Serge King has recently written an interesting article ‘Making Sense of Meditation’ which can be found here http://www.huna.org/html/meditation.html It provides a brief overview of meditation including key Hawaiian concepts.
A few years ago I invited Serge over to the UK to deliver some huna workshops. For many years I have meditated regularly drawing on a number of styles and traditions. As a result, one of the workshops I asked Serge to deliver was on shamanic creative meditation. I felt that it would be good for a UK audience to find out more about huna meditation. This workshop focussed on nalu and hua forms of meditation which loosely can be considered as passive and active forms. Serge’s article reinforces what I consider to be some fundamentally important points about meditation, namely:
- there is confusion about what meditation is. In practice however the common thread is reducing your scope of focus. With this in mind it is useful to remember the huna principle ‘pono’ and use a technique that you personally find effective.
- meditation should be used to change something. Even if it is as simple as changing your state through achieving relaxation
- although there are many different forms of meditation a common characteristic of a ‘good’ meditation is that you feel better for doing it
Meditating is one of the most consistently effective and beneficial things I have done in my life and I believe that over time I have experienced most if not all of the possible benefits that meditation can bring. I would strongly encourage anyone reading this who is not in the habit of meditating to give it a go to realise the benefits it can bring. I think that sometimes there can be a misconception that to be effective you must be able to meditate at the same time each day for example or for prolonged periods of time. In practice this is not the case – even shifting your focus in meditation for a minute at a time can bring discernable benefits.
The bottom line is not to get too hung up on tradition and technique. When starting out it is worth trying a number of techniques to discover what suits you personally. One could of course do worse than starting with the Hawaiian approach….
No related posts.