Meditation is a way to change your attitude towards life. The act of practicing meditation changes you from inside. It takes a lot of work, but slowly you become more relaxed and more connected to people. It’s not an easy solution. But it is a solution.
The basic idea behind meditation is that it is an exercise that teaches you to accept things the way they are. The way it does this is that when you meditate, you actually practice accepting things the way they are, and like anything, the more you practice the better you get. Gradually you become more accepting of things. When you meditate, you try to do two things. First, you try to pay attention to the breath going in and out of your nose without controlling it. You just watch it. If your mind wanders and you start thinking about something else, when you notice that your mind wandered, you bring your attention back to your breath. The second thing that you try to do is to accept how you are doing. If you can barely pay attention at all, you just accept it without getting annoyed. This sounds easy but it’s incredibly difficult because it is contrary to the way we’ve thought our whole lives. When you try to do something, if you do it well, you are happy. If you do it badly, you become unhappy. Even though it doesn’t really matter how well you are doing, just by trying to pay attention, you will want to do it well out of habit. You may accept how you are doing for a little while, but inevitably something will come up in your mind that you don’t accept. You may become bored, or tired, or uncomfortable, or you will want to feel differently than you do. You just have to try to accept these feelings. Of course you won’t be able to do this. Meditation is an exercise where by practicing, you get better at what you’re practicing. It’s like working out. You practice lifting weights and gradually you get better at it. In meditation you practice accepting things the way they are and gradually you get better at it. If you meditate regularly, you will become more accepting of how your meditation is going. This will carry over into your life and you will become more accepting of things in life. The more you meditate, the more accepting you will become.
You might wonder how being more accepting of how you pay attention to your breathing will have an affect on the rest of your life. This is the best analogy I can give. Let’s say someone couldn’t deal with losing at anything. If they lose at basketball, they throw a tantrum. If they lose at chess, they get furious. If they lose an argument, they’re pissed off for an hour. Now let’s say that person tried to accept when they lost at basketball. Whenever they lost at basketball they would do whatever they could not to get angry, and gradually they learned to deal with losing at basketball. You would think that if they then lost at chess, they wouldn’t get angry. It’s the same with meditation.
Becoming more accepting of things not being the way you want affects so many different aspects of your life. You become more accepting of things not going the way you want in life and people not acting how they’re "supposed to" act. These are the main causes of anger in life so you become less angry in circumstances that tend to make you angry and less angry in general. As you become more accepting of things not going how you want, you start to feel more like, "Whatever happens, happens. I’ll deal with it." This helps get rid of the natural fear of the unknown which tends to keep people from having a full life because they’re afraid of the negative possibility of new experiences. In the same way, it helps get rid of people’s fear of change. As you become less fearful of the unknown, you become less fearful of the future being different from how you want. And when you aren’t afraid of the future, you can enjoy the present more fully.
In addition, you become more accepting of your moods. When people are unhappy, angry, or just don’t feel how they would like to feel in any situation, they tend to get annoyed or upset by the way the way that they are feeling. This makes the situation worse and it becomes more difficult to come out of the "bad" mood. So when you become more accepting of your moods, you tend to come out of bad moods quicker. Overall, you become more relaxed at your core because your whole attitude towards life gradually becomes more relaxed. You also become more accepting of who you are so you won't try as much to act like something you're not. This leads to a gradual transformation where you begin to feel like you are becoming the "real" you.
As I said before, you also become more accepting of your faults so you become more honest about yourself which makes people respect you more. Because of their ego, many people aren't willing to admit faults that they have instead blaming things on other people. Pretty much everybody does this to some degree. Accepting the fact that you do something that is wrong is the first and arguably most important step to changing that behavior.
How to Practice
It’s better to meditate on an empty stomach than after a meal because after you eat you tend to be more tired and less able to pay attention. The question that may come up now is why does it matter if you pay attention well, isn’t it only important to accept how you are doing. The first part of the answer is that as you accept how you are doing, you will be able to pay attention better. But also, when you are trying to do something, there are many different ways that your mind might not accept how you are doing. For instance, you might not accept that you are not paying attention well, or if you are doing what you are trying to do well, you might not accept that although you are doing well now, this will change, and you will have difficult periods. This non-acceptance of change can manifest itself as an attachment or clinging to the present situation. When you are paying attention better, as well as accepting your shortcomings in your meditation, you will notice patterns of thought that are deeper in your mind. Things that you were aware of on a subconscious level but didn’t really notice. These won’t manifest themselves as revelations, (although this is possible) but rather as another way that you won’t accept how your meditation is going. So paying attention better will let you work on your mind at a deeper level. The ironic thing is that the desire to pay attention better actually makes it harder to pay attention. The stronger the desire, the harder it is. Ideally, you would try to pay attention well, but not hope for an outcome. However it goes, it goes. Don’t count on the ideal happening often.
You can sit with your legs crossed, but it’s not necessary. If you do, you should sit on an incline or put a pillow under your butt. This will help keep your back straight. You should sit in a comfortable position. If it’s not too uncomfortable you should keep your back straight. You shouldn’t lie down because you’re a lot more likely to fall asleep. I meditate with my eyes closed to reduce distractions, but there are people who meditate with their eyes open. There are different schools of though on this, both work, so you should just pick whichever one you like the sound of.
You should just try to pay attention to the breath going in and out of your nose. If your breath is deep, that’s fine. If it’s shallow, that’s fine. If it’s relaxed, that’s fine. If it’s not, that’s fine. Your job is not to judge or to control, just to observe. If you can feel the breath touching the inside of your nostrils, then you should feel it. If you can’t feel anything, just notice when it is entering your nose and when it is leaving. It doesn’t matter how well you can pay attention, only that you keep trying to pay attention. Your mind will wander, and it's shocking how quickly it will wander, often after less than one breath. When you notice that your mind has wandered, bring it back to your breath. When it wanders again, bring it back again.
The goal is to work at it without caring how it goes. However, you will find that you do care how it is going. As you practice and try to accept how it is going, you will improve and you will become more accepting of how you are doing.
There are many different ways you may not like how your meditation is going. You might get frustrated at your awful concentration; you might get bored; you might feel angry, sad, upset or annoyed; you might want the meditation to relax you and get frustrated that this isn’t happening, or countless other things. The way to deal with these is to realize that this is how meditation works. It’s supposed to bring up these feelings so you can learn to accept them. When you work out, you use weights that are difficult to lift because that is what makes you stronger. It’s the same way with meditation. It’s designed to be difficult.
Usually you can’t just accept that you don’t like how it’s going. Here’s how to work at it. Let’s say you notice that you are annoyed because you don’t feel like sitting anymore so you have the desire to stop. You realize that you are not paying attention to your breath but thinking about how you want to stop meditating. At this point you should try to pay attention to your breath realizing that it is more difficult because you are annoyed. Just try to do the best you can given the fact that you are annoyed. You might not even be able to go back to your breath well. Just to to do the best you can understanding the fact that it is more difficult simply because you are not accepting how you are doing. By doing this, you learn to better accept the thing that is making it difficult.
As time goes on, you will develop a more relaxed form of concentration. This may seem paradoxical because we normally associate strong concentration with a tense, furrowed brow type of image. Meditation changes the way you view the world, so many of the analogies that people use to describe it can at first seem contradictory. As you begin to practice, these examples begin to make more sense.
Sometimes when you are meditating, you can have strange experiences. You might experience emotions for no apparent reasons. You might see lights or your body may feel like it’s a single point. You might have visions pop into your head. There are countless different things like this that can happen, and they all make it harder to pay attention to your breath. If they do happen, you should treat them like every other distraction and try to pay attention to your breath as well as you can given that something is distracting you.
If you become relatively focused and accepting of your meditation, you will start to go deeper into your mind. This will cause you to notice mental patterns of non-accepting that you were previously unaware of. This makes it very difficult or uncomfortable to pay attention because you have to deal with something consciously that was previously in your subconscious. You probably won’t know what this pattern of thought is, but you will definitely notice how it affects your meditation. If you accept how it affects your meditation, but still work hard to pay attention, you will deal with this deeper mental habit and be able to work on even deeper levels of your mind.
The way you are meditating can change from minute to minute and from day to day. It can be frustrating to have what you consider a very acceptable meditation one day and one that you are unhappy with the next day. The goal obviously is to accept that it changes from day to day, and it’s not going to be how you want it to be. If this is frustrating for you, you should deal with the frustration the same way you deal with frustration while meditating. Realize that the goal is to accept the changing nature of your meditation and not get frustrated. This may not work and you may still be frustrated. Then, try to accept the fact that your mind reacts to certain things with frustration, and that’s just something you have to accept (or at least try to accept.) If you work at trying to accept that your mind reacts with frustration, anger, aversion, or other unpleasant emotions, you will become more accepting of these feelings and they won’t be as unpleasant.
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