Synopsis
This beginners meditation course features a variety of meditation techniques including mantra, meditating with the breath and music, concentration and meditation on a object. Each class includes a discussion topic and a guided meditation exercise. The Meditation Society of Australia (http://meditation.org.au) has no religious, political or financial affiliations, it is a community organization designed to help people meditate.
Episodes
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Class 30 - Free Your Mind
11/07/2008Topics Include: - appreciate the power of the mind - create an ego that will serve you not you serve it. One of the finest instruments given to us at the start of our life here on earth is our wonderful and complex mind. From the point of view of our meditation life the mind can be a blessing, but, if not properly trained, a profound hindrance. Its main feature is its malleability. This is also its problem. It can be made to believe anything. Indeed, it can even believe that it is in charge. It is programmed by its own thoughts, its own creation, and the more a thought is repeated the more likely it is to be believed. The mind is a master of habit. A habit is a thought pattern that requires no decision making process. For a computer this would be called a program. We program our mind by repetition. Just reflect for a moment how powerful this is. Just by repeating a thought pattern over and over, firstly it becomes a habit (so we no longer make decisions about it) and most often it becomes a belief, no m
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Class 29 - Charity & Oneness
13/06/2008Topics Include: Understand the relationship between charity and oneness. Roger walked into what was sometimes known as 'The Lost City' and was immediately struck by the level of suffering. This was not one or two homeless and hungry, this was tens of thousands of lost, lonely and painful souls. There were those bankrupt, those ostracised for their colour, religion, their weight or lack of weight, their ugly faces or scars or criminal record, their sexuality, their violence, their mental illness, their lack of education. There were people everywhere, in everyones faces, most were barely conscious from a cocktail of alcohol and drugs and petrol and paint cans. Everyone was on top of everyone and all they seemed to want was distance. A mess of urine and faeces littered the landscape but mostly it choked Rogers breath. He could barely breathe without feeling he was going to vomit. Involuntarily already he had dry wretched but had been able to hide it feebly behind a movement of his hand. He stared away not bec
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Class 28 - Living Your Bliss
11/06/2008Topics Include: Understand how blissful life actually is. For many to live in bliss is a fantasy. To be happy is not seen as a permanent state but as a kind of fleeting moment, a gift that fate might offer from time to time. Some people even think of too much happiness as being slightly delusional or uncaring for those that are suffering. It is simply unimaginable that a person could live free from suffering, free from the occasional nightmare, free from anxiety or pain, free from any or all negativity. But to live in bliss is possible. Not only possible but inevitable. Our most natural state is actually blissful. Many of us think we naturally are in a struggle with life, that we have to fight against fate, that we have to take what we need or we will be left behind. The opposite is true. We are naturally really happy beings. Our experience of fate is dictated by our choices, by our thoughts and intentions. The universe is actually incredibly abundant. It is only that we have created a series of illu
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Class 27 - Learning from the Negatives
07/06/2008Topics Include: For the last few classes we have been talking about so-called negative qualities. To summarise all negatives are really just the bludgeon of change. Every negative quality is actually just a wall we hit as the last stop before we learn and grow. It was the Dalai Lama that said that there isnt a big problem that did not start as a small one. This is true of all pain. Believe it or not, there is not a thing that happens in the world for no reason. Just as if a child was about to burn himself by putting his hand into a flame, an adult would yell and grab the child from harms way. The child might cry with the shock of being yanked to safety but most of us would say that that pain was necessary so the child would learn and grow. "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." Anonymous So it is for us exactly the same. Each so-called negative that we experience remains negative while we experience it as a negative. For the child, we all say to the child look you were so lucky, we saved you from bein
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Class 26 - Depression
06/06/2008Topics Include: Understand more about depression and how to treat it spiritually Find out the causes of depression Depression is a very serious condition. This class is not designed to be a cure-all for everyone, but it is hoped it will help inspire with a spiritual approach. Many times people with depression will feel helpless to change their current state, as though there is no point or that no-one can help. Depression often follows anger and helplessness. We quite often are literally beating ourselves up. Many times people that suffer from depression are extremely intelligent, very sensitive and compassionate people. Their sense of helplessness parallels the same spiral people suffering from anger travel into resentment and stress related illnesses (mentioned in class 22- Anger).
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Class 25 - Listening
06/06/2008There is a great deal of benefit to be derived from simply listening in almost every dimension of life but in particular in the spiritual life. To listen is a requirement for any spiritual evolution. It is the foundation of change. Without listening we cannot transform ourselves. It is listening that keeps us young and flexible. And it is not listening that ages us and makes us stagnant and unyielding. To listen to another is the first doorway to the flow of love between you. To listen to oneself is the doorway to the infinite flow of love within and between all things.
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Class 24 - Birthdays
21/02/2008Topics Include: The birthday is an extremely important day to the spiritual aspirant. Whether we realize it or not we do arrive at a particular time and place for a specific reason. There is nothing random about you being born on the date and time you were born.For this reason we should treat our birthdays with real reverence.
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Class 23 - Fear
23/01/2008Topics Include: Fear - a positive place to start. When we speak of fear, we speak of the most profound of all negativities. Profoundbecause fear is the root of all negativity, and because it most clearly exposes us to the most powerful of all dangers, the loss of awareness of our real self, our soul. It is the ego that fears, not the soul. It's ultimate fear is to lose itself. This is why death scares it so much. It is sure it is all there is, so death means extinction. It also fears what it perceives to be separate from itself. Other people. Nature. The Wind. A storm. Fate. Animals. Even ones own soul. The soul knows that we are not separate from each other. We are one. So why should we fear? The soul says there is nothing to fear. Even time or death are but manifestations of our eternal experience.
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Class 22 - Anger
11/01/2008Topics Include: How anger is really a cry for us to act. When we are angry we do not listen, we react without thinking, we feel unsafe, alone and threatened. Our lives can become hellish if we are often angry, especially for those that are unable to have an outlet for their anger, not to mention those that do have an outlet - for often it is the less physically powerful that receive the brunt of anger's violence.
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Class 21 - Guilt
07/01/2008Topics Include: Understand more about guilt and how to use it for yourself. Learn about constructive and destructive negatives. In the next few classes, we are going to talk about some of these, namely guilt, anger, fear and more. The one thing you will notice is that negative qualities are energy black-holes, they drain us very, very quickly by taxing our attention and focus and diverting us from the energy-giving divine within us all.
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Class 20 - The first twenty, now where?
24/07/2007Topics Include: The 20th class is a great achievement - well done! We'd really like to thank you for letting us into your spiritual life and we hope that you have enjoyed the classes so far. This class is all about assimilation. How you can live your spiritual life most effectively.
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Class 19 - Enthusiasm and Inspiration
24/07/2007Topics Include: Our daily meditation can sometimes become stale. We find ourselves having trouble getting new inspiration or enthusiasm. We sit to meditate and without inspiration our meditation might become a bit of a day dream, or we could find ourselves nodding off to sleep. We need to continuously look for ways for our meditation to evolve, ways to increase our enthusiasm and inspiration.
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Class 18 - Life Changers
04/06/2007Topics Include: In my own life, I came to a point where I was amazed at how little I knew about how to increase the quality of my life. I was happy, but I was not getting any happier, and I had no idea how to increase my happiness.
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Class 17 - String Theory
30/05/2007Topics Include: Explore the energy within the universe and look at 'string theory' and how it relates spiritually.
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Class 16 - Letting Go
30/03/2007Topics Include: Sometimes the hardest thing to do in our spiritual lives is to let go. There are so many chains that we drag around with us. Chains that might be attached to the heaviest, most cumbersome loads but we struggle on, fighting against our own very nature most of the time, because we simply do not know how to, or fear, letting go.
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Class 15 - Living our Spiritual Lives
09/03/2007Topics Include: practising a walking meditation and contemplating the process of meditation in action. Most of us have spent our lives living 'outside' of our real nature. We often have confused the desires of our body, ego and intellect, with the divine wishes of our soul. If you just reflect upon for a moment the way we habitually walk anywhere currently, you might be aware that most of the time, we are thinking about another place we want to be, or things we have to do, or any number of extraneous thoughts. We rarely are conscious of the present moment, and our heart and soul in the process of walking. Meditation, our spiritual life, seeks to redress the balance. It seeks to deepen every moment of our lives with the richness of experience of our own heart.
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Class 14 - Oneness and Humility
05/03/2007Topics Include: Understand the difference between intellectual belief and spiritual realisation and how to practise humility. The human ego is a wonderful tool, but can also leave us in a wonderful mess. It is very common for those studying spiritual philosophy to feel that their intellectual understanding is a spiritual truth, but this is a particularly dangerous trap! Everything understood must also be realised.
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Class 13 - Work
01/02/2007Topics Include: how to work easily with no stress and high efficiency and how to direct your spiritual life effortlessly to more and more of your so-called "outer life" Often in doing these classes, a common problem is the management of 'outer' work activities and our spiritual lives. The overwhelming complaint is that all this meditation and spiritual activity is fine for the time that we are not involved in our jobs and outer lives, but what do we do then? Obviously, the goal is not to create two separate lives, but rather to blend a much more holistic sense of self.
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Class 12 - Offering and Receiving Love
01/02/2007Topics Include: "Offering and Receiving Love" - It is impossible to feel unhappy when we are offering love for real joy is the result of the flow of love. There is no more 'in-nature' a state, no closer to heaven, in fact, heaven's singular characteristic is the constant offering of love. To be sure, heaven wishes nothing more than to flow through each of us, empowering and inspiring us with the infinite, spiritual force of the universe.
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Class 11 - The Ego and the Soul
30/01/2007Topics include: 'The Ego and the Soul'. In this class you will understand the roles of the ego and the soul and learn to discern your inner voice. The single most asked question we have come across is "how do I tell what are the messages of my ego and those of my soul?" To be true the ego and the soul have an existence within each other and so there is a measure of blurring between their realities but for the purposes of this class, let's separate them at their poles, so that we might more easily understand their nature and where they overlap.