Welcome to Release Into The Now. This is a 6-week online course where you’ll learn how to meditate and live a mindful life.
My name is Cory Allen. I’m the creator and host of this course. I’ve studied meditation and mindfulness for over fifteen years. I used my experience to create an easy to understand course which explains the basics of meditation and clearly lays out pathways to deep internal work. I took aspects from a variety of schools of thought and combined them with my personal discoveries to create a unique approach to practicing mindfulness and meditation.
A powerful benefit to working with a blend of styles is that you can experiment and discover approaches that work best for you. Finding what works for you, taking those pieces, and building your own model is fundamental as everyone is unique and responds to different methods. Over time, a personalized practice begins to feel comfortable and intuitive which promotes long term integration.
People often associate a sense of mystery and uncertainty around meditation. This is a challenge we face when dealing with any intangible because we’re solely working with our own mind and experience of reality. Progress while pursuing the intangible can only be felt and known through direct experience. This makes communicating what we’ve learned quite slippery. We must face the fact that the word ‘meditation’ unavoidably carries a lot of baggage. People unquestionably have wild and relative interpretations of the word. This symptom of human subjectivity will only be alleviated through honest and concise communication about our direct experiences.
In the first week I’m going to explain meditation without mystery or mysticism. This will allow you to release what you’ve learned about meditation and begin this course with an open mind. The foundation we’re going to build this week will consist of the physical fundamentals. Body, breath, and posture.
There’s a common misconception that the goal of meditation is to have a crystal clear mind that’s completely void of thought. However, the human mind doesn’t work that way. Your mind will always have thoughts and fragments flowing through it. This is your ego clicking and beeping, letting you know that it’s still working and you are still a person. So, trying to clear our mind of thoughts is not our goal. We simply need to learn how to work with our thoughts and interact with them properly.
Thoughts arise in our consciousness like a continuously flowing river. As we go through our day, our mind continues to flow and the river of thought fragments surges on. We have new or old thoughts arising, thought patterns which trigger in response to interactions, cyclical thoughts which arise in loops, unrelated thoughts morphing in and out of each other, and everything in between.
Often, a thought fragment will stick out like debris flowing down a river. We grab it and pull it out of the water. Now that this fragment is in our grasp, we contemplate, unpack, or obsess on it. Once we get tired of holding that shape of thought debris we toss it back into the river and grab the next enticing fragment that floats by. We then cling to this thought until we’re distracted by something new flowing past us. And so it goes.
Sometimes thoughts arise that frighten us, give us anxiety, or worry us. These are the really juicy ones that our ego can’t wait to sink it’s teeth into. Challenging emotional thoughts that induce physical stress not only have our mind clinging, but they quite literally get our bodies clinging as well. As the anxiety radiates through our being, our muscles tightened, our heart races, and our mind spirals. Nothing pleases our ego more than this because it craves our attention. And look how much attention it’s getting. The entire system is in gridlock!
Through this course we’ll practice observing, allowing, and letting go of thoughts.
As the continuous stream of ideas moves through your mind a thought will inevitably tap you on the shoulder and request your attention. When it does, acknowledge the thought. After you’ve acknowledged it you’ve given it it’s moment. You can then let it pass on and bring your attention back to the present moment. When the next thought arises, give it the same treatment. Acknowledge it and let it go.
This practice keeps thoughts from getting in the way and backing up our flow of consciousness. After developing this technique thoughts become a happenstance of having a mind, not something that overwhelms the mind. Through this practice and later practices in the course we’ll learn to become more self-aware of our consciousness. We’ll develop the witness mind which is another internal perspective that allows you to observe your consciousness as you experience reality.
These practices create internal space which is a foundation of mindfulness and a function of meditation. We carry the baggage of our life inside of us and much of which we are completely unaware of. Most people go their entire lives without letting go of their baggage and tend to cling to it more as they age. We’re born empty vessels and as we go through life we accumulate the trauma and imprintation of what we experience. We suppress and store these feelings away inside our bodies and minds. This creates internal congestion.
These negative imprints become operating guidelines for your consciousness. You begin to live a life guided by mental reflexes with no contemplation. This is because all of the open space inside of you has been filled with the baggage of past experience. As you release what you’re holding, you cultivate internal space. This allows you the room to step back in the moment and observe your thoughts. Through this practice you can see how your mind is reacting to life and respond in a more calm, compassionate, and mindful way.
In the early part of the course we’ll build a strong foundation by focusing on our body and breath. Through simple breathing techniques we’ll quickly discover a deeper comfort and ease in our body. As our breath relaxes our body we’ll begin to dilate and become more present, aware and confident. The more you practice this the more natural it will become.
Developing awareness of your breath is like learning any skill in life. It’s challenging when you pick up a guitar for the first time and decide to learn how to play. It’s hard to get your fingers positioned on the strings. It’s hard for your fingers to find the chord shapes and the muscles in your hand become sore after you’re done playing. Eventually, you get more comfortable with playing and you begin to build up muscle memory. Before you realize it you can pick up your guitar and start playing without even thinking about it. It becomes an intuitive expression of what you are.
Meditation is no different. As you practice sitting and breathing and using the mindfulness tools I share over the duration of the course, that feeling will become integrated into your everyday life.
You’ll begin to effortlessly feel and be that thing all of the time. It will become second nature to you. It will become your nature.
Meditation is a state of mind. It’s a point of view. It’s a frequency of consciousness that we can enrich our lives by tuning in to. We go through our lives unaware of ourselves. We are unaware of what’s happening in the universe in the multiplicity of frequencies that exist outside of our bodies. We are separate from the present conscious moment of now and what’s happening in the objective world. Through breath work and visualizations we can become less separated from the present moment. When flowing in synchronization with the now you exist in harmony with your mind, body and the pool of universal vibrations through which you glide.
Let’s go over a few basic sitting styles. The most important thing about learning how to sit is to find what feels most natural to you. Experiment. Try different styles and discover what provides you with the best results.
One basic approach to sitting is cross-legged. Simply sitting with your legs crossed. A classic style of sitting is a Half Lotus position. This is sitting cross-legged and bringing one ankle on top of the opposing knee. This is a great sitting style for beginning meditators because it doesn’t put a lot of stress on the knee joints and you don’t have to be particularly flexible. Another, yet more advanced sitting style is Full Lotus position. Full Lotus is similar to Half Lotus, but in Full Lotus you add the other ankle on top of the other opposing knee. This is an advanced method which requires advanced flexibility. Another form of sitting, which is my personal favorite, is a kneeling position called Seiza. In this position you rest on your knees with your feet underneath your butt and your hands on top of your thighs. Keep in mind that every person’s body has a different length in the arms, legs, and torso. Many people enjoy lying down or simply sitting in a chair.
There is no correct position in which to meditate. Play with different styles and find which one is the most comfortable for you. What’s important in your sitting position is that the lower part of your body feels like a foundation. This provides a firm resting base which allows the torso to stack and flow upwards. Allow your body to stack and rest on itself with your head simply floating on top.
Traditionally, people use mats and pillows to enhance their sitting posture. In the Cross-Legged, Half Lotus and Full Lotus sitting styles you could use a mat to provide comfort for your feet and legs. If you add a pillow underneath your butt, that raises your hips and gives your spine a more comfortable upward flowing position. This also makes it easier for your shoulders to relax down your back and your chest to rise outwards.
To sit In the kneeling position, you place your knees directly on your mat as if you were standing then went down to both knees. You then put a pillow or Zafu on your feet and rest back onto it. Place your hands palms-down on top of your thighs and allow your spine to flow upwards.
Now, you don’t necessarily have to run out and buy a meditation mat and zafu today. You can certainly practice meditation without them. However, if during this course it calls to you I would suggest picking a mat and pillow because they increase the comfort of your meditation immensely.
If you don’t have a meditation pillow you can use any cushion you have in your home. A bed pillow or a folded yoga mat can be used to create a makeshift cushion. Anything you can find to give yourself a bit of extra padding that provides more comfort during your practice.
Meditating in silence is common but many people like to use music or immersive sound during their meditation. It gives your ears something to focus on so that you’re not distracted by the ambient noises of your surroundings.
For me, meditating in silence is pleasurable, but I often prefer to meditate while listening to some form of ambient music. Meditating with sound can indeed increase your experience, however, picking suitable music is important. It may be stating the obvious, but picking music that’s relaxing is the beneficial. You don’t have to only listen to ambient music while meditating but picking music without percussion is often helpful. Percussion plots moments in time, so removing that element of time awareness will help alleviate the stress of clock watching.
Throughout this course each of the guided meditations will be accompanied by binaural beats that I created specifically for meditation. Binaural beats are an audio technology that use sound waves to induce brainwave entrainment. These specific audio frequencies can help you achieve different mental states such as relaxation, deep thinking, recovery, sleep or concentration. All of the guided meditations in this course are accompanied by binaural beats that are intended to assist you in achieving meditative states of consciousness.
So what is a guided meditation? A guided meditation is a great way to practice meditation without having to sit in the driver’s seat. It allows you to simply relax and be verbally led through your meditation by someone who is experienced and well informed. One of the many advantages of guided meditation is that it allows you to focus on your breath and any internal work that you’re doing instead of having to recall the motions of an active practice. You can easily lay back, be mentally guided, and take part in the experience. When you come across an exercise during a guided meditation that resonates with you, you can put it in your toolbox for use in future practices. Guided meditation is a good way to experience and benefit from approaches which otherwise might have taken years to discover or contextualize.
Each week, the guided meditations accompanying this course will increase in complexity and focus on a different aspect of the internal matrix. Week one will begin slowly. We’ll learn how to connect to our breath and find a comfortable posture.
As the weeks progress we’ll practice cultivating the witness mind, observation of our thoughts, visualizing and releasing things that we carry, heart opening, and chanting. We’ll finish the course by touching on more ethereal ideas like astral projection.
Thank you so much for taking this course. I sincerely hope that what I’ve learned in my fifteen years of practice will provide you with techniques that enrich your journey of life.
Together, we will develop your meditation practice and increase your mindfulness. We’ll develop a comfort with yourself which will allow you to feel more grounded, connected and peaceful in your life.
As I mentioned before, this course gets deeper as the weeks progress. There’s no rush. Take things at a comfortable pace. I encourage you to listen to these mindfulness talks and the guided meditations more than once. They are intentionally layered so that each time you listen you’ll have a unique experience. Thank you and much love.
]]>Welcome to Release Into Now, Week Two. This week, we’re going to focus on cultivating the witness mind and observing our thoughts.
The mind works like a radio. Our nervous system scans what’s happening outside of our body and takes in a continuous stream of information. The data our nervous system collects is what we define as our consciousness.
However, what we experience as consciousness is not a direct knowing of the objective world. It’s been filtered by programing of past experience, genetics, and relative cultural world view. We ‘tune in’ what’s happening outside of our bodies. We absorb a specific frequency and perspective that’s completely unique to us. We all experience a different flavor of reality because no two people are alike.
The frequency of our consciousness is always shifting in real time. It’s an ever unfolding process which occurs our entire life. The signal that we can tune in evolves as we continue to learn. As our consciousness expands and our perception increases, a deeper reality is revealed to us. When we grow – the world grows.
I have a simple thought experiment I’d like to share that shows how our consciousness and perception of reality is subjective. Imagine that you’re comfortably lying in your bedroom. You feel rested and content. Your bed is soft and the light radiating through the window is casting a spectrum of beautiful shadows. The colors on your wall look vibrant and alive. You feel relaxed and at home in your bed.
Now, let’s say you go out to a bar that evening and have 10 or 15 drinks. Enough drinks to leave you feeling pretty rough in the morning. You wake up the next morning in your bed, but now, your head hurts. The bed feels lumpy. You’re blood is hot and you feel sweaty. Through a pinched eye you notice that there’s dirt on the floor. You notice the paint is worn on the wall in a few places. The morning light shining in the window hurts your eyes and makes your headache even worse. You notice a sour smell in the room that makes you nauseous. The entire world is working against your senses like an opposing magnetic force.
Now, let’s learn something important from that story. Your room hasn’t changed at all. That’s the same room you felt relaxed and content in. What has changed is you. The frequency of your consciousness has shifted. Your objective bedroom is the exact same as it was the previous day when you felt wonderful. It will always be the same in objectivity. The experience of your bedroom is different because your mind has changed.
Our perception of reality is relative only to us and is constantly changing. We quite literally tune in our perception of what’s happening in the world outside of our bodies.
Through meditation and mindfulness practice we can achieve an awareness of the frequency of consciousness that we’re experiencing. How is that helpful? We become more present when we develop an awareness of the thoughts flowing through our minds, how we’re feeling, and how we’re responding to our world. We can begin to interact with our perception as it arises. This is extraordinary helpful. For example, if you feel yourself going down a negative train of thought which would likely lead to negative expression, you can get in front of it. You can observe the transaction and reflexive programed response that’s about to occur and change it.
The ability to observe our thoughts is a direct benefit of meditation. We want to cultivate internal space and presence of mind so we can reflect on our thoughts before responding to them. By developing a present awareness of our flow of consciousness we can interact with life with more patience, insight, and compassion.
There’s a saying which urges us to ‘step out the ember before it turns into a blaze.’ The practice of cultivating awareness of our thoughts deals with the same fabric. In life, we all at one point or another feel anger, frustration, and judgement. We experience indulgences of the ego and respond in armored and aggressive ways towards ideas that challenge our worldview.
However, equipped with the mindfulness tool of self-awareness this scenario plays out differently. You take note of the ember. You’re able to track the seed of a negative feeling just as it begins to sprout.
Before it turns into a blaze of reactive toxicity that overwhelms your mind, you recognize what’s happening. You have space to take a step back, step out the ember and move forward with peace. It only takes a touch of presence to extinguish the ego’s desire for an internal fire.
The breathing and sitting practices we’ll cover in this course will help you gain some of this awareness. This will give you greater command of your mind and bring you closer to the present. This awareness is not something you simply grasp. It’s something that you move towards. If you continue your practice, your awareness has potential to increase for the rest of your life. It’s an exponential process. You can become as aware of the world and your consciousness as you want to be. It’s simply a matter of your dedication and persistence to walking the path of mindfulness.
I have a story I’d like to share which is helpful in understanding the witness mind. For years, I tried to convince my mom to experience a flotation tank. If you aren’t familiar with what a flotation tank is, allow me to briefly explain. In short, a float tank is an enclosed metal or plastic chamber, almost like a massive bath tub with walls and a ceiling. The tank has about 8 inches of warm water in the bottom which is kept at a constant temperature. The water is intended to be the temperature of your skin so that it’s a challenge to discern where the water line starts. There’s a large amount of dissolved Epsom salt in the water so that you’ll float when you lay down, release and relax. It’s often dark in floatation tanks so your visual field doesn’t register perception. The float tank provides immense physical benefit by decompressing the spine, joints and muscles. Internally, your cognition shifts because you’re free from the distraction of your physical senses. This environment enables an effortless and immediate path to begin observing your own mind.
On to the story. After many conversations, I finally convinced my mom to try a flotation tank. She’d never experienced anything like a float tank before, but was brave and booked a session.
She called me after her session and said she enjoyed the feeling of the tank but that her mind was racing and she couldn’t get it to calm down. She could never get into what she thought a meditative state was suppose to be. She continued to explain to me that she was overwhelmed by the fact her mind was full of thought fragments that were racing a million miles a minute with no relief in sight. In the end, she decided her mind was one of those minds that just couldn’t get into a mindful state.
I suggested that she stop and reflect on the story she had just told me. In the description of her float tank experience she said she was watching her mind race and saw all of the fragments flying by. So there it is. She was watching her mind without realizing it. It just happens that the first look at her mind was quite a bustling one. Often, it’s simply a different perspective that activates the first step in waking up to your own mind.
Cultivating the witness mind and learning to observe our thoughts is a slow process. That’s fine because there’s no hurry. A seed doesn’t rush to become a tree. It grows slowly and steadily for years and figures out the direction of growth along the way. Perhaps through listening to this, you’ve already become somewhat aware of the thoughts that are flowing through your mind. Maybe even seeing them from the outside a bit. Or maybe you’re beginning to notice the separation between thoughts and how they arise one after another.
The more you practice observing your thoughts the clearer your perception of them becomes. Once you develop a steady awareness of your consciousness it becomes second nature to keep your river clean. The river of your consciousness. The stream of thoughts that are flowing through your mind all of the time. With this awareness you can see the traffic jams in your mind and the things you’re holding on to. This ability to recognize your thoughts allows you to observe them and let them go.
As humans, but in western culture specifically, we’re taught that we have to acquire things in order to achieve results. We must buy an expensive car to show our wealth. We must wear certain shoes to represent our social language. We must be able to hold it. Something has to be in our possession for it to be ours. We are of course then possessed by our possessions.
Meditation is the exact opposite. It’s about releasing, undoing and letting go. Unpacking. The more we can release what we’re holding on to the freer we are to exist in the flow. We all have old patterns of thinking that keep us stuck in the shapes of the past. By entering the flow of mindfulness we can accept fresher perceptions of who we are today. Over time this naturally becomes the dominant mindset. Through this practice you can become more of who you’d like to be as opposed to who you were.
Developing this mental technique is like any skill you learn in life. The more you practice, the more natural it becomes to you. It’s unique to develop an internal skill of the mind. We’re used to learning how to do something common like cook a new meal. The first time you make a new dish, it’s a bit rocky and you feel unsure. You take time to taste the flavors and get it just right. You feel excited after the new dish comes out well and it keeps getting easier each time. Maybe you begin to cook the dish without the recipe. After a while, you can go to the store and grab the ingredients without even checking your shopping list. Then, you can make that dish from intuition and have it taste beautiful and delicious. This is what bringing meditation into your daily life is like. The more you devote yourself to the practice the more it becomes a part of who you are.
A sense of oneness often arises after a period of self observation. We begin to intuitively understand that we are not separate from our environment. People tend to feel separate from the world around them because they can move around. How could all be connected if we aren’t physically rooted to nature?
Duality is a distinction created by the human mind. We think that because we have a body that contains our identity that there’s a separation from what exists outside of us. The edge of our body is a mere fence which our ego applies an illusion to in order to retain a sense of “I”.
It makes sense that a person would feel as if they’re the center of the universe because their reality emanates from their brain. To each of us, it seems as if our self-aware mind is the Sun shining light through a dark solar system. In actuality, we are all individual parts of one system that’s completely connected. We are the pixels that create the image of our universe.
As it was eloquently articulated by the great Alan Watts: Look at your backyard. There’s your yard and your neighbor’s yard. Those two yards are defined by a fence. Yet, It’s the same piece of Earth. Someone just stuck a fence there to create the illusion of separation.
This is what we deal with as humans while falling prey to the illusion of duality.
In the upcoming guided meditation we’ll focus on cultivating the witness mind and observing our own thoughts. We’ll also focus on gaining a sense oneness, a connection with the natural world of which we are all an expression.
]]>Welcome to Release Into Now, Week Three. This week we’ll focus on meditation visualizations and releasing what we carry.
As we go through life, all of the stress, fear, worry, and anxiety that we hold onto begins to build and create a compression within us. Over time, an internal congestion of negative emotion leaves us with a compressed body and mind. This makes the way you interact with the world and your internal self less elastic.
Internal space and flexibility is vital to handling challenging life situations. If you’re bound up and compressed inside you become a reactive being. When you’re confronted with a situation that contemplation and compassion would heal, you instead respond defensively. This is a reflex based on your negative past experience.
We humans inherently pack away our experiences and carry them around with us. The ones that often weigh the heaviest are emotional traumas or learned perspectives that we accumulate over time. The more internally dense with these things you become, the more you experience reality as a non-porous surface. You’re able to absorb new experiences as well as a rock can absorb water. As you experience life, much less is absorbed because you’ve developed a dense surface and interior. Naturally, that means that many positive things in life that give you pleasure or expand your perspective are also missed out on. You can’t absorb them because you’re too armored and internally dense from carrying around the reactions to your negative life experiences. It’s as if you jumped from being startled and forgot to relax. So, a large part of our focus this week will be learning how to unpack, release and let go of the negative weights we carry.
Releasing what we carry is a continuous process. As you release and let go of things, more challenges in life will come which will happily fill the void of something you’ve just let go. Over time, you can develop a skill at releasing attachment to negative emotions. Eventually, you’ll be able to release the new negative feelings that arise much more quickly.
The pursuit of releasing what you carry is to create internal space. This space will allow you to experience life in a more open way. This openness will lessen your suffering and expand your perspective, awareness, and patience. When moving through life with an expanded consciousness, you’re able to learn more about the world in which you live. You’re able to experience things in a richer, deeper, and more sincere way. We can achieve a great deal of letting go and deepening of our reality through meditative practice, contemplation and surrendering of the self to the self.
One of the most basic things you can do in meditation is simply sitting and breathing. At the foundational level, that’s what meditation is. It’s not mysterious. It’s not difficult. It just takes a bit of application. You can achieve the basic results of meditation by setting aside time each day to sit in a comfortable posture and breathe. Nothing else. You don’t have to attempt to control your mind. You don’t have to attempt to do visualizations. All you have to do is set aside 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes; however much time you can allocate per day without distraction and breathe. By just doing that, you’ll begin to release things and open up. The simple practice of sitting and breathing gets you comfortable in your own body. More relaxed in yourself.
Whenever you begin letting go, the things you’re carrying, much of which you probably aren’t even aware of at this point, will begin to simply fall away. It’s as if you have dozens of hands all over your body and they’re all clenching very tightly to strings which are attached to balloons. Through sitting and giving yourself the time to connect with your breath, those hands will begin to open. Those balloons, which are the negative experiences you’re holding onto, will begin to float away.
Many people go through life as a clenched-shut eye. Understandably so. In life, there are constantly challenging things coming at us, and so, we clench the eye of the self for protection. Through the practice of meditation, the eye of the self will begin to feel comfortable again. It will find new trust with the world. When the eye reopens, you see in a new way.
Another effective way at releasing what we carry is through visualizations. Essentially, this is creating and guiding different imaginative scenarios in your mind’s eye. This allows you to put intangible thoughts or feelings into a visual context. For example, you can use this practice to release something you’re holding onto, perhaps some form of stress or emotional injury. When you sit down to meditate, close your eyes and visualize something that represents what you’d like to let go of. Then, visualize that representation releasing and leaving your body. In some sense, practicing visualizations is like dreaming while you’re awake. After a bit of experience, you’ll begin to be able to control what you see during your visualization using the strength of your mind. This practice can become one of the most helpful tools in advancing your internal work. What you can achieve during your visualizations is quite limitless. The only restriction is the scope of your imagination.
Don’t feel discouraged if you have trouble getting started with your visualizations. Try to be patient. Keep trying. In my teaching experience, I find that it generally takes people a bit of time and practice to bring their visualizations to life. This is only natural. You’re developing a completely new skill. The more you practice, the better your visualizations will become.
One of the most beneficial things about guided meditation is that you can be moved through a visualization practice without needing to come up with the narrative. This alleviates creative pressure from the listener. You’re able to relax, listen to someone else describe an image, and simply follow the narrative that the speaker is guiding you through.
The visualizations I’ll lead you through in the following guided meditation range across many schools of thought. I’ve taken the structure of what I found to be the most functional aspect of several different visualization techniques and put them in a modern context so they’ll be easy to follow. I also include useful visualizations that have been presented to me during my own meditation practice over the years. It’s my pleasure to share those with you here.
I hope you enjoy the following guided meditation which focuses on releasing what we carry. If your mind wanders or you have a hard time bringing to life the visualization that’s being described to you, just keep trying. As I mentioned before, it takes most people a bit of time to develop this new type of seeing and it will get easier. Eventually, it will become second nature.
]]>Welcome to Release Into Now, Week Four. This week, we’ll focus on Heart and Third Eye opening.
When working with meditation the practice of heart opening commonly arises. This can be a challenging concept to understand as this practice is intangible and subjective. You can’t exactly compare results with friends as you make internal progress. Another barrier is that definitions of these pursuits are often ethereal and esoteric.
I define heart opening as the pursuit of identifying, deepening and expanding what a person recognizes as the physical sensation of love and compassion in their body. The root of this feeling is almost always located in the chest where the biological heart resides. It doesn’t matter whether you refer to it as an energy center, chakra, emotion, or whatever. The label isn’t important. Finding the feeling is what matters.
Imagine a person that you love deeply, an impossibly cute baby animal, a touching moment in your life, anything you know will make your heart swell with warmth. Direct your attention to the warm feeling in your chest. This is heart energy. Plain and simple. Now that you’ve identified that feeling in your body, try and make it expand until you feel that warmth in your entire body. Once your body feels full with this feeling, see if you can move that feeling out of your chest and into the world, like you’re a Sun shining rays of your own compassion upon all things.
That was a concise description of the heart opening process. Naturally, as you practice this technique you’ll achieve greater results. The experience and awareness of your heart resonance will become deeper, more complex, and clearer over time. The opening and acceptance of the love sensation within yourself is a lifelong process. Don’t rush. Don’t beat yourself up if this takes you a bit of time. There’s no imaginary finish line to get to. Little by little, as days, months, years, and decades go by, you’ll gain better command and sense of that feeling and the unfolding of your heart language will continue to grow.
Another benefit to tapping into and opening your heart is that you’ll develop a greater comfort and openness with accepting love for yourself and expressing it outwardly towards others. As a deepening of your heart resonance awakens you’ll notice your anxiety, armoring, and worry of vulnerability begin to fade.
Third Eye opening. Awakening of cosmic vision. Seeing from the Astral Eye. There are countless ways this has been described over the course of human history and I would wager that many have experienced this without the benefit of such context.
The Third Eye is commonly said to be located in the forehead, a few inches above our biological eyes. The Third Eye term represents the vision that awakens during meditation. The closest thing I would compare this cosmic vision to is dreaming while you’re awake. It’s as if your mind has a stage on which dreams are unfolding and you can interact with and guide the story.
Some would call this an expansion of consciousness, an increase of internal awareness, tapping into other dimensions of reality, or other frequencies of thought. As this type of vision continues to awaken, the richer our awareness of these frequencies become.
I would say the reason this phenomenon is depicted as a single eye on the forehead is because this is a universally common location people note as the birth of this sensation. During meditation, practitioners find the Third Eye to be an entry point to other dimensions of consciousness. This point often comes into awareness as a pinhole of light in the mind’s eye and expands over the course of years into an open channel of cosmic consciousness.
The mechanics of opening the Third Eye are similar to the process we followed for heart opening. However, in the case we’re dealing with our intuitive visionary mind.
After several years of steady meditation, I started to notice a muted silver point of light awakening in my forehead during my practice. As I continued to nurture and expand this sensation, the muted silver light began to come alive with a feeling of electricity. Shortly after that, the sensation grew into a spinning pinwheel of white light.
Throughout the next year, I continued to keep my attention directed towards the deepening and unraveling of that sensation. It continued to increase in intensity until I began to have a sense of that feeling in my Third Eye space even when I wasn’t meditating.
After years of devoting time and attention to expanding my Third Eye consciousness, it was if I broke through a membrane that separated what I understood to be my conscious awareness and another simultaneously occurring astral light dimension. Now, in my meditations or daily life, I can see a vision of a completely different world that I observe through the third eye space, just as clearly as I observe our layer of human consciousness.
Fortunately, at my core, I’m a scientific materialist just as much as I am an experimental explorer of my own consciousness. I want to be clear that I don’t ‘believe’ in the cosmic light world any more than I trust my own human subjective perception of our objective universe. They’re both simply forms of information to me on which I base my estimations of reality. I don’t find it important if this cosmic light world I’m tapping into is an empirically testable dimension that exists in a different layer of the multiverse. It could be that. Or it could be a symbolic connection with our internal self which exists only in our minds. A cosmic reality that’s buried so deeply within our brains that it arises to consciousness in the form of visions, sensations, symbols and abstract perceptual experiences. Regardless whether we’re seeing into another dimension of complex light consciousness or if we’re just watching a projection of our own mind – I’m interested in how this experience can be useful.
We can take the insights we receive from our Third Eye vision as another form of sense. It’s important to keep in mind, especially when dealing with the slippery sense of the mind, that our senses aren’t always correct. We use our sense organs to guide us through life, informing our brain what our body is experiencing. Sometimes we can think we see something, only to realize we have mistook it for something else. We constantly mishear speech and sounds in our environment. When tasting a complex meal you’d be hard pressed to define every spice in it. Alternatively, we do sometimes experience a crisp and accurate sense reading. Nonetheless, to me, our Third Eye sense, our cosmic vision, is equally flimsy in it’s factuality as our biological senses. In my experience, I feel that with discipline in refining and developing our cosmic sense, we can increase our intuition and sense of a consciousness that extends beyond ourselves. The Third Eye sense is not infallible, just like our other senses, but it can guide us towards truth. As long as we remain as non-dogmatic about that sense as we do our others.
One of the most powerful tools we can develop through meditation is the One Pointed Mind. I also like to call it ‘The Eagle Gaze.’ This technique is the ability to focus your mind on one singular thought or sensation at a time, with a pure clarity, distinct focus and unwavering concentration. Like all disciplines, building the strength of the One Pointed Mind takes dedication, but as you practice, your ability grows exponentially over time. The increased focus that developing the One Pointed MInd provides gives us the ability to observe, allow and differentiate between the thoughts that are constantly arising in our mind.
A One Pointed MInd is immensely helpful during meditation and in life. It allows us to stay focused, reflect on our thoughts, and contemplate our reality in an extraordinarily deep way. If we have a question that’s stuck with us, the One Pointed Mind gives us a control of our mental stage. This allows us to keep that question in our sights and ponder it during our meditation for an extended period of time. We can relax, allow, and let the answer that’s hidden in that question reveal itself to us. Most of the answers to larger questions are wound tightly in our own thoughts. With a calm and focused mind, we must simply allow our thoughts to unravel in order to expose the shining pearl that’s been there all along.
A strong command of our mental focus is indispensable when doing deep internal work. For example, we can dedicate an entire meditation session to focusing on the heart-mind and heart opening. We can spend a full hour concentrating on opening our third eye and increasing our cosmic consciousness. You can, and should, apply the strength a One Pointed Mind to all of the previous and future lessons in this course. A focused mind increases the ability to advance every level of your meditation and internal work. It will help you identify and release emotional trauma you’ve been carrying, it will help you simply sit and watch your breath, or it can enable your witness mind to observe your thoughts with immense discernment. Every aspect of your meditation and daily life are greatly empowered by developing a strong One Pointed Mind.
There are several simple ways to develop a One Pointed Mind. One way is the following: Before your meditation session, place a small object on your desk or bed. What’s important is that the object will be at eye height while you sit in your meditation posture. Sit at a comfortable distance from the object, I suggest 4-6 feet, so that you can easily see it while in your meditation position. While sitting and practicing meditative breathing, keep your eyes open and locked on the object.
Do nothing other than simply sit, breathe and keep your focus on that object. After a while, it’s common for your vision to get a bit hazy or for your depth perception to move in and out. It’s fine if this happens, just ride the motion and stay visually locked in to the object.
You can also do the same practice with your eyes closed. You’ll just need to imagine a simple object in your mind’s eye. When you sit down to meditate, close your eyes, picture a sphere, and hold that image in your mind. If your mind wanders, which is common at first, bring your mind back to the same sphere again. After some practice, when you can effortlessly hold that sphere in you mind’s eye, try manipulating it. See if you can make the sphere grow and shrink in size, get further away or closer, change color, or even morph into a different shape.
While seemingly simple and deceptively easy, these practices work like a gym for your mental focus and will develop the strength of your One Pointed Mind. With dedication, your focus will increase smoothly over time. So smoothly in fact, one day, you’ll likely be struck by the realization of your own ability to remain clear and focused.
In my early years of meditation I developed my One Pointed Mind by staring into a lit candle flame during my meditation sessions. I don’t necessarily recommend this for everyone. For some reason, my intuition drew me to this approach as an instinct. The dancing of the flame does make holding focus more challenging, but I enjoyed that, and it was useful to me. As a side note, if you do use this candle practice, please be mindful of the fact that you have a lit flame in your house.
After I dedicated a good deal of meditation sessions to cultivating the One Pointed Mind I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. With my gaze locked steadily on the candle, the flame would morph periodically. It would stretch, get larger, wider, taller, or all of the area around the flame would blur. I came to realize that was my mind becoming modular and releasing from the paradigms of a singular locked perceptual perspective. This was the moment when I began to be able to view my reality through multiple perspectives at once.
As you cultivate this mental skill, you will notice that it travels with you into your day. Your ability to listen to people, contemplate ideas, be self-aware, and navigate life will all increase exponentially. By raising your consciousness and seeing reality through multiple perspectives we become one step closer to truth.
In the upcoming guided meditation, we’ll focus on the heart and the third eye.
]]>Welcome to ‘Release Into Now’, week five. Chanting and mantras.
Chanting meditation is a beautiful and technically helpful form of meditation to practice. Essentially what this practice is is meditating and repeating one word or one phrase over and over and over. The word or phrase that is repeated is called a mantra. That mantra can be anything. It can be a word that you find meaningful to you or it can be a phrase that you find meaningful. It can also be a sound or a phrase that has no meaning whatsoever, but simply resonates with you. The main idea of chanting meditation is to repeat this word or phrase over and over so that it creates like a windshield wiper for the brain. Breathe in, and on your exhale, you say this word or phrase and again, breathe in and exhale, and repeat this word or phrase over and over. What happens is that it gives your mind something to focus on. It directs your consciousness towards a one pointed mind in the sense that all you’re focusing on is this word of phrase and repeating it. This works as a scaffolding in some ways as an attempt to keep your mind shielded from other thoughts coming in. A lot of people use the word ‘om’ whenever they chant (which can be spelled OM or AUM) and is used and seen frequently in Hinduism and Buddhism. The sound ‘om’ is said to be the resonating sound of the universe. An interesting thing that I found in chanting mediation is that whenever you’re holding the sustained tone of your phrase or your word, you feel your body resonate with what the frequency and pitch of the sound that you’re holding.
Whenever you hold a tone in a lower frequency you’ll feel it down in your chest moving further down into your stomach. Whenever you hold that tone in a higher pitch, you’ll feel that vibration move up your chest and closer into your throat. I found that experimenting with different pitches during chanting, you can actually find a place within yourself- a particular pitch which feels like the right place to resonate for you. I would call that the resonant frequency of your individual body. So while you try chanting during your meditation, search upwards and downwards in pitch and pay attention to how the sound is resonating in your body and find that place in your body that’s resonating with that pitch that feels the most comfortable to you. Sometimes you can feel like you’re even touching on something, something you’d like to hold a vibration on and break free from your body. Now there is no specific ideal pitch and there is no specific ideal length of the time that you’re suppose to hold these tones whenever you’re chanting.
If chanting in a group, there’s no agreed upon pitch you should be chanting in with regard to anyone else. There is no rhythm or timing that you should be chanting in with relation to anyone else. You simply need to find your tone and inhale and chant as you breathe out, inhale and chant as you breathe out. Everyone in the group follows their own timing and their own pitch and that within itself creates a unique vibrational harmony within the group. A functionally useful aspect of chanting meditation is that it forces you to take deeper breaths and hold your exhales longer and inhale deeper- holding longer while you’re saying this phrase or word. Practicing this over time you’ll find that you’re taking larger deeper slower breathes with longer cleansing exhales. This creates an accordion or bagpipe pumping sort of effect where your lungs, chest and stomach are all expanding contracting, expanding a bit more, contracting a bit more, expanding a bit more and so on. Over time you’ll find that it helps you build a deeper, slower breath. Another aspect of chanting meditation is that by increasing the oxygen flow to your system by taking these deeper fuller breaths and holding long, vibrational based resonant sounds,
a sense of trance and intoxication comes over you during the practice. Personally, I feel that way for quite some time afterwards. One of the curious things I started to notice during my journey of meditation is that as I would sit down to meditate I would close my eyes continuing with my practice and whenever I was finished and opened my eyes, slowly, over time, the colors in the room began to seem brighter. The space seemed more clearly defined. Objects seemed to hold a different type of space in the room. Soon I began to realize what was happening. My meditation was getting deeper, my practice was getting better, and that my consciousness and awareness was actually expanding during the meditation practice. So whenever I opened my eyes after I was done with my practice, I could actually visually see the result of this increased awareness in my perception. Chanting meditation is an expressive way to experience that phenomenon. Although it may be fleeting, you can experience that phenomenon for a short period of time after your chanting meditation. This is a helpful thing to be able to observe, so in your regular meditation you can begin to notice, observe, and track that progress as well. There are some schools of meditation that say you need to pay for a mantra or you need someone else to give it to you for it to have validity. I couldn’t disagree with this more. There’s absolutely no reason to pay someone else to give you a mantra and someone else giving you a mantra certainly doesn’t energize it any more. What’s important is whenever you search to find a phrase, a word or some series of sounds that you’d like to repeat during your meditation is that it’s something that comes from within. It’s something that has some meaning to you, and whenever you say that word, phrase, or sound, you feel something personal resonate within yourself. It can be as simple as the word ‘om’ or as long and complex and dynamic as your imagination wants it to be, so long as it feels natural and you feel connected to the sound.
As I’ve noted throughout the course, meditation is a personal journey. It’s all about finding what works best for you, what has meaning for you, and what allows you to achieve your richest meditative experience. Another thing to experiment with during your chanting is how widely or tightly constricted your mouth and the back of your throat are. You’ll notice that while you’re chanting if you have your mouth very open or very closed, you’ll get a different sound. If you expand the back of your throat and move the position of your tongue or constrict the back of your throat, you’ll find that all of these things affect the sound of your chant and the feeling of the vibration. Experiment with these things and find what variation feels best for you. I personally find it most effective whenever I begin with my throat and mouth as wide as possible and over the course of one exhale, slowly and slightly constrict the width of the throat and how wide my mouth is open.
In the following guided meditation we’ll simply chant the word ‘om’ for the first half and through the beauty of audio technology, we’ll slowly begin to turn into a group chant by having other layers of my voice chanting ‘om’ in order to simulate what a group chanting session would be like.
Remember, it’s all about opening up, being free and allowing your body to resonate. So don’t be shy, allow the vibration of the sound to flow through your body, to help you open up, relax, release and focus even more deeply.
]]>Welcome to Release Into Now, week six. Astral projection and conclusion.
One of the things you may have heard about or read about before whenever reading about meditation is astral projection. This idea is that during a meditative state, you can experience different realms or reality, different worlds, and different planes of existence within your mind. Now of course, this experience is intangible to anyone else other than the person experiencing it. To try and quantify, qualify, or gauge your own experience next to someone else’s is not only a diversion an indulgence of the ego, but it’s also an empty gesture. This would be like trying to compare what your dream that night was with someone else’s.
I find the idea and experience of astral projection fascinating and very useful. However, like all intangible experiences, I don’t put any belief or disbelief in these things. I look at that frontier of thought, feedback and experience with simply an open mind. A beautiful palette of our own consciousness which is there for us to explore, experiment with, but not get wrapped up and lost in our own images or our own ego. A very common thing happens to people whenever they start to experience the internal matrix is believing their experience is truth, and gaining some sense of self elevation from the knowing of that experience. Obviously, this is the antithesis of the goal of the entire practice of expanding your consciousness and increasing your mindfulness. Take any of the experiences that you tap into during the deeper and more developed stages of your meditative practice, simply as images of your own mind. Perhaps there is connectivity there with other people, places and things in that mind space. However there’s absolutely no reason to create any type of hierarchy of how you see yourself within the world.
I look at tapping into these states of thoughts as a potential image of my own internal mind. The deeper layers and symbols of my consciousness, which could be a projection of the deepest foundational aspects of my own brain. Also I’m open to the notion of there being shared experience in that space, being able to communicate with other people, and view other things. But like everything in life, I believe and disbelieve everything equally, knowing that my consciousness is simply an abstraction of the world that exists outside of my skin. A morphing, cyclical feedback taken in like a reading on an instrument by my nervous system, processed by my mind’s past experience, imprintation and genetic feedback. My advice in this realm is to not get lost in the path of belief or disbelief of these other layers but simply observe them for what they are, and move forward with the understanding that the unveiling and increasing of what our consciousness even means is a continuously unfolding process.
These experiences can be very helpful. During meditation, you may begin to see colors, shapes, other people, other creatures, all the things that your mind could possibly imagine. With practice, focus, and concentration, you’re able to navigate these things, and decode the symbology and meaning in these things, similar to finding meaning in a dream. As you develop more skill at navigating this space in your mind, you can begin to interact more deeply with those symbols and ultimately begin to unveil the depths of yourself to a degree which you’d never imagined.
Tapping into this frequency of mind is a process. For me, it slowly started as a silver light in my third eye during my meditation. As time progressed, that silver light began to open, to become more three dimensional, and to begin to spiral and expand. I started having slow experiences during my meditations, seeing as if doors were opening, other realms, and completely unique and new universes. Over the years, I’d begin to get more comfortable moving into those spaces until I could do so at will, at any point in time. At this point, in my own personal meditation practice, every meditation session is simply a trip through the astral world. I move through this fractal-based universe in my mind, creating things in that universe and removing them as I please, following my intuition and searching out answers to deeper questions of the universe. Asking deeper questions about myself and decoding and gaining understanding of the realities that are flowing through my life. As I noted before, this type of process takes time. It took me 10 to 15 years and a lot of other experimentation to develop that type of connection in my mind. We all develop at different rates. Perhaps you could tap into that space sooner, or perhaps it will take you longer. As you develop some skill at accessing this world, you’ll see you can discover great things about yourself and some of the most curious mysteries.
During the guided mediation this week, I’ll lead you through a basic process of beginning to identify the frequency and entry point to the astral plane within yourself. I’ll take you through a brief journey of what it would be like to experience moving around in such a space.
One of the most important aspects about all of this work, the entire course and the entire path of increasing your consciousness, increasing your awareness, and becoming more mindful, is to become more what you are. Humans are mimicking creatures, often we’ll identify the first person we encounter that holds some type of knowledge of all the things I’ve talked about throughout this course, as a symbol. That the way that they act, the way that they talk, the way that they dress, or their own unique life view has anything to do or is connected in any way to raising your mind and increasing your mindfulness. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Where someone’s from, how they’re dressed, how they speak, or how they act in life is simply the most skin deep aspect of human nature. True authenticism is derived from where someone’s actions come from, not what someone’s actions or preference seem to be. Speaking more softly or being more intense. Becoming a vegetarian or eating more meat. Wearing yoga pants or wearing a suit. All of that is completely irrelevant. What’s important in this path, is coming back to the self, becoming who you are, finding the deepest and most authentic version of you. Unifying all the parts of your personality, and what you are, and allowing it to grow outwards, and represent who you are in the world. By using these practices, you can become more comfortable with who you are, more open to the world, more patient, and develop a greater vision in what you’d like to become.
Meditation and mindfulness are things to take into your life with you. They’re not simply practices that you do 20 minutes a day and then move on. These things grow into your life. As you find you practice more, you’ll see that you become more aware of your thoughts and others, and able to respond to life in a more patient, rational, loving, and intelligent way. Over time, everything in life can become a meditation. Not in an active way, but because meditation is a frequency of mind. It’s a state of mind, and once you practice it enough, it becomes what you are.
I encourage you to revisit the material over time, and watch how it unfolds and develops as you continue on your path. Everything I’ve outlined in all of the lectures and in the guided meditations, I’ve done in such a way where it distills very large, very complex ideas into much more simple terms. But with that, all of the content in this course is built to continue to unfold, and as you learn, you can revisit it and find that another layer is revealed in each thing. As you learn more, you can revisit the material yet again, and find new meaning in the same material and a deeper layer available for you to discover. As you grow with this course, the course will grow with you. Enlightenment is not a destination. It’s a direction. A direction you can move towards for the rest of your life.
Thank you all so much for taking this course. With the deepest sincerity, I hope that it brings more peace, more patience, more space, and a larger perspective into your life. Please take with you my absolute best and deepest warmth on your path.
Much love, my friends. Be well.
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