At the beginner’s level, choosing a meditation spot is easy. All you need to do is find a comfortable room in your house and get locked in.
However, to reach advanced levels of mindful awareness, you must choose spots that challenge you.
Uncommon or weird places to meditate can help you with this goal. This blog contains six unusual locations that will help with your spiritual journey.
Burial Grounds
Have you ever felt that burial grounds are more peaceful than any religious place? Then whether you are trying individual meditation or a group mindfulness exercise. They might be among the weirdest meditation spots, but the type of ‘collective energy’ absorbed there is different.
When we visit a religious place (church, temple, mosque, monastery, etc.) we visit with an intention. Generally, we visit these places with some desire, some ego, something to be achieved. So, the collective energy that gets absorbed in religious places is generally that of anxiety, restlessness, and the need to control life.
But when we visit a burial site, it is generally with ‘acceptance’. When someone dies, there is a certain surrender and acceptance in people around them. In death, there is some realization of truth – body and mind are temporary, but the soul lives on. It is this collective consciousness that you feel on visiting a burial site. They might come among the strange places to meditate, but they can aid in your emotional healing stages.
So, the next time you want to try meditation, instead of visiting a worshiping site, try a nearby cemetery.
Lavatories
If I tell you truly, one of the best emotional healings I was able to do was in a washroom. Even some mindfulness books talk about this unusual location to meditate. In a lavatory, you are at your most natural self. From childhood till now, it has been in a washroom when you were able to be nude and at ease. There you have to wear no mask and maintain no role or pretensions of the world. It is this natural easiness that the deepest meditation practices demand.
Apart from this, there is another reason why toilets can help you even when they’re the weird places to meditate. As per the science behind chakras, the root chakra is a major energy center within the human body. However, since we wear clothes all the time, it remains less connected to the natural environment. In a washroom, when your genital region is freely exposed it creates a certain vulnerability and surrender within you. Such surrender also helps with losing the sense of body-mind and reaching a state of higher consciousness.
Landfills
Landfills also come among the unexpected meditation places that must be tried. There is a reason we crave luxuries in life – good restaurants, fancy hotels, stylish cars, and expensive items. We desire them because somewhere in deep we get disturbed by any ugliness around us. Whenever you are in a place that is not beautiful, you must look into yourself deeply. You will realize that it creates certain negative emotions within you – unpleasantness, sadness without reason, fears, anxiety, and even loneliness.
But the solution is not to run – not to distract yourself through luxuries. The solution is to look deeply into yourself. Look into each and every feeling that this ugliness creates inside you. In the process of such mindful awareness and depth, you will realize that these emotions will start to slowly dissolve away. Then whether you are in a landfill or a luxurious bed, you will have a certain ‘completeness’ within you – undefined by the outside world.
So, for today’s DIY meditation, you must go to an ugly and strange meditation spot like a landfill or garbage dump area. Meditating in such an area will help you understand how to feel your feelings fully.
Sewage Drains
An area near a sewage drain will be among the uncommon meditation spots for you. Sewer gases are known to produce oxygen deficiency in the human body. When you breathe in mild sewage gas it produces some forms of negative emotions within you. Try sitting near a drain and while breathing observe the emotions that it creates inside you. (Note: Do not get too close to sewage gases, especially underground, as they can be toxic to the human body).
Observe the loneliness, dread, and fears that this odd meditation spot produces within you. Try to go deeper and find the moments in which you felt similar emotions. This exercise can even help you with advanced procedures of ancestral healing and womb healing.
Roller Coaster Ride
There is no better place to build soul awareness than on a roller coaster ride. Such rides are among the most unusual locations to meditate. When you are in an intense activity, even in those moments, there is someone ‘silent’ within you. This someone is always undisturbed. It never moves and observes everything silently. When you sit on a roller coaster, start looking at your body. It will move, left to right, forward to backward. Your body’s movements will change its speed from slow to fast, and it will feel the changes in air pressure.
However, even in these intense physical movements, there will be someone who silently observes your body and its movements. The more awareness you put into this being, the more realization you will get about your true existence. Try this weird place to meditate, and you will feel the difference you can achieve your spiritual journey.
Crowded Markets
Meditating in a crowded place is definitely a practice that every spiritual seeker must do. Whilst learning meditation, initially it helps to choose isolation and quiet places. Certain stillness around us helps to find stillness within us. However, ultimately we are a part of the world. Being disturbed by the outside world means that we are still not enough centered within our own awareness. You will only feel disturbed by any activity in the outside world when your awareness is centered on that activity. If your awareness is centered within your own consciousness, then no matter what happens on the outside you will still be calm and undisturbed inside. That is why you must try an odd place to meditate.
Try sitting in a crowded and noisy marketplace. Look at people around you. But, try to look at them as if you are watching a movie running in a cinema. Do not pass judgments, do not think, just observe. If a thought comes, let it be produced but not held by you. Let every thought and every view run like a cloud around you – that you do not hold. And with this, even in the loudest noise, you will realize there is peace. You will get fleeting glimpses of the observer – the soul within you. It will ultimately help you with your spiritual journey stages to blissfulness.
All in All
These uncommon and weird places to meditate will challenge you to go deeper within yourself. Just remember to not put yourself in too much uneasiness. If while trying the above meditation spots you have to push yourself too hard, then they might not be right for you. Just listen to your deepest intuition, and you will get the answers.