Matrix Meditations: A 16-week Program for Developing the Mind-Heart Connection

by Victor Daniels, Kooch N. Daniels

Overview

65 dynamic meditation techniques for manifesting your desires and multiplying the power of your mind

• Contains meditation practices from both Eastern and Western traditions

• Includes proven techniques for increasing mental clarity, replacing negative behaviors that have become habits, and realizing your desires

Matrix Meditations offers dynamic meditation practices derived from both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions to develop intuition, manifest desires, and empower the self by forging a strong heart-mind relationship. The authors provide a systematic 16-week program that is designed to develop heightened awareness and deeper states of consciousness for readers with any level of meditation experience, moving from lessons in classical Eastern techniques to advanced levels that employ methods not found elsewhere.

Four key forms of meditation are used in the book: concentration, mindfulness, contemplation, and adventures in awareness. These are applied to specific practices that range from improving mental clarity and memory to replacing self-limiting patterns of thinking and behaving in which you may be trapped. Each of the 65 meditations offers a doorway into a different chamber of your consciousness and an opportunity to learn more about your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual nature. The matrix can also be used as an oracle to guide you to the most valuable meditation you need for the present moment--be it love, balance, conflict, dreams, renewal, or celebration. These meditation techniques are designed to create healing and harmony between the mind and emotions, allowing you to attain not only greater financial and emotional security and well-being but also life-long spiritual growth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594779701
Publisher:	Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date:	06/25/2009
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Victor Daniels, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Sonoma State University. He was the first director of the India Studies program at Sonoma and studied meditation with Harish Johari and Jakusho Kwong-Roshi. Kooch Daniels studied with Harish Johari for 20 years and is also a student of Sri Amritanandamayi. They are the authors of Tarot d’Amour and live in Sonoma County, California.
Victor Daniels, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Sonoma State University. He was the first director of the India Studies program at Sonoma and studied meditation with Harish Johari and Jakusho Kwong-Roshi. He is the coauthor, with Kooch Daniels, of Tarot d’Amour and lives in Bodega, California.
Kooch Daniels studied with Harish Johari for 20 years and is also a student of Sri Amritanandamayi. She is the coauthor, with Victor Daniels, Ph.D., of Tarot d’Amour and lives in Bodega, California.

Read an Excerpt

CELL 43
Joy: Happiness, Bliss, and Peak Experiences

The Sun in Your Heart

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
-- Abraham Lincoln

You can discover and let go of ways you make yourself unhappy and replace them with thoughts and acts that bring you great joy. Every language has many words for feeling good: joy, enjoyment, happiness, delight, pleasure, cheer, gladness, bliss, and ecstasy. Just hearing these words is reassuring. We’d all love to be able to go to the store and buy happiness, but it’s not for sale. You have to find it within. Happiness can be momentary or enduring. You feel it when you obtain something you want or when something good comes your way unexpectedly. You also feel happy when you’re doing something enjoyable or worthwhile. And you probably feel happy when you bring others happiness. In Swami Ramakrishananda Puri’s words, “Happiness is like perfume. We can’t pour it on someone else without getting a few drops on ourselves.” But for many people, it’s all too easy to get locked into routines so hectic that they leave little room for happiness. You can, however, increase your ability to be happy, or even joyful. Vietnamese Buddhist monk and meditation teacher Thich Nhat Hanh suggests using the metaphor of watering flowers: “Cultivating joy means to . . . organize our daily lives so that the positive seeds are watered every day, and the negative seeds are not watered.”2 How do you water seeds of joy? A good starting point is to notice your thoughts that contribute to making you feel bad and move your attention away from them. In their place, you can amplify thoughts that make you feel good and act in ways that help you feel optimistic instead of pessimistic. Also, notice whether you set limiting conditions for letting yourself feel good. If so, you can let go of those conditions and become more accepting of being in each moment. Observe when you’re tight and tense--since it’s hard to feel good then--and use whatever tools you know of to relax. We can learn something about watering seeds of joy from Gestalt therapist Stella Resnick, who had a thriving psychotherapy practice, a hectic life, and pervasive feelings of dissatisfaction. “I did yoga,” she writes. “I meditated. I exercised. I became a vegetarian. Why wasn’t I happy?” At the age of thirty-four, she closed her practice and moved to a house in the country where she lived alone for a year, read Thoreau, and contemplated her life. She discovered “how little I knew about how to be happy on a daily basis. I knew how to drive myself to succeed. I knew how to criticize myself. . . . But I didn’t know how to take on a day and enjoy it. . . . I suddenly realized: It isn’t enough to know what you are doing wrong. You have to . . . learn how to . . . enjoy your life--moment by moment and day by precious day.” The following meditation can help sow seeds of increased receptivity to joyful states of mind.

YOUR SPECTRUM OF ENJOYMENT

Remember large and small events that have brought you great pleasure, happiness, or joy. Think about pleasant events in your recent past. Then think back to your childhood, your teenage years, and your adulthood prior to the recent past and recall your most enjoyable times. Finally, contemplate potential enjoyments that you seldom or never allow yourself. When your recollections slow to a trickle, scan through those old and recent memories to see which sources of enjoyment are an active part of your life today and which are not. (For instance, perhaps when you were a teenager you spent pleasant, lazy afternoons with friends, but now you never do.) In your mind’s eye, survey the range of enjoyable experiences that you allow yourself. Then shift the spotlight of your attention to experiences that lie outside that range. Are there past pleasurable experiences that you’d like to make part of your life now? Are there opportunities for enjoying life that you’d like to allow yourself more often than you do? Is there something you’d like to try that you’ve never done? Finally, choose one neglected source of enjoyment that you’d like to allow yourself to do this week--and make a commitment to do so.


Variations in Technique
As in the above technique, recall various memories of happy moments. Now focus on just one or two of your most meaningful events. Take a few more minutes to reflect on the feelings and sensations you experienced in these happy moments. Enlarge these feelings from past happiness and let them saturate your present awareness. They live inside you. At any time, you can recall them by remembering the moments in which they arose.

Points in the Process
Contributing to others’ joy or happiness can increase your own. Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, and all the other great prophets and saints had this in common: They recognized that finding your own happiness, joy, or bliss is just one step on the path to self-realization. It’s still attachment to ego: “I am the one who must be happy. I am the one who must be saved.” The next step is to help others. Buddha used this metaphor: Once we’ve built a small boat and crossed the river from samsara (illusion, or your mind going around in circles) to nirvana (in which we discard illusion and live in abiding clarity and joy), the next step is to give up hanging out in bliss and go back across the river to the realm of toil and tears where most people live. There we can build a larger boat to ferry others across. He called one who does this a bodhisattva.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Directory of Meditations

Introduction: Inner Awakening

The Matrix of Consciousness

Part One: Wings to Soar

1. Starting Points: From Obstacles to Opportunities
2. Your Personal Renaissance: Dreams Can Come True
3. Portals to Your Inner World: Entering the Matrix
4. An Incredible Lens: Your Mind
5. Attention: Fine-tuning Your Awareness
6. Messages of the Heart: The Other Half of Yourself
7. Your Inner Guide: Turning Up the Volume
8. Preparing for Your Journey: Moving into Meditation
9. Dancing with Chance: The Matrix as an Oracle
10. Four Columns: Four Qualities

Part Two : Cells of the Matrix

Cell 0. Breath: From Here to Infinity / Feeling Your Breath
Cell 1. Balance: The Balance Point / Finding Your Center
Cell 2. Relaxation: Tension versus Relaxation / Relaxing Point by Point
Cell 3. Inner Peace: Stillness and Tranquillity / A Candle or a Flower
Cell 4. Patience: Impatience versus Presence / Moving Mudras
Cell 5. Flexibility: Rigidity versus Agility--Doubt versus Certainty / Counting Breaths
Cell 6. Renewal: Endings and New Beginnings / The Yogic Seal
Cell 7. Contentment: Dissatisfaction versus Enjoyment / Just Noticing
Cell 8. Focus: Zeroing In / One Move at a Time
Cell 9. Contact: Connection and Withdrawal / Snapshot Breaths
Cell 10. Stress: Holding Tight versus Letting Go / Emergency Meditation
Cell 11. Visualization: Mental Pictures, Symbols, and Metaphors / Symbolic Equivalents
Cell 12. Choice: Pathways, Preferences, and Self-Determination / Narrating Your Actions
Cell 13. Faith: From Despair to Hope / Double Counting
Cell 14. Security: Vulnerability, Alertness, and Self-assurance / Yes and No
Cell 15. Integrity: Deception versus Honesty--Duplicity versus Sincerity / Replaying Your Day
Cell 16. Karma: Carelessness versus Responsiveness--Denial versus Responsibility / Ripples in a Pond
Cell 17. Adventure: Outer and Inner Exploration / Double Counting with Eyes Closed
Cell 18. Health: Energy and Vitality / Walking and Breathing
Cell 19. Envy: Jealousy and Comparison / Just Sensing
Cell 20. Courage: Facing Fears / Step-by-Step
Cell 21. Sound and Silence: Words of Power / Mantra Practice
Cell 22. Sensation: Pleasure and Pain / Figure-eight Breathing
Cell 23. Self-acceptance: Liking Yourself / From Awareness to Acceptance
Cell 24. Shadow: Unseen Sides of Yourself / Messages from Dreams
Cell 25. Desire: Cravings and Realities / Mantra Passages
Cell 26. Listening: Where’s Your Interest? / Four Potent Phrases
Cell 27. Loss: Grief, Sadness, and Recovery / Sitting Like a Mountain
Cell 28. Judgment: Beyond One-upmanship / An Internal Frame of Reference
Cell 29. Presence: Awake in Each Moment / Frame by Frame
Cell 30. Respect: Disregard and Domination / Matching Walking
Cell 31. Limits: Possibilities and Boundaries / The Flow of Awareness
Cell 32. Communication: Priorities, Leveling, and Tact / Four-Level Communication
Cell 33. Wholeness: Fragmentation versus Integration / Total Attention
Cell 34. Freedom: Outer Autonomy and Inner Freedom / The Crystal Cavern
Cell 35. Worry: Uncertainty and Anxiety / Imaging and Calming
Cell 36. Anger: Hostility and Aggression / Expression and Restraint
Cell 37. Attachment: Impermanence and Clinging / Counting Your Cows
Cell 38. Attitude: It’s Up to You / Taking a Stance
Cell 39. Trust: Betrayal versus Loyalty / Carefree or Cautious?
Cell 40. Difficulties: Obstacles and Danger / The River of Time
Cell 41. Ego: Selfishness, Egotism, and Confidence / Sequenced Counting
Cell 42. Healing: Body and Mind / Your Inner Healing Center
Cell 43. Joy: Happiness and Bliss / Your Spectrum of Enjoyment
Cell 44. Success: From Trials to Triumph / The Magician
Cell 45. Transformation: Transitions and Passages / Harmonic Crossing
Cell 46. Hang-ups: Complexes and Sanskaras / Replaying Life Records
Cell 47. Love: Possessive versus Unselfish / Doors to Your Heart
Cell 48. Defensiveness: Justification and Restraint / Three Little Words
Cell 49. Conflict: Criticism and Opposition / Resolving and Transcending
Cell 50. Strength: Power and Control / You’ve Got the Moves
Cell 51. Confusion: Moving toward Clarity / Inner Voices
Cell 52. Kindness: Compassion and Caring / Random Acts of Kindness
Cell 53. Moderation: The Middle Way / One Touch, One Taste
Cell 54. Intuition: Your Sixth Sense / The Intuitive Sphere
Cell 55. Forgiveness: Beyond Revenge and Hatred / Where From, Where To?
Cell 56. Tolerance: Intolerance and Self-righteousness / Vive la différence!
Cell 57. Purpose: Goals and Meaning / The Sacred Well
Cell 58. Creativity: Inspiration, Exploration, and Evaluation / Focused Fantasy
Cell 59. Gratitude: Resentment versus Appreciation / The Direct Path and the Merry-Go-Round
Cell 60. Apology: Repentance, Atonement, and Restitution / Personal Accounting
Cell 61. Beauty: Grace and Charm / As If Never Before
Cell 62. Celebration: Small Miracles and Rejoicing / Moments of Appreciation
Cell 63. Generosity: Giving and Receiving / Everyday Seva
Cell 64. Unity: Every Person, Every Being / Illuminating Your Own Path

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Authors

Editorial Reviews

"Four key forms: concentration, mindfulness, contemplation, and awareness are applied to specific daily routines for added punch. No new age collection should be without this."

Oct 2009 The Midwest Book Review

"In Matrix Meditations, Victor Daniels and Kooch N. Daniels present their marvelous 16-week program for developing the Mind-Heart connection. These two experienced teachers present a method of honest communication with your inner self, and their techniques demonstrate how you may begin to listen to both your head and your heart—perhaps for the first real time in your life. After you have encountered the 65 cells in the Matrix of Consciousness, you may find that you will have to release some of your most cherished old concepts and ideas—but the good news is that you will also be able to free yourself from those stubborn roadblocks on the path to realizing your dreams and your true mission in life."

Brad Steiger

Matrix Meditations takes the complex and makes it simple, with one thought in mind—to show the reader that despair can be changed into hope and tragedy can be transformed into triumph. It gives readers truly practical methods for solving their worst problems and thus achieving happiness and success. Magical and mystical at the same time, Matrix Meditations is a must read!

John Harricharan

"If you are looking for a positive change in your life, or just want to deepen your daily meditation practice, Matrix Meditations . . . is your perfect companion and guide. After all, isn't it time to fully experience your inner bliss?"

Bliss Wood

"The authors draw from both Eastern and Western meditation techniques, writing about the basics of meditation in a clear and concise manner, and then expand upon it. . . . can offer new insights to both the advanced meditator and to the newest beginner."

Susan LosCalzo

"In Matrix Meditations, Victor and Kooch Daniels survey the landscape of the world wisdom traditions and present an unbiased and well-researched book that synthesizes and presents in very direct language what seers from all over the world teach about the mind and meditation. Matrix Meditations can serve as both a reference and guide to those seeking greater peace and the human desire to be of help to others. Whether you already have a meditation practice or are just embarking on such, it will be a source that you will read, practice, and treasure."

Robert Sachs

Victor and Kooch Daniels have studied dozens of meditative disciplines, creating a systems approach in which each of their readers will be able to find a suitable path. In today’s troubled world, navigating the sea of consciousness can be a hazardous task. Matrix Meditations provides a trustworthy guide for avoiding the hazards and enjoying the ride.

Stanley Krippner

"This is a great book and the authors point out it can also be used as an oracle. Just open it to any page and use that as your area of focus for the day."

New Spirit Journal

"Whether you are an experienced mediator or a beginner, this is easy to understand and to follow. It is written in real English, not psychobabble, and is in no way 'airy-fairy'."

Jennifer Hoskins

"Four key forms: concentration, mindfulness, contemplation, and awareness are applied to specific daily routines for added punch. No new age collection should be without this."

"If you are looking for a positive change in your life, or just want to deepen your daily meditation practice, Matrix Meditations . . . is your perfect companion and guide. After all, isn't it time to fully experience your inner bliss?"

"In Matrix Meditations, Victor and Kooch Daniels survey the landscape of the world wisdom traditions and present an unbiased and well-researched book that synthesizes and presents in very direct language what seers from all over the world teach about the mind and meditation. Matrix Meditations can serve as both a reference and guide to those seeking greater peace and the human desire to be of help to others. Whether you already have a meditation practice or are just embarking on such, it will be a source that you will read, practice, and treasure."

"In Matrix Meditations, Victor Daniels and Kooch N. Daniels present their marvelous 16-week program for developing the Mind-Heart connection. These two experienced teachers present a method of honest communication with your inner self, and their techniques demonstrate how you may begin to listen to both your head and your heart—perhaps for the first real time in your life. After you have encountered the 65 cells in the Matrix of Consciousness, you may find that you will have to release some of your most cherished old concepts and ideas—but the good news is that you will also be able to free yourself from those stubborn roadblocks on the path to realizing your dreams and your true mission in life."

"The authors draw from both Eastern and Western meditation techniques, writing about the basics of meditation in a clear and concise manner, and then expand upon it. . . . can offer new insights to both the advanced meditator and to the newest beginner."

"This is a great book and the authors point out it can also be used as an oracle. Just open it to any page and use that as your area of focus for the day."

"Whether you are an experienced mediator or a beginner, this is easy to understand and to follow. It is written in real English, not psychobabble, and is in no way 'airy-fairy'."

“Matrix Meditations takes the complex and makes it simple, with one thought in mind—to show the reader that despair can be changed into hope and tragedy can be transformed into triumph. It gives readers truly practical methods for solving their worst problems and thus achieving happiness and success. Magical and mystical at the same time, Matrix Meditations is a must read!”

“Victor and Kooch Daniels have studied dozens of meditative disciplines, creating a systems approach in which each of their readers will be able to find a suitable path. In today’s troubled world, navigating the sea of consciousness can be a hazardous task. Matrix Meditations provides a trustworthy guide for avoiding the hazards and enjoying the ride.

From the Publisher

"Four key forms: concentration, mindfulness, contemplation, and awareness are applied to specific daily routines for added punch. No new age collection should be without this."

The Midwest Book Review