Universal Light Meditation (Video)
The popularity of meditation is increasing as more people discover its benefits.
Meditation is a continuous process of training one’s mind to focus and gradually bring it to a state of stillness.
It enhances self-awareness and cultivates concentration and a deeper awareness of one’s surroundings.
It can help reduce stress, boost one’s immune system, cope with illness, and improve psychological balance.
The practice of meditation develops many other beneficial habits and feelings, such as a positive mood and outlook, self-discipline, healthy sleeping patterns and even increased pain tolerance. It promotes creativity.
The final goal of meditation is to lead one towards unity with one’s true inner Self.
- Stress reduction is one of the most common reasons people try meditation. Meditation can also reduce symptoms in people with stress-triggered medical conditions.
- Controls Anxiety. Less stress translates to less anxiety. Habitual meditation helps reduce anxiety and anxiety-related mental health issues like social anxiety, phobias and obsessive-compulsive behaviour.
- Promotes Emotional Health. It can improve depression and create a more positive outlook on life. Research shows that maintaining an ongoing habit of meditation may help you maintain these benefits on a long-term basis.
- Enhances Self-Awareness. Self-inquiry explicitly aims to help you develop a greater understanding of yourself and how you relate to those around you. This can be a starting point for making other positive changes.
- Lengthens Attention Span. Focused-attention meditation may build your ability to redirect and maintain attention. As little as four days of meditation may have an effect.
- May Reduce Age-Related Memory Loss. Improvements in attention and clarity of thinking may help keep your mind young. The improved focus you can gain through regular meditation, may increase memory and mental clarity. These benefits can help fight age-related memory loss and dementia.
- Generates Kindness. Light meditation is a practice of developing positive feelings, first toward yourself and then toward others. It increases positivity, empathy and compassionate behaviour toward others.
- Helps Transform Habits. Meditation develops mental discipline and willpower and can help you avoid triggers for unwanted impulses. This can help you recover from addiction, lose weight and redirect other unwanted habits.
- Improves Sleep. It helps you relax and control the "runaway" thoughts that can interfere with sleep. This can shorten the time it takes to fall asleep and increase sleep quality.
- Helps Control Pain. Your perception of pain is connected to your state of mind, and it can be elevated in stressful conditions. Meditation can diminish the perception of pain in the brain. This may help treat chronic pain when used as a supplement to medical care or physical therapy.
- Increase physical health. Meditation can also improve physical health by reducing strain on the heart. Blood pressure decreases not only during meditation, but also over time in individuals who meditate regularly. This can reduce strain on the heart and arteries, helping prevent heart disease.
LIGHT MEDITATION TECHNIQUE
“Meditation is a function of the inner Self; it involves deep subjective quiet, the emptying of the mind and filling oneself with the Light that emerges from the divine Spark within.” ~ Sathya Sai (22nd November 1970)
“Out of one single flame, one can light a million flames and still the original flame will remain. So, concentrating on such a flame is the best form of meditation and to realise that the flame is in all.” ~ Sathya Sai (25th May 1979)
As regards the technique of meditation, different teachers and trainers give different forms of advice. We propose the Light (Jyoti) meditation, a universal and effective form.
At first, set a few minutes every day for meditation, preferable in the morning because the body is refreshed after sleep, and the dealings of daytime will not yet have impinged on you. Then extend the time as you feel the benefit that you get.
Have a lamp or a candle before you with an open, steady, and straight flame. Sit in front of the candle in the lotus posture or any other comfortable sitting position. Look at the flame steadily for some time, and closing your eyes try to feel the flame inside you between your eyebrows.
Let it slide down into the lotus of your heart, illuminating the path. When it enters the heart, imagine that the petals of the lotus open out by one, bathing every thought, feeling, and emotion in the light and so removing darkness from them. There is no space for darkness to hide. The light of the flame becomes wider and brighter.
Let it pervade your limbs. Now those limbs can never indulge in dark, suspicious, and negative activities; they have become instruments of light and love.
As the light reaches up to the tongue, falsehood vanishes from it. Let it rise up to the eyes and the ears and destroy all the dark desires that invade them, and which lead you to undesirable sights and useless conversation.
Let your head be surcharged with light and all negative thoughts will flee therefrom. Imagine that the light is in you more and more intensely. Let it shine all around you and let it spread from you in ever-widening circles, taking in your loved ones, your kith, and kin, your friends and companions, your enemies and rivals, strangers, all living beings: animals and plants, the entire world.
Since the light illumines all the senses every day so deeply and so systematically, a time will soon come when you can no more relish dark and evil sights, crave for base, harmful, toxic food and drink, approach places of ill-fame and injury, or frame evil designs against anyone at any time. Stay on in that thrill of witnessing the light everywhere.
If you are adoring God in any form now, try to visualise that form in the all-pervasive light. For Light is God; God is Light.
