AMI Meditation: Transforming Thought Power

During the practice of seated AMI Meditation, you ask your mind to let go of its many attachments, distractions and the passing thoughts and associations of your normal waking experience. You do this not by attempting to stop or repress your thoughts, but by encouraging the mind to honor, witness and lovingly sacrifice the distracting thoughts, and compassionately bring the mind back to the mantra. This continuous, internal focus of attention stills and rests the mind by allowing it to cease its habitual and often stressful and poisonous mental processes.

By practicing the mantra-based AMI Meditation every day, you’ll quickly become aware that the mind begins at an active level of thinking. Then, as the meditation continues and deepens to a one-pointed focus of attention, you’ll experience more quiet and refined levels of thinking.

According to the science of Mind/Body Medicine, each of these states of “excitation” of the mind corresponds to a state of excitation of physiology. As your meditation practice deepens, the mind and the mantra increasingly slow down and become one. In that timeless presence of oneness, Consciousness rests in the fullness and bliss of silence, and the mind increasingly transcends its everyday active thinking process and instead experiences a least excited state of mind.

Because our mind and body are two aspects of the same process, the meditator then experiences a least excited state of physiology. This stillness of mind and body is what facilitates greater access to healing, creative energy throughout the entire mind/body/sense complex.

As when listening to a beautiful concert, in meditation you are fully alert, but you are not aware of yourself. As your capacity to witness your thoughts is developed, meditation encourages the mind to slow down its customary chatter by surrendering its persistent tendencies to solve problems, analyze, and entertain memories of the past or concerns for hypothetical situations in the future. The practice of AMI Meditation does not encourage the mind to wander aimlessly, nor to engage in some fascinating internal dialogue. AMI Meditation is simply a silent, effortless, one-pointed focus of attention and awareness.

The skills you gain in seated meditation—to mindfully witness and transform the power of your thoughts, desires and emotions—can then be employed in all your relationships through the practice of meditation-in-action. Instead of always reacting impulsively to your thoughts, desires and emotions, to fears (worry), anger and desires, you learn to observe and transform their inherent power into thoughts, words and deeds that enable you to experience greater health, happiness, creativity and contentment.

For individuals recovering from surgery or an emotional ordeal, AMI Meditation is profoundly therapeutic. It helps relax muscle tension and the autonomic nervous system, and it facilitates freedom from mental stress. Individuals who meditate attain a tranquility of mind that enhances the immune system by limiting the mind’s reaction to worry, anxiety and burnout.

After just a few days of sincere efforts, your AMI Meditation practice will begin to establish new, healthy habit patterns. These skills increase individual will power and help you make constructive choices in life. Sound decisions concerning a beneficial diet, daily exercise, diaphragmatic breathing and lifestyle choices all become possible when the mind is no longer controlled by unloving, unconscious habits.

In life, everything is constantly changing, and yet the habits of the mind resist that change. To facilitate positive change, the entire science of Yoga serves one simple goal: to know the true Higher Self in every circumstance and relationship. Increasingly learning to know your Higher Self on all grades, levels and degrees, inevitably introduces you to the intuitive wisdom of Consciousness at the core of your being, and prepares you to make reliably beneficial choices.

Sigmund Freud, noted neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, admitted that the ideal of psychoanalysis is to bring an individual from painful neurosis to “ordinary unhappiness.” In order to end the stress, burnout and dis-ease of daily modern life, we must begin the earnest exploration of the vast frontier that lies beyond the limitations of our everyday thinking process. To escape Freud’s “ordinary unhappiness” and find true joy and contentment, we must acknowledge and serve the wisdom of our spiritual center by learning to steward the power of our thoughts, desires and emotions.

The Heart and Science of Yoga Foundation Course curriculum is an empowering self-care program for a happy, healthy, joyful life. It is a time-honored system of holistic practices and techniques that improve physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. And the only two requirements for benefitting from its use are your own determination and earnestness.

Meet the author