Starting Out With Meditation
Meditation is a lifestyle choice, a way of getting your mind and your life under control. It helps to put things in perspective, and it helps you to come to terms with who you are. And if followed through to the very end, it can help you to attain Nirvana, the ultimate state of happiness, the goal of the Theravada Buddhist.
Meditation (especially as used to achieve Nirvana), is a way to train yourself for a more effective concentration of your mind. You can meditate while being seated or standing or lying down or even while you are walking. To begin with though, it is best to be seated in a comfortable and relaxed position, as this allows little leeway for your mind to become distracted by external things.
More Detailed Information
A brief look at what starting with meditation entails and how it can improve your life.
>> Initial steps in meditation.Here we outline some of the basic steps and methods you can utilise to start meditation.
You should be clean, and the clothes you are wearing must also be clean. The place that you have chosen should be very quiet and be without any bad smells. To aid in this act you can light a fragrant incense stick to provide your meditation area with a calming air.
Note: As your mind starts to focus on meditation your senses become very alert and you would start to smell even minor bad smells, including your body smells. Even minute sounds that you never knew existed will get magnified sufficiently to become a nuisance and distract you.
The key factor when you are meditating is to bring your mind into keen focus. You need to blot out the rest of the world and anything and everything which is happening around you, or in your thoughts.
To do this, you need to first realize and acknowledge that your mind is indeed wandering around from object to object. When you come to this realization you can then begin to control your thoughts and to herd them in the direction that you want them to go, not in the direction they want to take you!
To achieve the proper state of meditation, your mind needs to be a blank canvas. You can not have puffy white clouds or funky little neon colored swirls going around in your head. You need to bring your mind to the here and now. Forget about the past. Forget about what has yet to happen. They don稚 matter, and they don稚 exist.
Don't think about work or home; don稚 think about the pot which needs cleaning or the project which needs to be completed in two hours; don稚 think about the steady drip-drip sound of the leaking faucet, or even about the heady smell of roses outside your room.
Tear your mind away from all of these thoughts. Cast them out. All they do is hinder your peace of mind. Besides you can be assured that all of these things will still be there when you finish with your meditating.
Try not to think of anything at this point. If a stray thought comes in, just acknowledge it and drop it; start thinking of this moment, the here and now. At the beginning, when you first start to meditate, you will find that this type of focused concentration is difficult, if not impossible, to keep. Do not give up though. This is very normal.
It took you an endless number of lifetimes or a lifetime (for the person who does not believe in reincarnation), to get your head into this thoroughly disorganized state of muddle, and it can not be untangled in a few minutes, hours, or even days. It will take patience and a strong commitment on your part to follow through and untangle your mind, and meditation is the only key to this.
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