How to Meditate
"By the practice of meditation, you will find that you are carrying within your heart a portable paradise."Paramhansa Yogananda
Meditation is one of the most natural and rewarding of all human activities. With meditation, one can experience inner peace, health, and spiritual awakening.
Joy is within you, and meditation is the key to making that joy a permanent part of your life. In today’s day and age, meditation has become an indispensable tool for personal growth in all areas of life and the surest way to walk the path of Self-realization.
What is Meditation?
- Meditation is a state of intense awareness achieved by stilling and concentrating the thoughts. It is not “thinking deep thoughts.” In fact, true meditation begins only when thinking ends.
- Meditation is a daily discipline and practice of directing your energy inward and upward toward the point between the eyebrows – the most advanced part of the brain.
- Meditation is a technique that helps you connect with and become your Higher Self.
- Meditation is a journey to the center of our own being, a process so perfectly natural that we don’t have to learn how to meditate. Rather, we have to unlearn those habits and attitudes that keep us from experiencing our natural state of expanded awareness.
Benefits of Meditation
It’s almost a cliché to say that meditation is the solution to all problems but nonetheless it’s true. Lahiri Mahasaya, the guru of Paramhansa Yogananda’s Guru would recommend meditation and Kriya Yoga to solve all challenges. In the Autobiography of a Yogi he says, “Attune yourself to the active inner Guidance; the Divine Voice has the answer to every dilemma of life.”
How is that possible? Scientifically speaking, meditation helps stimulate the neurons in the prefrontoal lobe, the most advanced and evolved part of the brain thereby enhancing our capacity to draw solutions. It puts us in tune with what yogis call the “Superconscious State” which is a storehouse of creative ideas and solutions.
Meditation also weakens the more primitive parts of the brain thus helping you to leave behind all stress, worries and anxiety and reprogram your brain to access higher consciousness.
Physical Benefits
- Release tension
- Reduces stress, anxiety
- Helps with insomnia
- Lowers heart rate, blood pressure, cholestrol
- Strengthen the immune system
- Slow aging, and many more…
Mental/Emotional
- Improves concentration, focus and willopwer
- Enhances creativity, helps draw more solutions
- Better decision making and clarity of mind
- Improved relationships
- Better control over negative/emotional reactions
- Helps overcome bad habits/addictions, and many more…
Spiritual Benefits
- Feel connected to a greater reality
- Become less self-focused, more caring
- Enhanced intuition and ability to draw inner guidance
- Understand what is true for you and live from your center
- Become spontaneously joyful, peaceful and calm
- Progress toward Self-realization/moksha/enlightenment, and many more…
Why Learn to Meditate at Ananda?
Meditation is the science of Self-realization. These techniques, taught to our founder, Swami Kriyananda by his guru Paramhansa Yogananda don’t require any belief system to practice.
They are easy to learn but if practiced regularly, are incredibly powerful. The most basic technique of meditation – the Hong-Sau technique – can be learned in a few minutes. From there you can work your way to receiving Kriya Yoga initiation which requires about a year of preparation.
The Path of Kriya Yoga, as taught by Paramhansa Yogananda, has four main pillars or techniques as described below.
Hong-Sau Technique of Concentration
It’s a simple yet profound technique of meditation that uses a mantra to focus on the breath. It stills the mind, calms the heart and can take you, eventually, to breathless stillness or Samadhi.Energisation Exercises
The Energization Exercises are a set of 39 exercises which can instantly recharge the human body with an unlimited supply of cosmic energy. Using our willpower and concentration, we can energise all parts of the body in a few minutes.
Aum Technique
The AUM meditation technique offers a scientific way to listen and commune with the sound of AUM as an aspect of God. With practice, one not only listens to AUM but becomes one with it.
Kriya Yoga
Working directly with the spinal energies, Kriya Yoga is the most effective technique available to mankind to achieve Divine Union. Yogananda called it the “jet airplane route to God.”
