Understanding the meditation process

Understanding the meditation process

 

Meditation can be described as a continued, unbroken awareness of the mind in its raw state. It involves the overcoming of distractions and dissipated energies into a blissful awareness.

 

Let us look at it this way - at any point of time we are consumed with countless thoughts and emotional baggage at the conscious and subconscious level. This prevents us from experiences true, uninhibited bliss. Bliss will result from an expanded awareness of the happenings without any attachments and bondages whatsoever.

 

Meditation is a process which equips us with tools to experience this bliss. It shows us the path to live everyday life using these tools.

 

People who meditate realize that they experience a beautiful inner space as they disengage from the outside world and go deep into themselves. They get detached from their ego and the emotional bondage to experience this feeling. But as soon as they come out of it, they return to their 'personality shapes'. These shapes are accompanied by learned patterns of behavior and thinking about who they are and what they can or cannot achieve.

 

We must strive to relate these two states - the higher meditative state and the daily conscious state. At any point of time, we should be aware of our 'higher state'. Meditation is mind management and helps us do that.

 

What meditation does:

 

Meditation helps us overcome our manifold desires and distractions. It does so NOT by curbing desires - which will always be there - but by rendering them inconsequential in front of an unbroken and larger desire of existence. The more we can hold onto the memory of the meditation practice, the easier it is to pull yourself back from the endless desires.

 

Meditation teaches us to be a 'witness'. While we are meditating, we are detached and enjoying the moment. But the moment we finish, we lose it and return to our distracted state. So, we need to develop a meditative lifestyle. This lifestyle will help us observe and understand why we oscillate between the calm meditative state and our daily state of mind. We then understand what patterns of our lifestyle disturb our calm, blissful state.

 

Important prerequisite for meditation:

 

For successful meditation, we must be 'grounded'. Grounding is that anchor that helps us to be stable in the meditative process. Normally, grounding can be anchoring to your breath or your body movement while in the meditative state. It can happen that as you proceed in meditation, you reach a stage of unknown where you have no confidence to proceed further. At such a time, grounding is of great help as it provides a memory of where you are and what you are doing. It provides a stability to rest upon as energies start to change while proceeding in meditation.

 

How to use meditation:

 

In meditation, we should develop the capacity to use our energy to manipulate our mind and how we feel. We should be able to understand what is going on at our deeper levels. Only when we understand the issues can we tackle them and take them out as a distraction to our calm being.

 

In 'Antar Mouna' there are stages to do this. In stage 1 we witness the sensory information. In stage 2, we witness the spontaneous thoughts. In stage 3, we create thoughts that need to be tackled. Stage 4 deals with grappling with unconscious forces as they arise.

 

As you see, meditation is a time to work upon ourselves, to tackle issues that prevent us from being in a perpetual meditative state - one thatis without fear, anxiety, insecurity and desire.

 

Once we develop a meditative state we can see the strongest of emotions for what they are and deal with them in a calm confident manner.

 

Courtesy: http://www.healthandyoga.com