Article by Johnfox
Yoga and Meditation Techniques
The most important thing that I can share with you about yoga and meditation is that it's a personal journey of self-exploration. It's the ultimate personal experiment into the exploration of the psyche that is performed solely in the recesses of your own mind and body.
You will find inspiration from experienced yoga meditation instructors and treasured information that those great early meditation explorers have provided. But in the end this practice is all about you and is quite unique and personal.
Of course, in the beginning you will need a lot of guidance and structure to develop the basic skills needed to sit quietly. These basic yoga meditation techniques will help you attain the discipline needed to meditate regularly and effectively and to find comfort, quiet the mind and achieve razor sharp focus and attention.
As you progress you will catch your mind wandering and wavering, then you will gently return to your breath and focus. In time you will catch the wave of meditation. A new energy will flow effortlessly through your body and mind as you begin to experience quiet periods even during the day when you're not actively meditating. Miraculously, a sense of peace and contentment spreads throughout your entire life that few ever get to experience.
You come to realize how natural it is to meditate. You realize that meditation is a natural state and that the act of living is in total harmony with the act of meditation. You achieve emotional stability even when faced with uncomfortable and stressful situations. Your creative juices soar and insight and intuition will become welcome companions. The very act of meditating energizes your entire day and somehow makes it a little sweeter, calmer and more enjoyable.
As this process unfolds, subtle questions arise. You actively contemplate actions and reactions, causes and effects, motivations towards pleasure and away from pain, instinctual survival behavior, and deep-rooted iss! ues of t he self. At this stage of the process, insight, intuition and creativity lead a natural path towards wisdom. No longer a reactive being, you now possess the skills and powers necessary to leap beyond anything you ever imagined possible.
But we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. So let's take a step back and look at what's needed to achieve a proficient yoga meditation practice.
Balancing polarities focus versus letting go, structure versus freedom, strength versus flexibilityGood sitting posture the ability to get comfortable and keep your spine erectConcentration the act of Dharana, as defined in the Yoga SutrasAwareness of the breath, the mind, body and spiritSelf inquiryOpennessHonesty and the desire to find the truth ultimately, to find personal freedom from the prison walls that hold you captive.We begin our meditation practice with 10 minutes and begin to add a few more minutes each day. Never force the process and always move within your own personal zone of comfort. A practice of 20 minutes two times a day establishes a good core practice. To reach the deepest meditative states, you may eventually prefer to practice for 50 minutes to an hour at a time.
To develop a core practice takes some time and patience but will prove well worth the effort. The rewards are numerous and include a deeper sense of emotional stability, enhanced mental clarity and intuition, increased confidence, increased energy and awareness, and improved memory, concentration and focus.
You will learn over 20 core yoga and meditation techniques in The Yoga Awakening Meditation Collection, all designed to give you the tools necessary to develop a solid core yoga and meditation practice.
Most core practices fall into 6 basic categories:
MindfulnessMantraInner BodyBreathe AwarenessVisualizationSelf InquiryThe Yoga Awakening Meditation Program provides guided meditation techniques and training in each of these 6 different categories. You will work with each of these basic t! raining categories over a period of time and are encouraged to fully understand and explore each of the methods presented before moving on. In this way, each yoga and meditation technique becomes very comfortable and personal. You will get a clear sense of how each basic category and specific technique impacts and affects you and which works best.
Following are some basic assumptions to use in developing your core yoga and meditation practice:
First, your core yoga and meditation practice should feel pleasurable and enjoyable to you. This is the only way to maintain your practice over time. If it's not enjoyable, you won't want to do it.
Second, your practice should feel natural. If you are not a visually-oriented person, a core practice based on visualization is not well suited for you. The Yoga Awakening Meditation Collection guides you towards those techniques that work best and are most intuitively geared towards your own individual innate characteristics, traits and natural skill set.
Third, your core practice should quiet the mind so that you may turn inward towards your source and recognize your true inner being. The Yoga Awakening Meditation Collection uses guided meditation techniques to effectively help you achieve a deep sense of mental clarity, awareness and calm. You are literally guided to a place of extremely deep meditation. In this way you become intimate with the feeling and in time can return to this place of total peace and tranquility again and again and again.
So that's how the process works. You develop a core yoga meditation practice with the help of The Yoga Awakening Meditation Collection. From there, the sky's the limit. Once your core practice is in place your meditation practice will expand beyond anything that can be conveyed with mere words. You will become a self-explorer and through personal experience and self realization, will ride the wave of meditation to a new state of comprehension and consciousness that's truly amazing.
To Yoga and ! Meditati on Techniques, Abundance and Excellent Health,
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