Visualizations
When you start your meditation, picture a beautiful blue sky without any clouds in it. Feel that your body is growing lighter. Visualize that you are floating in the sky and that all tension, fatigue, worry and problems have left you.
After several minutes, picture that your entire body is merging with the blue sky. Feel that you have become the infinite blue sky that stretches endlessly in every direction.
The mind must be made calm and still. Then it is aimed at the sky, at the brightness, at that infinitude of being that stretches out endlessly in every direction forever.
We want to know what our self is. We are the sky. Our thoughts are the birds that come and go. You can enjoy the birds and their beauty, but it is the sky that lasts.
Take a deep breath and exhale slowly. Mentally picture all tiredness, tension, and fatigue leaving you. Visualize that a wave of golden light is entering you at the top of your head and passing throughout your entire body.
Picture another wave of golden light entering through the crown of your head and visualize it passing through your entire body and then leaving through the soles of your feet.
Picture that the waves of golden light have now become a solid river of golden light that is constantly passing through you. Picture this golden light expanding beyond your body and filling up the entire room.
You may feel a sensation of floating. You may see colors, maybe no phenomena, it doesn't matter. You are absorbing power.
Imagine a vast ocean. Feel that you are part of that ocean. Imagine that each wave in the ocean is slowly moving through you. Feel that each wave is a wave of joy.
Imagine wave after wave of joy passing through your whole body. As each wave passes through your body, feel that all worries, tensions, anxieties and problems are being washed away.
Now imagine that you are going beneath the surface of the ocean. Below the surface all is calm, silent, and serene. As you visualize yourself going deeper and deeper into the depths of the ocean, feel that a profound peace is entering you.
Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It's not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality.
Focus your attention on the center of your stomach, in the area of your naval. Feel that this is an area of tremendous strength.
Visualize a sphere, a dome of red energy surrounding you. Feel that you are consciously directing energy from the center of your body, in the area of your naval.
Feel that the energy of your willpower can easily deflect tension-causing feelings and frustrations that are directed towards you from the outside world.
As long as you visualize this sphere of red energy surrounding you, negative thoughts, hostilities, anger, and aggressive feelings of other persons and situations cannot enter you.
To meditate with humility, consider existence. It is infinite. You are finite. You are a finite portion of infinite existence. Let this be your meditation.
Visualize a beautiful rose in the center of your chest. Imagine a soft reddish rose. Imagine that the rose is completely folded up. Visualize the first set of petals is gradually unfolding.
There is no end to the petals of the inner rose. Continue to unfold set after set of petals until you have completed your meditation session.
An advanced way to meditate, of course, is to focus on your teacher. If you have a spiritual teacher and you focus on them during mediation, then you access the light that flows through them.
You can focus on me or on any spiritual teacher. Spiritual teachers who have left the body, who are no longer on earth can help you too. When I leave the body someday, I can help people just as effectively if they focus upon me.
You can focus on Jesus or Buddha or Krishna, Ramakrishna, Lao Tsu, Yukteswar, Yogananda, Vivekananda, any of the great spiritual teachers who have lived, or on a living teacher, and draw light from them.
Focusing on an enlightened teacher is a doorway. It is not a person. We are focusing on the light that passes through them. We are moving through them into the planes of light and eventually to nirvana.
The inner cry is a very good way to meditate. As you're sitting there in meditation, just cry inwardly to God, to that source, to your spiritual teacher or to a particular god or goddess.
When you are meditating, after you've meditated on the yantra or candle flame, simply try feeling gratitude. Sit and feel grateful to existence because you are meditating.
Practice smiling for five minutes. Stop trying to meditate. Just smile. Let your smile get bigger and bigger. Oh, you're unhappy, you're miserable, nothing is working in life...doesn't matter. Smile anyway.
If you can't feel grateful, if you're discouraged or depressed, then think of the fact that things could be a lot worse than they are.
Cry to god. If you do that just for a couple minutes with your whole being, just like a child who so badly wants a cookie. You will break through the barrier of the mind.
Try to feel that you are beyond time and space when you practice meditation. Go beyond this world, beyond time, beyond life, not a feeling of being spaced out, but in touch with the moment and with eternity.
Meditate upon all the perfect light within your own mind! Do this repeatedly and the radiant Bodhisattvas of Wisdom and Laughter will visit you and change your karma forever!
Love is perhaps the strongest force in the universe. When you meditate with love, what you do is you feel love. Love is like a bird, you get on its back and you ride it up very high above the thought level.
In meditation have a complete focus on light, brightness, spiritual oneness, God, infinity, eternity. You know - silly things.
Remember you have lots of help. God is meditating in you and through you. The beneficent forces of existence are glad to help you. You can focus on any spiritual teacher. We are glad to help you.
