Guided Meditation
What is Guided Meditation? It is meditation which incorporates the use of guided imagery and visualization. Sports psychologists sometimes refer to it as ‘mental rehearsal’. This is precisely what many sports people use to achieve gold medals. They are building neural pathways inside their deeper mind which actually help them to achieve.
Look at what Michael Phelps achieved in the Beijing Olympics – 8 gold medals in swimming for USA! The greatest Olympian ever! Besides all the training, the strict diets and all the usual preparation required for any professional athlete he had a ‘preparation secret’. Yes it was putting the techniques espoused by the book The Secret to work using Guided Meditation.
In Phelps’ own words he wrote in his 2004 autobiography ‘Beneath the Surface’: “There are times in my sleep when I literally dream my race from start to finish. Other nights … I visualize to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish the race.”
Phelps was ‘guiding himself’ whereas CALM has pre-prepared meditations which guide you to achieve much of what you want in life.
Guided meditation offers a very gentle way for beginning meditators to ease into the practice of meditation. Guided meditation seamlessly leads the meditator into an experience of ever deeper states of relaxation and into Theta brainwave state in which the mind is alert and the body is completely relaxed.
Sandy MacGregor, founder of CALM Meditation, has taught thousands of people how to meditate properly through his guided meditation books, CDs and DVDs. Guided meditation has far-reaching benefits to health, tranquillity, relationships with others, manifesting goals, losing weight and many other areas of life that people often struggle with.
Sandy has been teaching his techniques since 1989. He has personally used the practice of guided meditation found in his books and CDs to drop 49 pounds (22 kgs) of excess weight. Guided meditation helped his son save his own leg from amputation and handle asthma. Sandy also used it to transmute hatred, anger and revenge into acceptance, love and forgiveness while coping with the murder of his three children.
CALM utilizes the most advanced, scientific and up-to-date techniques available in easy-to-follow books, CDs, DVDs and direct downloads to your computer.
Specific meditation sessions have been designed for dealing with particular issues such as health concerns, relationship challenges and other issues and challenges that life presents. The ability to fine tune each guided meditation to your individual requirements is what makes this such a useful and practical process.
Some people do like to create their own personalized meditation sessions by recording their own voices and choice of background music. Music with a tempo of 60 beats a minutes has been scientifically shown to be most beneficial for the purpose of guided meditation. Music at 60 beats a minute, tends to make the human heart get in time with the music, which of course is the relaxed state and in turn helps to deepen the meditation experience and enhance its effectiveness.
Creative Accelerated Learning Methods (CALM) as taught by Sandy MacGregor uses the visualization of color to take the meditator deeply into Theta meditation. The colors of the spectrum are used, starting with red and then orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, violet and finally the clear colorless white light. The science behind this is that each color on being visualized, vibrates according to its wave length within the body. The wave length decreases as the colors progress, so the vibrations in the body are becoming finer. The body feels the vibration and it is this progression of fineness coming into the body (the colors) that takes you to the meditation state.
Guided meditation is best done on a regular basis for short periods of twenty minutes or so per session. Regularity is important to establish the habit. Most people begin to notice a difference in both the quality of their meditation sessions and in the results usually after a very short period of time.
Guided meditation utilizes visualization of images by using the senses – see, feel, smell, taste, hear and most important of all imagination and self talk. Everybody can visualize to create and suggest positive images! Using the mind in this way can be very powerful and yet simple to learn. Besides the many applications already mentioned, guided meditation is a safe and economical way of achieving relaxation, serenity and handling stress.