Austin Meditation

Posts Tagged ‘Mind’

Whether you have decided to start meditating and don’t know how or where to begin, or if you have experience but want a deeper understanding, it may be time to seek a meditation teacher or coach. Not all teachers are the same, and there are a few things to consider in order to create a fulfilling partnership.

Discuss with your prospective teacher what you are trying to achieve. You may only be interested in the psychological and emotional benefits of meditation. You interest may have developed out a yoga class and you may only be interested in enhancing your physical development. A teacher should understand and be able to help you achieve those goals.

Is the teacher open to many methods or just one? Many certified teachers have extensive experience in a variety of methods, while others are only certified in one. You will need to evaluate if his or her limitations are acceptable to you or not.

Does he or she respect you? If you are searching spiritually or emotionally, a teacher or coach should understand and respect that. An effective coach will value your beliefs and will not take advantage of your confusion. Be wary of coaches who make promises without appearing to fully understand your goals and how they will help you work toward them.

Do they rush or take their time? A caring teacher will take the time to understand your needs and explain how the method may help. A teacher who seems focused on getting you to sign up could be a signal that they only want to make a sale.

Most importantly, you and the teacher should “click”. If the person makes you uncomfortable or you don’t care for the environment, you will not get much out of the experience. Take the time to find an instructor who will be both a leader and a partner in your journey.

The human mind is the most uncontrollable object in the universe. Just try controlling your mind to do something that it does not want to and you will automatically face problems. Let us take the example of meditation. You know that it is advisable to meditate. However, there is a possibility that your mind will just not want to concentrate and meditate on a daily basis.

You will come up with numerous reasons why meditation will not work. For starters, your mind will tell you that you are spending too much time sitting idle and pretending to focus. You will be told that it makes more sense to focus on your work in a disciplined manner.

Your mind will argue that giving 100% concentration to your work is no different than meditation. At the end of the day, you will be forced to skip meditation and start your daily activities. The moment you agree, the mind is going to wander and will be very difficult to control.

Do not presume that you will face these problems only in the beginning. From family worries to emotional issues-there will be many things to distract you from your meditation technique. A slow and steady approach will always win the race.

You cannot bring your mind under control in a single day. This is going to take a lot of time. In fact, you should be prepared to work on your mind for many years before you can claim to exert a sense of control. Since we are focusing on such a large timescale, it does not make sense to expect results in just a week or 10 days.

You will have to battle the skepticism of your mind on a daily basis. A person who succeeds will enjoy the benefits. On the other hand, a person who gives in will find that the mind reverts back to its old ways and does not listen to you. t

Any person who has tried medication will confirm that it can look very easy but is very difficult to practice. For starters, the human attention span is so short that it is virtually next to impossible to control the mind and keep it focused on a specific point.

Secondly, most of us are not habituated to sitting in one place for a long period. Of course, we have no problem in sitting in front of the computer for hours at a stretch when playing games. However, to sit and focus inwards is something that most of us find next to impossible.

Thirdly, most of us are unfit and are not in a position to exert control over a body and sit in the right posture for long durations. If you are sitting cross legged on the floor, your back will begin to ache, your feet will become numb and your body will be wracked by pain. Further, you will find it difficult to focus.

All this will force you to get up and take a short walk or watch television for some time. Meditation is supposed to be relaxing. However, many beginners feel the necessity to actually relax after meditating for some time. So, how should one proceed?

It is important to keep in mind that these starting troubles are faced by all. If you quit, you will never be in a position to meditate. When you join gym, you are wracked by body pain and muscle ache for the first few days. It will take at least a week to10 days for the body to reduce to physical exertion.

In the same way, the mind requires time to get used to medication. However, once you strike the golden spot, you will automatically become comfortable with meditation. So much so that your day will be seem empty unless you meditate and relax yourself.

What will happen if you ask your mind to focus on emptiness? The mind will immediately create a big box in your head and try to show how emptiness looks. However, the problem with this approach is that you will focus more on the box and not on the emptiness.

No matter how hard you try, you will never find anything that can qualify as empty and vacant when you are meditating. This is the rule of the pink elephant and is a very big problem faced by all individuals who try to mediate. So, what steps should you take?

Who says that you have to start focusing on emptiness at the very beginning? Why don’t you create a blackboard in your mind and draw images and figures on the same. You can then mentally erase each and every image individually. You can do this in a gradual and faced manner.

Soon, you would have wiped the entire blackboard clean. What remains is emptiness. The best part is that you would have meditated for 10 to 15 minutes by the time you reach the stage of the empty blackboard. From that point onwards, even if you meditate for a few minutes on the emptiness, you would have done a great job of keeping your mind under your control for close to 20 minutes.

As time goes by, you will discover that you can visualize the empty blackboard and black space without any difficulty. If it does not work, you can always go back to the idea of drawing something on the blackboard and wiping it off. This is the best way to control your thoughts. Rather than trying to impose artificial and external control, you can keep it natural and do it in a simple and effective manner for maximum benefits.

Are meditation resources of any use? Is it essential to have a guide or a teacher? If meditation is nothing more than sitting in one place and relaxing for a specific period of time, why should it be so difficult? It sounds simple enough for any and every individual to do without any formal training whatsoever.

Well, many persons begin meditating with such an approach. However, they quickly discover that it is very difficult to keep the mind under control for even a few minutes, let alone 15 to 20 minutes.

Further, many persons overestimate the benefits of meditation in the beginning. They think that staying focused for 20 minutes will automatically make their mind disciplined and will remove all distractions. They presume that they can put in 10 hours of hard work nonstop without any complications whatsoever.

Well, the mind often tries to encourage you to over exaggerate the benefits so that you can stop mediating as quickly as possible. Do not expect the mind to help you keep it under control. In such a scenario, listening to somebody who knows about meditation and who has helped others in the past will be very useful.

You just need a voice of reassurance that tells you that you are doing right and you just need to be patient. This can be very confusing if you do not have somebody to help you out. This is one of the primary reasons why people opt for meditation resources. Hence, there is no need to opt for resources immediately.

You can try meditating and find out whether it works. In some cases, you may do it in a disciplined manner in the beginning but may become indiscipline once you start enjoying benefits. You should keep a sharp lookout for instances where you are beginning to relax and lose concentration. You should be smart enough to use the right resources at the right spot to ensure maximum benefits.

Many persons opt for meditation classes because they believe that it will help them stay disciplined. However, the mind works in very funny ways. The mind tells you that you need not meditate unless and until you go to the class. Once this rule is set, the mind will come up with various excuses and reasons why you cannot go to class today.  Your mind might convince you to go shopping for designer jewelry, to head the coffee shop for a cappuccino or various other things.

The net result is that you would have spent more than a week without having meditated even once. The mind will then tell you that going to the class after gap of one week is going to be very embarrassing. One week becomes two weeks and you decide that you shall no longer go there.

You would have probably spent just a few hours meditating in a week and that would be the end of the story. Well, the internet has simplified stuff. There is no need to step out of your house.

You can check out videos of meditation that helps you get advice from your teacher without any difficulty. You can access these resources by either paying for it using your credit card or by simply checking out free resources.

You can also check out e-books and other resources that can be carried in your purse at all times. You can even use audio books to listen to meditation tips and techniques when you are traveling to work. All this will give you an opportunity to bypass your mind and avoid the excuses that you create to stop meditating.

Another advantage of the internet is that you can contact many persons who have attended different stages of meditation. You can find out how they have benefited and how you can benefit if you proceed. You can also find out whether you are committing any mistake and whether you should take remedial action. Bulk of the information is available for free and is completely reliable.

People presume that they simply have to find a quiet spot and settle down and they can meditate just like sages and meditation experts do. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Meditation is very hard work. Controlling your mind is a lot difficult as compared to controlling your body.

You might have run for ten minutes but you can push your body to run harder for five more minutes. This is because your mental strength will help you keep going. However, controlling a weak mind is always a very big problem. So, you should always try to give yourself good chance of focusing on your meditation when you are beginning to concentrate.

For starters, make use of meditation tools and aids like music. Do not presume that it is simply a fashionable accessory. One of the advantages of classical music is that it gives you something to focus on. Asking your mind to focus on some abstract or imaginative concept can be very difficult.

The mind will automatically come up with various alternatives. The end result is that you will spend your meditation time discussing the pros and cons of various tools and methods of meditation. The only point here is that all discussion will be taking place inside your mind.

Your desire to have some mental peace would be left unfulfilled. So, how should you proceed? Have an external object that you can use as a focusing aid. It can even be a clock which makes a distinctive loud noise. You just have to focus on the clock and the sound.

The trick is to teach your mind to focus on just one thing at a time. This is the reason why meditation helps in improvement of concentration. It is only when you start mediating will you realize how wildly your mind works. To control it will take time but it is not impossible.

Every person who has tried his or her hand at meditation will confirm the existence of the pink elephant concept. What does this concept say? Well, tell your mind not to think about the pink elephant. The moment you complete your instruction, you will find a vivid and clear image of a pink elephant in your mind.

The harder you try, the tougher it will be to get rid of the image of the pink elephant. So, how should you meditate? If you instruct your mind not to think about woman, you will find a list of all the women you have dated in your life on your mental screen.

If you tell your mind that you wish to focus on peace and inner quiet, you will end up imagining yourself in a loud party. Try to suppress something and the mind is going to react like a child and bring it forth and dare you to remove it.

Do not try to remove it. Removing such thoughts is not what meditation is all about. Rather, meditation is about the ability to ignore such thoughts. Can you ignore the pink elephant whenever your mind brings it up? If yes, then you will steal a march over your mind. This is what medication teaches you.

You should focus on your goal and let it flow. The initial few days will be very tough. You will probably end up focusing on your meditation goal for just a few minutes in an hour. However, you will have to learn to hear the silence. You will have to learn to ignore the various distractions that your mind throws up.

Once it is done, you will realize that your ability to focus on the goal increases. Your capacity will remain the same even if you change the meditation goal. If your goal is to visualize a clock, you will realize that it becomes sharper and clearer on a daily basis.

For someone that hasn’t ever done meditation before, it may be hard to understand how meditation actually works and what it does for a person’s mind and body. Basically, meditation involves having an uninterrupted 5 – 20 minute period of time spent sitting in a relaxed position and clearing your mind.

Some people focus on their breathing, while others focus on a particular sound (such as the “ooooommmm” many associate with meditation), while still others focus on absolutely nothing at all. It’s extremely helpful to be in a private and quiet place while meditating, but people that have been practicing meditation for a long time can pretty much do it anywhere they need to.

There are so many benefits to practicing meditation. First of all, meditation is always readily available — you can do it anytime, anywhere you want to. Additionally, practicing meditation comes at a very low cost (or can be even free) which makes it easy for everyone to be involved int. Also, meditation has been known to produce amazing results in reducing stress in people’s bodies and therefore having long-term health benefits associated with it too! And many people that practice meditation experience a spiritual component to it as well, which is definitely an added benefit. Lastly, the benefits of meditation can be felt the first time you do it – in just one session, which is pretty unbelievable! There aren’t many things that are effective after doing it one time.

Some people are able to learn on their own, but it may be helpful to go to a class with a formal instructor to help you learn the basics of meditation and the techniques that go along with it. Plus you’ll have the added benefit of being with others learning meditation too and be able to make new friends and be in a positive atmosphere! So, get started doing meditation today either on your own or by joining a group – your body and mind will definitely thank you!