Spirituality with meditation: Spirituality in healthcare

In meditation, it is helpful to be aware of “the witness.” Many experts agree that meditation is great for health thus meditation spirituality can be a boon to health care. The witness is the part of you that looks out through your eyes during your waking life, which observes your dreams and which observes your meditations. For example, consider what you mean if you say to yourself during meditation, “I see pulsing blue light.” Blue light is the object of that sentence. It is what “I” sees. But what is “I”? Think carefully. “I see” obviously has nothing to do with your eyes, which are closed. “I” does not mean your physical body, which is not functioning in a waking state. Yet, there is an “I” that is observing the meditation. That “I” has no obvious location. It has no obvious substance at all. Yet it sees. It witnesses. It may be called “the witness.”

In waking life, the witness is also present. It can see your troubles and your triumphs, not as the “subject” but as the observer. Thus, it can see life as a play being enacted for it. Life can become a play of consciousness — all the world’s a stage and we are merely actors. From that perspective, even the high drama of our life can have an interest to it beyond the seriousness that usually weighs us down. We can choose to see the entertaining side of the “high drama” of our life. We can become “light” about the circumstances of our life and see the humorous aspects and the helpful lessons, even of our tragedies. For us, life can become more of a dance. We can flow with it and experience ourselves as participants in the dance of life.

Meditation can bring us closer to God, providing access to the grace of being born again. It has many profound effects, including: relaxation, simplification of life, ease in making choices, increased openness to unexpected and creative ideas, increased self-esteem, patience, increased orderliness, a reduced need to control events and other people, reflectiveness and flexibility, an increased ability to love, greater appreciation of life, and more aliveness. It makes life more dynamic and more interesting and it attracts other people and new opportunities to us.

The experience of meditation may at first be boring. Often your ideas will continue racing through your head, producing the same pattern of thinking you are already sick of. But be patient. With practice, the space between the thoughts lengthens. You may become more aware of a still, quiet space that has always been within you, undiscovered. You may even reach a point in your meditation where the thoughts subside completely for a while.

Keep practicing meditation with patience. Know that if you are following the meditation directions, you are doing it right. Your meditation will never be wrong. It will always be precisely what you need at that time. In that sense, it is always perfect.

With practice, some of the things you may experience during meditation are: spontaneous vibrations, visions of beautiful colors that may not be seen in waking life, beautiful lights, auditory experiences (unstruck sounds), dream-like visions (some of which carry important insights with them and some of which may take you to worlds other than the physical world you live in), a new depth of stillness in the body, a feeling of warmth and relaxation in the heart area, spontaneous movements of the body, crying or laughing, the making of spontaneous sounds, moving into body positions you have never before experienced (spontaneous hatha yoga), feeling a desire to move as if you are being directed, the experience of deep bliss and peace, the melting of unwanted emotional feelings and the release of tightness in muscles.