: It's better to keep your practice steady and regular than to splurge one day and abstain for the rest of the week.

Monday, April 16, 2007

How to Sit Still For Mediation

When talking about the practice of sitting still, one of the great meditation teachers, the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, used to say that the best way to show a snake its true nature is to put it in a hollow stick of bamboo. Take a moment and give this unusual metaphor some thought. What could he have possibly meant by it?

Well, imagine that you're a snake in bamboo. What does it feel like? Every time you try to slither, which is after all what snakes like to do, you bump against the walls of your straight as-an-arrow home. If you pay attention, you start to notice how slippery you actually are.
In the same way, sitting in a certain posture and keeping your body relatively still provides a stick of bamboo that mirrors back to you every impulse and distraction. You get to see how fidgety your body can be - and how hyperactive your mind, which is actually the source of your body's restlessness. "Maybe I should scratch that itch or answer that phone or run that errand." For every plan or intention, there's a corresponding impulse in your muscles and skin. But you'll never notice all this activity unless you sit still.

The funny thing is, you can sit in the same position for hours without noticing it when you're happily engrossed in some favorite activity like watching a movie or surfing the Net or working on a hobby. But try to do something you find boring or unpleasant - especially an activity as strange and unfamiliar as turning your attention back on yourself and following your own breath or paying attention to your own sensations - and suddenly every minute can seem like an hour, every ache can seem like an ailment of life threatening proportions, and every item on your to-do list can take on irresistible urgency.

When you're constantly acting and reacting in response to thoughts and outside stimulation, you don't have a chance to get to know how your mind works. By sitting still like the snake in bamboo, you have a mirror that shows you just how slippery and elusive your mind can be.

Keeping still also gives you a tremendous edge when you're working on developing your concentration. Imagine a heart surgeon or a concert pianist who can't quiet her body while plying her craft. The fewer physical distractions you have, the easier it becomes to follow your breath, practice your mantra — or whatever your meditation happens to be.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

The Increasing Popularity of Meditation

Over the past twenty years or so, meditation has gained an increasing acceptance and practice in the Western world. While still far from being an important part of Western society, the practice of meditation has made significant inroads in the therapeutic and medical community and is winning increasingly broad support in business, educational, and political arenas.

In the United States, meditation has survived its infancy and is well on its way through childhood. The reason for this increasing acceptance is that meditation has proven to be both a practical and effective tool for increasing health as well as happiness. The past twenty years have provided consistent clinical and scientific experience that allows us to draw some strong conclusions about the practice of meditation. In general, we can state with great confidence, based on evidence that the consistent practice of meditation leads to a healthier and more effective human being.

More specifically, those who practice some form of meditation have one or more of the following characteristics: they have lower triglyceride levels; achieve a lower, more stable heart rate; they have lower blood pressure; they have a slower and more stable respiratory rate; they have a more stable galvanic skin response; report fewer psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches, colds, gastric disturbances; take fewer prescription and nonprescription drugs; report lower levels of anxiety and fear; score higher on self-actualization inventories; and have increased capacity for loving relationships.

These are only a few of the many benefits of meditation. In short, when compared to others who do not practice meditation, or to their state before they began to meditate, those who consistently practice meditation are healthier, happier, and more effective human beings.

Clinical experience, scientific research, and the experience of an average person all point to one and the same conclusion: the consistent practice of meditation is probably the most important and effective self-help tool available today for personal health and effectiveness. It is also clear that under the guidance of a competent instructor, meditation can be safely and successfully practiced by almost anyone without any fear of harmful side-effects.

The real question is not whether meditation is helpful, but rather how and why it works. What is it that happens during and as a result of meditation that produces such specific physical and mental benefits and leads to improvement in many aspects of one's life? The key to answering these questions lies in understanding the relationship between meditation and the emotions. The physiological, psychological, and behavioral changes listed above all reflect a more balanced and harmonious emotional state.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

The Benefits of Meditation

You do not have to be an expert or skilled in meditation to enjoy its benefits. You just need to practice regularly without trying to get anywhere or achieve anything in particular. And just like interest in a bank account, the benefits just accrue by themselves. The following are some wonderful rewards one can acquire through meditation:

Being awake at the present time. When you rush breathlessly from one moment to the next while anticipating another problem or yearning for another pleasure, you miss the beauty and closeness of the present, which is constantly unfolding before your eyes. Meditation teaches you to slow down and take each moment as it comes; the sounds of traffic, the smell of roses, the laughter of children, the beauty of the ocean, the coming and going of your breath. In fact, as the meditative traditions remind us, only the present moment exists anyway. The past is just a memory and the future a fantasy, projected on the movie screen of the brain right now.

Being friends with oneself. When you are constantly struggling to live up to expectations, whether your own or someone else's, or racing to reinvent inner self to survive in a competitive environment, you rarely have the opportunity or the motivation to get to know yourself just the way you are. Self-doubt and self-hatred may appear to fuel the fires of self-improvement, but they are painful and they contribute to other negative mind-states like fear, anger, depression, and alienation. They also prevent you from living up to your full potential. When you meditate, you learn to welcome every experience and aspect of your being without any judgment or denial. In the process, you begin to treat yourself as you would a close friend, accepting and loving the whole package, the apparent weaknesses and shortcomings as well as the positive qualities and strengths.

Creating a deep connection with others: As you wake up to the present time and open your heart and mind to your own experience, you naturally extend this quality of awareness and presence to your relationships with family and friends. If you are like most people, you tend to project your own desires and expectations to those who are close to you, which act as a barrier to real communication. But when you start to accept others the way they are, a skill you can develop through the practice of meditation, you open up the channels for a deeper love and intimacy to flow.

Relaxing your body and calming your consciousness. Your mind and body are inseparable, so an agitated mind inevitably produces a stressed out body. As your mind settles, relaxes, and opens during meditation, so does the body. The longer you spend meditating, the more this tranquility and relaxation ripples out to every area of your life, including your health.

Monday, April 2, 2007

Meditation for You

Lighten up! Perhaps you have noticed that non stop thinking and worrying generate a kind of inner fears feed on one another, problems get magnified exponentially, and the next thing you know, you are feeling overwhelmed and panicked.

Meditation encourages an inner mental spaciousness in which difficulties and concerns no longer seem so threatening. It seems like constructive solutions can naturally arise as well as a certain detachment that allows for greater objectivity, perspective, and humor. That mysterious word enlightenment actually refers to the supreme "lightening up"!

Here are some other benefits you can experience from practicing meditation:
  • Experiencing focus and flow - When you are so fully involved in an activity that all sense of self-consciousness, separation, and distraction dissolves. For human beings, this total immersion constitutes the ultimate enjoyment and provides the ultimate antidote to alienation of post modern life. There is no doubt you have experienced moments like these; reading, playing a sport, creating a work of art, working in the garden, making love. Athletes refer to this as "the zone." Through meditation, you can discover how to give the same focused attention to and derive the same enjoyment from every activity.
  • Feeling more centered, grounded, and balanced - To counter the growing insecurity of life in rapidly changing times, meditation offers an inner grounded ness and balance that external situations cannot interfere. When you practice coming home over and over to your body, your breath, your sensations, your feelings, you eventually grow to realize that you are always home, no matter where you go. And when you make friends with yourself, embracing the dark and the light, the weak and the strong, you no longer get thrown off-center by the "slings and arrows" of life.
  • Enhancing performance at work and play - Researches have shown that basic meditation practice alone can enhance clarity, creativity, self-actualization, and many of the other factors that contribute to superior performance. In addition, specific meditations have been devised to enhance performance in a variety of activities, from sports to schoolwork.
  • Increasing appreciation, gratitude, and love - As you begin to open to your experience without judgment or hatred, your heart gradually opens as well, to yourself and others. You can practice specific types of meditations for cultivating appreciation, gratitude, and love or you may find, as so many meditators have before you, that these qualities take place naturally when you can gaze at the world with fresh eyes, free from the usual projections and expectations.