Meditation is the most powerful self-help technique you can practice.  

Meditation is a beautiful and wonderful way to relax, leading to many wonderful self discoveries and changes. 

Meditation enhances:

• Clarity and peace of mind, a knowingness which leads to decisiveness in decision-making.

• Wellness - Many physical changes occur, breathing becomes easier; your immune system strengthens, a sense of empowerment happens as you participate in your own healing process.

• Your ability to reserve and use your energy for the good of your mind, body and spirit.

• Happiness and passion in your life.

• Nourishes and strengthens spirit. Strengthening faith, love and respect in yourself.

When all this is happening you are rejuvenating and regenerating instead of deteriorating.

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Simple Meditation

Meditation is simply resting your mind from working a hundred miles an hour. Your mind is normally on the go, worrying about how to do this or how to do that, worrying about what you said or did yesterday, or how you're going to get everything done tomorrow, wondering how you are going to fix this or that and the list goes on, the kids, the mortgage, work etc.

Meditation gives your mind a rest, clears your head and as a result your body responds beautifully by relaxing and re-energising.

So, firstly, you need to acknowledge that it is important and extremely valuable to your wellbeing to spend time with yourself. It is natural and normal. Give yourself permission to stop, slow down and relax.

Find your own personal space, somewhere you will be comfortable sitting or lying and will not be disturbed. If you are lying down and find you are sleeping please sit up.

Now meditation is not hard. Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed, close your eyes and follow, watch or sense your natural rhythmic breath in and out of your body. Let your breathing continue in a deep, smooth manner. Feel your abdomen, sides, lower back, and chest expand with each inhalation and contract with every exhalation.

As you inhale feel your abdomen rising, like a balloon filling with air. As you exhale releasing all the air, your abdomen comes back in. Repeat this until you feel your body relaxing, then go back to your natural rhythmic breath.

Now with each in breath affirm slow and with each out breath affirm down. Repeat this for 5 mins. When your feeling relaxed imagine you are in a beautiful, secluded, serene, peaceful place, it may be a mountaintop, or it may be in the middle of the Simpson Desert.

Use your imagination and imagine this place to be safe and out of bounds from any human contact. Then imagine yourself sitting in your paradise, focusing and feeling your breath flowing in and out of your body.

Whenever you begin to drift off in thought and you realise you are not sitting in your peaceful place, take yourself back there.

To return to your fully awake and alert state, take 4 slow deep breaths then slowly open your eyes and stretch out your body.

You can use this meditation in your daily life. Every hour check in and ask yourself 'How do I feel right now?' If you're feeling a little tense or tight, take your attention away from what you're doing for a couple of minutes, focus on your breathing, affirm slow down and take yourself into your peaceful paradise. Bring that peace back into your daily life.

I produced the Beautifully guided meditation CD series after a decade of meditating. I have practiced different meditations finding visualisation, imagery the most enjoyable and profound, therefore, recording meditations on the CDs, which have been and still are most valuable to me and my wellbeing.

Remember the more you practice the better you become...

Inner Child Meditation

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed, close your eyes and follow, watch or sense your natural rhythmic breath in and out of your body. As you follow your breath in, say LET and as you release your breath say GO.

Follow your breath and affirm LET GO until you feel your mind and body relaxing deeply. When you feel this peaceful relaxation imagine or sense your heart as a flower. Sitting on or in the flower is your inner child (yourself as a young child) Float into this flower and sit with your inner child.

When you feel comfortable ask your inner child how they are feeling? Give them the time they need: listen to what they have to say and allow them to express their feelings. They may not have been taught to do this as a child, and may find this difficult so you may need to teach them, encourage them.

Once they have expressed their feelings wrap your arms around them and allow your love to flow into them. When you are both feeling at peace, farewell your inner child, tell them they are safe and loved within your heart.

You can then float off to your peaceful serene paradise to replenish your energy, love and passion. When you're ready to return to your fully awake and alert state, take 4 slow deep breaths then slowly open your eyes and stretch out your body.

Guided Imagery Meditation for tension or pain

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed, close your eyes and slowly take 4 long, deep breaths, after a few normal breaths take another 10, slow deep breaths.

Counting down from 10 to 1 with each breath. Now follow, watch or sense your natural rhythmic breath in and out of your body. Follow it in through your nose, into your body and down into your abdomen then slowly back out. When you feel relaxed, ask yourself "Where am I holding tension or pain?" Then imagine or sense yourself as a little person standing inside this area.

Give yourself a little time to adjust then have a look around (if this feels too uncomfortable imagine yourself relaxing in a serene peaceful paradise). What does your pain or tension look like? What does it feel like? Ask yourself "how can I remove this?" Use your imagination; if it looks hard like a rock, use a pick, or don't be afraid to bring in the heavy artillery like a jackhammer.

If it looks muddy or murky you can use a pump or a  vacuum cleaner.  Then see or sense yourself cleaning it away and placing it into a bucket. When you have finished, pass the bucket over to your higher guidance (an angel, God, your higher self, Buddha, a goddess or a loved one who has passed over, whoever you feel comfortable with as your higher guidance) then float off to your relaxing peaceful paradise to regenerate and rejuvenate. 

When you're ready to return to your fully awake and alert state, take 4 slow deep breaths then slowly open your eyes and stretch out your body.

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The Deep Healing Powers of Imagery, Visualisation Meditation

Do you ever wonder why you get sick and tired? Why the same pain, infection or disease keeps recurring.  Or why you have that addiction in your life? 

Your body is a true indicator of what's happening in your life. Whether you're on the right track, or whether you're making your life too hard for yourself.

You can become responsible for your own well-being. This requires you to look into yourself for the reasons for your pain or disease. Your mind influences strongly your beliefs and conditionings. As you go along with life's ups and downs you react to these ups and downs with EMOTIONS. It is your reaction to your emotions that can allow you to live a healthy, fulfilling life or you can let these emotions eat away at you in the form of sickness, disease, addictions and the list goes on.

To feel your emotions and not be frightened of them is empowering. By understanding that you have emotions for truly great reasons. By acknowledging, understanding and releasing emotions such as fear, anger, guilt resentment and grief, you can then replace them with love, joy, passion and happiness. This in-turn frees your physical body allowing it to function at it's ultimate.

Meditation is the most powerful form of getting in touch with your feelings at a cellular level. Visualisation, imagery meditation allows you to unravel old beliefs and conditionings allowing you to understand where they came from without judgment. This form of meditation is valuable for releasing festering, bubbling unresolved issues, replacing them with peace, which allows you to bring more passion, love and happiness into your life. 

I encourage you to seek out and practice other methods of Meditation, fill yourself with as much knowledge on the subject as you can.  There are many inspirational books on restoring balance within mind, body and spirit, which can enrich and fulfill your understanding of your belief system and your emotions. 

Combining this knowledge with meditation you have a very powerful healing tool.

Plaited Rope Meditation or Breathing Easier.

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed, close your eyes and follow, watch or sense your natural rhythmic breath in and out of your body. Let your breathing continue in a deep, smooth manner.

Feel your abdomen, sides, lower back, and chest expand with each inhalation and contract with every exhalation. Repeat this until you feel your body relaxing, then go back to your natural rhythmic breath.

Now imagine a plaited rope inside your chest area, take note of how big or how tight it is and then release and loosen it. Stay focused on the rope if you do wander off with your thoughts, (and that's very natural) keep coming back to the rope. When your rope is nice and loose then imagine yourself in a beautiful serene peaceful place where there is no chance of you being disturbed and enjoy the stillness, the peace and the calm.

To return to your fully awake and alert state, take 4 slow deep breaths then slowly open your eyes and stretch out your body.

All breathing techniques should be done slowly and gently. If you breathe rapidly or 'try too hard' you may cause yourself to hyperventilate and this can trigger anxiety. Calm and even breathing will achieve the best results ---- in all situations.

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An article written and published in issue Three of Free Spirited Magazine.  December 2003 Available in News Agents Australia wide.

Pregnancy and giving birth can be an exhilarating, empowering and happy experience.   By Gael Drum

Yet, so often this beautiful, natural process evolves into a hard, distressing, sometimes complicated procedure. Women's bodies have been well designed to give birth, yet we can sabotage our own pregnancy and labour by holding onto negative beliefs and fears. 

These negative beliefs and fears, if not recognised, released and dealt with, will lock up and constrict important muscles and organs in the body preventing them from doing what they do best. Negative beliefs & fears are the major factors of difficult pregnancies and labours .

We are bombarded with stories and myths about pregnancy and birth. They have been passed down and around, from generation to generation, from girlfriend to girlfriends, husbands to husbands. They can be alive and as fearful as ever, resonating deep within our mind and bodies.

I don't know how many times I've heard the analogy of "having a baby" to being the equivalent to passing a watermelon through the bowels of our being, and that's putting it politely. Well it resinated well within my mind. It was a frightening picture; a frightful thought I carried through my pubescent years and into adulthood.

After the birth of my first baby, I couldn't wait to get home from hospital and tell anyone who wanted to listen. It felt just like I was told! A watermelon, only bigger and worse! How gutsy and lucky I was to survive such an experience I bragged. The pain, gore and the drugs I described in fine detail, until everyone was squirming. "And where was my husband when I needed him?" He was eating the breakfast I'd ordered for myself, in another room! Oh yes, I was the heroine of all heroines, who successfully produced a baby under very difficult circumstances!

Lets all squirm and giggle; yet it is because of these stories and myths we do have fears and negative thoughts lurking in our subconscious. We also have life to deal with - our relationships, our finances and work commitments. Quite often we shove any concerns about our life down and away when we don't want to deal with them. But remember they tense, tighten and constrict our bodies. The best environment for a foetus to nourish and grow is a relaxed, stress free body, where blood and oxygen flows freely into important organs and muscles. 

So how can we deal with this fear factor? Mostly when asked what our fears are, we give a good account of them - off the top of the head, so to speak. Or simply reply with "Oh, I'm o.k. I don't really have any fears." We are so good at popping things away we don't want to know about or feel. We don't give ourselves a chance to stop and look at these issues. Instead, we busy our lives up even more, so we don't have to GO THERE.

Meditation is an important self-help technique in aiding you to gently sit with your self, allowing you to relax into a state of peace and calm where you can eventually acknowledge and release fears and negative thoughts in a healthy positive way. 

Meditation takes your attention from the outside world, and brings your focus into yourself, just by closing your eyes and following your breath in and out takes your mind off the things you should be doing, the things you've got to do, the things you should have said and done. Yes, you are finally slowing down and resting your busy mind just by focusing on your breath.

Imagery, visualisation is a very effective form of releasing your fears and concerns from a deep cellular level. In a relaxed meditative state, you can visualize passing your fears and concerns over to a higher guidance, a spiritual being or a loved one who has passed from this life where they will take it to a place of healing. This will bring a sense of relief, and deeper relaxation.

A pregnant woman, having relaxed with her breath, released her fears and is in a state of deeper relaxation can then visualize travelling into her body to her baby. She can explore her uterus, her birth canal. She can feel and listen to her own body and her own needs. She can feel and listen to her baby's needs. Each time, she gathers more faith and trust in herself and her own abilities. 

A labouring woman can use her breath for focus and relaxation. She can breathe into her body as it contracts, not fearing the pressure/pain but using it. She can travel into her body to encourage and reassure herself and her baby of their inner-strengths. She can visualize her uterus relaxing and filling with energy, her womb, softening and opening for her baby's entry into the world. 

Yes, pregnancy and giving birth can be an exhilarating, empowering and happy experience. Know your baby's emotions are dependent on yours; being calm, happy and positive makes for a calm, happy and positive baby trusting in their own abilities. 

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Reviews

	Reviewed in the Sunday Telegraph's Body & Soul (5th October 2003) A Beautiful Guided Meditation by Gael Drum A Meditation teacher, Drum says that by practising visualisation meditation (her voice guides you through) we can travel  into our bodies and deal with underlying issues as they arise. This means we're more relaxed and less likely to be troubled by stress, pain and disease. The music is soothing, although Drum's voice comes through clearly - there are no whispery, sick-bed tones used here.
	Reviewed in Australian magazine FREE SPIRITED (5th January 2004) Bookshelf Author Review by Julia Hebaiter Each month in Bookshelf we review the works of self-published Australian Authors. This month Julia Hebaiter reviews Gael Drums beautiful Guided Meditation CD series. Meditation is a dedication to self,  turning your focus from the  outside world into yourself. Gael Drum Gael gently, but powerfully, facilitates deep relaxation, empowerment and positive change through her Beautifully Guided Meditation CD series. For anyone wanting to improve his or her life through the power of meditation, Gael has insightfully prepared three beautiful CD's. Her first, Meditation into Relaxing, Stilling and Cleansing Your Mind, Body and Spirit, will benefit anyone and everyone, while her next two - Meditation for Pregnant Women and Meditation for People with Cancer and People in Remission - address specific needs. She speaks with a calm and knowing voice, her authority and belief in her method flowing through. I felt a sense of trust, or 'rightness', as I allowed her to guide me along. There are a myriad of meditation CD's to choose from -some better then others- and it's encouraging to know that Gael's series forms part of the life work she's highly committed to. A passionate meditator, she facilitates meditation classes, works one on one with people with cancer, and is the Director of the Coffs Meditation centre in Coffs Harbour, NSW. The CD's are easy to listen to and follow. The background music, especially in the Meditation for People with Cancer, is soothing, uplifting and very nurturing. Each CD comprises two different meditations - a structure I particularly like, as you can choose either one or both according to your particular needs or time constraints. Gael's emphasis on 'the breath as a natural relaxant' is a beautiful and powerful concept. Some of us don't give our breath the attention it deserves. It is life, it reflects how our lives are going, it directs our lives to a large extent. It is the never-present constant that has much to teach us. It is always accessible and has none of the destructive qualities that some other relaxants do. Gael focuses on the nurturing qualities of the breath in order to guide us into a deeply relaxed state. It is a slow, deliciously leisurely process. The subsequent visualisations are all the more beneficial as, completely free from thought, we are more open and receptive to their full power. One of the Meditations into Relaxing, Stilling and Cleansing the Mind, Body and Spirit takes us to a safe, peaceful mountain peak high up in the heavens. The first of the Pregnancy Meditation guides us to a Celestial garden where we are immersed in a beautiful still pool of soothing water, while the second one directs one's focus inward toward connecting with the baby within. During the Cancer Meditation, Gael helps the listener face their cancer (after firstly couching them in a place of safety and trust). Attention is drawn to the bad cells and the sufferer is encouraged to confront them, explore the unexpressed emotions embedded in them, and then release them. She is very in tuned with the mind-body connection and treats the disease as a physical manifestation of an unresolved aspect of a person's life. It is a very empowering meditation - helping the sufferer discover both inner and divine power - power over their cancer, their emotions and the ability to make changes. All three CD's have a strong healing potential. Whether it be travelling to a safe, intuitive, knowing place within, or connecting with a cancer, or with our unborn baby, she takes us where we need to be with calm and confidence, and being where we need to be can only make our lives happier and healthier.

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Endorsements

I am a General Practitioner working in Coffs Harbour. N.S.W. Aust.  Along with my wife, who is a Psychiatric Nurse, we use meditation tapes and CDs to assist patients who are suffering from depression, insomnia, stress related problems and terminal diseases. We were thrilled to discover Gaels CD's and find them of a high standard of self-healing techniques.  The feedback has been positive, with patients experiencing feelings of calm and peace leading to awareness and clarity, thus enabling the mind to focus. In general, her CDs facilitate an overall feeling of well-being.

Dr. DAVID ELLIS. MB, BS, DRACOG. JUDYANNE ELLIS.
Psychiatric Nurse, Practice Manager.

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I have been practicing meditation with Gael for 6 years and one of the hardest things I have ever had to do is put into words my feelings towards Gaels meditations. How do you describe convincingly the feelings of intense well-being, self-empowerment, love, peacefulness and last but foremost the powers of healing these meditations evoke in you. Try them for yourself and I'm sure you will understand.

DEBORAH JONES. Massage Therapist.

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"Gael has taken me to the depths within my soul, some of which I was only vaguely aware and others I didn't know existed. An amazing journey of self-discovery, often frightening, never threatening, but immensely rewarding in terms of healing processes. She is a remarkable woman"

COLIN KING. Cancer Patient.

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I have listened to Gaels CD on a regular basis and have found it very helpful. It is both relaxing and creative. I am happy to recommend it to others.

JANNELLE GERAGHTY. Psychologist.

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By using meditation in giving birth to my second child, I stayed focused and in control. I used my inner-strength and power Gael speaks of in her pregnancy meditation CD and had no need to call on medication. My husband could not believe the difference with my second birth, and is now a great advocate for meditation in pregnancy and birth.

DONNA MAYER. Mother of Tegan 2yrs. & Tiana 1 month.

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