Meditation is the art, science and practice of controlling your thoughts.  Although there are a billion words written on the subject, that is what it boils down to.  You practice meditation to control your thoughts and calm your mind and your body. Thereby achieving not only a measure of peace and tranquility, but the ability to find focus and clarity in stressful situations even when you are not meditating.  That aspect of meditation, the ever growing ability to control racing thoughts in times of indecision, stress and emergency is one of the main reasons that I practice meditation.  I have A.D.D. and because of it I continually have a tornado of thoughts in my head.  Often there are so many thoughts on various topics racing around in my mind that I find it very difficult to concentrate on any one of them and get anything done.  Meditation helps with this quite a bit.

Calmly meditating also has the wonderful benefit of lowering your heart rate, respiration and your blood pressure.  So as you can see, the benefits are immediate, good for your body and your mind as well.  You do not have to have a special pillow, clothes, various accessories or even a special room to get started.  I will cover meditation with incense in a later post, but for now all you need to get started is a place where you won’t be disturbed for a little while and a way to make yourself comfortable for that length of time.  It really is that easy and everyone can afford it!

Contrary to some advice you may have received, you do not have to sit in the lotus position or any other specific pose in order to meditate successfully.  All that is required is that you keep your back straight and that you comfortable.  It is a real concentration breaker when you develop a cramp or your butt begins to ache from sitting on a hard floor!  So a pillow, a folded up blanket or even borrowing a cushion from the couch or chair will suffice for something to sit on.  You can even sit in a chair if you prefer.  Just sit however makes you comfortable, but remember that it is very important you keep your back straight.  It is important because of the breathing aspect of meditation.  If your back is not straight it is more difficult to breathe deeply and cleanly.  Breathing “right” plays a tremendous role in meditation and especially for those beginning to meditate.  If you learn a bad habit now, it is much harder to break that habit later when it becomes even more important to do it right.

As for what you should wear, wear anything that does not bind you or restrict your movement.  Comfy sweatpants, very loose shorts, your P.J.’s or even no clothes at all will work just fine.  Nude meditation will be the subject of another post.  It is actually more difficult in many respects than meditating in comfortable, loose fitting clothes.  Your goal should be to not feel pinched, or bound or restricted.  You might think you are completely comfortable, but once you sit still and concentrate on your breathing your mind will find all manner of things to attempt to distract you with.  This is the hardest part of beginning meditation by far!

Now, if you are comfortably attired and sitting in a comfortable position, you can begin.  With your back straight breathe in and out slowly and carefully.  Not slow enough to make you feel like you need more air and not deeply enough that you hyperventilate.  Just slowly, deeper than you would normally breathe and steadily.  Once you have a comfortable breathing pattern, focus entirely on your breathing.  Concentrate solely in the breath entering your lungs, filling them and then exiting your lungs.  Concentrate on all aspects of your breathing to the exclusion of everything else.  This is where it becomes difficult.  No mind likes to be bored and after a few minutes of this your attention will naturally want to wander to what you are going to make for dinner, what is that weird bump under my butt, is the cat inside or outside and a variety of other things. This is the part where you learn to exercise control over those stray and worrying thoughts by simply shutting them out and concentrating on your breathing.

No one can actually “teach” you how to meditate.  It is a self-discipline that you alone are responsible for mastering.  You can seek advice from myriad sources, but in the end it is up to you to focus yourself and learn to exclude any thoughts except for slow, steady, relaxing breathing.  If you are completely new to meditating then fifteen minutes is a great start.  Fifteen minutes does not sound like much when you read it here, but it is another thing entirely when you are trying to corral stray thoughts and focus entirely on one thing.

That is pretty much all you need to know about meditating to get started.  After you are able to calm and quiet your mind and focus more clearly you can practice meditating on a dilemma or aspect of life.  The variety of things you can meditate on is enormous but always the purpose is to find clarity and calm in your mind as well as your body while you concentrate on one thing at a time.

I hope this post helps you get started with meditation and all of the wonderful benefits you can derive from it.  Good luck and may you find Peace, Love and Happiness everywhere you look.

Made from the champa flower, halmaddi, sandalwood and other ingredients, nag champa is an incense that is both earthy and sweet while being woody with lighter notes of vanilla or nutmeg.  There isn’t another scent like it and none so distinctive or tied so strongly to India and Hippies. Bob Dylan burns it at his concerts, as do The Grateful Dead, Third Eye Blind and The Black Crowes among others.  It is referenced in rock songs and poetry and occupies a mystical part of the incense spectrum.

With that I present Goloka Nag Champa from the Goloka Seva Trust.  The second best selling nag champa in the world, right after Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa.  It occupies that spot for several good reasons and not the least of them being that this is an excellent nag champa.  It is everything you would want and expect in a nag champa, just slightly muskier and a bit less floral than other sticks.  To me, that equates to being a bit flat, but don’t think for one moment there are any glaring flaws with this stick.  Far from it.  It is just a personal preference of mine to have some sort of crisp or clean note on the top.

You can buy it here and support a truly wonderful cause at the same time.  100% of the proceeds go to charity to benefit children and women.

So lets get this out of the way first.  Nag champa is sweet, woody, earthy scent that can have notes of vanilla and nutmeg as well.  It is distinctive, unique, signature of Indian incense scents and incredibly enjoyable.  Now, with that said I want to tell you why I like the Sarathi Perfumery Works version in Tulasi Nag Champa.  It is oh so slightly more floral and woody than other offerings.  This (to me) makes it just a little bit crisper and slightly cleaner than some sticks.

I am not going to say it is a pure representation of nag champa, but it is nag champa with just a little more sweetness and light.  I find it to be very enjoyable and I use it quite often.  I still prefer Shanthimalai “Red” Nag Champa as my overall favorite but this wonderful version definitely has a place in my collection and I don’t think many people (if any) would be disappointed with it.

Help give it the respect it deserves by clicking here.

Right out of the heat sealed inner packet this stick is exactly that.  Sensual, lightly sweet, sultry and mysterious.  Once again though it has that sharp note I notice in Gonesh offerings and it tends to distract me.  If you have read my previous reviews you know I am not a fan of sweet or floral.  I lean towards earthy, musky, warm and spicy.  However, this scent works for me.  At least before it is lit that is.  Let’s find out what happens when we apply the Bic to it.

Surprise!  It works even better for me.  The scent takes on a warmer, slightly muskier character when burning and loses some of the floral notes.  To my nose it still has that uniquely Gonesh charcoal incense stick scent, but perhaps that is just me.  Like I said before, I am not a fan of sweet or floral except in rare cases and this scent won’t change my mind although it puts up a good fight at doing so.

It won’t take the place of a pure Dragons Blood resin, nor will it beat out other Dragons Blood sticks and cones in my opinion, but it is worth trying and enjoying if you are a fan of Dragons Blood.  A personal experiment I am going to try later is burning a bit of white sage at the same time as this.  I think the two scents will work together wonderfully.

Click here to purchase Gonesh Dragons Blood incense sticks.

It still smells citrus-like to me.  A fresh citrus smell that isn’t entirely natural.  More like a citrus scented household cleaner.  Which is not to say the scent is bad.  Not by any means.  It is just what the unlit stick reminded me of first.  When lit however the character of the scent changes quite a bit. It isn’t nearly as citrus-like and flattens out a bit to remind me of (variously) bubblegum, pink urinal cakes and flowers at a funeral!  I don’t know how the character of the scent changed in such a shocking way from unlit to lit, but it was more than a bit surprising.

I am trying to think of other ways to describe it, but so help me the mental/olfactory association that leaps to the forefront is the bathroom of a gas station.  Here is the kicker though.  I don’t find it to be an unpleasant scent.  It would take some getting used to and it would be best used for very specific moods, but it isn’t horrid by any means.  In fact, my significant other finds it to be rather pleasant and enjoyable and focuses more on the bubblegum like note.

I have been sitting in it for over half and hour now (Gonesh sticks burn a long time) and I suppose my scent receptors are tired and almost immune to the smell.  Since that strips out any of the more piercing notes in the blend it lets me say this as honestly as I am able.  It still smells like bubblegum, pink urinal cakes and Exxon bathrooms!

Perhaps I am just not a big fan of “blends” of this type or I need to experience this scent in another setting.  Whatever the reason, I am not terribly pleased with this scent and will only use it again grudgingly when my significant other wants to burn it.

We carry several scents by Mandala Arts & Incense and the packaging is unique and very attractive.  A very heavy, fibrous paper is wrapped around 14 dhoop style sticks and sealed on both ends with a wax seal.  It always seems a shame to break that seal as it was obviously placed there by hand with a great deal of care.   It seems even more of a shame when you tear or damage the Bodhi leaf that each packet is decorated with.  I have no idea how they manage to place such a delicate, spidery leaf on the packaging in the first place, but it is a very unique and interesting decoration.

I mentioned that we carry several scents by Mandala Arts & Incense and the main reason I mentioned that is because this particular scent is the only one that “bleeds” into the paper it is wrapped in.  I am not sure why that is as the sticks themselves are always very dry and the scent never seems affected.  I just wanted to give a brief note to the phenomenon in case you decided to try it and had questions about why the packaging seems less pristine than other scents from the same family.

Inside the wrapping paper a string is wrapped around the incense stick bundle very tightly.  I suggest a little extra care in extracting a stick as I have broken more than one of them in the process.  It doesn’t really matter I suppose as they are a dhoop style incense without a bamboo core and you can just as easily place the two broken halves upright in sand and burn them both.  However, that does mean double the amount of smoke.

I burn these sticks in a traditional fashion.  That is to say I insert them vertically into a small bowl of sand.  I prefer to burn incense this way as I personally believe it gives a more pure rendition of the scent because of the lack of “pre-heating” the next small section to be burned as the ember moves along the stick.  That is my personal preference and belief, your experience may differ.

Now, on to the lighting!  The sticks themselves are very dry and very unlike Durbars and Champas that feel slightly damp to the touch.  So I thought that when I applied flame to the tip it would fairly whoosh into flame.  That was not the case.  In fact it was more like lighting charcoal as no flame ever presented itself to be blown out.  Instead the tip glows after a moment or two under a match or lighter and then remains glowing.   Very simple and a little surprising.

The scent of this particular stick is very woody and smoky, yet extremely pleasant.  To be honest the first thing that came to my mind upon smelling the smoke was a campfire.  Not a cough inducing campfire from pine logs or green, damp wood, but a campfire from well seasoned oak or hickory.  This would be a wonderful accessory for those of you with a gas fireplace.  You could have the flames as well as the woody, smoky scent that should go along with it.

There is a fair amount of sandalwood in this formulation and every now and then you can detect a very slight note of it.  It is a great base scent for this particular blend as it adds just the right warmth underneath the sharper notes of the rest of the herbs and spices.  A similar scent would be white cedar, but this stick is not nearly as powerful as cedar.  Everyone here agrees that it is a woodsy, smoky, forest-like scent that has quite a bit of depth when you concentrate on it.

I would recommend this scent for those with gas fireplaces, burning outside on cool fall evenings or even during a barbecue.  I don’t think you will be disappointed at all with this scent and I am sure you can find many more wonderful uses and situations where it would fit perfectly.

Now we are finally able to help you choose and use incense from the amazing (and sometimes bewildering) types available.  Feel free to contact us with questions or concerns and we will do our best to help you in any way that we can.

We are looking for forward to serving you with the best prices, customer service and quickest delivery.  Thank you for visiting and shopping with us and we hope too that you will participate in the forums and in the comments for blog posts.

Peace, Love and Happiness from all of us at The Zen Hippie