Candle Meditation : The Infamous Form of Meditation

Photo by Moodywalk on Unsplash

Today , I want to talk about Candle Meditation . First of all I want to state that I am NOT a meditation expert and I have no formal education in meditation. I love reading books and articles about meditation and sharing what I have learn . Candle Meditation, also known as Grazing Meditation or Tratak Meditation is a meditation technique in which we keep the eyes open and softly focus our eyes on a physical object. The most popular object for this meditation is a candle,but you can use pretty much any object. For example, even a black dot on the wall assuming the wall is not black, obviously or a flower, a stone, or an image that’s meaningful to you, the moon, the first few minutes of the sun rising, and so on. And just to be clear, this does not count as gazing meditation.

The benefits of gazing meditation include an improvement in your concentration, memory, will power, stronger eyes and many more.

Photo by Kyle on Unsplash

So how do you do gazing meditation ?

• You sit down comfortably and you put your physical object that you’re going to gaze at in front of you at about eye level and about arm length distance away from you. So you might need to put it on a table. If you’re using a candle as your object then you want your room to be dark.
• So you set your gaze on the object and try not to move your eyes. Very soon, maybe in a minute or so, your eyes will get tired and they may even start watering and that’s okay and expected.
• When that happens, simply blink your eyes if you need to for comfort and then close your eyes.
• And then with your eyes closed, see the after image of that object in your behind the eye.
• When you’re ready, you can open your eyes and go for another round.
• Do this for about five to ten minutes but not more than 10 minutes and at the end of this meditation just wash your eyes out with cold water.

As with any other kind of meditation you will get distracted by thoughts and when that happens, you know what to do. You simply bring your attention back to your object of focus, which in this case is the candle or whatever physical object you chose.

A few tips and tricks to keep in mind regarding gazing meditation :

The first one. The key is to relax your eyes as much as possible. Be sure you can see the object clearly. If you need to, then put your glasses on. Don’t strain your eyes. If it starts to feel uncomfortable, blink your eyes.

Don’t do trataka on a candle if you have myopia, astigmatism, cataracts, glaucoma, epilepsy.

And the final point I want to make is that we are all different. There are different paths to meditation and one might be better for you than the other. So give this a try and if you like it, continue. If you don’t, then maybe some other kind of meditation would be better for you. So, different meditation techniques use different things as an anchor. For example, they might use breath as an anchor, or a mantra, or your body. In this one - gazing meditation - we use an external physical object as an anchor.

So, like I said, we’re all different. There are many paths to meditation and no one path is right or wrong. It’s all about experimenting, doing some hit and trial and seeing which one works for you.

So go ahead, give it a try and let me know how it went for you and if you think I’ve missed any important point about gazing meditation, please besure to type it in the comments below. Thank You !!