by Brain, mind, head or whatever you can call to the thing which sits at the top of your body. Following are my questions related to it for you:
Is your brain yours ?
Do you control brain or it controls you ?
The answer to any other part of your body is simple. Is your arm yours ? Yes. Do you control arm or arm controls you? Yes I control the arm. The same is not true for brain, it controls you. A simple example is: while you read this post, your brain would wander to multiple unrelated thoughts. Another example is: we get sucked into stream of our own thoughts and there is no way out of it, other times we want to focus on something but mind keeps drifting.
Meditation is one way to control your mind. I have been practicing meditation for few months now and I am a very basic level beginner but wanted to share my way of doing it.
How to meditate
The method I follow is focus on the breath. This is how I start
1. Sit in a comfortable position with something supporting my back, like sitting next to a wall.
2. Making sure that I am not hungry or just had my meal. Having a snack is ok
3. The environment should not have sharp sounds like loud noises
4. Sit in lotus position as much as possible
At this point I am physically ready to do the meditation, now I start preparing my mind for meditation:
- Focus on the current surroundings like smells, background noise if any
- Reduce the area of focus to body like any stiffness or how my body feels in general
- Reduce the focus to breath sensations
This way I don’t throw by body directly to observing breath but gradually go in it. This is helpful as it gives the mind the required runway for the flight of meditation.
Mind Wandering
Once I start focusing on breath, the mind would wander to random thoughts. Sometimes, its about the things I have done during the day or things which I could have done. However, as soon as I discover that I am not focusing on breath, I would positively recognize the same, then bring the focus back to breath. Its really important to take this recognition of mind wandering positively and encourage the realization that mind is not focused on the breath. This is also known as the “ahha” moment.
Initial Meditation practice
The mind would wander to various things, and moments of focus on breaths would be very short initially. The goal is to set a time for mediation and do it regularly. As days roll, the mind wandering gets reduced and the time focused on breath increases. I have experienced that now I can focus more on breath sensations compared to when I started meditation.
Meditation duration
I started with 20 minutes and now I am able to go up to 40 minutes. I have not been able to meditate more than 40 mins yet and never did it twice in a day. However, I deeply enjoy my practice and the feeling is really hard to describe in words. One needs to meditate to feel it. There is no other way to explain this feeling.
I have seen positive changes in my thinking with meditation, I’ll post those in a new post. But, I really hope more and more people would try meditation. Its a blissful feeling.
