Once and Once Again

How do I meditate?

Mindfulness is a meditation practice that allows you to be aware of your mind. Watching your mind helps create a clear distinction between thoughts and experiences. Thoughts include anything you might think about, but also any sort language you would use to describe those things. Experiences are deeply rooted in reality because they come from your senses in the present moment.

You are not your thoughts, you are considerable more. To be aware of your mind is to realize that thoughts will always come and go. Thoughts and feelings like anger, pain, and fear are bait. You notice these things, because you are watching out for them, but you don’t respond, you don’t take the bait and you don’t fall into these traps.

You always have a choice: how you respond determines how much or how little you suffer. Mindfulness allows you to see your thoughts as they are, notice they are separate from you, and hopefully see them coming next time.

To meditate all that is required is the following:

▪ A quiet comfortable place

▪ Breathe (in through the nose and out through the mouth)

▪ Do not judge your thoughts (have no opinions about them)

▪ Do not chase or play with any thoughts

▪ If a thought persists, breathe, and remain calm

As you begin to breathe with eyes closed, more than likely thoughts about your day so far will come to mind. Next, thoughts about what the remainder of the day will probably come. As you meditate though, you won’t be in the past or in future: you will be in a perpetual state of now.

“… the immediacy of our sensations is more important than our thoughts about them, and more important than the past and future.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn

You need to find a way to enjoy mediation. When or how you meditate is largely irrelevant as long as you actually do it. Style, or the way what you do conforms to what someone else thought about what you might want to do is an abstraction. Style is much less important than quality.