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Improve Your Casts Through Meditation – Page 3

Concentration and Thought

Now it’s time to start meditating. You’ve found your comfortable position, you’ve decided if you’ll use music, water, other sounds, or no sound at all. What’s the next step? Concentration and thought. This is the part where you attempt to clear your mind of all your stressful thoughts and worries and start to relax. The first thing that you’ll need to do is pick something that you’ll want to think about. If you don’t have an active imagination or aren’t good at mentally picturing things you may want to start out with something simple like a small red ball. Try to see the ball in your mind floating in the blackness. You don’t need to start off seeing the whole orb right away, if you need to start by trying to picture a small flat red disc, and then as you get better at that try to turn that disc into an orb. See the shading around the side of the ball, imagine it as if it were something physically there so real you could almost reach out and touch it.

Once you’ve mastered seeing the small red ball move onto something a little more complex and try that. Maybe try to imagine a six-sided dice cube with all the numbers (well little dots anyway) on it. Once you can do that, try to rotate that in your mind making it as real as possible. If you get good enough at this you’ll soon see that creating various objects in your mind isn’t difficult and you may be ready to move on.

You’ve mastered seeing an object in your mind and you’re ready for the next step, scent. Picture an apple pie, or freshly baked bread floating there in your mind. Since you’re nearly an expert at visualizing images make it as realistic as possible. Now try to imagine what that item smells like. It may be helpful at this stage to use scented candles that are suppose to smell like the object you are trying to picture. If you do use candles for this make sure that each time you do this you move the candle further and further away from you. Then after a while attempt it without the candle. By moving the candle away you’re picking up less and less of the scent and allowing your mind to “fill in the scent” more and more.

All right you’ve mastered sight and scent, now it’s time to try taste, touch and feeling. You can keep using the image of the pie or the bread for this because they both have texture as well as taste. Also if you imagined them coming right out of the over you can play around with the sensation of temperature. The technique is pretty much the same as always, get the mental image in your mind, attempt to smell the object’s scent and when you have that done, try to imagine what that object feels like and tastes. Is it warm or cold, are the edges soft or a bit rough, bitter or sweet? Pretend that the only way for you ever to be able to taste or feel this object again is with your mind. Or even better, yet a little more difficult, pretend that you have to describe this object to someone lacking any senses. Obviously you’re not saying the details out loud but thinking them. The greater and more in-depth the detail the easier you’ll be able to “taste” and “feel” the object.

The last sense you need to work on for meditation is hearing and it’s not as difficult as you might think. If you have any pets, especially noisy ones – obviously fish would not work here – you can use them for your mental image. It’s nice because you can probably already picture your pet in your mind without too much work. So get your mind going and picture your pet or if you don’t have a pet then just pick your favorite “noisy” animal. Imagine this animal with all the techniques mentioned above and then concentrate on what they sound like. Hear them calling out to you, purring, howling, grunting, and making calls to other animals out in the wild. If you’ve concentrated and used the previous mentioned techniques you should be able to “hear” them without much difficulty.

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