A similar, helpful technique is to review each day during your evening meditation with honest self-analysis. Go through the day’s events and review what happened, what you did, what you said. What were the effects of your words and actions on others? If you made mistakes, admit them and inwardly apologize, and pray for help to improve. Don’t hold onto your past mistakes or feel guilty. Besides, guilt is often just a substitute for making the necessary effort to change.
Those who have had a “near-death” experience sometimes report a similar “review” happens shortly after leaving the body. Some report the presence of an entirely benevolent guardian spirit giving them a chance to review their life as if reliving them with greatly expanded awareness. Not only did they see their past actions but also their resulting effect on others. Those that were helpful or kind gave tremendous joy during the review. Harmful actions caused deep pain. No one judged them. They simply felt clearly the consequences of their deeds. Many who have had such an experience have come back to life filled with a determination to love more deeply and to be a source of kindness and compassion.
Spend a few minutes each evening conducting such a review. If you had times of confusion, hold the incident up to the light and ask for guidance and clarity. Stand back a bit, as if seeking guidance for a friend rather than for yourself, and ask how he or she could have done it better. Feel for the answer in your heart—it is the center of intuition. To receive such guidance, you must be calm and detached, otherwise you will block or muddy your intuitive perceptions.
End each day by offering yourself to God. Release all attachments, all desires, all limiting self-definitions into His light. Feel before sleep that you are completely free in your self. Try this visualisation:
Visualise the heart, where attachments form, as a golden ball of light. See your desires and attachments as if they were strings attached to this golden globe. Now, cut every string until the ball is perfectly smooth. Polish the ball and as you do so, feel that you are becoming freer and freer. Offer everything you possess and everything you are back to God, from whence it came. Become one with His light. Stay in that state as you drift into sleep, and try to awaken in that infinite freedom as you regain awareness in the morning.
