A Creative Toolkit of Meditations

How do we become happier? Certainly friends, humor, and investigative dialogue are remedies for issues such as unhappiness in a relationship or with our job. To achieve a more positive state, we can reset out emotions. Every meditation I’ve ever studied promotes inner peace. We can live inside a harmonious Silence, a Here-and-Now Presence.
Although A Magical Toolkit of Meditations devotes time to close analysis of the material cited below, it’s reader-friendly with many interesting anecdotes illustrating these concepts.
A Magical Toolkit of Meditations features four distinctive, interacting approaches. The first is eighteen meditations picked from well-known traditions. Why so many meditations? The answer is that people vary in their likes and dislikes. When you finish this book, you’ll be capable of creating your own meditation toolkit.
The second uniqueness of A Magical Toolkit of Meditations is its topic-specific treatments of meditations. Chapter Eight lists eight topics and their respective meditation applications: 1) awareness of surroundings, 2) recognizing and experiencing our true self as Consciousness-Energy, 3) effective communication with others, 4) connecting mind and body: relaxing, 5) identifying healthy and unhealthy emotions, 6) probing and revealing our deep-seated, childhood-based negative beliefs, 7) releasing anger, 8) improving relationships. You can select meditations that penetrate each of these topics.
Practicing this self-choosing builds confidence and independence.
An an example, the topic “improving relationships” lists five meditations you can cash in on: Dimensions in Relationshps (Buddhist), Loving-Kindness (Buddhist), Investigative Dialogue (mostly my invention), Ask the Light (Quaker), and Anger Meditation (Buddhist).
A third uniqueness of A Magical Toolkit of Meditations is its systematic presentation of “growing up” and “waking up.” I borrowed this brilliant distinction from an essay in Tricycle magazine by John Welman. Growing up is the horizontal movement of becoming more functional, happy, giving, and community-involved through self-investigation. Chapters One, Two, and Three present meditations designed to help us grow up. No one ever grows up completely as this first journey of life never ends, not even for the most advanced sages. These three chapters elucidate eight inquiry and mindfulness meditations.
The second life journey is waking up or enlightenment. Waking up is vertical, private, and life-changing. All our belief systems vanish, and therefore we might suffer an emotional “dark night of the soul.” More encouraging, we now experience an immense freedom from all restrictions, all shoulds and should nots. Our clarity about our own negative traits makes us authentically humble. Ironically, we now feel unified with everything, and that everything is interconnected, while recognizing our absolute distinctiveness. Acceptance of everything amplifies. Wow! becomes our descriptor for our life. Enlightenment is explained in Chapter Four, and my enlightenment experience and its insights are fully articulated. I’ve written three quite simple meditations to prompt waking up.
Chapters Five through Eight integrate growing up and waking up. Chapter Five enlarges our capacity to assist ourselves and others to explore our personal and cultural biases. Couples can better savor their relationships after mastering investigative dialogue. In this chapter, I’ve utilized Helen Gurley Brown’s excellent work on listening skills. The meditation was designed by me.
Chapter Six is about relationships and how to establish harmony with your mate while achieving and maintaining your autonomy and independence. Chapter Seven pictures our fragmenting culture, with depictions of, and research data about, our disastrous educational and corporate systems. These two messes provide huge opportunities for us to meditate on staying emotionally healthy when confronted by them.
Chapter Eight is a summary of A Magical Toolkit of Meditations. It also adds six meditations to your potential toolkit. Since the book’s meditations are non-sectarian and acceptable to both traditional religious believers and to non-believers, I added one meditation I wrote for Christians. It’s readily adaptable to serve Muslims and Jews.
What’s the fourth distinctive approach of A Magical Toolkit of Meditations? Over the last four years, I’ve tested out and refined these meditations. Representative anecdotes illustrate core concepts. Testing out and representativeness occurred due to my facilitation of two eight-week meditations classes each year. Participants speak out candidly about their likes and dislikes. If a participant named James rants “I got zero from Ask the Light,” Mary seated near him will pip up with , “Wrong, James! Ask the Light is super for my husband and me. We enjoy each other more.”
At this point, James might stare at Mary and reply, “Well…Good for you. You know, I don’t have a girlfriend. Haven’t had one for a year. Maybe I’ll meditate why the hell I don’t.”
At this point, Mary might finish off with a goodie such as, “Do Ask the Light.” Spend five extra minutes on question four, Why? My hubbie and I share for maybe an hour after we do this meditation. We go down and dirty into our Whys? Why argue? Why not share dishwashing? Why spend thousands seeing a shrink every week when we can do Ask the Light together?”
Several psychologists have repeatedly shown up at my classes One told me, “Bill, talk therapy is really helpful for many people, but so is meditation. It directly places responsibility on the individual.”
I’ll say one more thing about A Magical Toolkit of Meditations and my classes. Many decades ago, I began my career of teaching college English at Kankakee Community College in Illinois. This college was introducing a new instructional method that was “learner-centered” and “experiential” rather than mainly “cognitive” and “teacher-centered.” Bye-Bye lecturing for an hour to students seated in rows, the lazy ones shielded by sitting against the back wall. We formed circles for the whole class and for small circles of students. Precise performance objectives were handed out each week. For two years I absorbed this method
Then I returned to California to commence my thirty-three year career instructing English classes. During the final twenty years, over one hundred students published essays in recognized, top scale journals and magazines. I loved teaching and the intense interaction with students. I loved how intelligently the students worked together. When I commenced facilitating meditation classes, I continued this learner-centered, experiential format. Everyone enjoys it. Then, while writing A Magical Toolkit of Meditations, I attempted to make my book experiential. That’s why it has eighteen meditations. That’s why it encompasses both growing up and waking up. That’s why the eight potentially painful human issues have several meditations to turn them around.
In any case, good luck with your meditation choices and practice. A sound meditation practice requires courage and perseverance. According to considerable research, the payoff is a longer and happier life.