Freestyle Friday: Meditation

 

On Tuesday, I wrote about using mediation in your writing.  I wanted to touch on the subject once more. Meditation can be a way to find stillness in this hectic world, and it is beneficial to your overall wellness. Though meditation requires nothing other than you and the focus on your breath, in the beginning it can be difficult. Below you will find a few tools to help with meditation.

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Quiet the mind, and the soul will speak.”
― Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, The 11 Karmic Spaces: Choosing Freedom from the Patterns That Bind You  

“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”
― Voltaire 

Books

Clicking on the bookcovers will take you to the Amazon pages where you can read the opening pages.

 CDs and MP3s - Guided Meditations

Guided meditation makes it a bit easy to concentrate only only the task at hand.  It helps you recognize when your brain is jumping the track.Clicking on the images will take you to Amazon or SoundsTrue.

Videos

No need to spend money. There are many guided mediation videos available on Youtube. They range from 5 minutes to over an hour, and include many different types of focus such as healing, relaxation, or self-confidence. Here are a few sample youtube videos that provide guided meditation. 

New to mediation--start small. Give yourself 5 minutes to get in touch with your imagination. 


This is a 10 minute guided mediation to help with self-confidence.


 
A 10 minute guided mediation for deep relaxation.

Pandora Stations

Already versed in mediation. Sometimes just adding a bit of music helps. Here are a few Pandora stations that I have used for meditation. Just enter any of the following into www.pandora.com under "New Station".

 

 

Video Games

Yes, they even have video games to assist with mediation. Deepak Chopra's Leela is an interactive meditative video game available for the Wii and Kinect game consoles. Below is a trailer.

Margaret Mitchell House

Repost from 8/5/2009

www.margaretmitchellhouse.com

My husband and I recently had the opportunity to tour the Margaret Mitchell house, cleverly marketed as the birthplace of Gone with the Wind. I’m not sure what I expected when I walked in there, but whatever it was, I was wrong.

We paid the twelve bucks each to take the tour. I did not read the brochure before, so I was unaware that although the building was three story highs we would be seeing three rooms on the first floor. The large gift shop was about the size of half the space that we would be touring. About six of us lined up while a magenta haired woman took center stage.

She begins the tour by telling us who saved the building, which was once apartment buildings, from destruction, about multiple fires, and how the tile floor is the original tile floor. I would quickly learn that would be one of the only things that was original. Well, except for a toilet, but don’t get excited, it wasn’t Margaret’s toilet. No chance of sitting down and channeling greatness. It belonged to an apartment on the third floor.

She then complained in great detail because the keys were not numbered while searching for the one that would open Apartment Number One. My mood quickly shifted for the worst. 

The tour was of the apartment where she lived while writing the book. The walls, I think were even new. A living room, bed room, kitchen (smaller than most closets), and a bathroom with the third floor toilet. All filled with antique furniture purchased to give the appearance of what it would have looked like. 

It wasn’t the short tour that aggravated me. It was the woman. I’m not sure that she has even read GWTW. She seemed so uneducated. She walked from room to room speculating and making weird comments about the photos. I was none too happy with my trusty tour guide.

When we excited, I finally went off on my own. I walked over to a plaque on the wall and began to read. And this was the place where everything changed. Margaret Mitchell’s first fiancé went to war, but never came home. Her first husband was a drunk and very abusive. She married a second time. She said that before she wrote GWTW, she read up everything she could get her hands on and feeling frustrated she started her own book. Her famous quote was “In a weak moment, I have written a book. “ (My closest friends will understand that.) And lastly, when she finished chapters she would put them in manila envelopes and send them to a friend who would read them. By the time I finished reading this plaque, my face was soaked. Tears involuntarily flowing down my face. 

My husband, who was reading along with me, says, “Wow, ya’ll have a lot in common.” And here, I thought I was nuts.

We walked over to the movie memorabilia part of the house. I turned to my husband and said, “If I ever make it big, let’s systematically burn and destroy every house we have ever lived in.” 

He laughed. He thought I was kidding.

But then Ann saved the day. I was standing in the gift shop holding a cookbook titled “Gone with the Grits” with complete disgust, when a southern woman’s twang filled the air. It was time for the 3:30 tour. Her humor and knowledge struck me. We took the tour again. She knew so much about the petite author, you would have thought they were old friends. She gave us gossip, and was full of laughs. A real tribute to the personality and quirkiness of Margaret Mitchell. By the end of the tour, I wanted to hug her neck. 

I then went home and smiled at my own pile of manila envelopes filled with chapters.

Thanks Tour Guide Ann!

Watcha Say Wednesdays: Location, Location, Location

Time and place is a huge part of a novel. There are books that are set in real places with great detail that closely matches the spot a the map. While others are created from scratch with elaborate made-up worlds and unique ecosystems. Then yet there are those examples where the story is set in Anytown, USA--where the setting is barely relevant to the story.

When you write, do you create worlds or do you pick a real place and try to stay true to it? How much time and energy do you spend in researching your setting?  Do you try to keep as close to a real map as possible or do you enjoy inventing new spaces?

When you are reading, what do you prefer --- realism or fantasy? Do you want to visit imaginary places that are created by the author or do you prefer to journey to places that already exist?  Have you read a book and decided you now need to visit this place to see if the real thing holds up to the picture the author drew? 

Whatcha Say Wednesdays are for you. It's a chance to voice your opinion, share your knowledge, and interact with one another. Answer what speaks to you, and ignore the rest. But do tell—I’m quite curious.