I currently hold a meditation evening every Wednesday at The Chiron Centre, 130 Westbury Road, Westbury on Trym. Please do join us, all are welcome and no experience is necessary. Start time is 7.30, £5.00
I know from my own personal experience there can be many benefits from regularly sitting to meditate, sitting to take time out for yourself and joining together with like minded people. The energy built when groups sit together can be more powerful then when sitting as individuals, and sitting with people that you regularly see can also enhance your connection.
If you would like further details or information, please do contact me on 07870 557641 or email sam@samanthacross.co.uk
When I first started meditating it was at the Spiritualist Church and part of my spiritual journey. I used to have these most amazing experiences where I felt I was floating, growing taller, journeying and had amazing visual imagery. However, years later I realised there was more to this than meets the eye – or the mind, so to speak. I also started to realise that I had been doing a form of meditation for years. Meditation is part of everyday existence, it’s a state of mind, feeling and sensing, it’s just being. You become the observer….
A lot of the time we generally live within our heads, we think we are our minds and become ungrounded, feeling like we’re not quite in the world. Thoughts are constant and listening to those thoughts can cause us to lose energy, at times the mind can be so busy that we can become exhausted.
Meditation can help us to realise how deeply we are conditioned by our thoughts and how we react to them, how we believe them and how they can at times cause us great pain. By just sitting with them and allowing them to come and go we can then see the separation, we can then see that we are not our thoughts, we are something deeper. Thoughts will come and go and it’s impossible to stop them, however by gaining an awareness you can see that they are just there….that you don’t have to fight them or try and switch them off….
Thinking will very often be related to the past, the present, your story or someone else’s story…thinking will take you out of the present. Together with your imagination you will make up stories of how you perceive things to be (very often based on past experience, misconceptions, views of others, societal conditioning and much more…), stories that will give you a sense of reality that is not in existence – it only exists in your head, you start believing it and then you give it more energy, you become stressed and all of a sudden totally out of touch with your present moment. The present moment; where the only reality that exists is this second….
Meditating can help you stay within that moment, it can help you become centred and within a reality where you know there is a deep sense of peace and understanding of yourself. Some people find it difficult to be with that moment, to be with that stillness and recognise the thoughts that spill from the mind. However that does pass and a resonating peace and understanding can follow…
Meditating does become a way of life and you can find yourself drifting into that space at any time. It’s an instant connection to your soul and can ease you back into a feeling of peace. If you take time out specifically to mediate make sure that you have switched the phone off, find yourself somewhere comfortable to sit (many people suggest a hard back chair so your spine is straight) but the main thing to do though is be comfortable, take a couple of deep breaths and just allow your body to let go.
A couple of things that may help when you are starting to meditate is to concentrate on something – this could be gentle music, an object or your breathing. However, when concentrating on them do so with your senses, rather than with your thoughts. Allow the music to wash over you, feel your breath in your nostrils and your body rising and falling as you breath, gaze at a candle and watch it flicker, or with your eyes shut see in your minds eye what the room that you are currently sat in looks like if you did have your eyes open – this gives you a great sense of being in the moment and grounded within your space. You then may become aware of your thoughts and escape back into the mind, this is ok and do not judge yourself, just do one of the above to bring yourself back in to the present and into the body.
Eventually you will find that you will become aware of your thoughts and become the observer, thus seeing something deep and fundamental within you.
