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Meditation and Mindfulness | Basics, a Guide and Benefits !

Meditation and Mindfulness

The fascinating part of practicing mindfulness is actually the power it renders to you at the end of the day. What is mindfulness? The state of mindfulness is when we are aware of ourselves, our feelings, the present moment and our surrounding, rather than being taken away by the thoughts of future and past. The basic method of doing so is simply by sitting down and focusing on the breath and monitoring our thoughts without any judgment whatsoever. Oftentimes, when we try meditation, we kinda get lost in our thoughts and when we realize this, we get frustrated. The significant point here is that this is the nature of our mind. As it is put by Master S. N. Goenka, the genuine nature of our mind is that it is fleeting. Our mind cannot stay at the present moment, but it essays to live in the beauties and miseries of the past or wants of the future. Therefore, the mindfulness meditation introduced and practiced by Master S.N. Goenka (a.k.a vipassana meditation!), is done to train the mind to stay in the present moment to eventually feel the happiness.

Benefits of Meditation

With the growing tendency towards the New Age movement and way of living, we feel compelled to get to know ourselves and handle our issues internally rather than finding a solution in the outside world. The characteristics of New Age Movement (aka New Age Spirituality) are as below:

• The tendency towards inner space
• Passion for nature
• Bringing together the old knowledge, methods and technics and modern concepts
• Having a holistic approach towards the world
• Questioning omnivorism and adopting a vegan and vegetarian diet

Oftentimes, we all have had the experience of facing an obstacle in which we have found solace through going deep down in ourselves rather than in the material world. It goes without mentioning that it has happened for a plethora of times for every one of us that we have almost seen some unjustifiable last minutes resolution in dealing with anxieties, life difficulties and so on and so forth. Explaining theresolutions, in terms of concrete scientific terms, is immaterial, in my perspective.
Many people, who actually practice meditation on a daily basis, find life very pleasing; and deal with it very more rationally comparing to rest of us. Those who meditate are less prone to be affected by the sudden unfortunate changes in their lives; they are calmer, and can see even more clearly. In this sense, Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the best-selling Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind has mentioned for time and again, that he meditates every day for two hours. Harari has claimed that meditation has helped him to see more clearly. The leading Beat Poet, Allen Ginsberg also stated that he would see more clearly through practicing meditation during the last two decades of his life. Over the course of the history, there are humongous numbers of preeminent people who has offered the same ideas with regard to the benefits of meditation. In this regard, Jack Kerouac has touched on the healing ability of meditation in his novella, Darma Bums, in which he meditates to heal his mother’s allergy:

“A strange thing happened the next day, to illustrate the true power I had gained from these magic visions. My mother had been coughing for five days and her nose was running and now her throat was beginning to hurt so much that her coughs were painful and sounded dangerous to me. I decided to go into a deep trance and hypnotize myself, reminding myself "All is empty and awake," to investigate the cause and cure of my mother's illness. Instantly, in my closed eyes, I saw a vision of a brandy bottle which then I saw to be "Heet" rubbing medicine and on top of that, superimposed like a movie fade-in, I saw a distinct picture of little white flowers, round, with small petals. I instantly got up, it was midnight, my mother was coughing in her bed, and I went and took several bowls of bachelor's buttons my sister had arranged around the house the week before and I set them outside. Then I took some "Heet" out of the medicine cabinet and told my mother to rub it on her neck. The next day her cough was gone.
Later on, after I was gone hitchhiking west, a nurse friend of ours heard the story and said "Yes, it sounds like an allergy to the flowers." During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilizing physical opportunities to punish themselves because of their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Allah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last "miracle" because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the responsibility.
Everybody in the family heard of my vision and what I did but they didn't seem to think much of it: in fact I didn't, either. And that was right. I was very rich now, a super myriad trillionaire in Samapatti transcendental graces, because of good humble karma, maybe because I had pitied the dog and forgiven men. But I knew now that I was a bliss heir, and that the final sin, the worst, is righteousness.”
Darma Bums

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How to meditate

The first thing to know is that you don’t want to do anything unnatural. The whole idea of meditation, as Mooji puts it is “beingness”. We want to simply be, going back to our own peace of mind and simply embrace what we are and whatever thought we have. As a misconception, his probably happens to every one of us that when we sit down the first time, we prepare ourselves to block every thought and feel emptiness by force. We want to go back to our nature. Surely the first couple of times, it is going to be challenging as we have been configured to run and run and run, and to be worried, rather than staying put. In the following, I am going to provide a very brief meditation guide and these are the basic steps and probably all we need to know to handle ourselves pretty fine and thorough.

A Brief Meditation Guide

OK! Cool! Let’s begin with the following steps.

The first step is finding a quiet and comfortable space in which you know that you won’t be interrupted.
Simply sit down, relax and as they say, focus on your breath; the coming and going away.
You will notice that your thoughts will invade your concentration. Don’t make any judgment and come back to your breath.
When you notice that to have been wandering in your thoughts, simply observe that. The whole idea of meditation is simply being an observer so that eventually we realize that happiness comes as the result of being a mere observer.
As a part of the process you may consider playing meditation music!. They are abundantly helpful during the first endeavors.

As there is no fixed way of meditating, and everyone actually does it almost differently after a while, in order to get an idea in the beginning, there are copious numbers of guided meditations on YouTube. I myself was always enjoying Mooji’s guided meditation!, as he was one of the few people who helped me to take the primary steps. However, as the whole idea of meditation and mindfulness is to be aware of our internal space, and the internal space for everyone differs from one to another, it is primarily vital to find your own way.

This is the whole idea. But these pieces of advice can be found anywhere. What I want to explain in the following is something additional to the abovementioned. First off, in my view, as I have already mentioned above, there is not a unique method for meditation. Secondly, many of the people who have been practicing meditation and mindfulness for a while, realize that after some time meditation comes to their every moment; meaning that they don’t actually feel the need to sit down and meditate and undergo the whole process. For these practitioners, meditation and mindfulness are done during the day, whether they want it or not. After some time, they find it overwhelmingly easier to become mindful and aware of their surroundings. This is probably the core basis of Vipassana meditation. It helps you see the world as it really is, and therefore lead to happiness. It is worth mentioning that Vipassana courses are done in a 10 day period. I have heard from the people who have actually attended these courses that they feel more relaxed and they tend to take their time and see the world rather than feeling the fret of the technological world.

I took these photos in Lumbini, Nepal, wherein a Vipassana Center is located.
@siavashgh