Vedic meditation is a technique dating back thousands of years in India that emphasises effortlessness in meditation, allowing thoughts and accepting what is happening in your body as you meditate.
My teacher, Anne, did a beautiful ceremony and gave us a mantra that should not be shared. She taught us how to use the mantra to quieten the mind and drop down through our consciousness. She normalised the thoughts that will inevitably come up and framed them as part of the nervous system releasing stress.
This makes sense to me because meditation takes us into a deeper state than sleep, and we know the healing benefits of sleep. In EMDR, a research-based trauma treatment, they think that the bilateral eye movements that are used in combination with the mind having one foot in the trauma memory and one foot in the present emulates REM sleep and allows the trauma to process in the way it would naturally. So, trauma doesn’t become PTSD.
This meditation technique gives built-up stress in the nervous system a safe way to be released.
The thoughts come, and then you gently return your awareness to the mantra. The practice is twice a day before food, morning and night.
DAY 1 – In my initial practice, there were many thoughts at the beginning, and then I felt like I entered the space I go into just before falling asleep. I finished the practice feeling refreshed, like I had just had a day nap.
DAY 2 – I missed the previous evening because of events running late into the night, so I did 40 mins the following morning. I was surprised that it seemed to go quite quickly. I also noticed that the mantra seemed to move from being quite loud in my head to being soft in my heart, and rather than me having to say them, it felt like they were speaking independently in my heart, and I was just listening.
I’m curious to continue this daily practice in addition to my current mantra.
If you like the sound of Vedic meditation and want to give it a go, contact Anne Durham. She’s a beautiful teacher with lots of personal experience.
Love Jen
