BEGINNING YOUR MEDITATION JOURNEY. Part 5 of 5

Although concentration and sensory awareness are extremely beneficial; it is insight and understanding — of how the mind works, how you perpetuate your suffering, how attached you are to the outcome of events, and how uncontrollable and fleeting these events are — that ultimately provide relief from suffering. In your daily life, creative thinking — free of the usual constrained, repetitive patterns of thought — provides answers to issues. As a result, contemplation is the third essential component that elevates meditation from a tranquil, relaxing activity to a vehicle for freedom and creative expression. You finally discover that you have access to a more profound insight into the nature of your experience once you've increased your attention and enlarged your awareness. You may utilise this ability to explore your inner landscape and progressively comprehend and overcome your mind's propensity to give you pain and tension. If you're a spiritual seeker, you can utilise this capacity to ponder the nature of yourself or to contemplate the mystery of God and creation. If you have more practical worries, you may consider the next step in your career or relationship, or you may consider some intractable difficulty in your life.

Some meditations are designed to awaken the heart and foster life-affirming traits such as compassion, loving kindness, serenity, joy, and forgiveness. On a more practical level, you can utilise meditation to boost your immune system or to improve your poise and precision in a sport. I  efer to these types of meditations as cultivation. Whereas contemplation seeks to investigate, inquire, and ultimately see deeply into the nature of things, cultivation can assist you in transforming your inner life by directing the concentration you develop to strengthen positive, healthy mind-states while withdrawing energy from those that are reactive and self-defeating.

 Developing and directing your awareness may be the cornerstone of effective meditation. Still, it is only the beginning, as with any excellent foundation. The next phase is to construct your home brick by brick, meditation session by meditation session, figuring out what works and what doesn't until your practice is solid and secure. To use an analogy from the journey, awareness is the muscle that drives you up the mountain. However, you must choose your path, find your pace, and navigate the obstacles that stand in your way. In other words, you must create and maintain your practice and solve any problems that develop.

When you begin to develop and direct your awareness in meditation, you confront the difficulty of integrating all the parts into a practice specifically tailored to your requirements. Consider the following possibilities: You may be drawn to types of meditation that focus on concentration and have little interest in those that emphasise open, letting of the quality of receptive consciousness. You may treasure the calm and relaxation that comes from simply sitting peacefully without any effort or focus, without even the effort to be aware. You may have a particular aim for meditating, such as treating sickness or addressing a troubling psychological condition, and you are drawn primarily to ways that help you achieve your objectives. The idea is to try out several types of meditation and trust your intuition to tell you which ones are right for you at this stage in climbing the mountain.

Yin and yang invariably balance each other out. In that instance, you may begin with a strong focus and progress to a more relaxed, receptive consciousness. Alternatively, you might begin in a more receptive mode and gradually discover the benefits of focus. The path of meditation has its lessons to teach; no matter what your objectives are, you'll eventually come across those teachings you were meant to learn. Of course, suppose you wish to keep your practice going from week to week and month to month, which is the only way to realise the advantages of meditation. In that case, you'll need to rely on three time-honoured attributes that every prolonged endeavour necessitates: drive, discipline, and dedication.

These characteristics have gotten a poor name in Western culture. People want their demands to be satisfied immediately, if not sooner, yet they aren't difficult to nurture. They emerge organically when you're involved in and passionate about your actions.

As your meditation practice matures and evolves, you may meet unforeseen problems that you are unsure how to address. The mountain metaphor comes in helpful once more. Assume you're halfway up the route when you encounter freezing terrain, stones that block your path, or a rainstorm that sends you scrambling for safety. What are you going to do? Do you get out your specialised tools and refer to pre-established procedures for dealing with difficulties? Or are you forced to improvise as best you can? As I mentioned earlier in this post, humans have ascended this mountain for thousands of years. They've created tools and maps to make the journey as easy and painless as possible. For example, suppose strong emotions such as anger, fear, sorrow, or grief surge over your meditation and make it difficult to stay present. In that case, you can use ways to break their hold. I have an upcoming post with tips for meditating with difficult emotions and habitual behaviours. Or, if you come into some of the frequent barriers and roadblocks on the path of meditation, such as tiredness, restlessness, ecstasy, or uncertainty, you may rely on time-honoured strategies for getting beyond them and can keep going.

Whatever your path entails, you're sure to find professional advice in the content on my website and social media chaqnnels, which draws not only on my experience as a practitioner and teacher but also on the cumulative knowledge of the world's contemplative traditions. I go through all the fundamental techniques and potential concerns. If interested, I suggest you go to additional sites for more research and study.

Although I give a range of approaches for your enjoyment and inquiry, the core approach of this post is what Buddhists call mindfulness – constant attention to whatever occurs moment to moment. Based on my years of experience and training, I've discovered that mindfulness combines focus and sensory awareness, one of the most straightforward techniques for novices to acquire and one of the most adaptive to the hectic schedules that most people confront. After all, if you're anything like me, you're more concerned with living a more peaceful, loving, stress-free existence than with ascending into some disembodied spiritual world disconnected from the people and places you cherish. In truth, the beauty, belonging, and love you seek are right here and now — you just need to clear your mind and open your eyes, which is precisely what mindfulness practice is designed to teach! When you pay attention to your experience from moment to moment, you keep waking up from your mind's daydreams and anxieties and returning to the present's clarity, precision, and simplicity, where life indeed occurs. The nice thing about mindfulness is that you don't have to limit your practice to specific locations or times – you may practise waking up and paying attention whenever you choose, day or night.

Assume you've just arrived from another planet and have never seen an orange before for this in-the-moment exercise.

1. Close your eyes and place an orange on a platter.

2. Set away any preconceived notions and thoughts, open your eyes, and look at the fruit as though for the first time. Take note of the shape, size, colour, and texture.

3. As you start peeling the orange, note how it feels on your fingertips. Take note of the difference between the meat and the peel and the weight of the fruit in your palm.

4. Raise a piece of orange to your lips slowly and wait a second before chewing. Before you begin, take note of how it smells.

5. Open your mouth, bite down, and enjoy the soft flesh's texture and the first rush of juice into your mouth.

6. Continue to bite and chew the orange, paying attention to the sensations as they change from moment to moment. As though this is the first and only orange you would ever eat, let each moment be fresh, new, and complete in itself.

Now consider how this orange-eating experience varies from how you usually consume a piece of fruit.

Be well.

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