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.

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.

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.

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.

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.