All posts by born_admin

Dadi Janki and the Brahma Kumaris

I was blessed during a stay at the Brahma Kumaris Global retreat in Oxfordshire to meet Dadi Janki during my stay at the centre, a beautiful energy that invigorated us all with love. Here is a short video documentary about her loving giving, throughout her life.

Dadi Janki : Beyond Words from Brahma Kumaris on Vimeo.

http://www.globalretreatcentre.org/

The Brahma Kumaris also hold a popular festival every summer called ‘Peace in the Park’ inside the grounds of their Global retreat centre near Oxford, you can visit their Peace in the Park website here

Meditation Cushions

It is always difficult to find traditional products for meditation such as cushions, I have found and used a great UK based company with the right credentials who supply cushions for meditation, Yoga and Shiatsu at such reasonable prices that I felt the need to share. If you have ever meditated on a traditional ‘buckwheat husks’ filled cushion then you will know what it means to feel right.

http://bluebanyan.co.uk/

Using a traditional style cushion allows your knees to be lower than your hips, this will encourage your energy to flow in a circular fashion, but just as important it will allow your body to be more comfortable over longer periods of time during your meditation practice. Below are several diagrams which provide the idea of Ki (Chi) energy in a circular pattern

Circular Energy

Energy Circular

The One World Festival Release a Video

The One World Festival continues to grow and amaze with its range of workshops, the fabulous atmosphere that is created by the wonderful guests and the many healers and facilitators that come to teach and pass on their gifts can make the air tingle with energy,

To give everyone a flavour of  what the One World Festival is all about, I have attached this years (2013) workshop programme, the English OWF moves around the country and sets up each year at a different location, this makes it easier for local people to do day visits.

The One World Festival workshop programme for 2013 can be opened or downloaded below.

programme-leighton-2013

Heart felt or Meta Meditation

Meta or Heart Felt meditations are great healing meditations for all of us, doing a Heart Felt mediation really brings awareness to the heart and helps you to recognise the importance of the Heart in your wellbeing and those around.

The Global Coherence organisation has been producing some amazing research on the Heart which has contributed to our understanding that the Heart actually not only puts out an amazing strong electro magnetic field, but it also has enough neurons or ‘brain cells’ to have a brain the size of a pigeon. This Heart Brain has the need of its own mediations different from our head brain, I have placed a Heart Felt Meditation for you to download and use freely if you wish.

 

I hope you enjoyed the video, please feel free to download the Meta Heartfelt meditation and use and share with love, it is good to share.
Heartfelt_meditation

Free Meditation Resource To Check out

This is a great site to check out to help with your meditations and mindfulness, because meditation is not just about making you feel nice for half n hour, real meditation is about changing the way you think, it’s about de-programing the negativity from your ego and re-programing with the positive aspects of love and joy. This is accomplished with awareness when you do your mindfulness meditation, of course you also need wisdom, knowledge and guidance to make progress which is what you can gather from this website.

The Upaya Zen centre is a great resource because they provide for free, text and audio podcasts of their masters teachings. I hope you enjoy listening to the wisdoms as much as I do.

Upaya Zen Centre

 

Methods to aid Meditations

Part of your meditation learning could be Tree hugging, this is a wonderfully simple exercise to do and not only provides a great grounding but actually allows thetree_hugger1 sharing of energies with another living organism, which is good right ?

Remember we are all part of the same universal energy matrix, when you share or hug in joy, what you put out there are some really positive vibes as Karma, this will only be good for you and the universe as positive energies are good for all of us.

Completed Meditation Workshops

The Meditation workshops went well at the One World Festival, with an average of ten people a day showing up to learn and grow, I introduced to our lovely students the basic techniques for focused meditation, Transcendental Meditation and open eye meditation for the first 4 days and on the final day of the workshop we did some guided Meta (Heartfelt) Meditation and Kundalini Yoga Meditation, both healing and growing meditations.

This August bank holiday weekend I will be visiting the SuperSpirit festival and will be doing workshops on Wizardry and with luck some more meditation workshops.

This is an interesting audio interview from the Heart Math Institute that you can download that discusses how the brain/mind use’s negativity to learn with, which was one of the discussions in my Meditation workshops.

Heart Coherence project

May happy times follow you all

Ken

Meditation and Diet

I have been meditating since I was a ten year old boy, and I had also been eating a traditional English western diet of meat and three veg, but after my first visit to the One World Festival in 2003 (www.oneworldcamp.com) I was introduced to a Macrobiotic diet which is a Vegetarian/Vegan diet. Macrobiotic food or diet is based around a nutritional balanced diet of proteins, minerals and vegetables, with amazing flavours and texture, the new flavours I was introduced to made me forget about meat immediately and I have never touched meat again, although from time to time I do have shellfish on my home diet and rarely a small portion of small fish (oily fish), that is not to say if out and about and feeling hungry I will not succumb to fish and chips, but never, ever land animals.

I actually can’t say that my diet is 100% Macrobiotic (like Madonna’s) but after much research I recognised the basics of Macrobiotic as a good healthy thing to achieve mainly to its stipulation of aiming for a meal that would consist of between 10 – 15 different items on the plate in the meal (main meal). So creating a meal of such a multitude of items can be awkward but not impossible. You may now be asking what has this got to do with meditation, well the truth is I found it much easier to meditate after dropping meat from my diet!

The secret of true meditation is getting the mind to be quite, from that point all things are possible, from healing old memories through to heightening your Pineal gland and increasing your Psychic and Spiritual connections, from the quite mind flows all the benefits of meditation, when I was a meat eater I would find it difficult to quieten the mind sufficiently to reach the stage that I was aiming for and taking 30 minutes or longer just to quieten the ‘monkey mind’,  once I had dropped meat from my diet five or ten minutes would suffice to reach that meditative state.

Why would this be the case? You may ask, I have some theories and ideas, but I think it is really up to the individual on this choice, it does seem to be a natural direction for those who meditate that once they have achieved a certain level they tend to gravitate towards becoming vegetarians.

Below is a photo of one of my recent meal’s consisting of:

Beetroot, Cucumber, Radish, Tomatoes, Spring onion, Celery, Leaves (rocket, spinach, lambs lettuce, Chives, red lettuce) Garlic, Chilli, Pine nuts, Green lentils, Kidney beans, Brown rice and wild rice, Tofu (beech wood smoked with sesame seeds and almonds) and then I dressed this plate with (not shown) a mix of Olive, Flax, Evening primrose and hemp oils, Soy sauce for saltiness and a Honey and Mustard vinaigrette. Most of this is organic, although not all.

dinner_one

This took 5 minutes to put together on the plate, the Rice, Lentils and Kidney beans I had cooked earlier and kept in the fridge for contributions to my meals. So not a seriously difficult meal to create, fairly cheap and unbelievably healthy.

The protein is supplied by the Tofu, Kidney beans and Lentils, Kidney beans have 4 times the amount of iron than does steak, (weight for weight) while the Soy sauce provides all the vitamin B’s that are so difficult to get, although this is only one meal, I also add on occasions, red lentils, various seed sprinkles (poppy, sesame, pumpkin, sunflower) Sweet peppers, Avocado, pineapple, add whatever you like, the more the merrier, the secret is small portions and lots of different foods. Don’t use white rice, always use brown rice for the minerals and protein content.

This is similar to a typical meal prepared at the Macrobiotic One World Festival, although Macrobiotic diets don’t use onions, the OWF also prepare an alternative menu that would provide fish as part of the meal.

www.oneworldcamp.com

Meditation Workshop at the One World Festival

I have been thinking about how to structure the 90 minute workshops that I will be delivering every day at the forthcoming One World Festival for the six day program. I have decided that rather than spend to much time on one type of meditation, I will introduce people on the workshop to SIX different meditations.

www.oneworldcamp.com

This may sound like an awfully ambitious workshop, but I recognise that new-comers to meditation don’t always get on with just the one type they are introduced to. So I hope that by talking and guiding people through the basics of the six different types of meditation, they will be fired up enough to choose whichever one that suits their needs and continue one or more of these meditations in their life.

To really provide a full in depth teach-in on any meditation involves much time and effort by the student and coach, even 90 minutes on one type of meditation is not going to provide this depth and breadth of experience and knowledge that is required, so this workshop is going to be designed to show that people can achieve a quite mind in a short while, which is the greater achievement, for those who are looking for healing or a deep spiritual transformation, then please contact me for proper coaching on this subject.

www.oneworldcamp.com

Thoughts & Deeds

Open Eye Meditation Walk

 

Today I found myself a bit short on patience with someone and after some contemplation I came to the conclusion that I probably needed to do some affirmations to help my Ego child grow a bit more. It is surprising how flexible and easy to teach our inner-self can be, we only have to think of what a hypnotist can do with suggestions to recognise the power of thought, think of the programming we undertake every day in a world where we are bombarded with ‘programing thoughts’ from advertising and other imagery that we get subjected to either willingly or unwillingly, over time these can all have an effect on our behaviour towards ourselves or those around us.

walkin meditation

It was a nice day so I thought I will go for a walk and do some open eye mediation while walking and perform my affirmations at the same time.

As the walk was about 2 miles (5km) I chose to do 3 affirmations over the course of the walk, they were as follows.

Every day I will treat people with love, respect and patience

Every day I will treat people with kindness

Every day I will treat myself with kindness

I can’t say how many times I repeated them, but at the end I felt tingly from the meditation and a warm glow from inside, which told me, I had done good work.