Learn Meditation Techniques

Although meditation is about liberating your mind, you may well find that, at first, you focus on your body in order to achieve that end. Many meditation techniques from Asian traditions involve visualizing particular sites on your body.

Eastern wisdom - including traditional Indian and Chinese medicine - conceptualizes the body as a system that is constantly pulling in energy and expelling it. For your mind and body to be working at their best you need to be getting rid of stagnant, used up and negative energy, and pulling in positive fresh energy.

On a mental level, this is about eliminating negative thoughts and emotions while nurturing positive ones,

Meditations within this framework are, in general terms, about moving the energy within your own system. For example, meditators who build their practice from yoga may work with the chakras, a word which literally means wheels in Sanskrit.

The chakra system is a connected series of energy 'wheels' within your body. The Chinese use a similar map of human energy, which is important for Taoist meditation. Whether you view chakras as metaphorical or literal, they can be a powerful tool in meditative practice.

According to most teachers, there are seven chakras - although some would say there is an eighth floating just above your head. They line up along your spinal column and according to the psychically sensitive, they protrude before and behind you. Clairvoyants claim to be able to see the chakras as discs of color in the body.

You can access each chakra mentally by visualizing it - or physically by doing certain yoga exercises - or even just by massaging the spot where it is centered.

Each chakra is spinning and has a particular color. Again different sources suggest quite different colors, although currently the most widely accepted range is that of a rainbow, starting with red in the lowest chakra and moving through the spectrum to violet or white in the highest.

If you are visualizing these colors, these shades should be deep, vibrant and lustrous, as if they are lit from within. However it's unusual to see them all as perfectly mono-hued, after all one area of life is inclined to leak into the next.

The respected teacher Swami Vishnu Devananda (1927-1993), a pioneer of yoga in the West, recommends two chakras, in particular, for meditators. For those whose approach to life is intellectual, he advises focusing on the third eye, the point between the eyebrows.

Those who are more emotional should try focusing on the heart chakra. If you would like to try dealing with a particular problem, concentrating on the relevant chakra during meditation may release blocked energy. However, this is an advanced meditation technique and the resulting release can be powerful, so it's important that you follow instructions for chakra meditations carefully, and do not omit the final, important 'grounding' part of the exercise.