Preparation Exercises
It was great to see how well everybody is remembering the preparation exercises taught the week before. And it was also encouraging to hear how you are all noticing the effects of doing these simple exercises and how it helps the meditation. In a couple of weeks we will start to explore one or two additional exercises you can use.
Standing Meditation
Meanwhile continuing our exploration of meditation in different postures was very illuminating. I would encourage you to carry on practising standing meditation with hands in prayer position at least once each day for about ten minutes.
On Tuesday you began to develop an awareness of alignment and how you could make very small subtle changes to your body allowing your mind to become stiller. Sometimes for some people these tiny adjustments can be done very quickly whilst others may find it takes a few minutes before the body feels totally aligned - eventually it becomes very intuitive.
Shivasana and Meditation
We also had time to contrast the experience of shivasana (corpse pose). This posture can be challenging. A certain amount of mindfulness is required to avoid either dropping into sleep or experiencing "monkey brain" (where the mind starts becoming preoccupied with lots of thoughts).
Now you have observed how your mind behaves in various postures you can discover the differences you can make with some ancient and very simple techniques. Practising meditation in shivasana can be assisted by various methods of mindfulness, guiding the direction of consciousness. In fact these methods will begin to have a positive effect in how your mind behaves in ordinary day to day activities too.
We will be working with some of these techniques during class (3) this evening.
Author: Andy Lucas, Spring to Mind Meditation Brighton
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