Let’s go back to the partly open eye technique – the ‘lions meditation’ – and try another exercise in concentration. The skill of concentration is more easily mastered when you can visually connect to something, an anchor point for the mind – like a magnifying glass gathering and focusing the rays of the sun.

Concentration on a flower

Concentration on the dot

Some Pointers:

• Each time you practice, feel that every moment spent meditating is a golden opportunity to learn and become something very special. Feel each moment of meditation is sacred – you are following an inner pathway that will bring about a great blossoming of spirit. This feeling will give you sincerity, intensity and focus and help you to deeply value the time you have set aside each day.
• In his teachings and writings Sri Chinmoy talks of two other complementary attitudes to enhance our love of meditation. The first is to have a feeling of gratitude(link is external) in our heart when we begin our practice. A special opportunity has come into our life – we are awakening as though from a long sleep and beginning the journey of self–discovery. A feeling of gratitude – to our soul, to God, to life – opens the heart and helps us to cherish our developing practice and to deepen our receptivity to the gifts and benefits of meditation. You can look back at your past, at what you once were, and look forward into your future at what you will become and also feel gratitude. A new world of purpose and happiness is beckoning you. If you believe in God, feel that God is calling you – you are meditating because your soul is responding to a call from a higher world and for this gift you also feel gratitude. Try chanting the word ‘gratitude’ seven times like a mantra before you begin – over time this deceptively simple practice will gradually deepen your meditation experience.
• The second useful attitude Sri Chinmoy(link is external) encourages is the feeling of being like a child. A child’s sincere cry brings the father or mother to him immediately – if you feel helpless like a child and have a child’s simplicity, purity, sincerity, you will be less concerned with technique and self–effort and feel that your way forward, your practice of meditation will all be given to you by the loving parent, God. Meditation is a gift and you bring this gift of silence, stillness, inner peace into your life when you call out with your child’s heart of sincerity, your inner cry.