Transpersonal Counseling assists you in fully integrating the personal and transpersonal dimensions of interpersonal relationships, community, service, and encounters with the natural world.

Transformation Meditation

What Is Meditation? 

Meditation is a method for synchronizing body and mind in the present moment. When our body and mind are in sync, we are naturally relaxed, alert, open, and aware.

What does it mean to “synchronize body and mind”? For a moment or two, right now, pay close attention to the feeling of the rising and falling of your belly with each in-breath and out-breath. You will notice that when you pay attention in this way, even after just a few moments, your mind and body start working together, and everything in you starts to calm down, relax, and open.

Most of the time, our minds and bodies are not in sync. Our minds are like broken record players, going over the same habitual thoughts again and again. Our bodies are often ignored; sensations of pain and pleasure alike are “run over” by the speed and busy-ness of our lives. The experience for most of us in any given moment is that we are stuck in our heads, ignoring our bodies, and living one step removed from our immediate situation.  We find the missing piece of the puzzle in our heads, by discovering the depth of our being through meditation.

When we slow down and take time to synchronize body and mind, we experience ourselves and the world in a direct, unmediated way, without conceptual filters. It is this direct experience of the fullness, vitality, and splendor of life that is the gift of meditation.

How would meditation benefit ME?

People come to meditation for different reasons.   Common motivations for learning and applying meditation are:

1. Chronic dissatisfaction with life.

“I feel like something is missing. I know that life carries more beauty and depth and magic than I am currently experiencing, and I want to live from that place. I want to open my heart more and experience a greater sense of connection with others.”

2. Recommendation from a doctor, friend, or loved one.

“I have been told by my doctor/therapist/co-worker/friend that I need to meditate. I am often under tremendous stress, and symptoms of stress are showing up in my life in a variety of ways—including health issues, a short temper with those I love, and an inability to sleep through the night. I want to feel more at ease and spacious in my life, and I am hoping that meditation will help with this.”

3. Anxiety and other challenging emotions.

“I don’t know how to work skillfully with emotions like anger and anxiety. I hear that meditation might help me develop the ability to be with emotional ups and downs and not be so reactive. That kind of equanimity is something I could really use right now.”

4. Physical pain.

“I have chronic physical pain and no traditional medical treatment seems to help for very long. I have heard that meditation is a way to relate directly with pain at the level of sensation and that it can help ‘melt’ and release painful physical blockages. At this point. I am desperate to be in less pain and willing to give meditation a try.”

5. Seeing how meditation has helped others.

“I know someone (a co-worker or a friend or family member) who meditates on a regular basis and this person has some kind of hard-to-describe quality that I aspire to emulate. She (or he) seems unusually grounded and at ease with her own being, at home somehow with herself. I would like to be like that.”

6. Addiction.

“I am struggling with an addiction and I don’t feel able to break the addictive pattern of behavior. I hear that meditation can help interrupt habitual reactive patterns and that’s what I need help with.”

7. Past spiritual experience.

“There was a totally unexpected moment in my life in which I felt time stop and I knew myself as greater than I ever knew I was—as infinite being. I would like to experience that kind of vastness again and on a regular basis, and I hear that meditation is a method for cultivating that type of awareness.”

8. Fears of mortality.

“I am plagued by existential concerns—what will happen when I die? Does my life have any meaning? I hear that meditation is a tool that I can use to directly investigate the nature of reality so that I can discover what is true for myself.”

9. Desire to experience God.

“I want to have a personal experience of God and to come to know directly the divine presence in my life. I have heard that meditation is a way to be in direct communion with the divine and, ultimately, to experience union and oneness with God. In short, I want to be closer to God.”

Benefits of Meditation

Regardless of one’s original motivation, meditation can provide physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits. Of course, these dimensions of being all interrelate; however, it can be useful to consider what the benefits are of meditation at these three levels.

Health Benefits:

1. Increased relaxation
2. Reduction of high blood pressure
3. Reduction of high cholesterol levels
4. Slowing down of the aging process
5. Improved sleep patterns
6. Reduced illness, costs of medication, and frequency of doctor's visits
7. Measurable help in working with drug and alcohol addiction

Interpersonal Benefits:

1. Decreased anxiety
2. Increased calmness
3. Decreased depression
4. Increased personal development, productivity, and satisfaction

Psychological Benefits:

1. Better use of brain functioning
2. Improved memory
3. Increased EEG coherence
4. Increased IQ and other intelligence-based measures

 Spiritual Benefits:

1. Meditation enables us to investigate the nature of reality non-conceptually through direct experience.
2. Meditation allows us to know ourselves outside of any identification.
3. Meditation helps us learn to surrender totally and completely and at every level of our being—surrendering all holding back and self-contraction to awareness or God, or however you name ultimate reality.

Opening Our Hearts to the World

A final motivation that brings people to mediation, perhaps strangely enough, is the motivation of compassion. Many people in this world feel a sense of sadness when they see suffering around them; they feel a longing to be helpful to other people in some kind of true and genuine way. But they also feel very limited. Many of us feel that when we try to help other people often we end up either making things worse or simply missing the point.

When we are engaged with people in an intimate way, in terms of trying to help them, when we’re close to them and close to their suffering, we often discover that we back up, we shy away, we can’t really be present, we can’t really be helpful, we feel our own limitations. Some people come to meditation practice because they sense that through working on themselves in this way they can be actually much more effective in terms of addressing other people’s needs and other people’s sorrow and pain.

Rev. Dr. Cindy Clark-Heald is a Transformatiion Meditation teacher.  She is available for group retreats, hospitals and other health related facilities, small in-home groups, and personal mindfulness training. If you would like additional information on Dr. Heald's Transformation Meditation classes, please provide your pertinent information in the form below.  Once it is received, Dr. Heald will personally send you the information requested.   Click here for an audio sample of her most recent meditations.