Understanding Meditation
At a high level, meditation helps maintain the peaceful state of mind. Our brain is wired to think and make decisions on conscious and subconscious levels at all times, it never stops.
The good news is that we can control and train our mind through a process of meditation. Something that more and more researchers and doctors confirm and what yogis and monks have been using for thousands of years. Granted that brain is the master computer that governs all aspects of individual life, it’s safe to call meditation a single most important practice that you can bring into your daily routine.
Meditation is suitable for anyone, irrespective of age and background.
It is a personally dedicated practice, not something you can delegate or combine with other activities. To start, you can use a meditation studio or use a guided meditation. Eventually, you would transition into a personal moment of silence.
Here we share the process of the meditation for you to gain a better understanding of this powerful technique. There are four stages in a meditation process or four aspects of movement of awareness.
Meditation starts with withdrawing of all your senses inward, pulling them back and focusing the attention on the inner being. Our mind is preoccupied with the world, with the stories and events, with work and chores and so on. The first part of the meditation, therefore, is withdrawing your senses inward by closing your eyes and focusing your attention on the space between the eyebrows or your breath.
By focusing your attention, you move to the second stage of the meditation, which is concentration and focus of the awareness.
Instead of having the mind scattered and wandering in thoughts, plans, emotions, you direct it to one point of attention.
Important not to force it, it is a natural focus. The distractions will slowly vanish and the attention starts to go more and more inward to a selected place. Different meditation techniques use breath, mantra or anything else to give work to the mind. Important to understand that meditation is about a focus on one particular point, which is something that does not come naturally to most people in the modern world. It is not about stopping the thought process and not thinking any thoughts, which is impossible to achieve.
As you continue to meditate, spontaneously you start to get merged with a deeper state of silence as you go deeper into the consciousness. You start to get settled down slowly, and it feels like rest. That’s when meditation is happening to you, you are not meditating anymore, which is the third stage.
Meeting yourself before the thought is the fourths and the most desired stage of the meditation.
That’s when you reach the true mastery of life, directing your mind and choosing your thoughts.
Buddhist monks achieve this state by long hours of daily meditation.
For the busy modern professionals, who cannot meditate long hours, the best outcomes of meditation are profound rest, stress relief and gaining deep self-awareness by putting a degree of separation between the thought and the action resulting from it. Your brain is naturally wired to think and give you “fight or flight” responses. Meditation helps gain the power of action over what the mind is telling you, which leads to more focus and control in life. Instead of reacting, meditation helps you to live more aware, conscious and fulfilled life.
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