Meditation awakens us and enables us to experience the present moment and cultivate a deep awareness.

This awakening involves gaining wisdom, understanding the interconnectedness of events and objects and recognising cause and effect.

There are many techniques for meditation that, due to the lack of understanding in the West, have resulted in certain incorrect assumptions about meditation being made. For us meditation is about being yourself and understanding who you are. Meditation helps us to recognise our lives' paths and the continuous unfolding of our lives, moment by moment, and that each moment influences the next. The fact that one moment influences the next motivates us to look within the here and now. In order to assess where we are, we need to take account of our inner and outer bearings and perceive with clarity the decisions we make and the consequent direction our lives take.

We can wake up to ignorant states of mind and wake up to this moment.

A dictionary definition of meditation is given below.

"A serious and sustained reflection or mental contemplation. A continuous application of the mind to the contemplation of some religious truth or mystery, or object of reverence, as a devotional exercise."

The emphasis herein is on the control and conquest of the mind without which we can not tread the path of meditation. However, the mind is subtle and unpredictable.

If one is ignorant of the mind, then one is ignorant of meditation.

Normally our minds are "living" either in the future or the past and being judgemental. As long as the mind does not recognise that it exists in opposites, it is steeped in ignorance, duality and illusion. Whilst the mind exists in this state, we are living in forgetfulness and ignorance. If we consider our lives seriously, we only have this moment. The past has gone, the future is not here. Only here and now are present at any one moment.

We are used to living our lives in a robot-like way: seeing, thinking and doing. This leads to breaking contact with our deeper selves. Carelessly, these moments become periods and these periods become whole lifetimes.

To allow ourselves to be in touch with our deeper selves we need to stop and experience long enough to allow the present moment to sink in, to feel it in our awareness and gain an understanding of it. It is through this knowledge that we can accept the truth of this moment in our life and learn from it in order to move on. We tend to look forward to the future when things will be better or, on the other hand, we are preoccupied with the past when life was better. The truth is that neither the past nor the future is here, you only have now and will always have now.