How to empty your mind.

Dear All,

The life-transforming/enhancing effect of your daily practice of sahaja yoga meditation, comes about through regularly achieving a few seconds to a few minutes of 'thoughtless awareness' ; when you can feel the cool breeze above your head. If you find that you can't stop thinking then here's a common reason why and what to do to make progress.

I'll tell you what my experience is and you can take from it whatever you think might help you.

The problem is one of attention. After a busy day, largely spent in front of a screen taking in and processing information of one sort or another; plus moving about, interacting with people, taking in sights, sounds, images; plus the to and fro wash of thoughts, feelings and memory; I know when my attention is overloaded.

The attention  can be like a fishing net. You throw it out there and when you pull it back in and see what you've caught, there's some plastic bottles, somebody's missing left shoe, a child's toy, some stones, a punctured football and......hey! One fish! Which is to say that the things that our attention is weighted down with usually have no relevance.

When you sit down to meditate there's a tendency to go on picking through your fishing net, when what you should be doing is emptying it.

Here's where two things help: doing a footspa with cool salt water and use of a particular meditation photo. The footspa helps clear the void, nabhi and swadisthan energy centres; and use of meditation photo clears the agnya chakra. By soothing these energy centres down, the attention becomes clearer and steadier and can pass through the top of your head as the cool breeze.

The particular meditation photo I use with my footspa is the one below, which I find is particularly effective at clearing the agnya chakra - by steadily watching Shri Mataji's agnya chakra( the red 'bindi') until there's a pulling sensation out of my own agnya and the feeling of vibes at the top of my head become stronger.

As you develop your sensitivity to vibes, what becomes clear is that making use of different meditation photos is like having a selection of tools in your toolbox: you pick the one that does the job. Or you find that a particular photo just makes you feel good(hint: it's the vibes).

For your own journey of experiment and discovery, I've put a selection of meditation photos in my dropbox folder for you, which you can download, print(try Boots online print service) and benefit from: click here.

See you at group meditation tomorrow.

Regards