Spiritual Meditation; Do I have to Belief?

Do I have to belief in God to be able to gain benefits from meditation? Is meditation per definition a practice that involves religion or a belief system? Is it always a spiritual meditation?

There is a lot of confusion around this area and in this article we hope to clear some of the misconceptions and beliefs about meditation out of the way.

The practice of going within is frequently referred to as a spiritual meditation.

Meditation means going within. And our true essence is called spirit. You don’t have to be on a spiritual path, or even believe in God, to receive assistance from your meditation work and to connect to spirit within. In fact it is concepts and beliefs that are often the main obstacles one encounters when going within.

There are meditators that are agnostics or atheists, they do not belief in God and find great benefits from their practice. People with many different cultural and religious backgrounds practice meditation and there is no conflict with their current religious beliefs.

Meditation is universal and an ancient practice that has the ability to bring  all nations, religions and different faiths together. Meditation is truly for everyone. It is there to enrich anyone's life.

It’s better to think not from the perspective of,

“what is the right thing to believe about meditation, or God or the universe––”

... but more like,

“what is it that I can understand about the simple practice of going within?”

Usually, spiritual  meditation is a practice which stems from a spiritual belief system that instructs all people to do the same thing all the time in meditation – such as witnessing, removing all thoughts, breathing, chanting, being still, and so on. This type of practice is often referred to as a “blanket process.”

Of course people can make great strides by using a blanket process, but eventually many become stuck and lost in the process itself. Often people try to do the same spiritual practices or techniques all the time to become self-realized and to find truth. Thus they become attached to the process itself and are not open to other avenues that may be more helpful at different points on their path.

For instance, a popular spiritual meditation discipline is to “witness with awareness,” which is a helpful and often necessary meditation discipline for a person to do at some point, but it will not help the person when they need to do something else in meditation to unblock and let go of deep-seated repressed emotions. Similarly, always using the technique of trying to “detach from all thoughts and emotions” puts limits on your experience in meditation. For example, it leaves little, if any, room for feeling God’s unconditional love. In addition, detaching from thought does not help you access higher intelligence.

These understandings regarding the use of blanket processes are given in the event it may help some of you understand a point or two about meditation – and spiritual life in general – that you may have long sensed to be true, but perhaps could not put your finger on.

I hope this article on spiritual meditation cleared up one of the many misconceptions and myths about meditation.

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