Start Your Meditation with an Intention: 36 Ideas
When you sit down to meditate, what you experience depends partly on your intention.
The same action done with a different intention will produce different results.
What kind of intention might you have for a meditation session?
There are three kinds of intentions, which require increasing levels of skill.
The simplest intentions require only good concentration (called dharana) to attain exceptional awareness. You can fulfill these intentions without changing your sense of self or identity. Here are examples of intentions of this kind, which are all very valuable:
1. Calm your mind by focusing on the sensation of breathing
2. Attain internal awareness of emotions and sensation
3. Attain heart rhythm coherence
4. Attain a profound state of relaxation
5. Feel relief from pain in an injured area
6. Calm your stomach and bowels
7. Feel tingling energy in your hands, a sign of healing energy
8. Feel expansive pressure in your forehead, a sign of developing insight
9. Holding food in your hand, experience its digestion and what effect it would have on you
10. Experience the depth of your feeling about a person or situation
11. Reprogram your subconscious patterns by repetitive affirmations or sacred words
12. Send a wave of peace to another person
If you’re confident in your ability to attain the above invocations, proceed to the second set of intentions. These require a shift in your consciousness to a different time, space or person. To fulfill these intentions as a real experience, you’ll need advanced methods, not imagination, to attain the state called “Contemplation” (dhyana). Here are some examples of Contemplation intentions.
1. Without sight or touch, feel within yourself the condition of a plant or animal
2. Feel the emotion of another person as your own emotion
3. Place yourself in a distant space that was very inspiring, like a home or retreat place
4. Shift the present moment to a time in the past to re-experience a significant event as now
5. Shift the present moment forward to experience your last living hour as now
6. Identify with a teacher and enter the teacher’s meditation
7. Identify with and feel your energy body
8. Feel what it’s like to be inside your heart
9. Hear the voice of your heart and listen to its specific guidance about your life
10. Claim and explore a hidden quality of yourself that you’ve seen in another
11. Instead of doing a meditation, let the meditation do you: ride the magic carpet
12. Recognize your ideal in the heart of every person
The third set of intentions requires real meditation, where you experience the Unlimited in one of its aspects: eternity, infinity or perfection.
1. Listen to the ‘sound of the spheres” coming from within; see the colors and shapes of the inner light
2. Attain the state of no blame of anyone for anything
3. Experience unconditional love, continuously received and given
4. Experience yourself as subsumed within all things and beings
5. Experience all things and beings as parts of yourself
6. Expand the radiance of your heart to interlace the light of the stars
7. Feel yourself as you existed before life: your angelic field of light
8. Feel yourself as you will continue to be after life: your resurrected self
9. Tune yourself to feel the cry of the heart of humanity
10. Let yourself be overwhelmed by the cosmic emotions of the universe
11. Accept responsibility as the co-creator of your world
12. Integrate your body, mind, heart and soul as a full embodiment of Self
Are you ready to learn more and try this out?
Join me on a special live broadcast this Saturday, January 28th:
