Meditation has always been something that I’ve been fascinated with for as long I knew it existed and in various ways even before.
So I suppose that I’ve been doing some kind of meditation since I was eight.
If you want to learn about meditation one of the greatest sources is pretty much everything from Buddhism and Hinduism as they’ve spent a great deal of effort in mastering the mind and this is one of the primary tools.
So even if the eastern philosophy isn’t really your cup of tea, but meditation is, then they certainly have much to say of value upon the topic.
Often our present mind is referred to as the ‘monkey mind’ in which our minds greatly resemble as we jump from thought to thought constantly and relentlessly like a monkey in the trees.
This becomes crystal clear the moment you try and calm your mind instead of relaxing or focusing your mind you find yourself thinking about dinner, kids, work or whatever and where ever your stream of consciousness takes you.
I’ve had some rather interesting experiences but trust me when I say my monkey is still very bad and hasn’t responded to spanking.
I have found that, many times while writing, I feel a sense of meditation and able to hyper focus just on this and the rest of the worldly issues I have fall away.
I’ve done some research and it relates to what I understand of Zen with their active meditation more so then the infinite stillness that sitting meditation encourages.
To highlight it is not a replacement of mindful meditation but I wonder what it is because in so many ways I feel like when I am doing it I leave the room and others around me feel like I’ve left the room while I hyper focus on whatever I’m working on.
Only recently with a chain of seemingly unusual epiphanies have I found the foot hold I feel that I need to really sink my teeth into meditation.
In many ways meditation, up until recently, has always seemed like taking higher math in school without having a clue what in the world I’m doing it for and I’ve never been good on doing things on faith alone.
Many times focusing on your breath is the start of meditation and I read something that made some sense as to why.
One more thing that I am ‘very’ inspired to bring back is some amazing experiences I had with meditation from many years ago.
I was working with a system of meditation that is called Autogenics I read in a book called Super Learning 2000 and it is a meditation technique based upon some studies by during WW2. It is almost like an automated mechanical way to make your body relax in a very deep way and if done correctly you can train yourself to do this upon command.
Whatever meditation I will be exploring will be rooted within this technique as I know it is effective and dare I suggest almost a short cut to some deeper experiences.
In brief one of the most intense, and so very real experiences, I had was putting myself into this very deep physical relaxation and focus my mind on attempting and Out of Body experience that I read somewhere else.
My body literally went to sleep and when you are in a deep sleep your body paralyzes you and is a well known part of sleep.
Anyway, my body was a sleep due to this technique and yet my mind was totally awake.
Every cell felt alive, felt larger and electric… I felt like just this sea of vibrating energy and it was overwhelming, not just in my head but very very very real! So… naive as I was at the time I was like alright maybe this is supposed to happen to leave my body and so I tried and nothing happened.
Find Discipline in your local area
