Diana Lang - Opening to Meditation: A Gentle, Guided Approach

A lovely book! Clear, gentle, and practical just like the experience of meditation itself.

Tobin Blake, author of The Power of Stillness

Diana Langs gift is her simplicity. She has the courage to demystify meditation and make it easily accessible, and she infuses her book with warmth, clarity, and gentleness. This is a fine and open-minded introduction to meditation that should suit many people of different persuasions.

Andrew Weiss, author of Beginning Mindfulness

Diana Lang understands the fears that block most people from meditating effectively. Her instructions on how to remove them are so simple and delightful that it almost seems unfair that we get results so quickly. Isnt meditation supposed to be daunting? But the benefits dont stop there. Lang also understands and gently leads us to the ultimate benefit the experience of the loving Reality that already embraces us all.

Gayle and Hugh Prather, authors of Shining Through

Copyright 2004 by Diana Lang

All rights reserved. This book and CD may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Edited by Marc Allen

Front cover design, text design, and typography by Mary Ann Casler

Author photo by J. Daniel Chapman

CD produced by Angela Hite

CD engineered and mastered by Jimmy Hite

Music by Martin Lund

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lang, Diana, 1957

Opening to meditation : a gentle, guided approach / Diana Lang. 1st ed.

p. cm.

A book and CD set.

ISBN 978-1-57731-454-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Meditation. I. Title.

BF637.M4L36 2004

158.12DC22

First printing, November 2004

ISBN 978-1-57731-454-7

Printed in China

Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

for june

breathe.

Meditation is easy. You can do it right now, right where you are. It is not mysterious or esoteric. It is your natural birthright as a human being.

Meditation is an age-old practice that quiets the mind and allows our inner spirit to shine through our life more and more. The effects of meditation unfold over time. It is a practice of awareness that increases our focus, our consciousness, and our soul-knowing.

Meditation creates a foundation that lets you know yourself deeply your true self the part of you that is eternal. It allows for the full potential of your soul to be expressed in your daily life.

Meditation helps you to become self-realized to realize who you really are in your deepest essence. In meditation, you arrive at a state of awareness where you consciously recognize the link between your personality and your soul. Meditation aligns these two seemingly separate parts so they are known to be one and act as one. This is called congruency a conscious bridge between the self and the soul.

The path to self-realization is a choice. It is the ongoing decision to live your life as truthfully and lovingly as possible. Every time you sit to meditate you are choosing to live an awakened life.

Meditation reveals a beauty beyond words. By turning within, we discover a world of knowledge, the bounty of our rich inner knowing. We discover that we are more than what we seem; we are better far greater than what we have believed about ourselves.

At our core, we discover we are simply and absolutely the radiance of pure love. Allowing this love to shine more brightly through our life is an inevitable and direct consequence of our meditation practice. We are the directors of our growth; it is always our choice to what degree we want to be receptive to our inner knowing. This inner knowing is always available to us. It does not waver or vary. The flow of our soul is constant. All we have to do is open to it.

One of the purposes of this book is to show you that you need nothing outside yourself to take your next spiritual step. You already have everything you need.

Your next step is the one thats right in front of you, the one you can take right now. If you let your inner knowing guide you, you cant go wrong. Your next step almost always feels simple, natural, even ordinary. We sometimes expect great changes to happen in our lives instantly, in some dramatic fashion, with a bang, but that rarely happens. More often it is simply putting one foot in front of the other until inevitably some momentous event occurs; it looks like a miracle from the outside, but your personal experience of it most likely feels quite normal and natural. Were always looking for some breathtaking, heart-stopping spiritual event to know weve arrived, when in fact it is most often as ordinary as exhaling.

All it takes is an understanding of a few basic truths: we are far greater beings than we think we are. We have a vast and eternal spirit as well as these physical bodies. Where we are at this moment, how we are, who we are, is perfect as it is. There is no secret recipe; there is no magic formula. It is all as it should be, a perfect and gentle unfolding of your soul. If it feels difficult, it is only because you are out of touch with your true self; you are out of the flow.

When were out of flow, were out of sync with our soul. This creates a feeling of separation that in the moment feels real and true. When we feel separate, we are suffering from the painful illusion that we are unworthy in some way. This is a fallacy, perpetuated by our smaller self, or by what is often called the ego. It can throw us off course and confuse our sense of direction.

Meditation is a direct route to inner harmony, balance, and peace. There are many methods that can take you where you want to go, but meditation is by far the quickest and most precise. Its effects are cumulative and lasting. You can stop meditating for years and pick up right where you left off.

When this life is over, you wont take your possessions, your degrees, or your deeds with you, but you will take the consciousness you have built up from your meditation practice. Through your meditation, your consciousness changes and evolves. You become aware of who you really are. The consciousness you build in this lifetime is your ever-increasing legacy.

This consciousness is who you are.

Through the process of meditation you discover your true goodness. It may take a while, and you may have to wade through doubts and fears at first, but at some moment youll discover there at the core of you, perfectly in place your authentic, worthy, beautiful self.

Anything that says otherwise is the egos doubt, and if theres a devil, this is it. It causes us to confuse ourselves and forget who we really are. When we doubt, we empower fear. Doubt is at the heart of any fear-based decision the decision to not trust, the decision to not be open, the decision to not love. Doubt is the stuff of our insecurity. It is at the core of any act that is less than our best.

Meditation helps you sift through all of this doubt and fear and feel your way home to your true self, to the knowing that you are naturally and inherently