Hack Yourself - Meditation 101
Meditation practice can take on many forms and each culture adds its own particular flavor. A friend asked recently what I thought about various forms of meditation: Transcendental Meditation, Vipassna, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR, Zen Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist etc. These and many other forms of meditation are taught all over the world and have been practiced for centuries. Just in the last 10 years western science has published findings, based on contemplative research, that describe the effects of meditation and the human nervous system. In the west we are beginning to recognize the benefits of meditation and corporations are introducing programs for their employees. Google’s Chade-Meng Tan started ‘Search Inside Yourself’ a meditation class at Google that is extremely popular with their engineers. The point is there are many teachers and many ways. The important thing is to look into the essence of what is being taught. Meditation can be broken down to 2 essential practices: focus and mindfulness. Focus practices such as focusing on breath, reciting a mantra, gazing at a candle flame, listening to meditative music and focusing on an internal place in the body such as the heart, are all different ways to focus your attention and train your brain. By focusing attention on a regular basis you start to become aware of thoughts, feelings and sensations that arise while your attention is focused. Instead of being identified with each thought, feeling or sensation as being 'real', the focal point allows you to separate enough to recognize there is space between 'you' and the thoughts, feelings, body sensations and memories that surface and pass through your awareness.
Pick one type of focus and try it to see if it resonates. Don't be discouraged if it doesn't, just try another focus. We are all different. Just like we may learn better with visual images rather than reading or listening or by writing notes; meditation is the same, you need to find the approach that works best to focus your attention. Explore, have fun, be light, enjoy, it's a happy journey into the workings of your own mind.
Once you develop the ability to focus, you can move on to mindfulness - becoming aware of that thought, feeling or sensation and recognizing that it arises and it dissolves if you do not give your focus and attention to it. In other words, if you don’t identify with your thoughts, feelings and sensations as ‘me’ rather, seeing these as phenomenon that arise and disappear in the totality of awareness that IS me. Mindfulness develops our capacity to make a choice about what dominates our mind, our thoughts and how we choose to spend our attention, energy and focus.
Those of us with strong analytical minds, who have been very successful in our lives through the exercise of our analytical thinking, have a double edge sword. The challenge is to let go of analytical thought – just as an experiment. In meditation there is nothing to attain, figure out or know. That tends to be harder for us. The benefit we have is that we have a strong capacity to apply that mental power into focus.
Finding a focus meditation that works is the best way to start for those of us with strong analytical tendencies. Try different types because you will find that you have a stronger resonance with one or another of these practices based on how your brain is wired. I personally like to listen to music when I meditate and allow that to be the focus. You may download music currently available on this website for free to try with headphones as a method for focus meditation.