A Simple Guide to Meditation
by Sue Charman in Creativity
A simple meditation involves being comfortably seated in a quiet place where won’t be disturbed. Closing your eyes, or concentrating on a flame, and allowing your eyes to focus softly and inwardly, you can bring a kind and gentle awareness to each area of your body to relax it. Any tension you find can be invited to release by imagining your out-breath leaving your body through that tense place.
When you feel relaxed, you can bring your attention to your breath, just following the in and the out. This is a difficult practice for our busy minds and they often stray towards more active things or random thoughts, but we can just gently let that part of the brain release to and bring our attention back to the breath.
When your mind is also relaxed, you are able to open your inner eyes and journey. You might want to imagine yourself on a path and start walking. Pay attention to the tiny details of the path and you will find yourself in an inner landscape which you can explore – you may be by the sea, or in a wood, or in a building or a specific room. It may be somewhere you recognise or not. Allow yourself to explore without judgement or resistance. Then, after five minutes or so, retrace your steps back to where you started, imagine the place where you are seated and begin to wriggle your toes and fingers and rub your face before opening your eyes or focussing on the room again.
You might want to keep a meditation journal, because the inner landscape you have just explored is the same place that the Clean Language questions take us to – indeed when you are skilled in meditation practice you may even be able to quietly ask yourself some Clean Language questions during the meditation. “And when that cupboard is locked, what would like to have happen?” “What kind of tree is that tree?” “Whereabouts is that lake?” You may even encounter “characters” in the landscape (not necessarily human) with whom you can converse and who may offer you advice. Noting all this down gives you a much greater understanding of your inner workings, develops strong resources (places and people you can go back to) and can shift old habits.
Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash
Related blog posts
About Sue Charman
Sue Charman came to Clean Language from a theatre and storytelling background, fascinated by metaphor, inner landscapes and our own capacity for change, all of which are areas where story and psychology overlap. She discovered Clean Language via Caitlin Walker’s TedX talk and trained with Clean Learning during 2012, becoming a Level One Clean Facilitator in October of that year. She experiences both facilitation and training as inspiring, exciting and empowering for herself and others. Sue also runs “Wood Sisters”, a women’s modern mystery school combining meditation, myth, sacred time in nature and crafts.
- Blog categories
- A - Z of Clean
- Adventures in Clean
- Book Reviews
- Business
- Clean Ambassadors
- Clean Interviewing
- Clean is like ...
- Clean Language
- Clean Language Questions
- Clean Space
- Client Stories
- Coaching
- Creativity
- #DramaFree
- Education
- Health
- ICF
- Life Purpose
- Listening
- Metaphor
- Modelling
- Outcomes
- Practice Group
- Symbolic Modelling
- Systemic Modelling
- Training