Meditation and Prayer

Well it certainly would be nice to sit like Buddha and smile through all the challenges and tribulations that are coming our way. Meditation and prayer are viable and important tools with which to shape our lives and the very nature of our personal consciousness. In a pinch they offer us comfort and even sanity when we confront things beyond our control

There is so much that can be said about meditation and prayer but the most important thing is to practice rather than talk or conceptualize about them. Both involve a doing. Meditation and prayer involve actions on a non-physical level and in fact are processes that connect us to the astral level of existence and to a deep and meaningful connection with everything and everyone around us.

Christ’s prayer—As I walk through the valley and shadow of death I shall fear no evil because the Lord is with me—is one of the ultimate prayers that each of us should be familiar with because all of us live in the shadow of death.

We all will die sooner or later and it’s comforting to know and identify with something that will keep our fears of death at bay. Meditation and prayer through the years build a quality of being that is better able to meet death face-to-face—something we all must do.

Through meditation and prayer we can shape our own self worth; we can deliberately shape our consciousness into something that not only we can enjoy but also those around us find beautiful, attractive and interesting.

In my book HeartHealth is a series of practices of a different kind whose goal is the opening up of one’s feeling center, one’s heart and being with all their vulnerabilities. The first HeartHealth exercise drives us to directly seek out the tears of the melting heart, a process that heals as we open. It’s as simple as feeling our feelings but interestingly enough, this is extraordinarily difficult for the majority who have locked up their vulnerabilities and hurts. People are so identified with their minds and thoughts that their ability to get in touch with vulnerable feelings atrophies.

What I would like to share today is a very simple centering and expanding meditation protocol that yields quick results if practiced daily. The result one achieves is directly proportional to one’s persistence and consistency of practice.

The main obstacle and difficulty is that our minds do not want to get out of the way. Try not thinking for even 30 seconds and you will see what I mean. About 20 years ago I was proficient at doing this for upwards of 20 minutes at a time and I tell you it’s something to be experienced. Spending time in an isolation chamber is helpful in assisting one to arrive at this particular station.

Basic Centering Meditation

One can sit or lie down to do this meditation and it is best to start by taking some deep abdominal breaths. One standard way of doing this is to use the mind—give it something to do. One can count to 10 or 20 on the in breath, hold for the same count, and exhale also counting. The mind, in general, can only think about one thing at a time so here we replace the mind’s tendency to run around in rapid circles (chase its own tail) with the counting.

After a minute or two of this one begins to imagine the breath coming into the brain like a cooling wind to wash away the thought flow further. It’s helpful to imagine the breath like water flowing into a washing machine, washing our brains, clearing away all the dirt we normally have running around in our minds. One can do this for a few moments or move quickly to the next part.

We then drop our focus down to our heart center, to the point in our chests between our breasts, and feel our feelings. Here we breathe in, get a feeling of ourselves, and then breathe out, expanding our awareness and consciousness to the entire world, sending out a wave of compassion and empathy to all fellow beings who share this planet with us.

After we do this several times with several breaths we bring our consciousness down to our first chakra, to the red sexual center and breathe in, feeling our vitality, and then on the out breath we send this energy and awareness to our body. Instead of breathing out to the rest of the world we breathe out to the colony of cells, and even to our astral form, the vital energy we have or can feel from our genital area.

If we are doing this right we will actually feel the effects. First in a deepening calmness and cleanness of mind, then in expansion as we send our heart center feeling of self out to the entire world, and then in part three we feel ourselves charged up with energy.

So actually this is like self-guided imagery that parallels feelings. The imagination is, after all, the creative power; all artists know this. So we can pick up the instrument of our imagination and use it to create some sweeter inner music.

“Earth is approaching a threshold—the crossroads in human history where decisions to safeguard the planet and the human race or plunge unwittingly into the abyss of disaster will mark our every weighted step advancing into the future. Never before in recorded history have there been so many potential threats facing so many people. The Earth is in crisis,” writes the Extinction Protocol.

Bowing before eternity is something monks get used to doing but now at these end of times or whatever else you want to call it, we all need to get the knack of seeing beyond the pain and suffering around and inside of us through tuning into the everlasting feelings.

This is one of the few beautiful videos I have seen on the Internet lately—been waiting for the right place to share this and now it has found a perfect home. This is a good empathy test. Experience yourself watching this and count the tears. If you have none, you are hopeless in terms of having an open heart to feel and identify deeply with the pain, courage and beauty of others.

The tears of the melting heart are felt every time we cross the boundaries of our hearts. When we enter and even when we leave we can feel these tears, which represent our vulnerable feelings—our pure feelings.