Kaivalya Centre - Kaivalya Centre: Awakening your Potential

Particles of sand: the art of meditation

Excerpts from an interview with Lynne Cardinal by Tanya Witteveen, undertaken as research for her master's thesis. Tanya is working on her Master of Arts degree in Human Kinetics at the University of Ottawa.

Tanya: Lynne, could you explain the process of meditation?

Lynne: Meditation is a tool to help settle the mind, to create a sense of peacefulness within. Once that is achieved, a new type of awareness emerges, a perspective that is impossible to attain with an overactive or anxious mind. According to Ken Wilber, a contemporary philosopher of international acclaim, "Meditation empirically demonstrates techniques that will increase self-esteem." Indeed, meditation provides us with a confidence or a sense of self that is peaceful, stable and unshakable. This confidence is not based on superiority, but rather on the knowledge that our true essential existence is eternally free.

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Meditation: Witnessing the Power of Thoughts

Meditation: Witnessing the Power of Thoughts

"Every day, most of us [...] are engaging in a common activity--worrying.  After all, what is worrying?  It is making up a negative thought in our mind to which our body responds--with tears, increased heart rate and blood pressure, irregular breathing, increased muscle tension, stomach tension, etc.  One thought has caused millions of cellular biochemical reactions."[i]

"Finding the balance between observing our circuitry [thought patterns] and engaging with our circuitry is essential for our healing." [ii]

Thoughts have tremendous power, yet they are subtle, mostly automatic, and arise so rapidly that we barely recognize their presence. There is in our mind an on-going conversation which is triggered by habit patterns, pre-acquired concepts, expectations and ideas.

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