The process of self awareness through meditation is like a spiralling staircase.
Meditation techniques ought to be used under the supervision of a treating psychiatrist for people prone to psychotic episodes.
Meditation is a simple and effortless technique that has been used to alleviate suffering and promote healing for thousands of years. It is a regressive technique that reduces a person's defences; it encourages and assists unresolved issues to come to the surface.
Often anxiety can hold deeper feelings such as grief and loss at bay. Meditation can reduce the anxiety and release the underlying emotion. For this reason guidance is recommended if you are considering using meditation for relaxation and stress management.
When using meditation it is very important to separate therapeutic life from decision making about real-life issues. It can be dangerous to discover something in a meditative state and act on it in real-life.
Some people use meditation to achieve higher consciousness. However, this is a no-go area for people who are prone to psychosis. In fact, it can be dangerous even for people without psychosis because it promotes acting out rather than inner freedom.
Meditation is frequently confused with forms of concentration such as yoga, tai-chi, guided-imagery and visualizations. The purpose of these exercises is often to focus full and undivided attention on a specific aspect of the mind and/or body in order to achieve a certain goal, develop a certain skill or promote a specific pathway of internal inquiry. These forms of mental exercise have a specific deliberate agenda.
Meditation doesn't have an agenda. Meditation is experienced as random and non-directed. Meditation is about free association and involuntary affective consciousness.
Meditation techniques work by promoting day dreaming. By repeating a mantra, without deliberately concentrating on the procedure or word, a daydreaming state of mind is achieved. In this meditative state one stops deliberately searching for answers to problems that don't appear to have immediate answers. The pain or pleasure associated with an unresolved issue then surfaces directing ones thoughts or consciousness.
Our normal tendency is to try to manage our emotions, whether they are pleasurable or painful. In meditation we are encouraged to keep returning to our mantra recitation and breathing exercises as a way of stopping the tendency to hold onto or manage the emotion as a way of practicing openness to our experience. In this sense meditation can be thought of as an exercise for the mind- an exercise used to promote inner freedom and openness to experience, which can help one cope with the pressures of life.
You will often hear instructors telling people to let go. By allowing the emotions to sort themselves out we allow our unconscious sense of reality and safety to unify the apparently random thoughts and emotions. We allow our being to be more directed by peaceful instincts and not destructive ones.
The process of becoming more psychologically healthy is mostly unconscious. It is not something you figure out consciously so to speak. The synthesising of what appear to be random and unresolved; thoughts, feelings, instincts, ideas, desires, quests for happiness, truth and identity mostly happens unconsciously, if we exercise trust and openness. We live in accordance with this non-observable reality by being open to our experience rather than jumping to conclusions about apparently unresolvable problems.
Meditation encourages you to trust what you don't see. Trusting your unconscious sense of reality will stand you in good stead when you are required to act in the outer world of risk. Meditation can train you to develop the habit of trusting yourself, and by doing so, break the habit of worrying. In the sense that it is a technique which encourages the habit of trust, it promotes your creative innate capacities to love and seek happiness: worry does the opposite.
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