Silent Meditation Retreat Benefits: Expanding creativity, peacefulness, self-realization, service to others and being your own best friend.
Via Dr. Sid Jordan | April 12, 2015
Expanding Creative Potential and Peaceful Moments
Whether you are an experienced or beginning meditator your can benefit from a more intensive period of silent meditation to quiet the mind and reset your heart felt priorities. We need to remember that silent meditative or contemplative moments have been a natural part of our lives on nature walks, gardening, or sitting quietly somewhere in nature or on our porch. These moments of reflection in nature or in our morning shower are often punctuated with insights into issues we have been intensely pondering for some period of time. In these slower paced and quieter moments a needed solution spontaneously appears. Imagine these moments of insight being multiplied by days devoted to silent meditation. Cutting through the minds chatter in extended silent meditations we discover that just below the surface of our busy lives and thoughts there is a clear and peaceful mind and heart that offers creative and clear directions. With disciplined effort we can return repeatedly to this peaceful abode for guidance.
Self Realization and Service to Others
Learning to deepen this process of silent meditation in a group is easier that meditating alone. The collective resonance of tuning into our stream of intuition that lies hidden in the cave of silence gives us access to our intuition and creative energies. This creativity and self-awareness connects us with our deeper selves and others. That creative potential becomes more personally owned when we realize that meditation to achieve self-realization and service to others are complementary. One Hasidic saint reminds us that one will not attain salvation without taking others with us towards salvation. We are like a group of pilgrims on a journey towards our goal. When one of us encounters obstacles on the journey we stop and help our fellow pilgrim and then all continue together on our journey. One participant at the end of a silent retreat remarked, “ I got to know my fellow silent retreaters better than I would have if we had talked to one another. I felt a strong support and bond with one another.” We learn in silence that our simple and attentive “personal presence” is one of our greatest gifts to one another.
Being your own best friend
Knowing where we are in moving toward realizing our true potential is not easy to evaluate in the midst of the buzzing confusion of everyday life. Silent meditation offers us an opportunity to witness and calm our emotions and identify more with our positive core self. When we begin to quiet the self critic and experience gratitude for all of the things that are going well for us, even in difficult times, we begin to have a growing appreciation of our strengths and gifts. We then become more gentle and patient with ourselves. This is the beginning of becoming our own best friend. As our meditation deepens we start to feel that this “best friend” is none other than our own true self, our intuition or higher self. This is the secret honey knowledge that spiritual aspirants discover, that our “higher self” or our own “best friend” is guiding us from the core of our hearts and minds. This inner best friend revealed in meditation coupled with the support of our outer best friends give us the power to fulfill our potential for a life of self-realization and service to others.
As a clinical psychologist, Dr. Sid Jordan taught psychotherapy and directed mental health, alcohol and drug services while in the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, SC. from 1969-1993. He began his practices of yoga and meditation in 1971 pursuing the integration of yoga and psychology in his teaching and clinical practices. In 1997 he trained as a yoga and meditation teacher in India applying the tantric yoga teachings of Shrii Shrii Anandamurti the preceptor of Ananda Marga.
Currently he is Director of the Prama Institute where he teaches yoga psychology and spiritual practices. At the Prama Wellness Center he offers yoga therapy and stress management to individuals and groups. He continues to offer his 40 years of experience and teaching of yoga psychology, philosophy and practices to audiences worldwide.
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