Often I am asked about meditation. I do try to meditate with the Tarot sometimes, but my best method of meditation is a walking one. However, here are some tips for you to try out in order to attempt a more traditional method of meditation.
Choose a Tarot card. You can pick a random card or a specific one. For this meditation, I picked the Witch from Ffiona Morgan’s Daughters Of The Moon (color version).
- Meditation Exercise
- Get comfortable. Sitting or kneeling is better than lying down. Lying down makes you want to go to sleep!
- Do a check on your body. Are your hands clenched? Relax them! Roll your shoulders out.
- Set a time for 5 minutes. I find that timers that don’t make a lot of noise work best for me.
- Take a deep breath. Count to ten as you breathe in.
- As you breathe in, look at the card.
- Slowly breathe out as you count to ten again.
- Let your focus soften on the card. By that I mean don’t try to take it all in. Just let it exist in your eyesight.
- Continue to count your breaths for a full ten breaths while letting the card fill your vision until you are stepping into the card.
- You may find that thoughts will keep coming in. Acknowledge them and let them go. You can come back to them.
As you relax, you may find yourself within the card. It’s ok. That’s the point of this exercise. I first learned this from Mary K. Greer’s Tarot For Yourself which I still guide people to when they want a good book on Tarot. I own three copies of it in fact. (Sorry to those of you haunting used book stores in my neck of the woods.)
Look around. What do you see first? Is there a figure near you? Speak to it. You will be safe in this card. Just relax and let things happen. When you come out of this meditation, write things down! This is VERY important, k? WRITE IT DOWN. Trust me. You will forget it otherwise.
You can use the above method sans Tarot of course. One of the biggest benefits of meditation is the ability to problem solve. So pay attention to the thoughts because one of them might be how to fix that issue. But don’t hold on to it. Focus on stilling your mind.
The above is known as Mindfulness Meditation and is what I do.
Others do an alternative known as Transcendental Meditation or TM. It is based on repetitive mantras. Take a focus word (doesn’t have to mean anything) and repeat it to yourself over and over again. When a thought comes in, let it go and start repeating the word again if necessary.
The key to successful meditation of any type is repetition. It is a habit you will need to develop because our norm is to be constantly ON. It is better to meditate for five minutes every day than 15 minutes once a week. And it will feel weird and wasteful and unproductive to be quiet for 5 minutes a day.
To build up:
· 5 minutes a day for five days.
· 10 minutes a day for five days.
· 15 minutes a day thereafter.
It is my belief that you will find it very beneficial to have this small moment out of each day for yourself. For me, it is better than an hour nap some times.
If you find that you are too distracted by outside noise, get earplugs or turn on some quiet music or natural sounds to mask what is distracting you.
I’d love to hear from you on how you do with this practice. If you have other tips, feel free to share them in the comments.
BTW? I hooked the scanner up to the laptop where it works (I’m sure it is an IRQ conflict on the desktop since it’s been acting up since I started using the wireless mouse). Sorry for the askew image. I’ll try harder next time. LOL
