meditation with crystals
Practising meditation can be extremely beneficial. It is a safe and simple way to balance a person's physical, emotional, and mental states. Meditating with crystals can bring a new dimension to the practice of meditation.
Before beginning a crystal meditation make sure your have cleansed your crystal.
To begin choose your crystal. Choosing a crystal with fault lines or patterns within it may help you to 'lose yourself' within the crystal while meditating.
Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed. Hold your chosen crystal or place it in front of you where you can see it clearly. Breath gently. Make each breath out a little longer than the breath in. Look at your crystal, notice it's colour, pattern, shape.
Hold your crystal in both hands, close your eyes and relax. Imagine you are inside your crystal; let yourself move with the flow of the crystal. Let go of worldly thoughts and emotions and move deep into the centre of your crystal, imagine you are wandering through it exploring its inner beauty.
When you are ready, slowly allow yourself to come back to physical reality. Put your crystal aside and ground yourself by imagining roots coming from your feet and going down into the ground. Twiddle your toes, shake your hands and just sit for a moment reflecting on what you saw and how you felt. You may just want to lie and put your crystal on it's associated chakra.
Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study
But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world's more mysterious diseases?
Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise.
Since 2008, the researcher has been placing the minds and bodies of prominent Buddhist figures into a five-tonne (5,000kg) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.
The scanner tracks blood flow within the monks' heads as they meditate inside its clunky walls, which echoes a musical rhythm when the machine is operating.
Dr Josipovic, who also moonlights as a Buddhist monk, says he is hoping to find how some meditators achieve a state of "nonduality" or "oneness" with the world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment.
"One thing that meditation does for those who practise it a lot is that it cultivates attentional skills," Dr Josipovic says, adding that those harnessed skills can help lead to a more tranquil and happier way of being.
"Meditation research, particularly in the last 10 years or so, has shown to be very promising because it points to an ability of the brain to change and optimise in a way we didn't know previously was possible."
When one relaxes into a state of oneness, the neural networks in experienced practitioners change as they lower the psychological wall between themselves and their environments, Dr Josipovic says.
And this reorganisation in the brain may lead to what some meditators claim to be a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings
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