TOOLS FOR TRANSFORMATION – MEDITATION

Dec 15
2012

Two Perspectives on Meditation as a Tool for Transformation

Dr. Amit Nagpal, New Delhi, India, and

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield, Florida, USA

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Dr. Amit Nagpal’s Perspective

For introverts and silence lovers, meditation is probably the most powerful personal transformation tool. While chanting and Vipassana may be good examples of formal meditation techniques, living in the moment, silence and simply observing your breath may be good examples of informal meditation techniques.

Here are some of the major benefits of meditative/contemplative practices:

Finding Joy and Peace

The conscious mind is the source of stress and limiting beliefs. Silencing the conscious mind helps us not just relieve stress but rather find peace and joy. I personally believe, “Meditation should not be used as a reactive tool for handling stress but rather used as a proactive tool for creating joy.” In fact my collaborative book (with 19 thought leaders from 6 countries) highlights that money is not the only source of joy but connecting with self, discovering our deep passion and so on are sources of joy which the society is yet to fully tap.

Understanding our Passion and Purpose

Self-reflection with the help of meditation is the best way to discover our true and deepest passion. We can use many spiritual and non-spiritual tools to discover our passions but using meditation can make the process of discovery much faster. If you feel more comfortable with self reflection or plain contemplation or sitting silently surrounded by nature rather than meditation, it is very much fine. The sub-conscious provides us the wisdom, intuition and clarity of thinking to find out what we truly want. We have many passions in life or many hobbies we feel passionate about, but it takes time to discover our deep passion. Here is a post I wrote, “Discover Your Deepest Passion.”

Boosting Our Creativity

Meditation releases Theta waves which boost our creativity and provide us inspiration. My advice to creative professionals is to practice meditation to see exponential growth in their creativity. Meditation boosts our creativity through reflection, though practice and repetition play a critical role in honing creative skills. A desire to boost creativity through meditation can create stress and expectation, which may backfire. So just meditate to relax and improved creativity will be a side benefit. Here is an interesting post, “How I Regained my Lost Creativity.”

Beauty and Charisma

When one has peace within, the face being the index of the mind reflects that as peace written all over you which makes you look beautiful and attractive. Inner beauty comes from a stress-free mind and a confident, giving personality. Someone has rightly said, worry is like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. Here is a detailed post on “Beauty and Charisma through Meditation.”

Tapping the Sub-Conscious

Prayer and meditation also increase levels of dopamine, often referred to as the brain’s pleasure hormone. During meditation the conscious mind gets silent. As a result, we are able to hear the sub-conscious mind or we can say that the sub-conscious gets activated. Then begins the sweet journey of creativity, joy, wisdom, intuition, awareness and in fact, a point of ecstasy and oneness, where none of these matter.

(If you fail at meditation or have failed in the past, then you must read this post.)

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Dr Amit Nagpal is a Personal Branding Consultant and Deepest Passion Coach. He is based in New Delhi, India and specializes in personal branding with a holistic touch. His philosophy is, “Enlarge as a Human Being, Excel as a Social Media Being and Evolve as a Personal Brand.”

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Dr. Janet Smith Warfield’s Perspective

Background:

Meditation is a mind-body-spirit practice originating in ancient Eastern spiritual traditions and used throughout the world for thousands of years. It calms the conditioned mind, relaxes the body, and allows the practitioner to connect to a much larger, more encompassing energy, variously labeled “God”, “The Tao”, “Higher Power”, “Allah”, “Jehovah”, “Universal Consciousness”, “YHWH”, “intuition”, “creativity”, Cosmic Energy. The practitioner learns to trust this power because of the amazing growth, freedom, and spiritual strength it provides.

Benefits of Meditation:

  1. Relaxed awareness
  2. Stress release
  3. Letting go of fear
  4. Channeling rage into constructive action
  5. Mental self-regulation
  6. Improved focus
  7. New ways of thinking
  8. Single pointed concentration
  9. Correct understanding
  10. Humility
  11. Effortless speech
  12. Effortless action
  13. Building internal energy
  14. Developing compassion, love, patience, forgiveness
  15. Openness to synchronicities that effortlessly resolve challenges
  16. Indestructible sense of well-being
  17. Bliss
  18. Transformation

Enhance Your Experience with:

  1. A quiet location
  2. A comfortable position
  3. An open attitude
  4. Mental focus

Some Forms of Meditation:

  1. Mindfulness meditation
  2. Transcendental meditation
  3. Mantra meditation
  4. Zen Buddhist meditation
  5. Breath meditation
  6. Relaxation response
  7. Action meditation
  8. Sound meditation
  9. Reiki meditation
  10. Guided meditation
  11. HeartMath meditation
  12. Walking meditation
  13. Crystal bowl meditation
  14. Chanting
  15. Rituals
  16. Jungian meditation

Areas in Which Scientific Research is Being Done:

  1. Relief of chronic back pain
  2. Minimizing hot flashes in menopausal women
  3. Relieving asthma
  4. Improving the ability to focus and prioritize
  5. Releasing stress in caregivers of elderly patients with dementia
  6. Fibromyalgia
  7. Cancer
  8. Hypertension
  9. Psoriasis
  10. Changing brain and immune functions in positive ways
  11. Anxiety disorders
  12. Women’s health

Here is one example of a guided meditation:

 

Here are some other resources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfFJ6BI1l_E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx-cJrVUBPE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wbC2n-9FKI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWttCv0p6WQ

Enjoy!

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Dr. Janet Smith Warfield serves wisdom-seekers who want understanding and clarity so they can live peaceful, powerful, prosperous lives. Through her unique combination of holistic, creative, right-brain transformational experiences and 22 years of rigorous, left-brain law practice, she has learned how to sculpt words in atypical ways to shift her listeners into experiences beyond words, transforming turmoil into inner peace. For more information, see wordsculptures.com, janetsmithwarfield.com, and wordsculpturespublishing.com.

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The Subconscious – Tapping Its Enormous Power

Mar 12
2012

Two Perspectives on The Subconscious – Tapping Its Enormous Power

Dr. Amit Nagpal, New Delhi, India, and

Dr. Janet Smith Warfield, Florida, USA

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Dr. Amit Nagpal’s Perspective

Before we learn to tap the enormous power of the sub-conscious, we need to first understand what is the difference between conscious and sub-conscious mind.

Conscious Mind

Many of us wonder if everyone is appreciative of the sub-conscious mind and critical of conscious mind, why did God create the conscious mind in the first place. Is the conscious mind obsolete?

Conscious mind is needed by human beings but it should be treated like a servant. Since most of the population does not know how to activate and utilize the enormous power of sub-conscious, the conscious mind runs the show. No wonder Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Sri Aurobindo, the Indian sage, said that just as the monkey’s tail disappeared during the evolution of the human being because it was no longer required, similarly the conscious mind will disappear as human beings evolve.

Sub-conscious Mind

Subconscious mind gives us wisdom and intuition and is activated mainly by three activities viz. deep relaxation, meditation and mental imagery/visualization. It also tends to get active during deep sleep (no wonder many people say sleep over your problem and you will wake up with the answer) but deep sleep is out of our control (we often forget the dreams) and whether we will have sound/deep sleep or not is often beyond the control of an average person.

Unconscious Mind

There is a difference of opinion between scientists here. Some believe mind only has two parts conscious and unconscious (call it sub-conscious if you wish) while others believe that mind has three parts viz. conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious. I believe in the latter school of thought and I believe conscious is often negative, sub-conscious is generally wise/positive and unconscious has all the repressed memories (both positive and negative). So what comes out during past regression therapy and hypnotherapy are the memories stored in the unconscious mind.

A Final Word

Silence the conscious mind and the sub-conscious will get activated. The conscious can be silenced through Sufi dances, meditation and whole lot of concentration exercises and contemplative practices.

Sub-conscious makes us wise, intuitive and highly creative. But to tap its enormous power requires enormous hard work. We tend to be so busy in our mechanical-routine lives, we hardly have time even to think on these lines. And we keep postponing whatever can be postponed until we reach a crisis.

Abba Eban said, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” Will we start tapping our sub-conscious only when we have exhausted all other alternatives and made a complete fool of ourselves?

The choice is ours.

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Dr. Amit Nagpal is a Personal Branding Consultant, passionate Blogger, and Motivational Speaker based in New Delhi, India. He specializes in personal branding with a holistic touch. His philosophy is “Take Charge of your Life and your Brand” He writes a Blog, “The Joys of Teaching

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Dr. Janet Smith Warfield’s Perspective

What do we mean when we talk about the subconscious? How can we tap into its power to enhance our effectiveness?

Our subconscious and conscious minds are like an iceberg. The conscious mind is the tip we can see. It is that small part of awareness that is above the surface, the part on which we are currently focused, the part that is obvious, right here, right now, to our five senses. The subconscious mind lies below the surface. It is an enormous source of untapped resources we don’t normally see. What we don’t see, we can’t use to support our lives, our communities, and our world. When we tap into our subconscious and bring its energetic power to the surface, we mine its abundance and use its resources to enhance both our own lives and the lives of all around us. We tap into the depths to experience the light.

There are parts of our subconscious we don’t want to see because they hurt too much or are too frightening. We don’t want to look at our fear until we develop phobias. We don’t want to look at our pain and rage until we’ve experienced deep betrayal and loss. We don’t want to look at our guilt until we’re ready to say, “I’m sorry” and change our conduct. We don’t want to look at our self-righteousness until we are willing and able to walk in another’s shoes.

I’d like to invite you to a mutual mind-mapping game with the intention of engaging both you and me in tapping into the power of our individual subconscious minds. Then we can shape the energy we discover and transform it into powerful tools for transforming our lives.

I’m going to put my thoughts “out there”. As you read my thoughts, just notice your own thoughts and emotions. Your mind may be saying, “Oh, that’s neat. I hadn’t thought of that before.” Or your mind may be saying, “Is she nuts? That doesn’t make sense at all.”  What your mind says doesn’t matter. Just notice where your mind and emotions are taking you when you read my words. Notice whether you are feeling an attraction, a resistance, or no emotional charge at all.

What you feel doesn’t matter. Just notice the energy of that feeling. You are observing your subconscious by using Witness mode – the detached portion of yourself looking at the mentally and emotionally involved part of yourself. Then begin your own mind mapping process, starting with what you notice about your own thoughts and emotions. Are you focused on the meanings of my words? Are you feeling attraction? Curiosity? Resistance? Play? Fear? Write down whatever flows through your mind – without censorship.

The “without censorship” is vital. That is how you bypass the conditioned thinking of the conscious mind – the mind you’ve been taught is all that is; the mind you’ve been taught is right, the mind that wears dark glasses so it doesn’t have to look at things it doesn’t want to see below the tip of the iceberg, beneath the surface of consciousness.

If and when you and I become willing to explore the unending depths of our own subconscious, we discover a never-ending, fertile, playground for exploration, discovery, creativity, and self-empowerment. Sometimes our subconscious takes us on joyous rides of ecstasy. Other times it takes us into deep, dark caverns of terror, rage, and guilt. Like St. John of the Cross, our subconscious offers us spiritual opportunities to come face to face with our own dark night of the soul, master our emotions, integrate our spiritual gifts of deepening understanding and clarity, and shift into fuller awareness, consciousness, power, and peace. The change in our own energy is the enormous power that indirectly changes the lives of those around us. This is the space where synchronicities abound and miracles happen.

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Dr. Janet Smith Warfield serves wisdom-seekers who want understanding and clarity so they can live peaceful, powerful, prosperous lives. Through her unique combination of holistic, creative, right-brain transformational experiences and 22 years of rigorous, left-brain law practice, she has learned how to sculpt words in atypical ways to shift her listeners into experiences beyond words, transforming turmoil into inner peace. To learn more, see www.wordsculptures.com, www.wordsculpturespublishing.com, www.janetsmithwarfield.com