Meditation – Why and how?

55 Comments / Diseases, Fitness, General Counselling, Health, Life Issues, Pre-Marriage Counselling, Relationship, Sleep, Stress, Weight Loss / By

meditation 1

What is Meditation?

Meditation is a cleansing process through self-observation, which not only helps us to reduce stress but also trains our mind not to get stressed. It’s the best way to manage stress.

Meditation is a state of thoughtless awareness in which the excessive stress producing activity of the mind is neutralized without reducing alertness and effectiveness.

Benefits of meditation:

Meditation not only helps to avoid and reduce stress but is also proven to be an effective way of enhancing the quality of life by improving physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. There are numerous benefits of meditation, here mentioning some of them.

Meditation helps us,

  • to avoid our reactions
  • it help us to cope up with the situation
  • to make a balance in the body and our life
  • it helps to be in the present
  • to stay away from negative emotions
  • it cleanse our mind by removing accumulated negative emotions
  • keep our mind calm and clear
  • it polish our cognitive functions like concentration, memory etc.
  • to avoid and reduce stress, in turn helping us to prevent and maintain all lifestyle diseases
  • it increases the Immunity, which in turn helps us to protect from infectious diseases
  • it helps to rejuvenate our cells and delay the aging process


Meditation and Yoga Block for Sukh Asana Posture 5 inch

Meditation technique:

It is very simple but not so easy. We need to practice it daily as much as possible to experience its effects. To start with we can do it for minimum 10 minutes to as long as possible. Once you get habituate with practicing regular meditation, you will enjoy its benefits.

We can do meditation in 2 stages,

  1. Observation of Breathing Pattern

Take a comfortable sitting position and close your eyes. Now focus all your attention to your breath. Observe your breath “as it is”, do not try to change it. It may be fast or slow, warm or cold. It may come from right nostril and go from left nostril or vice versa. We can follow the breath while inhaling and exhaling.

As I said it’s simple but not easy, while you are trying to focus your attention on your breath, your mind will wander here and there. It will either go in past or future. You may get the thoughts about the past incidences, where you reacted to something and these emotions get accumulate in your subconscious mind. We don’t think much about these past incidents, but still they are present in our subconscious mind. These emotions get store  because of our attachment to that them. It may be an anger, fear, insulted feeling, neglected feeling or any other feeling. Whatever emotions are inside you, only they are going to come out. Sometimes we feel that why I got angry for such a silly reason? The reason is inside you and not outside. And to remove this reason we are doing Meditation.

We can also get thoughts about our future worries and insecurities.  We get so much attach to them that they go deep inside our subconscious mind. And they come out in an exaggerated form as a reaction to small things.

So what we will do when these thoughts will intrude our mind while we are trying to focus on the breath?

You will observe them “AS IT IS” as you are observing our breath and “LET IT GO”. Do not feel the same emotion with that thought. Look at them as you are watching a movie, without any emotional involvement. When we see a quarrel or fighting scene in movie, we do not feel like fighting.

By this process, you are letting go all accumulated emotions to which we have got attach, which are the root cause of our sufferings.

After observing these emotions as it is and letting them go out, you can focus again on your breath. Again your mind will wander into some deep-seated emotion or thought or incidence. The Same process will continue while you observe your breath.

In this stage of meditation, we are learning to observe everything “AS IT IS” without any emotional involvement, it can be inside or outside. Eg. I will not scared of the cockroach; I will observe him and act. If someone is behaving badly, I will observe how he is reacting because of his internal suffering; and our action will be to try to help him or go away without any emotional involvement.

So by practicing the first stage of meditation, we are not only detaching our deep-seated emotions, desires, which are the root cause of our sufferings but to also train our mind to look at everything, inside and outside “AS IT IS”.

We can be aware of our breathing in any situation, at any time and not only while meditating, it will help us to be in present moment or reality.

  1. Observation of Sensation

Before you start this stage, observe your breath at least for 10 minutes.

Then start scanning your body from head to foot and vice versa. While doing so we may feel any kind of sensation like pain, contracting sensation, heat or cold, itching, crawling, tingling, numbness, stiffness etc.

Bodily sensations are whatever we feel in the body, in the present moment. Bodily sensations are temporary and changing in nature. They have the characteristics of arising, staying for some time and passing.

For example, we may get the sensation of intense pain within our body. An unpleasant feeling may arise associated with the bodily sensation. You may feel getting up from your sitting position. This creates an unpleasant state of mind and reaction to these unpleasant feelings, thoughts, and states of mind; we react with aversion and try to suppress it. The more we suppress the sensation, the more it will arise, the more we will suffer from a miserable state of mind, and the more we will react, we create a vicious cycle of reaction within us.

We should aware of the impermanent nature of sensations and let them go without reacting to them with craving (like) and aversion (dislike). We should remain balanced and aware of the unconscious cycle of reaction within us.

 All thoughts and emotions which are associated with these sensations arise, stay for some time and pass within awareness.

Once the sensation will pass, we return again to scanning our body.

 We can practice being aware of our bodily movements and sensations during daily life. Practice may lead to awareness of seeing things as they are in the present moment.

By practicing this we are training our mind to observe the emotions or situations without reacting to it because it is going to change after some period. By not doing so we are going to suffer.

We need to meditate daily for a cleansing process, as we clean our body daily. It helps us to remove all accumulated negative emotions, desires, attachments which are the root cause of all sufferings.

I hope you will find this information helpful to live a peaceful life.

 

 

 

55 thoughts on “Meditation – Why and how?”

  2. engrreginald

    Wow….this is a very useful tips, I never for one day thought of all this but from your detailed explanation, I can boldly understand and apply this very well in my life. Thanks for sharing

    Reply

  5. Pingback: Stress management through lifestyle changes – Have healthy lifestyle

    1. havehealthylifestyle

      Thanks and do not worry Dree, it’s very common issue.
      If you focus 100% on whatever you are doing, it may be cooking, spending time with your kids etc… it is also a kind of Meditation. We just need to be in the present moment and that we can do anytime.

      Reply
  11. Kimbra

    I’ve been looking into Meditation for some time, but haven’t gotten the guts to get started as of yet. This is a great read and I will be back for more information

    Reply
  12. my10kday

    Awesome… Wish all humanity was into meditation!
    A lot of us, in this chaotic world we are living, are in a constant state of mental agitation and restlessness. We are confused, anxious, stressed, and can’t seem to find a way to relax our minds and experience serenity and clarity.

    Had a listen to this epic Alan Watts guided meditation… helped with my anxiety today
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPpUNAFHgxM

    Reply
  13. Stephanie

    Thank you for this post detailing why & how you should meditate. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time but didn’t know where to start.

    Reply
  29. sikis

    Hello, always i used to check webpage posts here in the early hours in the daylight, as i enjoy to gain knowledge of more and more. Danyette Konrad Gusti

    Reply
  30. sikis

    Hi! I just wish to offer you a big thumbs up for your great info you have right here on this post. I will be coming back to your site for more soon. Dionne Dav Christye

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *