Learning meditation

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

By training the mind to focus on a movement such as walking - you become aware of your normal uncontrolled thinking patterns

Although there are numerous meditation traditions - Eastern and Western, religious and secular - most meditation techniques fall into four ways of working with the mind.

Using a focus

The first technique involves learning to focus and concentrate. By training the mind to focus on an object – such as a candle, on the breath, or on a movement such as walking - you become aware of your normal uncontrolled thinking patterns and eventually learn to relax and quiet your mind.

It is a good beginning practice and important as a basis for mindfulness meditation.

Using mindfulness

The second technique involves learning about yourself and the world around you. You become aware of the content of your mind and the subtle feelings in your body. Then you begin to observe the mental habits and patterns that may be holding you back in life.

Through mindfulness you learn to be mentally present - aware of what you are doing and thinking, and aware also of the world around you - while maintaining a non-judgmental and compassionate attitude.

Using a topic

The third way to meditate is to contemplate a topic. The early Christians for example meditatedon passages of The New Testament, while Tibetan Buddhists meditate on topics such as compassion.

Often spiritual adepts of all traditions East and West meditate on death to help recognise the fleeting quality and precious nature of human life.

Using the senses

The fourth type of meditation engages the senses. For instance using your sense of hearing and your voice you can practise chanting and mantra recitation and listen to music and the sounds of nature.

MASTERING THE BASICS

EXERCISE ONE: Relaxing your body

Relaxation reduces stress and prepares you for meditation. The body’s bio-chemistry responds in the same way to real or imagined threat, releasing chemicals into the bloodstream that tell body and brain to get ready for danger.

Try this exercise to negate this response and bring peace...

Relaxation can help you prepare for meditation

Put on loose, comfortable clothing and remove any jewellery and your watch.

Then lie on your bed or on the floor in a place where you will not be disturbed. If the room is cool, cover yourself with a light blanket to preserve body heat.

Let your feet fall apart and your arms relax by your sides. Close your eyes.

Feel your feet. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and let them sink into the floor. Start with relaxing your toes, then the ball of your foot, the arch, your heels and your ankles.

Relax your lower legs. Feel your knees. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and feel any tension dissolve.

Continue slowly working up your body through your thighs, abdomen, chest and buttocks.

Then consciously relax your hands, arms, shoulders and neck. Finish by relaxing your head, mouth and jaw, eyes and cheeks. Let any tension release.

Mentally scan your body. If you find any place that is still tense, then consciously relax that place and let the tension dissipate.

When you are ready open your eyes and stretch.

EXERCISE TWO: Breathing more deeply

In many meditations you will be advised to breathe ‘into the belly’. Belly breathing focuses you on using the diaphragm to expand and contract the belly, which helps to deepen the breath.

Many of us simply expand the rib-cage, which sits on top of the diaphragm. This results in a shallow breath.

Try this exercise to counter stress and anger...

When inhaling soften your belly as this allows your diaphragm to drop down., making room for your lungs

Lie down and get comfortable. Suck in your belly and try to inhale deeply. With your belly contracted you should feel a great deal of tension and difficulty in breathing, forcing you to take frequent, shallow breaths. When the belly is tight, the diaphragm has a difficult time moving downwards because it is resisted by contracted abdominal muscles and internal organs.

Place one hand on your belly and one on your chest. Now soften your belly and let it expand as you take a long slow breath in. Feel your diaphragm drop,
as first the lower then the upper part of your lungs fills with air.

When you soften your belly, allowing it to expand as you inhale, your organs drop, allowing the diaphragm to more easily contract downwards.

Exhale slowly, allowing your belly to settle into its normal position. As your diaphragm relaxes and moves upwards feel your belly settle back into its
normal place.

Practise belly breathing in this way for ten minutes. Bear in mind that exhaling for twice as long as you inhale helps the body relax and let go of the ‘fight-or-flight’ stress responses. Sit up carefully after ending your practice.

EXERCISE THREE: Sitting to meditate

When meditating you can sit on a straight-backed chair, cross-legged on a cushion or in a kneeling pose sitting on your calves with the backs of your feet flat against the floor...

Sitting cross-legged on a cushion is one of the popular meditative poses

Sit in your chosen position. Gently sway your body from side to side until your spine feels centred. Lengthen your spine into its natural curve by imagining you have a
string attached to the crown of your head and that it is being pulled gently
from above.

Relax your stomach muscles so that your abdomen becomes soft and rounded and the small of your back gently curves forward. Scan your body and release any tension or tightness.

Check that your head is level, your shoulders are relaxed and your ears are parallel with your shoulders. Align your nose directly over your navel, and slightly tuck in your chin.

Focus your eyes in the space about 3 to 4ft in front of you, lowering your eyelids slightly at a 45-degree angle.

Place your left hand on top of your right hand with both palms facing upwards and your thumbs raised slightly and just touching. The sides of your little fingers should rest against your lower abdomen about three inches below your navel.

Close your mouth and rest your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Let
the tip of your tongue rest gently against your upper front teeth.

Remain in this position while focusing on slow belly breathing for a few minutes. Then unfold your hands and legs and stretch carefully before slowly standing up, raising your head last.

Extracted from The Meditation Experience by Madonna Gauding, RRP £12.99, and published by Godsfield Press (part of the Octopus Publishing Group)

Even cheaper here....

Mindfulness

How to alleviate mental and physical conditions by being mindful

Long practiced by ­Buddhists, mindfulness is now well established in the West and widely used by those seeking psychological or spiritual change in their lives.

Advocates believe this meditational practice can help alleviate a variety of mental and physical conditions, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety. But what is mindfulness and how might we use it?

Find inner peace: Meditating could enhance your life

SEIZE THE MOMENT

Mindfulness is concerned with the present; with keeping your consciousness alive to the present moment.

This may appear a simple task, but is harder than it sounds. Most of the time, our minds are taking us back into the past or into the imaginary future.

To help us to engage with the present moment, breath work is a great help, because unlike our mind, it is always present. So becoming aware of your breathing — in and out, in and out — is a wonderful start to becoming present.

NOTICE WHAT IS NOW

We are also helped into the present by noticing things: if we’re turning a key in a lock, we notice we are turning a key in a lock; if we’re walking down the street, we notice the shifting cloud formations or the negative feelings arising in us towards a car driver.

It’s about noticing what’s happening now. When we make a cup of tea or do the washing-up without thinking of what we are going to do next, we are mindful.

We are happier when we notice the present and let the future take care of itself.

BECOME THE EXPLORER

Mindfulness makes explorers of us, and like all explorers we will have to be brave if we wish to discover new lands.

Mindfulness asks a hard question of us: are you willing to experience openly what makes you unhappy?

We tend to shy away from this because the thought of it scares us. And, of course, this is why we became unhappy in the first place, because we were scared.

But if we are willing to face things, we will discover a fresh knowing — virgin territory, which restores happiness.

If we are not willing to face things, then, sadly, we continue to walk the same mental circles we have always walked. There is a great courage in mindfulness.

SEA OF CALM

Meditation and mindfulness can ease depression, lower blood pressure and chronic pain

STOP THINKING

Surprisingly, mindfulness encourages us to stop taking our thoughts too seriously. It invites us to stop wandering off into the past or the future.

Instead, we stop thinking and focus on our breathing. We’re quiet, present and watch our thoughts as they arise. Soon, we become aware of the mad restlessness and capriciousness of our minds, and, in time, we begin to take our thoughts less seriously.

This is liberating, as we have been their unquestioning slave for too long. Our thoughts do not always offer us the ‘reality’ we imagine.

DON'T CENSOR YOURSELF - ACCEPT YOURSELF

As you get in touch with your breathing, thoughts will arise in you, unbidden. Don’t censor them, whatever their nature, but rather allow them all.

In accepting them, you accept yourself. If you censor emotions as they appear, they’ll bury themselves even deeper within you and you’ll never discover anything you didn’t know already.

If you allow everything, it may well be that you meet what is making you unhappy, but this is good.

How can you say ‘goodbye’ to it until you’ve said ‘hello’?

QUESTION THE NEGATIVE

We are shaped by what we do with our negative experiences. Depression, for instance, is a turning away from experience in order to avoid emotional pain.

Mindfulness doesn’t stop negative thoughts or feelings, but does help us to question their believability. Are these negative feelings quite as solid as they appear? Life is all in the perception; how we perceive events.

Mindfulness practice creates in us a sense of water flowing, things passing through, rather than hard blocks of ice inside us, solid and immovable.

JUDGE BY RESULTS

Our judgments of others arise in direct proportion to our self-judgment. But as we allow ourselves to notice self-­judgment, we also allow ourselves to be free of it.

People at peace are those who both see and accept the truth of who they are, rather than avoiding it and blaming someone else. Such people are less likely to find fault with others.

GIVE UP YOUR OPINIONS

You cannot be mindful while holding on to your opinions. That’s like trying to keep dry by jumping into the sea.

PROTECT THE SPACE

Add a tablespoon of salt to a glass of water and it makes a significant ­difference. Add the same spoon of salt to a jug of water and it makes some difference to the taste.

Add it to a lake, however, and it hardly affects anything.

Mindfulness makes us larger containers. This happens as we remove from ourselves all the clutter of past and future concerns.

In the present, we have endless inner space, which is a great step towards happiness.

Difficult emotions, like salt, may remain, but their power to affect us is diffused. Previously they could ruin our day, but now they can barely ruin five minutes.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1343495/How-alleviate-mental-physical-conditions-mindful.html#ixzz1A2B1l4NM