5 Finger Meditation Technique

Just as I promised to share my various meditation methods, here it is! One of them which i always like to start with is the 5 finger meditation method. Which has a very dear story to it.

I was going through a really painful break up, and I needed to get away. I couldn't stop crying, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't function... so I hopped on a bus to Chicago to see my bestie, who I hadn't seen in a while. I kept myself occupied by watching a movie on the bus, and eventually dozed-off in an awkward position. I got there and it was friday night. We washed up, and went to bed. The next day was full of activities and occasionally I would have a break down. That night we visited her pool, which also had a sauna, and I had a major break down, weeping so much that I couldn't breathe or talk. So she held my hands and told me to close my eyes, feel the warmth of the sauna, and breathe with her.

She held out her hand and used her fingers to count to three. That was the deep inhale. The exhale was longer, and she used five fingers to count the exhale. We did this for 5- 6 minutes and it really helped me calm down.

She later told me this was a method she would use to calm down/ and relax her patients! It works wonders, and I use it to calm myself down, and also help me focus on my breathing. After which meditation comes in easily.

I am so grateful for having her as my friend, and am so glad and impressed she uses meditation and other breathing techniques to calm her patients down. Which goes to prove that yoga, pranayama and meditation are practices that heal! I hope you find this technique as helpful and soothing as I have found it to be.


OM!

Picture from The Legend of Korra (A "Avatar: The Last Airbender" adventure). Korra has to learn to meditate to tap into her Avatar energies!

ॐ Yoga and Meditation 1 ॐ

I've been meditating a lot recently, thanks to yoga class, at least 2- 3 times a week. Meditation and Yoga go hand in hand. One must do yoga to quiet the body, and then meditation calms the mind and the body! Also 3 ॐ s at the end of practice can help seal the deal, in helps the vibrations from the practice be vocalized. I used to be embarrassed of the ॐ we said as a greeting and farewell, at the Sivananda Yoga center, when growing up in India. now I find beauty, mysticism, wholeness, and energy in them. Perhaps chanting, meditation and yoga all go hand in hand. It makes sense why all the Sanyasis do all three and more. So it should feel right. There is a beauty in silence and fasting too!

Last night at yoga, we meditated after the 45 minutes of vinyasa. The yogi guided us through a very interesting technique where we focused on breathing. The difference was we focused on inhale right nostril, exhale left nostril, then inhale left nostril, exhale right nostril. When focusing on this, just through your mind, I believe the nose muscles, and nostrils start actually doing it! So it is like doing Anuloma Viloma, with no hand! It was a very amazing, although I felt my breathing was loud, deep an obnoxious, so I tried to quieten it a little. We closed with a chant, and three ॐ.

At the beginning of the practice and the end, we always set our intentions for our practice, individually, for ourselves. It's internal, a quiet whisper to ourselves. We close with remembering those intentions. At the end of the meditation, we repeated our intentions to ourselves and the yogi also asked us to remember sradha the word for faith, belief and trust, and focus that onto ourselves: Internally and externally. To have sradha in ourselves, the world, the practice, to listen and then have faith. An example was when we were in headstand, we should listen to our bodies to see how far we can go, and not to push it, but trust it. It's an amazing thing to meditate on, and be aware of. Also remembering to let go of the things we can not control, those that add to our worries. These external problems/unchangeable do not help us in our sradha, but we should let it go and accept it the way it is. I am so glad the yogi is mindful to always go back to that - the philosophy, the spirituality, the connectedness and energy behind meditation and meditation.

ॐ

 

 

Notes:

Practice = the practice of living something, in this case it is yoga and meditation. Although I won't perform it, I practice it daily. :-P I guess I picked this up from my yoga teacher training class.

Sradha - Faith or see the hindu or collective definition or Buddhist definition... I hope to post more on this subject!