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Gratitude Meditation
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Close your eyes for 2 -3 minutes.
Look at yourself. Imagine your duplicate or clone which is exactly like you, but blind.
Look at the whole life of your blind clone. How he/she is living from morning to night. Look at what difficulties he/she faces due to being blind. Look at your clone living your daily life.
While imagining all this, feel all of his/her suffering arising out of the difficulties.
After seeing all this, make your clone go away. Now you will be filled with gratitude because you don't face all these difficulties since you have sight. Thank the Lord for this.
On the second day of this meditation, see your clone as deaf and perceive all his difficulties. Thank God. Get filled with gratitude. The feeling of gratitude makes you sensitive and receptive. You begin to understand more of others' pains and sufferings.
Every day in this meditation, contemplate on various blessings in the life of an individual and imagine about them. This will enable you to feel the grace that has been bestowed upon you. Without contemplation, even diamonds are coals.
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Concentration Meditation
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Concentration Meditation means to concentrate on something. For instance, if you are asked to recall what you had eaten yesterday at night or in the afternoon, then you will have to concentrate there. In this way, you can do this meditation by various methods. Here is the way to meditate recalling music:
Close your eyes, sit in the meditation posture, and listen with your internal ears.
Keep your fingers in the dhyan mudra (join the index finger and thumb while keeping rest of the fingers straight) during this experiment.
With your eyes closed, try to listen with your internal ears the sound of a flute. (This flute is actually not playing anywhere outside. Just like you can hear movie or album songs in your mind even when they are actually not being played anywhere, in the same manner listen to the sound of a flute).
Listen only to the sound of a flute, if you hear the sound of some drums or anything else in between, push it aside.
Now open your eyes.
In this meditation, many people feel that they could hear the sound initially, then it got lost, again they could grasp it, again it got lost. This happens because the flute is not really being played at this time which can be listened to. Many people have listened to the sound of flute very often, that is why it can be very easy for them. It may not be simple for many others because they have hardly ever heard the sound of a flute.
In this experiment, you should keep changing the sounds. You can sometimes listen to drums, sometimes to a clarinet and so on. In this way you can keep changing the musical instrument. This will help strengthen your concentration power. You can listen to a different sound every day.
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