Use these meditations when you want to center yourself and bring greater balance to your energies. Many use meditations like this as a preliminary to deeper psychic or meditative work or healing work. You can also use these meditations when you are falling asleep at night. It takes 10 to 20 minutes or more.

Settle comfortably in a place where you won't be disturbed for a little while. Close your eyes.

Place your attention on the place just in front of the base of your spine, right where you sit. This is the muladhara (root) chakra, located at the sacro-coccyxgeal nerve plexus. Visualize or imagine that this area is flooding with the most bright and brilliant red you can imagine. Make it a rich, jewel tone, as though sunlight was shining through a ruby or garnet, or the red in a stained glass window. Feel it or imagine it or see it in your mind's eye, surrounding the chakra, filling the body in the area, penetrating even the cells. Enjoy the sensation of it flooding the root chakra area. Take as long as you need here. When you are ready, move upward to the next chakra.

This is the svadhistana (sacral) chakra, located in the lower abdomen, about half-way between your belly-button and the top of your pubic bone. Flood this area with orange, just as you did for the root chakra. Make sure the colour is bright and light filled - not muddy or dark. As before, feel it or imagine it or see it enveloping and penetrating the area.

When you are ready, move upward to the manipura (solar plexus) chakra, and do the same, using the colour yellow. This chakra is located at the solar plexus, about half way between the bottom of the breast bone and the belly-button. Sometimes I imagine the colour of lemon meringue pie to get me going, then I let the yellow develop into a brilliant, golden-silver light.

Continue on with each chakra as before. The anahata (heart) chakra in the centre of your chest with green, the vishuddha chakra (throat) with royal bright blue, the ajna (third eye) chakra between your eyebrows in a deep bright violet (blue-purple) and then the sahasrara (crown) chakra at the top of your head in a rich red-violet. Use whatever starting points you need to bring the colour to mind. Then allow each colour to brighten and deepen and become rich and brilliant.

When you have moved through all the colours of the rainbow, notice them all, bottom to top, and enjoy the sensations that the meditation can evoke. You can stop here or you can use this meditation to launch you into other explorations of consciousness.

This meditation is much the same as the chakra meditation as it asks you to find each colour with as much richness, depth and brilliance as you can. In this one, however, you imagine you are walking along a lane or path. You see a red cloud of light ahead and step into it, walking slowly as the red surrounds and fills your entire body. As you continue to walk, and as you are ready, the red becomes orange, then yellow, then green, then blue, then violet and finally red-violet. Allow the full flavour of each colour to mix with your energies and notice what changes, if any, have come about as a result.

Your attention may wander. When it does, take yourself back to the place where you left off, then keep going.

If you always start from one colour, be willing to start at the other end of the spectrum during another sitting. I prefer to do the chakra meditation from muladhara to sahasrara (root to crown) but when I go the other direction now and again it shakes things up in a happy way. New things may come to light that had not been apparent.

These meditations both offer a playful way to develop focus, while they can lead to expanded awareness and a deeper sense of well-being.

There are no right or wrong ways to do a meditation. The instructions are guidelines; adapt them to who you are and to your needs at that particular time. Be curious about the process itself.

Remember most meditations become richer the more you practice them. They reveal more of themselves. It can take practice to remember to do a meditation when you need to, and it can take practice to go through the steps. But that's why it is called practice, and for most of us, we practice for the rest of our lives.

Meditations like these are a regular feature of my free monthly Ezine, Starry Night. Subscribe today!

All content Copyright © Janet Dane unless otherwise stated.