Vodou Culture 101: Meditation

While vodou does not believe free will is common, it does believe that you have some will, some capacity to decide and act. You can hone that capacity over the course of your life through meditation.

Meditation is a series of mental disciplines that allow you to maintain balance, or if you like, to maintain your calm or cool.

Work on elevation or changing your life is often coupled to it, in part because of how disruptive or disorienting we tend to find change. Generally speaking, meditation is a tool applied to the combination of emotional and mental turbulence that tends to accompany that change. Even people who have done a lot of elevation work in any particular life tend to continue meditation, because it is a very effective way to maintain self-discipline.

Meditation is also a powerful tool in spiritual purification. Vodou takes for granted that human beings can be influenced by a lot more than they think they can, and that the spiritual world is a very occupied place. There are a lot of things that can influence the emotions, thoughts, and concentration of people, and those things tend to benefit from people being distractable. Meditation helps to firm up boundaries, and helps teach people to begin to distinguish different types of influence. This can eventually help the person more easily distinguish themselves from those influences, helping them to gain a freer will earlier in the process of lives than they might otherwise be expected to gain it.

We take for granted, in vodou, that there are ways to elevate a little faster.

If you are working with me on elevation or change, you will be meditating. You’ll know how badly you need to meditate by how annoying or frustrating you find it, or how easily you are distracted when you try to meditate. If you’re finding it impossible to meditate, it indicates problems with self-discipline and spiritual interference—both of which are to be expected when you are trying to change.

People aren’t the only things that dislike change.