Blog 261 – Using Meditation and Yoga to Leave The Pit, Part 2 – 25 May 2025

In Blog 260 I talked about the value of yoga as a tool in helping me to meditate and the circumstances in which I began to do yoga.

In this Blog, I will continue to talk about yoga, its usefulness in meditation and how I have used yoga and meditation not just to leave the Pit of Depression, but to stay alive when I should have died.

Although yoga is a set of physical exercises to help with meditation and helping with meditation is the fundamental reason why yoga was invented, yoga is also valuable as a means to physical fitness.

This Blog ignores yoga’s impact on physical fitness.

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I am still alive and writing these Blogs because I learned how to meditate and because I started yoga 10 weeks after I had open heart surgery.

Being able to control the river of chaotic thoughts rushing through my brain meant that when I should have died, I did not die.  When I hovered so very near death, I meditated, used yoga to breathe and I stayed alive when I should have died.  This enabled me to keep living when Margaret needed me more than ever.

If I had not learned at least some yoga, I would not have been able to meditate when my body wanted desperately to stop working.

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Continue to drink these words deeply inside you.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

I am continuing to give you information I have put together over a lifetime because I want every one of you to live a life filled with as much joy as your spirits can cope with – with even more joy on top of that.

I want you to be filled with hope.

I want you to know there is no padlock on what you think is the cell that you think you are locked in.

There is no cell and there is no lock.

Walk away from the cell.  It does not exist.

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This is a photo of me on 16 March 2011 at Kalbari National Park in Western Australia.  I was noticeably overweight in 2011.

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This was Pinnacles National Park in Western Australia on 15 March 2011.  The wind shapes the sandstone rocks into figures like these.  Pinnacles National Park is filled with statues just like these.

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This little lizard (it was not really little at all) was not interested in posing to have a photo taken when I was at Coronation Beach, north of Geraldton in Western Australian on 16 March 2011.

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This was the spectacular view I got of Kalbari National Park in Western Australia on 16 March 2011.  Most of Western Australia is desert and there are few permanent water sources.  The Kalbari National Park is spectacular – and it is also a sanctuary where flies breed in their uncountable millions and try to eat all humans who come anywhere near them.

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Within days of Margaret being diagnosed with fatal, untreatable cancer in July 2020, I started experiencing my own extreme health symptoms .  My symptoms included a vastly swollen stomach together with extreme stomach pain, optical migraines (migraine symptoms but without the headaches) and extreme difficulty in being able to breathe.

I was admitted to hospital on 30 April 2021 and my symptoms were so severe, I know I would have died if I had not been in hospital.  On the evening of Tuesday 4 May my life was especially grim.  By 11:00 pm that evening, my inability to breathe was acute and the stomach bloat had me in agonising pain.

To calm my body, I began slow, methodical walking around the hospital room.  While doing my very slow walking around the tiny hospital room, I listened to meditation music through my headphones, willing myself to remain calm.  I knew that if I panicked, my breathing difficulties would turn from acute to deadly.  While doing my slow walks around the room, I practised my yoga breathing exercises. Somehow I was able to stay calm and keep breathing.

My salvation came when the night duty nurse came into the room.  She nurse immediately put tubes in my nostrils and put me on oxygen.  Every four hours after that she made me get up. sit in a special chair and placed me on a nebuliser, with a mask over my nose and mouth.  The nebuliser contained medication to help open my airways.  I had to breathe through this machine for at least 20 minutes every time she made me use it.

I remained on the oxygen until 11.00 am next day.

At about 6.00 am on the Wednesday, I began to believe I would live.  It had been a terrifying night.

When Margaret visited me on the Wednesday morning, she saw a bent, haggard, old man walking towards her as she came out of the lift.  She did not recognise the old man until I hugged her tightly.

Meditation is the only reason I survived that night.  Without meditation, I would have done what any same person would have done in those circumstances.

I would have panicked.

If I had panicked, I would have died.  Nothing could be more certain.

And if I had not started yoga the year before, I would not have been able to meditate when I knew that I could not breathe and that the Angel of Death was waiting nearby to snatch my life.

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I will tell you more tomorrow.

 

Blog 260 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 1 – 24 May 2025

In Blog 259 I talked about the physical aspects of meditating – how I do it and what things I find useful in helping me slow down the river of thoughts racing through my brain.

In this Blog, I will talk about yoga and why I started yoga

You probably see yoga as an exercise regime, but although yoga is indeed in a practical sense, an exercise regime, yoga is not really an exercise regime.

Yoga is a set of physical exercises designed to help you meditate.

The principal aim of yoga is to provide people with a set of physical exercises that will help them to slow down the river of thoughts that races through their brains.

The most important aspect of yoga is not the physical fitness that you can derive from yoga, although yoga will certainly improve your physical fitness.

The most important aspect of yoga is that it provides a set of exercises which strengthen your ability to focus on the yoga exercises.  By focusing on the yoga exercises, you discover that a great many of the other chaotic thoughts generated by the river of thoughts, disappear.

When you control the river of chaotic thoughts rushing through your brain, you are meditating. 

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Drink this purpose deeply inside you.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

When I set out my purpose, I am trying to tell you something important about me.

I am not trying to sell you anything.  Selling can wait.

This is the 260^th Blog I have written and I have not tried to sell you anything in any of the previous 259 Blogs.

I am giving you information I have put together over a lifetime and I have done this for zero price.

I have done this because I want to give you hope.

I want you to know there is hope and that there is no padlock on what you think is the cell you are locked up in.

There is no padlock and there is no cell.

All you need to do is walk away … and I am trying to show you how to do that.  Follow my steps and walk away.

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Ten years before she cancelled me, Ann was one of my favourite people.  On 7 March 2011 in Western Australia, she was wearing my hat.  Perhaps one day, Ann will stop being frightened by the existence of deadly diseases like cancer, learn how to meditate and walk out of the Pit of Depression.  When she does, she might stop disliking herself and remind those around her of the woman they used to know.

Walk out of the Pit, Ann.  Do it for your sake and for Margaret’s sake.  Stop hating yourself and stop being so frightened.

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This character liked the environment of the Pemberton Tree.  He stayed still long enough for me to take many photos.  This one was taken only a few metres from the Pemberton Tree.

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This is a photo of Preston Beach.  It is adjacent to Yalgorup National Park, to the south of Perth in Western Australia; I took this photo on 12 March 2011

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Another photo of Preston Beach, south of Perth.  The coast of Western Australia has many, many miles of beaches that are all just as unspoiled as this one.

I took this photo on 12 March 2011.

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I had open heart surgery on 20 November 2018.  My surgeon was James Edwards.  After he had used a chain saw to cut through the ribs of my chest and gain access to my heart, Dr Edwards fitted my heart with something called an Annuloplasty Ring.  The ring repaired my heart valve.  My heart valve was leaking and blood that was supposed to be circulating through my body, kept flooding backwards instead of going forward to give me the oxygen I needed to stay alive in the long term.  While he was having a close up look at my heart, Dr Edwards noticed that three of my arteries – pipes that feed blood around the body, had become too narrow, so he also gave me three arterial bypasses.

What is the relevance of my Chain Saw Operation to yoga?

I had my very first yoga class on the first Monday in February 2019 - 4 February 2019.  the class was precisely 10 weeks after I had my open heart surgery.

I was still very sore all over my body.

I had this long wound running down the front of my body and if I sneezed too vigorously – which I did a lot – I was in danger of having bits of me explode all over the inside of my shirt.

I did gentle yoga at that stage because I was barely able to do anything.

I did yoga because someone had told me that it would help me with my meditation.

Why did I so badly want help with my meditation? 

When I was in the Intensive Care Unit for the three nights after the heart surgery, I was in horrendous pain that the pain killers had little impact on.  The only thing that helped me stay alive in ICU was meditation.  I would struggle my way through the very long hours of darkness by meditating.

No one can feel your pain except you.  I was so very alone.

Only you have the ability to make the pain recede into a bottomless drain hole leading into the next universe.

I had to make the pain disappear down the drain hole into the next universe.

If I did not succeed in making the pain go down the drain, I was going to die.

And I definitely did not want to die.

I had been offered the option of dying during the operation but rejected it.  I somehow knew a semi-trailer load of awfulness was heading straight down the highway right at Margaret and I could not let her face it alone. 

So I meditated the pain down the drain hole to stay alive.

I stayed alive because Margaret was going to need me very, very soon.

When I got the chance to learn yoga and meditate better, I grabbed it.

Yoga meant I could get better quicker, and be stronger faster.

I had to get better fast, because when I was being offered an easy death during the operation, I was given some hints about what was in store for Margaret.

She was going to REALLY need me soon.

Very soon after I started yoga, I became grateful that I had started.

The sh*t sandwiches soon started flying everywhere.

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I will tell you more tomorrow, mostly about yoga and meditation.

 

Blog 259 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 5 – 23 May 2025

In Blog 258 I talked about the purpose of listening to music as a means of enabling you to stop being trapped by the never ending river of thoughts racing through your brain.

If you want to get out of the pit of Depression, you must gain control over your own thoughts.  The river of chaotic thoughts must be brought under your own control – and I fully realise this is not easy.

Although the only vehicle in existence that has the power to help you escape the Pit is you, you definitely have all of the skills necessary to achieve your own great escape.  You have probably been told the exact opposite of this for most of your life, but you are a genuine champion – every human being is a champion.

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I will again repeat my purpose.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

You are the only hero in the central position in your own life and you hold within yourself, the only key in the whole universe that will ever unlock your exit from the Pit.  Use it.

This is literal truth.

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The creatures who share this world with us are startlingly intelligent and without them, the world would be such a dismal place.  This magpie paid me a visit on 13 March 2011 when I was in Western Australia.

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This is what the Ceduna foreshore looked like at sunset on 1 March 2011.  I was travelling to Western Australia and stayed in Ceduna.

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This is a stretch of the South Australian section of the Nullabor Plain as on 4 March 2011.  Nullabor comes from two Latin words; “null” means zero and “abor” means tree.  The Nullabor Plain definitely has no trees.  I took this photo while the car was speeding down the highway.

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 Look carefully and you will see someone scaling this tree by using stakes that were put into the tree trunk in a spiral all the way up to the top.  This tree is located in Pemberton, Western Australia.  Fire watchers used to scale it and keep watch for bushfires.  The Pemberton Tree is so high that on cloudy days, it goes through the cloud cover.  I was half way up the Pemberton tree in 1975 when it started to rain heavily.  That was frightening because it was just as dangerous to try and get down as it was to keep going up.  I steeled my courage and kept going up through the rain clouds.

I took this photo on 7 March 2011 at Pemberton, Western Australia.

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The beach at Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia on 12 March 2011.  This was as populated as the beach ever got that day and of course it did look much better than shown in my photo.

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How should you go about meditating?

Until you are used to the process of meditating, try and find somewhere that is relaxing.

Sit in a chair, sit on the floor; sit at the top of the Pemberton Tree - sit anywhere you are comfortable.

Find yourself a comfortable place to sit.  I use a cane armchair, but if you are comfortable sitting cross legged – for me that is impossible – then try that until your body tells you it hurts too much.

It is not necessary to close your eyes, but I always do.  It is hard enough to get rid of the rubbish in your head without giving permission for additional rubbish to get inside you by having your eyes open. 

I have read books where experienced meditators have said it is not necessary to close your eyes when meditating.  I know this is factually true, but when you start something for the first time, any distraction can completely eliminate your ability to learn.  Let the genius meditators leave their eyes open.

I always close my eyes when meditating and I have been meditating since 2014 – 11 years as at today’s date.

Try not to meditate in a noisy place.  The noise will distract you.

I found that the more comfortable the environment, the better I was able to get rid of the river of thoughts.

Once I was relaxed and “starting” to meditate, I initially played a cd on a music player.  That did not really help much.  Because the music was coming from an outside source, I focused too much on listening to the music.

I discovered that if I listen to music through headphones, I am more successful in getting the music to fade into the background while I carefully tried to eliminate the distractions rolling around in my own mind.

Can you actually empty your brain of all thoughts?

Maybe meditation saints can do this.  I cannot eliminate all thoughts, but I can stop the great river of thoughts from continuing to be a river.  I am very happy if I can slow the river down to a slow moving stream.  You can definitely slow the river down.

Do not beat yourself up just because you are not able to achieve what you think might be perfection.

The major point of meditation is to enable us to accept ourselves just as we are.

A beautiful hearted so called “idiot” is a much more pleasant person to meet that a mean spirited “genius”.

I will tell you more tomorrow.

 

Blog 258 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 4 – 21 May 2025

I finished Blog 257 with these words.

The music is only an efficient tool to help you eliminate clutter from your brain.  You need to eliminate the clutter because the clutter is the reason why you are still in the Pit.  Toss the clutter into the rubbish bin and the way out of the Pit becomes so much clearer. If you simply get lost in listening to beautiful music, this gives you the same effect as asking the doctor for some pills.  It dulls the pain, but the muted pain stays with you forever. If you simply listen to beautiful music without getting rid of the mental clutter, you are just rearranging the furniture in your room in the Pit to make the room more user friendly – but the room remains located in the centre of the Pit. Don’t use the music to rearrange the furniture in the Pit. Use the music for its intended purpose – getting rid of the mad mess of thoughts in your head so you can walk away from the Pit and never go back.

I am serious when I say that you must avoid the attractive trap of avoiding your genuine escape from the Pit by thinking you can escape just by listening to wonderful music.

The wonderful music will certainly make you feel better while you are listening to it, and for a short while after it has finished, but music is not your escape vehicle.

The only escape vehicle that will ever exist is a hero called YOU.

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I keep repeating my purpose.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

You are the hero and you hold within yourself, the only key in the whole universe that will ever unlock your exit from the Pit.

That is not a fantasy but the literal truth.

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Photo of me next to the 4 wheel drive that got me into the camp at the base of Mount Ragged on 10 April 2011.

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I took this photo on 8 April 2011 when I camped at Cape Arid National Park on the eastern coast of Western Australia.  There is no phone reception and no services of any kind; bring your own water, food and everything else.  If you do not bring everything you will need, there is a good chance you will die.

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This is the track that eventually brought me to the Mount Ragged campsite on 10 April 2011.

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Contrast the wild ruggedness of the dirt track I drove along, with the fragility of this glorious butterfly!

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Dawn on 11 April 2011 at the Mount Ragged campsite.  Dawn actually looked so much better than shown in my photo.

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I camped in a bush camp at the bottom of Mount Ragged on 11 April 2011.  The nearest living human being was no closer than 200 kilometres away.  If you get into trouble in this area, it is not possible to phone a friend.  If you break a leg climbing Mount Ragged, you will have to crawl down the mountain; even if you do crawl down the mountain, you will probably die.

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In case you did not completely understand what I have been saying, I will repeat myself.  The purpose of listening to the beautiful music is to enable you to develop the ability to focus your thoughts.  If you focus your thoughts on the music, this will automatically drive the usual mental clutter out of your brain.  The usual mental clutter is what holds us in the Pit.

When you are able to focus on music which is beautiful but repetitious, you are on the way to being able to focus your thoughts by consciously excluding things that bring your spirit down.  This is why I have described musica as a tool and not as the end result.  You train yourself to control the thoughts going through you head in a similar way to how you train yourself to be a good cricket or basketball or football player – practice, practice and yet more practice is needed.

You are no more likely to become a master of your thoughts in a short time than any professional sportsperson is likely to master a sport in a short time.  To conquer the flow of rubbish constantly flowing through your brain, you must practise until you acquire the necessary skill.

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Here are some more chant artists that I have found helpful.  Some chant artists focus on the repletion of the chants rather than on making the chants sound exceptionally beautiful.  This is because these artists want to help you master the skills of meditation in preference to making gorgeous sounding music.  You should not assume that the music is boring.  The intent is to enable you to concentrate on the chant and drive the rubbish out of your head.

·         Kamini Natarajan (https://www.kaminimusic.com):

o   Chants for Meditation.

o   Chants for Meditation 2.

o   Shiva Meditation.

·         Ajeet Kaur (https://www.ajeetmusic.com)

o   Haseya.

o   At the Temple Door.

·         Dechen Shak Dagsay (https://www.dechen-shak.com):

o   Day Tomorrow

o   Jewel, Joyful Heart Through Precious Tibetan Mantras

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Tomorrow, I will tell you more about how to meditate.

 Blog 257 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 3 – 20 May 2025

You are asking “Am I really saying I should sit down somewhere and do nothing and this will get rid of my depression?”

I can hear you saying this is crazy.

It may sound crazy, but if you REALLY want to get out of the Pit of Despair instead of wallow in it, you – and no one else – are the only one who can get you out.  You and no one else are the only one who can get you out.

If you convince yourself that you can walk away from the Pit … if only

·         You had a loving husband to take care of you

·         You had a loving wife to take care of you

·         Your friends and family really understood what you are going through

·         You had another gorgeous dog just like Rufus

You are deluding yourself.

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I keep telling you my purpose.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

Because I want to give you some hope and not another spoonful of bullsh*t, I am indeed telling you that meditation is one of the tools you need to develop if you are to ever get out of the Pit.

And one other thing is important.  If you REALLY want to get out of the Pit, you must have commitment to yourself.  You are the only one who can cure you of the despair gripping your whole system.

You might think it is easier to ask your doctor to give you some pills, and it will seem easier for a bit, but the pills cannot actually get you out of the Pit. 

Your doctor will tell you this if you ask. 

The pills can dull the pain, but the pain will never leave you.

If you meditate, you will eventually get rid of the pain … forever … and it will not ever come back.

Hard as it may seem, meditation will guarantee you an exit from the Pit, and it gets easier as you keep at it.

But meditation takes time … just as it takes time to get to that attractive holiday destination you always yearned for. 

Buckle up and get ready for the journey!

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In Blog 256, I outlined the benefits of binaural beats to scramble up the thoughts processes and give you an opportunity to regain control of your river of thoughts.

So what do you do once you get sick of the binaural beats - and you will?

Once you have some control over the chaos of thoughts running wildly through your head, you can start to have some fun while meditating.

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Photo of me framed by one of the enormous karri trees in the forests of south west Western Australia; photo taken 5 April 2011; back then, I had a belly that was far too big.

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Cape Leeuwin coast in the south west of Western Australia on 4 April 2011.  It is so untamed! 

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Mighty Karri tree in the south west of Western Australia on 5 April 2011.  I am astonished that they used to cut these magnificent trees down so they could use the timber for better things than just looking wonderful as the trees were in the ground.

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More of the giant forest of karri trees from south west Western Australia.

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Once the binaural beats had outlived their usefulness, I discovered that if I listened to sweet, relaxing music, it helped eliminate a large part of the useless thought clutter running through my head.

I did not find any benefit listening to sounds of the rain dripping down in the rainforest or similar sounds.

What I discovered through trial and error was that if I listened to beautiful music that kept repeating the same simple set of words, my brain was able to begin focusing on the music.  The more I focused on the music, the less useless thought clutter ran through my head.  I got better at meditating!

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In addition to being very useful in helping reduce the thought clutter in your head, listening to beautiful music has a big advantage over binaural beats – you can actually enjoy the music while you are meditating.

The major benefit of chant music is that the same thing is repeated continuously in the music.  Your brain tunes in to the repeating pattern and this pushes out the rubbish that continually invades all of our brains.

There is a vast range of chant singers that you can choose from and many of them – probably most - produce beautiful music.  Soon after I started to teach myself to meditate, I discovered these chant singers.  They are so good that I still listen to them.

·         Carrie Grossman (https://www.carriegmusic.com):

o   Soma Bandhu – Friend of the Moon;

o   The Ram Sessions;

o   Homeward

·         Jai Jagdeesh (https://www.jaijagdeesh.com)

o   I am Thine

·         Tsering Cho (no website):

o   devotion

·         Yoko (https://www.yokodharma.com   

o   Treasury of Jewels

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If you think the main aim in listening to relaxing music is to allow you to relax and feel good about the music, you are wrong.

The music is only an efficient tool to help you eliminate clutter from your brain.  You need to eliminate the clutter because the clutter is the reason why you are still in the Pit.  Toss the clutter into the rubbish bin and the way out of the Pit becomes so much clearer.

If you simply get lost in listening to beautiful music, this gives you the same effect as asking the doctor for some pills.  It dulls the pain, but the muted pain stays with you forever.

If you simply listen to beautiful music without getting rid of the mental clutter, you are just rearranging the furniture in you room in the Pit to make the room more user friendly – but the room is remains located right in the centre of the Pit.

Don’t use the music to rearrange the furniture in the Pit.

Use the music for its intended purpose – getting rid of the mad mess of thoughts in your head so you can walk away from the Pit and never go back.

You can do it.

Give it a try.

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Tomorrow I will tell you more about the practical tools I use to help me leave the Pit of Despair.

 

 

Blog 256 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 2 – 19 May 2025

 

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

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Blog 255 finished with these words.

Meditation meant I was able to keep driving Margaret to her appointments and medical treatments; it helped me be firm enough to insist that she had to be seen in A & E departments even though the staff kept insisting they were full.  Meditation gave me the courage to visit Margaret every day when she was in hospital. Meditation enabled me to accept that although her death was unstoppable, I could shower her with love and care during every moment we had before her body was conquered.

 

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Photo of me at the top of Mount Brown on 25 March 2005.  At 964 metres, Mount Brown is the highest mountain in South Australia.

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 I took this photo on 22 March 2005 during the same trek where I climbed Mount Brown.  This is a view of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.  Handled with care, sheep can be raised in this country, but the rainfall is too low for any crop growing.

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This is the view from the top of Mount Brown on 22 March 2005.  It was a hard climb getting there, but it was worth the effort.  I was lucky enough to get phone reception at the top and was able to ring Margaret and boast about how clever I had been in getting there.

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You are probably sick of hearing me say this, but I really am proud of you and I hope you realise how important you are.  You have the strength to leave the Pit.  Give meditation a try.  It is a useful tool.  It helped me a lot at a time when no other help was ever going to come. 

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I promised to tell you about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.

I will start with a tool that I tried to use and failed miserably with.

When I started teaching myself how to meditate, I started using guided meditations.  Surely at least some of the people putting out guided meditations knew what they were doing; even if most of the guided meditation teachers were useless, surely some of them would work.

I found not one of the guided meditations I tried was of any help to me at all.  I eventually worked out that this was because of a quirk of my brain that most people do not have – a quirk that I did not realise existed.

Every guided meditation that I have tried told me to visualise or imagine a scene in my head.  Until I started learning to meditate, whenever I was asked to imagine or visualise something, I thought that everyone in the world did what I did.  If the guided meditation told me to visualise I was in a forest for example, I NEVER saw a picture of a forest in my head.  I got (at best) the image of the word “Forest” – just as I have typed it here.  So when I was asked to visualise a forest, with a path leading down to the shore of a lake where fishes were jumping and the sun was shining over the water with a wise man or woman sitting in a chair, I got a long and confusing string of words jumping around in my head.

I wondered how a long string of words jumping around in my head was supposed to help me, so I asked Margaret what happened in her head when she was asked to visualise something such as a forest path.  I was shocked when she told me that she actually saw a picture in her head of a forest path.  Until then, it had never occurred to me that when people were asked to “visualise” most people actually saw pictures of the things they were visualising.

Once I knew I was wired differently from most other people – at least in relation to visualising – I did a google search and found there is a label for people like me – “Aphantasia” is the label.  Wiki says “Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images.”

So because I cannot visualise, using guided meditation was of no use to me in learning how to meditate.

If you are like me and cannot visualise, you will probably find guided meditations are not helpful.

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Because I have loved music all my life, I decided to try music.

Although listening calming music certainly helped slow down the great river of chaotic thoughts in my brain, this did not enable me to get rid of the chaos in the river of thoughts.  The river of chaos was just too strong.

The first tool I tried that actually helped me really slow down the chaos, was something called binaural beats.  Binaural beats are when two different tones are played in each ear.  Binaural tones only work if you use headphones.  For some reason, I found that if I listened to binaural tones, this genuinely disrupted the waves of chaotic thoughts in my head.  Once the waves had been disrupted, I was much more successful in learning how to really get rid of the chaos.

I no longer use binaural beats because I don’t need them.  When you start meditating, you may find them useful, but don’t get sucked in by the sales pitch. One binaural beat sounds just like every other binaural beat and there is no musical quality to them that I can detect.  Binaural beats are strictly a tool that helped me disrupt my thoughts enough so that I was able to learn how to meditate.

Some of the binaural beats I used most often when I started learning to meditate were these.

·         Jurgen Ziewe created two binaural beats albums that he gave away for free from his website https://www.multidimensionalman.com   They helped me

·         Two young men from Adelaide published some useful binaural beats under the name Sacred Resonance – https://www.sacredresonance.com.au   They also helped me.

In a practical sense, the binaural beats are all the same and once you have one or two, getting more is unlikely to be any more helpful than using the ones you already have.  Some websites charge far too much for what is a fairly uncomplicated product, so you can afford to be choosy.

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Tomorrow I will tell you more about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.

 

 

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

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Blog 254 finished with these words.

When Margaret was so very ill, meditation enabled me to accept that there was nothing I could do except always be there for her whenever she needed me.  The best solution to Margaret’s illness was for me to accept that there was no solution.  She was dying and I needed to ensure I did everything thing I could to ease her pain. And that is what I did.

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I like to bushwalk with a backpack on my back and trek through wild places.  This was me on 22 September 2010 at Wilpena Pound in South Australia’s astonishing Flinders Ranges.

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I also took this photo on 22 September 2010 when I was in the Flinders Ranges.  Margaret could never understand why I liked to walk for miles, sleep on the ground in a sleeping bag, and then carry a backpack for yet more miles before again sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag.  What can I say?  You either understand because you do it, or you will never understand because you do not do it.   I do it because it makes me feel more alive. 

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I took this photo on 5 March 2011 when I was camping in Ceduna in South Australia.  If you want to see glorious sunrises like this one, you have to be up and about before dawn.  If you do this, the reward is unbelievably uplifting.

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I was completely proud of you.  I hope you realise how important you are.  Without you, the universe would not know how to exist.

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So how on earth can meditation help you get out of the Pit?  The first thing you will notice if you try meditation is that you will fall asleep.  You heard me, meditation will send you to sleep; as soon as you slow down that great river of your thoughts, your body will immediately say it is time to nod off.  Don’t panic, that is actually a good sign!  You have slowed yourself down enough for your body to be able to say “Thank goodness, at last I can get a rest”.

Don’t give up just because you get sleepy.  If you immediately fall asleep and wake up wondering what has happened, this means that you have pushed yourself so hard that you were exhausted.  When you are exhausted, you need rest.  Falling asleep when you are meditating is a sign that the process is working.  Just imagine, you have slowed down the great waterfall of thoughts running through your mind; you have done it so much that your exhausted body is finally able to get the rest that it so desperately needs.   Resist the sleepiness, but do not panic if the sleep wins the struggle.

The essence of meditation is to accept what is happening and not be utterly panicked by it.  Accept that your diet at the moment sonsists only of sh*t sandwiches.  If you are panicked by having to eat all the sh*t sandwiches, you will not be able to clear your thoughts enough to be able to work out how to lay hands of genuine nutrition to replace the sh*t sandwiches.

In my experience, the major benefit of meditation is to allow my brain which is working overtime all the time, to slow down.

It may sound crazy, but when you are surrounded by chaos, the best way to tame the chaos is to slow your thoughts down.  If you can slow your thoughts down, your ability to precisely identify what is happening, will improve greatly.  Once you identify precisely what is happening, the best course of action will often be obvious.

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I was with Margaret when the doctor told us that she had an untreatable cancer and that she would die in less than 5 months.  The news was devastating.  Surprise, surprise, I panicked.  Margaret was had an illness that the doctors could not cure.  She was dying and I wanted to stay alive.

When we got home, I meditated.  By that stage, I had been meditating for six years, so I was much better at it than I had been when I started.  The great river of crazy thoughts became fifteen River Amazons - all rushing madly through my head.  My wife was dying, I did not want her to die, what could I do … you know the sort of stuff in the crazy, horrible dance that went through my head.

Eventually, the Amazons started to settle.  

There was nothing I could do to cure Margaret of the cancer … nothing at all.  

The only thing I could do was to make sure that whenever she needed me, I would be there for her.  If I fell into a crazy panic of despair, Margaret would still have untreatable cancer, and she would know that I was a useless donkey who could not be relied on to help her with her daily struggle to stay alive in the time left to her.

I swallowed the sh*t sandwich of Margaret’s untreatable cancer – just as Margaret did.

If you think meditation is a miracle cure for anything, you will be very disappointed.  Meditation is not a miracle cure.  But it did help me swallow a continuous diet of sh*t sandwiches and help Margaret in every possible way on her journey into the next world.

Meditation meant I was able to keep driving Margaret to her appointments and treatments; it helped me insist that she had to be seen in A & E departments even though the staff kept insisting A & E was full.  Meditation gave me the courage to visit Margaret every day when she was in hospital.  Meditation gave me the courage to make sure I knew exactly what Margaret wanted me to do when the end of her life was close.  Meditation gave me the courage to tell the doctors to turn the machines off and let her die when only the machines were keeping her alive. 

Meditation enabled me to accept that although her death was unstoppable, I could shower her with my love and care before the cancer conquered her body.

Meditation is not a miracle cure, but it is an effective survival tool.

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Tomorrow, I will tell you more about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.