Why I meditate

JUST THINKING AND FEELING

DR. ICHAK ADIZES shares his passion for meditation, and explains why he meditates, how it benefits him in day-to-day life, and the importance of love, which arises from meditation.

Physics tells us that when the Big Bang happened, time and space started, which means that what existed before the Big Bang had no time or space limits. It was infinite. Likewise, love has no time nor space limits. Love is what created everything.

Imagine any act of creation: a musician writing music, a painter painting, or an entrepreneur starting a company. What makes them write music, paint, or start a company is love. They love what they are creating, or they would not do it. Behind all creations is love.

Babies grow stronger with love and are underweight and sickly looking if denied love. All organic systems grow better with love: flowers and trees, not to mention dogs, cats, or horses. Notice how love gives you energy and hate leaves you exhausted? Notice how people in love look younger and people who hate look old? Look at a little baby. When it meets an unknown person, it’s either going to cry or it is going to smile. For few seconds, the baby is watching this foreign person and tries to decide, should I cry, or should I stretch my hands to that person to be hugged? How does a baby decide? It’s sensing: Is there love in the other person or not?

Opening our hearts and spreading love, I believe, is essential if humanity is going to survive. Unless we open our hearts and engage love in our behavior, Nazi Germany will turn out not to have been a fluke of history but a preamble of what is to come: strength and brain with no heart. It is imperative for humanity to work diligently, continuously, and doggedly in opening our hearts and centering love as the driving force in our behavior. And that is where Heartfulness Meditation comes to play a serious role where we focus on our heart and search for light which is infinite, with no space or time limits. We focus on love.

It is imperative for humanity to work diligently, continuously, and doggedly in opening our hearts and centering love as the driving force in our behavior.

In my meditation, I seek the feeling of love spreading through my body. Love yourself and feel love beyond yourself. Eventually you will lose any sensation as if asleep without being asleep. You are nowhere and everywhere. You are now part of infinity.

Heartfulness says we find infinite love in the silence of meditation. Why? Have you ever fallen in love or felt love in a noisy railway station or airport, late for your departure? Do you find love in noisy, deafening music? Probably not. We fall in love when we are at peace, when we are walking on the beach at sunset. When our energy is united into one big core. When there is noise, we get distracted, and distraction disintegrates us. It is an antithesis to love, which is total integration.

Note that Moses found God in the desert. Notice that Buddha was enlightened sitting under a tree in solitude. Mohammed got his insights about God in the Saudi desert where silence reigns. You will not find spiritual inspiration in a noisy airport.

During meditation, there will be temptations to scratch our nose or hand. For instance, to move a leg, or thoughts will cross our minds. These are temptations to take a detour from feeling love. And this reflects the reality of life. It is not easy to love. There are endless temptations to feel rejection, anger, and sometimes even hate.

In Heartfulness Meditation we are allowed to scratch if that is what the body asks for, observe thoughts without getting attached to them, and go promptly back to meditation, to feeling love. In Heartfulness Meditation we are practicing not to allow those tests, those distractions, to ruin our feeling of the infinite, our connection to the sublime.

The second ingredient of Heartfulness is the practice of Cleaning, where we imagine for a few minutes at the end of the day how all the experiences we had that day – experiences that undermine love – evaporate through our backs like vapor. If we don’t expel them every day, they accumulate and develop into negative feelings that displace love.

Practice the routine, and with time it becomes our personality, and we will not need to work to recall the feeling of love anymore. It will be who we are.

We need to free ourselves from shame, from self-judgment, from accusations; we need to love ourselves and from there love all those who God loves, and since He created it all, we aim to love it all too.

The third component of Heartfulness practice is  to constantly remind ourselves to maintain the meditative state throughout the day. To me that means recalling that feeling of love generated during meditation. And if we practice it continually, eventually it will become a routine. Practice the routine, and with time it becomes our personality, and we will not need to work to recall the feeling of love anymore. It will be who we are.

Just thinking and feeling, Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Article by DR. ICHAK ADIZES Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL