Meditation is a recognised form of alternative therapy that produces a sense of deep relaxation, inner calm and greater self-awareness. This deep relaxation technique also provides many health benefits and promotes both physical and emotional wellbeing. Holistic practices treat the entire body and therefore address problems on many levels.
What is Holistic Meditation?
There are many different types of relaxing meditation concepts and styles available that reduce symptoms of stress and fatigue, and promote healing and wellbeing. The holistic, or spiritual, approach to meditation offers a complete mind-body-spirit sense of awareness and provides a beneficial treatment that helps reduce everyday weariness and stress.
Treating the body, mind and spirit as a whole means that holistic meditation offers a relaxing method of finding inner harmony, peace and balance. Healing, using meditation, also helps improve problems like insomnia and can help lower high blood pressure. By treating the body in this way an individual is able to experience positive changes in emotional, mental and physical ways.
The Basic Elements of Meditation
All beneficial meditation requires the basic elements. In order to achieve a positive meditation experience it is important to: find a quiet place in which to meditate, sit in a comfortable position, hold a point of focus and maintain a passive attitude. Poised awareness can be achieved by focusing on a particular meditation object, like a candle or flower. By mentally switching off from external distractions an individual is able to balance relaxation and alertness, and this in turn creates a letting go of bodily tension.
As relaxation begins to deepen the mind will let go of distracting thoughts and images. As breathing becomes more focused calm thoughts will float through the mind like clouds. Maintaining this passive attitude is a meditation technique that may require some form of mastering but will provide beneficial relaxation once it is fully developed.
Meditation Healing Power
Although a tranquil, gentle process meditation is a powerful method of healing that can be accessed, learned and mastered by anyone. No tools are required, although ensuring the four basic elements of meditation are considered and followed is important in achieving the desired holistic experience. Meditation can contribute to psychological and physiological wellbeing and is considered as a recognised form of healing by health practitioners and alternative therapists worldwide.
Physical benefits of holistic meditation include stress reduction, lower cholesterol, decreased blood pressure and the many health benefits of deep rest – lower heart and metabolic rates.
A Simple Meditation
There are many types holistic meditation techniques and practices, and these are offered via facilitated programmes or sessions, Cds, books and other media. The following simple meditation process can be performed during quiet moments that are most conducive for healing.
Find a suitably quiet location and ensure you follow the basic elements of meditation. Once you are totally comfortably relaxed start to visualise a white light that courses down around you and flows freely through the seven chakra energy points in the body. The chakras are positioned in the crown of the head, at the brow, throat, heart, solar plexus, sacral and base/root of the body. Visualise the white light travelling through your body like a waterfall, as you become more and more deeply relaxed. Continue the process until you feel the energy of the white light connect all the chakras together.
Finish the meditation by grounding yourself. This is done by visualising deep roots sprouting from your body and connecting and anchoring you to the core of the earth.