Meditation Articles Series

Expanding Your Awareness - Part 1

Getting into meditation will help you to relax, become peaceful and calm and energize you both physically and mentally. Meditation helps to access the right hemisphere of the brain and as we do so we experience a change in brain wave patterns. We are able to access what is known as the Alpha state. Here we experience mental alertness, while at the same time being calm and clear in our physical and mental functioning.

Practical and simple ways to expand your awareness

Over the next three weeks read these blogs to learn practical and simple ways to change your awareness and to experience a move to Alpha state. Any one of these exercises can be done as part of your meditation practice, or simply to enjoy other aspects of right brain functioning that lead to greater calmness, expansiveness, creativity and oneness.

Exercise 1: Open Your Focus

The first exercise is called “Open Your Focus.”

Les Fehnis, PhD, a brain scientist and author of “The Open Focus Brain”, found that when our eyes are in ‘sharp focus’ our stress responses increase; when they’re in ‘soft’ or open focus, we relax. An animal relaxing in the sun will maintain soft focus until something threatening or appetizing appears; only then will its eyes become sharp. Softening your eyes releases the sequential processing of the left brain and turns on the holistic perceptions of the right brain.

Try softening your focus now. After reading this paragraph look up at whatever’s in front of you. Then without moving your eyes allow your attention to broaden taking in everything you see. Slowly expand your attention to include everything you can hear, smell, feel and taste. As your focus opens, you’ll stop thinking in words, become more present, and see beauty everywhere. Fehnis research showed that if we do it consistently, this practice affects the brain like meditation. Try it, it works.

Quoted from a Martha Beck article written in the “Oprah” magazine May 2008.