Can Christians benefit from meditation?

Can Christians benefit from meditation?

While Christianity offers prayer primarily as a path to “transcendence,” Eastern spiritual traditions offer meditation. Both calm the mind and expand it beyond everyday limits.

Christian theology also includes meditation as a form of contemplative prayer that reflects on God's revelations in the Bible.

Can Christians practice eastern yoga and meditation to use the physical advantages that they offer, such as deep relaxation, better health and anti-aging as well as spiritual growth?

Deepak Chopra offers sage advice on how to transform your life from a Christian perspective in his novel Jesus. Although many Christians may not agree with his fictional account of Jesus' lost years before his ministry began, they can gain new insight from the book's reader's guide to "Jesus and the Path to Enlightenment."

Chopra writes that Jesus was the product of transformation and that he wanted others to be transformed too, giving up unloving, violent, selfish and narrow-minded attitudes and giving only love and peace to the world. He describes how all of Jesus' teachings served one goal: to find the way back home to unity with God. Not so different from chakra meditation, which has been practiced for over 5,000 years - we move from the material plane, starting with the root chakra, and working our way up to unity by opening the crown chakra.

Deepak Chopra's explanation is that Jesus taught how to find the source of all God's qualities in themselves and ultimately embodies them. Working on the chakras will help you embody these qualities ... what it does in harmony with Christ's awareness.

Here is a wonderful meditation about the heart chakra: sit down calmly and focus on the middle of your chest, concentrate on your heart. Gently bring your attention back when emotions, sensations, feelings or pictures appear. Hidden memories will reappear; Incovered emotions will flow. Experience will soon change if you contact the heart as the center of tenderness and love. If you move towards silence, the door opens for an invisible presence. The more you sit with it, the more it begins to express the characteristics of God, such as love and tenderness, strength and strength.

For a guided meditation on all seven major chakras, or energy centers, of the body up to the spiritual or crown chakra, try this Chakra meditation.