Creating a Meditative Environment

Charles Shahar offers various suggestions conducive to making your meditation practice intense and fruitful

- Charles Shahar

Part of the practice of meditation involves cultivating an environment where the mind can enjoy a sense of tranquillity. For instance, I don’t often engage in meditation while riding in a subway or visiting the local gym. There is obviously something about these places that doesn’t inspire me to sit down, close my eyes, and transcend the worldly plane. It is partly the physical noise there, but also the fabric of the subtle field in these places has a harsh and unsettled quality.

In my living room where I practise meditation, I have cultivated a certain energy that I would describe as ‘blown.’ People feel it as soon as they walk in. In fact, they usually don‘t wish to leave and end up reclining on some pillows with dreamy looks on their faces. What is it about this atmosphere that attracts them so much? It is certainly a sense of bliss. This bliss is woven into the fabric of the subtle field there.

I have lived in meditation communities, where the energy is intensely spiritual. People who meditate regularly build a certain atmosphere that is unlike almost any other on earth. The space around them seems to sparkle or shimmer. One simply has to close their eyes in such a place and the consciousness will be transported to states beyond the mind field.

The fact is that you don‘t have to go to a temple or church, or live in a spiritual commune, to experience a meditative atmosphere. By taking certain steps, you can nurture such a quality in your own home. Every time you walk into such a place, you will notice a stillness, and the more meditation that is practised there, the more a calmness will pervade the air.