Discover the Benefits of Incense Meditation
Incense meditation can have a tremendous impact on your life. If you have not built a meditation practice into your daily routine, it is time.
Meditation is not only one of the most powerful tools you can have in your spiritual tool box, but it is also critical to solid mental health.
And as a bonus, it is the primary key to opening the door to your own magical practice.
Everyone who meditates or teaches meditation has their own practice specific to them, and you will, if you are building meditation in, also develop your own.
Incense meditation is just one great way to deepen your practice, and it comes with its own set of advantages, particularly in the area of spiritual witchy stuff.
Meditation
At its heart, meditation simply means to sit still, in a clean, clear, quiet space, and clear your mind of all thoughts.
Why to Meditate
The purpose of meditation is more critical now than it ever has been.
We are today inundated with a constant flow of information vying for our attention.
If it is not the actual people in our lives (and if you’re a mother, you know what I’m talking about), then it is the social media we are all hung up on. If it’s not social media, then it is the news. If it is not the news, we are reaching for something else to take up our time.
Our nervous system is overwhelmed by constant activation, and most of it is not positive.
Of course, in order to get more clicks, more likes, more attention, the media in all of its variations has to be shocking, scary, and dramatic.
Which means most of us live our lives in a constant state of panic, anxiety, or depression.
The CDC recently reported that people with actual diagnosed anxiety or depression has risen to more than 40%.
And that’s just what has been diagnosed!
There are millions of people struggling with anxiety and depression who have not even sought treatment. Treatment is expensive!
So we struggle alone.
While therapy is important, and getting the help you need should be available to every single person on earth, meditation is a way to treat yourself now.
Meditation allows us to crowd all the noise out and develop a relationship with the quiet.
And the science support the need for meditation.
It has been shown in numerous studies around the world that meditation heals our immune systems, improves our mental health, lifts our moods, heals us from illness, lowers our blood pressure, can help prevent cancer, reduces stress, and makes us better people all around.
There is really no downside to meditation.
There’s this great quote about meditation from a zen master that says “if you don’t have time to meditate for an hour, meditate for two hours.”
The point here is not that you should meditate for two hours; it is that if you think you don’t have to time to meditate, then you especially need to meditate.
When to Meditate
The most ideal time to meditate is first thing in the morning, before you do anything else that involves other people.
In my routine that I have developed over several years of spiritual practice, I wake up, brush my teeth and scrape my tongue, drink a glass of lemon water, make my bed, and do yoga for 15 to 20 minutes to fully wake up my body.
After yoga, I sit in meditation for twenty minutes.
Sometimes, I forget to brush my teeth; sometimes I forget my water. Other times I don’t make my bed because my husband is still in it (that would be rude). Sometimes I’m too busy to do yoga for 15 minutes so I cut it down to 10.
And yes, sometimes I don’t have enough time to meditate for 20 minutes.
I almost always will cut everything else short in order to meditate for the full 20 minutes.
I will move rooms, put other things off, ignore my phone, you name it.
The other morning, I woke up late, my mom and kids were screaming in delight over something that Johnny Depp said or did, and I could not figure out how to meditate.
Finally, I stepped quietly out onto my front deck and meditated under the rising sun, facing the mountain in front of my house.
Nature meditation.
I get it in wherever I can.
In the absolute worst case scenario, I will do a quick 10 minute meditation that at least allows me to scan my body from crown chakra to root chakra, lovingly observing each body part and chakra, filling them up with the loving energy of the Universe, and closing out with honoring the four corners of the earth and their elements, earth, air, fire, and water.
The bottom line, meditate before you do anything else.
How to Meditate
Again, you will eventually develop your own practice that works for you.
But to begin, you can simply make a space for yourself every single morning to sit quietly for 20 minutes.
Make sure you will not be interrupted and that the space is organized and clean. A clean environment makes for a more peaceful and healthy mind.
Set your timer for 20 minutes and begin your full body scan.
Begin with the crown chakra, and honor your connection to the divine; picture light entering your crown from the Universe, a purely loving energy.
Move that light and love into your third eye chakra and honor your ability to see the world around you from a place of love and light, as an expression of the divine.
Next, move the light into your throat chakra, honoring your power to speak Truth, the Truth you see through your third eye, with kindness and compassion.
Then move the light into your heart chakra and commit to loving yourself deeply throughout your day.
Work that light down into your solar plexus and dedicate yourself to trusting your instincts when they are good and recognizing when they are off.
Move the light then down into your sacral chakra and make a promise to yourself to be creative at some point that day.
Finally, move the light into your root chakra, where the light will fill your whole body up and flood down into the earth, connecting you to all of life on earth. Commit to being grounded and present for the entire day. That when you step out of the present and into worry or depression, you will remind yourself, gently and lovingly, and get back into the present moment.
Imagine how small you are as a single being on earth, and simultaneously how loved you are by the Universe that energizes and empowers you.
Sometimes, you will slip in and out of meditation so often that the timer will go off before you’re done.
The goal is to get through this scan relatively quickly and with focus so you can sit quietly and go deeper within, connecting yourself back to the Universe.
You may feel shaky, agitated, or nervous. That is normal. It is the fear that you will lose control of your body if you allow the divine in.
Don’t worry.
The divine has no interest in possessing you.
This is not some movie slated for Halloween release.
Incense Meditation
Incense meditation is another layer added to basic meditation.
The benefit of incense meditation is that you can focus on your breathwork and, ideally, go deeper still than you have ever been.
How?
Focus.
Abraham Hicks talks about the power of things like chakras or incense or tarot or any divination tools to help us focus more.
“It could be a doorknob or a candle flame instead of a chakra or a crystal. Anything that will help you focus.”
As we discussed already, with the entire world screaming at us for attention, we have all but lost our ability to focus on any one thing for any extended period of time.
Incense captures another one of our sense, which encourages us to stay with the incense, which gives our mind something to hold onto, rather than thinking about Johnny Depp or Halloween movies.
During incense meditation, you will begin to burn incense a few minutes before you begin meditation, close enough to your yoga mat or chair or wherever you will be meditating that you can actually smell the incense fragrance strong enough to focus on it.
Best Incense for Incense Meditation
Truly, you can choose any fragrance that speaks to you in a calming way.
My favorite fragrances are jasmine and vanilla, but I might choose a pine or another woodsy scent if I am in the middle of winter, or even a lighter, citrusy fragrance during summer.
The most important thing you can do is find an incense that is committed to being “natural,” meaning 100% of its ingredients are naturally sourced, so you’re not inhaling chemicals while trying to get healthy.
Try various fragrances, maybe even invest in a variety pack, and see what works for you in your incense meditation.
The use of incense, the burning of incense, can bring spiritual connections, high quality hope to a stressful day and good fortune to negative energies.
A solid meditation session using natural materials and natural ingredients in an incense burner will relax your limbic systems and awaken your cerebral cortex. All from a single piece of stick incense or even white sage.
When you make natural incense sticks a common practice, you can raise your energy levels and even your sexual desire, bringing a calming state of mind and inner peace.
Who doesn’t want that kind of special calming effect? From your first time, you can explore different kinds of incense, rich scents, and find your favorite, eradicating negative energies and reaping health benefits for good.
Happy manifesting!
