Practical Meditation

It is theorized that time is relative. Certainly, our perception of time is relative. We sometimes listen to music while we walk, run, perform aerobic exercises or lift weights to stay in shape. The music helps to take our mind off the monotony of the routine. This is a subtle form of hypnosis we utilize to influence our perception of time.

For writers, the act of mentally composing an article topic or even a scene in a book works especially well in this task. Often, my hour-long walk each day seems over before it began as I play over each sentence of my topic in my head. Also, the clock can seem to come to a dead stop during jobs that require little brain stimulation. Mentally detailing every aspect of a hobby or personal project can help make the time fly by.

Listening to binaural beats before sleep is a relatively new technique I have adopted. Often while lying in bed, I find that my mind is racing. Although I am physically exhausted, I cannot seem to settle my mind to drift off into sleep. Listening to binaural beats for 30 minutes before sleep helps to provide a gentle distraction to quiet my mind.

When I feel myself getting drowsy I simply remove my ear buds and roll over. Moments later, I am fast asleep. Some very effective audio tracks of binaural beats can be found online. Visual projection is a somewhat advanced technique in meditation. It involves seeing what you want on the blank canvas of your mind. I frequently do this while listening to binaural beats.

It takes practice, but given time, you can paint a living portrait of your goal. This only serves as a means to strengthen your resolve toward that goal. Coincidentally, visual projection also leads us into our next technique of directed dreaming. Some of us have developed a mental block in which we cannot remember our dreams. It is said that, although we all dream, we may not always be able to remember our dreams.

Visual projection evolves into directed dreaming by playing out a scene of your goals in your mind like a movie. It is more like day dreaming, except you do this just before sleep while lying down with your eyes closed. Often, you will find that your movie will become a recurring dream reinforcing your goal on a subconscious level. Whether you remember it or not makes no difference, the positive effect is the same.

Perhaps you may scoff at the effectiveness of these techniques and the value of your dreams. But keep in mind, everything we have created around us as a civilization began as a dream that evolved into a visionary idea. We become better at performing new tasks by doing them repeatedly.

In these techniques, you are merely mentally going through the motions of making your dreams come true each night. Just like the ways we learn to more efficiently perform the routine tasks in our day-to-day lives, through the repetition of practical meditation, we find more efficient ways to accomplish our goals.

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