Before you meditate
May 28, 2024 18:04:40 GMT
Post by Stella on May 28, 2024 18:04:40 GMT
I've selected this image (Pixabay) again to highlight what I feel is the most common mistake when it comes to meditation. Here we see a woman seated perfectly in the lotus position, common throughout Buddhism. The legs are crossed, the hands resting on the knees, and even the fingers are in formation. What you have is a woman trying desperately to be Buddha or some other teacher and struggling to be so. The whole emphasis is on the form. As someone who has practised meditation for many years it's always painful to see something like this. Really. It makes me wince.
Meditation has no form whatsoever
There are as many different forms of meditation as there are forms of yoga but all the forms are related to the techniques and the starting point, because once you get into it, all meditation is formless and without form. This means penultimately meditation can be either samatha meditation to bring stillness and equilibrium or it can be vipassana meditation to develop perception of an environment. Here of course I'm referring to meditation as a concept. Please keep in mind that I would put myself through meditation when practising magic as a way of aligning myself with my environment or to bring myself back after a ritual or spell.
I'm pointing this out because meditation as a practice can be harmful if you don't understand what you're doing. All too often when people undertake meditation as a practice what people try to do is try and suppress or stifle brain activity. Now think about this. Would you ever try to suppress or mess around with your heartbeat or the rhythm of your heart? The brain is arguably the most important organ in your body. It's also the only organ in your body not protected by your sensory nervous system. It's incredibly sensitive, especially to forms of abuse and all too often meditation as a practice is a forceful activity which disrupts the naturally occurring brain waves.
The only time when meditation as an action or practice has any potential benefit is during an anxiety attack when you're bouncing between memory and imagination in a traumatic or destructive thought process. But what you are doing here is intervening in an anxiety attack by suppressing it. But you could easily shift the focus of your conscious attention to something else in your environment rather than sitting down and trying to suppress your mind by staring into space....read more