I'm slowly starting to get into a more regular meditation practice now that Renaissance Festival is over and I have time again. I missed today's meditation, but I'm probably going to make it up when I get home from work.
I've been having trouble settling on a style of meditation that works for me, but I think I've come a lot closer to finding one. Maintaining a focused awareness is my biggest problem, and I wanted to try a mantra-based meditation. My counselor suggested using "Om Mani Padme Hum," and so far I've found it to be pretty effective. I find that even just repeating the mantra in my head is quite calming. Repetition of that mantra combined with deep breaths (sometimes I try to match the breaths to the mantra...one repetition on the in-breath, one on the out, but this can be hard to keep up) and alpha brainwave entrainment makes for a very relaxing session.
Using a mantra as a focus though has me curious about something. Ultimately, I am interested in trances and conscious projections. When going into a trance, is there some point where you go beyond the initial focus of the meditation (breath, images, mantras), or is that something that remains ever-present in the background of the experience? I've considered that one possible way this could work is that as you fall deeper into trance the object of the meditation begins to lose its meaning, at which point the object is no longer bound and is free to evolve into whatever experience you are about to have, in a sense serving as a gateway or stepping stone into an altered state of consciousness. I'm unsure how that transition would work though, as it seems to me that any number of things could easily prevent or abort that transition from occurring.
Of course, I could just be over-analyzing it.
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