The Concept

Introduction

This is a simple, effective and easy to learn meditation practice aimed at helping as many people as possible to meditate and thus bring more peace, more presence and more love into their lives, the lives of their family and friends, and on into the wider troubled world in which we live. It will connect you to that still place within, common in all human beings on the planet and has the potential to unite us all as we learn compassion, forgiveness and the none-judgment of others.

As your present moment awareness develops and grows, and as we dissolve the stress and conditioning that keeps us locked into old patterns of thinking and behaviours, we are freeing ourselves from the daily struggle we all have trying to control every aspect of our lives, rather than going with the natural flow of being and of nature.

It will also free you from the many negative effects of the constant cultural conditioning occurring around the world today that is not deliberately, but effectively, taking away your own sense of yourself.

The Basic Concept

There are in fact two sides to the human condition, our inner self, the awareness or consciousness and our outer self, the conditioned ego, and so the physical and the none physical facets to human identity. The inner self is our true nature, our pure presence and is the primary state of being although we tend to lose this awareness as we enter adulthood as by then we are mostly dominated by the outer self, the conditioned ego, a secondary layer of being and a product of the personality, the conditioning, and our life experiences to date. In short then, we all have an Unconditioned and a Conditioned Self.

theStillPlace.com Meditation Practice has developed a technique that will progressively take you back to that unconditioned self within where peace, love and happiness along with your essential innocence still resides. As adults we have all lost touch with some of that natural beauty we had as a child, but it is still there beneath the layers of life experience and any pain and suffering we may have endured along the way. It is still there beneath the protection we form around ourselves as a consequence of that experience and, it is still there beneath the cultural conditioning we are subject to throughout our lifetime. A conditioning that can exploit a decreased sense of self that we all have through the lack of awareness of the human duality I refer to above.

Now that’s pretty much it. Don’t look for anything more complicated when you either start to meditate or seek a basic level understanding of what meditation is or what it can do for you. Just sit still as often as you can and your inner peace, your own presence, will reveal itself to you. Your old patterns will start to dissolve as you heal. Any anger or sadness, the sheer madness of the ego sometimes, along with any drama you hold onto from the past and or project into the future, will melt away. To simplify still further: we are all far more than the sum of our parts and our life experiences to date. We are far more than “the story” that we have come to believe defines us as human beings.

So how does it work?

When we meditate and reduce the thinking mind to fewer thoughts, or no thoughts at all, we enter a different state of being. The primary state of being, pure being or pure presence. In this ‘presence’ state of mind, our natural state before the conditioning occurred, we find peace and dissolve stress that gets trapped in the body and the body’s nervous system. Stress can remain trapped for decades and if not addressed may lead to a whole lifetime of stress-related dependency. Prescription and non-prescription drug dependency, alcohol, nicotine, illegal drugs and, increasingly, overeating are just some examples of how we can react to the symptoms but not remove the cause of our unhappiness. This behaviour can result in a whole host of physical and mental illnesses and inevitably more suffering.

The good news is that we can in fact break the cycle and the conditioning. The body and the mind can and will heal itself given the right conditions. Meditation sets up the conditions for self-healing. During your regular meditation routine, slowly but surely you start to change as you heal from within and release the stress and tension trapped in the body and its nervous system. Yoga, good nutrition, regular exercise and getting plenty of sleep are also very effective in releasing this stress and tension, so try and combine them with your daily meditation routine. When you start to experience the different state of being, however subtle at first, more peace and more love enter your world from the true source within you. As a result, “your story”, and any stress or unhappiness you carry around with you start to fade away. Over time, and as your awareness of this ever changing and fluid experience grows, you become aware of the awareness itself which is huge as the awareness or “pure consciousness” is who we all really are beyond the confines of the conditioned ego and physical body. It’s the none-physical part of you defined by Quantum Mechanics and so may well survive physical death.

The seven principles for peace themselves are based on the repetition (think CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) of the positive core values of our shared humanity. Peace, Love, Compassion, Acceptance, Non-judgement, Empathy and Forgiveness. Repeating these positive values each day does a couple of important things for us, it rewires the negative circuits in the brain and the conditioned values that form part of our repeating patterns and cycles of compulsive thinking and behaviours, patterns that can be harmful to ourselves and others. And it creates new positive circuits in the brain that start to change our experience and bring the emotional balance back into our lives.

As we become more accepting of all those things in our lives and in the world that we cannot change we start to respond rationally and in proportion to the event instead of reacting emotionally and irrationally leading to increased stress levels. And so, the positive values enable us to take a “Positive Mental Position” first and foremost, and from that position we are much better placed to respond accordingly and in proportion to incoming events and not react adversely and irrationally as these negative reactions are the most common form of confrontation in human relationships.

The Nafina Technique
& seven principles

Sit in a comfortable position and take a few deep breaths. Rest and repeat the seven principles for peace below to lead you into the meditation state and de-clutter your mind of the day’s activities and thoughts.

Be still for 10, 20, or 40 minutes – or whatever time you have.

When you get distracted by thoughts (which is perfectly normal) repeat one of the principles to bring yourself back to the stillness of meditation. This will become a natural response to random thought activity and over time you will lose focus less often and remain in the stillness for a longer period. In the stillness created you will heal and grow as you develop your very own personal connection to your wholeness, your deep inner goodness and the foundation of your being.

Seven principles for peace

Allow everything to be – resist nothing

Watch the mind – stay alert

Stay present – free from time, free from drama

Remain fully conscious – and forgive the unconscious

Bathe in true peace – inner freedom from external conditions

Surrender to what is – the flow of being, the joy of being

Create no more pain – end all judgement and thus all suffering

The seven principles
for peace explained

Further information on the concept and an explanation of the seven principles for peace can be found in the concept document in the download section of this website.