Meditation, the train of thought.
This post here is not for the veteran, not for someone who has been practicing Yoga and meditation for decades. This is for the novice meditator, someone who is new to it and going through the initial snags that come with the Art of relaxation.
The first step is to find a comfortable position to sit in. Most times if you´re practicing yoga you´ll be able to sit cross legged with your feet tucked in under your legs, arms placed on your knees and eyes closed. However you don´t need to be in this position to practice meditate. You could just as easily do it while lying down on the ground or your bed. Or with your eyes open, as long as you´re looking at something 20 feet away. You could strive to sit in this position, I think of as an ideal position(speaking for myself), once you´re more comfortable in this position. From there, start to follow your breath. Count to ten seconds as you breathe in. Hold that breath for five seconds, count those seconds. Then follow through with slowly breathing out for ten seconds.
Ten, five and ten seconds.
Follow your breath, let it guide your brain and your thoughts.
When I wrote this(the first draft), I had been meditating for near to two years by now. When I started I had trouble getting my mind to focus and my body to stop fidgeting for even 2 minutes. I started to read up about meditation and come across quite few different methods, but then I came across a Reddit post about meditation that just spoke to me. I then took what I had learned from the post and applied it.
The first step is to find a comfortable position to sit in. Most times if you´re practicing yoga you´ll be able to sit cross legged with your feet tucked in under your legs, arms placed on your knees and eyes closed. However you don´t need to be in this position to practice meditate. You could just as easily do it while lying down on the ground or your bed. Or with your eyes open, as long as you´re looking at something 20 feet away. You could strive to sit in this position, I think of as an ideal position(speaking for myself), once you´re more comfortable in this position. From there, start to follow your breath. Count to ten seconds as you breathe in. Hold that breath for five seconds, count those seconds. Then follow through with slowly breathing out for ten seconds.
Ten, five and ten seconds.
Follow your breath, let it guide your brain and your thoughts.
The two minutes became three and then that became a wholesome ten minutes, on a few occasions. Keep in mind I rarely achieved the 10 minutes of serenity that comes with meditation. Most days I could sit down relax and block out the thousands of external stimuli. This I found irksome.
Just focus on my breathing and I'll be fine. That's what I thought, block thoughts, drown them and focus on my breathing. Boy was I wrong, as this left me tense as a wire. Constantly bringing myself to my breathing, after rebuking myself on the slippages. The slippages, themselves, became more often. Sometimes during the meditation period, I would lash out at my family who were making a ruckus around me. Then I had to struggle to even start meditating.
So I did some more research and came across a Mobile Application called HeadSpace. I tried it for the entirety of its trial period. I enjoyed the whole period. The App told me in the deep soothing voice that it has, that my approach was wrong. It taught me to let the thoughts flow through me. To bring myself gently back to my breathing whenever my concentration wavered. This taught me I was too harsh on myself, too harsh on my thoughts previously.. Let what thoughts come wash over you, let the lessons these thoughts have taught you, etch in your brain again. Let the emotions pour into you and let go of them as you bring your focus back to your breathing. No matter what the thoughts are, whether an exciting encounter or an embarrassing situation bring back yourself back to your breathing.
The App taught this via an analogy. I came across a different analogy on my own a few days ago:
Meditation is like a train journey. The passengers being our thoughts, the feelings. They get on board and then off, bring along with themselves their own baggage, some passengers are rowdy and boisterous creating a ruckus, in the same way negative thoughts and happenings around us can leave our thoughts awry and flustered. Whereas some passengers are courteous, quite in general and engaging in polite small talk with other thoughts/people around them. It is up to us, the meditator, to let the thoughts and passengers come and go as they please, the important thing to keep in mind is to not be a nuisance to ourselves by getting in the way of others(the thoughts) and enjoying the view outside, the breathing we are supposed to be concentrating on while meditating.
Through the journey of meditation, there will come a time when you simply can't get your mind off the time. You'll be constanly thinking about the time left, constantly wondering(fixated on the time elapsed). Yet when the alram rings you'll be think of it as not enough.
This is the time for you to stop setting the arlam before you sit down to meditate. What you'll be looking to is for the serenity that envelops your amygdala. That cool breeze that blows right through your brain, after you've found that sweet, serene and exact spot of your thinking for long enough.
If you've haven't come across this ambrosia like sensation, you shouldn't even be reading this part. Some people never find it, maybe its the circumstances, the environment or their self. This might take many many tries or a few. A few years or a few days or even never.
Know this though , if you feel these calm cold waves washing over your brain, you've attained what I think is Nirvana. There's nothing that compares to this sweet sensation. Sometimes this feeling is preceded by a piercing pain in the front of your eyes somewhere between your brain, and the first time you experience this Nirvana, this excruciating pain will most probably have accompanied it. It feels, to me, like the realignment of your chakras that causes the pain and as they settle into their new positions, all the relief and happiness flowing through your body is registered by your brain. It feels like a cool, calm breeze churning in your brain
Second draft:
I edit out quite a bit of the first draft, mostly grammatical mistakes as I check my post before forwarding it to my classmate who seems to be interested in this Art. Also rereading this I feel like it`s more of a diary entry than a blog post. Or something my classmate would find helpful on her initial days of meditation.
I´m currently at a point in my life where I`m having difficulty with settling my thoughts when I sit down to meditate. It`s not having a turbulent life which was the case before but rather having a lot of new experiences. Or could be just be my lifestyle which makes it difficult for me to find that serenity as easily as I did before.
The slippages are a lot and many, I find myself losing myself in my thoughts. The alarm I keep for my meditation session is always more than 10 minutes. Despite increasing the time I spend cross legged with my eyes closed trying to count the seconds I spend in the act of breathing. I rarely manage to do it for the whole time.
Through the journey of meditation, there will come a time when you simply can't get your mind off the time. You'll be constanly thinking about the time left, constantly wondering(fixated on the time elapsed). Yet when the alram rings you'll be think of it as not enough.
This is the time for you to stop setting the arlam before you sit down to meditate. What you'll be looking to is for the serenity that envelops your amygdala. That cool breeze that blows right through your brain, after you've found that sweet, serene and exact spot of your thinking for long enough.
If you've haven't come across this ambrosia like sensation, you shouldn't even be reading this part. Some people never find it, maybe its the circumstances, the environment or their self. This might take many many tries or a few. A few years or a few days or even never.
Know this though , if you feel these calm cold waves washing over your brain, you've attained what I think is Nirvana. There's nothing that compares to this sweet sensation. Sometimes this feeling is preceded by a piercing pain in the front of your eyes somewhere between your brain, and the first time you experience this Nirvana, this excruciating pain will most probably have accompanied it. It feels, to me, like the realignment of your chakras that causes the pain and as they settle into their new positions, all the relief and happiness flowing through your body is registered by your brain. It feels like a cool, calm breeze churning in your brain
Second draft:
I edit out quite a bit of the first draft, mostly grammatical mistakes as I check my post before forwarding it to my classmate who seems to be interested in this Art. Also rereading this I feel like it`s more of a diary entry than a blog post. Or something my classmate would find helpful on her initial days of meditation.
I´m currently at a point in my life where I`m having difficulty with settling my thoughts when I sit down to meditate. It`s not having a turbulent life which was the case before but rather having a lot of new experiences. Or could be just be my lifestyle which makes it difficult for me to find that serenity as easily as I did before.
The slippages are a lot and many, I find myself losing myself in my thoughts. The alarm I keep for my meditation session is always more than 10 minutes. Despite increasing the time I spend cross legged with my eyes closed trying to count the seconds I spend in the act of breathing. I rarely manage to do it for the whole time.
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