Swami Kriyananda wrote a little booklet called Secrets of Meditation, in which he offers 31 suggestions for deepening our inner experience: one for each day of the month. All of them are precious jewels. Today we will take a look at the first one. You will find effective techniques designed to help you apply this “secret” to your meditation.
Significantly, the first secret Swami Kriyananda offers is an inner attitude:
The secret of meditation is…
relinquishing outward attachments,
and affirming divine freedom within.
Why is non-attachment so essential? You may imagine attachments like a glue: they bind our mind and energy to the outer world, blocking them from turning within. Or, if you prefer another metaphor: visualize attachments like heavy stones which don’t allow the “hot air balloon” of our consciousness to rise. They “glue” it down to the ground. No doubt some attachments are quite hard to “unglue,” but if we work on it, yes, “We shall overcome!”
Clarity
The first step is to get clarity about your main attachments: which things, situations, experiences, persons bind you most? Which ones engage your mind and heart most? Which ones are the greatest “glue” for you? Take some time to think about it, and then write them down, to really pin them down!
Techniques
- At the beginning of your meditation, just before starting your technique, visualize one thing you are attached to as being tied to your heart with a string. Then mentally take a pair of scissors and with determination cut that string. It is a happy act. Feel your heart becoming free and joyful. Affirm: “I don’t need this thing to be happy. My happiness is inside.”
Try that same exercise also with a person you are attached to. Feel, after you have cut the string, that your love hasn’t diminished, but rather increased. At the same time affirm with wisdom, “Nobody is mine, nothing is mine.”
- Alternatively you may mentally build a bonfire and throw any lingering sensation of attachment into it. You may repeat the Sanskrit mantra, “AUM, swaha.” Feel your heart now being purified, light, and free.
- After the visualization, affirm: “Nothing on earth can hold me! My soul, like a weightless balloon, soars upward through skies of eternal freedom!” (From Affirmations for Self-Healing by Swami Kriyananda)
Right afterwards, start your meditation techniques and see if your heart and mind won’t naturally carry you into the inner world.
Daily Life
Practice this secret of non-attachment in your daily life. Try to do everything with a joyful sense of freedom toward everything and everyone. Be responsible, be loving, do well whatever you do, while always affirming that nothing is yours forever. Practice being free inside. In this way your daily life will help your meditation, and meditation will help your daily life.
More precious Secrets of Meditation are waiting for you…. But this first one certainly deserves our full attention for now!
In divine friendship,
Jayadev
24 Comments
Thank you for these early day thoughts!
Lovely, Jayadev! Thanks for writing.
My chant of the day: “Nothing on earth can hold me. Rise O, my soul in freedom!”
Tomorrow may be: “I own Nothing; I am FREE. In myself, I am FREE!”
Excellent presentation!
Excellent. Eagerly waiting for more secrets…Nothing on earth can hold me!
I am intrested in meditation. And like to know the true of my life.
I like to go more deeper into the meditation and like to know the root cause of my suffering in this life. Plz some one guide me.
boy, let God enter in your decision. Just ask His help again and again till your who dissolves in Him.
Thank you, this is most helpful. I will make my list of attachments and do the visualization. Jai Jai Babaji! Blessings to all!
I always had a saying you can not take it. Thanks for writing. It says to me that I need to hang around with like minded people. Material stuff we are care takers of it. You made my day thanks.
Thank you Tyagi.
Learning to rise above attachment. Thank you.
Thanks Aum nama shivaya