HELLO…

“Welcome. You may be wondering, why would this meditation program fit for me?

A lot of meditation programs are designed to train your focus. They bring you to a place of neutrality. They help you understand the difference between the concept of completely emptying the mind, and simply returning the mind over and over again to one point of focus.

Part of the Illumine® programs are also designed to train you to focus the mind. The style of the approach is to guide you to approach your mind with kindness, gentleness, and compassion. In many meditation traditions, the mind is referred to as “monkey mind”. In Illumine®, I like to refer to it as “puppy mind”. Imagine walking a new puppy dog down the street. It’s so cute and sweet, that you want to be kind and gentle with the new puppy. However, it wiggles this way and that, and does not easily walk a straight line. Over time, with each walk, you gradually start to train the puppy to walk in a straight line as to reach a destination in a faster time.

In the online programs, the goal is to see the mind as simply a vehicle of your thoughts. So that the mind is not wrong or right, bad or good, true or false. Also an aspect of the programs are meditations designed in the style of yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra has been found to relax the body, and relax the nervous system. You may find that initially, you get so relaxed that you fall asleep.

Another component of the online programs is greater understanding of the heart. The heart can be impacted by different emotional states. By cultivating positive emotional states, theoretically you can shift the way you use your heart, and the way you use your mind.

In the Illumine® meditations, you also travel through inner landscapes of consciousness. As you travel through these landscapes, because of the style of the guided meditation, your own unique imagination will become fully alive and colour in the way that you journey through the inner landscapes. For example, one part of a meditation says “ you might come to a body of water . . . notice if the water is deep or shallow, light or dark, moving a lot or more still . . . “. So then you are the artist of your experience - you develop your inner landscape form the richness of your imagination, your preferences, and the creative working of your mind and heart. In this way, the Illumine® meditations are a more advanced type of meditation, and also more playful and incorporate the intuitive imagination of each individual person, rather than focus on creating a neutral state. In this way, the Illumine® meditations are similar to the aspects of consciousness accessed in the amplified state of some of the breath work practices.

You might think of these as guided daydreams, or inner travels, or inner journeys, where the imagination of each individual may become fully alive in a deeply personalized manner. To access the beauty of your imagination, your wisdom, your intuition to enrich the sense of who you are and to enrich the sense of the beauty of who you are.

For the Illumine® Signature Program, theoretically there may be a result such that, deeply experiencing the beauty and the brilliance of who you are is a guiding light that then allows you to face challenges and obstacles with greater ease and greater tolerance.

The Illumine® Signature Program is an introductory program to begin a style of meditation and reflection. In the beginning, I explain the development of the Illumine Method ™ and then you are guided in a meditation to imagine what it would feel like to imagine yourself as a being of pure light. The guided process for this aspect, has an option using more trauma-sensitive language such as “you might”, “if you like”, “perhaps” and other such invitational words. There is also a more direct language option as I have found that some people prefer more direct and efficient language. Beautifully, the direct language option also has a different version that includes the addition of the soothing and resonant alchemy crystal bowl sounds as composed and played by musician Faye Mallett.

After this, you are brought to the breath practice. As you develop this practice, you begin to recognize feelings of being trapped or free. The practice starts to help you recognize that there may be much more accessible states of freedom than you had formerly realized.

The breath can be very powerful. By developing a breathing practice, you can start to notice how to realize that, within each moment, you actually have many degrees of freedom.

The breath practice is coupled with the yogic approach to experiencing channels of energy believed to exist in the body as columns of light. This includes a voice only meditation, and a meditation with the addition of Faye Mallett’s soundscape.

With each meditation practice, you can download the audio file to your device, so that you can play it from your device when not on your computer for your practice.

After the breath practice, you are brought to the section on Illumine Yoga Nidra. This meditation takes you on an inner journey through a landscape where you are invited to have several different experiences. One of the experiences is imagining what it would feel like to be bathed by light.

Part way through the development of the Illumine® Signature Program, I met Theda Phoenix. She is a transformational musician that has experience developing sound for doctors Deepak Chopra and Christiane Northrup. I am so honoured to have her music for the Illumine Yoga Nidra guided meditation soundscape. She has created a beautiful transformative soundscape with rain stick sound, crystal bowls, and her haunting vocals to bring you into an enriched state of inner journeying.

For each of the modules, you are guided to write down your experience afterwards in your Illumine Signature booklet. In addition, you are invited to use the Illumine Signature Scent. The Illumine Signature Scent is designed to enhance the meditative process of the Illumine meditations, based on both the traditional uses of the plant essences, as well as the way that the scents can make people feel. The plant essences in the scent include Immortelle - an uplifting and a beautiful metaphor for the concept of the eternal soul - , Nootka rose - a honey scented soothing smell - , Cedarwood and other evergreen trees - refreshing scents. I also love that these plants are ethically sourced from Tofino, BC, Canada, which many people find to be a strengthening, relaxing and recharging place. The scent is all natural, organic, and without any synthetics and encased in a glass vial as a roll on perfume oil.

Our hope is that the scent, the booklet, the visual design, the soundscapes, the beautiful photos, the guided meditations, and the neuroscience explained behind the program - that all of these elements combine to help you enter beautiful states of consciousness that help you contact your own beauty and brilliance.

Our hope is that you use the amplified states that you can create through this program as a source of knowing, a source of joy, a source of being uplifted, and a source of hope.

So in this way, this program is different than other meditation programs that create a sense of neutrality and focus on training the mind.

The Illumine Signature Program brings in deep relaxation and sensing your brilliance within through the engagement of your creative imagination. You repeat a consistent focus over and over, which can calm the mind, calm the nervous system, and can enrich your imagination.

I believe that imagination can be a used as a positive and uplifting aspect of the human being. You may have heard of Harry Potter. So many people are entranced by the magical nature of the Harry Potter books. So, I like to think of the imaginative part of the Illumine offerings as a kind of Disneyland for adults. A way for you to enter into a beautiful space. You don’t need a plane ticket, you don’t need a guru, you simply need the program and the brilliance and beauty of your self. You hopefully also get a consistent reminder of the beauty and intelligence within you, and that there is a clarity there achieved that gives you a consistent place of hope and resilience and beauty within.

So that is the Illumine® Signature Program. Please feel free to look at the description page a little bit more, or listen to the audio samples.

Have a beautiful remainder of your day,

Maia