{"id":102,"date":"2022-08-24T18:56:26","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T18:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.168.1.104\/enfold-blog\/?p=1"},"modified":"2024-01-08T17:00:20","modified_gmt":"2024-01-08T17:00:20","slug":"meditation-health-and-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/meditation-health-and-spirituality\/","title":{"rendered":"Meditation: Health and Spirituality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The aim of meditation, the scientists discovered long after Eastern mystics had\u00a0been practicing it for centuries, is to get alpha waves of about 9Hz to\u00a0predominate in the brain instead of the everyday life beta waves of 20+Hz. This\u00a0results in a reduction in stress and anxiety levels, which are probably at an all-\u00a0time high in the populations of the developed world, in those who practice it.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>You can choose from a number of types of meditation, varying in price when it\u00a0comes to teachers and teaching methods, or you can DIY with meditation CDs,\u00a0the internet and books.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u2018Mantra meditation\u2019 was given to the western world and the Beatles in\u00a0the 1960s with TM, Transcendental meditation.<\/li>\n<li>Other mantra types include NSR, Natural Stress Relief techniques,<\/li>\n<li>And Primordial Sound Meditation, from Dr Deepak Chopra.<\/li>\n<li>Buddhists favour Pranayama, a practice with breathing and counting,\u00a0not a mantra.<\/li>\n<li>Mindfulness, one of the most recent introductions and highly thought of\u00a0in Mental Health circles. It has its\u2019 own website, www.mindful.org , and\u00a0is accessible through books and the internet, free on Youtube.<\/li>\n<li>\u2018Guided meditations\u2019 and visualisations are also available on Youtube\u00a0and CDs are available for different slants on Personal Development and\u00a0spirituality.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Before the buzz word of \u2018Meditation\u2019, religions had their own approach to\u00a0mental prayer, sometimes dubbed \u2018Contemplation\u2019. The Greek philosopher\u00a0Plato reckoned that contemplation would give the contemplative access to the<br \/>\nhighest form; Jewish thought was that contemplating God involved recognizing\u00a0moral perfection; Mohammed went up Mt Hira to contemplate Life and its\u2019\u00a0meaning; the 14 th century Christian treatise \u2018The cloud of unknowing\u2019 said\u00a0that contemplation was a \u2018kind of transcendent seeing\u2019, without use of the\u00a0intellect\u2026.\u2019God can be loved, but not thought\u2019<\/p>\n<p>The differences between the two practices become blurred when the\u00a0brainwaves of 9 Hz are approached. The Contemplative\u2019s direct awareness of\u00a0the Divine and the Meditator\u2019s clearance of thoughts from the mind both have\u00a0the possibility of connecting with the Divine.<\/p>\n<p><strong>This is why Spiritualists meditate.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The aim of meditation, the scientists discovered long after Eastern mystics had\u00a0been practicing it for centuries, is to get alpha waves of about 9Hz to\u00a0predominate in the brain instead of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,2],"tags":[16,22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manchesterspiritualistcentre.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}