The meditation is in mp3 format, is 22 MB, and lasts 18.5 minutes. There is a link here and also at the bottom of this post.
For me, meditation provides the simplest, richest, and most effective window into whatever issues are most urgent and troubling in my life. It doesn’t matter what I’m struggling with — meditation almost always helps. I’ve used meditation for:
- Dispelling fear
- Helping to decide on and maintain sleep patterns
- Contacting hidden elements of my subconscious
- Contacting spirits, guides, and even gods
- Bringing peace
- Manifesting money
- Weight loss
- Guidance on the Druid path
My goodness! I wasn’t expecting the list to be so long when I started making it.
My Experience With Meditation
And understand that this is all just in the past year. Before last summer, I meditated very infrequently — almost never, in fact. Don’t get me wrong: my mother introduced me to self-hypnosis around the age of nine or ten, and I used it in high school to work past my outer layers of shyness. But in college and afterwards I hardly used it, except for every simple Zen-inspired breath work occasionally to calm myself down. It just never occurred to me to use it.
Last summer, though, I suddenly found that I had a huge amount of fear that seemed to be coming out of nowhere, and I just couldn’t handle it. I struggled for months before I finally managed to bring it under control with a meditative technique I stumbled on at Steve Pavlina’s site called Go To Your Room. You can read about my further adventures with this issue here.
Kinds of meditation
I do three kinds of meditations:
- Emptiness meditations. For these, I simply practice emptying my mind of everything.
- Peace meditations. This is actually a series of three meditations done in succession that I designed for myself to break away from the fears created by my ego, infuse myself with compassion, and re-connect with the living universe.
- Visualization meditations. In these, I use vivid visualization to connect with Spirit.
I do the “emptiness” meditations whenever I do yoga, since I find it’s a great way to round out the practice. Lately I’ve been doing it once or twice a day, since I’ve started doing more yoga as part of my physical manifestation overhaul. The “peace” meditations (described in the “My Favorite Meditation” series of posts) I do just once or twice a month, since they’re a sort of last-resort method of getting myself out of a rut of depression or fear, which happens less and less frequently these days, thank the gods! The visualization meditations I do once or twice a week, whenever I feel like there’s an issue I need help with.
Troubles at First
Don’t let me give you the impression that I’ve just dropped into visualizations with no trouble at all. Oh no! While I haven’t had any trouble with the visualizing itself, I’ve had a fair bit of trouble maintaining a true connection to Spirit while doing so. What do I mean by that?
If you meditate without a “true connection”, the images you get are disconnected, and sometimes disturbing. The information you get from them doesn’t really resonate, and you feel uncertain about it. The scenes you see, and the characters you meet, seem more random, and less trustworthy. You may get the impression that someone or something is playing tricks on you, just trying to hold on to your attention.
If you meditate with a “true connection”, the images flow smoothly; they are never disturbing, although they may be odd or inexplicable; the information resonates, and you can feel — emotionally — that it is important and true. The experience leaves you with a feeling of peace and, frequently, companionship.
Getting that “true connection” was frequently hard at first. I would start down the path into the woods and find myself being stalked by some kind of beast; I’d turn to meet it, and it would bare its teeth at me, or change into a horrible image of a skull, or some other nonsense. At first I wondered what these images meant, and tried to work with them in a deep way, but I realized that the feelings I got from them were that they were trivial and not worth bothering about. They only appeared when I was feeling tired, upset, fearful, or otherwise at a “low” vibration. Some may call these evil spirits, and others may say that they are just reflections of the ego’s fears. In any case, I learned that the best thing to do with them was ignore them, and they would disappear immediately. If, for whatever reason, I simply couldn’t do that, I ended the meditation and tried again later, when I was more at peace.
This Guided Meditation
I’ve described a lot of my visualizations at length on this blog, and many people have told me that they enjoy reading them and wish that they had similar experiences when meditating. I was struck in particular by this incident that Kullervo mentions on his blog, in which he tried a visualization and ended up with his time wasted by one of those attention-grabbing fear-spirits. I wondered if there was some way that I could help people get the same benefit that I’ve had from this practice.
In this meditation, I lead you gently into a relaxed state, and then take you through a series of images designed to help you feel happy and fearless and loving. Only then do I bring you to a place where you can meet a guide. If the meditation is successful, you will have no chance of meeting any awful beasties, and — if not immediately, then with practice — you should be able to establish a good connection with Spirit.
You can go into this meditation with a particular guide or spirit in mind that you want to meet with. Alternatively, you can simply see who shows up! If there are guides with good intentions out there who wish to contact you, then they will probably jump at this chance to communicate with you.
Please let me know how it goes, and don’t be afraid to give me feedback, or let me know where you’ve had trouble. I’ve inflicted this meditation on three people so far, all of whom have enjoyed it, but got very different results:
- My wife, who is much better at focusing on sound than on vision, got very relaxed and happy, but could only get brief flashes of “someone tall” when she tried to meet someone.
- Kara-Leah met a different kind of guide: “My four year old self turned up… we chased each other around the bench and played in the flowers and climbed the tree and had a chat… it was wonderful.”
- Slade said, “Your voice is wonderfully suited to this format. Your voice is warm, calming, authoritative, benevolent…”. He has a lot of experience meeting guides, but he found that the meditation opened him up to enable him to receive a message from someone else’s guide who had been trying to reach him.
So without further ado:
The meditation is in mp3 format, is 22 MB, and lasts 18.5 minutes. Enjoy!
Finally:
If you’re looking for more downloadable audio meditations, you can’t start at a better place than Kara-Leah Masina’s great article here. Not only does she provide in-depth reviews of ten meditations, all freely available online — she also chose mine as one of them, thereby showing her usual impeccably discerning taste.
Druid Journal 
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