There are two things that I have become enchanted with over the last year or so: Meditation and Mindfulness. Both relate to your mind, one aims to train your mind while the other allows you to focus on now. In fact it is common to hear the term Mindfulness Meditation.
As I wrote in my previous post, I find it extremely important to meditate. I also have started believing that almost all of us need to meditate in today’s modern world just due to the immense amount of information flowing through. Meditation is the only effective tool to deal with this information and maintain a calm demeanor.
I used to try to meditate on and off but never got into a routine. However I have finally focused on it as a New Year Resolution and have made some progress since then. I think the single biggest learning here is to get away from the idea of instant gratification. Meditation works but it takes time. You cannot expect to be the Buddha on Day 1. So with that idea firmly ingrained I started off on this journey of meditating.
The second lesson is that your mind is usually very cluttered. Different thoughts (information) are flowing at different rates through your conscious mind. I had always thought of meditation as just starting with focusing on your breath. However I wasn’t able to do that at all since every minute a thought would take over my active mind. And almost all of these thoughts were old, the same worries and planning.
The approach I took was to consider these thoughts like clothes. My mind is a room and these clothes (thoughts) are just lying around randomly. And new clothes keep piling up until I am being crushed by the weight of my own clothes. So the first 2-3 weeks I started my meditation with considering each thought and putting it in a compartment. It’s like looking at a thought and deciding a category and putting it there. In a way it was also like taking the shirt or jeans, folding it and putting it in a cupboard. Slowly I was able to do more and more of this.
At first the rate at which you put thoughts away is much lower than the rate at which thoughts flit around. If you keep at it regularly, you would start matching the rate and eventually surpassing it. At that point you can put all the clothes in their cupboards. All thoughts re-directed to their categories like Work, Money, Family or Fantasies. I imagine these cupboards to be locked and only I can open them. So I had these 6-7 cupboards in my mind and I started categorizing and filing my thoughts into them. I started realizing that almost 90% of the thoughts were same worries day over day.
Finally there came a point where I had no stray thoughts lying around my mind. Everything, every worry, every future plan had been considered and actioned or filed since it cannot really be actioned. This point comes with some effort and it doesn’t always continue directly in the next meditation. It may only last for a few seconds or minutes. But it is at this time where you almost feel like you are flying above a lake that it completely still. It is what I call the still mind state. This moment itself is just worth the effort of meditation for the last few weeks.
The still mind is a beautiful state where you have completely still lake. If you were to drop just one drop of red ink, it would color the complete lake red in moments. This is when your mind is receptive to new directions. All you need to do is focus on a thought you want to believe in: “The world is beautiful”, “Human beings care for each other” and you really believe it in that instant. You know it is true and possible. Everything is possible at that moment.
The other interesting thing about this state is also that it is a cradle of new ideas. When you allow your mind this moment of stillness, sometimes it would surprise you with a new idea that was almost always there but yet feels impossible to have come to mind. The analogy of still lake and colors came to me in one such moment. Before that I was unable to describe what that moment felt like.
This is where I am in my journey of meditation right now. I have heard stories of being able to channel your energies, reaching elevated consciousness levels etc but these are still far away. I have found immense joy and calm in just being able to close a facet of thoughts like Work the moment I want to detach from it. And I think it is helped improve my life in all ways like a ray of sunshine bringing the warmth on a cold morning.