Meditation alone may not be enough!

It is true that meditation is a wonderful practice. You can step back from the dramas of the mind and find a quiet space. Even if the mind doesn’t quieten down, the time spent just sitting quietly allowing the thoughts to roll over is helpful. If you are looking for stress reduction and some peace, will get that. Along with the physiological changes from countering the effects of the stress response, that is a huge benefit of meditation.

And in that quiet place regular meditators may also find insight, creativity, flow and perhaps a feeling of bliss. How wonderful!

In meditation you can step back from being caught up in the mind to being able to observe the mind. But then who are you if you can watch the mind? And who are you if you can recognise that it is the mind that creates the ‘me’? ‘Me’ is a bundle of thoughts and so essentially a fiction, but it is also something that we are so familiar with that it becomes a central point from where we almost always operate. Maybe meditation helps us to see this mis-identification, this ‘maya’ or veil of illusion’. This may prompt further contemplation and questioning about how to integrate the experience of small individual self and the larger Self that we might call Universal Consciousness (or many other names such as God) into our everyday life.

This is the work of Yoga isn’t it – finding that we can experience that Union of the individual with the whole?

Then the experiences known as kaivalya, nirvana, moksha or enlightenment make perfect sense. Perhaps this can lead to further contemplation about being okay with the mystery of life and not taking the mind’s view of reality so seriously.

Fun, right?

You can purchase your own set of these contemplation cards from the store here and postage is free in Australia. The picture on the front of each card is by Gayle Stone Art. I’d love your feedback and look out for my blog about the next card soon.