These steps will assist you in preparing for meditation.
- Set a Spiritual Ideal for your life. A spiritual ideal is something non-material we can seek to live up to on a daily basis. When it becomes a part of our daily living we may then seek to add and to work on another spiritual ideal.
Example of a Spiritual Ideal: Qualities of being of service, love, peace, patience, and compassion - Set a Mental Ideal for your life. A mental ideal is a chosen way we want to think and act. Perhaps it’s eliminating negative or limiting beliefs and replacing them with positive and uplifting thoughts and beliefs.
Example of Mental Ideal: Acceptance, forgiveness, confidence, gratitude, awareness of thoughts. - Set a Physical Ideal for your life. A physical ideal how we want our body to be maintained in order balance our mental and spiritual ideals. The more balanced our physical body, the more support it can give to our mental and spiritual bodies.
Example of Physical Ideal: Aspiring to a balanced diet: 80/20 alkaline/acidic, exercise, food supplements, cleansing body, rest, meditation.
By establishing spiritual, mental, and physical ideals, we pave the way for our spiritual, mental, and physical bodies to cooperate with each other and come into wholeness.
List the physical, mental, and spiritual ideals you would like to adopt:
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List those attitudes and emotions you wish release from your life:
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List those attitudes and emotions you wish to express more frequently:
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Before meditation, eat and drink lightly, if at all. Establish a time, quiet space, or place to create the habit of meditation. Do the “3 minute” meditation to start and get into practice. Getting started and creating the habit is important. When possible, build upon and lengthen the meditation.
Aids for attunement: Deep and focused breathing, incense, yoga, light music, tones, frequencies, practicing “aum”, chants, prayer, reading inspirational material, head and neck exercises, walk quietly in nature.
Throughout meditation, re-focus on the breath; listen to music, sound or silence; focus on the feeling of your “ideal” (spiritual quality); focus on stillness, an image or a color. When distracted by thoughts, immediately focus on the breath, create an image to put thoughts to a cloud, put them in a jar or let them float away down a stream. For certain lingering emotions, honor them using mindfulness; allow yourself to feel “sadness” for example, then allow your mind to repeat, “sadness”, “sadness”. Listen for the message. Is there an action or non-action (acceptance) to take?
Acknowledging and experiencing your emotions in meditation allows them to dissipate. Then you can go back to clearing the mind or focusing on what you really want.
We hope you find these steps and ideas helpful in starting and maintaining your meditation practice.
For a printable version of this worksheet, click here.