Meditation

"Meditation for every day people"

"There is no reason for not starting the practice of meditation right now. It is our great source for a sane perspective. Start now by paying attention to yourself as you read."

If asked what I thought was the most beneficial thing a person could do for themselves I would say meditation. But "not" as a tool for self improvement. I want to do away with that type of thinking from the start. Lets look at it as a tool for self-enjoyment and self-exploration. When we understand that all our manageable troubles reside between our ears it's easy to see why meditation will serve as a great asset. Remember all those historic messengers giving us their wisdom? To a person they included meditation in their instruction. Some called it the journey within or searching the heart but its all the same thing. It is the best way to view ourselves. It is the intentional repositioning of our point of view.

"Meditation in practice"

Everything included on this page is written for people who want to begin the meditation practice. I'm only going to talk about phase one concepts. Other concepts are looked at in the later essays. Those concepts would not benefit the reader here. So what we learn here is a foundational concept to get us going. I'm going to talk about positioning here. The concept of positioning will change as we go along. But it's important to use the first stage concept for this first stage practice.

"Positioning The Me For Meditation"

One way of wording an awareness of something is to say we become conscious of it. This is really all meditation is. We start by paying attention to the breath. This is just the place where meditation takes off because everyone is breathing and it happens without us doing anything. So we pay attention to our breath. It seems like a do nothing practice that couldn't possibly have any effect because we aren't doing anything. Just understand: doing nothing is impossible. All doing, as cause, has an effect.

When we begin to focus on our breathing the first thing we see, or hear, is our thoughts. You can also feel these thoughts. You will see how difficult it is not to get entangled in them. It's really difficult at first not to pay attention to them. This is why people tell us to meditate and this is where the first exercise in positioning comes into play. For now we want to look at our thoughts, not be them. From the position of the viewer - we watch our breath and our thoughts. We always focus primarily on the breath. When thoughts come up, we look at them for a moment, we say, "I see you", and return to the breath.

The thoughts are the by-product of the brain. Like heat is the by-product of circulation. Like sensation is a by-product of our experience in our bodies. What we are, in our new position is consciousness. We are conscious of all we focus on. We can focus on what we choose. We've all developed some unintentional focusing habits. I suggest we use this meditation practice to arrest those habits. Wouldn't it be nice to only focus on what we consciously chose?

"Intentional Focus"

For this first meditation concept lets focus as much as possible on to things: Our breathing and our bodies. We've talked about the breath and that's fairly intuitive because it's so obvious. But lets look at this body idea. When you think about yourself, as the viewer, where are you? Focus for a minute, watch the breath, where are you watching from?

From what I've found we seem to be sitting somewhere just above and between the eyes. I'm not sure why this is but it seems to be pretty universal. What I'd like to do is have you spread yourself out a bit. As you focus on the breath stay conscious of the entire body. If sensation is the by-product of experiencing the body we should be able to sense the body as a whole. We know we can sense the parts that hurt. What about the rest of it? It's alive and full of nerves. Just experiment with being that body. Fill that body with the consciousness that you sense in that small place above and between the eyes. Expand it to fill the entire body. Play with it.

A good accompanying video for this new focus and beginning a meditation practice is here - Qigong, Gathering and Balancing Energy Technique. There is also this full length Qigong video available.

This should get you started. It's really a lot to look at and do. For ideas and thoughts on life concepts and some examination of consciousness and the "Self" follow at life-after-addiction.com.

"The Trouble With Thought"

All of our troubles pass to us through thought. So can our present form of thinking solve the trouble - that thinking created? In the same line of reasoning, how can we deal with something when we're deeply entangled in it? When we can't separate the it from the I? We can quickly see that the it is not us, or we couldn't look at it. When we, for the first time, stand apart from the brain and know we are looking upon it from a different location the entire world becomes different. We are in a new place.

Imagine how hard it would be to referee a football game if you had to play right tackle at the same time. Unless we get off to one side where we can watch we will miss most of what happens, we literally won't know what's going on until the play is over.

There is so much material on meditation that its not possible for me to add anything on the formal practice side. A lot of it is a waste of time. A lot of it is written for profit or notoriety. My best advice is to ask "Life" to direct you to what is best. I've read books, three and five and fifteen years ago, that I didn't really comprehend. Now, that I've been willing to practice meditation, I understand most of what is being written and I get useful stuff from them. My point is that its not necessary to understand all the intricacies of meditation to enjoy the benefit of meditation. In fact it could just add confusion. I read something, by some expert, about meditation that stuck with me. He said the reason that everybody isn't doing it is because it's hard. I think that for some people it is very hard. I had to let go of the idea that I was after something. That I had a goal. I decided that I was just going to sit for a time each morning and see if I could breathe and not get entangled in the rampant racing thoughts. I just kept doing it, no matter what. Most of what I got from it I didn't get while doing it but rather as a result of doing it. I didn't ever have the feeling of, boy I'm doing a really good job at meditating, while I was meditating. My life, in its totality, got better. I got calmer. I could watch things closer. I guess you could say that I became able to watch things better. I could view them from my understanding of what entanglement was and not get so emotionally involved with them. So I continue. If you read something, or are presently reading something, on meditation and it's just not clicking with you don't worry about it. Set it aside, you'll know what is right when it comes to you. You will always find what you are looking for.

Continuing to make the case for discovering life as the solution to all problems I put meditation in the essential column. Meditation will always help to make us more solid. More grounded. More secure. Living in a factually constructed world is the way out for us and all of humanity. If you can't touch it you don't need it. I have found that people who have their feet planted firmly in the present, in the world that we know exists, don't suffer from the craziness like those who live inside a story given to them from some unknown source. Not only are the sources of these stories, for the most part unknown, they get passed down through generations who all have their own motives, agendas and character flaws. There is a game where people whisper a sentence in the ear of the person next to them and by the time it gets around the room it is compared with the original. Try it sometime. It's used as a demonstration of how information gets unintentionally compromised by the messenger. What we are most interested in, if we decide to get started on a self determined path are the facts about life. That will give us the facts about ourselves. The most efficient method for understanding ourselves is meditation. The first step in understanding life is understanding ourselves. It's no different, no more complex, than when dealing with cars. Who would do better at deciding what was good for a car, someone who understood the principles of internal combustion or someone who thinks cars are magical beasts? I personally would like cars to be magical beasts but that isn't the way it is. At some point it all comes down to the way it is. There is nothing else. Any departure from the way it is creates a duality. In no philosophy or mythology has duality been the recommended path. Yin and Yang is not duality but completeness. We'll benefit from meditation as we become connected to ourselves. We don't need to look outside ourselves to find out about life. We are life. It is us. We simply need connect with ourselves and understanding is there. Saying that understanding will come to us isn't really accurate. There is no where for it to come from. We are part of understanding. The examination of life is simple to start. The path inward is open to you now.

I continue to practice meditation to see more of whats going on. I really want answers to everything and don't agree with the idea that there are some things we can't know. I, like everyone else, am curious as to why I'm here and what I am. I didn't start meditating for this purpose. Like I mentioned I started because I was so crazy I had to do something. It helped with that and as a result I started finding answers. It was more like answers would appear in my path. They showed up as books and people and videos. They sometimes just show up inside me. All of a sudden they're there. That's it, I meditate, and watch what's happening.

I will say that one can know everything in every book written about meditation and gain nary an ounce of benefit. There is no substitute for practical application and real experience. With meditation: doing is knowing.
Read The Power Of Now, by Eckart Tolle and watch an Eckhart Tolle Video.

"If I could meditate, I'd be a better person."

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It's a bit like saying, "If I jog, I'll be a much better person." "If I could only get a nicer house, I'd be a better person." "If I could meditate and calm down, I'd be a better person"...

But loving-kindness - maitri - toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.
- Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness from Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith.