Subliminal Dreams Website

Meditation

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Brainwave Entrainment / Binaural Beats

Meditation in its many forms has been practised since antiquity and forms an integral part of many religious traditions.

In more recent times, meditation has attracted interest as a means of promoting good health through mental and physical relaxation techniques; and as a therapy for reducing stress and alleviating pain.

There are many different styles and techniques for meditation, but the basic principles are essentially the same.

The idea is to achieve a state of total mental and physical relaxation. This is usually achieved by sitting in a comfortable position and then gradually clearing your mind of all logical and deliberate thought processes.

If any thoughts do happen to materialise in your mind, don't try to hold them back, or fight them off - just allow them to flow through and out of your mind. By quieting your mind in this way, you will find yourself simply observing any thoughts that form in your mind without actually engaging them.

Meditation allows you to enter an altered state of consciousness - a quiet and calm state of mind which is focused entirely on the present moment in time, without any thought of the future or the past.

There are various techniques that can be used to achieve this focus.

One is to focus on sensations that you feel in your body - without deliberating as to why you feel them, but just experiencing them as sensations.

Another is to focus on something else intently.  It might be something that you can see - like a statue, an ornament, or a flickering candle flame ...
or it might be something that you can hear - like the ticking of a grandfather clock, the sound of ocean waves, or even the sound of your own breathing.

The objective is to 'stay in' the present, and allow yourself to slip into an altered state of consciousness - where you become oblivious to the constant stream of thoughts and commentary from your conscious mind.
 
Transcendental meditation is a very simple and effective form of meditation which involves the conscious repetition of a sound, or mantra, until a dream-like state of mind or trance is induced.

Introduced to the West by the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi this form of meditation became extremely popular in the late 1960's, when it attracted a large cult following, which included well-known celebrities such as George Harrison (of Beatles fame) and others.

Many Indian masters were said to be able to alter their states of consciousness and even control their bodily functions using the techniques of transcendental meditation; and it wasn't long before the medical fraternity began to explore the potential health benefits of this ancient practice.

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that all types of meditation offer many health-enhancing benefits - like reducing symptoms of stress and anxiety, relieving headaches, curing insomnia, lowering blood pressure, helping asthmatic patients breathe more easily, and even enhancing immunity to illness.

It is a fact that periods of prolonged stress can cause physical damage to almost every part of the body.  Meditation affects the body in exactly the opposite way, restoring the mind and body to a state of calm, helping the body to repair itself and avoid suffering new stress-related damage.

Studies have shown that meditation lowers levels of stress hormones, which leads to a healthier functioning of the immune system.  People who meditate regularly also find it far easier to give up health-damaging habits such as smoking, drug taking, and drinking to excess.

There are a large number of resources that you can make use of to help you drift into a calm, peaceful, meditative state of mind.

Brainwave Technology (Brainwave Harmonics)

The brain operates at certain brainwave frequencies - variously known as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Theta brainwaves - depending on its general pattern of behaviour at the time.

When you are sleeping, your mind is operating in the Delta wavelength range.  When you are wide awake, and thinking about things, your mind is in the Beta wavelength range.  When you start meditating, your mind begins to drift into lower Alpha.

As you become more experienced, your mind will be able to reach more profound levels of meditation, first deep Alpha, then Theta, or even upper Delta.  

Binaural Beats (Binaural Tones)

The expression 'binaural beats' refers to a technique discovered in 1839 by the Prussian physicist, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove.

It is a process which involves playing slightly different frequencies into the left and right ear, which has the effect of generating a third frequency inside the mind, equal to the difference between the two original frequencies.  This third frequency is the 'binaural beat'.

The brain then automatically 'follows' this frequency - which means that it is gently 'persuaded' to adopt the state of mind that is normally associated with brainwaves of that frequency.

This process is called brainwave entrainment, and it is finding a wide range of applications as a therapeutic tool.

For example, if you suffer from insomnia, listening to a low Delta binaural beat frequency will probably send you to sleep.  And if you listen to frequencies in the deep Alpha, Theta, and upper Delta ranges, you should be able to replicate states of deep meditation.

There are many sites on the Internet that provide access to binaural beats, either as digital downloads, or on tape or CD, as an aid to meditation.  The Ennora Binaural Beats program, which offers mp3 recordings for immediate download, is just one example.

The Unexplainable Store offers an entirely different approach by providing meditation visualisation videos with isochronic audio.  Isochronic tones consist of separate pulses of a single tone emitted at regular intervals, which (unlike binaural beats) do not require the use of stereo headphones.

The Chakra & Kundalini Activator Suites are brainwave entrainment programs that use both binaural and isochronic beats to facilitate these very popular forms of meditation.  Chakra vibrations are built into the notes of a musical composition and are designed to energise the 7 Chakras by attuning each one in turn to the corresponding electrical frequency in the brain.  
There is an option to include an eighth frequency to stimulate the Kundalini which, when awakened, allows the Chakras to manifest and express themselves spontaneously in our lives.

The Guided Meditations website provides superb guided imagery narrations, set to soothing background music, as a means of facilitating meditation.  The Company has been supplying high quality guided meditation resources for over 30 years, during which time they have sold well over 100,000 copies of their recordings in cassette and CD form.  These are now available as digital downloads in the form of mp3 audio files.   

One of the most spectacular illustrations of the power of meditation when combined with music comes from the inspirational story of David Ison.

David was a composer and sound engineer who combined his musical skills with his extensive knowledge of meditation practices to recover from severe spinal injuries suffered in a car crash in 1980.  He was eventually able to regain full mobility of his legs and lower body without the intervention of surgery.

The compositional and meditation techniques that he used now form the basis of The Ison Method which David teaches at conferences and medical centres around the world.

The Musical Body by David Ison provides Chakra Meditations which target specific centres of energy in your body to clear out layers of emotional and personal baggage - allowing your true essential self to flow through you - and bringing you mental, spiritual and physical rewards as it does so.

The Musical Body by David Ison

Ennora Binaural Beats

The Unexplainable Store

Chakra & Kundalini Activator Suites

Guided Meditations

Explore Meditation

Meditation Power