First of all, make sure that you won’t be interrupted for your meditation – so take the phone off the hook or put on the answering machine. Ask other people in the household to give you half an hour or so without disturbance. For some people this can present a problem, if so, then just take ten minutes or even five minutes to start with. As you become more skilled you will find that you can literally meditate anywhere, but at the beginning it can be easy to get distracted.

Secondly, find a comfortable place to sit – you don’t need to sit cross legged, just concentrate on keeping the back upright, the knees just very slightly lower than the body and the feet firmly on the floor. During the meditation resist the urge to scratch, to fidget, to adjust your posture – these can all be distractions.

• Now take about five minutes to relax your body. Work through the body from the feet up to the head and imagine that you can just let go of the muscles, make sure that the stomach, the shoulders and the jaw are relaxed – these are places where we hold a lot of tension.
• When you have done this then just bring your attention to your breathing, don’t try to change it, just notice the breath moving in and out of your body. Observe as much as you can about your breathing – how does it feel as the breath moves in and out of the nostrils, where do you take the breath to in your body? Stay with this for another five minutes or so.
• Now imagine that you are outside in the sunshine, try to really get a sense of the light of the sun, warm, but not hot, shining down on you. You might like to imagine that you are lying on a quiet beach soaking up the sun. Imagine that you can breathe in the light of the sun, taking it into your body. Let the light fill up every cell of your body as if you are drinking in light. When you feel glowing and full of light, let that light move anywhere in your body where you feel that you are in need of healing. Then let the light expand out, as if you are radiating light into the energy fields around your body so that you are imagining yourself glowing with light and health. Stay with this part of the meditation for about ten minutes, really using your imagination to help you.
• Now just bring your attention to your breath and on each in breath say to yourself, ‘Breathing in I am breathing in health,’ and on each out breath say to yourself, ‘Breathing out I am completely relaxed.’ As you do this try to really feel the truth of what you are asserting. Do this for about twenty repetitions.
• Let it all go and start to bring yourself back to the room, slowly and gently coming back, stamping your feet on the floor and opening your eyes.

This meditation is a great way to start to experience the benefits of meditation at a physical and an emotional level. Visualising light is a very powerful tool in self healing. Just let your imagination be your friend as you begin meditation, you may not actually see light, but just feel it, that is fine. Try doing this process two or three times a week for a month and notice the difference in how you feel before and after.

We offer a comprehensive introduction to meditation in her course Practical Meditation. A teacher’s qualification with the School is also available after taking the course if you feel drawn to teaching meditation. This is usually taken as a one day intensive training called How to Teach Meditation at the School of the Living Light. The School has a wide range of guided meditations available online, MP3 downloads are coming to the website soon.

One of the most difficult aspects of learning to meditate is perseverance. You do not just sit down and meditate first time unless you are extremely lucky. Many of the books on meditation instruct you to sit down and to ‘empty your mind.’ This is not something that comes easily to the Western person, we are trained to use our minds, to cultivate an active and analytical way of thinking, this is in direct contrast to the Eastern way of being, a mode where clearing the mind is a great deal easier for them to follow. Because of this problem it is helpful if you are interested in taking up meditation to think of trying the methods that have been developed by Westerners rather than Eastern techniques to begin with. By using guided visualisations and processes you can keep the mind busy, the mind is following the journey or process described and eventually this will liberate the consciousness. When you have become used to sitting still and concentrating, then you can try the more advanced techniques.

One of the greatest mistakes we make is to think that the mind is the consciousness; the mind is the tool of consciousness but consciousness does not arise from the mind. When you meditate the truth of this becomes clear. For me this was a great breakthrough, my training as a scientist told me that the brain was everything and that my awareness arose from my mind, now I know this is not the case and I know this from direct experience. When I have taught other people to meditate and asserted this, they always look sceptical, but after a few weeks of meditation they soon change their view!

Physically, through meditation, you can slow down the processes of your body. Think of the great yogis who can slow down their heartbeat to practically nothing, you don’t need to go to these lengths, but when you move into a state of meditation, your heart rate does decrease and your body relaxes. Your brain waves alter as well, they move from the normal waking wave patterns to slower, deeper waves which reflect the deep state of relaxation the mind can move into. Meditation can also strengthen the immune system thus increasing your body’s ability to fight disease.

Emotionally, meditation brings calmness and serenity if practised regularly. Detachment from the ups and downs of life is another corollary of a regular meditation practise. One man I know said that after a few weeks of meditation he was coming to know himself quite differently, he saw himself with ‘new eyes’ and he didn’t altogether like what he saw. When you practise meditation regularly the blinkers start to come off and you are enabled to see yourself from a new angle. By doing this you become able to make changes to who you are at a psychological and an emotional level. It is as if you are moving to a broader view through meditation.

Psychologically, the benefits of meditation are tremendous, bringing an increased ability to concentrate and to hold a focus. Because of this, meditators are often very efficient and their job performance improves.

The ‘New Age’ movement is gathering tremendous momentum as thousands of people buy books, guided meditations and DVDs which urge us to take responsibility for ourselves and our health. Many, many authors are urging us to take up meditation as a way into this. Meditation is definitely a spiritual path as well. It was meditation that led Buddha to become enlightened as he sat beneath the Bodhi tree. Prayer is a form of meditation too.