Meditation / Visualization

[airwaves]

I don't meditate. I've tried it at different points in my life all without noticeable results. Perhaps I'm just doing it wrong. Or perhaps I'm expecting the wrong things. I just ended up giving up on it.

How do you know you're doing it right? Sensations? Visions? Feelings? What is supposed to happen? I'd really appreciate a "what it feels like" from an experienced practitioner. I usually just feel like I just sit there. There was a group meditation once where people were meditating. And I got the "I am just sitting here" feeling I didn't want to bother others by making noises or leaving so I just started coding. I didn't end up with spiritual revelations. But I figured out for the first time how to triangulate terrain.

When do you know you're meditating as opposed to just pumping more oxygen in your blood through various breathing techniques? Which of course is great and sensible to do as well.

I do practice various techniques like energy work, dzikr, prayer and mindfulness. But I don't consider it meditation. I don't think I've ever done meditation right. Unless slowly getting in touch with a more bored version of myself means you're doing it right. :-/

Well Ali it is not very often that I find myself in the position of possibly being able to help someone on this forum. You are all so well centered! You need not expect anything too happen when meditating. It is simply moving into the silence. Another way to calm the nerves so to speek You will still have thoughts uponn entering the silence. That is normal. It is impossible to completely remove yourself from all that concerns you in daily life and so forth. Watch these thoughts, in a third person view, not responding to them just observing; as if they are a slide show, each new one coming and falling away.

Although we say in many different ways that you cannot lose your way amidst whatever change, we would say, as always, that a great aid in keeping one’s balance in the midst of great transformation is the daily habit of silence. Whether it be contemplation, meditation, a silent walk, whatever it be that is your own prayer of the heart, open that heart to the silence daily and allow the experience that is coming through you to seat itself there. For time spent in silence is time spent with the Creator. And what a blessing for the Creator to spend time in silence with you. For there is no asking and there is no telling, but just the meaning. And the Creator craves your company and your communion and loves you so dearly, and waits for you so patiently to remember who you are, and whose.

May each of you be about your business. May each of you, as this instrument says, bring each other home. For you see, in that mirror world, each of you is, to the other, the picture of the self, the picture of the Creator. What shall you mirror by your thoughts this day? What Creator shall you be to those about you? And what being shall you be to yourself? May each of you enter your own heart in a mood to forgive completely, to fall completely in love with yourself just as you are. This is an important step in the evolution of the spirit, this ability to accept the self as it is, with every distortion, every folly, everything that the illusion seems to be telling you about yourself. For, you see, you are looking so hard at a personality shell that is not really there. Instead, depend upon that self that is beneath the surface, that will well up in the silence and tell you who you are when you need to know it, will give you new information when you need it, and may tell you to wait when you least want to hear it. Fall in love with that self that is you. Forgive and love that self, and you will find it easy to love the rest of the selves about you. Or at least as easy to love as it was to love the self.