Meditation is a fundamental ingredient of practising spiritual behaviour and will help you to train your mind to be able to turn off the continuous chatter. Through meditation you will be able to take time to listen quietly to your thoughts, observe your mind and look inside yourself to find inner peace and calmness. In this chapter I will give you some guidance on how to begin practising meditation.
Meditating regularly is essential for cultivating and maintaining inner peace, tranquillity, calmness and serenity. Further if you can start to cultivate some inner peace, you can gradually grow this into permanent inner peace (when you are not meditating), and even become a source of inner peace for others. Meditation is recommended as part of most personal transformation approaches. Don’t be put off. Meditation is not a religious practice, and neither is it prayer or hypnosis. People often meditate in groups but essentially meditation is a personal and individual experience and can be done anywhere, anytime.
It is also a great aid for developing what is often referred to as mindfulness which can be defined as living in the moment, awareness, and calmness. Without a calm mind, such insight cannot occur. Do not think that mindfulness sounds like some new age alternative quack therapy. You would be wrong. Mindfulness has gone mainstream now and is promoted everywhere for the very good reason that it works.
Meditation is a secure refuge just for you and belongs to you. It is a private place, an oasis, where you can just be you away from the world and refuel with new calmness and resolve to continue your spiritual journey. Don’t think of meditation as another job or chore to be fitted into your busy schedule! On the contrary, meditation- once you get the hang of it- is pleasurable. It can be like having your head stroked by a loving parent as a child, or the mental equivalent of having a massage or relaxing in a hot tub! And the great news is that if you do it on your own it is absolutely free! You will definitely find it makes you feel better and has an enduring positive effect. The inner peace that you develop through meditation makes you less dependent on external pleasures, and when external things go wrong the impact on you is much less as you have this inner peace to draw upon. Regular meditation makes you happier. These are all bold claims but meditation is not an ancient and worldwide practice for nothing.
You may like to consider looking for a local meditation class for which it usual for there to be a small charge. Many people find both the discipline of a regular weekly commitment, and meditating with like minded others in a group where the subject of the meditation is directed by a leader, to be helpful. A weekly meditation class is a bit like a ‘pit stop’ where you can recharge your positive energy batteries and are restored to go out into the world and face the challenges and trials of life better equipped to take them in your stride.
What exactly is meditation? It’s taking time out on a regular basis to listen to your thoughts, not to pursue them but rather the opposite-to observe them-and not pursue them. It's about learning the skill to be able to just let these thoughts go, without following them or worrying about them and thereby learning how to not be a slave to the endless chatter of thoughts that invade the mind. You come to understand that thoughts form and can dissolve away like wavelets on the sea and you do not have to seize each one and process it. Meditation is essential training for developing your ability to live in the moment, and to be able to accept or reject your thoughts.
As you gain experience with meditation you will begin to be able to cease the endless desire and anxiety that can pervade normal life. Also the thought process that endlessly generates the ego comes to a stop and at this point there is a window where is no thought-creating self, and no self concern and deeper insight arises.
If you have not meditated before here is a brief guide to get you started:
Start by relaxing your physical body. Try to get comfortable sitting in an upright position perhaps with your hands on your lap. Concentrate on relaxing your neck, legs, arms, in turn but then try to let them go. Be aware of background noise in the room or wherever you are but try to let that go too and not be distracted by it. It is important that you do not drift off to sleep when you are meditating so the perceived wisdom is that you should keep your eyes slightly open but personally I prefer to close mine. If you find ritual such as having a Buddha figure in the room or burning incense conducive to creating conditions that assist your meditation then there is nothing wrong with using such aids.
Now, as your meditation begins, quietly and calmly observe your thoughts but then let them go. Instead try to just concentrate on your breathing, and specifically the in breath and then the out breath and so on. Breathing is widely chosen as the object of meditation to focus on because it is available to everyone, anywhere, anytime. Each time a thought comes in to your mind, try to let it go calmly and practise returning your concentration to just the in breath and the out breath. When your mind wanders try to bring it back. You are trying to just concentrate on being aware of your very existence and just being alive and breathing. You are also trying, through meditation, to get to know and make friends with your inner self! After a while the predictability of your mundane thoughts may even start to amuse you! Learn through meditation that you can accept or reject your thoughts; they are only thoughts and they have no power over you. It is believed that simply concentrating on your breathing is a good discipline because if you can train your mind to do this, then you are on the way to being able to control your mind and thoughts during normal life when you are not meditating.
Being able to meditate takes a bit of practice and is a skill but you will quickly acquire it so please do not be put off if mundane thoughts and worries keep invading your mind; this is the very reason you need to keep going because you absolutely will get better at it. And I can assure you that the inner peace, and serenity that meditation bestows will equip and empower you to start to change how you see the world.
Do meditate regularly as this is essential for developing and maintaining your new tranquillity and serenity.