Guided Meditation & Teaching You to Meditate

Essentially,

Meditation is training in inner peace! It is a simple and easy to learn technique for a happier, healthier and more balanced life.

Meditation is an ancient eastern method of training your mind, of cultivating and encouraging awareness and changing the way you think and respond to your experience. For thousands of years, people have used meditation to move beyond the mind’s busy activity and emotional turbulence into profound peace and expanded awareness. It has been recognised for its healing, therapeutic and spiritual benefits.

Meditation is a method which develops more open, aware, relaxed and kinder attitudes to yourself and others in your everyday life.

Anyone can learn to meditate.

Anyone who has looked at a sunset or a beautiful painting and felt a sense of calm and inner joy, while their mind became clear and their perception sharpened, has had a taste of the realm of meditation.

You don’t even need to sit cross legged if this is uncomfortable. You can meditate effectively whilst sitting comfortably in a chair.

Successful meditation means simply being - not judging, not thinking, just being aware, at peace and living each moment as it unfolds. You might think that meditation is about switching off, but its actually about switching on and developing awareness. A regular meditation practice will give you the foundation for establishing mindfulness in every day life, giving you calm and clarity throughout the day!

Meditation and has two stages…

The first stage involves focusing single-pointedly on the object of meditation (often the breath or a mantra) in order to calm and focus the mind. This encourages the busyness and chaos of the mind to subside. As the mind wanders away to work, worries, to-do lists, shopping lists etc, we gently and patiently bring it back to present moment awareness and our object (breath/ mantra), which is our anchor. It isn’t about forcing your mind to be quiet, but about experiencing the quiet that is already there. The mind gradually settles and eventually, with consistent practice, achieves a level of stillness, leaving feelings of peace, spaciousness, clarity and contentedness.

Mastering this meditation technique helps us find increased clarity, creative energy, calmness, and enjoyment of life. It can even help improve your concentration and attention span!

After mastering this tranquillity meditation, you can, if you wish,  take your meditation to a deeper level and move on to explore Insight meditation in which we expand our focus to include our body and physical sensations, our thoughts and emotions, sounds etc, being receptive to whatever experience is arising in the present moment. One sits calmly, aware of what is happening in one’s experience without judging, fantasising or trying to change things.

In this open, wakeful awareness, we watch as all of these phenomena arise and pass and we gain insight about ourselves, our true nature and the true nature of reality. It is a practice of self-transformation through self-observation and introspection.

This meditation, with consistent practice, brings to the surface and dissolves deep-seated complexes and tensions, leads to the cessation of cravings and fears and cultivates a balanced mind where we don’t become fixated on external things to make us happy, but instead accept life as it is and find peace from within, leaving behind destructive habits. When our meditation becomes deep, it facilitates an inner cleansing and purifying process, promoting deeper, subtler states of awareness. This process is sometimes called “samskaric burnofff”, where we “burnoff” buried thoughts and feelings that are layered into our body and mind. These hidden feelings and impressions are responsible for a lot of our pain and unconscious behaviour. Deep meditation releases a powerful energy and awareness that can sweep out the rooms of our unconscious mind.

Though I use meditations that originate from the Buddhist tradition, these techniques are suitable for people of any religious / spiritual persuasion or none.

The beauty of meditation is that you can take it on whatever level feels right for you. At its most basic level, you can take meditation as secular, evidence-based technique for relaxing the body, calming the mind and coping with emotional difficulty.

Or, if you have an interest in spirituality, there is a whole other aspect of meditation that can be explored, in that it connects us with our true nature and the ‘divine’ in whatever way we understand that, purifying the mind and increasing our wisdom and compassion.

Research has demonstrated that regular meditation actually changes the structure of the brain, hard-wiring you for emotional fulfilment!

Now, the scientific and medical communities are beginning to take notice of meditation’s effects. For example, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which is about 80 percent meditation, has been approved in Britain for use with people who have experienced recurring depression (three or more episodes of depression).

MRI scans of long-term meditators have shown greater activity in brain circuits involved in paying attention. Long-term meditation can also cause changes in the actual structure of your cortex, the outer layer of your brain. Brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing have been shown to be thicker in meditators.

Studies suggest that meditation can help you to train your attention and focus, even in the midst of distractions. For instance, when disturbing noises were played to a group of experienced meditators undergoing an MRI, they had little effect on the brain areas involved in emotion and decision making. 

A recent study has also demonstrated that use of compassion or Loving Kindness meditations can actually increase empathy and benevolence for others, resulting in increased empathic reactions in the insular cortex and temporoparietal junction in the brain.

I offer guided meditations, in which I will guide you through a relaxing meditation that will leave you feeling calm and centred, peaceful yet refreshed and energised.

I also offer meditation coaching, in which I will instruct you on how to meditate effectively in a range of styles and give you advice and motivation to sustain a daily meditation practice.

For Prices see Therapy Prices