ORANGE PARK – Eleven men and woman sat with their eyes closed, silent, still as statuettes while the sun fell and the moon rose outside.

Some are veterans to meditation. Others are newcomers. All sit motionless, every muscle loose and relaxed despite stressful days full of anger, danger and distraction.

Meditation teaches practitioners to release all of the baggage of the day, invoke a single base thought and focus on the “source of light in the heart.”

Since last July, meditation instructor Anish Mehra with the global meditation and spirituality nonprofit Heartfulness Institute has held meditation classes in a solar-powered, off-the-grid building behind the Granary Whole Foods store on Kingsley Avenue. The class begins every Sunday evening at 5 p.m.

The free class serves as a continuation of meditation and relaxation education for veterans and an introductory handshake of sorts for newcomers to the ancient spiritual practice.

At its nucleus, Mehra describes the practice of meditation as the exercise of focusing on a single thought. He said, in this way, people are constantly meditating as long as they are focusing on one single idea.

“It is so difficult in today’s life when multi-tasking is so common, we have so many distractions,” Mehra said. “To focus and help keep our minds still, meditation helps tremendously. Through meditation, we actually go inside us, not necessarily focusing on something external, but going into our inner abilities we have within us already present, the source of inspiration – the source of passion.”

However, the meditation Mehra practices and teaches involves the heart more so than the mind. When a practitioner meditates on the heart, he said, “the heaviness inside of us starts to melt away.”

The practice is comparable to hygiene for the heart. Mehra’s meditation helps a practitioner floss away the “layers” of impressions, good or bad, that everyone experiences every day, experiences that pile onto each other and fog the mind.

“The qualities of the heart are love, joy, warmth and happiness,” Mehra said. “Meditation of the heart helps you become more aware of those qualities.”

Additionally, meditation can help reduce blood pressure, ease symptoms of anxiety and depression and may help people with insomnia according to studies conducted by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the federal government’s chief agency that researches practices and products not generally considered part of conventional medicine.

The NCCIH is currently examining the effects meditation has on teens who have chronic pain and those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Brain scans performed on those who meditate regularly have also shown increased mental focus and even cognitive ability, according to a study by Italian neuroscientist Giuseppe Pagnoni.

Mehra said a group meditation increases the length a person can focus substantially.

“I’ve tried [meditation] before, but I’ve never had the strength to go more than maybe five minutes. I guess being in a class session once I got to that threshold I was kind of forced to stick through it, which made it a little easier,” said Chris Carey, who lives with attention deficit disorder and attended his first guided meditation at Sunday’s class.

“Dealing with the ADD, everything kind of moves at a fast pace all day, constantly thinking about something new, to do what I missed, what I forgot. At that moment, everything slowed down…and so much more peaceful.”

Controlling thoughts is not the point of meditation, Mehra said.

“Think that you are sitting in a train, everything else is a scenery that is passing by,” he said. “You are looking outside the window, you don’t have control of what is passing by [just like] you don’t have control on what cars are going to pass by on the road.”

The overall goal is to increase the length practitioners can meditate over time.

Nelson and Julie Hellmuth, who own the Granary, opened the off-the-grid building in the back of their store eight years ago and have since held a number of classes in it. They attend the class every Sunday, Nelson said.

According to Mehra, one of the most striking realizations he’s had about meditation since he began the practice on a whim in 1995 has been its widespread and unprejudiced practice.

“This can be done by anyone of any religious, social, cultural, economic background,” Mehra said. “People from all different religions and continents practice this. There is no religious connotation, it is non-denominational.”

However, he said, “There is a spiritual element. The idea of spirituality is to seek within. Irrespective of religious background… [meditation contains] that idea of connecting with the ultimate, with the absolute. You can go back to that connection within your heart.”