meditate on this

[aroraborealis]

What metaphors do you use for meditation?

For example, I've heard meditation described as standing on the bank of a river, where the river are thoughts and emotions, or as being an empty room with open windows, where the thoughts and feelings pass through (and hopefully don't linger).

What metaphor(s) describe the experience of meditation for you

Comments

[keyne]

Squirrels running around in a cage. :} Clearly Eastern forms of meditation are not my thing.

I can put groups into trance via guided meditation, and achieve deep relaxation at the drop of a hat -- I teach relaxation techniques -- but the methods that work for me involve thoughts and images. I just don't do "empty mind" well.

[kcatalyst]

My brain is a puppy that keeps getting up and wandering off and I need to gently move it back to center.

[dpolicar]

There's a lot of visual/kinesthetic imagery I use when inducing meditation, depending on just what's going on in my head.

If I'm feeling angry or over-stimulated, I typically sit in the middle of a globe of cool blue water, about 20' in diameter, that spins gently around me. (At least, I think that's what it's doing. It's hard to tell just what a globe of water is doing.)

If I'm feeling injured, or fatigued, or disconnected from pieces of myself, I typically feel waves of energy rising up from the ground through my feet, flowing up through the front of my body and down through the back and returning to the ground. (Most often a standing meditation in tadasana; or on my knees if my leg isn't up to that.) If I feel the need for more focus I overlay a visual of "nerves" lighting up and dimming as the current flows through them.

If I'm walking, I'm typically in a current that carries me with it.

I'm often floating in empty air.

There's a particular sequence of visual/kinesthetic images I use with metta meditations; I initially

[miss_chance]

A a metaphor for my experience, there's one I've always enjoyed: the surface of the lake. When calm it reflects a clear picture of all that's going on above, and at the same time allows you to see into what's going on below. When the wind starts to whip up the surface, the reflection is distorted; a simple form, reflected in a choppy surface seems fractured and complicated, and what's going on underneath is invisible. If the world feels choppy and fractured and I feel like I'm only seeing the surface, my mind may need settling.

I don't use metaphors while actually meditating, I think the metaphor becomes to much part of the narrative for me, but as a reminder as to what the experience is, and why it's important to me, that one ..heh, reflects my experience well.

[dancingwolfgrrl]

I use a lake image: the lake is stillness and silence and sometimes I'm looking at it or standing in it or floating on it (but not like a person floating, like some of the water floating).