Meditation

A Simple Practice

The practice of meditation to settle our mind and soften our emotions is a fundamental pillar of healing and well-being. Because meditation is really about practice, before we continue talking about it, let’s start with a short practice.

Just read the following four steps, then continue with this observation for a few breaths:

1. Wherever you are, without attempting to change anything, bring your attention to your breathing.
2. Be aware of your breathing as the air comes in.
3. Be aware of your breathing as the air goes out.
4. Allow your body and mind to relax as you observe the natural rhythm of your breathing.

Congratulations. You have completed your first healing meditation practice. Easy and enjoyable, right? This seed practice is the foundation of all the other practices. You can go back to this simple practice any time to feel well, calm, and clear.

What Is Healing Meditation?

Healing is an expression of love. The love that heals arises out of the recognition, or at least the theoretical understanding, of our divine and perfectly pure nature. Love heals because its warmth reminds us that our essential nature is free and open, like a boundless, clear sky. From our heart, the sun in that cloudless sky, blissful sunrays of love and well-being shine in all directions.

But it often happens that we get distracted from our essential nature. When we are distracted from who we are, emotions such as fear, anger, hatred, attachment, and jealousy form as clouds that appear in the sky. These clouds temporarily block our natural inner radiance. Even though the sunrays, our love and well-being, never disappear, when the clouds cover the sky of our being for long enough, we forget that the sun still shines behind the clouds. Not only that, we also forget we are the sky. Instead, we start believing that we are the clouds. Then we feel physically, energetically, emotionally, and mentally ill.

Healing meditation is a system of practices that invites us to remember the vastness of who we are by encouraging us to focus on the sunrays instead of the clouds. Even though we might feel ill and our body might be going through an illness process, healing meditation guides us to realize that our love, joy, and well-being have never left us. Even in the darkest and cloudiest situation, love, joy, and well-being remain as our boundless and flawless essence, the wonder of wonders.

By inspiring us to renew our view of life, healing meditation guides us to reawaken well-being in our body, positive emotions in our heart, insight in our mind, and clarity in our consciousness. Through healing meditation, by sustaining our attention on life’s joyful radiance, we soften and dispel the clouds, the anger, grudges, resentment, and fear, that separate us from others and ourselves. As the sunrays from our heart shine with more ease and openness, the clouds thin and dissolve. Then magic happens: we remember who we are and what the world is, and we heal.

The deepest power of healing meditation comes from transforming our mind and emotions. This is so because our thinking, our points of view, and our idea of what is possible determine how we feel and how we heal.

During healing meditation practice, we consciously choose how we want our body and mind to feel. Healing meditation invites us to reflect on what kinds of thoughts we entertain from moment to moment. It asks us to examine, in this moment, “Who is making my decisions for me? Am I giving my personal power away to old habits? To family patterns? To past traumas? To the media?” Healing meditation guides us to become the heartful owners of our own life. As our practice empowers us with greater self-confidence, we joyfully embrace ourselves for the miracle that we truly are.

From the simplicity of observing our breath to the richness of harmonizing the universal elements within us, healing meditation also allows us to see that our inner divine nature is the source of all our healing and well-being.

Types of Practice

The healing meditation practices we use are presented in five categories:

Breath. Simple practices that bring our attention to the natural rhythm of breathing, the seed practice on which all the others are built.

Sound. Practices that use sound as the object of our attention, guiding us to relax the body and settle the mind.

Light and color. Practices that use the color of the Five Elements, inviting us to see ourselves as radiant with health and clarity.

Self-massage. Practices of therapeutic touch that we can do ourselves to awaken the body’s energy and help it flow.

Rejuvenation Movement Qi Gong. Gentle, restorative movements coordinated with breath and intention to bring body, energy, and mind into harmony.

Benefits of Healing Meditation

As human beings, we live our life through three fundamental layers of experience: matter (our physical body), energy (our sensations and emotions), and mind-spirit (our thoughts and perceptions). When these three layers are in harmony, our body feels well; we have the vitality to do what we want to do, and our spirit stays centered, calm, and kind.

In our fast-paced world, which is disconnected from nature and dependent on technology, these three layers easily fall out of balance. Regardless of how different from each other all the symptoms and illnesses might seem, at the root of all these challenges we find an inner disconnect between our body, our energy, and our mind.

Through the alignment of our posture, our breathing, and our intention, healing meditation guides us to regain and maintain a harmonious relationship between our physical body, our energetic system, and our mental-spiritual essence. This renewed inner harmony helps us by:

• Reducing stress, increasing relaxation, and balancing the nervous system.
• Improving our breathing, promoting better blood circulation, and balancing blood pressure.
• Promoting better digestion, absorption of nutrients, and elimination of toxins.
• Improving sleep and maintaining good energy levels.
• Strengthening our immunity and reducing the length of acute illness.
• Promoting recovery from chronic illness.
• Fostering positive emotions and increasing our confidence.
• Establishing a general sense of peace of mind, contentment, and positive direction in our life.

Healing is fundamentally about revealing our essential nature. Practices, therapies, herbs, and drugs can help us because the seed of well-being is already within us. The greatest gift that healing meditation offers is to reconnect us with that inner seed of well-being, and then to strengthen that connection.

Regardless of our age, gender, culture, or any other worldly labels, healing meditation can reward us with tangible benefits. Through healing meditation, whether engaged in practice or as we go about our daily activities, as we develop a state of relaxed wakefulness, our heart grows more loving and kind. Then our body, energy, and emotions naturally heal. Such is the powerful gift of healing meditation.

Where Do These Practices Originate?

The practices come from the ancient traditions of eastern medicine and from the people who practiced the Tao, the integral way of life, as an approach for living long, healthy lives and for spiritual development. For these ancient practitioners, well-being was the result of a lifestyle based on the observation of nature and its rhythms. Their lifestyle promoted efficient energy flow and harmony with their environment.

Their deep understanding of life and the cosmos developed into a holistic medicine that included acupuncture, herbology, nutrition, therapeutic massage, breathing exercises, restorative movement, and meditation. Although rooted in their ancient wisdom, this is a simple yet profound approach to healing meditation for our current times.