The Viable Alternative

I’ve been meditating for the last 7 years. I started as a result of a huge crisis in my life where I was questioning whether I even wanted to live, and rather than “give up,” I dug my feet in and said the crisis wasn’t going to beat me, and I picked up meditation to shore up my resolve to make myself stronger to face the situation.

However, it is only as of recent that I really started to realize that I, like probably many people, had the whole meditation thing wrong and that there is a true power to meditation that I didn’t even realize.

As a result of my spiritual experiences over the past few months that jolted me out of my denial that I had spiritual gifts, I’ve been wanting to hear a lot more from God in order to receive more guidance and also attunement to my spiritual gifts, so I’ve felt compelled to meditate a lot more in order to learn to shut out the inner noise so I can easier hear the still small voice of God.

With all the work I’ve done with body oriented therapy over the past almost two and a half years, combined with my recent spiritual shift, my meditation sessions have taken on a whole new dimension.

The purpose of meditation is to get out of our head in order for us to be in our bodies in the present. That involves deep breathing and embodying ourselves while noticing but not reacting to the thoughts that pop up in our heads in a way that get us stuck in our heads once more.

The problem is that most of us, when we meditate, are in our heads thinking about being present rather than actually being present. We’re thinking about being in our bodies rather than actually being in our bodies. We’re thinking about feeling who we are from head to toe, rather than actually being in our bodies and FEELING who we are – our core essence.

TRUE meditation is when is actually BEING present, where you have no concern whether you’re being present or not, or how well you’re being present because you’re already IN the present.

It took me a long time to realize this, but though we think we are our minds and the thoughts that emanate from them, we’re not, in actuality, we’re FEELING. I’m not talking about feeling in terms of the emotions of sadness, happiness, anger, etc, but the actual visceral sensation we experience when we connect to the core of who we are.

Now when I meditate, I engage in connecting to the feeling of who I am, and because I’ve been doing that more frequently, it has gradually been showing up my every day life in such a way that when negative thoughts come up that trigger the negative feelings, it’s become easier for me to not get sucked in by them because they don’t feel like ME.

In other words, like the development of a muscle, I’ve become more familiar with the feeling of ME that when one of my wounded inner children gets triggered inside of me, instead of identifying with them assuming they’re the REAL me, I have now been saying, “Wait, this doesn’t feel like ME.” This causes me to recognize the separation between ME and one of my false, wounded selves and stops me from identifying with them, thus preventing a vicious cycle of negativity.

There is a power in the practice of meditation and participating in the process of mastering it. It helps us connect to our TRUE selves in a way that no one, not even our own thoughts can ever take away. The more connected to our selves we are, the better our self esteem, the more secure we become with ourselves, and the more powerful we feel and the more of our innate, God given power we have at our disposal.

Meditation helps us get out of our own way, and when we’re able to do that, we’re better able to be attuned to God’s way.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love