What matters is what you do, not what you want to do.

One brilliant summer day many years ago a beautiful young man was torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs, according to the ancient Greek myth. The young man, Acteon, had not really done that much: when walking in the forrest and stumled upon the hunting goddess Artemis when she was bathing in a forrest lake, naked. She immediatly turned him into a stag and made sure his own dogs turned on him and tore him to pieces, not recognizing him.  

The storey points out a principle that was important to the ancient greeks: What mattered was what you did, not the intention behind it.  This is a principle that Western culture has grown more ambivalent towards. When somebody is let of the hook for a murder due to his or hers intent, this is an example of this. 

However life itself can be unforgiving. "I really meant to finish my exam, but..", "My intention was to save some money to the end of the month, but..", "The sales figures looked achievable at the start of the year, but then..".  If we fail an exam we may or we may not be able to try agian. Money spent, or overspent,  do not come back.  Our boss may or may not forgive us for not achieving our sales numbers.  What matters is what we do, not the intention. 

In Acem- mediation it is also what we do, not what we want to do. Free mental attitude, repeating the meditation sound as easy and effortlessly as possible, is what matters. Sometimes we want to repeat it this way are not able to do it. We may think we are repeating it in this way, but we are really not. 

But the big difference with life itself is that in Mediation we can get as many opportunitites to correct this as we want. Each time we repeat the sound is really a new chance to establish free mental attitude. We always get another chance. That is more than Artemis granted poor Acteon. 

Youtube

Some friends of mine made a video about meditation, it is kinda funny and veeery Norwegian, the link is HERE.

Enjoy!

Decisions, decisions….

It’s been a while since I was last in here, I need to get my act together. I really wanted to submit weekly…

Anyway, I am working on a lecture theme centered around “Decisions”. Decisions in meditation, decisions in life, society. One interesting point about meditation is those decisions in meditation that may seem mundane have interesting implications for the life of the individual concerned. For instance, how the meditation sound is repeated – easy, effortlessly or controlled, intense, or distant and removed – may also reflect our attitude to life. The control freak will probably also try to control the sound too much, thereby loosing free mental attitude needed to trigger the relaxation response. Working with letting go of the control may enable that individual to bring some more freedom from control into his or her own life.

Similarly, for the person with to little control in life this may manifest itself with a removed, distant way of repeating the sound that can trigger the need to look at how one is meditating. By slowly and gradually bringing the sound more into focus of attention this can also change patterns in life.

That little quiet corner of my life

There’s a lot going on at work these days, we have a major restructuring going on. At the same time we are under budget preassure, I have projects in France, Turkey, Denmark, Norway, resources are leaving, yet we are really short on them – the next few weeks looks extremely “interesting”. So this is when I in my meditation love those little moments when all that noise that I feel surround my life somehow recedes and I find myself in a more quiet state of mind. To be honest, I do not know what I’d do without it.

Spontaneous activity of the mind

Acem meditation consists of several elements: a sound is repeated in the mind with fee mental attitude. This releases the spontaneous activity of the mind. The meditation sound is a non associative word with a rhythm and which repetition also requires some energy. As this is repeated in the mind the spontaneous activity is released, which means that you will be thinking about anything that occupies your mind. Thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, memories, smells, sounds - everything that goes through your mind. Letting this "roam free" is quite important for us, for our recreation, access to our resources, creativity, intimacy and friendship. Stuff that is more emotionally charged, such as thoughts about a quarrel you had, or something you are anxious about, will be more immediately pressing in this spontaneous thought stream than other thoughts. However by giving these thoughts “room to move” the energy that is attached to them is released, and stress is relieved. Acem- meditation creates the ideal environment for this process to take place. Read more HERE.

Some notes on yoga

There is an interesting article in The Guardian recently on the popularity of Yoga and how it has become one of the fastest growing exercise activities in the western world. In the process something has been lost though, which is the "spiritual" part. In Yoga the physical benefits are not really an end to itself, but more steps on the path to enlightenment. So is Sports yoga not really yoga? Well, classical yoga it aint. It may borrow postures and stretching, but it works differently. If yoga shall have the deepening effect, that feeling of getting closer to that area where the body and the mind comes together, it needs to be done with cold muscles, slowly, with focus on the breath and the attention resting in the stretch.
Then there is the debate about what "enlightenment" means in this context. Personally I find that an alienating word, which really does not describe why I practice yoga. I do it because after going through the asanas and the breathing excersises some restlessness, some tiredness of the body, this stored muscular stress has been relieved. And in the process I also somehow get closer to how my everyday life is internalised in my body, how the stress shows up as tighened muscles. And bealive it or not, that feels good.

Time

How much do you need to meditate for this to be effective? As with everything else in life, the more you put into it the more you get out of doing it. To have full effect and stress reduction we recommend 30 minutes twice daily or 45 minutes once. But a little meditation every day can be very effective, 10 minutes a day can help reduce the stress level significantly and make transitions from work to family life or play smother. Or make it easier to fall asleep at night. It is really each user who needs to decide for him or her how they want to use meditation. Personally I meditate in the morning before breakfast and when I come home from work.

Children

I have a kid, she's great to be around. We have a lot of fun together. Problem is sometimes, I also have a very busy job, and I tend to bring my job home, think about this and that etc. So I prefer to meditate in the afternoon, that way one can get more energy and sort of "clean out" the residues from the day. This does not make me the perfect dad, far from it. But it helps us all get through our daily lives more smoothly.
This is how it works: During the day everything we do needs to be worked through by the mind. Some things more than others, typically challenging or emotionally loaded situations gets more "stuck" in the mind than other, more neutral issues. Meditation releases these thoughts by stimulating the spontaneous activity of the mind, thereby whatever is "charged" is worked through and the bound-up energy is released.
It is very effective.

The non-religious meditation

Acem- meditation is based on an age-old method that is understood and interpreted in the light of western psychology. It does not require any particular religios bealif from the user. It is neutral as far as belief system goes.
The method in itself is simple: the repetition of a meditation sound in the mind triggers a relaxation response. For this to work effectively the neutrality of the sound and how one interprets what is happening in the mind is important. So this neutrality is actually an important condition for meditation to be effective.
However this does not mean that the meditation person cannot him or herself be religious. It just means that meditation itself should not be interpreted within a religious context.

Hello world

Ever since I was 17 I wanted to learn to meditate. I saw my mother and my brother, and I saw that meditation was really good for them, they got calmer, more collected, less bothered by all that inner stuff that we all have.
So I started to meditate at 20 using Acem-meditation. Ever since I have devoted time and effort to meditate. I also teach meditation. It is not my profession, I work within the financial services industry, working from Nottingham, UK.
I want to share some of my experiences here. So there is more to come.