new age spirituality

Category: meditation

  • Conscious Peace

    From the Book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War By William T. Hathaway

    I was sitting in full lotus, body wrapped in a blanket, mind rapt in deep stillness, breathing lightly, wisps of air curling into the infinite space behind my closed eyes. My mantra had gone beyond sound to become a pulse of light in an emptiness that contained everything.

    An electric shock flashed down my spine and through my body. My head snapped back, limbs jerked, a cry burst from my throat. Every muscle in my body contracted ― neck rigid, jaws clenched, forehead tight. Bolts of pain shot through me in all directions, then drew together in my chest. Heart attack! I thought. I managed to lie down, then noticed I wasn’t breathing ― maybe I was already dead. I groaned and gulped a huge breath, which stirred a whirl of thoughts and images.

    Vietnam again: Rotor wind from a hovering helicopter flails the water of a rice paddy while farmers run frantically for cover. Points of fire spark out from a bamboo grove to become dopplered whines past my ears. A plane dives on the grove to release a bomb which tumbles end over end and bursts into an orange globe of napalm. A man in my arms shakes in spasms as his chest gushes blood. (more…)

  • Visit to the Brahmasthan

    By William T. Hathaway

    I recently visited the ashram that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi built at the central point of India, the Brahmasthan. Two thousand Vedic pandits live there, meditating and performing ceremonies.

    I’ve been doing Transcendental Meditation for many years and have had wonderful results in my active life — clearer thinking, less stress, more energy — but I’ve had very few experiences while meditating. A couple of times a year I might have a moment when the thoughts thin out enough for me to sense there is a field of silence underlying them. Very rarely I’ve glimpsed a bit of glow coming from that underlying field. I treasure these few moments.

    In my first program in the yogic flying hall I felt deep silence as soon as I started meditating. And it didn’t go away as it always had before. It lasted, and it glowed. When I started the sutras, I gradually became aware that the silence had an energy to it, an inner dynamism. As I went on, joy began radiating from it like sunlight. (more…)

  • Listen to Your Heart’s Wisdom

    By Dr. Stewart Bitkoff

    While we are living in unsettled times, it seems that many periods in human history have been that way. Consider this famous quote from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, authored in 1859.

    “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.”  Charles Dickens

    Might not this description fit our modern life?  Add to this description an overlay of daily predictions of natural disasters, excessive drug and alcohol use, rampant societal depression, terrorists blowing-up innocents, civil unrest and riots across the globe, the failure of capitalism as a viable way of life and a general fear that the fabric of our daily lives is being destroyed.  (more…)

  • Channeling

    By Sheila Applegate

    As we learn to love one another, we come to realize that, in their purest forms, all religions teach the same basic spiritual truths:  It is only the different ways we express them that divides us.  Each system of belief has a different piece of the puzzle, and ultimately, to heal our communities and our world, we will have to fit these different pieces together and realize the essential truths that connect us all as one.  In order to allow this to occur, we must open our hearts to hear beyond language and to expand in our understanding. (more…)

  • Meditation for Communication with Departed Loved Ones

    We are at essence Spiritual entities. While incarnate upon the earth plane we inhabit a physical body to enable us to survive and interact with our environment and fellow travelers. Upon physical death our Spiritual essence or soul simply discards the body and returns wholly to the Spirit realm that is its natural home. Our personality, memories, experiences, and concerns for those we walked the earth with remain intact. This meditation will help you raise the vibrations of your inner self to become more aware of the Spiritual realm and to more easily communicate with departed loved ones. (more…)

  • Meditation for Past Life Recall

    Human experience is transient, but the soul within is eternal. Many of us have walked the earth plane before in one or more previous lives. In some cases the experiences of our past lives continue to an exert an influence on our present existence.

    This meditation can help you unlock hidden memories from previous incarnations. Use it for relaxation, fun, or to better understand what makes you what you are. (more…)

  • 3 Lessons To Learn From Eastern Style Meditation

    by Amy Zimmerman

    The real purpose of your existence can be understood only when you make an intense look at your life with an objective approach. Meditation techniques will help you to have the correct assessment about your consciousness and the unwanted noise covering your true self will be revealed in a gradual manner. The real problem with modern day living is that people are getting increasingly frustrated with stress and strain and identifying the best suited method to get over this situation has become a tough task. That is where the importance of meditation comes in. Learning meditation is not a difficult process and a huge number of people have benefitted from the tremendous advantages of meditation. (more…)

  • Transmission: A Meditation for the New Age

    Questions and Answers by Benjamin Creme

    A selection of answers to questions about the science and the practice of Transmission Meditation. (March 2012) 

    The January/February issue of Share International published an edited version of a talk by Benjamin Creme on ‘Transmission: a Meditation for the New Age’, which took place at Cecil Sharp House, London on 26 January 2008. We present a selection of previously published questions on Transmission Meditation and some new questions from the Transmission Meditation Conference held at Kerkrade, the Netherlands, in September 2011. (more…)

  • Meditation re-shapes the Brain

    Meditation has long been considered a pathway to Spiritual progression, but a Huffington Post article by naturopathic doctor Michael Stanclift suggests it may also have a more direct physical impact upon practitioners.

    Confirming long-held belief in the power of thought, and pointing to research from neuroscience, Stanclift says where we direct our attention actually changes the anatomy of the brain. Meditation helps us wilfully direct our attention and thus consciously create our physical as well as Spiritual evolution.

    Understanding Meditation: How Attention Changes Our Brains, The Huffington Post 12/14/2011

  • Academics Embrace Meditation

    Harvard Magazine, January-February 2012, carries an article describing how some leading academics are embracing retreats conducive to the practice of meditation.

    MIT Dalai Lama Center for Ethics fellow Sousan Abadian, a regular retreat participant, says: “Retreats allow us to access and strengthen subtle capacities and to hear ourselves and others on a different level.”

    Christopher Germer, clinical instructor in psychology in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and practicing Buddhist says: “Mindfulness has become probably the dominant paradigm of psychotherapy”.

    Cambridge psychotherapists Susan and Bill Morgan are attendees at a silent meditation retreat. Susan says: “The encouragement is to unplug from this world… to learn how to straddle that line between participant and observer all the time… and learn how to meet all of experience with a certain amount of equanimity.”

    Abiding Our Own Minds, Harvard Magazine January-February 2012