Reaching a meditative state once a day can change your life.
Why Meditation as Medicine?
Siobhan O’Connell spent four years in intensive training with Deepak Chopra at his facility in California. Now as a certified Chopra Global Institute instructor, Siobhan works one-on-one with you to fine-tune meditation techniques and ensure you are maximizing potential for holistically good health.
About Meditation
Meditation is best described as a state of awareness that exists between the sleep and awake states we are so familiar with. The purpose of meditation is to bring you peace. It has been used by people across all cultures and beliefs for thousands of years to benefit the mind body and soul. In the Vedic tradition taught by Dr Deepak Chopra, it is described as a state of deep peace and stillness, that we find in the “gap” between one thought and the next.
We are conditioned today to look outside of ourselves for access to peace happiness and fulfillment and for all the solutions to our life challenges. Practicing meditation daily reminds us that as humans with consciousness, the peace we seek is actually already inside us available for access anytime, any place.
Primordial Sound Meditation is a mantra-based effortless gentle practice developed by Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. David Simon. As physicians with an expanded concept of human wellbeing, they observed the profound effect of stress on our health, and its role in the manifestations of diseases. It shares its roots with Transcendental Meditation but differs in that the mantra used in the Chopra Global style, is not generic but personalized to you on the basis of date and place of birth. Together Dr. Chopra and Dr. Simon founded the Chopra Global Centre for Wellbeing to offer training, retreats and to produce the many scientific studies proving the wide-ranging benefits of the practice.
Meditation and mindfulness are not the same practice but are mutually complimentary.
Mindfulness is the practice of present moment awareness: re-learning to focus with all 5 senses on the activity or thought you are having in this exact moment. The NOW. It is an excellent way to start to retrain your “monkey mind”, your insatiable mind of non-stop thinking, ruminating on the past and fantasizing about the future. The essence of most teachings on these topics is that the past is gone and can’t be changed and the future is totally unpredictable. The only true moment we ever have is the one that’s here right NOW. Mindfulness is a practice that can be step one in learning to bring your awareness from the external world to your own internal landscape of NOW.
Meditation is an evolution of that practice where we are present in NOW but transcend the level of thoughts altogether to what we call a state of quiet restful awareness. Brain waves measured in both states are shown to be different: Mindfulness is based in the Buddhist tradition and is associated with alpha wave activation (more aroused) and meditation is associated with the deeper state of brain rest known as theta state which is closer to light sleep. Both will bring your mind from activity to rest, a rest that is five times more effective in resetting the body than sleep.
Photo by Mitchell Griest
Benefits of Meditation
Reduction of stress hormones
Reduced blood pressure and heart rate
Less stressful thoughts and anxiety
Enhanced resilience to physical and emotional stresses
Strengthened immunity and improved sleep quality
Sense of peace, gratitude and connection to others
Heightened intuition with enhanced emotional health
Overall calmness and more enjoyment of life
How Chopra meditation works
PSM is derived from the Indian Vedic tradition dating back 6000 years. The technique, closely related to transcendental meditation, was revived and modernized for the western mind by Dr Chopra and Dr Simon. The Vedic tradition is understood to be one of the oldest philosophies in the world, from which all known religions and medical foundations have some roots. (Ayurveda )
It is not a religion – it is simply a philosophy for living in a way that embraces the concept of yoga: union of mind, body, spirit and environment. Each are inter-dependent; for example the quality of the air we breathe and the food is important for our bodies to work efficiently. We now also know that the quality of our thoughts affects every cell in our bodies moment by moment. Stressful thoughts activate our fight or flight reflex increasing cortisol and potential for inflammation and disease. Cause and effect cannot be separated.
In the Vedic tradition this was known as Advaita or non-duality: our minds and bodies are not separate from each other and as humans, we’re not separate from each other. Advaita recognises that the matrix of our being is fundamentally pure consciousness. In this realm we are not attached to time, space or location. There is no separate “me” or “you”, we are all one in this field of pure awareness.
In PSM we move from the activity of our external world and thoughts to that field of pure consciousness with an effortless gentle practice using a mantra. A primordial sound is a sound from nature: wind in the trees, rain on the street, waves crashing on a sea shore which are all essentially the vibrations of nature.
A mantra (from Vedic words “man = hand” and “tra= to cross-over “ This is a simple calming Vedic word or vibration or phrase that has no association with your thoughts or day to day life.
The technique is effective regardless of spiritual beliefs and you do not have to take anything on, or let anything go in your life, to enjoy the huge benefits of this form of meditation.
Begin Again. These are two of my favourite words in the English language. Let’s meet up and I will give you a guided tour into the process and provide you with the info you need to create your own expectations for an outcome. This really is an opportunity to 'begin again’.