The Art of Meditation
A Gateway to the Heart
Meditation is an activity, not a passive way to while away time. It is a practice of sitting, stilling the mind using a variety of techniques, done on your own or in a group. Some sessions can be quite grueling, with the chattering of the mind overtaking the solemnity of peace.
Returning Makes the Difference
It is the exercise of returning to the stillness, or the breath or whatever you set as your anchor point that makes the session worthwhile. The constant returning from a distraction makes the difference which is sometimes not noticeable until you get up from your sit and rejoin the world.
But leaving your meditation just to return a week later is not quite the point. Meditation is an art that can be put into daily actions.
Finding Yourself Present in each Moment
‘Creative living gives us fluidity, adaptability, spontaneity, and resourcefulness. As with concentration it implies living in the present and having a mindfulness which is an awareness of every moment’ says Judy Jacka, a teacher and author of meditation.
Just asThich Nhat Hanh, one of the revered teachers of Zen Buddhism, found in his early training as a monk, that simple mundane tasks such as washing up are the times that meditation can change the task into a moment of being. In his monastery they had piles of dishes and pots with no hot water or washing up detergent, only coconut husks. He learnt that being present with the breath, plates, cold water etc, changed the task from a laborious challenge into a meaningful experience.
It is easier to imagine the feeling of oneness when you are sitting in front of a sunset. The horizon filled with the magnificent tones of pinks and oranges, and the majestic sun dropping lower into the sky, until it disappears. As your mind becomes occupied with the sight, you notice that you are no longer feeling separate, but have become part of the landscape.
Opening the Heart
Meditation practice helps to find the way beyond, or as Deepak Chopra MD., who has been hailed as a “pioneer in the medicine of the future”, through his teachings and books, puts it, “dropping into the gap between the thoughts” and to experience moments that we are less engrossed with the busy mind.
The meditative listener listens to the heart, to the breath, to the body. In these other centers there is a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that is waiting to be applied to your every day life that will change the mundane into the extraordinary.
If praying is talking to your God, then meditation is listening.
“ If we’re really engaged in mindfulness while walking along the path to the village, then we will consider the act of each step we take as an infinite wonder, and a joy will open our hearts like a flower, enabling us to enter the world of reality’ writes Thich Nhat Hanh in The Miracle of Mindfulness.
Reference: The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh. Beacon Press (Boston) ISBN 08070122327
Meditation The most natural therapy, Judy Jacka. Lothian. (Australia) ISBN 0850913934
The Higher Self, Deepak Chopra, MD. Nightingale Conant (Illinois)
moment of stillness
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