You Can Meditate Anytime, Anywhere. It’s Much Easier Than You Think!
When most people think of meditation they conjure up images of people sitting cross-legged for hours with serious expressions on their face trying hard to empty their minds, and that puts a lot of people off meditating.
The reality is meditation is merely focussed attention and the opportunity to meditate is always present, even if it’s only for a few seconds and I thought I’d share some tips with you in the hope that it may encourage you to try meditation by dispelling some of the myths about it so that you can take advantage of meditation’s many benefits.
One myth (already mentioned) is that before you start to meditate you must first empty your mind of all thoughts, but that’s not true because for a mind to be empty it has to be empty of something? This is a misinterpretation of the Buddhist teaching on signlessness, inter-being and impermanence.
To meditate all you need to do is focus your attention on one thing and the easiest thing to do is focus on your breathing.
For example, like a lot of people I used to get frustrated at being stuck in traffic, but now I see it as an opportunity to meditate and all I do is focus on my breath and to help me do that I follow the advice of a great Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hahn who taught me that if I said to myself: “Breathing in I know I am breathing in”, as I take an in-breath and “breathing out I know I am breathing out” as I exhale my breath, I can simply and easily concentrate just on my breathing which grounds me in the present moment
Sometimes when I’m in a queue in a shop for a few minutes I simply use that time to focus on my breathing, even if it is for only two or three breaths.
When I’m working on my computer and an email comes in, what many people do is react to that by stopping what they are working on to go to the email, read it and then answer it. What I do is stop, take two or three breaths, and then decide whether I need to respond and look at the email or continue with what I was doing before the email came in.
And many times now, before I answer an email I will read it again slowly, whilst also breathing slowly whilst concentrating on the words in the email (as that is a form of meditation) and then stop and take three breaths whilst focussing on my breath entering and leaving my body before I respond to it.
There are so many opportunities for you to meditate, even if it for a few seconds, and if you do it regularly you can train your mind to not only enjoy the present moment but build resilience as well as benefiting from all of the other physical and mental benefits of meditation.
And if you’d like to know more about those benefits you can listen to this podcast or read the blog post here – https://nfps.info/why-do-i-meditate-have-i-gone-over-to-the-dark-side/
I’d be interested in your comments.