Meditation is a practice that benefits mind, body and spirit. Through inner exploration, meditation awakens creativity, healing, and transformation. We spend most of our lives looking outward to the world of form and phenomena, believing that the source of happiness, peace, and fulfillment lies external to ourselves. During meditation, we expand our internal reference point from local to non-local, from constricted to expanded awareness, from a skin-encapsulated ego to a field of ever-present witnessing awareness. Meditation allows us to explore our essential nature, restoring the memory of wholeness in our lives.
Meditation is not about forcing our mind to be quiet; rather it's a process to rediscover the quietness that is ever present. Behind the screen of our internal dialogue is the silence of pure awareness-a silence that is not disturbed by thoughts of the past or concerns of the future.
Primordial Sound Meditation is a meditation technique derived from the yoga tradition of India. Yoga means union-the union of environment, senses, body, mind, and soul. This union is described in an ancient text known as the Yoga Sutras written by the sage Patanjali, in which he explains that yoga is the progressive settling down of the mind into the field of pure silence, which is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind. When through meditation we are able to access the silent spaces between thoughts, we enter into the field of unbounded awareness.
The silence we experience in meditation is in the "gap" between thoughts. Glimpsing this field of quiet, expanded awareness allows us to recognize that our essential self is not the perpetual traffic of thoughts that fill our minds, but the silent witness to our thoughts, words, and actions.
Regular practice of the meditation technique known as Primordial Sound Meditation helps establish inner quietness in life, providing access to creativity and enabling us to make life-affirming choices.
Past actions (karmas) create memories, which generate desires (sanskaras), which in turn lead to new actions (vasanas). The seeds of these memories and desires are present at the level of our soul. It is this "software of the soul" that propels each of us to make choices that define our lives. Meditation helps us recognize that we are capable of making conscious choices that enable us to experience greater peace, love, and success.
By reducing stress and fatigue, meditation enables us to connect with our higher self-where energy, creativity and inner awareness are our natural state of being. The purpose of meditation is to enrich all aspects of life-body, mind, and spirit.
A Technique for "Going Beyond"
Physical impurities in cells have their equivalents in the mind: fear, anger, greed, compulsivity, doubt, and other negative emotions. Operating at the quantum level, they can be as damaging to us as any chemical toxin. The mind body connection turns negative attitudes into chemical toxins, the so-called "stress hormones" that have been linked to many different diseases. Ayurveda lumps all negative tendencies together as "mental ama," which needs to be cleaned from the mind. But how?
It is not possible to purify the mind by thinking about it. An angry mind cannot conquer its own anger; fear cannot quench fear. Instead, a technique is required that goes beyond the domain where fear, anger, and all other forms of mental ama hold sway. This technique is meditation. If properly taught and used, meditation allows a person to become unstuck from the ama in his thoughts and emotions. The Chopra Center prescribes the meditation technique known as Primordial Sound Meditation, or PSM, as a simple, natural way of accomplishing this goal.
About Primordial Sound Meditation
Primordial Sound Meditation, as introduced by Drs. Deepak Chopra and David Simon is a mantra-based practice that systematically allows the experience of quieter, more peaceful levels of the mind. A mantra is a specific sound, which when used silently, serves as a vehicle to connect with deeper aspects of consciousness. With its origins in the ancient Vedic tradition of India, Primordial Sound Meditation is the perfect antidote to modern stress.
