Meditation Deep & Blissful

Comes with Seven Guided Meditations

as Audio Downloads

Your Gift with Purchase!

Follow These Simple Steps:

#1 Find Your Gift Code

(It’s in Chapter 10 Under Guided Meditations)

#2 Go to Sharon’s Website

MeditationBeautiful.com

#3 Type in Your Code and Get Your Gift!

Meditation Deep & Blissful

How to Still The Mind’s Compulsive Thinking Let Go of Upset

Tap Into the Juice & Meditate at a Whole New Level

With Seven Guided Meditations

as Audio Downloads

Sharon Rose Summers

Austin & Goldenlight Publishing

Copyright © 2013 Sharon Rose Summers

No portion of this book may be duplicated, recorded, distributed, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, scanning, photocopying, audio recording or other, without prior written permission of the publisher. The suggestions in this book are guidelines for the healthy individual. Not all meditation and breathwork exercises are suitable for everyone, special cautions may apply for individuals with health issues, and for this reason, you should consult with your doctor to find out if any restrictions apply to you before performing the exercises in this book, or any new exercise. The author’s intent is to provide material to inform you in your pursuit of personal growth and neither the author nor publisher assume responsibility for your actions. This book is sold with the understanding that the information herein should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health treatment and that neither the author nor publisher are engaged in rendering psychological or other professional services. If counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought. The author and publisher specifically disclaim any responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book. Library of Congress # Library of Congress Subject Headings:

1. Meditation 2. Personal Growth 3. Yoga

ISBN 13: 978-0-9858-108-4-9 ISBN 10: 0-9858-108-4X

Cover Design: Andrew Brown, Design for Writers

~~~

Table of Contents

Part I – Principles 1. The Three Essentials................................................................................................. 1

Newcomer or Seasoned Meditator? The Three Essentials

#1 Understanding the Mind #2 Understanding Emotion #3 The Right Technique (for You)

Why Meditate 2. What Is Meditation?..................................................................................................7

Welcome to Your Inner Landscape – The Meditative State Housecleaning – Clearing Your Energetic Field A Burnt Pot of Stew (That’s You) Tapping into the Juice

3. Understanding the Mind........................................................................................11

The Mind Is a Software Application The Seven Functions

1 – Labeling (Everything) 2 – Commenting – Your Inner Talk Show 3 – Judging, Comparing, and Measuring (All the Time) 4 – Scanning For Danger – Your Private Bodyguard 5 – Identifying and Solving Problems 6 – Planning 7 – Becoming

4. Software Problems...................................................................................................17

The Veil of the Verbal Commentary The Terminator – Mechanical by Nature A Case of Mistaken Identity Alive to It All – The Real You Exiting the Program What Makes the Mind Go into Overdrive Peaceful Coexistence

5. A Word on the Ego...................................................................................................25

6. Understanding Emotion.........................................................................................27

Emotional Undercurrents Working with Emotion in Meditation

– Light Upsets – Deeper Emotions – The Stuff You Can’t Stop Thinking About – Icebergs

A Lighter, Brighter You Radio Signals – How Inner States Attract Outer Experiences Peaceful Heart, Peaceful Mind Meditation as a Container How Much Faster and Easier? The Big Stuff Structured Practices

7. The Chakras..............................................................................................................39

Your Energetic System Where Your Awareness Goes, Energy Flows

8. Practical Guidelines Part I – Structuring Your Meditation.............................43

How Often to Meditate How Long to Meditate When and Where to Meditate (and Where Not to) Meditating at Home The Sound of Music Meditating with Groups

9. Practical Guidelines Part II – When It’s Time to Meditate.............................53 Before You Begin

– What to Wear – Journaling (For Those So Inclined) – Posing Questions – Getting Ready

Opening Your Meditation Getting (and Staying) Comfortable

– How to Sit – How to Place Your Hands – Breathing – Easy and Deep – It’s Perfectly Okay to Move (In Super-Slow Motion)

What to Expect – Wandering Thoughts – Ups and Downs – It’s Only Natural

Closing Your Meditation

Part II – Meditation Techniques 10. The Right Techniques (For You)...........................................................................63

Overview The Guided Meditations How to Choose

I. Still and Quiet Meditation – The Timeless Classics..........................................71

The Heart Meditation The Empowered Mantras Chakra Check-In – Root to Crown Chakra Meditation – Going Deeper Taste of Zen – Breath Awareness Mindfulness Meditation – Being Present

II. Cleansers and Energizers – Gentle to Strong......................................................93

Chakra Tone Up (Chakra Dhyana) – Toning with Sound Supercharger – A More Powerful Cleanser – The Cleansing Breath Ananda Mandala – The Master Blaster Sonic Cleanse – First Aid for Stuck, Stagnant, or Dense Chakras

III. Meditation in Motion...........................................................................................111

Chant Walking Walk in the Park – Moving with Energy Slooow Flow Yoga Dancing from the Inside

IV. Special Purpose Meditations..............................................................................125

Witnessing – A Zen Practice Working with Emotion

– Upset about a Current Incident, Person, Situation – Clear the Day

Loving Kindness The Enhanced Heart – For the Spiritually Minded Deep Relaxation

Resources......................................................................................................................143 About the Author........................................................................................................144

1

The Three Essentials

Chapter One

Newcomer or Seasoned Meditator?

This book is designed for both the newcomer and the experienced meditator.

For the newcomer, it has practical guidelines with everything you need to know, plus a comprehensive selection of excellent techniques to explore and make your own (along with easy, step-by-step instructions). You’ll come away with a set of techniques you love and that really work for you.

For the experienced meditator—and especially for anyone who’s ever had a little trouble going deep—this book gives you powerful insights into the reasons why people can become frustrated and discouraged. You’ll learn how to navigate the obstacles that can keep you from moving into deep meditative states and how, when you do, it takes your meditation to a whole new level.

Even the long-seasoned meditator will come away with new realizations and techniques that enhance your practice and take you deeper.

The Three Essentials

There are three essentials to really rich, deep, satisfying meditation. Under-standing these essentials paves the way for you to move into deeper, more blissful meditative states.

Essential #1 – Understanding the Mind

One of the things we face in meditation, and in life, is the endlessly arising stream of thoughts and words, that voice in our head that likes to talk (and talk),

Meditation – Deep and Blissful

2

our tireless companion—the mind. Understanding how the mind operates—what it’s trying to accomplish with all the intense thinking—can absolutely transform your meditation.

The mind is like a software application—one that runs on its own, with very specific functions and features, all of which revolve around taking care of you. In fact, that’s the mind’s reason for being—to look after your safety and welfare. That’s its job.

To do this, it runs certain functions automatically, much like an automatic antivirus or a software update. In addition, it responds to certain triggers by going into overdrive, and when it does, it takes over, driving the involuntary thinking and non-stop commentary that can, alas, completely hijack your meditation.

It’s not just the thinking, but the state of being that goes with it. When the mind goes into overdrive, there’s a subtle but constant sense of urgency—it’s task-oriented, almost machine-like, always pressing forward, on to the next thing.

While useful for situations when your survival is at stake, this state is not exactly sweetness and light, and it’s certainly not a state that you want to be in for very long (or, as is the case for so many of us, all the time). In meditation, it’s easy to see it in action, and you have an opportunity to shift out it.

This book shows you how this software operates and how to work with it. First, you’ll cover the seven functions of the mind—what they are and how they go awry—and then you’ll look in-depth at what triggers the mind to take over.

Once you understand what might be happening when the mind keeps switching on during your meditation, you’re much better able to switch it off again (at least temporarily!) and go into much deeper states.

Essential #2 – Understanding Emotion

During meditation, what’s alive in you is what comes up—including any problems you may be facing and your feelings about them. One of the beauties of meditation is that as you move into a quiet, interior space and become more aware of what’s going on inside you, any undercurrents of emotional turbulence

The Three Essentials

3

move out of the background and into the forefront of your consciousness, where you can work with them.

Unburdening yourself of any emotional baggage you may be carrying not only feels good—it’s such a welcomed relief—but doing so also leaves you in a very good place for meditation, serene and centered. It’s one of the reasons meditation is so healing and liberating.

This books shows you how to recognize and work with emotional upsets, be they large or small, how to bring them into the light of awareness within the container of meditation, and be with them in such a way that they dissolve on their own. Such emotions hold energy, and when they dissipate, they release their energy to flood back into your system, taking you into even deeper and more peaceful meditative states.

Essential #3 – The Right Techniques (for You)

Sometimes if you’re having problems meditating, if your experience in meditation is shallow or scattery, it’s not you—you’re not doing anything wrong—it’s your technique. So, there are two important things to know about meditation techniques.

First, as a unique individual, certain techniques will resonate with you—they’ll really work for you, meaning they’ll really take you into a meditative state—and others won’t. For this reason, it’s important to find the ones that suit you best.

Second, it’s good to have more than one technique at your disposal—think of it as having more than one song on your playlist—because certain techniques work better for certain purposes.

To elaborate:

• Some techniques are good for taking you deep—the still and quiet classics—and you definitely want one of those on your playlist.

• Some are excellent for times when you’re stressed or when your inner energies are depleted—the cleansers and energizers. These have powerful restorative qualities and work even when the mind is overactive—also a must-have.

Meditation – Deep and Blissful

4

• Others are good supportive practices for the office-bound—anyone who spends most of the day in a chair. These moving meditations combine meditative energy work with exercise so that you can have your workout and meditate too. Although they won’t take you deep the way the quiet classics do, they are pretty magical in their own way.

• Finally, there are meditations with special purposes—cultivating kindness, opening the heart, Zen witnessing, or relaxing deeply before sleep—that facilitate your well-being or growth in other ways.

For your personal playlist, it’s best to have one or two techniques that you love as your core practice, as well as a few supplemental practices that fit your lifestyle and your personal growth needs.

This book gives you a comprehensive selection of excellent techniques in all the above categories to explore and make your own. By the time you finish this book, you’ll have a set of techniques—your personal playlist, your customized program—that you love and that really work for you.

With techniques that work for you and the insight necessary to work successfully with the mind and emotions, you have the essentials you need to really tap into the juice (more on that later) and have a truly beautiful meditation practice.

It is my heartfelt hope that the insights offered here will help you to transform—will help to lift away the dross and open the door to more spirit, more consciousness, and more bliss—in both your meditation practice and your life.

Why Meditate

If you’ve never meditated you may wonder why people do it—what is it that they like about it. We each come to meditation for different reasons, depending on what’s going on in our lives, the ways in which we hope to grow and evolve, and what meditation does for us. Here are ten possible reasons why you might find yourself drawn to meditation:

1. You want to be more present in daily life, to cultivate mindfulness. One of the benefits of meditation is that your meditative state begins to permeate your day-to-day existence; you have more moments when you are fully present, in your being, clear and aware.

The Three Essentials

5

2. You love the bliss, the sense of being washed in peace and presence, the reprieve from the day’s concerns. You love the almost miraculous way meditation restores and recharges.

3. You want to work smarter, to cultivate your intuition. You’ve read about how Steve Jobs credited meditation with teaching him to think intuitively, or about another smart meditator, Albert Einstein, who agreed, saying, “The really valuable thing is intuition. Through meditation, I found answers before I even asked the question. ”

4. Meditation puts you in touch with a higher source. You cherish the moments of connection, of attunement with the rhythms of the universe, of communion.

5. You want to elevate your state, to be lighter and brighter all the time, to grow in consciousness and move into a new way of being. You’re serious about living your best life and you’ve given yourself permission to really shine. Meditation is one of the many good things you’re doing for yourself to get there.

6. It’s simple—when you meditate, you feel happier, more at ease, and more comfortable with yourself and the world.

7. Meditation helps you concentrate—it clears your head and helps you stay focused—which means you study and work better.

8. You want to work on certain areas of personal growth—to soften the heart, clear the chakras, or cultivate kindness—and certain meditative practices are designed to help with exactly that.

9. Your life is busy and demanding and you look to meditation to reduce stress—which it does so beautifully. When you’re under stress—be it temporary (a deadline) or permanent (that’s just the way it is in your line of work)—meditation can keep you centered and calm, poised in the face of adversity.

10. You have health challenges. You’ve had a wake-up call and are taking responsibility for your health in a whole new way. You’re serious about lowering your blood pressure and cholesterol, or keeping your blood sugar

Meditation – Deep and Blissful

6

in the right range. You know stress is a contributing factor, and if meditation can reduce stress, you’re willing to give it a try.

Or maybe you’re just curious. Maybe you’ve meditated at the end of yoga class or with a group and you’d like to know more.

It’s not exactly a reason to meditate, but some people (including me) also find it interesting that certain celebrities meditate: Oprah, Drew, Gwyneth, Goldie, and Gisele. And it’s not just the divas, the men meditate too: Jerry Seinfeld, Keanu Reeves, Hugh Jackman, Orlando Bloom, Jeff Bridges, and even Howard Stern.

It’s also interesting that so many people meditate: 20 million in the United States, and judging from Google data, meditation also seems to be big in the UK, Europe, Australia, and (surprise, surprise) India.

In sum, there are more than a few good reasons that people enjoy meditation and integrate it into the flow of their lives. There are so many juicy states (and some dry ones!) and however your journey unfolds, your experience in meditation becomes something you treasure.

7

What Is Meditation?

Chapter Two

What Meditation Is

Simply put, meditation is three things happening more or less simultaneously:

• One is what you do—the technique or method you use.

• The second is what happens as a result—that using the technique pulls you into a meditative state.

• The third is what happens then—your experience while you’re in that meditative state.

What you do is very simple, in principle. You focus your attention on something—a mantra, an energy center, the breath—and then, each time you realize your attention has wandered, you notice where it has wandered to—the thought, feeling, or external distraction—then gently let that distraction go and bring your attention back to your object of meditation, to your anchor.

What happens as a result is that you’re pulled into a meditative state. It’s pretty amazing that these simple techniques can have this effect, but they do—it’s the magic of meditation.

The process of noticing your wandering thoughts and shifting your attention back to your meditative anchor—over and over (and over) again—somehow, the process itself works the magic. Each inward shift of attention away from a train of thought takes you a little deeper, a little further into the awareness that is the foundation of your being.

Meditation – Deep and Blissful

8

Welcome to Your Inner Landscape The Meditative State

What happens then is your experience while in a meditative state. As you move into a meditative state, you become more aware of what is really going on inside you, more in touch with your inner landscape. This inner landscape shifts and changes—it’s not just one thing but many different states and experiences.

You may feel very awake and aware, keenly conscious of everything around you or, at the other end of the spectrum, you may feel pushed inward, quiet and deep.

You may find yourself watching the mind at work, witnessing the ever-arising stream of thought, and as you do, you drop in more deeply, gently moving away from the thoughtstream’s chatter and into yourself, to center.

We often live in our heads and, in meditation, come back to our bodies, to inhabit ourselves fully again. You’ll likely notice any places in your body that feel constricted or are holding tension, and oftentimes, as soon as you notice it, the tension begins to soften and your body begins to relax.

You may become very aware of your breathing—the feel and sound of your breath—or of the pulsation of your own being gently rising and falling beneath it, the lifeforce that underlies the breath. There may be other sensations—pressure in the forehead or heart, or a sense of expansion.

Some experiences seem to be associated with your conceptual style. Visually oriented people may experience subtle visual imagery, perhaps a sensation of mentally moving through inner cloudbanks or otherwise shifting interior terrain. If you’re kinesthetically oriented, you may feel aswirl in inner turbulence, afloat in stormy waters that grow calmer as you meditate.

However, sensation is not always at the forefront. At times, you may be entirely unaware of your physicality, in a state of profound stillness and silence.

Those who are spiritually minded may find that in the quiet spaciousness of meditation it is quite easy to connect, to feel a sense of attunement, of communion with your higher source.

What is Meditation?

9

~~~

You never know exactly what the ride is going to be like—each meditation is as individual as the day. Whatever your experiences may be , over time you’ll also find yourself moving more deeply into your being, into your essence, and into deeper states.

Your meditation practice evolves over time, as you evolve. Your capacity to concentrate is a muscle that becomes stronger with use. As you become more comfortable and more adept, as your concentration becomes steadier, you relax more profoundly, and you just go deeper.

The longer you meditate, the more your meditative state, with its greater depth and presence, begins to percolate through to your day-to-day existence. You begin to experience things in a meditative way, or better put, you experience yourself in a meditative way—really in your being—peaceful, calm, clear, and aware.

Housecleaning Clearing Your Energetic Field

We carry what you might call psychic gunk in the different layers or dimensions of our being, and meditation awakens a certain inner energy that sets to work to clear that gunk out.

In meditation, this energy sweeps gently through your field, cleansing, clearing, and flushing your energetic system. It’s a little like washing off caked mud after a long day’s work—wholesome and fitting—and one of the reasons you feel so refreshed.

It’s also much like cleaning at home: some areas need only a light dusting while others—say, under the kitchen sink—may need some serious work. What happens for you in meditation will depend on your individual makeup, on the nature of the housecleaning that needs to be done, on what you’re carrying in your being. And, you don’t get perfectly clean all at once—to the contrary—it takes time.

~~~

Meditation – Deep and Blissful

10

A Burned Pot of Stew (That’s You)

Imagine soaking a burned pot of stew (that’s you). When you first immerse the pot in soapy water, the loose stuff swipes off easily. But the real work has not yet begun. At first nothing happens, but as the pot soaks, the burned parts start to soften. Eventually pieces break free, washing away from the pot and dissolving in the soapy water. Gradually, the rest of the burned bits soften and scrub off. With time and repeated scrubbing, the pot comes clean.

With every meditation, you get a little cleaning. Every time you meditate, you’re soaking in consciousness, and your stuff—your issues—soften and, over time, dissolve and wash away. Every time, you get a little lighter and brighter, a little more radiant, and the effect is cumulative. In a very real sense, it is a work of grace.

11

Buy the Complete Book

Sharon Rose Summers

Meditation – Deep and Blissful

Click Here

Or Go To MeditationBeautiful.com/where-to-find-meditation-deep-and-blissful