I have a routine I follow every day. Every morning, I do my yoga, breathing exercises and meditation and the entire sequence takes me about an hour and a half.
I’ve been at it for about 6 months now, and I can honestly say that it has been one of the best investment I’ve made yet. Not only for my health, but for the overall defining of my lifestyle. The benefits of yoga, breathing exercises and meditation are already known to most of us. Some of us believe it, some don’t. That’s everyone’s personal choice. But from personal experience I can say that the routine has not only boosted my energy levels, but there is something about the meditation that changes the way you look at life and the world around you. Rather, the world within you.
I will be honest, I don’t know how it happens and I don’t know why. But it has to deal with how my routine has shaped my life. Not many things exist in our lives, that can significantly boost the growth of our spirituality, while at the same time being easy to do and requiring a very small investment of time on our part. This is one of them.
I won’t get into “how to meditate” because each one of us has our own style of getting into that state, but there are a few things that I have noticed that greatly seem to enhance the length and ease with which I am able to hold that state. That’s what I want to discuss with you. For me, I can sense that I have entered “state” when my body relaxes completely, and there is this tingling, almost vibrational, feeling that starts travelling throughout my body. One way that I confirm this is by focusing on specific body parts and as I focus, I can literally feel that tingling travel or spread over to that body part. That’s when I know I’m in an enhanced state of awareness, consciousness or simply just “in state”. For others, it might be something else, but we all have some kind of signal that lets us know that we have reached a heightened awareness.
Once in this state, some people choose to visualize things, some people ask themselves questions, some just try to keep a silent mind and the list goes on. But the problem arises when I sometimes encounter difficulty in being able to hit that state. Some days it just happens within the first five minutes of finishing the breathing exercises and getting into meditation mode, but other times I’d be at the end cycle and nothing happens.
Why was this happening? And how was I going to make "missing state" more infrequent?
Eventually I figured out the reason for my lack of state at times…
Voices in my head!
Cryptic as it sounds, that’s what it really was. A very important part of getting into that meditative state was being able to quite out the chatter in my head, long enough for me to be able to gain a stronghold over the noise and fade it out, or rather, stop it from registering any distractive impression on my mind.
The solution was: Physical exhaustion
Physical exhaustion doesn't imply crazy sweating like a triathlete. Physical exhaustion means having the various body parts well stretched and pushed to a comfortable level of physical Activity prior to the breathing exercises. What this does is it gets each one of your body parts warmed up and the blood circulation increases throughout the body This has tremendous benefits from not only a medical health point of view, but also for our purpose of meditation.
And that’s when I figured out that yoga might in some sense be aimed at this exact goal. To stretch and get the body all set for meditation! In ancient days, they’d do yoga prior to long sessions of meditation. Maybe this is the reason why they did it. The yoga helped in getting the body too tired to think about distracting and random thoughts!
I had learnt some yoga techniques and applying those, before a meditation session , has really boosted my reaching of “state.” Making it easier to achieve and lasting much longer.
I realize that most of us might choose not to do it because it’s “extra” work. First doing the yoga then meditation. But trust me and give it a try. Do it for a week and you will notice changes that you could only attribute to a miracle. Believe it will work and have faith in your actions. You are in for an AMAZING experience and this is going to work wonders for you :D