Last Thursday night, I was invited (kind of last minute, but A-OK, especially for this) to an open meditation group located in an old mill building here in town. The guy who runs the group has got some kind of connection to the Maharishi. I had an interesting time.
First of all, it’s fair to day that I do a fair bit of meditation. I try to do a half-hour a day, and there’s all that taiji or taiji, too. Additionally, I do a lot of ritual work designed around my poetry work. So the sitting and breathing was not actually new to me. What was new, really, was doing it that long in a crowd. There were 20 or so people there, mostly experienced meditators. We were supposed to be breathing with eyes. Nice.
It’s hard for me to estimate times in meditation still. About 20 minutes in, though, my eyes popped open and there was a clarity in my awareness that was surprising. I shut my eyes and kept breathing.
Several times during the evening, I was able to control my coughing fits through the applications of symbols to my throat. I’m reiki II, so the healing symbol and the energy symbol figured prominently in my work. These were quite successful.
After meditation at the suitable hour I used Frater RO’s angelic instructions adapted from Abbot Trimethius. It was a good bit of effort to do with my head all stuffed up, but I felt that I got good results from it.
