Meditations for a world out of balance
Our world is out of balance. Multiple and overlapping social, political, and environmental crises are only getting worse. People are waking up to the fact that things need to change, but the status quo can feel as if it’s almost cemented in place.
Meditation is a tool that I rely on in this challenging era, for multiple reasons. Meditation helps calm the mind. The meditative state is also a place of mental freedom and creativity, where anything is possible.
I want to share three different meditations that I often use in my own practice. Feel free to use, improve, and remix them as you see fit for your own purposes.
Meditation of Purpose
This meditation helps in imagining a day-to-day life that is more in tune with one’s true self, where the seeker can act in ways consistent with a deeper purpose. This meditation can also help in making career and professional choices.
Use your preferred framework for calming yourself and entering a meditative state
Upon reaching a meditative state, imagine yourself in a state of abundance where all of your essential needs have been met. You can wake up and do anything you would like, without having to worry about the basics of living a comfortable and abundant existence. This includes your emotional and spiritual needs as well as your physical needs.
Take your time to feel a sense of gratitude and abundance for being able to do anything you would like and to live any kind of life you would like.
When you feel a deep sense of gratitude and abundance, think about what you would most like to do if you could be of service to others, to the planet, and to future generations. Give yourself permission to dream about the kind of life you would build with these goals in mind.
In building this kind of life, what would you be doing a month from now? One year from now? Ten years from now?
In building this kind of life, what would you like to accomplish before your death? What would you want your legacy to be in living this kind of life?
When you exit the meditation, take the lessons you derived and think about how much of the life you imagined might already be available to you. In addition, consider what changes you can make to your life to align yourself with the life you just imagined.
Meditation on the Universe
This meditation invites the seeker to adopt an increasingly grander perspective on one’s place in the universe. This can be a good meditation for resetting the mind and for interacting with the world beyond a limited vision of the immediate here and now.
Use your preferred framework for calming yourself and entering a meditative state
Upon reaching a meditative state, imagine yourself in your location, wherever you may be. Then, using your mind’s eye, look at yourself as if you were in an airplane far above. Consider how small everything looks from this perspective. Houses, roads, and natural landmarks might appear to be tiny.
Extend your perspective again from space, and zoom out so that you are looking at your location right above the Earth from outer space. Look at the beauty of the Earth from this height, and reflect on how grand the Earth is. Spend some time here just examining the beauty you see from your mind’s eye. Think about how privileged we are to know what the Earth looks like from this distance. What are the things you see? What are the feelings that come to you from this distance?
Extend your perspective again, this time zooming out to the perspective of the solar system. Look at the planets circling the sun. Reflect on your place in this grand system, which we are usually not thinking about in our day-to-day lives. Spend some time here looking at this vast planetary system. What are the things you see? What are the feelings that come to you from this distance?
Extend your perspective again, this time zooming out to the perspective of the galaxy. The galaxy is immense, with hundreds of billions of stars. If you are familiar with galactic coordinates, look for where our sun might be in the Milky Way. Again, reflect on your place in the galaxy, and how much larger it is even from the planetary system you were just in. Think about how many other kinds of other planetary systems there are, and our very small place in the galaxy. What are the feelings that come to you from this distance?
Zoom out once again, perhaps to our Local Group of galaxies or to something even more vast in the subset of trillions of galaxies that are estimated to exist. Again, reflect on your place in the universe. What are the feelings that come to you from this distance?
When you exit the meditation, keep the sensations and sense of awe you may have felt with you in your memory and reflect on the feelings you felt in your day-to-day life.
Meditation on Guidance From the Future
This meditation invites the seeker to listen to guidance from the future. Receiving this kind of insight allows us to consider how our actions in the present can have powerful impacts on the future, including impacts that may not be immediately apparent.
Use your preferred framework for calming yourself and entering a meditative state
Upon reaching a meditative state, imagine yourself in your location, wherever you may be, but extend yourself on the axis of time to some distant future. Picture yourself in your location 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 500 years from now, or some other time.
What is going on in this period and time frame? What does the world look like?
Invite a descendant or well-wisher from this period to speak to you. I sometimes begin a conversation by asking, “How can I be of most service to you?” What does your descendant or this well-wisher want to tell you?
When you exit the meditation, think about what it is you learned, and how this might impact your day-to-day life.