Five Superpowers You Can Harness Through Meditation
Meditation imbues practitioners with superpowers. If you want to change gracefully, elevate through joy, access divine flow and cultivate health, then meditation may be your perfect prescription. Meditation actually changes your brain: add a meditation practice to your daily routine and cultivate the following powers.
1. Power of Manifestation
According to Joe Dispenza in Your Brain on Meditation, “if you want peace in the world… you have to demonstrate peace everywhere in your life.” Humans have an average of 60,000-70,000 thoughts per day: Dispenza concludes that, because most of those thoughts are the same, and thoughts precede words, action, and choice, people end up stuck. The subjective mind produces an objective effect. Meditation offers an opportunity to change your life, from the source – your thoughts – and manifest your dreams.
2. Power of Joy
Change in the world and life is inevitable: you can experience a change in a state of suffering or state of joy. In this sense, joy refers to a state of bliss, calm, and connection to the divine. A belief in divine intelligence. Meditation provides an opportunity to choose joy, not in spite of but in union with what the outside world offers. Through meditation, you can move from a survival consciousness to mindfulness. According to Dispenza, “you don’t need the cause-and-effect model to send gratitude… your body does not know the difference.” In other words, you don’t need something material or external to experience joy; a perpetual state of gratitude is enough.
3. Power of Flow
The power of flow refers to an ability to access divine intelligence. This may appear as an intense concentration: When you embark on a project or are enraptured by a book, the flow state is when hours fly by, and you forget to eat or drink or check your phone. Meditation can help you access this state, which is closely linked to creativity and ideation. A San Francisco school extended the school day by 30 minutes for meditation, which resulted in better academic performance and a 75 percent decrease in suspensions. The students also felt “more conscious of their actions, calmer and less angry.” Access to the divine through flow has far-reaching potential for the future of humanity.
4. Power of Wisdom
In a study published in the Journal of Psychological Science, a meditation course “improved GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity while simultaneously reducing the occurrence of distracting thoughts.” Meditation is an effective technique for improving cognitive function. Wisdom is deeper than cognitive function, however. Dispenza says wisdom is “memory without the emotional charge.” Trauma and stress, and the resulting patterns of remembrance, often trigger deep insecurities. Meditation offers a path to watching the ebbs and flows of memory without the knee-jerk emotional responses. Essentially, meditation allows movement forward through an acceptance of the past. Time spent envisioning a positive future versus revisiting the past is time better spent. Consider if your thoughts reflect your future self, your dream life.
5. Power of Health
Without your health, you have nothing, as the adage goes. The stress of modern living and environmental issues often lead to lifelong conditions and ailments. The National Center for Complementary and Integrated Health states that meditation reduces the severity of and/or aids the following: pain, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, anxiety, depression and insomnia, and smoking cessation. A study published in the Journal of General Hospital Psychiatry, concluded that meditation “can have long-term beneficial effects in the treatment of people diagnosed with anxiety disorders.” Focus, through meditation, on health, feeling well leads to drastic improvements in existing conditions and may help with prevention. Does deductive reasoning beg the question, if our thoughts make us sick, can our thoughts also make us well?
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Meditation for Connecting with the Goddess
From Bastet to Artemis, throughout history, the presence of goddesses have been written into human lore and mythology. But what does a modern goddess mean for us today?
The modern Goddess is often connected with Wicca, or paganism, but it’s important to hold to her image very broadly. All goddesses are considered different reflections of the one Divine Mother. Pinning the Goddess down is a challenge, as believers state she expresses herself in many different ways in the physical, mental and spiritual planes.
According to Wikipedia, some people in the Goddess movement recognize multiple goddesses. Some also include gods. While others honor what they refer to as “the Goddess”, which is not necessarily seen as monotheistic, but is often understood to be an inclusive, encompassing term incorporating many goddesses in many different cultures. The term “the Goddess” may also be understood to include a multiplicity of ways to view deity personified as female, or as a metaphor, or as a process. Other names she has include the One Goddess, Divine Mother , the Great Mother, the Divine Feminine, and the One (or Source) Energy. As other believers put it, “She is the embodiment of the divine feminine. She is Mother Nature, the Earth– Gaia; she is fertility and the turning of the seasons. She is the cycle of birth, life, death, and regeneration– or rebirth; she is the Creatrix of all that is, was, and will be. Where the God is hard and unyielding, the Goddess is soft and pliant, embracing the individual and human diversity, allowing for growth and expansion.”
The concept of a goddess can sound very abstract, which is why using a guided meditation can be of such importance. BeliefNet has a great one that is very visualization-heavy, and yet offers excellent guidance. Find out for yourself what this deity means to you:
Goddess Meditation
1. Begin your meditation by sitting in a quiet place. Mentally surround yourself with a zone of silence as if you have drawn a veil between yourself and the world. Gradually, begin to slow the rhythm of your breath. As you inhale, then exhale, let your breath carry you deeper and deeper within. As the distractions of everyday life fall away, let your awareness drop down into the inner chamber of your heart.
2. Next, imagine that you find yourself walking along a pathway that leads you further and further away from civilization, and deep into the heart of a primeval forest. As you follow this trail, imagine that you are winding around and among trees that are hundreds of years old. Flowers carpet the ground and birds sing. In the distance you hear the muffled roar of the ocean waves, rising and falling, rising and falling, like music. Your heartbeat, your breath, and the ocean waves keep time with the rhythm of nature.
3. Soon the path you are on brings you to a tiny, crumbling, stone sanctuary, a place so old and hidden it had been forgotten by time. Thickly covered with vines and gnarled branches, it is clear that no one entered this chapel in centuries, perhaps even thousands of years. Intuitively you sense that something mysterious yet deeply familiar lies within this ruin of a forgotten shrine. Slowly you push open the door and enter. As you open the door, something old and timeless opens within your soul as well.
4. Once across the threshold, you find yourself immersed in an atmosphere that is sacred and holy. Vaulted ceilings arch over a rough, stone altar at the front. Candles are burning, there is a smell of fragrant incense. On an altar stands a statue of the female deity, the Goddess. Her face is so old and dark with time, the lines on her body so worn from the touch of praying hands that you cannot even tell what religion she belongs to. She is simply the Mother, god as a woman, the one to whom the world turns in all its grief and suffering. She is Sofia, Kwan Yin, Mary, Sarah, Fatima, White Buffalo Woman, Isis, Sita, Innanna, and Demeter. She is all the feminine faces of God, but she is more than that. She is the mother of life itself.
5. Kneeling before her in reverence, you bow your head in prayer. Immediately you are embraced by her being, and the cares and worries of the world fall away, soothed in her loving acceptance of all your human faults and frailties. Entering even more deeply into your meditation the statue you are praying before suddenly comes alive as a real being and now you find yourself before the mystery of the living mother of all creation.
6. As she comes to life, the chapel fills with a warm and golden light. Now the face of the ancient mother becomes animated with feeling. Seated before her you gaze into each other’s eyes. She penetrates your soul with a glance that loves you to the core of your very being. Emotions of sweetness, mercy, and loving forgiveness emanate from her, sweeping over you in waves of bliss, healing all the parts of your that are hurt, broken, and wounded. Held within her arms, taken onto her lap, you become like a little child with its mother. You touch her hair, her face in loving affection, and feel her loving affection for you in return.
7. Going more deeply into this experience you begin to feel as if the body of the ancient mother is the gateway to the body of creation itself. Going beyond her form, you enter into communion with the body of the earth — all her creatures, trees, oceans, rivers, mountains, cities, and people. Going even beyond the earth, feel the body of the ancient mother expand into space, becoming the bodies of the stars and the planets and the whirling galaxies that are spread over the universe like a mantle of bright jewels.
8. Held in the womb of this mystery you feel a powerful force, holy energy, and the breath of life, the soul of the cosmos. Feel your heartbeat in rhythm with the rhythm of life itself. Slowly begin to return your awareness to your body, still seated before the ancient mother in prayer. Inhale deeply, taking into every cell of your body, every thought in your mind her cherishing nourishing life-sustaining love. Exhale, letting this energy flow out of you like a river of grace watering your life and all those you know and care for, with a stream of blessings, happiness, and well-being.
9. Now close your meditation bowing once more before the ancient mother. Rise and exit from her humble little sanctuary, closing the door behind you. As you make your way along the path back to the life you left behind, remember that you carry within your heart a precious secret: faith in the goodness of life, the gift of love of the Divine Mother of the world.
