Freddie Wyndham Yoga - logophilosophy
  1. Prayer
  2. Dhyana, Jnana and Bhakti - Living the Life of a Yogi
  3. Meditation - Experiencing Your Beingness
  4. Happiness is the natural state of our Being
  5. Conscious Awareness
  6. Metaphors to illustrate the Nature of our True Self – the Soul
  7. What is the Heart?
  8. Our Soul is our true and deepest Teacher
  9. Two facets of our Spiritual Practice and Life
  10. What is Yoga?
  11. Jnanahata Yoga
  12. Our Sadhana is a process of Purification
  13. Samskaras
  14. Sanskrit and The Study of The Yoga Texts and Scriptures
  15. Yoga Sutras
  1. Patanjali's Eight Limbs of Yoga
  2. Dhyana (meditation)
  3. Samadhi
  4. The Metaphor of a Raft Flowing On a River
  5. A guided Dhyana Practice
  6. Intuition and Omniscience
  7. What is Meditation?
  8. Practicing the Presence
  9. What is Enlightenment?
  10. Chanting and Mantra
  11. Yoga and Spirituality
  12. New Years Message 2009
  13. Reawakening: Spring Message 2010
  14. How do you define Love?
  15. Christmas/New Years Prayer/Message 2011
  16. The Miracle of Yoga - New Years Message 2012
  17. Heaven of our Hearts - New Years Message 2013

Dhyana (meditation)

In his Yoga Sutras, Patanjali outlines eight limbs of yoga. The last 4 limbs, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi outline the steps of meditation. Pratyahara is turning or drawing our attention within, away from distractions and the senses. Dharana means concentration, and refers to the practice or art of focusing the attention on one thing, without necessarily considering any particular duration. Dhyana means meditation and can be interpreted as an unbroken awareness, or experience, of the object of meditation, thus referring to a continuous and steady flow of concentration, as if we were on a raft on a river flowing with the current. The last stage, Samadhi, is a state of total and complete immersion, or merging with the object of meditation to the extent that you lose any sense of separateness from, or any sense of identity separate from the object of meditation. You experience yourself as one with, or in unity with, the object of meditation.

I my humble opinion, the ultimate meditation is becoming so still and quiet that we perceive and become immersed in an unbroken experience of our pure consciousness, the Heart or Soul, the nature of which is eternal, infinite and boundless love, joy, truth, peace, light, compassion and goodness. One step beyond that is to perceive and finally merge with, or into, the eternal, infinite and boundless Ocean of love, joy, truth, peace, light and goodness that the wave of our Soul arises out of. Our Souls being a wave on that Ocean are one with, made of, and share the qualities, or attributes of the Ocean. Being one with the Ocean, when we experience ourselves as the wave, we automatically experience and know the Ocean.

This may seem like a simple description, and it is. Because our true nature is already the Soul, and we are already, and always one with the Ocean of God’s blessed, loving presence. The hard part is becoming still and quiet enough to recognize and experience our pure consciousness beyond the mind and feelings. And then to learn how to surrender into that experience enough to achieve Dhyana — to become established in an unbroken experience or awareness of our pure consciousness, and ultimately merging into God.

The breath is a steppingstone to the deeper experiences of meditation. When we can become established in Dhyana with the breath, we are necessarily liberated from distractions, and begin to experience a deep and profound stillness and silence, which are qualities of our pure consciousness. That stillness and silence is a portal through which we may move into the experience of the love, joy, truth, peace, light, compassion and goodness of the Heart or Soul, in other words, through which we may experience our Heart or Soul, the pure and true nature of our being.

Experiencing a glimpse of one or more of the qualities of our pure consciousness is a major step in our meditation practice, because then we know what we’re looking for, what the experience of our pure consciousness is like. Before we recognize it we may have actually been experiencing it but weren’t aware of it. It’s such a subtle experience that sometimes we overlook it expecting something bigger, or more dramatic. We have to settle down enough, become still and quiet enough to perceive it. But once we do experience it we discover that it is amazingly dramatic because it’s so joyful, so vast and boundless — omnipresent.

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