PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY

Meditation for your soul

Spirituality was the original purpose of meditation, and its benefits, such as those shown here, can be significant. These often take longer to notice than the health and wellness benefits, but they meet a much deeper need.

PURIFICATION OF MIND AND HEART

By shedding light on the unconscious mind, meditation enables you to free yourself from inner darkness.

MEDITATION MAKES US FACE OUR FEARS, our shadows, and ourselves. It brings to light everything we carry inside us, such as repressed memories, negative emotional patterns, and unexpressed feelings. In meditation, we bear witness to this psychological material, while keeping the mind calm and refraining from self-judgment and interpretations. Little by little, these thoughts and feelings are either released or integrated into our conscious mind and personality.

WISDOM, INSIGHT, AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Depending on how you approach your practice, meditation can involve a study of the deeper truths of life.

TRADITIONALLY, MEDITATION IS SEEN AS a way to cut through our illusions and reveal either the true nature of reality, as in the Buddhist and Taoist approaches, or our identity as the immortal Self, as in the Yogic and Vedantic approaches. The result is deeper insight into your “self,” and greater wisdom about life. Along with the development of self-awareness, this can eventually lead to spiritual awakening or enlightenment and the transcendence of suffering.

CONNECTION WITH “SOURCE”

For some, meditation is a time to connect with a higher power or reality—whatever that means to you.

MEDITATION IS A PAUSE IN YOUR LIFE when you don’t engage with the exterior world. For some people, it is a time to connect to a higher reality or power. This can help you experience a sense of oneness with other people and life in general, which soothes the pain of being an isolated individual and pushes you beyond the limits of your ego. Other forms of spiritual connection, such as prayer, chanting, contemplation, or selfless service, are enhanced by meditation practice.

CONTENTMENT AND UNSHAKABLE PEACE

As you begin to notice the benefits of meditation, you start to feel that everything will always be okay.

IT BECOMES OUR LIVED EXPERIENCE that, no matter how wrong things go, we are always able to access an inner shrine of stillness through meditation. This becomes the foundation for contentment with yourself and your life and for happiness without a particular reason. Being happy for a reason is unsafe, because that reason may change. But if you are happy for no reason—if happiness or contentment is part of your being—then nobody can take that away from you.

SENSE OF PURPOSE AND MEANING

Practiced in a spiritual context, meditation is always part of a larger scheme or journey.

WHETHER MEDITATION SERVES to expand your human potential, connect with God, or achieve enlightenment, the result is the same: it gives a strong sense of purpose and meaning to your existence. As you try to align yourself with a higher power and make choices that help your spiritual growth, you no longer feel so lost in life. Otherwise, questions like “What is life for?” are never really tackled, and your material life, however successful, keeps failing to meet your deeper urges.

INCREASED INTUITION

Meditation helps us to give the thinking mind a break and tune in to something more powerful.

MANY OF US EXPERIENCE MOMENTS when we have direct knowledge of something without any apparent means to know it. Whether it is a flash of insight or a gut feeling, intuition can help us stay away from danger, understand the true motivations of people, and make difficult decisions in life. Meditation helps develop intuition by pausing our analytical mind. All techniques can improve this, but some, such as Trataka, are said to be more powerful.

“Peace is the foundation for existential happiness.”

An ancient symbol

Revered in many cultures, the lotus represents purity and enlightenment.