THE MEDITATION PAGE AND BLOG

Overview: Keys to Remarkable Journeys

This blog includes items for beginners and items for advanced meditators. This brief  overview is about what meditation is, what its effects are, and the major forms of meditation.  It draws from diverse traditions and teachers.

Recently “mindfulness” has become popular in the west. The term refers to a form of formal sitting meditation that involves noticing whatever is occurring within you and around you at each moment, and also to maintaining that attitude during daily activities.

Mindfulness is best known as part of Buddhist practice, but its essence was practiced earlier as “witness” consciousness in the Raja Yoga and Tantra Yoga traditions.

Actually, in both Buddhist and Yogic traditions, mindfulness is one of several dimensions of meditative practice. This blog addresses the following:

• Introduction to meditation
• Mindfulness meditation
• Concentrative meditation
• Everyday awareness practices
• Contemplative meditation
• Advanced methods

Concentrative practices (sometimes called “focusing meditation”) help you calm and focus your mind. They give you a handle that makes it easy to keep your thoughts from darting everywhere when that’s not what you want them to do. These practices develop your ability to know where your attention is at any moment, and to be able to place your attention where you want it to be rather than letting your attention be at the mercy of whatever is going on around you.

Mindfulness meditation involves noticing, acknowledging and accepting whatever is going on in you and around you, being more aware of all those inner and outer events. If you can focus on observing your own sensations, emotions, thoughts and actions as they’re occurring, and if you say to yourself, “This isn’t what I want to be doing right now”, then you can change and let your mind do something else.

Everyday awareness practices take mindfulness into daily life. They can also serve as a gateway to formal sitting meditation for people who have a hard time getting right into the latter.

And contemplative meditation moves from the starting-points of concentration and mindfulness to exploring the depths of your psyche and your life. These meditative forms help you explore and examine various aspects of your inner world and your relationship to your outer world and, if you wish, find new directions and possibilities.

Each of the category titles above is linked on the right to a page of blog post titles. (Or will be, as the posts are written.)

Stumbling Toward Enlightenment

There’s also that goal of attaining enlightenment and experiencing cosmic consciousness. You’ve doubtless noticed that totally conscious and cosmically conscious people are hard to find. That includes even certified masters and teachers in this tradition or that one. But moments of enlightenment, and moments of cosmic consciousness—those are possible for almost everyone—even if in the next moment that fleeting instant of incredible beauty and transformed being is forgotten. And some people are certainly more enlightened—or less so—than some others. It helps to remember that the journey itself rather than attaining a goal is the thing, for there will always be a journey.

The methods described in these blog posts are all appropriate for people of any religious outlook or none. With one exception: If you’re so attached to every detail of any religious or secular ideology that you feel threatened by any challenge to any belief that’s part of it, your own mind will cause you discomfort if you try to meditate. Seriously.

A Beginning Meditation

This is a basic breath-counting (or breathing and mantra) meditation. If you don’t already meditate, then if you do no more that this, it will be valuable to you. And if you wish, it can serve as a foundation for the rest of the meditations in the series.

In this you do no more than breathe, notice your breathing, count your breaths, and let go.
As you breathe, on the inbreath [DEMO] you will count One.
On the Outbreath [DEMO] You will notice the words and pictures that appeared in your mind on the inbreath and let go of them. Release all that mental “stuff.” I sometimes think of all that as the contents of a washing machine that’s slopping around in your mind. Everything you see and hear in your mental washing machine, you let it go.

Then you breathe in again [DEMO]. As you do, focus on the number TWO. And as you breathe out [ DEMO] you will find that AGAIN in the course of just half a cycle of breath, words and pictures have formed themselves in your mind. Let go of them. You’re gradually clearing your mind.

And then, number THREE on your inhalation. Once again, visualize the number or hear it in your ears on the inbreath. Then on the outbreath, allow everything that’s formed itself on the inbreath to FLOW AWAY.

Now, continue in the same way with the numbers FOUR through TEN. Just ten breaths in all. This time, I’ll count the numbers and guess that you can breathe on your own at about the same rate I do, counting on the inbreath and releasing on the outbreath for the next seven breaths. And then you can go off and do it by yourself

This is a foundation on which the whole spectrum of meditations is built. It all rests on this foundation of noticing your breaths. And counting them. Or if you prefer, you can move into using a mantra instead of counting .

So here we go, four through ten. Now, be comfortable. Then,

FOUR . . breathing in. Then breathing out and letting go. Sense your breath.
FIVE . . . breathe in. Then as you breathe out let all those words and images go.
SIX … breathing in… then clearing your mind.
SEVEN ..breathing in…letting go …. Noticing your mind being emptier.
EIGHT … in … out
NINE … in.. out
TEN … in… out

Now, Look around you. ou may find that you can see and hear what’s going on around you more clearly and sharply than you could before those ten breaths.

That’s the beginning of meditation. Welcome to the series, and I hope you enjoy the rest.