Meditation. 1. What is it?

I meditate. Since long. I think I discovered it when I was 13 or 14. It started with a little book by Dr. Gisela Eberlein called "Health through autogenic training" (in Dutch: "Gezond door autogene training".)

It worked well for me for a while. After that I ventured into yoga and even a short bout of Zen, but that was too foreign for me. Then I discovered TM. Transcendental Meditation. That was an eye opener. Simple, easy, effortless (once you're through the initial period of the "restless mind". Other practitioners will recognise this. :-) ).

Meditation is a way to calm your Self down or to help you in focussing on a specific thing/issue. Meditation is not fixed on one particular thing. The purposes are many, as are the ways in which to meditate. Some prefer group meditations, some practice solo, some dive into themselves using a mantra and some follow guided meditations or path-workings where they follow the lead of someone's words to enter a specific realm or mindset. Those words can come from someone reading a text or from any sound-source that is available.

So far this first post on meditation. If you want to keep an eye on this little series, you can follow the meditation category link on my site.