How to practice meditation technic – Mindfulness

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. This special kind of meditation technic is called “mindfulness”.

Here how the technique “mindfulness” works and how to practice it –

Sit cross-legged in a quiet place, preferably on a low pillow or cushion to reduce strain on your back. Your back should be straight in such a way that it should not hurt you. Take deep breaths.
Close your eyes and listen to your inner monologue, the thoughts that spin through your mind all the time: home, work, office, travel, movie etc. Those thoughts are the chattering of your “monkey mind.” Don’t try to stop it from chattering, at least not yet. Instead just observe how it jumps from thought to thought. Do this for five minutes every day for a week.
After a week, without trying to silence your monkey mind, during the meditation, shift your attention to your “ox mind.” Your ox mind is the part of your brain that thinks slowly and quietly. It senses things around you. It doesn’t try to assign meaning to anything. It just sees, hears, and feels. Most people only really hear their ox mind when they experience a “breathtaking moment” that temporarily stops the monkey mind from chattering. However, even when your monkey mind is driving you crazy with blah blah or hush hush, your ox mind is still there, thinking its slow, deep thoughts.
Once you’re feeling more aware of your ox mind, ask it to start quieting your monkey mind down. What worked for me was imagining the monkey mind going to sleep due to the slow walking of the ox as it moves patiently along a road. Don’t get upset if your monkey mind keeps waking up. It’s a monkey, so it can’t help acting like one. However, you’ll find that, despite its protests, your monkey mind would rather give it rest and stop making all that tiring and tiresome noise.
As your monkey mind calms down, continue to shift your attention to your ox mind. Each breath will seem to take a long time. You’ll feel the air on your skin. You may feel your blood flowing through your body. If you open your eyes, the world will look brand new and even rather strange.
While it can take a while to get there, you’ll know you’re doing the exercise correctly when it seems as if no time has passed at all between when you started the timer and when it goes off. When you succeed at that, gradually increase the amount of time you spend each day. Weirdly, no matter how long you practice, it will seem as if no time has passed.

In my experience, daily practice of mindfulness has three valuable results:

First, it completely eliminates stress. While the stress may return, it’s starting from scratch and thus has less chance of snowballing into something unmanageable.

Second, it eliminates insomnia. When I was practicing this regularly, I was able to close my eyes and go to sleep within two or three seconds. That alone is worth the effort, in my view.

Third, and most important, it allows you to think more clearly and more creatively about everything happening in your own life. In my case, I used the sense of calm to extract myself from an unhealthy relationship and a job that made me miserable.

So, while I can’t promise that practicing mindfulness will make you as creative as Steve Jobs, I can promise from my own experience that mindfulness will create positive change in your life.

Success Mantra – Slow down your mind

Every day more and more people are becoming depressed and unhappy with their lives. The reasons are many: amongst them are financial worries, work related problems, family problems, weight issues, health issues etc. Your mind is running fast, is disturbed and is not focused on the job. Have you ever observed your mind? Just observe your mind, is it running fast, thinking so many things at a time and because of that you are unhappy right? Have you ever observed that whenever you are happy, your mind is always calm focusing only on one thing that time, that happy moment. So it means the solution of your problem is slowing down your mind. What happens when you slow down your mind? You become happy, yes happy.

Slow down your mind, if you truly want to be successful. Its called slowdown therapy. Lets see how can you slowdown your mind –

Slowdown Therapy

Slow down; you are not responsible for doing all by yourself and right now.
Recall a happy, peaceful time experienced in your past. Be there in that moment, rest there.
Set you own pace. Do not run and try to compete with every other person with you.
Take nothing for granted, watch the water flow, wind blow, corn grow.
Savour the taste of your food.
Notice the sun and the moon as they rise and set. They are remarkable for their steady pattern of movement, not their speed.
When you talk with someone, don’t think about what you will say next. Thoughts will spring up naturally if you let them.
Talk and play with children. It will bring out the unhurried little person inside you.
Create a place in your home, at your workplace and in your heart inside you where you can go for solitude and recollection.
Allow yourself time to be lazy and unproductive some time. Rest is not luxury, its a necessity.
Be in your present and just feel the things which you are doing right now.
Talk slowly, talk less, don’t talk. Communication is not measured by words.
Give yourself permission to be late sometimes. Life is for living, not scheduling.
Take time just to think. Action is good and necessary, but it’s fruitful only if we muse, ponder and mull.
Find time for play or any thing which you like to do.
Watch and listen to night sky. It speaks.
Listen to the words you speak, specially in prayer.
Learn to stand back and let others take turn as leaders. There will always be new opportunities for you to step out in front again.
Divide big jobs into little jobs.
When you find yourself rushing and anxious, STOP. Ask yourself ‘why’ you are rushing and anxious. The reason may improve your self understanding.
Take time to read.
Direct your life with purposeful choices, not with speed and efficiency. The best musician is one who plays with expression and meaning, not the one who finishes first.
Take a day off alone.
Work with your hands. It frees your mind.
Take time to wonder. Without wonder life is a mere existence.
Sit in dark sometime. It will teach you to see, hear, taste and smell.
Once is a while turn down the lights, the volume, the throttle, the network, the invitations. Less can be more sometime.
Take a walk without any destination in mind.
Count your friends. If you have one you are lucky. If you have more you are blessed. Bless them in return.
Count your blessings – one at a time and slowly.
Meditate daily.

My Experience with Meditation

In this busy and fast paced life where we are virtually connected with almost entire world, we forget to connect with ourself. Everybody is running some sort of a race knowingly or unknowingly; a race of money, fame, success, to do something different etc etc. This includes me as well. I am not denying the importance of race or some kind of motive in life which motivates you for the race but slowly we forget the purpose of race and the journey of that race. We forget the people around us, the beauty around us, the family, the nature and most important we forget the inner peace with us. This happened to me as well. I lost the inner peace, calmness, inner happiness and much more in the race of corporate life. And one day I decided to stop this, I wanted to get my inner peace back. I adopted meditation as the regular habit in my daily routine.

I started practicing meditation each day. Initially it was very tough to sit quite for sometime and concentrate on your self. But eventually it was better with time. Though its not been a long time since I started but within 6 months of my start I can feel the difference inside me. People say meditation gets better with time and it takes good long years of practice to meditate and concentrate for long time at one stretch. I started as 5 mins regular sitting in the morning. In 5 mins I was able to concentrate hardly 30 seconds at a stretch when my brain in completely switched off. Believe it or not switching your brain off for your desired time is the hardest thing I think. I have played lot of sports and did long trails on cycles but I think that switching off your brain is the hardest thing for a normal person, much harder than any sport (at the beginning).

5 mins start stretched to 15 mins slowly and than 30 mins. Though I still struggle sometime to concentrate for 5 mins at one stretch. But its getting better and better with time and practice. After the meditation I perform 2 mins of “shirshasana” (standing on your head with legs straight). Combination of mediation and shirshasana have played a very important role in changing my attitude towards life. Now I am feel much happy from inside in whatever I do. I am more calm, have more patience and have a realisation of inner peace at times. With my experience I want to highlight few points here which can help you in meditating better specially if you are a beginner like me.

Mediation tips for beginners –

Always start slow, do not think much while practicing. Keep it very calm and relax.
Meditation is a art of relaxation of your body which means your body should be very light, your mind should be calm, your environment should be peaceful around you.
Keep your phone, laptop, tablet away from you while practicing.
Find a very comfortable position. There is not hard and fast rule to sit on hard floor, you can use a cushion under your butt if you require. Do not make your body stiff. Keep the body relax and out of any sort of pain or discomfort.
Do not close your eyes immediately.
Keep a good body posture preferable straight if possible. your back should be straight ideally.
Avoid sitting in noisy place in the beginning, away from TV, music system or outside noise.
If possible do a little bit stretch after sitting so that your body is relaxed. There should not be any tightness or stiffness at any joint.
Better to avoid heavy meals before practice.
After sitting take a deep breath. Inhale form nose and exhale from mouth slowly.
In the beginning you can also count your breath to keep your concentration at the moment. Take a slow deep breath, fill the air in your stomach, feel the air and exhale from mouth slowly.
Its very important to feel the air going from your nostrils, travelling inside your body, reaching to your stomach and finally coming out from mouth.
In the beginning take 10 deep breaths with your eyes open.
Now gently close your eyes or it will close naturally without your realisation sometime. When you are in the moment and feeling the breath, your eyes will automatically close naturally.
Keep doing the same thing with your eyes closed. Sometime your mind starts thinking sometime else and you are out of the present moment. That is natural, nothing to worry about. The moment you realize that you are thinking something else, just come back to present moment and start feeling the air traversing inside your body.
If you feel like itching some where during the practice, just scratch it at that body part. Do not avoid that. Avoiding scratching will lead you to think more on that part which will disturb your practice. So its very natural to have some sort of itching or realisation of scratch in some body part. This happens only for few days initially.
Try to see a dark black spot when your eyes are closed. This will enhance your concentration in the present moment. The more concentration you will have in the present moment, the more deep you will go in your practice.
Meditation is all about being in your present moment. This is the art you have to practice which will help your brain to focus more on current moment instead of wandering around.
Slowly increase your time every day. You will realise the difference in few days.
Do not break your practice any day else you will break the momentum. In the start focus on practicing 10 days daily for 5-10 mins.
There is no good to bad time for meditation. Whenever you feel like doing, you can do. But just avoid full stomach. Perfect time is in the morning before your first tea or coffee with empty stomach.

I hope these tips will help you in practicing meditation in the beginning and you will see and realise the difference within yourself in few days of practicing.