By George A. Boyd ©1999
- Go to your meditation space daily and sit.
You start your practice by going to your meditation space and doing
spiritual activities. You may wish to pray, chant a mantra on your rosary
(mala), read from your spiritual or inspirational books, write in your
meditation journal, or practice a specific meditation.
To get the habit of meditation, you need to do this daily for at least
three weeks. Set aside 15 to 30 minutes at a convenient time. Many people
find that the early hours of the morning between 4:00am and 6:00am are
especially conducive to meditation, because it is quiet and still.
If you find you are being resistant or stubborn about wanting to crawl
out of your warm bed, or change your well-established routine, you may
wish to enlist an ally. You may have your friend, partner, or spouse,
agree with you that you will go to meditate at a certain time. Your
ally will encourage you and praise you when you actually go to your
meditation space and do a spiritual activity. You may even have them
wake you up, or reward you with a special breakfast treat when you keep
your agreement.
- Create a strong internal incentive to meditate.
Reading spiritual books, remembering the attributes of the Divine,
and reading about the lives of great devotees can inspire you with a
fervent desire to know and be with God. Being with God-intoxicated saints
can fill you with a great devotion (bhakti), and longing for liberation
(mumukhsatwa).
Once the fire of devotion begins to blaze brightly within you, you
will have no problem getting yourself to meditate. In fact, it will
actually become difficult to pull yourself away from meditation. You
may find yourself scheduling longer and longer meditation periods to
do inner communion. At one point in my own life, I was meditating 8
to 12 hours a dayI was irresistibly drawn to the Inner Light.
- Schedule God into your busy schedule.
When you set goals for your week, make sure you schedule spiritual
communion time. Block off time for meditation, time to go to church
or temple, time to go to satsang.
Make your vacations into a spiritual retreat. Go to the ashram or yoga
center for your vacations instead of the casino or amusement park.
- Keep a meditation journal.
Record your insights in a meditation journal. You may want to write
down your realizations or discoveries, what you saw or heard in meditation,
what you learned from your inner voice of intuition. You can draw pictures,
write poems, compose music, clip inspiring photos and comment on them,
or record aphorisms for the nuggets of wisdom you received during your
sitting.
My meditation journal has progressed to the point where I can take
the insights I glean from my meditations and transfer them directly
into the books, workshop materials, and correspondence course that I
am writing. Others have done the same: song lyrics and melodies, poems,
ideas for books, have all come out of series of meditation sessions.
In time, you can do the same.
- Work to progressively expand your insights.
Keep going higher and deeper into your inner vehicles. Go to the deepest
place of yesterday's meditation, and seek to move beyond it today. Keep
stretching the telescope of your inner vision so you can expand your
consciousness to ever-new inner horizons. Your goal is to know the infinite
depths, the illimitable heights, the fullness of the being and the presence
of the Divine
to know the Great Continuum of Consciousness in its
entirety.
- Realize your Soul.
By achieving your own enlightenment, you will begin to teach yourself.
Gradually, you will also be able to teach others. As you accumulate
a large reservoir of inner experiences in meditation, you can begin
to recognize the experiences of others, and you can act as a coach.
Also, by realizing your own Soul, and gaining the ability to unite
your attentional principle with your Higher Self at will, you will
have made the first important step in preparing yourself for discipleship.
Discipleship is the ability to commune with a Master Teacher, and
act as an instrument for that Master's grace and Power. It is the
next step in your ability to be of service to humanity, and in your
own spiritual evolution.