Meditation – 3 Ways

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meditation

What Is Meditation – 3 Ways?

Meditation is a physical and mental practice to find peace with all aspects of yourself and existence. That sounds way too big to grasp, right? That’s why this article is about breaking down meditation to make it more understandable, and make the practice more practical.

I recommend three different, but related, meditation practices to incorporate into your daily life. First is a Loving Meditation which is all about learning to genuinely love and accept who you are without judgement. The second is called Healing Meditation and does what it says, promoting emotional and physical healing. Finally, there is Oneness Meditation, which is a more traditional meditation to move you beyond thought into a realm of pure being.

You can use any of these three approaches in a meditation session, or even move between all of them, whatever works. You can also bring meditation into every moment of your life, which I’ll discuss towards the end of the article.

By practicing three different types of meditation, you can see meditation as more diverse than the simple traditional view of sitting cross legged and becoming completely detached from your thoughts. This broader view then takes a lot of the pressure off the meditation process. Meditation only works without this pressure. So, release yourself from building meditation up as some kind of goal or reward in itself, and see it for what it actually is – a practice or process to connect fully with your body, and thoughts, and the infinite.

Daily Practice

To benefit from any meditation, you really need to make it a daily practice. Take a growth mindset view on meditation, and see it as a skill to be learned, (rather than something you either can or can’t do), and as a skill it requires practice to improve. Preparation pays off with learning any skill, so knowing the common basics with all three meditation ways is important.

All three ways work best if you have the following seven steps in place:

  1. Find a quiet time & place where you won’t be disturbed – I’m an early riser and like to meditate in the morning around 6.30 am, before the rest of the household gets up.
  2. Sit comfortably or lie down – I lie on a yoga mat with a cushion under my head. The aim here is comfort, so that you aren’t distracted by aches and pains, or spending time wondering if you’re sitting correctly.
  3. Set a timer for 10, 15 or 20 mins – Setting a timer means you are less likely to be distracted with thoughts of how long you’ve been meditating for, is it enough time yet, etc? A timer on a phone is fine, as long as it’s not a phone you’re likely to receive calls on, or have interrupting notifications. And make the timer sound soft, so you’re not jolted when returning to full consciousness at the end of the session! I usually meditate for 15 mins, but sometimes 10 if I don’t have a lot of time, or 20 if I want more time. If you’re new to meditation start with 5 mins to get a feel for it and of course, down the line, you can choose longer times than 20 mins, if you find that beneficial.
  4. Close your eyes – Again this is about limiting distractions. Meditation is about turning inward.
  5. Relax your breathing – Becoming aware of your breathing is common to all meditation practices, because it is important to breathe in a relaxed way, and also because focusing on your breathing is a good way to slow your thoughts, and stop them distracting you. However, when you are advised to relax your breathing it can be hard to know what this means, and you might even become more tense, wondering if you are breathing in the right way! What I recommend is to take three deep breaths one after the other, (in through your nose, out through your mouth), and on the third take an extra inhale then let it out slowly and completely through your mouth. This extra in-breath is called a physiological sigh and if you follow the link there is an excellent video by Dr. Andrew Huberman about how to do this and how it helps with relaxation. You can use the physiological sigh at anytime in your day as well as during meditation. After these three breaths you will feel relaxed, and can stop thinking about your breathing, and just allow it to happen as normal. Just try and keep aware that you aren’t holding your breath in, which means tension. If this happens, just do another physiological sigh, or just relax your stomach or/or chest muscles, and breathe normally again.
  6. Relax your muscles – Like when we are holding our breath without realising this is happening, it is easy to be tensing your muscles, without even knowing you’re doing it. Though there are many meditation practices that will take you on a tour of your body, tensing and relaxing your muscles from the top of your head, to the tips of your toes, I find these too repetitive and formulaic. Instead I recommend a quick check over of your body – are you frowning, squeezing your eyes shut, clenching your jaw, clenching your fists or gripping something, curling your toes, tightening your stomach muscles or hunching your shoulders? Learn to look out for the parts of your body where you hold tension most often, and relax these areas when you feel tension. Again, like breathing, this is a useful practice in daily life, as well as during meditation.
  7. Become aware of your thoughts – The final common step to all three ways to meditate is of course to become aware of your own thoughts, and the space that you also are around these thoughts. All you have to do is become aware that you have thoughts. Listen for these thoughts, which are generally opinionated, and feel a sense that you are separate from them. If this is new to you then you can prompt the process by inserting the words “I am having the thought that…” once you catch a thought to help create distance and separateness from your thoughts. For example, “I am having the thought that… I want to open my eyes.” This separateness is the space around your thoughts. It can be called the observing mind or the watcher and many other names. I call it Universal Consciousness as it seems to be a level of consciousness universal to all humans.

1. Loving Meditation

This is the simplest meditation to explain, but for anyone who has fed themselves on a lifetime of self-criticism, it may be one of the hardest to practice. Loving Meditation is about loving and accepting yourself without condition. This is feel good meditation, but it has nothing to do with thinking positive, or faking it till you make it, or being your best self, or any other wellness tropes. Loving Meditation is simply about allowing yourself to be yourself without having to justify your own existence. We can all be too hard on ourselves, and this meditation is all about learning how to love and accept yourself fully – giving yourself unconditional love – from a place that is already part of you, but which you may never have felt before.

First, follow the seven steps below:

  1. Find a quiet time & place where you won’t be disturbed
  2. Sit comfortably or lie down
  3. Set a timer for 10, 15 or 20 mins
  4. Close your eyes
  5. Relax your breathing
  6. Relax your muscles
  7. Become aware of your thoughts

At this point listen to your thoughts, until you can feel that you are both your thoughts, and the space around your thoughts. This space around your thoughts doesn’t have to be narrowly defined, and there is no right way to feel this, it will be different for everyone. However, this space can only be felt – it has no direct voice and so no direct opinions either. It will feel like a loving presence.

This is Universal Consciousness, the Observing Mind in ACT and other mindfulness based practices, and the Self in IFS. This is the part of you that accepts all of your thoughts, without judgement, and loves you unconditionally. Universal Consciousness allows your thoughts to be exactly as they are.

As you feel this Universal Consciousness as separate to your everyday opinionated thoughts, there is no need to get caught up in trying to completely detach from those thoughts. Just be aware of and open to your internal dialogue. Even if you know you don’t like a thought, (maybe it’s self-critical or judgmental or fearful or boastful or just downright crazy or nasty), try to not chase it away or challenge it – just listen. The important thing at this point is to feel the space around these thoughts, which is Universal Consciousness, and which is separate from your thoughts. Even if this is only felt temporarily at first, with practice, this will be extended.

It’s helpful to know that usually thoughts will pass along and change in their own time as well, and if they don’t and you really get stuck in a thought loop, just relax out of the meditation and open your eyes and try again another time. There’s no test here, and you don’t have to get it right all the time.

With practice you will feel Universal Consciousness as separate to your thoughts, and you can then direct your thoughts to focus on two specific concepts – Acceptance of all parts of yourself & Love of all parts of yourself. These are the first two of Gabor Mate’s seven A’s of healing as explored in the article ALIIGNED, and are fundamental to meeting and knowing yourself, and so relaxing fully into a state of peace.

Accepting yourself means accepting all your feelings and thoughts in whatever form they come.

Loving yourself means that you are perfect as you are. There is no need to justify your existence.

Acceptance and Love combined make unconditional love. Unconditional love is usually associated with a parent’s love for their child, and though not all parents give this to their children, as numerous family fall outs testify, it is a kind of love that all parents will have felt at least once in their lives, even if they have then chosen to reject this feeling. Unconditional love for our children is a biological necessity – an evolutionary adaption to make sure we get the little blighters to a point where they can fly the nest and unconditionally love their own progeny. It is also perhaps a process where Universal Consciousness connects to itself in another person.

Now, here’s the magic, the big reveal – you can give unconditional love to yourself. You don’t have to find a perfect lover to give this to you. You don’t have to have parents who you knew loved you unconditionally. You don’t have to have children to know how to do this either. To help feel acceptance and love of yourself, to feel unconditional love of yourself, you say to yourself, while feeling the presence of Universal Consciousness, the following words, or words like them:

I accept all my thoughts and feelings.

I am alive and that is enough.

There is no need to justify my existence or prove anything.

Full disclosure – it is highly unlikely this will work for you straightaway. You are unlikely to feel a blast of loving energy, and understanding, and acceptance, and love that sweeps away years of self-doubt, self-criticism, loneliness, fear, anger, frustration, disappointment and rejection both by yourself and by others. Though that may happen, it’s best not to expect it to happen – you’re setting yourself and the process up for failure.

Now you may be thinking – these are just affirmations right? You tried that and it didn’t work. Please listen – the three sentences above are not affirmations, even if they sound a bit like affirmations. I have nothing against some kinds of affirmations, they can be a useful way to change repetitive thought processes, but generally affirmations are designed to give your internal dialogue a new, more productive, script to follow. Let me be clear – you cannot talk or affirm yourself into loving and accepting all parts of yourself. This is the idea that if you repeat love for yourself over and over you will start to believe it. This doesn’t work, because it is fundamentally flawed. You must feel the love and acceptance of yourself, without words.

The three sentences above are not about convincing yourself of anything. They are simply pointers, way-signs, lights to guide you back to the feeling of love and acceptance, the unconditional love you can already feel for yourself inside, as Universal Consciousness. This is why you don’t have to stick to the exact words. Use different words if you like them better. Make them into one sentence, or one-hundred sentences, it doesn’t matter. Here they are again, with some elaboration:

I accept all my thoughts and feelings – Yes, all thoughts. You have no good thoughts, or bad thoughts, just thoughts. If you starting putting your thoughts into a hierarchy you are already judging yourself.

I am alive and that is enough – It really is. Does a baby need permission to be born? At the point of conception did you get a phone call asking if it was okay for your parents to proceed?

There is no need to justify my existence or prove anything – You can love yourself just as you are. Any achievements or failures in life don’t define you. All of that is surface level stuff. Underneath you are genuinely perfect, and you only need to know this for yourself. No-one else can know this for you.

In Loving Meditation you generally don’t spend the entire time repeating the three sentences above. You may do this at first to get the ideas into your head and that’s fine, but at some point other thoughts will come. Try to listen to them without joining them and becoming those thoughts. Try and feel fully the fact that all humans, (and you are one), are allowed to be just as they are right now. You don’t have to win or compete to be worthy of love of yourself. And try to feel this love for yourself, for the fact of your existence and the fact that you have nothing to prove.

If you have thoughts that criticise, or argue, or boast, or distract, then always try to simply allow these thoughts, accept them without joining in with them and playing along with their games or arguing with their arguments. Your thoughts are a part of who you are, but so is the space around your thoughts, and it is only from this space of Universal Consciousness that full understanding, and love and acceptance of yourself can come.

2. Healing Meditation

In Healing Meditation you will be following a version of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) self-therapy process. This process is explained in detail by Jay Earley in his book Self-Therapy which is reviewed in the Guides section of the website and reading this book and practicing the IFS process is essential before trying Healing Meditation for yourself. However, once you are familiar with the IFS process you can follow the instructions below to make this a daily practice.

Healing Meditation, as in IFS therapy, means seeing yourself in a new way. You have already felt a sense of Universal Consciousness in Loving Meditation and this plays a major part in all types of meditation. You also are aware of your internal dialogue, which can be helpful or unhelpful. This internal dialogue is what IFS calls the various Parts of yourself, each with their own views and each together making up who you see as yourself in the world. This totality of yourself in the world, with all your desires and fears, is what I call your World Identity, and it is your World Identity that is the focus of Healing Meditation and, for most of us, our World Identity really needs healing.

The healing in Healing Meditation is both mental and physical healing, and is not metaphorical. This meditation is about reducing your stress and if you have health problems it is about finding out why that might be, and helping you improve your health. It is also about meeting your thoughts and learning where they come from, and helping them resolve, which is especially helpful if your thoughts are self-critical or self-abusive in any way.

First, as in Loving Meditation, follow the seven steps below:

  1. Find a quiet time & place where you won’t be disturbed
  2. Sit comfortably or lie down
  3. Set a timer for 10, 15 or 20 mins
  4. Close your eyes
  5. Relax your breathing
  6. Relax your muscles
  7. Become aware of your thoughts

Again, as in Loving Meditation, listen to your thoughts until you can feel that you are both your thoughts and the space around your thoughts – Universal Consciousness – which is called Self in the IFS process, but we will stick with Universal Consciousness. This will feel like a loving presence. Universal Consciousness is the atmosphere which our World Identities live within and which provides the feeling that you are who you are beyond each of your current likes and dislikes. This is the feeling that you are the same person now as you were when you were a child even if all your atoms1 and most of your views have changed since that time.

Next, instead of inserting any kind of thoughts into your ongoing internal dialogue, just allow your internal dialogue to continue and focus on either an emotional pain you are feeling or a physical pain you are feeling. The focus here doesn’t have to be a narrow, laser type, focus, just allow yourself to become generally aware of either an emotional pain you are feeling or a physical pain you are feeling. Let’s look at these two types of pain separately now, though the process of Healing Meditation is the same for both.

Emotional Healing

When you are practicing Healing Meditation and at the point of focusing on your emotional pain, it may be a question of which one? Most people live lives in a near constant flow of underlying emotional pain in the form of worried, guilty, critical or shaming thoughts as well as visceral feelings of anger, fear and desire that sometimes arise as if from nowhere, but so forcefully as to abduct our lives either momentarily or with permanent, sometimes dire, consequences.

Healing meditation is not about suddenly healing all your emotional pain in one simple go around. There really are no magic bullets so stop looking for them. This is an ongoing process, a meeting and understanding the various Parts of your World Identity from a loving place of Universal Consciousness, which involves meeting and healing one Part of yourself at a time.

To choose a single Part of yourself to heal at a Healing Meditation session just allow an issue to come up naturally. This will happen because by starting a Healing Meditation session you have made an intention, even if sub-consciously, and this will be responded to by a Part of yourself. Issues that come up can be past hurts or current conflicts. They are generally related to the main areas of our lives where conflict arises – family life and work life – so these areas can be thought about generally, and you will find emotional pain arising.

Also, our World Identities are generally, at any point, driven by one particular Part of ourselves, and that one Part wants to be heard. It will speak and you may also visualise it as a form, or a person, most often a child as lots of these Parts of ourselves were first formed in childhood. The fact that a Part wants to be heard is so important I’m stressing it again. The Parts of ourselves that make up our World Identities are always trying to tell us something, and it’s always either something we either want, or don’t want, to happen. Though many therapies and spiritual practices try to dismiss or ignore or turn these desires and fears into evils, they are really what makes us who we are in the world, they make up our World Identity and without listening to them, and healing their pain, we can never fully live and grow. We are neither World Identity or Universal Consciousness, we are both.

If during Healing Meditation you still unable to find an emotional pain, which will only happen if you are completely resistant to the process, then think directly of a time in the past when something happened that brought emotional pain, and makes you feel that pain now. Once you have that memory, listen for a voice that rises above the others in your internal dialogue. Now you can start a conversation with that Part of yourself.

For example, perhaps you think of a time when you argued with a family member, say a parent, a time when you knew they were wrong, and you were right, and you really gave them both barrels. That Part of yourself that felt righteous has it’s own voice and may tell you now that you had to shout and say those things. By keeping connected to Universal Consciousness you can feel open to this Part of yourself, you don’t have to join in and again let this self righteous part dominate your thoughts.

As the IFS process teaches, ask this self-righteous part a key question – “What bad thing will happen if you stop holding this view and feeling this way?”

Wait for an answer. It will come. It may surprise you.

Your self-righteous part may say something like, if I don’t get angry then they will control me again and have me doing all sorts of crap I don’t want to do, like they did before…

And there it is, you have learned this self-righteous part is trying to protect you. In the language of IFS it is a Protector Part. And behind this Protector Part you may now see, or feel, or hear, the Part it is trying to defend you from even knowing that it is there. This is usually a child-like part, an Exile, in the language of IFS, that has been wounded in the past. This Exile has been exiled from your awareness, but it is still very much a Part of your World Identity. In the example we are working through, this exiled Part was perhaps shouted at, or demeaned, by the parent you had an argument with. Your exiled Part felt scared and shamed and controlled, and now your Protector Part refuses to let you feel this pain again, so goes on the attack.

Now comes the healing.

Following the IFS process, after gaining permission from the Protector Part to engage directly with the Exiled Part, you can witness, as Universal Consciousness, the original event when the Exile was created. Further, as Universal Consciousness, you can change that event to rescue the Exile. So, in this example, the Exile might want you to make your parent treat you with love, instead of shaming you. Once you do this, and imagine your parent treating you with love, there will be no need for your Protector Part to protect anymore and so both the Protector and the Exile can be released from their roles to live either in some other place of their choosing, like a fantasy land in your mind, or they can simply become part of yourself now, within your body, but in peace instead of at war.

By following this process, you both heal a past trauma, and gain insight into your actions, and the actions of others. When your parent makes a demand of you again in the future, you will be less likely to blow up at them, as you have one less Part of yourself to protect.

Physical Healing

The process of using Healing Meditation to heal your body follows much of the same ground as when healing your emotions, and also uses the IFS process as before. However, though IFS sometimes advises using a physical pain as a way in, a “trailhead” to finding a Part that needs heard, IFS never states directly that it can heal physical pain. My direct experience though has shown me this is true. There is also numerous examples of physical healing coming from resolving emotional pain explored in the three books on health in the Guides section of this website – Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno; Cured by Dr. Jeff Rediger and When The Body Says No by Dr. Gabor Mate.

The starting place for a Healing Meditation focused on physical healing is always your body, and in this way it is much easier to get started, as you will know immediately where you must direct your attention, either from the actual physical pain/discomfort, or from the diagnosis you have received from a medical doctor.

Let’s say it’s something simple – you have a pain in your neck – a crick in the neck. You just woke up with it this morning, and so you immediately think you just slept awkwardly, or twisted it the day before without noticing at the time. This is the explanation you heard growing up and it’s the explanation most people still use today. A crick in the neck usually doesn’t last long and resolves itself for most of us, though for some it can lead to lifelong chronic pain.

In your Healing Meditation, you direct your attention towards the neck pain, and from a place of Universal Consciousness, you listen for your thoughts. The words come – That Little Bastard! and they are accompanied by an image from yesterday of your two year old puking all down your suit just as you’re about to go to work.

You’re appalled by the thought that you could think anything so nasty about your own child. At the time of the puke you were the perfect Dad. You sighed and groaned, but you knew your toddler didn’t do it on purpose, they’re just a child. You cleaned your kid, then changed your suit. You were late to work but thankfully your boss has a two year old herself and saw the funny side of it. Though she still gave you the, try not to let it happen again lecture, in that singsong way she has which is very friendly, yet very threatening.

The key to Healing Meditation is to listen to what your inner Parts are telling you, rather than what the outer world looks like, to find out what else is going on here. Why really do you have a crick in your neck? You’ll get the answer by asking the question inside – what bad thing will happen if I don’t have neck pain?

Two answers – first you may start thinking about how you sometimes resent the pressure your child’s needs place on you – we all want to be free like we were when we were kids, but wanting this instead of looking after your child makes you feel like a bad person. Second, you may not get sympathy or help from others if you’re not in pain. Your Boss laughed at you and threatened you. Your partner has cleaned up enough baby puke that they’re not handing you any medals for the job. You want love and sympathy, like you got from your parents when things went wrong when you were a child.

Now you know these answers, in Healing Meditation you can meet the Parts of yourself that need the love and sympathy, and the Parts of yourself that want to have no responsibilities. You can meet and witness and love these parts from a place of Universal Consciousness. You can give all this to yourself and by doing that you can subconsciously allow your body to heal, letting it release the tension in your muscles that is causing the pain.

Even if this doesn’t happen immediately, it will happen and will, at the very least, stop your crick in the neck from developing into a chronic problem. By acknowledging and then resolving inner psychological strains and stresses, strains and stresses that can at times seem so childish and silly as to be impossible to take seriously, but when you do take them seriously you will begin to treat all physical problems this way, and you will learn, as Dr. John Sarno teaches, to think psychological, not physical.”2

Well that’s okay, everyone gets a crick in the neck, it’s only a crick in the neck you might say, I don’t need a Healing Meditation for that, I’ve got Stage 4 Lymphoma for f**k’s sake, not a crick in the neck.

I cannot promise you healing. I don’t want to give you false hope. I don’t ask you to stop any conventional treatments you are receiving. But to you I would say the process is the same. Go through the same steps and ask the question – What bad thing will happen if… I get better… if I live …if my cancer goes into remission? Are you unhappy in your life, with your spouse, with your job, with your kids? Have you past traumas that you know are there, but don’t want to think about, or that you are repressing altogether?

These are hard questions, and even the idea that we might allow cancer to develop in our bodies as a way of resolving inner conflict, is anathema to most people. However, there is more and more evidence to show that our emotional states are, at the very least, a part of the mechanism of any disease and most likely a major part. Healing Meditation using the IFS process is the simplest way I have found to find the way through the labyrinth of our emotions to Parts of our World Identity crying out to be heard. They are crying so loud that, if they are not heard, they can destroy our bodies altogether, rather than be ignored.

It’s important to know there is no blame in this process. You are not at “fault” for your illness. Your illness is an expression of inner turmoil, there is no need to attach any blame for this turmoil. By seeing yourself as a World Identity made up of separate Parts born from different experiences, and expressing different emotions, makes it easier to detach the idea of blame, because there is no-one person to blame, either yourself or someone else like a parent, spouse or an abuser. Healing meditation is first and foremost about healing your inner Parts, and so creating a harmonious World Identity. Blame gets in the way of all healing. Leave blame behind.

Knowing When To Stop The Healing

I’m a methodical person – a Part of me that likes organisation is one of the more dominant parts of my World Identity. When I first started Healing Meditations I kept a list of each traumatic event in my life, each ailment, each emotional pain I wanted to heal. It was a long list. It was a really, really long list.

I would use the list of pains to inspire a Healing Meditation session, and when the pain was healed, (sometimes in one session, sometimes over several), I would tick the pain off, and remove it from the pain list. The pain list should have gotten smaller, but it didn’t, it just kept getting longer and longer and longer.

This was when I realised that I had drifted into a loop of self-analysis that would never end. I was looking for scabs to pick. So I ended it, and you must end it as well, if this happens to you. Make a pain list if you want but then dump it. Once you have healed the major traumas and health problems in your past and present, and you’ll know when this is done, stop searching for new ones. Don’t pick the scabs. Trust me, there will always be plenty of new wounds to heal.

Use Healing Meditation in this way to help resolve issues as they arise, and these issues will naturally take you into the past, as the past is part of why we are where we are today. Use Healing Meditation to help keep yourself in good health and pain free. Use it to help you understand what you want or don’t want in your life. Use it to heal the past, yes, but once you feel you’re going looking for trouble, stop and smell the roses around you, and enjoy your World Identity. Give yourself love, and know you can always give yourself love, and you can always use Healing Meditation to heal any new pain that arises.

3. Oneness Meditation

This is the traditional type of meditation and the one you are likely familiar with if you have ever looked into or tried meditation previously. Oneness Meditation is about feeling yourself more as Universal Consciousness and detaching from your World Identity. In Oneness Meditation you are witnessing your thoughts, your internal dialogue, without inserting any kind of words, like in Loving Meditation and without engaging with your thoughts, like in Healing Meditation. You are also not being carried away by your thoughts. You become aware of your thoughts, but it is as if your thoughts are clouds floating across the sky, or cars passing on a road and you are the surroundings, Universal Consciousness, aware of these thoughts.

Oneness Meditation is probably the most challenging to maintain for extended periods of time. Though this type of meditation can bring an incredible sense of oneness, and a bliss like connection to all existence, meditating in this way can also lead to disappointment and a sense of failure if you find yourself constantly being drawn back into your thoughts. One minute you feel like your atoms have dissolved completely and you are only energy, the next minute you are having an argument in your head with the traffic warden who gave you a ticket for being two seconds over yesterday!

As the traditional type of meditation, Oneness Meditation most often conjures up images of cross-legged yoga poses, incense, floaty music and perhaps an ommmm or other chant. Though all of that is fine and chanting is certainly a way to concentrate the mind away from direct thoughts, none of that is necessary in Oneness Meditation.

As before, start by following the seven steps below:

  1. Find a quiet time & place where you won’t be disturbed
  2. Sit comfortably or lie down
  3. Set a timer for 10, 15 or 20 mins
  4. Close your eyes
  5. Relax your breathing
  6. Relax your muscles
  7. Become aware of your thoughts

As in the Loving and Healing Meditations listen to your thoughts, but in Oneness Meditation there is no need to engage in any way with your thoughts. Feel yourself as the space around your thoughts, as Universal Consciousness, separate from the everyday thoughts and remain as this space and separateness. This of course is easier said than done, and like in the previous meditations, it really helps to take a growth mindset view here – Rome wasn’t built in a day, and meditation requires regular repeated practice to bear fruit.

A common way, and the most useful way I have found, to help along the process of remaining as Universal Consciousness, is to concentrate on your breathing. This is not concentration in a narrow sense with tightening of muscles and thoughts of how you must get this right, and questions of, are you doing this right? This is concentration with a light touch – be aware of your in-breath and out-breath and repeat. Try to fall in to a simple rhythm – breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, and insert a physiological sigh if you feel any tension.

While you are being lightly aware of your breathing in this way, your thoughts will come and stick around, then go, and change, and can be more intrusive, or quieter. Let them be as they are. Don’t try to direct or change them. If you find you slip into becoming your thoughts – getting caught up in your internal dialogue, (that traffic warden really needs to hear your side of the story) – once you become aware of this then become aware of your breathing again, and relax back into Universal Consciousness.

Remember – this isn’t a test or an exam. There is no goal to score here, and no task to tick off. Though in Oneness Meditation you can experience real blissful feelings of joy, as if you are really part of everything that exists without boundary or description, you also won’t feel that way, you might feel a quiet type of peace, or you might get stuck in your thoughts and have to write the session off completely.

The important point is that the blissful feelings of joy aren’t a goal, they’re just a byproduct of the experience of Oneness Meditation. If you go looking for blissful joy every time you practice Oneness Meditation then this become just another thought that you get caught up in and can let go. It becomes another goal, or tick box.

So what’s the point of Oneness Meditation?

Of course the answer is there is no point as such. Oneness Meditation is about meeting yourself, as part of all existence, as part of Infinite Existence. It is about being in the present moment completely without expectation and without motive to be somewhere else, (past or future), or someone else, whether in your thoughts, or in a physical sense. It is about being yourself completely, right here and now.

Spontaneous Oneness Meditation

I want you now to forget the seven steps I advise to lead you into each of the three meditations. Forget about finding a quiet time & place. You don’t have to sit or lie down. There’s no timer needed, no eyes closed, and forget your breathing, forget about your muscles, or your thoughts. Just go for a walk, on your own, somewhere outside in a park, or a country trail. look at the sky and the trees. Watch the clouds. Feel the vastness of yourself as part of all around you. Everything is made of atoms, which is energy in the form of matter, and so there is no true boundary between you and the trees around you, or the clouds in the sky, or the sun and planets, or the stars beyond, or the infinity of universes beyond our own. It all goes on and on, and us with it.

Whether you have ever intentionally practised any kind of meditation or not, or ever articulated any of this to yourself, you probably have felt this vastness at some point in your life. This is spontaneous Oneness Meditation. This is you, your World Identity, feeling Infinite Existence as Universal Consciousness.

For me, being outdoors alone in nature almost always brings this feeling of oneness. I feel connected to all things without the need for interpretation or analysis or naming. After my father died I felt his presence on walks alone. I still do, and now also feel that all of life, all possibilities and all those people who have gone before and will come again are around us. Not in a literal way, their World Identities are gone, or are yet to be born, but they are here as a feeling, as Universal Consciousness which is a loving presence.

Being alone and in nature is not the only way to spontaneously feel this transcendent oneness. It can come when on your own in general, or when outdoors in a city or a crowded space and you feel suddenly as if everything, everywhere, is happening all at once. You might feel this when carried away by music or at a gig being carried away as part of a crowd singing out your favourite song. You can feel it in a place of worship, where oneness is God, and you might feel it when carried away by exercise or briefly when in the throes of love and sex.

Drugs and Brain Conditions and Spontaneous Oneness

Though not in any way meditation, it must be pointed out that a sense of oneness with nature, other people and everything can come when the brain is affected in certain ways through illness or injury and when taking certain drugs. Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor describes feeling a complete oneness with all life during and after a stroke that mainly affected the left hemisphere of her brain and she describes this dramatic event and the force of the experience in the Ted Talk A Stroke of Insight.

Drugs, both recreational hallucinogenic type drugs such as LSD, or the drugs which have been used by traditional cultures in shamanistic ceremonies for centuries, such as mescaline and ayahuasca, are also well documented as producing similar feelings of oneness as Bolte-Taylor describes in her Ted Talk.

Modern medicine is at last researching the use of hallucinogenic drugs, and their potential in therapy instead of demonising them, however, though these drugs can bring about a strong sense of oneness, I know from my own experimentation with LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms), that the effect is most often overwhelming. Though there is perhaps a place for such drugs in certain settings and for people who are severely blocked in some way in their lives, or with their healing, I can’t see their use in a more general sense.

Hallucinogenic drugs will never be for everyone, and their use as recreational drugs has a dark side with some people experiencing severe paranoia, and ongoing psychological problems after their use. I don’t believe these problems come from the drugs themselves, but rather the drugs exacerbate unresolved conflicts already within the person. These conflicts are magnified out of proportion and can lead to severe anxiety, depression and even suicidal thoughts. This was my own experience in my early twenties and one from which it took time to recover.

This has not been such a problem I believe with hallucinogens in traditional cultures as their use is mediated by a shaman, who is essentially a guide to lead the subject through the experience, and help lead them out the other side, with a renewed sense of who they and their place within society. The recreational tripper has no such guide, and is left to make some sense of the experience for themselves.

Meditation in Every Moment

Seeing every moment as a moment of meditation is a key tenant of Buddhism, and also part of many mindfulness practices. It is primarily about living in the present moment, experiencing each moment without seeing it as a stepping stone, or obstacle to some future, better moment, or without drifting off in your head into ruminations about the past or future.

This will help improve your dedicated meditation sessions, as you are paying attention to what is happening right now. This helps you become aware of your thoughts. This helps you learn about the Parts of yourself that make up your World Identity, and helps develop the connection to the space around your thoughts that is Universal Consciousness.

All this makes it easier to not get caught up in your thoughts when meditating. So, if you are waiting for someone or something, then the waiting is the meditation and there is no need to get caught up in impatient thoughts. If you are walking somewhere then pay attention to each step, without simply thinking about where you are going, or what you’ll do when you get there.

You can also practise Loving Meditation throughout your everyday life as well. Anytime you want you can feel the love of Universal Consciousness for your World Identity with all its conflicted thoughts and emotions.

Healing Meditation can also be an everyday experience. If in a moment you feel pain strike, physical or mental, you can have an automatic response of healing to the pain. You don’t have to explore it right there and then, the day to day of work, friends and family is hectic enough without adding inner exploration into the mix, it’s enough to acknowledge that the pain is there and that it will be listened to, understood, helped and healed.

Bringing meditation into your every day life will benefit your actions making them more in line with who you know you are. It also improves how you interact with others as you see them at a deeper level and see your feelings towards them with greater understanding. Meditation in every moment brings a fuller sense of yourself, and brings an enjoyment to life that you may never have thought was possible.

No Pressure

It is worth repeating – there is no test to pass with meditation.

Let go of trying to get meditation right and correct. Don’t try to box it off. Take the pressure of yourself and the process.

Every meditation won’t go the way you want it to go, and some days you’ll find yourself caught up in World Identity woes about that damn traffic warden, and much worse. It’s helpful to know that usually thoughts will pass along, and change in their own time as well, and if they don’t and you really get stuck, just relax out of the meditation, and open your eyes, and try again another time.

Like I said, no one is grading you on this, and there’s no need to judge yourself. Allow yourself the time to practice, and learn, and you’ll find the benefits come without the need to chase after them.

Footnotes

  1. It is estimated that all atoms in our bodies are replaced every 5-7 years. Interestingly, as atoms aren’t destroyed the same atoms that made up historical figures such as Aristotle, Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare for example, will at some point also probably have made up you. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/12/27/dear-science-could-my-body-include-an-atom-from-shakespeare/ and https://time.com/archive/6869550/science-the-fleeting-flesh/ ↩︎
  2. “develop the habit of “thinking psychological” instead of physical. In other words, I suggest to patients that when they find themselves being aware of the pain, they must consciously and forcefully shift their attention to something psychological, like something they are worried about, a chronic family or financial problem, a recurrent source of irritation, anything in the psychological realm, for that sends a message to the brain that they’re no longer deceived by the pain. When that message reaches the depths of the mind, the subconscious, the pain ceases.” Sarno, John E.. Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection (p. 99). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition. etc. ↩︎

Further Reading

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