Complete Meditative session

A complete meditative session should include these practices:

Deep relaxation: Completely relax every part of your body as also your mind. This puts you in a receptive state and helps you access your pranic energy.

Focusing: You focus your attention between your eyebrows — the centre of luminous spiritual energy, the area of peace inside you. Here, you let go the needless past and future worries and be wholly in the peace of the present moment. You train your mind to still its thoughts and learn what it is to be in sattvic calmness. Initially, you can silently repeat “I am peace” until you feel it spreading through you.

Diaphragmatic breathing: Push your abdominal muscles outward as you inhale and pull them inward as you exhale. This is considered to be the more natural form of breathing and, thus, staves off stress and tension and influences the prana to flow more smoothly and strongly.

Sound chanting: The sound can be ‘Om’. Rhythmic sound harmonises the prana. When the mind stops drifting and gets drawn into the sound, that mental concentration makes for a powerful inner sattvic energisation.

Visualisation: This is to attune the senses to your inner sattvic quality or inner divinity. Artists, writers, musicians are privileged to get this rapturous feeling of being deeply absorbed in divine beauty through their art. Visualisation meditation serves the same purpose and harmonises the mind and prana together.

Praying or chanting: So far, all the practices discussed above influence the mind, prana, senses. A prayer or chant repeated melodiously opens your heart and invokes the sattvic qualities of love, humility, expansiveness, wanting to give. Often, in your daily living, you may find you spontaneously want to give but the mind throws cold water on it raising questions of ‘sense’ or ‘rational’. Ultimately, these ‘justifications’ harden into beliefs and close the heart and your channel to sattvic living. Chanting, praying reopen the floodgates of giving and loving to transform your outlook.

Meditation does not just calm you, it also blunts that painful edge of being in a competitive environment. You do not regard another as a competitor who you must defeat; you affectionately regard his/her high standards as those you too can achieve. If you meditate for just 20 minutes daily, you will find a new keenness in your taste; your sense of humour too will be stronger where you laugh more, and more joyously; and your physical exercise sessions will feel like fun-and-games sessions. Oh yes, please do continue your cycling, walking or any form of exercise as also your sensible eating ways.

While it is important that you meditate daily, it is equally important that you carry this glorious, purified (sattvic-ised) feeling of peace and joy to all your activities. Work, speak, exercise, relate from this elevated state. In this New Year, may you experience the glow of meditative wellbeing; may you experience peace and bliss; may you be filled with grace.