Ethics – Integration – The Meditation

Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 8:00 am.
by pre.

This week we present our final walking meditation, a short guided walk in which you’ll direct your thoughts towards improving your ability to empathise with others, to better interpret their signals to enable you to feel what they are feeling, and understand what they are thinking.

As usual this lap, you should listen to it while strolling around your neighbourhood, whether in the journey to work or a short constitutional stroll after dinner. The important thing is to have the meditation playing in your ears, a relaxed smile and gait, and allow your mind to be directed by the voice over as you listen and roam.

In doing this meditation you will stretch your neural structures, encouraging them to grow new pathways, form new connections, to improve your basic gut instinct understanding of how people are minded, what they think and how they will behave. Not just in an book-reading intellectual way, but in a visceral and vivid way, almost a new sense added to your perceptions.

The Meditation

After the usual minute or so of introduction and relaxation, you’ll look around to see if there are any people nearby. If so you’ll concentrate on them for a moment, and if not then you’ll just remember some meeting recently and concentrate on that.

You’ll try to imagine their mannerisms, their gait, and imagine yourself copying it. Maybe even actually changing your stride or posture to match theirs, trying to see yourself literally in their position.

You’ll imagine their voice, concentrate on it, hear it running through your head as though you were saying it, doing an internal impression of them, forcing your mind to take the same kinds of paths their mind does.

Likewise with their thoughts, the actual words they use, you’ll imagine them in your mouth, as your own words, straining to see the world from their point of view, to become them as much as you can, to think as they think, feel the emotions that they feel.

After a few minutes of this you’ll try to see your own individual identity alongside you, as you play at being this other person. You’ll learn to pay attention to either, to be either, to experience your life as yourself, and simultaneously as this other.

You’ll pay close attention to the feelings and emotions this brings up, how it feels to empathise, what a sense of empathy feels like, stretching your perception, gaining new skills.

Of course the whole meditation is, as usual, loaded with suggestions that you’re improving, that you’ll practice these skills more often both listening to the meditation and in general life while actually interacting with others.

Next Week

This meditation marks the end of our third lap around the spiral. Next week we’ll return to Transcendence in general, the centre of the spiral, the crux of the journey.

Guided Meditation File 33 – Ethics – Empathy
Backing Music “Move To The Groove” By Solar System
Download Meditation Download Backing Music Visit Artist's Site Read Articles