APPENDIX: TIPS AND ADVICE FOR MEDITATION
It’s good if you choose to sit in a special place every time you meditate. Then you’ll create a peaceful space where you can get to know yourself. It can be an armchair in the living room, in the bedroom or at the office. You might want to light a candle next to you. Make your place simple and accessible. That way you will develop a routine while you are learning the meditations. Once the meditations are established within you, they are so simple that you can do them anywhere, even on the bus, when you are out shopping or in traffic. If you have any questions about your experiences, please contact us on Facebook (The Spiritual Password) or via Twitter (@spiritualpasswd).
When we were learning new meditation techniques, we both had to check in books whenever we forgot what the next step was. When that happens, after coming out of meditation you don’t experience the continuous joy and depth of feelings a meditation may give. Therefore we created a recording of the meditations in the book – The Spiritual Password: Meditations – which is available on CD and to download (please visit www.astarte-inspiration.com for more information). The recorded meditations differ slightly from those in the book, but the message is the same.
Listening to the meditations might be a practical way to proceed, as it avoids trying to remember the different steps by heart or constantly having to look in the book.
It can be an advantage to do the meditations with someone else. It is often difficult to find time and inspiration to sit down to explore yourself through meditation, but two or more people can encourage each other.
It is very likely that you will experience your meditation in a different way from your friend. Be curious about what you find. Explore. Most important: be patient with yourself. We can often recognize patterns in others more easily than in ourselves. And nobody has exactly the same approach: we tackle misfortunes, traumas, joy and success in various ways.
Whatever you feel, be present. Trust that your experience is right for you, no matter what other people experience. This can be a bit difficult if you don’t experience anything at all, especially if the person you are with encounters a lot. But it doesn’t matter. You’re fine the way you are. We’re not the same. And that’s good.
The meditation experience often changes from time to time, even if we do the same meditation. The meditations can help us to let go of old resistance or acquired patterns, among other things, and so a change might take place within us which might give rise to a new experience next time. It is like wearing many pairs of spectacles at the same time, with different colours and strengths. Every time we let go of some resistance, it is like taking off one of the pairs. As a result, the world will look slightly different every time. Finally, we will see the world without spectacles, with our own eyes, in our own unique way. That is why how the meditation was last time isn’t important. The essential thing is to be in the present and to explore the world from our position right now.
Many people live in the past or the future. ‘When I lived there I was happy’ is a phrase we often hear people say. Or ‘When I move out of this flat/have that car/that job/those clothes/that lover, my life will be perfect.’ We plan what we are going to do next week, next month, next year, rushing from one thing to the other without being present in the moment. In fact we miss out on the only time we actually can be present. That is the reason why it is important to practise being in the now. So, allow yourself to let go of what you were doing before the meditation and what you are going to do right afterwards.
It may help to bear in mind that there is no right or wrong way to encounter the Spiritual Password. Remember that everyone has their own unique password and whatever surfaces is of equal value. Some people see images, others see colours or light. Some hear words, others are aware of a feeling. Some people just know, others feel that nothing is happening. Some feel warmth, others cold. Whatever surfaces is of equal value. The most important thing is to dare to encounter yourself with acceptance, honesty and love. Right here and now you have the chance to give yourself a great gift: to throw your inner judge overboard and encounter yourself, including all your shortcomings, with love. Acknowledge that you are fine just the way you are.
By allowing this encounter to take place, you make changes possible through your own power. It is exciting, challenging and often frustrating to encounter yourself. But when you really dare to do it, the rewards are boundless.
This is quite natural. Meditation can be compared with a muscle that needs to be exercised. If you continue, it will solve itself gradually. Maybe you’ve already found out that it is easier to follow the later meditations than the first ones. If not, just go on, and it will come to you little by little.
Don’t despair – this happens to lots of people. What’s happening is that during meditation, the brain frequency is going down. There are different stages of sleep: beta, alpha, theta and delta levels. When you’re meditating, you go through all these stages in your brain, just like when you’re asleep – only this time you’re awake. Your body is not used to being at these levels when you’re awake, and that is why it feels as if you’re between wakefulness and sleep. On and off, you will even drift in and out of sleep. This will pass as you get into meditation. The information will sink in one way or other. Just trust the process.
Perhaps you think that now you’re finally starting to communicate with your body, all the aches and pains that you used to feel should disappear. However, very often they get worse. It is as if your body suddenly understands that it’s in contact with you. So it lets you know of all the places that hurt at the same time. It can be compared with a person bottling up their tears. When they finally have a legitimate reason to cry, it all comes out in one go. Maybe that’s why some people have an extra good cry at the cinema.
These meditations won’t make your body ache more. It is completely safe to meditate. The pains that emerge tend to be those that you have chosen to overlook for some reason or other; perhaps you held them back or didn’t listen to them. Maybe that is how you’ve treated a lot of what your body has tried to communicate to you. But a new era is here. Now you can listen to your body and to your heart. Now your body can unburden itself and point out what is wrong, knowing that you can receive what it has to convey. So the aches will surface from the unconscious to the conscious, but now you have the tools to deal with them. Ask your body what the pains are about. Let go of the blockages, either by breathing them out and taking in more of yourself and your own energy or by using tones. Find the tone of the place where your pain is. Find the tone to letting go. Feel the pain going away. Finally, find the tone of your frequency in the relevant area.
If you aren’t used to meditating, it can be difficult to trust your experience. How can you know that it’s real? Or that it’s providing an answer?
The truth is, you can’t know. Nobody can prove that what you experienced was an answer from your heart or your guardian angel. Nobody can refute it either. That is why it’s great to trust your experiences. We have repeated many times in this book that all information is good. Whatever emerges, it’s information about you right now. In an hour, it may be different. But at this very moment, this is the way your body wants to communicate with you. So, instead of dismissing it as bogus or your imagination, try to understand what your body wants to focus on through this experience. Give the communication a chance. When your body understands that you’re open to communication, it will gradually become more specific.
The key is to trust yourself. Nobody else in the whole world has your way of encountering yourself, and therefore you cannot compare yourself with others. Their experiences won’t be the same either. And you can’t try to figure out whether you did it right or wrong, because there is no right or wrong with the encounters during meditation. There are only your experiences when encountering your heart, the heart of the Earth, the heart of the universe and your guardian angel.
Sometimes when you are meditating, you may find that nothing happens. You see nothing, hear nothing. Everything is black or grey. You may become paralysed or angry because you can’t ‘make it work’. You start thinking that this meditation stuff is really ridiculous and feel like going and doing something completely different. What can you do about it?
First, are you sure nothing’s happening? Maybe you can’t see anything, but you can feel something instead. Perhaps there’s pressure on your forehead, warmth in your breast, coldness in your legs or pain in your back, head or somewhere else. Encounter whatever emerges.
Secondly, you might be facing resistance to the exercise – you might actually be experiencing something but not allowing yourself to perceive it. So you have to ask yourself what is making you experience this? Is there something you are trying to avoid about yourself? Something you are afraid of rediscovering, perhaps? Something you have promised yourself never to be in touch with again?
Encountering yourself in the way we have described in this book forces you to be honest with yourself. Many people have left honest communication with themselves behind for various reasons. Perhaps they have experienced something painful and not dealt with it. They have to shut off to survive. But then the Spiritual Password on all levels is shut off. If this has happened to you, when you start to open up to the Spiritual Password again, you will find yourself poking into things you have dismissed as non-existent. It can be frightening, provocative, paralysing and strange. This is what we call resistance. You may have resistance to exploring a certain area. You may have resistance to opening up, as there is so much pain there. You may not know why the resistance is there. Don’t despair. You have already survived the pain. And now you can tackle it from a fresh starting point. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So, knowing that you’re already stronger, let whatever you are holding back be transformed into something that makes you grow. The way to do this is to shed light on it, to dare to encounter it and to let go of it. That way it will no longer block the Spiritual Password. You might like to do this exercise with someone close, if this makes you feel more secure.
Take some deep breaths. Breathe in more of yourself and let go of the resistance.
Thank yourself as the resistance to your body, heart, grounding, the universe and your guardian angel is dispersed at a speed you can handle, enabling you to encounter what lies behind it, no matter what that may be.
Be patient with yourself.
Tell yourself you are willing to enter that locked room out of love for yourself. Breathe out resistance and breathe in more of yourself and your energy, or use tones. (Find a tone for the frequency, find a tone for letting go of the resistance, and finally find a tone for your own frequency for that area.)
Another layer of resistance may now surface. Keep on working with it in the same way.
When you feel that you have done enough for the day, you can meditate again to see if anything has changed or not. Good luck!
We’re used to being guided by common sense, to predetermining our experiences and letting reason rule. When we meditate, however, we begin to open to our unconscious. So, the fact that you’re not getting answers to your questions during meditation is great. It simply means that you’ve started to open to the unconscious and the Spiritual Password. It may well be that you will get the answers in time – they’ll just come in a different way than expected. Keep on listening to yourself, uncritically and with acceptance.
Everyone has different ways of communicating with themselves. Some can feel their heartbeat everywhere in their body, others can only to a lesser extent, maybe only in their chest, or even not at all. Well, it doesn’t matter what other people do – what’s important is how you feel your heartbeat. Explore where you can feel it. Does that change from day to day? Is your heartbeat always absent from a particular place or is it perceptible from time to time? Explore. Play with your experience. Have fun getting to know yourself in this way.
Even if we have miracles under our very nose, it’s surprising how often we manage to overlook them. We meet our experiences with the ego structure within – for example, by adopting the victim’s role, just like a four-year-old whose need wasn’t satisfied, or out of fear of being condemned as worthless. Our ego structure developed in response to our past experiences. But now things are different. We can allow ourselves to receive exactly what we need, based on the person we are today. We can allow ourselves to encounter the experiences the Spiritual Password will bring with respect, acceptance and love for ourselves.