“Meditation is an art; it can change a crawling grasshopper into a conscious human being” (Anand Krishna)
Tuesday January 16th, 2012 Anand Ashram (affiliated with the UN) held its regular meditation training program named NEO SELF EMPOWERMENT. The participants of this meditation training will get a meditation technique in order to empower themselves so that they can face the challenges of everyday life. Anand Krishna, a spiritualist activist and a prolific author of 140 books in Indonesian and English, choreographed these meditation exercises specifically.
Dian Martin started the exercises by reading out a text to prompt the participants to start contemplating on their lives; whether or not they perceived their lives to be going smooth or bumpy. If our life is going smooth, according to Dian, we should also ask ourselves, do we still continue to grow or did we stop growing?
Dian illustrated the process of making bread. We have to knead and give some pressure on the dough to make it rise. Every pressure on the dough will raise it to perfection which results in perfect bread. So it is in our daily lives. There has to be some pressure which eventually drives us to grow, pushes us to continue growing in life. The pressure meant by Dian is stress. Modern human beings are not free from stress whether we are aware of it or not, regardless we admit it or not. Stress indicates we still live and are ready to grow. This program utilizes stress to help free ourselves from stress.
He reminded us that a perfect practice yields a perfect result, like perfect dough will result in perfect bread. Therefore it’s importance to practice perfectly in order to obtain a perfect outcome. For that we need our wholeheartedness and discipline to always empower ourselves, to always practice the meditation exercises to keep us developing and growing. We human beings also have to continue developing and growing for that reason. Afterwards the participants were guided to meditation exercises which employ stress to deal with stress.
Source : http://www.anandashram.or.id/index.php?id=programs/semedi1
(Reporter and Photographer: Su Rahman, Translator: Sylvia Antaresa)
