Deborah Lipp

I am busy. My neck hurts. My hand has gone numb. I have a slight hangover.

So. Not meditative. Sorry.

(Um…does anyone miss these when I don’t do them? Or like them when I do them? Because I can’t really tell.)

Take this meditation outside on a sunny day.

Ground and center.

Feel the sun where it touches your skin.

Feel the sunlight that penetrates through your closed eyes.

Breath in the sun.

Feel the warmth. Feel the energy. Breath in the energy of the sun.

The warmth of the sun is within your own body. It is a part of you. The power and energy of the sun are within your own body. They are a part of you.

Let the sunlight come into you, through your skin. Feel it reach into your very core. Feel how it warms you. It warms your heart, your feelings, and your hopes. As your heart is heated by the Sun, warm compassion flows forth.

Feel how sunlight energizes you. Feel it reach into your muscles and joints, and allow yourself to know the pleasure of movement that comes from being powered by the Sun. Feel the energy flowing into your thoughts. As your mind is heated by the Sun, inspiration flows forth.

Know that you are a solar battery. Your skin is solar paneling. You store sunlight within you and use it when you need it. Feel how the warmth stays with you, how the energy is a part of you.

When you are tired, you can draw on your solar energy. When you feel cold and distant, you can draw on your solar warmth. And when you need to renew yourself, you can return yourself to sunlight, and refresh your batteries.

Another “guest” meditation this week, I found this lovely piece by Mara Freeman on Beliefnet:

Close your eyes and send your consciousness down through the room, down through the floor of the building, and down, deep down, into the earth. Be aware of the mass of rock that lies beneath the soil- shale, quartz, sandstone, granite; the black, white, and red-shot through with bands of minerals, darkly glittering; crystals that shine like stars within the stones ..Let your consciousness become one with the mineral kingdom: You might choose to become a mountain as old as the planet itself, once part of the seabed, thrown up by unspeakable forces now stilled, enormously, timelessly rooted in the earth, its head in the stars…Or a minute grain of sand, one among trillions and trillions, endlessly shifting, sifting, with the ocean tides .Or become a stone. the stone people are alive – it’s just that their hearts beat slower than ours .

Now become aware of the plant kingdom: algae and seaweeds, forests of kelp, grasses blowing in a savanna wind, yellow and orange lichens on a rock in a wood, prickly pears, an oak wood, a rain forest blooming with delicate orchids, vines hanging with fruit . Become one with the plant kingdom now – soft green moss on a rock by a stream, a mountain strawberry, a wild rose…..what does it feel like to be blown softly by the wind..or to split your husk and feel your seeds fall to the ground?

And now become aware of the animal kingdom.. listen to the voices of the wild: the roar of the tiger, the belling of the stag, the howl of the wolf; the cries of owls and the tapping of woodpeckers, the whirring of birds’ wings, the padding of soft paws…become one now with the animal kingdom, with the salmon leaping upstream, the fox gliding through the night, or the snake shedding its skin.feel what your new body is like and what it feels like to creep, walk, climb, run or fly in free motion..

And now become aware of the human kingdom .you are standing on two feet .notice how different that feels: you can stand like a stone, grow like a plant, move like an animal, but you can now create with your mind and your hands and you can sing and dance and dream in your heart and make that dream real upon the earth .and when you are ready, slowly open your eyes and come back to the room.

Today we have a “guest meditation.” I’ve found this website that offers several short meditation “tapes” you can play on the computer with Real Player. They are, of course, selling a bunch of stuff, but the link is directly to the “Meditation Room” and you can skip the shop.

Enjoy.

Today I am preparing for a trip, finishing a writing project, getting caught up on other writing projects, and oh, yeah, organizing tax information. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. So today is a good day to look at how not to get overwhelmed.

First, before meditating, if you have a to do list, write it down. What this does is get the things to do out of your head and onto paper. You can forget about them now, because they’re written down. No need to focus or to remember, just do whatever task you’re doing at the moment, and rely on the written list to tell you what’s next. I find the list is crucial for keeping me out of my head and preventing panic.

Set up your first task. Suppose you’re me and you have to write something. Sit at your desk with your word processor ready to go. Or suppose you have a big meal to prepare. Get your hands washed, your apron on, and sit in the kitchen. Now, ground and center.

Allow calm to run through your body. Allow yourself to feel soothed. Energy moves through you, from your center, radiating to your extremities. With each breath, soothing energy moves from your center to your hands, feet, and head. You feel relaxed and alert.

Say to yourself “I am doing this.” (Fill in the task. “I am writing.” “I am cooking.”)

Take a deep breath, and as you exhale, release anything that isn’t your task.

Breathe in, and repeat your “I am doing this” affirmation.

Breath out, and release everything else.

Now do the task.

When you’re ready, go to your list for your next task and repeat the process.

Roberta blogged recently about living with pain, so I thought this would be a good time to talk about how meditative techniques can be used to manage pain.

First, start with breathing.

No matter what you’re feeling, whether intense and agonizing, or dull and throbbing, as soon as you can, focus on your breath. If you are overwhelmed, it will be hard, and probably impossible at first, but as soon as you can, find your breath, and turn your thoughts to breath.

If I am helping someone who is in pain, I force eye contact and we breathe together. If you look inward when in pain, you’ll tend to look at the pain. So if there isn’t a partner to help you with eye contact, find an outside focal point; a window, an object, anything. And look at it, hold it in your field of vision, and breathe.

Breathe.

Once you’re breathing, do a muscle sweep. You will probably find that you are clenching a lot of secondary muscles—muscles no where near the hurt part. Your jaw is tight, your hands are balled into fists, your feet are curled up. You are in the posture of resistance.

What happens, though, is that tight muscles hold more pain than loose muscles, so loosening these muscles will help. Plus, your muscles work in groups, and as you relax your hands and feet, the muscles near the pain will also start to loosen. Even though you haven’t been thinking about that painful area.

Breathe.

Unclench your feet. Open your hands. Let your fingers be soft. Relax your jaw and let your mouth fall open a little.

Once you feel as relaxed as you can, start breathing that relaxation into the pain. The breath runs over the pain like the soothing and gentle stroke of a hand. Stay with this image. If the pain starts to increase, look away from the pain and go back to your focal object and your secondary muscles. If you’re not able to breath into the pain at all, that’s okay, just do the breathing, the muscles, and the focal object.

Practice this technique when you’re not in pain so it’s available to you when you need it.

Continuing from where we left off last week.

In a comfortable position, ground and center.

Return to the image from the first exercise, the tree or bonfire or whatever it is. Select a part of it to focus on. For the tree, you can focus on keeping a single tree in your mind’s eye. Or you can zoom in and focus on a leaf.

Your task now is to stay with the leaf (or whatever you have selected) for the entire meditation. If you wander away, gently come back. If you feel yourself struggling, return to the ‘wandering about the tree’ imagery of the first exercise, and gradually ease yourself back to the single image.

Never blame yourself if your mind wanders. You aren’t wrong or a bad meditator. It is a natural part of meditation to occasionally “lose it.” Just as you can sometimes be driving and look away from the road for a moment, and then look back, you can sometimes look away from meditation for a moment. Gently return your inner gaze to your meditation object.

Stay with the leaf for the full meditation period, setting extraneous thoughts aside. When you finish meditating, take a deep breath and allow yourself to return to ordinary consciousness.

Today is for those of you who think you’re not good at meditation, or “can’t” meditate. It is a sort of intermediary exercise; a baby step towards meditation, if you will. I was given this exercise very early in my Pagan studies, on a handout with a note that it was adapted from What Witches Do. I have further adapted it.

Pick something to meditate on. It should be something you can picture clearly, and something that will be pleasurable to spend your meditation time with. Here are some examples: A tree, a flower, a bonfire, fresh bread, a stream. (For the instructions, I’ll use a tree.)

In a comfortable position, ground and center.

Visualize the tree. Don’t concentrate on it, just see it. Engage all of your senses with the tree. Can you hear the wind rustling in its leaves? Can you feel the roughness of the bark? Can you smell the scent of woods?

You don’t have stay with any one part of the tree. You can visualize the tree in a forest. You can visualize bark. You can imagine yourself picnicking in its shade. Your thoughts can wander anywhere they wish to, as long as they stay with the tree. When non-tree thoughts arise, gently set them aside and stay with your tree focus.

By giving your mind permission to wander, you may find meditation much easier. Note that you are still going to eliminate off-focus thoughts, but you may find that in “wandering” mode, wandering back is easier.

The first time you do this exercise, your goal is to maintain this diffuse focus for five minutes. Continue practicing with your tree (bread/stream/flower/fire) until you can stay with it for fifteen minutes.

Today I’m thinking about focus; mental clarity; concentration. Certainly a weak area for me, I tend to be forgetful, kinda ditzy. I concentrate best when I’m juggling two or three thoughts. Which drives Arthur crazy, because he can only focus on one thing at a time.

In meditation, we try to focus on a single thought. Meditate on a tree. Meditate on a mandala. Meditate on darkness. Meditate on Lakshmi. And in the process of meditation, we discover how unfocused our minds truly are, how we get pulled into distractions and down random paths; how undisciplined and chaotic our thought processes can be.

So today I’m visualizing a meditation on concentration itself.

If you like, burn sage or rosemary (or inhale fresh rosemary). Both herbs sharpen the mind.

Ground and center.

Think about work you have to do that requires focus. Hold an image of that work in your mind. See yourself doing the work. Perhaps you need to write, or to balance your bank accounts, or organize your closet. See the work getting done.

See yourself completing the task. Visualize it through—from beginning to end. Observe yourself focusing on this work. If you like, go back to the beginning and see it through again.

Now acknowledge yourself for completing this work. Perhaps you felt distracted. Perhaps, during the course of visualizing, your mind wandered away. Notice also that it came back, that despite whatever wandering or distraction you experienced, you made it to the end. Allow yourself to enjoy the pleasure of a completed task, and notice that this is focus. This is accomplishment.

Stay with that feeling, of accomplishment, and notice it required focus in order to have that feeling.