Meditation for Busy Women Part IV: Belief Not Required

Many people hear the word ‘meditation’ and think instantly of Buddhist monks or Hindu yogis. But meditation has been (and is) practiced within all the world’s religions, although it is often called by another name. Devotions, chanting, silent prayer, visualizations of saints – these are all forms of meditation. The purpose of each is to help us connect to the spiritual levels of our own awareness – to shift us into these levels. What I’ve tried to do in this series is touch upon some ways we busy women can find this connection throughout our day, even for just a moment. Moments add up.

You can of course expand any of the techniques I outlined into formal, sitting meditations. And you don’t have to have religious or spiritual beliefs to benefit from them. These days meditation is practiced for stress management, pain relief, drug and alcohol rehab, psychological awareness, concentration improvement, creativity  help and more. And there are as many meditation techniques as there are reasons to practice it. Some popular ones that I didn’t touch on are deep breathing, chanting, chakra meditation, and moving meditation. There are alot of great websites and blogs out there about these (maybe I’ll compile a list someday!) so just search around for what fits you.

My own interest in meditation at this point in my life is primarily spiritual. However, what I really love about it is that belief is not required as a starting point. From a spiritual perspective, meditation is really a form of inquiry and investigation. You meditate, see what you experience, and then decide what that experience represents. Just trying it opens up new parts of your awareness and your brain. You may decide the feelings and experiences you have in meditation represent a connection to a higher power, or you may decide they are simply a bio-physical response. Or that they are both, which is my own view.

The point is, your relationship to your own awareness is bound to change, and the relationship between your own awareness and the world around you. And that has always been the starting point for mystic experience, whatever religion it occurs within. You could say that the religion we ‘believe’ in determines how we interpret our meditation experiences, but it doesn’t cause them. So you can start meditating without any religious beliefs, and some may develop – or not. Either way, you are expanding your awareness, and that can only be good.

Other related posts:
Meditation for Busy Women Part I – Shifting
Meditation for Busy Women Part II – Symbols
Meditation for Busy Women Part III – Love
For moms – If You Think You’re Enlightened, Have Kids
For those interested in spirituality and the brain – Book Review: My Stroke of Insight

Meditation for Busy Women Series: Part III – Love

“He that made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end.” – Julian of Norwich, 14^th century British Christian anchoress

 

“Live in joy, in love, even among those who hate.” – from the Dhammapada, words of the Buddha

 

“I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of God.” – Rabia Basri, 7th century Islamic Sufi

 

“I am mad with love…for the divine.” – Mirabai, 16^th century Hindu Indian Saint

 

“I do this act…in awe and in love, to unite the holy letters…of the holy name into complete unity” – mystic Jewish candle-lighting incantation

 

“It is love alone that gives worth to all things.” – Theresa of Avila, 16^th century Spanish Catholic Saint

 

These quotes (four by women) pretty much sum up the spiritual purpose and source of all the major religions – LOVE. Although countless religious wars throughout history are testament to how often the world’s faiths have gone awry on this score, the mystics that have sprung up in spite of such turmoil have always served to remind us that LOVE is what it’s really all about.

Meditations on love are a key component of the devotional arms of every spiritual tradition. I have written a bit about this in my posts on mommy devotion (Part I and Part II), so I won’t go into it more here. We all have people in our lives that we love (and creatures – pets count!). The issue from a spiritual perspective is how, in our busy lives, can we FEEL that love more often, instead of getting bogged down in the day-to-day muck of interacting? And then, how can we transform that personal love for one being or creature into a wider, more universal love that links us to a higher power or force within ourselves?

Here’s one idea, based on the ‘bhakti’ yoga concept of devotional visualization:

Choose someone (or some creature) in your life that you have a fairly uncomplicated love for. Take a moment out of your busy day to visualize him/her with your eyes closed – if you have kids, doing this right outside their door after you put them to bed is great. Visualize them until you feel a swell of affection in your heart (if you’ve had a rough day with the person and can’t feel that love, don’t worry, just pick someone else for now!). Once you are feeling your love for that person (or pet), drop your visualization of them, and see if you can just FEEL the love, apart from that trigger. If you can, then imagine that feeling of love expanding larger and larger, until it takes over your entire body. If you can keep the feeling and visualization going, imagine that love emanating out from you, until you are just a little dot in a giant field of love.

Like all visualizations, this one can take a few attempts to login to. But it is something you can do for even just a few minutes to shift yourself, and open that magical doorway to all spirituality – yes, LOVE.

Here’s the prior and final post in this series.

Meditation for Busy Women Series: Part II – Symbols

What do you think of when you see the Nike swoosh? Nike hopes you think excellence, victory, speed, power, motivation…you get the idea. They spend millions of dollars in advertising and athlete endorsement deals to generate those associations deep in your subconscious. When you see that swoosh they want you to have an instant, visceral reaction, so that when you are looking for athletic gear, Nike is the brand you have to have.

Branding experts understand the power of symbols, and how they speak directly to the unconscious levels of our awareness (and all you moms out there see everyday just how young this conditioning starts – can anyone say Disney?!?) But spiritual traditions have known this power for thousands of years, and used it for other purposes – to trigger spiritual experience, insight, and shifts in consciousness. Symbols are shortcuts to meaning and shifting, because they compact dozens of emotional and intellectual associations down to one visual queu. And they are highly personal – your reaction to a Christian cross, Star of David, or Islamic crescent is going to be based on your own experiences and relationship to the religions they represent, your past emotional associations with these symbols, and your current intellectual views.

Because symbols are shortcuts, they are excellent shifters (for more on shifting and its relationship to meditation, see the first post in this series.) And because women’s brains tend to have more connections between the intuitive, emotional hemisphere and the rational, analytic one, I think symbols are particularly powerful for us (see this post for more info on brain hemispheres.) 

Selecting and printing out some key symbols that represent your personal and spiritual goals, and displaying them around your computer, on your refrigerator, bathroom mirror, in your wallet, or anywhere else that you will come across them throughout your day can be a great way to trigger shifting on a moment’s notice. Here’s what I suggest (and since this is a post for BUSY women, I have tried to keep this intitial setup to under 10 minutes!):

- Spend 1 minute creating a free-form list of emotions or spiritual concepts that you would like to cultivate more of in your life. Some examples might be peace, joy, gratitude, calm, compassion, love, or strength.

- Now spend 1 minute thinking of an image, symbol, or picture that represents each concept for you. A dove might represent peace, a single candle flame calm, two hands together in prayer gratitude. Or, perhaps you already have some spiritual symbols that you associate with these things, such as mandalas, or pictures of saints or teachers. Don’t worry about getting everything down the first time – you are likely to think of more over time once you start this process.

- Spend 5 minutes on the internet doing an image search. Both yahoo and google have search options to search only images. Save the pictures you like to your hard drive, or print them out straight from the site.

- Spend 2 minutes placing or taping these pictures in key locations where you will encounter them, such as those mentioned above. It’s best to have just one symbol in each location, and it can be small and unobtrusive.

- When you come across each symbol, just take one deep breath as you focus on the symbol. Of course, if you can do more, do more! And if you want to try a more formal meditation, gazing symbols such as these for a few minutes while deep breathing can be a great form of meditation. Symbol contemplations and meditations have been integral to almost every spiritual tradition humanity has generated.

Go back to the first post on shifting, or on to the third post on love.

Meditation for Busy Women Series: Part I – Shifting

My favorite professor in college once said to me, ‘The best skill you can develop in life is how to shift gears.’  She had just walked into a conference with me, after bidding farewell to her toddler and babysitter on the campus lawn outside. At the time, she was juggling a full teaching schedule, two young children, a book project, and her tenure review process. I didn’t really know what she meant then, but I do now, as do most women juggling family, career, friends, volunteer projects, and countless other activities. Sometimes life feels like one big ‘Survivor’ challenge - we sprint up the rope ladder, leap over the log hurdle, crawl through the tube tunnel, and think we’re done…only to be confronted by a 200-yard swim across a lake.

I meet many women who want to incorporate some type of contemplation or meditation into their lives, but simply feel they do not have the time, and I can definately relate (found this cute post on trying to meditate with a baby recently – definately deja vu for me.) So I’ve decided to put together a series of five posts on meditation techniques for busy women, especially moms.

The theme for this first one is SHIFTING! I think it’s a mistake to think that meditation is mostly about quieting or calming your mind. More than anything it is about shifting your attention, instantly and completely, when you need to. And you probably already do this to some extent, as research shows women are actually better at this than men (see my post on Multitasking for some info on this.) You can shift from a conference call, to comforting your three-year old after a fall, and back to your conference call, without batting an eye. You probably engage in shifting of this type dozens of times throughout your day.

Meditation is simply using your shifting abilities to connect to something greater than yourself, outside of your normal everyday awareness. And doing this for even a few moments at key points throughout your day can really make a difference. Here’s a few shifting/meditation techniques you can incorporate into any day:

1) Parking Lot Moment: Anytime you are walking to or from your car in a parking lot (or to and from a bus stop, subway stop, etc.) focus on the feeling of the sun as it hits your face or body. If the sun is not out, focus on any breeze you can feel. The elements of nature are classic meditation foci, and anytime you get your awareness out of your busy head and into some natural element of your surroundings, you will shift. The sun and air are with you everywhere and they are vastly bigger than you are, so connecting to them instantly expands your awareness beyond yourself.

2) Bathroom Vacation: Memory is incredibly powerful, and research has shown that each time we recall a memory, we rewrite it to our brain with new emotional content, potentially making it more and more powerful over time. Pick a favorite vacation moment that you have had, particularly one that represents a relaxed and happy feeling. Everytime you go to the bathroom, close your eyes for just a few seconds after you are done and imagine yourself back in that moment. Develop the scene in your head visually. Make every potty break a chance to revitalize!

3) Shoe-Changing Thank-Yous: Gratitude is a universal spiritual theme. Connect to it at least twice every day by using the acts of putting on or taking off your shoes as opportunities to say thank you. Everytime you take a shoe on or off, think of one thing you are grateful for. Don’t get too  high-falutin here – keep it simple (and if all you can be grateful for is that this day will be over eventually, that’s fine!)

Of course, any of these can be expanded into longer, more formal sitting meditations if you have the time. Just try and seclude yourself in a quiet spot for 10-15 minutes (at first - you can go longer if you like later on.) Sit up straight anywhere you are comfortable, take a few deep breaths, and then commence with one of the techniques from above. If your mind begins to clear, you can drop your visualization and simply float in the sensation you have. When your mind wanders, just pull it back. Don’t get frustrated – each time you pull your mind back, you are doing a meditation ‘push-up’, and you will benefit, whether you realize it or not!

If you are interested in a more formal, sitting meditation practice, try the Types of Meditation post. Or, the other posts in this series, which also include meditation techniques you can incorporate into your day, are on Symbols, Love, and Belief.

Of, if you are interested in posts on motherhood, try the Spirituality and Motherhood posts.

For all the meditation related posts, go to the Meditation Category. Or, check out some meditation books from the Women’s Spirituality Book List.