Some patients struggle to do meditation or they don’t stick to it on a regular basis which is critical to see the incredible effects.
Doing meditation today doesn’t make you feel better tomorrow. That’s a fact. Maybe you don’t even feel anything or consider it a waste of time. Or even commonly people think they’re not doing it well as they don’t feel what New Age books say you should do (e.g life-changing effects where problems suddenly disappear from life…). The problem here relates to a lack of patience to see results instead of the effectiveness itself.
The key is being constant and practice meditation specially when you’re feeling well instead of getting into desperate with anxiety to begin. Thus, once life becomes a struggle you’ll find out things and disgraceful events are more manageable as meditation provides healthy coping skills for uncomfortable emotions: life-changing realization happens once you’re put into situation as your mind will become calmer so solutions suddenly start to pop up. The primary aim of meditation is WISDOM.
Wisdom arises because we learn to become the witness of our minds and our behaviours instead of being engulfed by them. At some point we all need to realize that we are simply witnessing the mind and it’s thinking and we are not actually the thinking itself.
When we sit and practice observation, we allow thoughts to arise but we don’t place any importance on them and we just let them pass. Allow space to take their place. The space, the context is already there, we just don’t know it because we have been busy filling it up with more and more contents. One of the best techniques or tools to work with is your breath.
It’s with you all the time, and its free, you don’t need any special equipment or anything. What you do with your breath is you simply draw your minds attention to the entry of the nostrils and watch the breath and it enters, and watch the breath as it leaves. That is all. Just watch it come in, and watch it go out. As thoughts arise, you are likely to get distracted, it does not matter, it is natural. It happened to Buddha too (although he had an easy life).
The fundamental thing we need to understand is that we are not our thoughts. Thoughts are just products of the mind, contents that come and go. We are something much greater than the mind, something beyond the limited constructs of the mind. Practice non-reaction.
To be honest, I believe all of our addictive behaviours come from the feeling of lack in our lives; the feeling that we are lacking something and we need to fill the lack up in order to feel fulfilled. After some time we all come to realize that this lack can never be fulfilled via external things like clothes, cars, food, money, relationships etc.
However, the fulfillment that we all seek is already lying within us. You are already complete as you are, when you go within through the practices of meditation and observation you will find this to be true.
Photo by S Migaj
