10 Tips for Effective Meditation

1. Daily Practice. Meditation doesn't necessarily mean taking a few hours out of your day. In fact, morning and evening meditation can fit easier into your schedule. Try simple breathing exercises after you lie down to fall asleep. When you wake up, spend a few minutes with the same breathing exercises. A regular mindfulness practice will gradually spill over to your every-day life. You'll notice yourself going back into that "flowing" state during the day.
2. Mindfulness. Whether or not you have more time, mindfulness can be applied throughout the day. Simply notice things, pay attention to your breathing while you walk. Notice simple and subtle bodily aspects-- emotional and physical reactions. Simply notice your thoughts as they arise. Watch the world arise and fall as you move through it. Once again, a daily practice is the most important for effectiveness.
3. Follow the breath. Inhale through your nose, feel the air fill your lungs, feel the air leave. Beginners are encouraged to count 1-10 to help keep the pace. Once you are comfortable, quietly follow the breath. This is tricky to do at first, but it is the foundation of meditation. Gradually it will become more natural for you. When you first start, don't worry about the thoughts that pop up. Just keep following the breath. When you lose count, or get distracted, quietly pause and then begin the count again.
4. Read. Digging into a good book may stimulate your thoughts, but it also may stimulate meditative states. Reading Tao te Ching, Krishnamurti or even Eckhart Tolle can help trigger you into reflective, mindful states. Reading blogs, links and anything on the internet is good for stimulating your mind and encourage self reflection.
5. Exercise. Physical meditation, you could call it. Mindfulness during physical exertion is sometimes one of the most effective ways to meditate. It lets you both be physically healthy and more aware of your body in motion. Meditation is not just about "sitting still" - that is, not just literally. It's also finding the still point while in motion.
6. If you're feeling negative emotions-- good! Or, in other words, when anxiety, anger, fear, etc. pop up during your practice, it means you are peeling off the layers and noticing things that have been brushed aside. When these feelings do arise, don't try to fix them. Just be with them, notice them and observe them. Just like you are doing with your body. This simple acceptance of their presence is sometimes the most important thing you could do for your mental and emotional well being.
7. Don't push yourself! No, really. One of the most difficult things many beginners and long time meditators experience is frustration. How can you "stop" yourself from thinking? Well, the trick is it can't be forced. If you are having trouble focusing, just notice that. If your thoughts wander, do your best to accept that and simply observe them as they stray. Once again, this bare attention is vital to a fruitful meditation practice.
8. Practice Compassion. For those of you who would like to try a more hands-on, creative approach to meditation. This form of meditation is compassion practice. Start by following the breath. After a minute or two, begin to imagine the world. Start with loved ones, and then go out to greater and greater points of view. Imagine any sickness, physical or emotional pain. As you breathe in, inhale that pain. If it helps, conceive of that pain as dark tar or black smoke. When exhaling, imagine letting that pain and sickness go into an infinite, unconditional love. You can imagine that love as an infinite blue sky or white light. Do this for 10-15 minutes a day. The results may be surprising!
9. Eat right. A healthy diet can make all the difference for your mental health. It helps attentiveness, awareness and general mental/physical strength. Not to mention-- sleep right too!
10. Music and environment helps. The right ambient (or any music, mind you) sounds can help stimulate mindfulness. Also, the right environment can help you too. A quiet day with the window open, spring or even winter air can help you induce a state of meditation. Music, it almost goes without saying, is an extremely potent tool. Don't be ashamed to try meditation CD's either!

That's it for now. Stay tuned for a follow up blog on meditation, brain waves, and Holosync.

On the State of Awareness

It is perhaps at first very arrogant to assume that there is a "state" in which one has primordial awareness. This may be so. Just as likely, however, is to assume that there isn't - and so we are faced with a false dilemna. To believe? To not to believe? What would happen if someone approached you, or even me - and stated that there was no believing or unbelieving. There simply "is." All at once, we may find ourselves questioning rational thought. Not to believe or unbelieve - then is it simply apathy? To this, the imposter would simply reply, "No, that is itself another term and condition of reality - I offer you none but reality itself."

Logic has constructed for us a rather perfect world of order. Where there is disorder? A sufficient understanding simply hasn't been discovered yet. Yet, the strange questionaire might ask us this: What happens when the mind is silent? There is no room for logic then. What is there when silence pervades? And perhaps, as a means to deepen our understanding of what it means to be quiet, we should attempt this. What is it to be utterly and profoundly quiet, as deeply so as the silence after the first snow of winter, of the ice cold plains of the arctic, or the deep quiet of a forest untouched by humanity except by your own breath?

Indeed, what good would such a quiet mind do?

Unfortunately, I must end this masquerade and reveal myself as the madman, the imposter. What this book will attempt to do, and hopefully is doing as you read these pages, is to openly play with your own concepts of reality. To lightly push and pull, untie the knots of preconceived notion so that you may also explore what it is to be human, what is to be without labels and conditions - what it is to roam freely in a land where the only fences are the ones we have built nail by driven nail. I invite you to explore further, with me, with all other readers who are intrigued by this notion. We are all too often caught in the humdrum of everyday life, of distractions, interests, falling in and out of our own awareness. What I propose with this book is absolutely nothing special, elitist, arrogant or idealistic in any way. I simply ask the reader to join me in self-awareness - to attempt to "just be," and see what may or may not come out of it. I write with this in mind, and this only. That being said, let us begin.

Spirit Dance

I wrote this during english class in senior year of high school. Our teacher gave us a simple worksheet with a number of creative writing topics. I chose, "The birth of the sun." Not sure why or how, but this is what stream-of-consciousness poured through. Now that I'm older and probably not wiser, it makes all the more sense and seems to confirm things I have learned.

The spirit danced in its conscious sleep, tossing and turning in one long dream, giving birth to the gods, who too were spun into the fabric of a false solidity. The gods moved the dreams, the dreams moved the gods - because they were one in the same. Soon, in the loose and serpentine illusion of time, ideas were born, creating the stars and the planets of an infinite heaven, and soon we too were born into them, and with our minds, and dreams within the dream we gave birth to all things: Night and day, blue and starry skies, moon and sun. We danced in its light, its gift of life, unaware that we too were but the dreams of a sleeping God.

Kosmic Chefs

We hereby declare, that all sentient beings with the capacity to awaken others should do so. We are others, and they are us. When seeing this clearly, all other reasons fall like imaginative speculations, elaborate ethical codes flutter like butterfly wings carried harmlessly in the wind. These transpersonal domains, we hold, are of non-rational nature, as they are transrational; that being, beyond reason. Man has stepped up from the primordial soup and will gain no trophy, but be asked to give of himself, and that giving is compassion. Our evolutionary tool? Love.

So what is the meaning of all this? Why are we here? What depth, if any, is out there, in here? Who? What? Where? Why? What is my nature, and what is yours? Are there links that bind us, and are we truly separated from the elements, locked in grids of stone, granite and metal? Or, can we, and should we, facilitate new structures? Curved lines where there are straight, straight where they are curved- should we act now to encourage the collective consciousness of a society malnourished, to evolve? We hereby declare that consciousness, as is, is set back by the collective shadow; our fears, our escapes, our masks and fleeting satisfactions that only acquire a moment of pleasure before returning us to the abyss of "the unknown."

We seek to provide a platform for evolutionary consciousness. With the eye of both mind and spirit, we will open ourselves to divine knowledge, explore the nature of subtle, causal and gross energy systems in order to define and embrace a truly, "integral," system of health.

We hereby declare that the narrow lense of empirical analysis is not fit to hold its own. In fact, taken alone it only works to limit the scope of human potential. Thus it will be integrated, embraced and transcended as we attempt to discover inclusive systems of transformation.

What we are missing is good Kosmic food. "Kosmic," necessitating all aspects of "what is." Matter, life, mind, spirit and shadow. Interior and exterior. So from hence forth, we will be labeled Kosmic Chefs, using our ingredients to help all sentient beings evolve up the spiral of development, at the same time eating the fruit of the divine to dissolve ourselves into that same spirit.

Kosmic Chefs, at your service! Involution, evolution - What's on your plate?