MEDITATION

From my book Cosmic Love ... New age pioneer Deepak Chopra, author of Unconditional Life and many other best-sellers, talks a lot about 'calming emotional turmoil', to manifest your dreams. And his preferred way to calm inner mayhem is meditation. Manifesting anything, he says, depends on your brain emitting a clear signal about what it wants ... and meditation calms your mind to the point where it can radiate your intentions loudly and clearly … MEDITATION IS ... Put simply, we become who we think we are. And we think we're better if we meditate. I took up meditation in the mid-nineties, while I was in London. I'd been working in tv doing long hours with lots of burned-out tv execs and non-execs and it wasn't pretty. People were tired, angry and dysfunctional, back-stabbing and even treacherous. Once that lovely little ordeal was over, I decided I needed a tool to combat any such future stress. Life was too short to end the day in bed with a bottle of beer and a sad heart. A girlfriend recommended meditation, so I called up the Clapham Common Buddhist Centre down the road and spoke to an Austrian chap called Werner, who asked me if I wanted to come in and learn to meditate. 'Yes,' I said. 'When?' 'When would suit you?' 'Oh, any time,' he said, sounding meditatively mellow. 'How about next week?' 'Sure. Which day?' 'Er, when would suit you?' 'Oh any day..' 'Wednesday?' I ventured 'Sure. What time suits you?' 'Um. 11am?' 'Sure,' he said, and gave me the address. Werner proved as easy to get along with in real life as he'd been on the phone. At the centre, we learned how to sit as if our spines were a pile of well-balanced gold coins and we were taught open-eyed Buddhist meditation. I fell asleep the first few times I practised but ploughed on, returning to see Werner at the centre just once more. I meditated a bit in London, continued when I got home to Australia six months later and had a few spectacular sessions at sunrise on various beaches in Thailand. Not too much later, another girlfriend took up meditation here in Sydney and urged me to learn her method. Jane is now also teaching privately in San Diego, US, so if you're in the area and curious, drop her a line from here. This time we were taught mantra meditation (ie meditation where you silently chant a mantra) by a teacher who had studied with the Transcendental Meditation guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in India. This was a closed eye meditation and I found it took me even deeper. Along the way I stumbled across a few other methods; one taught for free by a Bondi local at his healing centre, another using candles. One woman even took me aside during a health retreat I had on the south coast and told me: 'masturbate while you meditate. No teacher will tell you that but it's very, very good for you and your Kundalini (sexual energy).' Goodness. In the end, I've stuck with Transcendental Meditation. Email Barbara Cooper in Sydney for details of where you can study TM. COSMIC LOVE MANTRA Manifesting depends on your brain emitting a clear signal about what it wants. Meditation breeds mental calm GETTING STARTED I'm convinced there are as many ways to meditate as there are days in the year. Or more. You can go to any bookshop and try Paul Wilson's Secrets Of Calm, or the Louise L. Hay or Deepak Chopra tapes. You can meditate at Vipassna or with Shirley McLaine's outrageous but very good Chakra Meditation video. Or read Ian Gawler's beautiful book Meditation Pure and Simple. But meditation is never about 'my method is better than your method' … so beware any teacher who says that. The main things to remember about meditation are: 1. You don't have to be naked in a cave in India to do it. You can do it as a part of your corporate-raiding/mid-Australia/relaxed hippy lifestyle. You can do it in the loo at work before you go to lunch and no one will ever know; you can do it naked on a beach at sunrise if you're that way inclined. The main this is to do it. 2. There's no such thing as a bad meditation. 3. Some medics believe that meditation is as crucial to the mind as exercise is to the body. 4. It's essential for manifesting whatever you want for yourself - including love. WHY MEDITATION ROCKS When I first got into meditating, I talked so often and so enthusiastically about it that my psychiatrist Dad thought I was about to go off and join a cult. So I went to Melbourne, instead, to research why this sitting down with my eyes closed and breathing seemed to have such astonishing results. There I met one Dr Craig Hassed (no long white beard), senior lecturer in Community Medicine in the Department of General Practice. He explained the points outlined below to me in scientific terms that even my Dad could relate to. The thing about meditation is that in the 30 years since the Beatles popularised it in the West, science's gadgets and gizmos have come a long way and we now have the technology to monitor the physiological changes which meditating produces. Here are some of the facts DR Hassed imparted: · Long-term meditators (ie: people who've meditated daily for six weeks or more) have been found to have higher levels of the chemical serotonin (which makes you happy). · Long-term meditators have higher levels of melatonin (which research is suggesting boosts the immune system and has anti-cancer effects. It also happens to help with anti aging). · Long-term meditators have lower levels of cortisol (a blood serum which indicates how stressed you are). · Brainwave patterns of people who practise meditation eventually change. These changes include a greater level of alpha waves associated with a calmer more focused state of mind. · Also, 'EEG coherence' increases - this is like a co-ordination or harmony between the brainwave activity in different parts of the brain. The EEG starts to become a much more harmonious, coordinated pattern. Says DR Hassed: "When you talk about relaxation most people think of it as a dull, lethargic trance like state, sort of vegging out. But meditation is actually very potent, focused and aware, relaxed conscious state. "Some of the benefits can be produced by other means - exercise brings some of them - but it seems as though meditation is the most potent way to consciously redress the needless mental activity, confusion, the ability to distinguish between what's real and just in our heads or imaginations." GIVE IT A GO If you have a clear mind, then your thoughts and intentions will emit an even clearer signal to the Universe. Give it a go. There are countless places where you can learn how to meditate. However, learning it from a book is like learning a new language via signing. At most Buddhist Centres, you can learn for free without any pressure at all to 'become' a Buddhist. New agers everywhere run free meditation courses, if for no other reason than to introduce you to their centres. Some good-hearted folk run them for nix at public meetings, just because they can. You can also pay anything from $10 for a lecture at the Mind Body Spirit festival to a few hundred at evening college to hundreds, to thousands of dollars for all kinds of exotic courses. Or you can buy a boxed set of tapes as a taster, and go from there. Whatever way you learn it, just do it. While you're cosmic loving, you'd do well to do it once a day. Apart from anything else, while you're manifesting, you need to emit that clear signal. HOW TO MEDITATE I've kept this bit short to show you how simple it is. Even so, when it comes to learning how to meditate, there's no substitute for a real-life teacher or at least spoken instructions on tape. Try the following once a day, until you get around to learning this amazing little routine properly. For your meditation area, choose a part of your bedroom or home which doesn't otherwise get used much. Meditate in this place each day, so the good vibrations can build up. If you're that way inclined, make a mini-altar with some candles, incense and love trinkets there. Combined with your Cosmic Love crystal zinging/essential oil burning/fenging efforts, the results might amaze you. HOW TO MEDITATE IN 8 EASY STEPS 1. Take the phone off the hook. 2. Sit down. 3. Close your eyes. 4. Breathe. 5. Start to become aware of the rise and fall of your breath. 6. Think "Om" (which means 'peace'). 7. Do this for 20 minutes or so. 8. Sit quietly for a few moments, then open your eyes. One day you'll open your eyes and the person of your dreams - or of your Wish Lists and Positive Drawings - will be right there in front on you. Maybe even sitting in a lotus position and meditating beside you, thanking the Universe for delivering him such a God/Goddess. MAY THE FORCE OF LOVE BE WITH YOU If you thought the other bits in this book were demanding or challenging, try this: once you've completed your cosmic love course, forget about it. Get on with life, keep meditating and zing the odd crystal, but allow life to unfurl without anxiety. Your intentions are out there. Let the Universe do its thang. What you've just read is an excerpt from my book Cosmic Love... I hope it meant something to you! To read more about it, see here To learn about meditation in Sydney, click here Click here to order in the US and Cananda Click here for ordering online from the UK Click here for ordering online from Australia   back to the front page please ... Top of the page