An Efficient Meditation Technique - Basic Steps to Follow

Many individuals that are in search of clearing their minds from daily worries and stress turn to meditation. But is there a 100% efficient meditation technique? The facts are that there can be found various meditation techniques - some of them quite specialized and detailed - but there are a few steps that need to be followed regardless of the chosen method: the breathing, the relaxing and the meditation itself. Here they are!

How to Breathe

The first thing you should know is that there is no effective meditation technique without a proper breathing. Basically, you need to focus on your breathing, to breathe in slowly, yet deeply and to let the air out as slowly as you can, but without making effort. Try to think that the air is clean and pure, that it comes straight from God, from the perfect nature or from other positive, ideal sources. Furthermore, try to feel that the breathing is cleaning your entire body and that it is helping your body loosen up. Some individuals find it useful to try to breath as slowly as possible and, at the same time, as quietly as possible - try to think like you are "whispering" your breathing.

How to Relax

Meditation and relaxation go hand in hand and depend on each other, so make sure that you are committed to begin a complex and unite meditation exercises program, a program that is based on a previous relaxation and detachment from worries and problems. But how can you make sure that you reach the needed level of relaxation? Well, first of all, you need to be surrounded by a welcoming, appealing and intimate decor that can permit you relax and meditate. Select the place where you feel most comfortable and at peace.

How to Meditate

The wide range of meditation tools and techniques permits you to find the one that is most suitable for you. But there is one meditation technique that seems to be very popular and easily applicable: the visualization meditation practice. The only question here is: "What should you visualize?" the answer is quite simple: you should visualize the one thing that makes you feel relaxed, happy, satisfied or that induces any other feeling you enjoy. Basically, it can be anything: a moment that happened, a moment that you expect to happen, an activity that relaxes you, a fantasy, a trip to an exotic island or, why not, to your own room or home (the place where you feel safest and best), a natural element, your loved ones and the list can go on and on.

When you are imagining or picturing the selected moment or element, you have to let all its beauty invade you, you have to be receptive to all the stimulants that it offers you, to enjoy it in all the ways you can. Observe your selected element carefully, slowly, be attentive to the details. Live the emotions that it creates with intensity and you will live the meditation experience at high
standards.

Once you have started to meditate, make sure you practice your meditation technique every day or at least every other day and make sure you follow the above tips, in order to get to the desired results. Remember that meditation is a key to a better health, a better sleep, a better focus and, in general, to a better life, so those 10 minutes every day are worth it!


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Breathing Meditation Instructions to Relax Your Body and Calm Your Mind

This is a breathing meditation instructions that I wrote a couple of years ago in my old website. It was based on the teachings of my late teacher Ven. Bhante Vimalaramsi, the abbott of the Dhammasukha Meditation Center.

Instructions:

1. First of all, close your eyes, keep your body erect and sit on any comfortable position. Start to follow your breath naturally. "Breathing in, I know that I'm breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I'm breathing out." You just need to know and understand the general characteristic of breath, either long or short, fine or coarse, etc. You don't need to overfocus or overconcentrate on the breath as exclusion of everything else, nor to focus on nostril tip, upper lip, or abdomen. Just let the breath flows naturally and relax.

2. If a thought or feeling appears, just let it go. "Let it go" means just let it be there without interrupting it in any way. Allow it to come and do whatever it wants, but you don't need to pay attention to it. It's just a thought after all. You don't need to squeeze or suppress your mind in any way. Just let it be there by itself.

3. Next, just relax the tightness and tension in your mind and body. This tension is the form of craving that manifests in both your mind and body. We can see this tightness and tension clearly just after the mind starts to wobble around. This is how the "I like it or I don't like it" mind arises and creates huge amount of suffering in our life due to our attachment and craving to these fleeting phenomenas. Therefore, we just need to relax and let go all the tightness and tension and feel our mind opened and expanded in space of infinite emptiness.

4. After that, you can notice the tight mental fist wrapped around the sensation (feeling) and just let it be there, let it float like the bubble in the air. You don't need to verbalize it or make it more than what it is. It's just a feeling anyway. Let it be there by itself and just be aware of it without any resistance. Sonn you will find all the pain and unpleasant feeling in your body and will dissolve by itself without you doing anything.

5. Finally, re-establish your mindfulness and allow the breath to become predominant again. After that SMILE!!! DON'T FORGET TO SMILE. Smile can relax all the tension in your facial muscles and make your face more calm and serene. Just look at the Buddha statue. Every Buddha Statue is smiling, isn't it?

Take nothing seriously. Just let go, relax, and breathe...

You can also laugh when you see how crazy your mind is. Don't try to control the feelings with thoughts, because it doesn't work and it hurts. The source of suffering is trying to change and verbalize the feelings with thoughts. Feeling is just a feeling, thought is just a thought. If you can, try to examine passively these links of dependent origination: after contact arises, feeling arises (Pleasant, unpleasant or neutral), after feeling arises, craving arises (I like it or I don't like it /tension in body and mind), shortly after craving arises, clinging arises (the thoughts about why it's there and how to change it). If you understand this, you can let go more easily and joyfully.

Allow Yourself to Relax - Simple Relaxation Techniques That You Can Try

Stress is one of the curse of living in modern times. Almost everyone suffers from stress and it can also bring lots of negative impacts to both our body and mind. When we are feeling stressed out or worn out maybe because we have extremely miserable day or things just don't work out the way we want to, the best thing that we can do is relax. So what can we do to achieve relaxation? If there are thousands of ways we can get stressed, there are also many ways we can relax.

One way of relaxation is by using a breathing meditation technique. The simple way to do that is just by becoming aware of the movement of your breath going in and out and relax the tension in your mind and body. When thoughts or feelings appear, just let it be there without resistance at all and re-establish your attention to the breath. Doing this for 10-15 minutes will help greatly to reduce the stress and tension in your mind.

Listening to relaxing music or sound of nature also help a lot to reduce stress. Just by listening to the sound of waterfall or the birds chirping harmoniously, you can feel that instant joy and ease in your mind. It will take your attention from your stressful situation to a more peaceful and relaxing state of mind.

Doing a mindful walking in the garden path or nearby lake side is also a great way to relax. Walk slowly and be mindful of your breath and the movements of your feet. Also, be aware and present with all the surroundings when you walk. You can notice that just by being with the trees or looking mindfully at the sky, you can be with the present moment without any struggle or resistance. It can also help you to get in touch with nature and feel the peace that is always there in the present moment.

Another easy way to achieve relaxation is by doing yoga. I'm a practicioner of Asthanga yoga myself and I feel lots of benefits from it both physically and mentally. Yoga can help to reduce stress and lower your blood pressure which makes your body more energized and at ease. Doing yoga in the morning before you start doing your activities is a great way to start your day.

Hypnosis is one controversial relaxation technique that you can try. There are lots of guided self hypnosis on the internet that you can listen to and it is a really great alternative if you don't have any idea on how to relax before. It is also a good alternative for people with stress related health problems.

These relaxation techniques are just some of the ways you can achieve relaxation. My suggestion is just choose any technique that suits you and practice it regularly. By applying these techniques, you can start to reduce the stress from your daily life and become more accepting with whatever happening in your life.

Simple Instructions on Insight Meditation

If you want to improve your meditation practice and start developing spiritual insight into the true nature of your mind and body, you can start with these step-by-step insight meditation instructions below:


STEP 1: First, sit comfortably to relax your body and your respiration. We call this first step the "preparatory practices", or physiological adjustments, for tuning the physical nature. Basically, you want to situate yourself so as to lessen any physical disturbances or distractions. Then after your body is calmed, you start quietly observing your inner thoughts and emotions. In other words, you simply watch your internal psychological functions like a third person observer. This third person doesn't interfere with what's going on, or participate in the activities they're observing. He just stays there watching, neither rejecting or clinging to anything; he simply sits there silently observing.

STEP 2: You continue watching your internal process of mentation until you reach the point where you can clearly observe every thought and idea which appears in the mind without any vagueness or ambiguity. Naturally, you are not tightening your body nor mentally straining during this practice. Rather, you always remain relaxed while clearly observing your internal mental processes. After a while, you will eventually be able to distinguish that the process of mentation has three parts: a preceding thought which has gone, a thought which has not yet arisen, and the immediate clear radiance, or mental state of present mind. With continued watching, the separation of these three states becomes quite clear.

STEP 3: With continued observation, you progress a bit further and next realize that the past, present and future thoughts never stay. Since they don't stay they can never be grasped, hence we say that "fundamentally, they have no base to rely upon". Observing the appearance and disappearance of thoughts is called "observing birth and death", for the coming and going of thoughts is a ceaseless, never-ending process of arising and then disappearance, or decay. This is the realm of birth and death.

By observing this stream of birth and death, you will gradually learn how to detach from the mental processes, and you will become more familiar with the false mind of consciousness. In other words, you will be able to drop the illusion that our mental process is a fundamental reality. Rather, you will gradually see that all mental states are ungraspable, transient phenomena which come and go without end, and they're more like insubstantial bubbles of foam or particles of dust which have no fixity of nature. Because of their ceaseless birth and death and the gap in-between, what we normally imagine as a continuous continuity of thoughts is actually an illusion, like the unbroken wheel of light we see when a stick of fire is spun in the air. Thus through this process of inner watching, you will begin to realize that our mental state is an ongoing process separate from our true self. The true self is what's watching this play scene, so it's like an internal knower who never moves. If you go from here to the North Pole and back, the scenery always changes, but that inner knower never changes--it never moves. In fact, it never leaves, and has never come either. It just is. That's what we're seeking, though on a more profound level than we can explain here.

Now in watching thoughts without adding any energy to the process, you'll begin to understand how dreamlike our consciousness actually is because the reality it gives birth to seems to be there and yet the concreteness of this reality isn't real. Phenomena are empty, and yet they are conventionally real, but this conventional reality is also empty. So eventually, through observation with detachment, you'll reach the stage where you can mentally relax while "giving birth to the mind without abiding anywhere".

Through continued observation you will notice that thoughts or phenomena ("existence") are born from emptiness (mental silence), and the existence of emptiness relies on phenomena. Existence and emptiness are both manifestations of one nature--its single source, our true self--so on the road of cultivation you don't cling to either side. Both sides are phenomenal constructions, or false relativities, so both sides are not real. Hence in shamatha-vipashyana practice, you start to contemplate the mean between stillness and activity.

In practicing this inner watching, you'll get progressively better at becoming mentally free because you'll stop clinging to or rejecting your thoughts, emotions and sensations. Thus your mental awareness will increasingly "open" and your ability to function in the world will increase as well, so you'll actually be expanding your awareness while saving a lot of energy that you'd normally waste in useless clinging. Furthermore, your internal state of peace and calm will progressively develop with every increase in clarity. Thus if you keep observing the origin and destruction of thoughts while paying particular attention to where they come from and go to, you'll eventually obstruct the stream of consciousness.

STEP 4: With the stream of consciousness disrupted, you will then notice a momentary gap of stillness, or silence, between all your thoughts. In other words, if you practice this method of inner observation for a long time--by wordlessly watching thoughts without injecting energy into the thought stream--the process of silent observation will itself disrupt the stream of mentation. The state of mind in the immediate present will gradually open up to reveal a tiny gap of mental quiet, or emptiness; when a previous thought has disappeared and a subsequent thought has not yet arisen, the mind will seem quiet. This mental silence is not a gap of dullness nor stupor, nor should it be a forced silence or blankness you create through suppressing thoughts. Rather, it will be a lucid, clear and open awareness, and these characteristics will gradually unfold as more time is spent in this state.

In other words, after quietly observing our mental processes for quite some while, one will notice a tiny gap of silent pausation between thoughts which we refer to as "cessation". If we continue observing this state without effort and shine awareness on it, it will gradually expand further and further. Looking into this gap of silence is the process of "contemplation" or vipashyana. It's a quiet realm similar to emptiness, but it still isn't the genuine emptiness of Tao. Nevertheless, this is what we're initially after because we can use this state to begin cultivating prajna wisdom.

STEP 5: If you continue to carry over this state of watching the mind (the process of silent detachment and immediate awareness) during all your normal activities--whether walking, talking, sitting or sleeping--you'll be able to reach the point where thoughts no longer bind you. Gradually their volume will die down, your radiant awareness will expand and you will be able to seamlessly enter into the real emptiness of samadhi.

In other words, if you keep observing the state of cessation by shining awareness on this state, you will eventually arrive at dhyana. Thus the practice of shining awareness on the silence within is commonly referred to as "contemplating mind". If you continue progressing in this manner by reaching further levels of emptiness and shining wisdom awareness on any state of cessation you reach, you will eventually acquire prajna wisdom, or transcendental wisdom. Then you'll climb the various ranks of samadhi and enter into the Tao.

From: Twenty-Five Doors To Meditation by William Bodri and Lee Shu Mei


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