Category Archives: Meditation

An email reading. A writer asks: Will I win the lottery?

mega-millionsQUESTION: My question is will I win the lottery or any source of money to get out of debt and build my dream home. I’m disabled and live on a fixed income. I’m so far in debt I don’t see a way out!

ANSWER: Hi and thanks for writing. I’ve been asked this question before and the answer is always the same. The easy answer is, you’ll win the lottery when (1) when your expectation and belief attract it and (2) you have no resistance to it. You’re the one who determines what date and time that will be.
Doing this reading by email will be helpful to you because you’ll have a written record to go over again and again to remind yourself what is possible. Things like this I have to read little by little so it can sink in. Let me first say that no matter how desperate your situation seems right now, dollars can come to you out of the blue, from somewhere you don’t expect. As long as you expect and believe that it can, because if you think it can’t happen, you will prevent it from coming to you.  If it’s hard to believe, then think of the next 30-60-90 days as an experiment in attracting a different experience in your life about money. If it’s hard for you to believe, then for those 30-60-90 days, put that belief on hold and accept as a possibility that money can come to you anytime from a source you don’t expect.   Continue reading

A visualization to find a stack of money on the ground

dollars stackHere’s a fun way to exercise your creative visualization. Found money is one way the Universe likes to surprise us when we’re in the flow. Look at the bills in the image. See them against the white background.
1.  Now see them on the floor in your closet.
2.  Now see them in the pocket of a coat.
3.  Now see them under the socks in your dresser.
4.  Now see them in that secret side pocket in your wallet, or in the glove compartment.
5.  See them on the floor of your garage.
6.  See them on the side of the roadway on your morning walk.
7.  See them on the floor at the grocery and on the ground at the gas station.

Keep an eye out for them. Give it a few days. Report back where it showed up. You can also do this with a lost object. Imagine seeing it in a few different settings, then begin searching then staying on lookout for it. Here are some links to the techniques I’ve written for creative visualization. Like everything else, it’s not magic, it just works if you work it.

RELATED: The Creative Visualization Process (and links)

 

I restore my meditation area to its original location

altar 7-29-15I woke up yesterday morning and sat to meditate. It wasn’t happening. I’d moved my altar area a few months ago and it still did not feel comfortable. Today was the day to do something about it. Since I’m rehabbing my knee, I moved the exercise bike, the HealthRider and the rebounder off to one side. I also can’t sit cross legged on the floor right now, either, which cramps my style. Formerly, I had the inside of my fireplace lined in mirrored tiles, with altar items inside and posters of deities overhead on the mantelpiece. I had to take them out of the fireplace because Benny the Cat thought that was a cool place to walk around. I moved a two shelf cabinet with clear doors in front of the fireplace. It has a short strand of lights inside and now contains all the altar items, as well as on top. I moved a café table and two chairs to the center of the room. My meditation area was now situated the same as it had been the last 20+ years. It felt familiar again. I felt in the slot once more. Meditation came easily after that.   

RELATED:
Andrea’s Meditation Process (and links!)
Meditation Twice a Day Keeps the Outside World at Bay
Preparing For Relaxation; Preparing For Meditation; Daily Practice
Herbert Benson’s Relaxation Response is Transcendental Meditation minus the ritual
Paving neural pathways to achieve meditation and access elusive inner states
Neurotheology: How God Changes Your Brain
Regulate your body chemistry: meditation as anti-aging medicine
A list of meditation’s positive effect on some of your body’s chemicals
Meditating to the superconscious state
An 11 Minute, 11 Step Meditation to Develop Compassionate Understanding
(also type “meditation” in the search box and find more)

I visit John Ruch who does the Crystal/Tibetan Bowl Meditations

. . . .  John Ruch  . . . .

When I delivered the July magazine to Sacred Gardens, I got to visit with John Ruch and had a great chat about crystal bowls, Tibetan bowls, tuning forks, crystals, sailboats and our awesome community of healers. Someone mentioned business is always slow in the summer — we quickly agreed that doesn’t have to be so unless we believe and expect it to be. John is a soul brother for sure! Here’s his next event. https://www.facebook.com/events/117026685299161/

A meditation retreat this weekend

Meditate tree sunsetI’ve been doing a solitary retreat this weekend, doing sessions every few hours of Vipassana and Metta meditation. The first few years I meditated, I felt I wasn’t getting “results” and had no one to talk to about it. My first meditation teachers made me feel guilty and wrong for not having vivid experiences. My daily meditation is the foundation of my spiritual practice. I want everyone to experience what I experience when I’m connected to inner guidance. A friend asks, “I can never stay in the moment more than a moment. After all these years my brain will not stay still. Any advice?”    Continue reading

An 11 Minute, 11 Step Meditation to Develop Compassionate Understanding

meditate silhouette72This is an effective meditation. Like building any muscle, exercising it daily gives the quickest result. You want quick results to develop understanding so that you aren’t letting unconscious or emotional stuff from the past prevent you from moving forward into a better tomorrow.  Practice this twice daily and you will soon find yourself with less stress and less emotional pain, with deeper compassion and understanding.   Continue reading

How to Practice Loving Kindness Meditation (Metta)

Meditate tree sunsetThe practice of loving kindness or goodwill meditation is an excellent tool for breaking down barriers as well as restoring humanity and kindness when your mind feels like a battlefield. The benefits are also that you re-train your mind to let go of stress far more easily when the mind is more calm and happy and come up with mutually beneficial solutions to challenges you may be facing.  The relevance of the practice of goodwill meditation is simply that it can tame our emotions and develop the mind to being more humane and more wise.   Continue reading

How to Practice Metta, Loving Kindness Meditation, a Short Version

meditating silhouetteThe original name of this practice is metta bhavana, which comes from the Pali language. Metta means love, friendliness, or kindness: hence ‘loving-kindness’ for short. It is an emotion, something you feel in your heart. Bhavana means development or cultivation. The commonest form of the practice is in five stages, each of which should last about five minutes for a beginner. here are the stages:

In the first stage, you feel metta for yourself. You start by becoming aware of yourself, and focusing on feelings of peace, calm, and tranquillity. Then you let these grow in to feelings of strength and confidence, and then develop into love within your heart. You can use an image, like golden light flooding your body, or a phrase such as ‘may I be well and happy’, which you can repeat to yourself. These are ways of stimulating the feeling of metta for yourself.   Continue reading

A meditation to enhance your capacity for joy

joyful-783117We’ve heard for years, meditation teachers saying “close your eyes and go to your happy place” but we don’t realize the huge significance of doing that. In creative visualization we talk about going within and remembering a place of feeling extreme love, of supreme happiness and replaying that emotion and that feeling over and over in your mind for as long as you can — hopefully for 5 maybe 10 minutes a day twice a day as a meditation practice. What this does is it changes how we perceive the world. How we perceive the world is how we experience the world.  In every day society, the news we watch does the work of exercising our emotional muscles to increase our capacity for psychological stress and pain. For some people, that’s hours every day. We become desensitized and often don’t notice the stress until there’s a blow up.  This meditation is a release valve for that stress. This meditation is an antidote for the violent, cruel actions we witness every day — on tv, online or in real life. This meditation does the work of exercising our emotional muscles to increase our capacity for joy. It practices stretching that space like you’d expand a balloon. Once it’s stretched, it has greater capacity. The emotions are like any muscle, they have memory and they can be strengthened and programmed with daily practice.   Continue reading

Andrea’s February 2015 Editorial

February 2015 cover

February 2015 cover

Hello and welcome to the February 2015 edition of Horizons Magazine. This month, JP Sears gives tips on Living Beyond Emotional Triggers, and Karen Williams shows how to use the thought of what you don’t want as a trigger to change the energy of the circumstance. Michelle Whitedove shows how to use goal setting to assist in law of attraction and Leo Babauta suggests simplifying, cutting down and imposing limits. Different strokes for different folks, huh? Doreen Virtue discusses dreamtime with the angels, and Sonia Choquette shares her favorite traditions that keep her connected to Spirit through daily practice. Sonia Choquette really speaks to me. I’ve read all of her books and seen her numerous times. I admit my own life is a series of routines and rituals. It’s not due to superstition, it’s just that over the years I’ve developed daily practices that help keep me centered and set the tone for my day. Here are some things I do to connect to Spirit each day:   Continue reading