Meditation
- Increases relaxation and eliminates tension,
- Increases and focuses concentration,
- Improves Memory,
- Improves reflexes,
- Controls Pain,
- Improves Sex Life,
- Increases organization and efficiency,
- Increases Motivation,
- Improves interpersonal relationships,
- Slows the aging process,
- Facilitates anxiety and depression,
- Overcome bereavement,
- Eliminates headaches, including migraine headaches,
- Eliminates allergies and skin disorders,
- Strengthens your immune system to resist any disease,
- Eliminates habits, phobias, and other negative tendencies,
- Improves decisiveness,
- Improves the quality of people, and circumstances in general, that you attract into your life,
- Increases your ability to earn and hold onto money,
- Overcomes obsessive compulsive behaviour,
- Improves the overall quality of your life,
- Improves psychic awareness - ESP, astral projection, telepathy, super conscious mind taps,
- Eliminates the fear of death,
- Attracts a soul mate into your life,
- Establishes and maintains harmony of body, mind and spirit.
......now why is it you don't meditate?
Bringing Meditation into life
If you practicing regularly and work hard when you practice, you will gradually become more accepting of things and experience the benefits of meditation. However, you can also work when you are not meditating to bring the benefits into your life. Let’s say you are in a situation where you are experiencing something unpleasant.
Like you are stuck in a traffic jam and you are upset that you have to wait and you are angry at yourself because you were too lazy to check the traffic report. Look at the things that you cannot control like the traffic, and the fact that you didn’t check the traffic report (because that happened in the past) and try to accept them as they are.
If you cannot accept them and you are still angry, realize that the fact that your mind created anger is out of your control right now. Try to accept the fact that you are angry and realize that by practicing this you will become more accepting so in the future this type of situation won’t be quite as unpleasant.
One way that often helps to accept the emotion is to observe the effect that the emotion has on your body. In the same way that fear creates a sensation in your stomach; all emotions create sensations in your body. Observe how the anger or frustration affects you physically while you are experiencing it. This method can have incredible results.
Using negative experiences to develop your attitude of acceptance has another benefit as well. As you begin to realize that these negative experiences can be useful, it starts to feel like there is a positive side to them so they don't seem all bad.
Many schools of meditation teach that if you want meditation to have an effect on your life, it is important to live in a moral way (what they consider moral varies somewhat, but it's basically the usual with some form of vegetarianism included.) Some schools feel that it is so important that they even teach that morality is part of the meditation technique.
Although I can't say for sure whether morality helps meditation affect your life, it does make sense to me that this would be true. One of the main reasons has to do with the way that the attitude you develop through meditation helps you feel more connected to people in general. This feeling is one of the great benefits of meditation.
When you act selfishly and screw other people over, you are working to subconsciously develop an attitude that is directly opposed to this feeling of connectedness. When you act selflessly, you are working to develop an attitude of connectedness and therefore enhancing the benefits of your meditation.
How to Practise
it’s better to meditate on an empty stomach than after a meal because after you eat you tend to be more tired and less able to pay attention. The question that may come up now is why does it matter if you pay attention well, isn’t it only important to accept how you are doing.
The first part of the answer is that as you accept how you are doing, you will be able to pay attention better. But also, when you are trying to do something, there are many different ways that your mind might not accept how you are doing. For instance, you might not accept that you are not paying attention well, or if you are doing what you are trying to do well, you might not accept that although you are doing well now, this will change, and you will have difficult periods.
This non-acceptance of change can manifest itself as an attachment or clinging to the present situation. When you are paying attention better, as well as accepting your shortcomings in your meditation, you will notice patterns of thought that are deeper in your mind. Things that you were aware of on a subconscious level but didn’t really notice. These won’t manifest themselves as revelations, (although this is possible) but rather as another way that you won’t accept how your meditation is going.
So paying attention better will let you work on your mind at a deeper level. The ironic thing is that the desire to pay attention better actually makes it harder to pay attention. The stronger the desire, the harder it is. Ideally, you would try to pay attention well, but not hope for an outcome. However it goes, it goes. Don’t count on the ideal happening often.
You can sit with your legs crossed, but it’s not necessary. If you do, you should sit on an incline or put a pillow under your butt. This will help keep your back straight. You should sit in a comfortable position. If it’s not too uncomfortable you should keep your back straight. You shouldn’t lie down because you’re a lot more likely to fall asleep. I meditate with my eyes closed to reduce distractions, but there are people who meditate with their eyes open. There are different schools of thought on this, both works, so you should just pick whichever one you like the sound of.
You should just try to pay attention to the breath going in and out of your nose. If your breath is deep, that’s fine. If it’s shallow, that’s fine. If it’s relaxed, that’s fine. If its not, that’s fine. Your job is not to judge or to control, just to observe. If you can feel the breath touching the inside of your nostrils, then you should feel it. If you cannot feel anything, just notice when it is entering your nose and when it is leaving. It doesn’t matter how well you can pay attention, only that you keep trying to pay attention.
Your mind will wander, and it's shocking how quickly it will wander, often after less than one breath. When you notice that your mind has wandered, bring it back to your breath. When it wanders again, bring it back again.
The goal is to work at it without caring how it goes. However, you will find that you do care how it is going. As you practice and try to accept how it is going, you will improve and you will become more accepting of how you are doing.
There are many different ways you may not like how your meditation is going. You might get frustrated at your awful concentration; you might get bored; you might feel angry, sad, upset or annoyed; you might want the meditation to relax you and get frustrated that this isn’t happening, or countless other things. The way to deal with these is to realize that this is how meditation works. It’s supposed to bring up these feelings so you can learn to accept them. When you work out, you use weights that are difficult to lift because that is what makes you stronger. It’s the same way with meditation. It’s designed to be difficult.
Usually you cannot just accept that you don’t like how it’s going. Here’s how to work at it. Let’s say you notice that you are annoyed because you don’t feel like sitting anymore so you have the desire to stop. You realize that you are not paying attention to your breath but thinking about how you want to stop meditating.
At this point you should try to pay attention to your breath realizing that it is more difficult because you are annoyed. Just try to do the best you can, given the fact that you are annoyed. You might not even be able to go back to your breath well. Just to do the best you can understanding the fact that it is more difficult simply because you are not accepting how you are doing. By doing this, you learn to better accept the thing that is making it difficult.
As time goes on, you will develop a more relaxed form of concentration. This may seem paradoxical because we normally associate strong concentration with a tense, furrowed brow type of image. Meditation changes the way you view the world, so many of the analogies that people use to describe it can at first seem contradictory. As you begin to practice, these examples begin to make more sense.
Sometimes when you are meditating, you can have strange experiences. You might experience emotions for no apparent reasons. You might see lights or your body may feel like it’s a single point. You might have visions pop into your head. There are countless different things like this that can happen, and they all make it harder to pay attention to your breath. If they do happen, you should treat them like every other distraction and try to pay attention to your breath as well as you can given that something is distracting you.
If you become relatively focused and accepting of your meditation, you will start to go deeper into your mind. This will cause you to notice mental patterns of non-accepting that you were previously unaware of. This makes it very difficult or uncomfortable to pay attention because you have to deal with something consciously that was previously in your subconscious.
You probably won’t know what this pattern of thought is, but you will definitely notice how it affects your meditation. If you accept how it affects your meditation, but still work hard to pay attention, you will deal with this deeper mental habit and be able to work on even deeper levels of your mind.
The way you are meditating can change from minute to minute and from day to day. It can be frustrating to have what you consider a very acceptable meditation one day and one that you are unhappy with the next day. The goal obviously is to accept that it changes from day to day, and it’s not going to be how you want it to be. If this is frustrating for you, you should deal with the frustration the same way you deal with frustration while meditating. Realize that the goal is to accept the changing nature of your meditation and not get frustrated.
This may not work and you may still be frustrated. Then, try to accept the fact that your mind reacts to certain things with frustration, and that’s just something you have to accept (or at least try to accept.) If you work at trying to accept that your mind reacts with frustration, anger, aversion, or other unpleasant emotions, you will become more accepting of these feelings and they won’t be as unpleasant.
