In my last column, I talked about preparing yourself and your environment for meditating and how to get started with guided meditations.
This time we will dive right in with meditation prompts you guide yourself through and some tips on how to do so.
As with any meditation session, your first two steps are to set your mood, and then find your groove.
Set your mood by choosing or building the environment around you, whether under a forest tree or in your bedroom. Always remember to take into consideration seating comfort, light, and temperature, along with things like background sounds and scents which may help you achieve a meditative state.
Find your groove by taking the appropriate dosage to meet your satisfaction for your mediation experience. If you know you will need to occasionally top off your high, be sure to have all supplies available and easy to use.
Photo by James Wheeler/pexels.com
Elicit elation
A quick and easy self-guided meditation that can be used to improve your mood, or even to give yourself a pleasant start to the day, is simply to recall a memory in which you were extremely happy.
Negativity bombards everywhere we go. It beats us down. For a swift pick me up, combat the negative with a burst of positive.
Meditate on times of happiness and joy. Put yourself into your memory and let the emotions and feelings you felt then come flooding back to you now. Relive your moment and let the positivity carry you throughout the rest of the day.
Photo Credit: Thomas Nordwest, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Create a sacred space
One of my favorite parts of meditation is being able to create my own limitless ideal sacred space in my mind. It is a place only I know exists. It is mine and mine alone. When I need to get away from it all and destress, I can throw some music on, light up my favorite incense, hit my bong and let my higher self (no pun intended) lead me on a journey to my own sacred space.
I admit, I have more than one, because why not? When I really want to zone out and tune out, I can find myself floating in ethereal stardust. When I want to be at peace and at one with nature, my mind follows a winding path through my own secret woods where the light gently breaks through the leaves to radiate on an old oak log lying on the side of a small stream. I have spent many hours there, wading in the water contemplating the how and why of life and its more complicated events.
These places I have built in my mind bring me comfort and peace at times when I need it the most. Journeying toward a sacred space shifts your mind from the mundane to the spiritual, from chaos to calm.
Spend several meditations building your own sacred spaces. Make them as detailed as you want and practice visiting them, adjusting your conjured setting as you desire. The more you practice journeying to your sacred space, the easier it will become to get there.
Your sacred spaces may serve multiple purposes. It may be a place of safety, contemplation, or a beginning and ending point for other deeper or branched off meditations. Any time you want to visit your own sacred space, for whatever reason, it will be there exactly as you build it.
Photo by Nadi Whatisdelirium on Unsplash
Inviting the divine
Whether you work with a specific deity or your higher self, you can invite any aspect of the divine to work with you in your meditation session.
Once you are comfortable in a meditative state in your sacred space, simply send out an invitation to your deity or higher self to join you. Open your awareness completely to everything around you. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? Use your senses to detect any subtle changes. Pay close attention to how you feel and what your intuition tells you. As you become more proficient, you may find these changes shift from subtle to dramatic.
Open yourself to all possibilities, even if what you feel seems farfetched, don’t worry about it. Recognize and appreciate whatever you find yourself feeling and experiencing. Let it happen but be sure to take careful mental notes of everything. Don’t judge, document. If you are unsure of what entity you are encountering, simply ask.
How do you feel in the presence of your higher power? Is there a message for you, and if so, what is it? When you are ready, thank your deity or higher self for visiting with you and let them leave.
While you can repeat this meditation as many times as you like, if you work with several different higher powers, you will learn to distinguish the difference between them depending on what you experience.
Photo by Michael Burrows/ pexels.com
Write it all down
Journaling after a meditation session is an ideal way to get any important information or messages down right away before they fade away. I have on more than one occasion come up with what I know was a great idea in a meditation but didn’t write it down right away. Several of those ideas are still out there floating around in the ethereal realm, hopefully for me to catch up with some where down the line.
When something seems extra important to me, I have been known to use my personal smart devices (aka Alexa) to record a note during my actual meditation. Even these notes have been difficult for me to decipher on occasion, so trust me when I say, try to be specific if you can. Sometimes a high is so good, we leave behind more than we planned.
Coming Up
I am heading out soon to spend a week in New Orleans, one of my most favorite places on earth – place that has been very important to me in my own spiritual journey.
In my next column, I will detail more about my own spiritual journey.
If you have questions you would like to see answered in this column, contact me at kerrilynconnor@gmail.com.
Until next time, stay lit.
Kerri Connor is the author of Wake, Bake, & Meditate, 420 Meditations, and Conjuring with Cannabis. She runs The Gathering Grove at her home in northern Illinois. You can find her at KerriConnor.com
