Pagan Meditation Techniques

Pagans may use meditation for many different purposes. Some may use it as a form of prayer or worship, before doing any kind of spell work, before doing a reading (i.e. tarot or runes), to open up a blocked chakra or simply to relax and clear the mind and body from daily stress.

With meditation, the objective is to quiet your mind. This is not to say that your mind is completely blank. When I first started to meditate, I thought that this is what I needed to be in an effective meditative state. When I could not obtain this state, it would frustrate me and push me even further away from the state of mind I needed to meditate. For beginners, if you can first clear away the stresses and to-do lists of your daily life for a little bit, consider meditation a success.

If you feel you will need help in focusing your mind, consider using "gazing" to meditate. This is where you use a crystal ball or the flame of a candle to focus your mind and block out any outside influences.

Soft music may also help. Your best choices for this may be new age or sounds of nature. You should choose something that relaxes, while at the same time drowning out any distracting background noise you find in everyday life.

Find a quiet place in your home or outside to meditate. You will need approximately half an hour for an effective meditation session. You will also need a place and time where you will not be distracted from anyone or anything. Turn off the phones in your house, leave your cell phone behind, tell your family that you need thirty minutes to yourself. Find a quiet place such as your bedroom, a garden or anyplace that you will feel most relaxed.

Before beginning, I have found that burning sage is beneficial for the cleansing of negative energy. Use a large feather or your hand to move the sage smoke towards you. Open your mind and feel the negative energy being cleansed from your body. This is not a necessary step, but it helps. Even the most skeptical of people have claimed to feel a difference after doing this.

Situate yourself in a comfortable position, either sitting up or lying down. If you choose to lie down, be sure you will not fall asleep. It will be tempting. If you are sitting up, sit with your back straight and place your hands comfortably in your lap. If you decide to lie down, place your hands at the sides of your body. Now, concentrate on your breathing. Breathing and visualizing are key steps in effective meditation. Breathe in through your nose, hold it in for a few seconds while visualizing negativity you feel you have stored in your body gathering in that breath. Slowly exhale through your mouth, while visualizing that negative energy that you gathered being released and exiting your body with that breath. Do this about five times or until you feel cleansed of any negative energy.

Now it is time to relax. While breathing normal, relax your body, relax the muscles in your body and release the tension that has built up in those muscles. Visualize a pure, white light building in the center of your body and spreading throughout the rest of your body with each breath. As you visualize this white light growing, also visualize it pushing any remaining negativity out of your body until only the white light remains. Visualize this "gray" negativity leaving your body through your toes, your fingertips and the top of your head. Visualize the white light growing until it completely fills you and surrounds you, like an aura.

Once you feel you have completely relaxed and filled yourself with this white light, it is now time to come back to full consciousness. Allow yourself to do this slowly. Start at your toes and imagine each part of your body coming alive until you reach the top of your head. Stand up slowly while focusing on how refreshed your body feels.

With pagan meditation techniques, you may in time find it has been beneficial to other areas of your life. You may find that you have become calmer and more relaxed even in a non-meditative state. You may also find that you are better able to handle every day stresses. You may also find that meditation allows you to feel closer to the God and/or Goddess, and feel more connected and grounded in your spiritual life.

If you are just beginning to use meditation in your life, don't let yourself become discouraged if you don't completely get to the meditative state you think you should be at. As with many things in life, practice makes perfect, and any little bit helps.