In the blog category “Mindfulness Meditation techniques”, I will list various techniques that will help practitioners of this form of meditation. Over a period of years, I have compiled a variety of such techniques and formed a virtual toolkit from which I draw upon on a regular basis.
Coming on the heels of my previous blog post on standing meditation, this technique will seem to be its complementary.
Take a few minutes to just sit comfortably and not do anything while keeping your eyes gently closed or gently opened or perhaps alternate between closing and opening your eyes. Focus on your breath as it comes in and goes out. You will soon find that your mind revolts against you. You will be bombarded with all kinds of thoughts. There will be reminders for tasks that need to be completed; planning for your next important meeting or business trip or an exciting social event; judgments about events and activities that transpired recently; speculation about current business or political news, etc. From time to time; you will be tempted to get up, get to work and to stop the activity of simply sitting. In the midst of it all, you will realize that you are no longer focusing on your breath. It will be worthwhile to investigate the source of all these thoughts, feelings, judgments and emotions. Are you generating them or are they coming outside of your own self? If you simply observe their flow, do they go away or do they stay in your mind all the time?
The purpose of this exercise is to prove to you that there is no end to the myriad of thoughts, emotions and feelings that bombard you when you take a step aside and jut watch what is going on inside of yourself. You will soon realize that you are caught up in this vicious cycle of conditioning over which you probably have no control. As I mentioned in my previous blog post on being proactive, the point here is not to get these questions answered, the point is to simply be in the space between the stimulus and response which can then become a crucible for insight, transformation and right action.
The goal of mindfulness meditation is not just to be mindful in formal periods of meditation where we sit with our eyes closed. Rather the goal of mindfulness meditation is for us to have the quality and ability to be mindful when we are engaged with the world outside of us, with our eyes wide open. So even though you are just sitting there, you are actually doing something very important; you are learning more about your own self, about the conditioned nature of your inner world and how it keeps going on its own accord.
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