ENERGY BOOST: A WAKENING TO THE WORLD

Low energy levels can derive from illness, stress, poor lifestyle choices or low self-esteem. Whatever the underlying cause, positive imagery in a mandala meditation can help to provide a much-needed boost of mental vitality.

Any serious illness can make you feel tired, while there are minor illnesses that can leave you feeling washed out. Particular medical causes of fatigue include coeliac disease, anaemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, sleep apnoea, underactive thyroid, diabetes, glandular fever and depression. All these, if diagnosed, need professional attention, though meditation can still help as a complementary therapy.

Even without any fatiguing medical condition, it is common at times to feel listless, lacking in energy. Although this might be related to lifestyle issues (poor diet; inadequate sleep or exercise), often the root cause is largely a question of outlook. In particular, low self-esteem depletes our vitality. In extreme cases we simply can’t see the point of making an effort. Meditation can help build our self-image through the power of positive imagery.

Poor posture is tiring, since it skews the spine out of alignment. Being homebound is also enervating, which is why this meditation has an unfamiliar outdoor setting. Light plays an important part of the symbolism here, because dim lighting levels reduce our vitality: lack of sunlight prompts the brain to produce more melatonin, which makes us sleepy.

Alertness can be self-fulfilling: once fully awake, we often remain so. We can all recognize this from our everyday contrast in mental states between lying in bed in the morning and being up and about. What is needed to shrug off psychological fatigue is a prompt, a call to wakefulness. This mandala, with accompanying meditation, provides such a trigger.

Wakefulness may seem an unexpected out-come of a meditation, but in fact the idea that meditators experience loosened attention is a fallacy. During practice the mind enters a state of heightened, focused awareness. The effect, after the session itself, can be to “relax” the mind in the sense of freeing it from stress. However, during the meditation, we are fully awake and energized. The meditation here has been devised to prolong this transformed mind-state as a lasting after-effect.

“Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather.”

Martha Graham

Focus on your breathing / Enter a relaxed awareness / Meditate on the scene of productive work / Choose a farm worker with whom to identify / Imagine the satisfactions of work well done / Gaze at the other workers and feel a sense of common purpose / Identify with the windmill sails turning / Draw energy from the sun

ENERGY BOOST MEDITATION

SUMMONING FRESH VITALITY

In this meditation, the power of the sun is sourced to energize mind and body. The windmill shows the strength of an invisible force that ultimately derives its power from the sun. A further source of inspiration in this practice is the sense of fellow feeling with those who work for the common good.

Sit comfortably with the Energy Boost Mandala (shown on the previous page) in front of you.

Empty your mind of all anxieties and preoccupations. Focus gently on your breathing. Inhale and exhale slowly, becoming more relaxed with each in-breath and going deeper into awareness with each out-breath.

Now gaze at the mandala, with all its productive work on the land. Contemplate the windmill too – the sails turn automatically in the wind, and do their own work, but that too is due to human labour, ingeniously directed in an efficient machine. Turn your attention to the sun pouring energy onto this scene, and to the bees and flowers working similarly in non-human nature.

Choose one of the labourers, following your intuition, and focus on the work he or she is doing for the sake of the common good. Identify a common purpose with his person, envisaging him or her as a surrogate for the work of a different kind, whatever its nature, that you seek to have the energy to do.

Imagine your farmer working productively and happily. Feel the benefits he or she is enjoying: a sense of worthy labour, the self-respect that comes from benevolent action, pride in good workmanship. He or she is pleased to be making a contribution to a common cause. Imagine yourself having all these positive feelings after doing a similar job.

Look now at the workers with whom you did not choose to identify. They have been working alongside you, in selfless communal action. You feel a bond with those who strive alongside you in all your endeavours.

Now imagine yourself in the scene, with the sun pouring light and warmth onto you and the wind turning the windmill sails. All this energy in nature is not separate from you: you share it. Feel a sense of belonging with the dynamic weather system you inhabit: the wind, the sun, the snow, the rain.

Look at the windmill sails, turning. The wind that moves them cannot be seen, only inferred from the movement in trees and bushes. In the same way, you understand that you too have potential to be set in motion by an invisible force available to you.

Recognize the sun as the source of this much-needed energy. Conclude your meditation by fixing your gaze on the sun’s disc and visualizing its powerful rays streaming into your mind and muscles. Feel fatigue dissipating as you draw strength from the most powerful force in the solar system.

“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”

Theodore Roosevelt