This meditation is designed for the beginning user and assumes no previous experience. This, and the others in the group, are specific in their demands to insure that the beginner gets the basic technique of altering a positive memory and can then do it alone. They are best used after a review of the material on the YogaToGo page at http://richardmgray.home.comcast.net For a more typical and easily accessible guided meditation, try the beach meditation.

I nearly always derive more value from guided meditations or visualizations when silence is offered more space than it is on this recording.

On "Altered State Meditation One" the guide is not quite relentless, but he does demand attention to the point that he creates unnecessary strain in places. For example, he asks the listener to locate a certain kind of memory. The exercise does require that he help you "refine your search" with hints of what to look for, but he streams the hints to the point of distraction. After two or three suggestions had he then just allowed a space for silence he would have made it easier for the appropriate memory to arise within the listener.

I think that it is the right use of silent space that gives a guided meditation or visualization its greatest value in repetition. And it's the repetition that leads to the deep benefit that a sincere author hopes to facilitate.

Unfortunately this is not a recording I could use repeatedly, though there is much valuable content. As an initial exercise in a course or a program it is sensible that it needed a denser verbal construction. Perhaps that relaxes as the program develops. It seems like this content as presented would be most useful to me as an adjunct to working with the author directly.

"Altered State Meditation One" could very easily be revised and reproduced and so made vastly better. I hope the author, if he is able, will consider it.