Guided Meditations – Is a Bare Bones Style the Best?

For some people meditation means creative visualization, targeted thinking, systematic relaxation of muscles, sitting still without talking, or any number of other activities. For our purposes here, none of these activities qualify as meditation.

For our purposes here, what does qualify is a special kind of attention that makes it possible to radically retrain your relationship to pain.

I teach this special kind of attention because it is the kind of meditation that has so transformed my life, even though for years I used an electric wheelchair to get around, I am now arthritis-free.

I can't guarantee these meditations will have the same kind of profound outcome for you, but that is my hope. It is the best way I know to have such an undistracted experience of yourself that you are able to experience the gift of deep and often impossible seeming levels of healing.

Because I am not intending to induce in you any transient feel-good states, I don't include any feel good music on my guided meditation CDs. During our guided meditations together, I had rather you have a direct and focused experience of whatever you are spontaneously experiencing in that moment. The last thing I want to do is use external distraction, even if it is pleasant, to distract you from experiencing yourself.

One woman was initially quite disappointed when she started using my anger guided meditation CD. She was expecting beautiful music and beautiful words to help her not feel angry anymore. The last thing she wanted was to be more in contact with her anger. She was in the middle of a difficult divorce. Her anger was intense. Despite her disappointment, however, she decided to use the anger guided meditation CD every night for several weeks.

By the end of that time she had had a change of heart. She contacted me to get another set of the CDs. The ongoing experience of being with her anger without making it bad or wrong and without needing to act on it, was changing her life. She was feeling the benefits so strongly that she spontaneously gave her anger CD to a friend who was also going through a tough time. After just a few days, she missed the anger guided meditations CD enough that she wanted a copy for herself again.

She still didn't particularly like the fact that the anger guided meditation CD brought her into deeper contact with her anger, but she loved how the rest of her life was gradually changing for the better because of doing this work.

If you want a guided meditation that will make you feel temporarily better every time you use it, you will probably not initially like my CD set, especially if you are in intense emotional or physical pain. What you are likely to experience is not distraction from your pain but a clearer, less distracted experience of that pain. This isn't always pleasant. However, these practices do create ideal conditions for radical transformation and healing.

No matter what your initial expectations are, I encourage you to make at least a several week commitment to listening to these CDs, so that you too can begin to experience their healing potential.